Page 55 - Eclipse of God

28 Chapter 3

a new founding which arises through the desire to return to
the original religious element. It is a struggle for the protection
of lived concreteness as the meeting- place between the human
and the divine. The actually lived concrete is the “moment”
in its unforeseeableness and its irrecoverableness, in its undi-
vertible character of happening but once, in its decisiveness,
in its secret dialogue between that which happens and that
which is willed, between fate and action, address and answer.
This lived concreteness is threatened by the invasion of the
extra- religious elements, and it is protected on all fronts by the
religious in its unavoidable aloneness.
The religious essence in every religion can be found in its
highest certainty. That is the certainty that the meaning of ex-
istence is open and accessible in the actual lived concrete, not
above the struggle with reality but in it.
That meaning is open and accessible in the actual lived con-
crete does not mean it is to be won and possessed through
any type of analytical or synthetic investigation or through any
type of reflection upon the lived concrete. Meaning is to be
experienced in living action and suffering itself, in the unre-
duced immediacy of the moment. Of course, he who aims at
the experiencing of experience will necessarily miss the mean-
ing, for he destroys the spontaneity of the mystery. Only he
reaches the meaning who stands firm, without holding back or
reservation, before the whole might of reality and answers it in
a living way. He is ready to confirm with his life the meaning
which he has attained.
Every religious utterance is a vain attempt to do justice to
the meaning which has been attained. All religious expression
is only an intimation of its attainment. The reply of the people
of Israel on Sinai, “We will do it, we will hear it,” expresses the
decisive with naïve and unsurpassable pregnancy. The meaning