ABSTRACT
Marc Maesschalk confirms that the new attention devoted to human freedom - especially the description of man as a 'central being', and the insistence that human freedom represents a real choice for good or evil which has real historical consequences - indicates 'a renewal in anthropological approach'. Schelling's successive systems up to 1804 were vitiated by their failure genuinely to accommodate human freedom. The specifically neo-Platonist influences on Schelling, which came principally from Christian mystics like Giordano Bruno and Jakob Bohme, had forced him to abandon the over-optimistic, harmonizing approach to the relationship between the Absolute and the finite which had characterised the Nature Philosophy and the Identity Philosophy. The compatibility between such a remark and Christian metaphysics is only marginal: on the one hand, the Christian obviously does hold, with Schelling, that the creation is God's revelation, and that man was created in God's image, as a free being.
