Boenhoffer on Modernity

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BONHOEFFER ON MODERNITY

Sic et Non

Jean Bethke Elshtain

ABSTRACT

Though Bonhoeffer is usually thought to have been one of the architects ofmodern theology, he was also one of modernitys most penetrating critics.

The author lays out Bonhoeffers challenges to certain cherished modern

assumptions by examining (1) his linkage of totalitarianism to the politi-

cal utopianism that arose out of the French Revolution, (2) his fear of the

nihilistic implications of the rationalists notion of the sovereign self and of

the modern tendency to view life as an end in itself, and (3) his suspicion of

all forms of moral absolutism, including the Kantian absolutizing of the

duty to tell the truth. What emerges is a picture of Bonhoeffer as a theolo-

gian who coupled a keen sense of our creatureliness and limitation with a

resolute belief in the activity of God in history, and of Bonhoeffer as anethicist who generated a Christian relational ethics that offers an alter-

native to both the ethics of abstract principle and the ethics of intuitive sit-

uational response.

KEY WORDS:Bonhoeffer, compassion, freedom, limits, nihilism, truth, utopianism

DIETRICH BONHOEFFERS REACTION TO THAT CONFLUENCE of features and

forces that we call modernity is nuanced and by no means easily cate-

gorized, as befits the complexity of his work overall. He typically refuses

to freeze thinking and argument within the rigidities of yes or no.Among my graduate students there are always some who are, at first,

perplexed by and a few who become thorougly troubled by Bonhoeffers

arguments in his Ethics against the French Revolution, against abor-

tion, and in support of an understanding of government that insists that

its institution by God is in no circumstances possible without reference

to Jesus Christ (Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 331). These students find it

difficult, at least initially, to deal with the intellectual and emotional

dissonance such newfound recognitions generate. They have so ab-

sorbed representations of Bonhoeffer as an ultramodern (he who spokeof a religionless Christianity and of a world come of age, who wrote

an essay on truth that is anti-Kantian and seems to them to match their

own often not thoroughly thought-through historicist understandings of

JRE 29.3:34566. 2001 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.


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truth, who has been featured so persistently not only as an anti-Nazi

martyr but even, at times, as a kind of all-purpose protestor) that the

Bonhoeffer whom they are encountering through his own words is a

figure they find troubling.They should. Any major thinker should vex and not comfort us. Com-

plex thinkers defy facile attempts at categorization. So it is withBonhoeffer. It is true that some who see themselves as traditionalistsor conservatives will find points of reassurance in his work; others whocall themselves liberals or even radicals will find passages that theycan wrap around themselves. But to take such moments for the whole,as people lined up on sides tend to do, is to fail to forthrightly engageBonhoeffers work in all its complexity. Even with a genuine effort, such

engagement is no easy thing. We are creatures of our own time. Weshare the prejudices of that timein our case, both modernist and nowpostmodernist prejudices. It follows that weand here I include all ofus, even those of us who are troubled by some features of our late mod-ern or postmodern worldcannot easily imagine ourselves back into thepolitical turbulence of Bonhoeffers world. Nor can we recapture the in-tellectual milieu, a very rich one, that helped to shape who he was, whathe became, and who he is for us today.

Important as it is to take him up entire, as best we can, the most that

I can hope to do in a single essay is to examine a few central features ofhis thought. I will draw primarily, but not exclusively, from hisEthics asthat, together with Letters and Papers from Prison, is the text thatspeaks most directly to my own concerns as a teacher of social and politi-cal ethics and theory. I propose that we engage Bonhoeffer as a powerful,troubling, and compelling interlocutor on the many issues of importancethat he dealt with and that haunt us still. I will try to acknowledge andconvey the complexity of Bonhoeffers thought as I look at three power-ful and interrelated Bonhoefferian themes: (1) politics and limits,

particularly what happens when politics aspires to a kind of totalitythat too easily turns demonic (here, Bonhoeffers anti-utopian strainrises to the fore explicitly); (2) human finitude and the problem of con-tempt for persons that culminates in nihilism (the issue of limits isimportant here as well); and (3) the problem of truth, which one mightperhaps articulate more precisely as the problem of finding a way to tellthe truth that takes account of human frailty and the delicate skeins ofhuman relationality. Each of these problems was deeded to Bonhoefferby the forces unleashed by modernity, but what he brings to bear on thematters at hand also challenges those forces.

1. Bonhoeffer on the French Revolution

Bonhoeffers biting critique of the French Revolution is, as I have al-

ready noted, unsettling to many contemporary studentsand teachers,

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for that matter. Bonhoeffer seems quite prescient in this regard, how-

ever, as his analysis presages the critical rethinking of the legacy of the

French Revolution in the important historical scholarship of recent

years. This new scholarship reminds us that it was the French Revolu-tion that bequeathed a new and terrible termterrorto the Western

political vocabulary, together with the insistence that only through just

terror can authentic societal transformation be achieved.1 If the French

Revolution was, politically speaking, the inauguration of modernity

(and thus it has been enshrined), that inauguration was one soaked in

blood. Much of the horror unleashed in those years derived from the idea

that a decisive wholesale break with the past could and should be made.

To the extent that this is a distinctively modernist prejudice, it can be

attributed in large part to the architects of the terror who believed thatone must eviscerate, rather than reform, extant institutions, must ex-

cise familiar words and invent new vocabularies wholesale, and must

throw out old calendars and old holidays, replacing them with newly

invented ones that, in this instance at least, celebrate the apotheosis

of the revolutionary state. It was with the French Revolution that the

ideological categories that have hobbled us ever since were created: left

versus right, radical versus conservative, liberal versus traditional.

Even theology could not escape getting shoved into such categories.

1.1 Emancipated reason and Western godlessness

What is the point, theologically speaking, of bringing this up?

Bonhoeffer advanced the argument in powerful prose. His critique of the

Enlightenment was unsparing, even as he acknowledges the fact that

many prejudices, social conceits, hollow forms and insensitive senti-

mentality were swept clean by the fresh wind of intellectual clarity.

Intellectual honesty in all things, including questions of belief, was the

Bonhoeffer on Modernity 347

1 The work of George Armstrong Kelly, my political theory mentor and dissertation di-

rector, should be noted here. Many years before anyone had heard the name F. Furet, Kelly

investigated thepolitical language of the terror and the origins of the word terror itself.

Here, Kelly was something of a pioneer. As a graduate student, I really did not appreciate

just what he was up to, and it was not until many years later that I figured it outtoo late

to discuss the matter with him because of his untimely death. I should also make clear

here that political theorists understand the past as the present past, the past as deeded

to us through political vocabularies and aspirations, through the underwriting of historic

teleologies, and the like. Bonhoeffer works the same way. He is not offering a history of the

French Revolution so much as a take on the Revolution and its subsequent encoding,

particularly for revolutionary purposes. This, of course, is also what Hannah Arendt is

doing in her great work On Revolution and in her by now classic essay On Violence, in

which she ponders the attraction of teleologies of violence to thinkers at both ends of the

political spectrum at different points in history (in her own time, the late 1960s, the attrac-

tion was primarily to the left).


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great achievement of emancipated reason and it has ever since been one

of the indispensable moral requirements of western man (Bonhoeffer

1949/1995, 98). Keep this requirementemancipated reasonin mind

as an assumed precondition for the moral life as we move to Bonhoefferscritique: The cult of reason, the deification of nature, faith in progress

and a critical approach to civilization, the revolt of the bourgeoisie and

the revolt of the masses, nationalism and anti-clericalism, the rights

of man and dictatorial terrorall this together erupted chaotically

as something new in the history of the western world (Bonhoeffer

1949/1995, 9798). In Bonhoeffers view, it is the tragic, unintended con-

sequences of many of these forms of emancipation that haunt the West.

The new nationalism that took shape with the French Revolution was

based on a principle of the absolute sovereignty of the people, which, inpractice, led to war, even as the alleged emancipation of the masses

meant, not authentic liberation, but an unleashing ofressentiment that

erupted in the reign of terror. The enshrined version of the liberation

of man as an absolute ideal leads only to mans self destruction. At the

end of the path which was first trodden in the French Revolution there

is nihilism (Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 103). What Bonhoeffer had in his

sights, then, were any and all projects of historical self-deification and

state idolatry.

The French Revolution, as an archetypical event, was important be-cause it threw into stark relief western godlessness. This, Bonhoeffer

insisted, is totally different from the atheism of certain individual

Greek, Indian, Chinese and western thinkers. It is not the theoretical

denial of the existence of a God. It is itself a religion, a religion of hostil-

ity to God. It is in just this that it is western . . . the deification of man is

the proclamation of nihilism (Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 103).2 The error,

argued Bonhoeffer, was at base an anthropological one. By contrast

to the authors of the U.S. Constitution (men who were conscious

of original sin and the wickedness of the human heart [1949/1995,105]), the French revolutionaries embraced notions of human innocence

and human malleability: human beings were considered to be clay to

be molded by architects who knew where history was going and what

must be done to get there. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was lurking in the

background here, with his anthropology of a solitary human isolate

wandering in the forest, foraging for berries and nuts, drinking from the

nearest stream, and living to and for himself or herself in a world not

so much beyond as before good and evil. In effect, the architects of

the French Revolution resituated themselves in such a realm. They


2 On this deification of human beings, see my discussion of contemporary pridefulness

(Elshtain 2000, 3980).


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embraced a radical view of human self-sovereignty and self-creation,

disdained the God of creation who reminds human beings of their de-

pendence and creatureliness, and embarked on a course of destruction

(a perverse mimesis of Gods generativity) under the presumption thatthe categories of good and evil did not apply.

1.2 The dangers of utopianism

The sanitizing of all these developments in the second half of the

twentieth century is something that Bonhoeffer would no doubt find

remarkable. Such sanitizing is nowhere more in evidence than in the

work of Richard Rorty, the paradigmatic progressive-pragmatist phi-

losopher for our time (or so he has been tagged). In Rortys Contingency,Irony, and Solidarity,one discerns a matter-of-fact (by which I mean, not

to be argued out) commitment to a teleology of historical progress, so

long as things are more or less working out and will continue to develop

in the direction Rorty finds salutary. Bonhoeffer warned against deter-

ministic teleologies (whether of the hard or soft variety, and I take

Rortys to be a soft teleology, but a teleology nonetheless) that make a

kind of idol out of historical progress. Rorty treats the French Revolu-

tion in a blithe way that never approaches Bonhoefferian gravitas as he

represents its playing out as a benign instance of utopian politics andthe almost wholesale displacement of all that had gone before. Rorty

accepts and celebrates what Bonhoeffer acknowledged and deplored.

Here is Rortys depiction of things:

The French Revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social rela-

tions, the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced almost

overnight. This precedent made utopian politics the rule rather than the

exception among intellectuals. Utopian politics sets aside questions about

both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a hith-

erto unknown form of society [Rorty 1989, 3].

Rorty misses the terrible tragedy, hence the deep irony, of the Revolu-

tion. In the name of the rights of man, or under that banner, tens of

thousands were imprisoned and many thousands guillotined between

1792 and 1794 alone. Rorty pays no attention to the price of this ostensi-

ble progress, to the mounds of bodies on which the reality and theory of

the apotheosis of the modern nation-state rests. Instead, we are treated

to the comforting notion that somehow things all work out for the best

under the banner of freedom.Bonhoeffer would not permit such reasoning. He insisted that one

cannot set aside questions concerning the nature of man and cannot

avoid asking in what a persons freedom consists. Freedom is not

a word that is its own principle of justification. Sooner or later the



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anthropological questions are going to come up. Sooner or later a debate

must occur concerning the adequacy of contrasting anthropologies.

Bonhoeffer never forgot that it is only through foregrounding the an-

thropological questionWhat does it mean to be created in the image ofGod?that theology can prevent its assimilation into some variant of an

ideology external to itself, can forestall its sublimination within some

political doctrine or plan or scheme, whether Bolshevism, or fascism, or

even liberalism.

His concerns are echoed, in very different ways, by the works of

Albert Camus and Vaclav Havel. Havel, for example, is haunted by the

question of why it is that all sorts of good people, over the course of

history, have signed on with utopian projects and ways of thinking that

have wound up doing immense damage. One answer is likely to be:because they radically misconstrued human nature. Utopianism I

here define as the search for an overarching Weltanschauung, or the

embrace of a teleology of sure and certain progress of the sort that we

find in Rortys work. Havel, who helped to bring about a peaceful revolu-

tion in the name of human dignity and a limited, not limitless, principle

of human freedom, scorns utopianism as

an arrogant attempt by human reason to plan life. But it is not possible to

force life to conform to some abstract blueprint. Life is something unfath-omable, ever-changing, mysterious, and every attempt to confine it within

an artificial, abstract structure inevitably ends up homogenizing, regi-

menting, standardizing and destroying life, as well as curtailing every-

thing that projects beyond, overflows or falls outside the abstract project.

What is a concentration camp, after all, but an attempt by utopians to dis-

pose of those elements which do not fit in? [Havel]

The construction of a rigidified ideology that destroys in the name

of progress came about, in part, because emancipated reason, which

Bonhoeffer rightly identified as one of the givens of the modern condi-tion and a necessary presupposition for any compelling account of moral

freedom, may unleash tragic consequences if it is tethered to a flawed

anthropology. The challenge, therefore, is to find a way to embrace a ver-

sion of moral freedom that is indebted to a notion of emancipated reason

yet remains aware of clear limits on the operation of this freedom.

2. Who Are We?

How do we sort things out? What can best explain both human joyand human despair? Genocide and civil rights movements, each carried

out in the name of human freedom? The parent who loves and cares for a

child and the parent who beats, torments, and harms a child? The politi-

cal leader who accepts office as a vocation and a trust and the political



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leader who lies, deceives, and profits off of his or her people? These are

but a few human possibilities. A compelling anthropology should help us

to cope with this complexity, while also challenging and questioning our

cultures preoccupations in order that we might embrace that which hasworth beyond the ephemeral shadow play of passing trends, celebrity,

and expediency. Here, Bonhoeffer departed decisively from the modern-

ist presupposition of, and celebration of, human self-sovereignty: he

held that no one is sufficient unto himself or herself, and to presume

anything of that sort would constitute the sin of pride. We are always

living with, and within, a limit.

Let me unpack Bonhoeffers views in this matter, once again with

an eye toward displaying his yes and no to modernity. The yes was re-

sounding: we cannot do without some notion of human freedom andemancipation. The no was equally decisive: on the one hand, we face an

unprecedented mechanization of life, on the other hand, we confront the

spread of what Bonhoeffer called vitalism, which posits life as an

absolute, as an end in itself a view that cannot but end in nihilism,

in the disruption of all that is natural (Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 148). The

problem here is the absolutization of an authentic insight, namely, the

insistence that life is not only a means but also an end in itself. How is

that end construed? How is it misconstrued?

2.1 The unnatural as the enemy of life

It is misconstrued if the human being sees himself as his own princi-

ple of justification and embraces an image of human completeness and

self-sovereignty that forgets mutability, temporality, contingency, and

finitude and thus leads to prideful self-absorption. What is thought,

within this framework, to constitute freedom is a perversion of authen-

tic freedom; what masquerades as freedom is self-involved willfulness

that recognizes no limit. Acts of true freedom, undertaken from faithand in love, are acts that recognize a limit, but what is that limit? What

is the horizon within which human freedom is realized? There are two

tendencies at play in modernity. The first tendency is to believe that

that horizon or boundary is set by collectivities like states, as human be-

ings are sacrified to ends determined by rulers. The second tendency is

to believe that horizon to be defined by the putatively sovereign self,

whose choices are absolute and whose desires trump all communal

claims. Either way, human beings are transmogrified into destroyers

and misuse freedom. This is tragic, for freedom is a constitutive part ofhuman nature. Actual freedom is always situated and concrete and al-

ways implicates us in acts that signal, at one and the same time, our

ability to bring about change and our inability to even remotely ap-

proach total transformation, whether of selves or situations. However,



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this recognition still begs the question of who and what sets, or affords,

that limit that we are called to recognize.

Bonhoeffer worked in several ways to articulate the notion of a limit.

The first was to argue that we must take account of that which is givenor natural. These are categories that have fallen into disrepute among

us; in Bonhoeffers time, according to his account, they had already been

discredited in Protestant ethics and were being preserved almost exclu-

sively within Catholic thought. This was unfortunate, he claimed, as we

require some appreciation of that which is natural or given in the order

of things. But do frail human minds have access to such a standard? Is it

not the case that any such possibility has been spoiled by the noetic con-

sequences of sin? Bonhoeffers response was to argue that we do have

access to the natural, but only on the basis of the gospel.3 The natural,he continued, could not stand alone as a limit, but after the Fall, is di-

rected toward the coming of Christ. In his effort to redeem a concept of

the natural for Protestant ethics, Bonhoeffer argued that we enjoy a

relative freedom in natural life. Nonetheless, he held that there are

true and . . . mistaken uses of this freedom, and these mark the differ-

ence between the natural and the unnatural. He threw down the

gauntlet: Destruction of the natural means destruction of life. . . . The

unnatural is the enemy of life.

It is unnatural to approach life from a false vitalism and excessiveidealism or, contrastingly, from an equally false mechanization and

lassitude that shows despair towards natural life, expressing as it

does a certain hostility to life, tiredness of life and incapacity for life.

Thus, our right to bodily life is a natural, not an invented, right and the

basis of all other rights, given that Christian teaching repudiates the

view that the body is but a prison for the immortal soul. Harming the

body harms the self at its core: Bodilyness and human life belong insep-

arably together. Our bodies are ends in themselves, and this has very

far-reaching consequences for the Christian appraisal of all the prob-lems that have to do with the life of the body, housing, food, clothing,

recreation, play and sex. We can use our bodies and the bodies of others

well or ill. The most striking and radical excision of the integrity and

right of natural life is arbitrary killing, the deliberate destruction of

innocent life.

Before I unpack Bonhoeffers argument further, it is important to

clarify what Bonhoeffer and other thinkers, whether theologians or not,

mean by innocent life. There are those who have attacked any such

notion, arguing that it is wrong to see some lives as innocent and oth-ers, presumably, as guilty. But this misunderstands the category of


3 See Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 14285; all quotations in these two paragraphs are drawn

from these pages.


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innocence in the context in which Bonhoeffer or, for another example,

thinkers in the just war tradition use the term. Innocent does not

mean morally blameless, as if some among us have miraculously es-

caped the taint of sin, whether original or committed; rather, innocent,for this ethical purpose, means persons who are incapable of defending

themselves: a prisoner of war who has surrendered, a person with his or

her back turned to a silently approaching assailant, an infirm or weak

person, a child, and so on.

Bonhoeffer regarded aborting pregnancies, killing defenseless pris-

oners or wounded men, and destroying lives that we do not find worth

living (a clear reference to Nazi euthanasia and genocidal policies

toward the ill, the infirm, all persons with disabilities) as egregious vio-

lations. The right to live is a matter of the essence and not of anysocially imposed or constructed values. Even the most wretched life

is worth living before God. Other violations of the liberty of the body

include physical torture, arbitrary seizure and enslavement (American

slavery is here referenced), deportations, separation of persons from

home and family against their willthe full panoply of horrors that

the twentieth century has dished up in superabundance. Thus, he held

that nature and the naturaland it was created nature and nature

as redeemed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ

that Bonhoeffer had in mindestablish the horizon for the assessmentof enactments of human freedom. Bonhoeffer never lost sight of our

creatureliness, our fleshly condition, the fact that we are soft-shelled

creatures. Such is not mere lifeit is, simply and profoundly, life. More-

over, a life is always a life in relation, a life among. In Life Together,

Bonhoeffer meditated on the nature of a Christian community, stress-

ing the embodied nature of that community. A human being is created

as a body; the Son of God appeared on earth in the body for our sake and

was raised in the body. In the sacrament the believer receives the Lord

Christ in the body, and the resurrection of the dead will bring about theperfected community of Gods spiritual-physical creatures (Bonhoeffer

1939/1996, 29).

It is hard to overstate the importance of naturalness and embodiment

for Bonhoeffer. He saw around him arguments that demeaned or dimin-

ished embodied integrity and came to fruition in evil practices. The first

step down this road was the failure to find value in life itself. That, in

turn, permitted the Nazi state to construct itself as the final horizon of

meaning. The state could thus determine which lives had value and

which had not. The same, of course, was true of the horrors of Stalinism.Bonhoeffer understood the importance of maintaining firewalls of con-

ceptual, theological, and ethical sorts to forestall such depredations. Nor

would he let us off the hook. The prevalence in our own time of crude

utilitarianism affords examples in abundance of the sorts of arguments



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and claims that Bonhoeffer repudiated as evidence of nihilismhatred

of God and creation, yielding hatred of the human itself. In our own

time, so-called positive eugenics, or genetic engineering and manipu-

lation, repudiates any Bonhoefferian limit, as do the unlimited right toabortion, the death penalty, and a host of other practices that are no lon-

ger seen as extreme at all, at least not in the United States.4 Bonhoeffer,

were he alive to assess all this, would be a powerful critic of the distorted

notions of human freedom being enacted among us today. The distor-

tions need not be anything so extreme as Nazism to incur his censure.

2.2 Existential limits

The other limit to distorted misuses of freedom is one I will call, fol-lowing Bonhoeffer, existential. Bonhoeffer stressed unceasingly that

the other who exists before me exists concretely, not as some abstraction

that I can simply wish away or manipulate or take into account willy-

nilly, as the mood strikes me. When I deal with another, that other is not

an abstract category of discourse hypostasized to archetypal propor-

tions, but a real, flawed, limited, complex human beingone of Gods

creatures. If I am not permitted to wish him or her away, neither am I

permitted to assimilate this concrete other in such a way that his or her

autonomy is effaced. Bonhoeffer used the term existential to charac-terize the proper way to think of Christ: Christ is not first a Christ for

himself and then a Christ in the Church . . . Christ can never be thought

of as a being for himself, but only in relation to me (Bonhoeffer 1933/

1960, 47). Analogously, he presented self and other not as opposite and

incommensurable principles, but only in relation. Even as Christ has

really bound himself in freedom to me, I, in turn, bind myself, or am

bound, to others. I really am my brothers and sisters keeper.

This is not startling news to any reader of Bonhoeffer, but I want to

add a twist to the argument.The danger Bonhoeffer faced straight on was that of a self-absorbed

self, who has no room for another either because he or she is caught

up in the idealist miasma of vitalism or because he or she views the

other through the lens of mechanization and utilityor an even more

deadly ideology of racial superiority. We are all alert to these dangers.

However, self-absorption takes other forms that we are less able to

see, though they are manifest in our own time in Western culture, no-

where more so than in the United States. The absorption of the other

in and through categories of empathic sentimentalizationthe I feelyour pain phenomenoneclipses utterly the distance between self and


4 For a detailed discussion of contemporary visions of a genetic utopia, or eugenics, see

Elshtain 2000, especially chap. 3.


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other, erasing the concrete humanity of the other just as surely as do

those activities we are more accustomed to denounce. Though this cur-

rent form of self-absorption was scarcely visible in Bonhoeffers time

and place, it redounds to his credit that he recognized and condemned itfor what it was. Understanding this will enable us to see just how far a

common criticism of Bonhoeffer misses the mark.

Bonhoeffers discussion of the sense of quality inLetters and Papers

from Prison has provoked criticism of his elitism, as if his arguments

were little more than a reflection of his family background and status.

This sort of complaint arises because interpreters fail to distinguish be-

tween a nostalgic defense of class-indexed mannerisms and a moral

exhortation to preserve and cultivate the self-reserve that is inseparable

from genuine respect for the concrete existential presence of the trulyother. Bonhoeffer called for the courage to fight for a revival of whole-

sale reserve between man and man [lest] we . . . perish in an anarchy of

human values (Bonhoeffer 1951/1997, 12). Contempt for reserve he

called the mark of the rabble, and this has earned him ire for his

alleged haughtiness. However, the rabble was not a category of class or

status; it was an attitude and disposition, an outburst of contempt and

insolence, a kind of slothfulness. Bonhoeffers hope lay in the birth of a

new sense of nobility drawn from all former social classes (Bonhoeffer

1951/1997, 13). The qualities that were to characterize this new nobilitywere a sense of duty, due regard for self and others, and the recovery of

quality. No doubt Bonhoeffer had in mind, as an example of what he

found insufferable, the values of what Hannah Arendt referred to (and

condemned) as theparvenu, the low-minded social climber whose entire

way of being pivots around flattery, contempt, and low ambition. Given

the prevalence of such values in the Nazi era, it was unsurprising that

Bonhoeffer insisted that if Christianity once championed equality, it

must in his own time defend passionately human dignity and reserve

(Bonhoeffer 1951/1997, 12).I sometimes think of those wordsdignity and reservewhen I ob-

serve the way human beings ill-dignify themselves for the sake of just a

few moments of television time. In the grotesque displays on American

television every afternoon (and now many evenings as well), we are let

in on everyones grubbiest secret. People shout and scream filth at one

anotherall this in the name of bringing out the truth, of breaking

down barriers to honesty and full revelation, of besting the horrors of

hypocrisy and deceit. The audience hoots, yells, screams, hisses, sheds

tearsthey are feeling everyones everything: pain, contempt, shock, in-solence, revenge. A woman slept with her sisters husband. A best

girlfriend got pregnant having sex with the groom on the eve of his wed-

ding after his unsuspecting bride, her friend, went to bed early. The

variations are nigh endless. This erasure of the distinction between



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selveswhat Arendt called the space in between people that protects

human dignity and pluralityis presented as a perverse kind of public

service, a way to get people to confront their lives. It is the eradication

of this space in between that is a constitutive feature of totalitarian-ism, Arendt argued, as people are stripped of their membership in

solidaristic institutions and find themselves standing alone, not as

strong moral agents but as weak reeds blowing in the gale-force winds of

ideology. Then, a new dynamic is unleashed that more or less glues

these isolates together to form a mass or a mob to be manipulated and

unleashed against all enemies, foreign or domestic.5

That the phenomenon of demanding that people display their most

intimate and private lives for public consumption is widespread in late

modern Western culture is scarcely a secret. Recall, if you will, the hys-teria occasioned by the death of Princess Diana and the ire heaped

upon Britains royal family because they did what dignified people do

when tragedy strikesthey helped the young sons to deal with the

death of a mother; they went to church; they sought to protect one

another. This was considered cold and inconsiderate to the public,

given its insatiable need for the erasure of distance and its clamor for

more exposure. Bonhoeffer would have been as appalled by this vora-

cious, self-righteous, and, indeed, violent violation of boundaries as

by the shameless self-exposures that answer and feed it and the pan-dering producers that exploit it. He detested anything cloying and

bathetic, anything that cheapens and degrades. He rightly saw such

sentimentality as the opposite of Christian caritas, for the expression

or extension of authentic compassion always recognizes the indepen-

dent existence of the other who has a claim on my attention. He

admired writers who treated the most delicate matters without senti-

mentality, the most serious without flippancy and who were able to

express their convictions without pathos (Bonhoeffer 1951/1997, 78).

He was himself a master of understatement, describing one Alliedbombing raid on Berlin that threatened those (like himself) who were

imprisoned as not exactly pleasant (Bonhoeffer 1951/1997, 137).

2.3 True and false forms of compassion

This reserve (of which he is both theorist and witness) makes him

vulnerable to a second criticism. The reactions of my students are

once again instructive. Not a few have been troubled by Bonhoeffers


5 Solidaristic institutions (such as churches, craft guilds, trade unions, and community

organizations) recognize and build on human sociality. The mass comes into being only

after these solidaristic institutions have been destroyed, undermined, or cut adrift; the

mass relies on human isolation.


13/22

apparentthis is how they read himlack of sympathy for his fellow

prisoners who collapsed under the stress of the bombing and, as if that

were not sufficiently bothersome, his articulated contempt for those

who talked quite openly about how frightened they were (Bonhoeffer1951/1997, 146). He had particularly little patience with or sympathy

for those who moaned and carried on at night during the bombing, but

who, once they were in daylight and out of immediate harms way, were

very hard on others and talk big about a dangerous life; he met their

panic by telling them that they were ridiculous and that there were 17

and 18-year-olds here in much more dangerous places during the raids

who behave splendidly (Bonhoeffer 1951/1997, 2045, 205). Moreover,

Bonhoeffers idea of giving comfort was to tell a shattered fellow pris-

oner that it would last only a few more minutes. From their pointof view, the case has thus been made for his emotional deficiency. For

contemporary students who have come of age in a culture of exposure

that valorizes subjectivism, this stance seems harsh, even unfeeling.

His gestures of support seem paltry to our day and age, characterized,

as it is, by rhetorical excess that parades its empathy effusively and re-

quires that one rip open ones chest to display ones beating heart in

order to demonstrate ones authentic capacity to feel anothers pain.

Bonhoeffer did not defend himself directly inLetters and Papers from

Prison, but I will. Bonhoeffers impatience with a certain sort of fearfuldisplay shows subtlety of insight: Bonhoeffer had a hunch that one

should not parade ones fears, that perhaps doing so was one side of the

coin whose other face was an excess of braggadocio (Bonhoeffer 1951/

1997, 146). His restraint in the face of more authentic distress is more

complex. While it is true that Bonhoeffer himself said (in his February 1,

1944, letter to Eberhard Bethge from Tegel) that he was bad at comfort-

ing; I can listen all right, but I can hardly ever find anything to say, the

passage that immediately follows is far more revealing: But perhaps

the way one asks about some things and not about others helps to sug-gest what really matters; and it seems to me more important actually to

share someones distress than to use smooth words about it (Bonhoeffer

1951/1997, 203). One does this by beingfor the other, rather than col-

lapsing the other into oneself. Moreover, it strikes me that telling a

terror-stricken sufferer it will only be a few more minutes, rather than

something like I know what it feels like (and oneself growing fearful in

order that one can cling, weeping, to the other), is a form of comfort that

respects the distance between persons but holds out a powerful lifeline:

this will not last much longer. Perhaps childbirth is not a very goodanalogy, but I cannot help thinking of the woman in labor for whom the

most effective form of help and comfort is to time contractions, to say

only so many more seconds, and to help her do something quite practi-

cal about breathing (as birth coaches are trained to do). The more brisk,



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matter-of-fact, and businesslike this help is, the better. A person is not

much help if he faints as you faint, weeps as you weep, falls apart as you

fall apart. Bonhoeffer did say that he had not joined the ranks of the

toughs. He meant simply to stand firm against a kind of weakness thatChristianity does not hold with, but which people insist on claiming as

Christian (Bonhoeffer 1951/1997, 205). Reticence and reserve are ways

of not so overflowing the boundaries of ones self that one floods the

other. In observing the boundaries of the self, one makes more room for

another. The seeds of a powerful critique of the many ways in which

self-absorption masquerades nowadays as concern lie in these sugges-

tive observations by Bonhoeffer, fleshed out in his discussion of Ethics

as Formation inEthics (Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 7376).

It is the despiser of personsmore precisely the tyrannical despiserof personswho exploits the baseness of the human heart and who

plays on human weaknesses, legitimating and authenticating those

weaknesses. He thinks people stupid, and they become stupid. He

thinks them weak, and they become weak. He thinks them criminal,

and they become criminal. . . . Contempt for man and idolization of man

are close neighbors (Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 74). There are among us

those who are satisfied only if other human beings live up (or, to put it

more accurately, live down) to their ideas of human weakness, victimiza-

tion, and helplessness. Rather than helping others to be strong, theymistakenly see strength as somehow an insult to the weak. Such people

claim to be concerned and compassionate, and because they appear to

want everyone to feel better, it is very difficult to challenge them. Any

criticism of their caring position seems to make one hard-boiled (as

Bonhoeffer suspected that others judged him to be). However, the vic-

tims of Nazismand there are real victims in the worldrequired bold

assistance. They required persons with rectitude, conviction, presence of

mindvirtues that are part and parcel of authentic Christian compas-

sion of the sort that eschews sentimentality in favor of something moretough minded. Standing with and supporting ones brother and sister in

Christ differs greatly from the sentimentalized, and far easier, feeling of

anothers pain, an identification with that amounts to a vaguely para-

sitical joining that requires victims in order that it can, in our current

parlance, feel good about itself. Genuine compassion seeks to help oth-

ers grow strong and rejoices when this happens. Compassion responds

to cries for help but does not need victims the way an addict needs drugs.

3. Truth Telling and Ethical Demands

Now, let us turn to the final tough questionthat of truth.

Bonhoeffer is often misunderstood in the matter of truth. He was no

situationist. He did not believe that one could cut and trim as one saw



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fit, nor did he believe that truth claims have no objective warrant out-

side the subjectivity of first-person reports. His insistence that what it

means to tell the truth is inseparable from consideration of the concrete

situation in which issues of truth and falsehood are joined is no blanketinvitation to deceit, slipperiness, manipulation, wholesale invention. In

order to understand Bonhoeffer on this matter, one must appreciate his

often severe criticism of the ethics developed by Immanuel Kant. Be-

cause so many moral philosophers construe ethics and Kant as nigh

synonymous, to depart from Kants categorical imperatives seems to

abandon the ground of ethics altogether and to enter into a purely

consequentialist realm. Indeed, this is how the alternatives are all too

often posedonce again through a false dichotomy: it is either that I

cannot lie under any and all circumstances or whether or not I can liedepends just on my assessment of the consequences of doing one or the

other. Surely the possibilities are more complex and nuanced than

that!

3.1 Conscience, responsibility, and truth

Bonhoeffers views on what it means to tell the truth cannot be sepa-

rated from Bonhoeffers views on the one who stands fast. The person

who stands fast is one whose final standard is not his reason, his princi-ples, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to

sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in

faith and in exclusive allegiance to Godthe responsible man, who tries

to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God

(Bonhoeffer 1951/1997, 5). He contrasted the responsible person to the

person who seeks the sanctuary of private virtuousness. But anyone

who does this [pursues private virtue] must shut his mouth and his eyes

to the injustice around him. Only at the cost of self-deception can he

keep himself pure from the contamination arising from responsible ac-tion (Bonhoeffer 1951/1997, 5). The privately virtuous are those who

flee, those who preen themselves on their own sanctimoniousnessin

contrast to those with dirty hands who have engaged the world through

responsible action. How does truth telling enter into this?

There are different possible interpretations of what it means to tell

the truth. To begin with, truthfulness does not mean uncovering every-

thing that exists. God himself made clothes for men; and that means

that in statu corruptionis many things in human life ought to remain

covered, and that evil, even though it cannot be eradicated, ought atleast to be concealed (Bonhoeffer 1951/1997, 158). So truth telling is not

ripping the mask off everything, getting all the secrets out into the open.

Nor is it wrapping oneself in the mantle of virtuousnessI cannot tell a

lie. That is just too easy and too tempting. In Letters and Papers,



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Bonhoeffer tells Bethge that he is working on an essay on what is speak-

ing the truth and that he is trying to draw a contrast between trust,

loyalty, and secrecy, on one hand, and what he calls the cynical concep-

tion of truth, on the other. The cynical conception does not accept theobligations signaled by trust, loyalty, or even secrecy. Falsehood is hos-

tility to reality and destruction of reality, so much so that anyone

who tells the truth cynically is lying (Bonhoeffer 1951/1997, 163).

Something that Bonhoeffer calls moral memory (although he finds it a

horrid expression) helps us to be responsible and to sustain obliga-

tions, including love, marriage, friendship, and loyalty. Having been

formed in and to and for relationship and responsibility, these are (so to

speak) encoded in our very being: we are marked by the memory of these

relations, and these memories are moral. If we shun such memories,treat them with contempt, repress and forget them, we make ourselves

far more susceptible to the cynical manipulators of symbols of power,

far more likely to be drawn into the roaring vortex of the demonic

(and such he found Nazism) and far more likely to conform to the

requirements of the world of extreme power that knows no limit and

that presents itself as an irresistible drama. The destruction of life,

resituated within this drama of human power and willfulness, takes on

a kind of aestheticized necessity: all this must be done in order to rid the

world of that blemish or those unworthy parts.What helps us to stand fast is not, he suggested, the inviolable call

of conscience but, rather, responsibility for our neighbor (Bonhoeffer

1949/1995, 238). With his discussions of truth telling, of conscience, of

the importance of staying in touch with the real and the actual, the

claims of neighbor love, Bonhoeffer reminds us that Christianity is not

primarily a moralistic system. Those who moralize Christianity treat

God as a metaphysical first principle of some sort, rather than recogniz-

ing the living Trinitarian God who is a true agent in history. If we locate

God safely outside the cosmos, all that is left is our action; then wedecide that our action requires rules, and we make of Christianity a

rule-governed moral system. However, this kills the living Christ and

freezes the moral memory so that itand wecan no longer respond

large-heartedly to the neighbor before us. A certain fetishization of truth

telling is part and parcel of moralizing Christianity, and Bonhoeffer

considered Kant to be the predominant figure who had led things badly

astray.

Let us take up his discussion of Conscience in part 1 ofEthics before

turning to that little essay at the end of part 2 that many find so enig-matic, What Does It Mean to Tell the Truth? Many are those who

situate the moral life within a horizon in which conscience is the last

court of appeal: individuals find unity for their existence in their auton-

omy. I will. . . or so that I may will. . . The unity of the ego is sought



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in its conformity with an abstract universal principle of the moral

law. Bonhoeffer noted Nazi perversions of this when national socialists

said, My conscience is Adolf Hitlerhere, too, positing a foundation

for unity of the ego beyond oneself. Arendt, in her controversial bookEichmann in Jerusalem, noted that Eichmann could provide a credit-

able (though perverted) articulation of theform of a Kantian categorical

imperative, one in which he substituted the will of the Fhrer as the

external principle of legitimation. What is going on in such moments is

an attempt on the part of the ego to justify itself with reference to an ex-

ternal standard internalized so as to become ones own: conscience.

There, alone, can unity or a unifying experience be found.

Christianity, by contrast, works in a very different way. The unity of

human existence is not thought to consist in autonomy; rather, it isfound in and through Jesus Christ, who is met not as a metaphysical

first principle but as true God and true man, with whom I am in fellow-

ship. In this fellowship, I am set free for responsible service. Thus it

is Jesus Christ who sets conscience free for the service of God and of

our neighbor (Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 240). This Bonhoeffer offered

by contrast to the severity of Kants principle of truthfulness. In this

matter Bonhoeffers prose was unsparing: Kant had drawn, he said,

the grotesque conclusion that I must even return an honest yes to the

enquiry of the murderer who breaks into my house and asks whethermy friend whom he is pursuing has taken refuge there; in such a case

self-righteousness of conscience has become outrageous presumption

and blocks the path of responsible action (Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 241).

According to Bonhoeffer, I should, instead, tell a robust lie for the sake

of my friend and bear the guilt involvedbear it responsibly (Bon-

hoeffer 1949/1995, 241). Our deeds are always performed in a domain of

relativity, in a kind of twilight, in the midst of what Bonhoeffer calls

innumerable perspectives. Our deeds are heavy with the soot and dirt

of the world. The pristine clarity of the Kantian categorical imperativedo not lie no matter whatis inhuman, and it makes of the moralist a

tormenter of humanity.

3.2 Truth telling as a learned rhetorical practice

With this backdrop, we can turn to the fragment on truth with which

Ethics concludes. Truth must take account of particular situations and

relationships. Where do I, if I am speaker, stand? What about others in

relation to me?6 Speech between parent and child is different from


6 See Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 35967; all quotations in this section are drawn from these

pages.


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speech between man and wife, between friends, between teacher and

pupil. (Had Bonhoeffer embarked on an analysis of the constitutive role

of authority in creating and sustaining diverse relationships in plural

settings, I think that would have clarified his consideration of truth tell-ing and would have helped to make clear that he was neither a crude

consequentialist nor a flat-out situationist. He did not offer such an

analysis, but a full treatment of this little essay could, and should, pro-

vide such as an essential supplement to Bonhoeffers argument.) Truth

must be concrete, not a dictum from nowhere. We learn to tell the

truthit is not something innate. Truth telling is, on Bonhoeffers view,

a complex rhetorical practice, mastered as we learn what is appropriate

or not, given a specific situation, given what our voice represents in that

situation, given the particular people who surround us, and so on. Onemust know the right word on each occasion. One does not tell a barn-

yard joke in the nursery, even though that joke may be on ones mind at

that moment. Here, Bonhoeffer attacks as inadequate the definition of

truth telling as saying what is on ones mind, as collapsing thinking into

speaking. To define truth telling this way strips it of its relational di-

mensions and absolutizes the subjectivist moment. Authentic truth

cannot be separated from life, and that means that true utterances will

differ according to whom I am addressing, where, and to what ends. It is

the fanatical devotee of truth who can make no allowance for humanweaknesses, and it is this same moralist who, by his or her scrupulous

and technical truth telling, destroys the living truth between men.

Let me now offer several examples that seem to me to illustrate what

Bonhoeffer was arguing. For a very short timeonly the duration of a

single meeting, as I found the whole thing unpleasanta friend and I

interacted with a womens collective in Boston back in 1973. (I later

found a wonderful feminist consciousness raising group that stayed to-

gether for five years.) Each of us was to tell what brought us to the

meeting and what we had in mind that we could do to change theworldmodest stuff like that. One very young womanshe could not

have been more than eighteenbegan her comments by noting that her

grandmother, an eighty-nine-year-old lady in Southie (Bostons south

side, heavily Irish-American and, of course, Catholic) was ill and proba-

bly dying. Just as we began to express condolences, the young woman

said: And Im going over there tomorrow and Im going to force her to

confront the truth about my abortion. I thought, What possible good

can come from compelling a devout eighty-nine-year-old Irish-American

Catholic grandmother, who lies dying, to confront the truth of a be-loved granddaughters abortion? This struck me then and strikes me yet

as an act of violence carried out in the name of truth. Forcing a frail old

woman to confront unpleasant facts seems to me to be the sort of thing

Bonhoeffer had in mind when he wrote of the fanatical devotee of truth



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who wounds shame, desecrates mystery, breaks confidence, betrays the

community in which he lives, and laughs arrogantly at the devastation

he has wrought and at the human weakness which cannot bear the

truth. For the fanatical devotee, truth is destructive and demands vic-tims. Such truth is not Gods truth, Bonhoeffer insisted, for Gods truth

judges from love, not from hatred. Let me hasten to add that the woman

in questionI do not remember her namewas young and she was

angry. It is just that she had targeted for her ire a dying womanher

grandmotherwho should have been allowed, in recognition of our

human frailty and our need for goodness, to go to her death in peace. I

hope her plan was not carried out, for I have to believe the young woman

in question would have lived to regret what she had done and to regret it

deeply. We should all come to regret our acts of cruelty, especially whenthey are carried out in the name of some lofty ideal.

Utterances have homes in particular environments: words live in par-

ticular places. When a word is wrenched inappropriately from one place

to another (gets displaced), distortionand worsemay follow. Here is

another example: The Czech writer Milan Kundera in 1984 recalled the

tragedy of a friend, a writer named Jan Prochazka, whose intimate

kitchen table talks over wine, in his own home and with friends at

table, were recorded by the state police in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia and

then assembled into a program that was broadcast on state radio. Ofhis friend, Kundera observed: He finds himself in a state of complete

humiliation: the secret eye observes him even when he kisses his wife in

the bedroom or stands in front of the toilet bowl. Such a man can only

die. And Prochazka did. There is a border between intimate life and

public life . . . that cant be crossed with impunity, wrote Kundera,

because the man who was the same in both public and intimate life

would be a monster. How so?

He would be without spontaneity in his private life and without responsi-bility in his public life. For example: privately to you I can say of a friend

whos done something stupid, that hes an idiot, that his ears ought to be

cut off, that he should be hung upside down and a mouse stuffed in his

mouth. But if the same statement were broadcast over the radio spoken in

a serious toneand we all prefer to make such jokes in a serious toneit

would be indefensible [Kundera 1984, 42].

This, surely, is something of what Bonhoeffer has in mind when he says

that there is too much talk. And when the limits of the various words

are obliterated, when words become rootless and homeless, then theword loses truth, and then indeed there must almost inevitably be

lying. The essential character of a lie is not to be found, as Bonhoeffer

has shown us, in the discrepancy between thought and speech but at a

far deeper level. Something is being denied in the lie. A lie is the



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denial, the negation and the conscious and deliberate destruction of the

reality which is created by God and which consists in God, no matter

whether this purpose is achieved by speech or silence.

3.3 Duties and capacities in relation

We are getting closer to what Bonhoeffer had in mind. Clearly, his

theology of the mandates or various orders of reality came into play. He

viewed the lie as a deliberate destruction of reality because he believedthat lies tear and break the relationships that are the very warp and

woof of each of Gods created orders. If a child had reported to the state

police that a parent had uttered a dismissive word about Adolf Hitler

and if that parent had subsequently been taken to a concentrationcamp, how should we assess the childs report? It stated verbatim the

parents words, but it was a despicable lie, on Bonhoeffers view, becauseit wrenched words from one order of reality in which human beings are

embedded and unleashed them in another order of the realin this

case, in a perverted order of the real, since Gods mandate of governance

had been twisted by the Nazis and turned into something demonic.However, according to Bonhoeffer, even if a parents critical or sardonic

words were reported only to a school teacher or to a local politician, this

would be an act of betrayal involving a lie. Thus, every utterance is in-volved in a relation both with another man and with a thing, and in

every utterance, therefore, this twofold reference must be apparent. An

utterance without reference is empty. It contains no truth (Bonhoeffer

1949/1995, 365). One is not simply entitled, as so many of our moderncontemporaries hold, to say what one thinks and then call this truth

telling. We are not bound to tell the truth to everyone who crosses

our pathto do so is aggression unleashed as a virtue. Instead, we arebidden to think about occasion, relation, where I stand, where she

stands, and who or what entitles me to speak.Parents try desperately, or used to, to instill in their children an ap-

propriate sense of the occasion: what you do in your own living room isnot appropriate at church. This is a way of recognizing that we are mul-

tiform and plural selves. It is also a way of acknowledging the fact that

the truth of such earthbound yet high-flying creatures as ourselvesmust remain, at the same time, grounded and concrete, but also un-

afraid to face the world of others with generous large-heartedness. In

such a world, a pettifogging insistence on the truth, the whole truth, and

nothing butas if every encounter were in a metaphorical court of lawand unfolded under oathwould be seen for what, in fact, it is: a desper-

ate attempt by perplexed and often resentful human beings to display

our own virtue, to unmask the perfidy of others, to gain an advantage, tosatisfy our own morbid curiosity, to undermine those we envy or fear

(the list could go on).



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Bonhoeffer resituated truth telling as one among many human dutiesand capacities in relation. Rather thanprimus inter pares, it is a rathermodest virtue and, as we have seen, an ambiguous and complex one.

Bonhoeffer acknowledged that his views about the living truth weredangerous, inviting some to suspect that truth could be trimmed to

suit any particular situation. However, his views were no more danger-ous, surely, than the presumption of the fanatical devotee ready to givea friend over to assassins in order to maintain his or her own purity. Inthe words of Pope John Paul II:

Human perfection . . . consists not simply in acquiring an abstract knowl-

edge of the truth, but in a dynamic relationship of faithful self-giving with

others. . . . knowledge through belief, grounded as it is on trust between

persons, is linked to truth: in the act of believing, men and women entrust

themselves to the truth which the other declares to them [John Paul II

1998, 49].

I began by insisting that Bonhoeffers relation to modernity was botha ringing yes and a resounding no. That was consistent with his theol-ogy of the cross. When God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, historybecame a serious matter without being canonized. The yes and the nowhich God addresses to history in the incarnation and crucifixion of

Jesus Christ introduces into every historical instant an infinite and un-reasonable tension (Bonhoeffer 1949/1995, 90). It is that tension thatBonhoeffer reproduced in his discussions of modernity. This is not aproblem that using better logic or dropping categories and adding newones will solve. For what is modernity save one moment in created time

between the creation and the eschaton? All such moments are touchednot only by their created origin but also by the Fall, which makes of anydream of full human unity a chimera, and a dangerous one at that.

REFERENCESArendt, Hannah

1963a Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New

York: Viking Press.

1963b On Revolution. New York: Viking Press.

1970 On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich

1960 Christ the Center. 1933. Translated by Edwin H. Robertson. New

York: Harper Ministers Paperback Library.

1995 Ethics. 1949. Edited by Eberhard Bethge. Translated by NevilleHorton Smith. New York: Simon and Schuster.

1996 Life Together. 1939. English edition edited by Geffrey B. Kelly.

Translated by Daniel W. Bloesch. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works:

Translated from the German Edition, edited by Wayne Whitson

Floyd, 5:25118. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press.



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1997 Letters and Papers from Prison. 1951. Edited by Eberhard Bethge.

Enlarged edition. Translated by Reginald Fuller, Frank Clark, and

others, with additional material by John Bowden. New York:

Simon and Schuster, Touchstone Books.Camus, Albert

1956 The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Translated by Anthony

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Elshtain, Jean Bethke

1995 Democracy on Trial. New York: HarperCollins, Basic Books.

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Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Havel, Vaclav

1989 Letters to Olga. New York: Henry Holt.1990 Open Letters: Selected Writings 19641990. New York: Knopf.

John Paul II

1998 Fides et ratio. (On the Relationship between Faith and Reason.)

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Kundera, Milan

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Boenhoffer on Modernity

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