The Art of Loving - Erich Fromm Page 0,29

idea of an omniscient and omnipotent God is considered the ultimate form of ignorance. (Cf. Zimmer, ibid., p. 424.) We see here the connection with the namelessness of the Tao, the nameless name of the God who reveals himself to Moses, of the “absolute Nothing” of Meister Eckhart. Man can only know the negation, never the position of ultimate reality. “Meanwhile man can not know what God is, even though he be ever so well aware of what God is not.… Thus contented with nothing, the mind clamors for the highest good of all.”[21] For Meister Eckhart, “The Divine One is a negation of negations, and a denial of denials.… Every creature contains a negation: one denies that it is the other.[22] It is only a further consequence that God becomes for Meister Eckhart “The absolute Nothing,” just as the ultimate reality is the “En Sof,” the Endless One, for the Kabalah.

I have discussed the difference between Aristotelian and paradoxical logic in order to prepare the ground for an important difference in the concept of the love of God. The teachers of paradoxical logic say that man can perceive reality only in contradictions, and can never perceive in thought the ultimate reality-unity, the One itself. This led to the consequence that one did not seek as the ultimate aim to find the answer in thought. Thought can only lead us to the knowledge that it cannot give us the ultimate answer. The world of thought remains caught in the paradox. The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness. Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one’s love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.

This leads to the emphasis on the right way of living. All of life, every little and every important action, is devoted to the knowledge of God, but a knowledge not in right thought, but in right action. This can be clearly seen in Oriental religions. In Brahmanism as well as in Buddhism and Taoism, the ultimate aim of religion is not the right belief, but the right action. We find the same emphasis in the Jewish religion. There was hardly ever a schism over belief in the Jewish tradition (the one great exception, the difference between Pharisees and Sadducees, was essentially one of two opposite social classes). The emphasis of the Jewish religion was (especially from the beginning of our era on) on the right way of living, the Halacha (this word actually having the same meaning as the Tao).

In modern history, the same principle is expressed in the thought of Spinoza, Marx and Freud. In Spinoza’s philosophy the emphasis is shifted from the right belief to the right conduct of life. Marx stated the same principle when he said, “The philosophers have interpreted the world in different ways—the task is to transform it.” Freud’s paradoxical logic leads him to the process of psychoanalytic therapy, the ever deepening experience of oneself.

From the standpoint of paradoxical logic the emphasis is not on thought, but on the act. This attitude had several other consequences. First of all, it led to the tolerance which we find in Indian and Chinese religious development. If the right thought is not the ultimate truth, and not the way to salvation, there is no reason to fight others, whose thinking has arrived at different formulations. This tolerance is beautifully expressed in the story of several men who were asked to describe an elephant in the dark. One, touching his trunk, said “this animal is like a water pipe”; another, touching his ear, said “this animal is like a fan”; a third, touching his legs, described the animal as a pillar.

Secondly, the paradoxical standpoint led to the emphasis on transforming man, rather than to the development of dogma on the one hand, and science on the other. From the Indian, Chinese and mystical standpoints, the religious task of man is not to think right, but to act right, and/or to become one with the One in the act of concentrated meditation.

The opposite is true for the main stream of Western thought. Since one expected to find the ultimate truth in the right thought, major emphasis was on thought, although right action was held to be important too. In religious development this led to the formulation of dogmas,