Page 80 - Eclipse of God

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RELIGION AND MODERN THINKING

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I shall speak of the relation of modern thought to religion. By
this I do not mean the attempts to think from the standpoint
of religious reality, or to create an understanding between it
and philosophy based on mutual tolerance. My subject shall
rather be modern thought only insofar as it undertakes to give
a verdict as to whether or under what conditions or within
what limits the character of a living human reality can be as-
cribed to religion. We find a judgment of this sort in the onto-
logical sense, on the one hand, in the so- called existentialism
of Sartre and Heidegger, and in the psychological sense, on the
other, in Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. Basic to
both positions is the assumption that the outcome of the cri-
sis in which religion has entered depends essentially upon the
judgments which are made by modern ontological or psycho-
logical thought. It is this assumption that we must examine.
In naming Heidegger and Sartre together, I by no means
imply that they have the same attitude toward religion. On the
contrary, in this respect as in so many others they are without

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