In
lumine Dei:
Scheler’s Phenomenology of World and God
by Eugene
Kelly, New York Institute of Technology ________________________________________________________________________
In The
Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevski’s character Ivan considers Voltaire’s
dictum, il n’existait pas Dieu, il faudrait l’inventer. Man,
Ivan says, has invented God. But
the wonder of it, he adds, is that such a notion of the necessity of God
could creep into the head of such a wild and wicked animal as man. The point
is well taken, though it surely begs the question of the wickedness of
humankind. Perhaps it is precisely the wicked, like Ivan, who have had to
invent God. Max Scheler once noted (235) [241]
that a strong temptation to evil exists in men of deep spiritual nature.
Ivan senses the evil in the world too closely and perhaps in himself too
intensely, as Scheler might diagnose his case, for him to know God
spontaneously; he therefore wonders from where came the idea of the
necessity of God.
The response
Scheler might have made to Ivan’s musing is complex and profound, and it
possesses implications for us today that neither Ivan nor Voltaire could
have imagined. Scheler’s response rests on two significant theses: that
knowledge of the Absolute is necessarily a universal phenomenon in
humankind, and that it is irreducible to and not derivable from any
human experience outside itself. Are his claims true, however? Is Ivan
mistaken, as Scheler thinks he is, in his assumption that the idea of God
has entered persons’ minds surreptitiously, as it were, planted in this
unpromising soil by an animal need for shelter, or by the vicissitudes of
life, or the machinations of some wise or wicked men? Could it, therefore,
eventually be supplanted by more adequate conceptions of the human
condition? Further, can Scheler’s essential phenomenology of religion
possess salutary value in contemporary moral disputes between scientists and
spokespersons of religion on just these matters?
We will
confine ourselves in this paper to an examination of Scheler’s thoughts on
God and our knowledge of Him that he developed during his middle period, and
refer exclusively to the essays in Vom Ewigen im Menschen and Vom
Umsturz der Werte. Wolfhart Henckmann has observed
that [by the 1920's,] Scheler no longer considered religion to be an
essential category of the human spirit. The
remarks of Scheler to this effect in the later work to which Henckmann
refers (Probleme einer Soziologie des Wissens) may, I think, be quite
consistent with Scheler’s claim in Vom Ewigen im Menschen that
knowledge of the sphere of the Absolute is primordial and not derivable.
What he gives up, in the end, is his own performance of the religious acts
and their correlates that are typical of the Christian religion, while
maintaining their essential validity for the Christian religious experience.
To the end, he holds fast to the Ens a se. We may assert, then, that the two
theses we consider here are at least consistent with the later work. Indeed
his later work shows a religious attitude toward the objects of his
metaphysical speculations.
Whether the absolute entity posited by his later metaphysics may
legitimately make themselves amenable to what we commonly call worship is a
question I will leave to Peter Spader to consider later in this meeting. But
there is no question that Scheler continued to believe that religion and
religious knowledge was sui generis, unfounded, necessary for, and
natural to, the human species. The idea of God is not innate (195), but
rather is a datum of non-inductive experience of essence that is peculiar to
the finite mind (197).
We come to
know God through a fivefold process: 1) In the order of foundation in which
the world as value and meaning becomes manifest to finite spirit ontogenetically
and phylogeneticaly in acts of love; 2) in the revelation of the absolute
being to persons in primordial religious acts that are unified, homogeneous
and simple (178) and its threefold articulation as Ens a se, as omnipotent,
and as holy; 3) in the identification of the divine nature by analogy with
features of the world seen in the light of God, a process that begins with
the identification of God as Spirit (the natural revelation); 4) in the
articulation of ideas of God via the self-revelation by grace of the divine
omnipotent Ens a se to individuals, and via God’s self-revelation to
prophets, according them a role as the messengers of God’s will to
humanity in the form of revelation; and 5) in the mediation of
mankind’s experience and knowledge of God by the historical and social
contexts in which such grace and revelation occurs. Religious acts are a)
voluntary, b) subject to correction by phenomenological re-enactment of them
and of their object, and c) provide, therefore, genuine knowledge of what is
intended in them, that is, the nature of God, though not of God’s
existence. This experience is closed and autonomous (350), does not conflict
with knowledge in any of the other spheres of knowledge, and its foundations
are in fundamental harmony with the focal points of religious belief of the
other religions of the world that developed in the Iron Age: there is an Ens
a se, it is holy, and it is omnipotent.
The defenses
of thesis (a) of universality, and thesis (b) of irreducibility take the
following forms in Scheler.
a) The
universality thesis maintains that human beings, and indeed the finite mind
as such (262), has an apprehension of the Absolute that lies at the root of
our intentional awareness of the world. Scheler notes (171) Der Bezug des Menschen auf das Göttliche ist
. . . für
das Wesen des Menschen konsitutiv. Love and hate, as defining
characteristics of spirit, are the deepest sources of our knowledge of Self,
World, and God; they open and close us to a realm of meaning and value.
Without them, human beings would be locked, as animals are, in an
environment, and incapable of intentional acts. The foundational object, or
first evidentiary datum, of spirit’s frail awareness, is that there is
not nothing B
that is, absolute nothingness B
and the second datum metaphorically covers up the first, namely the
datum there is absolute being, as an item of essential, not
existential knowledge. This sphere of the Absolute is thus second of the
spheres of being in the order
of foundation after the sphere of values. The primary function of love and
hate, upon which the initial evidentiary datum of the not-being of absolute
nothingness is founded, is to open us to these spheres.
Scheler’s
exhibition of these matters does not describe non-metaphorically how the
second evidentiary datum, that of absolute being, arises out of the first.
It surely does not do so by means of a logical inference, for that there
is absolute being does not follow from there is not nothing, and
its status as an essential relation (Wesenszusammenhang) is not
phenomenologically evident. The relationship is clearly not a simple given,
an Urphänomen or axiom, as it were. Yet Scheler notes in support of
his thesis that even the atheist cannot avoid the distinction between
absolute and relative being, as far as he recognizes his own contingency and
finitude, for the recognition of one’s own finitude presupposes a category
of absolute being. No doubt the distinctions between the limited and the
unlimited, the contingent and the necessary appear to have deep roots in our
minds and our languages, whatever their provenance, necessity, and
universality. Scheler writes in Vom Wesen der Philosophie that the
failure to distinguish sharply the absolute from relative being is called relativism;
yet the relativist is the absolutist of the relative (for his relativism presupposes
insight into the Absolute) (Cf. GW 96). A person is therefore
essentially either a believer or an idolater. I find nothing implausible or
even ad hominem in this idea, for it is hardly a condemnation of
idolatry. The idolater, in Scheler’s view, merely requires a kind of
phenomenological therapy to correct his idolatry by means of clear insight
into his own capacity for religious experience. Perhaps therefore the claim
that the awareness of absolute being is universal has a certain
plausibility.
b) The human
capacity, Scheler believes, for executing religious acts is founded only in
the primordial givenness of the essence of the Absolute as the second
primary datum. It is therefore irreducible to our experience of items
in any of the other spheres. Consequently, Scheler denies that we derive our
knowledge of the absolute from empirical experience, such as
Schleiermacher’s celebrated doctrine that our experience of the Divine is
founded in the experience of dependency. We could not feel such dependency unless
we possessed an antecedent awareness of that on which we were dependent. As
a corollary, Scheler notes that we cannot account for the origin of
religion any more than we can account for the origin of language. A person
does not develop to religion; one can only turn away from the
Absolute, for it is native to one’s mind or, alternatively, the essential
structures that are available to the human mind in religious experience may
be deepened or distorted by knowledge of a different kind.
Thus any naturalistic explanation of monotheism as a response to the
physical and social conditions of our evolving species, or by means of
putative laws governing our psychosexual development, such as that attempted
by Scheler’s contemporary Freud, would fail before the phenomenology of
the necessary and essential order of foundation of intentional acts.
Knowledge of the Absolute must be available before it can be nurtured or
distorted by the conditions of psychosocial development.
Does this
second thesis possess as much plausibility as the first? Note that the
universality thesis does not imply the irreducibility thesis. An idea may be
universal to humankind, yet be derived from some unknown psychic mechanism,
whatever phenomenological facts may later be given to the developed mind. No
empirical or phenomenological data can decide this issue. We can
demonstrate the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of a phenomenological
resolution of the irreducibility thesis in two ways. Let us take the
phenomenology of the levels of value-types as a paradigm of the phenomenological
procedure in Scheler’s hands. Scheler changed the number of value-types at
one point, increasing it from four to five. This alone need not be taken as
in indication that phenomenological insight lacks apodicticity, only that
it is subject to accretion. One may have insight that is perfect, yet
incomplete. The key question here is whether the added fourth level of
value-types B
that of the utility values B
and its placement between the fifth and third level is irreducible to the
others, as it ought to be if it is a primordial phenomenon whose exhibition
is based upon phenomenological insight, or whether it is derived, for
example, from an augmentation and variation of the class of values of
pleasure and pain. This crucial issue, which has implications for our notion
of phenomenological evidence itself, seems not to be a decidable one, yet
its isomorphism with Scheler’s claim of the irreducibility of the sphere
of religious acts is clear. The possibility of the derivation of the
religious sphere from, say, the experience of the authority of our fathers
as we shrink from the guilt of psychosexual conflict and then transfer our
anxiety and conflict to a new and augmented, yet perhaps more merciful,
paternal authority, cannot, I believe, be excluded by any available
phenomenological evidence.
Scheler’s
argument for irreducibility is, however, not merely phenomenological, though
it does not consider the possibility that unreflective levels of experience
may create imaginary objects and prompt beliefs that empirical science might
one day make available to exploration. He adds to his argument a
demonstration that the intentional acts in which the Absolute is first
perceived have roots in regions of the mind beneath empirical awareness and
give us data that transcend empirical knowledge and are hence not reducible
to it. We have seen Scheler argue that even if we were prompted by
psychological need to seek a resolution in religious faith of an internal
conflict of some kind, we must already possess some prior living knowledge
of the Absolute before that possible resolution can become available to us.
His further reasoning is reminiscent of St. Augustine, who argued,
especially in De Libero Arbitrio and in De Magistro, that we
possess an awareness of a possible happiness that is greater than anything
we have experienced in this life. This awareness must therefore require an
illumination of the mind by God, through which our cognitions perceive
truths that cannot be known by sense experience. The resulting truths are
necessary and apodictic. In De Trinitatis 12, Augustine postulates
the idea of a divine light that allows us fallen beings to perceive the
certainty and necessity of some truths presented to our judgment; only
because of the divine light are these truths discernable as necessary and
eternal by persons. For Augustine, this light was an explanation of the
(fallen) mind’s ability to perceive such truths, and it is posited as a
metaphysical reality designed to solve an epistemological problem. Scheler
attempts to bolster the irreducibility thesis by using the Augustinian
doctrine in a new, different, and, if I may say so, in an illuminating way.
The
expression in lumine Dei in Scheler appears, on my count, three times
in Wesensphänomenologie der Religion. It
contrasts with such phrases as per lumen dei (190) and in
lumine mundi (194). Scheler, of course, thinks men to be less fallen
than Augustine does;
he believes, as his epistemological foundationalism requires, that
phenomenology gives us the means to discern truly and to perfect our
knowledge of the essential (eternal and necessary) aspects of the world.
The meaning
with which he invests the Latin expression is perhaps best expressed in a
footnote to 176 [180-81]. It is precisely in the primordial religious act
that we become aware of God as in a mirror. We come to see the
world’s being and essence in the light of (formal) divinity. We no
longer see God directly; the sun is, as it were, at our back as for
Faust: Im farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben. Scheler thus
attributes to us an irreducible capacity to view God’s light as spread
over all things, for the sphere of the Absolute founds all other spheres;
its content transcends the finite world. Divine illumination, for Scheler,
gives us neither certitude nor content. It is not an intentional act. We see
in this light the relation of created things to eternal supersensible
realities of which there is no direct vision in this life. We see the world
in a new way: the mirrored light of God in all things enables the awed
engagement by which we long to peer beyond the known. It inspires the
peculiar act of love that Scheler calls reverence.
A further key
to the meaning of in lumine Dei in the phenomenology of the religious
act is the experience of the suffusion (hineinleuchten, 168)
of the world and its essential structure by the infinite divine reason. The
being of the world, or of nature, or the certainty with which its essence
and structure is known, is not thereby affected; this pouring in is
not an act of creation. But in that light we see the world mystically, as it
appears in Giovanni Bellini’s
great work St. Francis in the Desert: The painting seems to depict
not a moment of natural revelation, but of sudden grace. Nothing of the
nature of the things changes at that moment B
everything is just as it appears naturally
B
but the light. In that light, Francis perceives God as in a mirror. Like
him, we can see the same natural everyday objects in a new way, once we have
already accepted the testimony of our primordial wordless experience of the
Absolute, and assured ourselves of God’s existence. As in the farbigen
Abglanz we have life, so upon and in the things suffused
by the light of God the religious mind enjoys the presence of God. God’s
spirit is the light that infuses all things, even knowledge itself (298-99)
with glory. Indeed, Scheler’s Wesensphänomenologie der Religion
is precisely a re-enactment of the religious acts executed in lumine Dei,
in which we see the same essential structure of the world revealed by
phenomenology, as in a mirror by which God becomes darkly visible, and His
nature becomes expressible in analogies with things. Scheler invites us to
re-experience, in his Aufweisen, the acts peculiar to the religious
awareness. This procedure culminates in the isolation of what Scheler calls
the irreducible characteristics of the religious act: 1. the transcendence
of the world of its intention; 2. its ability to be fulfilled only by the divine;
3. its fulfillment only by the adoption of a self-revealing divine character
that gives itself to man, such that all knowledge of God is knowledge
through God. (244-45) [250]. Such acts, which occur prior to empirical
experience, intend meanings transcendent of empirical experience, which,
again, cannot be derived from it. Yet we cannot conclude to their
superempirical origin.
The
reverential motivation of his inquiry, and his use of the term adoption
(Aufname) in the third characteristic, both point to an ambiguity in
Scheler’s procedure. Is Scheler’s Wesensphänomenologie der Religion
merely a descriptive science of the ideal essential acts and their objects
executed by a person who has in some extraphilosophical manner assured
himself of the existence of the Ens a se?
Or is Scheler’s work itself a contribution to a new kind of natural
theology that is apologetic in intention, that is, it attempts to assure us
of the legitimacy and plausibility of the religious life? Initially the
answer would appear to be that it is not apologetic, since Scheler rejects
all means of establishing God’s existence that do not emerge from
religious experience itself. Specifically, Scheler’s hostility to the
traditional proofs of the existence of God is based not simply upon the
undesirability of allowing metaphysics to move from its rightful sphere as
ontology, or the science of being, to that of the science of the real,
because it then will enter inevitably into conflict with empirical science.
His hostility is rather to the forgetfulness by natural theologians that
their proofs are founded upon a prior experience of God. Without such
experiences, the premises of theology would be literally incomprehensible,
perhaps a valid example of falling to the verifiability criterion of
meaningfulness.
Scheler first
finds this forgetful attitude in Aquinas, who passes from the world to God
rather than from God to the world: for Scheler, we see the world in the
light of God, not God in the light of the world. The latter puts the horse
of natural religious experience before the cart of discursive knowledge.
Proofs are hence futile, for their meaning presupposes what they are trying
to prove, and they distort the soul’s true road to God, and its capacity
for intuitive emotional contact with the Divinity, (239) [244]
which encourages symbolic attributions to God as mirroring Himself in the
world. All of reality is suffused with mind: this is a phenomenological, but
not analytical Wesenszusammenhang. But only religious
experience, not discursive inference, can see the world in this light. In
faith, the mind proceeds by analogies that pass from the nature of the
illuminated objects to the nature of the light that shines on them. It sees
the act of divine creation mirrored in the work of the artist; the divine
love for each person is mirrored in love of one person for another; in
temporal phenomena we see eternity reflected; in spatial phenomena the
ubiquity, in magnitude the immesurability of God.
In genuine
religious experience, the first mirror of God in the world is the human
spirit (191). We experience spirit as the primary creation of God, and as
His self-revelation in man as a reflected glory, and in this act we
experience ourselves as a mirror of God: we enter in this way for the first
time in possession of ourselves as persons. We come to see the Absolute
reflected in spirit before we see it reflected in the physical world. The
connection between God and the world is then mediated by finite spirit as it
takes part epistemically in the essential structure of the world. Here, of
course, we have begun to enter the Western religious perspective on God:
that He is personal spirit, and man is created in His image as the
microcosmic spirit. At this point, and only then, do we proceed, in
Scheler’s estimation, to form analogies between God as the holy omnipotent
absolute spirit and the world created by Him as the artist creates an
artwork. God becomes known as spirit B
and so as a person B
in the objects of the world (in lumine mundi) by our first learning
to see the world in the light of God. The religious man enacts a movement of
the soul that Scheler says is wie ein unerhörtes geheimnisvolles Drama
in den tiefsten Tiefen der Seele (183), in which appears the special
dignity of the human spirit and its function as the primary mirror of God. A
single soul would suffice to make God knowable to us as spirit. (193) In
this process appears also the sublime indifference of our knowledge
of God to our knowledge of the world. No changes in scientific paradigms
will change our idea of the spirituality of God and the created objects of
the world as reflected in the divine spirit. (194) But in turn we see again
the futility of attempts to prove God’s existence by means of
inferences such as the cosmological arguments. Our knowledge of God does not
deepen our knowledge of, say, the complexity of biological structures (as
some argue today under the rubric of intelligent design), nor does knowledge
of these structures deepen our knowledge of God.
As a further
example of our knowledge of God as mirrored in the world,
Scheler holds that in natural religious experience God is given as will.
If so, the theological dispute whether God’s infinite reason renders His
acts of will (understood as overcoming resistance) superfluous or impossible
would have to be answered negatively, despite whatever theological scruples
may remain. Theologians must listen to their prophets. Theology must also
take account of how we grasp the world in religious experience as the effected,
die Bewirkte, and not simply as dependent upon the Ens a se (pace
Schleiermacher). In the divine light, reality has initially the
character of a willful decree. There is an essential connection
between primordial becoming-real and being desired (Gewolltwerden,
216). God wills the reality of each thing; He wants eternally what he
loves, and lovingly affirms it as value (219). Thus the religious
consciousness sees the action of the human artificer as a mirror of God’s
affirming love of the values that He wills to realize in His creation.
Touching in its pathos is Scheler’s remark that art is not an escape from
fallen reality, but the effort to capture the world as it came from the
hands of its Creator, when it shone more brightly as His mirror, and to
offer us a promise of future salvation (231).
This
descriptive phenomenology of religion, which investigates religion from the
inside, as it were, of religious experience, rather than discursively as in
theology and the philosophy of religion, liberates religion from science and
philosophy while tying it to all human knowledge by means of the
phenomenological exhibition of its givens. Yet B
to return to our earlier question B
Scheler’s intentions are also normative and apologetic, for he attempts
to establish the legitimacy of what otherwise might be the unbridled
exercise of the imagination. Faith, according to Scheler, is not a
groundless leap toward the Absolute; he considers faith of a Christian sort
to be reasonable, though its categories are subject, of course, to
correction by phenomenological analysis. How then is it related to empirical
science, and what is the epistemic status of faith?
Scheler’s
belief in the unity and foundational integrity of all knowledge is well
known. All knowledge arises from love, and human beings naturally and
universally desire to possess the things of the world truly as God knows
them (cf. 199), that is, in their essential truth. This is not Faust’s
prideful desire to know what holds the world together physically in its
inmost reaches, or Tennyson’s desire to know the flower in the crannied
wall all in all, but to know the essential structure of the world and
the empirical laws of its operation, an aim that is possible by means of
essential phenomenology primarily, and natural science secondarily. Yet in
both forms of knowledge, the empirical and the phenomenological, the extent
of a thing’s being transcends one’s grasp of it. Thus the need for, and
the edifying value of, humility and reverence. Die Rehabilitierung der
Tugend explores the value of the religious virtue of reverence in its
function as a spur to knowledge of the world: [A] class of things tends to
become free for scientific inquiry when a deeply engaged and
spiritualized reverence toward things has already penetrated to a level of
its existence closer to one of the invisible sources of the visible world.
The level that is more distant from those sources and more turned toward our
senses then becomes cold, and comes to be seen as amenable to
scientific analysis. If one studies more closely the diverse epochs of
progress, for example in astronomy, one will perceive at its source
the continuous growth of a new and deeper reverence for the invisible. One
will find, for example, that a new and deeper reverence had developed in
advance of the detachment of feelings of reverence for the visible night
sky, in which attitude the idea of the heavens had undergone a
religious purification and spiritualization. Thus it was not too much but
rather too little genuine reverence toward the divine and the world
that had hampered the progress of astronomy.
Reverence as
such is love that is seeks the being of an object beyond its intentional
givenness; it allows us to sense a greater profundity in the thing than we
can perceive. It is a form of the love for all being and essence that
convinces us that the world is not exhausted by our current knowledge of it.
It inspires us to push ahead, like the lover into the being of what he
loves, in the search for a deeper truth. Religious reverence does not
interfere with the empirical and phenomenological exploration of the
world, but provokes and energizes a deep exploration of the parts of the
world that have already passed beyond the discoveries of science. As a
religious act, it seeks the divine nature mirrored in the intentional
object. In science, reverence seeks a deeper understanding of the physical
constitution and lawlike behavior of its object. If we now explore black
holes and superstrings and singularities, and the neurophysiological basis
of consciousness, the reverential attitude in Scheler’s sense is not
absent from them who seek, even if they have abandoned the notion of the
Absolute as spirit, and divorced themselves from Abrahamic religion, as did
Scheler himself.
Misguided
reverence has, of course, often impeded scientific progress and led to holy
wars; Scheler argues that it is nevertheless the fount in the human spirit
of science’s deepest possibility. In contrast, when asked why science
first developed in Europe rather than in the civilizations of India or
China, Einstein observed that what is surprising is not that science did not
arise in India or China, but that it arose anywhere at all. Thus he severed
the impulse to science from the impulses to knowledge of the human spirit in
general.
Yet
scientists routinely disparage religion as an alien recrudescence of
discredited or at least superannuated forms of thought. Richard Dawkins, a
notable opponent of any attitude that is supportive of religious reverence,
quotes in a recent book
a saying he attributes to Douglas Adams: I’d take the awe of
understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. True,
the reverential awe we feel toward that which surpasseth all
understanding may come to misrepresent its proper object, and transfer
its rapt receptiveness to theological dogmas, as Scheler also realizes quite
clearly. Yet it is hard to see why Adams or anyone would feel any awe over
what science understands about the causal relations among phenomena that are
the objects of its inquiries. The mere complexity of the world, mirrored in
one’s understanding of it, can hardly of itself inspire awe. One suspects
that Adams’s awe is inspired instead by humankind’s achievements in
science, not by the objects science discloses, and it may also be inspired
by his satisfaction with being above the idiocies that travel under the
title of religion. Such attitudes are reviled by Scheler in his essay on
reverence and humility as the very essence of demonic pride.
Scheler’s
own attitude toward nature in his essay on the rehabilitation of virtue is
the moral earth in which took root his phenomenological and sociological
works, in which he castigates science for disregarding a wide range of
phenomena to focus upon the measurable and practical aspects of things
and classifies scientific knowledge as inferior to philosophical knowledge
of essence. No doubt, humility and reverence would lose their power to
inspire our inquiry if we were not able to accept the world as the created
mirror of God, much as the awe, or hubris, or chutzpah, that
science may inspire as it draws many of us into scientific inquiry would be
quickly dispelled if we discovered that the world is not, in its inmost
nature, as science depicts it. Gertrude
Himmelfarb, the author of an important work on Darwin and his age,
noted recently that contemporary scientists B
she mentioned Edward O. Wilson and James Watson as examples B
who revile religious mythmaking in the name of science have evidently not
leaned humility, that is, an appreciation of the limits of science, of
what science does not know and cannot know.
The comment of Owen Flanagan, in a recent book,
that there is no longer any place [in the brain] for the soul to hide,
given the growth in our knowledge of the operations of that organ, ignores,
I think, the depth of our ignorance of how the mind works B
if in fact works is the
proper word.
The ferocity
of current conflicts between religious and secular persons forgets the
common ground between them. It is not that the two sides play different
language games, or require different leaps of faith; if that were so, they
could not even grasp the gulf that separates them, they could only hope the
other side vanishes because of its unwelcome political or moral stances. Yet
their epistemic positions cannot be reconciled, for the phenomenological and
empirical data that would allow one side to vanquish the other are absent.
No doubt Scheler, too, is guilty of dismissing cavalierly his positivist
opponents by calling science merely knowledge for practical power, but his
attitude in the essay on the rehabilitation of virtue is not so dismissive
of science. Although he never makes evident the earliest beginnings of
essential knowledge, he does not beg the question by saying that it is the
light of God that enables us to obtain it. He presses love into service as
the deepest horizon of spirit, for it opens us to knowledge of essence. Can
we monitor that awakening, inchoate mind as it grasps in order and in turns,
the essential structure of the world to which it awakens? To do so
retrospectively does beg the question of its foundational quality: what
appears as a foundation in retrospect may not be one in fact. In sum, it is
plausible but not evident that knowledge of the Absolute is universal, and
yet unpersuasive and unevident that it is underived. Our intellectual
origins, sadly, are not transparent to us, as Scheler imagined.
No doubt the
difference in fundamental ontology that separates Scheler from naturalistic
theses concerning our awareness of a realm of the Absolute is considerable. By
this I mean not simply the difference between naturalist or supernaturalist
metaphysics. Rather, what emerges from the horizon of what is still unknown
may appear to inquirers as bearing a value worthy of religious reverence, or
one inspiring scientific curiosity. The sphere of the unknown always stands as
a background to the known. The religious man plunges into that sphere of our
ignorance not with curiosity, but with reverence and humility. He begins with
the indubitable reality of the sphere of the Absolute, and, drawing from his
deepest experience, proceeds to identify the unknown with the Ens a se,
Brahman, the Buddha-mind, or with Being itself. He explores lovingly that
sphere for its content, believing that the content reveals more momentous
features of reality than does ordinary perception. Today’s naturalist
dismisses all natural human reverence toward the divine as emanating from
human frailty at worst or a mistake in reasoning at best, and he considers the
content of religious experience as an unreliable indicator of what is real,
and rejects its articulation in human culture. Religion, as Santayana noted,
is simply poetry that takes itself seriously as science, and, to naturalists,
God-seekers are poetic dreamers who let themselves forget they are dreaming,
and who are simply seeking to escape the human condition. Both sides may be
wrong in ways they do not yet suspect.
All
page references in brackets refer to Scheler’s Probleme der Religion,
Gesammelte Werke, Band 5, 6th edition, Bouvier, Bonn,
2000. The page numbers in square brackets refer to the English translation
of the fourth edition (Bernard Noble, translator: New York, Harper, 1960).
Max
Scheler, München, Beck, 1998,
138.
Cf.
Gesammelte Werke, Band 15, 182-84.
Cf.:
The Christian Faith, Edinburgh, 1999
He
notes (335) that one consequence of the Fall is Adam’s loss of
completely adequate knowledge of God. Scheler apparently believes that the
fallen state of the world is not only a truth inseparable form theism, but
phenomenologically evident (230). This fascinating claim appears to imply
the irreducibility of the notion of sin. It forms the source of
humankind’s neediness in the face of irredeemable evil, of loss, and our
abiding sense of sorrow. That we can trace this fallen-away aspect of the
human condition to the religious experience of a Fall from grace
antecedent to our creation is, however, hardly phenomenologically evident.
Scheler
argues in Die Wesensphänomenologie der Religion that the process
whereby on e assures oneself of the existence of God may take tow forms:
the direct and the indirect. In the fist, Scheler appears to refer to
something like a spontaneous leap of faith; in the second, one goes from
the consideration of the essential assumptions of one’s culture to an
entirely new level in which those assumptions are taken to be true.
Scheler
notes in the essay, Warum keine neue Religion? (GW 5) that
it must be counted a fault, and not an error, not to hear the whisper of
the personal loving deity in one’s deep personal nucleus. He forgets
that this failure is hardly a fault if one has not assured onself of the
existence of the Ens a se.
A
Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003
As
he argues, for example, in Gesammelte Werke, Band 10, 209-10.
Darwin
and the Darwinian Revolution
(New York: Norton, 1962).
The
New Republic, December 12, 2005, 31.
The
Problem of the Soul (New York:
Basic Books, 2002), 6.