Four Germans and an Austrian . . . and an Englishman

Just after struggling so long with Spengler and having regretted including so many Germans in one year of my plan, I picked up Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall. I see great similarities in the styles of Kant, Hegel, Spengler, and Bonhoeffer. They're Germans, so they all want to be organized. But while their sometimes intricate tables of contents show a lot of organizational effort, their arguments often don't. Descartes thought of geometry as the most organized discipline, so he wrote some of his philosophical works like geometry books: he started with carefully explained axioms and built up his theorems bit by bit so the reader could (mostly) follow. But the Germans just jump into the middle of their ideas with special terminology and unexplained metaphors. Spengler, for instance, talks about the Baroque of the ancient world or about Faustian civilization as if they need no explanation. He doesn't explain until halfway through the book that the "West" of the title of his book doesn't mean what you probably think it means. Kant has his apodeictic judgments and his transcendental objects (which are different from transcendent objects), and Hegel has his reflections and negations. They often sound more like prophets than schoolteachers, receiving their mind-boggling visions from a greater Mind and then trying as hard as they can to describe the wheels within wheels.

Bonhoeffer fits right into this tradition of jumping into the middle of things. In fact, his first confusing metaphor is the very idea of the middle. Humans, he says, are in the middle. The Bible starts with a declaration of the beginning, which people in the middle can't understand and can't begin to know of without a revelation from God. Jesus is the Beginning and the End, and we are in the middle. It's pretty, and I think I learned something from the times Bonhoeffer used it. But is it a consistent metaphor? Does Jesus have a gap between beginning and end? Since we're in the middle, do we fill the gap in Jesus? (Pascal famously said the opposite.) Or are we in some other middle?

Bonhoeffer clearly gets this style from the Germans who preceded him, because he alludes to them frequently. Some of his allusions he makes explicit, some I recognized having read the other books, and some I discovered only by doing searches of some Latin phrases I didn't know. Bonhoeffer knows German philosophy and uses it often in this theological work, but he knows when to draw from it in a positive way and when to argue against it.

For instance, he says that the Day and Night created on (or themselves constituting) the first day represent the dialectic of creation, the constant ballet of existence and negation that all of creation dances. This dialectical idea is what Hegel is most famous for, and surely Bonhoeffer had Hegel in mind when he said this. Later he says that with the death of Christ on the cross "the nihil negativum broke its way into God's own being," another idea I just read in Hegel this past spring. But I notice that where Hegel says God's very essence involves the opposition of death and life, Bonhoeffer knows that God is Life alone and that death must "break its way" into God's being. In another place, he simply calls Hegel wrong for enthroning Reason in God's place. Bonhoeffer also explicitly contradicts Kant, who said that the only good thing possible is a good will, by pointing out that God declared his creation good.

I haven't read much Schopenhauer yet, but in looking up nihil negativum and its companion phrase nihil privativum, I found that they came from Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea. (The latter is a nothingness that exists as an absence of something positive, as darkness is the absence of light. The former is absolute nothingness.) Bonhoeffer alludes to Nietzsche by saying that, before eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam lived beyond good and evil. He makes an interesting allusion to Freud's theory of dreams when he says that the common human dream of trying to escape something is a manifestation of the subconscious knowledge of our fallen state. And he refers to the popularizer of evolution simply by saying that the creation of Adam has nothing to do with Darwin.

Bonhoeffer's nuanced references to these philosophers encourages me. Obviously he had studied these non-Christian (or at the very least less-than-orthodox) philosophers, finding them not only not detrimental to the thinking of a Christian but even helpful. And now I'll cite an African, St. Augustine, who, in his treatise On Christian Doctrine, declared that "All truth is God's truth." All correct, wise, or beautiful statements are possible only because of God, so what does it matter what human utters them? Augustine's approval of the use of pagan literature in the education of Christians secured the place of the classics in the medieval curriculum; in fact, it probably saved a lot of literature we enjoy today from the ravages of both time and puritans. And now I benefit today from the works of pagan philosophers (Aristotle, Nietzsche, etc.), from the Christians who approved their study, and from Christians -- like Bonhoeffer -- who demonstrated the rewards of knowing them.

When Should We Then Live?

One occasionally hears advice to "live in the now" or "in the moment." If people who give this advice mean that we should deal with what we have at the present, responsible with its problems and joyful in its blessings, neither disabled by regrets nor bedazzled by pipe dreams, then I agree. I just read today in Plutarch's summary of Caius Marius that thoughtless people "lose the enjoyment of their present prosperity by fancying something better to come," and that they "reject their present success" while they "do nothing but dream of future uncertainties." He's right: Caius Marius and others like him should not have neglected the now.

But if the people giving this advice mean, as I'm afraid most of them do these days, that we should ignore both the lessons of the past and the fears of future consequences, as if all lessons and consequences are mere conventional strictures designed to spoil us of our rightful joy, then I can't agree. I'm sorry to have to say so often that I remember reading something without remembering who said it, but I have to do it again. I remember reading somewhere that among the effects the Fall is the brokenness of time for humans, so that we have trouble seeing the connection between past, present, and future. Part of our Redemption then is seeing that Time is one -- that God has a plan for all of Time and that we play a part in it, that our Salvation came at the fulness of time, that the history recorded in the Bible teaches us in the present, and that all of creation rushes to a future that includes glory for the redeemed.

In his introduction to Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall, John W. deGruchy suggests that Dietrich Bonhoeffer would also agree with the need to see Time as one. As deGruchy points out, Bonhoeffer taught both that the Old Testament should be read in light of the New Testament, since the declarations of the Hebrew Bible were made possible only by the Word revealed in the New Testament, and that the New should be read in the light of the Old, since the New Testament only makes sense in the context of the history given in the Old. Failure to see the integrity of biblical history and of the biblical message leads to a separation of creation and redemption, a separation of public and private spheres of life, a Gnostic separation of matter and spirit, and -- especially in Bonhoeffer's world -- anti-Semitism.

In the text of the book itself, Bonhoeffer begins his exposition of the first three chapters of Genesis with a discussion of what "the beginning" means, and points out that the human who wrote that sentence could only know about the beginning by having been told about it by Someone Who was the Beginning. But such a person must also be the End. The Bible, Bonhoeffer says, "needs to be read and proclaimed wholly from the viewpoint of the end. In the church, therefore, the story of creation must be read in a way that begins with Christ and only then moves on toward him as its goal." Without revelation about our beginning, he says, humans don't know their end either and thus live on a circle, an isolated path with neither origin nor goal. Although we can see the middle, we can't see the beginning or the end, and yet we know that we are in the middle. Any proclamations about the beginning or end disturb us: they can only come from liars or from the Creator.

I love this opening to the book, partly because it reminds me of several other books I love -- books whose authors I do remember. It first makes me think of Pascal's statements in the Pensées about humanity living in the middle, unable to know either the very small or the very large. Pascal was both right and out of step with his times: made at a time when faith in reason was growing and when some philosophers were starting to say that we could one day understand all there is to know, his humble assertions have proven astonishingly accurate, as science has shown, for instance, that the location and vector of subatomic particles cannot be known simultaneously, and that our observation of the history of the material universe hits an impenetrable curtain at 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang. Of course that last point about disturbing proclamations reminds me of C. S. Lewis's famous "Lord, Liar, Lunatic" argument from Mere Christianity.

But most of all, this passage in Bonhoeffer reminds me of Scrooge, who got it right at the end of his story. With him, I say, "I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach." May the Beginning and the End hold me to it.

The Best of Enemies

Someone -- I think it was Napoleon -- once said that the fiercest enemies have much in common and must agree about the most important matters. Two generals at war with each other, for instance, might agree that some piece of land is valuable and worth spending human lives on. The Democrat and the Republican in Congress, denouncing each other in the most vitriolic terms, agree that talking and voting make for the best way to settle an issue and come to a decision.

Amid its talking trees and flying horses and magic fountains, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso also presents a lot of fighting. Rinaldo and Sacripante fight to see who wins Angelica; both men agree Angelica is a worthy prize. (Angelica, unwilling to take either of them, simply runs away before they finish their fight.) Bradamante fights the sorcerer Atlante in order to free the knights held captive in his magic castle; both parties agree that knights are valuable. And Lurcanio and Ariodante fight to determine Ginevra's guilt or innocence; both sides agree on the vital importance of a woman's chastity and on the necessity of fighting for truth.

This last match-up stands as an example of the medieval practice of Trial by Combat, a curious custom I've been thinking about off and on for the last few years, ever since the last time I read Richard II and noticed its importance in that play. Two combatants fight for opposing viewpoints, but both trust God to grant victory to the one in the right. I suppose it's basically a pious duel.

As it happens, the topic came up in my reading earlier this year, as well. Bonhoeffer, praising medieval Christendom, speaks with admiration in his Ethics about what he sees as its attitude to war: fight fairly and accept the result as God's judgment. By contrast, says Bonhoeffer, the nation engaging in modern warfare takes survival of the homeland for the absolute, admits no possibility of the enemy's being right, and stops at nothing in order to achieve victory. Perhaps he would have difficulty finding anything that modern enemies agree on. But in his ideal view of European war in the Middle Ages, both parties agree in their Christian faith and in their reliance on God's ability to reveal his will. Medieval warriors come to battle as enemies and walk away as brothers. If war between Christians can be justified at all, after all, it must be founded on Jesus' instruction to love our enemies.

Ariosto got my attention by adding a new element to this picture of mutually respectful enemies. Writing around 1500, while Muslim nations attacked Europe, Ariosto's epic tells about a similar situation seven hundred years earlier, when the Mohammedans of Spain poured across the Pyrenees to attack Charlemagne's Christian empire. These two forces don't share a religion, and each intends to force the other off the land of "France" by killing as many enemy soldiers as possible. They agree that the land is worth fighting for. But do they know they agree, and can they honor each other for fighting over that land in the name of God (in their respective understandings of Him)?

Ariosto thought so. In Book I, he recounts the story of two knights, one from each army, wounded and exhausted from battle, separated from their comrades, and lost in the woods. Rinaldo and Ferraù (for such are their names) find each other and one horse. From what we know of recent war and from war movies, we in the twenty-first century would not be surprised to find them fighting ruthlessly for the horse. We might even expect one of them to ambush the other for the sake of that horse. But Rinaldo and Ferraù live in, as ObiWan would say, a more civilized age. They shake hands and share the horse. Ariosto writes this:

O noble chivalry of knights of yore!
Here were two rivals, of opposed belief,
Who from the blows exchanged were bruised and sore,
Aching from head to foot without relief,
Yet to each other no resentment bore.
Through the dark wood and winding paths, as if
Two friends, they go. Against the charger's sides
Four spurs are thrust until the road divides.

Living in an era of Muslim assaults on the West, Ariosto wrote of an earlier age of Muslim assaults on the West. Coincidentally, I'm reading the book at yet another time of Muslim assaults and threats of assault on the West, and of the twenty-first century's version of the counterattacking Crusades. The parallels are striking; yet the West is now decidedly less Christian than it was in the day of either Charlemagne or Ariosto. The West's current postmodern culture has difficulty agreeing to disagree. Doing so requires saying that someone is wrong, and that action depends on a belief in Truth, the denial of which forms one of the fundamental truths of the postmodern creed. If we can't openly celebrate another person's culture and character and preferences today, we tend to acknowledge only two other options: (1) maintaining a polite silence about differences or (2) denouncing the other party as something less than human. I would have to search a long time among non-Muslims in this country today to find anything other than one of these three attitudes toward the adherents of Islam.

But Ariosto reminds us that the West once recognized a fourth way. Openly acknowledging one's differences with another person, far from being a sign of intolerance, actually shows respect. It implies that the topics of disagreement are important, that truth matters, and that the other person's beliefs represent honest, human attempts at finding that truth, attempts worth examining and addressing. If I am tempted to think that no Christian and Muslim can be hospitable to each other, debate their differences respectfully, and dine together in the enjoyment of all they agree on, I only have to reread the story of Patriarch Timothy and Caliph Mahdi. And if I forget that this could be true even of warriors who would gladly kill each other another day in the context of a battle, I need only review the encounter of Richard the Lionhearted and Saladin.

Freedom and Coincidence

Most people reading this have probably had the experience of learning a new word or phrase, thinking you have never heard it before, and then coming across the very word more than once within just a few weeks.  Coincidences happen all the time, but some, like coming across the new word, stand out.  The odds of your car and that blue car coming up to that intersection at the same time were microscopic at the beginning of the day, and yet there you both are.  This coincidence doesn't stand out only because you meet some car at an intersection many times each day.  Only when an object stands out to begin with, like the new word, do we become aware of a coincidence it plays a part of.

Since I read two or three things each day, I'm bound to come across coincidences there, also.  But while I know not to be amazed, it's still intriguing when it happens.  One of these coincidences happened today.

Bonhoeffer has become confusing.  When he says that there is only one principle to the universe, God, I understand.  When he says that God created our world, took it on in the incarnation, and preserves it through his will, I understand.  But when he says that ethics is not about confronting the way things are in this world with the way things ought to be, I don't understand.  We don't just acquiesce in what is, he says, but we mustn't think in terms of an ideal that should be happening, either.  If that's true, I don't know why I pray, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven."  I tend to think that God has an ideal will, which includes things like me never sinning, and a contingent will, which includes all the things He allows.  He has obviously allowed the world to be this way, but if the world as it is matched his ideal will, it seems Jesus would not have taught us that prayer.

Today I gained a little more understanding, though.  Bonhoeffer scolded Kant for saying that, since lying is wrong, we must always tell the truth, even if it means giving up a hiding friend to the enemy.  Instead, Bonhoeffer says, God's will is above all laws and all ethical principles.  Didn't Jesus break Sabbath law by eating grain in the field and by healing on the Sabbath?  God's will can't be codified, because it is always grounded in a specific concrete situation.  We can't even really know what the good option is in any given situation.  We learn to do God's will by doing his will, but He doesn't spell it all out for us, and He doesn't make us obey Him by force.  We must simply act in freedom as God gives us to see what is right in each situation, and trust to his mercy.  If doing God's will means breaking the law and being found guilty, so be it; that didn't stop Jesus.  After reading this today, it occurs to me that in this section Bonhoeffer was probably trying to explain to us (and to himself!) why it was right for a Christian to be part of a plot to kill Hitler.

The coincidences occurred in the Bible passages I read just after reading the Ethics.  In Psalm 32, I read, "I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.  Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle."   To have God's will codified, I thought, so that some written word or guiding principle would tell me exactly what to do in any given situation, would make me like the dumb animal.  As Bonhoeffer says, we must act freely, not under the compulsion of a spiritual or ethical bit and bridle, although our free act comes after being taught by God's companionable guidance.

The next thing I read, though, got me questioning Bonhoeffer again.  In Philippians I read, "It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent."  Where Bonhoeffer seems to say that we should do God's will in love without distinguishing good and evil and without even knowing if what we do is right (because such knowledge would come from a codified ethical ideal), Paul seems to say that growth in love requires knowledge and discernment.

I don't know exactly what to make of Bonhoeffer yet.  I do know that I should keep reading the book, a few pages a day until I finish.  And since it doesn't appear to be breaking any law to do that, I think I'm safe.

How the West Was Lost

I'm taking Bonhoeffer's Ethics and its bold opening premise that we are wrong to distinguish good and evil in the light of Bonhoeffer's history as a member of the German resistance movement that sought to overthrow Hitler and the Nazis.  Clearly Bonhoeffer saw Hitler's program as evil.  (The book speaks in such generalities about events in Germany at the time that I refrain from guessing whether Bonhoeffer thought Hitler himself was evil, i.e. beyond hope.)

I'm about 40% of the way through the book now, and as Bonhoeffer's picture resolves itself in my mind, the focal point seems to be his tenet of the two kingdoms: the Kingdom of the Word and the Kingdom of the Sword, or the Church and secular government.  Each is answerable to Christ, since He established each, and each has its distinct mission.  As I understand Bonhoeffer at this point, the proper place for judgment of good and evil in this world is in the secular government.  It deals with the penultimate (see previous post), whereas the ultimate, preaching the Way of Life and offering reconciliation, is left to the Church.

Bonhoeffer looks back with some nostalgia to the age of Christendom, when Church and Empire both professed the same goal.  Wars between Church and Empire or between Christian nations don't seem to sway his view: these were "chivalrous" wars, he says, ones in which the combatants recognized God as Arbiter.  Contrast this with the typical Asian war, he says, a total war in which the combatants will do anything -- even kill noncombatants, including children -- to preserve their earthly vision of nation or empire.  (Was "Asian war" only a code phrase for WWII?)

Bonhoeffer sees the West as a unit, as the former Christendom.  The end of this unity's actuality happened when the two kingdoms split and eventually quit recognizing the relationship they should have.  (Intriguingly, Bonhoeffer points out that the English-speaking countries have not experienced a radical split of the two kingdoms.)  The Kingdom of the Sword no longer acknowledges the Church's mission, and the Kingdom of the Word hunkers down defensively in the face of the government.  Bonhoeffer wanted to see the relationship restored.

But what common ground can the two kingdoms have today?  How could they possibly work together?  Bonhoeffer answers these questions by dividing the penultimate (the things of this fallen world) into the natural and the unnatural.  The natural, he says, is a preserving element God has given the world: virtue, goods of the world, and all that preserves life.  The unnatural -- evil acts, destructive philosophies, totalitarian governments, and such -- works in the long run against life.  The Church must offer natural services as part of preparing the Way for the Lord: food, clothes, comfort, counseling, teaching on virtuous living, and the like.  John the Baptist, after all, prepared the Way by preaching repentance, not that good living makes Christ's coming sure but simply easier.  So the Church operates in both the penultimate world and the ultimate: she feeds and she preaches.  If the secular government can't see the value of the latter, it can at least support the former and thus, even unwittingly, serve her Founder.  Bonhoeffer tells us to pray for the revival of the unified West: both kingdoms in every nation serving Christ in their proper spheres.

In September of 2001, I watched the news for hours every day along with everyone else.  Horrified by the attacks and inspired by the courage of the rescuers, I was also troubled by the form that the appeals for prayer took.  Perhaps I should have been happier to hear so much about prayer on national television, but I couldn't help noticing that every last person asked Americans to pray for the victims, rescue workers, and their families. Not one that I heard, not even pastors or other acknowledged Christians, asked for prayers for the families of the attackers or for the Muslims of the world.  When I heard tax collector -- er, Senator -- Hillary Clinton voice the same tired phrase, "Pray for the victims, the rescue workers, and their families," I immediately thought of Jesus's words in his sermon on the mount:

You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.  For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

Similarly, the Presidential Prayer Team, an online Christian organization, recently called for prayer for Representative Gabrielle Giffords, other victims of the shooting, and for their families.  I've been praying for these people, but where was the call for prayer for the shooter?  Our prayer guides appear comfortable with their roles as judges, distinguishing good people from evil people.  God rains on the just and the unjust, but we seem to insist on shining our sun only on the good.  In doing so, I think Bonhoeffer would say that we're making the mistake of living only in the penultimate.

Bonhoeffer's Ultimate and Penultimate

A post from a few days ago told about my first impressions of Bonhoeffer's Ethics.  His message seemed unusual to me on day one.  Having read some more, I'd say now that Bonhoeffer has some unusual things to say, some classic Christian things to say, and some unusual ways of saying some classic things.  It's all a little clearer now but still challenging and definitely inspirational.

Bonhoeffer mystified me at first by saying we should not judge between good and evil, even though his argument for getting there (acquiring the knowledge of good and evil got us into the trouble we're in) resonated with me.  But once I read some applications of this tenet, it started making sense.  First and foremost, we should not distinguish good and bad people.  Everyone we come across is simply a human, and humans have already been judged and sentenced in the death of Jesus Christ.  Bonhoeffer doesn't quote II Corinthians in this passage (surprisingly), but I couldn't help think about chapter 5 as I was reading:

For the love of Christ controls us, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.  From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer.

God judges; for us to judge is to arrogate his function.  Our job is to show Christ's love by giving anyone we meet what the occasion calls for.  Why identify the sinners and look in indignation on them?  Instead of denouncing the libertine, just teach the virtue of chastity, and let people come to Christ.

Second, not judging good and evil means not grading our own actions.  The Christian's task is to do the will of God, not to figure out what's good, do it, and then enjoy satisfaction in his own good deed.  The Pharisees tried very hard to discern what was good and to do it, and Jesus scolded them.  Christ is present in the individual Christian and in the Church, and his mission now, through both the individual and the Body, is reconciliation (also found in II Corinthians 5).  We try conscience, duty, responsibility, virtue, ideals, and programs to overthrow the evil we see in the world, when instead we should be acting and preaching reconciliation, and that message cannot be reduced to an absolute, unchanging program or plan.

This all sounds pretty good to me until I start to wonder how I know what the moment calls for if I don't have a sense of right and wrong, and whether in some situations love doesn't involve a declaration of evil -- a judgment.  Surely when Wackford Squeers is beating Smike, Nicholas Nickleby is right to cry, "Stop!"  But Bonhoeffer seems to address this concern with his idea of the penultimate and the ultimate.  Our new, fully-righteous life pertains to the ultimate, to the eternal, heavenly truth.  But ultimate implies a penultimate: our condition and life in this world of sin.  By his incarnation, Jesus accepted all that is human.  By his death, He judged and suffered for human sin.  By his resurrection, He gained new life for humans.  When we identify with Christ, we should identify with all these aspects of his ministry.  To acknowledge only the resurrected life and live only in the ideal world of heavenly vision makes us radical and judgmental.  To acknowledge only his humble humanity and his death and live only in the practical world of sin makes us compromisers. We must always do both.  When a friend's loved one dies, for instance, we must both sympathize with the pain (deal with the penultimate) and speak hope (deal with the ultimate).

Tomorrow a little bit about Bonhoeffer's intriguing view of culture in the West.

The Wait Is Over

Every time I reach the end of one book and start another that I've never read before, I think, "The wait is over."  Before I had a Plan, I had scattered mental lists of books I wanted to read, and I'd scribble down names of a few that I planned to enjoy over the next few months.  But I've always wanted to read so many books, the process of deciding and scheduling was always overwhelming.  After writing a list, I would always remember some book (let's say Great Thoughts by Smith) that I had thought about for years, and I'd think, "I'll never get to that book."  OK, so why not just start reading it now?  Well, that would mean reading Great Thoughts instead of whatever else I had planned (let's say The Complete Course of Mathematics by Brown), and then The Complete Course got bumped to that overwhelmed region of my mind, and I'd think, "I'll never get to Brown."

That's the beauty of a Plan.  I've wanted to read the Venerable Bede for decades, but I just never got to his history of the Church.  But now he's on the master list, and when I think of Bede or see his name in another book, instead of having to fight a feeling of frustration, I just remember that he's coming up.  As soon as I finished drawing up the Plan some four years ago, I looked at some of the titles in Year 10 and took comfort knowing that, even if I had to wait nine-and-a-half more years, I would eventually get to those books.  And then having planned for years makes starting those books so much more satisfying and fun!

Yesterday, I finished reading The Odyssey and started Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics with great joy.  I had wanted to read Bonhoeffer for decades.  His story is so intriguing: resisting the Nazis and then being executed just days before the end of the war.  Every once in a great while, I heard people (mostly pastors) talk about him and about how important his writings were.  But I seldom heard any details about his ideas; people generally referred to his life and not the contents of his books.

Now I know why.  Bonhoeffer has an unusual message, so quick quotations probably don't easily fit in to illustrate whatever anybody else has to say.  Bonhoeffer begins by saying that Christian ethics necessarily differs from all other ethics.  All other ethical studies seek to know good and evil, but Christian doctrine teaches that desiring and acquiring the knowledge of good and evil separated us from God.  Where we should have known only God and experienced everything else through Him, we wanted to become independent judges.  Each one of us, then, is separated not only from God but from all other humans and even from ourselves.  As a result, we wrestle every day with shame, alternately giving in to it and denying it.  What we need is not to judge good and evil anymore.

The thought is challenging and intriguing.  Today I read his explanation of the Pharisees as people who tried very hard to do good but missed the mark because they were always judging what was good.  God can only be pleased by our submitting to his judgment, by constantly seeking and proving his will, which can not be reduced to a formula.  But how can we learn his will if we aren't thinking about good and evil, right and wrong?  Bonhoeffer deals with the riddles about judging found in II Corinthians (in some passages, we must not judge people, and in others it is our express mission to judge) and explains, I believe, that the Christian must live on two levels at once: the psychological (which judges) and the spiritual (which doesn't).

I'm not sure at all right now that I even understand what it is I don't understand.  But that's why I gave myself a few weeks to read the Ethics; I had a feeling from all the oblique references to Bonhoeffer I had heard over the years that a book by him was not to be rushed.