Page 50 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Philosophy 23

not the poet who speaks here but his characters, yet they un-
questionably express the actual inner situation of his life.
It is the situation of the man who no longer experiences
the divine as standing over against him. It does not matter
whether he does not dare or is unable to experience it as such.
Since he has removed himself from it existentially, he no longer
knows it as standing over against him. Although the chorus of
Aeschylus also speaks of God in the third person, it makes a
genuine invocation from human to divine being. On the other
hand, in the pathos of Hecuba, despite its threefold saying of
“Thou,” no true Thou is in reality implied.
Protagoras once remarked that he could ascertain neither
that gods exist nor that they do not, for the discovery is hin-
dered by the mysteriousness of the subject and the brevity of
human life. This famous saying translates the situation into
the language of philosophical consciousness, but it is a con-
sciousness which is strongly conditioned by the time in which
Protagoras lived. For this particular consciousness, which
caught up and absorbed all that was absolute in the mirror of
a universal relativism, the question about the gods had become
merely the question whether it was possible to ascertain their
existence. To the great thinkers of the preceding age this ques-
tion would have appeared meaningless. In Heraclitus’ saying,
“Here also are gods,” the word “also” is a strong indication of
the existence of immediately present divine being. And when
he explains that the One which alone is wise wishes and does
not wish to be called by the name of Zeus, he has given phil-
osophical expression to an original relation between religion
and philosophy as that between the meeting with the divine
and its objectification in thought. The dissolution of this re-
lation is proclaimed by the sophist, to whom the myths and
cults of popular tradition are no longer witness and symbol
of a transcendent presence, but rather only something in the