Religion As Metaphysics: A Category Mistake

The claim that God is real, or even that God's existence is reality, is problematic chiefly because it incurs the category mistake of treating religion as through it were metaphysics. Rather than being an atheistic argument, obviating the mistake privileges God's radical transcendence. To be sure, viewing religion through metaphysical lenses is problematic for some other, relatively minor reasons as well. 

For one thing, pondering the metaphysical in religious garb may actually be the human mind looking at itself as though through a mirror. “God, as a metaphysical being, is the intelligence satisfied in itself, or rather, conversely, the intelligence, satisfied in itself, thinking itself as the absolute being, is God as a metaphysical being. Hence all metaphysical predicates of God are real predicates only when they are recognised as belonging to thought, to intelligence, to the understanding.”[1] Accordingly, theology “is pre-occupied with the metaphysical attributes of eternity, unconditionedness, unchangeableness, and the like abstractions, which express the nature of the understanding.”[2] But Kant claims that God’s “existence is not susceptible of proof from reason.”[3] Feuerbach explains that the “proof of the existence of God transcends the limits of the reason.”[4] In other words, if God transcends the limits of our intellects, then God as a metaphysical being must go beyond our understanding and its attributes. Hence Feuerbach insists that, “to religion God is not a matter of abstract thought,--he is a present truth and reality.”[5] God as a reality is distinct from attributes of the human mind.

Does this mean, then, that God’s reality is of feeling?  Feuerbach thought that God was a mere projection of human feelings. The philosopher claims that God “in the sense of a nomen proprium, not of a vague, metaphysical entity, is essentially an object only of religion, not of philosophy,—of feeling, not of the intellect.”[6] But whereas reason seeks to ponder reality—even being the real in Kant’s self-serving idealism—feeling is oriented to human experience, which is hardly reality itself. In other words, if God extends (or is based) beyond the limits of human perception too, then feeling also falls short from getting us to the reality of God.

Such an evasive thing that reality is, for besides being mistakenly likened to the human intellect and its abstract ideas, and even feeling, belief itself has been allowed to take center stage. The belief affirming God’s sui generis existence in particular has been allowed to become the definitive litmus test in theistic religions; “belief in the existence of God becomes . . . the spiritual import of the idea of God, a chief point in religion.”[7] For example, a person is “a Christian only through this, that he believes in Christ.”[8] Whether the person values the teachings or the example of Jesus is only indirectly related—the key being the belief in the metaphysics of Christ’s unique existence, or reality. Accordingly, Feuerbach makes the following remark: “If the existence of God, taken by itself, had not rooted itself as a religious truth in minds, there would never have been those infamous, senseless, horrible ideas of God which stigmatise the history of religion and theology.”[9] It is fully in line with the nature of faith, Feuerbach argues, to slap a nonbeliever on the face rather than turn the other cheek, which could alternatively be the Christian’s focus.

In short, the belief that God exists is all that counts to the theist, who is prepared to fight on behalf of the belief, for it is easier for the human mind to grasp such a belief than the nature of God’s reality itself. “The existence in the existence of God is the belief in a special existence,” Feuerbach explains, “separate from the existence of man and Nature.”[10] In other words, “Existence, empirical existence, is proved to me by the senses alone; and in the question as to the being of God, the existence implied has not the significance of inward reality, of truth, but the significance of a formal, external existence.”[11] The special nature of the existence thus goes beyond the belief in whether God exists. As Feuerbach points out, God “is not only a being for us, a being in our faith, our feeling, our nature, he is a being in himself, a being external to us,--in a word, not merely a belief, a feeling, a thought, but also a real existence apart from belief, feeling, and thought.”[12]  

The transcendence of such a real existence is unfortunately undercut by the heavily anthropomorphic nature of the god-man type. Hence Feuerbach makes the following distinction: “But it is equally perverse to attempt to deduce the Incarnation from purely speculative, i.e., metaphysical abstract grounds; for metaphysics apply only to the first person of the Godhead, who does not become incarnate, who is not a dramatic person.”[13] The Trinity thus incorporates the idea that “God is universal, abstract Being, simply the idea of Being; and yet he must be conceived as a personal, individual being.”[14] God as a historical person is difficult to reconcile with the universal quality of reality itself. Likewise, it is much easier to relate Brahman than Vishnu or Shiva to the real in Hinduism. To say that the atman (soul) is the same as Brahman, which pervades everything and everywhere, is of a different relation than that which exists between the atman and one of the deities.

Yet even to say that the Christian Godhead or the Hindu Brahman is real—and in a sense that does not dovetail with the nature of reason or feeling—is misleading, for the association involves the category mistake of taking religion as metaphysics. Is eternity really a metaphysical concept? Is reality a religious concept? If God is the Creator of what exists, then to reduce God to that which is real mistakes the Creator for the creation. Stopping at reality thus falls short of God’s radical transcendence. To yearn experientially for the very condition behind or aside from reality extends the experience of transcendence. To think of God as not depending on reality, but, rather, as giving rise to it pushes the deity that much further away from the entrapments of human understanding, which so likes to capture the divine rather than fall away. To ponder God’s kind of existence as sui generis is thus to unhinge it from even being the real. That sort of existence is distinctly religious, and given the religious notion of transcendence the nature of God’s existence necessarily transcends our intellect. So how could we expect to stay long with the comparatively easy metaphysical notion of reality? It’s time for religionists to leave the foreign garden of metaphysics in order to return home to finally ponder, just what is the native fauna among the untended weeks in the proverbial Garden of Eden?  

Related: Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, a short book that is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

---

1. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, George Eliot, trans. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 37.

2. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 54.

3. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 201.

4. Ibid.

5. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 199.

6. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 186.

7. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 201.

8. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 329.

9. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 202.

10. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 203.

11. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 201.

12. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 199.

13. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 52.

14. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 213.

Experience of Transcendence: The Core of Religion and Spirituality

Transcendence beyond the limits of human cognition, and thus reason and even religious beliefs is notoriously difficult for the human mind to grasp; even if as I suspect the human mind has an instinctual urge to yearn to go beyond cognitive and perceptual boundaries (i.e., beyond our ordinary experience), that same mind also has a dogged proclivity to cloth wholly-other religious objects (e.g., a deity) in familiar garb. Transcendent experience itself is immune, hence focusing on the experience itself is superior to getting caught up with the presumably certain divine attributes of a religious object, yet even such experience can be held back, or unduly circumscribed, when the transcendent reference-point is rendered conveniently familiar. Hence the dictum against graven images.  

As “an emotional and sensuous being,” a human being, Feuerbach suggests, “is governed and made happy only by images, by sensible representations,” including those that are fabricated by the imagination.[1] In other words, we have “an instinct, an internal necessity, which impels [us] to think, to perceive, to imagine.”[2] This instinct sees nothing wrong with applying itself to religious objects, essentially robbing them of their rightful transcendence.

The Son, is, therefore, expressly called the Image of God; his essence is that he is an image—the representation of God, the visible glory of the invisible God. The Son is the satisfaction of the need for mental images, the nature of the imaginative activity in man made objective as an absolute, divine activity.[3]

Feuerbach must have read Hume, for he too laments how inherently difficult it is for the human mind to hold onto the divine as a pure, incorporeal spirit for long;  the mind automatically sets about clothing it in anthropomorphic attributes because they are familiar, which is in itself is “so agreeable to the mind.”[4] In other words, “an invisible spiritual intelligence is an object too refined for vulgar apprehension,” so we “naturally affix it to some sensible representation.”[5] By means of the instinct described by Feuerbach, the human mind tends to render the transcendent perceptual by our senses, and thus firmly within the limits of perception. In fact, Hume goes so far as to define idolatry as the portrayal of the invisible divine, which the human mind has trouble holding onto, in terms of “some sensible representation.”[6]

Is worship of a god-man, as in God made flesh, therefore an instance of self-idolatry? The very structure of man worshipping a god-man would suggest so. Furthermore, God made flesh in the Incarnation as Jesus Christ renders worship of the eternal Word, the Logos, surreptitiously susceptible to actually being worship of the human form idealized.[7] Augustine points to the significance of the human form of the second person of the Trinity:

[Jesus] was a baby, he grew as a man, he walked as a man, he hungered, thirsted as a man, he slept as a man, then at last he suffered as a man. . . . In the same form he arose, in the same form he ascended into heaven. . . . When, therefore, you think about the form of the servant in Christ, think of his human shape, if there is faith in you.[8]

Faith is tied here to Jesus Christ having a human shape (i.e., a human body).  It is not as if Augustine were unaware of the risks involved, for he warns against associating the form of the human body with the divine, which inherently transcends finite forms or embodiments:

(L)et every human configuration vanish from your heart; let there be driven from your thought whatever is limited by a bodily boundary, whatever is confined by the extent of a place or is extended with any bulk whatsoever; let such a fictitious image disappear from your heart. . . . Now, O man, if you cannot see your wisdom with the eyes of the flesh, nor think of it with such imaginings as bodily things are thought of, do you dare to impose the form of the human body on the wisdom of God?[9]

Hume stresses that the human brain cannot help but create such perceptual imaginings of bodily things to render the transcendent familiar at the expense of being wholly other and thus transcendent. Feuerbach points out that “the relations of humanity are not excluded from God” in that “God has a Son; God is a father”[10] Sensing that such relations render the deity too humanlike at the expense of being wholly other (as transcendent), Augustine strictly warns his readers that “no carnal thought creep up” in interpreting Jesus’s expression, “As the Father has taught me” in terms of a human father teaching his son. To liken the Trinitarian relationship to a (merely) human one would be, Augustine writes, to “fashion idols” in one’s heart.[11] Unfortunately, such idolatry is a danger even in spite of this warning, for “it is only natural that our own experiences or observations of father-son relations would mold how we view Jesus’ relation to his Father.”[12] In other words, our minds are susceptible to rendering the transcendent in familiar terms even to the point that the religious object is, as Feuerbach contends, actually human potential without our limitations as individuals.

Augustine exempts the case of Jesus Christ, however, on account of divine revelation attesting, albeit by faith alone, to the truth of the Incarnation; Jesus Christ is not just human potential, as divinity is something more even if it manifests as a Son in human form. Yet does this mean that the godhead tempts us mere mortals into self-idolatry by clothing the divinity in such brazenly anthropomorphic garb? At the very least, Feuerbach suggests, understanding repudiates the application of anthropomorphisms to God.[13]

Not so, Kierkegaard would undoubtedly reply, for the eternal coming into history through the Incarnation transcends human understanding, and thus cognition itself. Larger principles, in other words, are involved than the anthropomorphism. As Kierkegaard points out, “faith is not a knowledge, for all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, which excludes the temporal and the historical as inconsequential, or it is purely historical knowledge, and no knowledge can have as its object this absurdity that the eternal is the historical.”[14] Absurdity and paradox, which stress transcendence beyond human cognition, are two terms that Kierkegaard uses to describe distinctly religious phenomena.

In Fear and Trembling, for instance, Kierkegaard places the absurd above even human morality. The divine command given to Abraham that he sacrifice Isaac is not in a religious sense murder.  In other words, the religious sacrifice is above the moral verdict of murder—yet another indication that religion does not reduce to morality, and thus spiritual leadership is not really just ethical leadership. The absurd, unlike a moral system, lies beyond the clutches of reasoning. In Fear and Trembling, the absurd is Abraham’s faith that God would not break the promise that Abraham’s offspring would go on to fill nations even though that same God has commanded the old man to sacrifice his only child. This makes no sense, and yet for God all things are possible. Similarly, the eternal in a historical person, albeit historical in a faith narrative, is a paradox that can only be taken on faith.

The paradox is “the god’s planting himself in human life.”[15] This is no trivial point in historical Christianity, for, as Kierkegaard states, “(t)he heart of the matter is the historical fact that the god has been in human form.”[16] Christianity, he explains, “by means of the historical . . . has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness.”[17] Unlike Socrates, a teacher is needed who can occasion a re-birth of sorts in a person. The condition must be so significant that the person would never forget it.  “(I)n order for the teacher to be able to give the condition, he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it, he must be man. This contradiction is in turn the object of faith.”[18]

Feuerbach admits that “out of the need for salvation is postulated something transcending human nature, a being different from” human beings, yet “no sooner is this being postulated than there arises the yearning of man after himself, after his own nature, and man is immediately re-established.”[19] Therefore, “the contemplation of God as human,” with love as the unifier of the two, is “the mystery of the Incarnation.”[20] “In the Incarnation religion only confesses” what theology will not admit, “that God is an altogether human being.”[21] That which is supposedly “mysterious and incomprehensible” (i.e., suggesting of transcendence) about the notion that “God is or becomes a man” is actually “nothing more than the human form of a God, who already in his nature . . . is a merciful and therefore a human God.”[22] Neither the human form nor the idealized human qualities of mercy, goodness (benevolentia), power (omnipotentia), and knowledge (omniscientia) are particularly transcendent, as they pertain or come out of our realm and are very much within the limits of our perception and cognition, respectively.  Even in terms of human sentiments, a religious person “unhesitatingly assigns his own feelings to God; God is to him a heart susceptible to all that is human; . . . feeling can appeal only to feeling.”[23] Hence, petitions through prayer appealing to God’s goodness and mercy. Even in such a momentous condition in salvation history, therefore, the human mind leans toward seeing the transcendent through heavily-tinted anthropomorphic sunglasses such that the god is essentially rendered as human at the expense of transcendence.

Even though Kierkegaard considered the mystery of the Incarnation—the absolute paradox, in other words, as an object of faith rather than knowledge—to be beyond the limits of cognition, even his paradox may not reach transcendence in a religious sense. Generally speaking, the ultimate paradox of thought is “to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”[24] The mind, in other words, paradoxically seeks to go beyond itself. So far, the understanding evinces the notion of transcendence. In “its paradoxical passion,” Kierkegaard writes, “the understanding does indeed will its own downfall.”[25] Likewise, cognition and reasoning fall before the Lord.

Yet if the eternal in history—in a human form no less!—is merely a species of the human imagination borne out of instinct rather than begotten by a godhead whose existence is not just idealized human qualities as Feuerbach suggests, then the absolute paradox is not beyond thought. For that matter, I could imagine a unicorn standing on the moon even though the actual science defines reason. Just as my imagination is not bound by the strictures of science, religion is not bound by science, or even metaphysics (i.e., what is real?) Even Feuerbach’s own notion of God holds back from transcending cognition, for “God is thy highest idea, the supreme effort of they understanding, thy highest power of thought.”[26] In other words, “God is what the understanding thinks as the highest.”[27] Religious yearning, on the other hand, goes beyond the point where understanding ends.

 Kierkegaard too holds back, as he is content to remain on the cusp of the unknown, where it collides with the understanding, rather than pushing further. “The paradoxical passion of the understanding,” he writes, “is continually colliding with this unknown. . . . The understanding does not go beyond this; yet in its paradoxicality the understanding cannot stop reaching it and being engaged with it, because wanting to express its relation to it by saying that this unknown does not exist will not do, since just saying that involves a relation.”[28]  The understanding does not go beyond the edge of the unknown that can be made known, and Kierkegaard is satisfied to remain there rather than to venture into the unknown, and thus to God beyond cognition. “But what, then, is this unknown, for does not its being the god merely signify to us that it is the unknown?”[29]  In other words, the unknown is the god. Yet the unknown to understanding is none other than ignorance, and the god, as omniscient, is hardly that. God extending beyond human understanding does not necessarily mean that the god is just the absence of understanding. Furthermore, that the god is mysterious, and thus not fully known, is not to say that it is simply the unknown.

In short, the understanding stops at the beginning of the unknown—arriving at it—whereas religious faith, and thus experience, extends into the wholly other, or absolutely different.  “To declare that God is the unknown because we cannot know it, and that even if we could know it we could not express it, does not satisfy the passion,” Kierkegaard states, “although it has correctly perceived the unknown as frontier. But a frontier is expressly the passion’s torment, even though it is also its incentive. And yet it can go no further. . . . What, then, is the unknown? It is the frontier that is continually arrived at . . . it is the different, the absolutely different.”[30] To arrive at something is not to go past its border into it. To be sure, it is not the understanding that can venture so. “Defined as the absolutely different, it seems to be at the point of being disclosed, but not so, because the understanding cannot even think the absolutely different; it cannot absolutely negate itself but uses itself for that purpose and consequently thinks the difference in itself, which it thinks by itself. It cannot absolutely transcend itself and therefore thinks as above itself only the sublimity that it thinks by itself.”[31] This is why it is so difficult for the human mind to conceive of God as wholly other; it is in the very nature of thought to conceive of objects in terms that bear some familiarity to the mind, which “cannot absolutely transcend itself and therefore thinks as above itself only the sublimity that it thinks by itself.”[32] To even try to think of something absolutely different involves an arbitrariness, and yet we affix such certainty to our knowledge of the divine attributes. Consequently, Kierkegaard points out that “at the very bottom of devoutness there madly lurks the capricious arbitrariness that knows it itself has produced the god.”[33] Hence the nature of the god—the religious object—may not be the basis of religion. Religious experience, on the other hand, is felt on our side of the line, within the known, and yet crucially its object or aim transcends even the border to the absolutely different that cannot be known, sensed, or perceived. The nature of the experience is thus unique. As such, it is part of the native fauna in the religious garden. In fact, being in itself immune from anthropomorphism from within our realm, the sui generis experience is, I submit, the defining characteristic of religion and spirituality. We can indeed transcend even the masks of eternity that we hold as ultimate. In achieving such transcendence, a person enters religion’s inner sanctum—that which religion really is.

The essay pertains to chapter 3, "Spiritual Leadership Revised," in Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

---

1. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, George Eliot, trans. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 75.

2. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 78.

3. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 75.

4. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, sec. 5, in Principal Writings on Religion including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 1993), 150.

5. Hume, Natural History, 152.

6. Hume, Natural History, 152.

7. Worden, God’s Gold, 338. See John 1:14.

8. Augustine, Tractates on John, 127.

9. Augustine, Tractates on John, 127.

10. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 56.

11. Augustine, Tractates on John: Books 28-54, 40.4, trans. John W. Rettig, Fathers of the Church: 

A New Translation 88 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 126.

12. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (Tucson, AZ: The Worden Report, 2015), 339.

13. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 35.

14. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, eds. and trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 62.

15. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 107.

16. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 103.

17. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 109.

18. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 62.

19. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 45.

20. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 50. See also p. 48.

21. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 56.

22. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 51

23. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 55.

24. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 37.

25. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 47.

26. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 38.

27. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 38.

28. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 44.

29. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 44.

30. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 44.

31. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 45.

32. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 45.

33. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 45.

Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical

In this essay, I provide a synopsis of my booklet on spiritual leadership in business. In the text, I suggest that while it may convenient in the business world to conceptualize spiritual leadership as being essentially ethical in nature, this convenient tactic does not do justice to the distinctly religious basis and connotations of spirituality. By religion, I do not mean only theism, or even just organized religion (i.e., religious organizations); rather, I have in mind religious experience—whether through prayer, meditation, worship, or another means that is oriented to yearning beyond the limits of cognition, sentiment, and perception—as if an inherently limited human brain were nonetheless “hard-wired” for beyondness itself whether or not a transcendent religious object (e.g., a deity) exists. Rather than expunging spiritual from its native terrain and reconfiguring it to fit within a secular context as ethics, we can relate the religious sense of spirituality to the secular world of business with due deference to their respective natures rather than muddling them into something murky.[1]

The full essay is at "Spiritual Leadership in Business."

The booklet, Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

---

1. By analogy, the notion that Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine—a theory coined at the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E.—involves taking the human as human and the divine as divine rather than reconfiguring one term to suit the other. Just as one essence, or ousia, has a human element and a divine element, spiritual leadership can be reckoned as having a religious and a secular element. One essence can contain a notion of spirituality that is religious in nature and a theory of leadership that is been derived in a secular context.