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History is really the science of that which is, for everything before now is revealed as the basis for the present.
-Friedrich Schleiermacher (1793)1
I have learned to see that religion, public faith, and life in the state form the point around which everything else revolves.
-F. W. J. Schelling (1806)2
As the nineteenth century dawned, the philosopher F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854) announced that the present epoch was ''surely bound to give birth to a new world,'' with universities strategically occupying the vanguard.3 Schelling's Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803), addresses he delivered in Jena in 1802, profoundly shaped the future of German higher education in general, and the founding of the new Prussian University of Berlin in 1810-a replacement for Prussia's humiliating loss of the University of Halle in 1806-in particular.4 After the Peace of Tilsit in 1807, Friedrich Wilhelm III pronounced, ''the state must replace intellectually what it has lost physically,'' and Schelling's Vorlesungen constructed much of the intellectual framework for that task.5 Furthermore, the Vorlesungen wielded a ''determining influence,'' Arnaldo Momigliano suggested, upon the ''first phase of the so-called 'Historismus,' '' promoting ''empirical history against the theory of a history a priori.''6
In an intriguing outcome, however, Schelling's lectures also elicited a lengthy critical review by the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768- 1834), who was himself an honorary member of the Jena circle and a major intellectual architect of the University of Berlin.7 In the embellished words of Karl Barth, Schleiermacher was ''the great Niagara Falls'' to which the theology of two centuries was inexorably drawn.8 As the ''Church Father'' of the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher's relation to Schelling had considerable ramifications for the orientation of academic, scientific (wissenschaftliche) theology in modern Europe.9 Formidable Protestants from Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) to Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89) found in both a deep well from which to draw for their own accounts of the Christian religion.10 Members of the ''Catholic Tübingen School'' evidenced perhaps to an even greater extent the influence of Schelling's and Schleiermacher's ideas arising from their interaction-a line of influence that reached even to the Second Vatican Council.11 Despite this, historians have generally neglected Schleiermacher's review.12 The contours of Schleiermacher's engagement with Schelling thus warrant investigation.
In this article, I contend that...