Die Elenden sollen essen

This text has been translated with DeepL (www.deepl.com).

Christiane Tietz

The father whimpered and groaned. He had been lying in his sickbed for months. He had long since been unable to perform his duties as a pastor. The headaches grew stronger and stronger. Again and again he had to vomit terribly. The mother revealed to a friend that the doctor had diagnosed a “brain disorder,” but tried to reassure herself: “We trust in God and in the skilled doctor who gave us the best hope for his recovery and pious expression, if it is God’s will.”[1] When there was no improvement, the mother wrote to her friend again: Now one learns “to truly appreciate and recognise the need to still have a loving heavenly Father, whose helping hand alone can turn everything to the best.”[2]

Soon, the father could no longer see. The mother still hoped for improvement: “Now, with God, nothing is impossible, and that is why we repeatedly commend our dear sufferer to His protection and gracious help.”[3] But after weeks of misery on his deathbed at home, during which his father cried out in pain, he died on 30 July 1849. His son had witnessed his father’s infirmity at close quarters. He was four years old. His name: Friedrich Nietzsche.

A few years later, in his first youthful memoirs, Friedrich Nietzsche described his father’s illness and the day of his death in detail. The funeral was oppressive for him: “The dull sound” of the full peal of bells “will never leave my ears, I will never forget the sombre, rushing melody of the song ‘Jesu meine Zuversicht’!” The words of the pastor at the grave in were also “dull”. The boy tried to comfort himself: “A believing soul lost the earth, a seeing soul received heaven.”[4]

The words of the soprano we have just heard exude the piety in which Friedrich Nietzsche was also raised: “I accept my suffering with joy.” He was taught to joyfully accept his father’s suffering and death as God’s will. Nietzsche learned: “What God does is well done.” The cup I am given to drink tastes bitter to me. But – as the cantata says – this is my delusion, my mistake. For ultimately, it is not life here on earth that is decisive, but life there in heaven.

Nietzsche’s childhood experiences led him to philosophise. He asked himself: if God is the one who let his father die so miserably, can God be as thoroughly loving as his mother and father had taught him? At the age of twelve, he wrote his first philosophical text in response to this question. In it, Nietzsche invented his own Trinity: God thinks himself and thus creates the Son, the second person of the Godhead; for what God thinks becomes reality. But in order to understand himself, God must also think, and thus create, his opposite: the Devil. And so, for the boy, the Trinity of God did not consist of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as in Christian tradition, but of the Father, Son and – the Devil. For Nietzsche, the Devil is essential and part of God from the outset. If something as terrible as the death of the father comes from God, then God cannot be only good. Then evil also belongs to God himself.

In his early poems, Nietzsche first expressed doubts about God. At first, the adolescent still wrote in the old style: “Let me see your face forever / Take me to you; / … thy will be done,” but immediately followed this with: “Can I trust you!?”[5] Later, in view of the suffering in the world, the adult philosopher exclaimed: “The only excuse for God is that he does not exist.”^[6] Finally, he rejoiced in liberation: “God is dead! God remains dead. And we have killed him.”[7]

Nietzsche’s reckoning with Christianity also included his criticism of Christians’ escapism. He felt compelled to observe that hope for the hereafter quickly turns into consolation for the hereafter. The here and now then becomes nothing more than a vale of tears that must be endured before entering into heavenly joys. Responsibility for the world and shaping the world are superfluous. Pious resignation to suffering and quietism, which folds its hands in its lap, are siblings. Nietzsche believed that only atheists were capable of shaping this world responsibly, resisting injustice and confronting suffering. For only atheists do not hold God responsible for everything in the world.

I can understand Nietzsche’s doubts and his path to atheism. His family lacked any confrontation with the experience of suffering. No lamentations. No questions to God: “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

But is there only the alternative between pious resignation to suffering, as in Nietzsche’s parents, and aggressive atheism, as in their son? Must one give up belief in God in order to be able to resist the injustices in the world?

I return to the words of the chorale we just heard: “What God does is well done.” Nietzsche learned that God does everything. He therefore concluded from the ambivalence of the world that God is also ambivalent: if the world is not only good, then God cannot be only good either. That was the beginning of his doubt. For him, it ended with the non-existence of God.

As a theologian, I have been preoccupied again and again with the question of whether an honest perception of suffering in the world is compatible with belief in God. I asked myself: Does God do everything? Did God cause the concentration camps in which 6 million Jews, 500,000 Sinti and Roma and many other people were murdered? Did God cause the tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed more than 200,000 people?

Yes, Nietzsche is right: much in this world contradicts the existence of a good God. There is a contradiction between much in this world and the existence of a good God. But man may complain to this God about his suffering. And this God suffers with people when they suffer. And this God contradicts many places in this world. This good God says no to murder and war, to poverty and injustice.

Faith in this God allows us to name the contradiction between suffering and God. It allows us to complain to God about suffering. And faith has a counterfactual power that protests against reality and refuses to accept the status quo. Faith holds fast to the belief that God remains friendly towards this world and its people, even if there is little evidence of this at the moment.

I have encountered the resilience of faith particularly in the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During the Nazi era, he was one of the most important figures in the so-called Confessing Church, the part of the Protestant Church in Germany that opposed the influence of National Socialism. Later, he joined a group of political resistance fighters who attempted to remove Adolf Hitler by force. A few weeks before the end of the war, Bonhoeffer was murdered in a concentration camp.

His most famous text is a poem: “Von guten Mächten” (By Good Powers) with the moving 7th stanza: “By good powers wonderfully sheltered / we confidently await what may come. / God is with us in the evening and in the morning / and most certainly on each new day.”[8] Bonhoeffer wrote the poem for Christmas 1944. He had been imprisoned by the Nazis for almost two years.

The third verse begins with words that echo Bach’s chorale: “And if you give us the heavy cup, the bitter one, / filled to the brim with suffering.” Unlike in the chorale we just heard, the cup does not only taste bitter “because of my delusion.” The cup is bitter. Bonhoeffer does not sugarcoat anything. It is heavy suffering that awaits Bonhoeffer, who was expecting his imminent execution, and his family.

What Bonhoeffer then formulates sounds to me like an excessive demand: if you give us the bitter cup, “we will take it gratefully without trembling / from your good and beloved hand”.

The key to understanding this is the good and beloved hand of God. Bonhoeffer trusted that God was close to him in everything. God did not throw his life at his feet like an imposition that he alone had to cope with. No, God carried and accompanied him. Bonhoeffer believed – as he confessed elsewhere – “that God wants to give us as much resilience as we need in every situation of distress. But he does not give it in advance, so that we do not rely on ourselves, but on him alone.”

Do you know that feeling? When you find yourself in a situation that is so difficult that you lose all your courage and strength. You don’t know how to cope and you just want to run away. Bonhoeffer observes that if you felt strength within yourself before, you would rely on yourself. If you no longer feel any strength, then there is nothing left but to rely on God. And then you experience that God carries and helps you.

What was special about Bonhoeffer’s trust in God was that it did not cause him to withdraw from the world into pious inwardness and passivity. Bonhoeffer did not think, ‘Everything that happens is God’s will – and my task is to surrender to it and accept everything gratefully.’ He distinguished between what he had to surrender to and what he should resist. The former came from God’s hand, the latter did not. His trust in God led him to take responsibility in this world for creating a better world. He courageously resisted worldly injustices. For him, trust in God and responsibility for shaping this world went hand in hand. In his own words: “There are people who consider it frivolous, Christians who consider it ungodly, to hope for a better earthly future and to prepare for it. They believe in chaos, disorder and catastrophe as the meaning of current events and, in resignation or pious escapism, shirk their responsibility for continuing life, for rebuilding, for future generations. It may be that the Last Day will dawn tomorrow, in which case we will gladly lay down our work for a better future, but not before.”[9]

I am convinced that Johann Sebastian Bach, too, did not want to speak of pious resignation to suffering and religious escapism in today’s cantata. Anyone who composes such comforting music does not simply want to flee to a better afterlife . They want comfort that gives strength for life here. For Bach, as for Bonhoeffer, comfort lies in the closeness of God, who is there even in the greatest suffering. God is not the one who sends everything, including evil. God is the one who is at our side, strengthening and supporting us through difficult times.

This is clearly echoed in the final chorale. There, Bach repeats the phrase “What God does is well done”. I now hear it differently: “What God does is well done.” Bach clearly names hardship, death and misery. There is nothing to gloss over here. And what does God do? God will hold him “in his arms like a father.” This is already happening. Bach’s music is like this fatherly arm, no matter what hardships and misfortunes occur. “Therefore, I let him rule.”

[1] Franziska Nietzsche, letter to Emma Schenk dated 1 December 1848, quoted from Klaus Goch: Nietzsche’s Father or The Catastrophe of German Protestantism. A Biography, Berlin 2000, p. 379 f.; cf. Christiane Tietz: Nietzsche. Life and Thought under the Spell of Christianity, Munich 2025.

[2] Franziska Nietzsche, letter to Emma Schenk dated 8 March 1849, quoted from Goch, Nietzsches Vater, p. 383.

[3] Franziska Nietzsche, letter to Emma Schenk dated 4 April 1849, quoted from Reiner Bohley: Nietzsche’s Christian Education [I], in: Nietzsche Studies 16 (1987), pp. 164–196, here p. 179.

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche: Aus meinem Leben, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. I/1, Berlin, New York 1967, p. 286.

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche: Posthumous Notes April–October 1859, 6 [20], KGW I/2, pp. 54 f.

[6] Friedrich Nietzsche: Ecce homo. Why I Am So Clever, 3, KSA 6, 286 (my emphasis).

[7] Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science. Third Book 125, KSA 3, p. 481.

[8] Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Von guten Mächten, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, vol. 8, Gütersloh 1998, p. 608.

[9] Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 8, p. 36.