1768-1834
Protestant Theologian

Early Life. Friedrich Schleiermacher was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland). His great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were all pastors in the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition. A decade after Friedrich's birth, his father, a chaplain in the Prussian army, experienced a pietistic awakening after coming into contact with a Moravian community, a German Protestant sect. He and his wife were so impressed with the Moravians that in 1783 they sent Friedrich to a Moravian school in Niesky, near Gorlitz. There he studied ancient languages, mathematics, and botany, as well as acquiring an appreciation for the importance of a transforming, inner religious experience. When he was sixteen, he entered the Moravian seminary in Barby. A young scholar with keen intellect and great curiosity, Schleiermacher smuggled into his dormitory philosophical books forbidden by the Moravian schoolmasters and read them surreptitiously. In 1787, against his father's wishes, he...