Friday, October 7, 2011

He is not ours; we are His

When you meet God, you cannot put the meeting into words, much less the God you meet. God cannot be an object of our concepts. Concepts shatter like broken eyeglasses, like broken eyes -- in fact, like broken I's. No longer am I I and God my Thou, my object; now God is I, and I am his thou, his object. The illusion that is destroyed is not the self itself but its usual standpoint in which I am I, the center, and God appears on my screen somewhere. This self is illusion, and God shatters it by reversing the standpoint: we appear on his screen. We are his object, not he ours.
~ Peter Kreeft from his book Three Philosophies of Life

1 comment:

Gwendolyn said...

That was one of the passages that really struck me too. Martin Buber's I and Thou was one of the most impacting of all books I read while a philosophy major. I think he affected P. K. as well :-)