the name of God served again and again as the pretext for injustice, for mas-
sive failures and mass murder. “Deus vult – God wills it!” was the justification
of the blood-thirstiness during the conquests of the Middle Ages as it was
during the crimes of the Inquisition. However, this does not reflect on the
fact that its own love for the truth, its contempt of manipulation by unscrupu-
lous cliques, finally even that faith owes itself to that which it denounces.
Still through bitter disdain, with which it disavows its own realization, it
unconsciously recognizes a homesickness that cannot refrain from the thought
of paradise. The despair is not annulled by a consoling confession but only
by the transformation of the impulse into rebellion. The contrast of a mis-
taken earnest devotion to the unknown Highest is in any case not so crass
as is the new policy of conformity that today, as is well known in this post-
war period, ignores the horror that has dominated history.
If true rebellion against the bad ever included the idea of the Other, the
Right, so trust in the Eternal includes the thought of going under. As already
said, that which belongs to the idea of divine shelter on earth is also that of
the ruin of those who are protected, of constantly vigilant envy, of malice
and betrayal, of the threat of absolute disaster. The Eternal means refuge and
where refuge is required, danger lurks. The offence, which is rightly expressed
in the human way of thinking in the Psalm as well as in many other places
in the Bible, produces out of itself the praise of God’s goodness and omnipo-
tence. Who trust and long for God will be set free. “The one who calls to me,
to him I will listen,” proclaims God of the End. “I am with him in distress,
pulling him out and bringing him to honor.” The downfall of innumerable
ones count as the “reward of the godless.” Those who rely on the Eternal
One, will share in God’s help. The horrible history should thereby become a
just state of being. Were the victims of Pharaoh and the Roman Caesars up
to those of Hitler, Stalin and Mao more wicked than their inhuman execu-
tioners? Was it by Grace that their going under is to be regarded? Should the
terror that happens in the world every day and every hour, both openly and
secretively, should this horrible injustice be called well-deserved punishment?
As a contradiction to common sense, the plausible, I know only powerless-
ness as an explanation in the midst of the terrible existence; the insanity of
another reality that compensates by renouncing all of one’s own competence
through the flight into a trust in that which is totally Other, to that which is
good despite everything.
The Jews, who had sang the Psalms through the millennium, knew that
all too often they themselves were counted as sacrifices to the swords of
Psalm 91 • 117