An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834)
In 1799 Friedrich Schleiermacher published his early, Romantic work, 
Über die Religion
:
 Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern
(On 
Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers). The speeches were directed 
at the cynical critics of religion (his own circle of friends in particular) in a 
direct challenge. He told them that religion was not about doctrine or phi-
losophy, but based on feeling and intuition. He aimed to dispel his readers’ 
opinions of religion as something contemptible and suggested that by 
searching for metaphysics or morals, they were looking for the wrong 
thing. He encouraged them to see that true religion is not about dead texts. 
Although most people need some kind of mediator or exemplary figure, 
each individual should move on and listen to their innermost nature, their 
deepest feelings. For Schleiermacher, religion is to be found in experience, 
in particular the feeling of dependence and a sense of the infinite.
To be one with the infinite in the midst of the finite and to be eternal 
in a moment, that is the immortality of religion.
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He put it clearly in his later work 
The Christian Faith
:
[T]he consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the 
same thing, of being in relation with God.
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In Schleiermacher’s view, the different religions have developed from the 
original vision but in such a way that the ‘cultured despisers’ are right to 
disavow. Schleiermacher suggests a return to the vision of the originator.
I invite you to consider every faith humanity has confessed, every religion 
you designate with a definite name and character and that has perhaps 
long since degenerated into a code of empty customs and a system of 
abstract concepts and theories. If you investigate them at their source and 
their original components, you will find that all the dead slag was once 
the glowing outpouring of the inner fire that is contained in all religions 
. . . Each religion was one of the particular forms eternal and infinite reli-
gion necessarily had to assume among finite and limited beings.
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