Page 82 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Modern Thinking 55

live in the age of such a concealment, such a divine silence, and
we shall perhaps understand its implication for our existence
as something entirely different from that which Sartre desires
to teach us.
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What Sartre desires to teach us, he says to us clearly enough.
“This silence of the transcendent, combined with the persever-
ance of the religious need in modern man, that is the great
concern to- day as yesterday. It is the problem which torments
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers.” In other words, existentialism
must take courage, it must give up once for all the search for
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God, it must “forget” God. After a century- long crisis of faith
as well as of knowledge, man must finally recover the crea-
tive freedom which he once falsely ascribed to God. He must
recognize himself as the being through whose appearance the
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world exists. For, says Sartre, “there is no universe other than
a human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.” The
sentence that I have just quoted sounds like the thesis of a
resurrected idealism.
The problem that “torments” the existentialist thinker of our
age, insofar as he does not, like Sartre, dismiss it out of hand,
lies deeper than Sartre thinks. It focuses finally in the question
of whether the perseverance of the “religious need” does not
indicate something inherent in human existence. Does exist-
ence really mean, as Sartre thinks, existing “for oneself” en-
capsuled in one’s own subjectivity? Or does it not essentially
mean standing over against the x— not an x for which a certain
quantity could be substituted, but rather the X itself, the un-
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definable and unfathomable? “God,” says Sartre, “is the quin-
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tessence of the Other.” But the Other for Sartre is he who
“looks at” me, who makes me into an object, as I make him.
The idea of God, moreover, he also understands as that of an
inescapable witness, and if that is so, “What need have we of