Page 114 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Ethics 87

such alternatives. The whole meaning of reciprocity, indeed,
lies in just this, that it does not wish to impose itself but to be
freely apprehended. It gives us something to apprehend, but
it does not give us the apprehension. Our act must be entirely
our own for that which is to be disclosed to us to be disclosed,
even that which must disclose each individual to himself. In
theonomy the divine law seeks for your own, and true revela-
tion reveals to you yourself.

3
From this point, from the reality of the relationship between the
spheres in the life of the person, and only from this point can
their relationship in the history of man be adequately grasped.
Twice in the history of mankind— insofar as it can be sur-
veyed and understood by man— there has been an attempt to
bind the radical distinction between good and evil to the Ab-
solute. The two manifestations of this great enterprise of the
spirit are, to be sure, as different as possible in their nature and
course of development.
The first manifestation appeared in Oriental and Greek an-
tiquity. It is the teaching of a universal continuity of mean-
ing, whose principle appears in China as Tao, in India as Rita,
in Iran as Urta (usually pronounced Asha), and in Greece as
Dike. Heavenly powers, we are told, have entrusted to man the
pattern of right behaviour. But this is not an order that they
have devised for man; it is their own order. Heaven does not
wish to establish a special order for earth; it wishes to let it par-
take in its own order. The moral order is identical with the cos-
mic. The totality of existing beings is by its nature one society
with one code of laws. It is immaterial whether the ancestors
are themselves represented as gods or whether a relationship
of give- and- take exists between the ancestors and the gods. In