Ricerc@Sapienza

The essay reconstructs some steps of the increasing use of “sacred” in order to define religious experience in the first decade of 19th century in Germany. The starting point is the definition of sacred in Eschenmayer’s dialogue Der Eremit und der Fremdling (1805) that establishes some important features of this idea: its difference to knowledge, ethics and aesthetics; its unattainability by rational knowledge and its accessibility through a paradoxical non sensible perception. The context of the debate within the schellinghian circle is argued on the basis of the critical exchange between Eschenmayer and Schelling in these years. In a second part Schleiermacher’s uses of the word in his first work, On Religion (1799), is analyzed in order to show their importance but at the same time their indeterminateness. Schleiermacher specifies religious experience through intuition and feeling, offering therefore a hypothesis on the human and social origin of sacred. In the last part of the essay a survey on the influence of this debate is given looking shortly at Fries’ reaction against Eschenmayer and at the presence of the sacred in Hegel’s Phenomenology of spirit and finally at some less known literature of this decade.