The Perfect Combination

As people began to question the religious norms of the day during the Reformations and through the periods after the Enlightenment, a plethora of new religious thoughts and arguments arose. Immanuel Kant published his thoughts on the importance of reason above all else during the Enlightenment. This concept was very popular and proceeded to cause the Protestant theology to lose influence, due to the fact that reason was the new authority for all matters. To combat these “cultured despisers”, Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote a series of speeches that address the experience, not the reason, that religion is all about. Both of these modern thinkers made enticing arguments; however, they did not realize that religion requires a combination of both reason and experience, not just one.

Immanuel Kant’s An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? stresses the importance of using “reason publicly in all matters” (Kant 2). Kant encourages people to obey the rules set upon them by their priests and churches, but they must also use their reason to publicly argue about their problems with the religious institutions. Yet if people only used reason in their religious lives, then their religion would not amount to much of anything, because no matter how enlightened one is, he or she will never fully understand God and all of his ways. They would also fail to actually engage in their faith, just as most people do not engage with the fact that two plus two equals four, even though most everyone completely understands this truth.

Nevertheless, if someone only engages in his or her faith without intellectually understanding it, that person would be at the same loss that the person with only reason would be. This is the crucial flaw that Schleiermacher has in his On Religion speeches. He purports that religion is based solely on the feeling or experience that one has with or toward God. Schleiermacher’s idea does have merit, but a religion based on experience would wind up in utter disarray. This would occur because no one would be able to discuss, counsel, or teach one another, which is the result of not being able to assimilate or articulate one’s “Gefuehl”. There would be no identical beliefs, and therefore no structure to religion, because “every man has greater receptiveness for some religious experiences and feelings than for others” (Schleiermacher 135).

How one experiences God is necessary to religion. So is how one understands God. But either one of these elements of religion cannot stand on their own. Experience and reason together make up the majority of what is needed in religion. With both of these aspects, people can experience God, while still being able to understand Him and convey their thoughts to others. This combination can make it so that someone can intellectually understand a certain characteristic of the Divine and then go on to actually feel what he or she understands. “The whole of religion is nothing but the sum of all relations of man to God,” so if someone can feel God and comprehend a lot about Him, he or she could attain a very close relationship to Him.

Kant, Immanuel. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? 1784

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers

By Michael Hampl