I-Thou as Beyond Gender

 

Hazor stele -- hands raised in prayer

“The permutations of gender in mystical texts, and among mystics themselves, are endlessly interesting. Nevertheless, it is wise to remember that this category is not ultimate. As the great Jewish theologian Martin Buber argued, a human being and God can only be related as two subjects, an “I” and a “Thou” – not subject and object, or “I” and “It.” (Buber chose “Thou” as the singular, intimate form of the pronoun, du rather than Sie.) Any “I” who says “Thou” to a lover must be present as a whole to a whole. This is true above all of the divine, eternal Thou, who sustains all relationships and is knowable only through dialogue and presence. Significantly, the pronouns “I” and “Thou” in English, as in German, are ungendered. Whenever an “I” speaks to a “Thou,” gender is grammatically absent, for “he” and “she” emerge only at the distance of third-person narration. These pronouns thus reveal the difference between a direct, first-person relationship with God, experienced in prayer or mystical union, and the narrative produced when that experience is recounted to another. As soon as the third person intervenes, the I-Thou relationship becomes a story about He–and–I or I–and–She. It is this necessary, but distorting gap between the experience of relationship and the language of narration that gives gender, fascinating though it is, more prominence than most mystics would say it deserves.”

—  “Gender.” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Lamm

Buber's Apophatic or "Free Solo" Spirituality

 

In I and Thou §48b-c Buber spells out an apophatic approach to God as the life-journey of faith:

There is no such thing as seeking God, for there is nothing in which God could not be found. . . . God cannot be inferred in anything — in nature, say, as its author, or in history as its master, or in the subject as the self that is thought in it. Something else is not "given" and God then elicited from it; but God is the Being that is directly, most nearly, and lastingly, over against us. To put it accurately, God may only be addressed, not expressed.

 [Yet there] is a finding without seeking, a discovering of the primal, of the origin. One’s sense of Thou, which cannot be satiated until one finds the eternal Thou, had the Thou present to it from the beginning; the presence had only to become wholly real to him in the actuality of the hallowed life of the world. . . . this finding is not the end, but only the eternal Center, of the way.

 Such “going out” to God is like free solo rock climbing, where a person strips away all props and accessories so that he climbs alone without ropes, harnesses, or other protective equipment. Without any mediating aids whatsoever, all the climber has is the immediacy of his own being and the being of the rock – I and Thou – forcing him to rely entirely on his own inner preparation, determination, strength, and skills. Yet, as Buber makes clear, for the spiritual free soloist, grace arises to meet him at every move along the way: “No one goes out in order to turn without grace coming to meet him” (Two Types 158).

 Almost thirty years later, Buber presents prayer as just such an apophatic turning to intimacy with God:

 In the Jewish tradition of prayer . . . one’s turning to God is accomplished in a peculiarly direct way. Praying means going above and beyond everything verbal: learning how to turn oneself toward God. In an imageless religion this is a very special thing, but even more so in one which discerns ever more clearly that “Heaven and the heavens of heavens cannot contain You” (I Kings 8:27). The universe [das All] no longer offers any image as support for the act of turning. Such turning takes place, not towards a remoteness, but only towards a nearness and intimacy with God that can no longer be coordinated with the space-time world.   (Two Types of Faith, translation modified 157)

Martin Buber vs. Viktor Frankl

 

    Viktor Frankl climbing in the Austrian Alps – his favorite mountaineering area was 

    the Rax, a massif in the Wiener Hausberge, about an hour by train south of Vienna 

(see the new book, Berg und Sinn: Im Nachstieg von Viktor Frankl, 2020)

    Viktor Frankl had a lot in common with Martin Buber. Both were born to Jewish parents in Vienna, although Buber was 27 years Frankl’s senior. Both had a bar mitzvah yet each went a different way with Judaism. Buber’s human-grounded spirituality was oriented to the Jewish-Biblical-Hasidic tradition and its texts while Frankl’s quest for meaning was more secular. Each was at home with the language of the German-speaking academy and yet neither was part of its mainstream. While Buber was a lifelong hiker, Frankl was a lifelong mountain climber.

    Yet their paths did not cross nor did their key ideas really mesh. Buber had moved to Germany before Frankl was born. Later, Buber relocated to Jerusalem in 1938 while Frankl stayed in Vienna to be with his parents until he was incarcerated in concentration camps for three years (1942-1945). This divergence gave them very different vantage points for their interpretations of the world. There is no published correspondence between them and Buber never referred to Frankl in his writings.

    Frankl’s main reference to Buber is in his essay “A Critique of Pure Encounter,” published in his collection of essays titled The Unheard Cry for Meaning in 1977 (pages 64-78). There he lists Martin Buber, along with Ferdinand Ebner and Jacob Levy Moreno, as those who introduced “encounter” (Begegnung) into the discourse of existential social thought (64-65).

    Frankl’s brief account fundamentally misrepresents Buber’s thought. Frankl begins with his definition of encounter as “a relationship between an I and a Thou – a relationship which by its very nature can be established only on the human and personal level” (65). It is noteworthy that he uses the word “relationship,” a term Buber warns against for its implied reification of the “event” nature of relating as encounter. Further, Frankl grounds his concept of encounter in language, which is foreign to Buber’s “encounter” for fundamental reasons: for Buber, encounter is grounded in silence—note the role of silence in the two primary scenarios of encounter that he presents in “Dialogue” (BMM 3-4, 5-6). The first hypothetical encounter involves no speech; in the second encounter, between Buber and Florens Christian Rang, the crucial moment of the encounter takes place in the silence that follows speech.

    Furthermore, because Frankl sees encounter as verbal, he sees Buber’s I-Thou encounter as two dimensional, lacking an “intentional referent” or logos (Frankl’s term for the realm of meaning—he extended it as the name for his therapeutic method: “logotherapy”) as his crucial third dimension of language. It is significant that in this way he equates meaning (Sinn) with logos, making meaning inseparable from the Greek word for “word.” Frankl’s resulting reduction of dialogue marks his fundamental departure from Buber. He writes, “A dialogue without the logos, lacking the direction to an intentional referent, is really a mutual monologue, merely mutual self-expression.[ It lacks] ‘self-transcendence’” (66). Frankl does not see that, fundamental to Buber, the I of I-It is a very different entity than the I of I-Thou which by its very nature is at once both pre-verbal and self-transcendent.

    How this difference between Frankl and Buber works out becomes clear in Frankl’s discussion of self-transcendence. At the core of Frank’s vision is the person’s “reaching out toward meaning.” This reaching out is the essence of human nature as self-transcendence, a “relating and being directed to something other than to oneself” (66). This reaching out is both “for a meaning to fulfill” and “for another person to love.” In Frankl’s sense of encounter, self-transcending love “makes us realize the humanness of the dialogical partner, whereas loving him shows us more—his essential uniqueness. This uniqueness is the constitutive characteristic of personhood” (66-67).

    Every element of this analysis, which Frankl sees as totally beyond his two-dimensional reduction of Buber’s I-Thou encounter, is actually integral to what Buber means by the I-Thou encounter. Buber’s I-Thou is all about transcendent love:

Love . . . is between I and Thou. 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, persons are freed from their mere entanglement in bustling activity. Good people and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly, one after the other, each becomes real to him as Thou; so set free, each stands out in his uniqueness and confronts him as Thou. In a wonderful way, as from moment to moment their exclusiveness arises, . . . he can be effective, helping, healing, educating, raising up, saving. Love is this responsibility of an I for a Thou.  (§ 19b)

     Further, Buber emphasizes that the I-Thou encounter is inseparable from the transcendence which is the Presence: “Through each event of the Other’s becoming present to us, we gaze toward the fringe of the eternal Thou; with each we are aware of a breath of the eternal Thou; in each enunciation of Thou we address the Eternal” (§9f).

    Finally, this Presence is inseparable from the pre-verbal, pre-conceptual meaning at the heart of life:

The meaning of existence is open and accessible in the actual lived concrete, not above the struggle with reality but in it. Meaning is to be experienced in living action and suffering itself, in the unreduced immediacy of the moment. Only he reaches the meaning who stands firm, without holding back or reservation, before the whole might of reality and answers it in a living way. He is ready to confirm with his life the meaning which he has attained. (Eclipse 35; see Turning to the Other 250-51)

    It is too bad that Frankl did not tread as carefully traversing the landscape of Buber’s thought as he did negotiating the precipices of his beloved Austrian Alps! 

Dialogue while hiking -- Martin Buber and Rudolf Otto

 

Rudolf Otto and Martin Buber, with Marburg on the Lahn River 

In his 1950 Foreword to Two Types of Faith, Buber wrote a warm acknowledgement of Rudolf Otto, another of his friends who happened to be a Lutheran theologian. Here is Buber’s acknowledgement:

I harbor grateful memories of Rudolf Otto for his profound understanding of the divine Majesty in the Hebrew Bible [in his The Idea of the Holy] and for a number of richly realistic insights in [his The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man,] his work on eschatology, the importance of which far outweighs its errors; but even more, I remember the noble transparency with which he opened up his believing soul to me in our peripatetic conversations. Of these conversations, the most potent for me was the first because at first I had to break through the psychologistic wall that he had built around himself, but then it was not just a significant religious individuality that was revealed, but in the between-two-Persons the presence of the Present One.                        —  Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, tr. Goldhawk, translation modified 14

Here Buber alludes to Otto’s two most significant works, Das Heilige (1917) and Gottesreich und Menschensohn (1934). But he also bears in on his personal relationship with Otto, referring to an undisclosed number of “our peripatetic conversations,” conversations that likely took place while the two were hiking together, perhaps in the countryside near Marburg or that around Heppenheim, the towns where each lived (Otto moved to Marburg to become the professor of theology at Marburg University in 1917 and he lived there until his death in 1937). Their two towns were about an hour apart by train.

The last sentence of this tribute is a striking affirmation of the power of mutuality in dialogue. This account resonates with a statement by Buber about dialogue that Maurice Friedman transmits to us as his recollection:

What I mean by religion is just one’s personal life. One usually does not dream of putting his personal life at stake—of really meeting abyss with abyss. I must by violence of the spirit bring the person I meet to deal with his personal life. I must not show him that his arguments are wrong by their content but that argument—argumentation as such—is wrong. I must break down his security by driving him to confront his self. He puts me in a situation of responsibility for him . . . struggling with him against him—using as allies the forces deep within him. I can venture this only if he comes in utter sincerity without any restraint. It is just a question of personal relationship—nothing else.                                                                                                             — Buber in Friedman,  Encounter on the Narrow Ridge 335

In that first walk with Otto, there was a breakthrough to mutual presence, an event that transcended itself, just as Buber described in I and Thou: “Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou” (§§9f, 44b, 48a).

Buber’s first comment, that about Otto’s “profound understanding of ‘die Majestas’ [the divine Majesty] in the Hebrew Bible,” suggests an experience Otto had identified as the undergirding of his idea of the holy:

It is Sabbath, and already in the dark and inconceivably grimy passage of the house we hear that sing-song of prayers and reading of scriptures, that nasal half-singing half-speaking sound which Church and Mosque have taken over from the Synagogue. The sound is pleasant, one can soon distinguish certain modulations and cadences that follow one another at regular intervals like Leitmotifs. The ear tries to grasp individual words but it is scarcely possible and one has almost given up the attempt, when suddenly out of the babel of voices, causing a thrill of fear, there it begins, unified, clear and unmistakeable:

Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh Elohim Adonai Zebaoth

Male’u hashamayim wahaarets kebodo!

(Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts,

the heavens and the earth are full of thy glory).

I have heard the Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus of the cardinals in St. Peter’s, the Swiat Swiat Swiat in the Cathedral of the Kremlin, and the Holy Holy Holy of the Patriarch in Jerusalem. In whatever language these words resound, these most sublime words that human lips have ever uttered, they always seize one in the deepest ground of the soul, with a mighty shudder arousing and exciting the mystery of the other-worldly latent therein. And this more than anywhere else here in this modest place, where they resound in the same language in which Isaiah first heard them and on the lips of the people whose heritage they initially were.                                                              — Otto, travel letter published in Die Christliche Welt, Vol. 25, 1911, p. 709.

This event took place in Essaouria, Morocco (a port city on the Atlantic Ocean linking the caravan trade with Europe with at one time a large Jewish population), in the spring of 1911 when Otto was taking a tour through North Africa.

Here was a pathetic, impoverished building with a tiny gathering of poor, marginalized human beings (Existenzen) – and in this context arose the dazzling hymn of the trisagion, the antiphonal seraphim song of praise from the prophet Isaiah [Isaiah 6:3]. By the flickering light of the candles the full majesty of the Lord of heaven and earth was present in the midst of our poverty and paltriness. Afterwards Rudolf Otto experienced the Holy in other religions, too. But it seemed to him that the juxtaposition between the humble and the sublime in that synagogue made that single impression the most shattering of all. Later he identified that experience as the precise moment (die Stunde) when his understanding of the Holy was consolidated, and so he described it in the moving words of his account.                                                                                     (Heinrich Frick at Otto’s graveside, Frick 1937a: 5-6)

Dialogue while Hiking – Martin Buber and Albert Schweitzer

In his 1950 Forward to Two Types of Faith, Buber’s major book comparing Judaism and Christianity, he wrote a warm acknowledgement of four Christian theologians whose work had been instrumental for the thinking expressed in the book. Albert Schweitzer was one of those four.

Buber’s published correspondence with Schweitzer spanned thirty years from 1928 to 1958. Their mutual admiration was clear throughout as were their theological differences.

On February 23, 1933, Buber took a train from Heppenheim to Königsfeld, a small town at the northern edge of the Black Forest near Strasbourg where Schweitzer had made his home, to spend a good part of the day with Schweitzer. In the Foreword he wrote seventeen years later, Buber referred explicitly and movingly to the personal impact of that I-Thou encounter as it unfolded in the course of their walk together:

The hours of a hike we took together through the landscape of Königsfeld and through that of the spirit remain unforgettable in my heart . . .  (14)

That day when they traversed landscapes, both of the Black Forest and of the spirit, became the core moment of the dialogical relationship which the two men shared.

Buber traced his debt to Schweitzer back to 1901, when a book by Schweitzer first gave him “a strong incentive for my studies on . . . the meaning of the servant of God in Deutero-Isaiah for Jesus.” It was that year that Schweitzer published Das Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis: eine Skizze des Lebens Jesu (tr. The Mystery of the Kingdom of God), a study of Jesus in relation to the servant of God in Isaiah which has strong parallels to Buber’s interpretation of Jesus in Two Types of Faith (Otto Spear, “In the View of Research: Schweitzer and Buber on the Will of Jesus and the Idea of the Kingdom of God,”Universitas, January 1980).

In summing up, Buber expressed his gratitude to Schweitzer for more than just his writings; he had received something of Schweitzer’s openness of spirit through his person and his life:

I am thankful to Albert Schweitzer that through him, through his person and his life, I first got to know the open-mindedness, and thus also the particular closeness to Israel, which are possible for Christians and also for Christian theologians.  (13-14) 

The Edge of the Knife

 

“The way in this world is like a knife edge. There is an abyss on either side, and the way of life lies in between.”                                             

                          –   Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov in Tales of the Hasidim 2.92.

Buber -- Dialogical Silence

         Our bias—we too easily assume that dialogue is a verbal exchange. This is due in part to the use of the word to refer to a script for a theatrical play. Or we see it as a synonym for “conversation,” which specifically refers to the oral exchange of thoughts and sentiments between persons. “Dialogue” as Buber uses it has an important non-verbal dimension and it is broad enough to include interactions that are not verbal; in fact, for him, dialogue can take place in silence between two persons or creatures. In fact, for him dialogue has a crucial non-verbal component.

        Buber makes clear that to present dialogue through discursive reasoning is impossible, so he uses anecdotes to disclose it:

The true nature of dialogue cannot be conveyed to readers by simply using ideas. It can best be presented only in narrative accounts that embody the opening up of dialogue, thereby revealing dialogue as a genuine transformation from communication to communion. That is, it is most adequately conveyed through examples— provided that we do not shrink from drawing such examples from the inmost recesses of personal life. For where else could such a thing be found?  (“Dialogue,” 5)

        In I and Thou and in Dialogue, its contemporaneous companion piece, Buber gives three striking examples of dialogical silence. We begin with Buber’s discussion of the gaze of his cat, which he presents as an example of how the eyes of an animal can silently address a person as Thou (I and Thou §52). “Independently, without sounds or gestures, most forcibly when they rely wholly on their glance, the eyes express the mystery” of being. “No speech will ever convey what that stammering gaze knows and can proclaim.” When Buber looks into his cat’s eyes, although “the world of It surrounds the animal and myself, for the space of a glance the world of Thou shines out from the depths, only to at once be extinguished and put back into the world of It.” Thus Buber presents the depths of a dialogical encounter, the moment that reveals mutuality-in-being, in its naked immediacy, stripped of words.

        In a passage in “Dialogue” Buber creates a scenario to convey the power of silent dialogue. Two people are seated on a park bench alongside each other after a morning of hiking. They are strangers and do not talk to each other. The one is calm, present in the moment, and rests in postures that communicate ease, non-reactivity, and an openness to whatever happens. The other is reserved, restricted, closed to even his own experience. Yet something happens between them. Buber:

And now – let us imagine that this is one of those moments that manages to break through the seven iron bands around the heart† – imperceptibly the spell is lifted. Even now the man doesn't say a word, doesn't move a finger. Yet something happens. The letting go came upon him without his doing, the release of a reserve over which only he himself had had control. This shift freely flows from him, and the silence carries it to his neighbor and his neighbor receives it unreservedly like all genuine destiny that comes to him. He will not be able to tell anyone, even himself, what he has experienced. What does he "know" about the other? It is no longer a matter of knowledge. For where unreserved openness has prevailed between persons, even when wordless, the dialogical word has happened sacramentally. (“Dialogue,” 4)

† Here Buber alludes to the fairy tale “The Frog King” where Faithful Heinrich had to place iron bands around his heart like barrel hoops to keep it from bursting in grief and sorrow. These bands broke apart and fell off once a turn of events restored his hopes.

Buber tells this story to highlight a tacit exchange, one that is completely without words: the self-enclosed person has come to know a new way of being in the world and it is not coincidental that the open person is present. Here the sense of relief, release from constriction or restriction, is part of a dialogical encounter that completely lacks a verbal component. Yet in it both persons have come to a new, non-cognitive knowing. Both have been changed in a way that is only possible in the mutuality of dialogical encounter.

        In another passage in “Dialogue” Buber gives a first-person anecdote that shows how a dialogue that begins as a verbal interchange can culminate as an I-Thou moment shared in the silence of a non-verbal gesture:

My friendship with [Florens Christian Rang] arose in an incident that may be described as a broken-off conversation. The date is Easter 1914. Some people from across Europe had met in an undefined presentiment of the [outbreak of World War I] in order to make preparations for an attempt to establish a supra-national authority. The conversations were marked by a lack of reserve, whose substance and fruitfulness I have scarcely ever experienced so strongly. It had such an effect on all who took part that the fictitious fell away and every word was an actuality. As we discussed the com­position of a larger circle from which a public initiative should proceed, one of us, [Rang,]a man of passionate concentration and the judicial power of love, said that too many Jews had been nominated for this. . . .

Obstinate Jew that I am, I protested against this protest. I no longer know how from that I came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him. ". . . In a way that remains inaccessible to you"—so I directly addressed Rang. He stood up; I too stood. We looked into the heart of one another's eyes. "It is gone," he said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of brotherhood. The discussion of the situation between Jews and Christians had been transformed into a bond between the Christian and the Jew. In this transformation dialogue was fulfilled. Opinions were gone, in a bodily way the factual took place. (“Dialogue,” 5-6)

        Dialogue was fulfilled because the interaction had been transformed from mere contentious opinions to the “factual” concreteness of mutual affirmation. From that moment Buber and Rang became lifelong friends.

        These three examples show how silence as attentive, receptive openness to the other is an essential component of the fabric of dialogue, often the pivotal moment at which I-Thou blazes forth.