Page 44 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Reality 17

foundations and principles of the existent, the ideals, as well as
the suprasensual, God and the gods.” But the living God who
approaches and addresses an individual in the situations of real
life is not a component part of such a suprasensual world; His
place is no more there than it is in the sensible world, and
whenever man nonetheless has to interpret encounters with
Him as self- encounters, man’s very structure is destroyed. This
is the portent of the present hour.
Heidegger rightfully looks upon this hour as an hour of
night. Thus he refers to a verse of Hölderlin, the great poet to
whose work he has devoted some of his most important inter-
pretative writings. Hölderlin says:

Aber weh! es wandelt in Nacht, es wohnt, wie im Orkus,
Ohne Goettliches unser Geschlecht.
(But alas! our generation walks in night, dwells as in Hades,
without the divine.)
It is true that Heidegger holds out the promise, even
though only as a possibility, of an intellectual transformation
from which day may dawn again, and then “the appearing of
God and the gods may begin again.” But this coupling of an
absolute singular with an iridescent plural has a ring differ-
ent from that of the verses in which Hölderlin a century and
a half ago praised God and His manifestations in the active
forces of nature, i.e., the gods. To- day, when we are faced by
the question of our destiny, the question as to the essential
difference between all subjectivity and that which transcends
it, the juxtaposition of such a singular and such a plural seems
to indicate that after the imageless era a new procession of
images may begin— images of God and images of gods, images
of God and gods together— without man’s again experienc-
ing and accepting his real encounters with the divine as such.
But without the truth of the encounter, all images are illusion