Page 288 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN HUSSERL 281

to see this we need the phenomenological reduction. He does not make
explicit what he has in mind here but it would seem to be the themes
recounted in Ideas § 51 and 58 (see our remarks below). But clearly he
believes that only the transcendental phenomenological theme of eidetic
intuition can do justice to the full scope of what is in play in religious
intuitions—and therefore what he calls "the noble artist" is of great aid
in these matters. But this leaves him unsatisfied. Although the divine and
the Good (or the absolute ought) are manifest apart from transcendental
phenomenology, unless the transcendental phenomenological origins are
a theme, the proper sense of the religious themes and values, the proper
sense of "God" remains forever hidden. This leads him to oberve that
perhaps it is enjoined on humans to create religion in a twofold sense:

In the one case religion as progressive mythos, as one-sided and genuine
intuition of religious ideals surrounded by a horizon of inkling, into
whose infinities one does not penetrate but before which unsearchable
infinities one bows; in the other case religion as metaphysics of religion,
as ultimate conclusion of the universal science, as norm for all the
intuitive mythical symbolism which rules its formations and transforma-
tions of phantasy (Hua XXVII, 102-103).

The study, not practice, of the former, would be the more familiar sense
of Religionswissenschaft and perhaps an extended sense of the phenomen-
ology of religion. Husserl's interests or strengths did not, it would seem,
move him to work in this area.
The other, second, study would be transcendental phenomenology's
own rich, if never completed, philosophical theology. Again, the best
formulations of Husserl's position on these matters is §§51 and 58 of
Ideas (which I have studied elsewhere^^). For our present purposes suffice
it to say that the non-worldly, non-thingly divine transcendence to the
world-pole and transcendence in immanence of the I-pole are claimed to
have modes of intuitive disclosure other than the worldly or thingly—the
typical mode of disclosure, presumably, of myth and religion—to which
theory may adjust itself. Although one finds in Husserl's writings
considerable delineation of transcendental phenomenology's basic
theological themes, e.g., the divine idea, divine entelechy, and the

^* See "A Pr6cis of an Husserlian Philosophical Theology," in Essays in
Phenomenological Theology,