Martijn Buijs

The principle of philosophy, Schelling declares in his 1810 Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, is the Absolute or God.1 The terms are brought into close yet ambiguous proximity by this assertion. Yet how are we to think them together? It is far from clear just how the Absolute—the abstract, universal, all-encompassing name Idealism gives to what, most fundamentally, there is—and God, a name with a rather longer life story, are to be related. Are we to take it that the Absolute and God are to be baldly equated? That the one is a mere term of convenience properly understood in the light of the other? That the one is a supplement or corrective that the other is in need of? And who would be the arbiter of...

What is a philosophical religion? Carlos Fraenkel proposes that we use this term to describe “the interpretation of the historical forms of a religion in philosophical terms”. Such a philosophical interpretation allows religious traditions to be utilized in service of a political-pedagogical program, the goal of which is orienting society towards the highest good: human excellence. Here, I outline the idea of a philosophical religion as it can be found in the Arabic tradition of rationalist Aristotelianism and scrutinize Spinoza’s ambiguous response to this idea. Despite his programmatic separation of theology and philosophy, I argue, Spinoza, at least in some crucial passages, shows himself to be engaged in the project of retrieving the truths of philosophy through the interpretation of Scripture. Thus, there are two contradictory strains at work in Spinoza’s philosophy of religion: he systematically denies that Scripture is the locus of truth, yet he articulates parts of his philosophical anthropology and rational theology by means of Scriptural exegesis. Both of these strains, however, depend on the claim that the final arbiter of truth about the divine and the one true act of worship of God is metaphysics.

What is usually known as Schelling’s late thought, the system of negative and positive philosophy, is marked by a deep engagement with the question of the religious—and with Christianity in particular. Yet ironically, this does not mean that Schelling is in any immediate sense a resource for the project of developing a religious ethics, if what is meant by such an ethics is the articulation, evaluation, and prescription of moral norms such as might be provided by Christian scripture. Schelling instead mounts a fundamental critique of the possibility of such an ethical project, and does so, one might say, precisely in the name of Christianity. For ethics for Schelling is necessarily a question of universal moral norms imposed by reason upon itself; but the universality of this moral law is such that it cannot account for what in us touches most closely, and stands most in need, of the divine: our non-universalizable personhood. In a philosophical recasting of Paul’s critique of the Law, Schelling attempts to show how only as free persons searching for a free God can we hope to establish a religious bond as an actual and historical force. Schelling’s Pauline anthropology thus allows him to show how negative philosophy, as the project of knowing God as the sum total of reality by a priori reason, ends in the need for a God outside of the mere concept, a God as the history of religious consciousness may give us hope there is.