ABSTRACT
Those in the eighteenth century who defended faith in revelation maintained a fundamentally different position than do those who defend it today, just as in general the same ideas can acquire extremely divergent meanings according to their respective historical moments. At that time a scholastic concept, which was inherited from the tradition and more or less supported by the authority of society, was being defended against the attack by an autonomous ratio that refuses to accept anything other than what stands up to examination on its own terms. Such a defense against ratio had to be carried out with rational means and was in this respect, as Hegel pronounced in the Phenomenology, hopeless from the very start: with the means of argumentation it used, the very defense already assumed the principle that belonged to its adversary.Today the turn toward faith in revelation is a desperate reaction to just these very means, to ratio. The irresistible progress of ratio is seen solely in negative terms, and revelation is invoked so as to halt what Hegel calls the “fury of destruction”: because supposedly it would be a good thing to have revelation. Doubts about the possibility of such a restoration are muffled by appealing to the consensus of all the others who also would like it. “Today it is no longer at all unmodern to believe in God,” a lady once told me whose family had returned to the religion of her childhood after a stormy enlightenment intermezzo. In the best case, that is, where it is not just a question of imitation and conformity, it is desire that produces such an attitude: it is not the truth and authenticity of the revelation that are decisive but rather the need for guidance, the confirmation of what is already firmly established, and also the hope that by means of a resolute decision alone one could breathe back that meaning into the disenchanted world under whose absence we have been suffering so long, as though we were mere spectators staring at something meaningless. It seems to me that the religious renaissances of today are philosophy of religion, not religion. In any case, here they concur with the apologetics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in that they strive through rational reflection to conjure
up its opposite, but now they apply rational reflection to ratio itself with a mounting willingness to strike out at it and with a tendency toward obscurantism that is far more vicious than all the restrained orthodoxy of the earlier period, because it does not completely believe in itself.The new religious attitude is that of the convert, even among those who do not formally convert or who simply support emphatically whatever seems sanctioned as the “religion of the fathers” as well as what with fatherly authority since time immemorial-and even in Kierkegaard’s understanding of the individual-helped to suppress through intimidation the rising doubt.
