The "Essence" of Religion

Catrina and Alex both recently posted about the definition of religion, and I'd actually just been thinking about the same issue because of a reading I had to do for my Christianity in the Modern World class. In On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, written in 1799, Friedrich Schleiermacher tackles the very same question, and his basic conclusion is that religion's true form is personal experience--feeling and intuition. What I find so interesting about Schleiermacher’s definition is that instead of seeing religion as a box or chain or whatever other metaphors we’ve used in class, he sees it as only the very essence, or core, of those aspects which we seem to categorize within the religion definition. In his words, “religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite,” meaning that when one has a religious experience, one feels immediately a connection to the infinite, a.k.a. God, and this feeling is so strong that one knows without a doubt that there really is that connection to the infinite (285). He divides human experience into three categories: thinking, acting, and religion. Thinking includes science, rationalism, and metaphysics, and this is not religious because it is derived from imperfect [finite] human views of the world. Acting, or doing, includes morality and is not religious because it isolates humans instead of seeing them as part of the infinite universe. According to Schleiermacher, thinking and acting are “empty” except when approached from the perspective of previous or current religious experience (286). Catrina mentioned in her post that “morality is not purely the realm of the religious,” and Schleiermacher would definitely agree. To him, a religion cannot be defined strictly by morality; it needs to have the underlying religious experience (like the “spirituality” that Catrina talked about) to back it up.

Schleiermacher talks a lot about how morality and metaphysics are so often seen as religion but are really just an outgrowth of one's awareness of the world gained through the aforementioned religious intuition. Religion itself is simply that feeling, and everything else connected to it--theology, identity, community, morality, etc.--instead of being based on the intuition of knowing God are based on such things as consciousness or contemplation of finite things. Therefore they are not really religion, and critiques of them should not be counted as critiques of actual religion. This would be one answer to Alex's aversion to religious sects that sanction violence toward outsiders (although I do think Catrina's point in class on Wednesday was very important as well--she said that even without religion, people will still naturally create in- and out-groups which will lead to conflict). Schleiermacher would most likely agree with Alex that such violence is wrong, but he would not see it as a fault with the religion but with the human interpreter of the religious experience.

When Schleiermacher defined religion, he differentiated between Religion the entity (almost like Plato would say… the “form” of religion) and various religions, which he saw as outward manifestations of real Religion. Interestingly, he accepted religious pluralism, saying that no religion is able to be a perfect version of Religion. This idea seems to go along with what we’ve been talking about—that it’s so hard to define religion because all religions are so different that they don’t necessarily all have the same common elements. While Shleiermacher sees it as different perspectives of approaching the same “taste for the infinite,” we’ve been talking about it as different manifestations of humans’ evolutionary desire for supernatural explanations and/or community. As different as our class’s complicated definition of religion and Schleiermacher’s very basic definition seem, we come out with almost the same conclusion. It’s just that Schleiermacher didn’t try as hard to figure out what all the different manifestations of religion could be like we’re doing.