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)
