Abstract

Usener's use of philology and more specifically of comparative philology for the transformation of the study of religion during the late nineteenth century resulted from a slow realization of certain potentialities of philology which he and others had not grasped before. When Usener aimed at a definite and systematic examination of pagan elements in Christianity, with the ultimate purpose of preparing their elimination from modern Christianity, he made the decisive move from what we would call the humanistic tradition of the textual critic and interpreter to the task of the philological - and by implication antitheological - interpreter of religion. An interpretation of Usener in terms of a modified Kantian problematic about the relation between phenomenon and noumenon would show that Usener struggled to find in human language the channel toward the Noumenon