Page 62 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Philosophy 35

longs the actual, ever- recurring renunciation of the original
relational bond, of the reality which takes place between I and
Thou, of the spontaneity of the moment. Religion must know
knowledge not only as a need but also as a duty of man. It must
know that history moves along the way of this need and duty,
that, Biblically speaking, the eating of the tree of knowledge
leads out of Paradise but into the world.
The world, the world as objective and self- contained con-
nection of all being, natural and spiritual, would not exist for
us if our thinking, which develops in philosophizing, did not
melt together the world- concreta which are presented to us.
It would not exist if our thinking did not merge these world-
concreta with one another and with all that man has ever ex-
perienced and has ever comprehended as experienceable. And
spirit all the more would not genuinely exist for us as objec-
tive connection if thought did not objectify it, if spirit itself as
philosophy did not objectify and unite itself. Only through the
fact that philosophy radically abandoned the relation with the
concrete did that amazing construction of an objective thought-
continuum become possible, with a static system of concepts
and a dynamic one of problems. Every man who can “think”
may enter this continuum through the simple use of this ability,
through a thinking comprehension of thought. Only through
this is there an “objective” mutual understanding, that is, one
which does not, like the religious, entail two men’s each recog-
nizing the other by the personal involvement in life which he
has achieved. Instead, both fulfil a function of thought which
demands no involvement in life and bear in fruitful dialectic the
tension between the reciprocal ideas and problems.
The religious communication of a content of being takes place
in paradox. It is not a demonstrable assertion (theology which pre-
tends to be this is rather a questionable type of philosophy), but a
pointing toward the hidden realm of existence of the hearing man