VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

43 THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD AND “THE NEW EPISTEMOLOGICAL IDEALISM”
Already it was remarked by Augustine that the doctrine
of God transcendent was Platonic, but that the
conception of God incarnate was found nowhere but in
Christianity. 35
At this point, one may say that the Christian synthesis attained through
the doctrine of incarnation is at bottom (even if only for a minority of
genuinely religious people) a matter of revelation and can ignore all
philosophical legitimating pursuits. In my opinion, this would be considered
by Collingwood a mistake; and what he presumably learns from Kant with
respect to this particular matter is, according to Felser, precisely that one
cannot talk about revelation apart from the act of receiving—that is, hearing
and encountering—and that whatever is revealed is essentially molded by
the receiving medium, and cannot be characterized apart from such
subjective factors as the beliefs, desires, prejudices, problems, language,
etc., of the recipients. 36 In other words, the Kantian demonstration of the
active role of the cognitive subject has inspired the English philosopher in his
attempt to answer the question whether or not Christianity is compatible with
“the new epistemological idealism” arguing that, in principle, Christianity is
“capable of representing the truth of God’s nature”. But this is possible only
within the two-sided frame of Christian religion, which will reunite both the
view of pure transcendence and that of pure immanence:
[F]or the idealistic philosopher… Christianity, like
all other truths, is a two-sided thing: there must be a
truth, and a person fitted to receive it… If God means a
finite personal being, outside the world, however good
and great, a mere omnipotent creator whose personal
life is lived outside the universe he creates, then
idealism denies not only that his existence can be
proved, but that he exists at all. But if God is the one and
absolute creative spirit, the spirit whose life is the life of
the world, the spirit that became incarnate in the son of
Mary and becomes incarnate again in the Church, the
company of all faithful people who endeavor to live the
life of the spirit, then I can only say that the whole of
philosophy is the proof of his existence. If anything can
be proved, his existence can be proved. 37
And, Collingwood continues, given that man’s true nature, mainly his
needs, are given the best account by the Christian doctrine, it follows that it
is a doctrine made by man for man. Its expressions—often obscure—if not
interpreted in a superstitious sense, but “with love and intelligence” can
describe the truth of God’s nature, the “truer truth” which is nowhere else
given to man than in the Christian creeds. And this truth cannot be but