Part Four -- The Nature and Redemption of Evil
Chapter 16: The Eclipse of God
The absolute affirmation of the self in the second stage of evil is an extreme form of man’s hiding from the ‘signs’ which address him. A more common form of cutting oneself off from dialogue is the action of the man who ‘masters’ each situation or approaches it with a formulated technique or programme. Another is the various types of ‘once for all’
which make unnecessary the ‘ever anew’ of real response to the unique situation which confronts one in each hour. This false security prevents us from making our relationships to others real through opening
ourselves to them and thereby leads us to ‘squander the most precious, irreplaceable and irrecoverable material’ of life. It also prevents us from making real our relationship to God, for the meeting with God takes place in the ‘lived concrete,’ and lived concreteness exists only in so far as the moment retains its true dialogical character of presentness and uniqueness. (Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue, p. 16, What Is Man?’, p. 170; Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 49.)
The logical and dialectical God of the theologians -- the God who can be
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put into a system, enclosed in an idea, or thought about philosophically as ‘a state of being in which all ideas are absorbed’ -- is not the God who can be met in the lived concrete. The ‘once for all’ of dogma resists the unforeseeable moment and thereby becomes ‘the most exalted form of invulnerability against revelation.’ ‘Centralization and codification, undertaken in the interests of religion, are a danger to the core of
religion, unless there is the strongest life of faith, embodied in the whole existence of the community, and not relaxing in its renewing activity.’
(Between Man and Man, ‘The Question to the Single One,’ p. 57 f.;
Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘The Love of God and the Idea of Deity,’
p. 53; Kampf um Israel op. cit., p. 203 f; Between Man and Man,
‘Dialogue,’ p. 18; The Prophetic Faith op. cit., p. 70.)
It is only one step from dogma to ‘magic,’ for a God that can be fixed in dogma can also be possessed and used. ‘Always and everywhere in the history of religion, the fact that God is identified with success is the greatest obstacle to a steadfast religious life.’ Magic operates wherever one celebrates rites ‘without being turned to the Thou and . . . really meaning its Presence.’ In magic God becomes a bundle of powers, present at man’s command and in the form in which man wishes them.
(Moses, op. cit., pp. 88, 185; Eclipse of God, ‘God and the Spirit of Man,’ trans. by Maurice S. Friedman, p. 161 f.; Israel and the World,
‘The Faith of Judaism,’ pp. 21-24; Hasidism, ‘Spirit and Body of the Hasidic Movement,’ p. 79, ‘Symbolical and Sacramental Existence in Judaism,’ p. 142 f. Cf. Moses, p. 22 f. for Buber’s contrast between
‘technical magic’ and ‘magic of spontaneity.’)
As a step in one direction leads from dogma to magic, a step in another leads to ‘gnosis,’ the attempt to raise the veil which divides the revealed from the hidden and to lead forth the divine mystery. Gnosis, like magic, stands as the great threat to dialogical life and to the turning to God.
Gnosis attempts to see through the contradiction of existence and free itself from it, rather than endure the contradiction and redeem it. Buber illustrates this contrast through a comparison between Hasidism and the Kabbalah.
The whole systematic structure of the Kabbalah is
determined by a principle of certitude which hardly ever stops short, hardly ever cowers with terror, hardly ever prostrates itself. Hasidic piety, on the other hand, finds its real life just in stopping short, in letting itself be
disconcerted, in its deep-seated knowledge of the
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impotence of all ready-made knowledge, of the
incongruity of all acquired truth, in the ‘holy insecurity.’
(Israel and the World, ‘The Faith of Judaism,’ pp. 21-24,
‘The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,’ p. 31 f.; Eclipse of God, ‘God and the Spirit of Man,’ p. 162; Hasidism,
‘Symbolical Existence in Judaism,’ p. 141 f.)
This gnosis is not found in the modern world in theosophies and occult systems alone. ‘In many theologies also, unveiling gestures are to be discovered behind the interpreting ones.’ Gnosis has even found its way into modern psychotherapy through the teachings of Carl Jung:
The psychological doctrine which deals with mysteries without knowing the attitude of faith toward mystery is the modern manifestation of Gnosis. Gnosis is not to be understood as only historical category, but as a universal one. It -- and not atheism, which annihilates God because it must reject the hitherto existing images of God -- is the real antagonist of the reality of faith. (Eclipse of God,
‘God and the Spirit of Man,’ p. 162, ‘Reply to C. G.
Jung,’ p. 175 f.)
Concern with revelation of the future, the attempt to get behind the problematic of life, the desire to possess or use divine power, the
acceptance of tradition and law as a ‘once for all’ in which one can take refuge -- all these prevent the meeting with God in the lived concrete.
Even the belief in immortality may be a threat to the relation of faith, for by making death appear unreal or unserious, it may hinder our
recognition of the limits of finitude as the threshold of Eternity. (For the sake of Heaven op. cit., p. 238 f.; Martin Buber, ‘Nach dem Ted’,
Münchener Neuesten Nachrichten, February 8, 1928.) Similarly, the very symbols which man uses to address God often stand in the way of that address.
The religious reality of the meeting with the Meeter . . . knows only the presence of the Present One. Symbols of Him, whether images or ideas, always exist first when and in so far as Thou becomes He, and that means It.
‘God, so we may surmise, does not despise all these similarly and necessarily untrue images, but rather suffers that one look at Him through them.’ But there inevitably comes a time when the symbol,
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instead of enabling men to enter into relation with God, stands in the way of that relation. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 62 f., ‘The Love of God and the Idea of Deity,’ p. 84.)
The philosopher helps restore the lived concrete to the religious man through destroying the images which no longer do justice to God. But the ‘pure idea,’ which he raises to the throne of reality in their place, also stands between man and God. Philosophy begins with ‘the primary act of abstraction,’ that ‘inner action in which man lifts himself above the concrete situation into the sphere of precise conceptualization.’ The concepts which man develops in this sphere ‘no longer serve as a means of apprehending reality, but instead represent as the object of thought Being freed from the limitations of the actual.’ From the lived
togetherness of I and It, philosophy abstracts the I into a subject which can do nothing but observe and reflect and the It into a passive object of thought. The ‘God of the philosophers,’ in consequence, is a
conceptually comprehensible thing among things, and no longer a living God who can be the object of imagination, wishes, and feelings. Nor is this situation changed by the special place which philosophy gives the absolute as the object from which all other objects are derived, or as
‘Speech’ (Logos), ‘the Unlimited,’ or simply ‘Being.’ ‘Philosophy is grounded on the presupposition that one sees the absolute in universals.’
As a result philosophy must necessarily deny, or at the very least turn away from, the reality on which religion is grounded, ‘the covenant of the absolute with the particular, with the concrete.’ (Ibid, ‘Religion and Philosophy,, pp. 44 f., 53-63, ‘Religion and Reality,’ p. 28.)
Both the philosophizing and the religious person wonder at phenomena, says Buber, but ‘the one neutralizes his wonder in ideal knowledge, while the other abides in that wonder.’ (Moses, p. 75) When man has felt at home in the universe, his thought about himself has only been a part of his cosmological thought. But when man has felt himself shut in by a strict and inescapable solitude, his thinking about himself has been deep and fruitful and independent of cosmology. Buber criticizes Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hegel because in their systems of thought man attains to consciousness of himself only in the third person. Man is no longer problematic for himself, and the wonder at man is simply wonder at the universe as a whole. Hegel’s theoretical certainty is derived from his incorporation of cosmological rather than actual human time into the groundwork of his image of the universe. ‘Cosmological time’ is abstract and relativized. In it all the future can appear theoretically present. ‘Anthropological time,’ in contrast, has reality only in the past.
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Since the future depends in part on man’s consciousness and will, on decisions which have not yet taken place, no certainty of the future is possible within the boundaries of the human world. Marx takes over Hegel’s cosmological time to provide the proletariat the security of an assured victory in the future. This security, like Hegel’s, is a false one since it ignores man’s powers of decisions. ‘It depends on the direction and force of this power how far the renewing powers of life as such are able to take effect, and even whether they are not transformed into powers of destruction.’ (Between Man and Man, pp. 126-129, 131 f., 139-145.)
The submersion of the dialogical life by the ‘once for all’ of gnosis, theology, philosophy, and social doctrine is only a part of a larger development of civilization. All great civilizations at their early stages are ‘life-systems’ built up around a supreme principle which pervades the entire existence of the group. This principle is at once a religious and a normative one since it implies a concrete attachment of human life to the Absolute and an attempt to bring order and meaning into earthly existence through the imitation of transcendent Being. All spheres of being are essentially determined by the relationship to this principle. In proportion to the development of its specific forms, however, every civilization strives increasingly to become independent of its principle.
In the great Western civilizations, this manifests itself partly by their individual spheres isolating themselves and each of them establishing its own basis and order, and partly by the principle itself losing its absolute character and validity, so that the holy norm degenerates into a human convention, or by the attachment to the absolute being reduced, avowedly or unavowedly, to a mere symbolic-ritual requirement, which may be adequately satisfied in the cultic sphere. (At the Turning, op. cit.,
‘Judism and Civilization,’ pp. 11-15)
Once the spheres have become independent of the original principle of the civilization, ‘religion’ no longer means just the whole of one’s existence in its relation to the Absolute but a special domain of dogma and cult. ‘The original evil of all "religion," writes Buber, is ‘the
separation of "living in God" from "living in the world."’ This separated religion is man’s greatest danger whether it manifests itself in the form of a cult in which sacramental forms are independent of everyday life or of a soul detached from life in devotional rapture and solitary relation
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with God. ‘The sacrament . . . misleads the faithful into feeling secure in a merely "objective" consummation without any personal participation.’
In such a service the real partner of the communion is no longer present.
Similarly, when the soul cuts itself off from the world, God is displaced by a figment of the soul itself: the dialogue which the soul thinks it is carrying on ‘is only a monologue with divided roles,’ (Hasidism,
‘Spinoza,’ pp. 104, 99 f., ‘Symbolical Existence in Judaism,’ p. 132.) This dualism between the life of the spirit and the life of the world was already present in biblical Judaism, but it gained still greater ground in Christianity because of the latter’s surrender of the concept of a ‘holy people’ for that of personal holiness. ‘Those who believed in Christ possessed at every period a twofold being: as individuals in the realm of the person and as participants in the public life of their nations.’
Although ‘in the history of Christian peoples there has been no lack of men of the spirit afire and ready for martyrdom in the struggle for righteousness,’ the norm of realizing the religion in all aspects of social existence can no longer occupy a central place. As a result it is made easy for the secular law to gain ever more ground at the expense of the religious. At the point at which the public sphere encroaches
disastrously on the personal, as it does in our time, ‘the disparity
between the sanctification of the individual and the accepted unholiness of his community’ is transferred to an inner contradiction in the
redeemed soul. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics,’ pp. 138-141;
Two Types of Faith, op. cit., p. 173.)
The apocalyptic element in religion also tends to lead to a dualism between the secular and the religious. The eschatological expectation of the imminent rule of God leads to a desire to do away with law in the name of the divine freedom which is or will be directly present in all creatures without need of law or representation. As soon as this
expectation slackens, ‘it follows historically that God’s rule is restricted to the "religious" sphere, everything that is left over is rendered unto Caesar; and the rift which runs through the whole being of the human world receives its sanction.’ This dualism enters deeply into Paul’s essentially Gnostic view of the world. It is also found in Judaism, where the autochthonous prophetic belief is opposed by an apocalyptic one built up out of elements from Iranian dualism. The one ‘promises a consummation of creation,’ the other ‘its abrogation and suppression by another world completely different in nature.’
The prophetic allows ‘the evil’ to find the direction that
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leads toward God, and to enter into the good; the
apocalyptic sees good and evil severed forever at the end of days, the good redeemed, the evil unredeemable for all eternity; the prophetic believes that the earth shall be hallowed, the apocalyptic despairs of an earth which it considers to be hopelessly doomed.... (Moses, p.188;
Israel and the World, ‘The Power of the Spirit,’ pp. 176- 179.)
The prophetic and Hasidic belief in the hallowing of the earth also stands in contrast to the pagan world’s glorification of the elemental forces and the Christian world’s conquest of them. Christianity, through its ascetic emphasis, desanctified the elemental and created a world alien to spirit and a spirit alien to world. ‘Even when Christianity includes the natural life in its sacredness, as in the sacrament of marriage, the bodily life is not hallowed, but merely made subservient to holiness.’ The result has been a split between the actual and the ideal, between life as it is lived and life as it should be lived. (Israel and the World, ‘The Power of the Spirit,’ pp. 176-179)
All historical religion must fight the tendency of metaphysics, gnosis, magic, and politics to become independent of the religious life of the person, and it must also fight the tendency of myth and cult to aid them in this attempt. What is threatened by these extra-religious elements is the lived concrete -- the moment ‘in its unforeseeableness and . . . irrecoverableness . . . its undivertible character of happening but once.’
The lived concrete is also threatened by those religious elements that destroy the concreteness of the memory of past moments of meeting with God that have been preserved in religious tradition -- theology, which makes temporal facts into timeless symbols, and mysticism, which dilutes and weakens the images of memory by proclaiming all experience accessible at once. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and
Philosophy,’ p. 48 f.; Martin Buber, ‘Religion und Philosopie,’
Europäische Revue, Berlin, V [August 1929], p. 330 f.)
In the modern world the moment is expropriated and dispossessed in four different ways. Through the historicizing of the moment it is regarded as a pure product of the past. Through the technicizing of the moment it is treated as purely a means to a goal and hence as existing only in the future. Through the psychologizing of the moment its total content is reflected upon and reduced to a process or experience of the soul. Through the philosophizing of the moment it is abstracted from its
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reality. Modern life is divided into levels and aspects. Modern man enjoys erotic, aesthetic, political, and religious experiences
independently of one another. As a result, religion is for him only one aspect of his life rather than its totality. The men of the Bible were sinners like us, says Buber, but they did not commit the arch sin of professing God in the synagogue and denying him in the sphere of economics, politics, and the ‘self-assertion’ of the group. Nor did they believe it possible to be honest and upright in private life and to lie in public for the sake of the commonwealth. (‘Religion und Philosophie,’
p. 334; Martin Huber, ‘Religion und Gottesherrschaft,’ a criticism of Leonhard Ragaz’s Weltreich, Religion und Gottesherrschaft.
Frankfurter Zeitung, ‘Literaturblatt,’ No. 9, April 27, 1923; Israel and the World ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ p. 90 f., ‘And If Not Now, When?’ p. 235 f.,’Hebrew Humanism,’p. 246 f.; Des Baal- Schem-Tow Unterweisung, op. cit., p. 116 f.)
The dualistic character of our age is shown particularly clearly in its relation to work. In times when the relation with the Absolute enters into every sphere of existence men see meaning in their work, but in times like ours when life is divided into separate spheres men experience work as an inescapable compulsion. The nature of work itself is perverted in the modern world by the divorce of technical means from value ends, I- It from I-Thou. The modern industrial worker has to perform
meaningless and mechanical work because of an inhuman utilization of human power without regard to the worthiness of the work performed.
The modern worker divides his life into hours on a treadmill and hours of freedom from the treadmill, and the hours of freedom cannot
compensate for the others for they are conditioned by them. To accept the treadmill and try to reduce working hours is merely to eternalize this condition. (Kampf um Israel, pp. 281, 277)
‘Man is in a growing measure sociologically determined,’ writes Buber.
In the technical, economic, and political spheres of his existence he finds himself ‘in the grip of incomprehensible powers’ which trample again and again on all human purposes. This purposelessness of modern life is also manifested in the worship of freedom for its own sake.
Modern vitalism and Lehensphilosophie have exchanged a life-drunk spirit for the detached intellect against which they reacted. Progressive education has tended to free the child’s creative impulses without helping him to acquire the personal responsibility which should
accompany it. This sickness of modern man is manifested most clearly of all, however, in the individualism and nationalism which make power
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