Philosophy and religion have completely different tasks and essence. various essentially a form of spiritual activity. Religion is life in communion with God aimed at satisfying the personal needs of the human soul in salvation in finding the last strength and satisfaction, unshakable peace of mind and joy. Philosophy is, in essence, completely independent of any personal interests. the highest, final comprehension of being and life by seeing their absolute fundamental principle. But these, in essence, heterogeneous forms of spiritual life coincide with each other in the sense that both of them are feasible only through focus of consciousness on the same object – on God more precisely, through the living, experienced discernment of God. Of course, abstractly reasoning, it is possible to imagine the reverse relationship - namely, the complete divergence of the ways of accomplishing both tasks. Where, as, for example, in Buddhism, personal salvation is not found on the path of communion with God, and where, on the other hand, , reason strives to comprehend life and the world not from its eternal and absolute fundamental principle - there is nothing in common between religion and philosophy; not only do they contradict one another, but in this case they are just as out of touch with each other as, say, music and chemical analysis. But the whole point is precisely in the fact that such completely divergent paths are for both religion and philosophy imaginary paths that do not lead to the goal, and that, on the contrary, genuine the fulfillment of the tasks of both is possible only on the paths leading to the same goal - to God. With regard to this assertion, of course, no special proof is required; here we can calmly leave individual paradoxists to work, contrary to common human experience, to prove the opposite. On the contrary, in relation to philosophy, this is a thesis that requires final clarification and proof, by no means exhausted by the previous general considerations.

Modern consciousness, even if it thinks in terms close to the above considerations, seems unlikely or even completely impossible for the absolute, which is needed in philosophy as the highest logical category, uniting and ordering the theoretical comprehension of being, to coincide with the living personal God, which requires and with which alone religious faith can be satisfied.

Two doubts arise here, which, from different angles, express essentially the same difficulty. On the one hand, the religious idea of ​​God, apparently, contradicts the goals of philosophy in the sense that it presupposes in the nature of God and therefore in a living relationship to God the moment mysteries, incomprehensibility, inadequacy to the human mind, while the task of philosophy is precisely to understand and explain fundamental principle of life. Everything that is logically proven, understood, completely clear, already thereby loses its religious significance. God, mathematically proven, is not the god of religious faith. From this it seems that even if philosophy really knew the true God, proved His existence, explained His properties, it would precisely by this deprive Him of the meaning that He has for religion, i.e., would kill the most precious thing that exists in living religious faith. Such is the doubt of many religious natures, to whom it often seems that the more a philosophy is religious in its subject matter, i.e., the more stubbornly it is occupied with the logical comprehension of God, the more dangerous it is for the purpose of religion - for the living, believing possession of an unsearchable and inexpressible source of salvation. And the same train of thought sometimes leads philosophy to the conviction that its true task is to understand God, thereby destroying that lack of accountability and mystery of Him, which gives the character of an intimate faith; philosophy is in this case, as in Hegel, the replacement of unconscious, instinctive faith by clear knowledge - overcoming faith with knowledge. Just as it is impossible to simultaneously experience the joy of living love for a person and take the same person as an object of cold scientific analysis, so it is impossible to simultaneously believe in God and comprehend Him logically.

In another aspect, the same difficulty takes the form of another doubt. religious faith, the source of personal salvation must be a living person. But, apparently, of all the categorical forms in which the central philosophical concept of the fundamental principle of being can be conceived, the form living personality. Whether it is conceived in philosophy as the substance of the world or as its primary cause, as an all-one eternity or as a creative force of development, as a world mind or as life, it is, in any case, something impersonal, to some extent always pantheistically world-encompassing. a beginning in which philosophy, without changing its task of comprehending and logically comprehending being and without artificially adapting to the requirements of religious feeling, cannot see the anthropomorphic features of a living, punishing and loving person, necessary for a religious relationship with God. In a fatal way, regardless of the content of a separate philosophical system, the God of philosophy bears the stamp of his dependence on the needs of abstract thought, and that is why for religious feeling there is only an illusory surrogate for the true God - a dead stone instead of bread that satisfies the hunger of a religious soul, or, at best, , a useless, vague, ethereal shadow of that truly existing, which in all the fullness and vitality of His reality is already possessed by direct religious faith.

Both doubts are ultimately based, as already indicated, on one difficulty; and it must be admitted that this is indeed a serious difficulty - one of the deepest and most important philosophical problems - in contrast to the easily resolved contradiction with which we dealt above and which arose only from superficial and completely false banal ideas about the essence of philosophy and religion. . This difficulty boils down to the question: can philosophy, which is the comprehension of being in the logical form of a concept, at the same time not be rationalism? It is noteworthy that this issue is decisive not only for the harmonization of philosophy and religion, but also for the possibility of philosophy itself. In fact, philosophy, on the one hand, is the comprehension of being in the system of concepts and, on the other hand, the comprehension of it from its absolute and all-embracing fundamental principle. But the concept is always something relative and limited; how is it possible to express the absolute in the forms of the relative, to master the infinite by catching it in the network of the finite? How is it possible, to put it simply, to comprehend the incomprehensible? It would seem that we are faced with a fatal dilemma: either we are looking for the absolute itself, which goes beyond the limits of everything finite and - thereby - logically expressible, and then we cannot really comprehend and logically fix; or we are looking for only a logical system of concepts and then we always stay in the sphere of only the relative, particular, derivative, not reaching the true fundamental principle and integral unity of being. In both cases, the task of philosophy remains unfulfilled.

Many philosophical systems have collapsed on this difficulty. But in its main thoroughfare, philosophy long ago reckoned with this difficulty and overcame it in principle. In the teaching of Heraclitus on the mutual connection and living harmony of opposites, in the most profound, overcoming early rationalism, the later dialogues of Plato, in the teaching of God by the Philo of Alexandria, in the whole direction of the so-called “negative theology”, in neo-Platonism and the philosophical mysticism of Christianity, in the teaching Nicholas of Cusa about docta ignorantia, in the most thoughtful and precise formulations of the so-called “ontological proof” of the existence of God, in Spinoza’s doctrine of the substantial unity of heterogeneous attributes, in Leibniz’s theory of the continuity of being, in Schelling’s philosophy of identity, in Hegel’s dialectical ontology, we have different - and different in depth and adequacy , - but basically identical and fundamentally successful solutions to this difficulty. The general meaning of overcoming it lies in the discretion supralogical, intuitive basis of logical thought. Philosophy comprehends – and thereby distinctly logically expresses – the absolute through direct observation and logical fixation of its eminent form, which exceeds the logical concept. We are deprived of the opportunity to give here a detailed logical explanation of this most profound and at the same time axiomatically self-evident relationship; we can only in a few words lead the reader's mind to the connection that is being revealed here. The perception of the absolute, all-encompassing nature of being, which goes beyond the limitations and relativity of everything logically fixed, is precisely its logically adequate view. Or, in other words: it is precisely a logically mature thought that has reached the last clarity, seeing the inexhaustibility and infinity of the absolute, its fundamental difference from everything rationally expressible, humbly recognizing, therefore, the limited achievements of the mind in the face of true being, precisely in open and clear awareness of this correlation, and only in it alone, overcomes the limitations of the mind and takes possession of an object that surpasses its forces. As Nicholas of Cusa succinctly puts it, "the unattainable is achieved through its non-attainment." Therefore, true philosophy not only does not deny the consciousness of mystery, inexhaustible depth and boundless fullness of being, but, on the contrary, is entirely based on this consciousness and proceeds from it as a self-evident and first fundamental truth. In general, this consciousness is a constitutive sign of any true knowledge, in contrast to imaginary knowledge, which claims to be omniscient. Where a person, indulging in the pride of knowledge, imagines that he has exhausted the subject with his knowledge, there is precisely the first condition of knowledge - a clear vision of his subject; for where there is this vision, i.e. where—thus—there is knowledge, there is also the obvious insight into the incompleteness and incompleteness of knowledge. Genuinely perceived knowledge is always accompanied by the feeling that the brilliant creator of the mathematical system of the Universe Newton classically expressed in the words that he imagines himself a child collecting individual shells on the shore of a boundless and unexplored ocean. And vice versa, that stupid self-conceit, to which being appears as a limited and flat folding picture, easily and completely exhausted in a few formulas, not only contains an illegal exaggeration of the significance of any knowledge achieved, but is simply complete blindness, in which even the first knowledge step.

By this elucidation of the condition of the possibility of philosophy itself, at least the first of these two doubts about the relation between philosophical knowledge of God and religious feeling is immediately eliminated. In whatever concepts abstract philosophical thought expresses its knowledge of God, its basic intuition and thus its highest and supreme concept remains the purely religious idea of ​​the immensity, inexhaustible depth and mystery of God; and, in essence, the rest of the system of concepts has as its final purpose to bring thought closer to grasping precisely this supra-finite and supra-rational nature of God, which constitutes His absoluteness. The usual misconception in understanding the relationship between philosophy and religion at this point is that the sense of mystery is presented as a condition that blocks cognitive penetration, and, conversely, the passion for knowledge is a force that destroys the humble sense of mystery and therefore favors the conceit of atheism. In reality, on the contrary, a religious sense of the mystery and depth of being is the first and necessary condition for the development of philosophy, while the self-conceit of atheism kills the very instinct of philosophizing at the root and is just as much a denial of philosophy as of religion. Opportunity and even private case intermediate forms - the insufficiency of philosophical energy, due to which thought, not penetrating to the last depth, stops halfway, sets itself the last limits here and, simplifying being, favors semi-unbelief or poverty and schematic religious consciousness - of course, does not refute, but rather confirms the basic, explained us ratio. The ongoing battle between the minds, so to speak. deep minds, that is, those who feel the depth and infinite complexity of life, and flat minds, imagining that life can be easily taken apart like a house of cards and put back together at will, there is as much a struggle for the religious as for philosophical, worldview.

This way the way to the solution of the second doubt is also found. True, since we will express it in a rough and logically firm formula, according to which faith is a human-like person. The god of philosophy is an impersonal absolute, it seems utterly irresistible. But only the one-sidedness and logical simplicity of the formula itself is to blame for this. Neither the God of religion nor the God of philosophy is the simple and unambiguous content to which this formula reduces Him, precisely because He is, first of all, inexhaustible depth and inexhaustible richness. He is the fullness all definitions, because it stands above each of them separately; and therefore one definition does not contradict another in Him, provided that each of them is taken in the proper sense, not as an exhaustive adequate knowledge of His very essence, but precisely as an understanding of one of His aspects, which, due to the fundamental unity of His essence, has only a symbolic meaning to define the whole. After all, even religious faith contains – at the very first attempt at any one-sided definition of It – a multitude of contradictions, which in reality are not contradictions, but antinomies that agree in a higher, supra-rational unity. On the other hand, philosophical knowledge of God is only in an imaginary way chained to the indicated impersonal and, as it were, formless concept of God as some kind of only all-encompassing principle. The seeming inevitability of this trend follows only from the one-sided restriction of the task of philosophy to theoretical understanding of the world. If we remember and keep in mind that the task of philosophy is not exhausted by this, but requires holistic understanding of being in all its living fullness and depth, embracing as one of its main points the reality of spiritual life with all its moral and religious demands and problems - if we recall the need for such philosophical problems as the problem of good and evil, theodicy, the relationship between the moral ideal and reality, freedom and necessity, reason and blindness of natural forces, then we will understand that the highest illuminating unity that philosophy seeks is not only an impersonal unity. ordering the picture of the objective world being, but really a holistic unity of life in the deepest and most comprehensive sense of this concept. The whole point is that true philosophy, capable of fulfilling its purpose, must proceed from a real, i.e., absolutely complete and concrete total unity, and not from an imaginary, in essence, only partial and abstract unity of the system of objective being. And this means that the last source and criterion of philosophical knowledge is w only a dispassionate, purely contemplative intuition of objective being, and a holistic and living spiritual experience - comprehending the experiential survival of the last depths of life. The traditional school understanding of philosophy - insofar as it generally admits philosophy as metaphysics or ontology - sees in the latter the content of "theoretical philosophy" and separates from it as special, additional and, moreover, relatively minor branches of philosophical knowledge - "ethics", or "practical philosophy" , “aesthetics”, “philosophy of religion”, “philosophy of history”, etc. Practically and propaedeutically, such or a division of philosophy similar to it is, of course, inevitable, in view of the diversity of philosophical interests and the impossibility of immediately presenting the subject of philosophy from all its sides. But since it is believed that such a division precisely expresses the internal structure of philosophical knowledge, which follows from the structure of its very subject, this is a dangerous delusion that diverts the spiritual gaze from the true nature of the subject of philosophy. On the one side, any philosophy is ontology or “theoretical philosophy” (meaningless pleonasm – after all, philosophy is always knowledge, i.e. theory!), for philosophy everywhere and everywhere cognizes the truly existing; and, on the other hand, which is especially important here, true ontology is not a dispassionate study of the forthcoming picture of being alien to the spirit and only from outside it (for such a being is precisely not an integral being or a true all-unity), but the comprehension of absolute being, embracing and all the spiritual life of the subject of knowledge itself - the human personality. But the cognitive focus on the absolute in this, its only true sense, presupposes spiritual experience not as an external contemplation, but as based on a true internal experience understanding the essence and meaning of life. In short, a genuine, and not only school and propaedeutic, ontology must be based on living religious experience and therefore, in principle, cannot contradict him. The whole set of painful doubts, searches and achievements of religious experience, united in the theme “about the meaning of life”, is the problem of guilt, retribution and forgiveness, personal responsibility and human impotence, predestination and freedom, the reality of evil and goodness of the Existing One, the fragility of empirical existence and indestructibility. personality - is included as a legitimate and necessary theme in the ontology, deserving its name of the doctrine of being.

One need only remember this primary and basic being, concentrate on it and see in it the last criterion of knowledge, so that the whole correlation, which at first glance seems confusing and almost insoluble, becomes - at least in principle - self-evidently clear. There are not two truths, but only one - and it is where there is maximum completeness and specificity. No matter how different the personal-religious relationship to God may be from the cognitive relationship to Him in philosophy, no matter what differences we find between religious and philosophical interest, all these relationships are established within the same ultimate reality that lies before the spiritual gaze of the individual. and remains itself, no matter whether it is expressed in direct religious experience or in a mediated system of logical concepts. The main thing, however, is to have a living experience of reality itself. Only where religion takes the dogmas of faith not as symbolic and mysterious designations of the divine nature, but as complete and exhaustive adequate revelations of God, turning them into one-sided logical definitions, or where philosophy imagines in an abstract system of ready-made formulas to determine to the end the last depths of reality, - only there are possible - and even inevitable - conflicts between philosophy and religion. The internal connection and intimate affinity of philosophy were most of all obscured by naive and daring attempts to rationalize the dogmas of faith, compromising both philosophy and religion. Mysterious and significant religious intuitions - the fruit of the spiritual experience of religious geniuses and the conciliar religious consciousness - almost inaccessible in their depth to the inexperienced experience of the average person, are sometimes discussed - both in substantiating them and in refuting them - as simple truths, the meaning of which is accessible to common sense and can be established by simple logical analysis. Pitiable is that wisdom which, in ignorant conceit, refutes the dogma of the Trinity on the simple ground that one is not equal to three; but a bit of philosophical wisdom and in a bold attempt, without penetrating this secret experimentally, in an imaginary way "prove" it logically, by means of an abstract analysis of poor content and formless common idea Deities. On the contrary, the deeper and more authentic philosophical knowledge, the more it is inclined to humility, to the recognition of the Socratic position that the source of knowledge is the consciousness of one's ignorance.

Philosophical knowledge in its achievements necessarily lags behind the achievements of direct religious penetration into the depths of being. There are substantial grounds for this, rooted in the very nature of both spiritual activities. First of all, religious faith, being a living, direct sensation and experience of the Divine, does not need for its achievements the hard mental work of rational explanation and substantiation of its truths. In addition, although religion, as indicated above, necessarily contains, as its main reference point, the moment of direct personal discretion of truth, it does not at all need this direct discretion to extend to all content of religious belief. On the contrary, it is characteristic that this moment of immediate evidence is inherent in the perception of truthfulness, unconditional truth. source of revelation whether there will be the same Deity or this or that intermediary between God and man - by virtue of which the content of the revelation acquires an indirect certainty of the truth, reported by a self-evidently reliable witness. Therefore, the property personal Faith can be - and even necessarily happens - the content of the conciliar religious experience, with all the achievements of religious geniuses included in it. This achieves the possibility of completeness, richness and depth of religious revelation, completely unattainable for philosophical knowledge. For although philosophical knowledge is not set here no major barriers and the possibility of infinite achievements is open, but the nature of philosophical knowledge requires logical unity content makes it nearly impossible for it to be used on a single system all the fullness of the religious experience of mankind. Only completeness and diversity all philosophical achievements of human thought, in principle, can become at the level of its religious achievements, but this completeness can only be given to spiritual and historical intuition, but is not adequately expressed in any unified system. A philosophical system that attempts to express and logically capture the whole religious experience of mankind, there is a plan similar to an attempt to draw a geographical map, on which all the diversity of geographical reality would be marked. And here, on the other hand, we are again convinced that the correct relationship between religion and philosophy is possible only on the basis of that “wise ignorance” ( docta ignorantia), which is the most mature fruit of true enlightenment. A truly philosophical frame of mind coincides in its volitional structure with a religious frame of mind: in both - contrary to superficial opinion, which seems impossible - humility is combined with the boldness of creativity, and moreover, not in such a way that each of these volitional tendencies restrains and limits the other, but that each of them, on the contrary, nourishes and strengthens the other.

What is "Philosophy of Religion"? Its two main forms

The concept of "philosophy of religion" can be considered in a broad and narrow sense. The philosophy of religion in the broad sense of the word is a set of actual and potential philosophical attitudes towards religion, understanding of its nature and functions, as well as philosophical justifications for the existence of God, reasoning about his nature and relation to the world and man.

The claims of the philosophy of religion are determined by the very essence of philosophy. European philosophy recognizes itself as a universal or supreme cognitive effort. Any reality and any kind of cognition and activity must - in accordance with the fundamental cultural attitude towards philosophy - receive justification and sanction from the philosophical mind. Such an attitude is, of course, subject to historical modifications, and its degree of expression varies. However, just in relation to religion, this fundamental cultural attitude is reproduced constantly.

The philosophy of religion in the narrow sense of the word appears either as a special topic, a special section of major philosophical systems, or as a separate philosophical discipline. (Of course, one does not exclude the other.)

There is no unanimity in understanding the nature and function of the philosophy of religion among philosophers. Nevertheless, the philosophy of religion has an objectively established subject area, constantly reproducing forms of implementation, rather stable differences from other areas of philosophical knowledge, as well as from theology and religious disciplines. It is a special type of philosophizing, demonstrating the diversity of historical forms of implementation.

The common subject area of ​​the overwhelming majority of varieties of modern philosophy of religion is the study and understanding of theism in various aspects, as well as the justification of traditional, "classical" theism or the construction of philosophical alternatives to classical theism. Theism should be understood as a set of certain religious-metaphysical statements, the core of which is ideas about God. God is conceived as an infinite, eternal, uncreated, perfect personal reality. He created everything that exists outside of him. He is transcendent in relation to all that exists, but retains an active presence in the world.

In its historical existence, the philosophy of religion exhibits certain stable forms. It always appears either as philosophical religion, or as philosophical theology (philosophical analysis of the "religious attitude", the relationship of man to God), or as an attempt to develop a philosophical doctrine of God.

Philosophical Religious Studies

Philosophical religious studies is a set of philosophical reasoning, the subject of which is the "religious attitude" of a person or the "religious consciousness of a person". This, in our understanding, is the minimum definition of the subject area of ​​the philosophy of religion in its religious function.

The specificity of the philosophy of religion as religious studies is that it is limited to the study of religion and does not deal with the description or conceptualization of supernatural reality or the supernatural dimension of a single reality. In other words, philosophical religious studies do not directly address either the study or the conceptualization of the object of religion.

This does not mean at all that the philosophy of religion, as a philosophical study of religion, questions the existence of God or biblical content. Philosophical religious studies seem to be distracted from this. The relationship to God, the divine, is a real relationship for believers, but the philosophy of religion distances itself from this relationship in the sense that it considers itself entitled not only to describe and explicate it, but also to subject it to verification. As a result, this or that moment, the aspect of the religious attitude can be justified or the question remains open.

Consideration of the religious relationship philosophy of religion focuses on religious knowledge, on what is called the "ideational component of religion." A religious attitude in its entirety is also a cognitive attitude. After all, every moment and aspect of this relationship, i.e. relation to divine reality, includes a certain knowledge of this reality, as well as the associated knowledge of man about the world and himself.

In our view, the specificity of the philosophy of religion in its religious form should be in the priority attention to the religious attitude, religious consciousness, taken in its cognitive aspect. Accordingly, we are faced with the task of indicating what kind of religious knowledge becomes the object of study and comprehension in the philosophy of religion. It is knowledge expressed in religious beliefs.

By beliefs is meant religious knowledge, and that which is taken for granted. Beliefs are what believers, adherents of a particular religion, know about divine reality, about the world and about themselves. This knowledge underlies religious practice and the actions of believers in general. Therefore, according to the modern philosophy of religion, the concept of "belief" is legitimate to apply when referring to those religious traditions in which it is not used.

The philosophical study of religious beliefs can be oriented toward solving two opposing tasks. First, the clarification and evaluation of religious beliefs can lead to the conclusion that these beliefs are inconsistent and philosophical; secondly, they can be aimed at the philosophical justification of beliefs. In this case, philosophical religious studies appear as philosophical apologetics.

The core of philosophical religious studies, at least the latest, is formed by epistemological problems. We are talking about the problems of substantiation and justification of religious beliefs, mainly theistic beliefs.

These problems have long been at the center of ideological disputes around religion. And this is not surprising, since within the framework of a culture focused on certain standards in comprehending the world and organizing social life, the question of whether all types of spiritual, intellectual and spiritual life meet these standards is inevitable. practical activities. Due to a number of historical factors, the question of the correspondence of religion to the established standards of rationality for European culture has always been particularly acute.

Within the framework of the problem of the validity and rationality of religious beliefs, two main positions are possible: 1) philosophically reasoned doubt, denial of the legitimacy of these beliefs from the point of view of reason; 2) philosophical confirmation of the conformity of religious beliefs to accepted or innovative standards of rationality. Both of these positions are opposed to fideism (the assertion of the unconditional legitimacy of the content of religious beliefs - regardless of the assessments of reason, including philosophical).

The first position in the latest philosophy of religion is represented very poorly. A few critical concepts do not go beyond traditional agnostic views. Essentially, no innovative critical approach has been proposed since the "neo-positivist attack".

1 Kimelev Yu.A. Modern Western Philosophy of Religion. M., 1989. S. 29 - 61.

The second position can be presented in two aspects. The first is the assertion that religious beliefs and reasoning conform to the same epistemological standards as other types of knowledge and cognitive activity. Most often, this approach takes the form of a justificatory epistemological comparison of religion and science.

Epistemological analysis in the current conditions inevitably involves a comparison of religious knowledge and reasoning with the process and results of scientific knowledge. This is due to the fact that scientific knowledge in modern culture is recognized as a paradigm of reasonable and rational knowledge, at least theoretical knowledge.

There are two main points in the philosophical and epistemological comparison of religion and science. First, this comparison takes the form of likening religion to science (and not vice versa). Secondly, it pursues mainly apologetic goals, although it fully retains an exploratory character.

Approaching the question of the validity and rationality of religious beliefs from a different perspective, one can note the desire to show that religious beliefs are fully justified, justified and rational, even if they do not meet certain traditionally accepted philosophical standards of the validity and rationality of religious knowledge. At the center of the philosophical and epistemological discussion of recent years regarding religious beliefs are precisely those concepts in which this position is presented.

Statements about the inconsistency of religious beliefs with the accepted criteria for the validity and rationality of knowledge do not mean that these beliefs should be considered unfounded, unjustified or irrational.

According to traditional views, religious beliefs or ideas are legitimate and justified only if they rely as evidence in their favor on non-religious beliefs and ideas that are considered self-evident for one reason or another. Such traditional views are referred to as fundamentalism. Philosophical-religious foundationism is a specific refraction of the corresponding general epistemological position.

The concepts that we have identified as the second variety deny fundamentalism, proclaim religious beliefs themselves to be basic in the sense that they do not need justification through correlation with some other beliefs. Such concepts do not assume the presence or absence of reliable external, i.e. non-religious, testimonial, grounds as a criterion for the rationality or irrationality of faith in God, respectively, the criterion for its acceptance or denial. So, we talked about the philosophical analysis of religious beliefs.

Another important area of ​​philosophical and religious research is the study of religious experience. In philosophical literature, religious experience is understood mainly as a certain state of consciousness, of the entire intellectual and emotional sphere, correlated by the subject of experience with the highest divine reality. In other words, people who have religious experience consider the deity to be the cause of this experience. Therefore, philosophers who turn to the study of religious experience are mainly concerned with the study of various aspects of this belief.

All philosophers who turn to the study of religious experience emphasize the "enormous", "unheard of", "perplexing" variety of such experience. Nevertheless, the very choice of religious experience as an object of philosophical consideration indicates that the existence of some general characteristics, allowing us to give a more or less rigorous definition.

The object of research is "ordinary religious experience" or "mystical experience". Such a typology of religious experience prevails in modern philosophical religious studies. We can distinguish the following main areas of philosophical study of ordinary religious experience: the study of means of expressing religious experience; solution of the question - can this experience certify the existence of God.

Individual religious experience can be clearly expressed only through correlation with religious beliefs existing in a given social space. In other words, beliefs are essentially the only means of interpreting religious experience. The truth or falsity of this experience can be judged through beliefs. At the same time, present beliefs are the most important condition for the emergence and reproduction of religious experience itself. This is a very significant moment in the reproduction of a particular religious tradition. Researchers generally recognize the role of existing religious beliefs in the emergence and shaping of religious experience.

Within the framework of the problem of religious experience, the problem of whether it is possible to verify the existence of God on the basis of religious experience is of particular importance for the philosophy of religion. In conditions when the conviction about the futility of any attempts to prove the existence of God is spreading more and more, some philosophers tend to believe that knowledge about the existence of God, as well as other religious knowledge associated with it, can only be obtained through some act of consciousness or intuition, i.e. . through experience.

The philosophical study of mysticism forms a relatively autonomous field of research, in some ways coinciding, and in some ways diverging from the general study of religious experience. The study of mysticism is predominantly comparative in nature. Researchers of mysticism can rely on the results of studying non-European cultures and religions and, in general, on research experience in Indology, Buddhology, Sinology, etc. At the same time, evidence from the Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions is most intensively used.

1 The study of mysticism involves comparing a number of factors.

2 It should be noted that mainly data from the Western Christian tradition are used as Christian testimonies. A significant shortcoming, in our opinion, is the inattention to the mystical tradition in Orthodoxy, in particular to hesiahism (peace, silence, detachment).

The mystical experience is traditionally perceived both by the mystics themselves and by those who judge it from their words, as an experience of direct, living contact with the higher, divine reality, the absolute, which is somehow represented. Such contact appears in the religious consciousness as "unification" with this reality, "dissolution" in it, "immersion" in it, "ascent" or "descent" to it. At the same time, the states-experiences designated in this way are perceived as unique existential situations and ways of relating to reality, which have almost no analogues in the ordinary sensory and intellectual functions of consciousness.

Of course, in different religious traditions, both the divine reality itself and the nature of mystical contact with it are understood differently. The attitude towards mysticism is also different. If in some religious traditions mystical experience is generally difficult and conditionally separated from religious and metaphysical experience within these traditions, then in others, primarily monotheistic traditions, the understanding of mysticism and, accordingly, the attitude towards it has never been unambiguous. The ambiguity stemmed primarily from the fact that these are "revelation religions" that presuppose a certain normative regulation of religious experience. Mystical experience can appear here, on the one hand, as an instance confirming the fundamental mythological and doctrinal components of these traditions, and on the other hand, mystics can act as a kind of religious anarchists, questioning some of these components. But even in the latter case, as a rule, the peculiar dignity of mystical experience is recognized, and mystical experience, the content of which does not diverge from the fundamental content of this tradition, seems all the more worthy.

In the study of mysticism in modern philosophy of religion, attention is focused primarily on methodology; attempts to establish universal-constitutive characteristics of mystical experience; developed classifications of this experience; the problem of the relationship between mystical experience and its interpretation, and, finally, the problem of the ontological and epistemological status of mystical experience. Today, these are the main directions in the study of mysticism within the framework of the philosophy of religion.

Philosophical theology

According to our classification, the second main form of the philosophy of religion is philosophical theology. Historically, this form clearly prevailed. Before the Enlightenment, the philosophy of religion acted mainly as a philosophical theology, which, of course, did not exclude the presence of religious components in it.

As a kind of philosophical-religious theorizing, "philosophical theology" can be designated as "natural theology", "religious philosophy", "religious metaphysics", "Christian philosophy", "Christian metaphysics", "rational theology".

We prefer the designation "philosophical theology" for the following reasons. First of all, this term most clearly shows that we are talking about attempts to somehow use the elements of precisely philosophical reasoning for religious purposes. It is immediately emphasized that the main, fundamental task of this type of philosophy is the philosophical knowledge of God.

Traditionally, the term "natural theology" has been used for appropriate purposes. The main reason for preferring the term "philosophical theology" to the term "natural theology" is that the first term can be applied to both confessional and non-confessional philosophical-religious constructions. The term "natural theology" has usually been used to denote the philosophical-apologetic and philosophical-constructive efforts associated with confessional theology. Thus "natural theology" can be seen as a kind of "philosophical theology".

Philosophical theology can be understood in a broad sense and in a narrow or strict one. In principle, the designation "philosophical theology" can refer to the whole range of positive relations between philosophy and religion, philosophy and theology in the history of European thought.

If we approach philosophical theology in this way, then the consideration of philosophical theology, in essence, would coincide with writing in a certain key the history of Christian theology, on the one hand, and the history of European philosophy, on the other.

Philosophical theology in the narrow or strict sense is the effort to create a doctrine only by philosophical means, only relying on the data of "natural experience", i.e. the experience of human existence in the natural-cosmic and socio-historical environments, as well as the existential experience of individual life existence.

The creation of such a doctrine involves the solution of the following three interrelated tasks: first, to demonstrate or confirm the existence of God; secondly, to determine, if possible, the nature of God; thirdly, to characterize the relationship between God and the world, God and man.

The philosophical substantiation of the existence of God consists in providing philosophical arguments in favor of the cash, "real" existence of God. In all cases, rational-philosophical reasoning, based on certain natural-cosmic, socio-historical and individual life phenomena, given in human experience, acts as a means of justification.

Thus, of the three main sources of belief in the existence of God (revelation, reason and experience), philosophical-theological attempts to verify the existence of God are based on experience and reason. Accordingly, the search for new experimental and mental resources always forms the essence of attempts to confirm the available or create some innovative ways to justify the existence of God.

Diverse efforts to justify the existence of God can be classified as follows: philosophical-theological and philosophical-anthropological.

Here it is necessary to say a few words about terminology. The terms "proof", "argument" and "indication" are used to refer to efforts undertaken to theoretically confirm or substantiate the existence of God. Proof in the modern sense should not be understood in relation to classical philosophical theory, nor by analogy with natural science or mathematical proof. The reservations with which the concepts of proof and argument are used are intended to show the well-known problematic nature of the very enterprise for the theoretical justification of the existence of God.

The validity of theism is most often made dependent on the validity of the three traditional theistic proofs: ontological, cosmological, and teleological. This evidence demonstrates a remarkable historical stability, not least due to the rigor and clarity of their argument.

Ontological proof substantiates the existence of God on the basis of the concept of God as a reality, more perfect than which nothing can be conceived. To imagine such a reality, such a being, as having no real existence would mean falling into contradiction, thinking that the greatest and all-perfect being is devoid of the perfection of existence.

This is the ontological proof in its classical form. It became the object of many interpretations, attempts to correct and improve, undertaken in history with the help of ever new philosophical, argumentative and logical means. It became both the object of criticism and counter-argumentation, which took the most famous form in Kant. Kant's critique is to deny that existence is a predicate comparable to other properties that an entity may or may not have.

It seemed that Kant and many other thinkers finally refuted the ontological proof. This refutation was perceived as a very sensitive blow to natural theology. And yet, ontological proof has experienced a renaissance in recent decades. It again began to be actively discussed in the philosophical and theological literature. In the new reconstructions of the ontological argument, the emphasis was placed on the fact that the concept of God is the concept of a being that either necessarily exists or necessarily does not exist. The concept of a being, more perfect than which nothing can be conceived, is the concept of a being that necessarily has existence. Its non-existence is simply unimaginable. The concept of the most perfect being cannot be the concept of a being that may or may not exist. Thus it is clear from the very concept of God that his existence is either necessary or impossible. This existence, following the logic of such reasoning, would be impossible only if the concept of God were self-contradictory. As long as the internal contradiction of the concept of God is not shown, his existence is necessarily evident from his concept.

As can be seen, the new version of the ontological proof of the existence of God is based on the logical-modal distinction between chance and necessity. God either necessarily exists or necessarily does not exist. Since the concept of a maximally perfect being is coherent, its existence is logically necessary.

Cosmological proof in its essence is a statement of the question about God, which is based on an impulse to comprehend the world. In a generalized form, this is primarily a question of why there is reality at all, and not nothing. We are talking about the famous question, most aptly formulated by Leibniz, "why there is something and not nothing." We should rather not talk about "cosmological evidence", but about "cosmological evidence", since we are talking about a group of similar evidence, united by a number of common grounds. The most important reason is the fact that all of them proceed from the "reality of the world", more precisely, from certain essential characteristics of this reality. In other words, cosmological proofs start from the properties that any space-time order possesses.

Historically, the discussion and use of cosmological proofs has been reduced mainly to the discussion and use of that version of the cosmological proof that comes from the relativity or chance of mundane existence. It is possible to speak about the accidental existence of something if it is logically possible that it exists, and logically possible that it does not exist. The actual existence of some something can only be explained as the result of the activity of another entity, the existence of which is logically necessary. In this way, one can briefly express the essence of modern approaches to cosmological proof.

The most important premise of the cosmological proof is the notion that no contingent existence, no contingent fact, can be satisfactorily explained by means of contingent causes. The same is true for the totality of random facts. In this context, it does not matter whether the totality of random existence has a temporary beginning in the sense that it has a first instance, a first link.

This premise is closely related to the "principle of sufficient reason." This principle has received various interpretations in the history of philosophical thought. It was understood both as a necessary truth, and simply as an empirical generalization, and as a prerequisite for any rational activity, including cognitive activity. In connection with the problems of cosmological proof, it is important that the principle of sufficient reason in any form is generally recognized.

If, based on such a reconstruction, we look at the current situation in the discussion of the cosmological proof, we can state that neither one nor the other premise has been satisfactorily refuted. Accordingly, the right of the cosmological proof of the existence of God to exist is not theoretically crossed out.

The teleological proof of the existence of God is based on the idea that the order observed in nature is the result of the design and action of an intelligent omnipotent organizer. The essence of the proof is the assertion that the order in nature cannot be random. The history of teleological proof is not only the history of attempts to give an appropriate interpretation to the diverse forms of order and expediency of the life of nature, but also the history of strivings to include new spheres of natural, social, personal being in the "experimental basis" of this proof.

In the 18th century, teleological proof became the basis of the entire structure of philosophical theology as physical theology. A feature of the latter was the desire to give an anthropocentric orientation to the interpretation of nature. The teleological proof, which formed the basis of this kind of physical theology, was essentially more audacious and pretentious than that of Thomas Aquinas.

The variants of teleological proof that were offered in the 18th and 19th centuries appealed to the same natural phenomena and anthropological data as science. scientific theories far from always agreed with the interpretations required by the very principle of teleological proof. This circumstance, combined with philosophical criticism, led to considerable intellectual discrediting of this evidence at that time.

In the first half of our century, efforts were made to expand the experiential basis of teleological proof. It has been proposed to consider, from the perspective of teleological proof, the fact that nature might not contain all the conditions required for the emergence of animal life and consciousness; the fact that the universe exhibits a certain rational structure and is somewhat intelligible to the human mind; aesthetic aspects of nature; the presence of moral consciousness and the possibility of realizing moral ideals. The essence of the argument is the assertion that the world is quite imaginable without all these phenomena, and there is reason to consider their presence as evidence in favor of the existence of a powerful and benevolent mind.

It should be noted that all attempts at present to develop a teleological proof are oriented towards one of these areas of experience. At the same time, primary attention is paid to the conditions for the emergence of life, primarily human life. The combination of structural components and evolutionary processes of the Universe, which are special conditions for the emergence of human life, receive an interpretation that is appropriate to call "providential". It is noted that these conditions form too complex a relationship to be explained by a simple coincidence of circumstances or inorganic and organic evolution. Such a connection can only be realized by wise divine power, realizing a certain plan.

1 Providencialism (from lat. providentia providence) - a religious understanding of history as a manifestation of the will of God, the implementation of a predetermined plan for the "salvation" of man.

Philosophical and anthropological justifications for the existence of God are built mainly through understanding the image of man. The Christian tradition, like any other religious tradition, has certain basic anthropological ideas, i.e. its image of man, and philosophical and religious anthropology strives to reproduce these ideas by philosophical means.

2 See: Yu. A. Kimelev. Modern Philosophical and Religious Anthropology. M., 1995.

Christian tradition affirms, first of all, the likeness of man to God. All Christian anthropological ideas and teachings are, in fact, attempts to comprehend this fundamental statement, designed to characterize the essence of man. The very drama of human existence in the Christian sense is conditioned by its god-likeness. Since in the Christian tradition God is "transcendent" in relation to the world, the fundamental structural components of the human image, such as the spirit, soul, physical structures, must also show some kind of "transcendence". The only way of philosophical substantiation of this is seen in such a conceptualization of these components, in which they appeared as something, at least in part, inexplicable within the framework of natural and historical reality. If it is possible to show the inexplicability of certain fundamental components of the human image, then it can be passed off as evidence of the "transcendence" of the world and, consequently, the supernatural origin of this anthropological fact.

Interpreted in this way, these facts should, firstly, act as an indication of the existence of another, transcendent-divine reality, through the prism of which they supposedly can only be explained, and, secondly, should appear as a reproduction of certain moments of the traditional Christian image person. It is easy to see that mutual justification takes place here: a certain philosophical-anthropological concept indicates the existence of God, and the existence of God justifies and confirms the content of the corresponding philosophical-anthropological concept.

The God-likeness of man, his metaphysical dignity in the Christian ideological tradition has always been seen primarily in his spirituality. It is the spirit in the Christian ideological tradition that appears as something that can lead a person beyond the limits of the world, make him a partaker of the divine. In other words, the spirit acts as a condition for the possibility of man's transcendence, which, in turn, determines and explains the whole drama of his earthly existence.

Naturally, the main efforts of representatives of philosophical and religious anthropology are directed precisely at the philosophical conceptualization in the appropriate key of the human spirit. Although they solve the problem of conceptualizing the human spirit in different ways, the common thing is the desire to identify spirituality with "man's openness to the world", and to interpret the latter in the sense of his openness to God and, accordingly, present it as something God-given. A person's openness to the world in modern philosophical anthropology is understood mainly as an a priori behavioral structure that determines the specifics of a person's relationship to the world. This concept is comprehended mainly in the cosmological perspective, i.e. through correlation with other forms of life, primarily with the forms of animal behavior. And in such a variety of philosophical anthropology as philosophical-religious anthropology, openness to the world appears as a corresponding divine project regarding man, as the basis of his god-likeness.

Felix Hammer (b. 1932) is an American philosopher and theologian. Author of "Theonome Anthropologie?: Max Schelers Menschenbild und seine Grensen" (Den Haag, 1972). As the starting point of his philosophical construction, Hammer uses the obvious, in his opinion, circumstance that everyday experience allows us to state an unequal degree of intensity of manifestation of the main types of life activity in different people, and especially such characteristics as the ability to think, moral feeling, which Hammer calls the main "dimensions person". The experience of insufficiency, incompleteness of the diverse ways of self-realization of a person is possible, according to Hammer, only on the basis of comprehending the full, complete essence of all these ways. A person, as it were, a priori possesses knowledge of the full-fledged essence of one or another type of life activity, in relation to which its specific implementation is perceived as defective, insufficient. The main conclusion that Hammer draws from this is an indication of the finiteness, "insufficiency" of a person. The philosophical-concrete experience of finiteness, insufficiency of man should be, according to Hammer's plan, used to point to the existence of God.

However, the experimental basis in itself is still insufficient in this problematic area. Some general final or semantic principle is required, which consists in the premise that a person's desire for the full realization of the comprehended essential content is an "objective semantic given" that needs to be explained. The objectivity of this givenness, Hammer believes, is at least as great as the objectivity of nature and its laws.

The final principle, combined with the essential idea of ​​man postulated by him, allows Hammer, as he believes, to take the final step in the philosophical and anthropological proof of the existence of God. A person, as stated, cannot stay in himself, he constantly needs a partner who complements him, who feels the same need. Both parties, however, learn from experience that the other cannot give everything that is required, since he himself does not have everything that is required. Constantly felt insufficiency leads to the conviction that a meeting to the extent that a person needs it can only take place with a partner who himself does not need anything at all. Based on these considerations, Hammer concludes: "An encounter that arises not from need, but from pure perfection, is possible only with the infinite personal being of God."

Along with substantiating the existence of divine reality, the most important tasks of philosophical knowledge of God are to determine, as far as possible, the nature of this reality and comprehend the nature of its relationship with worldly reality.

Philosophical-theistic conceptualizations of the nature of God are historically very diverse. Playback in in full the history of these conceptualizations would largely coincide with the history of European metaphysics in its philosophical and theological aspect. However, since the Middle Ages, and especially after Descartes, the philosophical and theological concept of God has been reproduced in more or less stable content contours. We can say that it was this concept that dominated the history of theological and philosophical thought.

Characterizing the classical philosophical concept of God, it seems appropriate to resort to one distinction used in late scholasticism - the distinction between the metaphysical and physical essence of God.

God is the foundation of the world. Everything is rooted in it, since everything proceeds from it as the first cause and is drawn to it as the final goal, since everything participates in its fullness and therefore is its likeness, or at least keeps traces of its greatness. The primordial basis itself as such is rooted not in something else, but only in itself. The first and last cause of everything must be the cause of itself. God as such a cause exists by virtue of the absolute necessity of his own essence. It is being out of itself. Therefore, in God, essence and existence coincide completely. He not only possesses being as being, i.e. having being, but being itself, or being subsisting. This is the metaphysical essence of God, by which he is constituted and by which he is separated from everything that is not himself.

The physical essence of God embraces, together with subsisting being, all of his perfections. They define a concrete subsistent being, they are called properties or attributes of God. In God Himself they do not form a multitude, but are a simple and at the same time infinite fullness.

We can attribute to God only pure perfections, which mean pure being (wisdom, goodness, power), but not mixed perfections, in the essence of which being is mixed with non-being or with imperfection.

As being itself, God is the fullness of being and therefore infinite. God inexpressibly transcends the finite, the being subject to becoming, i.e. it is transcendent in relation to the existent, although it simultaneously resides in it as its primordial basis (immanent to the existent). Since corporeal existence contains non-existence, God is pure spirit. However, God is a personal being.

If we apply the distinction used here in order to characterize modern conceptualizations of the philosophical concept of God, more or less positively correlated with the classical philosophical concept, then the situation is as follows.

In characterizing the metaphysical essence of God, the concept of God as an all-perfect being or the most perfect reality is increasingly used. A maximally perfect reality can be defined as a reality so great and so perfect that no actual or possible reality is greater. To assert that God is maximally perfect means to assert not only that nothing in the actual world surpasses him, but also that nothing surpasses him in any possible world.

It can be argued that if any property is perfection and no equal or greater perfection is incompatible with it, then the most perfect reality will have it.

The efforts of modern philosophical theology are focused on testing whether the concept of an absolutely perfect being, as traditional philosophical theism claims, is coherent.

The desire to know the physical essence of God lies in the comprehension of attributes as its essential properties. Neither systematic theology nor philosophical theology in the Christian tradition claims to have an exhaustive and complete understanding of the nature of God. Any comprehension is understood as limited in scope and depth.

Within this limitation, philosophical theology imposes another limitation on itself. Philosophical theology is called upon to indicate only some of the main attributes of a deity, in principle accessible to the "natural" human mind, consciously abstracted from the knowledge that has become the property of man thanks to God's self-disclosure, divine revelation. The attributes traditionally ascribed to God lend themselves to philosophical comprehension to varying degrees.

It should be noted that modern philosophical theology does not conceptualize any previously unknown attributes as the essential properties of God. The development of the classical philosophical-theistic concept of God in modern philosophical theology is primarily a conceptual analysis of divine attributes, their compatibility, compatibility. With this approach, traditional attributes are perceived as purely religious givens, which can be analyzed without reference to the non-religious sphere.

At the same time, the demonstration of conceptual inconsistency, logical inconsistency, incompatibility of divine attributes is the main means of criticizing religion and theology within the framework of academic philosophy.

In the approach of modern philosophical theology to traditional philosophical theism, two main directions can be distinguished. The first is formed by attempts to consider omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipresence, immutability, non-materiality as independent, unique properties exemplarily represented in God.

The second direction sees these properties in close relationship, and each is presented as a different aspect of the same primary property, namely, divine perfection. Adherents of the second direction assume that God embodies each of his properties to a degree no less, but no more than his perfection requires.

The most influential alternative to traditional philosophical theism is non-classical theism, represented in the doctrine of God by process theology. The dispute between classical theism and process-theism forms the core of the modern philosophical-theological discussion. This dispute has long gone beyond the boundaries of English-language philosophical theology, where it was originally fought.

Philosophical process-theology is an attempt to create a holistic metaphysical construction that can serve as an alternative to classical theism. Accordingly, process-theism as the basis of such a metaphysical doctrine is intended to be an alternative to classical philosophical theism as the basis of the classical metaphysical worldview. Philosophical process-theology is focused on the creation of a philosophical doctrine of God in the traditional sense of the term; its nerve is the discussion with classical philosophical theism.

The initial material of process-theology is, first of all, experience, the world, natural reality, in which processes, events, and not the substances of the world, are real. The process means not only the transition to some actuality - the existence and life of all actual events are processual in nature.

The entire cosmic process presupposes God as the creator and as the creative force. At the same time, process theologians hold different views on how God himself is included in this process. In philosophical theology, attempts can be made to conceptualize divine reality in such a way that the result will show very little resemblance to the philosophical-theistic concept of God. General points will be reduced to a limited set of properties that will qualify reality, conceptualized in an innovative philosophical and theological construction, as "divine". Ultimately, it will be a certain transcendence in relation to natural and other beings, to sovereignty in relation to this being, as well as to the absolute or limitless power of that reality that is conceptualized as "divine". In the XX century. The most interesting is the theory of V. Vaishedel.

Wilhelm Weischedel (b. 1905) - German philosopher, theologian. Author of "Der Gott der Philosophen: Grundlegung einer philosophishen Theologie im Zeitalter des Nihilismus" (Munchen, 1979. Bd. 1-2).

Realize the program of philosophical theology as truly philosophical, i.e. based on its own proven premises, perhaps, according to Vaishedel, only if an experiential basis for philosophical theology is acquired. Such a basis is the "radical doubtfulness of reality", which appears as its most general and deepest characteristic.

The doubtfulness of reality as a whole is manifested in the doubtfulness of individual realities, examples of which are failures in life, betrayal of friends and relatives, the rapidity of life, fear of illness, death, shock from an unexpected and abrupt violation of the way of things, etc. These types of experience, these realities do not exhaust the content of the total experience of reality. However, they allow one to clearly realize that the world in which they meet is "a highly doubtful world." The experience of doubtfulness of reality is designated as "fundamental experience". Fundamental experience is an experience of the doubtfulness of reality, primarily because it is in an oscillating state between being and non-being.

Every "is" is experienced as being under the sign and threat of non-being and at the same time not disappearing into it. Every "nothing" for its part is tested as being in some kind of mysterious connection with being. The truth of the existing is "the fluctuation of its reality."

In order to avoid all possible misunderstandings of a static, material and substantial nature, the word "whence" is proposed. This word does not refer to any entity. It only shows the direction from which something "comes." “As the last and absolute thing that can be said about reality, Vaishedel emphasizes, “whence” of radical doubtfulness occupies the place that belongs to God in the traditional word usage. philosophy". In the era of nihilism, when traditional ideas about God showed their lack of evidence and inconsistency, "whence" is "the only possible concept of God of philosophers."

"From where" to God, as a process that conditions, causes the doubtfulness of reality, is inherent in limitless power. This powerful process should not be understood as some kind of powerful being. This is the power of the process itself, which keeps reality in a state of oscillation between being and non-being.

Accordingly, the three structural moments of the radical doubtfulness of reality - being, non-being and fluctuation between them - appear as three aspects of the phenomenon "whence".

1. The action "from where", which puts every being on the brink of non-existence, showing the fragility and unreliability of things and "I", is experienced as a "shock".

2. "From where", putting the existent on the brink of non-existence, keeps it in existence. It is "holding-in-being".

3. "From where" oscillates between two extremes. Existence is not pure nothingness. It is both in the mode of doubt or hesitation.

Another important task of philosophical theology, as well as any knowledge of God, is to determine, as far as possible, the relationship between God and worldly reality.

Philosophical theology, in its understanding of the relationship between God and worldly reality, proceeds from certain well-established ideas about the nature of these relationships. In the Christian theological and philosophical tradition, questions of the relationship between God and creation, God and the world, of course, played a very significant role. In the process of centuries-old comprehension of these issues, a differentiated typology of the relationship between God and the world was developed. This typology is based on two sources - biblical content and philosophical reflection.

The theological tradition in defining the relationship between God and the world has always sought to avoid two extremes: pantheism, i.e. identification of God and the world, on the one hand, and dualism, i.e. position of God and the world as two completely separate and various kinds being, on the other.

The basic concepts with which Christian theology in all its varieties comprehends the relationship between God and the world are the concepts of "theism", "deism", "pantheism" and "panentheism".

Theism emphasizes the complete independence and self-sufficiency of God. Only theism in the full sense affirms the creation of the world by God. Deism denies the effective presence of God in the world after the creation of the world.

Pantheism affirms the identity of God and the universe. God appears as a universal presence, but does not appear as any particular entity. Pantheism does not identify God with the cosmos, but it does not separate them either. Existence is a part of God, but not God himself. All these kinds of understanding of the relationship between God and the world have many nuances.

The brief characteristics given here are sufficient from a philosophical and theological point of view. Consideration of the relationship between God and the world in systematic theology presupposes consideration of the whole range of problems of the "theology of creation".

The established basic views, reflected in this typology, determine the content of the philosophical and theological discussion on the problems of relations between God and the world, even in cases where the concepts of "theism", "deism", "pantheism", "panentheism" are not used.

All positions in the current discussion on these issues can be divided into two main groups. One group is formed by concepts whose authors attempt to show that some deviation from traditional views on the relationship between God and the world that they defend leads not to heresy, but, on the contrary, to the only adequate understanding of genuine Christian intuition. The other group includes concepts in which the goal is to substantiate the truth of the traditional understanding of the relationship between God and the world. They seek to achieve this goal mainly through a critical analysis of the proposed innovations.

The choice between these positions depends on the general nature of a particular philosophical and theological concept. It is clear that with a positive development or simply reproduction of traditional proofs of the existence of God, traditional views on the relationship between God and the world will also be reproduced. At the same time, an attempt at an alternative to the classical conceptualization of the nature of God may lead or even presuppose certain changes in the understanding of the nature of the relationship between God and the world.

For additional reading

Kimelev Yu.A. Modern philosophical and religious anthropology. M., 1985.

Kimelev Yu.A. Modern Western Philosophy of Religion. M., 1989.

Kimelev Yu.A. philosophical theism. M., 1993.

Nikonov K.I. Criticism of the anthropological foundation of religion. M., 1989.

Contemporary Classics4n_Phflosophy of Religion. La Salle, 1991.

Philosophy of Religion. An Anthology of Contemporary Views. N.Y., 1996.

Fourth lecture. Philosophy and religion

For millennia, philosophy and religion have been in alliance or opposed to each other in enmity.

They exist side by side, first in myths and pictures of the world, then in theology, to the extent that philosophy appears in the guise of theology, just as in other cases philosophy appears in the guise of poetry and mostly in the guise of science.

But later, when they are separated, religion becomes a great mystery for philosophy, which it cannot comprehend. It makes the cult, the claim to revelation, the claim to power of the religion-based community, its organization and politics, and the meaning that religion gives to itself as the subject of its study.

In this very relation to religion as a subject of study, the germ of a struggle is already contained. For philosophy, this struggle is possible only as a struggle for truth by spiritual means alone.

Both, religion and philosophy, are not unambiguous formations, from which we can proceed in comparative consideration, as from two points of support. Both are subject to historical transformation, but both always perceive themselves in relation to the eternal truth, the historical appearance of which both hides and communicates this truth. I will not speak of eternal religious truth. Philosophical truth, on the other hand, is philosophia perennis, which no one can claim as his own property, but which is nevertheless important to every philosophizer and is present wherever people actually philosophize.

There can be no position outside the opposition of philosophy and religion. Each of us is in this polarity on the side of one of them and speaks about the essence of the other, without having our own experience. Therefore, you can also expect from me that in something I will be blind and not understanding. I hesitate, and yet I can't help but say. This talk about religion is doubtful if you do not live it yourself, but it is inevitable as an expression of a clear understanding of your own insufficiency, as a search for truth, and also as an affirmation of religious faith itself within the framework of the questions that arise in this way. For philosophy, religion is not an enemy, but that which essentially affects it and arouses its anxiety.

Here we are today in a situation that I will describe in words that have a personal connotation. Since religion is so essential, the consciousness that I was missing something made me want to hear what was being said from the standpoint of religious faith. Among the painful sensations of my truth-seeking life is the experience that at a decisive moment the discussion with theologians is interrupted, they fall silent, utter some incomprehensible phrase, begin to talk about something else, assert something completely unconditionally, friendly and kindly convince, not taking, in essence, into account what has been said before, and in the end it turns out that all this, in fact, is not interesting to them. For, on the one hand, they feel confident in their truth, frighteningly confident, on the other hand, it seems to them that they should not be concerned with us, people who seem to them closed in their unbelief. Meanwhile, conversation with each other requires listening to the interlocutor and a genuine answer, does not allow silence or attempts to evade questions, requires first of all that every statement of faith, which, being expressed in human language and directed to objects, was a discovery in the world, would be questioned and tested again, not only outwardly but also inwardly. The one who believes that he is in full possession of the truth can no longer really speak with another - he interrupts the true communication in favor of the content in which he believes.

This serious problem I can touch here only from a few points of view and not in sufficient depth. It is important for me to give a sense of the original philosophical faith in this way.

In contrast to philosophy, religion can be characterized as follows: In religion there is a cult, it is associated with a special community of people associated with a cult and is inseparable from myth. Religion is always inherent in the real connection of man with transcendence in the form of a saint encountered in the world, isolated from the uninitiated or one who is deprived of holiness. Where it no longer exists, or where it has been abandoned, the peculiarity of religion disappears. The life of almost all mankind, accessible to historical memory, is religious; it is an indication of the truth and essence contained in religion, which cannot be ignored.

On the contrary, philosophy as such knows neither a cult, nor a community headed by a priest, nor a sanctity in the world withdrawn from worldly existence. For her, everything that religion localizes somewhere can be everywhere and everywhere. It has developed for the individual in free, non-sociologically real relationships, without the guarantee provided by the community. Philosophy knows neither rites nor originally real myths. It is assimilated in free tradition, always being transformed. Although it belongs to man as man, it remains the work of individuals.

Religion primarily strives for incarnation, philosophy - only for effective certainty. Religion philosophic god appears wretched, pale, empty, she dismissively calls the position of the philosophers "deism"; philosophy, religious incarnations are a deceptive disguise and a false rapprochement with the deity. Religion calls the philosophical god an empty abstraction, philosophy does not trust the religious images of God, considering them a seduction, worship, even majestic, but idols.

However, the way in which the contents of philosophy and religion come into contact, even seem to be identified, despite the fact that their phenomena repel each other, can be explained by the example of the idea of ​​God, prayer, revelation.

The Idea of ​​God: In the West, the idea of ​​one God originated in Greek philosophy and in the Old Testament. In both cases a high abstraction was achieved, but in quite different ways.

In Greek philosophy, monotheism arises as a thought born of ethics, and acquires certainty in concentrated rest. It leaves its imprint not on the masses of people, but on individual individuals. Its result is images of high humanity and free philosophy, and not the effective formation of communities.

On the contrary, in the Old Testament, monotheism arises in a passionate struggle for the pure, true, and only God. The abstraction is done not through logic, but as a result of shock through images and incarnations that obscure God rather than show Him, and then in protest against the perversions of the cult, the Dionysian festivals, the idea of ​​the meaning of sacrifices. In the struggle with Baal*, with intra-Roman religion, its happiness and festivities, its intoxication, tranquility and self-satisfaction, with its moral indifference, the pure idea of ​​God is acquired as a service to the Living God. This true God does not tolerate images or likenesses, does not attach importance to worship and sacrifices, temples and rituals, laws, but requires only a righteous life and love for a person (Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah) *. This abstraction acts as nihilism in relation to the existence of the world, but it stems from the fullness of consciousness, to which the transcendent Creator God with his ethical requirements has been revealed. This abstraction is based not on developed thought, but on the word that God spoke, on God himself, recognized in the word reported by the prophet as the word of God. This monotheism is created not by the power of thought, but by the power of the reality of God in the consciousness of prophetic existence. Hence the surprising fact that Greek and Old Testament monotheisms coincide in their mental content, but radically differ in the nature of the presence of God. This is the difference between philosophy and religion. In the future, this is the difference between deity and God, between mental transcendence and living God; a single philosophy is not a single Bible.

However, with the dominance of philosophical clarity, the question arises whether the faith of the prophets, their incomparable conviction that still captivates us today, is possible only because they did not yet know philosophizing in their naive life, which preceded all philosophizing, and therefore did not notice that in what God directly said "word" contains the remnant of that embodiment of reality, that image and likeness, against which they resolutely fought.

Greek and Old Testament monotheisms jointly created the Western idea of ​​God. They interpreted each other. This was possible because in the faith of the prophets there was an abstraction analogous to philosophical abstraction. The faith of the prophets surpasses in its power the philosophical faith, since it comes from a direct vision of God, but is inferior to philosophy in the clarity of thought; therefore it disappears in subsequent religious formations, often even in the Bible itself.

Prayer: The cult is an act of the community, prayer is the action of the individual in his solitude. The cult is universal, prayer appears in history here and there, in the Old Testament finally only in Jeremiah. In the spiritual content of the liturgy associated with the cult, there are many texts called prayers, because they cry out to God, praise Him, and pray to Him. But the essential thing in them is the unchanging solid forms dating back to time immemorial, which once arose in distant generations and changed, but were subsequently experienced as permanent. They have long become incomprehensible in some of their parts - they are perceived either as a secret, or they are changed, giving them a new meaning. On the contrary, prayer is individual, it is existentially present in the present*. An individual person performs it in the way it is prescribed by the cult in firmly prescribed form, and remains entirely in the realm of religion. However, as a truly personal and primordial prayer is on the border of philosophizing and becomes philosophy at the moment when the purposeful connection with the deity and the real will to influence him disappear. This is a leap from a personal relationship with a personal God - one of the origins of religion - to a soaring philosophical contemplation, in which at first only humility and gratitude remain, but then confidence gives a person the ground he needs. This contemplation achieves nothing in the world, it only affects the person himself. Speculative certainty, where it has become genuine contemplation, becomes, as it were, the only prayer. If this contemplation was originally in the whole, realized as religion, now it differs from religious action and has become possible as something independent.

Revelation: Religion is based on revelation; clearly and consciously - the Indian and Biblical religions. Revelation is the immediate, localized in time, given to all people the message of God through the word, demand, action, event. God gives his commandments, creates communities, establishes a cult. Thus, the Christian cult is founded as an act of God through the establishment of communion. Since revelation serves as the source of religious content, it is significant not in itself, but in the community - the people, the community, the church as a guarantee in the present. which serves as authority and guarantee in the present.

In attempts to philosophically invent God, in this thinking, in which each new step constantly destroys what was created by the previous one, we hear the reproach: every invention of God is in vain, a person knows and can know about God only through revelation. God gave the law, he sent prophets, he himself came to people in the guise of a slave to save us by his death on the cross.

But revelation, communicated as such, must have an image in the world. As stated, it falls under the power of finitude, even intelligibility. In words, what was supposed to be distorted in it. The word of man is no longer the word of God. What in revelation concerns man as man becomes the content of philosophy and, as such, is significant even without revelation. Should we consider that we are talking about the weakening of religion, the loss of its substance? Then it is called secularization. Or is it about purification, about returning to the original essence, about deepening, namely about substantialization? Apparently, both processes are going on. The danger of being devastated by enlightenment is opposed by the chance of becoming an authentic person.

Since antiquity, religion has been rejected by philosophers all the time. Let us list a number of typical objections and try to critically indicate to each of them its limits.

a) “The presence of many religions proves that among them there is no true one. For there is only one truth."

This objection retains its validity only if the statements of faith are considered as the content of knowledge, and not as religious faith itself. It has its own historical phenomenon and its expression should not be confused with the content of life itself in faith, which says: Una religio in rituum varietate (Cusanus).

6) “Religions have so far sanctioned any evil, created and justified the most terrible. violence and lies, human sacrifice, crusades, religious wars." It is difficult to compare the amount of good and evil that was committed under the influence of religion. Every value judgment must be based on a study of historical data. The reproach should be supplemented with data on the beneficial effect of religion - on the depth of emotional experiences, on the regulation of human relations, on charity on a large scale, on giving content to art and thinking.

If, however, they assert that good relations between people, peace and order, can be brought about rather by reason than by religion, that justice achieves more than faith, practical morality more than religion, that everything good in a person is a matter of science and reason, and not religion, then it must be objected to all this that religion, after all, does not exclude reason, that until now religion has in fact most often carried out a stable and meaningful order, moreover, with the help of reason and not through direct instructions, but with the help of believers, and seriousness and ability to trust them. On the contrary, as we know from historical experience, nihilistic chaos quickly followed the attempt to rely only on reason - in this case, they usually mean reason.

c) “Religion breeds false fear. The soul is tormented by illusions. The torments of hell, the wrath of God, the incomprehensible reality of a merciless will, and the like, evoke horror, especially on the deathbed. Liberation from religion means peace, for it is liberation from deceit."

This reproach is true to the extent that specific superstitious ideas are meant. But it becomes false if we turn to the content of this fear. If the fear of hellish torment has served countless souls as the basis for inclining towards good rather than evil, then this fear is usually nothing more than fear of an imaginary reality. In the cipher of the idea of ​​hell, this fear can make a person understand the deep existential motives of his own essence. Fear associated with the desire for true being is the main feature of an awakened person. The peace that comes from the denial of hell is not enough, it must come from a positive trust, from a basic state of mind that follows goodwill, all the while overcoming fear. Where fear disappears, man is only superficial.

d) “Religion brings up an all-pervading untruth. Starting from the incomprehensible, from the meaningless, from the absurd, not allowing it to be called into question, it creates dull obedience in the form of a basic mood. As soon as any question arises, violence is committed against one's own mind, and this absurdity is considered a merit. The habit of not asking questions leads to untruth in general. Contradictions in thinking and in own behavior are not noticed. Distortions of the originally true are allowed, because they are not noticed. Religious faith and untruth are related to each other.

In response to this reproach, one can only say that the origins of religion cannot have what appears in the process of its development. If, according to Burkgardt, the measure of uncriticality inherent in religious creative people can hardly be understood by us, then there must not necessarily be untruth in uncriticality. Limits and riddles, which reason tends to hide from itself, become immediately present in religion, although in mythical form, and they tend to pass immediately into the content of superstition.

e) “Religions isolate in the world as sacred that which in reality is of a worldly nature and created by man. The increase in mystery leads to the depreciation of the rest of the world. The deep reverence associated with religious ideas leads to a decrease in reverence wherever religion does not penetrate. A specifically fixed reverence is no longer an all-encompassing, all-founding reverence. Delimitation simultaneously contains exclusion and annihilation.

This reproach is by no means applicable to every religious person. On the contrary, religion is capable of illuminating the whole world with its light; a reflection of its originality can fall on the whole of reality. However, this reproach is true of many realizations of religion, even if from a religious point of view they are rejected as deviations from the true path.

All these arguments about religion do not concern the main thing in it.

The reproaches expressed here refer to deviations, and not to religion itself.

Further, it was only about religion and religions, and not about what appears as the only truth of revelation, announces itself, puts forward certain claims and prevents it from being included as one of many in the classification of religions. This is happening in churches and denominations that have emerged from the all-encompassing biblical religion that we all belong to, Jews and Christians, Orthodox Greeks, Catholics and Protestants, and perhaps Islam.

From philosophical faith, here two propositions follow for us, which I would like to justify (negative and positive): 1) In biblical religion there is, although, perhaps, not at all necessary for it, a claim to exclusivity, which appears in all its branches. This claim - both in its motives and in its consequences - is disastrous for us humans. With this deadly claim we must fight for the sake of truth and for the sake of our soul.

2) We philosophize on the basis of biblical religion, and comprehend the unique truth in it.

Both of these provisions are important to us. They are connected with the question that is today the question of the future fate of the West: what will the biblical religion become?

Against the claim to exclusivity

The following can be objected to this: If God sees his children in people, then, it would seem, his children are all people, and not just some of them or one, the only one of them. The affirmation that only those who believe in Christ are waiting for immortal life, unconvincing. For we see people of high nobility and pure souls also outside of Christianity; it would be absurd to suppose that they will perish, especially when compared with those whose merit is doubtful and who hardly deserves love among the truly greatest figures in the history of Christianity. Man's inner conversion, the transition from self-will to the greatest sacrifice took place not only in Christianity. However, all these objections do not affect the most essential.

Wherever in the world people find the truth of faith, it becomes unconditionally significant for them. However, outside the biblical world, this does not force them to exclude other truths that are meaningful to others. Philosophically, this universal behavior of people is objectively correct. This requires reflection on the fundamental difference in the sense of truth (from which we proceeded when speaking of Bruno and Galileo).

Where I act unconditionally, because I believe unconditionally, there is no sufficient reason and purpose, on the basis of which the action would correspond to the purpose, i.e., be comprehended as understandable. The unconditional is not universal, it exists historically in the impenetrable, becoming vitality of action in the present. It is inaccessible to knowledge in its depth, no matter how much is learned and said based on it. It is irreplaceable, therefore unique, and yet it can serve others not only as an orientation, but also as a way to recognize that inherent in them, which is different in a historical phenomenon, but unites in eternity. Although what is historically and existentially true is unconditional, it is not, in its expression and its appearance, the truth for all.

And vice versa, what is universally valid (like what is scientifically and rationally correct) is precisely for this reason not unconditional, but universally and for everyone correct under given conditions from one point of view and with a certain method. This correctness is convincing to everyone whose reason comprehends it. But it is relative and depends on the point of view and the nature of thinking. Existentially, it is indifferent as finite, particular, objectively convincing - a person cannot and should not die for it.

In short: The unconditionality of historical truth is characterized by the relativity of all statements and the historically finite forms of the phenomenon. The general significance of cognitive correctness is characterized by the relativity of the points of view and methods that substantiate it. The expressed content of faith cannot be treated as universally correct; the unconditional understanding of the true in faith is something originally different, different from the grasping of universal validity, always partially correct in knowledge. Historical unconditionality is not the general significance of its manifestation in the word, dogma, cult, rites, institution. Only confusion makes possible the claim of faith to the exclusivity of its truth.

To consider what is generally valid in scientific knowledge as absolute, on the basis of which I could live, to expect from science what it can never give, is a distortion of the truth. True, my inclination towards truth requires me not to ignore what is convincing for knowledge, but, on the contrary, to put it into action without limit. But to demand from this content what only the metaphysical content of the consciousness of contentment with being, peace in being can give, is tantamount to a deceit that suggests something completely empty instead of full being.

But the opposite distortion is also dangerous: the transformation of the unconditionalness of an existential decision into knowledge of the correct, expressed as a requirement, or the distortion of the historically connected conditionality of faith by turning it into a universally valid truth, into a truth for all.

The result of such distortions is self-deception about what I, in fact, am and what I want, intolerance (rejection of everything except my own statements turned into dogmas) and inability to communicate (inability to listen to another, inability to honestly let myself be questioned) . Ultimately, the drives in our present existence, such as the will to power, cruelty, the instinct of destruction, become driving forces disguised by an already distorted will to truth. These impulses find their more or less open satisfaction in the imaginary replacement of truth by self-justification, terrible in its untruth.

It is only in the sphere of biblical religion that the exclusiveness of the grasped truth of faith seems to be connected with faith itself, consciously expressed and accepted with all its consequences. For a believer, this can serve as a new sign of the reliability of his faith. On the contrary, philosophical shrugging sees in such a belief not only the absence of truth due to the confusion of principles, but also (the possibility of) dire consequences.

Within the biblical religion, an example is Christianity, with its claim to have absolute truth for all. Our knowledge of the exceptional significance of Christianity, of the outstanding people who lived in this faith and by this faith, cannot prevent us from seeing the grave consequences, masquerading as absolute holy truth, to which this basic distortion has led in history.

Let us take a look at some of the consequences of this claim to exclusivity. Already in the New Testament, Jesus, who called for no resistance and taught this in the Sermon on the Mount, says: I did not come to bring peace, but a sword*. An alternative is established, whether to follow him or not: He who is not with Me is against Me*.

This has been consistent throughout history with the behavior of many believers in Christ. According to their ideas about salvation, people who live before Christ or without Christ are in for death. Many religions are only the sum of the untrue, or at best a collection of partial truths; all who profess them are pagans. They are to give up their religion and follow their faith in Christ. Such a universal mission not only proclaimed this faith to the peoples by all means of propaganda; behind this there was always hidden the will to force into this faith those who did not voluntarily accept it (coge intrare). In the world, people were destroyed, they called for crusades. Supporters of various Christian denominations waged religious wars with each other. Politics becomes an instrument of the church.

Thus, the will to power becomes the main factor of this religious reality, which in its origin had nothing to do with power. The claim to world domination is a consequence of the claim to the exclusivity of truth. In the great process of secularization - which means the preservation of the biblical content in the world while eliminating the form of faith - the fanaticism of unbelief is still influenced by biblical origins. In Western cultures, in the ideological positions of secularization, there is often a desire for absoluteness, for the persecution of supporters of other beliefs, for an aggressive recognition of one's adherence to the true faith, for an inquisitorial verification of the beliefs of other people - and all this is always due to the claim to the imaginary exclusivity of the absolute faith of each of its representatives.

In the face of all this reality, philosophical faith is left only with the hard-to-accept conclusion that, due to the cessation of communication and the admission of reason, even the maximum will to communicate is rendered untenable under certain conditions.

It is not clear to me how one can remain neutral in relation to the claim to exclusivity. It might still be possible if it would be acceptable to consider intolerance as actually not dangerous, a kind of strange anomaly. But this is not the case with the biblical claim to exclusivity. By its nature and essence, it always seeks to rely on powerful institutions and is always ready to rekindle the fires for heretics. This is rooted in the nature of this claim, which is found in all sayings of biblical religion, even if many believers have not the slightest inclination to violence, much less to destroy those who, in their opinion, belong to the infidels.

Since intolerance against intolerance (but only against it) is inevitable, intolerance against the claim to exclusivity is necessary in cases where a given belief is preached not only in order to test it by other ideas, but tends to be enforced by law, school education etc.

Faith in Christ takes on a completely different aspect if it is freed from the claim to exclusivity and the consequences associated with it. The question, important for our time, should the decline in the number of Christian believers (which would by no means mean the end of Christianity as a biblical religion) be considered a temporary decline or the result of a final change in worldview? Today it seems that fewer and fewer people believe in Christ as the only begotten Son of God, the only mediator between Him and people sent by God. It is difficult to check this. Apparently, faith still overflows the hearts of people - by its personal qualities - of a high rank. The question of whether the Christian faith, by changing, can be preserved as a moment of biblical religion, being freed from the sign of exclusivity, cannot be answered in advance. What will then be its significance - the internal question of biblical religion, if it, in its all-encompassing reality as a whole, again dissolves in itself this absolutized faith that emerged from it.

The claim to exclusivity is characteristic of the Christian faith, the faith of the Jews in the law, the national religion, Islam. Biblical religion is an all-encompassing historical space, from which each denomination extracts the special meaning it needs, ignoring the rest of its content. The Bible in its entirety as the Old and New Testaments is a sacred book only for Christian denominations. The Jews do not consider the New Testament a holy book, although it was created by the Jews, despite the fact that its ethical and monotheistic content was no less important for the Jewish confession than for the Christian one. For Islam, this book has never been sacred, although Islam arose under the influence of Jews and Christians on the same religious basis.

The main thing for philosophizing, the main characteristic feature of the Bible and biblical religion is that it does not give the doctrine as a whole, does not give anything complete. Biblical religion as a whole is not characterized by a claim to exclusivity, it arose only in its individual branches, fixed in the course of the historical development of this religion. The claim to exclusivity is the work of people and is not based on the will of God, who opened many paths for people to himself.

The Bible and biblical religion are the foundation of our philosophizing, give us constant orientation, and serve as a source of irreplaceable content. The philosophizing of the West - admit it or not - is always connected with the Bible, even when it fights with it. In conclusion, we will make a few remarks about the positive character of the Bible for philosophizing.

In Defense of Biblical Religion

The Bible reveals the most extreme rationally inevitable contradictions:

1) From the sacrifice of the patriarchs to the complexly designed daily sacrifice in the Jerusalem temple and to Christian communion, the Bible passes through cult religion. Inside this cult religion, there is always a tendency to limit and spiritualize the cult - it manifests itself in the abolition of "mountain peaks" (numerous places of worship in the country) in favor of a single cult in the Jerusalem temple, then in the transformation of the original, habitual living cult into an abstract one performed by officials ritual and, finally, in the sublimation of the cult, in the replacement of sacrifices by communion and mass. All this is a cult. But the prophets begin to speak passionately against the cult in general (not just against beliefs that falsely evaluate a cult). Yahweh says (Amos 5:21): “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I do not smell the sacrifices in your solemn assemblies. If you offer me a burnt offering and a meat offering, I will not accept them, nor will I look down on the thanksgiving sacrifice of your fat calves. Remove from me the noise of your songs, for I will not listen to the sound of your harp." And Yahweh says (Hosea 6:5): "For I want mercy, and not sacrifices and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings."

2) From the Decalogue and the law of the covenant to the lengthy laws of Deuteronomy and the priestly code, there is development religion of the law. The law is given in the revelation of God by the word of the Torah*, it is written down. But Jeremiah opposes written law in general (Jeremiah 8:8): "The lying reed of the scribes and his turns it into a lie. The law of God is not in fixed words, but in heart:“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel… says the Lord: I will put My law in their entrails, and I will write it on their hearts…” (31, 33).

3) Since the covenant of the times of Moses, consciousness passes through the Bible the chosen people.“Are you not like the sons of the Ethiopians, and you are for me, the sons of Israel? says the Lord. “Didn’t I bring Israel out of the land of Egypt and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramites from Cairo?” (Amos 9.7). Peoples have one rank. During the time of captivity, God once again becomes the God of Israel, but at the same time - as the creator of the world - and the God of all peoples, who, even despite the heartlessness of Jonah, took pity on the pagans of Nineveh *.

4) Jesus becomes God, Christ. However, from the very beginning, this is contradicted by the words of Jesus himself: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18).

Such examples can be multiplied. It may be ventured that in the Bible, taken as a whole, everything occurs in polarity. Ultimately, for each fixation of an idea in a word, one can find a statement that contradicts it. Nowhere is the complete, pure truth given, because it cannot be expressed either in human language or in any particular way of human life. In our limited perception, the opposite pole disappears for us each time. We touch truth only if we approach it in a clear consciousness of the polarities, passing through them.

Thus, the cult religion and the prophetic religion of pure ethos oppose each other; the religion of law and the religion of love; isolation in frozen forms (in order to save through time the precious treasure of faith) and openness to a person who only believes in God and loves Him; the religion of priests and free religion in the prayer of individual people; national God and God of all people; covenant with the chosen people and covenant with man as man; the calculation of guilt and punishment in this very life (happiness and misfortune as a measure of merit and sin) and the faith of Jeremiah, Job before the mystery; the religion of the community and the religion of God's chosen ones, clairvoyants, prophets; magical religion and ethical religion in the rational thought of creation. The Bible contains even the greatest oppositions to faith: disbelief in demonology, deification of people, nihilism (the last one is in the book of Ecclesiastes). The consequence of these polarities in the Bible was that all parties and representatives of different trends in subsequent history could in one way or another refer to the Bible. The polarities clearly developed there are constantly returning - Jewish theocracy in Christian churches, the freedom of prophets among mystics, reformers, the chosen people among a number of Christian peoples, communities and sects who considered themselves chosen. All the time there is a restoration, opposition to fixation, living creation on the basis of biblical religion. It was as if the destiny of the West was to have, through the unshakable authority of its sacred book, the predestination of all the contradictions of life and to become thereby free for all possibilities and for the continuous struggle for the exaltation of a person who, in his free action, knows that he has been given to himself by God.

The most primitive and most exalted human reality finds its spiritual expression in the texts of the Bible. This makes it related to other great testimonies of religion.

However, already at the beginning of the barbarian time, that ancient grandeur is revealed, which makes us doubt that this time can simply be called barbarian. Things are expressed there with all immediacy. Something unshakable calls to us in this naivety.

Passion runs through the entire Bible, acting with exceptional force, because it is related to God. God is in the flames of a volcano, in an earthquake, in a storm. He rises to inaccessibility, turns hurricanes into his heralds, and Himself, causing alarm, remains in a light breath of air. He rises above sensual phenomena, as well as above all images, as an absolutely transcendent creator, God Almighty, unimaginable, towering over all passions, impenetrable in his thoughts, but still, as it were, personally present in the pathos that excites a person.

Being before this God, the people of the Bible, knowing about their insignificance, grow into something superhuman. These messengers of God and prophets, unarmed, heroes at heart; they resist - sometimes all alone - everything that surrounds them, because they feel like servants of God. What already emerges in the legends of Moses and Elijah appears as reality in Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah - in fact, the images that Michelangelo saw.

Heroism* in the Bible is not the stubbornness of a force relying on itself. People dare to do the impossible at the command of God. Heroism is sublimated.

But the thought of God that makes this possible can easily deviate from its origins. Then it leads to the deformation of heroism and its transformation into an ugly distorted stubbornness of a spirit that has gone astray. The schizophrenic Ezekiel can - once - have a world-historical impact*.

But there are also such words of the Bible that are quiet, pure and act like the truth itself. They are rare and drawn into the cycle of extreme possibilities. One of the elements of the Bible is immeasurability, unbridledness, ugliness. And this is ultimately covered by a veil of fabrication and monotony. Even here, however, forces seem to have been at work to prevent the later death of rigor mortis in Ezra's* religion; the flame from which Job, the Psalms, Ruth, and the Ecclesiastes emerged, remained alive.

The constant connection of biblical truth with the matter of myths, social reality, untenable pictures of the world, with primitive pre-scientific knowledge subsequently turns the historical biblical truth itself into mere history. Veils of this phenomenon are already interchangeable in the Bible itself.

The Bible lacks, with the exception of barely discernible firstfruits, philosophical self-awareness. Hence the power of speaking existence, the origins of the revelation of truth, but also constant deviations in opposite directions. The dominance of thought checks is absent. Passion is corrected by passion.

The Bible is a repository of thousands of years of frontier experiences of mankind. They illuminated the spirit of man, and he believed in God, and at the same time in himself. This creates the unique atmosphere of the Bible.

In the Bible we see man in the basic forms of his downfall. But in such a way that it is precisely in ruin that being and the possibility of realization are revealed to him.

In relation to the Bible, it is always a matter of rediscovering in deviations the truth that remains equal to itself, which, however, can never be objectively final. True transformation is a return to the original. The old clothes must be discarded, those that correspond to the present must be created. However, the primordial is not the initial, it always exists, authentic and eternal. But once expressed, it immediately takes on its temporary appearance. In time, his appearance in the image of this time corresponds to faith.

But it is necessary not only to throw off outdated clothes, it is necessary to return the original from fixation and distortion - to regain the polar tension - to try in the most humble way to understand and elevate the eternally true.

1) Return from fixation: the truth of biblical religion does not allow fixation, which was carried out in itself; perhaps it once had historical significance, but now it has lost it for philosophical thinking. If I am not mistaken, examples of such fixation can be: national religion, religion of the law, specific religion of Christ.

A national religion should be abandoned, such as it was in the early stages of the biblical religion as the Israelite religion of Yahweh and which it repeated primarily in Protestant, in particular in Calvinist, directions, which relied in their Christianity more on separate parts of the Old Testament than on him in general and on the New Testament.

The religion of the law should be abandoned in the form that it received in the book of Ezra and Nehemiah, in the main sections of the priestly code and in many editions of the Old Testament books during the period when Judaism in the narrow sense was formed. Along with the religion of the law, the rule of the priests (hierocracy) should be abandoned, since it was created and implemented by the Jews under foreign rule, and then continued and demanded by the Christian churches.

It is necessary to renounce the religion of Christ, which sees God in Jesus and, applying to Jesus the idea of ​​sacrifice expressed in DeuteroIsaiah, connects salvation with him.

Each of these three religious forms becomes limited, although each comes from a moment of truth. A national religion, as such, cannot be absolute and is capable of expressing only the superficial truth of a phenomenon. The religion of law externalizes the depth of the idea of ​​law and leads to its disintegration into many absurdities.

The religion of Christ contains the truth, which is that God speaks to man through the mouths of people, but God speaks through the mouths of many people, in the Bible - through the prophets, the last of which is Jesus; there is no man who could be God; God does not speak only through the lips of one person, moreover, it is polysemantic through each.

The religion of Christ contains the truth, turning the individual to himself. The Spirit of Christ is the work of every man. He is pneuma, i.e., the spirit of enthusiasm for rising to the supersensible; he is openness to his own suffering as a path to transcendence; he who is ready to take up the cross can find in the downfall the certainty of the real. Finally, the spirit of Christ is the connection with the God-given nobilitas ingenita that I follow or that I betray, the presence of the divine in man. But if the religion of Christ means approaching in faith to the Savior who exists outside of me, through the realization of the spirit of Christ in me, then two points remain indisputable for our philosophizing: Christ in me is not connected exclusively with that Jesus Christ who once existed, and Jesus as the Christ like the God-man is a myth. In demythologization, one should not arbitrarily dwell on this. The most profound myth remains a myth and is a game; it becomes an objective guarantee only either through religious truth (which philosophizing is unable to perceive) or through error.

2) Rediscovering polar tensions: in order to assimilate the truth that is in the Bible, it is necessary to consciously imagine the contradictions encountered in the Bible. The contradictions have many meanings. Rational contradictions lead to alternatives where only one side can be correct. The opposing forces each time form a polar whole through which the true acts. Dialectical contradictions mean the movement of thought through which the true, inaccessible to direct utterance, speaks.

Biblical religion is characterized by the fullness of the contradictory, polar tension and dialectic. Not only through the will, but through a constant readiness to remain open to the contradictory, the driving energy of tension can be preserved or regained where it has been lost. Reason and the need for peace, as well as the destructive will to fight, strive to destroy contradictions in order to establish the dominance of the unambiguous and one-sided.

In the books of the Bible one finds the same basic tensions that have kept the West in motion to this day; God and the world, church and state, religion and philosophy, religion of law and prophetic religion, cult and ethos.

Therefore, the truth that remains the same can only be obtained by being open to the unsolvable problems of present existence and by doubting every realized phenomenon, without losing sight of the extreme: ruin.

3) Clarification and elevation of the eternally true: by penetrating into tension, into the dialectic of contradictions striving for a solution, one can positively grasp what is expressed in words only abstractly - the truth that was outlined in the main features of biblical religion. The moments of this truth, once again expressed as a philosophical belief, are these:

The idea of ​​a single God;

Consciousness of the unconditional choice between good and evil in a finite person;

Love as the basic reality of the eternal in man;

Action - external and internal behavior - as a statement of man;

The ideas of the world order, although historically unconditional, are devoid of absoluteness and exceptional significance;

The openness of the created world, its inability to self-sufficient existence, the failure of any order on the borders;

Recognition of the extreme;

The last and only refuge is with God.

How pale is all that has been said in the face of genuine religious reality! As soon as we begin to consider this question, we immediately fall into the realm of philosophical faith. The renewal of religious faith from the origins is involuntarily considered by us as a renewal of the philosophical faith hidden in religiosity, as the transformation of religion into philosophy (or philosophical religion). However, this will certainly not be the path of all mankind, although it may be the path of a few.

A philosopher certainly cannot tell theologians and churches what to do. The philosopher can only hope to participate in the development of premises. He would like to help prepare the ground and make tangible the space of the spiritual situation in which that which he cannot create must grow.