Finally, the Protestant who is not a Fundamentalist, or a Roman Catholic, must be aware in every moment of his religious life of this risk of faith, and he must ask himself: “Why can I make of risk?” [probably: “Why should I take this risk?"--Ed.] This leads to the question, “Are there criteria?,” and “What is the real risk? What do we risk if we affirm something concrete as our ultimate concern?” The answer is obvious: We risk ourselves, because ultimate concern is a matter of a total surrender of the centered personality in all sides of his existence. Such a total surrender, if it is to an idolatric reality, means self-destruction in the long run. Now you can observe this especially well in all periods of history. I come back to the example of success.

Some of you may have read this book, which was also in a movie: Point of no return^c.¹ There you have the description of a successful businessman, a banker, who somehow realizes, at the top of his success, that he has been driven in a direction from which there is no return any more to a life of more meaning than the life which he has to lead from now on. It is the risk of falling into complete emptiness, when your ultimate concern proves not to have been really ultimate but very preliminary and vanishing, especially in the moment in which the promise which it implies is fulfilled.

You could observe the same thing with the breakdown of the two totalitarian minds in our period: the Nazis and the Communists in our Western society. For many in the last decades these were matters of ultimate concern, and they really meant it as ultimate concern, as total surrender. It was a pact with a demonic power, like in Goethe's ^h Faustⁱ: the pact with the devil² is a symbol for the possibility of having an ultimate concern which is not really ultimate, and then one day the lack of real ultimacy becomes visible! And I can witness to the breakdown of the personalities, of their center, of their will to live, of their courage of self-affirmation, after they had given their totality to a destructive faith, which was first glorified ecstatically and then proved to be demonic and destructive because it was not the true ultimate.

Now this is an experience which can reveal the meaning of faith better than many chapters of theologians, Church Fathers, and even the Biblical literature, which cannot be understood if we have no keys to it out of our own experience, and this