Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. In 2 volumes. Great condition. Please use photographs to ascertain condition.

About the book >.>.> Schleiermacher never actually swerved from this fundamental conception of religion but in his later years it is possible to detect a certain change of emphasis; probably he himself was not altogether conscious of this change but it is this which makes the Glaubenslehre the work of his old age so contra- dictory. Here also he takes as his starting-point religion in general the “essence” of religion which is also the essence of the Christian religion. There is no room in the religious conception of the Glaubenslehre for any idea of connection with an historical fact. For in this conception the central element is immediate “feeling”; now a conception of this kind cannot be intensified by the knowledge of some particular fact which has actually taken place; on the contrary it would only lead to confusion. For here also it is true that “Religion is not knowledge.” The “religion within religions” consists in feeling or to define it more precisely in the “feeling of absolute dependence”; this is the “essence of religion” even of the Christian religion. The relation of this general “essence” of religion to the historical faiths is here also as it is in the Reden to be determined by two general conceptio (which indeed had not been clearly worked out until now): (a) the conception of the stage of development that is through the degree of clearness or strength or purity of that “feeling” in which religion consists and (b) the conception of the varied forms which this general “feeling” will take in different individuals in actual contact with life. There is only one religion but this one religion passes through different stages of development and it expresses itself-on the same plane of development-in various forms. (MP)