In this essay, I place Buber’s thought in dialogue with Eckhart. Each understood that the theopoetic propensity to imagine the transcendent in images is no more than a projection of our will to impute form to the formless. The presence of God is made present through imaging the real, but imaging the real implies that the nonrepresentable presence can only be made present through the absence of representation. The goal of the journey is to venture beyond the Godhead in light of which all personalistic depictions of the divine person are rendered idolatrous. Perhaps this is the most important implication of Eckhart’s impact on Buber, an insight that may still have theopolitical implications in a world where too often personifications of the God beyond personification are worshipped at the expense of losing contact with an absolute person that cannot be personified absolutely.
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Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 250–263.
Michael Löwy, “Romantic Prophets of Utopia: Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber,” in Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Anya Mali in collaboration with Hanna Delf von Wolzogen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 65.
Raymond B. Blakney, Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), xiii. More contemporary with Buber, we think, for instance, of Heidegger, whose early study of Eckhart influenced his reflections on the nothing (das Nichts) and the notion of releasement (Gelassenheit). Previous works that have contributed to this discussion are John D. Caputo, “Meister Eckhart and the Later Heidegger: The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought: Part One,” Journal ofthe History of Philosophy 12 (1974): 479–494; idem, “Meister Eckhart and the Later Heidegger: The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought: Part Two,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 13 (1975): 61–80; idem, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978); Holger Helting, Heidegger und Meister Eckehart: Vorbereitende Überlegungen zu ihrem Gottesdenken (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997); Sonya Sikka, Forms of Transcendence: Heidegger and Medieval Mystical Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007).
Miklós Vassányi, Anima Mundi: The Rise of the World Soul Theory in Modern German Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011).
Martin Buber, “Bücher, die jetzt und immer zu lessen sind,” Wiener Kunst- und Buchschau 9–10 (1914): 7, cited in Martina Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 18.
Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal, 18–19. The use of the adjective “heretical” is not without complication, both in Eckhart’s time and through the centuries up until the present. Eckhart was accused of heresy by the church authorities of his time, since some of his ideas were deemed to be dangerous to orthodox dogma, but that is not conclusive proof of their dissenting or sacrilegious nature. Closer to the bone, as it were, is the observation of Blakney: “Eckhart was a breaker of shells, not as an iconoclast breaks them, but as life breaks its shells by its own resurgent power.” Blakney, Meister Eckhart, xiv. See, however, p. xx, where the author writes about Eckhart “moving toward heresy, a heresy of degree if not of idea,” and p. xxi, where he writes that the “passionate radicalism of his application of the dogma of the God-man” was enough to make “him a heretic, that is to say, one dangerous to the church as an institution.” Invoking a distinction made by Wittgenstein, we would say there is a world of difference between bending the branch and breaking it. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. Georg Henrik Von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1, cited and discussed in Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Ethics in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 241. Availing myself of the Wittgensteinian language, I would say that Eckhart was a master at bending the tree without allowing it to break. This might serve as a caution against the offensive use made of Eckhart, as we discover in the hands of some exponents of National Socialism, who saw in him the basis for their own nihilism and atheism. See Blakney, Meister Eckhart, xv.
Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal, 18. See also Yossef Schwartz, “The Politicization of the Mystical in Buber and His Contemporaries,” in New Perspectives on Martin Buber, ed. Michael Zank (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 205–218.
Gustav Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche Anschluβ an Mauthners Sprachkritik (Münster: Büchse der Pandora, 1978), 47, translated in Schwartz, “Gustav Landauer,” 175 n. 9.
Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 47–48. See Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue, 133 n. 21.
Gustav Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedanken?,” in Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch (Leipzig: K. Wolff, 1913), 253.
Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue, 57–58. See as well Lunn, Prophet of Community, 146.
Sarah K. Pinnock, “Holocaust, Mysticism, and Liberation after the Death of God: The Significance of Dorothee Soelle,” in Resurrecting the Death of God: The Origins, Influence, and Return of Radical Theology, ed. Daniel J. Peterson and G. Michael Zbaraschuk (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 98.
Lunn, Prophet of Community, 153; Schwartz, “Gustav Landauer,” 174.
Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 1. I have used the translation in Landauer, Revolution, 94. See Schwartz, “Gustav Landauer,” 190.
Gershom Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 293; Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, xv.
Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 6. The passage is translated into English by Mendes-Flohr in Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, xv. Compare the analysis of Mauthner’s view on language in Lunn, Prophet of Community, 155–157.
Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, 5; Ekstatische Konfessionen, 54.
Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, 5–6; Ekstatische Konfessionen, 54–55.
Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, 153; Ekstatische Konfessionen, 208.
Dagmar Gottschall, “Eckhart and the Vernacular Tradition: Pseudo-Eckhart and Eckhart Legends,” in A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah M. Hackett (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 549–550. See also Franz-Josef Schweitzer, Die Freiheitsbegriff der deutschen Mystik: Seine Beziehung zur Ketzerei der “Brüder und Schwestern vom Freien Geist”, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den pseudoeckartischen Traktat “Schwester Katrei” (Frankfurt am Main: Peter D. Lang, 1981); Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, trans. Randall Cherry and Ian Peterson (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 149–152; Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 172–181; E. D. Sylla, “Swester Katrei and Gregory of Rimini: Angels, God, and Mathematics in the Fourteenth Century,” in Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study, ed. Teun Koetsier and Luc Bergmans (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 249–272.
Landauer, Revolution, 98. Landauer considered Eckhart to have been the author of Schwester Katrei.
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2:612. This source is noted by Phil Huston, Martin Buber’s Journey to Presence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 65–66.
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2:612–613.
Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, 156; Ekstatische Konfessionen, 210–211.
Buber, Werkausgabe 1, 245. I have utilized, albeit with slight modifications, the translation in Huston, Martin Buber’s Journey, 175–176. For an alternative rendering, see Buber, Daniel, 143–144.
Ibid., 186.
Martin Buber, Be-Fardes ha-Ḥasidut: Iyyunim be-Maḥashavtah u-ve-Hawayatah (Tel Aviv: Mosad Bialik, 1945), 98.
Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing (New York: Crossroad, 2001), 145.
Ibid., 187–188.
Ibid., 188–189.
Ibid., 198–199.
Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1996), Balaq, 70d.
Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 78, 84, 88–89, 97–98, 105–106, 168, 213. My perspective is encapsulated in the assertion that “apophatic panentheism” presumes “a reciprocal transcendence whereby God and world abide in the difference of their belonging-together, indeed they belong together precisely in virtue of their difference” (91).
Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2001), 27d. On Shneur Zalman’s teaching that the pronoun attah signifies the essence of the infinite (aṣmut ein sof), see the following note.
Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Ḥaqdamot u-She‘arim (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2006), 42c.
Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-Be’urim (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2011), 5a. Compare Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-De‘ah (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2005), pt. 1, 160–161.
Ḥayyim Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim (Jerusalem: Sitrei Ḥayyim, 2013), 3:3, 17a.
Ibid., 198.
See Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 21–29.
Cohen, Religion of Reason, 212–214; Religion der Vernunft, 248–250.
Ibid., 62.
Ibid., 59.
Buber, I and Thou, 134; Ich und Du, 104. See also idem, Between Man and Man, 59, and the German Die Frage an den Einzelnen in Martin Buber, Das dialogische Prinzip (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1986), 216.
Buber, Eclipse of God, 28. The reality of faith, according to Buber, means “living in relationship” to the “absolute Being” that one believes in unconditionally (31).
Ibid., 130–131. Compare Martin Buber, Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998), 51–53: “As reply to his question about the name Moses is told: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. This is usually understood to mean ‘I am that I am’ in the sense that Yhvh describes himself as the Being One or even the Everlasting One, the one unalterably persisting in his being. . . . It means: happening, coming into being, being there, being present, being thus and thus; but not being in an abstract sense. . . . Yhvh indeed states that he will always be present, but at any given moment as the one as whom he then, in that given moment, will be present. He who promises his steady presence, his steady assistance, refuses to restrict himself to definite forms of manifestation; how could the people even venture to conjure and limit him! . . . That Ehyeh is not a name; the God can never be named so; only on this one occasion, in this sole moment of transmitting his work, is Moses allowed and ordered to take the God’s self-comprehension in his mouth as a name.” See ibid., 117–118: “The saga of the Fathers . . . has something to tell of human figures, in which Yhvh lets himself be seen. But there is nothing supernatural about them, and they are not present otherwise than any other section of Nature in which the God manifests himself. What is actually meant by this letting-Himself-be-seen on the part of Yhvh has been shown in the story of the Burning Bush; in the fiery flame, not as a form to be separated from it, but in it and through it. . . . And it is in precisely such a fashion . . . that the representatives of Israel come to see Him on the heights of Sinai. . . . He allows them to see Him in the glory of His light, becoming manifest yet remaining invisible.” See also Martin Buber, Kingship of God, 3rd ed., trans. Richard Scheimann (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1990), 105–106.
Ibid., 46.
Ibid., 119.
Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 11–12.
Ibid., 12.
Alexander Altmann, “The God of Religion, the God of Metaphysics and Wittgenstein’s ‘Language-Games,’ ” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 39 (1987): 291.
Ibid., 292.
Ibid., 294.
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In this essay, I place Buber’s thought in dialogue with Eckhart. Each understood that the theopoetic propensity to imagine the transcendent in images is no more than a projection of our will to impute form to the formless. The presence of God is made present through imaging the real, but imaging the real implies that the nonrepresentable presence can only be made present through the absence of representation. The goal of the journey is to venture beyond the Godhead in light of which all personalistic depictions of the divine person are rendered idolatrous. Perhaps this is the most important implication of Eckhart’s impact on Buber, an insight that may still have theopolitical implications in a world where too often personifications of the God beyond personification are worshipped at the expense of losing contact with an absolute person that cannot be personified absolutely.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 465 | 67 | 14 |
Full Text Views | 217 | 5 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 88 | 12 | 3 |