Page 122 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Ethics 95

first Biblical prophets to the Sermon on the Mount. But the
tendency from Augustine to the Reformation was to see faith
as a gift of God. This sublime conception, with all that goes
with it, resulted in the retreating into obscurity of the Israelite
mystery of man as an independent partner of God. The dogma
of original sin was not, indeed, adapted to further that especial
connection of the ethical with the religious that true theon-
omy seeks to realize through the faithful autonomy of man.
In the teachings of the correspondence between heaven
and earth, found in the great Asiatic cultures, the normative
principle is not yet differentiated at all from the theological
(theology being understood as religion’s reflection on itself).
There only exists a normative side of truth turned toward man.
In the teaching of Israel the ethos is an inherent function of
religion, no longer one side indeed but a direct effect of it. In
Christianity, which gives the character of exclusiveness to the
Israelite belief in the indispensable grace of God, the norm,
even if it steps forth as the “new law,” can no longer occupy
a central place. It is thus made easy for the secular norm to
gain ever more ground at its expense. In its political form, to
be sure, the secular norm seeks to secure an absolute religious
basis through the concept of the divine right of kings and
other means. The true binding of the ethical to the Absolute,
however, is here ever less present.

6
The crisis of the second great attempt to bind the ethical to
the Absolute extends into our time. Like the first, it also found
its intellectual expression in a philosophical movement that
relativized values, though one that was, to be sure, far more dif-
ferentiated than that of the Sophists. It had its prelude already
in the seventeenth century in views such as that of Hobbes,