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A2 Religious Studies: Implications.
Some Notes for Westphal
To understand this article, it is important that you remember the difference between
God and religion and between revelation and reason.
Georg Hegel.
Hegel was an idealist: he believed that non-physical things have a higher, purer
existence than physical things. This distinguishes him from materialists or empiricists
like David Hume. Hegel believed that a finite thing can only become free when it has
become infinite, because finite things are determined by their boundaries. It is
religion that helps us to achieve this, but that it needed reform.
Hegel was concerned that ‘deism’, which is the belief in a
God that is beyond human experience and that cannot
be known, was taking over and that humans were being
denied the opportunity to think about, let alone
experience God or the transcendent: deism is the
movement Hegel deplored.
Hegel believed, on the contrary, that humanity was
evolving to a position of ‘Absolut Geist’ or absolute
spirit. A humanity that exists in absolut geist, is one
which is based upon reason, has complete freedom and
is not a slave to the passions. Humans who are free are
happy and moral and they can see the world as it is
objectively, not subjectively.
Hegel believed that religion is basically true, but that it presents the world through
images, symbols and metaphors: as much as the individual person can handle.
Philosophy on the other hand, using reason, deals with pure thought, pure concept
(which he called Begriff). For Hegel, absolute geist, Begriff, reason, God, all can be
known by human beings. He believed that it is wrong to argue that God is beyond
our understanding.
Immanuel Kant.
‘Augustinian’: the idea (in this context) that all human beings are fallen and sinful and
rely upon the grace and help of God to turn away from evil.
‘Pelagian’: after the British monk Pelagius, who argued against Augustine that humans
can live a sinless life by exercising their will.
Kant believed that true religion should be governed by
reason alone. For him, religion was not about trying to
please God, or performing rituals; it was about living a life
according to the moral law that we each discover using
reason. The moral life should be the sole object of religion.
Reason is universal.
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A2 Religious Studies: Implications.
‘Apart from a good life-conduct, anything which the human being supposes he can do to
become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion and counterfeit service of God.’
Kant believed that God was not needed for us to obey the moral law: only reason.
Morality does not depend on religion, but morality does lead to religion because in
order for us to be moral, we postulate immortality and the existence of God.
Kant, like Hegel, distinguished between the pure world of reason (the noumenal
world) and the world of the senses (the phenomenal world). He believed that
humans do bad things and live immoral lives because they are slaves to the passions
and the senses which are part of the noumenal world. The human who lives a good
moral life is exercising their freedom which comes from using reason. Reason
involves thinking in the abstract. Truly religious thought should, for Kant, be
governed by reason. For Kant, ‘God’ existed in the noumenal realm. For Kant, the
highest form of life is the moral life lived according to reason.
Kant believed that for humans to live good lives, they had to discover the moral law
using reason and live according to it. He understood that humans did not always do
this and wrote about ‘radical evil’ which is where a human freely chooses to act
according to evil, rather than good. Kant argued that a sinful human needs moral
regeneration: they need to turn their will towards the good. Kant believed that there
are examples of morally perfect prototypes: like Jesus. He was not concerned with
whether or not he actually existed, but held him up as a universal example of a
morally pure human being.
Kant’s vision of a religion, was of a community devoted to living morally perfect lives.
He wrote about the church invisible and the church visible. The church invisible is
the ideal, where human beings exist together under direct, divine rule and live the
moral life. The visible church is the actual group of moral humans trying to live
according to the moral law as best they can. For Kant, such a ‘church’ would be free
of superstition and internal division: in other words, all meaningless ritual (‘fetishfaith’ he called it) and differences between religions would disappear.
Kant did accept that there is a human need for things that the senses can grasp hold
of and that the visible church may need rituals and scriptures, but they must exist to
help people to discover the moral law. In this sense he is like Schleiermacher (in
affirming a religious need) and Jung (in arguing that religion helps us to make meaning
of life). Kant strongly objected to ‘priestcraft’ where the clergy keep aspects of the
religion mysterious and make rituals more important than the moral law.
Friedrich Schleiermacher: you can think too
much…
Schleiermacher was writing at the end of the 18th Century
(1700s). He was concerned that the Enlightenment had led
to the belief that morality, aesthetic awareness
(appreciation of art etc) and reason alone were enough as
a basis for human life and that religion was superfluous
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A2 Religious Studies: Implications.
(not needed). He argued against this that religion was a profound and essential part
of being human:
"Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep
need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition
and a feeling. ... Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are
derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are
the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not
necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure
contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack
of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve
one's own finite self."
Schleiermacher believed that the individual, the ego, was a reflection of the universe
as a whole and humanity as a whole (a bit like Jung’s idea of the archetype). For
Schleiermacher, the universe is not to be understood through cognition, thought or
reason, but through feeling and self-consciousness. If we are self-conscious, we can
achieve supreme unity of thought, or what some call enlightenment.
For Schleiermacher then, religion comes from immediate experience, it is not
mediated through the intellect or the mind. This is very similar to what H.P. Owen
argues, who is mentioned in the Donovan article. This kind of ‘direct awareness’ is
not popular with philosophers, particularly those like A.J. Ayer.
Baruch de Spinoza.
Spinoza was a rationalist and believed that knowledge of the universe could be
achieved by exercising reason alone. He believed that
the universe was logically arranged in a rational order,
but it cannot be comprehended fully by the senses,
which are imperfect.
Spinoza believed that there is only one true substance in
the universe, and that substance is God. For Spinoza,
everything in existence is somehow in God. God did not
create nature; God is nature. Thought and space are
simply two of God’s infinite attributes, the two
attributes we have access to. God is impersonal for
Spinoza; like a geometric formula. There is no personal
God for Spinoza. Spinoza influenced Schleiermacher
heavily because his God present in everything was available to be experienced
directly.
Spinoza was a determinist: he believed that all human actions were determined by
prior causes. It is not possible for humans to be fully free: only God can be fully free.
Spinoza did believe that we can overcome our passions however, but this comes
from a deep understanding of what causes us to act. In a way he was describing a
form of psychotherapy: to be free, we have to fully understand how our mind works
and how our passions motivate us.
Westphal.