Schleirmacher on Feeling, Intuition and Religion

Here are a few excerpts from Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion which deal directly with the role of feeling or intuition in true religion. All are taken from the Second Speech which tries to define religion, not as metaphysics nor as a system of morality, but as something distinct which has at its essence a particular kind of feeling. I want to refrain deliberately from commenting and interpreting these lines here. Let's experience these statements simply as they stand in all their enthusiastic force and naivete of German romantic rhetoric (admittedly, a wider context is missing).

"Religion's essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling." (22)

"every intuition is, by its very nature, connected with feeling." (29)

"religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite." (23)

"religion wishes to see the infinite, its imprints and its manifestation, in humanity no less than in all other individual and finite forms." (23)

" (Religious) feelings are supposed to possess us, and we should express, maintain, and portray them." (29)

"Thus it was religion when the ancients, annihilating the limitations of time and space, regarded every unique type of life throughout the whole world as the work and rein of omnipresent being. They have intuited a unique mode of acting of the universe and its unity, and designated this intuition accordingly." (25)

"To present all events in the world as the actions of a god is religion; it expresses its connection to an infinite totality." (25)

"What is it in religion over which men have argued, taken sides, and ignited wars? Sometimes over morals and always over metaphysics, and neither of these belong to it. ... Religion does not strive to bring those who believe and feel under a single belief and feeling. It strives, to be sure, to open the eyes of those who are not yet capable of intuiting the universe, for everyone who sees is a new priest, a new mediator, a new mouthpiece; but for just this reason it avoids with aversion the barren uniformity that would again destroy this divine abundance." (28)

"we should do everything with religion, nothing because of religion." (30; italics added)

Page numbers from Schleiermacher, On Religion. (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Edited by R. Crouter, Cambridge: CUP, 1996.