Coleridge and Schleiermacher - Humanities-Ebooks

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The Hermeneutic Community: Coleridge and Schleiermacher
E. S. SHAFFER
In using the word ‘hermeneutic’ I wish to call attention to the relationship, as yet
largely unexplored, between the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and
that of Coleridge in beginning to formulate a general hermeneutics, a secular hermeneutics
that would subsume biblical hermeneutics, on the basis of a romantic aesthetics
of creative Verstehen, or Imagination. Wilhelm Dilthey, Schleiermacher’s exponent
and interpreter in the late nineteenth century, did call attention to the relation between
Coleridge and Schleiermacher, though in very general terms, identifying them both as
belonging to that major group of thinkers who emphasised ‘die geschichtliche Natur
des Menschen und der von ihm geschaffenen Culturformen und Verbände’, ‘the historical
nature of man and the cultural forms and groupings created by him’. More
recently, Claude Welch has linked their names, in order to establish that Coleridge is
of equal stature with Schleiermacher: ‘Coleridge must again be seen as a real turning
point into the new kinds of theologising that mark the nineteenth century, a thinker as
important for British and American thought as were Schleiermacher and Hegel’.
The new tendency to regard the Bible not as the product of dictation by the Holy
Ghost but as the work of men, and the rational inquiry into historical sources casting
doubt on the trustworthiness of the reports of events in both Testaments as in other
texts, threw the burden of determining and maintaining the significance of the text,
even canonicity itself, on the community that received it, both the historical community
of early Christianity so far as it could be determined, and the present community.
This momentous shift, clearly expressed by J. G. Eichhorn (1752–1827),
a major influence on both Schleiermacher and Coleridge, was elaborated by both
Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Schleiermacher’, Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Bd. 30, 450. Dilthey places
in this same group Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, ‘the Romantics and the historical school’, Carlyle,
Maine de Biran, and Guizot, Schleiermacher is compared to Wordsworth in J. Arundel Chapman,
Introduction to Schleiermacher (London: Epworth Press, 1932), to Wordsworth’s advantage.
Claude Welch, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West,
vol. ii, eds Ninian Smart, et al. (Cambridge University Press, 1985) p. 2.