Page 48 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Philosophy 21

But they are bound like men by the chain of desire, heavenly
figures entangled, even as men, in the “wheel of births.” One
may worship them, but the legends consistently picture them
as paying homage to him, the Buddha, the “Awakened One,”
freed and freeing from the wheel of births. On the other hand,
Buddha knows a genuinely divine, an “Unborn, Unoriginated,
Uncreated.” He knows it only in this wholly negative designa-
tion, and he refuses to make any assertions about it. Yet he stands
related to it with his whole being. Here is neither proclamation
nor worship of a deity, yet unmistakable religious reality.

2

Thus the personal manifestation of the divine is not decisive
for the genuineness of religion. What is decisive is that I re-
late myself to the divine as to Being which is over against me,
though not over against me alone. Complete inclusion of the
divine in the sphere of the human self abolishes its divinity. It
is not necessary to know something about God in order re-
ally to believe in Him: many true believers know how to talk
to God but not about Him. If one dares to turn toward the
unknown God, to go to meet Him, to call to Him, Reality is
present. He who refuses to limit God to the transcendent has a
fuller conception of Him than he who does so limit Him. But
he who confines God within the immanent means something
other than Him.
The radical difference between the two becomes clear when
one compares religious speech in Aeschylus with that in Euri-
pides. In Agamemnon the chorus says:

Zeus, whoever he is,
If it pleases him so to be called,
With this name I invoke him.