Page 118 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Ethics 91

the Good. In its light all secret teachings appear as learnable
conventions; the essential relation of the human person to that
which “towers above being” cannot be learned, it can only be
awakened.

5

Plato’s daring attempt to set a world of Ideas in the place of the
collapsing prototypal heavenly world that guaranteed the ab-
soluteness of the highest values to the great Oriental cultures
did not succeed, however great and persevering its influence.
The process which had begun continued, leading to the disso-
lution of the absoluteness of the ethical co- ordinates and, in
constant interaction with it, to the disintegration of the old
world.
Long before this, however, the first stage had been com-
pleted in the second great attempt in the history of the human
spirit to bind the radical distinction between good and evil
with the Absolute. This attempt, as I said before, was utterly
different from the first in its method and course of develop-
ment. It did not originate, like the first, in a connected group
of higher cultures stretching over a continent. It originated in
a band of cattle- breeders and occasional farmers who left the
high civilization of Egypt, where, as a foreign people, they had
eked out a half- free, half- slave existence, to become wander-
ers and land- seekers and who on the way, in an oasis, consti-
tuted themselves as a covenantal union of tribes united by their
common faith in God. This “God of Israel” was a giver and
protector of law, like some other Semitic tribal gods, but the
covenant that was made with Him was based on such an ear-
nest, such a genuinely demanded and protected distinction be-
tween right and wrong as had not been known in any of those
tribes. The spiritual leaders ever again and ever more clearly