RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Religion, Philosophy of
states of feeling. Infinity is the formal and spirituality is the material element, and the two together constitute the idea of God, the absolute Spirit, from which the idea of personality must be far removed. On the other side, C. H. Weisse, Herman Ulrici, and I. H. Fichte (q.v.) specially emphasize the personality of God and thus violently attack the Hegelian doctrine; although much indebted to it. With still greater positiveness, they threw themselves against materialism, but availed themselves of the idea of experience in order to bring philosophy nearer to theology. Their avowed object was to demonstrate a speculative theism.
An altogether different course from that of Hegel was taken by J. F. Herbart, who wrote no religious philosophy, but expressed religious views sporadically in his works. Religious belief is to proceed from the view of nature. The higher organisms especially argue a designing intelli- 9' dL t gence> and ^ can not be safely assumed an Z ' that this teleological feature exists only
in representation and not in nature itself. Still, no binding proof of this intelligence can be adduced; a natural theology is impossible; and to bring the representative concept of God in comparison with nature or the real results in contradictions. Hence God can be more closely apprehended by the ethical predicates — wisdom, holiness, power, love, righteousness — derived from practical ideas but not adaptable to a pantheistic conception. Herbart has a high esteem for religion on account of its solacing and disciplinary efficacy. Wilhelm Drobisch (1840) carries out Herbart's position more fully, not without some impressions from Kant. The sense of impotence and limitation — physical, intellectual, and moral — gives rise to desire for liberation and the ascent above the finite. A divine existence is not only to be wished for but must be subject of proof for the sake of objective significance. The inadequate teleological argument must be supplemented by practical moral reasons of belief. The moral world-ideal is to be realized as the highest good; but this is possible only if God is the cause of that ideal as well as of the means in nature necessary to its realization. J. F. Fries, followed by E. F. Apelt and W. M. L. de Wette (q.v.), is notable for emphasizing the esthetic element for religious philosophy. In the beautiful and the sublime are viewed the finite as manifestation of the eternal. The esthetic view of the world subserves the ideas of faith. Of more recent thinkers the most influential in this connection is Hermann Lotze (q.v.), who produced no philosophy of religion but furnishes glimpses in his lectures and his " Microcosm." He does not find the main field of religious philosophy in the analysis of the moments of consciousness, but would inquire first how much light reason alone can afford concerning the supersensuous world, and then how far a revealed religious content may be combined with these fundamental principles. The central point for him is the existence of God, for which he, however, does not furnish adequate proofs. In support of it, he lays considerable stress upon a form of the ontological argument: it is impossible that the greatest thinkable object does not exist; therefore, there
must be a greatest. The universal substance, at once the ground of the real and the ideal world, attains its full content first in the concept of God; and God may not be thought without personality, to which the antithesis to a non-ego or actual external world is not essential. Personality is spirit already when in antithesis with its own states; that is, with its own representations, it knows itself as the simple, uniting subject upon which they are merely contingent. The being of the personal God appears only imperfectly in the known, empirical personality; it must, in a measure, be superpersonal, whereby the concept of personality seems again to vanish. The relations of God to the universe, subjoined to the three categories of creation, preservation, and government, occasion the designation of attributes (see Providence) ; of which the metaphysical determine God as the ground of all reality in the finite, and the ethical satisfy the desire to find in the supreme existence also the supreme values. The religious feeling transcends cognition, in that man apprehends himself as divine being, as united with God, who conditions his being and reveals himself in him. Here Lotze approximates pantheism as he does also in his metaphysics, inasmuch as, for him, the single substantial cosmic ground comprehends all individual realities. Gustav Glogaus, upon whose views a cult was established after his death, held that the existence of God was the summit of all philosophy. Its certainty is deduced from that of self-existence. From God are derived the ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good, which constitute the essence of the spirits created by God after his image. Opposing extreme intellectualism, he regards feeling and experience of God as the essentials of religion. The same tendency as Lotze 's is shown by Guenther Thiele, in Die Philosophie des Selbstbewusstseins (1895), depending also upon J. G. Fichte. At the root of the acts of the individual ego appearing in the succession of time is the absolute supertemporal Ego. The concept of God has its termination in the absolute Ego rising from animism to the god of the sun or the celestial sphere, and thence to the absolute substance, implying necessarily the concept of the allwise and omnipotent Creator. Much deserving recognition has been accorded to Hermann Siebeck, who in his Lehrbuch der Religionsphilosophie (Freiburg, 1893) defined this subject to be the application of philosophy, as the science of the nature and activity of the spiritual life upon the fact of religion, for its particular, distinct formulation. He defines religion as the intellectual, emotional, and active practical conviction of the existence of God and the supramundane and, in connection therewith, of the possibility of redemption. The aim of science and metaphysics is to gain a knowledge of the ground of things and their unity as an impersonal subject, and it arrives at the idea of a spirit immanent in the world, which may, not inconsequently, be thought of as personality. On the other hand faith or religion concerns itself with the consciousness of a personal relation of man with the divine ground of things and with knowledge only so far as it mediates this consciousness. As this does not lie in the empirical world, therefore faith
Religion, Philosophy of