by Iris Murdoch
A powerful religious visual image is the all-seeing eye of God. God sees me. Also the other person (envisaged by Sartre as the enemy) sees me and may turn me to stone. Looking at other people is different from looking at trees or works of art. We may receive deep consolation from knowing that we are ‘present’, pictured, in someone else’s loving thoughts or prayers. It matters how we see other people. Such looking is not always dialogue, indeed it is rarely mutual. Others are given to us as a spectacle which we should treat with wise respect. A loving just gaze cherishes and adds substance, a contemptuous gaze withers. A look of hatred designs to kill. I quote from Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 76. ‘The soul that will be at rest, when other men’s sins come to mind should flee from them as from the pains of hell. For the beholding of other men’s sins maketh, as it were, a thick mist before the eye of the soul; so that we cannot, for the time, see the fairness of God — unless we behold them with contrition along with the sinner, with compassion on him and with holy desire to God for him.’ In our information-ridden society, a prime satisfaction is the spectacle of the misdeeds and misfortunes of others. These reflections, which might proceed further, now lead back to Buber. Buber dislikes visual metaphysics because he wants to use the language of encounter or dialogue, not of contemplation. The deep Judaeo-Christian idea that God is essentially invisible is in tension with the natural ubiquity of the visual image. Is vision discredited because of the Second Commandment? ‘No images’ means no visible or visual images. Do not picture God. Looking at something we may turn it to stone — or be turned to stone ourselves. Buber wishes to present dialogue as encounter, speech. God is that which can only be thou, never it. ‘After the imageless era a new procession of images may begin ... But without the truth of the encounter all images are illusion.’ (p. 23.) ‘Faith is not a feeling in the soul of man but an entrance into reality, an entrance into the whole of reality.’ (p. 3.) Buber’s pervasive conception of a dialogue involves, certainly suggests, the retention of the word ‘God’, a personal name, which he explicitly dramatises and defends. God ‘is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it.’ (p. 7.) (Quoted earlier.) It is a word which we must look after during a period of interim or interregnum.
Without encounter images are dead. Buber emphasises minute-to-minute religious experience, consciousness. The ‘lived concrete’ is the moment, the meeting place of human and divine. ‘The religious essence of every religion can be found in its highest certainty, that is the certainty that the meaning of existence is open and accessible in the actual lived concrete, not above the struggle with reality, but in it.’ (p. 35.) We experience the mysterious fullness of the concrete situation. When we are most alone we know in our hearts the difference between good and evil. A guiding light (visual image) must be discovered not made. The relation to the moment must be preserved. Here we relate to the divine as to an encountered reality. I do not, as I shall explain, believe in Buber’s I-Thou God, or in his fundamental key idea of dialogue. But I like very much what he says about religion being a matter of a continuous consciousness, a preservation of the moment, an entrance into the whole of reality. Also this: ‘The ground of human existence in which it’ (that is, encountered reality, for Buber God) ‘gathers and becomes whole is also the deep abyss out of which images arise. Symbols of God come into being, some of which allow themselves to be fixed in lasting visibility, even in earthly material, and some which tolerate no other sanctuary than that of the soul.’ (p. 45.) This abyss is not Jung’s or Freud’s unconscious mind, though it may be called an unconscious mind or a deep soul. It is, as I see it, more like the dark realm of Plato’s anamnesis, or St John of the Cross’s abyss of faith into which we fall when we have discarded all images of God; or the seething bubbling cauldron in terms of which Eckhart once described God. I quote from Eckhart’s Commentary on the Book of Exodus.
‘The repetition of “am” in the words “I am who I am” indicates the purity of the affirmation, which excludes every kind of negation from God. It indicates too a certain turning-back and reversion of His being into and upon itself and its indwelling or inherence in itself: not only this but a boiling-up, as it were, or a process of giving birth to itself – inwardly seething, melting and boiling in itself and into itself, light in light and into light wholly interpenetrating itself, wholly and from every side turned and reflected upon itself. As the wise man [Hermes Trismegistus] says: monad begets, or begat, monad and reflected its love and ardour upon itself. For this reason it is said in the first chapter of St John’s Gospel: “In Him was life.” For life denotes a sort of outpouring, whereby a thing, swelling up inwardly, completely floods itself, each part of it interpenetrating the rest, until at last it spills and boils over. This explains the fact that the emanation of the Persons of the Deity is the reason for the creation and precedes it. “In the beginning was the Word” (John I. I) comes first and is followed by the words, “All things were made through Him”.’
The God celebrated in this mix of sexual and cosmic symbols, and images of light and movement, may seem far from the dark quiet Godhead affirmed by Buber; but there is the same conception of God as a creative fullness of all being, continually engendering Himself. Here we are outside philosophy in poetic theology or mystical poetry. The idea of this image-making abyss is also the concept of a via negativa, which is both iconoclastic and fertile of new images.
However that may be (I continue now with Buber), at the present time the God who formerly spoke to us is dumb. We confront ‘the silence of the Transcendent’. Images of God appear less spontaneously out of the abyss, which is perhaps after all a dark and ambiguous place containing demons. Buber here (p. 30) quotes Heraclitus’s high saying which I quote earlier, that ‘the One who alone is wise does not want and does want to be called by the name of Zeus’. (Fr. 32.) Buber takes this as picturing the original relation between religion and philosophy, between meeting and objectifying the divine. I think this saying can, or can also, be taken as referring to a familiar, personal, subjective-objective dialectic in religious experience (of which the contrast between religion and philosophy could then be taken as an image): the sense of being swept to and fro between an absolutely certain sense of a reality, and an instinctive rejection of this reality because it cannot be ultimate, and cannot be that which is sought. To return to Buber, whose point is more specific: the position of the thinker (whether or not philosopher or theologian) is certainly at present a difficult one. Prayer which ‘ultimately asks for the manifestation of the divine presence’ may lose its spontaneity in this age of ‘subjectivised reflection’. (p. 126.) We have lost confidence in certainty and absolute. Buber quotes the words of Hölderlin which are also quoted by Heidegger:Aber weh! es wandelt in Nacht, es wohnt wie in Orcus,
Ohne Göttliches, unser Geschlecht.
Alas, it wanders in night, it dwells as in Orcus, without the divine, our generation. In this interregnum however, Buber sees an important role for philosophy. When images of God obstruct the way to Him, He removes Himself from them.
‘Then comes round the hour of the philosopher who rejects both the image and the God whom it symbolises, and opposes to it the pure idea, which he even at times understands as the negation of all metaphysical ideas. This critical “atheism” (Atheoi is the name which the Greeks gave to those who denied the traditional gods) is the prayer which is spoken in the third person in the form of speech about an idea. It is the prayer of the philosopher to the again unknown God. It is well suited to arouse religious men and to impel them to set forth right across the God-deprived reality to a new meeting. On their way they destroy the images which manifestly no longer do justice to God. The spirit moves them which moved the philosophers.’
(p. 46.)
Unlike many people who profess to, or attempt to, or seem to, write about religion, Buber really is writing about religion. He is expressing religious faith and depl
oying a context which is to give fresh meaning to the word ‘God’. I see and feel what he means about the philosopher who sets up the pure idea. And about God removing himself from the obstructive images. (Actually, this is a Platonic picture.) Religion is always, perhaps essentially, something of a mess. It is the task of some to set up close to it, outside it, intolerably abstract things. However philosophy, as it exists now in the west, apparently lacks the passionate interest in religion which would be needed to generate a new formulation. Can there be, for those who set out across the wasteland, any meetings which are at all like the old ones? We are told that the Absolute is there, but veiled; its time will come again. For the present, to use Buber’s own theological language, I – thou is in the catacombs, I-it is in charge. The present does certainly appear to be a time of ‘angels’, of wandering fragmented spirituality. But is there any sense in extending the idea, a traditional one after all, of God’s absence and his return, out into this dark fire-illumined void? Of course the idea of such a triumphant return is dramatic and comforting. ‘There is no sphere above our moral decisions on the one hand and our relation to the Absolute on the other. Only this is given; and herein religion bestows and the ethical receives.’ Buber believes in God and is confident about Absolute and about ‘religion’. But can Absolute live without God? We feel, it must live, morality must be fundamental in human life. But someone may say, we shall have to live now with spirit and without absolute and be thankful if we still have spirit and if that too is not withdrawn from us. Prophets like drama, after all they want to attract attention. We are dealing with difficult and ambiguous images and may wonder, as we constantly return to them, how much light they shed. Buber believes in a personal God, of whom we may have experience, whom we (indubitably perhaps) meet. He wants, as he has said, to preserve and protect the name of God, as naming the purest form of a dialogue which he regards as the essence of religion and morality. (The ethical receives.) He does not want or need a mystical Christ or a mystical Buddha. A mystical Moses would be a contradiction in terms. The idea and name of God brings with it a stricter and more vivid picture of encounter and of prayer. Buber evidently believes that in spite of the Godless darkness of the time, which in his prophetic role he is partly foreseeing, individuals can encounter God. I relate to the divine as to ‘Being which is over against me, though not over against me alone’. This Being is personal Being. It is ‘permissible for the believer to believe that God became a person for love of him, because in our human mode of existence the only reciprocal relation with us that exists is a personal one’. (p. 97.) Here the person that God becomes for our benefit is of course not Christ or any other human incarnation, but the Person whose presence and loving concern we, with utmost certainty, discover in meditation and prayer. ‘The real self appears only when it enters into relation with the Other.’ (p. 97.) For Buber, the reciprocal relation is what is absolutely necessary, and in, and as, this necessity he discovers God. The circle of self is broken by what is other. The dialogue of I and Thou ‘finds its highest intensity and transfiguration in religious reality in which unlimited Being becomes, as absolute person my partner’. (p. 45.) So, the reality of God is to establish man as partner. This might sound, after all, like Feuerbach’s triumphant elevation of man; yet Buber’s language is that of a traditional piety and his faith, moving in darkness, is in a traditional God. There are here some partings of ways between demythologising thinkers, our prophets, iconoclasts, destroyers and renewers of images. If in the darkness of deep prayer I meet a person may this not be myself in some disguise – and why not? I am indeed, to use Buber’s terms, constantly a ‘thou’ to myself, as well as an ‘it’. Morality is loss of egoism. The tutoiement between me and myself can be various, and good or bad. I encounter a higher, or a lower, part of my soul. Jung tells us that God and the Unconscious are probably the same thing. This, however one may attempt to raise the status of the Unconscious, seems to remove from God the moral absolutism and separate being accorded to him by Buber. At a simpler more empirical level we may agree that meditation (prayer, attention, with or without God) may enlarge our being by giving power and reality to good impulses. This may serve as a starting point for diverging roads. Should we move on into a theological or religious terminology? If we speak here of an Absolute, is this a ‘move’ or a tautology? Tradition provides words and pictures and we may wish to benefit from using them. Buddhism provides such language at its least dogmatic when speaking of the Buddha nature within us. (In Platonic terms, the higher part of our soul.) We might speak of the Christ nature within us. Jungian psychology speaks a different language when it speaks of unifying the personality. (At what level?) The absolute as the possible totally harmonised individual (a Hegelian image) cannot be a religious or moral absolute, as these demand a distinction between good and evil. The perfectly integrated personality, as presented by Jung as an ideal, must include some notion of a pact with, or somehow reassessment of, what is evil in the soul. Of course we may, and often, feel that we ought to ‘harmonise’ our personality; but we may also feel that we have to live with disharmony. Amid such variant moral styles and contrasting pictures of the soul, it may be said, Why worry, surely this is a private matter, and are we not out at the edge of language at transcendental barriers? Let each man have his own faith and his own god or absolute, if he can invent one or feel sure he has discovered one. Is there anything for the philosopher to say here about theology, or even about morality, which goes beyond piecemeal conceptual clarifications here and there? What sense can we attach to Buber’s ‘pure idea’ which is to be set up outside, in the desert, or his prayer of the philosopher which is unlike the prayer of the believer? One wants to explain more clearly what it is to have lost the old personal God, and to do this without surrendering the concept of religion. What is meant here by ‘absolute’ must also show the essential mutual connection of religion, as now conceived, and morality. One thing needful is a refreshed conception of transcendence. We may turn here to Plato and Kant, and be edified by the tension between these two mentors.