The ontological argument in the philosophical theology of Bernhardt Welte: a way of the reading of Anselm

Abstract

The ontological proof of the existence of God was formulated by Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century and remains controversial throughout the history of philosophy. In the 20th century, philosophers began to turn to him especially often, which is associated with the active development of scientific thought. Anselm's argument began to be interpreted, criticized, and challenged in such fields of thought as logical research, phenomenology, and Protestant neo-orthodoxy. One of such philosophers, for whom the ontological argument became an important point of consideration within his own philosophical thought, was the Catholic theologian Bernhardt Welte (1906-1983), who turned to the legacy of Anselm as part of his phenomenological project of knowledge of God, which became part of a more general project - the renewal of traditional Catholic metaphysics. At the same time, the issue of rational justification of the existence of God remains an independent and always relevant issue for Christian theological thought, within which the ontological argument of Anselm of Canterbury is one of the most original and significant attempts at such justification. In our research, we aimed to consider not only the role and function of the ontological argument in the work of B. Welte, but also the peculiar revival of Anselm's argument in the philosophical theology of the 20th century using the example of the chosen philosopher. This choice is due to the fact that, in our opinion, Welte presented one of the most extensive and original systems of the knowledge of God (he called it “The project of the ways of the knowledge of God"), combining the phenomenological method with traditional Catholic metaphysics. In this sense, Welte is not only a follower of the tradition of Catholic theology, going back to the second half of the 20th century through neo-scholasticism and neotomism, but also a thinker of “his” time, close to the phenomenology and fundamental ontology of Heidegger.