Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2019)
W. De Wette’s philosophy of religion: religious feeling and ways of its comprehension
Abstract
This paper is devoted to the study of main ideas of philosophy of religion of W. M. L. de Wette (1780–1849), the German and Swiss Protestant theologian and biblical scholar. Two elements of de Wette’s work had a prolonged infl uence on the development of theology and religious studies, i.e. the original and fairly elaborate doctrine of the religious feeling and drafts of topics and methods of the planned scientifi c study of religion in the framework of theological knowledge. The article shows which place de Wette’s constructions occupy in the development of the German-language philosophy of religion of the 19th century. They are close to Fries’s ideas, though they do not go back to them in terms of their origin. De Wette states that the essence and source of religion are the unconveyable, the initially non-conscious feeling that emerges separately in each individual and has its foundation in the perception of the unity and the need for separate objects and phenomena. The natural and at the same time supernatural ability to feel the divine is also termed by de Wette the inner revelation. This complex feeling is comprised by several elements, i.e. the anticipation of the presence and activity in the fi nite world of the eternal, non-conditional, omnipotent Will; the anticipation of God’s kingdom on earth; full trust and self-off ering to God; awe in front of the beautiful and elevated in nature and culture. The feeling is initially image-related, then it is conceptualised by the power of reason on the collective level of community; its symbolisation generates religious institutions. De Wette’s contribution to the development of knowledge of religion is made up of his focus on making clear what religion is, his desire to reconstruct the initially non-conscious religious feeling by means of extremely strict introspection and refl ection; the claim that in order to study religion, one should master the language of its texts; the claim that it is necessary to study history of religion. The article shows that in its conception and methodology, de Wette’s doctrine foreshadows both the later-to-come liberal theology and the early projects in religious studies.
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