Page 135 - Eclipse of God

108 Chapter 8

also destroyed its own absoluteness along with absoluteness in
general. The spirit can now no longer exist as an independent
essence. There now exists only a product of human individu-
als called spirit, a product which they contain and secrete like
mucus and urine.
In this stage there first takes place the conceptual letting go
of God because only now philosophy cuts off its own hands,
the hands with which it was able to grasp and hold Him.
But an analogous process takes place on the other side, in
the development of religion itself (in the usual broad sense of
the word).
From the earliest times the reality of the relation of faith,
man’s standing before the face of God, world- happening as
dialogue, has been threatened by the impulse to control the
power yonder. Instead of understanding events as calls which
make demands on one, one wishes oneself to demand without
having to hearken. “I have,” says man, “power over the pow-
ers I conjure.” And that continues, with sundry modifications,
wherever one celebrates rites without being turned to the Thou
and without really meaning its Presence.
The other pseudoreligious counterpart of the relation of
faith, not so elementally active as conjuration but acting with the
mature power of the intellect, is unveiling. Here one takes the
position of raising the veil of the manifest, which divides the re-
vealed from the hidden, and leading forth the divine mysteries.
“I am,” says man, “acquainted with the unknown, and I make
it known.” The supposedly divine It that the magician manip-
ulates as the technician his dynamo, the Gnostic lays bare, the
whole divine apparatus. His heirs are not “theosophies” and
their neighbours alone; in many theologies also, unveiling ges-
tures are to be discovered behind the interpreting ones.
We find this replacement of I- Thou by an I- It in manifold
forms in that new philosophy of religion which seeks to “save”