In The Veiled God, Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft surveys Scheiermacher's writings, primarily early materials, with a focus on a central theme. That theme is Schleiermacher's position on human individuality: its high intrinsic value and its inescapable embeddedness in the world of finitude. She capably traces the development of this position through Schleiermacher's early works, both well-known and obscure. On her account the young Schleiermacher takes exception to the ‘uniformity’ prescribed for human existence by Kant in particular, comes to his own ‘highest intuition’ regarding the value of human individuality and deepens his understanding of the social conditions that make for the flourishing of individuality as his writings progress. Ravenscroft also directs attention to Schleiermacher's deployment of multiple voices in his writings, which highlights his commitment to the importance of individuality-in-context by showing how consistently it is displayed in the very structure of his writings.

Ravenscroft states early on that one of her aims is to demonstrate ‘the resolutely theological character of Schleiermacher’s thought’ (p. 4), and to show that for him ‘the telos of Bildung and indeed the end of all life and language is necessarily theological’ (p. 3). This theme is curiously underdeveloped in the body of the book. Theological themes naturally appear in discussions of particular works, and an early chapter surveys Schleiermacher's mature dogmatics in preparation for consideration of the preceding corpus. But the chapters do not argue for the resolutely theological character of every text, and the theme returns only elliptically in the book's Epilogue (p. 262). This is curious partly because there seem to be significant stakes involved. It would be a good thing for Schleiermacher's thought to be ‘resolutely theological’ if the idea that he builds a ‘closed-off anthropological system’ needs to be refuted (p. 25); but it would be a bad thing if it makes Schleiermacher a contributor to the ‘history of (Christian) theological assumptions being imported into … social-scientific fields of study, which has not only had disturbingly harmful consequences for the treatment and perception of certain religious groups but has also compromised the scientific quality of the methodology used in the field’ (p. 5). On balance the book seems to present a Schleiermacher who positions ‘the transcendent as the heart and ground of the everyday’ (p. 25), precisely by embedding (Christian) theological assumptions into his ‘scientific’ thinking; but I am not confident that I have followed this trajectory correctly.

In connection with Schleiermacher's contemporary usefulness, Ravenscroft condemns his reproduction of claims by the colonisers of ‘New Holland’ that its indigenous inhabitants were ‘in every respect at the lowest level of human cultivation’ (p. 135) and his failure to ‘properly uphold the freedoms of Berlin's Jewish population’ in supposing that the ‘Jewish practice of referring to themselves as a “nation”’ should be regarded by the Prussian state as an obstacle to citizenship (p. 260). (She also criticises Schleiermacher for his assumptions about gender, but not as prominently.) Both criticisms have interesting problems.

Ravenscroft argues that Schleiermacher's uncritical echoing of the colonisers’ judgements represents a failure to ‘do justice to the particularity’ of the indigenous New Hollanders (p. 185), and that ‘there is the possibility for confronting these pernicious assumptions in Schleiermacher's scheme by using the very principles that he claims to uphold’ (p. 168). But this possibility requires a very specific reading of a core principle. Here Ravenscroft attributes to Schleiermacher the position that ‘each person represents humanity in their own way’ (p. 185). But earlier in the book she had quoted Schleiermacher's own words: ‘each man is meant to represent humanity in his own way’ (p. 103). It matters, I think, whether Schleiermacher's ‘highest intuition’ was a normative principle or a descriptive claim. If the former, then whether or not a given person so represents humanity is an empirical question. And a normative rendering coheres with the thought that social conditions can promote or hinder the development of human particularity, which seems to undergird Schleiermacher's criticism of Prussian society for its ‘lifeless managerial structures … that stifle and strangle and sanitise’ (p. 234). It also opens the possibility that Schleiermacher might have believed, with full intentionality, that some cultures offered so little in the way of, say, education, arts and leisure that their inhabitants might generally not be quite so far along qua unique individuals as his readers. So I see Schleiermacher's view of indigenous New Hollanders as more principled than Ravenscroft does, and also less separable from the positions he claims to uphold.

Ravenscroft accuses Schleiermacher of ‘a lack of an ability to envisage that the Jewish approach to the relationship between “religion” and “politics” might well differ’ from his own (p. 253). Here talk of ‘the Jewish approach’ misrepresents the situation, since differences among forms of Judaism practised within Prussia was a premise of the current citizenship discussion. What we need to attribute to Schleiermacher to make sense of his recommendation is the belief that non-nationalistic forms of Judaism are possible. Perhaps he can be faulted for believing this. But a lack of ability to envisage possibilities does not seem to be at issue, and how exactly his recommendation fails to properly uphold religious freedoms is not clear to me.

Such issues aside, the core work of the book more than adequately responds to caricatures of Schleiermacher's position that have circulated within the secondary literature – such as that ‘he is an individualist theologian who internalises religion, and reduces religious belief to a function of human self-consciousness’ (p. 261). And Ravenscroft's principled resistance to identifying Schleiermacher fully with the characters who speak in his writings keeps the reader mindful of the perils of reading Schleiermacher's positions off the surface of his texts. The book will be a significant resource for readers in search of a sense of the intensity and internal complexity of the young Schleiermacher's grappling with the dynamics of individual formation, interpersonal relationality and social context. No one who reads this excellent book with understanding will be tempted by an oversimplified Schleiermacher afterwards.