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Updated: May 16, 2025
Thus, once more we are landed into the province of a religion of spiritual life as a necessity in the affairs of the world and of the State. Eucken's great plea is that the civilised nations of the world should become aware of all this before it is too late to turn back before the boat has reached too near the rapids to avoid disaster. The remedy is in our own hands.
Christianity is, in Eucken's view, much more closely bound up with historical events than any other religion, and it thus suffers more severe treatment at the hands of historical criticism than any other religion. Eucken considers such historical criticism to be of great value.
He is aware that that message is contrary to the current terminology and meaning of the philosophy of our day. It is one of his greatest books, and its value was not seen until the last few years. But the philosophy of the present day in Germany is tending more and more in the direction of Eucken's.
And it is in the recognition of this fact that Eucken's philosophy of religion constitutes a new kind of idealistic movement a movement tending more and more in the direction of Christianity. But he differs here again from the absolute idealists and the pragmatists.
The fact that the influence of Rudolf Eucken's personality and teaching is spreading with such rapidity and power from west to east and from north to south is a proof that an increasing number of men and women are aspiring after a religion of spiritual life such as was presented by the Founder of our Christianity.
Thus, and thus only, Eucken thinks that the Church can fulfil its proper function, and avoid being a danger to religion. Eucken's appreciation of Christianity is sincere. Viewing it from the standpoint of the Spiritual Life, he finds that it fulfils the conditions that religion should fulfil.
It is not difficult to see why the small nations of the North feel that in Eucken they possess a true friend who sees clearly what they feel instinctively, and who points out to them the path of their spiritual deliverance. It is impossible, also, to understand Eucken's system of philosophy without taking into account his religious experience.
Rudolf Eucken's gospel is a proclamation of the necessity of religion and the possibility of its possession. This, according to him, is the final goal of all knowledge and life. If religion is not this, it is the most tragic deception conceivable.
This is Eucken's main thesis, and connected with this thesis is the fact that religion can come to birth in the soul of man only through a conquest of the ordinary, natural world which surrounds him. The world which surrounds him hinders more than it helps the birth of religion in the soul.
Eucken's deepest, and consequently the most difficult, account of the meaning of religion is to be found in his Truth of Religion and his Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt. It is important to deal with the concept of the spiritual life at this stage of our inquiry, for it is the pivot around which the whole of Eucken's philosophy turns.
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