Page 112 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Ethics 85

of a religion. It is indeed legitimate to speak of the person of
God within the religious relation and in its language; but in so
doing we are making no statement about the Absolute which
reduces it to the personal. We are rather saying that it enters
into the relationship as the Absolute Person whom we call
God. One may understand the personality of God as His act.
It is, indeed, even permissible for the believer to believe that
God became a person for love of him, because in our human
mode of existence the only reciprocal relation with us that ex-
ists is a personal one.
We cannot, on the other hand, speak of the religious in the
strict sense meant here where there is no relation and can-
not be one. This is the case when a man means by his con-
cept of God simply all that is, outside of which he himself can
no longer in any way exist as a separate being who is able as
such to enter into relationship with God, even though it be
to lose himself ever anew in it. But this is also the case when
a man means by the concept of God his own self, no matter
under what complicated disguises he hides his meaning. What
happens here in the pseudo- mystical chamber of ghosts and
mirrors has nothing to do with the real relation or even with
the real self. The real self appears only when it enters into re-
lation with the Other. Where this relation is rejected, the real
self withers away— an event which at times, indeed, can evoke
most phosphorescent effects.
We must hold fast to these insights when we consider the
path of the human spirit from the standpoint of the changes in
the relationship between the ethical and the religious.

2

The essence of the relationship between the ethical and the
religious cannot be determined by comparing the teachings of