The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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For all of his many criticisms of mysticism, Bultmann also recognizes a certain (however distorted) truth in it. Thus he can even take the mystic to belong, in her or his way, to "the community in the transcendent" to which Luther, Sartre, Eliot, and Jaspers all belong -- also in their different ways (cf. GV 2: 271).

Significantly, perhaps, he does not reckon the humanist-idealist also to belong to this community, even though he's insistent that, in this case, also, there is, in a way, an acknowledgement of the transcendent -- an "immanent transcendent," if you will. On the contrary, he takes mysticism and Christianity to belong together over against humanism-idealism in having a more "radical" understanding of transcendence (cf., e.g., 2: 135; 3:69).

3 December 2001

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