Page 37 - Eclipse of God

10 Chapter 2

with awe, transport him with rapture, or merely give him guid-
ance. Anthropomorphism always reflects our need to preserve
the concrete quality evidenced in the encounter; yet even this
need is not its true root: it is in the encounter itself that we are
confronted with something compellingly anthropomorphic,
something demanding reciprocity, a primary Thou. This is true
of those moments of our daily life in which we become aware
of the reality that is absolutely independent of us, whether it
be as power or as glory, no less than of the hours of great rev-
elation of which only a halting record has been handed down
to us.
We find an all- important example of the necessary supple-
mentation of a genuine concept of God by an interpretation of
what man experiences humanly, occurring just a little before the
dawn of our own era, in the doctrine of Spinoza. In his the-
ory of the divine attributes he seems to have undertaken the
greatest anti- anthropomorphic effort ever essayed by the human
spirit. He designates the number of the attributes of the divine
substance as infinite. However, he gives names to only two of
these, “extension” and “thought”— in other words, the cosmos
and the spirit. Thus everything given us, both from without
and within ourselves, taken together, accounts for only two of
the infinite number of the attributes of God. This proposition
of Spinoza’s implies, among other things, a warning against
identifying God with a “spiritual principle,” as has been at-
tempted particularly in our own era with ever greater insist-
ence; for even the spirit is only one of the angelic forms, so
to speak, in which God manifests Himself. However, despite
the abstractness of the concept, the greatness of God is here
expressed in an incomparably vivid way.
Nevertheless, this highest concept of God would have re-
mained confined to the sphere of discursive thinking, and di-
vorced from religious actuality, if Spinoza had not introduced