Page 75 - Eclipse of God

48 Chapter 4

and Israel, to whom the commandment is addressed, does know
Him. Thus I can accept the injunction to love my fellow- man.
Cohen is, to be sure, actually referring to something else.
For now he raises the question whether he should take offense
at God’s being “only an idea.” “Why should I not be able,” he
replies, “to love ideas? What is man after all but a social idea,
and yet I can love him as an individual only through and by
virtue of that fact. Therefore, strictly considered, I can only love
the social idea of man.”
To me, it seems otherwise. Only if and because I love this
or that specific man can I elevate my relation to the social idea
of man into that emotional relationship involving my whole
being which I am entitled to call by the name of love. And
what of God? Franz Rosenzweig warned us that Cohen’s idea
of God should not be taken to mean that God is “only an idea”
in Cohen’s eyes. The warning is pertinent: Rosenzweig is right
to emphasize that an idea for Cohen is not “only an idea.” Yet,
at the same time, we must not ignore that other “only,” whose
meaning is quite different indeed in Cohen’s phrase, “a God
who is only an idea.” Let us, if we will, describe our relation to
the idea of the beautiful and the idea of the good by the name
of love— though in my opinion all this has content and value
for the soul only in being rendered concrete and made real. But
to love God differs from that relationship in essential quality.
He who loves God loves Him precisely insofar as He is not
“only an idea,” and can love Him because He is not “only an
idea.” And I permit myself to say that though Cohen indeed
thought of God as an idea, Cohen too loved Him as— God.

5

In the great work prepared after “The Concept of Religion”
and posthumously published under the title of “Religion of