The Phenomenology of Religious Life

Introductory Part: Interpretations of Augustine

INTRODUCTORY PART Interpretations of Augustine The task set before us is a limited one; to what extent it is limited will become clear, at least negatively, in its demarcation from other interpretations and evaluations of Augustine. These latter ones concur in their high esteem of Augustine’s cultural-historical impact. Medieval theology is based on Augustine. The medieval reception of Aristotle was able to assert itself—if at all—only in a sharp confrontation with Augustinian directions of thought. Medieval mysticism is a vivification of theological thought and practical-ecclesiastical religious ritual which, in essence , goes back to Augustinian motifs. In his decisive years of development, Luther was under the strong influence of Augustine. Within Protestantism, Augustine remained the most widely esteemed Father of the Church. Augustine was subject to a renewal in the Catholic Church, in particular in seventeenth-century France (Descartes, Malebranche, Pascal, Jansenism, Bossuet , Fénélon). He remained especially at home there until the modern Catholic school of apologetics in France, which at the same time appropriated Bergsonian ideas (which, in turn, were determined by Plotinus). What is at work in this is not really Augustine, but an Augustinianism which is more appropriate to the doctrine of the Church, and which slightly violates the dogmatic boundaries only in ontologism. (What Scheler is doing today is merely a secondary reception of these circles of thought dressed up in phenomenology .) Augustinianism has a twofold meaning: philosophically, it means a Christian Platonism turned against Aristotle; theologically, a certain conception of the doctrine of sins and of grace (freedom of the will and predestination). Augustine was subject to a reconsideration through the awakening of the critical science of history in the nineteenth century—that is, through the emergence of a real history of dogma and of the Church, as well as of a history of Christian writing and of Christian philosophy. Of the research of the last decades, we might characterize briefly the three most prominent interpretations and evaluations from which the following attempt distinguishes itself, and with regard to which it essentially limits itself.§ 1. Ernst Troeltsch’s Interpretation of Augustine E. Troeltsch presented the most recent interpretation in his work Augustin, die christliche Antike und das Mittelalter. Im Anschluß an die Schrift De Civitate 116 The Phenomenology of Religious Life [160–162] Dei [Augustine, Christian Antiquity, and the Middle Ages, following De Civitate Dei; 1915]. Troeltsch interprets Augustine from the perspective of a general , universal-historically oriented philosophy of culture. “Since the Christian movement [ . . . ] [left] the realm of education, property, and society [ . . . ] the problem of culture became the great problem of Christian thinkers,”1 — that is, the question of how the world and the real goods of culture are to be integrated into Christian salvation. (The problem of culture: How one is to establish oneself in the world, make oneself at home in it with decency and adjusted to progress, after one has already fallen for paganism.) Troeltsch sees the real significance of Augustine in his having become the great moral thinker of Christian antiquity with his ethics of the summum bonum. Augustine “is the last and greatest conjoinment of the dying ancient culture with the ethos, myth, authority and organization of the early Catholic Church.”2 (An old shelf-warmer, translated into the phraseology of universal history and philosophy of culture!) Thus, Augustine, “in his essence, could not at all be taken up on the soil of another culture.”3 He is more conclusive for antiquity and less foundational for the Middle Ages. In this way, one of the most important demarcations of the great periods and main formations of the Christian idea has been achieved. The course of this study runs entirely within the method of the history of religion which Troeltsch had already determined (cf. “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” Winter Semester 1920/214 ). According to this method, the research into, and presentation of, the “religious formation of ideas” is to be separated from the background of a determinate, theological dogmatism; and these ideas have to be viewed in their fusion with “the respective general situation of culture.”5 The method of the history of religion must be one of the history of culture, which also includes the method of social history. Troeltsch does not mean to say “that the great religious movements themselves derive immediately from the general situation of culture.”6 (But belong to it? This misunderstanding would be even worse, because the “derivation ” could really have a...