Erich Heller - Main Currents of His Thought: anima Naturaliter Religiosa

Main Currents of His Thought: anima Naturaliter Religiosa

Not a religious philosopher (and an agnostic by personal persuasion), he could show religious sensibility, as when he wrote, in an essay on Heinrich von Kleist that bridges Heideggerian and Biblical idioms, that:

according to Plato the human mind has been in the dark ever since it lost its place in the community of Truth, in the realm, that is, of the Ideas, the eternal and eternally perfect forms, those now unattainable models which man in his exile is able to see and recognize only as shadows or imperfect copies. And this Platonic parable of the damage suffered by man’s soul and consciousness is not unlike the Fall as it is narrated in Genesis. The Fall was the consequence and punishment of man’s free will that for the first time had asserted itself against the universal God and rejoiced in a consciousness and pleasure entirely its own –– tragically its own; for man had to forsake the indwelling in the supreme Intelligence and thus the harmony between himself and Being as such...

Heller accepted the Fall, or rather its philosophical consequences. Writing elsewhere about Friedrich von Schiller Heller states that Schiller presented

‘a striking instance of a European catastrophe of the spirit: the invasion and partial disruption of the aesthetic faculty by unemployed religious impulses. He is one of the most conspicuous and most impressive figures among the host of theologically displaced persons who found a precarious refuge in the emergency camp of Art.’