Page 67 - Eclipse of God

40 Chapter 4

thought precisely because He is God. He is beyond each and
every one of those systems, absolutely and by virtue of His
nature. What the philosophers describe by the name of God
cannot be more than an idea. But God, “the God of Abraham,”
is not an idea; all ideas are absorbed in Him. Nor is that all. If I
think even of a state of being in which all ideas are absorbed, and
think some philosophic thought about it as an idea— then I am
no longer referring to the God of Abraham. The “passion” pe-
culiar to philosophers is, according to a hint dropped by Pascal,
pride. They offer humanity their own system in place of God.
“What!” cries Pascal, “the philosophers recognized God and
desired not merely that men should love him, but that they
should reach their level and then stop!” It is precisely because
the philosophers replace him by the image of images, the idea,
that they remove themselves and remove the rest of us furthest
from him. There is no alternative. One must choose. Pascal
chose, during one of those all- overthrowing moments, when
he felt his sick- bed prayer was answered: “To be apart from the
world, divested of all things, lonely in your Presence, in order
to respond to your justice with all the motions of my heart.”
Pascal himself, to be sure, was not a philosopher but a math-
ematician, and it is easier for a mathematician to turn his back
on the God of the philosophers than for a philosopher. For the
philosopher, if he were really to wish to turn his back on that
God, would be compelled to renounce the attempt to include
God in his system in any conceptual form. Instead of includ-
ing God as one theme among others, that is, as the highest
theme of all, his philosophy both wholly and in part would be
compelled to point toward God, without actually dealing with
him. This means that the philosopher would be compelled to
recognize and admit the fact that his idea of the Absolute was
dissolving at the point where the Absolute lives; that it was