Abstract

The article takes up the problematic of the opposition between metaphysical doctrines concerning the existence of God and an anthropological analysis of the religious life. Modern philosophy of religion began with Kant's critique of the proofs for the existence of God. Agnosticism, which claims that theoretical knowledge had nothing to do with the meaning of life, implies the primacy of praxis and, consequently, the unlimited character of human freedom. Yet this is actually a theoretical stance. Philosophical thinking is, we can argue, necessarily based on an original theoretical understanding, which is prior to the bifurcation between theory and praxis. This original knowledge is to be discovered in an ontology of the human spirit: in spiritual life man sees himself as, at one and the same time, both given (in the theoretical attitude) and willed (in the practical attitude). The unity of these two aspects of man's spiritual life raises the problem of the relation between the finite and the infinite. While there is a recognition of man's spiritual life as belonging in part to the infinite, the infinite itself surpasses understanding. Yet a purely negative ontology of the infinite condemns human freedom to the arbitrary. Moreover, in religious life the infinite is conceived as a personal being. However, a philosophical description of the relationship between human spirituality and a divine person requires a philosophy of God that takes up again the classical metaphysical problematic as to how the necessity of God and the contingency of the world can be conceived simultaneously