Revelation and History: Schelling, Mohler and Congar: Thomas F. O'Meara

Thomas F. O’Meara, O.P.
Revelation and History:

Schelling, Mohler and Congar
This essay will explore the modern union of revelation and history, the
interpretation of Christianity as a historical unfolding of a divine idea
and power. We will see how the view of revelation as a process of
disclosure reaches from the great idealist systems grounded in science
and art to Roman Catholicism’s new self-understanding after Vatican 11.
Our first purpose is to understand how a union of revelation and
history entered Western modern thought in the years after 1800 through
Schelling, the philosopher of both idealism and romanticism. Thereby
we will learn something of modern philosophy’s rapid development from
Kant through the radical transcendentalism of Fichte to Schelling, sur-
passing both the new natural science and a temporal culmination in
aesthetics. History enters Schelling’s thought in his Lectures on
Academic Studies, a work which brings also his first formal considera-
tion of religion and Christianity. These pages have a second goal: to
show the impact of the Academic Lectures upon Roman Catholic
theology in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The influence of
Schelling upon Johann Adam Mohler in the 1820s and Yves Congar in
the 1930s leads to the momentous religious and cultural event of the
Second Vatican Council and raises questions about the role of modern
philosophy today in Catholic life and thought. Schelling’s philosophy at
the time of the Lectures is at the crossroads of many forces, being not
only the source for a single transcendental foundation for all of science
but the backdrop for the new criticism of literature and art in the sudden
advent of romanticism. With a dialectic of absolute and history, we
already have in 1803 the idealist system often ascribed solely to HegeI.
So motifs from German idealism were formative of Vatican I1 and then
at work in the post-conciliar world: motifs like subjectivity as process;
revelation as history; the absolute in dialectical forms.
I
SCHELLING, REVELATION AND UNIVERSAL PHILOSOPHY
By the end of his seminary education in 1794, Schelling viewed Chris-

tianity as moribund, isolated in a dry Lutheran orthodoxy or entangled
in a manipulated Kantianism. He identified the New Testament’s
“kingdom of God” with politics after the French Revolution and with
philosophy after Fichte (1, 112).’ The young man who graduated fro’m
the Tubingen Stvt at the head of his class, puzzling over his future while
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18 IRISH THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
a tutor in Leipzig, wrote his parents in 1797: “Theology is not for me

any more”.* Rather suddenly in 1800 while he was lecturing in Jena and
living at the centre of the Schlegels’ romantic circle, his first true system
united the two enterprises he had passed through before reaching his
twenty-fifth year - transcendental Wissenschaft and philosophy of
nature - and at its conclusion a “God” appeared, a “revealing” God.
Two years later in the lectures on the faculties of a university, chapters
were devoted to Christianity and t o theology.
The Academic Studies were written during the philosopher’s most
prolific period in the decade before 1810 and can be listed among Schell-
ing’s particularly influential works. Schelling’s application of his chang-
ing philosophy to a university was presented as lectures in the summer
semesters of 1802 and 1803 at Jena and were published by Cotta at
Easter, 1803. This is during Schelling’s second Jena period: he had
returned from his wdrk in medicine at Bamberg; he and Caroline
Schlegel had decided to marry; Hegel was in Jena and would produce
with Schelling their Kritisches Journal; a separation from Fichte’s
thought and person had begun after the publication of the System of
1800 with a central disagreement over the expansion of transcendental
philosophy into nature and art, and the drawing of the absolute beyond
absolute knowing.
Within ten years, Fichte (1807), Schleiermacher (1808), W. von Hum-
boldt (1809), H. Steffens (1809), Hegel (1812) and others wrote univer-
sity plans. One reason for the emergence of this new genre was the
expanding function of the German university. Then too, the young
philosophers of the young nineteenth century had aspirations towards
overseeing the transcendental world of all knowing and freedom. Fichte
had made philosophy into an all-organizing Wissenschaft whose forma-
tion of the knowing self involves the identity and then separate disclosure
of the absolute’s ideas in the various horizons of reality. The all-
encompassing hen kai pan corresponded literally to the universitas. The
lectures situate the various worlds of the university faculties in a
transcendental philosophy which Schelling has recently transposed into
a theory of history. “These are the same sciences,” Jean-Franqois Mar-
quet observes, “that Faust invokes at the beginning of his famous open-
ing monologue, and which Hegel’s Encyclopedia takes as its plan (except
that theology is transformed in the Logik into the science of the idea)”.3
Lecture eight deals with the nature of Christianity and lecture nine with
theology; the former is the more significant.
“In Nature . . . Spirit’s Odyssey”

Schelling found the absolute dominating Fichte’s thought to be a central
but unfinished enterprise. Reason does not explain its own origins but
has a ground and a history. The absolute identity has been distinguished
REVELATION AND HISTORY 19
into the ideal and the real. Both the realms of spirit and nature mirror
the process of the absolute revealing itself, but now the ideal and the real
are glimpsed together in history, in a way superior t o nature. History,
’“the true centre of the objectification of philosophy’’ (3, 283). appears
as a kind of revelation.
The dialectic of the ideal and the real explains Schelling’s thought
here. His thinking in six years had moved from a Fichtean transcendental
subjectivity through the influence of Spinoza and a philosophy of an
objective nature, whose structures were being revealed in the new
sciences of electricity, chemistry and magnetism, to art and history. Both
nature and consciousness were disclosing their forms, and ultimately
their ground was one for nature too revealed the “Odyssey of Geist”.
The ideal becomes disclosed in the realms of the real; while reality’s
being is not simply existence but the forms of life. The mysterious struc-
tures of nature and the objectification of the iranscendental led to objec-
tive idealism and to romantic idealism. The ideal appearing in the real,
the emergence of the absolute through its ideas in finite nature and
human consciousness, an interplay of polar processes which compose a
drama divine and human - this is how Schelling will describe “Offen-
barung ”.
History and Revelation

Revelation has to d o with some kind of idea about god or gods (5, 286).
The interplay of history and consciousness manifest in religion has gone
through three periods under three “ideas”: nature, destiny and pro-
vidence. In the period of nature both the ideal and the real are emersed
in the real. Then, separating from harmonious nature, eternal necessity
reveals itself as destiny; this brought conflict with freedom, a universal
Fall whose subsequent unfolding will be history. Christianity leads in the
third period, providential not in the sense of a governing, supreme God
(transcendent God has not been mentioned) but in the sense of knowing’s
insight into the universe as history. “This (is) the reason why the science
of religion is in itself inseparable from history, indeed must be fully one
with it” (5, 291). Religion undergoes metamorphoses but its goal is
revelation as disclosure in history.
Schelling contrasts revelation with Greek religion where nature froze
both ideal and real into “perduring, immutable forms” (5, 288). Nature
is ultimately outside of time, co-eternal with the absolute. On the other
hand, when the universality of reality is permeated by history, the infinite
can become more richly, more immediately present. The flow of history
with changing and varied figures is revelation. “Every particular moment
of time is revelation of a particular aspect of God in each of which it is
absolute; what Greek religion has as a simultaneity, Christianity has suc-
cessively . . .” ( 5 , 288).
The Meaning of Revelation
If it is clear that revelation has the form of history coursing through it,
still it is not so easy to grasp what for Schelling is being revealed. The
revelafa cannot be facts or information about a distinct, absolute being.
Revelation in history is not a message distinct from history, nor is history
a backdrop for special prophetic events and discourses. Rather, broad
forms or strokes of universal forms are perceived in and with knowing.
The process of the absolute in history. is witnessed t o by the distinction
and interplay of the reaIms of the real and the ideal. The revealed is the
divine (5, 289) but as the esoteric dimension or knowledge of the ideal
prior to the distinctions of the real and the ideal but manifest to us only
in their interplay.
Revelation belongs to the ideal realm, but, since it remains not the
unknown but the disclosed, it is not simply ideal. “In the ideal world,
which is history, the divine particularly removes its covering; it (history)
is the mystery of the divine kingdom expressed” (5, 289). Nature
remained opaque and mysterious even in its new discoveries of electricity
and chemistry. In history the idea! is set forth.
The Idea Revealed
The “ideal principle” (5, 292), Geisf, is disclosed through a process of

self-mediation facilitated in the realm of the finite by history. “Idea”
mediates between the absolute (where there is an identity of ideal and
real) and the real; a world unto itself, the idea contains a vital dynamic
towards the progressive particularisation of its form and content in the
finite.
What is an idea? The idea is the goal and essence of idealism: It is of
greater importance than the more popular aspects of that philosophy
such as dialectic, pantheism, logic. While the absolute is an immortal
knowing which is the grounding idea of all things, there are ideas govern-
ing sub-worlds. Through ideas, transcendental knowing is finitised,
realised, materialized by its entry into the forms of being. “The ideas are
the souls of things” ( 5 , 318). This positing of the infinite in the finite
occurs in the real world to make manifest t o consciousness the deeper,
governing arrangement of an area of reality and life. An idea arranging
reality is a ‘‘Construktion” (5, 292).‘ The perspective of the idea realized
in finite beings helps us understand why Schelling’s thought is an
idealism; it is an objective idealism and (because of the romantic over-
tones of insight into self and world) a romantic idealism. It is an idealism
unfolding in organic process, an idealism whose meditation from
absolute to existent has become, in art and religion, revelation.
The Idea of Christianity
The idea of Christianity is Christ, and Christ is nothing more than the
universal realisation of idea of all religion. The idea of Christianity is
incarnation, or (differently in the German) Menschwerdttng, “becoming
a human person”. For Wissenschaft to treat the human person, it must
recognise the human “idea” which is the unity of body and spirit ( 5 ,
270).
The first idea of Christianity is therefore of necessity the incarnate

God, Christ as the pinnacle and end of the oId worId of the gods.
He finitizes in himself the divine but he does not draw humanity into
its loftiness but into its lowliness, and appears as a phenomenon
determined from eternity but passing in time, as the borderline of
both worlds. He himself returns into the invisible and promises in
his place not the principles coming into finitude to remain, but the
spirit, the ideal which much more leads the finite to the infinite, and
as such is the light of a new world (5, 292).
If in the works before 1802 art stood at the end of the’ unfolding of
human consciousness, we might say that now at the central point of the
corridor of art Christ stands, but Christ as an interplay of the ideal and
real in a human person who is the power of God. In Christianity (and
its Wissenschaft, theology) what is crucial is its construction as a wider
discernment and systematization of the idea immanent in reality, form,
epoch and person ( 5 , 325). Christianity is not poetry or an arcane sym-
bolism (which must have as its form a mythology) lost in the “transitory
phenomena” (5, 293) of mysteries. It is a religion whose idea is the cen-
tral dynamic form of Schelling’s view of “Wissenschaft ”. Christianity is,
an intuitive view into the infinite present in the finite; its primal symbol
is aIso history; the showplace of freedom and necessity, of dynamic pro-
cess of ideal and real.
Incarnation is the central idea of all reality. In Christ, the ideal prin-
ciple leads the finite to the infinite. “. . . The truly infinite came into
finitude not to divinize it, but in its own person, t o offer (and thereby
to reconcile) it” (5, 292). As alluded to in St Paul’s metaphor of Christ
as the head of his body (Eph Ii16), revelation and incarnation are co-
extensive with history, indeed with eternity. “The incarnation of God is
an incarnation from eternity. The human being Christ is in his
appearance only the pinnacle and t o that extent also the beginning of
this; for from him this is continued by all of his followers being members
of one and same body of which he‘is the head. That God first in Christ
became truly objective - this is shown by history; for who before him
revealed the infinite in such a way?’’ (5, 298).
Revelation does not disdain in history some particularity and con-
cretization. The church mirrors the ideal realm as a “living work of art”
of what is scattered, while mysticism is “in general a subjective sym-
bolics” (5, 293f.) not foreign to transcendental Anschauung. When
either of these - through the excessive objectification of rituals and
frozen dogmas or by subjecting and demeaning the mystical - bans the
esoteric, it has simply returned to the earlier forms of nature religion
dominated by the real. Schelling’s romantic idealism is not the logic of
mental forms but a central dynamic revealing the somewhat esoteric in
the real.
The Task of Theology
The university lecture on the essence of Christianity interpreted Christ in

terms of the new philosophy, while the subsequent lecture on theology
dealt mainly with what Schelling saw as the failures of theology in his
time. “When I find it difficult to talk about the study of theology that
is because I must view that way of knowing and the entire standpoint out
of which its truths intend to be grasped as lost and astray” (5,296). What
is essential for theology is “the connection of the speculative and
historical construction of Christianity and its highest teachings” (5,304).
Lecture nine bemoans the reduction of the idea of Christianity into
forms which with the passing of history must inevitably appear dead.
Schelling is not speaking of medieval or patristic theologies but of those
auflkirisch texts in religion and morality appearing after the major
works of Kant and Fichte, half-hearted attempts he had witnessed in the
Tiibingen Seminary and at the University of Leipzig.l’
Schelling’s interpretation is quite different from that of Kant and the
Enlightenment who sought to interpret religion as a moral, practical
dynamic or to reduce revelation to an ethic. The Jena Dozent observed
that “the new . . . (pseudo-) Enlightenment which in terms of Chris-
tianity might rather be called a dis-Enlightenment” (5, 303) is a half-way
house between “dogmatism” and “criticism”. Kant was being used
merely to support further dogmatisms. Its scholarship, its textual work,
its theological interpretation (whether reflecting Lutheran Orthodoxy,
the Enlightenment or a combination of the two) have pursued in a dif-
ferent way the empirical style which misrepresents even as it deadens
Christianity. “Connected to this is the popular watering-down method
through which, under the view that this or that is only the literary style
of inflated speech common to orientals, the flat concepts of modern
morality and religion are read into these documents” ( 5 , 303).
The idea, the esoteric but omnipresent aspect of Christianity must step
forth welcomed by the new sense of mind, freedom and history, “the
spirit of the new world”. The modern world itself is revelation: “bearing
the infinite in eternally new forms”. That same world has made it quite
clear how “Christianity intends to be not an individual empirical
appearance but that eternal idea itself”. What Hegel and Schelling
viewed in 1795 as their delivery of the Kingdom of God through a univer-
sal science remains: “the rebirth of esoteric Christianity as the proclama-
tion of the absolute gospel in sich” (5, 305).
Revelation and Philosophy
How should we understand Schelling’s philosophy of revelation?

First, only a superficial reading would assert that the young
philosopher had made God and the world one; or, on the other hand,
that he had rehabilitated the Christian Gospel.
Schelling had little interest in a revelation of supernatural ideas and
theophanic facts. Revelation is the disclosure (offenbaren), ground and
temporal framework of reality. Is there a ground or a content for this
revelation distinct from the universe? The identity and distinctness of
God are still unclear. For the absolute, where thinking and being are the
same, this process unfolds its construction in different forms. A primal
identity gives birth to various realisations: “the birth of all things out of
God or the Absolute . . .in the eternal act of subject-objectification” (5,
324). While Schelling is not attacking or dismissing religion, he is already
arguing that its deepest meaning is one with what he considers to be the
definitive Wissenschaft. His philosophy brings truth and salvation. Here
is the point of departure for the attitude - ministerial, overbearing or
hostile - of modern philosophy to Christianity prior to the advent of the
new positivisms in the 1870s.
Second, the absolute is not a separate, objectified personality with
information for creatures; nor is it an unknown, utterly different, infinite
immensity whose wealth of being excludes knowability. Although after
1800 the word “God” enters Schelling’s writings, we must be careful not
to read traditional religious or theological meanings into this philosophy.
The absolute is the ensemble of reality, an identity which is not neces-
sarily a distinct being, a source of forms and powers which is nonetheless
immanent to them and realised in them. The role of revelation - this God
does not exist but is through self-revealing - describes and ensures not
a transcendent source of religion but an immanent absolute unfolded in
the interplay of ideal and real.
Third, transcendenta1 philosophy has received history into its very
essence. It is not emotion or solitude which marks romantic and idealist
philosophy but process and history contemptuous of the half-way house
of Kant’s categories and Newton’s mathematics. But does our world
have a true history if it lacks a ground, an origin and a goal somehow
distinct from itself? Is religion no more than history? Schelling’s
philosophy of history may, in the last analysis, be a history of con-
sciousness, even human but not of a distinct reality. In this, however, he
sets the stage for Hegel, Troeltsch and Tillich.
I1
SCHELLING AND CATHOLIC THEOLOGY IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
Delivered in lecture form in both Jena and Wiirzburg, upon publication

Schelling’s views on the university were a considerable success. We want
to see its surprising influence in Roman Catholic theology.6
Only in recent decades has the history of German Catholic theology
in the past century in Germany been researched. For long it was widely
thought that Catholic theology throughout the nineteenth century con-
sisted in a line of neo-scholasticism marred by a few unusual modernists.
In fact, the movements of neo-scholasticism and modernism appeared
after the period which interests us. Roman Catholic intellectual life
underwent an extraordinary renaissance in Germany beginning about
1795 and lasting through the 1830s. This coincided with, indeed was
caused by, the unexpectedly rapid move from Aufllarung t o Romantik.’
Since the early 1700s, scholasticism had been almost extinct in the
German-speaking world, occasionally replaced by an unsatisfactory
positive theology such as the Theologia Wirceburgensis of 1770s. There
were Catholic Kantians, and the court of the Wittelsbachs in Munich
pursued an Enlightenment Politik for Bavaria. New views of science and
art and a transcendental philosophy which ended in an Anschauung
similar to mysticism brought in the 1790s to Rhenish and South German
intellectual centres the import of a new age. Schelling’s unexpected loca-
tion after I804 in the Catholic South explains why he became a mentor
and catalyst for much of Catholic intellectual life in Germany in the first
decades of the nineteenth century. Oddly enough, it was his natural
philosophy, enthusiastically appropriated by medical faculties in
Bavaria, which first attracted the attention of German Catholicism; doc-
tors and teachers were his first followers and they arranged for an
honorary doctorate in medicine from Landshut in 1802 and for a pro-
fessorship in Wiirzburg in 1803.
Among the philosophical works of perduring influence on this new
Catholic intellectual renaissance was the Vorlesungen iiber die Methode
des akademischen Studiums. The Tiibingen school is the most important
example of a theology influenced by Schelling, a theology where doctrine
and church describe a fundamental revelation in and through history.*
Johann Sebastian Drey and Johann Adam Mohler (University

of Tubingen)
In 1817 the Catholic seminary of Ellwangen, recently created a univer-
sity, was moved to Tubingen which, from that time on, possessed two
theological faculties: one Protestant and one Catholic. Johann Sebastian
Drey (1777-1853)moved with the school and became its professor of
systematic and historical theology. At forty, Drey had a clear idea of the
direction he believed Catholic intellectual life should follow.

Transcendental philosophy and romantic aesthetics offered suggestions
for a new thology. He founded the Theologische Qrrarfalschr$ in 1819
and published in the first volume an essay on the nature of Catholicism.
There soon appeared A Short Introduction to the Sttrdy of Theology
prepared for by an address o n “the contemporary condition of
theology” given to the clergy of Constance in 181I . Behind both works
lie Schelling’s philosophy of revelation and Christianity. As Drey
observed in the Kurze Einleitung: “Individual, particularly stimulating
remarks concerning the scientific view of Christianity and a more
scientific treatment of theology can be found in Schelling’s Lecfures on
the Method of Academic S t ~ d i e s ” Schelling’s
.~ philosophy of nature had
been studied by Drey quite early and according to J. R. Geiselmann, “
The entire problematic (of the works on revising theology) is given by the
reading of the lectures on academic studies in 1803. Schelling is the
source from which Drey drew”.’O The complaint about azrfklarisch
empiricism in theology, the central role of history, the enfolding of the
“idea” of Christianity, the critique of excessive objectification in books
and objects - these central themes for Drey recall the Academic Lecfures,
eight and nine. Although Catholicism has a deep investment in the
historical objectification of revelation, Drey valued the Schellingian con-
stellation of insight, the living self (individual and collective) and the
totality of history as the unavoidable organ of revelation. He made them
all central to his theology of faith, dogma, sacrament and church.
Revelation is not something distinct from the being and mind of God,
and its presence to us finds access within our consciousness. “All faith
and all knowledge rests in the darkly felt or clearly recognized presup-
position that everything finite, all that exists, has not only emerged from
an eternal and absolute ground, but is also rooted and born in that
primal ground with this temporal being and life . . . The presentation of
God is the presentation of his essence in something other that is not God,
and consequently outside of God. Outside of God is the universe, and
only this. All revelation of God can only happen in the universe.”
Polarity, presented first in Schelling’s natural philosophy and then
applied to the other disciplines in a university, was of great significance
to the Catholic Tiibingen theologian. The vital continued on in a polar
dialectic, while the interplay of the ideal and real gave the theologian
hermeneutical tools by which he could better understand the history and
originality of ecclesial and dogmatic forms through the centuries. For
Drey the ideal was the inner spirit of God revealed in plan and decree
while the real was the history of Christian dogma and theology.’*
Naturally Drey placed greater value upon the historically empirical fact
to which the Christian faith bore witness and which was itself destined
to offer the dynamic and meaning of religious and secular history.
“Christianity as a positive, divine religion is a temporal phenomenon, a
fact”.13 Drey, intent upon preserving the divine transcendence and

freedom, saw history itself as a decree of God, guided by his free Spirit
to religious goals; the unfolding of a distinct divine idea but not of the
vital absolute itself. Drey had to explain how theology could be a
Wissenschaft even if his theology admitted the contingently historical in
Christian revelation and eschewed identifying the ideal with the neces-
sary.I4
For Drey the idea of Christianity was not the incarnation of Jesus but
the Kingdom of God. The complaint about empiricism in theology, the
central role of history, the enfolding of the “idea” of Christianity, the
critique of excessive objectification in books and objects - these became
central themes for Drey. For the parent of the Tubingen school, the ideal
expressed the inner spirit of God revealed in plan and decree while the
real was the history of Christian dogma and theology.“The presentation
of God is the presentation of his essence in another which is not God and
which in this way exists outside of him. Outside of God is the universe,
and only this. All revelation of God therefore can take place only in the
universe, and the universe itself is this revelation. Like religion, rcvela-
tion is from the beginning; it continues on and can never end”.I5
. . .the empirical-historical knowledge (Kenntniss)of Christianity is

raised to a proper science (Wissenschaft) when its content is brought
back to an idea . . . Because of the absolute necessity and truth
which this idea of the Kingdom of God has for reason, the same
character of necessity and truth is achieved by all the appearances
of this Kingdom in the history of mankind, and by all the doctFines
of Christianity, which uncover and explain the mysteries (the plan
and the organisation of the Kingdom) in this same history.I6
Obviously the Catholic theologian placed greater value upon the

historically empirical fact to which the Christian faith bore witness and
which was itself destined to offer the dynamic and meaning of religious
and secular history. Drey, intent upon preserving the divine
transcendence and freedom, saw history itself as a decree of God, guided
by his free Spirit, unfolding a divine idea but not the absolute itse1f.A~
with Schelling’s Vorlesungen, mysticism and the church concluded theo-
logical science. If the Kingdom of God was the Christian idea par
excellence, the church was its real embodiment. History best concretizes
an idea not in books but in a developing society which is an organic, col-
lective self. The church is “the living self-handing-on
(‘‘Selbstu berlieferung ”) of tradition’ ’.
Drey stands at the beginning of the romantic-idealist renaissance of
German Catholicism; but the line of verifiable influence into our own
times - fragile but of considerable importance - is found with Drey’s dis-
ciple, Johann Adam Mohler (1796-1838). Later in his career Mohler
turned more to historical research and was influenced philosophically

more by Hegel, but in his first great work Die Eitiheit in der Kirche the
themes of Schelling’s romantic idealism are active.
Die Einheit in der Kirche is an ecclesiology somewhat formed by
insights drawn from romantic idealism which are then filled out by
theologies drawn from the Church Fathers. The sub-title mentions a
search for the “Principle” of Catholicism. That principle is located in
the Holy Spirit. “Unity”, “Principle”, and “Holy Spirit” correspond
somewhat to the Absolute of Schelling which lives through self-
revelation in the4deal and the real. Mohler published this work when he
was twenty-nine and it brought him considerable fame.’*
The church is multiform unity: mystical, knowing, varied, realized in
external, visible forms; the eternal, visible form of a holy, living power
of love which the Holy Spirit imparts. “The principle of unity of the
Christian Church . . . consists in a life immediately moved through the
Holy Spirit, maintained and continued through the loving communica-
~ church is the body belonging to the spirit of
tion of the f a i t h f ~ l ” . ’The
believers, that spirit which is a consciousness and a faith unfolding itself
from the inner to the outer. How can the church retain its identity and
yet respond to the changes of cultural history and of dogmatic expres-
sion? The inner dynamic in the church, Mohler answered, is not simply
individual or collective consciousness, but the Holy Spirit presented as
life and power. As the soul lives in the human body through the
“organs” of the body, so in the church the spirit lives in faith and love,
in scripture and tradition, in office and charism. Mohler applied dialec-
tical thinking t o the long history of the church to explain change in
dogmatic perspective, growth in theological richness and heresy. When
the church is viewed as an organism which lives in history out of polar
forces (not an archive or a museum), there can be growth, insightful and
original reflection without heresy. The sources of Christianity are not
documents but life-principles - Christ and the Spirit - “which can suc-
cessively unfold these higher seeds of life while retaining their inner vital
unity,a process we see emerging with Paul, continuing with John into the
first centuries and then appearing in a gIorious fruitfulness at the great
Tradition is given particular attention in this book drawn from

patristic ecclesiologies. As the formaIization of the Holy Spirit and
believing consciousness, tradition is the mode by which life and thought
unfold. Tradition runs through all the periods of the church and is alive
at every moment. When the Holy Spirit gives life t o the collectivity of
the faithful, it unites the individual believer through a rich faith to the
entire church past and present. “Tradition is an expression of the Holy
Spirit vivifying the totality of the faithfuI through all ages, living in every
moment and yet expressing itself in forms . . . That tradition cannot be
separated from the life in the church is obvious . . . (tradition is) not
something merely heard . . . but that which sounds ever anew in each
age, continuing the past Word in the church”.*’
Liturgy should own an inner freedom for forms, not be bound to
classical or baroque expressions, but should express the culture. It is the
free expression of religion in the external sphere, the expression of
religious life and the community’s faith. “Liturgy is the presentation of
religious ideas, movement and facts through forms in space, through
bodily symbols and symbolic actions.”22 Mohler struggled with the
dialectics of his age; the objectively experienced and the subjectively
known, the spiritual and the corporeal, the flow of history and the
moment of time. His Geist ultimately was not Hegel’s Logos but, as he
repeatedly said, a vital principle capable of bringing love and learning.
YVES CONGAR AND MOHLER REDISCOVERED
The Catholic Tubingen tradition remained active within Germany even

if its voice was muted through the Modernist period, assuming some new
directions given it by Paul Schanz and Karl Adam. In the 1940s J. R.
Geiselmann began to edit the great German theologians of the early nine-
teenth century. It was, however, a Frenchman who more than anyone
else rehabilitated Mohler’s theology and made it live anew. Formed by
the historian of medieval theology, M. D. Chenu, Yves Congar chosc as
his life’s work the revivification of the theology (and the life) of the
church through a renewal of ecclesiology. Particular attention was to be
paid to the differences in the self-understanding of the church in the
various epochs of two millenia, and to the historical context of church
forms. Yves Conger is arguably the single most influential theologian of
Vatican 11. Richard McBrien writes: “By any reasonable account, Yves
Congar is the most distinguished ecclesiologist of this century’ and
perhaps of the entire post-Tridentine era. No modern theologian’s spirit
was accorded fuller play in the documents of Vatican I1 than Congar’s.
Vatican I1 was a council of the church, and Congar has been a theologian
of the church par excellence”.23 Through the French Dominican Mohler
became a catalyst for movements of renewal leading to Vatican I1 and
had a later impact unimaginable in the 1830s. Congar wrote for a volume
honouring the Tubingen faculty that “Mohler can even today be a vital
source - that is what he was for me over forty years
To a fundamental theology and ecclesiology monopolized by
scholastic and juridical expression, Mohler’s thought offered an alter-
native. “(The thought of Mohler) is characterised mainly by a return to
patristic sources and by a vision of the church best described as organic,
spiritual-pneumatological and sacramental. This current would bear
fruit only at Vatican I1 while from 1850 to 1950 other movements
dominate’’.2s Congar described the influence of Mohler upon him during

a series of interviews, after mentioning his Dominican teachers Chenu
and Gardeil:
Well, first of all, Mohler - the German theologian who died in 1838.
He stands in the line of German romanticism, as a reaction to the
rationalism of the eighteenth century. A vision which is more syn-
thetic, vital, communal; in communion with other people we can
reach a culture of being a people, a faith of a church.
In 1825 Mohler wrote L’UnitPduns f’Eglise. . .He knew very well
Irenaeus, Cyprian, Origen. He had derived from them a vision of
a church as a spiritual organism animated by the Holy Spirit . . .
My attention was drawn t o Mohler (as with so many other things)
by Pkre Chenu. I discovered there a source, the source I needed.
When later I began the collection Ununz Sanctarir I decided to begin
it with a translation of that work of Mohler. It would set the tone
for the collection. For various difficulties with the translation it was
the second work published in the collection. What Mohler did in the
nineteenth century - this became for me an ideal inspiring me in
what I wanted to carry out in the twentieth century, in my own
thought .26
In 1938 (the anniversary year of Mohler’s death) Congar wrote three

major articles on the Tubingen theologian making the theology of the
Einheit again known. The longest piece offered a scholarly description
of Mohler’s life, world and writings, and then surveyed the history of the
reception of the German theol~gian.~’ This work was supported and
enhanced by an article focused on Mohler’s attitude and method in
patristics. “The Fathers are people,” Congar began, “who, more com-
pletely and more totally than others, lived in the church.”2* They were
not scholars or hermits but voices of the church. We hear the tonality of
romantic idealism as Congar continues: “TO live in the church is to be
a living part of an organic totality of which the Holy Spirit is the interior
principle, a principIe continuing the Incarnation of Christ and incor-
porating itself in dogma, worship and the social or hierarchical institu-
~ ~ Spirit is both an objective reality and a subjectively active
t i o n ~ ” .The
principle anticipating the activity of the church.
Such a view of the life of the church in history when transposed to the
realms of believing and knowing raises the idea of tradition. After sum-
marising Mohler’s view of Athanasius, Congar moves to the explanation
of organic vitality within history. “So Mohler worked at presenting the
history of patristic thought not as that of different thinkers or writers
who succeeded each other but as the church itself thinking and
writing.”’O Nor is history a chronological backdrop for dogma written
in Greek but is the context of their life and thought. The church’s vitality
is always rooted in a particular epoch with its own forms. Congar stresses
MohIer’s perception of diversity in these “organs of the Holy Spirit”,
and traces it to their different understanding of the “essence” of Chris-
tianity. Unlike modern thinkers who searched for a single idea or a new
term which would capture fully Christianity, for the Fathers the
“essence” is Jesus Christ, the divine really incarnate in the human.3’
A third article related Mohler to the new (and as yet unaccepted by
Rome) ecumenical movement. Congar was a lonely pioneer in
ecumenism at this time, struggling to develop a theology which would
permit and draw Roman Catholic participation. Mohler’s trip as a young
scholar to see historians, theologians and philosophers at important Ger-
man universities - particularly Schleiermacher, Neander and Marheinke
- was ‘‘a revelati~n”.’~The later, more substantial Syrnbolik is
obviously not so ecumenical, but for Congar the inspiration and genius
of Mijhler is found in his ecclesiological work, Unity in the Church.
Through the scope and assimilative value of its principles, by the
richness, depth and fecundity of its points of view, by its integrative
vision, the book contributes to a liberation of forms in Catholicism
which are ossified and which obscure the reality they would bear. The
vision (of history), the return to sources, particularly the Fathers, the
theology done in terms of life - these outweigh the limitations of the
work. Congar then outlines Mohler’s response to the problem of heresy,
schism and division within the church and churches. All of this has
ecumenical value.
In the next year, 1939, the Dominican’s publication of a French
translation as an early volume within the series Unam Sanctam edited by
Congar as an organ for ecumenical and ecclesiological renewal aroused
Rome’s displeas~re.~’ Congar recalled: “What I was writing (after 1937)
displeased (Rome). There was no heresy with which I could be accused,
but I was suspect. When I published a translation of Mohler, Unity in
the Church, my enemies intensified their efforts. Mohler wasn’t very
popular in Rome; one imagined he was a precursor of modernism (that
wasn’t written but it was said in Roman circles), but I argued that this
was absolutely f a l ~ e . ” ’ ~
Towards a Renewal of Ecclesiology

Mohler and Congar had their .similarities: both struggled against a
scholastic monopoly in ecclesiology, but neither wrote his theology
against any particular school or group; both published ideas which
opened up a new world. In his history of the vast panorama of
ecclesiology Congar described the entry of the school of Tubingen with
its theology drawn from German romanticism bringing “a renewed
vision of the mystery of the church whose fecundity has lastcd t o our
own times”.3s Mohler was not a past figure but a programme for a vital
and ecumenical future.
REVELATION AND HlSTORY 31
In Die Einheit he is under the influence of Schelling’s organic

thought and Schleiermacher’s immanentism; what he finds in the
Fathers suggests to him that the aspect of society (emphasized by the
Enlightenment) must be balanced by institution and hierarchy.
Exterior structures do not create the intimate being of Christianity
nor do they precede it. The church is the community of the faithful,
a community vivified by the Spirit of love from Pentecost. Its exter-
nal constitution is only the manifestation of its essence. Mohler ..
assumes in this pneumatological perspective romantic ideas of
organism and community life. One finds already in the Einheit a
rapid development on the union of the divine and the human in the
incarnation as prototype (“Urbild”) of the church. Moreover, the
union of the divine and the human is seen there under the form of
a personal-substantial union of the Holy Spirit with the
In Mohler’s theology, church led to tradition, a topic in which Congar

became an expert. Congar notes Mohler’s implicit critique of the Baro-
que and the Enlightenment and views tradition again not as texts but as
something living, historical. Tradition is thought and faith com-
municating the whole of Christianity, encompassing scripture and
liturgy, and, Janus-like, looking backwards and forwards. “Through
Fenelon this idea of ‘living tradition’ passed to Sailer, then to Drey and
then to Mohler and the Catholic school of Tiibingen which made it one
of its main Tradition like church enjoyed a progress from
interior presence to external expression. “Starting with the Spirit within
which is for ever striving to find an adequate expression . . ., tradition,
made secure by the identity of the Spirit and by hierarchical succession,
is thus the identity of the meaning o r understanding of faith. It is a n
identity in time, an identity between the consciousness of each individual
believer and the consciousness of all, because it is a consciousness given
to each one when he lives in the communion of all by the Spirit. This
tradition is living because it is not a thing exterior to living souls vivified
by the Spirit”.38 Tradition as the whole life of the church could be well
described as dialectical and organic, sustaining a diversity of charisms
and offices, perspectives and insights. It liberated the church from being
’bound to one age, one technical language, one past liturgy.
Mohler saw in tradition that which effectively brings about the unity
of the Church as the Church formed both by the teaching of Christ
and by Pentecost ..
. The Spirit creates, from within, the unity of
the community, and also the organs or expressions of its special
genius, i.e., its tradition. The heart of all these theological perspec-
tives is the identity of the principle acting throughout the Church’s
duration in the activities by which it builds itself up with that prin-
ciple which was at work from the beginning .39 ..
Congar did not publish Mohler’s ideas simply as a contribution to the

history of ecclesiology, for many of them had become his own. One has
only to read Tradition and Traditions to see that central aspects of this
influential theology - both historical and speculative - are drawn from
the world of Mohler, or from his expression of patristic theologies. They
were destined in the 1960s rather than the 1830s to alter Catholicism’s
self-understanding. “The vision of the Council,” Congar wrote
retrospectively, “has been resolutely that of the history of salvation
completed by e s ~ h a t o l o g y . ” ~ ~
IV
CONCLUSION
Schelling’s career was an exploration of infinite and finite consciousness

mediated in nature, art and then religion. The lectures on a university
mark an early but important turn in his>career:art yields to religion as
the ultimate concretization of the ideal-real. The modern expansion of
the transcendental subject by history would prove to be an idea appealing
to the most diverse and tenacious movements in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, ranging from Marx t o Heidegger.
Through Drey and Mohler the dynamic of Schelling’s romantic
idealism after I800 entered Roman Catholic theology. Some primacy was
given to the subject as spirit; the framework of a dialectical expression
of the esoteric in finite forms as well as the intellectual world of the “con-
struction” were understood and employed; history as permeating the life
and knowing of the subject was acknowledged as was process in social
and cultural life. Mohler joined this to patristic thought with its motifs
of eschatology, life, history and spirituality. Through Congar the
Catholic theologians of Tubingen gained a new life at Vatican 11. “The
importance of Mohler,” Congar wrote, ‘ I . . .is t o open (or, t o re-open)
a truly theo-logical and incarnational ecclesiology . . beyond the .
treatises of ecclesiology done in terms of papal potestas or
apologetic^."^' The motifs of process, history, organic polarity, media-
tion, intuition fashioned an ecclesiology which could move beyond the
static and juridical t o the historical. “Congar’s effort was successful.
Catholic theology would no longer automatically portray the church
.
merely as a societas inaegualis hierarchica . . The idea of the church as
the Body of Christ transformed contemporary ecclesiology. It permeated
the Iiturgical and lay apostolate movements, and these, in turn, affected
the reshaping of contemporary ecclesiology.”‘* This shift Congar con-
cluded is the central contribution of Vatican 11, and the recent Synod re-
affirmed the conciliar ecclesiology through the motif of living com-
munio. Schelling’s ideas of spirit and life, process and polarity, the
unperceived in real but temporal forms perdured.
Our reflections on Schelling have described the entry of German

idealism into Catholic theology in the nineteenth and the twentieth cen-
turies. We must ponder the relationship of our own age to the nineteenth
century. We can recognise some sources of contemporary Catholic
theology and life in subjectivity, process, dialectic and history. At the
same time we should note that contrary to recent expectations that a
technology or fundamentalism of conceptualities would be the vehicles
of grace, we see the influence of idealist thought-forms today in areas as
distinct as Catholicism and Marxism.
Two decades after Vatican 11, it is clear that Western Catholicism is
summoned t o be a world-church. Thinking about how history is presence
and sacrament for the on-going incarnation of the Spirit in the Body of
Christ has liberated an a-historical, scholastic and European Roman
Catholicism for a broad and lengthy future. In one of his last essays,
Congar described the destiny of our ecclesial era as a multi-cultural
incarnation of the Spirit springing from “that fundamentally historical
Pentecost” in which we all participate and live.” Forms and ideas for
that future come from important moments in our modern past.
1. References to Schelling’s works will be placed in the text according to the Cotta edition.
2. F. W. J. Schelling. Briefe und Dokumenfe, 2 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1973). p- 124.
3. LibertP et exisfence (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). p. 259.
4. Cf. V. Verra, “La ‘Construction’ dans la Philosophie de Schelling”. in G. Planty-
Bonjour, ed.. Actualit& de Schelling (Parish: Vrin, 1979), p.. 22ff.; G. Schulte, Die
Wissenschafislehre des sputen Fichfe (Frankfurt: hlostermann. 1971).
5 . Schelling warns that “empirical” interpretations of the Trinity and Christ make no
sense: far from preserving these beliefs, their view of space and time renders them incredi-
ble, meaningless and ossified; nor should his interpretation of revelation be identified with
the history of the church or with the history of religion (5, 2%).
6. For a significant Protestant reaction cf. Schleiermacher’s review in Jenaische Allgemeing
Literatur-Zeitung 96 (1804) 137ff.
7. Cf. Yon der Aufliarung zur Romantik. Geistige Strornungen in Miinchen (Regensburg
Pustet, 1984); Thomas O’bleara, Romuntic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling
and the Theologians (Notre Dame: University Press, 1982).
8. Patriz Benedikt Zimmer (1752-1829) recognised in the last years of the eighteenth cen-
tury that Catholicism must find new philosophical directions. He appreciated the work of
Kant and Fichte but after reading Schelling he wrote to a colleague that now they had found
the true philosophy” (J. Salat, Denkwiirdigkeiten [Landshut: Weber, 18231, p. 263). A
close friend of J. hl. Sailer, Zimmer brought the university worlds of Ingolstadt and then
Landshut to an appreciation of Schelling. He was forced to resign from the latter university
in 1807 for two years because he seemed too much of “a Schellingian”. The Philosopher’s
enemies in hlunich - Enlightenment Catholics - referred to Zimmer’s as an “amalgam of
Schellingian and Catholic teaching” (P. Schaefer, Philosophie und Theologie im obergang
vonder Aufllarung zur Romantik dargestellt an P. B. Zimmer [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck
and Ruprecht, 19711, p. 68; cf. Die Kirche in der katholischen Theologie der
Aufklurungszeit [Munich: Huber, 19741).
Zimmer published in 1805 the lectures he was holding in Landshut more or less privately.
The Philosophische Religionslehre developed “how the philosophy of religion as idealism,
and Christianity - particularly Catholicism, as realism can and must come together”
(Philosophische Religionslehre [Landshut: Weber, 18051, 1, p. v.). Zimmer frequently
alluded to Schelling’s philosophy as his catalytic source, and we can see the influence of
the Vorlesungen in the conception and structure of the Religionslehre. “Following upon
the philosophy of identity of Schelling, Zimmer could ground the possibility of freedom
in God’s activity and in human dependence. This seemed to him to correspond more to the
mode of presentation in the Christian faith. Thus he fell into the influence of this
philosophy. He took the transcendental-philosophical method into foundations for faith
and looked for the conditions of the possibility of revelation and faith.” (P. Schaefer, “P.
B. Zimmer”, Katholische Theologen Deutschlands im 19. Jahrhundert, [hlunich: Kosel.
19751, 1. p. 112). Drey praised Zimmer as “one of the outstanding theologians of the
Catholic Church in Germany over the past thirty years”. “Nekrolog, P. B. Zimmer”,
Theologische Quorfalschrifl 2 (1820) 749. For the influence of Drey and Schelling upon
Zimmer’s view of the church, cf. Schaefer, Kirche rtnd Vernunft, pp. 2S2ff., and for Zim-
mer’s interesting view of the papacy, between Gallicanism and a theory of infallible but
isolated monarchy, cf. U. Horst, Unfehlbarkeit itnd Ceschiclzre (hlainz: hlatthias-
Griinewald, 1982). pp. 156f.
9. Krirze Einleitung (Frankfurt: hlinerva, 1966). p. 57. Wayne Fehr found in Drey’s own
copy of the Einleitung the name “Schelling” written in Drey’s hand next to a passage on
theological science; The Birth of the Catholic Mbingen School: Theological Dogmatics of
J. S. Drey (Chico: Scholars Press, 1981). p. 29.
10. “Die Glaubenswissenschaft der Katholischen Tiibinger Schule”. Theologische Quor-
talschrvt 111 (1930) 61.
11. Kurze Einkifung (Frankfurt: hlinerva, 1966), pp. 1, 10. Drey observed that the Kwze
Einleitung as a project was somewhat influenced by Schleiermacher’s Kurze Darslellung des
theologischen Studiums; Apologetik (Frankfurt: hlinerva, 1967), 1, p. 4. For a n insightful
comparison of Drey and Schelling, cf. Fehr, The Birth . . ., pp. 161-176.
12. “Vom Geist und Wesen des Katholizismus”, in J. R. Geiselmann, ed., Geist des
Christentrims und des Karholizismus (hlainz: hlatthias-Griinewald, 1940). pp. 250f.
13. Ibid., p. 195.
14. Kurze Einleitung, pp. 39ff.; cf. Geiselmann, “Die Glaubenswissenschaft . . 56f.; .”,
Fehr, The Birth .. ., pp. 138ff.. 145ff.
15. Ii’urze Einleitung, p. 10.
16. Ibid., p. 41.
17. Apologetik I , p, 382.
18. On the background of the work, cf. J. R. Geiselmann, “Zur Einfuhrung”, J. A.
hlohler, Die Einheit in der Kirche (Cologne and Olten: Hegner, 1956), pp. [13]ff.;
Geiselmann stresses Drey’s influence upon Mohler through his lectures on the development
of dogma and his view of patristic thought as seminal doctrines; p. 1311; W. Maurer. “Der
Organismusgedanke bei Schelling und in der Theologie der katholischen Tiibinger Schule”,
Kerygma und Dogma 8 (1962) 202ff.
19. J. A. hlohler, Die Einheit in der Kirche (Cologne and Olten: Hegner, 1956), p. 21.
20. Die Einheit, p. 44.
21. Die Einheit, pp. 38, 50.
22. Die Einheit, p. 157. hlohler’s dynamic theology of ecclesiology and tradition led him
to work on practical issues of church reform such as liturgical renewal, clerical celibacy,
etc.; cf. W. Leinweber, Der Streit um den Zolibat im 19 Jh (hliinster, 1938).
23. “Church and Ministry: The Achievement of Yves Congar”, Theologicul Digest 32
(1985) 203; cf. Timothy hlcDonald, The Ecclesiology of Y w s Congar (New York: Univer-
sity Press of America, 1984), pp. 27f.
24. “Johann Adam hlohler. 1796-1837”, Theologische Quartalschri/t 150 (1937) 51.
25. H. Le Grand, “La Realisation d e I’tglise en un lieu”, Initiation b la pratique de fa
thPologie (Paris: Cerf, 1983), p. 147.
26. J. Puyo, Congar (Paris: Le Centurion, 1973, pp. 47f.; a French translation had
already been published in Brussels in 1839 (cf. Geiselmann, p. [86]).
27. “Sur I’tvolution et I’interprttation de la penste de Moehler”, Revue des sciences
philosophiques el the‘ologiques 27 (1938) 129ff. Congar was not alone in working on
hlohler: the same issue carries a n article on the Tiibingen theologian and Newman and
Congar alludes to recent articles by French Jesuits and Dominicans as well as the publica-
tions in Germany on the centenary.
28. “L’esprit des Pkres d’aprks Moehler”, Vie Spirituelle. Supple‘ment (1938), 3 .
29. Ibid. “In every sphere the church’s potentialities are brought out by an actualization
of them, and the church comes to understand (itself or its mission) through events. Is that
not, after all, the law of living things?” “Vie de l’iglise et conscience de la catholicit?’,
Esquisses du mystcre de I’e‘glise (Paris: Cerf, 1941). p. 21.
30. Ibid.. 13.
31. Ibid., 15f.

32. “La signification oecurnenique de I’oeuvre de hloehler”. IrPnikon 15 (1938) 115.
33. J. P. Jossua. Yves Congar (Dubuque: Priory Press, 1%8), p. 29.
34. PUYO. P. loo.
35. “Dreyintroduced the idea of organic unity in the plan of God into theology He . ..
sees the church in the plan of God as the manifestation of the kingdom of God, the organ
of his revelation, an organism sustained by the Spirit ...
with an influence of Schelling.”
L’Eglise de S. Augustin d I’Ppoque moderne (Paris, Cerf, 1970), pp. 417ff.
..
36. L’EgliSe ., pp. 42Of.; cf. P. Hiinermann, “Der Reflex des deutschen Idealismus in
der Theologie der katholischen Tiibinger Schule”. Philosobhtsches Jahrbuch 73 (1965/66)
48ff.
37. Tradition cmd Traditions (New York, 1%7), p. 191.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., p. 340.
40. “Situation au moment de ‘Ecclesiam suatn”’ Le Concile de Vatican I1 (Paris:
Beauchesne, 1984), p. 27.
41. L’Eglise, p. 423; cf. “La Signification oecuminique .”, 121ff. ..
42. hlcBrien, 205.
43. “Les implications christologiques et pneurnatologiques de I’ecclisiologie de Vatican
11”. Le Concile . . ..
p. 176.

Revelation and History: Schelling, Mohler and Congar: Thomas F. O'Meara

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Revelation and History: Schelling, Mohler and Congar: Thomas F. O'Meara

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Thomas F. O’Meara, O.P.

Revelation and History:

By the end of his seminary education in 1794, Schelling viewed Chris-

a tutor in Leipzig, wrote his parents in 1797: “Theology is not for me

“In Nature . . . Spirit’s Odyssey”

History and Revelation

The Meaning of Revelation

The Idea Revealed

The “ideal principle” (5, 292), Geisf, is disclosed through a process of

The Idea of Christianity

The first idea of Christianity is therefore of necessity the incarnate

The Task of Theology

The university lecture on the essence of Christianity interpreted Christ in

Revelation and Philosophy

How should we understand Schelling’s philosophy of revelation?

Delivered in lecture form in both Jena and Wiirzburg, upon publication

Johann Sebastian Drey and Johann Adam Mohler (University

direction he believed Catholic intellectual life should follow.

fact”.13 Drey, intent upon preserving the divine transcendence and

. . .the empirical-historical knowledge (Kenntniss)of Christianity is

Obviously the Catholic theologian placed greater value upon the

turned more to historical research and was influenced philosophically

Tradition is given particular attention in this book drawn from

YVES CONGAR AND MOHLER REDISCOVERED

The Catholic Tubingen tradition remained active within Germany even

dominate’’.2s Congar described the influence of Mohler upon him during

In 1938 (the anniversary year of Mohler’s death) Congar wrote three

Towards a Renewal of Ecclesiology

In Die Einheit he is under the influence of Schelling’s organic

In Mohler’s theology, church led to tradition, a topic in which Congar

Congar did not publish Mohler’s ideas simply as a contribution to the

Schelling’s career was an exploration of infinite and finite consciousness

Our reflections on Schelling have described the entry of German

31. Ibid., 15f.

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