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403 BOOK THREE THE STAR OR ETERNAL TRUTH G OD is truth. Truth is his seal by which he is known, even if one day everything by which he made known his eternity in time, all eternal life, all eternal way, found its end where the eternal also finds its end: in eternity. For not only does the way end here, life does, too. Eternal life only lasts as long as life altogether lasts. Only in contrast to the always temporary life of the pavers of the eternal way is there eternal life. The desire for eternity, as it groans out of the tree trunks of this temporality, certainly assumes the configuration of a longing for eternal life, but only because it is itself temporal life. Truly, in the truth, even life disappears. It does not turn into an illusion like the way turned into the illusion that the sea of light engulfed in its waves, but it opens on to light. It is transformed: if it has transformed, however, then that which was transformed no longer exists. Life has risen into the light. The mute darkness of the primordial world has acquired language in death. Death was seized with a stronger power, with love. Love had decided on life. And just as the primordial world had found its word in death, so life now is concentrated in the silence of the supra-world and is changed into light. God is not life, God is light. He is the Lord of life, but he is as little alive as he is dead; and to state one or the other about him, as the ancient man states, that “he lives,” and as the modern man states, that he “is dead,” betrays equal pagan partiality. Only that neither-nor of dead and alive, only that fine point where life and death touch and melt into one does not forbid the typical terminology. God neither lives nor is dead, but he gives life to what is dead, he—loves. He is the God of the living as of the dead, just because he himself is neither living nor dead; we experience his existence immediately only in the fact that he loves us, and awakens our dead Self into the beloved soul that loves in return. The Revelation of the divine love is the heart of the All. WHAT we experience is that God loves, not that God is love. In the love, he draws too near to us for us still to say: he is this or that. In his love, we experience only that he is God, THE ETERNITY OF TRUTH GOD (THEOLOGIC) THE REVEALED ONE PART THREE: BOOK THREE 404 but not what he is. The what, the essence, remains hidden. It hides precisely by revealing itself. The essence of a God who does not reveal himself could not in the long run shut himself off from us; for what is hidden from the surrounding experience , from the grasping conception, from the perceiving reason of man? But just because he pours forth upon us in Revelation, and turns from that which is stagnant in us into something active, he puts our free reason, irresistible to all that is stagnant, into the chains of love, and, bound by such a bond, summoned by such a calling by name, we move in the circle in which we found ourselves, and on the path upon which we are placed, and grasp beyond only still with the feeble grasps of empty notions. When, therefore, the revealed aspect of God dawns in us, his hidden aspect remains all the more hidden with him. Certainly, we know him even by that which is dead and by that which is alive in him as the perpetrator who creates and recreates that which is dead until he finds the time to let it be given life, and as him who again severs from himself and redeems that which is alive that has heard from him the call of life. But we know Creator and Redeemer therefore only according to their connection in Revelation. Only from the God of love do we behold the Creator and Redeemer. Only as far as the shimmer of that moment of the divine love gives light, only so far do we behold what is before and what is afterwards. The pure before, the originally created primordial world, is too dark for us yet to know the Creator’s hand in it. And the pure...

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