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By the middle phase of his productive life, from about 1912 until about 1921, Scheler had developed an essential phenomenology of religion that had clear theological implications. One observer, H. Hafkesbrink, argues that Scheler surreptitiously overstepped the limits of pure phenom­enology during these years, notably in Vom Ewigen im Menschen, by supply­ing philosophical arguments in support of Catholic theology in order to ingratiate himself with Catholics, to whose church he was a convert.14 I will discuss the textual basis for that claim in this chapter. After about 1921, however, he began to distance himself from the Catholic Church, and to extend the results of his earlier phenomenological studies into theology and metaphysics in a way clearly incompatible with pure phenomenology. The direction that Scheler's philosophy was taking when his work was cut short by his premature death has been subject to a variety of contradictory interpre­tations. In these final years he speaks, often quite vaguely, of themes he wished to address in the books he intended to write. We have, in some cases, preparatory manuscripts, many of which have been published in the Ge­sammelte Werke thanks to the long and arduous work of Manfred Frings, who became their editor after the death of the philosopher's widow, Frau Maria Scheler, in 1969. These planned works had as their central concern the devel­opment of a system of metaphysics and a philosophical anthropology. This transition from theology to metaphysics was not altogether seamless, for much in the later work contradicts, in spirit if not as frequently in the letter, the earlier phenomenology of religion. I will develop these criticisms in the next chapter, and show what I take to be the implications of Scheler's turn to metaphysics. Here we will be concerned with the content of his phenomenol­ogy of the religious standpoint. However, the theological and metaphysical horizons of Scheler's "essential phenomenology of religion" have been studied by some critics recently, and their interpretations of Scheler's inten‑tions should be considered before we begin.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3099-0_12

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