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THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY...
the whole human being”, that is, the “illumination of the understanding and
improvement of the heart” In the context of reflections of sensibility, the
young Fichte also described the Christian religion as a “religion of the heart”,
a “religion of the good heart”, a “religion of the soul”, an “inner religion". He
contrasted this with a “merely intellectual religion”, a mere “external religion”,
which he rejected as a “religion of the memory and the mouth” because it was
incapable of touching and transforming men’s inner lives. AII forms of a
Christianity which had degenerated “into a purely academic study”, in par¬
ticular, the modern confessional Christianity of habit, he described critically
as “religion of the intellect”.“7 This term was synonymous with the Enlightened
term Vernunftreligion (reasonable religion), which had become vulgarized, and
whose meaning had been devalued. Fichte’s criticism of intellectual religion
was twofold: first, he suggested, it must necessarily decline into a mere aca¬
demic discipline which would be the religion of a few intelligent people only,"
and second, for the many it would degenerate into a “religion of the memory
and the mouth”.“ The intellectualism and indifference which he criticized were
symptoms of the same complaint. Fichte regarded indifference above all as an
essential feature of north German Christianity of his time.'*°
The emotionalization of religious awareness that erupted in connection with
sensibility was summed up by Friedrich Schleiermacher in a letter to Friedrich
Heinrich Jacobi: “Religiosity is a matter of feeling; what we call religion in
order to distinguish it from this in fact is always more or less dogmatics...”*!
Schleiermacher defined the distinct sphere of religion in a way independent of
morals, referring to the misleading term sense of feeling. However, he did not
understand sense of feeling as pure sentimentality or as pure emotion; instead
he conceived of sense of feeling as an existentialist moment.'*
44 FICHTE, Johann Gottlieb, Nachgelassene Schriften, in R. Lauth — H. Jacob (eds.), Gesamtausgabe
der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Series 2, Vol. 1, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, From¬
mann, 1962, 87.
145 Ibid., 75, cf. 87 ff.
146 Tbid., 75, 89.
47 Tbid., 83, 89.
M48 Tbid., 87.
149 Tbid., 89.
150 Ibid.
151 Friedrich Schleiermacher to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, in Jonas, L. — Dilthey W. (eds.), Aus Schlei¬
ermachers Leben. In Briefen, Vol. 1, 1st edition, Berlin, Reimer, 1858, 349f.
Cf. BARTH, Ulrich, Christentum und Selbstbewußtsein: Versuch einer rationalen Rekonstruktion
des systematischen Zusammenhangs von Schleiermachers subjektivitätstheoretischer Deutung der
christlichen Religion, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983.
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15!
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