Page 64 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Philosophy 37

basic modes of existing with being. The child that calls to his
mother and the child that watches his mother— or to give a
more exact example, the child that silently speaks to his mother
through nothing other than looking into her eyes and the same
child that looks at something on the mother as at any other
object— show the twofoldness in which man stands and re-
mains standing. Something of the sort is sometimes even to be
noticed in those near death. What is here apparent is the dou-
ble structure of human existence itself. Because these are the
two basic modes of our existence with being, they are the two
basic modes of our existence in general— I- Thou and I- It.
I- Thou finds its highest intensity and transfiguration in reli-
gious reality, in which unlimited Being becomes, as absolute
person, my partner. I- It finds its highest concentration and il-
lumination in philosophical knowledge. In this knowledge the
extraction of the subject from the I of the immediate lived
togetherness of I and It and the transformation of the It into
the object detached in its essence produces the exact thinking
of contemplated existing beings, yes, of contemplated Being
itself.
Divine truth, according to a saying of Franz Rosenzweig,
wishes to be implored “with both hands,” that of philosophy
and that of theology. “He who prays with the double prayer
of the believer and the unbeliever,” he continues, “to him it
will not deny itself.” But what is the prayer of the unbeliever?
Rosenzweig means by this Goethe’s prayer to his own destiny,
a prayer which, no matter how genuine, brings to mind that
of the Euripidean queen to fate or the human spirit, a prayer
whose Thou is no Thou. But there is another prayer of the phi-
losophers still farther from the Thou, and yet, it seems to me,
more important.
The religious reality of the meeting with the Meeter, who
shines through all forms and is Himself formless, knows no