Union Seminary Quarterly Review
253
DEATH BY BREAD ALONE: TEXTS AND REFLECTIONS ON RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE DOROTHEE SOELLE, Trans, by David L. Scheldt, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. Dorothée Soelle has become widely known as a proponent of political theology done out of a radically secular, nontheistic perspective. She was trained in the university in critical philological and critical social theory. Some readers may thus be surprised that she has written a book on mysticism and spirituality. In the Postscript prepared for the reader in the United States she says that she wants this book to be understood "as a contribution to liberation theology, which someday may come to be known as socialist theology" (p. 194). In dealing with mysticism she has "the goal of helping us to reestablish human dignity as it is seen in the Christian tradition, and of bringing mysticism and revolution closer together again" (p. 147). Her heart is with the radical reformation of Thomas Muntzer and she evidently appreciates Karl Marx's observation that in the modern world the inner flame of medieval mysticism turns outward in revolution. This is an important book. One senses that it is an adumbration of many more like it to come in the next decade. But it evidences the inconsistencies and tentativeness of a programmatic, ground-breaking work, (a) At points Soelle seems to be criticising herself and her fellow political theologians for taking a critical stance toward church and society without listening for and grappling with the religious questions of meaning and wholeness. We shouldn't try to answer questions which people are not asking religiously, (b) At other points she addresses nonbelievers with the argument that religious experience is the only means of combating the growing forms of personal and corporate death in our society. In this line of thought "mysticism" is evidently the real character of all true religion. People are not ordinarily mystical and the question is how to make them mystical, (c) But at still other points Soelle wants to argue that there is something distinctive about Christian mysticism. There is something about Christian faith that prompts the right (humanizing) religious questions and makes non-world-escaping and non-fatalistic mysticism possible. These three dimensions of Soelle's argument are not necessarily exclusive, but she has not carefully enough shown how they fit together. In describing religious experience in very general ways and in trying to make it as accessible as possible, she may not have been as critical as she wanted to be. Thfc book "speaks about the general level of religious needs and for this reason deals with the 'inward journey' " (p. 134). Reflecting on the relative success of the book in Germany, however, Soelle includes these lines in her postscript musings: "The 'inward journey' has been and may be used as a model for escapism into a better 'second world'. This book, too, is in danger of being read as a part of the nostalgia mood in which old reactionaries join with former revolutionary students who have made their peace with the system" (p. 146). Its search for transcendence may be misunderstood as a return to individualism and privatism. The burden of Soelle's argument is the demonstration that in the Judeo-Christian framework the questions of human identity and wholeness are answered in terms of the "return journey" and not just of the "inward journey." She is successful in showing that this is the case in some texts of the Judeo-Christian traditions but she is not very successful in giving the theological reasons for this. She makes a start at this: "The Christian answer to the question of meaning is that 'God is love,' and this general statement finds concrete expression in historical experiences of liberation Solidarity is the most human expression of God's love" (p. 134). But how we know that "God is love" does not become so clear. Part One sets the stage for a renewed appreciation of mysticism. Soelle begins with a description of our normal existence in an affluent society. In this way she makes her point