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Knowledge of God and Phenomenological Foundations of Religious Experience
The question of the knowledge of God in modern Orthodox theology is usually raised on the basis of the traditional meaning of Church Fathers, on the basis of hermeneutic and philosophical experience of medieval thought. However, the reconstruction of tradition does not always lead to theological conclusions and can be built into the academic dialogue. Even in the Middle Ages, the question of the knowledge of God included the theory of knowledge, the platonic tradition of contemplation or the genre of philsophical commentary. In modern philosophical theology, however, the idea of the subject, the human being as a creature, becomes the result of the sum of philosophical methods and scientific knowledge. The knowledge of God is considered like the experience of thinking and the phenomenon of consciousness which nature is understood, through philosophical forms of reflexion.
In this paper, special attention will be paid to the phenomenological direction which, after the ‘theological turn’ of the French school becomes significant for the continental tradition, not only as description, but in terms of theological understanding of the internal experience of thinking. In particular, the ideas of E. Husserl, which further discourse is based on will be considered, as well as the hypotheses of J.-L. Marion and J.-P. Manoussakis—the view of postmetaphysical philosophy on religious experience, in which both science as a form of thought and faith as a form of being become unified in the special dialectics of God knowledge.