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)