The Star of Redemption

TRANSITION

TRANSITION T HE mythical God, the plastic world, tragic man—we are holding the pieces in our hands. We have really shattered the All. The more deeply we descended into the night of the positive in order to capture the something immediately in its flight out of the nothing, the more the unity of the All is broken apart for us. The imperfect work of knowledge now surrounding us glances up at us with an oddly strange look. These are the elements of our world, but we do not know the world this way; this is the world we believe in, but we do not believe in it as it is presented to us here. We know a living movement, an electric circuit in which these elements swim; now they are pulled out of this current. In the path of the star shining over our life, they are familiar to us and in every sense credible; but detached, reduced to pure elements of a mathematical structure of the path, we no longer recognize them. And are we to recognize them!? Only the curve of the path can make visible the mystery of the elements. Only the curve leads from what is purely hypothetical about the elements into the categorical of perpetual reality . Maybe the elements were more than pure “hypotheses”: only their capacity to construct the visible path can bear this out. The hypothetical—this word explains to us that strange aspect of the pieces of the All. None of these pieces has a sure, unalterable place; above each of them an “if ” is secretly written. Behold: God is and is existing life; behold: the world is and is inspired configuration; behold: man is and is solitary Self; but if you ask how they might find each other, how man in his solitude is seated in the world that is moved by spirit; how God, in his unboundedness, tolerates remaining beside a world closed within itself and a man solitary within himself; or how this world, in its peaceful structuring, still leaves room for God’s infinite life and man’s own being; should you ask such questions, you will see a whole swarm of “if’s” rushing toward you masked as answers. Before your questions, the three elements could very possibly seem to co-exist in a tranquil solidity, each of them caught up in the feeling of the One and the All, a feeling, blind to the outside, of their own existence. On this point, all three are the same. God and the world as well, and not only man, are each a solitary Self staring within itself and knowing nothing of an outside; man and world as well, and not only God, live in the inner vitality of their own nature; they have no need of a being outside of them; RETROSPECTIVE : THE CHAOS OF THE ELEMENTS THE SECRET “IF” TRANSITION 94 man and God as well, and not only the world, are enclosed structures within themselves and inspired by their own spirit. So all limits and differences seem to disappear; each part is monistically set down as the whole, for it is a matter of three monisms, three consciousnesses of the One and the All that appear beside each other; three wholes were certainly possible, but three Alls are unthinkable. And so we must ask the question of their relationships after all. But this just adds to the confusion in the extreme. For in this case there is no relationship that could be excluded. There is no fixed order between the three points of God, world, man; there is neither above nor below, neither right nor left. There is no order among the three to which the pagan consciousness would agree without qualification. Each one is called to account. The “perhapses,” spring from the “ifs.” Is God the Creator of the world who imparts himself to man in a Revelation ? Perhaps; Plato teaches the Creation, as well as does many an author of myths in Europe and the Near-East; in the hundreds of sanctuaries where oracles are told, upon thousands of altars, in the palpitating entrails of the sacrificial victims, in the flight of birds, in the silent drifting of the stars—everywhere the lips of the gods speak to man, everywhere the God stoops to us and communicates his will. But behold: perhaps it is again otherwise ? Aren’t the gods parts and products of the eternal world? This is what Aristotle teaches and...