HISTORICAL SITUATION

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, lived religiousness and piety were no longer a matter of course in the intellectual circles of Europe. Schleiermacher's early work, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, signals this shift, as does the religion that is at once criticized and philosophically defended in Hegel's concept of Absolute Spirit. The opposition of rational enlightenment to nonconceptual (religious) revelation such as Kant and Lessing had carried out with exemplary success at the end of the eighteenth century lay like a long shadow over every effort of the subsequent period to present faith in God and religion - or even the core of Christianity, reconciliation - at all argumentatively.