Form is also a mixture of Thou and It. In belief and in a cult form can harden into an object; but, in virtue of the essential quality of relation that lives on in it, it continually becomes present again. God is near His forms so long as man does not remove them from Him. In true prayer belief and cult are united and purified to enter into the living relation. The fact that true prayer lives in the religions witnesses to their true life: they live so long as it lives in them. Degeneration of the religions means degeneration of prayer in them. Their power to enter into relation is buried under increasing objectification, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to say Thou with the whole undivided being, and finally, in order to be able to say it, man must come out of the false security into the venture of the infinite out of the community, that is now overarched only by the temple dome and not also by the firmament, into the final solitude. It is a profound misunderstanding of this impulse to ascribe it to “subjectivism”; life face to face with God is life in the one reality, the only true “objective”, and the man who goes out to this life desires to save himself, in the objective that truly is, from that which is apparent and illusory, before it has disturbed the truth of the teal objective for him. Subjectivism empties God of soul, objectivism makes Him into an object—the latter is a false fixing down, the former a false setting free; both are diversions from the way of reality, both are attempts to replace reality.
God is near His forms if man does not remove them from Him. But when the expanding movement of religion suppresses the movement of reversal and removes the form from God, the countenance of the form in obliterated, its lips are dead, its hands bang down, God knows it no more, and the universal dwelling-place that is built about its altar, the spiritually apprehended cosmos, tumbles in. And the fact that man, in the disturbance of his truth, no longer sees what is then taking place, is a part of what has then taken place.
Disintegration of the Word has taken place.
The Word has its essence in revelation, its effect in the life of the form, its currency during the domination of the form that has died.
This is the course and the counter-course of the eternal and eternally present Word in history.
The times in which the living Word appears are those in which the solidarity of connexion between I and the world is renewed; the times in which the effective Word reigns are those in which the agreement between 1 and the world are maintained; the times in which the Word becomes current are those in which alienation between I and the world, loss of reality, growth of fate, is completed—till there comes the great shudder, the holding of the breath in the dark, and the preparing silence.
But this course is not circular. It is the way. In each new son fate becomes more oppressive, reversal more shattering. And the theophany becomes ever nearer, increasingly near to the sphere that lies between beings, to the Kingdom that is hidden in our midst, there between us. History is a mysterious approach. Every spiral of its way leads us both into profounder perversion and more fundamental reversal. But the event that from the side of the world is called reversal is called from God’s side salvation.