The Philosophy of Religion (a textbook by Friedo Ricken S.J.)

(Friedo Ricken: Religionsphilosophie, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003)

Father Ricken, professor at the College for Philosophy in Munich, an excellent Aristotelian indeed, whom I saw once during a lecture, published 2003 a textbook on the philosophy of religion. What strikes me most is that he begins with Wittgenstein, but criticizes in the preface the analytical approach of Richard Swinburne & Alvin Platinga, both offered a proof for the existence of God. He rejects both proofs as not sufficient. So what is specifically interesting with Wittgenstein, who is quoted in the first chapter to say:

Though I am not a religious person, but I can't otherwise: I see each problem from a religious point of view (m. translation, PR 121)?

The critique of Wittgenstein on the Metaphysics is used by Ricken to show that philosophy, other than Plantiga and Swineburne believe, can't prove the truth of religion. But the philosophy can enhance our conscientiousness of the basic religious phenomena in our everyday life. It can, thus Ricken, "uncover trails of religious reaction and symbolic in a secularized culture" (page 56). Philosophy shows the boundaries of language and reason, and that the room within these boundaries is too narrow to live in. In this way, philosophy can tell us to transcendent these bounds.

Then he mentions William James with his thesis of religion as a basic action, Peirce (The Marriage of Religion and Science), and Newman (An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent 1870)

After mentioning these modern philosophers, he writes about Schleiermacher, Kant, Hume and Pascal in the second half of his book, the standard authors of philosophy of religion, and ends with Thomas Aquinas, Augustin and Plotin!

Don't have time enough to read the book carefully, but the composition is quite strange. Why shall it end with Plotin? If the book doesn't have a chronological order, then it should have thematic circles. But I can discern none. And if the older authors come later in this book, they must be in the opinion of Father Ricken more insightful than the modern philosophers? But why Plotin, the philosophical mystic as the capstone? His philosophy is a kind of mysticism. Not that Plotin gives us some valuable insights into the nature of religion. His philosophy is a kind of religion, a religion without revelation, and relying solely on the capacity of human souls.

I am afraid that Father Ricken has a different notion of "philosophy of religion" than I. I understand under this term a rational description and explanation of religion, but he understands under this term a rational tool for religion. Well, in the old sense of Thomas: Philosophy as ancilla theologiae. But what else can you await from a Jesuit?