Reflections
on the Theonomy in Scheler’s Understanding of the Human Person
by John F. Crosby, Franciscan University of Steubenville
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More
than once Max Scheler quotes the saying of Wilhelm von Humboldt that man could
not have created language since man is constituted as man by already having
language. Language is not a
product of human activity, for then it would come only after man is already
there as man, but it is in fact something that comes before any human activity
in the sense that it makes any human activity to be human in the first place.
And so it is, Scheler says, with our religious transcendence.
We do not reach out to God as already constituted human persons, but we
are constituted as persons by the act of reaching out; by the time we
understand what it is for us to exist as persons, we are already aware of
ourselves as Gottsucher. Our
transcendence towards God enters into the very definition of who we are as
persons; if we were to bracket out our religious transcendence, then we could
no longer recognize ourselves as persons.
This is what Scheler calls the “theomorphic” structure of the human
person; the anthropomorphic idea that we make God in our image has to give
way, he says, to the theomorphic idea that we exist in the image of God and
exist as persons thanks to the image of God in ourselves.
This theomorphic idea in Scheler is not just the familiar idea that the
dignity of human beings appears in its fullness only when they are set
in relation to God, it is instead the surprising idea that the very being of
human beings as persons appears fully only when they are set in relation to
God. The remarkable claim of
Scheler is not a claim about the value of human beings, but about their very
being. I propose to explore a
little this extraordinary theonomy of Scheler’s personalism, and to raise
some questions about it.
In his essay from 1915, “Zur Idee des Menschen,” Scheler is
concerned to distinguish the human being from higher sub-personal animals.
He considers and sets aside the usual appeals made to the rational
nature of man, for he recognizes a certain rational nature even in these
animals. That is, he thinks that
a very considerable intelligence may be found in them, as well as a certain
voluntariness of acting. He
thinks in fact that we constantly underestimate animal consciousness, and that
our conventional way of speaking about animals as being creatures of
“instinct” is entirely inadequate to the reality of their mental life.
This means that some of the rational activity of humans that is usually
taken as distinguishing them essentially from the animals, in fact differs
only by degree from the animal intelligence.
Hence the well-known line of Scheler:
“Great as the difference is between a clever chimpanzee and an
Edison, considered as a technician, it is only a gradual difference.”
(The basis for this surprising comparative judgment lies in
Scheler’s tripartite anthropology, that is, in his division of the human
being not just into “body and soul,” but into body, psyche, and spiritual
person. He thinks that the
intelligence of an Edison does not surpass the sphere of psyche, or Leben,
or vital energy, and that it does not yet belong to the sphere of Geist,
of the spiritual person.) Now
when a philosopher insists on the difficulty of surpassing animal
intelligence, that philosopher is commonly trying to cut the human being down
to size and to show that there is no difference in kind between these animals
and human beings. But Scheler’s
intention is exactly the opposite; he wants to show how great the difference
in kind is. He thinks that the
more there is to animal rationality, the greater human beings will appear in
surpassing the animals.
What then distinguishes human beings from the most intelligent animals,
and distinguishes them as an entirely new kind of being?
Scheler says in the 1915 essay: “Something which surpasses itself and
seeks God–this is precisely ‘man,’ no matter how it may look
otherwise.”
And: “only when an appetite for God powerfully drums all being and
all spirit to awaken, to awaken in opposition to all mere ‘world,’ does
homo bestia naturalis become homo himself.”
And again: “Something new in essence and kind does not begin
with homo naturalis, but with the God-related ‘historical’ man who
obtains his unity in that which he is and ought to become: precisely
through the idea of God and an infinitely perfect person.”
Scheler in fact thinks that, as long as we consider human beings
apart from their religious transcendence, every attempt to find a fundamental
difference in kind between them and the higher animals will fail and will
leave us with nothing more than a gradual difference.
Only as Gottsucher do human beings surpass entirely the sphere
of the vital, of Leben, and give evidence of existing in a way that no
animal exists, namely existing as geistige Personen, or spiritual
persons.
Particularly significant is this formulation in the same essay:
“‘Man’ in this wholly new sense is the intention and gesture of
‘transcendence’ itself. He is
the being that can pray and seek God. Not ‘man prays’–but he is the prayer of life
beyond itself.”
Scheler seems to mean that man is not first fully
constituted as spiritual person and then begins to pray, but that he
begins to exist as spiritual person only in the act of praying.
What he means is just like what Martin Buber means in saying that the I
of the word pair I-Thou does not first exist as a fully constituted I and then
turn to its Thou, but this I gets constituted as I only in the
ehncounter with the Thou. We
could also clarify Scheler’s meaning by referring to Trinitarian theology,
according to which the Father is not a fully constituted divine person who also
generates a Son, but He is the person He is only in and through generating a
Son.
It is very remarkable that Scheler often expresses himself in
distinctly Christian terms when he speaks about Leben and Person
in human beings. Thus Scheler
speaks of a human being considered simply in terms of Leben and vital
energy as belonging to the “old Adam,” whereas he speaks of the spiritual
person that emerges in the Gottsucher as a “child of God,” and one
of the “elect.” It is as if
for Scheler the spiritual person emerges in us human beings only when we are
called by the Christian God. Theological
critics of Scheler might express themselves, and have in fact expressed
themselves, by saying that the order of nature and the order of grace are run
together in Scheler’s account of the theonomous constitution of the human
person.
If we now step beyond this so significant essay of Scheler, we can find
in some of his later writings ideas that help us to unfold further his thought
on theonomy. Let us turn to Vom
Ewigen im Menschen from 1921 and in particular to his characterization
there of what he calls “the religious act.”
Most of you will recall the three essential notes of the religious act. Scheler says that in this act we human persons begin by
gathering together all finite and contingent goods and beings, ourselves
included, and that they we then surpass them, reaching for what is beyond them
and is fundamentally more than they are.
Secondly, we understand that we are reaching for what can in principle
never be fulfilled by any finite good. He
shows that religious hope and fear and gratitude and repentance aim at
something that can never be given in the empirical, contingent world.
He thinks that religiously awakened persons experience here the
restlessness of the human heart that was famously expressed by St. Augustine
on the first page of the Confessions, for they seek what cannot be
found in the world of their immediate experience.
And thirdly, we aim in the religious act at a divine and absolute being
that discloses itself to us; this being is not just there as a supreme
object, waiting to be apprehended in the religious act, but it is alive in a
personal way and makes itself known to us by revealing itself to us.
This is why Scheler says that in the religious act we have a knowledge
of God that is given through God. This
is also why he says that the religious act is not performed at our own
initiative but is rather elicited by God.
Now if we put this characterization of the religious act together with
the theonomous conception of the human person that we found in “Zur Idee des
Menschen,” then we get this result: the religious act is not just the
supreme act of the human person, is not just the highest possibility of the
human person; it is the act through which we exist as persons.
By revealing Himself to us and eliciting the religious act God
constitutes us as spiritual persons.
But we can perhaps go deeper still into the Schelerian theonomy.
In our existence as persons we do not always perform only the religious
act. Scheler often discusses
certain eminently personal acts without mentioning the religious act. I turn to the passage in Die Stellung des Menschen im
Kosmos in which he discusses the acts involved in breaking out of the
biologically conditioned environment and entering into the properly
personal realm of the world. I
think we will easily see that it is the religious act that empowers us to
perform these other eminently personal acts.
This is just what we would expect if the religious act is indeed
constitutive for human beings as persons in the sense in which Scheler claims
that it is.
Scheler says of animals in their environments: “The animal has no
‘objects.’ It lives, as it
were, ecstatically immersed in its environment which it carries along as a
snail carries its shell. It
cannot transform the environment into an object.
It cannot perform the peculiar act of detachment and distance by which
man transforms an ‘environment’ into the ‘world’...
It cannot perform the act by which man transforms the centers of
resistance determined by drives and affects into ‘objects.’”
But we human beings can step out of this state of immersion in
the environment, we can “set the environment at a distance,” to use the
expressive phrase of Buber. We
can put it in front of us as an object, we can achieve Sachlichkeit in
relation to it, that is, we can stop considering things as potential sources
of food, or as potential dangers, and begin wondering what things are in
their own right. With this we
begin wondering what things essentially are.
We begin wondering what the place of each thing within the whole of
being is, for what a thing is in its own right, and essentially, is in part
determined by its place within the whole.
We now set off on a journey that can never come to an end, for we can
never encompass the whole of being, and so we can never be finished with
understanding things in their own right and we can certainly never be finished
with loving them according to the value that they have in their own right.
Hence the restlessness that Scheler discerns in the human being who has
broken through to Sachlichkeit and so has emerged from the environment
into the world: he says that this “man is the eternal Faust, the creature
always seeking and desiring (bestia cupidissima rerum novarum), never
at peace with his environment, always anxious to break through the barriers of
his life here and now, always striving to transcend his environment, including
his own state of being.”
I am reminded here of the felicitous line of Bernard Lonergan:
“when an animal has satisfied all its needs, it goes to sleep; when a human
being has satisfied his needs, he asks a question.”
Now Scheler says that the man who is thus restless and world-open is
awakened as Geist, as person, or as he puts it in one place, that this
man has performed the fundamental act of Menschwerdung.
But then it follows, given the theonomy thesis of Scheler’s
personalism, that this man
must be performing the religious act. And
in fact it is not difficult to discern the religious act at the root of this
stirring into life of the human being as person.
The restlessness just mentioned is nothing other than the cor
inquietum of St. Augustine. The
human being cannot live immersed in his environment, because in performing the
religious act he gathers together all finite things, as we saw, and reaches
beyond them. And when he reaches towards the infinite he acquires a depth
of subjectivity–Scheler speaks of Sammlung, or recollection–which
makes him incommensurable with the environment and incapable of simply
blending into it. As a result of
his religious transcendence he loses his shelteredness in the environment and
cannot not live in openness to the world.
And so we can find the religious act, as Scheler calls it, at the root
of the Sachlichkeit and world-openness of the human person, which he
calls “the most formal category of the spirit.”
I acknowledge that Scheler does not find it in just the way I have
tried to find it. But I think
that I am just drawing out what is implicit in Scheler when I say that these
acts of the spirit, though they can
be characterized without any reference to God, are nevertheless found on
closer examination to depend on the religious act.
With this we deepen our sense of the centrality of the religious act
and lend support to Scheler’s theonomy thesis.
What I have so far presented seems to me to contain many profound
insights into the religious nature of the human person.
I see much merit in Scheler’s theonomous understanding of the human
person. But there are certain
formulations in the 1915 essay that raise serious questions, two of which I
would like to formulate by way of concluding.
Scheler says in that essay: “The
error of the hitherto prevailing theories about mankind lies in that they
wanted to introduce an additional fixed step between ‘life’ and ‘God,’
something definable as an essence: ‘mankind.’
But this step does not exist. Indefinability
belongs to the essence of mankind. Man
is only a ‘between,’ a ‘boundary,’ a ‘transition,’ an
‘appearance of God’ in the stream of life, and a perpetual ‘moving
forth’ of life beyond itself.”
With this Scheler goes farther than he goes in the quotes presented
above. For now the parallel with
Buber disappears; one can hardly say that the I is only a transition to the
Thou, or is nothing but a perpetual moving forth toward the Thou.
No, the I, much as it lives fully only in the relation to the Thou, is
a person all its own no less than the Thou is a person all its own.
And in the same way, one could hardly say that the Father is only a
transition towards the Son; He is a divine person no less than the Son.
Scheler seems in this and in other formulations to push the theonomy of
the human person so far that a certain minimal Eigensein of the human
person is put into question. The
theonomy of Scheler seems to be in danger of lapsing into heteronomy.
And there is something else that is troubling about this passage.
Scheler’s younger friend and one-time disciple, Dietrich von
Hildebrand, reviewed this essay in 1916, when it was first published.
In his largely favorable review von Hildebrand remarks, referring
exactly to this passage, that for Scheler “the creaturely character of man
gets obscured too much and the identity of the finite, creaturely person, man,
as contrasted with the divine, uncreated, infinite person almost disappears;
the gap between the creature made in the image of God and God himself is in
danger of becoming only a gradual difference.”
A theonomy based on closing this gap would in my view be a very
problematic theonomy indeed. Of
course, there are in Scheler many profound passages on the contingency and
finitude of human persons, but since the gap between finite creature and the
infinite God is undeniably closed in the last writings of Scheler, one has to
wonder whether the closing of the gap was, as Urs von Balthasar claims in his
study of Scheler, already sprungbereit,
waiting to be revealed, in
Scheler’s middle period. If
von Balthasar is right about an unseemly familiarity that Scheler always felt
towards God, and about a deficient sense of the divine transcendence and
majesty present in Scheler from the beginning,
then Scheler’s thought on theonomy, for all its depth and power, contains
elements that are unacceptable from the point of view of Christian theism and
Christian personalism.
Die Stellung des Menschen im
Kosmos, GW IX, 31 (my
translation).
“The Idea of Man,” tr. Nabe,
194. GW III, 189.
This conflation is perhaps no
where so clearly in evidence as in a passage in Scheler, Das Ressentiment
im Aufbau der Moralen, GW III: 108-109.
Scheler was apparently trying to retrieve an idea held by certain
early fathers of the Church, such as St. Irenaeus, Origen, and St.
Athanasius, who worked with the above-mentioned tripartite anthropology.
St. Athanasius held that human beings, composed of body and soul,
originally lacked immortality but then received it as a gift of God.
These human beings were in this way elevated into the life of the
spirit by a special divine initiative or grace.
They lost this gift of the spirit when they sinned and fell in
Adam, and they can recover it in Christ.
Since Scheler sees in this “spirit” what he calls the spiritual
person, it follows that we post-lapsarian persons exist as persons only in
relation to the Christian God.
Man’s Place in Nature, 39;
GW IX, 34.
Die Stellung des Menschen im
Kosmos, GW IX, 69.
Man’s Place in Nature,
39. GW IX, 34.
This objection has been raised
by Felix Hammer, Theonome Anthropologie?
Max Schelers Menschenbild und seine Grenzen (Den Haag: Nijhoff,
1972), 207-208.
Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Ueber
Max Schelers Abhandlungen und Aufsaetze,” Hochland 13
(January, 1916), 477.
Urs von Balthasar, Apocalypse
der deutschen Seele (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1998), III, 164.
Ibid., 167-170.
Von Balthasar detects this deficiency in Scheler’s tendency,
which we discussed above, to reduce the Christian vocation of human beings
to their character as persons.