ABSTRACT
Arthur Schopenhauer was born into a family of patrician traders in Danzig on 22 February 1788, and died seventy-two years later on 21 September 1860 in Frankfurt-am-Main. The early nineteenth century of Schopenhauer’s education and intellectual maturity was heir to a number of intellectual and cultural developments, which had placed theology and religion on the defence. Schopenhauer identified embodiment as providing the key to the riddle of Immanual Kant’s thing-in-itself, for the incarnate individual is not only a Kantian knower, but also and simultaneously one of the objects whose inner side it is seeking to know. Schopenhauer thought that the greater portion of theology was given over to fruitless and irresolvable infighting between different wings or tendencies. Given Schopenhauer’s assessment of the pursuits and contributions of theology, it is hardly surprising to find that his philosophy of religion has exerted no influence on mainstream theology whatsoever.
