[…] This belongs to thinking: to think that beyng is both
more than God and too little for
God. It is the latter because it is the former.
God is the God of Abraham, the God of Jesus. But there is no
God of beyng. The
very thought of such a God would be a blasphemy. This is why
there is no God for thinking.
Thinking that is thinking, and not a squinting at pale compromises
with the domination of a
faith, lets God “be” God more than faith does.
Thinking lets God be God,
inasmuch as it keeps him far from beyng and maintains this
distance between beyng and
God.
On the doctrine of gods. — Jehovah is the god who presumed
to make himself the
chosen god, and not to tolerate any other gods beside
himself. Only the fewest people can
guess that this god, even so, and necessarily so, must count
himself among the gods; how
else could he set himself apart? That is how he could become
the one, only god, apart from
whom (praeter quem) there was no other. What is a god who
raises himself up against the
others to become the chosen one? In any case, he is never
“the” God pure and simple, if
what this means could ever be divine. What if the divinity
of a god lay in the great calm
from which he recognizes the other gods? “God is”—speaking
this way is thoughtlessness,
and a veiling of thoughtlessness to boot, not to mention the
presumption that such idle talk
reveals, if it is supposed to be the talk of a thinking
person at all. Anxiety in the face of the
divine flees to “God,” who neither is a god, nor can be
“the” god; or else one flees to mere
theology.
What if the god of the philosophers were still more divine
than the god of Abraham,
who tolerated no others of his kind aside from himself, and
whose son Jesus sent all who did
not love him to Hell and let them roast there? What sort of
god is it who denies divinity, and
who has none of the generosity of pure joy at his kind and
at their inexhaustible richness?
(A note on Pascal.)
The modern systems of total dictatorship stem from
Judeo-Christian monotheism.
-M.H. Notebooks