Page 36 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Reality 9

a plane in itself fictitious but vested with reality by the soul.
Cultural epochs, such men say, can be classified according to
the imaginative strength of this projection; but in the end,
man, having attained to clear knowledge, must recognize that
every alleged colloquy with the divine was only a soliloquy, or
rather a conversation between various strata of the self. There-
upon, as a representative of this school in our time has done,
it becomes necessary to proclaim that God is “dead.” Actually,
this proclamation means only that man has become incapable
of apprehending a reality absolutely independent of himself
and of having a relation with it— incapable, moreover, of im-
aginatively perceiving this reality and representing it in images,
since it eludes direct contemplation. For the great images of
God fashioned by mankind are born not of imagination but
of real encounters with real divine power and glory. Man’s ca-
pacity to apprehend the divine in images is lamed in the same
measure as is his capacity to experience a reality absolutely in-
dependent of himself.

2

The foregoing naturally does not mean that a given concept of
God, a conceptual apprehension of the divine, necessarily im-
pairs the concrete religious relationship. Everything depends
on the extent to which this concept of God can do justice to
the reality which it denotes, do justice to it as a reality. The more
abstract the concept, the more does it need to be balanced by
the evidence of living experience, with which it is intimately
bound up rather than linked in an intellectual system. The fur-
ther removed a concept seems from anthropomorphism, the
more it must be organically completed by an expression of that
immediacy and, as it were, bodily nearness which overwhelm
man in his encounters with the divine, whether they fill him