Page 87 - Eclipse of God

60 Chapter 5

greatest care if we, as men, that is as existing beings, are to
experience a relation of God to man?” But this in his opinion
would belong to a new thinking of being through man. Ac-
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cording to Heidegger’s conception, to be sure, it is not for
man to decide whether and how the divine will reappear. Such
an appearance, he explains, will take place only through the
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fate of being itself. Since, however, he has stated as the pre-
supposition for this appearance that “beforehand and in long
preparation being itself is clarified and is experienced in its
truth,” there can be no doubt as to what part is to be ascribed
here to human thought about truth in the determination of
“whether and how the day of the holy will dawn.” It is indeed
precisely in human thought about truth that being becomes
illuminated. Heidegger usually conceives of this still uncertain
sunrise of the holy as the clear background before which “an
appearance of God and the gods can begin anew.”
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Once in interpreting Hölderlin, who had called our time
an indigent one, he explains this as “the time of the gods who
have fled and of the God who is coming.” It is indigent because
it stands in a double lack: “in the no longer of the departed
gods and the not yet of the Coming One.” As the denominat-
ing Word is wanting that could tell “who He Himself is who
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dwells in the holy,” so is God Himself wanting. This is “the
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age in which God is absent”; the Word and God are absent
together. The Word is not absent because God is absent, and
God is not absent because the Word is absent. Both are absent
together and appear together because of the nearness of man
to being, which is at times, historically, illuminated in him.
Thus, admonishes Heidegger, man living in this hour should
not strive to make a God for himself, nor call any longer on an
accustomed God.
Heidegger warns in this way against “religion” in general,
but in particular against the prophetic principle in the Judaeo-