Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer Meet on The Way to Heaven.
Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer met at their common level on the way to heaven. Part of their interesting dialogue follows.
N. May I call you Dietrich?
B. Of course. And you are Friedrich! This is wonderful.
N. Illuminating to say the least. There is this. There is us. And there is you. Where to begin?
B. So much to say. I think we must dispense with all but what is most important to each of us. I want to talk about how we both got here.
N. I want to share a persistent thought and ask you a question. Please begin.
B. I was hanged for my part in the effort to assassinate Hitler. It was excruciating. It seemed to take an eternity. All of my good will was momentarily absent. When I found myself here, I did not realize that we are known so entirely and that we can exist as we do now, with full awareness beyond anything we could have imagined.
N. I date my death the day I went mad in Turin. I count the intervening years before my final breath as a time out. I share your sense of the complete logic of this. Everyone gets exactly what they did and were - their consciousness insofar as it developed. This is a remarkable instance of eternal return and for that matter of amor fati. We must face our lives forever! Do you have any regrets about yours?
B. Many. I regret as you perhaps do as well that I did not have a fully satisfactory relationship. I regret in retrospect that I did what I did. And I feel cheated of the time it would have taken to fully state what I now understand. It is all the more painful because of the apparent legacy that has formed around me.
N. Sorry, but I am amused. I think killing Hitler was a wonderful way to go. Vastly better than having a sister make you into an apologist for him. We posthumous authors are not as fortunate as I once dreamed.
B. You at least have an enduring influence beyond all that. Me? I am going the way of the churches, off into the sunset. What is your persistent thought?.
N. That I actually completed my work save for one thing. I erroneously rejected Jesus. I blame the influence of my admirable father who was like you a minister of the gospel not of Jesus, but of a messiah created to exempt the world from the responsibility Jesus commended to all. I failed to understand him. I failed to understand proper values. I dug my own grave, as it were. It seems clear to me we both have regrets.
B. If I had it to do over, I would have chosen nonviolence. I would be killed on the way to confronting Hitler or avoid the encounter entirely, living to fight another day. The latter would have made the most sense. The legacy I left was a recipe for being permanently misunderstood. I was not a martyr. I suffered from the illness of two thousand years. Religious schizophrenia.
N. We must go now. We shall meet again. I never thought of this as our destiny, to be part of the continuity in this way. The freedom of the cosmos is preserved. Remarkable.
B. Indeed it is. And the world survives without us.
N. May I call you Dietrich?
B. Of course. And you are Friedrich! This is wonderful.
N. Illuminating to say the least. There is this. There is us. And there is you. Where to begin?
B. So much to say. I think we must dispense with all but what is most important to each of us. I want to talk about how we both got here.
N. I want to share a persistent thought and ask you a question. Please begin.
B. I was hanged for my part in the effort to assassinate Hitler. It was excruciating. It seemed to take an eternity. All of my good will was momentarily absent. When I found myself here, I did not realize that we are known so entirely and that we can exist as we do now, with full awareness beyond anything we could have imagined.
N. I date my death the day I went mad in Turin. I count the intervening years before my final breath as a time out. I share your sense of the complete logic of this. Everyone gets exactly what they did and were - their consciousness insofar as it developed. This is a remarkable instance of eternal return and for that matter of amor fati. We must face our lives forever! Do you have any regrets about yours?
B. Many. I regret as you perhaps do as well that I did not have a fully satisfactory relationship. I regret in retrospect that I did what I did. And I feel cheated of the time it would have taken to fully state what I now understand. It is all the more painful because of the apparent legacy that has formed around me.
N. Sorry, but I am amused. I think killing Hitler was a wonderful way to go. Vastly better than having a sister make you into an apologist for him. We posthumous authors are not as fortunate as I once dreamed.
B. You at least have an enduring influence beyond all that. Me? I am going the way of the churches, off into the sunset. What is your persistent thought?.
N. That I actually completed my work save for one thing. I erroneously rejected Jesus. I blame the influence of my admirable father who was like you a minister of the gospel not of Jesus, but of a messiah created to exempt the world from the responsibility Jesus commended to all. I failed to understand him. I failed to understand proper values. I dug my own grave, as it were. It seems clear to me we both have regrets.
B. If I had it to do over, I would have chosen nonviolence. I would be killed on the way to confronting Hitler or avoid the encounter entirely, living to fight another day. The latter would have made the most sense. The legacy I left was a recipe for being permanently misunderstood. I was not a martyr. I suffered from the illness of two thousand years. Religious schizophrenia.
N. We must go now. We shall meet again. I never thought of this as our destiny, to be part of the continuity in this way. The freedom of the cosmos is preserved. Remarkable.
B. Indeed it is. And the world survives without us.
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