Eclipse of God

Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy

Martin Buber

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400874088
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Biblical in origin, the expression "eclipse of God" refers to the Jewish concept of hester panim, the act of God concealing his face as a way of punishing his disobedient subjects. Though this idea is deeply troubling for many people, in this book Martin Buber uses the expression hopefully—for a hiding God is also a God who can be found.First published in 1952, Eclipse of God is a collection of nine essays concerning the relationship between religion and philosophy. The book features Buber's critique of the thematically interconnected—yet diverse—perspectives of Soren Kierkegaard, Hermann Cohen, C.G. Jung, Martin Heidegger, and other prominent modern thinkers. Buber deconstructs their philosophical conceptions of God and explains why religion needs philosophy to interpret what is authentic in spiritual encounters. He elucidates the religious implications of the I-Thou, or dialogical relationship, and explains how the exclusive focus on scientific knowledge in the modern world blocks the possibility of a personal relationship with God.Featuring a new introduction by Leora Batnitzky, Eclipse of God offers a glimpse into the mind of one of the modern world's greatest Jewish thinkers.

1

PRELUDE: REPORT ON TWO TALKS

I shall tell about two talks. One apparently came to a conclusion, as only occasionally a talk can come, and yet in reality remained unconcluded; the other was apparently broken off and yet found a completion such as rarely falls to the lot of discussions.

Both times it was a dispute about God, about the concept and the name of God, but each time of a very different nature.

On three successive evenings I spoke at the adult folk-school of a German industrial city on the subject “Religion as Reality.” What I meant by that was the simple thesis that “faith” is not a feeling in the soul of man but an entrance into reality, an entrance into the whole reality without reduction and curtailment. This thesis is simple but it contradicts the usual way of thinking. And so three evenings were necessary to make it clear, and not merely three lectures but also three discussions which followed the lectures. At these discussions I was struck by something which bothered me. A large part of the audience was evidently made up of workers but none of them spoke up. Those who spoke and raised questions, doubts, and reflections were for the most part students (for the city had a famous old university). But all kinds of other circles were also represented; the workers alone remained silent. Only at the conclusion of the third evening was this silence, which had by now become painful for me, explained. A young worker came up to me and said: “Do you know, we can’t speak in there, but if you would meet with us to-morrow, we could talk together the whole time.” Of course I agreed.

The next day was a Sunday. After dinner I came to the agreed place and now we talked together well into the evening. Among the workers was one, a man no longer young, whom I was drawn to look at again and again because he listened as one who really wished to hear. Real listening has become rare in our time. It is found most often among workers, who are not indeed concerned about the person speaking, as is so often the case with the bourgeois public, but about what he has to say. This man had a curious face. In an old Flemish altar picture representing the adoration of the shepherds one of them, who stretches out his arms toward the manger, has such a face. The man in front of me did not look as if he might have any desire to do the same; moreover, his face was not open like that in the picture. What was notable about him was that he heard and pondered, in a manner as slow as it was impressive. Finally, he opened his lips as well. “I have had the experience,” he explained slowly and impressively, repeating a saying which the astronomer Laplace is supposed to have used in conversation with Napoleon, “that I do not need this hypothesis ‘God’ in order to be quite at home in the world.” He pronounced the word “hypothesis” as if he had attended the lectures of the distinguished natural scientist who had taught in that industrial and university city and had died shortly before. Although he did not reject the designation “God” for his idea of nature, that naturalist spoke in a similar manner whether he pursued zoology or Weltanschauung.

The brief speech of the man struck me; I felt myself more deeply challenged than by the others. Up till then we had certainly debated very seriously, but in a somewhat relaxed way; now everything had suddenly become severe and hard. How should I reply to the man? I pondered awhile in the now severe atmosphere. It came to me that I must shatter the security of his Weltanschauung, through which he thought of a “world” in which one “felt at home.” What sort of a world was it? What we were accustomed to call world was the “world of the senses,” the world in which there exists vermilion and grass green, C major and B minor, the taste of apple and of wormwood. Was this world anything other than the meeting of our own senses with those unapproachable events about whose essential definition physics always troubles itself in vain? The red that we saw was neither there in the “things,” nor here in the “soul.” It at times flamed up and glowed just so long as a red-perceiving eye and a red-engendering “oscillation” found themselves over against each other. Where then was the world and its security? The unknown “objects” there, the apparently so well-known and yet not graspable “subjects” here, and the actual and still so evanescent meeting of both, the “phenomena”—was that not already three worlds which could no longer be comprehended from one alone? How could we in our thinking place together these worlds so divorced from one another? What was the being that gave this “world,” which had become so questionable, its foundation?

When I was through a stern silence ruled in the now twilit room. Then the man with the shepherd’s face raised his heavy lids, which had been lowered the whole time, and said slowly and impressively, “You are right.”

I sat in front of him dismayed. What had I done? I had led the man to the threshold beyond which there sat enthroned the majestic image which the great physicist, the great man of faith, Pascal, called the God of the Philosophers. Had I wished for that? Had I not rather wished to lead him to the other, Him whom Pascal called the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Him to whom one can say Thou?

It grew dusk, it was late. On the next day I had to depart. I could not remain, as I now ought to do; I could not enter into the factory where the man worked, become his comrade, live with him, win his trust through real life-relationship, help him to walk with me the way of the creature who accepts the creation. I could only return his gaze.

Some time later I was the guest of a noble old thinker. I had once made his acquaintance at a conference where he gave a lecture on elementary folk-schools and I gave one on adult folk-schools. That brought us together, for we were united by the fact that the word “folk” has to be understood in both cases in the same all-embracing sense. At that time I was happily surprised at how the man with the steel-grey locks asked us at the beginning of his talk to forget all that we believed we knew about his philosophy from his books. In the last years, which had been war years, reality had been brought so close to him that he saw everything with new eyes and had to think in a new way. To be old is a glorious thing when one has not unlearned what it means to begin, this old man had even perhaps first learned it thoroughly in old age. He was not at all young, but he was old in a young way, knowing how to begin.

He lived in another university city situated in the west. When the theology students of that university invited me to speak about prophecy, I stayed with the old man. There was a good spirit in his house, the spirit that wills to enter life and does not prescribe to life where it shall let it in.

One morning I got up early in order to read proofs. The evening before I had received galley proof of the preface of a book of mine, and since this preface was a statement of faith, I wished to read it once again quite carefully before it was printed. Now I took it into the study below that had been offered to me in case I should need it. But here the old man already sat at his writing-desk. Directly after greeting me he asked me what I had in my hand, and when I told him, he asked whether I would not read it aloud to him. I did so gladly. He listened in a friendly manner but clearly astonished, indeed with growing amazement. When I was through, he spoke hesitatingly, then, carried away by the importance of his subject, ever more passionately. “How can you bring yourself to say ‘God’ time after time? How can you expect that your readers will take the word in the sense in which you wish it to be taken? What you mean by the name of God is something above all human grasp and comprehension, but in speaking about it you have lowered it to human conceptualization. What word of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this! All the innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. All the injustice that it has been used to cover has effaced its features. When I hear the highest called ‘God,’ it sometimes seems almost blasphemous.”

The kindly clear eyes flamed. The voice itself flamed. Then we sat silent for awhile facing each other. The room lay in the flowing brightness of early morning. It seemed to me as if a power from the light entered into me. What I now answered, I cannot to-day reproduce but only indicate.

“Yes,” I said, “it is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. Generations of men have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of man with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their finger-marks and their blood. Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest! If I took the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby an unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of Him whom the generations of men have honoured and degraded with their awesome living and dying. I do indeed mean Him whom the hell-tormented and heaven-storming generations of men mean. Certainly, they draw caricatures and write ‘God’ underneath; they murder one another and say ‘in God’s name.’ But when all madness and delusion fall to dust, when they stand over against Him in the loneliest darkness and no longer say ‘He, He’ but rather sigh ‘Thou,’ shout ‘Thou,’ all of them the one word, and when they then add ‘God,’ is it not the real God whom they all implore, the One Living God, the God of the children of man? Is it not He who hears them? And just for this reason is not the word ‘God,’ the word of appeal, the word which has become a name, consecrated in all human tongues for all times? We must esteem those who interdict it because they rebel against the injustice and wrong which are so readily referred to ‘God’ for authorization. But we may not give it up. How understandable it is that some suggest we should remain silent about the ‘last things’ for a time in order that the misused words may be redeemed! But they are not to be redeemed thus. We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”

It had become very light in the room. It was no longer dawning, it was light. The old man stood up, came over to me, laid his hand on my shoulder and spoke: “Let us be friends.” The conversation was completed. For where two or three are truly together, they are together in the name of God.

2

RELIGION AND REALITY

1

The relationship between religion and reality prevailing in a given epoch is the most accurate index of its true character. In some periods, that which men “believe in” as something absolutely independent of themselves is a reality with which they are in a living relation, although they well know that they can form only a most inadequate representation of it. In other periods, on the contrary, this reality is replaced by a varying representation that men “have” and therefore can handle, or by only a residue of the representation, a concept which bears only faint traces of the original image.

Men who are still “religious” in such times usually fail to realize that the relation conceived of as religious no longer exists between them and a reality independent of them, but has existence only within the mind—a mind which at the same time contains hypostatized images, hypostatized “ideas.”

Concomitantly there appears, more or less clearly, a certain type of person, who thinks that this is as it should be: in the opinion of this person, religion has never been anything but an intra-psychic process whose products are “projected” on a plane in itself fictitious but vested with reality by the soul. Cultural epochs, such men say, can be classified according to the imaginative strength of this projection; but in the end, man, having attained to clear knowledge, must recognize that every alleged colloquy with the divine was only a soliloquy, or rather a conversation between various strata of the self. There-upon, as a representative of this school in our time has done, it becomes necessary to proclaim that God is “dead.” Actually, this proclamation means only that man has become incapable of apprehending a reality absolutely independent of himself and of having a relation with it—incapable, moreover, of imaginatively perceiving this reality and representing it in images, since it eludes direct contemplation. For the great images of God fashioned by mankind are born not of imagination but of real encounters with real divine power and glory. Man’s capacity to apprehend the divine in images is lamed in the same measure as is his capacity to experience a reality absolutely independent of himself.

2

The foregoing naturally does not mean that a given concept of God, a conceptual apprehension of the divine, necessarily impairs the concrete religious relationship. Everything depends on the extent to which this concept of God can do justice to the reality which it denotes, do justice to it as a reality. The more abstract the concept, the more does it need to be balanced by the evidence of living experience, with which it is intimately bound up rather than linked in an intellectual system. The further removed a concept seems from anthropomorphism, the more it must be organically completed by an expression of that immediacy and, as it were, bodily nearness which overwhelm man in his encounters with the divine, whether they fill him with awe, transport him with rapture, or merely give him guidance. Anthropomorphism always reflects our need to preserve the concrete quality evidenced in the encounter; yet even this need is not its true root: it is in the encounter itself that we are confronted with something compellingly anthropomorphic, something demanding reciprocity, a primary Thou. This is true of those moments of our daily life in which we become aware of the reality that is absolutely independent of us, whether it be as power or as glory, no less than of the hours of great revelation of which only a halting record has been handed down to us.

We find an all-important example of the necessary supplementation of a genuine concept of God by an interpretation of what man experiences humanly, occurring just a little before the dawn of our own era, in the doctrine of Spinoza. In his theory of the divine attributes he seems to have undertaken the greatest anti-anthropomorphic effort ever essayed by the human spirit. He designates the number of the attributes of the divine substance as infinite. However, he gives names to only two of these, “extension” and “thought”—in other words, the cosmos and the spirit. Thus everything given us, both from without and within ourselves, taken together, accounts for only two of the infinite number of the attributes of God. This proposition of Spinoza’s implies, among other things, a warning against identifying God with a “spiritual principle,” as has been attempted particularly in our own era with ever greater insistence; for even the spirit is only one of the angelic forms, so to speak, in which God manifests Himself. However, despite the abstractness of the concept, the greatness of God is here expressed in an incomparably vivid way.

Nevertheless, this highest concept of God would have remained confined to the sphere of discursive thinking, and divorced from religious actuality, if Spinoza had not introduced into his doctrine an element which for all that it is intended to be purely “intellectual,” is necessarily based on the experience that by its very nature draws man out of the domain of abstract thinking and puts him in actual relation with the real, namely, love. In this, although his exposition here is as strictly conceptual as everywhere else, Spinoza actually starts not from a concept but from a concrete fact, without which the conceptual formulation would have been impossible—and that fact is that there are men who love God (regardless of whether they are many or few, Spinoza himself obviously knew this fact from his own experience). He conceived of their love of God as God’s love of Himself, actualized by His creation, and encompassing man’s love of God as well as God’s love of man. Thus God—the very God among the infinity of whose attributes nature and spirit are only two—loves, and since His love becomes manifest in our love of Him the divine love must be of the same essence as human love. In this way the most extreme anti-anthropomorphism evolves into a sublime anthropomorphism. Here too we end up by recognizing that we have encountered the reality of God; it is truly an encounter, for it takes place here in the realization of the identity (unum et idem) of His love and ours, although we, finite natural and spiritual beings, are in no wise identical with Him, who is infinite.

3

Spinoza began with propositions stating that God is, that He exists not as a spiritual principle which has no being except in the mind of him who thinks it, but as a reality, a self-subsisting reality absolutely independent of our existence; this he expresses in the concept of substance. But he concluded with propositions implying that this God stands in a living relationship to us, and we in a living relationship to him. Spinoza includes these two aspects in the one concept of God’s intellectual love, and the adjective “intellectual” is to be construed in the light of the anti-anthropomorphic tendency of this philosopher, who was endeavouring to put an end to the human disposition to conceive images of God. Thus he aimed to give greater stringency to the Biblical prohibition, without, however, impairing the reality of the relation between God and man. He failed to avoid this impairment solely because he recognized only the supreme aspect of the relation, but not its core, the dialogue between God and man—the divine voice speaking in what befalls man, and man answering in what he does or forbears to do. However, Spinoza clearly stated his intention.

The thinking of our time is characterized by an essentially different aim. It seeks, on the one hand, to preserve the idea of the divine as the true concern of religion, and, on the other hand, to destroy the reality of the idea...