The German Liberal theology against which Barth rebelled – Barth’s critique of Kant.

Barth’s critique of Schleiermacher’s view of Christianity as the highest form of the religious sense.

Barth’s critique of Harnack, as subordinating faith to culture.

Contra Barth, The search for truth in religion is not wilful, but a great human good.

Jacobi’s central role in the Spinoza controversy opened the eyes of the young Schleiermacher and shaped his development as a theological thinker. Probably even more influential, however, was Jacobi’s philosophical concept of intuition as a source of the evidence of God, which this chapter explores both for Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto.

The secularisation paradigm, the notion that religion faded into irrelevance in the post-Enlightenment era, has long defined perceptions of Romantic religiosity and religious art. From this perspective, art – in particular, the phenomenon of art-religion – served to fill the void left by the retreat of religion, offering new secularised forms of transcendence to replace those once offered by conventional religious art. This chapter aims to overhaul our received picture by arguing that rather than usurping the place of religion, art-religion serves as its dynamic continuation. It reveals the porous nature of the boundaries between religious art and art-religion in early Romantic thought, examining key texts by Schleiermacher, Wackenroder, and Tieck. It then demonstrates how a similar logic of recuperation and reinvention is at work in Romantic music, drawing on examples ranging from quasi-liturgical music to the monuments of absolute music. The chapter culminates with an exploration of what are arguably the most complex, multilayered examples of Romantic art-religion in the musical sphere, Liszt’s Christus and Wagner’s Parsifal.

The themes from this book require extending into other research areas. First, the history of political thought and ideas: psychology itself is an idea, since modern political thought emanated not only from thinking about ‘man’ but also from what the thinker believed himself to be, qua man: that is, his interior religious and/or psychological status. Second is the history of education, where the importance of the German-language tradition (Schleiermacher, Herbart, Froebel) might lead to studying the idea of universal salvation as a founding discourse of modern schooling, and the ‘developer’ as the individual embodiment of social and national progress. Third comes disability history, concerning institutions and asylums, which has encouraged a single reified notion of developmental disability; a critical conceptual history should make it possible to stand outside this. The fourth area is literature. The novel is the classic literary ‘form’ of a linear developmental narrative, but its historical examples reveal it to be a constant subversion rather than reflection of the developmental idea, even in the typical novel of personal formation (Bildungsroman).

This chapter starts from the extraordinary historical circumstance that Schleiermacher and Schlegel, a theologian and classical scholar and philosopher, who both had a huge influence on the development of their disciplines and the institution of the university, shared lodgings as students. It explores their relationship, and the importance of it for their subsequent careers, and expands from this toconsider how the seminary, as dominant theological educational institution, was overtaken in the university by the seminar – to explore how both educational forums show similar negotiations of the dynamic between personal, affective relationships and methodological rigour. It thus raises questions about how the public and the private, emotion and objectivity became values of scholarship between philology and theology in the university

Chapter 5 engages proposals that deny the importance of a historical Fall. I begin with Kant’s account of radical evil. An influential reading is this. Every human being who reaches the age of reason freely subordinates the moral law to self-interest. Next is Karl Barth’s “christologized” version of radical evil: the Fall is the universal act of unbelief in Christ. I argue that the reduction of original sin to the universality of actual sin is insufficiently inclusive. Neither infants nor the severely mentally disabled choose wrongdoing. Schleiermacher separated original sin from the Fall in a different way. Original sin is the corporate act of humanity. The “force” of sin is present in infants, albeit in germinal form, and when they mature they lack God-consciousness and tend to sinful self-love. Schleiermacher’s view leads to a problematic conclusion. Either sin is numerically one, or sin is merely environmental, external to the will. Schoonenberg defends a similar view but stresses human freedom. McFarland intriguingly proposes a synthesis of Maximus’s and Augustine’s accounts of the fallen will, while arguing that we can avoid etiological explanations of sin altogether. I argue, however, that we have to choose: we need either to explain why original justice is theologically unnecessary or to defend it in some form.

The second chapter turns to the specific examples of Plato and of Socratic teaching as a template used for formulating an approach to the study of antiquity. It also introduces the institution of the philological seminar as a space for academic sociability modelled on Platonic precedent. Compared to an earlier interest in mainly Socrates (rather than Plato) as a mostly ambivalent figure, I trace a new understanding of Plato as the ostensibly unified author of systematic works centrally concerned with educational progress. My main example in this chapter is Wolf’s directorship of the philological seminar in Halle, together with his edition of Plato’s Symposium. I also look at the Socratic Memorabilia of J. G. Hamann (1759) and finally at some of the programmatic writings of Fichte and Schleiermacher for a new university in Berlin.

The third chapter forcuses on the influential translation project of the Platonic dialogues by Friedrich Schleiermacher and its relation to his own hermeneutics. Schleiermacher’s work and thinking on Plato is not only representative and innovative of Plato scholarship of the time but harnesses assumptions about individuality, development, and understanding to a Platonic model. This model is in evidence in Schleiermacher’s own thinking about education and scholarship and also importantly influenced such figureheads as August Boeckh, professor of classical philology in Berlin for over fifty years, and directions taken in classical scholarship.

The fifth chapter considers the narrative overlap of disciplinary filiation and the biographical. It does so through readings of Carl Justi’s biography of Winckelmann and Wilhelm Dilthey’s biographical work on Schleiermacher. Both were begun in the 1870s within a web of hermeneutic thinking about the biographical that characterized the Geisteswissenschaften and reflected back into the study of ancient biographical materials, too, and rendered scholars and their subject matter coextensive.