Page 83 - Eclipse of God

56 Chapter 5

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God? The Other is enough, no matter what other.” But what
if God is not the quintessence of the Other, but rather its abso-
luteness? And what if it is not primarily the reciprocal relation
of subject and object which exists between me and the other,
but rather the reciprocal relation of I and Thou? Each empir-
ical other does not, of course, remain my Thou; he becomes
an It, an object for me as I for him. It is not so, however, with
that absolute Other, the Absolute over against me, that unde-
finable and unfathomable X that I call “God.” God can never
become an object for me; I can attain no other relation to Him
than that of the I to its eternal Thou, that of the Thou to its
eternal I. But if man is no longer able to attain this relation, if
God is silent toward him and he toward God, then something
has taken place, not in human subjectivity but in Being itself.
It would be worthier not to explain it to oneself in sensational
and incompetent sayings, such as that of the “death” of God,
but to endure it as it is and at the same time to move existen-
tially toward a new happening, toward that event in which the
word between heaven and earth will again be heard. Thus the
perseverance of the “religious need,” to which Sartre objects
and which he thinks contradicts the silence of the transcend-
ent, instead points directly to the situation in which man be-
comes aware of this silence as such.
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Still more questionable is Sartre’s demand, reminiscent of
Ludwig Feuerbach, that man should recover for himself the
creative freedom which he ascribed to God and that he should
affirm himself as the being through whom a world exists. That
ordering of known phenomena which we call the world is, in-
deed, the composite work of a thousand human generations,
but it has come into being through the fact that manifold being,
which is not our work, meets us, who are, likewise, together
with our subjectivity, not our work. Nor is this meeting, out
of which arises the whole of the phenomena which we order