Page 40 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Reality 13

come the contradiction between the imperative, which is un-
conditional, and any immanent justification, which is condi-
tional; a God who is “the source of all moral obligation.”
The fact that a God who is nothing but a condition within
us cannot meet this requirement, that only an absolute can
give the quality of absoluteness to an obligation, is the spur
of Kant’s restlessness. He had tried to avoid this fundamental
difficulty in his moral philosophy by putting human society in
place of the individual man, believing that the continued exist-
ence of this society depends upon the moral principle. But do
we not discover, in the depth of any genuine solitude, that even
beyond all social existence— nay, precisely in this realm— there
is a conflict between good and evil, between fulfilment and
failure to fulfil the purpose embodied in us, in this individual
being? And yet I am constitutionally incapable of conceiving
of myself as the ultimate source of moral approval or disap-
proval of myself, as surety for the absoluteness that I, to be
sure, do not possess, but nevertheless imply with respect to this
yes or no. The encounter with the original voice, the original
source of yes or no, cannot be replaced by any self- encounter.

4

Understandably, the thinking of the era, in its effort to make
God unreal, has not contented itself with reducing Him to
a moral principle. The philosophers who followed Kant have
tried essentially to reinstate the absolute, conceived of as ex-
isting not “within us,” or at least not only within us. The tra-
ditional term “God” is to be preserved for the sake of its pro-
found overtones, but in such a way that any connection it may
have with our concrete life, as a life exposed to the manifesta-
tions of God, must become meaningless. The reality of a vision
or a contact that directly determines our existence, which was