Bonhoeffer thus sets out to describe what Floyd calls “a theology of consciousness” which reflects the Reformation understanding of the cor curvum in se as the beginning of human sinfulness—the principal cause of our turning away from God and each other. What is needed to make room for revelation is a theological epistemology, or philosophy of knowledge, that places the object of knowledge, whether divine or human, safely beyond the controlling reach of the knower—a way of thinking which, as Floyd describes it, gives life to transcendental philosophy’s own necessarily flawed endeavors “to think critically rather than systematically, its attempts to articulate a genuine . . . dialectics of Otherness.”
In Act and Being, Bonhoeffer seeks to expound a “genuine transcendentalism” and its correlate, a “genuine ontology,” with reference to Kant’s distinction between the transcendental unity of apperception (our self-conscious ordering of the various elements of experience) and the Ding-an-sich, the thing-in-itself (which lies always outside or beyond our experience). Floyd believes a genuine transcendental philosophy and a genuine ontology to be possible for Bonhoeffer only when a relationship is maintained between the act of thinking “and something transcendent to thought—ontologically distinct from the thinking subject—neither of which ‘swallows up’ the other.” This requires a dialectical form of thinking that is able to sustain “both thought—understood to be always ‘in reference to’ but not totally able to grasp reality in its entirety—and the ontological resistance of authentic otherness itself—both act and being.” It must be able to accommodate both the transcendental act of faith and the ontological being of revelation. The only alternative is systematic and totalizing thinking (“idealism,” for Bonhoeffer) which is of no value to theology because it apprehends “neither the true act of thinking-within-limits (the goal of genuine transcendental philosophy) nor the nature of the being of what-is-thought, yet remains beyond-thought—something transcendent (the goal of genuine ontology).”
Bonhoeffer argues that a “genuine ontology” requires an object of knowledge—a genuine Other—that “challenges and limits” the I; that resists being drawn into the I as a contingent object of cognition. Indeed, “the object of knowledge must so stand over against the I that it is free from becoming known.” It does not depend on the I, whose being and existing it precedes in every respect. Knowledge is suspended in “a being-already-known.”
This, as Floyd says, is why the concept of revelation is so important for Bonhoeffer—“it names that situation of openness, where reality is always and only to be understood ‘in reference to’ the thinking subject, whose process of thought is ontologically ‘suspended’ in being that it has not created.” It demands the recognition that human existence is always already a “being in.” The reality of revelation is the reality of our being already in Christ, where life plays out in manifold “acts of existence.” We have our being in Christ, in whom “alone is unity and wholeness of life,” and can speak, in this context, of a genuine ontology and a genuine transcendentalism only if we define “being in” in such a way that human knowing, “encountering itself in that which is,” is able simply to accept the being of existing things without seeking to press them into its service.
The Terrace
De la vaporisation et la centralisation du Moi. Tout est là.
—Baudelaire
We ate with steeps of sky about our shoulders,
High up a mountainside,
On a terrace like a raft roving
Seas of view,
The tablecloth was green, and blurred away
Toward verdure far and wide,
And all the country came to be
Our table too.
We drank in tilted glasses of rosé,
From tinted peaks of snow,
Tasting the frothy mist, and freshest
Fathoms of air.
Women were washing linens in a stream
Deep down below,
The sound of water over their knuckles,
A sauce rare.
Imminent towns whose weatherbeaten walls
Looked like the finest cheese
Bowled us enormous melons from their
Tolling towers.
Mixt into all the day we heard the spice
Of many tangy bees
Eddying through the miles-deep
Salad of flowers.
When we were done, we had our hunger still;
We dipped our cups in light;
We caught the fine-spun shade of clouds
In spoon and plate;
Drunk with imagined breathing, we inhaled
The dancing smell of height;
We fished for the bark of a dog, the squeak
Of a pasture gate.
But for all our benedictions and our gay
Readily said graces,
The evening stole our provender and
Left us there,
And darkness filled the specious space, and fell
Betwixt our silent faces,
Pressing against our eyes its absent
Fathomless stare.
Out in the dark we felt the real mountains
Hulking in proper might,
And we felt the edge of the black wind’s
Regardless cleave,
And we knew we had eaten not the manna of heaven
But our own reflected light,
And we were the only part of the night that we
Couldn’t believe.
— Richard Wilbur
(That line from Baudelaire: “On the vaporization and centralization of the Self. Everything is there.”)
The turn and finish in this poem just knocks the wind out of me.
It’s worth quoting something Bonhoeffer added in one of the passages Hooton references above: “Knowledge cannot have recourse to it as something available at one’s convenience, but as that in the presence of which it must suspend itself ever anew in knowledge.”