ABSTRACT
Modern Continental philosophy of religions began very obviously in 1799, when F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768-1834) published his Speeches on Religion. The work aimed at putting an end to Enlightened skepticism toward ’religion’ – not Christianity – and therefore provides the (cultured) reader with an apologetic of religious feeling with slight pantheistic overtones. When man does not feel the world religiously, his perception of reality is mutilated. All sense of infi nity disappears. The cultural context of the Speeches is clear: they are written in the age of Schiller and Goethe. The theological context, however, is not that clear. Though one must not forget that Schleiermacher, then a young parson in Berlin, was preaching the Christian gospel in church at the time he was writing the Speeches, they are a plea for ‘religion’ and for no defi nite religion. One must add, though, that Schleiermacher envisages a very specifi c religion: a pietistic religion with a God (or an Absolute) the heart can feel. The same feature is to be found in Schleiermacher’s magnum opus, his Christian Faith. Here again, feeling is the arch-concept. Man’s relation to God is lived in a ‘feeling of absolute dependence,’ and the content of Christian theology is interpreted according to this feeling – with the awkward consequence that a doctrine which cannot be felt (e.g., the doctrine of the Trinity) will only fi nd its niche in the book’s appendix. The anthropological reduction is clear. The concept of ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ is not derived from the specifi city of Christian experience (even if it may mean ‘knowing oneself as a creature’). Therefore, a philosophical a priori governs Schleiermacher’s dogmatics. Because of his cultural and anthropocentric emphasis, the nineteenth century was to become Schleiermacher’s century. Opposition came very soon nonetheless. It came fi rst from within German idealism. J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), who had published An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation in 1792, where revelation, in Kantian fashion, is restricted to its moral content, would later state that ‘the metaphysical only, and not the historical, gives beatitude.’ G. W. F. Hegel’s (1770-1831) contribution is of paramount importance. Hegel’s philosophy of religion is a history of the development
of religion from its elementary form to the ‘consummate religion’, namely, Christianity. Christianity is a religion. But as a religion it is also the unsurpassable religion, the religion in which the Absolute is ‘manifest’ (offenbar). There is more, though. For if Hegel’s philosophy of religion ends with the absolute religion, his philosophy doesn’t. Religious knowledge is not the last knowledge. And when consciousness has grasped absolute religion, it has still to reach ‘absolute knowledge,’ that is, a speculative knowledge where the content of religion becomes conceptually translucent. Absolute knowledge is knowledge of the Christian God and no other. (Also, neither absolute religion nor absolute knowledge is a matter of ‘feeling.’) However, this is theology and not faith, and faith must fi nd its fulfi llment in theology. A former friend of Hegel’s, F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854) opposed in his late philosophy the absorption of ‘absolute religion’ into ‘absolute knowledge.’ Schelling’s project, after repudiating his earlier so-called ‘negative philosophy,’ was to develop a ‘positive philosophy.’ In lectures given at Berlin, Schelling organized this positive philosophy as (a) a philosophy of mythology and (b) a philosophy of revelation (namely Christian revelation). We are dealing here with a speculative description and a teleology: ‘mythology’ has a philosophical truth of its own, but this truth culminates in Christianity. And as in Hegel, one point is clear: Schelling knows of no boundary between philosophy and theology and deals with theological material without the slightest concern for some ‘supernatural’ faith. The Christian God, as the mythological gods, stands at the philosopher’s disposal. S. A. Kierkegaard (1813-55) is known for his perpetual polemics against Hegel’s ‘system’ and his frustration as a listener to Schelling’s Berlin lectures. It is nonetheless a remarkable fact that he, too, knows of no boundary between philosophy and theology. His Philosophical Fragments is devoted to Christology and the theory of faith. His Concept of Anxiety deals with the concept of original sin. Here again, the Enlightenment is over, and theology is practiced out of theological ghettos. The originality of Kierkegaard’s attempts lies in his almost total lack of interest for the ‘content’ of the Christian religious experience. Faith, as described in the Fragments, faces an ‘absolute paradox’ (the Incarnation), and the paradox is not to be known except through love (‘one does not enter into truth, except through charity,’ as Augustine put it). One turns therefore from the what of faith to its how. There is indeed a ‘way’ to religious life, insofar as Kierkegaard describes existence as being lived ‘aesthetically,’ ‘ethically,’ and ‘religiously.’ But no dialectic leads to religious life. Furthermore, Christianity is not the ‘consummate religion’: the Kierkegaardian contrast is between Socrates and Jesus – between Hellenism and Christology, between the presence of a master and the presence of a savior. It is also worth noting that the Kierkegaardian accentuation of the how and of decision (a ‘leap into faith’) allows him to bypass the problems of historical exegesis and of the ‘historical Jesus.’ Whatever scholarship can teach us, God incarnate will always be the ‘absolute paradox,’ which is not to be understood objectively before believing in him, but which is known through believing in him. Historical inquiry cannot prove either faith or the absence of it. It is not surprising that the atheistic answer to a philosophy of religion which had turned into a philosophy of Christianity evoked during Kierkegaard’s lifetime an
attempted demolition of the Christian experience. L. Feuerbach (1804-72) published his Essence of Christianity in 1841. The thesis is clear-cut: the Christian God is a human artifact. No other God is known to Feuerbach, and his atheism is no anti-theism. Where does the secret of Christianity lie? In anthropology. Interpreting God’s love is nothing else than interpreting human love and its ambitions. Interpreting Christ’s passion is nothing else than interpreting the ‘essence of the heart’ and of human suffering (and Feuerbach brushes aside the metaphysical God, who is actus purus and not passio pura). ‘The fundamental dogmas of Christianity are realized wishes of the heart.’ More precisely, ‘the essence of Christianity is the essence of the heart [Gemüt].’ K. Barth would later remark that Feuerbach’s attack is an attack on religion and not on the Christian faith. Feuerbach’s God is undeniably not transcendent (not least because he does not exist): he is the hypostatized sum of human desires. This means that all knowledge becomes secondary. We are back on classical ground with Karl Marx’s (1818-83) critique of religion, which is by no means a critique of Christianity alone. Marx’s dissertation was devoted to Greek materialism, his ambition was to develop a materialistic science of history and economy, and religion has no other function in his philosophy than the function of an alienating ideology. Through religion, alienated man does not become conscious of his alienation. Religion, therefore, in a wholly anti-Hegelian fashion, is not knowledge at all, and knowledge of the actual situation of man in history and economics can only be achieved by the materialistic knowledge that can prove how ideology distorts man’s relationship to (material) reality. Thus, when the utopian classless society becomes reality, no room will be left for any religious ideology: in such a society, unprecedented production-relations will make materialism the only possible vision of being. E. Bloch (1885-1977) would later give a distinctly religious version of Marx’s philosophy of the end of history: Marxism appears as the foundation of an eschatological hope and Marxist praxis as a secularized messianism. Feuerbach’s atheism was directed against the Christian God. So was F. Nietzsche’s (1844-1900). As an exaltation of weakness and asceticism, Christianity, according to Nietzsche, is the way to nihilism (to the ‘devaluation of the highest values’). Following the Crucifi ed means taking leave of the world. It means refusing ‘life’ – that is, being-in-the-fl esh and will. Platonism, in a way, had refused the world before Christianity did. But even if Christianity may be called ‘a Platonism for the people,’ Nietzsche’s critique is much more anti-Christian than it is anti-Platonic. Nietzsche indeed provides us with an alternative religion of sorts. To the Christian focus on history as salvation-history, he opposes a conception of the ‘eternal return of the same.’ The ‘eternal return’ works as a substitute to the eschatological hope in a resurrection. The mythological fi gure of Dionysus is opposed to the historical fi gure of Jesus. The anti-messiah Zarathustra eclipses the ascetic priest. And the ‘will to power’ (i.e., the self-affi rmation of life) provides man with a way to overcome Platonic-Christian nihilism. Nietzsche the atheist puts on the lips of a ‘fool’ the ominous words, ‘God is dead.’ His philosophy, nonetheless, shelters an alternative gospel. One must add that Nietzsche’s ‘religion’ is a religion of art, where truth has lost all validity (‘truth is ugly’) and where values are always man-created values.
