Keywords
Phenomenology
Spirit/Life
Religious Experience
Religious Reverence
Ressentiment
How to Cite
Abstract
The object of this paper is to examine for their coherence some claims made by Max Scheler (1874-1928) concerning the nature of religious experience and the natural knowledge of God that it discloses apart from revelation. These claims were made in distinct stages of his philosophical development. The earliest was his essay, “On the Rehabilitation of Virtue” of 1913; later came the essay, “The Essential Phenomenology of Religion,” which is a segment of his On the Eternal in Man that was prepared for publication in 1920; and lastly his The Human Place in the Cosmos, which appeared in 1927. In the final phase of his development, Scheler rejected theism while remaining a nominal Catholic. He developed a metaphysical picture of the Ens-a-se which he did not live to clarify and complete. In this metaphysics, God is said to be the Ground of the World existing under two attributes, Spirit and Urge (Drang). This being requires human effort, if it is to “sublimate” the Urge and allow it to come to be as God, absolute, holy, and omnipotent. For we are a “microcosm” that possesses both attributes of God, Geist and Drang, in finite form. This vast and challenging notion inspired in Scheler some reflections in his posthumous works on the spiritual life that opens to those who enter the life of God-in-becoming, and he offers his own prayer to this precarious being. As some historians of philosophy have claimed to find a unity of thought in Scheler’s works, this paper will consider whether such a claim can be made for his concept of the spiritual life as well. We will ask whether the spiritual life described in the late work remains within the boundaries of Christian spirituality or whether it represents a spiritual life of an entirely different kind.
References
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