The Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 2010

REVIEW
Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich
Schleiermacher. By JACQUELINE MARIÑA. Pp. x þ 270.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 978 0 19
920637 7. £55.
IN this study, Jacqueline Mariña, a professor of philosophy
at Purdue University, seeks to provide an exposition and analysis
of the key metaphysical concepts undergirding Friedrich

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Schleiermacher’s thought regarding moral and spiritual transfor-
mation. She does so via an exegesis of the post-Enlightenment
and post-Kantian metaphysics upon which the mature
Schleiermacher develops his ethics—particularly the notions of
self-consciousness and personal identity—and that in sustained
conversation with some of the German theologian’s key dialogue
partners, principally Kant, but also Spinoza and Leibniz, and,
less so, Fichte and Jacobi, and with Platonic and Augustinian
metaphysics of the self. Mariña also oVers some helpful analyses
of the development of Schleiermacher’s thought regarding ethics.
Mariña’s essay has notable merits, principal among them being
its defence of Schleiermacher’s overall moral theory as both the
cornerstone of his thought and a legitimate entrée for under-
standing his theology. She understands that Schleiermacher’s
ethics are irreversibly engaged with his metaphysics of the abso-
lute and the philosophy of religion. Building on the work of
Frederick Beiser, she argues that ethical theory is ‘central to
Schleiermacher’s outlook’ and that ‘it is in the sphere of ethics
that religion has its ultimate meaning, for the fruit of all true
religion lies in its transformative power over the self’ (p. 3). The
significance of Schleiermacher’s achievement, Mariña argues, is
that by focusing on religious experience and the transcendental
conditions of subjectivity, Schleiermacher oVers an account of
religion unencumbered by reductionism and dogmaticism.
Insofar as he does this, Mariña contends, Schleiermacher
makes an important contribution to contemporary interreligious
dialogue.
Drawing on Schleiermacher’s early essays On Freedom
(1790–2), his notes on Kant’s second Critique (1789), the third
of his Dialogues on Freedom (1789), and his review of
Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1799), the
opening chapter, titled ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’, examines

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2 of 6 REVIEW

Schleiermacher’s struggle with Kant’s practical philosophy.

Mariña notes that while he had some sympathies with Kant’s
project, the early Schleiermacher became ‘increasingly dissatis-
fied with some of the deep philosophical problems posed by the
notion of transcendental freedom’ (p. 16).
Chapters 2 and 3 provide an analysis of two early works
(1793–4) by Schleiermacher on Spinoza, namely Spinozism and
the Short Presentation of the Spinozistic System. Chapter 2 exam-
ines Schleiermacher’s claim that there are no genuine indivi-
duals, and does so by way of considering Kant’s distinction
between noumena and phenomena. Mariña argues that Kant’s

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analysis of transcendental subjectivity remains an important
part of the early Schleiermacher’s thought and informs his deci-
sion to abandon Spinozism. She concludes: ‘Despite his famil-
iarity with Kant’s arguments against the possibility of knowledge
of the transcendent, in Spinozism Schleiermacher had already
come to the conclusion that it is through the transcendental
activity of the self that the soul comes into contact with what
is genuinely real’ (p. 75). Chapter 3 builds on the work under-
taken in the previous chapter and considers more deeply issues
of personal identity and (in agreement with Kant) our lack of
access to a substantial noumenal self.
Mariña then turns to the influence of Leibniz—‘a poor philo-
sopher [who] from time to time . . . developed better insights’
(p. 109)—on Schleiermacher’s thought by way of discussion of
Schleiermacher’s Monologen (1800), wherein Schleiermacher,
playing on Leibniz’s notion of the self as a mirror of the
world, envisions transcendentally free beings expressing them-
selves into the world. The author recalls Schleiermacher’s appro-
priation of Kant’s critique of rational psychology and his
avouchment that we have no access to knowledge of self as it
is in itself. ‘Self-knowledge is only of the empirical self, and this
means that the self knows itself only in its relation to that which
is diVerent from it and stands outside it. It is, therefore, through
the world that the self comes to know itself’ (pp. 110–11).
‘Without the other, there is no knowledge of the self. The
person expresses him or herself to the other, and the self as
thus expressed is reflected back to the self in the self-conscious-
ness of the other. Loss of the other is therefore a loss of oneself’
(p. 143). This contextualizes and anticipates the later discussion
on Christology, and addresses a foundation of Schleiermacher’s
employment of Leibniz’s (and Hegel’s) claim that it is
‘only in relation to a historical individual with a perfect God-
consciousness’ that human beings can ‘achieve moral perfection.
 REVIEW 3 of 6
For only such a one who expresses the divine love perfectly
knows the essence of all rational beings as their capacity to
express the divine love. Such a one reflects this essence back
to them so that they can thereby know themselves as beings
that express the divine love’ (p. 144). Clearly, Schleiermacher
has moved beyond Kant. The author here identifies key
Leibnizian themes that Schleiermacher will develop further in
his Dialektik (1814–15) and in Der christliche Glaube (1821–2)—
particularly the relationship between God and the self, and the
self and the world, and the integration that occurs between one’s
representation of the world and one’s own desires, and so one’s

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actions.
In chapter 5, Schleiermacher’s 1805–6 works, Notes on Ethics,
and his Outline of a Critique of Previous Ethical Theories (1803),
serve as the basis for exploring the implications of ensouled
human nature, and so a reality in which sensuously conditioned
desires can be infused with ethical content. Mariña considers
how the teleology of moral action seeks the perfection of this
world and not some other. She recognizes (in a later chapter)
that at the centre of Schleiermacher’s ethics lies the ‘non-
transposable character of individuals and historical communities,
each of which has a special character determined by a particular
historical development’ (p. 168), and that ‘Schleiermacher recog-
nized that not to acknowledge our situatedness can only lead
to delusions of absolute knowledge having the most pernicious
of consequences’ (p. 176), but unfortunately she does not take up
Karl Barth’s suggestion, in The Theology of Schleiermacher, that
we know Schleiermacher best when we understand him as a
virtuoso of family life, in the society of relatives either of
blood or of one’s own choosing (pp. 108–9).
The notion of ensoulment is further developed in chapter 6,
wherein Mariña probes the ensoulment of human nature through
reason and through the establishment of community, and in
chapter 7, ‘Transforming the Self through Christ’, in which
the author recalls Schleiermacher’s Christology (a subject
which ‘encapsulates the whole of his theology’, p. 187) in
terms of Christ’s own God-consciousness and of Christ’s creat-
ing God-consciousness in others, consequently transforming
their ethical outlook. Mariña contends that Schleiermacher’s
Christ—the one who ‘defines what it means to be human’
(p. 196)—engages in person-forming activity, a work established
in the original divine decree and which involves a transformation
of ethic. Insofar as he does this, Christ is, in Schleiermacher’s
words, ‘the completion of the creation of man’ (cited on p. 196).
4 of 6 REVIEW

This means, Mariña contends, that for Schleiermacher, ‘Jesus is

no mere teacher of morality, but that what he mediates is a
relation to the ground of being and love, and thereby to the
transcendental ground of all true religion and ethics’ (p. 197).
Moreover, our assimilation into Jesus’ divine life is ‘achieved
through the communication of his words and deeds’, both of
which are required to eVect the divine love in history and
shape human self-consciousness and being in the world. ‘The
divine love manifest in the life of the historical Jesus brings a
new way of envisioning what it means to be a human being, and
what it means to be in community’ (p. 219).

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The final chapter returns to the challenges of religious plural-
ism which were broached in the introduction and does so via an
analysis of arguments proVered in the 1821 edition of On
Religion and in the second edition of Der christliche Glaube.
Mariña argues that Schleiermacher’s thought provides a ‘gener-
ally coherent account of how it is possible that diVering religious
traditions are all based on the same experience of the absolute’
(p. 224). She further claims that religious diVerences are diVer-
ences only in degree, not in kind. ‘It is because there is a single,
fundamental experience to which all the world’s religions are
related that there can be meaningful and significant dialogue
among them’ (p. 243).
Mariña’s study has a number of strengths. Building upon her
already published work on Schleiermacher and Kant, she oVers a
valuable analysis of several chief sources of Schleiermacher’s
thought, and of his employment, discarding, and development
of some of their ideas through various stages of his own theolo-
gical and philosophical maturation, properly observing the way
in which Schleiermacher’s ethics are grounded upon his theolo-
gical claims, that philosophical ethics is purposely descriptive of
how divine causality finds shape in human community through
individual persons. Insofar as she does this, Mariña’s essay
fills a noticeable gap in the English-speaking literature, and is
a welcome complement to works by Richard R. Niebuhr
(Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, 1964), Albert Blackwell
(Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life: Determinism, Freedom,
Phantasy, 1982), Brian Gerrish (A Prince of the Church:
Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology, 1984),
Julia A. Lamm (The Living God: Schleiermacher’s Theological
Appropriation of Spinoza, 1996), Catherine L. Kelsey (Thinking
about Christ with Schleiermacher, 2003), and Richard Crouter
 REVIEW 5 of 6
(Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and
Romanticism, 2005).
Mariña’s argument could have been more persuasive had she
attended further to a number of her claims: for example, the
claim that Schleiermacher’s proposals concerning transcendental
freedom are made at the cost of abandoning determinism.
Readers may also be left unsatisfied that Mariña stops short
of recounting how the transformation of self with which
Schleiermacher is so concerned is eVected; and what lay
behind the author’s decision to give relatively little attention

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to Schleiermacher’s more mature ethics—for example, his lec-
tures on philosophical ethics delivered at the University of
Berlin between 1812 and 1830, a period which overlaps Hegel’s
time at that same institution, or Schleiermacher’s six
Akademieabhandlungen read before the Academy of Sciences
between 1819 and 1830—which invite us to consider how lan-
guage, tradition, and institutions inform the moral shape of
human being both universally and particularly? These works
might have assisted Mariña to provide a more rigorous compar-
ison between Schleiermacher’s early and later ethics and their
relation to his Christology developed in Der christliche Glaube
(1821–2, 1830–1)—to which she appropriately turns in her
penultimate chapter, though she fails to develop it as fully as
her project requires—and particularly the relationship between
Jesus’ own God-consciousness, the ethical significance of the
hypostatic union, and his mediating to us divine causality.
Moreover, Schleiermacher’s privileging of God’s ecclesiological
community as that creation of the Spirit with which Jesus’ reli-
giosity is a contemporary reality is disregarded by Mariña. Here,
some readers may also take issue that Mariña’s reading of
Schleiermacher as positing unmediated moments of the feeling
of absolute dependence (a notion which betrays Leibniz’s influ-
ence) is oVered too independently of Schleiermacher’s careful
underscoring of historical, social, theological, and cultural con-
tingencies and practices, with which much of his philosophical
ethics are concerned. Finally, while appropriately situating this
project and its value against the backdrop of contemporary chal-
lenges posed by various forms of religious (and other) funda-
mentalism and interreligious dialogue, the author minimizes
the obstacles to interreligious dialogue and overplays the profit-
ability that Schleiermacher’s project oVers therein.
6 of 6 REVIEW

Few will follow Mariña on every point, and those seeking a

particularly transpicuous exposition of Schleiermacher’s thought
might well be disappointed, but this remains a valuable essay all
the same, and those wishing to engage with Schleiermacher’s
abiding significance for ethics will not want to be without it.

doi:10.1093/jts/flq016 JASON A. GORONCY

Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership,
Dunedin
jgoroncy@knoxcollege.ac.nz

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