The Knowledge of God: Realism as Natural Theology in Max Scheler’s Phenomenology of Religion

Abstract

Max Scheler’s phenomenology of religion aimed at a renewed philosophical approach to the problem of God, willing to unify the modern need for a personalization of religion with the traditional objectivism and realism which, ever since the days of Thomas Aquinas, had been basic for Catholicism. For this purpose, Scheler argued for a return to an original level of the experience which could enable a new approach to the religious phenomenon, which could consider it at the level of a «living evidence», answering to the exigence of realism for which phenomenological philosophy was calling, thereby founding an original natural theology.