Eclipse of God by Buber Martin

Author:Buber, Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

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Cohen once said of Kant, “What is characteristic of his theology is the non-personal in the usual sense, the truly spiritual principle: the sublimation of God into an idea.” And he adds, “And nothing less than this is the deepest basis of the Jewish idea of God.” As far as Kant is concerned, Cohen was correct in this judgment. But throughout Kant’s posthumous work we can see emerging every now and then resistance to this sublimation of God into an idea; a sublimation which later even more prominently prevents in Cohen the linking of the idea with the concept of existence.

“Under the concept of God,” writes Kant, “Transcendental Philosophy refers to a substance possessing the greatest existence,” but he also qualifies God as “the ideal of a substance which we create ourselves.” What we have in these notes, which sometimes appear chaotic, are the records of a suit at law, the last phase which the thought of the idea of God assumes for its thinker, of a suit between the two elements, “idea” and “God,” which are contained in the idea of God; a suit which time and again reverts to the same point, until death cuts it short. Cohen set out to put the idea into a sequence so logical as to make it impossible for any impulse to opposition to develop. Even when overwhelmed by faith, Cohen continued the struggle to preserve this sequence. In so doing, he was of the opinion that “the deepest basis of the Jewish idea of God” was on his side. But even the deepest basis of the Jewish idea of God can be achieved only by plunging into that word by which God revealed Himself to Moses, “I shall be there.”1 It gives exact expression to the personal “existence” of God (not to His abstract “being”), and expression even to His living presence, which most directly of all His attributes touches the man to whom He manifests Himself. The speaker’s self-designation as the God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob (Exod. 3:15) is indissolubly united with that manifestation of “I shall be there,” and He cannot be reduced to a God of the philosophers.

But the man who says, “I love in God the father of man” has essentially already renounced the God of the philosophers in his innermost heart, even though he may not confess it to himself. Cohen did not consciously choose between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, rather believing to the last that he could succeed in identifying the two. Yet his inmost heart, that force from which thought too derives its vitality, had chosen and decided for him. The identification had failed, and of necessity had to fail. For the idea of God, that masterpiece of man’s construction, is only the image of images, the most lofty of all the images by which man imagines the imageless God. It is essentially repugnant to man to recognize this fact, and remain satisfied. For when man learns to love God, he senses an actuality which rises above the idea.

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