ISSN 1918-7351 Volume 9 (2017) Populism and the Late Schelling on Mythology, Ideology, and Revelation Sean J. McGrath Revelation according to Schelling is not the possession of any institutional form of Christianity; it is not even bound to faith or confession. Rather, revelation disseminates itself freely and universally throughout history. It now inextricably permeates modernity. Schelling’s philosophy of revelation does not look backwards to an event in the first century of the common era, it looks forward to the genuine singularity, the moment when humanity will become adequate to the divine subjectivity which lives in it. The event will inaugurate the final form of human community, “the Church of St. John,” a community of genuine freedom and equality, which will succeed all previous forms of the Church, and indeed, the State. The establishment of this community of the future is the penultimate eschaton proclaimed by Paul and the author or the Book of Revelation, the age of righteousness prior to the general resurrection. 1 By bringing mythological consciousness to an end and drawing real limits to rationalism (idealism), revelation first establishes a free relation of the human being to the divine. At the same time, revelation liberates philosophy and culture from religion and inaugurates secular consciousness. History, according to the late Schelling, which he undeniably reads Eurocentrically, is moving toward this third age of revelation (after Catholicism and Protestantism), in which all of humanity will pass over into absolute or true monotheism (Trinitarianism). With the universalization of the revelation, the free and philosophical appropriation of its content (what Schelling somewhat misleadingly calls “philosophical religion”), all historical forms of religion will be overcome, including, it should be added, all historical forms of institutional Christianity. The complete secularization of the world will be 1 See 1 Cor 15: 20-28; Rev 20:1-6. The end of history described in these New Testament texts predicts an age of righteousness, in which the Church will rule the world—the millennium prior to the Last Judgment and thematized by millenarians, such as Joachim of Fiore. In this age of the Church to come, the world will be united “in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:23) and a political transformation of this earth will ensue. In carrying this line of Biblical interpretation forward into a secular key, Schelling is a major figure in utopian thought and has had a significant influence on Ernst Bloch and Franz Rosenzweig, among others. On millenarianism, see Ernst Benz, Evolution and Christian Hope: Man’s Concept of the Future from the Early Father’s to Teilhard de Chardin (Garden City: New York: Doubleday, 1966), 10ff.