Bonhoeffer on subjectivity ========================== As I started to read Bonhoeffer's Sanctorum Communio, I came upon the following passage, which seemed to my theologically untrained mind to describe a "Copernican revolution" (eine kopernikanische Wendung) of the simpler theology I picked up in Sunday School fifty-five years ago. The extent to which Bonhoeffer resorted to italics (which I have rendered in upper case letters), reflects, I suspect, his struggle with these very difficult and untraditional concepts. Sanctorum Communio, Zweites Kapitel B. Gottesbegriff und soziale Grundbeziehungen unter dem Begriffe des Ich-Du-Verhaeltnisses ..... Zusammenfassung: DIE PERSON IST IN IHRER KONKRETEN LEBENDIGKEIT, GANZHEIT UND EINZIGARTIGKEIT ALS LETZTE EINHEIT VON GOTT GEWOLLT. DIE SOZIALEN BEZIEHUNGEN MUESSEN SOMIT ALS REIN INTERPERSONAL AUF EINZIGARTIGKEIT UND GESCHIEDENHEIT DER PERSONEN AUFBAUEND VORGESTELLT WERDEN. Es gibt keine Ueberwindung der Person durch apersonalen Geist, keine "Einheit", die die Personenvielheit aufhoebe. DIE SOZIALE GRUNDKATEGORIE IST DAS ICH-DU-VERHAELTNIS. DAS DU DES ANDEREN MENSCHEN IST DAS GOETTLICHE DU. Somit ist auch der Weg zu ihm derselbe wie zum goettlichen, der der Anerkennung oder Ablehnung. DER EINZELNE WIRD IM "AUGENBLICK" IMMER WIEDER PERSON DURCH DEN "ANDEREN". Der andere Mensch gibt uns dasselbe Erkenntnisproblem auf wie Gott selbst. Mein reales Verhaeltnis zum anderen Menschen ist orientiert an meinem Verhaeltnis zu Gott. WIE ICH GOTTES "ICH" ERST KENNE IN DER OFFEENBARUNG SEINER LIEBE, SO AUCH DEN ANDEREN MENSCHEN. HIER HAT DER KIRCHENBEGRIFF EINZUSETZEN. Dann wird es klar werden, dasz christliche Person ihr eigentliches Wesen erst erreicht, wenn Gott ihr nicht als DU gegenuebertritt, SONDERN ALS ICH IN SIE "EINGEHT". (S.33-34) Sanctorum Communio, Second Chapter B. The concept of God and fundamental social relationships implied in the I-Thou interaction. ...... Summary: IN ITS VITALITY, UNITY, AND UNIQUENESS, PERSONALITY IS ORDAINED BY GOD AS ULTIMATE ENTITY. THUS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS MUST BE DEEMED TO BE GROUNDED IN THE UNIQUENESS AND SEPARATENESS OF THE PERSONS THAT CONSTITUTE THEM. Personality cannot be overcome with impersonal "Spirit", nor can the multiplicity of personality be fused in a unity of any sort. THE FUNDAMENTAL CATEGORY OF SOCIETY IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN I AND THOU. THE THOU OF THE OTHER HUMAN BEING IS THE THOU OF GOD. Thus the path to the human thou is the same as the path to the divine thou, be it of acceptance or rejection. IN THE PRESENT MOMENT, THE INDIVIUAL BECOMES A PERSON BY VIRTUE OF THE OTHER. The other human being poses for us the same challenge of cognition as does God himself. The actual relationship between myself and the other human being is oriented by my relationship to God. AS I APPERCEIVE GOD'S SUBJEKTIVITY (SELF) ONLY IN THE REVELATION OF HIS LOVE, SO I APPERCEIVE THE OTHER HUMAN BEING (ONLY IN THE REVELATION OF GOD'S LOVE). This is the point of origin of the concept of church. It will then become obvious, that Christian Personality is actualized only when God no longer confronts it as THOU, BUT ENTERS INTO IT AS I. (freely translated from Sanctorum Communio, Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1986, pp. 33-34) The foregoing passage articulates three concepts which to my mind are of vast import not only to theology in particular but to philosophy, to the interpretation of our intellectual existence, in general. The first is the identifification of the primacy of the person- to-person relationship as opposed to the society-to-person relationship. The second is the identifification of the primacy of the person- to-God relationship as opposed to the society-to-God relationship. I find this second thesis both highly congenial but historically problematic in consideration of God's election of Israel as a people rather than as an aggregate of individuals to be the objects of his grace. I note the ambivalence between the Gloria (laudamus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te) of the Nicene Creed and its Credo, (*we* glorify - but *I* believe); and I relish the musical irony in which JS Bach gave expression to this contradiction by scoring the collective "Laudamus te" for one of the most exquisite of his duets for two solo (contrapuntal) voices (violin and alto), while treating the Credo in magnificent unison, the many voices fused into a single melodic line, marching resolutely up and down, over the mountains through the valleys of human experience. What impresses me most severely about the foregoing passage, however, is its assertion that God "enters into" the personality as "I". It seems to me that this assertion has at minimum three consequences: 1) It correlates the experience of deity with the experience of self, making "proofs" for the existence of God no less superfluous than proofs for the existence of self; it identifies human consciousness as the source of knowledge of God in much the same way as that consciousness is the source of knowledge of self. 2) It renders meaningless the efforts, be it in art or in propaganda, to make of God an OBJECT: of fear, of praise, of honor, or of anything whatever. It explains and reaffirms the ancient prohibition against the utterance of his name. Was this the passage from which Bonhoeffer's mentor Seeberg distanced himself in his appraisal of the thesis, when he wrote: "Die dialektischen Beweise des Autors sind nicht immer ueberzeugend. So etwa der wunderliche Beweis, dasz ein Ich nur auf dem Umweg ueber Gott zur Erkenntnis eines Du kommen koenne." "The dialectical proofs of the author are not always convincing. For example the curious proof that a self could arrive at knowledge of another only by a detour via God." (Does anyone besides myself question the celestial navigation of a theologian for whom the path to God is a "detour" (Umweg)?) It occurred to me that if Bonhoeffer had written some centuries earlier, perhaps ecclesiastical rather than secular authority would have made him a martyr. Is Isaiah's prophecy that God comes to his people as a bridegroom (to his bride) an expression of deity as conjugate to the self, an intuition of deity as subjective experience? and should we explain this powerful, and to modern ears somewhat embarrassing metaphor, by the fact that its author had been spared the transit through the morass of Kantian sentence structure, and therefore had not available to him the modern terms "subjective" and "objective" in which to clothe his prophecies? Perhaps Isaiah resorted to this provocative image because the fusion of subjectivities, or at any rate, the sublimation of objectivity as passion, is experienced by men and women most emphatically in the conjugal act. I am mindful of and apologetic for the presumptuousness of my exegesis, and ask to be corrected by those to whom it appears faulty. I scribble these glosses at my initial reading of Bonhoeffer, wholly unfamiliar with the entirety of his work. I ask myself (and you), Ist die Subjektivierung Gottes voruebergehende Laune? Is the conclusion that God enters into the Christian personality as I, a transient consideration of Bonhoeffer's, subsequently discarded, or does it become a cornerstone of his theology and of his anthropology, as I think it might? Ernst Meyer