The Potencies of God(s): Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology (review)

474 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:3 JULY 199 7 most noteworthy clarifications in this chapter is the distinction of three basic understandings of the term 'metaphysics' in the Architectonic. Quite relevant is also Tonelli's stress on the difference, blurred by Kemp Smith's translation, between essential and ultimate ends of reason at A 84o/B 868, which is taken as evidence of the unprecedented relation between ethics and metaphysics advocated by Kant. ALFREDO FERRARIN Boston University Edward Allen Beach. The Potengiesof God(s):Schelling'sPhilosophyof Mythology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Pp xii + 317 . Board, $18.95. An interesting theme of this book is the necessary ambivalence of human consciousness toward the object of religion. Parallel to this psychological ambivalence, objective ambiguities turn up in the history of religions: whether religion's object is one or plural, natural or spiritual, a completed entity or a developing one. Schelling devoted the last half of his life (in the lecture hall if not in print) to a two-sided attempt to revive theistic metaphysics and to "demonstrate" the reality of God in the history of religions. Beach's tide, with its ambiguity about the number of deity, reflects Schelling's bold attempt to validate the sky-monism of hunter-gatherers and the polytheism of early agricultural peoples as genuine religious experience. He made them phases of the development of true, revealed (i.e., Christian) religion by making their objects necessary components (or potencies) of the divine essence, displayed in mock independence in the history of mythology, but once properly developed and subordinated, the support for the experiential revelation of the actual, personal God. Schelling's programme in the late or Positive Philosophy is complicated both by its subject and its presentation in discrete lecture courses. Other scholars have treated the complexity of Schelling's attitude toward philosophy after the 182os, his repudiation of the static conceptualism of his own Identity-Philosophy and of Hegel's system as merely "negative" philosophy, and his demand that will, decision (freedom) and actuality be taken as the supports and starting-points of a second or "positive" philosophy. The classic study here is Walter Schulz's Die VoUendungdes Deutschen ldealismus in der Spiitphilosophie ScheUings(end ed., Pftitlingen: Neske, 1975). Beach focusses instead on the complexity of the vehicle Schelling chose to convey this positive philosophy: the history of religions, or in Scheiling's terms the philosophies of mythology and revelation . Though Schelling turned to theistic metaphysics late in life, he always regarded myth and symbol as the point where aesthetics, metaphysics, and religion converged. He developed an eye for the nuanced phenomena of religious experience, resisting the tendency of the nineteenth-century academy to reduce religious representations either to a flat mirroring of historical events or to an externalization of internal psychic conflicts. Beach shows how Schelling incorporated the historical and especially the psychological dimensions of religious experience into a nonreductive account of the unfolding of the divine reality in human cultures, inside a history generated not accidentally by the mere accumulation of unrelated events, but one driven by the logic BOOK REVIEWS 475 of the unfolding of the divine essence. The genius of Schelling's view of religion is to argue that "screens" placed by linguistic, cultural, and temporal differences do not divide the worshipper/intuiter from the "true God" but are preparatory vehicles necessary for the lived encounter with God. Comparing Schelling's method to the "hermeneutics of suspicion" practiced by Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Freud which resulted in purely reductive theories---e.g., Feuerbach's thesis that the gods are simultaneous projections of human capacity and incapacity--Beach argues that Schelling's theory offers a "sublimated projection theory" of religion. Rooted in the conviction that human consciousness is "Godpositing " but confronted with the facts that there are inconsistent paradigms of religion and its object(s), this theory first works deconstructively upon these ambiguities, then opens itself up for an "ecstatic," intuitive or experiential moment of spiritual illumination, but finally returns to rational discourse for a moment of "theodicy" or "confirmation." Beach abstracts this picture from Schelling's actual speculation, which is more technical and often pedantic, but all...