Page 43 - Eclipse of God

16 Chapter 2

Bergson’s point of departure is the fact of the effort créateur
que manifeste la vie. This effort, he says, “is of God (est de Dieu),
if it is not God Himself.” The second part of the sentence nul-
lifies the first. An effort, i.e., a process, or the preliminary forms
of a process, cannot be named God, without making the con-
cept of God utterly meaningless. Further, and most especially,
the crucial religious experiences of man do not take place in a
sphere in which creative energy operates without contradic-
tion, but in a sphere in which evil and good, despair and hope,
the power of destruction and the power of rebirth, dwell side
by side. The divine force which man actually encounters in life
does not hover above the demonic, but penetrates it. To con-
fine God to a producing function is to remove Him from the
world in which we live— a world filled with burning contra-
dictions, and with yearning for salvation.
The conception represented by Heidegger is of an essen-
tially different kind. Unlike Bergson, he does not aim at a new
concept of God. He accepts Nietzsche’s statement about the
death of God and interprets it. This interpretation is doubtless
correct to some extent. He holds the sentence “God is slain” to
mean that contemporary man has shifted the concept of God
from the realm of objective being to the “immanence of sub-
jectivity.” Indeed, specifically modern thought can no longer
endure a God who is not confined to man’s subjectivity, who is
not merely a “supreme value,” and, as we have seen, this thought
leads us down a path which although by no means straight, is
ultimately unmistakable. But then Heidegger goes on to say:
“The slaying means the elimination of the self- subsisting su-
prasensual world by man.” This sentence likewise, taken by
itself, is correct, but it leads to crucial problems that neither
Nietzsche— if Heidegger interprets him correctly— nor Hei-
degger has perceived or acknowledged. By the “self- subsisting
suprasensual world” Heidegger means “the highest ends, the