Page 116 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Ethics 89

on European soil, in Greece. The philosophical expression of
this crisis is known by the name of Sophistry. Its most char-
acteristic criticism attacks the connection between the ethical
and the absolute by calling in question, from the standpoint of
biological facts, the cosmos as a unified pattern. The heavenly
bodies may indeed appear to us to be in that perfect agreement
which a chorus of Aeschylus calls “the harmony of Zeus”; but
where life is, another law rules, according to which the strong
dispose of the weak. A few Sophists, the radically individu-
alistic among them, conclude from this that the right of the
strong is valid even within human society, but most of them
defend the law of society, which unites the weak into a pow-
erful body. Human society determines what is good and just;
it does so on the basis of what is useful to it. Rather, since
not one single society but many and varied societies exist, one
should say that societies behave thus. The good is therefore not
one and consistent, it is “variegated and manifold.” In other
words, there are only changing customs and manners, values
and regulations; there is no primordial function of assent and
dissent, inherent in Being itself, which underlies all this variety
and manifoldness and, in fact, makes it possible. “Man,” sums
up the greatest of the Sophists, “is the measure of all things.”
It is as a protest against this relativizing of all values that
we must understand Plato’s doctrine of Ideas. It is the great
attempt of ancient thought to restore the connection of the
ethical with the Absolute and thus allow the concrete acting
man to meet once again the primal ground of Being. In line
with this intention Plato formulated at the end of his path, as
an exact counterpart to the saying of Protagoras, the opposing
statement, “God is the measure of all things.” Once the belief
common to the early cultures of the Orient in a unity of the
universe representing what is right had been upset and na-
ture had been split into a harmonious cosmos and a discordant