Creation and Fall/The Center of the Earth

From YoKim

Gen. 2:8-17. The Center of the Earth 81 VV. 8-17 THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

And Yahweh God planted a garden in Eden towards the east and put in it the human being God had made. And Yahweh God made grow out of the earth all kinds of trees that we're delightful to see and good to eat and the tree of life in the center of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and from there divided into four main rivers. The first is named Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, and there one finds gold. And the gold of the land is precious; and one finds bdellium resin and shoham stone there. The second river is named Gihon; itflows around the whole land of the Moors [Mohrenland). The third river is named Hiddekel; it flows on this side of Assyria. The fourth river is the Phrates. And Yahweh God took the human being and put the human being in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And Yahweh God commanded the human being, saying: You shall eat from every kind of tree in the garden, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat; for on the day you eat from it you shall die.^[1]

How CAN ONE SPEAK of the first earth, earth in its youth, except in the language of fantasy [Marchen]? God prepares an exceedingly magnificent garden for the human being [der Mensch]^[2] created with God's own hands.^[3] What else would a person from the desert think of here but a land with magnificent rivers and trees full of fruit? Precious stones, rare odors, gorgeous colors surround the first human being. The fruitful land in the distant east, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, of which so many wonderful things were being told - perhaps that was the place, the garden of the first human being.

Who can speak of these things except in pictures? Pictures after all are not lies; rather they indicate things and enable the underlying meaning to shine through.^[4] To be sure, pictures do vary; the pictures of a child differ from those of an adult, and those of a person from the desert differ from those of a person from the city. One way or another, however, they remain true, to the extent that human speech and even speech about abstract ideas can remain true at all- that is, to the extent that God dwells in them.

In complete consistency with the framework of the picture, the story is told how the human being was put into this garden to live in it, and how in the center [Mitte]^[5] ofthe garden stood two trees: one the tree of life and the other the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The destiny of humankind is now to be decided in relation to these two trees)^[6]

We remain wholly in the world of pictures, in the world of the magical, with spells that are effected through forbidden contacts with sacred objects.^[7] We hear about trees of miraculous power, about enchanted animals, about fiery angel figures, the servants of a God who walks m this, God's enchanted garden. We hear about this God's mysterious deeds, about the creation of the woman from the man's rib - and in the midst of this world is the human being, the intelligent creature [der kluge], who knows the surrounding world, who freely. gives names to. it, and before whom the whole animal kingdom appears m order to receive their names. The human being is naked and not ashamed, speaks with, and has to do with, God as though they belonged to each another, talks with the beasts in the fields and lives sumptuously and with delight [herrlich und in Freuden ]^[8] in the enchanted garden - and then reaches out for the fruit of an enchanted tree and in that moment is displaced from paradise. This is a myth, a childlike, fanciful picture of the dim. and distant past [Vorzeit] - so says the world. This is God's word; this IS an event at the beginning of history, before history, beyond history, and yet in history; this is a decision that affects the world; we ourselves are the ones who are affected, are intended, are addressed, accused, condemned, expelled; God, yes God, is the one who blesses and curses; it is our primeval history [Urgeschichtej.^[9] truly our own, every individual person's beginning, destiny, guilt, and end - so says the church of Chnst. Why contend for the one assertion at the expense of the other? Why not see that all our speaking of God, of our beginning and end, and of our guilt never communicates these things themselves but always only pictures of them? Why not see that in both instances, with these ancient magical images as well as with our technical, abstract images, God must reach out to us, and that God must teach us if we are to become wise [klug]?

The exposition of what follows must therefore seek to translate the old picture language of the magical world into the new picture language of the technical world. This must always be done, however, on the basis of the presupposition that, whether in the one language or the other, we are the ones intended to be addressed. We must be open and prepared to be addressed by what was said at that time about human beings in that magical picture of the world. To be sure, we differ from the people who thought in terms of that worldview in that Christ has appeared, whereas they were waiting; but we are the same as they were in that - whether in hope or in fulfillment - we can live only through Christ as people who have been lost and, whether in hope or in fulfillment, have been graciously pardoned.

In the center of the garden stand two trees with particular names that connect them to human existence in a peculiar way: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To the latter is attached the prohibition against eating of its fruit and the threat of death. Life, knowledge, death - these three things are spoken of here as connected with one another, and it is important to understand this connection. Historical research seems to show that the stories of the tree of life and of the tree of knowledge originally came from different sources.^[10] But that is all very uncertain. Our concern is the text as it presents itself to the church of Christ today.^[11]

We begin with the tree of life. It follows from the context that humankind was not expresslytorbtdden to eat from this tree. Indeed this tree first gains its particular significance only after humankind has fallen prey to death by eating from the tree of knowledge. Before that, life is not something problematic or to be sought after or snatched at; instead it is just there, as a given life, indeed life before God.

For that reason the tree of life is in this passage mentioned with such little ceremony. It was at the center; that is all that is said about it. The life that comes from God is at the center; that is to say, God, who gives life, is at the center. At the center of the world that has been put at Adam's disposal and over which Adam has been given dominion is not Adam himself but the tree of divine life. Adam's life comes from the center which is not Adam but God; it revolves around this center constantly, without ever trying to take possession of this center of existence. It is characteristic of humankind that human life constantly revolves around its own center, but that it never takes possession of it. And this life that stems from the center, which God alone possesses, remains unassailed as long as humankind does not let itself be pushed off the track from another side. Adam is not, in temptation, to touch the tree of life, to seize hold of the divine tree at the center. There is no need at all to forbid [verboten] Adam - who would in no way understand the prohibition [Verbot] - to do this. Adam has life.

Adam has life, however, in a particular way.^[12] In the first place, Adam really possesses it and is not merely possessed by it. In the second place, Adam has life in the unity of unbroken obedience to the Creator - has life just because Adam lives from the center oflife, and is oriented toward the center of life, without placing Adam's own life at the center. The distinctive characteristic of Adam's life is utterly unbroken and unified obedience, that is, Adam's innocencee and ignorance of disobedience.

The life that God gave to humankind is not simply part of the makeup [eine Beschaffenheit], a qualitas^[13] of humankind; instead it is something given to humankind only in terms of its whole human existence. Human beings have life from God and before God. They receive it; they receive it, however, not as animals but as human beings. They possess it in their obedience, in their innocence, in their ignorance; that is, they possess it in their freedom. The life that human beings have happens in an obedience that issues from freedom. So while it cannot occur to Adam directly to lay hands on the tree oflife, because Adam already has life, the tree of life can nevertheless come indirectly under danger from elsewhere. It can be endangered by the freedom in the unbroken unity of obedience in which Adam has life. This means that it can be endan-gered by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In what way?

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, just like the tree of life, stands at the center of the garden. But as soon as this tree is pointed out, a special word of God is immediately attached - the prohibition against eating from it and the threat of death as soon as human beings transgress this commandment.

How is Adam to grasp what death is, what good and evil are, indeed even what a prohibition is,^[14] living as Adam does in unbroken obedience to the Creator? Can any of this mean anything else than empty words to Adam? Certainly Adam cannot know what death is, what good and evil are; but Adam understands that in these words God confronts Adam and points out Adam's limit [Grenze].^[15] It is we who ask: How can Adam, who does not know about good or evil, who is innocent and ignorant, understand the word of God that addresses Adam as a prohibition? The prohibition contained two complementary aspects. On the one hand it indicated that Adam was human, was free (free 'for' and 'from') - it is Adam, the human being, who is addressed concerning Adam's own human existence, and Adam understands this. On the other hand it indicates to this human being who is addressed as a free person their limit or boundedness, that is, the human being's creatureliness. The prohibition addresses Adam concerning Adam's freedom and creatureliness and binds Adam to this existence, the existence that belongs to Adam's own being. The prohibition means nothing other than this: Adam, you are who you are because of me, your Creator; so now be what you are. You are a free creature, so now be that. You are free, so be free; you are a creature, so be a creature. And this "- so be ... " is not a second thing besides the first but something always given already in and along with the first and guaranteed by the first. It is about being human - about the human existence that Adam receives from God at any given time - that Adam is addressed.^[16]

This singular interrelatedness, which is basically only the interrelatedness of freedom and creatureliness, is expressed here in the picture language of the Bible in that the tree of knowledge, the forbidden tree that denotes the human being's boundary, stands at the center. The human being's limit is at the center of human existence, not on the margin; the limit or constraint that people look for on the margin of humankind is the limit of the human condition, the limit of human technology, the limit of what is possible for humanity. The boundary that is at the center is the limit of human reality, of human existence as such. Knowledge of the limit or constraint on the margin is always accompanied by the possibility of failing to know any internal limit.^[17] Knowledge of the boundary at the center means knowing that the whole of existence, human existence in every possible way that it may comport itself, has its limit.

There where the boundary - the tree of knowledge - stands, there stands also the tree of life, that is, the very God who gives life.^[18] God is at once the boundary and the center of our existence. Adam knows that. But Adam knows it in such a way that this knowing is only an expression of Adam's existence from the center Adam's being oriented toward the center; it is an expression of Adam's creatureliness and freedom. Adam's knowing is embedded in Adam's freedom for God, in unbroken obedience to God; it is knowledge arising form the freedom of the creature, knowledge in life, knowledge in ignorance. Thus Adam cannot know evil, cannot conceive it, and cannot know or conceive death either. But Adam knows the limit of human beings because Adam knows God. Adam does not know the boundary as something that can be transgressed; otherwise Adam would know about evil. Adam knows it as the given grace that belongs to his creatureliness and freedom. Adam also knows, therefore, that life is possible only because of the limit; Adam lives from this boundary that is at the center. Thus Adam understands this prohibition and the threat of death only as a renewed gift, as the grace of God. The limit is grace because it is the basis of creatureliness and freedom; the boundary is the center. Grace is that which holds humankind over the abyss of nonbeing, nonliving, not-being-created, and Adam can think of all this nothingness only in terms of the given grace of God.

Thus not a word in the story up to this point hints at the possibility of understanding the prohibition differently, say as a temptation. The prohibition in paradise is the gmce of the Creator toward the creature. God tempts no one.^[19] Only the Creator knows what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is up to this point; Adam does not yet know it. As one who lives in the unity of obedience Adam does not comprehend that which is two-sided [das Zwiefache];^[20] as one who lives in the unity of the knowledge of God as the center and the boundary of human life Adam cannot conceive of the breaking apart of that knowledge into good and evil. Adam knows neither what good nor what evil is ^[21] and lives in the strictest sense beyond good and evil;^[22] that is, Adam lives out of the life that comes from God, before whom a life lived in good, just like a life lived in evil, would mean an unthinkable hilling away.

Good and evil, tob and ra,^[23] thus have a much wider meaning here than good and evil in our terminology. The words tob and ra speak of an ultimate split [Zwiespalt]^[24] in the world of humankind in general that goes back behind even the moral split, so that tob means also something like "pleasurable" [lustvoll] and ra "painful" [leidvoll] (Hans Schmidt).^[25] Tob and ra are concepts that express what is in every respect the deepest divide [Entzweiung]^[26] in human life. The essential point about them is that they appear as a pair, that in being split apart [in ihrer Zwiespaltigkeit] they belong inseparably together. There is no tob, nothing that is pleasurable/good/beautiful, without its being always already immersed in ra, in that which is painful/ evil/base/false [Unechte]. And what is painful! evil- in this wide sense - does not occur without a glimmer of desire for pleasure [Lust],^[27] which is what makes pain so completely pain. That which is good, in the sense of tob, is for us always only something that has been torn from evil, that has passed through evil, that has been conceived, carried, and borne by evil. The luster of the pleasurable/good is its origin in evil, in its overcoming of evil, to be sure, but in the same way that a child overcomes the mother's womb, that is, in such a way that the good is enhanced [geadelt] by the greatness of the evil from which it has torn itself. To us Ignatius is 'greater' than Francis, Augustine is greater than Monica, Hagen is greater than Siegfried.^[28]

In the same way, however, 'evil' is enhanced by the 'good' from which it comes; pain is enhanced by the pleasure out of whose depths alone it has become possible. No real evil wholly lacks the luster ofthe good. We have no utter [schlechthin] evil, nothing that is utterly painful, in human beings. Where there is utter evil with no good to enhance it, where baseness itself takes form, there human beings have lost their humanity and we call them sick; where that which is utterly painful has managed to lay hold of human beings, so that pleasure has been wholly destroyed in pain, there the sickness of mind called melancholia has overwhelmed human beings and they are no longer human.^[29] Healthy human beings in pain are borne up and nourished by what brings pleasure; in their experience of pleasure they are churned up by what is painful, in good by evil, in evil by good. They suffer from an inner split [Zwiespalt].

This describes us; it is we who have eaten from the tree of knowledge, not Adam. But we must go on and enquire further in order to understand the import of what the Bible says about the tree of knowledge: " ... as soon as you eat from it you must die." The tree of knowledge is the tree of death. It stands immediately next to the tree of life, and the tree of life is endangered only by this tree of death. Both trees are still untouched and untouchable; both constitute the boundary and the center. Whoever grasps at life must die; "those who want to save their life will lose it."^[30] Only those who have lost it, however, will grasp at it. And those who have attained the knowledge of good and evil, who live as people who are split apart within themselves rim Zwiespalt], have lost their life.

Why have they lost life? We have said that what is pleasurable/good is immersed in what is painful! evil, and vice versa. But just what is painful in pleasure? It is that in all pleasure a person desires eternity, but knows that pleasure is transient and will end. That is not a knowing that comes from a prior knowledge now applied to every pleasurable event; it is something that the depth of pleasure itself discloses to us if we listen to it: a thirst, a craving [Sucht],^[31] for eternity, precisely because pleasure is not eternal but instead has fallen prey to death. On the other hand we ask: What pleasure is there in pain? It is that in the depth of pain a person feels pleasure in transience, pleasure in the obliteration of apparently endless pain, pleasure in death.^[32]

What is the evil in good? It is that the good dies. What is the good in evil? It is that the evil dies. What is the state of being divided or torn apart into tob and ra in the world and in humankind? It is the pain and the pleasure with which a human being dies. A human being who knows about tob and ra knows immediately about death. Knowing about tob and ra itself constitutes death. Humankind dies from knowing good and evil. Humankind is dead in its own good and in its own evil. Death in terms of transience is not the death that comes from God. What does it mean to be dead? It does not mean the abolition of one's being a creature. Instead it means no longer being able to live before God, and yet having to live before God. It means standing before God as an outlaw, as one who is lost and damned, but not as one who no longer exists. It means receiving life from God no longer as grace coming from the center and the boundary of one's own existence but as a commandment that stands in one's way and with a flaming sword denies one any way of retreat.

Being dead in this sense means to have life not as a gift but as a commandment. But from this commandment no one can escape, not even by choosing oneself to die, for to be dead is itself to be subject to the commandment to live. To be dead means to-have-to-live. That irks our natural way of thinking. Being dead is not deliverance, salvation, or the final possibility of fleeing; instead flight into death is flight into the most terrible bondage to life. The inescapable nature of life as a commandment - to know that is to know death.

The commandment to live demands from me something that I am not in a position to fulfill. It obliges me to live out of myself, out of my own resources, and I am unable to do that. Just this, however, is the commandment that burdens those who know about tob and ra. They are obliged to live out of their own resources, and they do so, yet are unable to do it. They do so by living out of their own inner split, by living with their own good that comes out of evil and by their own evil that comes out of good, by deriving the strength of pain from pleasure and the strength of pleasure from pain. Humankind lives in a circle; it lives out of its own resources; it is alone. Yet it cannot live, because in fact it does not live but in this life is dead, because it must live, that is, it must accomplish life out of its own resources and jus t that is its death (as the basis at once of its knowledge and of its existence!).^[33] Humankind whom God's commandment confronts with a dernand^[34] is thrown back upon itself and now has to live in this way. Humankind now lives only out of its own resources, by its knowledge of good and evil, and thus is dead.

After all this, it is now at last quite clear that the tree of life comes to be in danger only where the tree of death has had its effect. It is clear why the prohibition was attached to the tree of death but not to the tree of life - or, to put it the other way around, why the tree to which the prohibition was attached has to be the tree of death. There is still one thing that remains quite unclear, however: how this deed that^[35] opened up and created this split-apart world of ours for us came about at all. The world that has been torn apart into tob and ra is known only in death. And Adam knows nothing of this world. To Adam it remains hidden in the tempting fruit of the tree of knowledge. What Adam knows is that the secret of humankind's limit, of the life of the human being, is in God's keeping.

At this point, however, we need to remind ourselves again that this is not a tale about some primeval human being that hardly affects us. If it were only a tale like that, our main task would be to give rein to our imagination so that it would transport us to this fairyland beyond tob and ra. Every such game of imagination would altogether discount our actual situation; indeed it is possible only in the split-apart world .in which human beings suppose that they could somehow still escape from themselves. What is important to understand, however, is that this story claims us not as listeners with the gift of imagination but as human beings who, no matter how much they stretch their imaginations and all their other mental or spiritual powers, are simply unable to transport themselves to this paradise 'beyond good and evil', 'beyond pleasure and pain'; instead, with all their powers of thinking, they remain tied to this torn-apart world, to antithesis, to contradiction. This is so because our thinking too is only the expression of our being, of our existence, which is grounded in contradiction. Because we do not exist in a state of unity, our thinking is torn apart as well.

Instead of sanctioning this impossibility [of transporting ourselves to that fairyland beyond],^[36] however, and instead of being allowed to judge what the Bible calls good by our idea of what is good and on that basis to criticize what the Bible says here about what is beyond good and evil, we are confronted by this Adam who disturbs us and criticizes us. This is so just because Adam is a human being like us and Adam's history is our history, with the one decisive difference, to be sure, that for us history begins where for Adam it ends. Our history is history through Christ, whereas Adam's history is history through the serpent. But precisely as those who live and have their history through Christ alone we are enabled to know about the beginning not by means of our own imagination but only from the new center, from Christ. We have this knowledge as those who by faith have been set free from the knowledge of good and evil, from death, and who by faith alone are able to make Adam's image their own.^[37]

[edit] References

1. ↑ The text follows LB throughout, but the rendering of the words for Havilah, bdellium resin, shoham stone, Gihon, and Phrates (Euphrates in LB) follows Kautzsch, 12-13. Kautzsch explains: "Bedolah, budulhu in Assyrian, is probably the Greek bdellion [Latin and English bdellium], a precious aromatic resin. Shoham stone is either beryl or a type of onyx" (12, note g). [The phrase "land of the Moors" is an anachronism, as "Moors" usually refers to the people of northwest Africa from the eighth century C.E. on. The Hebrew literally reads "land of Cush" (NRSV), which in the Old Testament is generally Ethiopia or Nubia, the land to the south of Egypt. "Hiddekel" transliterates the Hebrew. Cf. KjV. NRSV reads "Tigris,"] [DSB]
2. ↑ See editorial note 21 at the end of the previous section.
3. ↑ Cf. the beginning of the quotation from John of Damascus in Bernhard Bartmann, Dogrnatik: "With his body he [Adam] lived in an exceedingly divine and glorious place; with his soul, however, he resided in a sublime and utterly glorious domain, for he had the indwelling God as his dwelling" (296). (For the end of the quotation see above, page 64, editorial note 17.) Concerning what follows, UK writes: "(The imagination of someone from the orient!)" (20),
4. ↑ In EK there follows: "(d. Luther's letter to his son Hansie.)" (9). The same reference is made by HP (31). Luther in a letter written from the Koburg Castle onJune 19, 1530, pictures the kingdom of heaven for his four-year-old son: "1 know of a pretty, beautiful, [and] cheerful garden ... " (LW 49:323 [WA-BR 5:377-78, no. 1595]).
5. ↑ Bonhoeffer uses the word Mille to mean two different things. 1 have used the English word "middle" to translate Bonhoeffer's text where it refers to time and the English word "center" to translate Mitte where it refers to place, including the "center" that God provides as a limit. [DSB]
6. ↑ HP reads, "Not humankind but the two strange trees stand, and remain, at the center of the garden" (31). UK (20) and FL (36) are similar, and EK is almost word for word the same (9).
7. ↑ UK uses the technical term "taboo" (20) for what Bonhoeffer spells out here.
8. ↑ The German expression is a familiar one, included in the collection of quotations made by George Buchmann (1822-1884), which Bonhoeffer quotes from Luke 16: 19, as HP attests precisely (31). The 1933 edition incorrectly reads Frieden, "peace," for Freuden, "joy, enjoyment, delight." ...
9. ↑ The 1933 edition has Vorgeschichte, "prehistory" - a misreading of Bonhocffer's text. That Bonhoeffer did say "Urgeschichte" is attested by EK (9).
10. ↑ EK has here: "Cf. H. Schmidt 'Die Paradiesgeschichte'" (9). Hans Schmidt saw in Gen. 2:4-3:24 two stories, each with a tree, interwoven with each other. Kautzsch makes a similar conjecture (12, note e).
11. ↑ Cf. above, pages 22-23 (from the paragraph beginning "Theological exposition ... ").
12. ↑ EKhas "in contrast to the animals" (10).
13. ↑ "Quality," "property," or "attribute." [DSB]
14. ↑ Hans Schmidt argues, the "ability to distinguish between what is 'good' and what is 'bad' in the sense of what is 'morally perfect' and what is 'sinful'" is already "presupposed" at that moment "when a prohibition, with its demand to be observed, confronts human beings" (21 and note 1). Bonhoeffer refutes this argument in what follows.
15. ↑ Grenze is usually translated as "limit" in this book. As such it sometimes means a creaturely limit that cannot be surpassed and sometimes a prohibition that may not be transgressed. It is translated "boundary," however, when used together with spatial terms such as "center" and in phrases like "transgressing a boundary." Occasionally Grenze and its cognates are also translated "limit or boundedness," "limit or constraint," "limitedness" and "unlimitedness." [DSB]
16. ↑ Cf. above, pages 42-43, concerning how with God the "indicative," "you are," and the "imperative," "so be," are one. At the end of this paragraph, the conclusion of the seventh lecture period, HPhas "Creation: the Tree of Life. Sin: somehow the tree of knowledge. Here is the diacritical point. ... " (33). EK continues, "at which one m~st see how creation and sin stand together" (10). Cf UK (21-22); andFL has an echo of it (37). }n~dates the eighth lecture period asJan. 10,1933 (33). In the recapitulation at the beginning of the period, FL has the following, which is emphasized with a line in the margin: "the relationship with God and the moral relationship not to be tom apart" (39). UK has "The unity still obtains: what God gives is bound to be" (23); HP is similar (33).
17. ↑ Compare Bonhocffer's phrase "the possibility of failing to know any internal limit" with his exposition of idealist philosophy in his inaugural lecture of July 31,1930: "In that I limit my possibilities in thought ... in the very possibility of making a limit I demonstrate the infinity of my possibilities .... " ("Man [sic] in Contemporary Philosophy and Theology," NRS 60 [DBW 10:368 (GS 3:74)]). In Bonhoeffer's copy of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, he marked the following passage with a colored pencil (and an exclamation mark in the margin): " ... Plato [in the Dialogue Philebus, 26] declared the peras, the boundary that limits itself by itself, to be superior to the apeiron, the boundless" (Lasson ed., 12:148). [trans. DSB] Cf. Internationaies Bonhoeffer Forum 8:81-82 and 14. [For a brief discussion of the point involved in Hegel's doctrine of the infinite, see W. 1'. Stace: The Philosophy of Hegel, 142-49.] LJDEG]
18. ↑ The 1933 edition reads "the very Lord [Herr selbst]." This is shown to be an error by HP, who has "the God who gives life" (34) and UK, who has "the very God [Gott selbst]" (23).
19. ↑ Cf. the exposition of the sixth petition of the Lord's Prayer (Matt. 6: 13) in Martin Luther's Small Catechism: "God indeed tempts no one ... " (Book of Concord, 347). UK reads, "otherwise he [Adam] would already have fallen, because no human being would be able to resist, were God to tempt" (24). FL has very much the same (20).
20. ↑ Zwiefach means strictly "twofold, double" - like the two views one can take of a prohibition or like "the tree of knowledge of good and evil." Cf. what follows. [DSB]
21. ↑ Cf. Friedrich Gogarten, Politische Ethik, who says that the human being "who lets God be his God, as Adam does in Paradise, ... knows nothing about good and evil" (72).
22. ↑ Beyond Good and Evil is the title of a work that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1885-86. The idea is present already in many places in Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-84), e.g., in the section "Before Sunrise" (The Portable Nietzsche, 277-78): " ... all things have been baptized in the well of eternity and are beyond good and evil."
23. ↑ Tob and ra are Hebrew words, each having a range of meanings. Tob means "good, pleasing, pleasant, delightful, delicious, happy, glad, joyful," while ra means "bad, evil, disagreeable, displeasing, unpleasant, harmful." (See The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew and English Lexicon.) Hence tob can be translated by the German lustooll, which means either "pleasurable" or "joyful," and ra by leidvoll, which means either "painful, suffering" or "sorrowful." [DSB]
24. ↑ Zwiespalt means literally "a state of being split into two" and so "split, rift, cleavage, disruption, conflict, strife, dissension." [DSB]
25. ↑ Cf. Hans Schmidt, according to whom the words tob and ra "in their original concrete sense mean not 'good' and 'evil'" but that "which gives sensual pleasure and its opposite: they mean 'pleasurable' and 'painful" (26). UK adds the pair of ideas, 'Joy" [freude] and "unhappiness" (24), andn~ adds "happiness" and "unhappiness" (40). Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra, in the section "The Drunken Song": "my unhappiness, my happiness is deep" (The Portable Nietzsche, 433) and above all in the section "On the Afterworldly": "Good and evil and pleasure and pain ... " (The Portable Nietzsche, 142 [trans. altered DSBJ).
26. ↑ [Entzweiung means literally" dividing! separating or being divided/ separated into two."] [DSB] Cf. Hegel, 'The Christian Religion, in the section "The Representation of the Fall," 159: "The highest disunion, the distinction between good and evil, ... is certainly knowledge." Cf. also Iruernationales Bonhoejfer Forum 8:131.
27. ↑ Lust can also be translated 'Joy, delight, desire" or "lust." [DSB]
28. ↑ The steeliness of will of Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) contrasts with the gentleness of Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226). Augustine tells us about his pious mother Monica especially in the ninth book of his Confessions. Hagen is the murderer of Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied, a Middle High German epic poem.
29. ↑ "Melancholia" or "depression" as a technical term in psychiatry stands for the depressive emotional disorder that those who suffer from its severe forms experience as an unendurable condition.
30. ↑ Cf. Matt. 16:25, Luke 9:24. UK alone has here "Why does the one who reaches out for what is good deserve death?" (25).
31. ↑ Suchi means "a craving" or "an obsessive, uncontrollable, or insatiable desire."
32. ↑ See Nietzsche, Zarathustra, in the section "The Drunken Song": "Pleasure [Lust] wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants everything eternally the same .... Woe entreats: Go! Away, woe! ... Woe implores, 'Go!' .... All pleasure wants the eternity of all things .... - what does pleasure not desire! It is thirstier, heartier, hungrier, more terrible, more secretive than all woe; it wants itself, it bites into itself, the ring's will wrestles in it [des Ringes Wille ringt in ihrJ Pleasure ... wants deep, wants deep eternity" (The Portable Nietzsche, 434-36). [trans. altered DSB] [Nietzsche here poetically pictures Lust (pleasure, lust) as a snake biting its own tail and so forming a "ring" or circle. The verb ringt means "wrestles, strives" or "forms a ring."] UDEG]
33. ↑ A philosophical distinction made since Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (16<16-1716), to whose formulation of the problem in his Monadology - the inquiry after the principium rationis sufficientis ("the principle of sufficient reason") - Martin Heidegger refers in his The Essence of Reasons (11-33). Cf. Immanuel Kant, "Preface" to Critique of Practical Reason: "Though freedom is certainly the ratio essendi [basis of being] of the moral law, the latter is the ratio cognoscendi [basis of knowledge] offreedom" (4, note I).
34. ↑ According to HP (37), UK (26), and FL (46), in his (eighth) lecture Bonhoeffer said: "who transgress God's commandment." It is more probable that the text at this point was altered by Bonhoeffer than that it was misread.
35. ↑ HP reads, "this death that ... " (37).
36. ↑ Section in brackets added by translator. [DSB]
37. ↑ The end of the eighth lecture. HP dates the ninth Jan. 17, 1933 (37). From the comprehensive recapitulation at the beginning of the ninth lecture period HP recorded the following: "The existence of human beings who live between good and evil stands at any given time in relation to death, because they understand what it means to be transient. [UK reads, "Human beings who know that they are transient know of their death but only as a release, not as a punishment. They understand it wrongly. Human beings must live" (27).] The Greek knows of death as the cessation of the imperative to live. In suicide a person escapes from the demand that one must live. [.1'"1., reads, "suicide a possible way of bringing pain to completion in pleasure" (47).] The good that is always related to evil is not God's good. The person who has eaten from the tree of knowledge, who knows about good and evil, has fallen away from God. Before Adam ate, being good or evil did not in any way exist for the human being; Adam had not yet fallen away. So it is now with us; we are between good and evil and so stand between two possible states of having fallen away. This is not Hegel's divine knowledge of what is good and eviL Unity is grounded in faith alone. Faith is the truly good thing in God's eyes [das wirklich Cute Cottes]" (37f.). (This final phrase is later important in Bonhocffcr's The Cost of Discipleship.) UDEG] FL reads "[according to] Hegel human beings have God's knowledge of good and eviL To wish to live on the basis of one's own good is ... not good" (48). Cf. Hegel's The Christian Religion regarding Gen. 3:22a ("Behold Adam has become like one of us"): " ... The confirmation of the fact that knowledge of good and evil belongs to the divinity of man is placed on the lips of God ... " (159-60).