Page 92 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Modern Thinking 65

believing times, under divine judgment, but it itself, the unap-
pealable, assigns to the Coming One his way.
Heidegger, of course, understands by history something
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other than a list of dated events. “History,” he said in 1939, “is
rare.” And he explained: “History exists only when the essence
of truth is originally decided.” But it is just his hour which he
believes to be history, the very same hour whose problematics
in its most inhuman manifestation led him astray. He has al-
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lied his thought, the thought of being, in which he takes part
and to which he ascribes the power to make ready for the rise
of the holy, to that hour which he has affirmed as history. He
has bound his thought to his hour as no other philosopher has
done. Can he, the existential thinker, despite all this, existen-
tially wrestle, in opposition to the hour, for a freedom devoted
to the eternal and gain it? Or must he succumb to the fate
of the hour, and with it also to a “holy” to which no human
holiness, no hallowed standing fast of man in the face of his-
torical delusion, responsibly answers? The questions that I ask
are not rhetorical; they are true questions.
Of the two who have taken up Nietzsche’s expression of the
death of God, one, Sartre, has brought it and himself ad ab-
surdum through his postulate of the free invention of meaning
and value. The other, Heidegger, creates a concept of a rebirth
of God out of the thought of truth which falls into the en-
ticing nets of historical time. The path of this existentialism
seems to vanish.

2

In contrast to Heidegger and Sartre, Jung, the leading psy-
chologist of our day, has made religion in its historical and
biographical forms the subject of comprehensive observations.