Modern viewModern humanity cannot simply accept this assumption any longer. The notion of
the cosmos or the world still remains, but it has greatly changed. There seems to be
no other principle than a cold mechanism called the ‘laws of nature’. Confirmed only
by mathematical procedures, they provide us with the means of technological
manipulation of all beings. The personified universe of the good old days does not
show us a familiar face any longer. All that we can read in its indifferent countenance
is meaninglessness. There appears to be no place where one could live in a way suitable
to the word ‘human being’. To illustrate this uncanny alteration of the subjectively
felt meaning of the world, we need only mention nuclear weapons and genetic
manipulation, for example. It is an irony that words referring to ‘being-in-the-world’
(or being-in-the-cosmos) such as ‘cosmopolitan’ were used much less when people
believed in the divine cosmos than nowadays when it seems unrelated to us.
Interestingly, Jonas (1963) suggests a certain affinity between late antiquity and
modernity. In late antiquity, the ancient belief in the supreme cosmic order was
shaken to its foundation. This crisis provided the spiritual atmosphere in which the
Gnostic religions flourished and Christianity emerged. While the Gnostics were
strongly anticosmic, the Christians revered nature in terms of their belief in the
supreme goodness of the Creator. But both had the tendency to question the cosmos
as a whole, as well as their identity as cosmopolitans. Identity was found in a life
transcending the cosmos, and unlike that of ancients. Jonas finds existentialism and
nihilism, the spiritual expressions of our age, analogous to the Gnosticism of late
antiquity. Both are, in his view, related to each other like lock and key (Jonas 1963;
1964). More recently he has thus turned to study the ethics required in our historical
situation, with modern technology progressing in an uncanny way to an unforeseen,
maybe apocalyptic, future (Jonas 1963; 1981; 1983; 1984). In his historical
perspective he remains true to his early studies. The apparently natural existence of
humankind is not self-evident. In late antiquity, human life was believed to be possible
only through the invisible act of God. Our era, too, reveals the insufficiency of the
humanistic viewpoint in its modern sense. What seems to be needed is a
reconsideration of the perspective of late antiquity.
Everything in the cosmos now proves to be relative. Nothing is autonomous in
itself. All things in the world betray their interdependence with each other.
Metaphysics ceases to be an abstract system of thought and becomes an experiential
reality. Not beings in the world but the world itself comes to be questioned. Any
religion answering existentially to these ontological questions deserves to be called a
world religion. Western religions are world religions not merely because they are
spread worldwide but also because they reveal that all things, including the human,
owe existence to the creative act of God. Awareness of the existence of oneself leads
to a crisis in which one’s being-in-the-world is fundamentally questioned. One’s
existence, however, is not simply denied. Instead, one faces the basic fact that one is
responsible for one’s relations to all humans and other beings through one’s acts. At
this point one may be ready to hear the calling of God, as in Christian belief. Even
22 SHOJI MURAMOTO