#blumenberg

We ask once again about the relevance of absolute metaphors, their historical truth. This truth is pragmatic in a very broad sense. By providing a point of orientation, the content of absolute metaphors determines a particular attitude or conduct; they give structure to a world, representing the nonexperienceable, nonapprehensible totality of the real. To the historically trained eye, they therefore indicate the fundamental certainties, conjectures, and judgments in relation to which the attitudes and expectations, actions and inactio0ns, longings and disappointments, interests and indifferences, of an epoch are regulated. "What genuine guidance does it give?"

Thus, every well-invented poem is to be seen no otherwise than as a history from another possible world. And it is in this sense alone that the poet too is due the name poeton, the name of a Creator, because he makes things that do not exist for the senses. That is to say, he brings these things 'across' from the state of possibility into the state of reality, and imparts to them the semblance and the name of the real.

The modern age's readiness to inherit such a mortgage of prescribed questions and to accept as its own the obligation to pay it off goes a long way toward explaining its intellectual history. There is an element of tragedy in the way in which this effort, as generous as it was hopeless, finally ends with the more or less explicit insinuation that the inheritance came about in a dishonest way. What mainly occurred in the process that is interpreted as secularization, at least (so far) in all but a few recognizable and specific instances, should be described not as the transposition of authentically theological contents into secularized alienation from their origin but rather as the reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated.

If, then, we ought first to ascend unto a knowledge of His name, and if we wish to turn our attention to gradations, then it does not seem necessary to look at books, since there are countless books. Therefore, if we become involved with a countless multiplicity, we will fall into inescapable vanity. For the first wise men, viz., Pythagoras, Socrates, and even Christ, wrote nothing, as Augustine says in his Harmony of the Gospels. For they did not dream of bestowing on wisdom the writing about it; for this [action] would serve rather to diminish and to bedarken wisdom’s majesty. Moreover, there is only one Book of life in which is contained all wisdom, which is our goal. The many other books do not have a goal. But the Book of life is spiritual and intellectual. All other books— assimilated by learning, reasoning, or sensing—bear the image of this Book. Therefore, we ought not to concern ourselves with a host of books that have been produced by men. Rather, if we need to ascend from the perceptual to the intelligible, from the outer to the inner, from the visible to the immaterial, then let us turn to the one Book written by the Finger of God.