Philosophy of Religion: The Religious Experience

1. Philosophy of Religion: The Religious Experience

Contending against science for recognition as the ultimate arbiter of truth, the relevancy of religion was thrown seriously in doubt during Salome’s time. Endless debates were waged among Positivists (seeking to isolate religion to the misty sphere of values), those seeking to redeem religion (the Neo-Kantian for example), and Nietzsche’s “death of God” faction (intent on “overcoming” religion as a barrier to the “revaluation of values”). Others, like Sigmund Freud,24 exposed the myth of religion by revealing its roots in primal psychological needs. An intriguing remark is to be found among an early collection of Salome’s aphorisms - “There’s no harm in being godless if you’re really rid of God.”25 Whether she believed a state of God-riddance was possible is left unresolved here, however her subsequent writings seem to deny such a possibility.

What is both unique and valuable in Salome’s approach to religion is that she does not involve herself in the question of the source of religion nor of how this affects its credibility. To do so, in fact, amounts to a form of the Genetic Fallacy - that is, invalidly dismissing something based solely on its genesis or source. Instead, Salome begins with the fact of religious experience and seeks to evaluate that fundamental human experience on its own grounds. The problem in religion for Salome is not whether we should believe its claims, but rather what is the most effective content of that belief.26 The “essence of religious thought” is for her the human need to merge “with the powers of the outer world”, a need she thought was served equally by sex and art.27

In effect, Salome initiates her own phenomenology of religion, a philosophical exploration of the phenomena/experience of religion. She views the religious experience as compounded of two contrary feelings existing in creative tension, namely humility (Demut) and pride (Hochmut). The first of these is the result of our sense of inadequacy in the face of the divine, while the latter arises from our identification with its powers - “only the two together in enigmatic self-contradiction yield that friction from which suddenly, hot and vivid, the flame leaps out,” amounting 

to a fusion of “the knowledge of our limit, and at that limit the exalta-tion that grows beyond it.”28

While Salome’s religious views are often claimed to have been heavily influenced by Nietzsche,29 another possible source of influence seems to have been overlooked - namely Benedict de Spinoza. Salome became acquainted with Spinoza’s thought during her first serious lessons with Pastor Gillot.30 In him she found a kindred philosophical spirit, much as Friedrich Nietzsche was to be later on in her life. Moreover, her resonance with Spinoza seems to exceed that with Nietzsche, for she carried him with her even into her relationship with Freud.31 An early experience recorded in her autobiography demonstrates why Spinoza, who equates God with nature, proved so attractive to her; she describes a “darkly awakening sensation, never again ceasingt conclusive and fundamental, of immeasurable comradeship - in fate... with everything that exists.”32

Just as Spinoza begins his Ethics with God, Salome begins her auto-biography with “The Experience of God”. She even asks “What must I do to be blessed?”,33 echoing Spinoza’s discussion of the blessedness (equivalent to salvation and freedom) which results from the intellectual love of God.34 The joy which Spinoza ascribes to the ultimate intuitive love of God seems similar to Salom6’s own discussion of religious joy in her essays.35

Like Spinoza, Salom6 early on interpreted religion within elitist cate-gories.36 The ultimate peak experience of the elitist, however, is not the extreme individualism of Nietzsche, but rather the oneness of the Spinozistic universe: “At these heights of our self we are released from ourselves.”37 Hers was the religion of a freethinker seeking not an external divinity but a return to the self (prefiguring her later doctrine of narcissism).38 A contrast is made by Salome between the construction of the divine as an anticipation of “the prospects of the future” (found in primitive religion) and as the now more common source of “compen-sation”: “The two kinds of faith are as sharply and precisely distinguished as creative processes are from neurotic.”39 Salome, of course, opts for the primitive and healthy form of faith.