source: http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-94222019000400035&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en

How is religion (or religious experience) to be understood? If then described in terms of feeling, how is ‘feeling’ to be understood?

Schleiermacher (cf. 1830) firstly qualifies in his exposition of religion that ‘what is to follow’ implies diversity of expression (community) and sameness (individual) in the following way:

However diverse they might be, what all the expressions of piety have in common, whereby they are at the same time distinguished from all other feelings – thus the selfsame nature of piety – is this: that we are conscious of ourselves as absolutely dependent or, which intends the same meaning, as being in relation with God. (p. 18)

For Schleiermacher, religious experience (as ‘feelings of piety’) is not founded either on intellectual doctrinal beliefs or on the acceptance of moral principles. In addition, its core is also not in the first place to be understood as thinking or acting. It is to be taken as intuition (i.e. an immediate non-conceptual engagement with the universe as its object) and feeling (i.e. the subjective affective tone which follows this apprehension). The two are inseparable, although they can be separated in reflecting on their significance.

From here, Schleiermacher introduces the concept of ‘absolute dependence’ which is present and innate in every person.  For Schleiermacher, the relationship to God can be described as a feeling of absolute dependence that is situated in the immediate, pre-reflective consciousness. Perhaps more aptly formulated and explained: it is an immediate self-awareness that becomes an awareness of God: an immediate awareness of dependence of a particular nature that is called the feeling of absolute dependence. What does the ‘particular nature’ refer to?

For Schleiermacher, it represents a ‘one-ness’ with the infinite in the midst of the finite. The ‘particular nature’ is characterised  a sense and taste for the Infinite. The ‘whence’ of this feeling of absolute dependence is identified as God (cf. Schleiermacher 1830:24). It is a consciousness that is characterised by both receptivity and self-initiated activity, that is the feeling of dependence and of freedom that co-exist in our experience of self-consciousness (cf. Schleiermacher 1830:20-21).

He elaborates on religion as feeling, stating:

Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all doing and suffering. It is to have life and to know life in immediate feeling, only as such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal. (Schleiermacher 1799:36)

And more descriptive:

… true religion is sense and taste for the Infinite. (Schleiermacher 1799:39)

Religion, or perhaps better understood in this context as ‘religious experience’, is – on the one hand – not to be seen as mere ‘knowing’. That would be precisely that which he would like to protest against, namely the rational approach of doctrinal orthodoxy. On the other hand, religion is also not simply ‘doing’. That would reduce religion to morality. In this sense, consciousness precedes knowledge and action. Schleiermacher (1830) states:

The piety that constitutes the basis of all ecclesial communities regarded purely in and of itself, is neither a knowing nor a doing but a distinct formation of feeling, or of immediate self-consciousness. (p. 8)

Over against the No on both accounts, that is, to ‘mere knowing’ and ‘morality’, religious experience is explicated as an interior, personal experience with an element of the unknowable and the mysterious. In The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher (1830) goes on to say:

The feeling of absolute dependence, accordingly, is not to be explained as an awareness of the world’s existence, but only as an awareness of the existence of God, as the absolute undivided unity. (p. 32)

As experience (that can in this very sense be called a God-consciousness), it will find expression within a specific religious context in a definite form. As human beings that are social creatures, our expressed feelings are subsequently concrete.

And he continues:

Every religious and Christian self-consciousness presupposes and thus also actually contains the immediate feeling of absolute dependence, as the only way in which, in general, one’s own being and the infinite being of God can be one in self-consciousness. (Schleiermacher 1830:33)

This feeling of absolute dependence, in which our self-consciousness in general represents the finitude of our being, is therefore not an accidental element, nor a thing which varies from person to person, but is a universal element of life; and the recognition of this fact entirely takes the place, for the system of doctrine, of all so-called proofs of the existence of God.

Criticisms

Limiting myself to Schleiermacher’s concept of ‘absolute dependence’ but broadening its significance to a number of related contemporary discourses, I tentatively would like to pose the following critical comments.

For me, Schleiermacher has opened up in his understanding and explanation of religion and religious experience  a broader understanding of rationality that I find convincing and very intriguing that I would pursue today within theology-science discourses, especially in relation to evolutionary biological discourses.

Feeling – as immediate awareness, as consciousness – finds very apt evolutionary biological expressions. To name but one example from the field of the neuro-scientific example. In the classic work The Feeling of What Happens (1999) of the Portuguese-American neurobiologist Antonio Damasio, he describes consciousness in the shortest phrase possible as the ‘feeling that something happens’.

Feeling is here not be understood or confused with ’emotions’. Emotions follow from the basic description of ‘feeling’ as consciousness which then subsequently finds concrete physiological expression in emotions. But back to Schleiermacher. The ‘feeling’ as an a priori ontological statement regarding God-consciousness and ‘absolute dependence’, however, are in its interpretative unfolding by Schleiermacher in many ways promising but at the very same time problematic.

The broadening of our understandings of rationality and also his effort to overcome the strong boundaries of individualism are promising. However, from contemporary hermeneutical insights, that all experiences are interpreted experiences, it follows that no religious experience can be pre-linguistic. The experience as such is concretely and existentially ‘at home’ within a specific language tradition. God-consciousness finds expression as a conceptualised experience.

The French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) had it right – in my opinion now re-interpreted and understood from contemporary evolutionary biological insights – when he said in his own lively formulation of religious experience almost 150 years before Schleiermacher that the heart has indeed reasons of which reason itself is not even aware! In an evolutionary biological (rational) sense-making framework, his remark makes sense today. Metaphorically translated into religious experiential terms: we love God with our hearts, not our heads, and therefore all knowledge of God is affective knowledge.

But Schleiermacher’s depiction and unfolding of God-consciousness – as universal phenomenon – also becomes problematic in another sense when taken up in our post-modern contexts of pluralism (and therefore, of pluralistic understandings of religions).

The ‘whence’ has to be taken up interpretatively within the context of embodied personhood, that is, can only be formulated from the very different sense-making frameworks of the narrative identities of those who are witnessing the ‘whence’ of their specific religious experience. For me, the concept narrative identities captures the historical framework from which embodied persons within a specific linguistic-social tradition undertake their respective sense-making activities. Formulated in religious terms: our various witnesses to transcendence tell the stories from where we are conceptualising within a given linguistic tradition) and making sense of the ‘whence’ of our religious experiences.