Preliminaries

I begin with three prefatory notes.

First, Smith has me ‘charging’ Schleiermacher with welcoming the naturalistic explanation of religion (295, 300) and ‘criticizing’ both the phenomenological thinness of the feeling of absolute dependence and Schleiermacher's stipulation of the reference of this feeling as God (296, 299), and he describes my ascription of a rejection of supernatural intervention to Schleiermacher as my ‘principal case against’ him (301). But I do not consider the attempt to explain religion naturalistically a crime, such that Schleiermacher needs to be charged with having to do with it, and did not intend my claims about the feeling of absolute dependence as criticisms. Neither did I think of my remarks about Schleiermacher's rejection of supernaturalism as constituting a case against him.

Smith also ascribes to me the position that Schleiermacher's theological strategy involved ‘palming us off with’ reinterpretations of important doctrinal terms (302); but these are not terms I used, or would use. Elsewhere, I have defended the proposition that Schleiermacher was a religious naturalist, and I do not regard this as a bad thing to be.Footnote ² I do not think his construal leads Smith to misinterpret my arguments in substantive ways; but I do not want to be understood incorrectly on this issue.

Second, I claimed that in The Idea of the Holy Otto referred to the denial of supernatural intervention in the natural order as the ‘ossification and materialization of the most tender [element] in religion’.Footnote ³ I made use of this passage to support my claim that Otto defended an interventionist understanding of divine activity. Smith points out that this was a mistake, and that, in fact, the passage does not support my claim. Properly understood, what Otto labelled an ‘ossification’ is not the denial of supernatural intervention but ‘supernaturalistic’ interpretation of cases of divination. This ‘genuine, solidly rationalistic theory’ reasons that, since a particular religiously significant event has no natural causes, it must have had a supernatural cause.Footnote ⁴ Smith also points out that Otto himself rejected the idea that God interferes in the operation of natural laws (311f.). I stand corrected on this point; the question of what follows from this commitment of Otto's will be explored below.

Third, I had thought it both important and illuminating to call attention to Otto's attempts to distance himself from Schleiermacher. In The Philosophy of Religion Otto announced a shift of his philosophical allegiance from Schleiermacher to Fries, from whom he appropriated the crucial term Ahnung and the post-Kantian conceptuality that accompanies it; and several of the most important claims in The Idea of the Holy are presented precisely as departures from Schleiermacher.Footnote ⁵ My argument was that Otto himself saw Schleiermacher's understanding of religion as dangerously ‘naturalistic’ in a sense that opened religion to the charge of being, roughly, an illusory human production rather than something grounded in the experience of the transcendent. In his ‘Reappraisal’ Smith passes in silence over this material; he has subsequently dedicated an independent essay to discussing some of Otto's criticisms.Footnote ⁶

If I understand Smith correctly, his view is that, in the main, Otto's criticisms are based on misreadings of Schleiermacher, whose view is quite close to Otto's when properly understood.Footnote ⁷ A full-scale response to Smith's second essay would involve not only challenging his interpretation of Schleiermacher, but also pressing him on two further questions. The first of these is what it says about Otto's position that he wanted to distance himself from Schleiermacher (as he understood him) on the points in question; and the second, what to make of Otto's later preference for the philosophy of Fries (a topic Smith engages in neither essay). While my answers to these two questions should be clear from what follows below, space does not permit the full response that Smith's subsequent essay (which in important respects is more satisfactory than his ‘Reappraisal’) deserves.

Schleiermacher and the feeling of absolute dependence

With much of what Smith says under this heading I have no quarrel, and so far as I can see, his interpretation differs significantly from my own on only one point. Smith cites Schleiermacher's statement in §4.4 of The Christian Faith that ‘God is given to us in feeling in an original way’, and cites his reference in §5 to God as an ‘object’ which the feeling of absolute dependence ‘represents’ as evidence against my claim that the feeling of absolute dependence ‘does not secure unambiguous reference to God’.Footnote ⁸ Smith's first citation omits a phrase that was crucial to my argument, as it was crucial to the point Schleiermacher was trying to make. My citation read ‘In this sense it can indeed be said that God is given to us in feeling in an original way’. Schleiermacher was offering an account of what it could mean to say that ‘God is given in feeling’ on the account he was presenting.

On my reading of the passage, his view was that God is ‘given’ in the feeling of absolute dependence just in the sense that reflection upon the feeling of absolute dependence generates the idea of God as ‘that which is the co-determinant in this feeling and to which we trace our being in such a state’.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, the sentence at issue continues ‘and if we speak of an original revelation of God to man or in man, the meaning will always be just this, that along with [absolute dependence] there is given to man also the immediate self-consciousness of it, which becomes a consciousness of God’.Footnote ¹⁰ Fairly clearly, Schleiermacher was here offering reinterpretations of the idea of God being ‘given’ and of the notion of an ‘original revelation to God in man’ in his own terms, in order to show that his account could accommodate some familiar ways of speaking about religion. And I think talk of the feeling of absolute dependence ‘representing’ God, and of God being the ‘object’ of that feeling in §5 needs to be understood against this background.

So here I stick to my original claim: where ‘givenness’ is not understood in his revised terms, the right thing to say is that, for Schleiermacher, no transcendent or supernatural realities are ‘given’ in our experience either inwardly or outwardly.Footnote ¹¹ Smith does not contest my assertion that, for Otto, numinous experience has the character of an encounter with a ‘numinous object’, and notes in addition that for Otto ‘the sense of the presence of a non-natural object … alone can answer to the true inner nature of numinous feeling’ (298, emphasis added). He denies that this marks a significant difference between Schleiermacher and Otto. I think this denial is mistaken; but more importantly, in my essay I pointed out that Otto wanted to distance himself from Schleiermacher on just this point.

In The Idea of the Holy Otto characterized Schleiermacher's postulation of a moment of ‘self-feeling’ at the heart of religion as one of his prominent ‘mistakes’, observing that ‘[o]nly through a deduction, namely inasmuch as I also think of a cause outside myself, does one hit upon the divine itself, according to Schleiermacher’. As Otto would have it, self-regarding religious feeling ‘is as it were the shadow of another moment of feeling, which itself indubitably refers, primarily and immediately, to an object outside myself’.Footnote ¹² Thus, Otto seems to have thought that Schleiermacher's account lacked anything that could legitimately be interpreted as an experience of a transcendent object, and his own ‘numinous feeling’ was a proposal intended to remedy this lack.Footnote ¹³

Schleiermacher and the natural explicability of religion

To respond to Smith's discussion of the notion of the natural explicability of religion in Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre, I need to revisit the notion of naturalistic explanation. It is not always clear what is meant by the claim that religion, or indeed anything, ‘can be explained naturalistically’; and in fact due to the protean nature of the notions of ‘explanation’ and ‘explicability’ I now prefer to address my arguments to the issue that I take to be at the heart of the question of whether religion can be so explained. That issue is whether the factors that account for the events which constitute religion are without exception natural, such that all ‘religious’ events are themselves naturally produced, or whether some non-natural influences are active in religion.Footnote ¹⁴ The form of religious naturalism that I attribute to Schleiermacher is defined in these terms: it is the position that the true statement of the causes of all religious events will not include any non-natural/supernatural members, but rather that all of religion is ultimately naturally caused.Footnote ¹⁵ This is, it should be apparent, just the equivalent of saying that for Schleiermacher the supernatural does not impinge, discretely and temporally, upon the natural; and it is compatible with two claims he advanced in his capacity as a Christian theologian, viz. that God's activity (the ‘divine causality’) does bear upon the natural order as it were ‘globally’ and that the precise sequence of causes and effects within time are themselves of divine ordination.

It is not difficult to translate this understanding of religious naturalism into a statement of the ‘natural explicability’ of religion. Such a translation is what I had in mind: to assert that ‘religion can be explained naturalistically’ is to say that the true statement of the causes of all religious events, when it is finally produced by a completed science, will make reference only to natural events, forces and processes. But this is not the only way one could interpret the assertion: one could also interpret it, if less plausibly, as implying that we can actually detail a sequence of natural cause–effect relationships that constitutes the true explanation of religion. What is important about this ambiguity is that it is perfectly coherent to affirm religion's natural explicability in the first sense while denying it in the second: to affirm, that is, that the causes of religious events are all natural while denying that we are actually in a position to spell them out. I will return to this issue below.

There is a problem with Smith's understanding of what the project of explaining religion naturalistically involves. Smith identifies as my ‘principal charge’ that ‘Schleiermacher envisaged, indeed welcomed, a naturalistic approach to religion’ (300). But at the end of the same paragraph he observes that a passage I cite ‘cannot convict [Schleiermacher] of being open to the possibility of a non-religious “explanation” of religion’ (301, emphasis added). Smith does not say what he means by a non-religious explanation, so it is not clear what the identification of naturalistic with non-religious explanations contributes to his reading of my arguments. But inasmuch as his objections are ultimately to the claim that Schleiermacher was open to the possibility of explanations which, say, show religion to be false or illusory (which are plausible interpretations of ‘non-religious’), he misunderstands me. For this is not a claim I was making, and in fact I do not equate naturalistic explanations with non-religious explanations in this or any sense.

For this reason, I suspect that the claim I was trying to make about Schleiermacher's positive attitude towards naturalistic approaches to religion is more modest than the claim Smith attacks. He claims that I ‘cite (and can cite) only one passage from Schleiermacher in which he even remotely appears explicitly to endorse’ an openness to a naturalistic approach to religion: §3.1 of The Christian Faith, which in part reads ‘we have no desire to keep the leaders of science from scrutinizing and passing judgment from their own point of view upon piety and the communion relating to it’.Footnote ¹⁶ Smith is correct in saying that this remark would not be enough to convict Schleiermacher of being open to the possibility of ‘non-religious’ explanations of religion (on some construals of ‘non-religious’, anyway). All the passage in question does, according to him, is ‘situate religion in the total field of life in a way that has no purely religious justification, but rather, as it were, an “anthropological” one’; and this he thinks is a trivial matter, because ‘no-one thinks that nothing whatever can truly be said about religion in any respect from a naturalistic standpoint’ (301).

But I do think the passage from §3.1 supports the claim I do want to defend, that Schleiermacher was open to the possibility of the wissenschaftlich investigation of the natural causes of religious events and so of religion itself. Furthermore, I think Schleiermacher's view was not the trivial one that something true can be said about religion from a naturalistic perspective. Since I think his view was that the only causes that operate discretely within the natural order are natural causes, I think it was also his view that if what is desired is a grasp of the causes of religious phenomena, there is no alternative to natural investigation. Put somewhat differently, I attribute to him the view that approaches which decide in advance to consider only natural causes are not thereby opening their explanations to the risk of being incomplete because they fail to consider the possibility that religion involves discrete, temporal supernatural influence.

So understood, it is not the case that §3.1 is the only passage I can cite in support of my attribution to Schleiermacher of an openness to the naturalistic investigation of religion; in fact I cited five other passages from the Glaubenslehre in support. In one of these Schleiermacher speaks of the interest of piety and of science, and in particular ‘research into nature’ (Naturforschung), ‘meeting at the same point’ in that both should refuse the idea of supernatural interruptions in the natural order, with the result that for both piety and science ‘everything, even the most wonderful, that happens or has happened, remains a problem for scientific research’. In another, he objects to explanations which appeal to supernatural agencies on the grounds that they inhibit ‘the effort to explain all the phenomena, even the strangest, of the individual soul by its own particular qualities and by the influences of common life, which indeed cannot be encouraged enough’.Footnote ¹⁷ I do think such passages support the idea that Schleiermacher was open to the naturalistic investigation of religion, some more strongly than the one Smith describes as my only possible textual support.

The incarnation as a ‘supernatural’ event

Schleiermacher's account of the ‘supernatural’ status of the God-consciousness of Jesus is, as Smith recognizes, a crucial test case for my attribution to him of the position that religion can be ‘explained naturalistically’. Smith describes the understanding that I attribute to Schleiermacher as a ‘supposedly ersatz notion of the supernatural’ (302). He claims that my account of this revised sense of ‘supernatural’ is ‘restricted to making the negative point that it falls short of the supernatural in the absolute sense, and is merely “contextual”’, and that my ‘case against’ Schleiermacher can only be properly assessed once his positive account of the supernatural is in view (302). But here is my description of Schleiermacher's position:

So far as I can see this is a perfectly good positive account of what it means to call something ‘supernatural’, and it seems to me that Smith simply misses this account.

Here, once again, is the position on the incarnation that I attribute to Schleiermacher.Footnote ¹⁹ The appearance of perfect God-consciousness in Jesus of Nazareth is a natural fact in the sense that it was the result of the operation of causes within the natural order and did not involve divine intervention in that order. But it was also a supernatural fact in the contextual sense specified above. Specifically, this appearance was ‘supernatural’ relative to the ordinary life of human sinfulness, in the sense that the factors operative in the procreative activities of fallen human beings cannot by themselves account for the appearance of person born with perfect God-consciousness. What this means is that the conception of Jesus must have been influenced by factors other than simply ‘the reproductive power of the species’.Footnote ²⁰ But this influence is not a matter of the suspension of or addition to the ordinary workings of cause and effect within the natural order. Rather, the contribution God makes to this event is that of decreeing from eternity that the natural workings of cause and effect should, at the proper time and place, produce a human being with perfect God-consciousness; and it is by means of this arrangement of the entire natural order that God brought it about that a ‘new element’ should be introduced into the historical career of the human species.

Smith does not take issue with my claim that the inexplicability of the incarnation is context-relative, although as remarked above, the positive account of the supernatural on which that argument is based seems to have eluded him.Footnote ²¹ But more importantly, I cannot tell whether he thinks that Schleiermacher's account assumes supernatural intervention. On the one hand he cites Schleiermacher's references in §97.2 to a ‘special and immediate activity’ of God and of a particular ‘accession’ (Hinzutreten) of divine activity in connection with the conception of Christ (304) (pulling these terms, I am sorry to say, out of the context of Schleiermacher's arguments). But on the other hand, in several places he acknowledges that the divine activity in question must be regarded as eternal rather than as occurring at the time of the conception of Jesus (304, 305, 306).

He also seems to say contradictory things about the respect in which Schleiermacher supposes a distinct activity of God, claiming on the one hand that ‘the creative divine causality here in question is not simply that which undergirds and is expressed in the general natural processes in the world’, and that it is ‘different from the divine activity involved in the birth of any “ordinary human person”’ (304), but two pages later observing that ‘[s]ince, in God, there is no distinction between resolve and activity, nor between one activity and another, but God is one simple, pure act, there is but one single “divine decree”, which is expressed both in the creation and the incarnation’ (306). I think this last statement is the correct one, as it coheres with what Schleiermacher himself says in §97.2 about the ‘divine activity’ oriented towards the incarnation: that ‘this eternal activity means for us simply a divine decree, identical as such with the decree to create man and included therein’, and that the realization of this decree takes place within time.Footnote ²² Whether or not Smith and I understand Schleiermacher's position in the same way, he presents no textual or other grounds for me to change my view of the subject.

What, then, about the idea that the incarnation, as Schleiermacher understood it, can be explained naturalistically?

Human nature

The primary challenge Smith mounts to this claim is grounded in Schleiermacher's statement that the incarnation is an ‘original act of human nature’. In exploring this claim Smith at one point seems to be on the verge of conceding Schleiermacher's ‘naturalistic inclinations’, but then, as a way of forestalling this concession, draws attention to a distinction between two notions of human nature in Schleiermacher's arguments (305). On his account, Schleiermacher describes a conception of human nature which is not ‘available to a naturalistic explanation’, but to which human beings can attain ‘only by having access to [the] divine perspective: an access that is granted only to those who have experienced the redeeming activity of Christ, since only here is … true human nature revealed’ (305, 307). Possessing this conception provides the key for understanding how ‘Christ's birth can be explained by reference to human nature’ (306). Thus, ‘the sort of explanation of Christ in terms of human nature that Schleiermacher grants to be possible is not anything resembling a naturalistic explanation’ (305); it is available only ‘from a religious perspective’, and indeed its central component, that God-consciousness is the highest element in human nature, is ‘one that is given as a result of religious experience’ (307).

Here, I think, Smith misses the fact that Schleiermacher's discussion of the incarnation considers, and proposes ‘explanatory’ solutions to, at least two distinct problems. Schleiermacher himself did not distinguish cleanly between these problems, but for my purposes the difference is important.

My discussion was concerned with the problem of whether it is necessary to suppose divine intervention to make sense of the claim that in Jesus a ‘new element’ was introduced into the historical career of the human species. The material to which Smith refers is oriented not to this problem but to a different one. That problem, as I understand it, is this: given that a life without sin (i.e. a life of perfect God-consciousness) was not a possibility for any human beings before Christ, how can it be said that Christ and those who came before him share the same nature? The problem, in other words, is whether the ‘possibility of a sinless development’ is ‘incongruous with the idea of human nature’, as Schleiermacher put the point in §94.Footnote ²³ And the answer to this question is, roughly, that ‘human nature’ properly understood – as God from eternity understood it – includes perfect God-consciousness as its ‘original perfection’, such that the historical appearance of God-consciousness represents not the replacement of human nature by something else but the final stage of its creation. And it is in this sense that the incarnation represents, as Schleiermacher claims in §95, an ‘original act of human nature’.

These really are distinct problems. Schleiermacher's ‘explanation’ of the unity of human nature is not also an explanation of the incarnation as a ‘supernatural fact’. In order to cause a problem for my arguments it would have to be the case that this ‘explanation’ tells us something about the sequence of events leading up to the conception of Jesus that is ‘unavailable from a naturalistic perspective’. But, so far as I can see, the proposal that human nature be understood as including perfect God-consciousness as its ‘original perfection’ does not provide any such information. If this proposal tells us that human nature was ‘completed’ in the incarnation, it tells us nothing about the means God used to bring this about, including whether those means were natural or supernatural. The statement that the incarnation was an ‘original act of human nature’ is not a claim about the causes, natural or supernatural, behind the incarnation, but rather a claim about whether human nature admits or does not admit the possibility of perfect God-consciousness. The one who has ‘access’ to Schleiermacher's conception of ‘true human nature’ is not, it seems to me, in any better position than the one who does not as far as ‘explaining’ the incarnation as a ‘natural fact’ is concerned.

In addition, the problem of the identity of human nature is not generated by a conflict between traditional Christian language (i.e. that the incarnation was a supernatural event) and the demands of a scientific worldview. Rather it is generated by the tension between two doctrinal claims: first, that to be human is to be subject to sin, and second, that Christ was both human and free from sin. Schleiermacher inherited this tension from classical Christian theology, and the ‘explanation’ that he proposes to resolve it – the postulation of an ‘original perfection’ of human nature – is a recognizable descendent of the ‘original righteousness’ traditionally attributed to the pre-lapsarian Adam and Eve.

Since the problem of the unity of human nature is internal to the Christian doctrinal tradition and the postulation of ‘original perfection’ says nothing about the sequence of events leading up to its manifestation, it does not seem problematic to me that here Schleiermacher's ‘explanation’ is ‘inaccessible from a naturalistic standpoint’. Smith's claim that this explanation ‘is not anything resembling a naturalistic explanation’ is thus one that I can cheerfully grant. There is no more at stake, it seems to me, in this explanation resembling a naturalistic explanation than there is with explanations of how Christ could be at the same time born of a virgin and also a descendent of the house of David through Joseph, or of how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitute one God rather than three.

An aside: ‘religious experience’ in the translated Christian Faith

Smith's reading of §60.1 and §61.1 of The Christian Faith is of interest for a different reason. As Smith would have it, the true notion of human nature is ‘given as a result of religious experience’; thus, only ‘from a religious perspective’ can one explain the incarnation as an act of human nature. On this construal, Schleiermacher is describing ‘religious experience’ as a source of information about human nature, such that the one who has had ‘religious experience’, accompanied by certainty, knows something that one who has not had the relevant experience, or who does not possess certainty in relation to it, does not. This certainly makes Schleiermacher sound like Otto!

There is a translation issue here. The still-current English translation of The Christian Faith was produced by many hands; §32–61 were translated by Walter Matthews, of King's College London, and his student Edith Sandbach Marshall. In his memoirs Matthews recalled Sandbach Marshall, who died during World War II, as follows:

Matthews also described their process of translating Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre: ‘We would translate several pages literally and then the difficulties really began. What we had was apparently nonsense. Only by concentrated labour did we get something which made sense in English and indeed I wondered sometimes whether what we found was Schleiermacher's sense or ours’.Footnote ²⁴

The phrase ‘religious experience’ in the passages Smith cites is an artifact of this method of translation. The single appearance of the phrase in §60.1 is a rendering of Frömmigkeit, ‘piety’; in §61.1 the phrase is used twice to translate fromme Erregungen, ‘pious emotions’. Further, in §32–34 fromme Erregungen is variously translated as ‘pious affections’, ‘religious affections’, ‘religious emotions’, or ‘religious experience’, while ‘religious experience’ is also used to translate fromme Momenten and fromme Lebensmomenten. Simply put, Matthews and Sandbach-Marshall took considerable liberties with Schleiermacher's technical vocabulary. I suspect they took ‘religious experience’ to be an innocent term with a contemporary resonance that could be used to make Schleiermacher's text accessible to a general audience. It is not beside the point to note that in his own writing Matthews also vouched for the superiority of Otto's ‘numinous feeling’ over Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence.Footnote ²⁵

As I read §61.1, its point is rather different than what Smith claims. In this passage Schleiermacher was not describing a kind of generic, extra-traditional ‘encounter with the divine’ that grants one privileged access to the fact of the matter about human nature. Rather, he was describing a commitment that develops logically out of Christian piety, understood as an historically specific and socially transmitted way of understanding the self in relation to the world and God. In stating that the idea of the original perfection of human nature is ‘a matter of faith’, and that the one who possesses both piety and ‘certainty’ will ‘arrive at the idea’, Schleiermacher was claiming that the defining claim of Christian piety – that redemption has been universally accomplished in Jesus of Nazareth – in effect commits one to the position that perfect God-consciousness represents the original perfection of human nature. The one who is certain that her redemption and that of others has been accomplished in Jesus will ‘arrive at the idea’ of original perfection because this idea is required to secure the internal coherence of Christian convictions; the one who lacks such certainty will have no need of the idea.

On hidden laws

Smith does touch briefly on one claim by Schleiermacher that does pose a significant problem for my claim that according to him religion can be ‘explained naturalistically’. This is the claim that the laws which govern the events that culminated in the appearance of perfect God-consciousness in Jesus are ‘hidden from us’. Smith cites two passages wherein Schleiermacher sounds similar notes, one in which he observes that the connection between this event and the conditions that preceded it is ‘to be found only in the unity of the divine thought’, and another in which he states that the grasp of the entire nature-system which would make this connection clear is ‘unattainable by us’ (306).Footnote ²⁶ I have remarked elsewhere on the challenges such passages present, but it will not be out of place to revisit the subject.Footnote ²⁷

Here the distinction observed above between the two senses in which it can be said that something is naturalistically explicable comes into play. If what is meant by the claim that the incarnation can be explained naturalistically is that the true statement of the discrete causes leading up to the appearance of perfect God-consciousness in Jesus will list only natural members, there is nothing incoherent about claiming that this is the case even though we cannot and possibly could not ever produce such a statement. But the idea that the laws governing the relevant events are ‘hidden from us’ is incompatible with the other possible interpretation of the claim that the incarnation can be explained naturalistically – i.e. that we can actually produce the true statement of its natural causes. Schleiermacher's position on the incarnation thus seems to fall into the zone described above, affirming that religion can be explained naturalistically in one sense but not in another. This, in itself, is not objectionable, since the idea that we are not in possession of the completed science that would make religion and all of the events that constitute it explicable in the stronger sense is uncontroversial.

It is not yet clear, however, that Schleiermacher's position does not offend against the idea that religion is naturalistically explicable in a different way. Smith puts his finger on what I regard as the pressing question: whether Schleiermacher should be understood as claiming that the laws in question, and hence the understanding of the natural order that would provide us with the true natural-causal explanation of the incarnation, are hidden from us ‘in principle’ or only contingently (303). It is not an entirely straightforward manner to give a clear sense to this distinction between in-principle and contingent ‘hiddenness’. But let us suppose that a law is hidden contingently if it would be possible for human beings with the proper (natural) mode of access to phenomena governed by the law, and equipped with the proper investigative tools, to discover the law, and a law is hidden in principle if, say, God has deliberately established it in such a way that, although it operates within the natural order, no amount of human investigation can uncover it.Footnote ²⁸

If Schleiermacher's position was that the laws governing the sequence of historical events resulting in the incarnation are hidden ‘in principle’ in this sense, then he was claiming that the true natural explanation of the incarnation will forever elude our grasp. This position would offend against the idea that religion is naturalistically explicable in a fairly obvious way. Although the position is not incompatible with religious naturalism as I have been using the term (i.e. it is not incompatible with the denial that the incarnation involved supernatural intervention in the natural order), according to this position, the only one who could ever set out the true natural explanation of religion would be God. If I were convinced that this was Schleiermacher's position, then, the proper thing to do would be to make it clear that Schleiermacher's religious naturalism specifically incorporates resistance to the idea that religion can be explained naturalistically.

‘Dole might respond’ to this problem, suggests Smith, ‘by saying that Schleiermacher believed that such laws could “in principle” be discovered, and that they would then furnish a naturalistic explanation’ (303). Smith moves quickly away from this possibility, but my response to the problem does indeed lie in this vicinity. My view is that the texts do not settle the matter of whether Schleiermacher believed that the laws in question were ‘hidden’ in principle or only contingently. It is not clear, for example, whether Schleiermacher was claiming in-principle hiddenness or merely proposing this idea as a hypothesis when he argued in §13.1 that the incarnation must be regarded as an action of human nature, prepared for by all its past history, ‘even if we grant (auch gesetzt) that we could never penetrate so deep into those innermost secrets of the universal spiritual life as to be able to develop this general conviction into a definite perception’.Footnote ²⁹

I do not think, however, that we must leave the question entirely open. Even if the texts do not settle the matter entirely, two considerations suggest that it is highly unlikely that Schleiermacher's position was that the laws governing the events leading up to the incarnation are ‘hidden’ in the stronger sense.

First, it is not clear how Schleiermacher could have claimed to know that the relevant laws are such that we could never discover them. Schleiermacher was not, in general, one to assume a ‘God's-eye’ view; and it seems to me that the claim that something has been deliberately hidden by God from human comprehension is the sort of thing that one could know to be true only by virtue of sharing the divine viewpoint. The fact of this in-principle hiddenness could, of course, make its way into human comprehension by way of God's directly revealing it to human beings; but such a supposition is alien to Schleiermacher's understanding of the relationship between God and the world.

Second, so far as I can see, Schleiermacher had no reason to insist on the in-principle hiddenness of the laws in question, because he had no stake in the true natural-causal explanation of the incarnation forever eluding remaining humanity. He did have a stake in maintaining the inexplicability of that event relative to a particular context (viz. the natural procreative powers of fallen humanity), because this constituted his grounds for ascribing to the incarnation the status of a ‘supernatural event’. But the ascription of this status does not require the natural-causal inexplicability tout court of the appearance of perfect God-consciousness in Jesus – indeed, as I originally argued, the very reason why Schleiermacher offered a revisionary account of the ‘supernatural’ status of the incarnation was to secure the ascription of this status against the eventual attainment by the sciences of ‘comprehensive knowledge of the world’.Footnote ³⁰

There is something of a glass-half-empty/glass-half-full character to the interpretive options facing us. On a reading that Smith might defend, Schleiermacher's point is that whatever insights human beings might attain into the workings of the natural order, we could never explain the incarnation as a natural fact; it is destined to forever remain ‘inaccessible to naturalistic explanation’. On the reading I prefer, his point is that although we cannot and indeed even if we grant that we never could present a natural-causal explanation of the incarnation, we ought nevertheless to believe that it is a ‘natural fact’, and so ought to postulate the existence of natural laws governing the event.

Revisiting Otto

In the interest of brevity I pass quickly over two points on which Smith is correct: Otto and Schleiermacher both opposed ‘mechanistic reductionism’, and both thought it possible for religion to advance teleological claims which the empirical sciences could neither confirm nor falsify. Neither of these points impacts my arguments in any significant way, so far as I can see.

I disagree with Smith's reading on a more substantive matter which I have addressed at length elsewhere. I read Schleiermacher as a determinist and a compatibilist about human freedom, one result of which is that his resistance to ‘mechanistic reductionism’ was not predicated on the idea that human activities are not fully determined by prior causes.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, Schleiermacher's ambition for ‘ethics’, which as the ‘science of the principles of history’ is an antecedent of Dilthey's notion of the Geisteswissenschaften, was for it to produce a body of knowledge that ‘stands in the same relation to the study of history in the broadest sense as contemplative natural science does to the knowledge of nature in the broadest sense’.Footnote ³²

This is almost certainly a point of disagreement between Schleiermacher and Otto; in discussing the idea of predestination in The Idea of the Holy, Otto sharply criticizes ‘the form in which [this idea] has been put forward since the time of Schleiermacher, following the tradition of Leibniz and Spinoza’, which he describes as ‘simply a capitulation to natural law and causae secundae, a surrender to the claim of modern psychology that all human resolves and actions are subject to the compelling force of motives, so that a man is unfree and predetermined thereby’. For Otto ‘[t]here can be no more spurious product of theological speculation, no more fundamental falsification of religious conceptions’ than this idea of ‘predetermination by nature, having been identified with the all-embracing efficacy of God’.Footnote ³³

Was Otto a religious naturalist?

By far the most intriguing suggestion in Smith's essay is that perhaps Otto is also ‘open to the charge of explaining religion naturalistically’ (301). In what remains of this essay I will explore the question of whether Otto is properly to be read as a religious naturalist in something like Schleiermacher's sense. Smith highlights Otto's embrace of the idea that the natural world is law-governed and his rejection of the idea that God interferes with the operation of natural laws. If these commitments are indicative of Otto's general sense of how religion is to be understood, then indeed there is much less of a difference between him and Schleiermacher than I have claimed. Indeed, the right thing to say in the end might be that there is nothing significant to distinguish Schleiermacher and Otto, because in sharp contrast to the readings the formed the backdrop of my original essay, both were religious naturalists.

It is certainly possible to extract a position from Otto's texts, including The Idea of the Holy, that is compatible with religious naturalism. In citing Otto's claim that numinous experiences ‘are not themselves perceptions at all, but peculiar interpretations and valuations’ (297), for example, Smith draws our attention to a place where Otto describes religious experience in a way which does not depend on any notions of the transcendent intervening in the business of the phenomenal world.Footnote ³⁴ And the same can be said for his citation of Otto's claim that divination ‘is not concerned at all with the way in which a phenomenon … came into existence, but with what it means’ (311).Footnote ³⁵ If everything Otto had to say about religious experience was of this character, the grounds for considering him a religious naturalist would be fairly strong.

But if there are passages that support such a reading, there are also passages, primarily but not exclusively from The Idea of the Holy, that cut rather sharply against it. For this reason I am sceptical of the idea that Otto can be read as a consistent religious naturalist, particularly after his turn to Fries. What I propose to do in the space remaining is to briefly construct a case based on such passages against the idea that Otto was a religious naturalist. I am not certain whether my reading of the recalcitrant texts is the proper one; but it does at least have the virtue of making it clear how Otto could both embrace the idea that religion does not involve any supernaturally caused events and claim that religion involves an awareness of God ‘intervening actively in the phenomenal world’.

I begin with a claim by Smith that, if correct, would support a reading of Otto as a religious naturalist. Smith claims that in The Philosophy of Religion Otto ‘pledges allegiance’ to Luther's view that ‘God works ‘through the instrument’, i.e. that the whole system of ‘second causes’ is none other than the form of all-powerful divine action and that it is just in the middle causes that we must look for the working of God' (311).Footnote ³⁶ Now if the view is that the entire system of secondary causes is the form that divine activity assumes within time, then one of its entailments is that the influence of the divine over the temporal is, as it were, restricted to what can be accomplished by means of the sorts of causes that operate within territory accessible to natural-scientific investigation. This was essentially Schleiermacher's view; and if it was also Otto's, then there is a clear sense in which he and Schleiermacher would be in close agreement, and it would make sense to think of Otto as a religious naturalist. But in fact Smith's textual claim is not correct.

Five years prior to The Philosophy of Religion, in the conclusion to Naturalism and Religion, Otto offered an assessment of attempts by Christian dogmaticians to distinguish between natural and divine causality: to describe ‘the system of causes and effects within the world, according to which everything natural takes place, the “causae secundariae”; and in addition to these the divine causality co-operating and influencing the others, ordering them with gentle and delicate pressure’.Footnote ³⁷ This conception he labelled as ‘extremely primitive and unfavourable to religion itself’; and more importantly at risk of devolving into ‘the dreaded “Deism”’, according to which ‘God made the world in the beginning, and set the system of natural causes in motion, in such a way that no farther assistance was given, and everything went on of itself’.

In opposition to these ‘crude fabrications of the dogmaticians’, Otto argued that ‘Religion possesses, without the aid of any stilted and artificial theories … the experience of the revelation and communication of the Divine in the great developments and movements of spiritual and religious history’. And in defence of this claim he cited the ‘insufficiency of our causal study in general’, and in particular the fact that ‘[e]ven when we have established it as a fact that all phenomena are linked together in a chain of causes we are still far from having discovered how things actually come to pass’. Otto then cited Kant's philosophy, which ‘destroys the charm of the “purely causal view” by showing that this in itself cannot be made complete and is therefore contradictory’, as an advance relative to the doctrine of secondary causes.Footnote ³⁸ This citation repeats a theme expressed previously in the same text: that modern philosophy, with its ‘criticism of knowledge’, has come around to a view quite similar to the ‘very essence of religion’, which is ‘to distinguish this world from, and contrast it as insufficient with the real world which is sufficient, to regard this world which we see and know and possess as only an image, as only transiently real’.Footnote ³⁹

The passage from The Philosophy of Religion cited by Smith is part of Otto's initial placement of Fries within the history of ideas, and it repeats the movement of the conclusion of Naturalism and Religion. Otto cited Luther's ‘clumsy philosophic attempts’ as an advance on earlier views, but distanced himself from Luther fairly quickly. Luther's conception, he observed, ‘has a long run of development in the theology of the Aufklärung’, appearing, for example, in Hobbes as the notion that ‘Nature itself is nothing more than form of the universal divine operation’, and also in the philosophies of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke, and finally after a brief ‘recession’, emerging vividly in Goethe and Herder.Footnote ⁴⁰ But the decisive endpoint of this trajectory, according to Otto, lay in Kant's transcendental idealism:

It is this ‘great liberating doctrine’ that laid the groundwork for Fries, who finally solved the ‘most formidable problem in the Aufklärung theology, the problem set by the new science of Nature's legality’, by ‘demonstrating that faith is a form of higher knowledge … in comparison with which ordinary knowledge can but claim to be valid for phenomena; by searching for the power to become conscious of the eternal world of faith within the world of phenomena’.Footnote ⁴² And it is precisely through the faculty of Ahnung postulated by Fries that human beings can become conscious of this ‘eternal world’; as Otto argued later, ‘[n]ot by faith alone can we in conviction confront the world of Appearance with the true one, the World of Idea; we can become aware of the latter as a reality, and a reality fraught with blessing, by experience’.Footnote ⁴³ Through Ahnung ‘we understand without any medium the Eternal in the Temporal, and the Temporal as an appearance of the Eternal’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Kant and Fries, then, provided Otto with the philosophical resources to make two claims. The first of these is that the world that is accessible to scientific investigation and natural-causal explanation is but an inadequate image of the ‘real world’, the dynamics of which are not governed by natural law and are not scientifically accessible. And second is that human beings have experiential access, by means of Ahnung, to the intersection of this ‘real world’ with the world of phenomena.

Consider, now, Otto's introduction to the topic of ‘divination’ in The Idea of the Holy:

Now if Otto were a religious naturalist in the same sense as Schleiermacher, dedicated to the proposition that God works only through secondary causes without interfering in the natural laws that govern their operation, then it is fairly clear that he would not be able to assent to the idea of the divine ‘intervening actively in the phenomenal world’. The above passage, then, poses a problem for a reading of Otto as a religious naturalist: here he seems to embrace, as essential to religion itself, an idea that religious naturalism rules out.

Against the background of Kant and especially Fries, we can understand the sense in which Otto meant his proposal to do justice to this ‘fundamental conviction of religion as such’, without supposing that religion assumes the operation of ‘supernatural causes’. If the ‘real world’ intersects and interacts with the phenomenal world in ways that cannot be parsed in causal terms, and thus in respects that are inaccessible to natural-scientific investigation, then the kind of ‘presence’ and ‘intervention’ of the transcendent within the immanent that religion supposes does not require the abrogation of natural laws and does not involve the operation of ‘causes’. The special faculty of ‘divination’ renders certain individuals capable of perceiving instances of this non-causal interaction; and thus ‘numinous experience’, inasmuch as it involves an encounter with a transcendent object, is a matter of cognitive access to a stratum of reality that is always and everywhere interwoven with the natural, but is inaccessible to natural-causal investigation and explanation. In other words, on my reading Otto's affirmation of the view of the phenomenal world as without exception law-governed was not also an affirmation of the view that God (or the numinous, or the transcendent) does not intervene in or appear within the phenomenal world.

Now if it is correct to interpret Otto's talk of ‘encounter’ and ‘active intervention’ of the divine in the phenomenal world in this way, then there is a clear sense in which he was not a religious naturalist. Since the presence or activity of the transcendent within the immanent will elude natural-causal explanation, ‘numinous experience’ will also elude such explanation to the extent that it is the product of such presence or intervention. On the reading I am urging, Otto rejects the idea of supernatural causality at the same time he embraces the idea that religion involves awareness of a non- or supra-causal influence of the divine on the natural.

The supposition of a kind of influence on the natural order that cannot be parsed in causal terms might seem exotic and implausible; and indeed, I am far from certain that the reading I propose here is the correct one. But it seems to me that something of the sort is required in order to make sense of Otto's apparent approval of the language of ‘encounter’ and ‘active intervention’ against the background of his rejection of supernatural causes. I note that in a sense it is not controversial to attribute such a position to Otto; in the pages of this journal David Bastow, for instance, has summarized the ‘theory-claim’ of The Idea of the Holy as the claim that that ‘All religions involve and rest on the numinous, which affords a positive knowledge of the central object of religion – God’; or stated differently, that ‘religious phenomena are due to the action of some Transcendent being; numinous experiences are explained as being a meeting with a numen’.Footnote ⁴⁶