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The Love of God and the Idea of Deity 51
“And nothing less than this is the deepest basis of the Jewish
idea of God.” As far as Kant is concerned, Cohen was correct
in this judgment. But throughout Kant’s posthumous work we
can see emerging every now and then resistance to this sub-
limation of God into an idea; a sublimation which later even
more prominently prevents in Cohen the linking of the idea
with the concept of existence.
“Under the concept of God,” writes Kant, “Transcendental
Philosophy refers to a substance possessing the greatest ex-
istence,” but he also qualifies God as “the ideal of a substance
which we create ourselves.” What we have in these notes, which
sometimes appear chaotic, are the records of a suit at law, the
last phase which the thought of the idea of God assumes for its
thinker, of a suit between the two elements, “idea” and “God,”
which are contained in the idea of God; a suit which time
and again reverts to the same point, until death cuts it short.
Cohen set out to put the idea into a sequence so logical as
to make it impossible for any impulse to opposition to de-
velop. Even when overwhelmed by faith, Cohen continued the
struggle to preserve this sequence. In so doing, he was of the
opinion that “the deepest basis of the Jewish idea of God” was
on his side. But even the deepest basis of the Jewish idea of
God can be achieved only by plunging into that word by which
1
God revealed Himself to Moses, “I shall be there.” It gives
exact expression to the personal “existence” of God (not to His
abstract “being”), and expression even to His living presence,
which most directly of all His attributes touches the man to
whom He manifests Himself. The speaker’s self- designation as
the God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob (Exod.
3:15) is indissolubly united with that manifestation of “I shall be
there,” and He cannot be reduced to a God of the philosophers.
1 Exod. 3:14, part of the phrase commonly translated: “I am that I am.”