Page 69 - Eclipse of God

42 Chapter 4

internal and external reality.” Yet it is obvious that this kind of
reality is not adequate to make the thought about God identi-
cal with the “belief in Him and His personality.” Transcenden-
tal philosophy, whose task was to ascertain whether there is a
God, finally found itself compelled to state: “It is preposterous
to ask whether there is a God.”
The contradiction goes even deeper when Kant treats belief
from this point of view. He incidentally outlines a fundamental
distinction between “to believe God” and “to believe in God.”
“To believe God” obviously means God’s being the ideational
content of one’s faith. This is a deduction from the fact that
“to believe in God” means in the terminology of Kant, as he
himself expressly states, to believe in a living God. To believe
in God means, therefore, to stand in a personal relationship to
that God; a relationship in which it is possible to stand only
toward a living entity.
This distinction becomes still clearer through Kant’s adden-
dum: to believe “not in an entity which is only an idol and is
not a personality.” It follows that a God who is not a living
personality is an idol. Kant comes that close at this point to
the reality of faith. But he does not permit its validity to stand.
His system compels him decisively to restrict what he has said.
The same page of manuscript contains the following passage:
“The idea of God as a living God is nothing but the inescapa-
ble fate of man.” But if the idea of God is only that, then it is
totally impossible to “believe in God” legitimately; that is, it is
impossible to stand in a personal relationship with him. Man,
declares the philosopher, is compelled to believe in him the
moment he thinks God. But the philosopher is compelled to
withdraw the character of truth from this faith, and together
with it the character of reality (any reality, that is, which is
more than merely psychological). Here, apparently of necessity,