Edwards and Schleiermacher on Emotions

I am curious as to whether anyone knows of any studies comparing and contrasting Jonathan Edwards and Friedrich Schleiermacher on the role of emotions.  For Schleiermacher, religion consists in the emotions, for Edwards in the affections.  How are they different?

Schleirmacher says:

Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change,in all doing and suffering.  It is to have life and to know life in immediate feeling, only as such an existence in the infinite and eternal.

And:

True religion is sense and taste for the infinite.

Edwards says this:

For although to true religion there must indeed be something else besides affection; yet true religion consists so much in the affections, that there can be no true religion without them. He who has no religious affection, is in a state of spiritual death, and is wholly destitute of the powerful, quickening, saving influences of the Spirit of God upon his heart. As there is no true religion where there is nothing else but affection, so there is no true religion where there is no religious affection.

I think the main difference is that for Edwards, affections, or emotions, seem to be one element of genuine religion, wheras for Schleiermacher they were the sum total.   Also, it is surely true that Edwards and Schleiermacher held differing theological convictions on other matters which would influence the way they interpreted religious affections and/or emotions.

Still, I think it is helpful to call attention to this in light of these discussions that some of us have been having with Adrian Warnock on the place of emotions in Christian experience.  Though we may differ on the charismatic gifts and the place of emotions all of us come from the conservative side of the church aisle.  And being conservatives most of us would automatically think of Edwards as a good guy and Schleiermacher as a bad guy. 

Yet, it seems to me that they aren't all that far apart in their view of the place of emotions.  For Schleiermacher the sum total of Christianity is found in the emotions, for Edwards emotions are only primary.  But both seem to be romantics, just to different degrees.

So, if there is a criteria by which we distinguish between the views of Schleiermacher and Edwards, and thereby call Schleiermacher bad and Edwards good, then it seems that this criteria (whatever it may be) is of more importance than emotions in describing true Christian experience.

As I said at the beginning of the post - I offer these thoughts with a question mark at the end.  I only know a little bit about both of these theologians so in all likelihood I am missing something big here and would appreciate any enlightenment that anyone can offer.  It just seems to me like a good field of inquiry to compare and contrast these two who were champions of emotions.

Related Tags: Religion, Theology, Christian, Christianity, Romanticism, Religious Affections, Jonathan Edwards, Schleiermacher

Comments

[Agkyra]

I can only speak about Schleiermacher. I think that when we today speak about emotions, we're thinking about something that originates in us. Feeling for Schleiermacher is very different than that. In section three of "The Christian Faith," he argues that the essence of piety is neither knowing nor doing but feeling, and he expressly denies that piety is a combination of knowing, doing, and feeling. The specifically religious feeling is our sense of absolute dependence on God. We are purely receptive in this relationship, so that feeling is not really an emotion that originates in us. This seems to me to be more of a perception-by-feeling than an emotion. Emotions, as I conceive of them, are a subset of feelings, as I think Schleiermacher conceived of them.

[David Wayne]

Agkyra - many thanks for this

[Jeremy Pierce]

I was always under the impression that the affections for Edwards don't match up with our modern sense of emotions but are more closely related to the Hebrew notion of the heart, which includes what we call the mind and what we call the heart. The affections are dependent on intellectual beliefs to a significant degree. I'm not sure if it's like the Stoics, who thought of emotions simply as beliefs, or more like Aristotle, who thought of emotions as including beliefs as a component, but I think he's got the two tied up in some way.

Edwards' real source on all this is Augustine, who thought of the truly moral life as a life with rightly-ordered desires, meaning that our desires for what's most important are on top, with our desires for what's less valuable and worthy of desire being lower in the list. Sin corrupts the order of our desires, and conversion restores the ability to desire things rightly.

He doesn't think of emotions as the key, though. Emotions are sometimes morally necessary. Lack of the right emotions indicates that we are inhuman in our response. Sometimes they interfere with reason, though, and that's bad. But it's rightly-ordered desires that he sees as the nature of the godly life. Insofar as emotions and desires are related, you can see some real similarities between Augustine and Edwards. John Piper tries to bring them together in some ways, but I much prefer the way Augustine and Edwards think about these things. He doesn't make as many key distinctions.

[Russ]

I'd say they are considerably different. When Schleiermacher placed religion in the feelings, he was disassociating religion with the intellect; religion wasn't a form of knowledge at all. For Edwards, faith was a form of knowledge, even a form of empirical knowledge. Doctrine for Schleiermacher was simply the systemization of religious feelings, but for Edwards doctrine was from the Scripture, and was necessary, but insufficient on its own. Religious affections come from the work of the Holy Spirit in conversion creating a new "spiritual sense," that resulted in genuine religious affections. The metaphor used several times is the difference between knowing honey is sweet (doctrinal knowledge) and actually tasting honey (truly spiritual affections). But tasting honey isn't a feeling in Schleiermacher's sense; it's empirical knowledge.