The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1932 page)

(1904–84).
Christian philosopher and theologian. He was born in Freiburg im Breisgau and entered the N. German province of the Society of Jesus (the
Jesuits
) in 1922. He studied philosophy and then theology, and was ordained priest in 1932. From 1934 he undertook research at Freiburg. His dissertation on
Aquinas'
metaphysic of judgement was rejected for its explorations away from traditional interpretation into the direction of transcendental Thomism. He moved to Innsbruck where his dissertation was accepted, later published as
Geist im Welt
(Spirit in the World). His work dominates 20th-cent. philosophical theology, made up of densely laid foundations and sparkling raids on many different problems (some gathered in the long series,
Theological Investigations
), dominated by his pastoral concern that Christian truth must not be divorced from human living. He was influenced early on by Joseph Maréchal, who laid the foundations of neo-Thomism. Maréchal drew out the implications of the Thomist epistemology: knowledge is based on sense-data; the mind directs itself to sensory images; the mind therefore penetrates reality in the sense that it enters into the ontological nature of other things in its movement toward them of comprehension. Maréchal argued that the unity of sense and intellect, in the act of a unitary human subject
knowing
, required necessary conditions for its possibility, namely, that the knower and the sensible objects of knowledge be composed of matter, form, and existence, since otherwise the act of knowing (as it
is
known) could not occur.
In this way, Maréchal set the stage for neo-Thomism as the working out of its detail. Rahner set out to establish what he called ‘a transcendental Thomism’ and ‘theology taking a transcendental turn’. Rahner grasped that philosophy and theology must start with the human subject as the one who constitutes the world of possible knowledge. The human subject constantly seeks to transcend itself and its existing points of departure, aspiring to the infinite while rendering the world intelligible. The latter is only possible because humans have a prehension (
Vorgriff
) of the former—a genuine ‘pre-grasp’ of Infinite Being as the true horizon of the world as lived.
On this philosophical foundation, Rahner insisted that theology must begin ‘at the human end’, not with
a priori
dogmas handed out as though self-evidently true. This ‘theological anthropology’ investigates human being in so far as it is turned toward God—which is, at once, on the basis of his previous argument, transcendental anthropology. In this way, the otherwise largely remote doctrines of Christianity are firmly located in the actual conditions of human knowing and living. Life experienced as spiritual and full of grace leads to the proposition that the world is exactly that (notwithstanding the human experience of fallenness as well). In that case, all human beings are participants in the grace of God which seeks to redeem the fallen, and thus all are ‘Anonymous Christians’, and within the salvific purpose of God, whether they are baptized or not. At the centre of all Rahner's thought remains the unequivocal pastoral demand, how can we help each other to attain the unlimited horizon of God?

 
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R
hula
.

The son of Gautama, the
Buddha
. He was born at about the time that Gautama decided to leave his home in search of enlightenment. The Buddha later visited his son who was ordained as a novice (
s
ma
era
), and who received teaching from the Buddha.

 
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see
RAVI D
S
.

 
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