There was a palpable intensity to the sermon that seems to have taken some listeners by surprise, at least those who knew the pastor only from informal exchanges. It reveals Bonhoeffer reaching for a spiritual vitality permeating the totality of creation, beyond the familiar dualisms of the sacred and profane, of spirit and body, earth and heaven. Karl Barth had written that the Christian should be more humanist than the humanist, more romantic than the romanticist, but also more precise than either—humanism gathers tremendous strength in the story of the Word made flesh. And precision is the proper ordering of doctrine and belief.
Like Barth, Bonhoeffer interprets the human condition in the light of the incarnation, the “great event” when God assumed human form in Jesus of Nazareth, and, as described in the Gospel of John, “We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” But Bonhoeffer was seeking the precise terms for a lived faith in the here and now, hungering, as he said in the sermon, for “eternity in the midst of time.”
To be sure, the doctrine of sola gratia, that God alone forgives, justifies, and saves undeserving sinners, was the essential message of the Christian faith, at least in its Lutheran form. “If there is anything at all on this earth that, however seriously it may present itself, is not ultimately trivial or even comical, it is the fact of justification.” But to apprehend the doctrine without its changing one from the inside—without experience of a metanoia, a spiritual change of heart—is to trivialize God’s redemptive acts. Bonhoeffer wanted to awaken his flock to the wonder and power of the “new creation,” the universe as redeemed when God took flesh. He told them, “Through [justification] our gaze is opened on the entire world, on that which is vain and that which matters; in [that state] we understand both ourselves and … God.”34 He wanted his congregation to feel the full force of the “great disruption” caused by an awareness of God’s merciful gift. For justification was fact before ever being expressed as doctrine. Grace frees and forms, grace invites and involves. Grace calls the idle and the complacent, even the nouveaux riches, out of their spiritual lethargy into heightened knowledge of God. But grace has no use for the indifferent heart.
Bonhoeffer spoke of the unquiet soul described by St. Augustine in The Confessions: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless, until they find their rest in Thee.” Throughout his life, sometimes at the prodding of others—more often, though, of his own accord—Bonhoeffer would agitate against the Lutheran habit of reducing the self to an empty vessel into which God merely poured his grace. To be sure, the spectacular anguish Luther, as a new monk, had felt at his own insufficiency—the crushing weight of fear before his encounter with the God of infinite mercy—seemed to Bonhoeffer unsustainable in the languor of a semitropical paradise; he was, in any case, nowhere near such an extreme. So it was, then, that in several of the seventeen sermons preached during his year in Barcelona, his efforts to focus and inspire would follow not the Reformer of Wittenberg but the fourth-century Bishop Augustine of Hippo, the impulse not one of guilt or shame but rather sparked by the intimations of mystery everywhere abounding.
“ ‘Restless’: this is the word that concerns us,” Bonhoeffer said. “Restlessness is the characteristic distinguishing human beings from animals. Restlessness is the power that creates history and culture. Restlessness is the root of every spirit that uplifts itself toward morality; restlessness is—let us go ahead and say it—the most profound meaning and the lifeblood of all religion. Restlessness—not in any transitory human sense, in which all we find is nervousness and impatience—no, restlessness in the direction of the eternal … pointing toward the infinite.”35 Restlessness is the very condition induced by what he called “the great disturbance” and “the great disruption” occasioned by awareness of God, the source of freedom and movement. Guilt immobilizes and fear hollows out, but restlessness and desire open the self to God.36
Compared with the formal rigors of the doctoral dissertation, the Barcelona sermons are both literary and uninhibited. Bonhoeffer found writing them a great liberation, for the exercise drew on his musical gifts and artistic intuitions. Indeed these lyrical and expressive essays are among his most beautiful writings. A mystical current guides the pen.
In one delivered in April 1928, with the city glistening as it does in springtime, Bonhoeffer spoke of an “anxious … questioning for divine things,” “a great loneliness [that] has come upon our age,” and “an enormous distress of isolation and homelessness.” He alluded to a “yearning for the time when once again God might abide among human beings.… A thirst for contact with divine things has come upon people, a burning thirst demanding to be quenched.” The most important thing is “to keep our eyes open to see where we find God.”37
At Pentecost, a sermon of incandescent beauty summoned “torches of divine fire, divine clarity, divine light in the midst of a world that has sunk into night, torches pointing toward the light, torches with which others can light their own torches, torches ignited by the magnificence of the divine glory—this is what Jesus wants to make out of us. To purify and enlighten and warm.” He prayed for the day when “the divine fire alone illumines the world.”
On a subsequent Sunday, in the quiet of summer, when many parishioners were away, he spoke of the vision of God—the beatific vision—and he remarked the intimacy between a righteous life and the radiance of the Lord. Faith means this: “to behold our home after wandering our whole life long, to throw ourselves on God’s bosom and weep and rejoice the way a child does in its mother’s arms.” Faith “drinks God’s light,” craves “his clarity like living water.” To behold the majesty of God is “to become a piece of eternity.… It means rejoicing along with the chorus of the redeemed in white robes.… Oh, what a great wealth, both of wisdom and of the knowledge of God—[for] from God and to Him and Through Him are all things.”38 In faith, “our gaze opens to the fullness of divine life in the world.”39
On another such sparsely attended Sunday, in late August, Bonhoeffer invoked the mysterious word he used to whisper in his twin sister’s ear at bedtime, a word that now soared through his preaching like a bird against the Catalan azure. “God has touched [our souls] from eternity—this is the love within us and the longing and the sacred restlessness and the responsibility and joy and pain. It is the divine breath breathed into transitory being.”40 Nothing else could subdue earthly time except “Eternity,” and its “forceful luminous current.”41
“If we think about the boundaries of the world, of time,” the days shortening into fall, “something miraculous occurs.… The limits of the world, the end of the world,” where “time loses its power to eternity; the world’s ultimate reality, death, itself becomes something penultimate.… The transitory is subsumed within the perspective of eternity.” Beyond the ephemeral and the dark stands “a sign from eternity, solemn and mighty, bathed in the radiance of the divine sun of grace and light—the cross. And there [God] hangs, his arms outstretched as if to embrace the entire world in love.”42
Bonhoeffer’s presence in the pulpit, like in his work among the faithful, was a relief to the desperately overburdened Olbricht. Even so, the latter did not entirely appreciate his assistant’s grand style or the wunderkind’s effulgence. As church attendance grew steadily, and the youth group flourished, Bonhoeffer happily accepted credit—and Olbricht became increasingly jealous. He took Bonhoeffer’s aloofness as disrespect (which it may have been), and his grand style as arrogance (which in part it surely was). But the rector was in a bind. He could no longer do without the extra pair of hands, and so his reports back to Berlin could not have been sunnier.
Bonhoeffer was not unaware of the effect he was having. As he wrote his mother, Olbricht, glad at first, became jealous only “after my services were much better attended than his.” It was then, too, that Olbricht stopped announcing “ahead of time who would be preaching,” fearing Sunday attendance would vary depending on the homilist. I
n any event, strong attendance at Bonhoeffer’s lectures on other days also irked Olbricht—though perhaps not as much as would the assistant’s success with the nativity play: Bonhoeffer not only directed the pageant but took a starring role as Joseph. The rave reviews, Dietrich reported to Paula, precipitated “a clash” with Olbricht.43
Just as Bonhoeffer was unashamed of his privilege, he did not downplay his innate gifts. But nor did he exaggerate them. Later, allowing that the sin of pride had been a lifelong struggle, he would learn to restrain himself so as to put others at ease. But he would never disown the advantages of birth or pretend to have surpassed them. It was an aristocratic confidence, he would insist, that helped him see through propaganda and resist mediocrity. Be that as it may, in Barcelona, outside the forbearance of the family circle (or its power to take him down a peg), the prodigious gifts of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer’s sixth child often left others all too aware of their more modest endowments.
POSTCARD FROM DIETRICH BONHOEFFER FROM BARCELONA, TO RÜDIGER SCHLEICHER
“Greetings from the matador,” he wrote on a postcard home, with his face superimposed on that of a triumphant bullfighter, hovering above the dying beast.44 It was typical of the unchecked braggadocio of his reports to Grunewald. So, too, was a distinct lack of charity toward Olbricht, as evident in letters not made public until the past decade.45 Admittedly, they were never intended for eyes outside the family, but they are notably harsh and unforgiving.
He allowed as how his beleaguered senior colleague had “apparently hitherto done nothing by way of addressing the youth of the parish,” to whom he related but awkwardly. He also found Olbricht intemperate, “quick to rant”—“never toward me,” but “certainly toward women and children.” Olbricht reportedly would scold a confirmand who had dared ask a question instead of quietly writing out his weekly assignment. Olbricht was unfriendly to non-Germans who visited the parish, but his “excitement was almost childish when he received birthday presents.” His whole manner offended Bonhoeffer. So did his cast of mind. Olbricht was constantly swallowing phrases, “as if he were a bit embarrassed.”46 A fully formed sentence never passed from his lips. He rarely read, unless it was the newspaper or some nationalist tract, and he “studied even less.” Perhaps by no coincidence, “his sermons are uninspired and scandalously boring!” One might have forgiven his performance in the pulpit, but “[h]is pastoral care is nonexistent, and his instruction hopelessly uncomprehending.”47 Bonhoeffer believed Olbricht had missed his true calling: “He would have been better suited as a forest ranger or an infantryman,” Dietrich told his mother. Oh, and his parsonage lacked tasteful furnishings.
Had his situation been permanent, Bonhoeffer said, he would have raised these matters with Olbricht. But circumstances inspired his magnanimous silence, for the good of both men, it would seem. As it happened, “[We] never once discussed a theological question, let alone a religious one; we basically remained strangers, although we did like each other. He granted me all the freedom I wanted, and for that I was grateful to him.”48
Klaus Bonhoeffer arrived in Barcelona on Easter Sunday, April 8, 1928, for a two-month visit. As it was a fine spring day, his younger brother was especially surprised that Klaus came along to the morning service. Olbricht was away on one of his occasional ministries to the “diaspora,” as he liked to call German Lutherans living throughout Spain. This afforded Bonhoeffer the chance to shine on the holiest day of the year.49 Before a full house, including his bleary-eyed brother, Dietrich, sporting new robes for the occasion, held forth on a theme he always favored, “God’s intervention from eternity.”50
But he took a slightly different approach that Sunday. Easter is traditionally a day most churches welcome newcomers and members who rarely attend; the Lutheran church of Barcelona was no exception. And so for this special occasion, rather than read a prepared sermon, Bonhoeffer chose to preach extemporaneously from notes, in a flight of kataphatic optimism, on a passage from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church (I Corinthians 15:17): “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”
A dangerous Easter text. For if we look at it more closely … it could possibly rob us of all our Easter joy … Christian festival … threatening … allow this assault to affect us, then joy of Easter.—supports [are] pulled away, meaninglessness … illusory … Our life depends on Easter. We?…Text. “Resurrection”?—Easter question.—Spring enables to sense primal struggle between darkness and light … spring emerges from winter … all that is dark must become light … law of nature . . darkness and nothing … Humanity. Prometheus. Good Friday … God who became human crucified; God’s Holy One dies … Transcendent event. Not immortality … not divine seed … If God’s history ends on Good Friday…“Great Pan is dead.” Easter message: God lives, Jesus raised—fullness of God—God’s victory … a prologue of ultimate, ineffable things … the entire glory and power of God … Questions?51
Bonhoeffer seemed pleased with the results. Some of those present would later recall the sermon as expressive, poetic, and graceful. This was especially so in comparison with his usual efforts, which, most agreed, tended to be a little wordy, even though the young Berliner’s elocution always made his countrymen proud.
That afternoon Dietrich and Klaus joined Hermann Thumm, a German teacher, at the Plaza de Toros for the Easter corrida, the most anticipated bullfight of the season. Dietrich was pleased to report to his parents that he had not been troubled by the blood sport, at least not “the way many people think they owe it to their central European civilization to be shocked.” On the contrary, he found the “great spectacle” a fitting complement to Easter among the German Lutherans. “Glory and power” in the morning, “blood and cruelty” in the afternoon, he joked. Thirty thousand spectators whipped into an ecstatic frenzy: Spanish Catholicism made enviable room for the instincts to run wild. Far from shocked, Dietrich was enthralled.52
Two months later, on the Monday after Pentecost, Dietrich and Klaus left Barcelona for a three-week journey, the long-anticipated tour of southern Spain. It was to be at their parents’ expense, and long before, Dietrich had composed a two-page list of necessities for their consideration.53 In addition to cash, the list included socks and ties, a new tennis racket, and ticket upgrades. “If we were to travel third class the whole way,” Dietrich explained, “we would be spending a great deal of time on the frightfully slow railways, would often have to travel for considerable hours at night, etc.” As usual, his expenditures were approved.
If not quite the Grand Tour, their travels nonetheless followed a similar arc, from Madrid and Toledo to Seville, Ronda, and the Alboran Sea. On most days, the sun burned bright in a clear sky as the train cut through groves of olive trees or cork oaks, fields of agave or fig cactus. “The fragrance of oranges was intoxicating,” Klaus wrote in his journal. “Roses, carnations, gillyflowers, and wisteria created an incredible lushness on the squares and balconies” of the villages. The brothers traveled by car along the coast, taking breaks to swim, picnic, and sunbathe. Otherwise, they covered themselves “like a pious Arab woman—with a single eye exposed—to cope with the scorching sun.”54
From the port city of Algeciras, they hugged the shore all the way to Tarifa, where they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar by ferry for an overnight stay in Tétouan. This was to be their second visit to North Africa. But whereas on their Libyan excursion they had people to look up, in Morocco they knew no one at all. Still, they marveled at the ancient Arab city, bordered by orange groves, pomegranate orchards, and rows of almond and cypress trees. “Chills run up your spine when you hear [them] along the streets loudly reciting suras from the Qur’an,” Klaus wrote. Dietrich photographed the marble fountains and ornate houses, and the camels ferrying cargo along brick boulevards lined with citrus trees.
Near the harbor, they found a room in a small hotel, a sparsely furnished space resembling the interior of a mosque, “with three Arabic
archways, Saracen tiles and no light.” The windows had been barred and faced an interior courtyard anyway. They didn’t get much sleep during their one night in town, what with other guests rocking in their iron-framed beds before settling down to snore, to say nothing of the disturbance caused “by roosters crowing and by the penetrating songs of pious Muslims.”55 The next morning, the sight of the caliph riding under a baldachin, wearing a “strangely cordial, gentle, almost feminine smile” and drawn by magnificent, pompously harnessed horses, made a brief, favorable impression on the young men.56 In all they spent less than twenty-four hours in Morocco before beginning the journey back to Barcelona.
Following the three-week sojourn, Dietrich and Klaus were closer than they had ever been, even as their journals revealed strikingly different sensibilities. Klaus, who would return home in June, spoke fondly of the beautiful girls of Seville, their long black hair adorned with fire-red carnations, as well as of the Picasso he had purchased in a Madrid flea market: a mournful study of “degenerate women drinking absinthe,” which a Berlin appraiser would later determine to be fake.57 (The painting nonetheless remained in their parents’ home until the winter of 1945, when it was destroyed during an air raid that took out several rooms of the house.) For his part, Dietrich returned under the spell of the “reddish radiant” sunset from the towers of the Alhambra, the nightingales’ song, the fragrance of orange trees along the Andalusian plain, and his purchase of a “southern Spanish portrait of Christ” (which cost only seven marks), which was still hanging over his desk in Berlin the evening he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943.58
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