Page 86 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Modern Thinking 59

fore, in truth, not only religion but also metaphysics. Heidegger
believes that he can erect at the point of this extremest nega-
tion a new position which will be a pure ontological think-
ing. It is the teaching of being as attaining its illumination in
or through man. In this teaching the doctrine of Parmenides
which posits being as the original absolute which is prior to
and above form is curiously interwoven with the Hegelian the-
ory of the original principle which attains self- consciousness
in the human spirit.
It has been possible for Heidegger to erect this new position
despite the “death of God” because being for him is bound to
and attains its illumination through the destiny and history
of man, without its becoming thereby a function of human
subjectivity. But by this it is already indicated that, to use an
image that Heidegger himself avoids, God can rise from the
dead. This means that the unfolding of the new ontological
thought can prepare for a turning- point in which the divine,
or as Heidegger, in agreement with the poet Hölderlin, pre-
fers to say, the holy, will appear in new and still unanticipated
forms. This thinking is consequently, as Heidegger repeatedly
emphasizes, not atheism, for it “decides neither positively nor
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negatively about the possibility of God’s existing.” Rather
“through its adequate conception of existence” it makes it pos-
sible for the first time legitimately to ask “what is the ontolog-
ical state of the relation of existence to the divine.”
Heidegger not only protests against our regarding this view
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as atheism but also against our regarding it as an indifferentism
which must deteriorate into nihilism. He by no means wants to
teach an indifference toward the religious question. The single
need of this hour is, to him, much more the thinking through
of the basic religious concepts, the cogitative clarification of the
meaning of words such as God or the Holy. “Must we not first
be able,” he asks, “to understand and hear these words with the