A Cat Spoke to Me of God

Men have addressed their eternal Thou with many names. In singing of him who was thus named they always had the Thou in mind: the first myths were hymns of praise. Then the names took refuge in the language of It; men were more and more strongly moved to think of and to address their eternal Thou as an It. But all God’s names are hallowed, for in them He is not merely spoken about, but also spoken to.

Many men wish to reject the word God as a legitimate usage, because it is so misused. It is indeed the most heavily laden of all the words used by men. For that very reason it is the most imperishable and most indispensable. What does all mistaken talk about God’s being and works (though there has been, and can be, no other talk about these) matter in comparison with the one truth that all men who have addressed God had God himself in mind? For he who speaks the word God and really has Thou in mind (whatever the illusion by which he is held), addresses the true Thou of his life, which cannot be limited by another Thou, and to which he stands in a relation that gathers up and includes all others.

But when he, too, who abhors the name, and believes himself to be godless, gives his whole being to addressing the Thou of his life, as a Thou that cannot be limited by another, he addresses God.

An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language. Independently, without needing cooperation of sounds and gestures, most forcibly when they rely wholly on their glance, the eyes express the mystery in its natural prison, the anxiety of becoming. This condition of the mystery is known only by the animal, it alone can disclose it to us – and this condition only lets itself be disclosed, not fully revealed. The language in which it is uttered is what it says – anxiety, the movement of the creature between the realms of vegetable security and spiritual venture. This language is the stammering of nature at the first touch of spirit, before it yields to spirit’s cosmic venture that we call man. But no speech will ever repeat what that stammering knows and can proclaim.

Paul Klee, Cat and Bird, oil and ink on gessoed canvas, mounted on wood, 1928.

Sometimes I look into a cat’s eyes. The domesticated animal has not as it were received from us (as we sometimes imagine) the gift of the truly “speaking” glance, but only – at the price of its primitive disinterestedness – the capacity to turn its glance to us prodigious beings. But with this capacity there enters the glance, in its dawn and continuing in its rising, a quality of amazement and of inquiry that is wholly lacking in the original glance with all its anxiety. The beginning of this cat’s glance, lighting up under the touch of my glance, indisputably questioned me: “Is it possible that you think of me? Do you really not just want me to have fun? Do I concern you? Do I exist in your sight? Do I really exist? What is it that comes from you? What is it that surrounds me? What is it that comes to me? What is it?” (“I” is here a transcription for a word, that we do not have, denoting self without the ego; and by “it” is to be imagined the streaming human glance in the total reality of its power to enter into relation.) The animal’s glance, speech of disquietude, rose in its greatness – and set at once. My own glance was certainly more lasting; but it was no longer the streaming human glance.

The rotation of the world which introduced the relational event had been followed almost immediately by the other which ended it. 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.

How powerful is the unbroken world of It, and how delicate are the appearances of the Thou!

I relate this tiny episode, which I have experienced several times, for the sake of the speech of this almost unnoticeable sunrise and sunset of the spirit. In no other speech have I known so profoundly the fleeting nature of actuality in all its relations with being, the exalted melancholy of our fate, the change, heavy with destiny, of every isolated Thou into an It. For other events possessed between morning and evening their day, even though it might be brief; but here morning and evening flowed pitilessly mingled together, the bright Thou appeared and was gone. Had the burden of the world of It really been removed for the space of a glance from the animal and from myself? I myself could continue to think about the matter, but the animal had sunk back out of the stammer of its glance into the disquietude where there is no speech and almost no memory.

How powerful is the unbroken world of It, and how delicate are the appearances of the Thou!

So much can never break through the crust of the condition of things! O fragment of mica, looking on which I once learned, for the first time, that I is not something “in me” – with you I was nevertheless only bound up in myself; at that time the event took place only in me, not between me and you. But when one that is alive rises out of things, and becomes a being in relation to me, joined to me by its nearness and its speech, for how inevitably short a time is it nothing to me but Thou! It is not the relation that necessarily grows feeble, but the actuality of its immediacy. Love itself cannot persist in the immediacy of relation; love endures, but in the interchange of actual and potential being. Every Thou in the world is enjoined by its nature to become a thing for us, or at all events to re-enter continually the condition of things.

Only in one, all-embracing relation is potential still actual being. Only one Thou never ceases by its nature to be Thou for us. He who knows God knows also very well remoteness from God, and the anguish of barrenness in the tormented heart; but he does not know the absence of God: it is we only who are not always there.

The lover in the Vita Nuova rightly and properly says for the most part Ella and only at times Voi. The spectator of the Paradiso, when he says Colui, speaks from poetic necessity, and knows it. If God is addressed as He or It, it is always allegorically. But if we say Thou to Him, then mortal sense has set the unbroken truth of the world into a word.

From I and Thou by Martin Buber. Translation copyright ©️1958, 1970 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Reprinted by permission by Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.