Page 77 - Eclipse of God

50 Chapter 4

he contains the archetype. He issues forth the ideal, but does
not exhaust himself in the issuing. The unity of God is not the
Good; it is the Supergood. God desires that men should follow
His revelation, yet at the same time He wishes to be accepted
and loved in His deepest concealment. He who loves God
loves the ideal and loves God more than the ideal. He knows
himself to be loved by God, not by the ideal, not by an idea,
but even by Him whom ideality cannot grasp, namely, by that
absolute personality we call God. Can this be taken to mean that
God “is” a personality? The absolute character of His personal-
ity, that paradox of paradoxes, prohibits any such statement. It
only means that God loves as a personality and that He wishes
to be loved like a personality. And if He was not a person in
Himself, He, so to speak, became one in creating Man, in order
to love man and be loved by him— in order to love me and be
loved by me. For, even supposing that ideas can also be loved,
the fact remains that persons are the only ones who love. Even
the philosopher who has been overwhelmed by faith, though
he afterward continue to hug his system even more closely
than before, and to interpret the love between God and man
as the love between an idea and a person— even he, neverthe-
less, testifies to the existence of a love between God and man
that is basically reciprocal. That philosophy too, which, in order
to preserve the Being (esse; Sein) of God, deprives Him of ex-
istence (existentia; Dasein), indicates however unintentionally
the bridge standing indestructibly on the two pillars, one im-
perishable and the other ever crumbling, God and man.

6

Cohen once said of Kant, “What is characteristic of his the-
ology is the non- personal in the usual sense, the truly spiritual
principle: the sublimation of God into an idea.” And he adds,