Out of Revolution

"Many people might think of this as a strange choice, but it strongly influenced my interpretation of Bonhoeffer. Yes. Let me provide the background. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was a Jew turned Christian who appreciated both Judaism and Christianity. He wrote a great number of influential books. The poet W H Auden, for instanced, penned a preface for him. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessysays that the very things that Hanfried Mueller isolated and favoured about the world’s secularity bring their own problems. For Rosenstock-Huessy, Western Enlightenment thought since the great philosopher Descartes brought mixed blessings, and he believed that Descartes should not have the world to himself. He looked at learning as it developed in the West in three successive frameworks. The first is ‘ Credo ut intelligam ’ , ‘I believe in order that I might understand’, saying that squares with Augustine. The second saying moves from theology to science and scepticism. Descartes discovered or proposed ‘ Cogito ergo sum ’ , ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Rosenstock-Huessy says, if the first phrase in isolation led to ignorance, the second one leaves you alone in the world. Writing in World War I, he said that the instruments of science can lead to great problems. For example, the same thing that gives you a cancer cure can also give you murderous mustard gas. He offered a third view, which I think matches Bonhoeffer’s communal impulses – this imprisoned letter-writer needed company! This phrase was ‘ Respondeo etsi mutabor ’ , ‘I respond, though I will be changed’. You get back on track by interaction. His own writing is very much getting away from pure academic thought. He doesn’t think people can learn by just sitting in a library and reading. He was very eloquent about this. There are a couple of lines that are very moving. He says: ‘Historians and economists and psychologists cannot stand the idea of not being “pure” thinkers, real scientists. What a frustration! I am an impure thinker. I am hurt, swayed, shaken, elated, disillusioned, shocked, comforted, and I have to transmit my mental experiences lest I die. And although I may die. To write a book is no luxury. It is a means of survival. By writing a book, a man frees his mind from an overwhelming impression. The test for a book is its lack of arbitrariness, the fact that it had to be done in order to clear the road for further life and work, and to encounter each other.’ So it was with Bonhoeffer’s letters, as edited by his friend Eberhard Bethge. And that life of dialogue and interaction is so exciting today when the religions have to interact with each other, and not always militantly but so that they learn from each other. So there is a great openness in this tradition about learning from each other. And this is part of Bonhoeffer’s tradition as well."