nun schauervoll einmalig blickt es mich an
(2015, rev. 2017/19)
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Real faith—if I may so term presenting ourselves and perceiving—begins when the dictionary is put down, when you are done with it. What occurs to me says something to me, but what it says to me cannot be revealed by any esoteric information; for it has never been said before nor is it composed of sounds that have ever been said. It can neither be interpreted nor translated, I can have it neither explained nor displayed; it is not a what at all, it is said into my very life; it is no experience that can be remembered independently of the situation, it remains the address of that moment and cannot be isolated, it remains the question of a questioner and will have its answer.
(It remains the questions. For that is the other great contrast between all the business of interpreting sign and the speech of sign which I mean here: this speech never gives information or appeasement.)
Faith stands in the stream of “happening but once” which is spanned by knowledge. All the emergency structures of analogy and typology are indispensable for the work of the human spirit, but to step on them when the question of the questioner steps up to you, to me, would be running away. Lived life is tested and fulfilled in the stream alone.
With all deference to the world continuum of space and time I know as a living truth only concrete world reality which is constantly, in every moment, reached out to me. I can separate it into its component parts, I can compare them and distribute them into groups of similar phenomena, I can derive them from earlier and reduce them to simpler phenomena; and when I have done all this I have not touch my concrete world reality.
Inseparable, incomparable, irreducible, now, happening once only, it gazes upon me with a horrifying look.
(Martin Buber, Dialogue, 1932; transl. by Ronald Gregor-Smith)
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