Before I ventured upon this field of inquiry I spent many years of study upon the rational aspect of that supreme Reality we call God , and the results of my work are contained in my books, Naturalietische und religiose Weltansicht (Eng. Tr. Naturalism and Religion , London, 1907), and Die Kant-friesisclie Religions-Philosophie. And I feel that noone ought to concern himself with the 'Numen ineffabile' who has not already devoted assiduous and serious study to the 'Ratio aeterna'.

What is maintained in this book is, in fact, that religion is something not only natural but also, in the strict sense of the word, paradoxical. It is a real knowledge of, and real personal communion with, a Being whose nature is yet above knowledge and transcends personality.

We generally take holy as meaning completely good ; it is the absolute moral attribute, denoting the consummation of moral goodness

It will be our endeavour to suggest this unnamed Something to the reader as far as we may, so that he may himself feel it. There is no religion in which it does not live as the real innermost core, and without it no religion would be worthy of the name. It is pre-eminently a living force in the Semitic religions, and of these again in none has it such vigour as in that of the Bible. Here, too, it has a name of its own, viz. the Hebrew קדוש, to which the Greek ayios and the Latin sanctus, and, more accurately still, sacer, are the corresponding terms.

There you have a self-confessed feeling of dependence , which is yet at the same time far more than, and something other than, merely a feeling of dependence. Desiring to give it a name of its own, I propose to call it creature-consciousness or creature-feeling. It is the emotion of a creature, abased and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.

Religious dread (or awe ) would perhaps be a better designation. Its antecedent stage is daemonic dread (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive off-shoot, the dread of ghosts . It first begins to stir in the feeling of something uncanny , eerie , or weird . It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history.

And all ostensible explanations of the origin of religion in terms of animism or magic or folk psychology are doomed from the outset to wander astray and miss the real goal of their inquiry, unless they recognize this fact of our nature primary, unique, underivable from anything else to be the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution.

In the first place, it is patent from many passages of the Old Testament that this Wrath has no concern whatever with moral qualities. There is something very baffling in the way in which it is kindled and manifested. It is, ashas been well said, like a hidden force of nature , like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon any one who comestoonear. It is incalculable and arbitrary . Any one who is accustomed to think of deity only by its rational attributes must see in this "Wrath" mere caprice and wilful passion.

For one of the chiefest and most general features of Mysticism is just this self-depreciation (so plainly parallel to the case of Abraham) the estimation of the self, of the personal 1 , as something not perfectly or essentially real, or even as mere nullity, a self-depreciation which comes to demand its own fulfilment in practice in rejecting the delusion of selfhood, and so makes for the annihilation of the self.

Whatis really characteristic of this stage is not – as the theory of Animism would have us believe – that men are here concerned with curious entities, called souls or spirits , which happen to be invisible. Representations of spirits and similar conceptions are rather one and all early modes of rationalizing a precedent experience, to which they are subsidiary....They are the source from which springs, not religion, but the rationalization of religion, which often ends by constructing such a massive structure of theory and such a plausible fabric of interpretation, that the mystery is frankly excluded.

office hours