                           20020128.01

     The concept of a "community of saints" points to a dimension
of religious experience of considerable historical and practical
importance, our need for association (Vergesellschaftung), our
need to be part of a closed spiritual community to which we
dedicate our loyalty and in which we feel protected. "We few, we
happy few, we band of brothers ..." as Shakespeare phrased it.
Like other instincts, this instinct for social spiritual
encapsulation requires to be understood, to be accepted, to be
managed and to be guarded against.  Running counter to the need
to separate ourselves is the need to communicate, the need to
learn from others, the need to share our thoughts and feelings.
Running counter to our need to encapsulate ourselves is our
ability to assimilate, and to be assimilated to others.  A
society which is tolerant and receptive of aliens is, I think,
stronger and healthier.  It integrates potential enemies into its
social structure, rather than diluting its strength and risking
its existence in fighting them.

     The existential thinker, in his loneliness before his inward
God, is not threatened by speculative thought, because it cannot
penetrate his inwardness. The existential thinker has no agenda
for inflicting his inwardness on the speculative thinker: for to
purport to do so would be absurd. The speculative thinker, on the
other hand, unavoidably feels threatened, because his deity is an
outward, public deity, sanctioned and sustained by society, a
deity which is hardly immune to competition.

     To my mind the voice from the burning bush: "Ehyey Asher
Ehyeh", "I am that I am," signals irrevocably the anonymity of
God, an anonymity which liberated each of his individual children
individually, turning each of them not only from the service of
the Egyptians, from the idolatrous objectivity of the Pharaoh to
serve the anonymous God but potentially freeing each of them from
all other servitude, in the sense that service of the anonymous
God is inwardness and as such is absolute freedom.

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