Living Wittily

Does the Tragic Lives Industry Trivialise Tragedy?

I like to think I'm reasonably open minded, even to the point where I'm prepared to listen to people who say I'm not! As one feature of my alleged open-mindedness I have a fairly omnivorous approach to reading, so much so that I swing between discipline and dilettantism, between focusing on deep study or acting like a tourist with a camera more interested in capturing than enjoying.

Still. I do find it hard to have much patience with that genre of literature now established in the book markets, "Tragic Lives". It isn't  only that I am impatient with those who tell their story for self-therapy, or skeptical with writers who tell all to encourage others, or cyncial about those whose drastic revelations aim to inspire those who think they've had it rough but just wait till you read this. I've thought all these thoughts, and by and large avoid the genre. But there's a more fundamental point I want to suggest as the reason for my ambivalence to the tragic lives industry.

I think there is an enormous difference between stories told as an exhibition of human suffering, abuse, tragic loss, many of which are expoitative, of the writer or of the reader, and another kind of writing which explores the tragic through the lens of human sorrow. This second kind of literature can be illustrated by looking at several monumental achievements in writing, which set a standard of integrity and human authenticity so high that conveyor belts of imitiations are simply multiplied mediocrity. And I avoid entirely that other genre of the celebrity tells all about their briefly flickering moments of fame.

 
The Diary of Ann Frank, Etty; A Diary, and the two vilumes of Elie Wiesel's Memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea, and But the Sea is Never Full; these are another genre entirely, often referred to as Holocaust Literature. Such writing would never be described by the authors as 'tragic lives'. The shimmering characteristics of books like these include human hopefulness, moral courage, literary integrity and a declaration of self-worth and human value that has transmuted self-pity into a passionate commitment to the other.

Etty Hillesum's account of 1941-43 is as tragic as they come, though not as she sees it. Here is her take on that inner ache we call sorrow - these are words of humane wisdom and emotional precision:

"Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears his grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate. But if you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow, and instead reserve mostof the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge - for which new sorrows will be born for others - then sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply. And if you have given sorrow the space its gentle origins demand, then you may truly say: life is beautiful and so rich. So beautiful and so rich that it makes you want to believe in God."

  

Luther's anti-Jewish theology, German Theologians and the Holocaust.

Looking for background reading for something I'm writing on Bonhoeffer I discovered the recently published Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther's Theology, edited by R. Kolb, I. Dingel and L. Batka, (OUP: 2013). Of the 47 essays a number of them are to do with the reception of Luther's theology, and its legacy in different historical periods. Essay 41 is on the reception in the Nineteenth Century; chapter 42 then jumps forward to Marxist reception. There is no chapter on the reception and use of Luther in Germany in the first half of the 20th Century. There is a chapter on 'Luther's Views of Jews and Turks' (chapter 30).

I did a Google search for Holocaust and there is one occurrence of the term in the entire 688 pages - in chapter 30 on the Jews and Turks. I did a further search for Susannah Heschel whose book on The Aryan Jesus. Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany is a watershed in scholarship and research into the role of many Christian theologians and of significant sections of the German Lutheran church in the construction of an anti-Semitic mindset. Her name does not occur once.

It would be very unfair to make a critical judgement of this volume solely on such slight evidence as a Google search. But it's the omission of a chapter that spooked me, that jump of a hundred years missing out mid 20th century central Europe. I came away perturbed at such a lacuna in an authoritative academic Oxford Handbook on the subject of Luther's theology and its reception. There is only an introductory glance in chapter 30 referring to the Holocaust, and that is the one reference found by Google. The catastrophic impact of Luther's anti-Semitic writings and the direct role of a significant number of 1930s German theologians, academic and clerical, in giving such lethal prejudice the oxygen of scholarly credibility, is surely significant enough to have required an essay in its own right?

The same trawl on Amazon led to Before Auschwitz. What Christian Theologians Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism, by Peter Hinlicky. Susannah Heschel's name comes up with 21 hits. The relation between a number of German Christian theologians and the fate of the Jewish people in Europe from 1930 to 1945 is fully explored in this book.

Back to Bonhoeffer. I've been exploring the context of his writing in the 1930's and the increasingly dangerous call to follow Jesus through the minefield of National Socialist anti Semitic policies, and the crossfire between Church politics oscillating between collaboration and compromise, with significant numbers of Christians driven by conscience to stand firm in confession of Christ over and against sworn allegiance to Fuhrer or Fatherland. Bonhoeffer of course was a Lutheran, as was Martin Niemoller and Helmut Thielicke, so while Luther's anti Jewish writings were exploited in the interests of National Socialists by a number of leading academic theologians, there was no inevitable or essential connection between Luther's anti-Jewish writing, Lutheran theology and ideological anti-Semitism as political goal seeking religious justification. Many, many German Christians were not so easily taken in by such religious opportunism collaborating with political cynicism, with vast lethal consequence.

It is this complexity of motive and manoeuvre, the difficulties in establishing blame or innocence, culpability or naivete, and even culpable naivete, that gives rise to the moral perplexity and theological embarrassment evoked for subsequent generations of Christians, by Luther's anti-Jewish writings, and their reception culminating in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. These issues remain far too important, and that period of political and ecclesial history an episode of too recent tragic memory, for it to be subsumed into minor references and a page or two here and there, in what is a recognised academic reference work published by a highly respected University publisher, on the reception, legacy and content of the theology of Martin Luther.

I was so perturbed by this that I wrote a personal email to Professor Robert Kolb, one of the editors, and had a courteous and thoughtful reply, seeking to address my concerns from the standpoint of the editorial team and its decisions. I can see the Editors' point, that the issues of hard editorial choices meant that other important perspectives were also omitted; and that German reception of Luther in 1930's Germany competes with other important areas of interest for inclusion in full essay treatment; but editorial choices are inevitably powerful interpretive tools in the survey of a subject field, defining the relative importance of what is in and what is not.

I am glad too that my concerns are at least alluded to in several other essays in the collection, with pointers to further resources. But I remain perturbed - because the Holocaust is a permanent defining watershed in Jewish-Christian relations, requiring a disposition of Christian openness, repentance, self-critique and continuing reflection. Added to this, the active collaboration of prominent German Christian theologians using Luther's writings, baleful tendentious biblical eisegesis, and a theological overlay of public respectability, to give comfort, distorted credence and ideological validity to the anti-Semitic policies of National Socialism, was of critical importance in creating a zeitgeist in which the Holocaust was thinkable and made possible of implementation.

Such vast tragic evil makes an essay on Luther's theology, early 20th Century Germany, and the road to the Holocaust and beyond, self-choosing in the list of essential contents in a volume on Luther's Theology. The absence of such a treatment remains for me, a matter of deep regret, in an otherwise richly resourced compendium of current scholarly perspective on Luther's theology.

The Chief Rabbi, and Sitting at the Feet of Gamaliel.

"The story I am about to tell concerns the human mind's ability to do two quite different things. One is to break things down into their constituent parts and see how they mesh and interact. The other is to join things together so that they tell a story, and to join people together so that they form relationships. The best example of the first is science; of the second, religion. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean."

The voice of Jonathan Sacks is one of wisdom, reasoned thoughtfulness, passionate conviction tempered by humility, and generous judgement which is neither naive nor cynical. Reading him in books like this is to encounter a man of humane learning whose worldview accommodates diversity of viewpoints, and yet whose intellectual hospitality retains integrity of mind and truthfulness of heart. In my lifetime I judge the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, to be one of very few outstanding religious leaders in Britain. For me, and I may exaggerate ever so slightly, it is like sitting at the feet of Gamaliel, whose own wisdom was to be patient and see whether this, or that, is of God. If it is, it will propser; if not, then why get worked up about is. When someone writes books with titles such as, The Persistence of Faith, The Politics of Hope, The Dignity of Difference, then we hear an essential voice faithfully teaching us things we need to learn, or remember, which have to do with blessing and that lovely word, shalom. As I read this book, I'll likely feel the urge to say more about it here!

Edith Stein, Abraham Heschel, Philosophy, and God.

While reading Abraham Heschel and doing some research on the reception of his thought today I came across a forthcoming book that compares Heschel's doctrine of divine pathos with Edith Stein's philosophy of empathy. Edith Stein was brought up in a Jewish family and converted to Catholicism after a period of overt intellectual atheism. One of her theological and philosophical gifts was a capacity to refuse the temptation of intellectual polarity. The important truths of existence are seldom either or, but more often both and. She was a spiritual ecumenist, and never lost her gratitude for, her respect for, or her supportive interest in, the Jewish people and the Faith out of which Christianity was born. She was a student of Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and so gifted as a philosopher she was Husserl's assistant for a couple of years. The relationship between philosophy and theology was one where she was called to be a bridge between two intellectual continents, a conduit through whom philosophical theology and theological metaphysics passed creating in her a spirituality and devotional depth that remains a rich reservoir of faith.

Following her conversion she taught for a while, before becoming a Carmelite nun in 1932, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She died in Auschwitz in 1942, ironically as a Catholic nun comforting distressed Jewish children. In 1998 she was canonised by her Church.

I'm currently reading a selection of her writings, and am left wondering why it has taken so long to get to someone whose grasp of the eternally significant, and of the connection between contemplatiuve prayer and redemptive activity in the world was well ahead of its time. At the time of her canonisation Pope John Paul II described her:

"Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross says to us all: Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love that lacks truth. One without the other becomes a destructive lie....May her witness constantly strengthen  the bridge of mutual understanding between Jews and Christians."

 Part of the excitement of the rich and varied Christian tradition, is that it is really a river system of tributaries flowing together into the mighty river which reaches the ocean in a rich confluence from diverse sources, which sprung in hills and mountains, merging and separating then coming together in a flowing triumph of life-giving water. That's why to discover new thinkers and new thought, is no threat to the integrity of my tributary, but is a contribution to the onward flow of wisdom, understanding, prayer and worship of the God who is beyond our circumscribing habits of thought, and whose wine of glory and gladness can't be contained in the old wineskins of our intellectual and spiritual comfort zones.