Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

DIALOGICAL PERSONALISM REVISITED 223
nated, not by the force of ideas but by lived reality. Jesus definitively
shows how the I reaches the thou and the thou reaches the
I: each moves along two routes – towards God and towards man.
Because of Christ’s Incarnation, between God and man there is
now man, and in man there is now the privileged manifestation
of God.
Ebner’s thought is profound: any attempt to find the thou in
God alone is destined to fail because one doesn’t know how to
find the thou in man. Any road toward God that does not pass
through man is blocked. Man must search for God not only within
himself, but also in his neighbor, for man’s relationship with
God always begins by relating to concrete man. This means that
the I of man must make the leap from the experience of the
“Thou-God” to the experience of the “thou-man.” God is not metaphysically
remote from us but rather quite near and accessible:
We are therefore not to dream of Him. Whoever does that does
not want to see Him in the reality of His nearness. One could thus
even say that God is near to us not only spiritually but also physically:
near to us in everyone, and above all in the man next to us,
the neighbor… God is near to us in the man whom we, emerging
from our I-aloneness, make the true Thou of our I, which obviously
does not mean simply to look at him in his humanity as God.
What you have done to the very least of my brethren, you have
done to me… 43
The nearness of God is discovered in the I-Thou relation
with the neighbor. The true I is always in relation to a Thou such
that the “being-for-itself” of the I in its aloneness is not an authentic
part of the spiritual life of man, but is a consequence of
“secluding himself from the Thou,” which is, “nothing other
than the ‘fall from God,’ the attempt of man to exist in godless
‘inwardness’ (Innerlichkeit)…; it is the first abuse and perverted
use of the ‘freedom,’ of the ‘personality’ of existing, implanted into
man by God.” 44
43 GREEN, 210-211; WR, Schriften 1:268.
44 GREEN, 18; WR, Schriften 1:91.