As Ciências da Religião

da perspectiva histórica às possibilidades de uma fenomenologia da religião em vista dos aspectos ontológico, empírico e sistemático em Paul Tillich

Abstract

The phenomenology of religion seeks to understand the religious phenomenon in view of its complexity, avoiding both reductionisms and absolutizing readings. This complexity concerns not only the phenomenon itself, but, above all, the human being as both effect and actualizer of such a phenomenon in religious experience. In this sense, the phenomenology of religion is fundamental to the Study of Religion, whether by considering the entanglement inherent in these relations or by sustaining its scientific character. At a first moment, this work examines the historical conditions that preceded and contributed to the emergence of Religious Studies within the nineteenth-century European context, highlighting the political, scientific, economic, and cultural transformations decisive for its consolidation as an academic-scientific field. In this process, the role of Friedrich Max Müller is emphasized as a pioneer of the comparative study of religion, as well as the difficulties inherent to its consolidation and the academic resistances regarding its scientific applicability and autonomy as a non-confessional field. Subsequently, in view of the tensions that constituted Religious Studies and its interdisciplinary complexity, the phenomenology of religion is discussed. In seeking to mediate the empirical and the systematic, it remains insufficient insofar as it does not incorporate an ontological dimension capable of sustaining the irreducibility of the religious phenomenon. It is at this point that the necessity of the ontological in the thought of Paul Tillich becomes evident as a condition of possibility of being.