In Search of Martin Buber (V)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

Yet again I take up the philosophy of Martin Buber, as represented in his 1923 work I and Thou. In the previous installment, In Search of Martin Buber (IV), and in its predecessor, In Search of Martin Buber (III), I mentioned how key the Book of Job is to Buber's view of God as Thou. Job's wealth, offspring, and repute were taken away from him by the Lord, who subjected Job to humiliation upon humiliation and woe upon woe, just in order to test him. Job cried out to God to respond to his plaints face to face, and God appeared to Job from a whirlwind. We learn from this Old Testament book that such dialogue with the Lord, no matter what evils may be visited upon one, is one's best and only refuge.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The late myth guru Joseph Campbell also referred to Job in his 1948 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in his chapter on "Atonement with the Father":

In the Biblical story of Job, the Lord makes no attempt to justify in human or any other terms the ill pay meted out to his virtuous servant, "a simple and upright man, and fearing God, and avoiding evil." Nor was it for any sins of their own that Job's servants were slain by the Chaldean troops, his sons and his daughters crushed by a collapsing roof. When his friends arrive to console him, they declare, with a pious faith in God's justice, that Job must have done some evil to have deserved to be so frightfully afflicted. But the honest, courageous, horizon-searching sufferer insists that his deeds have been good; whereupon the comforter, Elihu, charges him with blasphemy, as naming himself more just than God.

When the Lord himself answers Job out of the whirlwind, He makes no attempt to vindicate His work in ethical terms, but only magnifies His Presence, bidding Job to do likewise on earth in human emulation of the way of heaven: "Gird up thy loins now like a man; I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayst be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him? Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place. Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret. Then I will also confess unto thee that thine own hand can save thee." (p. 147)

The will of God, Campbell says, "derives from a center beyond the range of human categories." Buber would say that all such categories are from the world of It, not Thou, since categories are first and foremost tools that we use to keep things separate from one another and from ourselves, so that we can manipulate them. When we take our stand in relation to the eternal Thou — he who is, of course, the One God — all those categories are dissolved and all supposedly separate things are taken up into the global presence. In that exclusive presence, nothing in this world gets excluded!

"In the relation with God unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness are one," writes Buber (p. 78, Ronald Gregor Smith translation). "He who enters on the absolute relation is concerned with nothing isolated any more, neither things nor beings, neither earth nor heaven; but everything is gathered up in the relation."

Standing in such absolute relation to God-as-Thou produces one's life's meaning, one's destiny. This is what Job finds out when he is given a mission to "abase" the proud: to give what we would term a wake-up call to those who live in a self-sufficient world of manipulating and exploiting all the categories of It. Thus God needs something from Job, and this is why God tells Job, perhaps somewhat surprisingly to us, that "thine own hand can save thee."

Each person needs God; God needs each person. Buber has this to say (p. 82): "You know always in your heart that you need God more than everything; but do you not know too that God needs you — in the fullness of his eternity needs you? How would man be, how would you be, if God did not need him, did not need you? You need God, in order to be — and God needs you [in order to offer him] the very meaning of your life."

Sacrifice and prayer, Buber tells us (p. 83), "are set 'before the Face [of God]', in the consummation of the holy primary word that means mutual action: they speak the Thou [i.e., they say Thou to God, they call God by the second-person-familiar pronoun], and then they hear."


The consummation of the I–Thou relation with God in mutual action is, for Campbell, what Job underwent as "atonement with the Father," which is one key stage in the full canonical "hero's journey." The mythic hero in the mythos of every culture accomplishes the same basic trajectory:

Departure:
• Hero's call to adventure
  
• Hero's initial refusal of call
  
• Hero's receipt of aid from a supernatural personage
  
• Hero's outbound threshold-crossing
  
• Hero's figuratively re-entering the womb to experience a rebirth
  
Initiation:

• Trials of the hero
  
• Meeting by the hero of "the Goddess"
  
• Temptation of the hero by a woman, which must be resisted
  
• Hero's atonement with the Father
  
• Apotheosis (hero's becoming, as it were, godlike)
  
• Hero's receipt of the "ultimate boon" or gift from the Father
  
Return:

• Hero's initial refusal of the return
  
• Hero's "magic flight" away from the Father's house
  
• Hero's rescue by someone outside the Father's house
  
• Hero's crossing of the return threshold
  
• Hero's return as "master of two worlds"
  
• Hero's gaining the "freedom to live"
  

In his discourse on mutual action, Buber has this to say about freedom:

Yes; in pure relation you have felt yourself to be purely dependent, as you are able to feel in no other relation — and simply free, too, as in no other time or place: you have felt yourself to be both creaturely and creative. You had the one feeling then no longer limited by the other, but you had both of them limitlessly and together." (p. 82)

This, for Buber, is what the hero's "freedom to live" really means.