Religious Representations

Schelling's assessment of religious representations is grounded on the combination of such a metaphysics of participation and the doctrine of potencies. This follows, insofar as these representations are the fruits of our participation in God’s creativity and in that they must be explained as living expressions of the three potencies. According to Schelling, the three prime principles or three potencies are “what serve as a mediation between the empirical being and the prime cause [God]”. As we come to represent God from our particular conditions we always imagine him through the prime principles and at the same time presuming them, as through them God is originally in relationship with us. In other words, we unavoidably participate in God …show more content…
Accordingly, we can see Christian symbols as finding the roots of their superiority in that revelation signals a heightened grade of participation in God, as we come to be aware and experience his essential freedom. This, happens insofar as, while God is silently present in mythology, he is not acknowledged as an active source of our religious representations. Mythology is a process through which human consciousness cures its post-Edenic wounds in a process dictated by natural necessity. This, does not mean that God is not present in this process as he inhabits the whole of creation: rather, this means that his presence is not recognized as such. By contrast, Christianity is grounded in revelation as the explicit act in history of a non-human free consciousness, something that by its very existence reveals an aspect of God the mythological consciousness was not aware of, namely his ability of acting freely and outside natural necessity. In Christianity, our participation in God is increased as a new relationship between he and humanity is established. In this we stand “face to face”, and we come to know him in his freedom, as well as ourselves as his images. Hence, we could say that symbols are the results of a symbiosis of two organisms, where the symbols develop the stronger this symbiotic relationship is. This also makes possible for religious representations to die as their age comes to pass as they are superseded by more accomplished representations. This happens, as over the course of the theogonical process our awareness of God’s nature and his connection to the world increases, and thus we come to imagine him in different ways. Consequently, older symbols die as they do not play an active role anymore in our putting into image the