The “religious” man is spoken of as one who does not need to take his stand in any relation to the world and to living beings, since the status of social life, that is defined from outside, is in him surpassed by means of a strength that works only from within. But in this idea of the social life two basically different things are combined—first, the community that is built up out of relation, and second, the collection of human units that do not know relation—modern man’s palpable condition of lack of relation. But the bright building of community, to which there is an escape even from the dungeon of “social life”, is the achievement of the same power that works in the relation between man and God. This does not mean that this one relation is set beside the others; for it is the universal relation, into which all streams pour, yet without exhausting their waters. Who wishes to make division and define boundaries between sea and streams? There we find only the one flow from I to Thou, unending, the one boundless flow of the real life. Life cannot be divided between a real relation with God and an unreal relation of I and It with the world—you cannot both truly pray to God and profit by the world. He who knows the world as something by which he is to profit knows God also in the same way. His prayer is a procedure of exoneration heard by the ear of the void. He—not the “atheist,” who addresses the Nameless out of the night and yearning of his garret-window—is the godless man.
It is further said that the “religious” man stands as a single, isolated, separated being before God, since he has also gone beyond the status of the “moral” man, who is still involved in duty and obligation to the world. The latter, it is said, is still burdened with responsibility for the action of those who act, since he is wholly defined by the tension between being and “ought to be”, and in grotesque and hopeless sacrificial courage casts his heart piece by piece into the insatiable gulf that lies between them. The “religious” man, on the other hand, has emerged from that tension into the tension between the world and God; there the command reigns that the unrest of responsibility and of demands on oneself be removed; there is no willing of one’s own, but only the being joined into what is ordained; every “ought” vanishes in unconditioned being, and the world, though still existing, no longer counts. For in it the “religious” man has to perform his particular duties, but as it were without obligation—beneath the aspect of the nothingness of all action. But that is to suppose that God has created His world as an illusion and man for frenzied being. He who approaches the Face has indeed surpassed duty and obligation- but not because he is now remote from the world; rather because he has truly drawn closer to it. Duty and obligation are rendered only to the stranger; we are drawn to and full of love for the intimate person. The world, lit by eternity, becomes fully present to him who approaches the Face, and to the Being of beings he can in a single response say Thou. Then there is no more tension between the world and God, but only the one reality. The man is not freed from responsibility; he has exchanged the torment of the finite, pursuit of effects, for the motive power of the infinite, he has got the mighty responsibility of love for the whole untraceable world-event, for the profound belonging to the world before the Face of God. He has, to be sure, abolished moral judgments for ever; the “evil” man is simply one who is commended to him for greater responsibility, one more needy of love; but he will have to practise, till death itself, decision in the depths of spontaneity, unruffled decision, made ever anew, to right action. Then action is not empty, but purposive, enjoined, needed, part of creation; but this action is no longer imposed upon the world, it grows on it as if it were non-action.