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Schleiermacher on Miracles and Revelation

June 19, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

We talked a bit on the episode towards the end about S's take on immortality. His take on miracles and on revelation is similar. In short, miracles are all around us, and all creativity is inspiration. It takes a pious person to recognize our ordinary environment as full of magic and wonder.

From his second speech:

The more religious you are, the more miracle would you see everywhere. All disputing about single events, as to whether or not they are to be called miraculous, gives me a painful impression of the poverty and wretchedness of the religious sense of the combatants. One party show it by protesting everywhere against miracle, whereby they manifest their wish not to see anything of immediate relationship to the Infinite and to the Deity. The other party display the same poverty by laying stress on this and that. A phenomenon for them must be marvellous before they will regard it as a miracle, whereby they simply announce that they are bad observers.

What is revelation? Every original and new communication of the Universe to man is a revelation, as, for example, every such moment of conscious insight... Every intuition and every original feeling proceeds from revelation... If nothing original has yet been generated in you, when it does come it will be a revelation for you also, and I counsel you to weigh it well.

What is inspiration? ...It is that action which springs from the heart of man, despite of, or at least, regardless of, all external occasion. In the same measure in which this action is freed from all earthly entanglement, it is felt as divine and referred to God.

...The man who does not see miracles of his own from the standpoint from which he contemplates the world, the man in whose heart no revelation of his own arises, when his soul longs to draw in the beauty of the world, and to be permeated by its spirit; the man who does not, in supreme moments, feel, with the most lively assurance, that a divine spirit urges him, and that he speaks and acts from holy inspiration, has
no religion. The religious man must, at least, be conscious of his feelings as the immediate product of the Universe; for less would mean nothing. He must recognize something individual in them, something that cannot be imitated, something that guarantees the purity of their origin from his own heart. To be assured of this possession is the true belief.

Belief, on the contrary, usually so called, which is to accept what another has said or done, or to wish to think and feel as another has thought and felt, is a hard and base service. So far is it from being the highest in religion, as is asserted, that it must be rejected by all who would force their way into the sanctuary of religion. To wish to have and hold a faith that is an echo, proves that a man is incapable of religion; to demand it of them, shows that there is no understanding of religion. You wish always to stand on your own feet and go your own way, and this worthy intent should not scare you from religion. Religion is no slavery, no captivity, least of all, for your reason. You must belong to yourselves. Indeed, this is an indispensable condition of having any part in religion.

According to Hume, this thing we call causality is mysterious, or rather it is the taking for granted of the mysterious: we just see one thing happen, then another, and think we understand the link, but we don't. So all causality is miraculous, and certainly if you can witness, e.g. a baby being born and not think a miracle is occurring, then something is wrong with you. A miracle for S. is a symbol of the divine working in our world, and we can see this everywhere, not just in magic tricks. Likewise, the process by which we think is equally mysterious, particularly in the case of those creative souls that call forth wonders but can't typically explain how. To appreciate this is to recognize revelation, according to S.

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Filed Under: PEL's Notes Tagged With: Friedrich Schleiermacher, miracles, philosophy blog, philosophy of religion, philosophy podcast

Comments

  1. Erik Douglas says

    June 19, 2011 at 10:52 pm

    Amen to Schleirmacher! Nice passage that.

    Reply
  2. Nullifidian says

    June 20, 2011 at 10:56 am

    I find arguments like these tremendously unconvincing and more instructive about the tenor of the times. For example, even if I didn’t roughly know when Schleiermacher lived, I could guess it from his depiction of inspiration as being highly colored by the Romantics’ idea of a poetic muse. That is not something anyone would have said or written prior to the late 18th century, even when they did believe that their artistic talent was god-given. You’d think that if god is timeless and immortal, that accounts about how it interacts with the world would be identifiably independent of the social and cultural cues of the time.

    Also, why do we only choose things like the birth of babies for our representative ‘miracles’? If things become miraculous because of the problem of causality, then surely any causal interaction will do. X hacks a young child with a machete during a genocide, and the young child then dies is invested with as much miraculousness as any smiling baby or bucolic nature scene. Sometimes the mechanics of death and destruction really are awesome to contemplate, like the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb or the ways in which HIV or the malarial parasites of the genus Plasmodium have evolved to evade the host’s immune defenses. If the things we like are miracles, then surely we must also consider that the things we dislike could be miracles by operation of the same principles. They’re all ruled by causality and are happening in god’s universe.

    Reply
  3. Mark Linsenmayer says

    June 20, 2011 at 11:13 am

    Nullifidian :

    Also, why do we only choose things like the birth of babies for our representative ‘miracles’? If things become miraculous because of the problem of causality, then surely any causal interaction will do.

    Yes, you’re right, of course. The baby thing is just an example to make it ring intuitively, i.e. a place were empirically we often find the everyday miraculous. Do you consider the fact that any causal event will do to be a reductio ad absurdum against S’s claim? I think he’d admit your claim about negative happenings; all of these things, for him, point out our fundamental lack of explicit understanding of the inner nature of things and yet our connectedness with them.

    Reply

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