skip to Main Content

Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence

Etty Hillesum had to reintroduce or restore the values that were under attack by Nazi terror. She faced her path with at least two sets of symbols: first, the language symbols that were part of her social reality, her upbringing, and her academic career; and second, the language symbols that arose in the course of her writing and reflection.

The relation between the two sets was complex. The second was derived from the first, but the first set could contain symbols derived from the clarifying process of other writers, such as Rilke and Jung. She reminded herself, however, that in the end she desired to become “wordless” and just be, that is, to be the “flow:”

Such words as “god” and “death” and “suffering” and “eternity” are best forgotten. We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be . . . . I cannot find the right words cither for that radiant feeling inside me, which en­compasses but is untouched by all the suffering and all the violence. But I am still talking in much too philosophical, much too bookish a way, as if I had thought it all up just to make life more pleasant for myself. I had much better learn to keep silent for the time being and simply be. (EH, 511; EHe, 483)FN

It is a common error to presume that the symbols of Hillesum’s reality were all clear concepts. Many of the things she described were not clear. The in­formation produced by her direct environment was often contracted by what Plato would have called doxa (opinion; knowledge of phenomena) or Nazi “ideology.”

Although she quoted extensively from other writers and tried to define certain concepts, Hillesum’s diary is not a warehouse of def­initions. Defining the complexity of reality was simply not possible for her. She was going through life as if there were, as she called it, “a photographic plate inside her” making a foolproof recording of everything around her down to the smallest detail. She was searching for her “tone:”

“Must find a new tone to go with this new attitude to life. Silence ought to be kept until that tone is found. But I must try to find it even while I speak; complete silence won’t do, it’s just another form of escape. The transition from the old to the new tone must be observed in all its nuances” (EH, 511; EHe, 484).

Hillesum was aware that her surroundings were poisoned by Nazi ide­ology and ignorance. National Socialism reflected the type of men and women of whom it was composed. Being able to see through its distortion, Hillesum had the urge to rediscover the true order of her soul within such an environment. This led her to express the desire for order, which she describes as a harmonious flowingness, in a society that was breaking down. Very early on in The Letters and Diaries Hillesum wrote:

“I am at a loss to understand myself right now. Only yesterday life was still one smoothly flowing whole for me, and I was flowing with it, if I may put it so impressively for once. But now everything has tensed up again. And I had such high hopes for my writing, but I can’t tear anything out of myself, it’s as if everything were crushed between blocks of granite” (EH, 44; EHe, 42).

She encountered one type of true humanity within herself side by side with several types of disorder in her psyche, but she remained firmly con­vinced that the true order of her soul was dependent on the love of divine wisdom: “It is the only way one can live nowadays, with unreserved love for one’s tortured fellow creature, no matter of what nation, race or creed” (EH, 671; EHe, 629). The experi­ences of such love became predominant in her life and formed her character.

The Purpose of the Diary

The diary was an attempt to formulate the meaning of her exis­tence by explicating the content of certain experiences. In the Aristotelian sense, she was a “mature woman” (spoudaios) maximally actualizing the po­tentialities of her human nature. Hillesum’s writings as such were a “flow study” of human life within her own existence. She developed her­self under all conditions and among different kind of people and was capa­ble of an imaginative reenactment of her experiences. Hillesum was intelli­gent in writing and open to parallel experiences of others, and she tested the truths she had discovered in her concrete daily living. Her openness to di­alogue and her personal honesty showed a great sign of her maturity:

“Oh God, times are too hard for frail people like myself. I know that a new and kinder day will come. I would so much like to live on, if only to express all the love I carry within me; carry into that new age all the humanity that survives in me, despite everything I go through every day. And there is only one way of preparing for the new age, by living it even now in our hearts. Some­where in me I feel so light, without the least bitterness and so full of strength and love. I would so much like to help prepare for the new age and to carry that which is indestructible within me intact into the new age, which is bound to come, for I can feel it growing inside me, every day.” (EH, 526; EHe, 497)

To “grow inside, ” to “go through”, for Hillesum, was happening in “the now.” Preparing for the new age is not something of the pastwhat happened before the experience–nor in the future–what happened after the experience. The process of attuning to the flow of presence, for Hillesum, was a gradual development in each moment of “the now” (AAZZ, 64-70).

A Catalog of Her Experiences

Let me make a brief catalogue of some of Hillesum’s experiences which, I believe, are equivalent to the classic experiences. She experienced a love of wisdom , an Eros toward the good and the beauti­ful; she desired justice and had the virtue to look for the right ordering of the forces of the soul.

She struggled with what Voegelin, following Plato,11 calls Thanatos, the cathartic purification of [her] conduct by being placed in the perspective of an awful death. Through kneel­ing and writing, she experienced some sort of mys­tical ascent of the soul toward the border of transcendence, analo­gous to that presented in Plato’s Symposium. She was part of a collective descent into the depths of nothingness in the holocaust. Among her friends she experienced something equivalent to the Aristotelian philia (love, homonoia), the nucleus of true community between mature men and women.

True “community” became more significant in Hille­sum’s development when she was able to let go of her Ich-haftigkeit, a German symbol for “selfishness” or “self-centeredness” (AAZZ, 181-85). In the beginning of the diaries, she was rather a spectator, not fully participating in “community.” She observed the reality of community from a distance, as an outsider.

When she gradually formulated a more pos­itive approach to community, the fight with her Ich-haftigkeit now as an “actor,” came to its climax: “It’s very shaming that you, Etty, have once again become entangled in wishes and longings which are not even genuine yearnings. I’ll have to reach clarity on this point first before I can count my­self part of the wider community again, and that involves getting rid of one’s egocentricity” (EH, 437; EHe, 416). What seemed to have been impossible happened: “I am so much of a social being, God, I never realized just how much. I want to be right in the midst of people, right in the midst of their fears. I want to see and comprehend everything for my­self and retell it later” (EH, 574; EHe, 542).

Since Hillesum desired to comprehend everything, to retell it and be right there in the midst of people, she was close to the reality of life. Did she become an authentic voice of experiential truth? Her experiences of love and goodness became the carriers of a truth to rival the Nazi ide­ology. Her opening of soul did not conquer any piece of land, nor did it prevent any of her fellow Jews being murdered, but through it, she discovered in her psyche a new center of love in which she ex­perienced herself as open toward divine reality, which she addressed as “You.”

She wanted to carry “You” intact with her and be faithful to “You.” To “carry” was a significant symbol for Hillesum in a variety of ways. Besides “You” or “God, ” she carried, for instance, “her inner moods, ” “inner peace and balance” (EH, 224), “the day,” “the other” (EHe, 281), and “the suffering of the world” (AAZZ, 128-36). “Still, I am grateful to You for driving me from my peaceful desk into the midst of the cares and sufferings of this age. It wouldn’t do, would it, to live an idyllic life with You in a sheltered study? Still I confess it truly is difficult to carry You intact with me and to remain faithful to You through everything, as I have always promised” (EH, 528; EHe, 499).

Hillesum’s psyche became the sensorium of transcendence with tremen­dous effect. The openness of her soul was experienced by others, since it encouraged the opening of their soul, “cosmic soul” (or world soul, Welten Seele) itself. It is hard indeed not to recognize Hillesum as a figure in her own way equivalent to those whom Voegelin calls mystic philoso­phers. She found herself in a new relation with “God” (You), discovering both her own psyche and transcendent divinity:

“As I walk through the streets I am forced to think a great deal about Your world. Think is not really the right word, it is more an attempt to plumb its mystery with a new sense. It often seems to me that I can already discern the beginning and the end of this one phase of histo­ry, already see it in perspective. And I am deeply grateful to You for leaving me so free of bitterness and hate, with so much acceptance, which is not at all the same as defeatism, and also with some under­standing for our age, strange though that may sound.” (EH, 528; EHe, 499)

Hillesum actively tried to take the stance that one should banish “hate” from one’s heart (AAZZ, 199-202). She believed that we cannot fight (the Nazi) hatred by means of hate. She especially reacted strongly to hatred against the Germans, radiated by people around her: “But indis­criminate hatred is the worst thing there is. It is a sickness of the soul. Ha­tred does not lie in my nature. If things were to come to such a pass that I began to hate people, then I would know that my soul was sick and I should have to look for a cure as quickly as possible” (EH, 19; EHe, 18).

The true order of Hillesum’s soul represented what in Voegelin is called the truth (aletheia) of human existence in-between what Hillesum herself refers to as life and death, on the border of transcendence. It was possible for Hillesum to measure both her human type of order and its social relevance. Abandoning all forms of hatred, she made it her principle that God was the measure and reference point. As she herself recognized, she was a measure of society only in so far as she was able to love.

As a Representative of Divine Truth

In this way, she became the representative of the divine truth that streamed into her at the meditative center within her. The survival, pub­lication, and worldwide dissemination of The Letters and Diaries have en­sured that just as Socrates’ dialogues survived his execution, so too Hille­sum’s experiential truth has outlasted her murder and continues to speak to us from beyond.

“There is a sort of lamentation and loving-kindness as well as a little wisdom somewhere inside me that cry to be let out. Sometimes sev­eral different dialogues run through me at the same time, images and figures, moods, a sudden Hash of something that must be my very own truth. Love for human beings that must be hard fought for. Not through politics or a party, but in myself. Still a lot of false shame to get rid of.”

“And there is God. The girl who could not kneel but learned to do so on the rough coconut matting in an untidy bathroom. Such things are more intimate even than sex. The story of the girl who grad­ually learned to kneel is something I would love to write in the fullest possible way.” (EH, 156; EHe, 148)

There is a development in the types of symbolization that occur through her diary. She learned that exposure to unseemly symbolizations arising from the alienation around her could corrupt the souls of those who were trying to keep an openness to the transcendent. Hillesum’s life was a tragic example of what can happen to an open human being in awful circumstances. She showed how difficult it was for love and truth (aletheia) to be socially effective in a distorted environment. The Nazis’ mur­derous pseudo-reality provoked enormous distress in many Jews. Hillesum felt the responsibility of representing “life” and the truth of the soul to strengthen her people. She expressed this experience in her Letters and Diaries, and through the choice to be with her people even at the cost of her own life.

Her appeal to justice was an act of will, defying the distorted Nazi law. In her writings we find a crystal clear ethical judgment against Nazi viola­tions of her family and her people. Notwithstanding this, Hillesum went toward her death in Auschwitz with love and compassion in her heart, and she also tried to persuade her friends not to give up on life but to cling to love in their hearts even as they faced death. Hillesum’s love and justice prevailed against the Nazi terror: She “left the camp singing” (EHe, 659). Etty Hillesum felt that her decision to love rather than to hate repre­sented the truth of God. She also represented her suffering as the consequence of the choice for justice and love.

The Letters and Diaries could be classified as a “history of suffering” and “passion.” Hillesum was continually preoccupied with “suffering” in her own life as well as with the suffering of mankind (AAZZ, 288-94). She searched for meaning in suffering and discovered that by accepting suffering she actually received strength. It broadened her hori­zon and enlarged her capacity to be truly human. “There is much grievous suffering in Your World, God, I feel something of it time and again in my own life. And I am grateful for this too in the final analysis: the fact that a distant echo of that suffering should sound in me and help me time and again to understand and sympathize with my fellow men a little more” (EH, 273; EHe, 262).

Hillesum not only articulated the existential meaning of suf­fering but also had a sense that she was a representative of transcendent truth. Hillesum felt when she stood in the divine presence, she did so on behalf of her people. “To help” and “help” for Hillesum was directed both ways, toward others as well as toward herself (AAZZ, 218-21). Working on herself, helping herself to mature, was essential if she ever wanted to be of any use in helping others, she believed.

She was aware that for helping others you need strength and energy, which meant connecting herself to the “flow of life, ” the “inner sources” or “undercur­rent.” Through the persuasion of love, Hillesum helped other men and women become active participants in the flow of presence. Her discovery of her psyche as a sensorium of transcendence led to a new discovery of the dignity of her fellow Jews as human beings. Oth­ers as well came into view with the discovery of the psyche as the sensorium of transcendence. By living the new truth she found within her, she brought it out into the small society around her; and with the publication and global availability of The Letters and Diaries, she has become the repre­sentative of this truth and the nucleus of an encouragement for a social or­der of love built on it.

The Event Character of the Flow

Voegelin uses the phrase “the event character of the flow” to express the fact that encounters with the Divine take place on particular occasions and find expression in the different symbols that emerge in each encounter. With this phrase, Voegelin puts us on our guard against assuming that the symbols can be understood and interpreted without referring to the spiri­tual events that gave birth to them.

There is flowing presence because while the same divine ground is met on each occasion, its impact on the human soul differs from one occasion to another. Recognition of this event char­acter helps significantly in our understanding of The Letters and Diaries.

What is taking place in them has many dimensions. On the surface, the writing is a chronological record of events over a number of years. On a deeper level, it is a story of a struggle for emotional healing. On another lev­el, it tells the story of Hillesum’s coming to terms with the fate that await­ed her.

Underlying these levels, however, and increasingly driving them, is the sequence of encounters with the presence. In each of these encounters, Hillesum grew in spiritual stature, and it is this spiritual growth that en­abled her to carry through the remarkable developments on each of these levels. The history of her own personal order emerged from the flowing pres­ence.

The Letters and Diaries symbolizes the event character of the flow as well as Hillesum’s reflective experience. Considering her life as an event, Hillesum recognized her existence as a “field” of historical tensions. As a reflec­tive person, she cannot help exploring and articulating the meaning of her existence. The structures that became visible in The Letters and Diaries mir­ror the two main tensions in Hillesum’s soul. First, she lived the ten­sion in her soul between its chaos and order before and after the event of writing. Second, she experienced the tension of her soul between time and eternity. Her soul was, not an object, but rather the sensorium of the ten­sions of her being, particularly of transcendence:

“Later on I shall have a notebook in which I shall try to write. It will be something I shall have to come to terms with alone, my private front line, and it will at times be a desperate struggle. It will be like a bloody battlefield of words fighting and struggling with one another in that notebook. And then, here and there, something may perhaps rise over that battlefield, pure as the moon, a little short story that will occasionally hover over a troubled life like a soothing smile.” (EH, 553; EHe, 523)

“To be alone” with that “battlefield of words” and to come to terms with things alone was a characteristic of Hillesum throughout her life (AAZZ, 39-44). She drew a parallel between “to be alone” and “loneliness” or “solitude.” Both have positive and negative connotations in The Letters and Diaries. Toward the end, however, she ex­perienced her aloneness as something positive and integrated it in her dai­ly life: “God and I have been left behind alone, and there is no one else left to help me . . . . It doesn’t make me feel impoverished at all, rather quite rich and peaceful: God and I have been left behind all alone” (EHe, 545).

Hillesum was deeply conscious of this immediate experience of “alone-ness” with God. The content of her experience was a loving urge and a grace­ful call to write and surrender to life. From the pole of the experience of temporal being within herself, she experienced the tension as a loving and hopeful urge toward the divine eternity. From the pole of eternal being, she experienced the tension as a call and irruption of the divine pull. For Hille­sum, the experience itself was not a psychologization of the divine as a pro­jection of her soul. The poles of temporal and eternal being were represented by the people in her life and the one God. The relations and interconnectedness among them all were mediated by Eros, the spirit of the in-between (metaxy).

The Platonic “Spiritual Woman”

In Plato’s terms, Hillesum would have been “the mortal,” “the spiritual woman,” and from time to time perhaps “the spiritually dull woman.” The sequence of these different types within Hillesum revealed the field of her personal history, which was constituted by the events of writing. After the experience of a gradual breakthrough, of dedicating herself to God, there was no way for Hillesum to return to the more “limited” ex­perience of being an unaware “mortal.” Should she have closed herself to this new order in her life, she would have become “spiritually dull” and disillusioned. By becoming a spiritual woman (spirituele vrouw) in the classical sense, she gained the criteria for judging and interpreting all that went on under the Presence.

The tensions were in the structure of her being, not in God. The divine was not an object to Hillesum but a “personal connection” or pole of con­scious response. However, she did not project her psyche beyond concrete human beings. She kept her feet on the ground. The field of her personal and historical tensions lay within her soul. She had a personal experience of being immersed in the flow of presence. In those moments, the immanence of the world and its temporality were not her primary experiences. They be­came evident when, through reflection and writing, she recognized the ten­sion between time and eternity.

Only when these poles are made into ob­jects is there a problem of reconciling them. But as Hillesum experienced them, they did not exist as objects; rather, she experienced the tension in her being as a bi-polar process, which she creatively expressed in words. This process occurred in the metaxy. Since Hillesum, a human person, also ex­isted in the world, she could relate mundane events to that process.

For Hillesum, eternal being was not an object in time, and her temporal being was not transposable into eternity. What Voegelin called flowing presence became a reality to her. She experienced “Eternal Being” in the tempo­ral flow. Her experience of the temporal flow, in which eternity was made present in the metaxy, was what Voegelin calls the event of philosophy, or flowing presence. The permanent tension of flowing presence in Hillesum’s consciousness constituted her “history,” as symbolized in The Letters and Diaries. As noted, the tension of her being was not reduced in her diaries to mere abstraction. It remained alive as Hillesum’s personal experience, and thus it influenced her outlook. This tension did not express itself in a dis­ordered multiplicity of symbols but manifested itself by traits of order. The tensions within the flow exhibit a firm direction: Hillesum speaks of sur­rendering to life. In weakness she found her strength:

“It still all comes down to the same thing: life is beautiful. And I believe in God. And I want to be there right in the thick of what people call “horror” and still be able to say: life is beautiful. And now here I lie in some corner, dizzy and feverish and unable to do a thing. When I woke up just now I was parched, reached for my glass of water, and, grateful for that one sip, thought to myself, “If I could only be there to give some of those parched thousands just one sip of water . . . .”

“Sometimes I might sit down beside someone, put an arm round a shoulder, say very little and just look into their eyes. Nothing was alien to me, not one single expression of human sorrow. Everything seemed so familiar, as if I knew it all and had gone through it all before. People said to me,” You must have nerves of steel to stand up to it.” I don’t think I have nerves of steel, far from it, but I can cer­tainly “stand up to things.” I am not afraid to look suffering straight in the eyes.”

“And at the end of each day, there was always the feeling: I love people so much. Never any bitterness about what was done to them, but always love for those who knew how to bear so much al­though nothing had prepared them for such burdens.” (EH, 578; EHe, 545-46)

The Diaries as a Means to Clarity

The focus by which Hillesum historically constituted her life’s purpose was her diary and its reflective experience. It was here that her eternal and tem­poral being encountered each other. This particular experience of writing was one among others that guided her in the field of flowing presence. She discovered, not new “objects,” but new ways of relating and ordering an already-known, distorted reality. What was known was the chaotic experience of her family and society. The context of writing replaced the older chaos with new clarity. She discovered “God” in the context of the new order dissociated from the chaos within. She developed an abiding con­cern with the transcendence of God, finding reassurance in reading Augus­tine and in the physical act of kneeling:

“I am going to read Saint Augustine again. He is so austere and so fer­vent. And so full of simple devotion in his love letters to God. Truly those are the only love letters one ought to write: love letters to God . . . . I fold my hands in a gesture that I have come to love, and in the dark I tell you silly and serious things and implore blessings upon your honest sweet head. Yes, I pray for you. Goodnight, beloved . . . .”

“I think that I can bear everything life and these times have in store for me. And when the turmoil becomes too great and I am completely at my wits’ end, then I still have my folded hands and bended knee. A posture that is not handed down from generation to generation with us Jews. I have had to learn it the hard way . . . .”

“What a strange story it really is, my story: the girl who could not kneel. Or its variation: the girl who learned to pray. That is my most intimate gesture, more intimate even than being with a man. After all, one can’t pour the whole of one’s love out over a single man, can one?” (EH, 579-80; EHe, 546-47)

Hillesum’s philosophical investigation received its impetus from the strug­gle with Nazi ideology. Her writing was not a one-time event but rather a continuing process of actualizing reflective poten­tialities for the investigation of events in her personal history. Barriers to this development did fall from time to time. Hillesum’s experience of the metaxy could not dwell exclusively on either the human or the divine pole. It would be a mistake to overemphasize the human pole of the divine-human ten­sion (tasis) in The Letters and Diaries or to over-concentrate on her mystical side, as some have done by speaking of her “sainthood.”

Hillesum and The Letters and Diaries have now and then been raised to the level of “sanctity.” Hillesum, however, had her feet firmly on the ground and did not claim any such notion for herself. She did mention Augustine as a saint (de Heilige Augustinus), but about herself she wrote: “You would actually be far better off as an out-and-out whore [straathoer; literally, ‘street prostitute’] or a real saint. You’d be at peace with yourself then be­cause you’d know exactly what you were up to. My ambivalence is shock­ing” (EH, 51; EHe, 49).

I believe that the truth is found in balancing the variety of passages to reach a portrait that catches the struggle between light and darkness that continued throughout her life. Making either attitude into an absolute does Hillesum an injustice and hinders the investigation of her uniquely personal history of interaction with flowing presence.

The “In-Between” Experienced by Etty

Current research on Hillesum’s life seems on the way to removing these obstacles. In my view, Plato’s symbol metaxy, the In-Between, is a suitable symbol to act as a tool of analysis of Hillesum’s writings. This In-Between conflict between the human and divine aspects in The Letters and Diaries is equivalently represented in the research work of Denise de Costa. She pays particular attention to the tension between time and eternity in terms of “inscribing spirituality and sexuality. ”

The center of Hillesum’s consciousness was the experience of participation (metalepsis). She was in contact with reality outside of herself, with which she was “consubstantial,” as Voegelin expresses it, but was also turned inward. Her experience of the flow of presence was In-Between the poles of her own being and the reality she experienced. The movements of divine presence were experienced in this In-Between as nudges of the spirit. Hille­sum’s experience focused on the reality of both the divine and her own hu­man presence. It is a fallacy to say that either pole of the participatory ex­perience was self-contained. Reality became luminous (intelligible) to itself in Hillesum’s human consciousness. On Monday, October 12, 1942, she reflects with greater awareness on the order of the soul:

“The soul has a different age from that recorded in the register of births and deaths. At your birth, the soul already has an age that never changes. One can be born with a twelve-year-old soul, and when one is eighty, that soul is still twelve years old and no older. One can also be born with a thousand-year-old soul, and one can tell that some twelve-year-old children have thousand-year-old souls. I believe the soul is that part of man that he is least aware of, particularly the West European, for I think that Orientals “live” their souls much more ful­ly. We Westerners do not really know what to do with them; indeed, we are ashamed of our souls as if they were something immoral. “Soul” is quite different from what we call “heart.” There are plenty of peo­ple who have lot of “heart” but very little soul.” (EH, 581; EHe, 548)

For Hillesum, the discovery of “order” meant the attainment of insight into the overall ordered structure of reality as experienced through her writing and through her attunement to that wider “cosmic” order. Her knowledge of order went back to her early life history, as did the experiences of disorder and chaos (both in the family and later in the breakdown of so­ciety), which produced moments of extreme alienation. Her interior en­counters with the flowing presence taught her to see the elements of disorder in herself as resulting from withdrawal from the tension toward the divine ground, a turning away from her reasonableness.

Hillesum did not use her reasoning powers to justify those moments of alienation but tried to deal with them as they occurred. She avoided the possibility of taking her state of alienation as the basis for understanding her reality and kept away from such “creations” of the mind that could have usurped the place of the di­vine. Hillesum did not arrive at Nietzsche’s “death of Cod.” Her interpre­tations were no longer “despair” but were open to the reality of the ground (arche). She did not try to create a justifying system to falsify reality, as the Nazis did with their creed of National Socialism.

Longing for a Simple Life

Hillesum did not produce a set of doctrines that entailed the deforma­tion of existence but instead compiled a collection of letters and diaries that expressed her experience. She did not lose contact with her surrounding re­ality, including the divine reality, nor as a writer did she become a victim of the degeneration of language.

Hillesum had a basic urge to live simply (AAZZ, 136-40). Although the attractions toward a simple life and “simplicity” were wildly contradicted by her strong feelings and moods, she fought and struggled hard to fulfill her desire for “simplicity.” She would love “just to be alone, to live and breathe lying snug­ly in eternity, in total simplicity” (EHe, 120). To reach “simplicity, ” she had to maneuver through all the gray areas and complications she found with­in herself.

“To live simply” for her was to finally let go of words by going beyond them. According to her, we must forget our ‘big words,’ beginning with ‘God’ and ending with ‘Death.’ Instead of talk­ing too much about ‘God’ with words, she desired to be immersed in the life of God, what she termed flowing ‘spring water:’ ‘We must become as simple as pure spring water. Above all, a little less wordy'” (EHe, 488).

 

References

EH: Etty: De nagelaten geschriften van Etty Hillesum 1941-1943, ed. Klaas A. D. Smelik

EHe: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943, ed. Klaas A. D. Smelik, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans

AAZZ: Van Aandacht en Adem tot Ziel en Zin: Honderd woorden uit het levenbeschouwend idioom van Etty Hillesum, by Ton Jorna and Denise de Costa

 

This excerpt is from Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis (University of Missouri, 200).

Avatar photo

Meins G.S. Coetsier is visiting scholar at the Loyola Institute and an ordained deacon and prison chaplain. He studied philosophy at The Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy and was awarded doctorate degrees from Ghent University in Philosophy (2008) and Comparative Science of Culture (2012), and from Trinity College Dublin in Theology (2021).

Back To Top