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JEWISH PHILOSOPHY |
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by Martin Buber
A definition of mysticism is always open to question, if, with any other religious teaching, it is made on the basis of subject matter or chief principle; for then we only have an idea or sentence that is at the same time abstract and somewhat vague, and that fails to comprehend what makes mysticism in its historical manifestations such a singular and remarkable type of religious life. We do better if we take as our starting point that experience of the soul, which is clearly common to all mystics, for they all speak of it in one way or another and, if only in a veiled reference or even in so objective an expression that the personal foundation, that very experience, does not come within our range of vision; here too are moments when a powerful recollection suddenly pulsates through the firm notes of the objective statement. Of course that experience may be called an experience of Unity; but once again we shall only have something abstract and indefinite, if we think merely of a contemplation of Unity, in which to be sure the one contemplating recedes, his essential position however, which he still feels to some extent in the midst of his experience, is no other than the essential position of all our human contemplation, the division of Being into the contemplating and the contemplated. One of the greatest among the mystics, Plotinus, leaves much room for such a misunderstanding when, as a true Greek still in the late period of the fusion of all spiritual elements, he interprets that experience in visual language as the image of the eye contemplating the light. In Plotinus also we perceive on closer observation that this is only one, if also the thinnest, of the garments in which mystical experience cloaks itself so as to be able to reveal itself, or rather to enable the wearer to fit his experience into the framework of his inner life and then into the framework of his cognition. Indeed the crucial factor in that experience is not that the multiplicity of manifestations collapses into the one, that the interplay of colours gives place to the absoluteness of the white light, but that in the one contemplating the act of contemplation is obliterated; it is not the dissolution of phenomenal diversity but of constructive dualism, the dualism of the I experiencing and the object experienced, which is the crucial factor, the peculiarity of mysticism in the true sense. And indeed we can only speak of mysticism in the true sense where we are concerned, not with men in an early state of semi-consciousness preceding a clear distinction between subject and object, but with those to whom the fundamental position has become a matter of course: an I complete in itself and a world complete in itself facing one another. This fundamental dualism, itself perceived only slowly by the human spirit, is at certain moments in an individual life swept aside in favor of an overwhelming experience of union; this it is which excites that deep and ever-recurring awe which, though in varying degrees of expression, we find in all mystics. In all mysticism, however, which springs from the soil of the so-called theistic religions, there is an additional factor to which a specifically religious significance is to be attributed. Here the mystic is conscious of a close personal contact with God, and this contact has, it is true, as its goal a union with God, a union which is often felt and presented in images of the earthly Eros, but in this as in every contact between Being and Being it is the very dualism of these beings which is the primary condition of what is occurring between them. It is not the dualism of subject and object, i.e., neither is to the other merely an object of contemplation, itself having no part in the relationship, but it is the dualism of I and Thou, both entering into reciprocal relationship. However God be comprehended as an absolute Being, He is here not the whole, but the Facing, the One facing this man; He is what this man is not, and is not what this man is; it is precisely upon this that the longing for union can be based. In other words, in this close association experienced by the mystic. God, even if the mystic wants to be merged in Him, is and remains a Person. The I of the mystic seeks to lose itself in the Thou of God, but this Thou of God, or, after the I of the mystic has been merged therein, this absolute I of God cannot pass away. That man's "I am" shall perish, so that the "I am" of God remains alone. "Between me and thee," says al-Hallaj, the great martyr of Moslem mysticism, "there is an 'I am' that grieves me. Ah! through thy 'I am' take away my 'I am' from betwixt us both." The mystic never thinks of calling into question the personality of this divine "I am." "I call thee," says al-Hallaj, ". . . no, it is thou who callest me to thee! How could I have said to thee 'It is thou,' if thou hadst not whispered to me 'It is I.'" The I of the revealing God, the I of the God Who accords to the mystic the intercourse with Him, and the I of God, in Whom the human I merges itself, are identical. The mystic remains in the sphere of intercourse, as he was in the sphere of revelation, a theist. It is otherwise when mysticism, penetrating beyond the sphere of experienced intercourse, dares to deal with God as He is in Himself, that is beyond the relation to man, and indeed beyond the relation to the created world generally. Of course it knows well that, as the greatest thinker of western mysticism, Meister Eckhart, put it, no one can really say what God is. 'But its conception of absolute unity, a unity therefore that nothing can face any more, is so strong that even the highest idea of the person must yield place to it. Unity which is in relationship to something other than itself is not perfect unity; and perfect unity can no more be personal. By that mysticism, sprung from the soil of a theistic religion, in no way means to deny the personal nature of the God; but it strives to raise that perfect unity, which is faced by nothing, above the God of revelation, and to differentiate between the Godhead abiding in pure being and the active God. Perfect unity merely is, it does not work. "Never," says Eckhart, "has the Godhead worked this or that, it is God Who creates all things." To that primal existence before the creation, to that unity transcending all dualism, the mystic strives finally to return; he wishes to become as he was before the creation. Theistic mysticism does not always strain its conception of unity to the extreme of setting up thereby a dualism in the very being of God. Islamic mysticism avoids it by seeking to raise the attribute of work to an abstract height, where it is compatible with perfect unity. Certainly its success here is only apparent, for it transfigures as it were mystically the monotheistic tradition of the active God, without allowing any of the work of the worker to penetrate the mystical sphere itself; -- the one is directed towards the world, the other is essentially acosmic; the one displays God's doings in the community of mankind, the other is only acquainted with Him in His contacts with the soul; so Islamic mysticism, at the price of dividing religious life into two, achieves a questionable unity of God. Christian mysticism, in the best of its theology, proceeds here more boldly and more consistently. With unsurpassable precision it locates the tension in the divine itself. "God and Godhead," says Eckhart, "are as different as heaven and earth. . . . God becomes (wird) and vanishes (entwird)." So here "God" is the name of the Divine, in so far as from perfect unity, faced by nothing. It made Itself in creation and revelation the One facing the world, and thereby the partaker in Its becoming and vanishing. For "God" only exists for a world, by the Divine becoming its, the world's. God; when "world" becomes. God becomes; and if there is no world, God ceases to be, and again there is only Godhead. Already here it can be seen that it would be a grave error to attribute to mysticism the view that the distinction between Godhead and God is only one of perspective, that is, one consisting not in itself but in the viewpoint of the world. Apart from all else such a view would nullify the historical revelation. Such is far from genuine theistic mysticism, which sees the distinction instead as founded in God's very being and consummated by Him. Thus far has Christian mysticism proceeded with Eckhart, as Indian mysticism earlier in Sankara; further it has not attempted to penetrate. But by that an enigma that confronts us on the borderline of human being, at the point where it touches the Divine, has been only shifted into the Divine itself, and so for the time being withdrawn from further investigation. Not for ever; for there is in the history of later mysticism yet one more endeavour, even if only fragmentary and if apparently coming to a standstill in its very start, to penetrate still further and here again to ask "Why?" The question may be formulated provisionally thus: Why did God become Person? That Hasidism so far as I can see, Hasidism alone) has ventured to attempt to answer this question -- or rather, as will be shown, a related question -- is indicated by the words of its greatest thinker, the Maggid of Mesritch, which we are able to extract from the notes of disciples and to some extent to put together. Here is one of the few points, in which Hasidic theology surpasses that of the later Kabbala, whose paths it follows here too, even if only gropingly.
Excerpted from Hasidism, by Martin Buber |
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