PAUL TILLICH PART 5: Mysterium Tremendum, Martin Buber,
In some of the typing about Tillich, and particularly about Einstein, I have found a dry taste forming in the top of my mouth. Never good. The dry taste is the result of the distance between a conceptual discourse about religion and the lived experience of religion.
By an experience of religion, what I mean here isn’t the situation of day-to-day devotion. Rather, what Rudolf Otto would classify as an experience of the “numinous.” The “numinous” is from the Latin word for God, numen. As a word it is certainly much preferable to “godious,” infinitely lovelier and less off-putting. (The word “godious,” with all the overtones of “gaudy” and “odious,” could perhaps work as an adjective for the gold-painted thrones one occasionally spots on a religious network.) It is good to make yourself smile. Anyhow, as there is not our English word “God” to evoke whatever feelings we have when we read or hear this word, the “numinous” has less tendency to devolve into an issue of belief. The “numinous” is not some experience that one is excluded from for a creed or a lack of a creed. It is on a broader level. You could call a numinous experience an experience of great depth. Experience might not be the right word. Perhaps it is what Martin Buber, the Hassidic mystic and philosopher, would refer to as an “encounter.” An encounter is deeper than an experience, in his thinking, and always takes the character of “I-thou.”
I should touch on Buber briefly. Buber says that every time we use the word “I,” we are actually using one of two conjunctive words: “I-it” or “I-thou.” When we say “I,” we are always meaning “I-it” or “I-thou.” A friend of mine, an Israeli chef named Ido, turned me on to him, and the first thing he mentioned was that in Buber’s thinking we are always all of us in a state of relationship. “Eef I think about Buber, I become I-tomato, I-knife, I-window, I-hand holding knife handle, I-hair on my head, I-bald spot, I-subway pole.” He is very right. To think about Buber is to engage your relationship with whatever it is you relating to, which produces a peculiar species of wonder.
Buber describes the “I-it” relationship as the surface relationship. He says we speak the “I-it” with just a part of ourselves. The “I-thou,” on the other hand, can only be spoken with the whole being. To have an “I-thou” relationship, be it with a mirror, a tree, a picture of your childhood pet, a poem, an icon, a person, et al., is to be momentarily in connection to the depth within that thing. You access the “You,” which is his name for the unbounded element, within it. This is not to say that you animate with human character, such as imagining that a tomato has a nervous system like yours, and cringes as you would if your head were about to be chopped into two. Buber says, “when Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds.” This “Thou” is quite a bit similar to what Tillich means in his use of the “depth in all things.”
In the “I-thou” relationship, as all of us alive have experience of it, both sides are grasped and transformed by a unity that is greater than each individual entity. In an I-Thou relationship, the “ground and abyss of Being,” the infinite in the finite, call it what you will, stares back out of the finite. This is not to say that it grows eyeballs, blinks, but rather that you have a feeling of being seen, being known, being grasped. We have all felt this feeling. It is a religious feeling, but isn’t confined to religion. One thinks of a Rilke poem such as “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.” All those Thing poems, really, that he writes after hooking up with Rodin. It isn’t necessarily always a feeling of terror....
Here is my favorite passage in Buber: “Feelings accompany the metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it. The accompanying feelings can be of greatly differing kinds. The feeling of Jesus for the demoniac differs from the feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is the one love. Feelings are entertained; love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its content, its object; but love is between the I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. Love ranges in its effect through the whole world. In the eyes of him who takes his stand in love, and gazes out of it, men are cut free from their entanglement in bustling activity. Good people and evil people, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly, becomes successively real to him; that is, set free they step forth in their singleness, and confront him as Thou. In a wonderful way, from time to time, exclusiveness arises – and so he can be effective, helping, healing, educating, raising up, saving. Love is responsibility of an I for a Thou. In this lies the likeness – impossible in any feeling whatsoever – of all those who love, from the smallest to the greatest and from the blessedly protected man, whose life is rounded in that of a loved being, to him who is all his life nailed to the cross of the world, and who ventures to bring himself to the dreadful point – to love all men.
Let the significance of the effect in the third example, that of the creature and our contemplation of it, remain sunk in mystery. Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the universe, and the meaning of that waiting, that craning of the neck in creatures will dawn upon you. Every word would falsify; but look! round about you beings live their life, and to whatever point you turn you come upon being."
