“Indeed, we await a time at the end of our artful cultivation when no other preparatory society for religion will be needed except pious domesticity. Now millions of persons of both sexes and all estates groan under mechanical and unworthy labors … This is the reason why they do not attain the free and open view with which alone one finds the universe. There is no greater hindrance to religion than that we must be our own slaves, for everyone is a slave who performs something that should be accomplishable by dead forces.
“One thing we hope for from the perfection of the sciences and arts is that they will make these dead forces subject to us, that they might turn the corporeal world and everything of the spiritual world that can be regulated into a fairy palace where the god of the earth needs only to utter a magic word or to press a button to have his commands done. Then, for the first time, everyone will be freeborn; then every life will be at the same time practical and contemplative; the rod of the taskmaster will be raised over no one, and all people will have peace and leisure to contemplate the world in themselves … In that happy time when each person can freely exercise and use his senses, everyone, at the first awakening of the higher powers in holy youth under the care of paternal wisdom, will take part in religion who is capable of it.
Schleiermacher, On Religion, 1799
Unfortunately, Schleiermacher does not seem to have read his Sorcerer’s Apprentice lately. What if the “dead forces” are not dead, but chthonic and active? And what if when we seek to master them, they exert their own will on us?
