Not Entirely Buried
When cultural worlds lose their naturalness, their keywords and substance fall with them. The remedies are
historical knowledge and (heart-) education
By Dorothee Soelle and Fulbert Steffensky
[This article originally published in: die tageszeitung, Oct 21, 2000 is translated from the German on the
World Wide Web, wysiwyg://250/http://www.taz.de.]
In the medieval hymn “God is where love (caritas) and longing (amor) are”, two forms of love are
named in a remarkable mixture, eros and charity. In antiquity, the Greek word “eros”, longing or yearning,
characterizes a demon which drives the person beyond himself to fulfillment and perfection. Eros arises
from the feeling of imperfection, deficiency and longing for what is not but what will be. This erotic power
lives in all people insofar as they are opened or created – to speak more piously – to relationship.
New life concepts often find new primary words. To describe its basic idea and praxis of love,
original Christianity did not hearken back to eros but to the more inconspicuous Greek word agape. This
term comes from the tradition of shared brotherly and sisterly meals, the feast of the Lord’s Supper. Agape
meant slaves and masters, colored and proprietors, Jewish and Greek people, locals and strangers share
what they had to eat in their feast of faith. The meal was the material expression of their coexistence or
being together. Being together in love represented this agape, not only the aversion or irreconcilable
differences of one to another. Agape is the capacity of the devotion of people, the ability to leave their selfincapsulation and see the face of another. “In the beginning was relationship”, as the Jewish religious
philosopher Martin Buber expressed this basic fact of human existence.
We are not simply economic persons content to follow enlightened self-interest. “In the
beginning” was not the homo oeconomicus, this individual capable of business and pleasure to which we
should be trained, but the self-transcendence of love.
The characteristic of this love is mutuality. Living the unity of acting and being presented and
avoiding the divisions in giving and receiving, acting and handled are part of the nature of love.
Love not only thinks interpersonally but lives in the structural consideration of reality. Love is
bound inseparably with justice, its political name. When this love is long-term and shakes off its political
naievity, then it knows what the market, the economy and ecology can do to people. This love that
becomes public and is interested in the general public best deserves the name solidarity. Solidarity is the
attitude that considers the conditions and structures of human life. The focus is not only the individual
person but humankind. Charity thinks of the hungry, the violated woman and the abandoned children who
come into my field of vision and adopt me. There is a difference in intensification but not in nature
between charity and solidarity. Solidarity without love in a purely moral-political mechanism becomes
empty. Love without intelligence, love without view to the structures of justice and injustice becomes
blind and helpless.
We have no time any more to allow solidarity and charity to be in competition. Both are
endangered. When cultural worlds lose their naturalness, their keywords and contents also fall with them.
The word solidarity became the password of socialism through the French revolution and the history of the
working class movement. The word love or charity was the watchword of Christianity. These two words
were not technical names; they were the short forms of the movements in which they were at home.
Whoever used the word may have even connected it to “international” and socialism. Whoever applied the
word charity was religious. What happens when the cultural homes which these words describe disappear
or fade? Can programmatic words and pictures wander about abandoned? Will they not perish with their
homes? Isn’t the cause endangered which these words intended? Intentions of humanity are not only
defended by individuals. Great life options like solidarity and love can only be maintained when they are
embedded in cultures.
We face new situations in which the foundation of both words is threatened. Once there was an
horizon supported by Christianity, socialism and humanistic groups and a canon of norms which
commanded solidarity, love, respect of life and remembrance of the dead. People under these horizons
were accustomed to think normatively. These norms were not only upheld through arguments. They were
practiced and made obvious through stories told in the group, perhaps of Francis of Assisi or Joe Hill,
Elisabeth of Thuringen and Rosa Luxemburg. There was a canon of memories of what people once dreamt
of their own movements. Failure did not make invalid their experiments. People sang songs and knew
poems which articulated the dreams and intentions of their groups.
What happens when norm horizons with their dramatizations break down in a post-traditional and
post-moral society, in a society of a raging thunderous individualism that doesn’t know any groups,
connections and origins any more? At the moment we experience the collapse or devaluation of the two
great variant readings of history, socialism and Christianity. No one can suppress the share of these two
readings in the insult of life. Christianity could block the way of Christians as the idea of socialism could
irritate real existing socialism. Rosa Luxemburg and Francis of Assisi could never be completely buried.
One had their subversive songs and stories and again and again groups dug them up. There were obliging
texts even if they were often falsified, suppressed or kept quiet. These texts commanded reading the world
from the victims and slandered. What happens when the culture declines in which these texts are at home?
What happens when the groups disappear in which such texts are known and read? When nothing can be
read any more, the world itself becomes illegible. When the songs grow silent, the spirit also grows silent.
The new enemy of solidarity and charity could be the undisturbed present-fixation of people, the traditionfree individual who is himself the horizon and exclusive norm.
Solidarity, charity and resistance against injustice need a spirituality to become long-term and
intensive. One rule of such a spirituality is: Know your own origin and the traditions of freedom! One has
to know much to escape hopelessness and cynicism. We are also responsible for our courage. However
courage is nourished by the stories of success. One must know that people once escaped from the houses
of bondage to believe that one can escape oneself. One must know what the dead to which we count
ourselves have dreamt so that our dreams and our consciences are sharpened by their dreams. Solidarity
does not arise in the moment when it is necessary. One must grow and broaden one’s horizons in love.
Education is a long-term enterprise.
Another rule of spiritual education is: Know what people have suffered in the place and region
where you live! One moment of spiritual training is remembrance of the dead. Home means living in
illuminated spaces, in spaces where one becomes familiarized. The heart of every narrative is
remembrance of suffering and remembrance of the dead that cannot be dismissed from our solidarity.
Remembrance of the dead is the appeal to solidarity with the living. Where the history of suffering is told,
every sentence declares: This cannot happen again!
We both speak as Christians. The Christian tradition and the church as an education workshop are
increasingly important to us. Christians are not better than others. The churches are among the last
institutions with a coherent language with stories of freedom and escape. The books preserving these
stories are read every Sunday and on all church days. Religion is the place of outlawed ideas and pictures:
justice, mercy, freedom, grace, protection of crushed life, comfort, overthrow of tyrants, narratives of
defeats and deliverances. Those who are inside know best the objections against these churches. However
the hostility to religion of the old left was a mistake. They wanted to act rationally, goal-oriented and
functionally. Many did this with consistency and passion. They could struggle but could not playfully
anticipate the victory of the right-wing. They could work but had little to nourish their own hope.
Love and solidarity need a language uniting us with others and with a tradition that goes beyond
pure subjectivity. We are all “incurably religious”, as Nicolai Berdayev said. Life isn’t possible without
God’s eroticism. The doubt in people who believe themselves “healed” from this sickness has grown more
and more with the totalizing of the economy. Can we live without “God’s love which is higher than all
reason”? Isn’t the renunciation on God a renunciation on eros? To say that a person is unerotic seems a
kind of death sentence. The destruction of our wishes and dreams for the life of everyone on this planet
advances with the irrelevance of religion. Isn’t that what many regard as enlightened intelligence, to act
according to the model: treatment (the sickness religion) successful, patient dead!
Dorothee Soelle, b.1929, evangelical theologian, lives as a free writer in Hamburg. She summons
Christians to tolerance and political action.
Fulbert Steffensky, b.1933, caused a sensation at the 1999 Evangelical chruch day when he urged marriage
for homosexual or same sex partners.