Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

216 JOSEPH CHAPEL
it was God himself who spoke, the Thou was not the one it otherwise
always ultimately is, God, but precisely man. 21
God is always the true Thou of man’s I. But in creating man,
God “addressed” him, so here man becomes the thou of the divine
Word which created him. In this one case the perspective
for understanding the spiritual is reversed.
In Ebner’s view, it is unlikely that a truly godless person or a
true atheist could exist, because man’s existence, created by
God, presupposes God, for it is still based on the “God-relationship,”
even when man acts in a godless manner:
We all live by the grace of God, and there is not a man who, in
the innermost part of his heart, does not know of God, does not believe
in God. Yet there are others who cannot put their trust in divine
grace, who secretly do not know how to live, and therefore in
their hidden helplessness and concealed from the eyes of all others,
suffer continually. 22
Those who deny their belief in God to themselves – denying
what dwells in the depths of their consciousness and constitutes
its essence and core – do not recognize God’s spirit present within.
This is their affliction and torment. How to discover the presence
of God’s spirit in man?
Having the Word: the Miracle of Language
For Ebner, the key fact that reveals the presence of the spirit
in man is that man “has the word” (Wort haben). Distinctive in
Ebner is the word as the “objective” vehicle that constitutes a
person and mediates the I-thou relationship. If “having the
word” is key to our human, “speaking nature,” what caused the
passage from nothingness to being? How is it that we “have the
word”? “Man has the word because Someone has called to him,
Someone who is word. Man is one called, one addressed: a proof
21 GREEN, 24; WR, Schriften 1:97.
22 GREEN, 27; WR, Schriften 1:100.