Abstract
In his book The Idea of the Holy, in the second footnote to the chapter entitled “The Holy as an A Priori Category, Part II,” Rudolf Otto makes the following suggestive comparison: The most interesting features in Luther ... are the passages upon ‘Faith’, in which Faith is described as a unique cognitive faculty for the apprehension of divine truth, and as such is contrasted with ‘natural’ capacities of the Understanding, as elsewhere the ‘Spirit’ is contrasted. ‘Faith’ is here like the ‘Synteresis’ in the theory of knowledge of the mystics, the ‘inward teacher’ (magister internus) of Augustine, and the ‘inward light’ light of the Quakers, which are all of them of course ‘above reason’, but yet an a priori element in ourselves.1
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Notes
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Trans. John Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 138.
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982). The relevant portions are as follows: Adolf Reinach, pp. 191-200; Dietrich von Hildebrand, 235-237; Max Scheler, 268-305; Edith Stein, 238-239; and Ludwig Landgrebe, 242-244.
Josef Seifert, Back to the Things Themselves: A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987)
Ludger Holscher, The Reality of the Mind: St. Augustine’s Philosophical Arguments for the Human Soul as Spiritual Substance (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986)
Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).
Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Martin Heidegger, ed., James Churchill, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), Part I: Introduction, p. 21. Husserl’s exact words are: “The analysis of time consciousness is an age-old crux of descriptive psychology and theory of knowledge. The first thinker to be deeply sensitive to the immense difficulties to be found there was Augustine, who larbored almost to despair over this problem. Chapters 13-18 of Book XI of the Confessions must even today be thoroughly studied by everyone concerned with the problem of time. For no one in this knowledge-proud modern generation has made more masterful of significant progress in these matters than this great thinker who struggled so earnestly with the problem. One may still say with Augustine: si nemo a me quaerat, scio, si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.”
Edmund Husserl, The Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), pp. 156-157 (182-183) and
Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), p. 39 (39).
Thomas Ryba, The Essence of Phenomenology and Its Meaning for the Scientific Study of Religion, Toronto Studies in Religion, Vol. 7 (New York: Peter Lang Press, 1991), pp. 208–209, n. 106.
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Ryba, T. (1994). The Magister Internus: An Augustinian Proto-Phenomenology of Faith as Desire and Teacher. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) From the Sacred to the Divine. Analecta Husserliana, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0846-1_21
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