Page 10 - Eclipse of God

Introduction to the 2016 Edition ix

myself and act as an isolated being, unaffected by the greater
reality of which I am a part.
This brings us to “the eclipse of God.” In the essays in this
volume, Buber describes God as “the primary Thou.” God is
the greater transcendent reality against which all of human life
takes place. The eclipse of God is the eclipse of the possibility
of experiencing human life in relation to this greater reality. In
this sense, the eclipse of God is also the eclipse of the human.
Let us turn to Buber’s own words from the second essay of this
volume, “Religion and Reality”:
Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God— such in-
deed is the character of the historic hour through which
the world is passing. . . . An eclipse of the sun is something
that occurs between the sun and our eyes, not in the sun
itself. . . . But . . . one misses everything when one insists
on discovering within earthly thought the power that
unveils the mystery. He who refuses to submit himself
to the effective reality of transcendence as such— our
vis- à- vis— contributes to the human responsibility for
the eclipse. (18)

Three points are important here. First, according to Buber, our
inability to see God does not mean that God is not there, just
as the sun still exists when the moon blocks it in a solar eclipse.
Second, seeing God’s reality is not merely a matter of adjusting
human psychology, just as seeing the sun during a solar eclipse
is not merely a matter of adjusting our eyesight. Finally, just as
the moon blocks the sun while in no way destroying the sun’s
reality in a solar eclipse, so too, Buber suggests, something lit-
erally blocks our relationship to God in our day. What stands
in the way of the human being and God in the modern world?
God is eclipsed in the modern world, argues Buber, by the
predominance of instrumentality, the glorification of usefulness,