Page 133 - Eclipse of God

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GOD AND THE SPIRIT OF MAN

This book discusses the relations between religion and philos-
ophy in the history of the spirit and deals with the part that
philosophy has played in its late period in making God and all
absoluteness appear unreal.
If philosophy is here set in contrast to religion, what is meant
by religion is not the massive fulness of statements, concepts,
and activities that one customarily describes by this name and
that men sometimes long for more than for God. Religion is
essentially the act of holding fast to God. And that does not
mean holding fast to an image that one has made of God, nor
even holding fast to the faith in God that one has conceived.
It means holding fast to the existing God. The earth would not
hold fast to its conception of the sun (if it had one) nor to its
connection with it, but to the sun itself.
In contrast to religion so understood, philosophy is here re-
garded as the process, reaching from the early becoming inde-
pendent of reflection to its more contemporary crisis, the last
stage of which is the intellectual letting go of God.
This process begins with man’s no longer contenting him-
self, as did the pre- philosophical man, with picturing the living
God, to whom one formerly only called— with a call of despair

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