Page 113 - Eclipse of God

86 Chapter 6

ethics and religion. One must rather penetrate into that area
within each sphere where they become solidified in a concrete,
personal situation. Thus it is the factual moral decision of the
individual on the one hand and his factual relationship to the
Absolute on the other that concerns us. In both cases it is
not a mere faculty of the person that is involved, whether it
be his thought or his feeling or his will, but the totality of these
faculties, and more than that, the whole man. A third sphere
overlying these two is not given us; we can only let the two
confront each other, and in such a way that in this meeting
each of them determines its relationship to the other. If from
the point of view of the religious we look in such concrete-
ness at the relation between the two spheres, we shall see its
strong tendency to send forth its rays into the whole life of
the person, effecting a comprehensive structural change. Liv-
ing religiousness wishes to bring forth living ethos. Something
essentially different meets our view if we seek to examine the
connection between the two fields from the standpoint of the
ethical. The man who seeks distinction and decision in his own
soul cannot draw from it, from his soul, absoluteness for his
scale of values. Only out of a personal relationship with the
Absolute can the absoluteness of the ethical co- ordinates arise
without which there is no complete awareness of self. Even
when the individual calls an absolute criterion handed down
by religious tradition his own, it must be reforged in the fire
of the truth of his personal essential relation to the Absolute
if it is to win true validity. But always it is the religious which
bestows, the ethical which receives.
It would be a fundamental misunderstanding of what I am
saying if one assumed that I am upholding so- called moral
heteronomy or external moral laws in opposition to so- called
moral autonomy or self- imposed moral laws. Where the Ab-
solute speaks in the reciprocal relationship, there are no longer