Page 61 - Eclipse of God

34 Chapter 3

religious man that he was) speaks the same sentence, he trans-
forms it. “Things” mean now to him not archetypes or “per-
fect essences,” but the actual exemplars, the beings and objects
with which he, this bodily person, spends his life. When he
ventures to say that he sees them in God, he does not speak
of looking upward but of looking here. He acknowledges that
meaning is open and attainable in the lived concreteness of
every moment.
Plato gives us a glorious human and poetic account of the
mysterious fullness of the concrete situation. He also knows
gloriously how to remain silent. When, however, he explains
and answers for his silence in that unforgettable passage of the
seventh epistle, he starts, to be sure, from the concreteness of
“life together,” where “in an instant a light is kindled as from
springing fire.” But in order to explain he turns immediately
to an exposition of the knowing of the known, meaning the
universal. Standing in the concrete situation and even witness-
ing to it, man is overspanned by the rainbow of the covenant
between the absolute and the concrete. If he wishes in philos-
ophizing to fix his glance upon the white light of the absolute
as the object of his knowledge, only archetypes or ideas, the
transfigurations of the universal, present themselves to him.
The color- free, beyond- color bridge fails to appear. Here also,
in my opinion, is to be found the reason why Plato changed
from the identification of the idea of the good with God, as
presented in his Republic, to the conception appearing in the
Timaeus of the demiurge who contemplates the Ideas.

8

Religion, however, is not allowed, even in the face of the most
self- confident pride of philosophy, to remain blind to philos-
ophy’s great engagement. To this engagement necessarily be-