Page 88 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Modern Thinking 61

Christian tradition. “The ‘prophets’ of these religions,” he
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says, “do not begin by foretelling the word of the Holy. They
announce immediately the God upon whom the certainty of
salvation in a supernatural blessedness reckons.” Incidentally,
I have never in our time encountered on a high philosophical
plane such a far- reaching misunderstanding of the prophets
of Israel. The prophets of Israel have never announced a God
upon whom their hearers’ striving for security reckoned. They
have always aimed to shatter all security and to proclaim in
the opened abyss of the final insecurity the unwished- for God
who demands that His human creatures become real, they be-
come human, and confounds all who imagine that they can
take refuge in the certainty that the temple of God is in their
midst. This is the God of the historical demand as the prophets
of Israel beheld Him. The primal reality of these prophecies
does not allow itself to be tossed into the attic of “religions”: it
is as living and actual in this historical hour as ever.
This is not the place for a critical discussion of Heidegger’s
theory of being. I shall only confess that for me a concept of
being that means anything other than the inherent fact of all
existing being, namely, that it exists, remains insurmountably
empty. That is, unless I have recourse to religion and see in it a
philosophical characterization of the Godhead similar to that
of some Christian scholastics and mystics who contemplate, or
think that they contemplate, the Godhead as it is in itself, thus
as prior to creation. It should also be noted, however, that one
of them, and the greatest of them all, Meister Eckhart, follows
in Plato’s footsteps by placing above the esse est Deus, as the
higher truth, the sentence, “Est enim (Deus) super esse et ens.”
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Compare this with Heidegger’s statement: “ ‘Being’— that is
not God and it is not a ground of the world. Being is more
than all that exists and is, nonetheless, nearer than any existing
thing, be it . . . an angel or God. Being is the nearest thing.” If