THE raison d'être to Böhme and Hegel

"The result of Hegel's project was to have been, he hoped, a return to a more 'natural' consciousness, like that possessed by the Greeks, but in a form that is fully modern and self-aware (to say nothing of being Protestant and Lutheran). Just as in Böhme, man's fall is necessary because his original unity with God and with his own true nature is an unthinking unity. We must be brought back to unity, but this time the unity must be achieved in full self-consciousness."

-- Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Glenn Alexander Magee, 2001, p. 87.

"...content to live without other faith...", 1904

"What you say of the connection between physical health and mental serenity and distress in giving up the hereditary faith, and finding one's-self [sic] incapable of forming any rational theory of the universe and of one's own relation to it, is undoubtedly true. But the mass of men, even of those called civilized and intelligent, really take little heed of these things, living by the day, and content to live without other faith than that the course of things, so far as they are concerned, will not undergo any startling change in their time. Natural motives are taking the place of supernatural, -- with considerable damage to the morality of common men, and with a need for a fundamental revision of ethical theories, and legal systems."

-- Letter of 29 July, 1904 of Charles Eliot Norton to William Roscoe Thayer, in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. II, 1913, p. 346-347.

Hamann, Hamlet and Herder, heading to Purgatory

"But Hamann taught Herder English, using as a textbook Shakespeare's Hamlet (!), which Herder learned so thoroughly that Caroline Herder reports he could quote most of it by heart. When, in 1764 Hamann left Königsberg on a trip to southern Germany  he wrote back to his father to greet Herder and to tell him that as soon as he had finished with Milton's Hell the two of them would venture into Dante's Purgatory."

-- Herder: His Life and Thought, Robert T. Clark, 1969, p. 46.

Schleiermacher, Fichte, absolute dependence

"Schleiermacher's impatience with the transcendental egotism of Fichte is evident in the early Speeches. Fichte shows how far he is from true piety in his Promethean confidence that man's world of meaning and value is his own creation. The pious man knows that he is not the ground of his own being -- that all reality comes to him as a gift, flowing from the great unseen reality in which all things cohere. In other words, religion at bottom is grace."
(p. 56.)

"Whatever its source, [Schleiermacher's] sense that everything of value in one's consciousness of God -- everything that can rightly be called religion -- comes as 'gift' is very deep. Indeed, Schleiermacher's well-known definition of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence is perhaps best understood as the awareness of the utter 'givenness' of faith."

-- Friedrich Schleiermacher, C. W. Christian, 1979, p. 35.

sic transit gloria Schleiermacher?

"Although much of the specific content of his [Schleiermacher] thought is now dated, its originality and daring is still evident and, behind the romantic rhetoric, his accomplishment remains remarkably fresh and relevant to the theological tasks of the present."

-- Friedrich Schleiermacher, C. W. Christian, 1979, p. 13.

still under the Ptolemaic dispensation, 1902

"The greatest spiritual change in ourselves which the past forty years have wrought is, I take it, the change in our conceptions of the relation of man to the universe, and of the possibility of knowledge of anything whatsoever that lies outside the narrow limits set for us by our senses and by the constitution of our mental powers. For us at least, faith in human fancies about invisible things long since died away, and, for my own part, I have no sentimental regret at its vanishing. Without it, I find myself more in harmony with the exceedingly minute section of the universe to which I belong; not, indeed, in closer intellectual agreement with most of the good men and women my contemporaries, of whom all but an insignificant fraction are still living under the Ptolemaic dispensation, undisturbed in their practical conviction that this earth is the centre of the universe, and man the chief object of creation. Even when their religion has gone as a controlling force, their superstition remains affecting their imaginations." 

-- Letter of C. E. Norton to Goldwin Smith, 19 July 1902, in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Vol. II, 1913, p. 326.

Rousseau's significance and fides implicita, Cassirer, 1932

"The significance of Rousseau's philosophy of religion for cultural history can be describe in a single phrase: he eliminated from the foundation of religion the doctrine of fides implicita*. No one can believe for another and with the help of another; in religion everyone must stand on his own. ... Neither Calvinism not Lutheranism had ever radically overcome the doctrine of the fides implicita; they had only shifted its center by replacing faith in tradition with faith in the Word of the Bible. But for Rousseau there existed no kind of inspiration outside the sphere of personal experience."

-- The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ernst Cassirer, 1954 [1932], p. 117-8, cited in Modern Christian Thought, Vol. 1: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, James Livingston, 2nd ed., 1997, p. 45.

*Fides implicita refers to the assent to the truths taught by the Church even though one has no knowledge of what these teachings are about or the evidence of their truth.

Back to the Garden, allegorically or agriculturally?

"The recognition that the paradise of knowledge enjoyed by our parents was an historical reality, combined with the acceptance of the command to 'have dominion' in its full literal sense, provided a vital impetus to the seventeenth-century quest to know and master the world. Only when the story of creation was divested of its symbolic elements could God's commands to Adam be related to worldly activities. If the Garden of Eden were but a lofty allegory, as Philo, Origen, and later Hugh of St. Victor, had suggested, there would be little point in attempting to re-establish a paradise on earth. If God's command to Adam to tend the garden had primarily symbolic significance, as Augustine had believed, then the idea that man was to re-establish paradise through gardening and agriculture would simply not have presented itself so strongly to the seventeenth-century mind."

-- The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science, Peter Harrison, 1998, p. 207.

Nietzsche, Sils-Maria, d. 8. Juli 1886.

"A profound man needs friends, unless indeed he has a God. And I have neither God nor friend!"

Letter Nietzsche to his sister, Sils-Maria, 8 July, 1886; cited in Modern Christian Thought, Vol. 1: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, James Livingston, 2nd ed., 1997, p. 399.

Shaftesbury and gnothi seauton, 1708

"We can never be fit to contemplate anything above us, when we are in no condition to look into ourselves, and calmly examine the temper of our mind and passions."

-- "A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm", Shaftesbury, 1708, cited in Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study of Enthusiasm, Stanley Grean, 1967, p. 30.