Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the development of Fichte’s theory of religion. Fichte felt the inadequacy of the theological rationalism which prevailed among the scientific circles and in the Protestant orthodoxy in his time. The rejection of a rationalistic understanding of faith and the need to save the ‘reasons of the heart’ without falling into a fideism, draw the background within which he develops, at different moments, his religious thought. The task of a transcendental philosophy of religion is to illustrate the condition of the possibility of faith, to show the genesis of the religious consciousness. The transcendental philosophy cannot, in fact, “produce”, but must “explain” the facts , it must “deduce2 the genesis of the religious sense in the human consciousness. The understanding of religion is fulfilled in Anweisung zum seeligen Leben not only through a philosophical elaboration of the relationship between being and existence, but thanks to an interpretation of the prologue of the Gospel of John. The Staatslehre – a doctrine of the “city of man and the city of God”– focuses on the relationship between religion and history