Mythology and revelation: are they the necessary and free epochs of the absolute's self-disclosure, or sub-philosophical theology?

F.W.J. Schelling, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Mythology is the necessary process by which God reveals himself to consciousness — natural consciousness left to itself generates the polytheistic pantheons of all the world's pagan traditions, in a sequence determined by the same potencies (A, B, +A) that structure nature and the Ages of the World.¹ Revelation is the supernatural completion: the free divine self-disclosure that breaks the necessity of mythology.

The structure (necessary process completed by free disclosure) instantiates positive philosophy's distinction between negative and positive — mythology is the necessity-side, revelation the contingency-and- freedom-side, of the absolute's becoming-actual in consciousness.²³

Sources

1. It is not at all the things with which man deals in the mythological process by which consciousness is moved, but rather it is the powers arising in the interior of consciousness itself.

   Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, p. 144

2. Now, however, as you see, this view has first become possible only through the expla- nation. For only for the reason that we are obliged to assume in mythology a necessary emergence are we also obliged to perceive in it necessary content, that is, truth.

   Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, pp. 149–150

3. Only in the meantime the discovery has come to light that the process producing mythology already has its ground and beginning in the first actual consciousness of mankind.

   Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, pp. 136–137

Where the argument is made

• Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (Richey and Zisselsberger, 2007, lectures from the 1840s), Philosophy and Religion (1804) as early anticipation, On University Studies (1803) on theological education, the Berlin Lectures (Matthews 2007, in The Grounding of Positive Philosophy), the Philosophy of Revelation (posthumous)

How the argument was received

Defended throughout the late period from the early 1820s through the unfinished Berlin lectures published posthumously. The structural philosophy (necessary process / free completion) is independent of the Christian-historical content; the same structure could in principle be instantiated differently. The mythological scholarship — Indo- European, Egyptian, Greek, Phoenician, Hebraic — is genuine textual-historical work, not illustration: the philosophy is grounded in actual history of religions material, not abstracted from it.