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Start by thinking of impulse as a non-rational drive or desire. In religious life, it’s a motivation toward something, and it tends to involve the object of motivation as much as it does the actual movement. Words you could associate this concept with are desire and urge, or even need. It is the interplay between what is desired and the process of seeking that.
This impulse is often triggered when a person begins to ask the ultimate questions of life: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the nature of the world around me? Is there a god or gods? What is my purpose? Do I even have a purpose? What is death? What happens after I die?
These kinds of preoccupations have plagued humanity for eons. They are not easy questions to grapple with, but almost everyone in every society confronts them in some conscious or unconscious way.
Religion, then, is an individual and collective response to these questions and the motivations and impulses behind them. The approach to the unknown often involves the unknown in one form or another.
In future lessons, you will look at the German Enlightenment, but for now, it is important to know it was a fertile time for actively engaging with these questions. Friedrich Schleiermacher was a very influential German theologian philosopher and protestant theologian during that time. He explored this interaction between subjective and objective knowledge.
Schleiermacher approached it from a theological and philosophical perspective. He determined that the union with the object of search in answer to the questions was not possible by human will alone. Something else was necessary. He describes this feeling of engagement with necessity as “utter dependence” or complete and absolute dependence.
In the late 19th century in Germany, Rudolf Otto described this experience with the Latin term “numinous.” This was to mean the power and the presence of divinity. He also used the terms “mysterium tremendum,” and “fascinans” to describe the subjective experience of the holy, the terror of the sacred, and “the terror before the sacred”. He extended it to the societies and cultures that gave meaning and context to the questions of life.
In the realm of sociology, these phenomena might be considered as ways of uniting people and maintaining cohesion. This is according to the famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who called it solidarity. The disparate and separate elements of experience needed some container for exchange and understanding; this container was society. He called it the “Social Glue Theory.”
In Holland at the same time, the religious philosopher Gerardus van der Leeuw was describing the same thing in terms of “power.” He put forth the idea that the sacred was compelling because it could be found everywhere. It represented power. The experience of otherness meant power. Things that were unfamiliar in the world were objects to be confronted. They manifest some relationship of power, some relationship with power, to power.
A brilliant and poetic German American theologian philosopher named Paul Tillich wrote and spoke about this. He said that this process, this impulse, requires faith as an “ultimate concern.”
He describes the relationship between the questions of the philosopher—who must analyze the subjective elements of experience—and the answers of the theologian—who might offer structure, meaning, and guidance for the impulse that we’re talking about.
A quote for you as we close out this tutorial.
Source: THIS TUTORIAL WAS AUTHORED BY TED FAIRCHILD FOR SOPHIA LEARNING. Please see our Terms of Use.
