The Seba library treats I Thou in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Yalom, Irvin D., Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), Augustine).
The very ‘I’ is different in the two situations. It is not the ‘I’ that has pre-eminent reality — an ‘I’ that can decide to relate to ‘Its’ or ‘Thous’ that are objects floating into one’s field of vision. No, the ‘I’ is ‘betweenness’
Yalom argues, following Buber, that the I-Thou relation is not a mode chosen by a pre-existing subject but the constitutive ground in which the ‘I’ itself is shaped and perpetually recreated.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
Behold, dear Lord, I Thy servant stand before Thee, speechless, motionless, awaiting the light of spiritual knowledge that comes from Thee.
The Philokalia’s contemplative address to God instantiates an I-Thou structure of radical receptivity in which the self stands wholly open before an irreducibly personal divine ‘Thou.’
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
I entered into the very seat of my mind (which it hath in my memory, inasmuch as the mind remembers itself also), neither wert Thou there: for as Thou art not a corporeal image… so neither art Thou the mind itself
Augustine’s inward search performs an I-Thou dynamic in which God as ‘Thou’ cannot be collapsed into any objective content of the mind, remaining irreducibly other even in intimate indwelling.
, Confessions, 397supporting
Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.
Augustine’s opening invocation enacts the primary I-Thou address: the human self is constituted as a ‘restless I’ whose telos is relational repose in the divine ‘Thou.’
, Confessions, 397supporting
Yet suffer me to speak unto Thy mercy, me, dust and ashes. Yet suffer me to speak, since I speak to Thy mercy, and not to scornful man.
Augustine’s insistence on speaking to divine mercy rather than to human judgment frames the I-Thou address as the only register in which authentic self-disclosure becomes possible.
, Confessions, 397supporting
There was a time when I, poor wretch, was not; before my life and consciousness and personality began to exist. It is to Thy mercy that I owe my life.
John of Damascus employs the second-person address to God as an onto-relational acknowledgment that the very existence of the ‘I’ is grounded in the prior call of the divine ‘Thou.’
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
He reveals his own treacherousness, stands before his son in naked humanity, presenting a truth about fatherhood and manhood: I, a father, a man, cannot be trusted.
Hillman’s account of paternal betrayal gestures toward a collapsed I-Thou encounter in which the father’s nakedly human fallibility paradoxically deepens rather than destroys genuine relational meeting.
, Senex & Puer, 2015aside
How hast Thou loved us, good Father, who sparedst not Thine only Son, but deliveredst Him up for us ungodly!
Augustine’s exclamatory address stages the I-Thou encounter as one of overwhelming asymmetrical gift, where the divine initiative precedes and enables any human response.
, Confessions, 397aside