RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
[Religion, Philosophy of
pie of their objective causes. Not to be able to escape the idea of purpose argues for the dependence of the world upon, and origin from, a being existing beyond the world, and this is rational because of design. God's existence, however, is not proven but here merely rests upon reflection upon design in nature.
J. G. Fichte (q.v.) in his Versuch einer Kritik oiler Offenbarung (1792) at first adopted Kant's moral view of rational faith; but, in addition, assumed that, where there is a state of moral deprav-
ity, miracle and revelation may serve _' hfiiiina'' as stimulants to morality. Later in
his treatment of the ground of faith in a divine government of the world, which gave rise to the atheistic controversy, he made religion to be faith in the moral order, which in its energy and operation is God. To assume beyond this that God is a special substance is impossible and contradictory, and his opponents are the real atheists who have no God, inasmuch as they set up an idol which debases the reason and multiplies and perpetuates human misery. The positive religions are institutions which morally preeminent men have set up to effect in others the development of the moral sense. They employ symbols to present abstract thoughts to sense and propagate religion in wider circles-; but the essential element is that of something supersensible not contained in nature, and the snd of the development is the rational ethical faith. Soon after, however, Fichte passed from subjective idealism or the absolute Ego over to the absolute as the middle ground of philosophy. God is absolute being, in whose absolute thought nature is opposed as the unreal non-ego. Religion is no longer mere morality, a mystical strain is added. The world of changeable phenomena is merely unsatisfying appearance, a mirage. To think oneself and all the universe in terms of unchangeable being is faith. True life is in God, the really unchangeable being, and this is the love of God. Philosophy and religion are identified. Finite being has a share in deity, varying according to degrees of consciousness. Religion is merely assertory; philosophy explains the how. Hence there must underlie a cosmic theory, so that metaphysics is the immediate element of religion, even religion itself. Schelling (q.v.), far from being religious, regarded matter or nature itself as the divine, in his natural philosophy (1797-99). But in his philosophy of identity (1800- 1802), the absolute, which is the identity of subject and object, and is the condition of the existence of every individual thing, is to him as God. Philosophy and religion consist in the intellectual perception of the infinite or absolute in the finite. Paganism consists in degrading the infinite to the finite; Christianity reverses the process. He approximates a mysticism of the kind of Jakob Boehme (q.v.) in his Untersuchungen uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809) and in his reply to F H. Jacobi against the charge of atheism and naturalism he states that God is to him first and last; the former as impersonal indifference or the absolute; the latter as personality, the subject of existence. The usual theism was impotent and empty; the mystical and irrational are the real speculative. In his
" Positive Philosophy," which is religious, philosophical, and mystical, he would not show from the concept of God his existence, but from existence would demonstrate the divinity of that which exists. If a positive exists as transcendent, it is to be taken up with the historical religions. But religion is either mythology or revelation, i.e., incomplete or complete. Therefore positive philosophy is essentially philosophy of mythology and revelation. Though furnishing no united system, Schelling stimulated much activity in the field of philosophy of religion. Of his followers, the fantastic K. A. Eschenmayer attempted to convert philosophy into its negative, or religious faith; and K. C. F. Krause, who called his doctrine panentheism, sets forth fundamentally God or being as the one good, and the perception and inner appropriation of the same as religion, or the participation in the one life of God.
From the ethicized types of religious philosophy of Kant and Fichte, Schleiermacher (q.v.), in his Reden (1799), made a signal departure, and from the rationalistic as well, not without a certain degree of shallowing. The same views are essentially re- _ _ . . . produced in his Dialektik (1811) and
'macher ^er christliche Glaube (1821). He finds in man as the basis of religion a particular faculty, the pious sense or feeling, for the thought of which he was indebted to Romanticism (q. v.). By means of it there is an immediate intuition or feeling of the infinite and eternal amid the finite. To feel everything as a part of the whole and to become one with the eternal is religion. Piety or subjective religion is neither a matter of cognition nor action, but a determination of feeling or self-consciousness. When it is stated that religion is based upon the feeling of absolute dependence, it follows that in this consciousness the infinite being of God is given with the being of self. This feeling springs from the sense of contingency in everything, wherefrom the self and the external universe are related back to a final ground, the deity. No cognition of God precedes this feeling but every judgment of God arises from it. God is the absolute unity of the ideal and the real. As we think only in antitheses, we can not apprehend the notion of God clearly in thought. Attributes of God do not represent real aspects of his being or activity but obtain only for the religious consciousness; the same is true of personality. Life, however, is the one thing necessary in God, whereby Schleiermacher escapes the inert idea of Spinoza. Pantheist he has been declared, not unjustly in view of such statements as that God could never have existed without the world. The unity of nature in relation to consciousness precludes interference or miracle. A determinist, freedom to him is no more than development of personality. Natural or rational religion is a mere abstraction. The various religions are representations of the idea of religion rising in scale according to the degree of the feeling of God and the elimination of differences in generalization. The influence of Schleiermacher must be taken as a wholesome reaction from the sterile rationalism and hard ethicism of the eighteenth century.
More one-sided is the view of religion of Hegel whose panlogistic or even pantheistic system is the
Religion, Philosophy of