Letters and Papers From Prison (40 page)

I’ve often wondered lately why we grow insensitive to hardships in the course of time. When I think how I felt for weeks a year ago, it strikes me very much. I now see the same things quite differently. To put it down to nature’s self-protection doesn’t seem to me adequate; I’m more inclined to think that it may come from a clearer and more sober estimate of our own limitations and possibilities, which makes it possible for us genuinely to love our neighbour; as long as we let our imagination run riot, love of one’s neighbour remains something vague and abstract. Today I can take a calmer view of other people, their predicaments and needs and so I’m better able to help them. I would speak of clarification rather than of insensitiveness; but of course, we are always having to try to change one into the other. I don’t think we need reproach ourselves just because our feelings grow cooler and calmer in the course of time, though, of course, we must always be alive to the danger of not seeing the wood for the trees and keep a warm heart as well as a cool head. Will these thoughts be of any use to you?

I wonder why it is that we find some days so much more oppressive than others, for no apparent reason. Is it growing pains - or spiritual trial? Once they’re over, the world looks quite a different place again.

The other day I heard the angel scene from
Palestrina
on the wireless, and thought of Munich. Even then, that was the only part that I specially liked. There is a great
Palestrina
fan here who
cannot understand why I didn’t specially care for it, and he was quite thrilled when I enjoyed the angel scene …

After a rather long unproductive period, I feel in better form for work now that spring is coming. I’ll tell you something about it next time. Meanwhile keep well and in good spirits. I hope that in spite of everything we shall soon have the joy of meeting again. With all my heart.

Your faithful Dietrich

To his parents

[Tegel] 26 April 1944

Dear parents,

As it will presumably be a while after your last visit until I can talk to you, I would like to let you have at least a letter so that you know that things are well with me. This is my second spring in prison, but it’s very different from last year’s. Then all my impressions were fresh and vivid, and privations and pleasures were felt more keenly. Since then something has happened which I should never have thought possible - I’ve got used to things; and the only question is which has been greater, the growth of insensitivity or the clarification of experience – it probably varies in different connections. The things towards which we become insensitive are soon forgotten, as they’re of no great consequence; but there are other things, which we have consciously or unconsciously assimilated and cannot forget. Intense experience forges them into convictions, resolutions, and plans, and as such they’re important for our lives in the future. It certainly makes a great difference whether one is in prison for a month or a year; in the latter case one absorbs not only an interesting or intense impression, but a radically new kind of life. At the same time I think that certain inward preconditions are necessary to enable one to assimilate this particular aspect of life without danger, and I think a long imprisonment is extremely dangerous for very young people as far as their spiritual development is concerned. The impressions come with such violence that they may well sweep a great deal overboard.

I must thank you very much for the way you’re continually making things easier for me by your regular visits, letters, and parcels. The great joy that your greetings give me has remained constant from the first, and always encourages me afresh to use my time here to the full. Thank you, too, for all the letters from the family - I had very nice letters again from Ursel and Karl-Friedrich. I wonder whether you could try to get me Ortega y Gasset’s new book,
The Nature of Historical Crises
(Deutsche Verlagsanstalt Stuttgart-Berlin) and, if possible, his earlier work,
History as a System;
also H. Pfeffer,
The British Empire and the USA
(1944, Diinnhauptverlag)? Perhaps Ursel might look after something from me for Dorothee’s birthday, if that’s possible. It’s the last birthday before her
abitur,
and I’m sure that there are books that she wants.

I hope that you will soon decide to go into the country again for a while; I would be very pleased about that.

I hope we shall see each other again soon. With much love,

your grateful Dietrich

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 30 April 1944

Dear Eberhard,

Another month gone. Does time fly as fast with you as it does with me here? I’m often surprised at it myself - and when will the month come when you and Renate, I and Maria, and we two can meet again? I have such a strong feeling that great events are moving the world every day and could change all our personal relationships, that I should like to write to you much oftener, partly because I don’t know how much longer I shall be able to, and even more because we want to share everything with each other as often and as long as we can. I’m firmly convinced that, by the time you get this letter, great decisions will already be setting things moving on all fronts. During the coming weeks we shall have to keep a stout heart, and that is what I wish you. We shall have to keep all our wits about us, so as to let nothing scare
us. In view of what is coming, I’m almost inclined to quote the biblical δεȋ, and I feel that I ‘long to look’, like the angels in I Peter 1.12,
⁷
to see how God is going to solve the apparently insoluble. I think God is about to accomplish something that, even if we take part in it either outwardly or inwardly, we can only receive with the greatest wonder and awe. Somehow it will be clear - for those who have eyes to see – that Ps. 58.11b and Ps. 9.19f.
⁸
are true; and we shall have to repeat Jer. 45.5
⁹
to ourselves every day. It’s harder for you to go through this separated from Renate and your boy than it is for me, so I will think of you especially, as I am already doing now.

How good it would seem to me, for both of us, if we could go through this time together, helping each other. But it’s probably ‘better’ for it not to be so, but for each of us to have to go through it alone. I find it hard not to be able to help you in anything -except by thinking of you every morning and evening when I read the Bible, and often during the day as well. You’ve no need to worry about me at all, as I’m getting on uncommonly well -you would be surprised, if you came to see me. People here keep on telling me (as you can see, I feel very flattered by it) that I’m ‘radiating so much peace around me’, and that I’m ‘always so cheerful’, - so that the feelings that I sometimes have to the contrary must, I suppose, rest on an illusion (not that I really believe that at all!). You would be surprised, and perhaps even worried, by my theological thoughts and the conclusions that they lead to; and this is where I miss you most of all, because I don’t know anyone else with whom I could so well discuss them to have my thinking clarified. What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience - and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious’.

Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the ‘religious
a priori’
of mankind. ‘Christianity’ has always been a form - perhaps the true form - of ‘religion’. But if one day it becomes clear that this
a priori
does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless - and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any ‘religious’ reaction?) - what does that mean for ‘Christianity’? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our ‘Christianity”, and that there remain only a few ‘last survivors of the age of chivalry’, or a few intellectually dishonest people, on whom we can descend as ‘religious’. Are they to be the chosen few? Is it on this dubious group of people that we are to pounce in fervour, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them our goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them? If we don’t want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity - and even this garment has looked very different at different times - then what is a religionless Christianity?

Barth, who is the only one to have started along this line of thought, did not carry it to completion, but arrived at a positivism of revelation, which in the last analysis is essentially a restoration. For the religionless working man (or any other man) nothing decisive is gained here. The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God - without religion, i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even ‘speak’ as we used to) in a ‘secular’ way about ‘God’? In what way are we ‘religionless-secular’ Christians, in what way are we the ἐ
-κλησία,
those who are
alled forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation? Does the secret discipline, or alternatively the difference (which I have suggested to you before) between penultimate and ultimate, take on a new importance here?

I must break off for today, so that the letter can go straight away. I’ll write to you again about it in two days’ time. I hope you see more or less what I mean, and that it doesn’t bore you. Goodbye for the present. It’s not easy always to write without an echo, and you must excuse me if that makes it something of a monologue.

I’m thinking of you very much.

Your Dietrich

I’m not really reproaching you for not writing. You have too much else to do.

I find, after all, that I can write a little more. - The Pauline question whether πε
ριτoμή
[circumcision] is a condition of justification seems to me in present-day terms to be whether religion is a condition of salvation. Freedom from περιτομή
τoμ
ή is also freedom from religion. I often ask myself why a ‘Christian instinct’ often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, by which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, ‘in brotherhood’. While I’m often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people - because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it’s particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable) - to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course. Religious people speak of God when human knowledge (perhaps simply because they are too lazy to think) has come to an end, or when human resources fail - in fact it is always the
deus ex machina
that they bring on to the scene, either for the apparent solution of insoluble problems, or as strength in human
failure – always, that is to say, exploiting human weakness or human boundaries. Of necessity, that can go on only till people can by their own strength push these boundaries somewhat further out, so that God becomes superfluous as a
deus ex machina.
I’ve come to be doubtful of talking about any human boundaries (is even death, which people now hardly fear, and is sin, which they now hardly understand, still a genuine boundary today?). It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness. As to the boundaries, it seems to me better to be silent and leave the insoluble unsolved. Belief in the resurrection is
not
the ‘solution’ of the problem of death. God’s ‘beyond’ is not the beyond of our cognitive faculties. The transcendence of epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village. That is how it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little in the light of the Old. How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes, is something that I’m thinking about a great deal, and I shall be writing to you again about it soon. It may be that on us in particular, midway between East and West, there will fall a heavy responsibility.

Now I really must stop. It would be fine to have a word from you about all this; it would mean a great deal to me - probably more than you can imagine. Some time, just read Prov. 22.11, 12;
¹⁰
there is something that will bar the way to any escapism disguised as piety.