the god of the philosophers

The God of the PhilosophersAuthor(s): Georg PichtSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Mar., 1980), pp. 61-79Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1463541Accessed: 11/11/2010 03:35

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLVIII/ 1, 61-79

The God of the Philosophers Georg Picht

ABSTRACT

Today all schools of philosophy seem to be agreed that God has no place in philosophy except as a phenomenon of the past. Whether the same fate awaits the God of Christian theology depends on whether the truth that appeared to the Greeks in the epiphany of the "God of the philosophers," who entered into alliance with the biblical God in Christian theology and whose death Nietzsche proclaimed, can come to light in a new form beyond the nihilism of Nietzsche's diagnosis. To understand the dimensions of the problem requires that one be clear on the nature of the God of the philosophers and its relation to the God of biblical revelation and that one see Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism against this background and in relation to today's possibilities.

Georg Picht is Professor of the Philosophy of Religion on the theological faculty of the University of Heidelberg. The present essay, which is translated from his Wahrheit- Vernunft- Verantwortung (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1969), pp. 229-51, represents a continuing theme in his publications over the years. It is used here with permission of the author in a translation by the Editor.

62 Georg Picht

I

few days after Pascal's death a servant accidentally discovered in the lining of his jacket a small folded parchment. It contained one of the greatest texts of Christian history; namely, the note, or memorial,

only one page long, which Pascal had written down on 23 November 1654. For eight years, at every change of coat, he removed it from the lining and sewed it in again by hand, so that he would always have it with him. Never was he to be left without the reminder of that hour of which the page still testifies to us. The text begins with the following words:

FIRE God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not the God of the philosophers and the wise men.

The appeal to the God of the Bible makes its way through the denial of the God of the philosophers and the wise men. Who is the God that in Pascal's text takes the place of the idols of the Old Testament? Who is the God of the philosophers?

Pascal noted in the margin the Bible passages that he had in mind in this invocation of God. The first passage is found in Exodus 3:1-6:

Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian; and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, "I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt." When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here am I." Then he said, "Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." And he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God (RSV).

The second passage is Matthew 22:31-32:

And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob"? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living (RSV).

This passage too, which refers to the text from Exodus, Pascal noted in the margin of his nmimorial; but instead of "not the God of the dead," there stands in the memorial: "not that of the philosophers and wise men.""God of the living"-what does this mean? The answer is given in the text's first word, written in capital letters: "FIRE."

The fire in which God shows himself to Moses through his appearance in the burning bush has a definite significance in the Old as well as the New

God of the Philosophers 63

Testament. It is the fire that will devour the world in God's final judgment. It is that fire of which John the Baptizer says (Matthew 3:11-12): "I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire" (RSV). It is the same fire that on the day of Pentecost appears in tongues on the heads of the assembled disciples. In fire the God of the final judgment appears, the God of eschatological revelation. The living and resurrected are those who are saved in the judgment that the Bible portrays in the mythical picture of a world conflagration. The life of the living is a life in the kingdom of God; it is not a matter of living from this world. Hence line 7 of the mnmorial says: "Forgetting the world and every being outside God." If, as the God of the living, the God summoned in his eschatological power through the invocation "FIRE" is here set in opposition to the God of the philosophers and the wise, Pascal will have us understand that the God of the philosophers is the God of the realm that will be devoured by fire in the revelation of the final judgment. That is to say, the God of the philosophers is the God of the world. We shall need to test whether this is true. But we can test it only if we know what is the true essence of that God whom Pascal names the "God of the philosophers and the wise men."

II

A hundred and fifty years ago it would have been easier to define the essence of the God of the philosophers in its truth and its reality [ Wirklichkeit]. At that time philosophy understood itself exclusively as the presentation of God, who in Hegel is conceived as absolute spirit. Today, by contrast, philosophy gives the impression that God as an object of philosophy is no longer taken seriously by anyone. The God of the philosophers seems to belong only in the history of philosophy. In philosophy today God is still mentioned only where thinking is satisfied to reproduce certain historical positions as museum material from the tradition. The hope is to be able simultaneously to restore, through such a reproduction of thoughts, the social and political conditions of earlier times-say, the ordo of medieval scholasticism or the bourgeois liberalism of the epoch of Humboldt. At the same time, however, the curatorial timidity of such preservation shows that one no longer believes in what one says; thinking despairs of the possibility of still being able to grasp adequately, under the old presuppositions and in the traditional forms, the truth of a new epoch of history.

One of the few thinkers to still take the God of the philosophers seriously is Martin Heidegger. In his address on the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics, delivered in 1957, he shows that the structure not only of philosophy today, but of philosophy at all, can be illuminated only through the question of the essence of the God of philosophy (Identittit und Differenz: 53 [1969:55]). But he undertakes this clarification of structure on the soil of a

64 Georg Picht

thinking that, as he says, must sacrifice the God of the philosophers (71 [1969:71]). Hence his question is: "How does God get into philosophy?" As this question shows, God still appears, in Heidegger no less than in Adorno, only as a scandalous alien body in philosophy. The God of the philosophers thus has a place in philosophy today only as a reminiscence, though becoming free of it does admittedly require desperate efforts. Anyone asking about truth is not asking about God; anyone who has God in mind is not asking about truth.

Since the representative philosophical directions of our time are agreed on the central thesis, however passionately they might otherwise do battle with each other-since Heidegger, the Marxists, and the positivists obviously do not contradict each other in this chief point, one can ask whether it makes any sense to occupy oneself with so untimely a phenomenon as the God of the philosophers. Philosophers are thoroughly agreed not only among themselves but also with the leading minds, at least of Protestant theology, that they do not want to hear any more of this their God. Yet the matter is not so simple. For ever since philosophy lost its ability to be metaphysics, that is, to think God along with everything else as the ground of truth in all thinking, it has ceased to be able to accomplish the task that at the beginning of its existence was given to it as the science of science. It can no longer say how the truth itself, the horizon of any knowledge at all, is to be thought; hence it breaks up into a mere accumulation of special sciences that are connected only historically. With the vanishing of God from philosophy, philosophy itself has fallen into dissolution.

For that reason the question obtrudes upon us whether the God of philosophy might not simultaneously have been the condition of the possibility of philosophy. Has the history of Western philosophy finally been the history of a single error, which we designate with the title "the God of the philosophers"? Or on the contrary, have we perhaps forgotten the truth of philosophy together with the God of the philosophers? Do we still even know what the names "God" and "truth" really signify? Or is one to conclude from the present constitution of philosophy and of the positive sciences as well that truth itself was only an error? And if philosophy lies in the throes of death, does not the same fate inevitably affect its twin sister, theology, which, ever since there has been a Christian theology at all, has lived from the conflicting conversation with philosophy and repeatedly renewed itself from philosophy? Is theology still possible without philosophy? Or does the God of the theologians vanish simultaneously with the God of the philosophers? Has not the God of the theologians too (of whom we do not know whether he is identical with the God of revelation), ever since there has been theology at all, been understandable only in such a manner that in a first step puts him in unity with the God of the philosophers in order then, in a second step but under the presupposition of the first step, to oppose him to the God of the philosophers? Does not God's disappearance from philosophy necessarily signify that he has vanished altogether from our thinking? And if he has once vanished from thinking, can he still exist in our life, our activity, and our faith,


in our churches and in our world in any way other than in philosophy; namely, as a historical reminiscence, as tradition, and as a reminder of purportedly better times, which we know have passed irrevocably away?

III

These questions have prepared us to understand the text that depicts the

great turning point in the history of the God of philosophy. It is located in Nietzsche's Frohliche Wissenschaft as aphorism no. 125 and bears the

superscription "Der tolle Mensch."

Have you not heard of that raving man who lighted a lantern in bright morning light, ran into the market, and cried out incessantly, "I am looking for God! I am looking for God!"

Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing there, the man aroused great laughter. "Is God lost? " one asked. "Did he lose his way, like a child?" said the other. "Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he set sail? emigrated?" So went the mixture of their cries and laughter. The raving man sprang in the midst of them and pierced them with his eyes. "Where has God gone?" he shouted. "Ill tell you. We have killed him-you and I! We are all his murderers! But how did we do it? How were we able to drink the sea empty? Who gave us the sponge to wipe out the whole horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Cut it off from all suns? Are we not plunging downward? And backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still an above and a below? Are we not wandering as through an infinite nothing? Is empty space not breathing on us? Has it not become colder? Is night not constantly coming, and more night? Must not lanterns be lighted in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who buried God? Do we still smell nothing of the rotting of God? Even gods decay! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? The most holy and the most mighty that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What expiatory rituals, what sacred plays will we have to invent? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods in order even to appear worthy of it? Never was there a greater deed-and everyone born after us belongs, for the sake of this deed, to a higher history than all previous history!"

Here the raving man fell silent and again looked at his hearers; they too were silent and looked at him with consternation. Finally he threw his lantern upon the ground so that it broke in pieces and went out. "I come too early," said he then; "I am not yet in time. This monstrous event is still underway and on foot-it has not yet penetrated to the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars needs time; even after they are done, deeds need time to be seen and heard. This deed is still farther from them than the most distant stars-and yet they did it! "

66 Georg Picht

It is still told how on the same day the raving man went into several churches and there struck up his Requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he always replied, it is said, only this: "What are these churches still if they are not the tombs and burial monuments of God?"

Anyone with ears for this text at all grasps immediately what can otherwise hardly be made conceivable-that the event which Nietzsche expresses with the proposition "God is dead" is not just some dreamed-up fable, but an actual event in our actual history. This is possible only if the anterior condition, the condition in which God was living, was equally actual, that is to say, if this God, as long as he was living, was likewise an actual power in our actual history. It makes no difference whether Nietzsche is speaking of the God of the theologians or the God of the philosophers, for in either case he is speaking of the actuality [ Wirklichkeit] and truth of the world and of the actuality of history. But is this statement still true today? Is it tenable in our phase of history, the phase to which Nietzsche looked ahead?

For the representative directions of thought today, philosophy and theology have become historical sciences; the actuality of God is regarded as only a fairytale that one reads about in ancient books. At the same time, however, no one wants to admit this condition for himself. Religion is still needed as an alibi. That is the attitude of the masses in the marketplace who first break into laughter over the raving man but then look at him with dismay. As Nietzsche expressly says, they do not believe in God, and yet the tidings of God's death have not yet penetrated their ears. They know neither of the reality [ Wirklichkeit] of the living God nor of the new reality that has already emerged with the colossal event of God's death. They can take seriously neither the one nor the other. Neither the one nor the other possesses enough obligation for them to shape their lives in one way or another. By that very fact they attest the truth of the event of which Nietzsche reports. But they themselves do not know what is unmistakably and irrevocably obvious in their deportment.

In other words, Nietzsche speaks of actual history. In this respect too he is the successor of Hegel-history has become the sole content of philosophical thinking for him. History is the horizon from which the report of the death of God is to be understood. In Nietzsche's thinking the death of God is nothing but an event of the history of humanity; to date it is the greatest such event, for only through it is history freed to be a history in which man produces himself as his own work of art and thus becomes the subject of his history. In the strictest sense of the word, then, history begins to be the history of man only with the death of God. For that reason history does not mean for Nietzsche a report of what was; instead, he understands all of history, even previous history, from the view of the history to come, just as, conversely, he also interprets future history as the eternal return of the same. The death of God is the greatest event of history because this event affords man the freedom to get into view his whole history as it is and as it will be; and getting it into view means, for Nietzsche, bringing it forth and willing it. The perspective


under which Nietzsche sees history in the shadow of this event is made known in the aphorism that the editors of the Wille zur Macht have reprinted as a foreword. There one reads:

What I tell is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come otherwise: the emergence of nihilism. This history can be told now already; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks in a hundred signs already. This destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are already pricked up. For a long time already our whole European culture has been rushing as toward a catastrophe with a torture that increases from decade to decade: restless, violent, headlong: like a stream that wills to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

This was written by Nietzsche in the speculative period of the seventies.

During the same time too he already recognized the great theme of that epoch of history which would follow the catastrophe of European culture. He writes: "There is approaching inevitably, hesitatingly, fearful as fate, the great task and question: How shall the earth as a whole be administered?" ( WzM:957 [1964c: 361]). He comprehends that philosophy after the death of God must be transformed, with the inevitability of a world-historical process, into grand politics. The concept of "grand politics" [grosse Politik] is Nietzsche's definition of the essence of his own philosophy.-But to return to the preface of the Will to Power: "The one who speaks here has, conversely, done nothing till now except meditate: as a philosopher and hermit by instinct, who found his advantage in the apart, the outside, in patience, in hesitation, in backwardness; a risking and tentative spirit, who has already lost his way once in that labyrinth of the future; as a soothsayer-spirit, who looks back when he narrates what will be coming; as the first complete nihilist of Europe, who, however, has lived nihilism to its end in himself-who has it behind himself, under himself, outside himself."

The concept of nihilism shows us how Nietzsche interprets the condition which must be set up through the event that he calls the death of God. When we understand how Nietzsche conceives nihilism, we shall also learn who the God is of whom Nietzsche says that he is dead. That is the question we want to clarify. But we have already learned from Nietzsche that it can be answered only historically. Nothing is served by an abstract clarification of the concept "nihilism." The answer to such a question can be gained only when we comprehend in which phase of the history of the next two centuries that Nietzsche describes we ourselves are standing, and what is to be done if we, with him, want to arrive at the position of looking back when we gaze upon that which will come. Nietzsche describes the condition after the death of God in aphorism 108 of Joyful Wisdom under the heading "Neue Kaimpfe": "After Buddha was dead, people still showed his shadow for centuries in a cave-a colossal, ghastly shadow. God is dead: but, as is the manner of men, there will

68 Georg Picht

probably be caves in which his shadow is shown for centuries. -And we-we must conquer his shadow yet too."

Nietzsche calls existence in the shadow of the dead God incomplete nihilism ( WzM:28 [1964b:24]): "Incomplete nihilism, its forms: we live in the midst of it. The efforts to elude nihilism without transvaluing the previous values produce the opposite, sharpen the problem." The representative type for that historical phase which Nietzsche calls imperfect nihilism-in other words, that type which sharpens the problem by endeavoring to elude nihilism-is characterised by Nietzsche under the name "The Idealists" in the following words (WzM:344 [1964b:279]): "Not to recognize oneself: wisdom of the idealists. The idealist: a being that has reasons for remaining in the dark about itself and that is clever enough to remain in the dark even about these reasons." For illustration of these words it is sufficient to recall the role of the idealists in the emergence of National Socialism.

But we must forgo pursuing Nietzsche's description of nihilism and its consequences in world history. It is sufficient to remark that today we are still caught in this "colossal logic of terror" (FW:343 [1964a:275]) and that our thinking is incessantly becoming entangled in the snares and labyrinths of this process. Conscious of this, we repeat the question of the essence of nihilism in order to be able to define on that basis the God whose death, according to Nietzsche, is the great turning of history. Nietzsche gives a short and concise answer. He says (WzM:2 [1964b:8]): "What does nihilism signify? That the highest values are devalued. A goal is missing; an answer to the 'Why?' is missing." Contrary to what one might think in the age of imperfect nihilism, the concepts of "goal" and "why" do not refer to the goal of the social process or to the goal of history understood as progress. Instead, Nietzsche has in mind here, as the opposite of nihilism, the supreme values, that is, the highest good. He refers to the concept of God which in Plato bears the title "the Idea of the Good." He defines this God, the God of the philosophers, as the "why" because Plato in the Gorgias develops the Good as the oiV

',VEKa, the "for the

sake of which," to which every doing, every striving, every desiring, and every becoming are referred. The "why" of becoming and being is the ground of being.

As the ground of being philosophers from Plato to Hegel have endeavored to understand the essence of God. If Nietzsche now says, "The goal is missing, the answer to the 'why' is missing," then he is describing the condition after the extinction of the idea of the Good. Since the time of Lotze what had been the ground of being has become a "value"; and with the acuteness peculiar to him, Nietzsche recognized that this concept, which comes from the philosophy of a bourgeois capitalism, already includes the devaluation in its thought. For our question we learn this: the God who Nietzsche says is dead is the God whose essence Kant defined as the transcendental Ideal. It is the God which Plato calls the idea of the Good. It is thus not the God of the Bible but the God of the philosophers.

To make this still clearer a second passage may be adduced, where Nietzsche says (WzM:12 [1964b:14]):


What basically has happened? The feeling of valuelessness was achieved when it was grasped that neither with the concept "goal" nor with the concept "unity" nor with the concept "truth" can the whole character of existence be interpreted. Nothing is achieved and attained with them; the overarching unity in the manifoldness of events is missing: the character of existence is not "true," it is false . .. one has absolutely no reason any more to persuade oneself of a true world ... In short, the categories "goal," "being," with which we have inserted a value in the world, are again extracted by us-and now the world looks valueless ...

The categories of goal, unity, and truth are the transcendentals of the philosophical doctrine of God: bonum, unum, verum. From Plato to Hegel the philosophical doctrine of God endeavored to define, as the unity of these three concepts, the essence of God, which is unreachable for human knowledge and yet at the same time is the only thing that makes it possible. That Nietzsche, in the last-named aphorism, defines the third member of this philosophical trinity first as truth, then as being, proves what understanding he had as a classical philologist for the Greek, the Platonic descent of this concept of God. For in Plato, and generally in the Greeks, truth belongs not on the side of cognition but on the side of being. Thus on the basis of the texts we can now say: the God whom Nietzsche proclaimed to be dead is the God of philosophy until Hegel; and this God is, according to his historical descent, the God of Greek philosophy. He is the God of metaphysics. He is the God of that epoch of thinking which teaches that the truth, if it is to be known at all, can be known only on the basis of its ground, on the basis of God.

This statement can be supported from the text of the piece "The Raving Man": "What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not continually plunging? and backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still an above and a below? " The sun-that is Plato's simile of the cave for the idea of God. The questions that press upon each other in Nietzsche's text depict the questions that occur when this sun is extinguished for human thinking, when the world is unchained from it. The preceding question: "Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon?" refers to the truth that shows itself in the light of this sun. For we designate, as a horizon, the realm in which things that we know show themselves to us; and the realm in which we cognize things is the truth. The first question: "How were we able to drink the sea empty? " refers to being; for being is the element in which everything is, as in a sea, everything of which we say that it is. Being, too, as Nietzsche says in the words cited previously, we have "extracted from the world"; whoever still speaks of being is ideologically compromised.

The ground of being and of truth, the idea of the good-this is, as we see, the God of the philosophers. If the world is unchained from this its sun and if this God sinks out of sight, then being and truth must also necessarily disappear ( WzM:493 [1964c:20]): "Truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of living being could not live. The value for ife finally decides." In

70 Georg Picht

order to measure what is said by these words and what is occurring historically, one must confront it with Hegel's thinking. In Hegel one can still read (Logik: 2,484, Lasson [1969:824]): "The absolute idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth and all truth. "The absolute idea-that is the God of the philosophers, the idea of the good. It is being, life, and truth. The death of God signifies the elimination of idea, truth, and being; only life- the still imperishable life-remains. But life no longer springs from the truth of the good; the condition of its possibility has become error, whose value is measured by whether it is capable of intensifying life.

But even more crashes down when being and truth are extinguished together with the good. In the piece "The Raving Man" Nietzsche says: "Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Does empty space not breathe on us? Has it not become colder? Does not night continue to come, and more night?" These questions are made intelligible by an aphorism from Jenseits von Gut und B&ise (150): "Round about the hero all becomes tragedy, round about the demigod all satire; and round about God all becomes-what? perhaps 'world'?" By "world" Nietzsche understands not the senseless and boundless mass of fixed stars and Milky Way systems, among which on a lost planet somewhere live the men who experience nihilism, but that world whose truth philosophy endeavored for two thousand years to grasp as a revelation of God. Nietzsche understood by world the world as a cosmos. Its contrast is the infinite nothing and the empty space in which there is neither an above nor a below, the so-called cosmic space, which physics and astronomy of modern times have opened up. When Nietzsche, the classical philologist, asks, "Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?" he is thinking of the original significance of the word "planet"-straying star. The death of the God of the philosophers is a consequence of the impossibility created through the recent development of physics; it is impossible to interpret the actual world-for us that is the world of physics-as cosmos in the sense of Greek ontology. Man can no longer grasp the truth of his own being on the basis of a pre-given harmony with the truth of nature as a whole. If existence on our lost wandering star is to make sense nonetheless, then sense must be injected by man himself. The error, which previously was called truth, he must, as an artist of himself, project in sovereign freedom in order then to be able to live from the power of this project.

But the shattering of the ordered world is only one side of the process that begins with the "greatest recent event that God is dead." Nietzsche says (FW:343 [1964a:275]):

The event is much too great, too distant, too removed from the capacity of many to grasp it, for its announcement even to be said to have arrived; to say nothing of their already knowing what really has happened-and what all must now collapse, once this faith has been undermined, because it was built upon this faith, leaned upon it, had grown into it: for example, our whole European morality. This profusion and sequence of demolition, destruction, decline, overthrow that now awaits us-who might divine enough of it already today so as


to have to be the teacher and prophet of this colossal logic of terror, the prophet of a darkening and eclipse of the sun, the like of which has probably never yet appeared on earth?

The whole texture of the political, social, and moral order and, in general, the whole edifice of our culture were erected on the foundation that begins to totter with the death of God. Nietzsche already recognizes the splits and fissures in the building, whose collapse was already perceptible to those thinkers in the last century "whose eyeing suspicion was strong and fine enough for this drama." In the meantime world wars and terroristic rulers have verified Nietzsche's prophecy. But eyes and ears have become so dull that even today alarm over that event of which Nietzsche spoke seldom reaches anyone's thought and conscience. One is happy to have become rid of a bogey, and the spirit continues, like a mole, to burrow its way in order to prepare a future collapse for everything still standing.

IV

The confirmation that the God whom Nietzsche proclaims to be dead is the God of the philosophers appears to make the answer to the question posed at the beginning easy-suspiciously easy. In his note Pascal says that the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob-that is, the God of biblical revelation-is not the God of the philosophers. True, Christian theology, from the earliest church fathers to the present day, fused the God of Christian revelation with the God of Greek philosophy almost inseparably. But theology in the twentieth century is about to break this connection. The God of the Old Testament appears to us anew in his original figure, and theology is on the way to discovering anew the eschatological meaning of the Christian message. Theologians are hence inclined to feel it as a great liberation that the absolute idea of the Hegelian system has become untrue and is disappearing. They are discovering that the God of philosophy has obstructed the God of revelation. If one can now say, by appealing to the philosophers themselves, that this God of the philosophers is dead, then perhaps the true life of the God to whom we pray as our father is beginning. Doubtless a view into a new terrain is being opened. But we shall forfeit every present possibility if we should too frivolously enter the path to which today theology is directed by the fate of philosophy. Are we really to believe that the God of the philosophers was a mere idol and that only his death opens the way to the right faith? Is that awful report of the death of God from now on only a fairytale, which makes our flesh creep, whereas in truth it is only with this event that Christian faith begins rightly to live? Dare Christians say they are not affected when that Greek idol perishes?

For Nietzsche the God whom we have murdered is at once the God of the philosophers and of the Christians. It is the churches that the raving man calls tombs and funeral monuments of God. They are the caves in which the shadow of the dead God will still be shown for thousands of years. He knows

72 Georg Picht

precisely the Greek descent of the philosophical concept of God, but he knows enough of the history of theology to equate Christianity and Platonism and to fight them with the same arguments. For Nietzsche, as was stated, the sole content of philosophy is history. He has too great a respect for history to be able to allow that the alliance of Christian faith and Platonism had been nothing but a trivial error from which one can withdraw through better methods of exegesis of the Old and New Testaments. Nietzsche would have analyzed our theology today too as a form of imperfect nihilism; there is not much that would withstand such an analysis. We must, therefore, repeat the question posed by him on the basis that we have now gained. Only if we better understand the essence of the God with whose death European nihilism begins shall we be able to examine what consequences his disappearance will have for the theology and the church of Christians.

V

Who is this God, in whose light thinking has always stood whenever it sought to cognize the truth of that which is? Who is this God, with whom, according to the common doctrine of all European philosophy, we must begin to think if we want to think at all? Who is the sun in whose light the powers of nature are willingly fit together into a cosmos and whose illuminating power made it possible to discover the foundations of European ethos; namely, reason and humanity?

The epiphany of this God took place at the close of antiquity among the Greeks. From Homer on it was in preparation in the poetry and plastic art of the Greeks, but then it is carried out, as it were, with one stroke, like every genuine divine epiphany. The poet and thinker who first expounded the essence of this new God in its purity, and did so in sharp contrast to the anthropomorphic God-figures of Greek myth, was Xenophon of Colophon. Starting from the representation of the eye of Zeus which sees all and knows all and from which nothing remains hidden, a representation to be met already in Hesiod, Xenophanes defines the essence of God as an essence that is nothing other than an omnipresent and pure seeing [Schauen]. He says of this God: "As a whole he sees, as a whole he knows, as a whole he hears." If he sees completely, then he is completely eye; if he hears completely, he is completely ear; if he is both at the same time and as a whole, then these concepts drawn from the sphere of sensibility are not to be taken literally, but point to the meaning of the word that stands in the middle: "As a whole he knows." Translated more exactly: as a whole he sees, with his no longer sensible, but spiritual, eye. As a whole he is nothing but "spiritual seeing" or, as the Greeks say, nous. As a whole: that is to say, he is through and through pure nous and nothing else.

If this nous sees all and knows all, its seeing is present in everything. From the point of view of an entity, this means that everything that is anything at all is perpetually in the presence of this pure seeing. The pure and omnipresent seeing on the part of the divine nous is thus nothing other than the truth of


being, the truth in which everything that can be at all must be sustained. What appears in time is in movement; but the omnipresent eye of God does not move, for if God's seeing had to move, it would not always be omnipresent. Everything we encounter in space and time is already standing in his presence. Thus, he himself cannot have his eternally self-identical and pure essence within space and time as something spatial and temporal. But what is not in space and time is not in motion.

This is not the place to describe how in his didactic poem Parmenides, with the inexorable power of the logic springing for the first time from the sight of God, described the essence of this God in whom being and seeing are one. It will be sufficient to pose two questions to make clear what will take place in the history of mankind should this God and his strict unity completely disappear from our thinking: 1. What is the relation of this God to the world? 2. What is the relation of this God to man?

1. What is the relation of this God to the world?

Parmenides says in his "Didactic Poem" (B8,43) that being-which is identical with the divine nous-is comparable to a well-rounded sphere: EVKVKXOV oU4prp EvaXLYKLOV O yKCp. Repeatedly it is asserted that Parmenides taught that being is a sphere, but that is not what the text says. The text says that being is comparable to a sphere. Not just any sphere can be compared with being, but only one single sphere is worthy of being compared to the pure being of nous; namely, the sphere of the firmament. But how is one to compare such incomparable things as the sphere of the firmament and pure nous? How can there be any tertium comparationis here? What do such words as "similarity" and "comparison" mean in view of pure being? The sphere of the firmament is comparable or similar to pure being because being appears in the firmament and in everything that this firmament embraces. The essence of that which we call an entity, the essence of physis, is: to be an appearance. This appearance is called doxa in Parmenides. That does not mean "deceptive opinion," as is repeatedly declared, but the actual appearing of that which in truth is-though always, admittedly, only as appearance. The medium in which being appears is the coming to be and passing away in the realm of sense experience; appearance is thus visible movement, and that means it is always spatial and temporal. One may recall that Kant still conceives nature as the whole concept of appearances and that even in him space and time are defined as the pure forms of intuition in which every phenomenon, though admittedly only as a phenomenon, is given to us. Even the philosophy of Kant and Hegel still remains in the framework of the philosophy of Parmenides, in which occurred the epiphany of that God about whose essence we ask anew today.

The world is accordingly defined by Parmenides as 6L&KOU10q oLtK9q-a like order resting on distribution. Order rests on distribution, for it is the appearance of the one in the manifold. It is like, for its essence is to be appearance. It is order, cosmos in Greek, for the manifold of appearance is perpetually referred to the unity that appears in it. This unity of being,

74 Georg Picht

however, is identical with the divine nous. Thus we can say: that structure of the world which is called "cosmos" among the Greeks is the appearance of God himself.

We call the appearance of a god in a beautifully ordered structure an "image of a god." The cosmos can thus be conceived only as an image of a god. The image of the God of Greek philosophy took the place of the anthropomorphic images of the mythical stage of religion. Whoever admires the cosmos is engaging in reverence of this God in that he is amazed at the glory of his image. Let no one say that looking at the cosmos in amazement is idolatry because it honors God in his image. Paul was acquainted with this Greek thought through the mediation of Philo of Alexandria, and he accepted it. He says in Romans 1:19-20 about the Greeks: "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made" (RSV). The equation of the God of biblical revelation with the God of Greek philosophy begins, thus, in Paul already and will be maintained in Christian theology so long as one still takes the letter to the Romans seriously as a witness of the revelation of Christ. Theologically this means eschatology cannot be separated from the theology of creation, and in the theology of creation the issue is that of perceiving God's invisible nature in creation. If eschatology is separated from the theology of creation, it becomes enthusiasm, as the history of the church repeatedly teaches. If the theology of creation is separated from eschatology, it becomes a theology of order and an idolization of the world. The ambivalent alliance between the God of biblical revelation and the God of philosophy is, as the passage from the letter to the Romans teaches us, assigned to theology from its origin, and no historical reflection can lift the burden of that alliance from our shoulders.

2. What is the relation of this God to man?

The Greeks not only spoke of the divine nous, they also spoke of the nous of man, and in the passage just quoted Paul took over this Greek philosophical concept too. What is the nous of man? Or, in the language of more recent philosophy: What is reason? How is human reason related to God? What is, accordingly, the cognition of God in thinking?

In order to give a brief answer to this question let me present the ultimate and profoundest thoughts of Greek philosophy in an extreme simplification and, while doing so, omit those historical differences between the various thinkers that one really ought not to omit. A more detailed basis for my presentation is out of place here / 1/.

a) What, then, is the nous of man and why does it bear the same name as the divine nous? The divine nous is, as we saw, pure spiritual seeing, or, according to Schelling's concept, intellectual intuition. What God's spiritual intuition is in a reality which is always and immovably equal to itself-that is what the spirit of man actually is when man elevates himself to see spiritually


that which in truth is. As soon as man actually intuits spiritually, however, one can no longer call his intuition human. In the moment of highest cognition it is identical with God's intuition: pure seeing of the eternal presence of pure being. For that reason Aristotle calls the capacity of intellectual intuition, or the nous, "the divine element in our composite nature" (Nic. Eth. 1177b, 26ff.). For the immeasurable duration of the moment of pure cognition man can be immortal, that is, he can arrive at unity with the Immortal.

b) Seeing is pure when, besides the seeing, there is nothing foreign that could disturb it. Hence the nature of God, as we saw, is pure seeing and nothing else. Man is a composite nature. The capacity of spiritual intuition is a capacity in addition to other capacities. But insofar as man frees himself for a pure spiritual intuition of that which truly is, his soul also is absorbed completely in the intuition. The capacity of intuition is the capacity to take up what is intuited in its pure sight without distortion. Viewed as a capacity the soul of man is a 6KTLK6Vd--something that can receive, a mere vessel. What the pure seeing takes up is the pure being of that which is; no longer does it now see being merely in its appearance but in its unadulterated sight. This sight bears, in Plato, the name "idea." But "idea" does not mean, as it does among us, a mere figure of thoughts; instead, it is the actual thing itself, the pure numbers and those pure structures that limit and sustain in its being everything that is at all. Insofar as the soul takes up these sights as they truly are, one can say that the soul, or more exactly, intellectual intuition, is the horizon within which the ideas stand and can be caught sight of. This is the case, however, only for the highest stage in which intuition is, in the strictest sense of the word, identical with the omnipresence of the divine intuition. In the Meno Plato states the bold proposition: "The truth of entities is always in our soul" (86 B) /2/. This proposition means nothing other than when, in the Parmenides, Plato says the ideas are like archetypes in nature; for that which the soul sees in the thing's undistorted truth is identical with that which appears in nature. Nothing else is meant when, in the myth of Phaedrus (247 B), Plato says the ideas have their place in the region above heaven, for the sphere above heaven is the region that Plato calls the vor-Tqro ro-oS

in the Republic, in contrast to the region of the mundus sensibilis that is visible to sensation-the region of intellectual intuition, or in the language of scholastic philosophy, the mundus intelligibilis; for this region above heaven is identical with the divine nous-with the pure intuition of the eternal presence of being; and the soul enters into this intuition when it cognizes the truth of being.

c) What man intuits in pure cognition he can also preserve and retain in memory. Then it is no longer immediate intuition, but what we call a thought. We express thoughts in propositions. But because we cannot express anything other than what we have either seen ourselves or learned from those who have seen it, the structure of thoughts and therewith the structure of assertions must accord with the structure of what was originally seen, that is, with the structure of what we call the entity that truly is [das wahrhaft Seiende]. If, therefore, one investigates the basic forms of any possible assertions at all, one must be able to read out of them the pure structure of that which is in truth.

76 Georg Picht

The basic forms of any assertion at all, from which we can read off these structures, are called "categories" in Aristotle. But what can be shown in the category is only secondarily the structures of the assertion and of thought; primarily it is the pure definitions of an entity at all, in its being, the pure and highest forms of an entity itself that comes to appearance in the sensible world. Thus, the horizon of intellectual intuition is not a projection of human thinking. The converse is so-human thinking is possible only because it has already participated in the pure sight of that which truly is. Philosophy later designated this state of affairs with the concept of the "a priori," and Kant showed how even sensible experience is possible only on the basis of a priori cognition. Because all human cognition is founded on the memory of its original identity with divine cognition and is possible only in the light of the divine cognition, philosophy from Parmenides to Hegel had to refer human thinking to the divine intuition of that which in truth is. Hence the cognition of truth in reason is the appearance of the divine presence in reason. The reason of man, no less than the cosmos, is an image of God.

d) Once man has cognized the pure truth, it has consequences for his whole life. There are, as Plato says, no means for preventing a person from incorporating in his whole life that at which he is amazed and with which he keeps company. These words are located in the paragraph of Plato's Republic (500 B7-501 C3) in which, for the first time, the education of man is compared with sculpture and thus expounded as "formation" /3/. The formation of an essence that is determined for the end of attaining unity with the divine intuition in the pure vision of that which truly is-this formation, as is shown us there, can only consist in man's assimilating himself to that which his spiritual eye can intuit as the divine. Education is hence the formation of man according to a divine archetype. It shapes man altogether as an image of God / 4/. The new form of ethos and morality, which was founded when one began to shape man in the image of God, we designate with the concept of humanity. Hence it is not only the essence of reason that is closely allied with the God of Greek philosophy, but also every form of morality founded on humanity. Not in vain does Nietzsche say that European morality must collapse if that God in whose light it has been shaped, i.e., the God of the philosophers, is no longer living.

e) Modern thought is proud of having based man's freedom, that is, his reason, on itself and its autonomy. On this account reason no longer conceives of itself as the appearance of divine truth in us; rather, it counts now as a natural talent of man. The ideas no longer are what truly is in its pure form, but only concepts of reason, the innate concepts of a human reason. Categories become, in Kant, pure concepts of understanding. That we define objects according to categories is no longer based on the circumstance that in the objects the same thing comes to appearance as what is purely thought in the categories, namely, pure being as it is in itself in its eternal truth; the agreement between object and category, on which every truth of cognition rests, serves rather, conversely, as a proof for our inability to know anything of God as he truly is.


But what the Greek philosophers once saw, in the light of their God, as the truth of being and preserved for the tradition of thought-in other words, the constitution of reason-is still preserved. In Kant too thinking is possible only because everything that is thinkable at all continues to be referred to an original unity. In Kant too the highest categories are the highest determina- tions of thinking as well as of that which our thinking cognizes, nature. In Kant too reason is compelled to define its own essence through a reference to that transcendental ideal which is identical in content with the Greek philosophical concept of God. Thus even autonomous reason is reason only thanks to the reminiscence of the God of the Greek philosophers that lives on in it. In the conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason stands the famous sentence: "Two things fill the heart with ever new and increasing admiration and respect, the more often and more persistently reflection concerns itself with them: the starry heavens above us and the moral law within us." This admiration or respect is Kant's reminder that originally cosmos and morality are, among the Greeks, images of God, that they are appearances of the one truth of God. But the foundation of a new form of human freedom demands simultaneously, and out of motives that are Christian in origin, that man emancipate himself from this God. Reason must seek its freedom in basing itself on itself and its own thinking. It does not yet know that at the same time it thereby destroys itself, that it breaks into pieces if it tries to support its self- understanding not on the truth but on the obscure concept of a natural talent-a disposition of nature that nonetheless is to be so independent of nature that it is postulated as the same for all men at all times.

On that account the age of incomplete nihilism is the age of the decay of reason. So deeply rooted are the effects that must occur when the God of the philosophers disappears from our thinking and from the shaping of our life.

VI

After this reminder it is no longer so easy for us to welcome the death of the God of Greek philosophy as the new birth of the God of eschatological revelation and to dissolve the marriage which bound philosophy and theology together for two thousand years of Christian tradition. But it is time to ask: What do we really mean by the name "God"? We use "God" as a generic name for the gods of the Egyptians and the Greeks and in general of all religions; we use the name "God" as a general concept under which the related phenomena of all religions can be subsumed on the basis of common characteristics. But if "God" is a general concept, we can no longer use this name to designate either the God of the Bible or the God of the philosophers and wise men, for the essence of both is that they are unique. If God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the one God whom we may invoke as God, we have a prima facie right to protest against philosophy's drawing its truth from a God who by nature as well as by historical origin is not identical with the God of the Bible.

But this protest is directed toward the misuse of a name; it says absolutely nothing about the truth or the untruth of what is designated with the name.

78 Georg Picht

The God of the philosophers is the truth of being in its unity and its self- sustaining nature. Truth of being is the truth of the being of this world. The God of the Christian faith is not of this world. To identify him with the truth of the being of this world is an unconscious blasphemy, even if this blasphemy is what has held theology together down to the present day. But the question how creation, being, and truth, or how truth and history, truth and being, truth and time, unity and time are to be thought and conceived by man, insofar as man, according to the words of Paul, is to recognize in the creation the invisible essence of God-this question is not eliminated by Nietzsche's words either; for the world appears as world at all only in the light of this question. As God, the God of whom Nietzsche spoke is dead. As God he is irrevocably dead. But the dimension that his epiphany opened for mankind among the Greeks is not to be eradicated. We must learn how to think the truth that has withdrawn itself from us behind the name "God." We must learn how humanity and reason can be newly founded on the basis of the truth of being in history and how that truth can be newly discovered-by going through Nietzsche and beyond Nietzsche.

For the Christian faith creation is the realm of what is temporal and, as

temporal, points to the future of that One who himself is not in time. Is, then, the truth which the Greeks thought as the truth of being the truth of time? Is the truth of time the appearance of time in history? Is the reason why history becomes the sole content of philosophy in Nietzsche that in nihilism the turning from the truth of being to the truth of time begins to be carried out? And does there again come to light, in the truth of time, what we now can no longer name "God" and what nevertheless, as creation, perpetually points to an actual recognition of the invisible truth of God the creator in the truth of time?

It is sufficient to have posed the questions here. Irrevocably the God of the philosophers is dead-but the truth of this God is perhaps coming to light again in a new form. How much may be tied to this possibility we cannot yet measure today /5/.

NOTES

/ 1/ Cf. "Der Sinn der Unterscheidung von Theorie und Praxis in der griechischen Philosophie," WVV, p. 108.

/2/ Cf. "Wissen des Nichtwissens und Anamnesis," WVV, p. 87.

/3/ The passage is interpreted in "Der Sinn der Unterscheidung von Theorie und Praxis in der griechischen Philosophie," WVV, pp. 118 ff.

/4/ Cf. "Das Wesen des Ideals," WVV, pp. 203 ff.

/5/ Cf. "Die Erfahrung der Geschichte," WVV, pp. 310 ff., for a working out of this question.


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*Translations of quotations in the article have been done by the Editor. Source information given in brackets refers to the translations listed in these works consulted.

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