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WHICH INITIATION DOES NOT LEAD ÁSTRAY FROM THE IRUE MYSTERIES
initiation. It is, namely, meant to function as a preliminary exercise to bring
philosophical consciousness into a position that allows for cognizing any
self-positing truth, for instance the truth of Revelation. Only an initiation
into positive philosophy does not lead reflective consciousness astray from
the true mysteries of existence.
The Introduction to which I am referring is thus not just a preliminary
commencement of a book, usually previewing or defining the subject matter
that will be discussed. On the contrary. Before entering into the philosophy
of Revelation as such and commencing its full exposition, a fortiori before
entering into the “special” philosophy of Revelation, i.e., Schelling’s
Christology (in Book III of The Philosophy of Revelation’), we have to set
our philosophical mind in an appropriate “position.” Schelling refers to
a position which allows reflective consciousness to comprehend the event of
Revelation (in general) adequately in order to let it be what, according to its
positive Realdefinition, it truly is with emphasis on “existence,” experience,
and facticity. No Revelation whatsoever, among the realities of experience
(for instance: real nature, real humanity, real consciousness, the entire history
of the human race, or Christianity) with which positive philosophy deals, can
ever become the subject matter of a positive philosophical comprehension
if the philosopher’s mind has not acknowledged in advance the undeniable
authority with which these events positively give themselves to us in
experience. The transcendental logic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which
authorizes itself by itself in constituting what it calls “objective experience,”
is not apt ever to comprehend any phenomenon of Revelation in nature.
Indeed, Kantian critical reason takes a position by which it is prepossessed
by the sheer potency of being (Kant calls this “omnitudo realitatis” with
reference to “transcendental matter”). Kant thinks of the omnitudo realitatis
in such a way that this potency has been “liberated” not merely from every
religious signification (revelation) but even from everything that has reality.*°
According to its idealistic definition, transcendental philosophy “flees—
Schelling states—into a complete wasteland devoid of all being, where nothing
is to be encountered but only [...] the sole immediate content of thought in
which it moves only within itself as within its own ether.”*' In Kant’s critical
view, “any future metaphysics that will be able to come forward as science,”*”
will, however, definitely defend some positivity in the doctrine of empirical
realism but it will do so only under the prior formal authority of a science of
29 SW II/14. In Schellings Werke, hrsg. Manfred Schröter, München, 1965, Sechster Hauptband,
Philosophie der Offenbarung, Drittes Buch: Der Philosophie der Offenbarung Zweiter Teil,
389-726.
30 Grounding, Lecture V (SW 11/3, 75-76).
3! Grounding, Lecture V (SW 11/3, 76).
52 Full title of his Prolegomena (1783).
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