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Ecstatic Confessions is Martin Buber's unique, personal gathering of the testimonies of mystics throughout the centuries expressing their encounters with the divine. It features the author's seminal introduction to mysticism, "Ecstasy and Confession," which probes the nature of what Buber terms the "most inward of all experiences. . . . God's highest gift."
Buber sifted through texts from oriental, pagan, Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim sources down the centuries to cull those moving records that manage to convey some quality of an experience that is essentially beyond the power of words to capture. Ecstatic Confessions orchestrates these reports from the edge of human experience into a revealing look at the nature of the ecstatic experience itself and the tension arising from the mystic's compelling need to give witness to an event that can never truly be verbalized.
Ecstatic Confessions illuminates the intellectual development of its author even as it probes the almost insurmountable barrier between language and authentic mystical experience, which is, in essence, beyond the grasp of rational constructs.
Martin Buber
Martin Buber (1878–1965) was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher, essayist, translator, and editor most known for his German translation of the Bible, his religious existentialism philosophy, and his role in the Zionist movement. Buber grew up in Vienna during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which fell after World War I. He was raised by his grandparents, who introduced him to Zionism and Hasidism at a young age. Buber had a knack for languages, learning more than ten during his school years. After school, Buber was recruited to lecture on Jewish religious studies at universities, educational centers, and Jewish groups. In 1938, as the Nazi Party gained power, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem. He continued to lecture in Jerusalem at Hebrew University. Known for politically utopian ideals including anarchism and socialism, Buber became a leader in the Zionist movement and supported a bi-national solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. In 1951, he received the Goethe Prize of the University of Hamburg and in 1953, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 1958, he won the Israel Prize. In 1963, he won the Erasmus Award in Amsterdam. He lived and worked in Jerusalem until his death in 1965.
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