Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [79]
Inasmuch as it denies a personal Godhead—creating out of nothing a world distinct from itself, through a free act of its will—pantheism, of necessity, blurs the concept of man as a finite being. The bond between Creator and creature is superseded by a relation between the whole and the part.
This has the double implication, on the one hand, of raising man to the level of absolute being, thus making his finiteness ambiguous; and on the other hand, of depriving him of the character of a distinct being and consequently of his peculiar dignity by contrast to the rest of nature. Regardless of the contradiction implicit in such a conception, an impersonal absolute is posited (though it cannot be but something metaphysically inferior to the persons who are supposed to be parts of it) and man is subordinated to that impersonal absolute. Man, a spiritual person, rests with his being in the non-personal absolute that engulfs him—an interpretation which is clearly intended to divest him of his character as a person.
This implies a tragic misconception of man’s metaphysical situation. Viewed as a drop in the world’s vast ocean, man is cheated of his specific dignity and his central importance; he is thus appreciated far below what is due to him. Again, being made part and parcel of the absolute—though it be in fact a sham absolute, beneath the level of personality and hence bare of dignity—he is on the other hand enormously overestimated. This is the aspect that panders to his pride.
Further, the depersonalization of God points unmistakably to a depersonalization of man as well. By assimilating man—as part of an impersonal deity—to the absolute, we at the same time displace his center of gravity from the sphere of personality within him into the impersonal lower regions of his nature. The rash attempt to elevate him to a level of absoluteness operates, actually, towards his degradation.
Classical polytheism trivializes God as well as man’s encounter with the Divine
In the conception of ancient polytheism, man, it is true, is created by a personal god; but this god, Jupiter, is himself finite. There can be no question, therefore, of a confrontation of man as a finite being with the absolute, the uncreated, the infinite. By virtue of the anthropomorphic conception of the gods, the pattern of earthly existence is projected upon the level of eternity; it is not human life which, in the conspectus of the absolute, acquires a universal and indelible meaning, but inversely, the world of the gods which becomes tinged with the flighty irrelevance of terrestrial life. Hence, the trait of playfulness which, in Homeric antiquity, seems invariably to cling to the image of man, as though he were irrevocably confined in his finiteness.
Here the transcendental glance of man which seeks for something absolute and simple—something that surpasses all manifoldness per eminentiam—is directed towards a mere magnified finiteness charged with all the motley plurality of earthly things. Man allows his ties with true Divinity to wither; he casts himself before the idols of which the Psalmist says, “They have eyes and see not: they have ears and hear not . . . they have hands and feel not” (Ps. 113:5-6).
True, man does not fall a victim to depersonalization; but he is deprived of his ordination to the absolute and the possibility of confrontation with God. And this, too, portends a fundamental loss of the deepest significance and nobility of man, chiefly because it conjures away the gravity and depth inherent in man’s metaphysical situation. Whereas in the Old Testament, which again clearly conceives of man as a creature and person facing his personal Creator in full distinctness, man’s whole life is dominated by the great dialogue between