Philosophy of Religion

On the Eternal in Man

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Max Scheler

1921

On the Eternal in Man is Scheler's most sustained work in philosophy of religion — an argument for the irreducibility of religious experience and the reality of its intentional object: God, or the Holy, or the Eternal. Scheler argues that religion is not a primitive form of science or morality but a distinct act of the human person directed at a distinct sphere of reality — the sphere of the holy and eternal. Religious acts (prayer, sacrifice, love of God, humility before the divine) are irreducible to any other type of act and cannot be derived from or explained by theoretical reason, practical reason, or aesthetic experience. The book also contains Scheler's account of the nature and possibility of religious knowledge: the holy is known through acts of love, not through theoretical inference, and genuine religious knowledge requires the cultivation of specific dispositions that open the person to the transcendent. On the Eternal in Man represents the period of Scheler's thought when he was closest to Catholic Christianity.