In my earlier years the “religious” was for me the exception.
There were hours that were taken out of the course of things.
From somewhere or other the firm crust of everyday was
pierced. Then the reliable permanence of appearances broke
down; the attack which took place burst its law asunder.
“Religious experience” was the experience of an otherness
which did not fit into the context of life. It could begin with
something customary, with consideration of some familiar
object, but which then became unexpectedly mysterious and
uncanny, finally lighting a way into the lightning-pierced dark-
ness of the mystery itself. But also, without any intermediate
stage, time could be torn apart—first the firm world’s structure
then the still firmer self-assurance flew apart and you were
delivered to fulness. The “religious” lifted you out. Over there
now lay the accustomed existence with its affairs, but here

illumination and ecstasy and rapture held, without time or
sequence. Thus your own being encompassed a life here and a
life beyond, and there was no bond but the actual moment of the
transition.

The illegitimacy of such a division of the temporal life, which
is streaming to death and eternity and which only in fulfilling its
temporality can be fulfilled in face of these, was brought home
to me by an everyday event, an event of judgment, judging with
that sentence from closed lips and an unmoved glance such as
the ongoing course of things loves to pronounce.

What happened was no more than that one forenoon, after a
morning of “religious” enthusiasm, I had a visit from an
unknown young man, without being there in spirit. I certainly
did not fail to let the meeting be friendly, I did not treat him any
more remissly than all his contemporaries who were in the habit
of seeking me out about this time of day as an oracle that is ready
to listen to reason. I conversed attentively and openly with
him—only I omitted to guess the questions which he did not
put. Later, not long after, I learned from one of his friends—he
himself was no longer alive—the essential content of these ques-
tions; I learned that he had come to me not casually, but borne
by destiny, not for a chat but for a decision. He had come to me,
he had come in this hour. What do we expect when we are in
despair and yet go to a man? Surely a presence by means of
which we are told that nevertheless there is meaning.

Since then I have given up the “religious” which is nothing
but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy; or it has given
me up. I possess nothing but the everyday out of which I am
never taken. The mystery is no longer disclosed, it has escaped or
it has made its dwelling here where everything happens as it
happens. I know no fulness but each mortal hour’s fulness of
claim and responsibility. Though far from being equal to it, yet I
know that in the claim I am claimed and may respond in
responsibility, and know who speaks and demands a response.

I do not know much more. If that is religion then it is just
everything, simply all that is lived in its possibility of dialogue.
Here is space also for religion’s highest forms. As when you pray
you do not thereby remove yourself from this life of yours but in
your praying refer your thought to it, even though it may be in
order to yield it; so too in the unprecedented and surprising,
when you are called upon from above, required, chosen,
empowered, sent, you with this your mortal bit of life are
referred to, this moment is not extracted from it, it rests on what
has been and beckons to the remainder which has still to be
lived, you are not swallowed up in a fulness without obligation,
you are willed for the life of communion.
 

Above and below are bound to one another. The word of him
who wishes to speak with men without speaking with God is
not fulfilled; but the word of him who wishes to speak with God
without speaking with men goes astray.

There is a tale that a man inspired by God once went out from
the creaturely realms into the vast waste. There he wandered till
he came to the gates of the mystery. He knocked. From within
came the cry: “What do you want here?” He said, “I have pro-
claimed your praise in the ears of mortals, but they were deaf to
me. So I come to you that you yourself may hear me and reply.”
“Turn back,” came the cry from within. “Here is no ear for you.
I have sunk my hearing in the deafness of mortals.”

True address from God directs man into the place of lived
speech, where the voices of the creatures grope past one another,
and in their very missing of one another succeed in reaching the
eternal partner.
 

Here I expect two objections, one weighty and one powerful.

One argument against me takes this form. When it is a ques-
tion of essential views, of views concerning Weltanschauung, the
conversation must not be broken off in such a way. Each must
expose himself wholly, in a real way, in his humanly unavoid-
able partiality, and thereby experience himself in a real way as
limited by the other, so that the two suffer together the destiny
of our conditioned nature and meet one another in it.

To this I answer that the experience of being limited is
included in what I refer to; but so too is the experience of
overcoming it together. This cannot be completed on the level of
Weltanschauung, but on that of reality. Neither needs to give up his
point of view; only, in that unexpectedly they do something and
unexpectedly something happens to them which is called a
covenant, they enter a realm where the law of the point of view
no longer holds. They too suffer the destiny of our conditioned
nature, but they honour it most highly when, as is permitted to
us, they let themselves run free of it for an immortal moment.
They had already met one another when each in his soul so
turned to the other that from then on, making him present, he
spoke really to and towards him.

The other objection, which comes from a quite different, in
fact from the opposite, side is to the effect that this may be true
so far as the province of the point of view reaches, but it ceases
to be true for a confession of faith. Two believers in conflict
about their doctrines are concerned with the execution of the
divine will, not with a fleeting personal agreement. For the man
who is so related to his faith that he is able to die or to slay for it
there can be no realm where the law of the faith ceases to hold. It
is laid on him to help truth to victory, he does not let himself be
misled by sentiments. The man holding a different, that is a false,
belief must be converted, or at least instructed; direct contact
with him can be achieved only outside the advocacy of the faith,
it cannot proceed from it. The thesis of religious disputation
cannot be allowed to “go”.

This objection derives its power from its indifference to the
non-binding character of the relativized spirit—a character
which is accepted as a matter of course. I can answer it
adequately only by a confession.

I have not the possibility of judging Luther, who refused fel-
lowship with Zwingli in Marburg, or Calvin who furthered the
death of Servetus. For Luther and Calvin believe that the Word of
God has so descended among men that it can be clearly known
and must therefore be exclusively advocated. I do not believe
that; the Word of God crosses my vision like a falling star to
whose fire the meteorite will bear witness without making it
light up for me, and I myself can only bear witness to the light
but not produce the stone and say “This is it”. But this difference
of faith is by no means to be understood merely as a subjective
one. It is not based on the fact that we who live to-day are weak
in faith, and it will remain even if our faith is ever so much
strengthened. The situation of the world itself, in the most ser-
ious sense, more precisely the relation between God and man,
has changed. And this change is certainly not comprehended in
its essence by our thinking only of the darkening, so familiar to

us, of the supreme light, only of the night of our being, empty of
revelation. It is the night of an expectation—not of a vague hope,
but of an expectation. We expect a theophany of which we know
nothing but the place, and the place is called community. In the
public catacombs of this expectation there is no single God’s
Word which can be clearly known and advocated, but the words
delivered are clarified for us in our human situation of being
turned to one another. There is no obedience to the coming one
without loyalty to his creature. To have experienced this is our
way.

A time of genuine religious conversations is beginning—not
those so-called but fictitious conversations where none regarded
and addressed his partner in reality, but genuine dialogues,
speech from certainty to certainty, but also from one open-
hearted person to another open-hearted person. Only then will
genuine common life appear, not that of an identical content of
faith which is alleged to be found in all religions, but that of the
situation, of anguish and of expectation.
 

Responsibility which does not respond to a word is a metaphor
of morality. Factually, responsibility only exists when the court
is there to which I am responsible, and “self-responsibility” has
reality only when the “self” to which I am responsible becomes
transparent into the absolute. But he who practises real responsi-
bility in the life of dialogue does not need to name the speaker of
the word to which he is responding—he knows him in the
word’s substance which presses on and in, assuming the cadence
of an inwardness, and stirs him in his heart of hearts. A man can

ward off with all his strength the belief that “God” is there, and
he tastes him in the strict sacrament of dialogue.

Yet let it not be supposed that I make morality questionable in
order to glorify religion. Religion, certainly, has this advantage
over morality, that it is a phenomenon and not a postulate, and
further that it is able to include composure as well as determin-
ation. The reality of morality, the demand of the demander, has a
place in religion, but the reality of religion, the unconditioned
being of the demander, has no place in morality. Nevertheless,
when religion does itself justice and asserts itself, it is much
more dubious than morality, just because it is more actual and
inclusive. Religion as risk, which is ready to give itself up, is the
nourishing stream of the arteries; as system, possessing, assured
and assuring, religion which believes in religion is the veins’
blood, which ceases to circulate. And if there is nothing that can
so hide the face of our fellow-man as morality can, religion can
hide from us as nothing else can the face of God. Principle there,
dogma here, I appreciate the “objective” compactness of dogma,
but behind both there lies in wait the—profane or holy—war
against the situation’s power of dialogue, there lies in wait the
“once-for-all” which resists the unforeseeable moment. Dogma,
even when its claim of origin remains uncontested, has become
the most exalted form of invulnerability against revelation. Revel-
ation will tolerate no perfect tense, but man with the arts of his
craze for security props it up to perfectedness.
 

We may distinguish three ways in which we are able to perceive
a man who is living before our eyes. (I am not thinking of an
object of scientific knowledge, of which I do not speak here.)
The object of our perception does not need to know of us, of our
being there. It does not matter at this point whether he stands in
a relation or has a standpoint towards the perceiver.

The observer is wholly intent on fixing the observed man in his
mind, on “noting” him. He probes him and writes him up.
That is, he is diligent to write up as many “traits” as possible. He
lies in wait for them, that none may escape him. The object
consists of traits, and it is known what lies behind each of them.
Knowledge of the human system of expression constantly
incorporates in the instant the newly appearing individual
variations, and remains applicable. A face is nothing but
physiognomy, movements nothing but gestures of expression.

The onlooker is not at all intent. He takes up the position which
lets him see the object freely, and undisturbed awaits what will
be presented to him. Only at the beginning may he be ruled by
purpose, everything beyond that is involuntary. He does not go
around taking notes indiscriminately, he lets himself go, he is
not in the least afraid of forgetting something (“Forgetting is
good,” he says). He gives his memory no tasks, he trusts its
organic work which preserves what is worth preserving. He does
not lead in the grass as green fodder, as the observer does; he
turns it and lets the sun shine on it. He pays no attention to traits
(“Traits lead astray,” he says). What stands out for him from the
object is what is not “character” and not “expression” (“The
interesting is not important,” he says). All great artists have been
onlookers.

But there is a perception of a decisively different kind.

The onlooker and the observer are similarly orientated, in that
they have a position, namely, the very desire to perceive the man
who is living before our eyes. Moreover, this man is for them an
object separated from themselves and their personal life, who
can in fact for this sole reason be “properly” perceived. Con-
sequently what they experience in this way, whether it is, as
with the observer, a sum of traits, or, as with the onlooker, an
existence, neither demands action from them nor inflicts destiny
on them. But rather the whole is given over to the aloof fields of
æsthesis.

It is a different matter when in a receptive hour of my per-
sonal life a man meets me about whom there is something,
which I cannot grasp in any objective way at all, that “says some-
thing” to me. That does not mean, says to me what manner of
man this is, what is going on in him, and the like. But it means,
says something to me, addresses something to me, speaks some-
thing that enters my own life. It can be something about this
man, for instance that he needs me. But it can also be something
about myself. The man himself in his relation to me has nothing
to do with what is said. He has no relation to me, he has indeed
not noticed me at all. It is not he who says it to me, as that
solitary man silently confessed his secret to his neighbour on the
seat; but it says it.

To understand “say” as a metaphor is not to understand. The
phrase “that doesn’t say a thing to me” is an outworn metaphor;
but the saying I am referring to is real speech. In the house of
speech are many mansions, and this is one of the inner.

The effect of having this said to me is completely different
from that of looking on and observing. I cannot depict or denote
or describe the man in whom, through whom, something has
been said to me. Were I to attempt it, that would be the end of
saying. This man is not my object; I have got to do with him.
Perhaps I have to accomplish something about him; but perhaps

I have only to learn something, and it is only a matter of my
“accepting”. It may be that I have to answer at once, to this very
man before me; it may be that the saying has a long and mani-
fold transmission before it, and that I am to answer some other
person at some other time and place, in who knows what kind of
speech, and that it is now only a matter of taking the answering
on myself. But in each instance a word demanding an answer has
happened to me.

We may term this way of perception becoming aware.

It by no means needs to be a man of whom I become aware. It
can be an animal, a plant, a stone. No kind of appearance or
event is fundamentally excluded from the series of the things
through which from time to time something is said to me. No-
thing can refuse to be the vessel for the Word. The limits of the
possibility of dialogue are the limits of awareness.
 

Human dialogue, therefore, although it has its distinctive life in
the sign, that is in sound and gesture (the letters of language
have their place in this only in special instances, as when,
between friends in a meeting, notes describing the atmosphere
skim back and forth across the table), can exist without the sign,
but admittedly not in an objectively comprehensible form. On
the other hand an element of communication, however inward,
seems to belong to its essence. But in its highest moments dia-
logue reaches out even beyond these boundaries. It is completed
outside contents, even the most personal, which are or can be
communicated. Moreover it is completed not in some “mys-
tical” event, but in one that is in the precise sense factual,
thoroughly dovetailed into the common human world and the
concrete time-sequence.

One might indeed be inclined to concede this as valid for the
special realm of the erotic. But I do not intend to bring even this
in here as an explanation. For Eros is in reality much more
strangely composed than in Plato’s genealogical myth, and the
erotic is in no way, as might be supposed, purely a compressing
and unfolding of dialogue. Rather do I know no other realm
where, as in this one (to be spoken of later), dialogue and mono-
logue are so mingled and opposed. Many celebrated ecstasies of
love are nothing but the lover’s delight in the possibilities of his
own person which are actualized in unexpected fulness.

I would rather think of something unpretentious yet
significant—of the glances which strangers exchange in a busy
street as they pass one another with unchanging pace. Some of

these glances, though not charged with destiny, nevertheless
reveal to one another two dialogical natures.

But I can really show what I have in mind only by events
which open into a genuine change from communication to
communion, that is, in an embodiment of the word of dialogue.

What I am here concerned with cannot be conveyed in ideas
to a reader. But we may represent it by examples—provided that,
where the matter is important, we do not eschew taking
examples from the inmost recesses of the personal life. For
where else should the like be found?

My friendship with one now dead arose in an incident that
may be described, if you will, as a broken-off conversation. The
date is Easter 1914. Some men from different European peoples
had met in an undefined presentiment of the catastrophe, in
order to make preparations for an attempt to establish a supra-
national authority. The conversations were marked by that
unreserve, whose substance and fruitfulness I have scarcely ever
experienced so strongly. It had such an effect on all who took
part that the fictitious fell away and every word was an actuality.
Then as we discussed the composition of the larger circle from
which public initiative should proceed (it was decided that it
should meet in August of the same year) one of us, a man of
passionate concentration and judicial power of love, raised the
consideration that too many Jews had been nominated, so that
several countries would be represented in unseemly proportion
by their Jews. Though similar reflections were not foreign to
my own mind, since I hold that Jewry can gain an effective and
more than merely stimulating share in the building of a stead-
fast world of peace only in its own community and not in
scattered members, they seemed to me, expressed in this way,
to be tainted in their justice. Obstinate Jew that I am, I pro-
tested against the protest. I no longer know how from that I
came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from
within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a

way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him.
“In a way that remains inaccessible to you”—so I directly
addressed the former clergyman. He stood up, I too stood, we
looked into the heart of one another’s eyes. “It is gone,” he
said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of
brotherhood.

The discussion of the situation between Jews and Christians
had been transformed into a bond between the Christian and the
Jew. In this transformation dialogue was fulfilled. Opinions were
gone, in a bodily way the factual took place.
 

Through all sorts of changes the same dream, sometimes after an
interval of several years, recurs to me. I name it the dream of the
double cry. Its context is always much the same, a “primitive”
world meagerly equipped. I find myself in a vast cave, like the
Latomias of Syracuse, or in a mud building that reminds me
when I awake of the villages of the fellahin, or on the fringe of a
gigantic forest whose like I cannot remember having seen.

The dream begins in very different ways, but always with
something extraordinary happening to me, for instance, with a
small animal resembling a lion-cub (whose name I know in the
dream but not when I awake) tearing the flesh from my arm and
being forced only with an effort to loose its hold. The strange
thing is that this first part of the dream story, which in the
duration as well as the outer meaning of the incidents is easily
the most important, always unrolls at a furious pace as though it

did not matter. Then suddenly the pace abates: I stand there and
cry out. In the view of the events which my waking conscious-
ness has I should have to suppose that the cry I utter varies in
accordance with what preceded it, and is sometimes joyous,
sometimes fearful, sometimes even filled both with pain and
with triumph. But in my morning recollection it is neither so
expressive nor so various. Each time it is the same cry, inarticu-
late but in strict rhythm, rising and falling, swelling to a fulness
which my throat could not endure were I awake, long and slow,
quiet, quite slow and very long, a cry that is a song. When it ends
my heart stops beating. But then, somewhere, far away, another
cry moves towards me, another which is the same, the same cry
uttered or sung by another voice. Yet it is not the same cry,
certainly no “echo” of my cry but rather its true rejoinder, tone
for tone not repeating mine, not even in a weakened form, but
corresponding to mine, answering its tones—so much so, that
mine, which at first had to my own ear no sound of questioning
at all, now appear as questions, as a long series of questions,
which now all receive a response. The response is no more cap-
able of interpretation than the question. And yet the cries that
meet the one cry that is the same do not seem to be the same as
one another. Each time the voice is new. But now, as the reply
ends, in the first moment after its dying fall, a certitude, true
dream certitude comes to me that now it has happened. Nothing
more. Just this, and in this way—now it has happened. If I should try
to explain it, it means that that happening which gave rise to my
cry has only now, with the rejoinder, really and undoubtedly
happened.

After this manner the dream has recurred each time—till
once, the last time, now two years ago. At first it was as usual (it
was the dream with the animal), my cry died away, again my
heart stood still. But then there was quiet. There came no
answering call. I listened, I heard no sound. For I awaited the
response for the first time; hitherto it had always surprised me,

as though I had never heard it before. Awaited, it failed to come.
But now something happened with me. As though I had till now
had no other access from the world to sensation save that of the
ear and now discovered myself as a being simply equipped with
senses, both those clothed in the bodily organs and the naked
senses, so I exposed myself to the distance, open to all sensation
and perception. And then, not from a distance but from the air
round about me, noiselessly, came the answer. Really it did not
come; it was there. It had been there—so I may explain it—even
before my cry: there it was, and now, when I laid myself open to
it, it let itself be received by me. I received it as completely into
my perception as ever I received the rejoinder in one of the
earlier dreams. If I were to report with what I heard it I should
have to say “with every pore of my body.” As ever the rejoinder
came in one of the earlier dreams this corresponded to and
answered my cry. It exceeded the earlier rejoinder in an
unknown perfection which is hard to define, for it resides in the
fact that it was already there.

When I had reached an end of receiving it, I felt again that
certainty, pealing out more than ever, that now it has happened.
 

The idea of responsibility is to be brought back from the prov-
ince of specialized ethics, of an “ought” that swings free in the
air, into that of lived life. Genuine responsibility exists only
where there is real responding.

Responding to what?

To what happens to one, to what is to be seen and heard and

felt. Each concrete hour allotted to the person, with its content
drawn from the world and from destiny, is speech for the man
who is attentive. Attentive, for no more than that is needed in
order to make a beginning with the reading of the signs that
are given to you. For that very reason, as I have already indi-
cated, the whole apparatus of our civilization is necessary to
preserve men from this attentiveness and its consequences. For
the attentive man would no longer, as his custom is, “master”
the situation the very moment after it stepped up to him: it
would be laid upon him to go up to and into it. Moreover,
nothing that he believed he possessed as always available would
help him, no knowledge and no technique, no system and no
programme; for now he would have to do with what cannot be
classified, with concretion itself. This speech has no alphabet,
each of its sounds is a new creation and only to be grasped as
such.

It will, then, be expected of the attentive man that he faces
creation as it happens. It happens as speech, and not as speech
rushing out over his head but as speech directed precisely at
him. And if one were to ask another if he too heard and he said
he did, they would have agreed only about an experiencing and
not about something experienced.

But the sounds of which the speech consists—I repeat it in
order to remove the misunderstanding, which is perhaps still
possible, that I referred to something extraordinary and larger
than life—are the events of the personal everyday life. In them, as
they now are, “great” or “small”, we are addressed, and those
which count as great, yield no greater signs than the others.

Our attitude, however, is not yet decided through our becom-
ing aware of the signs. We can still wrap silence about us—a
reply characteristic of a significant type of the age—or we can
step aside into the accustomed way; although both times we
carry away a wound that is not to be forgotten in any productiv-
ity or any narcotism. Yet it can happen that we venture to

respond, stammering perhaps—the soul is but rarely able to
attain to surer articulation—but it is an honest stammering, as
when sense and throat are united about what is to be said, but
the throat is too horrified at it to utter purely the already com-
posed sense. The words of our response are spoken in the
speech, untranslatable like the address, of doing and letting—
whereby the doing may behave like a letting and the letting like a
doing. What we say in this way with the being is our entering
upon the situation, into the situation, which has at this moment
stepped up to us, whose appearance we did not and could not
know, for its like has not yet been.

Nor are we now finished with it, we have to give up that
expectation: a situation of which we have become aware is never
finished with, but we subdue it into the substance of lived life.
Only then, true to the moment, do we experience a life that is
something other than a sum of moments. We respond to the
moment, but at the same time we respond on its behalf, we
answer for it. A newly-created concrete reality has been laid in
our arms; we answer for it. A dog has looked at you, you answer
for its glance, a child has clutched your hand, you answer for its
touch, a host of men moves about you, you answer for their
need (2).
 

The life of dialogue is not limited to men’s traffic with one
another; it is, it has shown itself to be, a relation of men to one
another that is only represented in their traffic.

Accordingly, even if speech and communication may be dis-
pensed with, the life of dialogue seems, from what we may
perceive, to have inextricably joined to it as its minimum consti-
tution one thing, the mutuality of the inner action. Two men
bound together in dialogue must obviously be turned to one
another, they must therefore—no matter with what measure of
activity or indeed of consciousness of activity—have turned to
one another.

It is good to put this forward so crudely and formally. For
behind the formulating question about the limits of a category

under discussion is hidden a question which bursts all formulas
asunder.
 

Just as the most eager speaking at one another does not make a
conversation (this is most clearly shown in that curious sport,
aptly termed discussion, that is, “breaking apart”, which is
indulged in by men who are to some extent gifted with the
ability to think), so for a conversation no sound is necessary, not
even a gesture. Speech can renounce all the media of sense, and it
is still speech.

Of course I am not thinking of lovers’ tender silence, resting
in one another, the expression and discernment of which can be
satisfied by a glance, indeed by the mere sharing of a gaze which
is rich in inward relations. Nor am I thinking of the mystical

shared silence, such as is reported of the Franciscan Aegidius and
Louis of France (or, almost identically, of two rabbis of the
Hasidim) who, meeting once, did not utter a word, but “taking
their stand in the reflection of the divine Face” experienced one
another. For here too there is still the expression of a gesture, of
the physical attitude of the one to the other.

What I am thinking of I will make clear by an example.

Imagine two men sitting beside one another in any kind of
solitude of the world. They do not speak with one another, they
do not look at one another, not once have they turned to one
another. They are not in one another’s confidence, the one
knows nothing of the other’s career, early that morning they got
to know one another in the course of their travels. In this
moment neither is thinking of the other; we do not need to
know what their thoughts are. The one is sitting on the common
seat obviously after his usual manner, calm, hospitably disposed
to everything that may come. His being seems to say it is too
little to be ready, one must also be really there. The other, whose
attitude does not betray him, is a man who holds himself in
reserve, withholds himself. But if we know about him we know
that a childhood’s spell is laid on him, that his withholding of
himself is something other than an attitude, behind all attitude is
entrenched the impenetrable inability to communicate himself.
And now—let us imagine that this is one of the hours which
succeed in bursting asunder the seven iron bands about our
heart—imperceptibly the spell is lifted. But even now the man
does not speak a word, does not stir a finger. Yet he does some-
thing. The lifting of the spell has happened to him—no matter
from where—without his doing. But this is what he does now:
he releases in himself a reserve over which only he himself has
power. Unreservedly communication streams from him, and the
silence bears it to his neighbour. Indeed it was intended for him,
and he receives it unreservedly as he receives all genuine destiny
that meets him. He will be able to tell no one, not even himself,

what he has experienced. What does he now “know” of the
other? No more knowing is needed. For where unreserve has
ruled, even wordlessly, between men, the word of dialogue has
happened sacramentally.
 

Each of us is encased in an armour whose task is to ward off
signs. Signs happen to us without respite, living means being
addressed, we would need only to present ourselves and to per-
ceive. But the risk is too dangerous for us, the soundless thunder-
ings seem to threaten us with annihilation, and from generation
to generation we perfect the defence apparatus. All our know-
ledge assures us, “Be calm, everything happens as it must hap-
pen, but nothing is directed at you, you are not meant; it is just
‘the world’, you can experience it as you like, but whatever you
make of it in yourself proceeds from you alone, nothing is
required of you, you are not addressed, all is quiet.”

Each of us is encased in an armour which we soon, out of
familiarity, no longer notice. There are only moments which
penetrate it and stir the soul to sensibility. And when such a
moment has imposed itself on us and we then take notice and
ask ourselves, “Has anything particular taken place? Was it not of

the kind I meet every day?” then we may reply to ourselves,
“Nothing particular, indeed, it is like this every day, only we are
not there every day.”

The signs of address are not something extraordinary, some-
thing that steps out of the order of things, they are just what goes
on time and again, just what goes on in any case, nothing is
added by the address. The waves of the æther roar on always, but
for most of the time we have turned off our receivers.

What occurs to me addresses me. In what occurs to me the
world-happening addresses me. Only by sterilizing it, removing
the seed of address from it, can I take what occurs to me as a part
of the world-happening which does not refer to me. The inter-
locking sterilized system into which all this only needs to be
dovetailed is man’s titanic work. Mankind has pressed speech
too into the service of this work.

From out of this tower of the ages the objection will be
levelled against me, if some of its doorkeepers should pay any
attention to such trains of thought, that it is nothing but a variety
of primitive superstition to hold that cosmic and telluric happen-
ings have for the life of the human person a direct meaning that
can be grasped. For instead of understanding an event physically,
biologically, sociologically (for which I, inclined as I always have
been to admire genuine acts of research, think a great deal, when
those who carry them out only know what they are doing and
do not lose sight of the limits of the realm in which they are
moving), these keepers say, an attempt is being made to get
behind the event’s alleged significance, and for this there is no
place in a reasonable world continuum of space and time.

Thus, then, unexpectedly I seem to have fallen into the com-
pany of the augurs, of whom, as is well-known, there are
remarkable modern varieties.

But whether they haruspicate or cast a horoscope their signs
have this peculiarity that they are in a dictionary, even if not
necessarily a written one. It does not matter how esoteric the

information that is handed down: he who searches out the signs
is well up in what life’s juncture this or that sign means. Nor does
it matter that special difficulties of separation and combination
are created by the meeting of several signs of different kinds. For
you can “look it up in the dictionary”. The common signature of
all this business is that it is for all time: things remain the same,
they are discovered once for all, rules, laws, and analogical con-
clusions may be employed throughout. What is commonly
termed superstition that is, perverse faith, appears to me rather
as perverse knowledge (1). From “superstition” about the num-
ber 13 an unbroken ladder leads into the dizziest heights of
gnosis. This is not even the aping of a real faith.

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 informa-
tion; 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 question. For that is the other great contrast
between all the business of interpreting signs and the speech of
signs 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 con-
stantly, 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 touched my concrete world reality.
Inseparable, incomparable, irreducible, now, happening once
only, it gazes upon me with a horrifying look. So in Stravinsky’s
ballet the director of the wandering marionette show wants to
point out to the people at the annual fair that a pierrot who
terrified them is nothing but a wisp of straw in clothes: he tears
it asunder—and collapses, gibbering, for on the roof of the
booth the living Petrouchka sits and laughs at him.

The true name of concrete reality is the creation which is
entrusted to me and to every man. In it the signs of address are
given to us.
 

In the signs of life which happen to us we are addressed. Who
speaks?

It would not avail us to give for reply the word “God”, if we
do not give it out of that decisive hour of personal existence
when we had to forget everything we imagined we knew of God,
when we dared to keep nothing handed down or learned or self-
contrived, no shred of knowledge, and were plunged into the
night.

When we rise out of it into the new life and there begin to
receive the signs, what can we know of that which—of him who
gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time
from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech
God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.

I will now use a gauche comparison, since I know no right one.

When we really understand a poem, all we know of the poet is
what we learn of him in the poem—no biographical wisdom is
of value for the pure understanding of what is to be understood:
the I which approaches us is the subject of this single poem. But
when we read other poems by the poet in the same true way

their subjects combine in all their multiplicity, completing and
confirming one another, to form the one polyphony of the
person’s existence.

In such a way, out of the givers of the signs, the speakers of
the words in lived life, out of the moment Gods there arises for
us with a single identity the Lord of the voice, the One.