Grant Kaplan on Schelling: “The Urmensch adam was ‘connected with the divine consciousness’ and ‘in immediate communion [Gemeinschaft] with the creator.’”[1]
One could, and should, spend costly time and effort of thought trying to imagine, to imaginatively discover, what this “immediate communion” with God—this direct and surely intimate relationship between man and God—was like.
I have often used as a sermon illustration the image of my daughters running to me after getting home from work, unlocking the front door, running up to me, jumping up onto me, screaming: “Daddy! Daddy! You’re home!” This, to me, is a dim intimation of what such intimate, loving communion with God must have been like in the Garden of Eden.
For Augustine (as a good Platonist), this is the primal memory which determines man more than any other. The pilgrimage of the Christian life, for him, is the process of recollecting, uncovering, getting back into touch with, this primal memory of communion with God in the garden.
For the Psalmist (especially in Psalms such as Ps 119, and within that especially in sections such as He, Waw, Zayin, Heth, and Teth), this is the point of the law, of meditating on God’s law day and night, with one’s “whole heart,” Ps. 119:34, 58 (BCP). To meditate on God’s torah, I have come to believe, is, at the deepest level, to dwell on God’s words to Moses (and the people of Israel) in Exodus 19:
You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,
How I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.
Now therefore if you obey my voice and keep my covenant,
You shall be my treasured possession out of the all the peoples.
Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be to me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.
These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.
It seems to me that here, we see God’s heart for humanity. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in Scripture, we get a glimpse of the direct, intimate communion between God and man in the Garden.
[1] Kaplan, Answering the Enlightenment 86a.
After I defended my dissertation (on Ratzinger’s Habilitationsschrift, the Theology of History in St. Bonaventure) in July of 2020, I began to see the need to situate the future Pontiff’s thought within deeper currents of German philosophy. It is extrememely plausible to see his defense of Bonaventure as motivated by the need to respond to contemporary developments about the nature of time and history (for example, the thought of Heidegger, which, one might say, conceives of being as something like Plato’s becoming), even though Ratzinger himself roots his concerns in the Protestant fascination (de riguer at the time) with Heilsgeschichte (e.g., Oscar Cullman’s Christ in Time).
That a central concern for Ratzinger in his Habilation research was Bonaventure’s surprising notion of revelation is an initial hint or suggestion that, indeed, Ratzinger is in some kind of dialogue with these antecedent currents of German thought of the early proponents of so-called German idealism.
In this post I want to rehearse a point about the Kantian (and Fichtean) rejection of revelation. On page 46, Kaplan quotes Fichte, who “raises the possibility that creation might be a revelation.”
“Indeed to the extent that [through such an empirical process] it were possible to have […] a knowledge of God, of our dependence upon him, and that certain duties resulted from this knowledge […] and to the extent that one could view God as the purpose of the creation of the world, one could believe for a moment that the entire system of appearances could be viewed as a revelation.”
But Fichte dismisses this possibility as soon as he raises it. Why? Because (as Kaplain states) “theoretical reason has no capacity to know the noumenal world.”
And why, in turn, is this?
It is because of the merely tangential role God plays in Kant’s and Fichte’s system. For Kant God is never evoked or even countenanced in the First Critique. That is, for Kant’s system of thoeretical reason, God is regarded as completely unnecessary. Kant’s theoretical system, then, assumes a methodological atheism.
God becomes a crucial plank in Kant’s thought, only with the moral philosophy of practical reason (the Second Critique). As Günter Meckenstock puts it (Kaplain 179 n 38) the concept of God is “bound to the apodictic validity of the moral and rational ethical law.” As Kaplain puts it on 44, “God is posulated as a being who makes the world of nature and of morality correspond.” You see, while the phenomenal world for Kant cannot affect the noumenal world (that is, the free will of the human person), the noumenal can and does affect the phenomenal. But in order for this to be compelling (since it cannot be observed), we need God to serve as a kind of placeholder or guarantor.
In other words, in his elaborate attempt to safeguard the freedom of the will (in the face of the Newtonian suggestion that all of nature follows fixed, mathematical laws), Kant must invoke the concept of God as a placeholder. For Kant the human will must be autonomous, following its own free choices and determinations, and in no way conditioned by external factors or laws. Heteronomy bad, autonomy good.
But this God, this role for God in human knowing or the grasp of truth about the world, is a far, far cry from God as creator, who has made a world which somehow reveals him (Ps 19:1). This “god” is a mere corollary of practical reason, since for Kant (and Fichte) theology is done only after practical philosophy (see Kaplan 47ff.).
