I and Thou

As the final orienting movement, the recognition of the world of Thou is consummated in the eternal Thou: “Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particular Thou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou” (61). The recognition of the Eternal Thou has been present from the start of human history, and has gone by many names. While the primal recognition of this Thou is always from the start as Thou, it has, over time, sometimes transferred over to the world of It. People looking to know and to categorize speak of the Eternal Thou—who is God—and will make this transferal, but He is always still Thou: “all God’s names are hallowed, for in them He is not merely spoken about, but also spoken to” (61, emphasis added). Regardless of how this Thou is thought or spoken of, it always remains Thou in the mind (even if subconsciously), since the Eternal Thou cannot be limited in any way.

The implications of this Eternal Thou as the supreme being and that which is truly real, that which truly exists, is that there is no actual separation between the world of It and the world of Thou—there is no illusion, all is the same reality. In this reality, the Eternal Thou reigns over all and orders all toward it, as “all else lives in its light” (63). God is met when human beings extend their whole being outwards to meet this Thou, but it is not they who do the finding, but instead are themselves found: “God is the ‘wholly Other’; but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present” (64). God cannot ever properly be said to be found, for there is nowhere he is not, and thus he cannot be found in one place rather than another. He is in all things and above all things and beneath all things.

The act of speaking communion with the Eternal Thou is necessary on account of the divine destiny, for God needs humans as humans need God; the world and its history is the act of creation always becoming. The act of religion, the act of sacrifice, are what is set before God as Thou in order to speak the Thou into the world. Religion and prayer and sacrifice are not magic, as an attempt to gain some divine favor, but they are communication, they are the means by which the I speaks to the Thou in relation. From the opposite direction, the act of absorption is also an act of being in relation to the Eternal Thou. Identification with God by way of absorption and identity of communion are the principle teachings of the great religious teachers and writings. The Gospel of John, for instance, speaks constantly about communion, as Jesus speaks about his union and identity with the Father: “It is really the Gospel of pure relation” (68, emphasis added).

The act of two becoming one is at the heart of the I—Thou relation, it is at the heart of the age-old language of rapture and eros. It is not a question of addition, or of two dissolving into a union without distinction, but is about the “dynamic of relation itself” (69). For its own part, the teaching of the Buddha is similar in its stress on being released from the cycle of repetition; there must be recognition of the constant and enduring Thou. The reality of spirit is recognized when we realize the unity and communion of all things; spirit is not in the person, and the person is not in spirit. Spirit is the principle of all and that in which all persist and share. It is not a question of whether one dwells in the world, or the world dwells in them, but in truth both are part of the same reality. The Eternal Thou is the foundation and source of all things: “God comprises, but is not, the universe. So, too, God comprises, but is not, my Self” (74).

In recognizing these truths, one realizes how precious and how infrequent true glimpses and encounters with the world of Thou truly are: “The world of It surrounded the animal and myself, for the space of a glance the world of Thou had shone out from the depths, to be at once extinguished and put back into the world of It” (75). For the majority of human life, we are surrounded by It; the infrequency of our encounter with Thou is due to the fact that only the Eternal Thou can ever truly remain Thou. Not that human beings do not often treat God as a member of the world of It, but even when they do, God is never truly an It, only the Thou who remains forever inviolable. It is the world of It, the world of creatures, that genuinely oscillates between Thou and It.

This is unsurprising, however, since the world of It is that which makes up the world of space and time (which is different than the world of Thou, which is not contained by those constraints). It is a privilege though that all three spheres of relation and existence—nature, humanity, spirit—ultimately all point toward the Eternal Thou. Nature provides us with physicality and consistency, humanity provides us with the notions of sensibility and feeling, while our relation to the spiritual world provides us with understanding. Our life with humanity is marked out for special recognition, since it is here that our power of speech is most manifest: “Here language is consummated as a sequence, in speech and counter-speech. Here alone does the word that is formed in language meet its response” (79).

Distinct from the relation of speech in harmony with other persons is the reality of solitude. Two kinds of solitude exist: the solitude of freedom from experience, and the solitude of the absence of all relations. Similarly, these two solitudes have their own particular characters: Solitude can be the place of purification, and solitude can be a place of isolation. Related to these experiences of solitude and loneliness are the two modes of existence that human beings can participate in when it comes to their relation to their neighbors and to God. One can be a moral person, fascinated with “duty and obligation to the world” (82), or one can be a religious person who desires only “the tension between the world and God” (82). The one who recognizes the Eternal Thou as God and enters into the religious mode of existence is the one who has passed beyond the necessity of obligation into the realm of love and recognition.

In recognizing this Thou, the person recognizes that they are spoken to, and this is what is called “revelation.” This revelation is not primarily a revelation of content and specific details but is rather the revelation of a presence: the presence of the Eternal Thou. This revelation of presence is in fact so far removed from specific content that it does not even include the name of God. Though God has refused to reveal the intimate details of himself in so many ways, human beings sometimes find the need to invent these things for themselves. In this way, they begin to manufacture what they think God to be, and in doing this, they treat the Eternal Thou as an It: “Man desires to possess God; he desires a continuity in space and time of possession of God” (85). In this manner, God becomes the object of a specific form of human worship. God ceases to be the object of relation, and the personal mode of communication in prayer is replaced by communal prayer and ritual that banishes the personal (the Thou) for the impersonal and the individual (the It).

In the end, the revelation of God and human recognition of the Eternal Thou in relation to themselves is about the recognition of truth and meaning. True religion is concerned with right relation first and foremost; when this concern for relation is present, and remains the definition of prayer, then religion remains true and living.