The Serpent | 75human being to God and to human fellowship. At present, nearly every religious
and socialist institution, whether a denomination, a party, or an intellectual ten-
dency, counts as fictitious. This partially explains why religion and socialism are
so often found in opposition, rather than in alliance. But there is hope: “Today
appearance is currently opposed to appearance. But within the hidden sphere
of the future the meeting has begun to take place.” This confidence presumably
derives from the activity of the religious socialists themselves. The final thesis
reiterates Buber’s Landauerian conviction regarding ends and means. Just as one
must “live one’s beliefs” in religion, so one must “live one’s accomplishments” in
socialism, which is to say, one must prefigure in one’s forms of organization the
kind of society sought by that organization. Violence and hierarchy must now
and always fail to achieve an egalitarian, nonhierarchical society, no matter how
expedient they seem.
In addition to his considerations of religion and politics in the Bible and in
theory, Buber sought to work out his theopolitical quandaries through the study
of an admired hero. “Gandhi, Politik, und Wir” (1930) was published in the trans-
denominational journal Die Kreatur, the editorship of which Buber shared with a
Catholic and a Protestant; this context reveals something about who the “we” of
the title might be. Buber singles out Gandhi, who at the time of his writing was
leading thousands of Indians in civil disobedience along the course of the Salt
March, as the contemporary exemplar of the theopolitical problematic. The Salt
March itself was not merely a tactic, deploying tax refusal as a weapon against
British colonial authority, but a religious experiment by Gandhi to discover just
“how much is Caesar’s.” But how does one read the results of such an experiment?
What does it mean for religion if the tactic is successful? If it fails? Gandhi, “as
no other man of our age, shows us the difficulty of the situation, the depth of its
problematic, the manifoldness of the battle fronts, the potency of the contradic-
tion, which is encompassed by paradox and must be endured in every hour.”^56
The essay opens with a consideration, once again, of the question of success, in
relation to Gandhi’s efforts. Gandhi knows that the British fear him because of the
masses he appears to command; that is to say, he seems to wield power of a type that
the British recognize. However, Gandhi himself fears this power, unable to gauge to
what extent his followers internalize his religious message as opposed to following
him blindly. Buber quotes Gandhi to the effect that he would be more comfortable
in a minority of one, standing firmly on his own truthful ground, and asks: “That
is unquestionably the statement of a truthful man.... But can this also be regarded
as the statement of a political man, that is, a man who undertakes to influence the
formation of institutions and their operation? In other words: is the statement of
Gandhi’s that we have quoted a declaration against lies in politics or is it a decla-
ration against politics?”^57 It seems at first that it may be the latter. “I seem to take
part in politics,” Gandhi writes, “but this is only because politics today strangles us