Don Quixote was for Bonhoeffer an important picture of the human condition. In his Ethics, he wrote that in our efforts to do good we, like that “knight of the doleful countenance,” are tilting at windmills. We think we are doing good and fighting evil, but in fact, we are living in an illusion. There was no moral condemnation in what Bonhoeffer said, however. “Only the mean-spirited can read the fate of Don Quixote,” he wrote, “without sharing in and being moved by it.” This is our universal predicament as human beings. The solution is to do the will of God, to do it radically and
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