Page 70 - Eclipse of God

The Love of God and the Idea of Deity 43

that which was decisive for Pascal, as it was for Abraham, is
missing; namely, the love of God.

3

But a philosopher who has been overwhelmed by faith must
speak of love.
Hermann Cohen, the last in the series of great disciples
of Kant, is a shining example of a philosopher who has been
overwhelmed by faith.
Belief in God was an important point in Cohen’s system
of thought as early as in his youth, when it interested him as
a psychological phenomenon. His explanations of “the origin
of the mythology of gods” and of the “poetic act” involved in
“god- creating fantasy,” contained in his study on “Mythologi-
cal Conceptions concerning God and Soul” which appeared in
1868 in Steinthal’s periodical, Zeitschrift fuer Voelkerpsychologie,
was an expression of this interest. Faith was there treated as
relative to psychological distinction; but in the course of the
development of Cohen’s philosophical system faith’s status as
an independent concept, distinct from knowledge, was to be-
come questionable.
In his “Ethics of Pure Will” (1904), Cohen writes: “God
must not become the content of belief, if that belief is to mean
something distinct from knowledge.” Of the two kinds of be-
lief which Kant distinguishes in his posthumous work, namely,
“to believe God” (that is, to introduce the idea of God into a
system of knowledge), and “to believe in a living God” (that is,
to have a vital relationship to him as a living entity), Cohen
rejects the second even more strongly than Kant. In this way
he means to overcome the “great equivocality” of the word “be-
lief.” Whereas Kant saw in the idea of God only the “fate” of