Throughout the various stages of Buber’s work, the term“religion”has been in-flected with distinctive meanings: it is never used in either the sense of a series of practices connected with a divine cult, or in the sense of a relation between man and a transcendent God, in the sense that crystallized in the early centuries of the Christian era. In the lecture entitledJüdische Religiosität, given in Prague in 1913, later collected inVom Geist des Judentums(1916), and then inReden über das Judentum(1923),⁴Buber opposesReligiositätas a productive, creative force to Religionas a series of forms, ceremonies and doctrines originally instantiated by this force. WhileReligionin Judaism denotes a heritage handed down in a long tradition, the father who teaches his children about the God in whom they should believe, and inculcates obedience to ritual and liturgical precepts, Reli-giosität means the individual’s choice and decision and the children setting themselves free to find their own path to the Absolute. Thus, this early text by Buber distinguishesreligioin two different moments, one subjective or personal in character, full of vitality, and the other objective and stable: the first moment
On the nihilistic trend in contemporary philosophy, elucidated–among others–by Karl Löw-ith, Leo Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas, and the necessity for contemporary thought to take up again Kant’s program of the defence of human rights against empiricism on the one hand, and metaphysical dreams on the other, see Irene Kajon,Contemporary Jewish Philosophy. An In-troduction(London: Routledge, 2006).
Martin Buber,Vom Geist des Judentums(Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1916);Reden über das Judentum (Frankfurt a. M.: Rütten & Loening, 1923); 2. ed. (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1932).
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proves able to give new impulse to the second when this becomes only a sign without a signification. This revitalization of the objective structure of religion through a subjective moment is inspired by the dialectic between the “life”
and the“forms”propounded by Georg Simmel, one of Buber’s philosophy teach-ers in Berlin in 1898–99.⁵But it was only during World War One that Buber ela-borated his idea of religion as the very reality of the relation (Beziehung) between I, Thou–whether belonging to the world of nature, plant or animal, or human being, or“spiritual entities,”that is, works that have come to be through the cre-ative human spirit–and the eternal Thou (God). Religion is the very fact of this relation, the lyrical-dramatic moment of human existence, the miraculous event that indicates to man his humanity, the most precious moment of his life.
In her bookBuber’s Way to“I and Thou”,⁶Rivka Horwitz analyzes Buber’s lectures“Religion als Gegenwart”that he delivered at the behest of Rosenzweig at the“Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus”in Frankfurt from January to March 1922. She also examines the correspondence between Buber and Rosenzweig regarding the lecture. Horwitz’s study reveals that in May 1922 Buber gave the title ofIch und Duto the text that emerged from these lessons. He had not yet given up, howev-er, his original plan of writing a work in five volumes whose aim was to describe Religionor, more precisely,Religiöses Leben, and explore how it takes shape and the different forms it has in human existence. This plan came to naught. ButIch und Du, which was ready for the press in December 1922, still contains the signs of this broader project: the wordReligionis precisely defined when its meaning in the text is differentiated from that of ordinary usage, formed through the pre-dominant directions of the history of European culture.
There are passages inIch und Duin which the term“religion”appears in in-verted commas. These passages do not present the author’s concept of religion so much as that of some modern philosophers (Buber seems to be thinking partic-ularly of Schleiermacher’s On Religion and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, though he does not mention them) or the common way of considering religion.
We find, for example, an appeal to the“religiöse Situation”of man in the third part of the book: here Buber discusses the “antinomy” and “paradox” of
On Buber’s education, cf. Maurice Friedman, MartinBuber’s Life and Work, (New York: Dut-ton, 1981), vol. 1:“The Early Years 1878–1923.”Georg Simmel expounds his thought on the rela-tion between the“life”and the“forms”in“Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur,”in Simmel, Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essais(Leipzig: A. Kroner, 1911), 245–277.
Rivka Horwitz,Buber’s Way to“I and Thou”: An Historical Analysis and the First Publication of Martin Buber’s Lectures“Religion als Gegenwart”(Heidelberg: Lothar Stiem, 1978). About Buber’s path towardsIch und Du, cf. also Paul Mendes-Flohr,Von der Mystik zum Dialog. Martin Bubers geistige Entwicklung bis hin zu“Ich und Du”(Königstein i.T.: Jüdischer Verlag, 1979).
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human existence that is both in time and in the eternal, in the finite and in the infinite, in necessity and in freedom, and cannot escape these contrasting real-ities, although one may try to reconcile them in thought.⁷Or we find an appeal to the“religiöser Mensch”when he recalls how religion is beyond the pure ethical moment, in a sphere in which man is alone before God in silence and detached from the world.⁸In other passages, however, it is the author himself who offers his meditation onReligion(this time without inverted commas) starting from the very event to which theReligionenallude and whose deeper sense he is seeking.
In the final pages ofIch und DuBuber writes:
Das ewige Du kann seinem Wesen nach nicht zum Es werden;weil es seinem Wesen nach nicht in Mass und Grenze, auch nicht in das Mass des Unermesslichen und die Grenze des Unbegrenzten gesetzt werden kann. […] Und doch machen wir das ewige Du immer wieder zum Es, zum Etwas, machen Gott zum Ding–unserem Wesen nach. Nicht aus Willkür. […] Das ausgesagte Wissen und das gesetzte tun der Religionen–woher kommen sie? […] Die Erklärung hat zwei Schichten.
Die äussere, psychische erkennen wir, wenn wir den Menschen für sich, von der Geschichte abgelöst betrachten; die innere, faktische, das Urphänomen der Religion,wenn wir ihn sodann in die Geschichte wiedereinstellen. Beide gehören zusammen.⁹
The eternalThoucannot by its very nature becomeIt; for by virtue of its nature it cannot be established in measure and bounds, not even in the measure of the immeasurable, or the bounds of boundless being. […] And yet in accordance with our nature we are continually mak-ing the eternalThouintoIt,into some thing–making God into a thing. Not indeed out of ar-bitrary self-will. […] What is the origin of the expressed knowledge and ordered action of the religions? […] The explanation has two layers. We understand the outer psychical layer when we consider man in himself, separated from history, and the inner factual layer, the primal phe-nomenon of religion, when we replace him in history. These two layers belong together.¹⁰ Religion is constituted by continuous alternation of the relation between man and the eternal Thou and the human expression of that relation as an It: this lat-ter It-expression necessarily grows out of the primal relation to the Elat-ternal Thou, although it is unfaithful to the essence of religion and to our religious life. Reli-gion refers to the human being who is both an individual, whose soul is before God, and a member of a community, which finds itself in a particular space and time. Thus religion embraces within itself both the relation between the I and the
Martin Buber,Ich und Du, in Buber,Werke(München-Heidelberg: Kösel Verlag, 1962), vol. 1:
142–43. Cf. Soeren Kierkegaard,Frygt og Baeven[Fear and Trembling], 1843.
Martin Buber,Ich und Du, 151. Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher,Ueber Religion. Reden an die Ge-bildeten unter ihren Verächtern[On Religion. Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers], 1799.
Martin Buber,Ich und Du, 154f.
Martin Buber,I and Thou,trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 112f.
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eternal Thou, and the I-Thou relation that takes place in the world and in history.
Buber writes, completing his thought on religion as an elementary, primitive, spontaneous phenomenon of human life:
In Wahrheit […] kann die reine Beziehung zu raumzeitlicher Stetigkeit nur auferbaut werden, indem sie sich an der ganzen Materie des Lebens verleiblicht. Sie kann nicht bewahrt, nur be-währt, sie kann nur getan, nur in das Leben eingetan werden. […] Die echte Bürgschaft der Dauer besteht darin, dass die reine Beziehung erfüllt werden kann im Du-werden der Wesen, in ihrer Erhebung zum Du, dass das heilige Grundwort sich in allen austönt. […] Und so besteht die echte Bürgschaft der Raumstetigkeit darin, dass die Beziehungen der Menschen zu ihrem wahren Du, die Radien, die von all den Ichpunkten zur Mitte ausgehn, einen Kreis schaffen. Nicht die Pe-ripherie, nicht die Gemeinschaft ist das erste, sondern die Radien, die Gemeinsamkeit der Be-ziehung zur Mitte. Sie allein gewährleistet den echten Bestand der Gemeinde.¹¹
Actually […] pure relation can only be raised to constancy in space and time by being em-bodied in the whole stuff of life. It cannot be preserved, but only proved true, only done, only done up into life. […] The authentic assurance of constancy in space consists in the fact that pure relation can be fulfilled in the growth and rise of beings intoThou,the holy primary word makes itself heard in them all. […] Thus, too, the authentic assurance of constancy in space consists in the fact that men’s relations with their trueThou, the ra-dial lines that come from all the points of theIto the Centre, form a circle. It is not the pe-riphery, the community, that comes first, but the radii, the common quality of relation with the Centre. This alone guarantees the authentic existence of the community.¹²
In this wayreligioinIch und Duappears as what really characterizes man: it is not a special sphere of life, but indicates the highest moment of life, that which allows all the other moments to take on meaning too. The I-ThouBeziehung (re-lation) is manifest in religion: and this concerns both the I-Thou relations of human beings with each other and with other vital finite beings, and the rela-tions between the I’s and the eternal Thou–the former event not being separa-ble from the latter. Objectivity– the world of It–presupposes the kingdom of living, animated subjectivities because these alone are the knowing I’s, and therefore give continuity to time and structure to space: what unites the subjec-tivities is not the Logos, but what Buber defines as“love”(Liebe)–not “senti-ment”(Gefühl), but “reality”(Wirklichkeit) – or as“spirit” (Geist). But “spirit”
as it allows the“between”(Zwischen) to be established is not a mediating ele-ment that can be hypostatized or substantiated:“spirit”is effective only in its unifying function of different beings; it is a force that is not an independent being. Buber replaces the God or the All of Spinoza and his followers with a God who does not deny human freedom: initially freedom is obtained in the
re- Ich und Du,156.
I and Thou, 114f.
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lation with the eternal Thou, as knowledge and love of Him, and then it is also manifest in free choice of individuals to pursue this relation. So human beings become what they are only through religion.
Subsequent to Ich und Du, in Eclipse of God, published in 1952,¹³ Buber would reflect anew on religion as that primary dimension of human existence, which modern civilisation risks forgetting because it recognizes and gives impor-tance only to the world of It: the religious dimension of existence needs to be urgently rediscovered in its authentic and original form, still present beneath the institutions created by religions, in society, in the world of economic rela-tions, and in politics. This can be the only way to individual and collective re-demption–to be found in both human resolve and divine grace. In his writings aboutreligio,Buber thus embarked on a radically new path compared with those philosophers of religion who continued to follow the path forged in the history of European philosophical and theological thought.