its own unsubstantial nullity.”^2 Hegel continues “we have to marvel at the
force of the elevation of the mind which abandons everything in order to
declare the exclusive power of God.” There is no longer such confidence in
reason being moral and human, as it had once been called in the early bour-
geois era. Immanuel Kant still had the notion of duty, of moral command-
ments as moments of practical reason; that they are in-born in all humanity.
Since it is immanent in human beings, Kant postulated the idea of the
autonomous individual as well as of the just God out of the demand to treat
one’s neighbor never merely as a means but also always as end. Whoever
considers this demand as necessary and true cannot reject the trust that is
announced in Psalm 91 as mere arbitrariness. Such unchangeable certainty
once belonged to today’s deeply threatened civilization no less than did such
certainty belong to the 18th century enlightenment’s recognition of that highly
problematic Kantian imperative, which existed without faith in God. Being
different from the categorical principles that are ascribed to reason, the thought
of refuge as it expresses itself in Psalm 91 awakens not merely obedience but
the love for that which is other than the world and which gives meaning to
life and the suffering in it. Despite everything. “May God’s wings cover you,
under God’s wings may you hide, shield and wall is God’s faithfulness.”
In modern theology, one may think of the unforgettable Paul Tillich who
attempted to mitigate the crass opposition in the biblical teaching, Christian
as well as Jewish, of the antagonism between the Goodness of God and the
unjust, malevolent horror in reality. Divine help, redemption, should not be
taken literally but symbolically. Not to speak of the logical problematic of the
notion of symbol in such connections, its seems to me decisive that the Psalms
witness a need, a devotion to the good, which itself is truly not symbolical.
Precisely, this devotion which is formed in the texts has forever cooperated
in the unfolding of childlike experiences. However, the adult who has not
preserved and also superceded his own childhood is not a true grown up.
He has resigned. Otherwise he could not remain unconditionally in the thought
that the world of terror should remain as it is. Rather, he flees to the utopia
of the Psalms, according to which one’s own judgment about right and wrong
is not the last one. There the Lord says: “Because he longs after me, thus I
Psalm 91 • 119(^2) Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Erster Band, in: Jubiläumsausgabe, Stuttgart 1927,
Bd. 12. S. 499. [English Text: Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art.
Volume 1, (Tr. T. M. Knox), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 375].