Bonhoeffer watching

I discovered later and I'm still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw oursleves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings but those of God in the world - watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian....[Letters and Papers, p. 370]

Quietism of a kind? Well yes, except quietism without the elitism of the Catholic strain of it - the expectation of the 'higher' spiritual life (we've had plenty of that nonsense in Protestantism too).

Can you want to be a saint?

In a letter to Eberhard Bethge written in July 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer remembered a conversation with ‘a young French pastor’ (identified by the editor as Jean Lasserre):

He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it’s quite likely that he did become one). At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realize the depth of the contrast.[1]

Bonhoeffer’s intuition is that intending ‘to become a saint’ is not the way to become one.[2] Even though desiring the honour of heaven appears to be a way to surmount the lust for earthly glory, is it not merely a displacement of the same desire? Eliot’s Thomas is not swayed by the promise of earthly honour, appealing though it is. Far dearer to his heart is the promise of heavenly glory. This temptation introduces a complex problem for Eliot and indeed for the whole theological tradition: what place does the heavenly prize have in the motivation of the holy to serve God? Does the offer of a heavenly reward or a martyr’s crown corrupt the pursuit of true sanctity? The question is most troublesome: the very idea of martyrdom threatens to collapse under its weight. Is the heavenly city merely the earthly city on a larger scale? Is the desire for a higher place in heaven, which Origen among others certainly believed would be bestowed on the martyrs,[3] any better than a desire for earthly glory? Thomas discovers himself in the untenable situation of wanting that for which the desiring makes the having apparently impossible.[4]

Is some form of what has been known as ‘Quietism’ the only way forward? The controversy over Quietism in late seventeenth century France brought just this dilemma to the fore. The impulse of the movement was certainly not new: Meister Eckhardt had been promulgating its main features over four hundred years earlier. Essentially, Quietism taught that any action motivated by self-interest to any degree was offensive to God. To achieve the purity of love characteristic of a saint, one must utterly divest oneself of self-interest – even to the extent of renouncing interest in salvation itself (and thus, like Bonhoeffer, renounce the desire to become a saint). As Madame Guyon wrote: ‘[W]e must suppress all desire…even the desire for the joys of Paradise’.[5] Her ecclesiastical advocate, François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, defended this ideal in more academic terms in his Explication des Maximes des Saints, arguing that , for a few especially gifted saints, there was the possibility to achieve a pure or disinterested love of God. Pressed by his adversary and fellow-bishop Jean-Bénigne Bossuet, Fénelon conceded that the saint might continue to hope, but argued that this was simply because this is commanded by God. Rightly, Bossuet could see that his opponent was stretching: this was no hope worthy of the name, just as Fénelon’s ‘pure love’ was mechanistic and inert, and barely recognisable as a species of love at all.[6] Quite apart from the problem of the overwhelming Scriptural testimony to heavenly rewards which it is apparently right to desire, the Quietist alternative foundered on the rocks of its own logic, not least because, in making a nothing of the self, it made the value of self-sacrifice questionable.


[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (London: SCM, 1999), p. 369.
[2] His bracketed comment is perhaps to be read as not wishing to appear malignant about Lasserre.
[3] Origen, Exhortation to Martyrdom L
[4] In his study on martyrdom, von Balthasar makes a comment that in one sense encapsulates Thomas’ predicament: ‘Man is capable of misusing and abusing everything for his own selfish ends, even the invitation to sacrifice his life for the sake of that love from which faith springs’ Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, p. 36.. Could even the pursuit of martyrdom turn out to be perverse? Certainly, this is what the modern world (Salman Rushdie being our example) has suspected.
[5] Quoted in Kenneth E. Kirk, The Vision of God : The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum, Bampton Lectures (London ; New York: Longmans, Green & Co, 1931), p. 454.
[6] Oliver O'Donovan, The Ways of Judgment : The Bampton Lectures, 2003, The Bampton Lectures (Grand Rapids, Mich. ; Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2005), p. 300-1.

Shh! It's the Quietists!

Is pure self-lessness really possible? Is anyone really 'pure in heart'? In commanding pure unselfishness, doesn't Christianity become the rankest of paradoxes, the absurdest of faiths?

Well, the Quietists of 17th Century Europe weren't happy to admit that complete disinterestedness was impossible. Rather, they claimed that disinterest was the essential condition which alone gives any action eternal worth. If heaven and hell are put forward as motives of right conduct, then selfishness has gained a toehold. Meister Eckhardt once said: 'He alone hath true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing'. Madame Guyon in the 17th Century wrote: 'We must suppress all desire, even the desire for the joys of Paradise'. So, the Quietists even spoke of wishing for one's own damnation, because this would be the truly self-less path. This is to make, of course, Judas the hero of the gospels...after all, it was he who really sacrificed everything and received nothing in return, not even ultimately his thirty pieces of silver...

The debate, in the end, was between two bishops, Fenelon and Bosseut. Fenelon explained that the Quietists set out to acquire disinterestedness by the methods of formalism, 'training themselves not to think of themselves, trying even to desire the pains of hell that they might stifle all longings for the joys of heaven.' (KE Kirk). Fenelon didn't want to go this far - a self-conscious ACT of self-abnegation is surely not very far from extreme egoism. For Fenelon, disinterestedness can only happen as a gift of God: the human subject's responsibility is only to contemplate as best he can, and leave the rest to God. Worship alone will disinfect our service from egotism, but not worship as self-examination. As Kirk says 'only by discharging the immediate duties honestly and without presumption shall we become disinterested, not by close scrutiny of our spiritual attainments'.