Contributors<\/p>\n
Renate Bethge: Author and editor, niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and widow of Bonhoeffer\u2019s close friend Eberhard Bethge, who initiated the widespread publication of Bonhoeffer\u2019s writings after his death and authored the definitive biography. Her most recent publications include: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life (Minneapolis: Fortress Publishers, 2004).<\/p>\n
Brian Brock: Lecturer in Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He was a visiting scholar in the theological faculty of Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2003\u20132004, and is author of Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).<\/p>\n
Stanley Hauerwas: Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law. His numerous book publications include: Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Non-Violence (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), and The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).<\/p>\n
Nancy Lukens: Professor of German and Women\u2019s Studies, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of New Hampshire, USA. She is co-translator of Bonhoeffer\u2019s Sanctorum Communio (DBWE 1) and Letters and Papers from Prison (DBWE 8), and translator of Fiction from Tegel Prison (DBWE 7).<\/p>\n
Michael Northcott: Professor of Ethics in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. His recent publications include A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 2007), and (ed. with Kyle Vanhoutan) Dominion, Diversity and Destruction: Religion and Science in the Struggle to Save Nature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).<\/p>\n
Oliver O\u2019Donovan: Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the School of Divinity, New College, University of Edinburgh; previously Regius Professor of Moral & Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. His numerous publications include: (with Joan Lockwood O\u2019Donovan) Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics Past and Present (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) and The Ways of Judgment. The Bampton Lectures 2003 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).<\/p>\n
Stephen Plant: Lecturer in Theology at the University of Durham. Former Director of Studies at Wesley House in the Cambridge Theological Federation and affiliated lecturer in the University of Cambridge. His publications include Bonhoeffer (London: Continuum, 2004) and Forming Character, Commanding Obedience: Uses of the Bible in Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Ethics\u2019 (Frankfurt\/M., New York: Peter Lang, 2009).<\/p>\n
Craig J. Slane: Owen Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, Department of Bible and Theology, Simpson University, Redding, California. In 2002, he was the Eberhard Bethge scholar in residence in Berlin-Charlottenburg, working daily in the Bonhoeffer House. Recent publications include: Bonhoeffer as Martyr (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004).<\/p>\n
Hans G. Ulrich: Professor emeritus for Systematic Theology and Ethics at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, and former president of the European Ethics Society (Societas Ethica). His numerous publications include Wie Gesch\u00f6pfe leben. Konturen evangelischer Ethik (M\u00fcnster, Hamburg, Berlin, Wien, London: LIT Verlag, 2005).<\/p>\n
Bernd Wannenwetsch: University Lecturer in Ethics, Oxford University; formerly taught Systematic Theology and Ethics at the Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Mainz. His publications include: Political Worship. Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford: OUP, 2004) and Members of One Another. Political Theology in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).<\/p>\n
Philip G. Ziegler: Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is author of Doing Theology When God Is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Kr\u00f6tke (Frankfurt\/M., New York: Peter Lang, 2007) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian of the Word of God (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).<\/p>\n
1<\/p>\n
Introduction<\/p>\n
Who is Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Us Today?<\/p>\n
Bernd Wannenwetsch<\/p>\n
I. Which Bonhoeffer, whose Bonhoeffer?<\/p>\n
The majority of contributions in this volume were first presented at the international conference, \u2018Bonhoeffer\u2019s Theology through the Lens of his Poetry\u2019, that was held at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, during 4\u20136 January 2006. This gathering was part of a worldwide series of events at the centenary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer\u2019s birth and the sixtieth anniversary of his martyrdom. As the purpose of this conference was not primarily to learn more about Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology, but to become itself an exercise in theologizing with Bonhoeffer, to continue the living Bonhoeffer tradition, it was of special importance to invite as much participation from, and interaction between, the participants as possible. The spread of participants was notably wide, ranging from theology graduate students and their academic teachers, pastors representing the generation of British Bonhoeffer renaissance in the 1960s, up to some in their eighties who could have been candidates for confirmation during Bonhoeffer\u2019s pastorate in London in the 1930s.
\nOne of the highlights of the conference was a theatrical experiment with philosopher and playwright Douglas Huff\u2019s play about Bonhoeffer\u2019s last days, entitled \u2018Emil\u2019s Enemies\u2019. Conference members engaged in small group, ad hoc performances of the play, followed by a staged performance of the last scene for the whole \u2018audience\u2019 to watch\u2014a dramatic spiritual dispute between Bonhoeffer and his prison guard. A particularly exciting moment occurred in one such theatre group when Renate Bethge, Bonhoeffer\u2019s niece, the widow of his best friend, and one of the conference\u2019s keynote speakers, actually played herself\u2014and quite convincingly! However, following the performance, and after admitting how much she liked the play as a whole, she made the thought-provoking qualification, \u2018except that Dietrich was really very different\u2019. When the eyewitness felt that the \u2018real\u2019 Bonhoeffer was different from the one portrayed in the play, the question arose: who actually \u2018owns\u2019 the man? Could there be an authority to tell us who Bonhoeffer really was, and what his life, theology, and death were really about? This question could not be settled simply by establishing which perspective or approach afforded the best view of the historical facts. While we might expect his niece and then wife of his best friend to have a different\u2014private\u2014perception of the man than a public perspective of the historical Bonhoeffer would assume, the question that ultimately interests us is not who Bonhoeffer was, but who he is\u2014who he is for us today. This is the sort of question appropriately aimed at such figures as the Church Fathers, as we inquire into the meaning of the cloud of witness in a particular instance. The former question must be subservient to the latter: historical knowledge of context and events, research into biographical, ecclesiastical, and political circumstances, are meaningful to us not because they explain Bonhoeffer as a phenomenon, but insofar as they actually help us understand what he communicated back then and what he has to say to us today.
\nAs with any Church Fathers who speak to subsequent generations, each generation needs to ask those same questions in its own way and seek answers according to their own unique historical vocation. As it was aptly demonstrated in the Oxford conference, and its unusual spread of participants, there are indeed a number of (rather different) \u2018Bonhoeffers\u2019\u2014the hero of political resistance, the stimulator of a new spiritual this-worldliness, the political theologian, the post-liberal prophet, and more. This variety is nothing to worry about per se, but only as long as the various claims to \u2018own\u2019 Bonhoeffer are willing to engage with others and learn from each other. Typically, \u2018camps\u2019 in Bonhoeffer interpretation are bound to a particular selection of his work (for example: Discipleship or Letters and Papers from Prison) and aligned to specific topics such as the criticism of \u2018cheap grace\u2019 or the suggestion of a \u2018non-religious interpretation\u2019 of the Bible. It is certainly true that Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been claimed in ideological fashion like few other authors have, and although nobody would intentionally wish to be one-sided or narrow, the choice of an entry point into the author\u2019s theology by identifying a focal vision or naming one or another core concepts has often resulted in this kind of one-sided perception or ideological partisanship.<\/p>\n
II. Poetry and theology\u2014illumination and horizon<\/p>\n
The contributions in this book aim to offer an alternative by approaching Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology through fresh interpretations of the ten poems he wrote in Tegel prison. Although limited in number and in terms of the time-span of production (from June to December 1944), these poems cover a wide range of topics, and taken together provide the sort of comprehensiveness that promises to counter-balance conceptual hypertrophy. Although we have to take into account Bonhoeffer\u2019s own verdict: \u2018I am certainly no poet!\u2019, and although the activity of writing poetry came to him only late in his life during his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer\u2019s poems have shown themselves to merit intensive engagement much more than, say, his ventures into drama or novel writing. While the latter were short-lived attempts that resulted in abandoned fragments, his poetry writing turned out a lasting activity that was taken up over and over again from the first attempt in 1944 until his death. All the poems that we have are Bonhoeffer\u2019s own approved and finished work, most of which have gone through several traceable revisions.
\nDue to their relative shortness, these poems can be comfortably brought into conversation with each other as well as with Bonhoeffer\u2019s theological prose. Although their difference from the Germanic, heavy-laden, and conceptual language of his prose is stark, the poems prove a useful lens through which the concepts can be visualized in sharper contours. This is particularly valid for theological concepts, since poetic language is of a somewhat apophatic nature, suited to express the thought that can hardly be thought, the insight that is only just within reach. Poetic language is capable of capturing the coincidence of opposites, of expressing harmonious tensions as well as demarcating rapture and fracture; it withstands any interpretative unilateralism, enables risk of imagination while at the same time protecting it from being trivialized.
\nWhile all this is true of poetry in general, and especially applicable to theological poetry, there is much in Bonhoeffer\u2019s case that suggests a peculiar suitability. The orchestrated nature of poetic language seems a particularly appropriate medium to capture the complexity of Bonhoeffer\u2019s theological thought whose richness in overtones is more reminiscent of musical cohesion than that of architecture. Whereas Barth\u2019s theology amounts to an impressive architectonic system in the Church Dogmatics, where every brick is accurately positioned to stabilize a precise number of surrounding bricks, Bonhoeffer\u2019s theologizing follows a deliberate non-system-building rationale that is marked by an inner sense of the dramatic instead of the static. \u2018As usual, I\u2019m being led on more by an instinctive feeling for questions that will arise later than by any conclusion that I\u2019ve reached about them.\u2019
\nIn an instructive way, this openness to divine illumination is reflected both in the actual composing of poetic material as well as in Bonhoeffer\u2019s reminiscing about the production process in his correspondence with Bethge. In the letter dated 5 June 1944 that came with the first poem (\u2018The Past\u2019), Bonhoeffer remarks about the \u2018crucial part\u2019 in the last few lines: \u2018Strangely enough they came out in rhyme of their own accord. The whole thing was composed in a few hours, and I didn\u2019t try to polish it.\u2019 The poietic process of thinking and writing poetry is by nature open to illumination as \u2018being led\u2019 in one\u2019s thinking, and hence particularly suited to theology\u2014as long as God is not reduced to the mere \u2018subject matter\u2019 of theology but allowed His own initiative in the poietic moment. That the author experienced lines as \u2018coming out in rhyme of their own accord\u2019 is not to be misunderstood, though, as immediately theological. The sort of illumination that a rhyme scheme invites results often enough in \u2018enforced\u2019 harmonics that are as predicable as profane. Rhyming does invite illumination, but it cannot command or direct it. Illumination does not intrude from anywhere or rise like a phoenix from the ashes, but rather it emerges from a background of images and ideas that shape the author\u2019s imaginative horizon, from which the illumination, as it were, \u2018chooses\u2019.
\nIn the poem \u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019, Bonhoeffer characterizes Christians as those who \u2018stand by God in his suffering\u2019. In a lost letter by Eberhard Bethge, in which he commented on the poem, the friend appears to have questioned the notion of \u2018standing by\u2019 as potentially too static. Bonhoeffer\u2019s reply dated 10 August alerts Bethge to the following: \u2018 \u201cStand by God\u201d probably arose from thinking about the cross.\u2019 This throw-away comment is instructive about the way in which poetry works with ideas, as these are not construed, but \u2018arise\u2019. In the process of thinking or writing in lines, verses, stanzas, etc., ideas \u2018emerge\u2019 from the rich horizon that familiar (in Bonhoeffer\u2019s case, biblical) images or concepts (of the theological tradition) provide for the author\u2019s mind and imagination. An idea, a concept, a word may come to mind as \u2018fitting\u2019 at first only in a formal respect (as an alliteration or perhaps completing a rhyme), but is revealed afterwards as fitting in a deeper, pneumatological sense\u2014as a matter of the illuminatio Spiritu Sancti: \u2018It probably arose from the cross.\u2019<\/p>\n
III. Poetry as ecclesiastical communication<\/p>\n
Another characteristic of his poetry writing reflects upon the connection between biography and theology that has fuelled enthusiasm in Bonhoeffer studies from the first. Composing poems was more than engaging in auto-therapeutic exercises for the inmate theologian. Instead of resulting from lonely soliloquy, these poems were a matter of communicating with friends, lover, and family. Although perhaps at first attempted as a sort of substitute for the impossible actual conversation with those who mattered most to him or had proven to be stimulating interlocutors, writing poetry became Bonhoeffer\u2019s mode of conversing with those who had contributed to his horizon up to this point: friends and family, but also hymn writers, biblical authors, and eventually God Himself: \u2018whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine\u2019.
\nBethge, in response to receiving the poem \u2018Stations on the Road to Freedom\u2019, perceptively expressed his gratitude for the gift of the friend making himself vulnerable and exposed in the way that concurs with poetic production:<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t give anything more personal than a poem. And you could hardly give me greater joy. There is no greater self-sacrifice, no better way of signifying an otherwise unattainable nearness than in a poem. And it is probably the form, because it makes visible the inwardness that is bound up and held in check within it. Unlimited surrender of the spirit awakens anxiety in the receiver. But this restrained surrender seems to me to be the highest degree of friendship and understanding. And as a result there is something very cheering and stimulating about it. Its touch is steadier and more far-reaching than that of a letter. Many thanks.<\/p>\n
Brian Brock, in his contribution to this volume, puts the communication of Bonhoeffer\u2019s poetry in the wider context of the poetic make-up of his life as a theologian:<\/p>\n
He [Bonhoeffer] undoubtedly harboured understandable reservations about exposing himself, both artistically and personally. He may well have had an aptitude for poetry never before recognized, having been stifled under cultural and temperamental reserve. Yet he ventured such writing because he had been taught by a tradition of scriptural interpretation to venture a very specific sort of intimacy with God. Having learned from Luther and the Psalms what mattered in one\u2019s converse with God, and how actually to go about it, he came both to understand the importance of the inner, affective relationship with God, and what builds and sustains the affective side of communication with God. Having learned to converse with God through poetry, it is not fanciful to suggest that he was emboldened to write poetry as a form of love for humans. He wrote poetry to those he loved, who shaped him, and who he was shaped by: his family, his friends, his fianc\u00e9e, and in and with them all, his church.<\/p>\n
Brock seems to me just right in expanding the list of addressees of Bonhoeffer\u2019s poetry beyond those who were marked as their first recipients to include \u2018in and with them all, his church\u2019. The point here, as I see it, is not so much that his inner circle was made up of fellow believers (which would not necessarily be true, at least not in regards to some family members and fellow-conspirators). The point of including the Church in the addressees of Bonhoeffer\u2019s prison poems is that they represent from the start a mode of ecclesiastical communication, shaped by the conversational circles that Bonhoeffer had available in his cell: from the biblical authors and hymn books (the Psalter) by way of the hymn writers of his church tradition (notably Paul Gerhardt) up to the theological interlocutors and authors of the books on his small prison desk. The fact that Bonhoeffer\u2019s poems are only fully intelligible when being read as an instance of immersing himself into the stream of conversation that is the Christian theological tradition allows us and even compels us to read these poems as being addressed to us today. Hence the purpose of this volume is to explore the poems as a way of understanding Bonhoeffer, the man and his theology, as a way of understanding our own vocation in our own day that is both similar and dissimilar to Bonhoeffer\u2019s day.<\/p>\n
IV. Precursors\u2014translations\u2014order of presentation<\/p>\n
The idea to make Bonhoeffer\u2019s poems the subject matter of a publication in their own right is not new. Already shortly after the end of the war, Eberhard Bethge published some of them in a booklet entitled, Auf dem Wege zur Freiheit: Gedichte aus Tegel (1946), even before the poems were incorporated in the famous collection Letters and Papers from Prison (1952). Other German publications by Johann Christoph Hampe (1976), and J\u00fcrgen Henkys (1986, 2005), presented the collection of poems together with interpretive attempts by the editors. For the English-speaking world, Edwin Robertson provided a similar service by publishing new translations of the poems together with short commentaries under the title The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1998).
\nThe authors of this book are indebted to those earlier attempts, and in particular to Henkys\u2019 detailed research on the genesis and background of every poem, which proved a valuable source and inspiration for many of the contributions presented here. The difference that we hope this book will make is in the deliberate emphasis on interpreting Bonhoeffer\u2019s poems in a way that helps us better understand his theology as a way of better understanding our world and vocation today. This purpose is also reflected in the range of authors in this volume, which brings into collaboration Bonhoeffer experts with others more well-known for their work in other fields such as moral theology.
\nA word on the translation of the poems: As there is no such thing as a \u2018perfect\u2019 translation, especially not of poetic material, the decision was taken to make the German originals available alongside the respective English version (either by John Bowden from LPP or Edwin Robertson) that was deemed most useful by each contributing author. It would have been ideal in many cases to use the new translations by Nancy Lukens as they will appear in the forthcoming volume of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works edition (DBWE 8). Due to the timing of the latter\u2019s publication this proved impossible, but the authors of this volume are grateful to the translator and publishers (Fortress Press) for the permission to access the new translations and make reference to them whenever it seemed appropriate for interpretative purposes. Nancy Lukens, in her own contribution to this volume (with Renate Bethge), of course, uses her new translation.
\nUnlike earlier publications of Bonhoeffer\u2019s poems, this volume does not present them in the order of production, but in the order that seemed to promise the best dramatic reading experience, according to the actual interpretations offered in the chapters of this book. Needless to say, the contributions can be read in whatever sequence suggests itself to the reader. Yet, the order chosen is appealing in particular as it \u2018groups\u2019 poems together that either have a common subject matter or converge in a particular approach or emphasis. So, for example, \u2018Powers of Good\u2019, \u2018Sorrow and Joy\u2019, and \u2018The Friend\u2019 all emphasize the significance of \u2018fidelity\u2019; \u2018Stations on the Road to Freedom\u2019 and \u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019 reflect on suffering as a hallmark of the Christian vocation; \u2018Jonah\u2019 and \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 both use Biblical archetypes for the sake of testing and clarifying Bonhoeffer\u2019s mission in regards to the concept of vicarious representative action; \u2018Who Am I?\u2019 and \u2018The Past\u2019 coincide in dealing with the author\u2019s painful self-inspection and troubled questioning. Furthermore, while \u2018Who am I?\u2019 and \u2018The Past\u2019 (which have been placed here first) each present their own sort of \u2018solution\u2019 to these questions, so it can be argued that \u2018Jonah\u2019 and \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 (placed at the end) act as a perfect frame by providing an even clearer answer: instead of answering the question, \u2018Who am I\u2019?, in the immediacy and urgency demanded by the quest for the modern self, through the typological interpretation of the Biblical narratives, the author has been set free to understand his vocation, and hence real identity, in being a Jonah, a Moses, or a Christ to his neighbours.
\nThe biographical, political, and theological impact of the chosen order can be explored in many other ways. However, perhaps most important is the way in which an order invites exploration of the individual poems in the light of the others and the surrounding theological prose. As with the best seating order at a banquet, it is always only as good as the conversations that actually ensue.<\/p>\n
V. Thanks<\/p>\n
I would like to thank the following institutions and individuals who made the conference itself possible and assisted with the works that lead to the publication of this book. For supporting the 2006 conference financially, logistically or morally: the Anglican-Lutheran Meissen Commission, the British Academy, the Higher Education Academy\u2019s Subject Centre for Philosophical and Theological Studies, Harris Manchester College, and the Theology Faculty, Oxford. For their help with organizing the conference: Dr. Robert Bates and my doctoral students Michael Black and Guido de Graaff. For permission to use and stage the play \u2018Emil\u2019s Enemies\u2019: Professor Douglas Huff. For permission to use choral music based on Bonhoeffer\u2019s prayers, and for performing it during the course of the conference: composer Philip Moore and Christ Church Cathedral Singers. For editorial help with this volume: Matthew D. Kirkpatrick and Casey Cep; T&T Clark and Thomas Kraft for their patience and collaboration.<\/p>\n
2<\/p>\n
\u2018Who Am I?\u2019<\/p>\n
Human Identity and the Spiritual Disciplines in the Witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer<\/p>\n
Michael Northcott<\/p>\n
\u2018Wer Bin Ich?\u2019<\/p>\n
Wer bin ich? Sie sagen mir oft,
\nich tr\u00e4te aus meiner Zelle
\ngelassen und heiter und fest,
\nwie ein Gutsherr aus seinem Schlo\u00df.<\/p>\n
Wer bin ich? Sie sagen mir oft,
\nich spr\u00e4che mit meinen Bewachern
\nfrei und freundlich und klar,
\nals h\u00e4tte ich zu gebieten.<\/p>\n
Wer bin ich? Sie sagen mir auch,
\nich tr\u00fcge die Tage des Ungl\u00fccks
\ngleichm\u00fctig, l\u00e4chelnd und stolz,
\nwie einer, der Siegen gewohnt ist.<\/p>\n
Bin ich das wirklich, was andere von mir sagen?
\nOder bin ich nur das, was ich selbst von mir wei\u00df?
\nunruhig, sehns\u00fcchtig, krank, wie ein Vogel im K\u00e4fig,
\nringend nach Lebensatem, als w\u00fcrgte mir einer die Kehle,
\nhungernd nach Farben, nach Blumen, nach Vogelstimmen,
\nd\u00fcrstend nach guten Worten, nach menschlicher N\u00e4he,
\nzitternd vor Zorn \u00fcber Willk\u00fcr und kleinlichste Kr\u00e4nkung,
\numgetrieben vom Warten auf gro\u00dfe Dinge,
\nohnm\u00e4chtig bangend um Freunde in endloser Ferne,
\nm\u00fcde und zu leer zum Beten, zum Denken, zum Schaffen,
\nmatt und bereit, von allem Abschied zu nehmen?<\/p>\n
Wer bin ich? Der oder jener?
\nBin ich denn heute dieser und morgen ein anderer?
\nBin ich beides zugleich? Vor Menschen ein Heuchler
\nund vor mir selbst ein ver\u00e4chtlich wehleidiger Schw\u00e4chling?
\nOder gleicht, was in mir noch ist, dem geschlagenen Heer,
\ndas in Unordnung weicht vor schon gewonnenem Sieg?<\/p>\n
Wer bin ich? Einsames Fragen treibt mit mir Spott.
\nWer ich auch bin, Du kennst mich, Dein bin ich, o Gott!<\/p>\n
Who am I?<\/p>\n
Who am I? They often tell me
\nI would step from my cell\u2019s confinement
\ncalmly, cheerfully, firmly,
\nlike a squire from his country-house.<\/p>\n
Who am I? They often tell me
\nI would talk to my warders
\nfreely and friendly and clearly,
\nas though it were mine to command.<\/p>\n
Who am I? They also tell me
\nI would bear the days of misfortune
\nequably, smilingly, proudly,
\nlike one accustomed to win.<\/p>\n
Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
\nOr am I only what I know of myself,
\nrestless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
\nstruggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,
\nyearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
\nthirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,
\ntrembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation,
\ntossing in expectation of great events,
\npowerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
\nweary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
\nfaint, and ready to say farewell to it all?<\/p>\n
Who am I? This or the other?
\nAm I one person today and tomorrow another?
\nAm I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
\nand before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
\nOr is something within me still like a beaten army,
\nFleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?<\/p>\n
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
\nWhoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.<\/p>\n
(Translation: John Bowden)<\/p>\n
The survival of the poems we engage with in this volume is testament to the character and courage of the man who has become Protestantism\u2019s greatest twentieth century saint. Dietrich Bonhoeffer displayed such calmness and inner strength in Tegel prison, and later at the Gestapo prison at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, that he won the admiration of his captors who offered to smuggle his papers and poems out to his friends. In response to a letter from his mother praising how he and his brother were coping with their trials, Bonhoeffer suggests that this capacity to suffer with equanimity and without self-pity \u2018is probably something we have inherited\u2019 since she herself had so often displayed complete calm and refused to show emotion at times of serious illness in the family. Not only was he calm but in the midst of his long interrogation, and strenuous efforts to hide the activities and names of his co-conspirators, he also continued an extensive correspondence and writing programme, and engaged often in conversation and counsel with his fellow prisoners and some of his captors. Those whom he met in Tegel spoke of the extraordinary practical assistance, friendship, and spiritual solace he gave to those around him, and of his powerful witness to the Gospel of Christ.
\nIn the second and third stanzas Bonhoeffer notes how those around him observed his power to command, and his apparent calmness in the face of great trials. But in the following stanzas we are given a glimpse behind this calm and commanding public face, which can create order and respect even in the midst of interrogation and incarceration. He describes a conflict between the public face of one emboldened by his identity as redeemed by Christ\u2014\u2018O God, I am thine\u2019\u2014and that \u2018other\u2019 identity, the one he describes as \u2018a contemptible woebegone weakling \u2026 Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved\u2019. But, this inner struggle does not reduce him to bouts of depression like those he had earlier experienced. As Eberhard Bethge suggests, he was buoyed up and sustained by the moral struggle of the plot against Hitler, and subsequent efforts to conceal it, and this saved him from melancholy.
\nIn the letter to Bethge that precedes this poem, Bonhoeffer disavows introspection, and criticizes accounts of the \u2018inner life\u2019 that posit an internal domain, hidden from outward view, in which God rules the individual. He observes how most of those who are confined in Tegel prison manifest a deep mistrust of others, both their jailors and their fellow prisoners, and suspect that even good acts are done for inscrutable but essentially selfish ends. Interestingly, he compares this suspicious tendency with the publication by gutter journalists\u2014the English phrase these days is \u2018tabloid newspapers\u2019\u2014of intimate and scandalous aspects of public figures. It is \u2018the displacement of God from the world, and from the public part of human life\u2019 that leads to the modern attempt to secure self-identity in some private part of the self. It also generates the modern suspicion of all exterior good acts and the effort to subvert them by delving behind public goods to some more truly personal private sinfulness; all of this manifests \u2018a basic antisocial attitude of mistrust and suspicion\u2019 that is \u2018the revolt of inferiority\u2019.
\nCommenting on the poem and the preceding letter, Bernd Wannenwetsch, our good friend who has brought these papers together, suggests along with Rowan Williams that this apparent dismissal of the inward dimension represents a critique of the modern hermeneutics of suspicion. The hermeneutics of suspicion arises from Descartes\u2019 recovery of the early Christian heresy of mind\/body dualism, and especially the Gnostic idea of the body as the prison of the soul. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud mediate this recovered dualism in their respective metaphysics of society, morality, and the psyche. All three assumed an intrinsic conflict between external acts and interior states in the human condition. Hidden or suppressed drives\u2014class conflict, weakness, the id\u2014become the principal agencies of the social, the moral and the soul, and only social or psychotherapeutic analysts, or \u2018supermen\u2019, can see through appearances to the true inner condition of each. Wannenwetsch enlists Bonhoeffer, and this poem, in the post-liberal attempt to recover the moral self through the public worship and the politics of the body of Christ. He suggests that Bonhoeffer\u2019s rejection of inwardness, and the pattern the poem evidences of lament and praise, reflects his \u2018hearing\u2019 of the Word in public worship. The claim is that Bonhoeffer sees Christian identity as intrinsically social and as arising from the invocation of God in the public life of the worshipping community. On this account Bonhoeffer anticipates the suspicion of Rowan Williams and Stanley Hauerwas of modern accounts of interiority and inwardness. They critique such accounts as evidence of the distorted effects of a mass society and modern individualism on the human person, and of the arrogance of those who wish to claim their lives as their own creations rather than as belonging to, and constituted by God or God\u2019s story. The post-liberal approach argues for the central and constitutive importance of the narratives of scripture, their reading (and being heard) in public worship, and the way in which this reading and hearing shapes communities of Christians in those moral excellences that characterize true discipleship. On this account, disposition depends above all on synergy between inner and outer. Whereas piety leads to an unhealthy dependence on religious experience divorced from the outer realm of communities, roles and relationships, the public reading and proclamation of the Word trains individuals to narrate their lives in association with the narratives of God\u2019s way with God\u2019s people.
\nThere is much in Wannenwetsch\u2019s account of this poem I would wish to affirm. The poem is indeed much like an individual Psalm of Lament in form. for Bonhoeffer, resolution of the putative conflict between inner and outer, desire and agency, intention and act, public and private, is found by analogy with the Psalmist who when he dwells on the desires of the heart apart from God is driven to despair. The Psalmist recalls the joy of God\u2019s presence in the Temple (Psalm 40), and that God\u2019s knowledge of him is greater even than his own (Psalm 139), his tendency to despair is replaced with praise and wonder at the glory of God. Like the Psalmist, Bonhoeffer acknowledges his own inner sense of division and of struggle and like the Psalmist also he sets this struggle in the context of his relations, or deprivation of relations, with other creatures:<\/p>\n
Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
\nOr am I only what I know of myself,
\nrestless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
\nstruggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,
\nyearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
\nthirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness \u2026<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer first acknowledges the outward face of respect and dignity that he, like the Davidic Psalmist, shows to the public world. And he then laments the inward sense of abandonment and desolation, of unworthiness and weakness that contrasts with this outer face:<\/p>\n
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
\nAm I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
\nand before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?<\/p>\n
And this lament is resolved, as it is for the Psalmist, by the acknowledgement that in the end it is God\u2019s knowledge of him that is superior to his own knowledge of himself or to the public face that others claim to see:<\/p>\n
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
\nWhoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.<\/p>\n
However, the account of the poem as critiquing the modern quest for the authentic self is hard to sustain given that this poem could only have been written by someone who had a deep sense of the importance of human interiority for personal identity, and who engaged in self-analysis, as Edwin Robertson suggests. What I take to be the misreading of the poem manifests a crucial failing in post-liberal narratives of the self and this is that instead of repairing the public-private division they simply move this division into the life of the Church so that the publicity of the Church\u2019s reading of liturgy and proclamation of scripture is overemphasized while the equally important dimension of the formative spiritual disciplines of individual confession, meditation, and private prayer is missing.
\nFar from dismissing accounts of the authentic self and interiority, when we read this poem in the context of Bonhoeffer\u2019s writing on the self, especially Sanctorum Communio, his works of spiritual counsel, including Life Together and Discipleship, as well as LPP, we find that Bonhoeffer is very interested indeed in recovering the authenticity of the self\u2014\u2018who I really am\u2019\u2014and hence a true individualism, as opposed to the fictional selves fostered by the will to power and the technological and bureaucratic age. Bonhoeffer makes no sharp division between public worship and private piety because he retains a spiritual and societal account of the self that is at variance with the account of the political self offered by Wannenwetsch and Williams. Bonhoeffer\u2019s distinctive accounts of the self in community and of spiritual discipline, and his practices of communal and private devotion, all of them reflected in this poem, present us with a portrait of the authentic self that is by no means dismissive of the language of the heart and narratives of inwardness.
\nIn his theological writing from his first dissertation Sanctorum Communio Bonhoeffer develops an account of the individual before God and in community. But against the reliance of modern narratives of the self on autonomous reason and inner feeling, Bonhoeffer argues that moral responsibility is the mark of true personhood. He proposes that the truly authentic person is one who is \u2018in the situation of responsibility, passionate ethical struggle, confrontation by an overwhelming claim\u2019. The moral struggle produces a spiritual encounter with an insurmountable \u2018barrier\u2019, which is \u2018the absolute duality of God and humanity\u2019. Against the German Church\u2019s baptism of the collective struggle to \u2018defend the fatherland\u2019, Bonhoeffer suggests that the end of humanity\u2019s moral striving is the revelation of humanity\u2019s rebellion against God. Only when a person has encountered the reality of sin, which manifests itself in the break between God and humanity, and between persons, will he come to see that he is not an unencumbered individual but part of a species that is marked indelibly, and unavoidably, by sin. The divine correlate of this revelation of the mark of sin is the presence of Christ in the Church, which is realized in the historical communion of saints. Apart from God, the self lacks truthful foundations and so is in some sense a fiction. The fictional self only acquires a true narrative when the self is incorporated into the body of Christ, which is the true social. The body of Christ is the only true community and it is only as part of this community that individuals are reconciled to God. Hence in the poem there is clearly a balance between the account of the self as \u2018that which other men tell of\u2019 and \u2018what I know of myself\u2019, and any lack of fit between these two is not so much resolved as set in perspective by the concluding recognition \u2018O God, I am thine\u2019.
\nThe project Bonhoeffer set himself in Sanctorum Communio was to repair Hegel\u2019s account of the self and in particular Hegel\u2019s over-identification of the individual with society, an over-identification in the realm of ideas that mapped onto the growing submersion of the individual in the mass society that is so much a feature of modern totalitarian societies, including Germany under the Third Reich, and more recently of modern consumer societies. for Bonhoeffer, the reconciled self is located within the social world of the Church, and not of society as a whole, thus repairing the Hegelian error. It is in the form of the restored image of God, latent in the dignity of the human person, that the individual in the world becomes a responsible agent. And it is precisely the substantive nature of the restored self in Bonhoeffer that provides the continuity between the Church and those other creation mandates\u2014work, family, state\u2014where the grace of God is also at work. Instead of Hegel\u2019s parable of Lord and Bondsman, Bonhoeffer recalls the Psalmist\u2019s celebration of the solidarity of community for \u2018How very good it is when kindred live together in unity\u2019.
\nThis emphasis on the mutual submission of Christians in community had a particular and personal significance for Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a charismatic teacher and a natural born leader of aristocratic bearing and upbringing, and even as a young man he came to realize that his gifts enabled him to dominate others and to order the world around him. These earthly powers, which he had in abundance, had the effect of isolating him from those around him and they prevented him from identifying with other people. As he put it in Act and Being, the dominating individual whose projects shape a world is torn out of \u2018community with God and, therefore, also from that with other human beings\u2019: by making his own life and the world around him his own project, both neighbour and God are reduced to objects for him to possess as projections of his own ego.
\nAgainst this temptation of the masterful self, with its echoes of Kant and Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer asserts, with Hegel, the sociality of the self. The authentic self is not born or formed in isolation but shaped by relationships with God, creation, and other people. Bonhoeffer, like St Paul, sets the self in the Spirit-sanctified community in which the true self, the reconciled self in which \u2018Christ lives\u2019, is restored. In community the moral encounter with other selves becomes redemptive rather than alienating. This spiritual breakthrough, through community, to the true self is part of what Bethge describes as Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018conversion to Jesus Christ\u2019 in the 1930s and is evidenced in the poem \u2018Who Am I?\u2019. Private prayer on its own is burdensome: the inmate longs for community, companionship and for the voices of creation.
\nReconciliation is not then for Bonhoeffer an ideal in history or a possibility of human consciousness realized by the principle of Incarnation. Rather the possibility of the reconciled self is tied to the empirical reality of the sanctified community. There is here no ideal community or Church, of the kind Barth often relies upon, which can offer an extra-empirical, and hence extra-scientific, guarantee of the reign of Christ. Indeed, Bonhoeffer inveighs against ideas of Christian community that turn into idolatrous wish dreams and provide an excuse for removing the self from the messy realities and necessary negotiations of the real empirical Church. In the reconciled community, which is the essence of the Church, the alienation of person from person and persons from God are both overcome, and persons recover their true sociality in life together. The individual apart from the Church is unthinkable. Neither the experience of the Holy nor his powers of reason can overcome the break between humanity and God. Only his enfolding in the prayer, renunciation, and reconciliation that are the marks of restored community can restore human identity from the curse of Adam.
\nRecognition of the central role of Church as devotional community in Bonhoeffer\u2019s account of Christian identity is crucial for understanding his stance with respect to the Nazi emergency and its threat to the true Church. If the empirical Church denies the truth of the sovereign rule of Christ, then the self-identity of the Christian is itself at risk. There is no escape for Bonhoeffer into the idealized physicalism of apostolic succession in Petrine Rome, nor into a Lutheran Volkskirche: if the German Church submits to alien power, then the Church is no longer the place where German people experience the truth of their reconciliation to and incorporation in Christ. More than anything else, it is this that can explain how it was that German Christians could celebrate word and sacrament in a Church located just across the road from the gates of Auschwitz.
\nIf the true self is restored in community, then this makes the poem we have before us all the more poignant. Bonhoeffer\u2019s account of the self finding its true being in solidarity with Christ through Christ\u2019s presence in the Church is not without its ambiguities for an isolated prisoner, cut off from his brothers and sisters in Christ, and from his family. As he acknowledges in Life Together, prisoners who are cut off from the blessing of Christian community may remember, as the Psalmist did, how they \u2018 \u201cwent with the throng, and let them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival\u201d (Ps. 42:5). But they remain alone in distant lands, a scattered seed according to God\u2019s will\u2019. Thirsting for kind words, for human company, the prisoner \u2018need not feel any shame when yearning for the physical presence of other Christians\u2019. And yet it is also important for the individual to be able to be alone, for it is only as alone that the individual can answer the call of God, struggle and pray, and, as Bonhoeffer does in this poem, face death and give a final account before God.
\nIn Life Together Bonhoeffer describes the spiritual journey of the individual who seeks to plumb the \u2018unfathomable depths\u2019 of God\u2019s Word and by meditating on a particular text to discern \u2018that it has something quite personal to say to us for this day and for our standing as Christians\u2019 so that the individual may discover that \u2018it is not only God\u2019s Word for the community of faith, but also God\u2019s Word for me personally. We expose ourselves to the particular sentence and word until we personally are affected by it\u2019. In his cell at Tegel, we know that Bonhoeffer continued with this practice of meditation and indeed he does not lament the near absence of public worship at Tegel. It is rather companionship than true prayer for which he yearns precisely because at Finkenwalde he learned the spiritual discipline of the heart. Contemplative meditation was central to Bonhoeffer\u2019s individual spiritual discipline, because, as Bonhoeffer himself put it, only by standing alone before the Word and in contemplating the image of the Word in Christ crucified, is it possible for the Christian to be \u2018drawn into Christ\u2019s image\u2019 and identified with the form of the crucified One and so be empowered to display the glory of the risen Christ before a watching world.<\/p>\n
Only because he was as we are can we be as he was. Only because we already are made like him can we be \u2018like Christ\u2019. Since we have been formed in the image of Christ, we can live following his example. On this basis, we are now actually able to do those deeds, and in the simplicity of discipleship, to live life in the likeness of Christ. Here simple obedience to the word takes place. I no longer cast even a single glance on my own life, on the new image I bear. For in the same moment that I would desire to see it, I would lose it. For it is, of course, merely the mirror reflection of the image of Jesus Christ upon which I look without ceasing. The followers look only to the one whom they follow.<\/p>\n
for Bonhoeffer, moral responsibility and spiritual formation are intricately connected. Only the one who is formed by meditating on the crucified Christ in the silence of his own heart is enabled in the rest of the day to take responsibility with Christ and so be \u2018the seed of the kingdom of God\u2019 in the world. Written just five years before his decision to engage in the plot to kill Hitler we find here a mystic key, in addition to genetic and theological ones, to the character he displays even in the darkest hours of the path to his own Calvary.
\nSome, including those who taught me theology in the 1970s, misread Bonhoeffer, and not least in some of his comments about a new \u2018religionless Christianity\u2019, in LPP, as advocating the abandonment of traditional Christian spirituality. But on the contrary Bonhoeffer\u2019s concern is not to eschew the \u2018arcane discipline\u2019 of the spiritual life, which is the work of prayer and meditation, but rather to critique the cheap grace of Christendom religiosity that reached its zenith in the sacralization of Nazi paganism. The legacy of a Christendom Church was that it had dispensed a \u2018cheap grace\u2019, giving away \u2018preaching and sacraments cheaply\u2019 and having \u2018absolved an entire people, unquestioned and unconditionally\u2019.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s ecclesial conception of Christian self-identity represents a powerful rejection of Hegelian idealism, the ideological face of Christendom religion in Germany, and of liberal pietism; he rejects both the language of social progress towards the principle of the Incarnation, and the liberal pietist account of god-consciousness. Bonhoeffer\u2019s critique of religion is focused on the privileged position of the Church in the public life of Germany, its efforts to preserve those privileges even under the Third Reich, and on extra-ecclesial accounts of god-consciousness as a psychic capacity. while Bonhoeffer anticipates post-liberal suspicion of liberal apologetic attempts to resist the autonomy of the world from the authority of Christ and the Church, he nonetheless retains the mystical language of \u2018inner detachment\u2019, and devotes much of his energy in leadership at the seminary at Finkenwalde to the recovery of traditional practices of private confession, meditation, and prayer. It was in the practice of private meditation that Bonhoeffer first discerned the particular form of his own calling, to participate in the plot against Hitler, and it was from this same practice that he drew strength to endure courageously his imprisonment and eventual execution. As his actions demonstrate, it was not that he thought that a religionless, post-liberal Christianity would eschew either the traditional spiritual disciplines or responsible public action in the world. Rather the \u2018discipline of the secret\u2019 would preserve Christians from merging their identity in Jesus Christ with their actions in the world or its prevailing ideologies and untruths.
\nIn a letter in which he commends inner detachment, Bonhoeffer speaks of how the loneliness and privation of life in prison threatened and fragmented the selfhood of many prisoners who were fearful when bombs fell, greedy when good food appeared, and despairing when disappointed:<\/p>\n
They miss the fullness of life and the wholeness of an independent existence; everything objective and subjective is dissolved for them into fragments. By contrast Christianity puts us into many different dimensions of life at the same time; we make room in ourselves, to some extent, for God and the whole world. We rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.<\/p>\n
Later in the same letter Bonhoeffer suggests that this holding together of the different facets of life is made possible when Christians stop treating God as a deus ex machina who merely answers the questions that in a scientific age remain unanswered and instead recognize God \u2018at the centre of life, not when we are at the end of our resources\u2019. Christ is at the centre of the discipline of the heart just as he is at the centre of life, and this is why faithfulness and perseverance in these disciplines are prerequisite for responsible action in a world come of age. The world apart from God stands more than ever under the wrath, as well as the grace, of God. Life in the world and its cities is full of \u2018all imaginable horrors\u2019 and the plots of individual lives have \u2018become fragmentary\u2019. Christians consequently should not invest, as their grandparents did, in projects to shape their own lives or plan for the future. Instead, as Bonhoeffer suggests in \u2018Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm R\u00fcdiger Bethge\u2019: \u2018if we can save ourselves from the wreckage of our material possessions, let us be satisfied with that\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u2018Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flows the spring of life\u2019 (Prov. 4:23). We shall have to keep our lives rather than shape them, to hope rather than plan.<\/p>\n
The Church in this context is to stop struggling for its self-preservation and better realize that \u2018our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. All Christian thinking, speaking and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action\u2019. Only renewal of the Church\u2019s form will enable men and women after much delay to again utter the word of God and proclaim \u2018God\u2019s peace with men and the coming of his kingdom\u2019.
\nRowan Williams\u2019 reading of Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem \u2018Who Am I?\u2019 suggests that it involves a rejection of the modern claim that the interior self is hidden from view, and only becomes available with the ministrations of a psychoanalyst. Williams and Wannenwetsch enlist Bonhoeffer in their critique of modern accounts of interiority and of the \u2018therapeutic self\u2019. Against these accounts Williams posits that the self finds its true being in the non-competitive space opened up by the non-coercive acts of God in Jesus who sits at the head of a banqueting table and invites all to join him. For Williams, the quest for personal authenticity is a false one, a delusion fostered amidst the turn of the self into an economic subject in the consumer society and further advanced by the loss of the icons of the Christian past.
\nIt is perhaps surprising to find an Anglican Archbishop closer to Hegel than a Lutheran theologian, and yet it is because of the care with which he critiques and repairs Hegel that Bonhoeffer\u2019s account of the reconciled and responsible self does not submerge but rather restores the substantial self as the unique site of the image of God in human beings. Bonhoeffer struggled with the sense of an interior self that threatened to obliterate meaning from politics and cosmos. He saw how the loss of sacred meaning in the cosmos had prepared the way for a technological age in which the idolization of human control over nature threatened to obliterate the good of creation both in nature and politics. And he was all too familiar with the Romantic and idealist response to the dying of the divine light in the cosmos where, instead of the soul being the microcosm of the cosmos, the soul through God-consciousness becomes cosmos, in the sense of orienting power.
\nBonhoeffer responds to these problems not by rejecting the substantial self, or the sacred cosmos, but by recovering those spiritual disciplines that train heart and mind to live at peace with creator and cosmos, and so with other men and women. Confession, the recitation of Psalms, and the reading of Scripture, private meditation, the prayer of the heart: these are the therapies prescribed by the Christian tradition for the reorientation of the disordered self to the original order of creation. It is no accident that Bonhoeffer engaged this therapy as he sought to build a counter-politics and a counter-Church in the heart of Nazi Germany at Finkenwalde, and later even in Tegel itself as he drew his fellow prisoners and some of his captors into the hospitable ambience of his spiritual practices. The error made by some of his interpreters is to exclude his doctrine of creation\u2014whose importance we glimpse in the \u2018voices of birds\u2019 in this poem\u2014from his account of the social self. Bonhoeffer is no Barthian. He does not so overstate the Christological principle that he cannot account (except through Mozart) for the workings of God in the heart. Indeed, Bonhoeffer criticizes Barth for having no place for the gradual unfolding of the \u2018mysteries of the Christian faith in the life of the Christian\u2019 in which the arcane disciplines train Christians. As Bethge reminds us, at the very beginning of the fragmentary essay in which he poses his ringing question \u2018who is Christ for us today\u2019, Bonhoeffer mentions prayer. He does not respond to liberal pietism or to the threatening \u00dcbermensch, by rejecting the traditional account of the journey of the soul towards the mystery of God. In his account of the intrinsic relation between self and society, prayer and action, spirituality and justice, he recalls the Augustinian claim that the pursuit of holiness, the education of desire, the quest to love what is truly loveable, involve paideia through those moral and spiritual practices that distinguish the citizens of the City of God from the earthly city.
\nIn sum, we cannot understand Bonhoeffer\u2019s theological account of human identity\u2014and the difference of his account from Barth\u2019s\u2014without seeing it in the context of his recovery of what Foucault, I think rather misleadingly, calls the \u2018technologies of the self\u2019. These \u2018technologies\u2019 do not begin with Christianity but the Christian claim is that Christ enlivens the practices of contemplation, confession, meditation on the Word and Psalm singing with the creator Spirit and thus sets these classical and Jewish disciplines of the soul within the divine plan of the salvation of the world. And this is why it is not accurate to speak of them as \u2018technologies of the self\u2019, for they are the practices by which Christians for two thousand years have trained themselves together and in solitude for the holy life, so that the microcosm that is the self\u2014body and soul\u2014is brought into peaceable harmony with the macrocosm of cosmos and Church that are the theatres of the glory of God, even as each individual self bears the divine image.
\nFoucault, of course, sees confession as the invention of medieval Catholicism. But the systematisation of the practice of confession really began when the holy men of the fourth century took to the desert to escape the dulling moral and spiritual effects of the turning of Christianity into an imperial cult. Bonhoeffer\u2019s recovery of confession and his proposal, first resisted but gradually adopted, that the seminarians at Finkenwalde confessed their sins regularly with peers of their own choosing, is not then a restoration of a Catholic and priestly practice\u2014the sacrament of penance\u2014but of an earlier tradition in which individuals confess their sins to one another as those who stand equally before God as redeemed sinners.
\nIt is one of the ironies of Christian spiritual history that the desert fathers\u2014who first went to the desert to live a solitary life\u2014present a narrative of the substantiality of human interiority, which is more intrinsically communal and societal than that offered in modern therapeutic culture and yet more faithful to the reality of the inner mystical quest than much recent post-liberal theology. These fathers went to the desert as hermits and dwelt severally in caves and huts in order to engage in the spiritual struggle against the world, the flesh and the devil. They went the way of the cross, often leaving a former life as robber or idle pedant, in order to purify their desires and recover the true self, restored by the Spirit, through askesis, prayer and solitude. And, as Benedicta Ward reminds us, this way of the cross is not all of suffering and mortification: the fruit of their spiritual struggle with self and with sin is resurrection. Ironically many of these desert fathers actually came to live longer than their contemporaries in the city. And people often testified, as in the case of Anthony, that after years in the desert their faces were shining with a new glow of inner sanctity and external physical wholeness. However, not all of the desert fathers were as strong as Anthony. Many found that as they continued in solitude and attracted visitors from the city looking for counsel, they encountered the dangers of acidie, pride and self-delusion. To preserve themselves from these dangers they began to develop communal practices that are the root of monasticism in Christian history and which, in Derwas Chitty\u2019s memorable phrase, turned the desert into a city. Central to these practices was the recognition that in the struggle between the self and the Spirit-illuminated true self there lies the danger of a new kind of pride\u2014pride in spiritual achievement. Confession, written and oral, one to another was the device that the desert fathers developed to preserve themselves from just such temptation. But confession and repentance are only the beginning of the restoration of the holy man. Their duty, as Benedicta Ward explains in her luminous Lives of the Desert Fathers, was to gloriously live as those who have been redeemed by Christ. Despair, if it continued, was to be used in their relationship with God, but in their outward life they obliged to be cheerful and hospitable. And it were precisely these qualities that visitors to the desert would comment on afterwards:<\/p>\n
What can I say that would do justice to their humanity, their courtesy, and their love.\u2026 Nowhere have I seen love flourish so greatly, nowhere such quick, such eager hospitality.<\/p>\n
In his poem \u2018Who Am I?\u2019, Bonhoeffer exemplifies the distinctive relation between the inner life of spiritual struggle and the outer life of cheerfulness, charity and hospitality\u2014outward charm, hopefulness, warmth, inward anger, despair, and worry that we also find in the desert fathers. The one who restores integrity, who makes it so that the outer is not a lie and the inner is not depression but a holy despair, is God:<\/p>\n
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
\nWhoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.<\/p>\n
But this resolution does not evacuate the significance of the difference between the inner and the outer: it heals the rift, bridges the gap, and restores wholeness. Of Bonhoeffer, an English prisoner Captain Payne Best, just before his execution, said that \u2018his soul really shone in the dark desperation of our prison. He was one of the very few men I have ever met to whom God was real and ever close to him.\u2019 The common witness of those who encountered the hospitality of the brothers in the desert, like Bonhoeffer playing host in his cell, was that these encounters surpassed all their experiences of the fruits of holy life.
\nThe interpreter of Bonhoeffer who is most in sympathy with the view I have argued for in my reading of this poem is the great twentieth century exponent of desert spirituality Thomas Merton. Like Bonhoeffer, Merton sees the dangers of the submission of so much of humanity to the dominant powers of statist ideology and the technological collective. Like Bonhoeffer, Merton rejects the Christendom synthesis of Church and world while calling for a new and more critical sense of responsibility for the world among Christians. And like Bonhoeffer, Merton suggests that \u2018the way to find the real \u201cworld\u201d is not merely to measure and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground. For that is where the world is first of all: in my deepest self\u2019. There is no false choice between choosing Christ and choosing the world as though we need to choose \u2018between two conflicting realities\u2019. Instead, \u2018we choose Christ by choosing the world as it really is in him, that is to say created and redeemed by him, and encountered in the ground of our own personal freedom and of our love\u2019.
\nMerton, like Bonhoeffer, celebrates the autonomy of the modern world, and of modern individuals, from the enforced tutelage of Christendom. And, like Bonhoeffer, Merton affirms the moral space and agency that this new autonomy of the world confers on the modern individual. This places a new requirement on the individual who would be morally responsible to engage in the spiritual disciplines that were traditionally reserved for the cloister for \u2018a certain depth of disciplined existence is a necessary ground for fruitful action\u2019. This is because the contemplative life produces not only \u2018a realization of the immensity and majesty of God \u201cout there\u201d as King and Ruler of the universe (which He is) but also a more intimate and more wonderful perception of Him as directly and personally present in our own being\u2019. As we encounter God in our innermost depths we also discover the opposition between our deepest self and God, and hence it is only through renunciation of self and the way of the desert that it is possible to reach a true awareness of God and of ourselves. And for Merton the repair of the drives of the self through contemplation forms the heart of the Christian response to the great crisis of the modern world and modern America. America has more power at its disposal than any previous civilization and has \u2018made a fetish out of action\u2019. But Americans have lost, or perhaps never had, the sense of contemplation, and this makes it hard for them to witness consistently to the power and meaning of love and its superiority as a principle of action to that of violence.
\nAt the time of the Vietnam War Merton through his vast correspondence and his poems and prose writings provided a distinctive spiritual orientation for those Christians who made common cause with the anti-war movement. For Merton, the Cold War and its outgrowth in Southeast Asia were the consequence of \u2018a corrupt idea of peace based on a policy of \u201cevery man for himself\u201d in ethics, economics and political life\u2019. And so he suggests that instead of loving what people think is peace and hating those whom people imagine are war-makers, the Christian call is to \u2018hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed\u2014but hate these things in yourself, not in another\u2019.
\nReading Bonhoeffer and Merton side by side, the parallels in their respective witness against the German Third Reich and the American military machine are remarkable. They both reject the uncritical conformity of Church to the world that the Carolingian era first produced in Christendom. They both propose that responsible action in the world requires a new post-institutional Christian spirituality that engages in contemplative prayer and witness to peace and justice at the same time. They both affirm the intrinsic relation of public and private, of prayer and action, of interior and exterior of which the prayer \u2018Who Am I?\u2019 is a poignant and powerful exemplar. We can say of Bonhoeffer, as of Merton, that he was a witness to the love of Christ for a world at war, and that this witness was rooted in his encounter with the love of Christ in Christian community and endured in the personal askesis of the \u2018arcane discipline\u2019.<\/p>\n
3<\/p>\n
\u2018Past\u2019<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Past\u2019<\/p>\n
Oliver O\u2019Donovan<\/p>\n
\u2018Vergangenheit\u2019<\/p>\n
Du gingst, geliebtes Gl\u00fcck und schwer geliebter Schmerz,
\nwie nenn\u2019 ich dich? Not, Leben, Seligkeit,
\nTeil meiner selbst, mein Herz,\u2014Vergangenheit?
\nEs fiel die T\u00fcr ins Schlo\u00df,
\nich h\u00f6re langsam Schritte sich entfernen und verhallen.
\nWas bleibt mir? Freude? Qual? Verlangen?
\nIch wei\u00df nur dies: du gingst\u2014und alles ist vergangen.<\/p>\n
Sp\u00fcrst du, wie ich jetzt nach dir greife,
\nmich an dir festklammere, da\u00df es dir wehtun muss?
\nwie ich dir Wunden rei\u00dfe, da\u00df dein Blut quillt,
\nnur um deiner N\u00e4he gewi\u00df zu bleiben,
\ndu leibliches irdisches, volles Leben?
\nAhnst du, da\u00df ich jetzt ein Verlangen habe nach eigenen Schmerzen,
\nda\u00df ich mein eigenes Blut zu sehen begehre,
\nnur damit nicht alles versinke\u2014im Vergangenen.<\/p>\n
Leben, was hast du mir angetan?
\nwarum kamst du? warum vergingst du?
\nVergangenheit, wenn du mich fliehst,
\nbleibst du nicht doch meine Vergangenheit, meine?<\/p>\n
Wie die Sonne \u00fcber dem Meer immer rascher sich senkt,
\nals z\u00f6ge es sie in die Finsternis,
\nso sinkt und sinkt und sinkt
\nohne Aufhalten
\ndein Bild ins Meer des Vergangenen
\nund ein paar Wellen begraben es.<\/p>\n
Wie der Hauch des warmen Atems
\nsich in k\u00fchler Morgenluft aufl\u00f6st,
\nso zerrinnt dein Bild,
\nda\u00df ich dein Angesicht, deine H\u00e4nde, deine Gestalt nicht mehr wei\u00df,
\nein L\u00e4cheln, ein Blick, ein Gru\u00df erscheint mir,
\ndoch es zerf\u00e4llt,
\nl\u00f6st sich auf,
\nist ohne Trost, ohne N\u00e4he,
\nist zerst\u00f6rt,
\nist nur noch vergangen.<\/p>\n
\u2018Past\u2019<\/p>\n
You walk away\u2014love\u2019s happiness and sore pain.
\nWhat name shall I give you? Distress, life, bliss,
\npart of myself, my heart\u2014times past? All gone?
\nThe door slams shut,
\nI hear your footsteps slowly die away.
\nWhat is left when you are gone? Joy, anguish, longing?
\nI know only this: you go away\u2014and all is gone.<\/p>\n
Can you feel now, how I clutch at you,
\nhow I hold you so tight
\nthat it must hurt you?
\nHow I open the wounds,
\nthat your blood may flow,
\nonly to be sure that you keep close to me,
\nyou, so full of real and earthly life?
\nCan you sense that I have now a terrible longing
\nfor my own suffering?
\nThat I yearn to see my own blood flow,
\nonly that all may not sink
\ninto times that are gone?<\/p>\n
Life, what have you done to me?
\nWhy did you come? Why do you pass away?
\nTimes past, if you flee from me,
\nare you not still my past, mine?<\/p>\n
As the sun sets ever more quickly over the ocean,
\nsucked into the darkness,
\nso sinks and sinks and sinks,
\nrelentlessly,
\nyour image into the sea of forgetfulness,
\nengulfed in a few waves.<\/p>\n
As a puff of warm breath
\ndissolves in the cool air of morning,
\nso fades your image,
\nuntil your face, your hands, your figure
\nI no longer know.
\nA laugh, a glance, a gesture appears to me,
\nthen it fades,
\ndisappears,
\nwithout comfort, without your nearness,
\nit is destroyed,
\nan illusion from the past.<\/p>\n
Ich m\u00f6chte den Duft deines Wesens atmen
\nihn einsaugen, in ihm bleiben
\nwie an einem hei\u00dfen Sommertag
\nschwere Bl\u00fcten die Bienen zu Gast laden
\nund sie berauschen,
\nwie Nachtschw\u00e4rmer vom Liguster trunken werden,
\naber ein rauher Windsto\u00df zerst\u00f6rt Duft und Bl\u00fcten
\nund ich stehe wie ein Narr
\nvor dem Entschwundenen, Vergangenen.<\/p>\n
Mir ist als wurden mit feurigen Zangen St\u00fccke aus meinem
\nFleisch gerissen,
\nwenn Du, mein vergangenes Leben, davoneilst.
\nTrotz und Zorn bef\u00e4llt mich,
\nich stelle wilde, unn\u00fctze Fragen.
\nWarum? warum? warum? sage ich immer.
\nWenn meine Sinne dich nicht halten k\u00f6nnen,
\nvergehendes, vergangenes Leben,
\nso will ich denken und wieder denken,
\nbis ich finde, was ich verlor.
\nAber ich sp\u00fcre,
\nwie das, was \u00fcber mir, neben mir, unter mir ist,
\nr\u00e4tselhaft und unger\u00fchrt \u00fcber mich l\u00e4chelt,
\n\u00fcber mein hoffnungslosestes M\u00fchn,
\nWind zu haschen,
\nVergangenes zur\u00fcck zu gewinnen.<\/p>\n
Auge und Seele wird b\u00f6se,
\nich hasse, was ich sehe,
\nhasse, was mich bewegt,
\nhasse alles Lebendige und Sch\u00f6ne,
\nwas mir Entgelt des Verlorenen sein will.
\nMein Leben will ich, mein eignes Leben fordr\u2019 ich zur\u00fcck,
\nmeine Vergangenheit,
\nDich!<\/p>\n
Dich\u2014eine Tr\u00e4ne schie\u00dft mir ins Auge,
\nvielleicht, da\u00df ich unter Schleiern der Tr\u00e4nen
\ndein ganzes Bild,
\ndich ganz,
\nwiedergewinne?
\nAber ich will nicht weinen.<\/p>\n
I want to breathe the air of your being,
\nabsorb it, lose myself in it,
\nas on a hot summer\u2019s day, the heavy blossom
\ninvites the bees,
\nand intoxicates them;
\nas the mohawk becomes drunk from the privet;
\nbut a rough wind destroys the fragrance and the blossom,
\nand I stand like a fool,
\nas all vanishes and is gone.<\/p>\n
To me, it is as though red-hot pincers
\ntear pieces from my flesh,
\nwhen you, my past life, rush away from me.
\nMad defiance and raging anger seize me,
\nI fling wild and meaningless questions into the air.
\nWhy and why and why? Always the same question.
\nIf my senses cannot hold you,
\nmy vanishing passing life,
\nI will think and think again
\nuntil I find what I have lost.
\nBut something tells me
\nthat all around me, within and without,
\nlaughs at me, unmoved and puzzled,
\nby my useless labours,
\nsnaring the wind,
\nto win back what is past and gone.<\/p>\n
Eye and soul become evil,
\nI hate what I see,
\nI hate what moves me,
\nI hate all that is alive and beautiful,
\nall that should console me for my loss.
\nI want my life, I demand my own life back,
\nmy past life,
\nYou!<\/p>\n
You! Tears fill my eyes;
\nperhaps through the veil of tears
\nI will win you back,
\nthe total vision,
\nthe whole of you.
\nNo! I will not weep.
\nTr\u00e4nen helfen nur Starken,
\nSchwache machen sie krank.<\/p>\n
M\u00fcde erreich\u2019 ich den Abend,
\nwillkommen ist mir das Lager,
\ndas mir Vergessen verhei\u00dft,
\nwenn mir Besitzen versagt ist.
\nNacht, l\u00f6sche aus, was brennt,
\nschenk mir volles Vergessen,
\nsei mir wohlt\u00e4tig, Nacht, \u00fcbe dein mildes Amt,
\ndir vertrau\u2019 ich mich an.
\nAber die Nacht ist weise und m\u00e4chtig,
\nweiser als ich und m\u00e4chtiger als der Tag.
\nWas keine irdische Kraft vermag,
\nworan Gedanken und Sinne, Trotz und Tr\u00e4nen verzagen m\u00fcssen
\ndas sch\u00fcttet die Nacht aus reicher F\u00fclle \u00fcber mich aus.
\nUnversehrt von feindseliger Zeit, rein, frei und ganz,
\nbringt der Traum dich zu mir,
\ndich, Vergangenes, dich, mein Leben,
\ndich, den gestrigen Tag, die gestrige Stunde.<\/p>\n
\u00dcber deiner N\u00e4he erwach ich mitten in tiefer Nacht
\nund erschrecke\u2014
\nbist du mir wieder verloren? Such\u2019 ich dich ewig vergeblich,
\ndich, meine Vergangenheit, meine?
\nIch strecke die H\u00e4nde aus
\nund bete\u2014
\nund ich erfahre das Neue:
\nVergangenes kehrt dir zur\u00fcck
\nals deines Lebens lebendigstes St\u00fcck
\ndurch Dank und durch Reue.
\nFa\u00df\u2019 im Vergangenen Gottes Vergebung und G\u00fcte
\nbete, da\u00df Gott dich heute und morgen beh\u00fcte.
\nOnly the strong are helped by tears,
\nthe weak are made weaker.<\/p>\n
I am tired as evening comes,
\nwelcome is my cell,
\nwhich promises forgetfulness
\nwhen possession is denied me.
\nNight, quench the fire that burns,
\nsend to me full forgetfulness,
\nbe kind to me, night, and perform your gentle art,
\nto you I entrust myself.
\nBut the night is strong and wise,
\nstronger than the day and wiser than me.
\nWhat no earthly power can do,
\nwhere thinking and feeling, defiance and tears must fail,
\nthe night showers its full riches upon me.
\nUndefiled by hostile time,
\npure, free and whole,
\nthe dream brings you to me,
\nyou, from the past, you, my life,
\nyou, from past days and past hours.<\/p>\n
By your presence, I am awakened in deepest night,
\nand cry out\u2014
\nare you again lost to me? Do I seek you ever in vain,
\nmy beloved of past days?
\nI stretch out my hands
\nand pray\u2014
\nand I learn something new:
\nThat which is past will return to you again
\nas your life\u2019s most living strain,
\nthrough thanks and through repentance.
\nLay hold on God\u2019s forgiveness in the past,
\npray that he will care for you this day and to the last.<\/p>\n
(Translation: Edwin Robertson, except for title)<\/p>\n
A visitor to the prison has come to the end of her visit and walks out, the door locked behind her as the sound of retreating steps reaches the prisoner. Or is it two visitors, \u2018bliss\u2019 and \u2018pain\u2019? That is a possibility that we should keep in mind, because we shall encounter these two again, in another form. But like those duplicate persons we encounter in dreams, one with the face towards us, the other turned away, these two turn out to be one and the same. The poet, like a dreamer on the edge of waking, fumbles for the name of his visitor and finds it: Vergangenheit, which means \u2018the past\u2019, but with more finality than our word \u2018past\u2019 conveys. The departing guest is the \u2018past-and-gone\u2019. And with that departure alles ist vergangen, \u2018all is gone\u2019. \u2018Past\u2019 is the name borne by the life the poet has led, a \u2018bodily, earthly fullness\u2019 of life, now disembodied and insubstantial.
\nThe emotions left behind by the passing of the past are indeterminate, a confusion of joy, pain, and longing. Only those for whom the past is a secure possession can reflect on happiness and pain distinctly, greeting the one or the other with the appropriate joy or sorrow. For someone whose past is past-and-gone the emotional reaction is simply \u2018reaching\u2019 and \u2018clutching\u2019. And here the paradox emerges. Because the past is past-and-gone, we are left with a constant struggle to make sure it is still there, to prevent its \u2018sinking\u2019 into the pastand-gone. This paradox generates the dialectical contradictions of the poem, expressed in a sequence of vivid images, and finally holds the key to its conclusion.
\nThe one who suffers the loss of his past is not simply and objectively without that past. He is perpetually in loss of it\u2014neither possessing it as an object of discriminating reflection, nor free of it. In one of the poem\u2019s great images the past is a perpetual sunset, forever sinking down on the horizon into the waves of the sea. Another image is that of warm air: the secure warmth that enfolds us in sleep suddenly dissipates on waking as the intimacy of the dream gives way to cold daylight; the warm fragrance that hangs on the air of a summer\u2019s day is suddenly blown away by a breeze. Nur noch vergangen: the English translators have had understandable difficulty with that simple phrase. It is gone, simply gone, and goes on being simply gone. This is not the kind of going that clears space for something else to happen. It is a going that perpetuates itself. The poet refers elsewhere to a vergehendes-vergangenes Leben, his \u2018going-going-gone\u2019 life.
\nThe poet is forever affected by the life that is past-and-gone. He is caught in a negative relation to it, an enchanted fool, standing gaping on the spot where there was something a moment ago which has now blown away. From an objective point of view the relation between the poet and his own life can seem quite contingent. Life came at him from somewhere, it picked him up, it employed him for some indecipherable purpose of its own, and it put him down again. Thus the great evolutionary stream appears to treat us all. Yet it does not leave him detached, free as an observer to ironize about it all. For this arbitrary series of happenings is his own past; it is all that he is. The mystery is that these contingent happenings could leave him behind as their outcome, a subjectivity with no relation to anything objective.
\nAnd at this the tone of the poem becomes more intense, evoking the rage into which the poet is plunged. Questions arise, which are declared from the outset to be \u2018wild\u2019 and \u2018useless\u2019: \u2018Why? why? why?\u2019 Why what? If he knew what he was asking the reason for, his questions would be neither wild nor useless. They would tend to interpret the life that was lost, and by interpreting it would give it back to the poet as a reflective possession. Even in the absence of answers an ability to focus questions can give one the purchase one needs on the past. But, the poet\u2019s questions are not about the content of the past, the reasons things happened, the reasons he did things. They are more like the relentless self-interrogation that springs from severe memory-loss, as one tries to recover what is not accessible any more, an incessant search for something that has slipped out of one\u2019s mind. The \u2018why?\u2019 that should be focused on the past keeps wheeling round and coming back to the present moment and its loss of purchase \u2018when my senses cannot hold you\u2019.
\nRage and defiance turn to hate. And as the defiant questioning was unfocused and unfocusable, so is the hatred; it is directed at the world around, at all that lives and all that is lovely. At this point loss of the past opens up a perspective on the roots of evil itself. Hatred of the world is a reality for those who have lost themselves; there is no compensation for that loss, it is too fundamental. And so the search for the self builds up to the near-hysterical climax: \u2018I demand my own life back, my past, you.\u2019 And only at this point in the poem, as has been observed, do the three names by which the object of the poet\u2019s search is known, \u2018life\u2019, \u2018past\u2019, and \u2018you\u2019, come together. That marks the significance of the crisis reached at this point, as does the use of a one-word line to close the stanza: \u2018Dich!\u2019, immediately repeated to open the next stanza.
\nWhy you? It is, after all, the poet\u2019s self that is addressed. Throughout the poem the poet has spoken to his past in the second person singular. Now, in this highly emphatic line, this innocent poetic device based on the image of the departing visitor suddenly assumes a suspect appearance. We are forced to ask what it means to speak to oneself in this way. In the loss of the past there is loss of self. The \u2018I\u2019, the point of Cartesian certainty, cannot be counted on any more. It is as though the sufferer begins chatting to his absent self, like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. But when the self starts usurping the place of the neighbour in this way, no real neighbour, no objective being can take on the role of a \u2018You\u2019 to my \u2018I\u2019.
\nAnd from this substitution of You for I there comes the moment of peripeteia, lightly treated by the poet and easy to pass over, yet of great significance in preparing for the conclusion. The poet begins to weep, and faces a choice as to whether to go on weeping. Tears, he reflects, may offer a suitable veil through which to trace the whole form of the missing past\u2014we note the repetition of the word ganz, \u2018whole\u2019. \u2018But I shall not weep\u2019, he says, with a new tone of philosophical deliberation. \u2018Only the strong are helped by tears, the weak are made weaker\u2019. And in the decision not to weep he has chosen not to pursue his irrecoverable past further into illusion and frustration. There is no hope of achieving what he really wants; to indulge that hope would be to prefer the hope to the fulfilment, to embrace an illusion as the best substitute for a lost reality. And that is the sickness he fears: no longer to be clear about what he has lost and the fact that he has lost it. If he were strong (i.e. with his relation to his past intact), he could weep because there would be something definite to weep over. Weeping would then adjust his relation to that thing. But with no object weeping can create its own surrogate object. So the poet will be loyal to the only thing he can be clear about, which is the lostness of the lost.
\nAnd with that moral choice made, the poem moves quietly towards its resolution. Suddenly, we notice, there is a time-coordinate to which we can relate ourselves: it is \u2018evening\u2019, and although the evening is a weary one and there is nothing to hope from it but forgetfulness in bed\u2014note the contrast with all those distressed images about waking up\u2014we have a sense of restoration to a world with a worldly rhythm. Furthermore, \u2018night is wise and mighty\u2019. There is a kind of recovery of the past that can be hoped for in sleep, though the details of this suggestion are rather difficult to make out. Dream will give back the past; but this past is not those past years of life and experience that he has struggled to recover in the daytime, but \u2018yesterday\u2019s day and yesterday\u2019s hour\u2019\u2014we should take that literally\u2014the latest moments \u2018given back\u2019 in a kind of reflection and acceptance. And in this anticipation we recognize that even the struggle we have witnessed has been a kind of labour, a kind of worldliness, and that the moral peripeteia reached has been a kind of achievement, a building up of the self. Out of that work the night can, as it were, process and secure the poet\u2019s self for him in his dream.
\nBut sleep is interrupted by another fearful wakening, and it looks initially as though we are beginning the whole cycle over again: \u2018are you lost to me once more?\u2019 But this waking\u2014the first concrete event of waking we have heard of after several allusions to waking\u2014is the beginning of something new. A prayer is uttered, and the poet \u2018discovers\u2019 a calming reflection that concludes the poem in a style quite different from the stormy free-verse that has gone before. It is a sestet with a rhyming scheme and lines that fall, though of irregular length, into recognizable feet; and it concludes with a rhyming couplet in pentameters, the traditional cadence recognized throughout European literature as bringing finality and conclusion.
\nIn this reflection three things are said: (1) the past will be restored through thanks and through repentance; (2) these are achieved by holding in mind God\u2019s forgiveness and kindness shown in the past; and also (3) by anticipating God\u2019s protection each day in prayer.
\nOn first reading the contrast between this and what has gone before may seem too great. Has the poet, after a vivid, searing account of his spiritual pathology, contented himself in the end with a pious exhortation? That would be a deadly conclusion indeed, given the weight Bonhoeffer laid upon the final lines: \u2018In this attempt of mine the crucial part is the last few lines.\u2019 The stylistic change of manner may, however, have its own weight of meaning. It reminds us, perhaps, of the conclusion of a Bach cantata, the simply harmonized chorale-verse taking over from the florid baroque stile moderno, and offering the simplest reflection that sets it all to rest.
\nThese concluding lines reflect back in important ways on the experience the poet has charted. First, there is the antithesis, Dank and Reue, thanks and regret, which immediately recall the Gl\u00fcck and Schmerz, happiness and pain, of the opening line. The clear distinction between these two emotional tones of experience was lost in the turbulence of the loss of the past. But the undistinguishable experience is precisely the ungraspable experience. How is distinction to be restored? Only by converting happiness and pain into thanks and repentance; that is to say, in bringing them into the context of responsibility before God. Moral discernment of our past restores the point of reference that was lost, allows us to distinguish experiences and to judge of them. But moral discernment is only possible under the gaze of the one to whom we owe it, in liturgical form, as thanks and penitence.
\nIn some ways the concluding reflection is like an oracle. It is never clear who is speaking\u2014it is merely das Neue, the new thing that the poet \u2018discovers\u2019. God is mentioned only in the third person. Yet, strikingly, the poet finds himself spoken to as Du. Du, constantly addressed by the poet to his own past, became a problem, an invitation to fantasy, an escape from reality. But up to this point there has been no other I in the poem who could address the poet as Du, so he has relapsed into addressing himself that way. Now he is addressed as Du from outside.
\nAnd in the last line of the poem there is, for the first time, mention of a future to balance the lost past. We are led to conclude, in fact, that the problem of the lost past was all the time tied up with problem of a lost future. The poet can grasp his past horizon only together with his future horizon, but that future horizon has proved horribly vulnerable to calamity; it has been snatched from him. How can it be given back again? By prayer for God\u2019s protection \u2018today and tomorrow\u2019. Or \u2018this day and to the last\u2019, as the new DBWE translation has it? It is a delicate point of interpretation. I suppose that, as with the past offered back in the night, the future horizon must be the very nearest one, an immediate, not a distant future\u2014but enough, nevertheless, to recapture the sense of past and future on which everything else depends.
\nThe close connection of Bonhoeffer\u2019s first prison-poem with his fianc\u00e9e Maria von Wedemeyer lends its account of loss and recovery of the past great dramatic pathos. Yet as commentators have seen, the setting can distract us from the theme of the poem, which is simply the past. Coming to terms with the past, as the poet said in his letter to Bethge, \u2018is the almost daily accompaniment of my life here\u2019, and then adds, \u2018especially after brief visits, which are always followed by long partings\u2019. The occasional experience of parting from the visitor has fused with the constant task of coming to terms with the past, and this fusion of experiences has driven the theologian-author to his first adventure as a poet. The occasional experience is highly personal, but the constant experience, that of coming to terms with the past, is shared with his fellow-prisoners at least, and perhaps with all mankind. So, the poem presents Maria with all the particularity of Dietrich\u2019s condition, so that he may appear in his universality as a human being like other human beings.
\nThree levels of interpreting the lost past suggest themselves. They cannot be disentangled neatly, and their interaction contributes to the poem\u2019s rich suggestiveness; but for analytical purposes to distinguish them may be helpful all the same. Each of the three levels looks in two directions: lost time has an existential meaning, on the one hand, and a social or political meaning on the other.
\nFirst, we may observe the specifically historical aspect of the loss of the past. There is the loss of a relationship that has constituted our past. Here a reference to Dietrich and Maria is to the point. To love is to know that relationships that have built us up and formed us must end, in death if not before. Death is the unmentioned figure in Bonhoeffer\u2019s desperate search for his past. These are the reflections of a man who knows that his life is over. But as such they simply focus with painful sharpness the meaning of the mortality in which we all stand. To lose relationship is to lose our past, which is to lose ourselves. We may usefully recall that chronic loss of memory is a standard affliction among the old, and may afflict others too, always accompanied by intense distress. But, and more immediately relevant to Bonhoeffer\u2019s own context, there is the phenomenon of depression which deprives us of our past as it deprives us of our future. We do not know what to make of what we have been; we are left unable to appraise it. We lack the confidence born of faith that God was at work in it.
\nThere is also a social dimension to this loss, and again the circumstances of the poem invite further reflection on a peculiarly social loss of the sense of the reality of the past, typical of times of turbulence and social disturbance, the cultural loss of memory that accompanies revolutions and wars. Bonhoeffer in prison bears in his self-aware amnesia the fate of Germany, violently disrupted from its historic roots and character, unable to tap the sources of its spiritual power and confidence.
\nSecondly, there is a moral aspect to the loss of the past. It may be read specifically as an account of human sin, the loss of that responsibility to which the closing lines draw us back, and with it the loss of self which has precisely to do with no longer being answerable. And here, too, the political reference is not far away. The poem unfolds as a descent into Hell and a return, beginning with an initial sense of loss and proceeding through meaninglessness, despair, paranoia, world-hatred and wild self-assertion. On this reading we are forced to ask what brings about the peripateia. The \u2018new experience\u2019, the moment of grace that comes in the night is not unprepared for. Three steps have led to it, the third of them and the only explicitly religious one being prayer, about which nothing is said except that it happened. The second, the most mysterious, is the provisional reconciliation achieved with the past in sleep. And the first is the refusal to weep, which is the hinge on which the poem hangs. We may see in this, perhaps, a certain order of creation, a force of sheer reality, taking over the poet\u2019s disrupted experience. He has performed that act of will which Augustine sees as the trace of fallen mankind\u2019s persistent orientation to God, the will not to be deceived. This initial step is far from being an act of moral substance or weight; it is, in itself, merely a continuation of the despair. He refuses false promises of comfort associated with self-pity not because they are self-pitying but simply because they are unreal. Yet it was always possible that he might have taken the other turn and fled further from reality than he has actually done. Upon this basis of his decision for the truth there ensues exhaustion, with the possibility for created rhythms of restoration to assert themselves in sleep. God as reality, God as creator, has made himself anonymously known before He makes himself known in the word of prophecy that finally restores hope and life.
\nThirdly it may be read at an anthropological level, as an account of the constitution of the human condition, which is that of passing through time.
\nOne thing we cannot hesitate to conclude after reading Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem is that he believed in a certain kind of self-possession as an indispensable anthropological minimum, a basis for human loves and actions, for confidence and responsible action. There is no hint of the virtuous self-annihilation of the mystic before God. To hold on to oneself is a necessary moral struggle, the basis of all other moral struggles. Yet this elemental reference to self can go wrong. It is not a simple anthropological datum but a precarious existential balance, which, when it tilts, can bring every other exercise of humanitas to an end. And its going wrong can take a peculiar form, the absence of the self from the self which is at the same time an objectification of the self to the self. That problematic Du, which the poet addressed to his past casting the self-relation in the mould of an ever-searching erotic yearning, is not that of good self-relationship, but of one in which the self has gone missing. It represents a split that has destroyed inner harmony and unity. For the past self is the self that we need to move out from, confidently and securely. To be involved in searching for one\u2019s past is ipso facto to have a wrong relationship with it, for one\u2019s past needs to be behind one\u2014not in a forgotten, abandoned distance, but right behind one, giving constant support, like an armour-bearer in a Homeric battle.
\nHere one may make an interesting comparison between this poem and Psalm 42\/3. The Psalmist speaks of his unsatisfied longing for God, and reflects on the lost past in which satisfaction seemed much easier to attain. God is addressed in the second person from the very first verse of this Psalm, but only when the Psalmist comes to the consoling refrain, which it is possible that the last line of Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem echoes, \u2018Hope still in God, for he will yet be the hope of your countenance and your God\u2019\u2014only then does he address himself, as my soul. Here the fundamental relational structure is in place from the beginning; the result of calling on God is to be consoled in a secure self-relation. These are the tears, as Bonhoeffer would say, that help the strong. In his poem things are the other way round: the self is addressed from the very beginning, and only in the consoling refrain does that persistent, obsessive self-address let up.
\nThe difference between the two texts turns on an additional complication that Bonhoeffer\u2019s anthropology introduces, that of temporality. The word \u2018tense\u2019 in English speaks of a certain \u2018tension\u2019 fundamental to human existence. Once the tension of the tenses is lost, all the tenses are lost. Alles ist vergangen, which means, of course, not only \u2018all is lost\u2019, but \u2018all is past\u2019. There is no present or future while we have to hunt for our past, for we are temporal existents for whom past, present, and future are constituted in an active disposition towards the world. Putting the past behind us (which is not the same as losing it) and grasping the future is, one might say, the business of the ontological engine-room of our lives, that leibliches, irdisches, volles Leben, which seems to offer us so much solidity and presence, and yet is actually passing away, so that, as philosophers and theologians continually reflect, it has no presence at all, but slips unperceived from the future into the past. How can we appropriate this ever-flowing stream that bears all its sons away? How can we call any life my life? How can the experience of time be other than that of having one\u2019s flesh torn off bit by bit? We can relate to our temporality only as we learn to judge our past under God, to distribute its doings and sufferings into those that merit our thanks and those that merit our penitence. Without the knowledge of God\u2019s grace, the ontological task is impossible.<\/p>\n
4<\/p>\n
\u2018Success and Failure\u2019<\/p>\n
Public Disasters, Works of Love, and the Inwardness of Faithfulness<\/p>\n
Brian Brock<\/p>\n
\u2018Gl\u00fcck und Ungl\u00fcck\u2019<\/p>\n
Gl\u00fcck und Ungl\u00fcck,
\ndie rasch uns und \u00fcberw\u00e4ltigend treffen,
\nsind sich im Anfang,
\nwie Hitze und Frost bei j\u00e4her Ber\u00fchrung,
\nkaum unterscheidbar nah.
\nWie Meteore
\naus \u00fcberirdischer Ferne geschleudert,
\nziehen sie leuchtend und drohend die Bahn
\n\u00fcber unseren H\u00e4uptern.
\nHeimgesuchte stehen betroffen
\nvor den Tr\u00fcmmern
\nihres allt\u00e4glichen, glanzlosen Daseins.<\/p>\n
Gro\u00df und erhaben,
\nzerst\u00f6rend, bezwingend,
\nh\u00e4lt Gl\u00fcck und Ungl\u00fcck,
\nerbeten und unerbeten,
\nfestlichen Einzug
\nbei den ersch\u00fctterten Menschen,
\nschm\u00fcckt und umkleidet
\ndie Heimgesuchten
\nmit Ernst und mit Weihe.<\/p>\n
Gl\u00fcck ist voll Schauer,
\nUngl\u00fcck voll S\u00fc\u00dfe.
\nUngeschieden scheint aus dem Ewigen
\neins und das andre zu kommen.
\nGro\u00df und schrecklich ist beides.
\nMenschen, ferne und nahe,
\nlaufen herbei und schauen
\nund gaffen
\nhalb neidisch, halb schaudernd,
\nins Ungeheure,
\nwo das \u00dcberirdische,
\nsegnend zugleich und vernichtend,
\nzum verwirrenden, unentrinnbaren,
\nirdischen Schauspiel sich stellt.
\nWas ist Gl\u00fcck? Was ist Ungl\u00fcck?<\/p>\n
\u2018Success and Failure\u2019<\/p>\n
Success and failure
\nsuddenly strike and overpower us,
\nboth the same at first,
\nlike the touch of burning heat and freezing cold,
\nindistinguishable.
\nLike meteors
\nflung from distant heavens,
\nblazing and threatening,
\nover our heads.
\nThose visited stand bemused
\namidst the ruins
\nof their dull, daily lives.<\/p>\n
Proud and exalted,
\ndestroying, subduing,
\nsuccess and failure,
\ninvited or uninvited,
\nhold festival with
\nthese shattered people.
\nDressed and decorated,
\nthe visited
\nprepare for the sacrificial feast.<\/p>\n
Success is full of foreboding,
\nfailure has its sweetness.
\nWithout distinction they appear to come,
\nthe one or the other,
\nfrom the unknown.
\nBoth are proud and terrible.
\nPeople come from far and wide,
\nwalk by and look,
\npausing to stare,
\nhalf envious, half afraid,
\nat the outrage,
\nwhere the supernatural,
\nblessing and cursing at the same time,
\nentangling and disentangling,
\nsets forth the drama of human life.
\nWhat is success and what is failure?<\/p>\n
Erst die Zeit teilt beide.
\nWenn das unfa\u00dfbar erregende,
\nj\u00e4he Ereignis
\nsich zu erm\u00fcdend qu\u00e4lender Dauer wandelt,
\nwenn die langsam schleichende Stunde des Tages
\nerst des Ungl\u00fccks wahre Gestalt uns enth\u00fcllt,
\ndann wenden die Meisten,
\n\u00fcberdr\u00fcssig der Eint\u00f6nigkeit
\ndes altgewordenen Ungl\u00fccks,
\nentt\u00e4uscht und gelangweilt sich ab.<\/p>\n
Das ist die Stunde der Treue,
\ndie Stunde der Mutter und der Geliebten,
\ndie Stunde des Freundes und Bruders.
\nTreue verkl\u00e4rt alles Ungl\u00fcck
\nund h\u00fcllt es leise
\nin milden,
\n\u00fcberirdischen Glanz.<\/p>\n
Time alone distinguishes.
\nWhen the incomprehensible, exciting,
\nsudden event
\nlapses into wearisome waiting,
\nwhen the creeping hours of the day
\nfirst reveal the true outlines of failure,
\nthen most give up,
\nweary of the monotony
\nof oft-repeated failure,
\ndisappointed and bored with themselves.<\/p>\n
That is the hour of steadfast love,
\nthe hour of the mother and the beloved,
\nthe hour of the friend and the brother.
\nSteadfast love transforms all failure,
\nand gently cradles it
\nin the soft
\nradiance of heavenly light.<\/p>\n
(Translation: Edwin Robertson)<\/p>\n
I. Introduction<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem \u2018Gl\u00fcck und Ungl\u00fcck\u2019 has received only passing attention in the literature, and this despite its obvious timeliness and theological density. In this chapter I will unpack the poem in three movements. A first section discusses the reasons for Bonhoeffer\u2019s decision to narrate public disasters and humiliations (such as his own failed plot and subsequent imprisonment) in terms of the ambiguity and dumbness of historical events. In a second section, I will indicate how this ambiguity is the setting into which God speaks in a new and intimate way through the mouths of friends and family. A final section will develop Bonhoeffer\u2019s explicit theological thought to pursue a more speculative, theological probing of the reasons why Bonhoeffer might have begun to write poetry for the first time only in the last months of his life. My suggestion is that his venture into intimacy with others through poetic writing was a reflection on, and shaped by, a prior journey into intimacy with God learned in the school of the Psalter.<\/p>\n
II. Translation and ambiguity<\/p>\n
It is necessary to begin discussion of this poem with a word about the English translations, which will introduce us to the theological questions raised by the poem. Unfortunately, the translation of this poem in LPP is quite poor, to the point of obscuring the poem\u2019s theology. Edwin Robertson\u2019s translation \u2018Success and Failure\u2019 is much better, though he makes some translation decisions that we will revisit. The problem with the LPP translation begins with the title, in which \u2018Gl\u00fcck und Ungl\u00fcck\u2019 becomes \u2018Sorrow and Joy\u2019. A woodenly literal translation of the German would be \u2018Happiness and Unhappiness\u2019, which would have been preferable to \u2018Sorrow and Joy\u2019 for two theological reasons (leaving aside aesthetic judgements, and the reversal of order).
\nFirst, the use of \u2018joy\u2019 locates the poem much closer to theological language, as \u2018joy\u2019 is rarely used in English without some religious associations. \u2018Happiness\u2019 has a more general, even secular, feel, which I believe was one of Bonhoeffer\u2019s aims. Here the new forthcoming DBWE translation (Fortune and Calamity) gets the nuance right, with its \u2018fortune\u2019. Second, \u2018sorrow\u2019 and \u2018joy\u2019 are more intense and less ambiguous terms than \u2018happiness\u2019 and \u2018unhappiness\u2019, and it is precisely this ambiguity that takes us into the heart of the poem. Inflating the affective resonance of the main terms thus obscures Bonhoeffer\u2019s linguistic, and ultimately theological, point. Put negatively, he had the perfectly acceptable \u2018Freude und Leiden\u2019 available, had he wanted the more emotionally forceful formulation \u2018Sorrow and Joy\u2019. The unhappy results of this affective inflation are most evident in the fourth stanza. \u2018Gl\u00fcck is voll Schauer\u2019 properly flags the tenor of \u2018happiness\u2019 as being \u2018full of \u201cshocking realizations\u201d \u2019 rather than, as LPP has it, \u2018Joy is rich in fears\u2019. The tonality of the translation obscures the sense in the German that rather mundane \u2018happy moments\u2019 are full of \u2018chilling realizations\u2019. The same analysis applies to \u2018sorrow has its sweetness\u2019 for \u2018Ungl\u00fcck voll S\u00fc\u00dfe\u2019. In what follows I have translated critical passages in more literal terms in order to give better access to the colouring of the German, but my translations ought to be read alongside the other translations and the new DBWE, in particular, which is very well done, if slanted in the direction of smooth English.
\nBonhoeffer was always a fastidious wordsmith, admiring and emulating writers of \u2018clear and simple German\u2019. He was also steeped in the phraseology of the Luther-Bibel, which often provides us with hints about the biblical passages on which he is commenting. Availing ourselves of this sort of interpretative clue in the case of this poem is complicated by the fact that the terms \u2018Gl\u00fcck\u2019 and \u2018Ungl\u00fcck\u2019 nowhere appear in the Luther-Bibel as a pair, or at least not in passages that would have been likely objects of study, such as Sir. 11:14 and Mal. 4:4. Despite this, there are good historical reasons to conclude that a Losungen reading stimulated the reflections on which the poem is built. Edwin Robertson writes: \u2018The text for May 30 [around the time of the poem\u2019s composition, thought to be early June] was Genesis 39:23: \u201cThe LORD was with Joseph and whatever he did, The Lord Made it prosper.\u201d Luther\u2019s translation of that last phrase is, \u201cdazu gab der Herr Gl\u00fcck\u201d.\u2019 This biblical phrase is particularly interesting because it occurs twice in Chapter 39, opening and closing the chapter, each time functioning as a word of comfort to Joseph in his imprisonment. No doubt this story and the promise of deliverance within it would have been particularly moving to the imprisoned Bonhoeffer. Joseph, like Bonhoeffer, simply did not know if his being sold into slavery was just bad luck, leading to grinding servitude and finally obliteration, or rather would be the place where God would meet his servant. Bonhoeffer is well aware that the resolution of his own predicament would have to unfold over time, and it is the dynamics of this unfolding that are the central concern of the poem.
\nDuring this period Bonhoeffer was also reflecting on the meaning of God\u2019s blessing. What might it mean to be one of God\u2019s \u2018blessed\u2019 in his imprisoned state? He was increasingly convinced that one must not spiritualize difficult life situations. I have elsewhere traced the evidence that during this period Bonhoeffer was deeply immersed in the Psalms, especially Psalm 119, where the blessedness of the righteous has a particularly high profile. As he comments on Ps. 119:1 (\u2018How blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the Law of the LORD!\u2019) Bonhoeffer becomes more certain that, correctly understood, the blessedness of God\u2019s children is a very concrete, earthly flourishing. It is a point elucidated during this period in a letter to Eberhard Bethge: \u2018It would be natural to suppose that, as usual, the New Testament spiritualizes the teaching of the Old Testament here, and therefore to regard the Old Testament blessing as superseded in the New.\u2019 But this supersessionist reading of the two testaments, continues Bonhoeffer, is mistaken: \u2018the only difference between the Old and New Testaments in this respect is that in the Old the blessing includes the cross, and in the New the cross includes the blessing.\u2019 In a poignant reflection on his own approaching death, Bonhoeffer does not take martyrdom to be the vocation of every Christian, but a special task for which God will provide special preparation and ensure its witness. Here he both agrees with and questions Christian interpretations of \u2018bearing the cross\u2019 as exemplified on the one hand by claims such as Calvin\u2019s, for whom \u2018the cross\u2019 is interpreted as the idea that happiness is best known in the circumstance of utter earthly loss, and on the other, by claims such as Yoder\u2019s, for whom the only part of Jesus\u2019 life that Christians are to imitate is his cross.
\nObserving these linkages of the poem with scriptural themes seems to validate Robertson\u2019s conclusion that the title of the poem means to draw attention to a special sort of ambiguity in human experience. \u2018The poem keeps us pondering the inexplicable nature of \u201cGl\u00fcck und Ungl\u00fcck\u201d\u2014fortune and misfortune, joy and sorrow, happiness and unhappiness, building up and tearing down, luckiness and unluckiness, good and evil, success and failure\u2014all are enigmatic.\u2019 Bonhoeffer\u2019s studied linguistic ambiguity is intended to reflect the theological and existential ambiguity that is the poem\u2019s subject. Something has happened to shake one out of everyday, unglamorous existence (Dasein), stirring up ambiguous and fluid emotions that lack a point of orientation. Bonhoeffer carefully protects the ambiguous nature of such events by saying they come from somewhere \u2018higher\u2019 but not necessarily from God. Descending from \u2018heaven\u2019, or \u2018eternity\u2019, which might be the hand of fate, this event \u2018consecrates\u2019 those it touches. In one of his unfinished prison plays, this ambivalence is expressed by one character\u2019s inability to immediately and precisely put a finger on the origin of the terrible event. Given these observations, I propose the following translation of Bonhoeffer\u2019s second stanza.<\/p>\n
Great and sublime,
\ndestructive, compelling,
\nhappiness and unhappiness,
\nsolemnly enter
\nwelcomed or unwelcomed
\nwith those shaken people,
\nthe bejewelled and dressed
\nthe afflicted
\nwith solemnity and consecration.<\/p>\n
This is an impressive phenomenology of the public gaze, picking out with the acuity of a participant the ways the spotlight descends, all eyes turn and, as Andy Warhol famously put it, one is summarily delivered up to fifteen minutes of fame or infamy. Bonhoeffer is acutely aware of the way modern society raises to visibility those who are suffering a destructive event, and suggests that we too are made spectators of this event, we also are the public, our hearts too race at the massing of cameras and social spectacle. But Bonhoeffer\u2019s concern is with the inner dynamic of this elevation. Given that modern society burns people with the spotlight, the believer must ask: \u2018What is God doing with those caught up in such moments?\u2019 More specifically, \u2018How ought faith to comport itself within such terrible circumstances?\u2019<\/p>\n
III. Living in the bomb crater<\/p>\n
It is in the last two stanzas (which the LPP translation breaks into three) that Bonhoeffer gets to the heart of his inquiry, and it is here that his theological thinking becomes more visible. The critical fourth (penultimate) stanza should read:<\/p>\n
Only time makes the division.
\nWhen the unfathomably exciting,
\nthe abrupt event [Ereignis]
\nis transformed into wearyingly excruciating duration,
\nwhen the slowly creeping boredom of the day\u2019s hours
\ndiscloses to us the true form of unhappiness,
\nthen most turn away,
\nwearied of the tedium
\nof the slowly aging unhappiness
\ncrestfallen and bored.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer is directing our attention to a specific experience in the individual life, the transition period when the shock of an \u2018event\u2019 gives way to a post-event normality. Here, he says, the tedium of picking up pieces causes most to turn away. The \u2018meteor from heaven\u2019, a phrase echoing the ubiquitous use of crater and meteor images by the early Barth, does no work to bring people to God: it may just as well have been fate, changing nothing, and so they settle, jaded but basically unchanged, into new routines. Bonhoeffer thus denies that historical occurrence has any inherent revelatory power.
\nThe protagonists, irresistibly swept into the public drama, are just as inexorably discarded, having been rendered boring by the inevitable collapse of narrative suspense. Having had their rounded and complex lives turned into the caricature of a news story and consumed, they are dropped unceremoniously into the ruins of the initial disaster. Here Bonhoeffer\u2019s portrait parallels the prophetic critique of modern publicity Nietzsche portrayed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: \u2018Does not this city steam with the fumes of slaughtered spirit?\u2026 Do you not see souls hanging there like limp and filthy rags?\u2014and they even make newspapers from these rags.\u2019
\nBut as the flash of a nuclear bomb leaves all things transfigured, all reality having a new aspect, something new is revealed to those \u2018afflicted with solemnity and consecration\u2019. They discover that, like ghosts amongst the rubble, people remain standing around them. Always there yet hidden by the distractions of daily life, those whose love is not affected by the event slowly become visible in a new way for the first time. Jean-Dominique Bauby echoes Bonhoeffer\u2019s preference for the metaphor of the explosion when recounting how he awoke to find himself a victim of locked-in syndrome. There he discovered himself as beneficiary of an unexpected \u2018personal bodyguard that spontaneously sprung up around me immediately after the disaster.\u2019 Bonhoeffer\u2019s suggestion is that their arising was neither spontaneous, nor did friendship begin because of the disaster\u2014it is the sufferer who has changed in the appearing, changed from outside.
\nIt is here in the fifth and final stanza that Bonhoeffer names this love \u2018die Treue\u2019 (italicized below).<\/p>\n
This is the hour for the faithful (one),
\nthe hour of the mother and the lover,
\nthe hour of friends and brothers.
\nFaithfulness transfigures all unhappiness
\nand wraps it quietly
\nin soothing,
\nsupernatural radiance.<\/p>\n
The literal meaning of Treue is faithfulness, or constancy, and in this stanza is presented as the sufferer\u2019s only bridge into a more meaningful reality that is forsaken by those who \u2018turn away\u2019. \u2018Faithfulness\u2019 names the transfiguration of unhappiness through which the divine is mediated. Two implications are worthy of note.
\nFirst, this faithfulness comes through family, lovers, friends, and brothers. The sequence of the pairings suggests first a domestic sphere and then a sphere of friendship and ecclesial relationship. During his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer was increasingly thinking about the ways family and friends mediated Christ\u2019s love as illustrated in his letters to Maria von Wedemeyer, and Eberhard Bethge, and the high profile given to family and friends in his prison fiction. He found the phrase \u2018Gl\u00fcck und Ungl\u00fcck\u2019 helpful for gathering together the instances when the acts of love of those closest to him had illumined God\u2019s working. In the last letter he wrote to Maria von Wedemeyer, at Christmas 1944, the phrase appears weaved into a pastiche of the main themes of his poetry.<\/p>\n
I have had the experience over and over again that the quieter it is around me, the clearer do I feel the connection to you. It is as though in solitude the soul develops senses which we hardly know in everyday life. Therefore I have not felt lonely or abandoned for one moment. You, the parents, all of you, the friends and students of mine at the front, all are constantly present to me \u2026 It is a great invisible sphere in which one lives and in whose reality there is no doubt \u2026 Therefore you must not think that I am unhappy. What is happiness and unhappiness [\u2018Gl\u00fcck und Ungl\u00fcck\u2019]? It depends so little on the circumstances; it depends really only on that which happens inside a person.<\/p>\n
In this poem Bonhoeffer is struggling to put into words how such human faithfulness functions. It does not make God directly present, but mediates this presence in the form of a \u2018soothing, supernatural radiance\u2019. The loving acts (good works) of family have the immediate effect of calming and comforting, but only further prayerful reflection reveals this as not a mere psychological effect, but God\u2019s blessing.
\nAs the focus of the next line is on friendship and brotherhood, the ecclesial context of these reflections comes into view. It is easy to see how Bonhoeffer, deprived of access to formal worship services, is forced to think further about the implications of the Lutheran conception of the worship service as the divine provision of a place where God may speak words of comfort to humans through the mouths of other humans. Though the space of worship orientates our hearing of the divine voice in other spheres, Bonhoeffer has a growing appreciation of the ways that God speaks bodily in other social spheres that he also has created. Here family and friendship receive special notice.
\nIn asking in real time how God is present to him, Bonhoeffer rediscovers simple things that bring him pleasure in prison. In his early letters from prison we can see Bonhoeffer ruminating on the relationship between food parcels and the soothing presence of loved ones.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s Whit Monday, and I was just sitting down to a dinner of turnips and potatoes when your parcel that Renate brought as a Whitsuntide present arrived quite unexpectedly. I really cannot tell you what happiness such things give one. However certain I am of the spiritual bond between all of you and myself, the spirit always seems to want some visible token of this union of love and remembrance, and then material things become the vehicles of spiritual realities. I think this is analogous to the need felt in all religions for the visible appearance of the Spirit in the sacrament.<\/p>\n
Eventually he comes to associate the essence of this soothing effect with speech, as he considered the relation of acts of kindness with words of kindness and even rebuke. Again he appears to be following out the logic of the Lutheran conception of worship in which divine comfort comes supremely through the speaking of divine promises. This realization is the conceptual background for the climactic scene, \u2018Christoph Argues with the Major\u2019, in Bonhoeffer\u2019s unfinished play, \u2018The Major\u2019s Story\u2019, where the theme of happiness and unhappiness is central. The Bonhoeffer character is portrayed as a young, aristocratic, and overly arduous (but ultimately insightful) radical who speaks rather too flippantly of the happiness he is willing to forego for the sake of leading the people out of bondage to oppressors. His overheated rhetoric is met, calmed, and focused on the importance of happiness as divine blessing, and the harshness of unhappiness, by a succession of wise pieces of advice from a friend, an elder statesman, and a fianc\u00e9e in turn; these are transparent narrative reflections by Bonhoeffer on the roles of those closest to him in shaping his life and theology.
\nThe central theological question raised in this stanza is why Bonhoeffer chooses to name this soothing presence as \u2018Treue\u2019. J\u00fcrgen Henkys somewhat tendentiously proposes that the background of the term is the monologue in Goethe\u2019s Iphigenie auf Tauris. In my opinion this is an unnecessarily speculative connection, given that there are less contentious connections to be made, such as Ilse T\u00f6dt\u2019s suggestion that in working on his Ethics Bonhoeffer had been reading the Berlin Philosopher Nicolai Hartman in which the \u2018Gl\u00fcck und Ungl\u00fcck\u2019 pairing does play an important role.
\nAs mentioned above, during this period Bonhoeffer was deeply immersed in the Psalms, particularly Psalm 119, a preoccupation that again sheds light on the questions at hand. There are two terms for \u2018faithfulness\u2019 that play central roles in Psalm 119. The first is \u2018emunah\u2019 which appears in vv. 75, 86, 90, 138, and 160. These are translated by Luther as \u2018deine Treue\u2019, \u2018Wahrheit\u2019, \u2018Wahrheit\u2019, \u2018gro\u00dfe Treue\u2019, and \u2018Wahrheit\u2019 respectively. English translations catch this confluence of objectivity and divine precedence, on which I believe Bonhoeffer was drawing, in two verses: v. 90, \u2018Your faithfulness endures to all generations; you have established the earth, and it stands fast\u2019, and v. 160 (from the New Jerusalem Bible) \u2018Faithfulness is the essence of your word, your upright judgements hold good forever\u2019.
\nA second Hebrew word for faithfulness is the heavily theologically freighted term, which appears five times in Psalm 119, \u2018hesed\u2019, which Luther almost exclusively translates with \u2018deine Gnade\u2019, \u2018thy grace\u2019. Here each of the references sheds light on Bonhoeffer\u2019s use of \u2018Treue\u2019.<\/p>\n
41 Let your steadfast [faithful] love [Luther-Bibel: \u2018Gnade\u2019] come to me, O LORD, your salvation according to your promise.
\n64 The earth, O LORD, is full of your steadfast love [Luther-Bibel: \u2018deiner G\u00fcte\u2019]; teach me your statutes.
\n88 In your steadfast love [Luther-Bibel: \u2018deiner Gnade\u2019] spare my life, so that I may keep the decrees of your mouth.
\n149 In your steadfast love [Luther-Bibel: \u2018deiner Gnade\u2019] hear my voice; O LORD, in your justice preserve my life.
\n159 Consider how I love your precepts; preserve my life according to your steadfast love [Luther-Bibel: \u2018deiner Gnade\u2019].<\/p>\n
Though Bonhoeffer\u2019s use of \u2018Treue\u2019 is clearly taking its references from Luther\u2019s translations of \u2018emunah\u2019, his theological exploration of the term works within the semantic field Luther sets up in which God\u2019s love and presence are conceived as conveyed through embodied forms. Luther often also refers to this as \u2018Bund der Treue\u2019, \u2018covenant of faithfulness\u2019. God\u2019s presence remains wholly God\u2019s love, and yet is spoken to us in and through material forms of human action. My suggestion is that Bonhoeffer is naming the presence, acts, and words of love by those around him as the agents through which \u2018salvation according to God\u2019s promise\u2019 is effected. I take the poem\u2019s final emphasis on \u2018quietly enveloping\u2019 as referring to the fact that this salvation is not so immediately visible as the initial event, or even the works of love which it brings forth from others. The modality of God\u2019s steadfast love does not effect an immediate and complete physical restoration, nor is it marked by the audible presence of God\u2019s voice apart from or beyond human voices. Nevertheless, this faithfulness and salvation is real and a real comfort, even if hidden to us. But it is salvation, and as such, beyond the search for happiness, rendering it uninteresting. In worldly unhappiness the futility of the search for happiness becomes manifest as the superiority of faithfulness eclipses it. In his Lutheran terminology, to need comfort is to need God\u2019s presence: Bonhoeffer suggests that the presence of others\u2019 faithfulness has the aspect of presence in hiddenness, a different topography of sensation than a direct divine intervention (as the initial event may have been), but still real and wholly concrete, to be thankfully appreciated in faith.
\nIt is others who rebuild us, or rather, it is God who rebuilds us through them, through a love that before we did not know as God\u2019s love, but of which we have become aware. It is through such human love that God reminds us to seek him alone by attacking our tendency to turn to \u2018religion\u2019 as a mechanism for soothing our disorientation. I suspect that for us, terrorism and medical emergencies will be the sorts of contemporary events to which Bonhoeffer\u2019s reflections provide the most obvious analogue. He provides a suggestive way of thinking about dilemmas in medical ethics such as the diagnosis of a fatal disease, mental illness, a disabled foetus, or terminal disease, where we are all too easily unhinged by bad news, driven into self-protective modes of reality avoidance. In such cases, Bonhoeffer provides the resources to say that the presence of an other\u2019s love may be a divine confrontation of our temptation to descend into self-centred disillusionment, opening ways of dealing with these blows not visible from the vantage point of the sufferer, and suggesting the vertical source and reference of this love.
\nThus far we have concentrated on how Bonhoeffer\u2019s reflections on God\u2019s presence with him through others is interpreted as a divine work of transformation through them. This is a question that is fruitful for us to reverse. In what ways do we serve God\u2019s love for others? With this question we are given new purchase for a theological exploration of Bonhoeffer\u2019s authorial activity. That he is constantly writing, I will suggest, is not an attempt to \u2018keep himself busy\u2019 in the isolation of prison, but an expression of his love for others, his attempt to serve God\u2019s faithful presence to others in need. This is part of why Bonhoeffer writes incessantly from his cell\u2014as a servant of God\u2019s love for others, and how he writes\u2014what forms he takes up. Each letter both expresses and further catalyses the transfiguration of writer and recipient by events, allowing brute history to become revelation. His writing is his tangible effort to give himself as God\u2019s love to others and, as such, serves as a lesson in what it means to be a Christian theologian. Just as the visits of his loved ones and the reception of their packages sustain him, so his writing sustains them: in each interchange, God is sustaining both human parties by way of the other.<\/p>\n
IV. Poetry, intimacy, and the unexpected<\/p>\n
Here we uncover a deeper connection between the Psalter and Bonhoeffer\u2019s poetry. Why, we might ask, did he write poetry at all? And why did he begin so very late in his career, after it was almost over? This is a question that we cannot objectively answer, alongside the question why Bonhoeffer joined the plot against Hitler. Even an understanding of his life\u2019s story provides little knowledge of the whys and wherefores of the decisions that most deeply shaped him. This is not to imply that moral \u2018decisions\u2019 are the essential concern of Christian ethics, but simply to point out that retelling the story of Bonhoeffer does not straightforwardly tell us what his example might mean for our own practice. Happily, Bonhoeffer has left us with some clues about the inner genesis of his decisions, in this case, the unexpected development in his writing style.
\nIn a well deserved retort to individualist versions of Christianity, recent strands in moral theology have strongly stressed the communal nature of Christian faith. Here we learn and embrace the Christian life as a craft skill, by watching and being taught by others. Such an approach assumes, but rarely investigates, the inner dynamics of this learning; its methodology bars it from asking what happens when no saints are physically available to teach and sustain faith. Put more pointedly, how can the Christian performance of faith ever have grown in richness if everything we learn is picked up from those around us? The standard response to these questions is that liturgy prepares Christians to \u2018improvise, to balance individual inventiveness with adherence to a tradition of prescribed conventions\u2014which means that elements of risk and unpredictable achievement are inescapable features.\u2019 While we might wish to affirm some objectively grounded definition of improvisation, Bonhoeffer\u2019s life, and especially his venture in poetry, allows us to test its sufficiency as an account of transformation in the Christian life.
\nLocked in a cell, and with only minimal contact with others, Bonhoeffer put on a form of relating, a persona, \u2018the poet\u2019, he had never before inhabited. Investigating why he might have made this attempt may help us to better understand why and how any believer might take up an unfamiliar social role or persona such as spouse, parent, minister, or ruler. Much thought has been devoted to the outward political witness of Bonhoeffer\u2019s last years: my interest is in the inner features of Bonhoeffer\u2019s lonely years, understanding that it was precisely their loneliness which make Bonhoeffer stand out as a witness to God\u2019s work. I will suggest that Bonhoeffer is an example of how the Psalter trains Christians to put on a persona before God which is not theirs, an \u2018alien self\u2019, to embolden them to live before and for others in novel ways.
\nBonhoeffer himself gives us licence to make such an inquiry with his reference to Joseph. From what sanctorum communio could a young Israelite in Egypt have learned to live with integrity before his God? In the case of Joseph, which raises the question to a new height, it is plausible to presume that years of liturgical formation took place before his brutal betrayal. But surely this would not have prepared him for the ethical and spiritual challenges he would face in the house of Pharaoh in Egypt. If it is true that he would have to \u2018improvise, to balance individual inventiveness with adherence to a tradition of prescribed conventions\u2019, it is also true that \u2018elements of risk and unpredictable achievement\u2019 would have been the primary location of his life of faith, rather than any regular contact with collective worship. For Joseph to remain a faithful Israelite, he would have to take on roles far beyond any role models the community of faith could offer him. Joseph would have to live a long stretch of his life cut off from what some theological ethics, such as that of Joel Shuman, designates the only resource for Christian moral renewal: \u2018some kind of habituation\u2019. Shuman suggests this habituation is grounded in liturgical practice: \u2018Through their regular participation in the liturgy, which is first of all (but not only) the ritual public worship of the gathered community, Christians enter into those relationships that train and enable them to live well as the body of Christ.\u2019 Thus, \u2018when God acts to form the character of a person through the infusion of theological and moral virtue, God\u2019s agency is mediated by the church: that community whose practices have been responsible for the transmission and re-enactment of God\u2019s story.\u2019
\nOne can only agree with Shuman\u2019s stress on the importance of gathered worship in forming Christian ideas and practices. It is a message that the muscular Christianity of individualistic heroism and supererogation must ever again hear. Yet the story of Joseph, and Bonhoeffer, forces us to go beyond the polarization of individual and collective, of word and deed. We must go beyond general assertions that Christians are formed by traditions to ask whether, when we investigate the way Christians are formed by their traditions, this emphasis on liturgical formation accurately reflects the witness of scripture. Such a question is also an inquiry into the substance of pneumatology and eschatology, which, if they are to mean anything at all in Christian ethics, must name the hope of human action that goes beyond (though not disconnected from) what we may have learned from our parents and teachers. Theology ought to readily affirm the outer, bodily, brute physicality of \u2018traditioning\u2019 through liturgical practices and habit formation, but not at the expense of ignoring the inner dynamics of that process, which are not reducible to our bodily formation.
\nThe legitimate worry about reducing Christian faith to \u2018my private time with God\u2019 tends to illegitimately obscure the forms God can and has provided to remain with us in any state we might find ourselves, including isolation from the Christian community. God has been gracious to form our converse with him through Scripture, \u2018softly suffusing us\u2019 with the presence of acts of love in the form of the Psalter. Not accidentally does the form of the Psalter, poetry, relate to its content, converse with God. There is ample evidence that Bonhoeffer\u2019s approach to the Psalter was deeply influenced by Luther, who thought of the Psalter as a divinely given form for addressing God. Bonhoeffer follows Luther in understanding the book as a \u2018children\u2019s primer\u2019 for learning to talk to God, in assuming that only one book in the Bible is devoted to training our speech and affections towards God, and in his Christological approach to the Psalms. There are striking parallels between Bonhoeffer\u2019s exegesis of Psalm 119 and Luther\u2019s treatment of it in his first lecture series, especially regarding the central place of the undivided heart, the primacy of the petition for grace, and the centrality of relying on God\u2019s Word rather than our own interpretations of Scripture.
\nIn Luther\u2019s eyes, in all other biblical books the narrator, as narrator, must assume a God\u2019s eye view of events in order to tell us about the deeds of the saints. But Christians do not learn to become saints by mimicking the saints\u2019 deeds, but by being given a renewed heart, the affective dimension of human life. Luther\u2019s stress is not on how we learn faith from first joining others\u2019 liturgical actions, but as in the context of this ongoing activity we discover the ways their actions are animated by an inner life characterized by a shaped and oriented desire. He concludes, \u2018I would rather hear what a saint says than see the deeds he does, [and] would far rather see his heart, and the treasure in his soul, than hear his words. And this, the Psalter gives us most abundantly concerning the saints \u2026 There you look into the hearts of all the saints, as into fair and pleasant gardens, yes, as into heaven itself.\u2019
\nWhat Luther finds in the Psalter, then, is that the saints are shaped by collective performance of worship, but that worship has an inner side, a training of the subject as hearer of God that is facilitated in a unique way by the Psalter:<\/p>\n
In the other books we are taught by both precept and example what we ought to do. This book not only teaches but also gives the means and method by which we may keep the precept and follow the example. For it is not by our striving that we fulfil the Law of God or imitate Christ. But we are to pray and wish that we may fulfil it and imitate Him; when we do, we are to praise and give thanks. And what is the Psalter but prayer and praise to God, that is, a book of hymns?<\/p>\n
The Psalms embody the love of God whose Spirit is the \u2018Father of orphans and the Teacher of the ignorant\u2019 (Rom. 8:26), who helps us to pray, to enjoy God, despite our weakness, our lack of desire for God, for good works, and our broken imagination. \u2018As a teacher will compose letters or little speeches for his pupils to write to their parents, so by this book He prepares both the language and the mood in which we should address the Heavenly Father and pray for that which the other books have taught us to do and to imitate.\u2019
\nLuther\u2019s suggestion is that God has provided humans with poems that make intimate conversation with Him possible in the dark and confined places as well as the green pastures and liturgical heartlands of this life. The poetic form expresses an immediacy that is uncritical at root. This is similar to the understanding of poetry for which Paul Ricoeur is well known. \u2018My deepest conviction is that poetic language alone restores to us that participation-in or belonging-to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects opposed to a subject.\u2019
\nWe have already noted that it is only in the last stages of his imprisonment, when death was immanent, that Bonhoeffer began writing poetry. His early prison letters can make quite pedestrian reading, being devoted to rather familiar topics: thanks for letters, requests for books, medicines, tobacco, and news of various friends and students. But the tone markedly changes as the situation drags on and the possibility of release becomes increasingly unlikely. Only at the very end do the letters begin to be sprinkled with poems.
\nThis development is susceptible to a range of interpretations. The sociological account no doubt appeals to many. As a well educated Prussian, Bonhoeffer was familiar with the techniques of poetry, and reserved enough to know he was no poet, a reserve broken down under the increased pressure to maintain emotional contact with loved ones. The psychological account is also no doubt persuasive, that the movement from more pedestrian letter writing into more revealing forms of writing is an artifact of a human craving for the deeper levels of contact which keep human souls alive. It is harder to take seriously a proposal that the eruption of poetry represented an unstoppable upwelling of a latent artistic gift, which would allow us to explain the poetry as the natural expression of an artistic genius. Each account probably contains certain elements of truth, indicating real immanent forces feeding the genesis of his poetry. Yet Bonhoeffer\u2019s own theology forces us beyond these immanent patterns to ask after the working of God.
\nI think Eberhard Bethge was right in believing that only poetry allowed Bonhoeffer to combine the intimacy and decorum demanded by their relationship with the terrible demands being placed on it. In his response to Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem \u2018The Friend\u2019, Bethge writes to Bonhoeffer,<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t give anything more personal than a poem. And you could hardly give me greater joy. There is no greater self-sacrifice, no better way of signifying an otherwise unattainable nearness than in a poem. And it is probably the form, because it makes visible the inwardness that is bound up and held in check within it. Unlimited surrender of the spirit awakens anxiety in the receiver. But this restrained surrender seems to me to be the highest degree of friendship and understanding. And as a result there is something very cheering and stimulating about it. Its touch is steadier and more far-reaching than that of a letter. Many thanks.<\/p>\n
Here we begin to glimpse the inner reasons for Bonhoeffer\u2019s poetic venture. He writes a poem to his friend about friendship as a desperate but controlled act of friendship, a work of love. And as Bethge\u2019s response shows us, it was more effective, by an order of magnitude, than any of his previous efforts. The connection and enjoyment that have been drained out of their relationship in being unable to make music together, by being unable to hear the other\u2019s voice inflection and see one another\u2019s body language has been restored, at least in part, by Bonhoeffer\u2019s risky and improvised poetic act. Bonhoeffer\u2019s heart for Bethge flows out into poetry; only in this good work do we have an evidence of the inner side of good works to which Luther has drawn our attention. Bonhoeffer grasps that poetry is a genre ideally suited to intimacy, to intensity of relation, and of affective connection, and says as much in a letter written only weeks before Bethge\u2019s expression of thanks.<\/p>\n
There is hardly anything that can make one happier than to feel that one counts for something with other people. What matters here is not numbers, but intensity. In the long run, human relationships are the most important thing in life; the modern \u2018efficient\u2019 man can do nothing to change this, nor can the demigods and lunatics who know nothing about human relationships. Everything else is close to hubris. Of course, one can cultivate human relationships all too consciously in an attempt to mean something to other people \u2026 But what is the finest book, or picture, or house, or estate, to me, compared to my wife, my parents, or my friend? One can, of course, speak like that if one has found others in one\u2019s life. For many today man is just a part of the world of things, because the experience of the human simply eludes them, we must be very glad that this experience has been amply bestowed on us in our lives.<\/p>\n
In the case of such a theological and existential thinker as Bonhoeffer, we ought, I think, to tie all these threads together. He undoubtedly harboured understandable reservations about exposing himself, both artistically and personally. He may well have had an aptitude for poetry never before recognized, having been stifled under cultural and temperamental reserve. Yet he ventured such writing because he had been taught by a tradition of scriptural interpretation to venture a very specific sort of intimacy with God. Having learned from Luther and the Psalms what mattered in one\u2019s converse with God, and how actually to go about it, he came both to understand the importance of the inner, affective relationship with God, and what builds and sustains the affective side of communication with God. Having learned to converse with God through poetry, it is not fanciful to suggest that he was emboldened to write poetry as a form of love for humans. He wrote poetry to those he loved, who shaped him, and who he was shaped by: his family, his friends, his fianc\u00e9e, and in and with them all, his church. Having learned intimacy with God in vibrant conversation with him, he discovered the strength, insight, and skill to venture intimacy with others.
\nFinally, our exploration of Bonhoeffer\u2019s use of \u2018Treue\u2019 indicated how such a venture of intimacy might be an attempt to serve God\u2019s venture of intimacy towards those we love. Again the form of the Psalter comes into view in a special way, as the venture of God to speak to humans and of humans to express their desire to continue with God. Poetry was the deepest and most intimate way Bonhoeffer could find to \u2018stay with\u2019 his loved ones, glimpsed for the first time in the realization that their lives together were effectively over. In this context his poetic act was not only a grasp at one last moment of human intimacy, but was self-consciously to serve God\u2019s own faithfulness to his loved ones in their mourning, even in the mourning of his own death.<\/p>\n
5<\/p>\n
\u2018By Powers of Good\u2019<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s Last Poem: Texts and Contexts<\/p>\n
Nancy Lukens and Renate Bethge<\/p>\n
\u2018Von Guten M\u00e4chten\u2019<\/p>\n
1. Von guten M\u00e4chten treu und still umgeben,
\nbeh\u00fctet und getr\u00f6stet wunderbar,\u2014
\nso will ich diese Tage mit euch leben
\nund mit euch gehen in ein neues Jahr.<\/p>\n
2. Noch will das alte unsre Herzen qu\u00e4len,
\nnoch dr\u00fcckt uns b\u00f6ser Tage schwere Last.
\nAch, Herr, gib unsern aufgescheuchten Seelen
\ndas Heil, f\u00fcr das Du uns bereitet hast.<\/p>\n
3. Und reichst Du uns den schweren Kelch, den bittern,
\ndes Leids, gef\u00fcllt bis an den h\u00f6chsten Rand,
\nso nehmen wir ihn dankbar ohne Zittern
\naus Deiner guten und geliebten Hand.<\/p>\n
4. Doch willst Du uns noch einmal Freude schenken
\nan dieser Welt und ihrer Sonne Glanz,
\ndann woll\u2019n wir des Vergangenen gedenken,
\nund dann geh\u00f6rt Dir unser Leben ganz.<\/p>\n
5. La\u00df warm und still die Kerzen heute flammen,
\ndie Du in unsre Dunkelheit gebracht,
\nf\u00fchr, wenn es sein kann, wieder uns zusammen!
\nWir wissen es, Dein Licht scheint in der Nacht.<\/p>\n
6. Wenn sich die Stille nun tief um uns breitet,
\nso la\u00df uns h\u00f6ren jenen vollen Klang
\nder Welt, die unsichtbar sich um uns weitet,
\nall Deiner Kinder hohen Lobgesang.<\/p>\n
7. Von guten M\u00e4chten wunderbar geborgen
\nerwarten wir getrost, was kommen mag.
\nGott ist mit uns am Abend und am Morgen,
\nund ganz gewi\u00df an jedem neuen Tag.<\/p>\n
\u2018By Powers of Good\u2019<\/p>\n
1. By faithful, quiet powers of good surrounded,
\nso wondrously consoled and sheltered here\u2014
\nI wish to live these days with you in spirit
\nand with you enter into a new year.<\/p>\n
2. The old year still would try our hearts to torment,
\nof evil times we still do bear the weight;
\nO Lord, do grant our souls, now terror-stricken,
\nsalvation for which you did us create.<\/p>\n
3. And should you offer us the cup of suffering,
\nthough heavy, brimming full and bitter brand,
\nwe\u2019ll thankfully accept it, never flinching,
\nfrom your good heart and your beloved hand.<\/p>\n
4. But should you wish now once again to give us
\nthe joys of this world and its glorious sun,
\nthen we\u2019ll recall anew what past times brought us
\nand then our life belongs to you alone.<\/p>\n
5. The candles you have brought into our darkness,
\nlet them today be burning warm and bright,
\nand if it\u2019s possible, do reunite us!
\nWe know your light is shining through the night.<\/p>\n
6. When now the quiet deepens all around us,
\nO, let our ears that fullest sound amaze
\nof this, your world, invisibly expanding
\nas all your children sing high hymns of praise.<\/p>\n
7. By powers of good so wondrously protected,
\nwe wait with confidence, befall what may.
\nGod is with us at night and in the morning
\nand oh, most certainly on each new day.<\/p>\n
(Translation: Nancy Lukens)<\/p>\n
I. The context<\/p>\n
This poem, though very well translated, is not the same in English as in its original German. It touched us deeply when it arrived. It reached us in a time of deep depression. Marie von Wedemeyer, Dietrich\u2019s fianc\u00e9e, had brought it in December 1944 from the Gestapo prison where Dietrich had been since the beginning of October and where no personal contact was possible as it had been before to a limited extent in Tegel. We had the good luck that Dietrich\u2019s prosecutor was fond of Maria. So we rightly hoped that if she would come to the prison he would give her things that Dietrich wanted her and us to have.
\nFirst I will tell you of whom Dietrich thought when he wrote this poem: of Maria, his fianc\u00e9e, his parents, living in Berlin next door to their daughter Ursula, whose husband R\u00fcdiger Schleicher was also in prison, as was Dietrich\u2019s brother Klaus; and Hans von Dohnanyi, husband of his sister Christine, and their respective children. It is easiest to see it from the perspective of Dietrich\u2019s parents: two sons and two sons-in-law were in prison as well as now Eberhard Bethge, husband of a granddaughter (myself, i.e. Dietrich\u2019s niece).
\nThe prison where Dietrich was held now was the Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz-Albrecht-Stra\u00dfe, formerly a palace. The few important prisoners held there were kept in the cellar. Some were tortured there, but we don\u2019t know that about Dietrich. In any case all were interrogated there. This is also the place where \u2018our\u2019 prisoners, like others, were brought for questioning, from the beginning of the arrests until this time. During some of the time Dietrich was held in this cellar prison. Hans von Dohnanyi was also detained briefly there. Once Dietrich managed to go into Dohnanyi\u2019s cell and confer with him, as we heard from a man who was later released. Hans had been very ill, paralyzed after a case of diphtheria. But now he went on pretending to be paralyzed, practising at night to walk, since he hoped somehow to escape one day.
\nDietrich\u2019s brother Klaus and my father, R\u00fcdiger Schleicher, were in another prison, Lehrter Stra\u00dfe, waiting for their trial, which took place on 2 February 1945, with eventual death sentences for both. But when Dietrich wrote this poem, the trial had not yet taken place. Dietrich\u2019s closest friend, my husband Eberhard Bethge, was also in the Lehrter Stra\u00dfe prison. He was the only one of the five imprisoned men from our families who was released at the end of the war. He later published the illegal prison letters to him from Dietrich that had survived, and after that he wrote the big Bonhoeffer biography.
\nIn addition to worrying about the men in prison there was also the worry about the air raids. The Dohnanyis lived outside Berlin in Sakrow, so Dietrich\u2019s parents now and then spent some nights there because one would not expect as much bombing there as in the Marienburger Allee, where they and their daughter Ursula lived with her family. At the very end of the war my parents\u2019 house there was hit. But this news did not reach either Dietrich or my father in prison. Yet you always had to expect news of this kind and worse. My brother Walter Schleicher was in the air force and had been shot down, without being hurt. Dietrich often asked about him in his letters.
\nWe knew that all our men didn\u2019t get enough to eat. Prisoners in Tegel were allowed to receive a parcel every ten days. When Maria came to Berlin she always brought Dietrich something to eat from her family estate in Pomerania. My mother managed to cook hot food for the three men in Lehrter Stra\u00dfe prison every day though we ourselves didn\u2019t have much, but it was easier to cook for the three than to bring them items such as butter, cheese or meat. Friends and relatives helped us sometimes with food stamps. My aunt Emmi, wife of Klaus Bonhoeffer, and I would carry the three portions, wrapped in newspaper and woolen shawls and blankets, to the prison: one portion in the middle between us and one for both of us in the other hand. There were two guards who usually took the things and brought them to the three men. And, of course, for the guards there were always some of the few cigarettes we got from our ration cards. Most went to the prisoners, but it was just as important to keep the guards in good spirits.
\nAfter a fairly long time one could apply for a \u2018Sprecherlaubnis\u2019, i.e. a date when one would be given permission to visit the prisoner. Parents, wives, sons and daughters would get it from time to time. I, for instance, could not get one to visit Dietrich in spite of my applications, though of course I did later get to visit my father and my husband. In summer 1944, however, Dietrich had arranged for Eberhard and me to visit him without official permission. Now only one guard had to be won over for that risky enterprise, but Dietrich had enough good friends among the guards at Tegel prison that apparently he was able to risk this, and they dared to do this for him. Dietrich was in astonishingly good spirits, because he must have heard about the planned plot against Hitler, which then occurred on 20 July 1944. When we saw him in Tegel we sometimes wondered how he seemed to know more than we did through our regular listening to the BBC (which was, of course, strictly forbidden). Our visit with Dietrich was cut short because of an air raid; we had to get to a large shelter outside the prison district.
\nBut after the coup attempt failed everything was different, and now Dietrich was transferred to the Prinz-Albrecht-Stra\u00dfe prison. They have now re-named the street and the rubble of the bombed building has been removed to expose the cellar.
\nAfter that we had very little contact. But of course we had in common the knowledge how Christmas and New Years\u2019 Eve were celebrated in our family. And Dietrich was sure that this year, too, things would be as every year in spite of the great distress: on Christmas Eve the reading of the Christmas story by my grandmother, and then the Christmas carols sung by everybody; on New Year\u2019s Eve the reading of Psalm 90, and with all the family, believers and non-believers alike, joining in the singing of all 15 verses of Paul Gerhardt\u2019s \u2018Nun la\u00dft uns gehn und treten mit Singen und mit Beten zum Herrn, der unserm Leben bis hierher Kraft gegeben\u2019 \u2026 (literally: \u2018Now let us go with singing and praying to the Lord, who has granted us strength for living until now.\u2019)
\nThe knowledge that the whole extended family would stick to that custom gave Dietrich the strength \u2018to live these days with you in spirit\u2019. These are the \u2018powers of good\u2019, which he knew would be strong even, and especially, in that very dark time.<\/p>\n
II. Publication history and reception of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019<\/p>\n
This poem was very soon fairly well known. It was published by Willem A. Vissert\u2019t Hooft in Geneva for the ecumenical council and by my husband in 1946 at the first anniversary of Dietrich\u2019s death in a booklet for schools in Berlin. In the same year there appeared two different English translations and soon different settings to music. Today there are innumerable musical versions of that poem, even though at first, knowledgeable musicians had said that this poem was unsuited to being set to music. They said that because the poem is written in pentameter, with five metric \u2018feet\u2019, and none of our hymns have that rhythm, Dietrich could not have thought of a hymn in writing the poem.
\nNow, later than in other countries, there are two versions in our German protestant hymnbook. The one had won over the \u2018Kirchentag\u2019 (the biennial all-church assembly), without the blessing of the official church authorities, when groups of young people sang it to the guitar. This is now the most popular version, but we are not so fond of it because it has the rhythm of a dance, which does not correspond to the situation when the poem was written. The other tune in our hymn book is more suitable; it\u2019s more in the manner of other hymns, but it\u2019s not very striking.
\nIt took a very long time before the church decided to accept \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 into our hymnbook. There are several possible explanations for this hesitancy. First, there were certain reservations about Bonhoeffer in Germany. He was seen as someone who had perhaps become guilty by joining the conspiracy to kill Hitler. Others argued: If he had been right, most of us other Germans would have been wrong. Even a very good man from the Confessing Church told me shortly after the war that he could not have taken the step that Dietrich took.
\nBut later on, when people had read more of what Bonhoeffer had written and what was written about him, the mood changed. Also, people in the meantime had become more fully aware of the terrible harm deliberately brought to Jews and other people during the \u2018Third Reich\u2019. Also a new generation that had not been so involved with National Socialism had now grown up. So they understood when Bonhoeffer wrote, for instance, that it is \u2018God who demands responsible action in a bold venture of faith, and promises forgiveness and consolation to the man who becomes a sinner in that venture\u2019.<\/p>\n
III. To be or not to be a poem: the genre of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019<\/p>\n
As Renate Bethge indicated, \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 has had a life of its own through its reception as a hymn, quite apart from its relevance to his prison theology or, indeed, equally importantly, the shifting views in Germany and elsewhere of Bonhoeffer\u2019s political witness. This is not the place to elaborate on the important and understandable reasons for the decades it has taken for the churches and civil society in Germany as well as elsewhere to begin to sort out the implications of Bonhoeffer\u2019s political witness. I would argue that a careful rereading of the ten poems as texts, especially in the new, complete versions with editorial apparatus and references to events and writings of the same time period, would shed important light on these questions. My purpose in looking at \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 as one of Bonhoeffer\u2019s last known utterances before his deportation from Berlin, is to make a modest beginning towards that end, but focusing primarily on the text itself, its addressees, and its contextual references.
\nBut this poem more than many others raises the question of its genre as a prerequisite to interpretation. In the more than six decades since Visser t\u2019Hooft\u2019s first little publication of \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 on the first anniversary of Bonhoeffer\u2019s death, parts of the poem have travelled the globe in numerous translations and musical settings. It is not my purpose to trace that history here. J\u00fcrgen Henkys, professor of theology with expertise in German literary criticism, hymnology, and Bonhoeffer studies, author of a 2005 monograph on the prison poetry, documented published listings of musical settings of \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 in his first book-length study of Bonhoeffer\u2019s poems in 1986. Here he cited a 1976 documentation of five musical settings, already then asserting that his own updated list of seventeen composers was certainly incomplete. I find it striking, given the familiarity to many Western German and English speaking Bonhoeffer aficionados of the seven-verse hymn or the published poem, that the best known melody of \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 was, as Henkys reports, composed after the fact of repeated use in the context of East German Church youth group gatherings in the 1950s. There, the last verse of the poem would be recited out of context as a prayer or meditation, from memory, without anyone necessarily knowing there were other verses, or perhaps even its author\u2019s name or the circumstances of its writing. Precisely because of its popularity, Theophil Rothenberg then asked Otto Abel to compose a melody for this last verse to be included in his youth hymnal. Henkys asks: \u2018What happens to a work when it is \u201cused\u201d (gebraucht) [i.e. as a hymn or prayer]? What is attributed to it or added to it in the process? What do people get from it, what is taken away from it?\u2019 Specifically in this case, what does the final verse of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 mean in a context when Church youth, say in 1950s Soviet-controlled East Berlin, find that it speaks to their situation? \u2018By powers of good so wondrously protected\/we wait with confidence, befall what may\/God is with us at night and in the morning\/and oh, most certainly on each new day.\u2019
\nConsidering the dramatic progression of the seven-verse sequence in \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019\u2014entering the new year together in spirit with absent loved ones, bearing the weight of evil times that still try to torment the heart, terror-stricken souls seeking the salvation for which human beings were created, gratefully and unflinchingly accepting the possibility of drinking the cup of suffering, but then confessing the desire for earthly joys, for reunion, for the sound of all God\u2019s children singing hymns of praise in an invisibly expanding universe\u2014it may seem \u2018cheap grace\u2019 to leap straight to the comforting lines of the final verse, or perhaps worse, to consciously lift it out of context. In another setting, participants at the 2000 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Congress in Berlin sang with inmates in Tegel Prison chapel the more dance-like melody of \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 referred to by Renate Bethge above. This version included only vv. 1\u20134, with v. 7 as the refrain. Given that, as far as the written record indicates, Bonhoeffer had no intention of his poem being read by others outside his extended family and his fianc\u00e9e, the question remains: Who are we to decide in this next millennium how it should be \u2018used\u2019, what should it \u2018mean\u2019 in contexts beyond late December 1944? Perhaps these two examples may serve to suggest how the interpretation of texts, including both prayer and song, is conditioned by their reception and vice versa.
\nThus \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 is widely known as a hymn, in many diverse translations and musical versions. Some versions omit certain verses or use only the final verse; some re-arrange the order of the verses, which are numbered by Bonhoeffer in the recently published original version in his own hand. The text uses forms of address typical of prayer in all but the opening and closing stanzas of the poem, i.e. in stanzas 2\u20136, after the intimate circle of addressees have been brought into the shared moment in v. 1. Thus one might be tempted to read the text, in fact, as a hymn. But is this its poetic genre?
\nAs Renate Bethge remarked, it appears unlikely that Bonhoeffer had in mind a hymn tune when writing the seven verses of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019. Bonhoeffer\u2019s intended audience, well read in German classical literature, would immediately feel at home reading these seven strophes, more so than they would read or sing an unfamiliar hymn text. His extended family were not churchgoers or particularly religious; they belonged to the secular Bildungsb\u00fcrgertum, the classically educated upper-middle class. The seven original German verses of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 are composed in strict iambic pentameter, the basic form adopted for classical German sonnets, terzines, and stanzas by German poets from J. W. von Goethe, Gottfried August B\u00fcrger, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, and C. F. Meyer, to Stephan George and R.M. Rilke, based originally on the Italian eleven-syllable stanza form. The verses consist of five metric feet per line, each line beginning with an unstressed syllable, alternating lines ending with an unstressed or stressed syllable, with a consistent ABBA rhyme scheme. It would appear that Bonhoeffer can hardly have had a hymn melody in mind when composing these verses, as Henkys asserts, for nowhere in German hymnody is there a hymn in iambic pentameter! As much as Bonhoeffer is known to have made a practice of reciting familiar hymns on a daily basis in prison, this poem does not appear to be conceived as such.
\nBut as Henkys has recently discovered, appearances can deceive. He concedes that his view has shifted on this point since discovering that the melody, metric pattern, and final verse of the Gottfried Arnold hymn, \u2018So f\u00fchrst du doch recht selig, Herr, die Deinen\u2019 (\u2018Thus you lead your people, Lord, to blessing\u2019), are strikingly similar to those of the final verse of \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019. On 9 September 1943, Bonhoeffer urged Maria to read the hymn, one of his favourites, despite its unfamiliarity and difficulty, saying \u2018it grows on one\u2019; on 29 September she replies that she often read it and was grateful for it. I shall return to Paul Gerhardt shortly. But first let us consider the poem as a poem.
\nUntil Henkys\u2019 1986 monograph, Bonhoeffer\u2019s ten poems attracted little critical attention as poetry per se\u2014much less as \u2018prison poetry\u2019, a genre in its own right. Eberhard Bethge devotes no more than several sentences of his biography to the poetry, describing these \u2018literary experiments\u2019 as \u2018efforts to overcome his isolation\u2019, \u2018so densely packed that they burst the forms of the poem.\u2019 Bethge devotes four lines to \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019, calling it \u2018the last theological and developed witness from Bonhoeffer\u2019s hand\u2019, and \u2018a prayer\u2019. As suggested by the title, the first separate German publication of the poems by Johann Christoph Hampe, Gebete und Gedichte (Prayers and Poems), gives the three prayers and ten poems equal weight, omitting mention of their genesis in prison. Its English equivalent ignores the texts\u2019 genre with the title Prayers from Prison. Not until the 1990s has there been greater attention to the prison poems as poetry, as exemplified by Henkys\u2019 critical study Geheimnis der Freiheit, or Edwin Robertson\u2019s adaptation of the 10 poems in English, appearing in the U.K. in 1998 and the U.S. a year later.
\nSo how and why does Bonhoeffer, who had written poetry as a youth and now returned to the genre in prison, go about communicating in this form? Bethge and others have justifiably asserted that Bonhoeffer\u2019s stylistic forte is the essay and the letter. Why, then, would he choose the classical Italian stanza form and pack such important material into it in order to communicate these end-of-year thoughts to an intimate circle of extended family and friends?
\nThe distinctly personal tone is set by Bonhoeffer\u2019s lyrical first person in v. 1 by creating an \u2018I-you\u2019 relationship: \u2018I want to live these days with you in spirit\u2019. Amidst terror and bombardment, imprisoned family members and a most uncertain future, there is an abyss to be crossed to affirm the connection between separated loved ones. How does Bonhoeffer do this?
\nOne answer to this question is: He does not do it merely by sending a poem. The poem is embedded in a letter. So, technically, we are looking at a more complex genre, as it turns out a kind of epistolary last testament with an embedded poetic jewel. Secondly, there are two separate letters and two slightly different surviving versions of the poem. In early editions of LPP, \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 is placed after Bonhoeffer\u2019s letter of 28 December 1944 to his mother, with wishes for her birthday. The updated English version of Eberhard Bethge\u2019s biography, as well as DBW 8, describe the poem as having been sent for his mother\u2019s 70th birthday on 30 December, \u2018through [his fianc\u00e9e] Maria [von Wedemeyer]\u2019. If we can assume Paula Bonhoeffer had already read the poem or received it about the time of the letter at New Years Eve, the following sentences will have struck a chord (cf. especially vv. 1, 2, and 5):<\/p>\n
I think these difficult years have brought us even closer together than we ever were before \u2026 I wish you and Papa and Maria and all of us that the new year might at least bring us a glimmer of light here and there and that we might be able to have the joy of being together again after all.<\/p>\n
As we know since the publication of LLC 92, the original manuscript of the poem comprised the conclusion of Bonhoeffer\u2019s Christmas letter of 19 December to Maria, delivered to her by Commissar Sonderegger for the holidays. The original was kept by her under lock and key until her death, with only the typed copy she gave the family circulating among them and then finding publication in the forms we knew until recently. In the lines of the letter immediately preceding the poem, Bonhoeffer describes it to Maria as, \u2018my Christmas greeting to you, my parents, and my brothers and sisters.\u2019 Thus we know that Bonhoeffer intended multiple addressees for the poem, as implied by Renate Bethge\u2019s remarks.
\nThe fact that Bonhoeffer\u2019s last poem is embedded within the last letter to his fianc\u00e9e arouses the interest of textual critics who look at intertextual resonances. The echoes here are striking: \u2018My dearest Maria \u2026 Our homes will be very quiet at this time [cf. vv. 1 and 6 of \u201cBy Powers of Good\u201d: \u201cBy faithful, quiet powers \u2026\u201d, and \u201cWhen now the quiet deepens all around us \u2026\u201d]. But I have often found that the quieter my surroundings, the more vividly I sense my connection with you all.\u2019 The world that read \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 in LPP without reference to the original would not have noticed the certainly conscious reference by Bonhoeffer in his letter to the poem that followed, because the LPP translation omitted the German word for \u2018quiet\u2019 in the first line.Knowing the custom of the family gathering, the correspondent and poet affirms his presence with them by alluding to the quiet and the ritual gathering. Quiet is a dominant motif in the poem, yet Bonhoeffer immediately re-defines it in v. 1: it is not the sentimental quiet of undisturbed middle-class life, but the quiet force of \u2018faithful powers of good\u2019 amidst the \u2018evil times\u2019 and \u2018terror-stricken\u2019 souls of v. 2. Bonhoeffer uses his final letter of 19 December to his fianc\u00e9e, which again was only published after her death, and his letter of 28 December to his mother, to introduce the prayer-like poem in secular language.
\nMaria once broke her oath of silence by reading aloud during a talk at Union Seminary in New York City the following passage from this letter. It, too, is alive with resonances with the poem, as if in writing the letter Bonhoeffer is finding his way towards the wording of the poem:<\/p>\n
It is as if, in solitude, the soul develops organs of which we\u2019re hardly aware in everyday life. So I haven\u2019t for an instant felt lonely and forlorn. You yourself, my parents\u2014all of you including my friends and students on active service\u2014are my constant companions. Your prayers and kind thoughts, passages from the Bible, long-forgotten conversations, pieces of music, books\u2014all are invested with life and reality as never before. It is a great, invisible realm in which one lives and of whose real existence there can be no doubt. The old children\u2019s song about the angels says \u2018two to cover me, two to wake me\u2019\u2014and today we grown-ups are no less in need than children of preservation, night and morning, by kindly, unseen powers. So you mustn\u2019t think I\u2019m unhappy.<\/p>\n
Motifs that reverberate through the poem cannot have been lost on the readers of the letter. The \u2018great, invisible realm \u2026 of whose real existence there can be no doubt\u2019, echoes in v. 6: \u2018your world, invisibly expanding\u2019. In this sense one could arguably consider this a coded piece. The language of the code specifically bridged the secular world of his readers and his own discovery of new theological dimensions. J\u00fcrgen Henkys\u2019 recent work on Paul Gerhardt has thrown new light on this possibility.
\nPermit me a closer look at one thread that may have contributed to a code I believe Bonhoeffer thought might unite him, consciously or unconsciously, with his fianc\u00e9e and extended family at the close of 1944. Renate Bethge told us that Paul Gerhardt\u2019s hymn \u2018Nun la\u00dft uns gehn und treten\u2019 was sung every New Year\u2019s Eve by believers and unbelievers alike in the Bonhoeffer household, all fifteen verses. Unfortunately, the English version available to me in a current Lutheran hymnal does not at all reflect the original Paul Gerhardt text, which echoes \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 in striking ways.
\nMy literal, unrhymed translation of \u2018Nun la\u00dft uns gehn und treten\u2019 follows here:<\/p>\n
1. Now let us go with singing and praying
\nbefore the Lord, who has given us strength up till now.<\/p>\n
2. We journey along and wander from one year to the next;
\nwe live and thrive from the old year into the new<\/p>\n
3. through so much fear and suffering, through trembling and faintheartedness,
\nthrough war and great horrors that cover the whole world.<\/p>\n
4. For just as the little children in heavy storms
\nhere on earth are conscientiously protected by faithful mothers,<\/p>\n
5. thus also and no less faithfully God keeps us, his children,
\nsafe in his bosom when dire need and tribulation strike.<\/p>\n
6. Oh, Protector of our life, in truth, all we do is in vain
\nunless your eye watches over us.<\/p>\n
7. Praised be your faithfulness, which is new each morning,
\nPraise be to the strong hands that turn all heart\u2019s sorrows.<\/p>\n
8. May we also ask of you, O Father, that you remain
\nin the midst of our sufferings a fount of our joys.<\/p>\n
9. Give me and all those whose hearts long for you
\nand your favor, a heart that knows patience.<\/p>\n
10. Close the gates of wailing and let everywhere
\nthe streams of joy flow over so much bloodshed.<\/p>\n
11. Give your kind blessing on all our paths,
\nlet the sun of your grace shine on the great and the small.<\/p>\n
12. Be the Father of the abandoned, counselor of the Lost,
\nGift for those not taken care of, Provision for the Poor.<\/p>\n
13. Help graciously all who are ill, give glad thoughts
\nto the sorely grieved souls that torment themselves with melancholy.<\/p>\n
14. And finally, most importantly, fill us with your Spirit,
\nthat it might adorn us here and lead us heavenward.<\/p>\n
15. May you grant all this, O Life of my Life,
\nto me and to the host of Christians at this blessed New Year.<\/p>\n
Like Bonhoeffer, Paul Gerhardt creates a \u2018we\u2019 position in relation to the war and terror all are experiencing as the old year ends (vv. 2\u20133). Bonhoeffer\u2019s letter to his mother is direct in its gratitude to her for her loving care; the faithful attention of loved ones is among the powers of good he mentions in both letters. The poem\u2019s emphasis on faithfulness (Treue) links it to Gerhardt\u2019s v. 7, which creates a feminine image of God caring \u2018no less faithfully\u2019 for \u2018us, his children\u2019 in times of dire need, than little children are protected in storms \u2018by faithful mothers\u2019. To all the poem\u2019s recipients familiar with the Gerhardt hymn, other links would surely have been sensed: \u2018your faithfulness, new each morning\u2019 (v. 7, as in v. 7 of the poem: \u2018God is with us each night and in the morning\u2019); the motif of tormented souls in v. 2 of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 and v. 13 of Gerhardt\u2019s hymn.
\nA striking contrast in \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 in contrast to the 17th century model, despite a close parallel in theme and language about joy and suffering, is found in the transition from v. 3 to v. 4 of the poem as compared to v. 8 of \u2018Nun la\u00dft uns gehn\u2019. Where Gerhardt, poet of the Thirty Years\u2019 War, pleads for God to be the fount of joy amidst suffering, Bonhoeffer lays the full weight of v. 3 on the act of unflinching acceptance of the \u2018cup of suffering\u2019, only then beginning v. 4 with a stressed \u2018But\u2019: \u2018But should you wish \u2026 to give us\/the joys of this world \u2026\u2019 Surely both the theological and the personal meaning of this allusion to Gethsemane and the cross\u2014especially with its significant reversal of conventional piety\u2014\u2018let us have just this one human request and then we\u2019ll accept the suffering that comes with doing your will\u2019\u2014will not have been lost on Maria or the family as they continued to the \u2018befall what may\u2019 of v. 7. Yet the poem\u2019s voice is distinctly familiar and nonreligious.
\nIn my view the poet chose a classical, secular lyrical form that his audience would know, at the same time infusing his lines with allusions to a beloved ritual that held deep meaning for them. As the Paul Gerhardt hymns had unexpectedly proven eye-opening to him once he began to study them in prison, this one, Bonhoeffer may have thought, could provide for his extended family and fianc\u00e9e some links between the themes of his New Year\u2019s poem and the key nuggets of his new theology. It remains for us to wonder whether he thought beyond that audience.<\/p>\n
IV. Interpreting the text<\/p>\n
Beyond the links between the poem, his cover letters to his mother and to Maria and to hymn texts, \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 contains numerous motifs that refer to the core ideas in Bonhoeffer\u2019s concurrent late prison writings. This is not the place to elaborate in detail on these. I shall focus on just three motifs of both poetic and theological significance in the poem and briefly illustrate how they work between several prison writings to help us understand the breadth and depth of Bonhoeffer\u2019s reach as a creative writer and thinker.
\nFirst, Bonhoeffer refers in his Ethics, as in almost every volume of his writings, to \u2018M\u00e4chte\u2019 as earthly, historical \u2018powers\u2019. In this poem, as in the letters, \u2018gute (kindly, goodly, generous, magnanimous) M\u00e4chte\u2019 are defined not in religious or spiritual terms, but as kind deeds of faithful loved ones, beloved pieces of music, letters, remembered conversations. But in this poem, as in the cover letter to Maria, the powers are associated with a guiding, protecting presence akin to that of angels.
\nSecondly, there is a striking connection between \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019, the letter of 19 December to Maria and \u2018The \u201cEthical\u201d and the \u201cChristian\u201d as a Topic\u2019 in Ethics where Bonhoeffer speaks of God\u2019s commandment as allowing human beings to be human before God, to be without inner conflict, to be confident (cf. v. 7 of the poem) because their action is preceded by the decision to obey God\u2019s call, and \u2018to be guided, accompanied and guarded on their way by the commandment as by a good angel.\u2019 Thus the affirmation voiced in the poem, concluding with the confidence of God\u2019s presence \u2018befall what may\u2019, can be seen as the fruit of a new understanding of the connection between God\u2019s commandment and the freedom of responsible action, shared in this lyrical form to be appreciated and loved for its beauty by his family who were not privy to his theological writings. Code, yes, but also Dichtung, condensed matter for thought and reflection\u2014perhaps, I would argue, even for his own clarification in the absence of conversation partners such as Bethge who had served that function.
\nThat brings us to the third motif, that of \u2018Geborgenheit\u2019 (safety, comfort, protection). \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten wunderbar geborgen\u2019 (literally \u2018wonderfully sheltered by powers of goodness\u2019), the opening line of the final stanza of the original poem, states the condition for confidence, now extending the \u2018I\u2019 of verse 1 to the \u2018we\u2019 whose experience has been drawn into the sequence of seven verses. The cadence and melody of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 with its iambic lines express it more simply, but one cannot help but hear the poem when contemplating Bonhoeffer\u2019s reflection on responsible action from \u2018History and the Good\u2019:<\/p>\n
Responsible action \u2026 gains its unity, and ultimately also its certainty, from this very limitation by God and neighbor \u2026 [I]t is creaturely and humble. This is precisely why it can be sustained by an ultimate joy and confidence, knowing that in its origin, essence and goal it is sheltered in Christ.<\/p>\n
\u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 is an affirmation of human and spiritual \u2018Geborgenheit\u2019 amidst the terror of evil times. It features a Gethsemane perikope without naming Christ. The motif of \u2018sheltering\u2019 here is a final expression of confidence in God\u2019s presence. The word is surely not chosen arbitrarily by the poet of \u2018Night Voices\u2019, written perhaps six months earlier, which uses the same rhyming pairs and the same motifs from Humperdinck\u2019s familiar children\u2019s lullaby from H\u00e4nsel und Gretel, but in consciously harsh juxtaposition to create a dissonant image of isolation:<\/p>\n
Twelve cold, thin clangs from the clock tower awaken (wecken) me.
\nNo resonance or warmth in them to cover (decken) me.
\nHowling, vicious dogs at midnight terrify (schrecken) me.<\/p>\n
Instead of the protection and comfort associated with the words and rhymes of the lullaby, Bonhoeffer uses them here in negation to describe the isolation of confinement. In \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019, by contrast, the images and allusions all serve to comfort the addressees, even while affirming the call to share in God\u2019s suffering in the world, and at the same time desiring to enjoy once more the abundance of earth\u2019s joys.
\n\u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 works as a hymn, a poem, a prayer or meditation. Its context as an embedded text within significant smuggled, uncensored messages from prison complicates the task of interpretation. Bonhoeffer\u2019s literary experiments with poetry may have helped him not only overcome his isolation but also, as Bethge put it, to find his way through the discipline of reading and writing poetry through the \u2018stations on the way to freedom\u2019. In exploring each poetic text and the wider contexts from which the poems arose we may better understand why Bonhoeffer\u2019s prison theology continues to expand our vision of that \u2018invisible realm \u2026 of whose real existence there can be no doubt.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Contributors Renate Bethge: Author and editor, niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and widow of Bonhoeffer\u2019s close friend Eberhard Bethge, who initiated the widespread publication of Bonhoeffer\u2019s writings after his death and authored the definitive biography. Her most recent publications include: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life (Minneapolis: Fortress Publishers, 2004). Brian Brock: Lecturer in Moral and Practical … <\/p>\n