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Christopher Ryan does not overdramatize his subject with this provocative subtitle. Rather, he recounts two moments in the development of European religious consciousness in the nineteenth century as Arthur Schopenhauer interprets a historical revolution in matters of religious faith taking shape during his time and virtually before his eyes. Schopenhauer is not only witness to what he thinks of as an inevitable progression toward atheism and away from naïve religious totemism and the personification of natural forces and human ideals in monotheistic traditions, especially Christianity, but he contributes philosophically to the process of assassinating God, and he holds out the prospect of a deeper religious rebirth of understanding inspired by the great Asian mythologies of Hinduism (Brahmanism) and Buddhism, coinciding not coincidentally with the principles of Schopenhauer's own transcendental idealism.
Ryan writes an excellent, philosophically informed, and scholarly account of Schopenhauer's philosophy of religion. Schopenhauer has much to say about religion, and about the concepts of and philosophical reasoning concerning the existence and nature of God, and the philosophical meaning of many elements of traditional religious practices, which he ventures to explain from the standpoint of his speculative metaphysics of the world as will and representation. Ryan has a thorough grasp of Schopenhauer's philosophy and a solid background in comparative religions. He moves comfortably between these two fields with a sufficient command of the necessary original languages to weave together an exposition of major topics surrounding Schopenhauer's complex critique of religion. Ryan details Schopenhauer's sense of a European cultural reawakening to true religious meaning in the form of a more philosophically respectable metaphysical appropriation of 'Oriental' religious ideas, dimly glimpsed and codified in fables, symbols, and parable for popular consumption in their original form, but better explicable, Schopenhauer believes, in terms of his own metaphysics. Christianity, as Schopenhauer perceives the spirit of the age, is slowly but tangibly vanishing both ideologically and spiritually from the hearts and minds of contemporary Europe. It is the death of one religion and the transition to a Europeanized version of the religions of India that constitute the opposing poles of Schopenhauer's philosophy of religion in Ryan's inquiry.
The great religions have sensed the truth that the world in reality is Will, if Schopenhauer...