Etty Hillesum and the Light of Faith: A Voegelinian Analysis

MEINS G. S. COETSIER is a researcher at the Etty
Hillesum Research Center at Ghent University and
author of Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence
(University of Missouri Press, 2008).

Throughout history, the symbol “God”
has been used or rather misused for
human purposes and for obscure immanent
and ideological projects,¹ till the moment
came that even “God” was announced
“dead.” Philosopher and postmodernism’s²
prophet Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche³ was
convinced: we killed God! The “God is
dead” statement in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft,⁴
published in 1882, is the single most-quoted
line expressing his concern for the development
of Western society in the modern age.
Modern science and the increasing secularization
of the West have, according to Nietzsche,
effectively “killed” the (Judeo-) Christian
God. The basis for meaning and value which
our civilization has known for thousands of
years is now literally under threat.

After the atrocities of 9/11 and in light of
recent intellectual debates on religion, as in
Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion,⁵ we
are not only facing global theoretical clashes
between various groups concerning the God
question, but will have to face up to its huge
practical implications, especially implementing
laws and decrees on a political level. The
divide in the West between those who accept
and believe in divine reality and those who
do not and the schism between religious
extremists using violence and the common
religious citizen, is an existential, practical,
and attitudinal, as well as an intellectual,
problem.

The debates that explore religion or spirituality,
as expressed in global book sales, have
grown by more than fifty percent in the past
three years. According to online retailer
Amazon, the “God-boom” in the new millennium
surpasses the rise in sales of books in
categories such as history, which have grown
by thirty-eight percent, and politics, up by
thirty percent, confirming that religion has
become a pivotal topic in the early twentyfirst
century.⁶

Since our human quest for knowledge still
seems to push us towards borders of transcendence,
one wonders: Has “God” or the
Biblical “I AM WHO I AM” really been put
to death in global consciousness? Or are we
just sleeping? Contemporary atheists Richard
Dawkins and Daniel Dennett would go
further than Nietzsche (who still believed that
there was a God—but He was dead) by
claiming that science has proven God’s existence
false. They firmly believe that science
has provided other truths to take its place.
The question is, can any scientific data fulfill
our spiritual cravings for meaning and happiness?
Do we need scientific “proof” in
order to be “sure” of divine reality? From a
philosophical angle, very little can be said
about religion and science other than that
religion, or perhaps more accurately “theology,”
⁷ and science are dealing with different
subject-matter, and so each should respect
the other’s disciplinary boundaries.

This essay attempts to go beyond discussions
on the existence of God. I will not
provide arguments for or against a deity,
neither will I attack or refute the theistic,
agnostic, or atheistic positions. What I hope
to do is to show that a very personal experience⁸
and struggle with life can actually bring
one to the point of acknowledging that there
is “God” or “You.” Seeking and searching
for order is the essence of the life and writings
of the Dutch thinker and mystic⁹ Etty
Hillesum. At the heart of her search and her
personal experience of the events of WWII,
is an encounter with “God,” as a “Heaven in
Hell.”

Voegelin’s philosophy of experience and
symbolization can help us to comprehend the
core development she underwent and her
personal choices more deeply. The articulated
experiences of this young woman in her
Letters and Diaries¹⁰ and her loving response
to and personal rediscovery of “God” make
a significant contribution to bringing order
to the present confusion in society, religion,
and culture.¹¹

Voegelin and Hillesum

The lives of Etty Hillesum and Eric Voegelin
were extraordinary adventures in reflection,
courageous human and philosophical responses
to a uniquely barbaric period of
history. Voegelin tried to find an answer to
this central German experiential problem:
What went wrong that allowed Adolf Hitler
to rise to power?¹² How could we, as thinking
human beings, have allowed these atrocities
to take place? Hillesum, who had literally
been chased by anti-Semitism and Nazism
through Europe, lived the consequences.
Both Voegelin and Hillesum were painfully
aware of Europe’s need for radical spiritual
reform. They were not interested in seeking
an easy way out of their struggle, which
emerged in the midst of a social collapse into
lethal disorder. The meaning of Etty
Hillesum’s and Voegelin’s work¹³ is best
articulated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “We
shall have to ‘rediscover our cultural treasures
and values’ not by erudition, not by scientific
accomplishment, but by our form of spiritual
conduct, by laying aside our material wellbeing
and, if the worse comes to the worst,
our lives.”¹⁴ Perhaps the life, writings, and
deliberate voluntary sacrifice of Etty Hillesum
in staying with “her people” through the
most horrific circumstances¹⁵ is such an example
of passing through what Solzhenitsyn
calls a “spiritual filter,” the only cure for
society’s ills.

This Jewish woman, who read so deeply
the signs of her times, still has something to
teach us about how to read the signs of ours,
because her personal rediscovery of true
interior religious experience with its “no” to
violence is so timely. Hillesum’s Letters and
Diaries mirror current issues of epidemic
family dysfunction, sexual revolution, emotional
and interpersonal distress, and of disorientation,
confusion, and despair. Her
writings give us a possible response to the
ongoing modern, and now post-modern,
crisis of values and identity in the West and
elsewhere. Hillesum articulates persuasively
the values of love and compassion on the basis
of which it is possible for individuals, groups,
and communities with different values and
backgrounds, different attitudes towards religion,
and a range of ethnic origins to come
together in mutual respect and form a functioning,
successful society and state.

Etty Hillesum

Etty Hillesum was born in the Netherlands in
1914 and so was caught up in the unfolding
of a systematic genocide that changed her
from a young Dutch woman into a Jewish
target for ideological mass murder. She was
imprisoned in Camp Westerbork in the
Netherlands and sent from there on to death
in Auschwitz at twenty-nine years of age.

Hillesum lived with a pen in her hand: she
wrote many diaries and letters. In her writings,
she tried to find a sense of meaning and
order in her life and to come to terms with
decisions to be made.¹⁶ Ten of Hillesum’s
diaries have survived. Others were lost,
among them those she kept in Camp
Westerbork. She also wrote numerous letters
to friends and acquaintances; these describe
her daily experiences, activities, hopes, and
fears. Her writings, which fill almost six
hundred pages of closely-printed diary entries
and more than one hundred pages of
letters, recount both her history and her
personal reflection on her life. In them we
discover a “mysticism of connectedness,” an
awareness of the divine presence. Hillesum’s
human and artistic attempt to find order and
meaning in her daily life anticipates the
words of the Russian filmmaker Andrey
Tarkovsky: “When someone who doesn’t
know how to swim is thrown into the water,
instinct tells his body what movements will
save him. The artist, too, is driven by a kind
of instinct, and his work furthers man’s
search for what is eternal, transcendent, divine—
often in spite of the sinfulness of the
poet himself.”¹⁷ Hillesum learned to kneel
and prayed and dedicated her hand to “God”
in order to write. It was this deep experience
expressed in her writings that brought a
significant order within herself towards God.

Because Voegelin and Hillesum both made
an attempt to communicate the Mystery
experienced during a difficult period in
history and entered the universal community
of the Spirit, Voegelin’s philosophy of experience
and symbolization enables us to reenact
Hillesum’s writings imaginatively, to
undergo something like the breakthrough
that she achieved. Her experience, I would
suggest, may have the potential to speak to a
greater number of people precisely because it
unfolds on a basic human level. It starts as a
confused and troubled young modern
woman’s diary, reflecting on the turmoil and
longings of her life,¹⁸ and then suddenly,
without warning, it shifts gear. Etty Hillesum
enters into a dialogue¹⁹ with a Presence she
found in the centre of her consciousness.
Where she has gone first, I suspect, many
likeminded others may follow.

Hell

It is surely not an exaggeration to describe
Etty Hillesum’s life as living in hell. She
moved from family dysfunction, through
emotional, sexual, and interpersonal²⁰
struggles for healing, only to be engulfed in
the waves of Nazi genocide sweeping across
Europe. Hillesum’s “Hell” had developed
from a psychological, ethical, and spiritual
distress caused by the instability of her family
environment. Etty like the whole Hillesum
family was chaotic; they lived a secular,
disordered, and hectic life. Her struggle to
overcome and heal this unbalanced life was a
primary motivation in her self-exploration.

As every new decree from the Nazis increased
the isolation of Jews, an ideological
manmade hell developed around her. Oscillating
between high exaltation and the deep
gloom of depression, Etty Hillesum felt the
urge to do something and started a counterattack
on paper. She kept a diary in an attempt
to overcome not only her depression and other
psychosomatic symptoms, but also the Hell
created in the atmosphere of genocide.

Hillesum experienced, what Voegelin
would term “deformed reality” or “deformation,”
the destruction of the order of the
soul, or the order of society, which should be
“formed” by (i.e., should receive its vital
principle from) the love of the transcendent
ground inherent in the fundamental tension
(tasis) of existence. While struggling with the
experience of political turmoil, fear, and the
inner and outer chaos of the Second World
War, Etty Hillesum fought against the “closure”
of her soul (ziel) through an ongoing
writing (schrijven) towards truth (aletheia). In
the Diaries, she described her experiences as
“Mortal fear in every fiber,” a “complete
collapse,” “lack of self-confidence,” “aversion,”
“panic,” “relapsing into,” what she
terms, as her own “Dark Ages” (EH, 148;
EHe, 141). This “spiritual constipation” (EH,
6; EHe, 6) could have ended up in a form of
“closed existence.” I am using Voegelin’s
term “closed existence” to refer to the mode
of “chaos” in Etty’s life (leven), in which
there were internal impediments to a free
flow of truth (aletheia) into consciousness
and to the pull of the transcendent.

To understand Hillesum’s search we could
recall Voegelin’s account of the origin of
philosophy in an act of resistance by a strong,
intellectual, and spiritually sensitive soul to
socially compelling untruth sensed as existentially
deformative. Like Voegelin, Hillesum
tried to rejuvenate the order that had been
eclipsed and distorted by Nazi rule. Voegelin,
who analyzed socially deformative processes
in his essay “The Eclipse of Reality,”²¹ set out
a detailed analysis of the different ways in
which man often shrinks or “contracts” himself
into a “deformed” being out of touch
with true humanity and the world. “Eclipse”
and “eclipsed” or “closed existence” are
Voegelin’s terms for the experience of an
often voluntary, but often also involuntarily
absorbed, perverse closure of consciousness
against reality. Martin Buber, who had also
experienced the rise of Nazism in Germany
in the early thirties, expressed this closure in
equivalent²² symbols:

“Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God—
such indeed is the character of the historic hour
through which the world is passing. But it is not
a process which can be adequately accounted for
by instancing the changes that have taken place in
man’s spirit. An eclipse of the sun is something
that occurs between the sun and our eyes, not in
the sun itself. Nor does philosophy consider us
blind to God. Philosophy holds that we lack today
only the spiritual orientation which can make
possible a reappearance “of God and the gods,” a
new procession of sublime images. But when, as
in this instance, something is taking place between
heaven and earth, one misses everything
when one insists on discovering within earthly
thought the power that unveils the mystery. He
who refuses to submit himself to the effective
reality of transcendence as such—our vis-à-vis—
contributes to the human responsibility for the
eclipse.”²³

Like Voegelin and Buber, Etty Hillesum
was moved by the confusion of the times and
responded by entering into a search for
order. Resisting the Zeitgeist of disorder, she
looked for a way to deal with her internal
chaos and to give new meaning to a life that
was in danger of becoming totally meaningless.
Hillesum actively tried to take the stance
that one should banish “hate” (haat) from
one’s heart. She believed that we cannot fight
Nazi hatred by means of hate. She especially
reacted strongly to hatred, radiated by people
around her, against the Germans: “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).

Voegelin, who utilized the Greek symbol
nosos (nosema) as used by Aeschylus and
Plato²⁴ to symbolize the experience of “sickness,”
“madness,” “nosemates adikas“: the
“sickness of injustice” saw that the cure for
such disease lies in the rediscovery of the
order of the soul. In Westerbork, Hillesum
faced the “sickness of injustice,” a Nazi
hatred with no remorse. She needed the
fullness of language to accept the void and
darkness that finally awaited her: “If I were
to say that I was in hell that night, what would
I really be telling you? I caught myself saying
it aloud in the night, aloud to myself and
quite soberly, ‘So that’s what hell is like'”
(EH, 689; EHe, 646).

Heaven

Etty Hillesum’s experience of “closure” or
“chaos” was in contrast to her experience of
“open existence,” when she was living more
“flowingly” (EHe, 6) or “fließender,” (EH, 6)
finding “order” and “form” in her chaos.
For Voegelin, “open existence” symbolized
the mode of existence in which consciousness
was consistently and unreservedly oriented
towards truth (aletheia) and towards the transcendent
pole of the tension of existence or,
in Hillesum’s own terminology, when things
would “melodiously” roll from “God’s hand”
(EH, 7; EHe, 7). She felt moved or drawn
(helkein) not only by God and people, but by
life (leven) itself. She had a desire (verlangen)
to escape her ignorance (agnoia, amathia) by
questioning (vragen) her experience and using
language to express it. For the many
burning “questions” (vragen) concerning the
“suffering of Mankind,” she endlessly searched
for an answer:

I feel like a small battlefield, in which the problems,
or some of the problems, of our time are
being fought out. All one can hope to do is to keep
oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a
battlefield. After all, the problems must be accommodated,
have somewhere to struggle, and
come to rest, and we, poor little humans, must put
our inner space at their service and not run away.
In that respect, I am probably very hospitable;
mine is often an exceedingly bloody battlefield,
and dreadful fatigue and splitting headaches are
the toll I have to pay. Still, now I am myself once
again Etty Hillesum, an industrious student in a
friendly room with books and a vase full of oxeye
daisies. I am flowing again in my own narrow
riverbed, and my desperate involvement with
“Mankind,” “World History,” and “Suffering”
has subsided. And that’s as it should be, otherwise
one might go mad. One ought not to lose oneself
forever in the great questions, one cannot always
be a battlefield, one must, time and again, feel
one’s own small boundaries within which one
goes on living one’s own small life conscientiously
and consciously, forever ripened and deepened
by one’s experiences during the almost
“impersonal” moments of contact with mankind
as a whole. (EH, 67, EHe, 63)

Having been robbed of her nationality,
like her Dutch contemporary Anne Frank,
Hillesum entered the land of writing, where
she could grow and develop and freely express
her inner feelings without being
hemmed in by restrictive measures. What
starts out as a diary of self-analysis undertaken
for therapeutic reasons begins to break
out into an interior conversation with a
transcendent Other encountered as a Presence
immanent within the Center (Centrum)
of her inmost being. In shockingly radiant
pages, we witness the flowering of this transcendent
dialogue into a remarkable, outof-
place serenity, altruism, and even forgiveness.
With a sharp consciousness of being
an Everywoman, Hillesum discovered
and lived out a paradigmatic response to the
ideological mass-murder she could see was
soon to devour her. She kept herself alive by
writing and managed to transform her exile
into a “nomadic consciousness,” creating
her “Heaven” wherever she was:

I am ready for everything, for anywhere on this
earth, wherever God may send me, and I am
ready to bear witness in any situation and unto
death that life is beautiful and meaningful and that
it is not God’s fault that things are as they are at
present, but our own. We have been granted every
opportunity to enter every paradise, but we still
have to learn to handle the opportunities. It is as
if I shed further burdens from moment to moment,
as if all the divisions there now are between
men and nations are being removed for me. There
are moments when I can see right through life and
the human heart, when I understand more and
more and become calmer and calmer and am filled
with a faith in God that has grown so quickly
inside me that it frightened me at first but has now
become inseparable from me. (EH, 508; EHe,
480-481)

Hillesum did not know what would happen
to her in the next week or even the next
afternoon. Instead of pretending to know
what the future held, she returned repeatedly
to the source within herself of the encounter
with “God.” Gradually, this encounter with
the divine transvalued the inner horizon
from which she interpreted and responded to
what was happening to and around her. In
the Letters and Diaries we can follow Hillesum
refusing to allow herself to become terrified
and disoriented by the fate that was rushing
towards her.

She was achingly conscious of what it
meant to be a human person and at the same
time, experiencing the polar opposite of that,
a totalitarian ideology²⁵ committed to extinguishing
individuality. Yet Etty Hillesum
adopted a stance towards this that was atypical:
she made a clear-eyed decision not to
respond to this totalitarian²⁶ system by seeking
to escape from it or to oppose or resist it
by force of arms. Although not “practicing”
or even “believing” in any conventionally
recognizable sense, she nonetheless chose to
stay with “her people,” knowing that she was
going to be murdered.

Hillesum maintained an equanimity, a
sense of the goodness of life and being alive,
and an attitude of other-centered support.
She kept a solidarity that evokes wonder
every time one reads her writings. Her inner
peace and positive outlook, her concern for
those around her, are the existence in truth,
the new order in her life that radiated from
the inner meetings between her soul and the
presence she found there.

It still all comes down to the same thing: life is
beautiful [het leven is mooi]. 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, 545-546)

In her experienced Hell, surprisingly
enough, Etty Hillesum found her Heaven.
Amidst atrocity she still discovered Beauty.
Faced with a fearful, “Nazi-eclipsed,” reality,
she fearlessly attuned herself to “the flow
of life” (stroom van leven) and was utterly alert
to mystery. Living in hope, while the world
around her was breaking down, she clung to
a faith in the goodness of humanity. Hillesum,
not wanting to drift away, did not retreat
from the emerging breakthrough in her
consciousness. The differentiation, evoked
through the process of writing, gave structure
to her personal history and was parallel
to what Voegelin described as the “philosopher,”
Plato’s spiritual man (daimonios aner)
or Aristotle’s²⁷ mature human being. Etty
Hillesum’s meditation and writing evoked a
response in her to the divine appeal that made
her reach out to others.²⁸ This accomplishment
with divine help, this gradual inward
conversion or periagogé, a cognitive and moral
reorientation toward the True and the Good
as such, literally turned her around to a life
fully committed to love for her fellow human
beings. Her act of writing and her silent
meditation helped her to tap into an area
within herself that in society had mainly
vanished. Like Plato and Aristotle she realized
intuitively that there was something
within her, which the Greeks called Nous or
reason,²⁹ that evoked in her a search for order
and clarity. Hillesum received “a greater
awareness” and hence easier access to her
“inner sources” (innerlijke [oer-] bronnen).

The often sudden and significant “bursts”
of personal development seem to have taken
place in her at all levels over the short period
covered in her writings. In this way the
writings of Etty Hillesum take their place
alongside the other modern philosophies that
seek the meaning of symbols in the experiences
which motivated and engendered them,
and which they were forged to articulate. It
is indeed hard not to recognize Hillesum as a
figure in her own way equivalent to those
whom Voegelin calls mystic philosophers.

A key difference between Hillesum and
many of her contemporaries who had lived
through the same terrible historical events is
her personal rediscovery of an existential
interior openness to the divine. In only a few
years, her writings chart a remarkable transformation.
Exiled by the times she lived in,
she testified to an experience of a “presence,”
a “Heaven in Hell,” which she discovered in
the course of her search for a solid ground of
existence.

She found herself in a new relation with
“God” (“You”), discovering both her own
psyche and transcendent divinity. The true
order of Etty Hillesum’s soul (ziel) represented
what Voegelin termed the truth
(aletheia) of human existence in between
what Hillesum herself refers to as life (leven)
and death (dood) 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 capable of love
(liefde). In this way she became the representative
of the divine truth that streamed into her
at the meditative Center (Centrum) 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.

Etty Hillesum, like Eric Voegelin, has
something to offer the search for political
order in our new millennium: a recovery of
the lost foundations of society and the lost
center of the person. Hillesum inspires us to
see that glimpse of heaven in our personal
experiences, enabling us to hold onto our
humanity³⁰ in any man-made hell and take
up the long work of resistance to it, through
an attunement to the “divine presence,”
Your Heaven!

NOTES

1. Voegelin has critiqued such thinkers as Marx and
   Hegel for creating systems by which transcendent reality
   and human experience are ideologically deconstructed,
   denied, or recreated and developed into an immanent
   framework. Cf. Eric Voegelin, “On Hegel: A Study in
   Sorcery” in Studium Generale 24, pp. 335-368. See also
   Published Essays 1966-1985, edited with an introduction
   by Ellis Sandoz, pp. 213-55. Vol. 12 of The Collected
   Works of Eric Voegelin (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State
   University Press, 1990); Ann T. Lawlor, Eric Voegelin’s
   Diagnosis of the Focus on World-Immanent Reality Consequent
   Upon the Atrophy of Transcendent Experience among Eighteenth
   and Nineteenth Century Thinkers, thesis, University
   College Dublin, 1992.

2. For an overview on
   postmodernism see After Philosophy: End or Transformation?,
   ed. K. Baynes, J. Bohman, and T. McCarthy
   (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987); Michael Paul Gallagher,
   S.J., Clashing Symbols: An Introduction to Faith and Culture
   (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997).

3. For
   Nietzsche see also: No. 230, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, in
   Werke VII ( Leipzig: 1903); The Gay Science, translation
   by Walter Kaufmann ( New York: Vintage, 1974); Beyond
   Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan (Chicago:
   1955); Also sprach Zarathustra, in Werke VI (Leipzig: 1904);
   Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translation by Walter Kaufmann
   (New York: Penguin, 1978); The Will to Power, translation
   by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967).

4. The Gay Science, paragraphs: 108, 125, 343.
5. Richard
   Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press,
   2006). In David Smith, “Believe it or not: the sceptics beat
   God in bestseller battle,” in The Observer, (Sunday August
   12, 2007), we read that one of the most popular “religious”
   books in recent times, according to Amazon, is
   The God Delusion, an anti-faith polemic by Prof. Dr.
   Richard Dawkins. Second is God is Not Great: How
   Religion Poisons Everything, another broadside at holy
   citadels, by the journalist Christopher Hitchens. Following
   Amazon statistics, the pope, being a firm spokesperson
   for a theistic worldview, takes third place with his
   popular book Jesus of Nazareth, followed by Paulo
   Coelho’s The Alchemist and a riposte to Dawkins entitled
   The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the
   Denial of the Divine by Alister and Joanna McGrath. It has
   been reported that The God Delusion, ironically enough,
   has driven the growth of the category “religion.” The
   publication of The God Delusion, in 2006, also prompted
   a 120 percent increase in sales of the Bible. Amy Worth,
   books manager at Amazon, said: “The God Delusion has
   been one of the bestselling books of the past year. People
   are interested in the debate it has sparked. There are 524
   readers’ comments on our site. The comments are both
   pro and against, and it’s clear that religious people are
   buying it.” Other books challenging religion have
   included Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and A.C.
   Grayling’s Against All Gods.

6. David Smith, “Believe it
   or not: the sceptics beat God in bestseller battle.”

7. For
   theology and Etty Hillesum see the recent Ph.D. dissertation
   of the Canadian philosopher Alexandra Pleshoyano
   who defended her work on November 30, 2007 at the
   Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands with
   the title: L’amour comme “seule solution”: Une herméneutique
   théologique au coeur du mal. She analyses the significance of
   Etty Hillesum for theology as well as her possible
   influence.

8. For Eric Voegelin on religious experience
   see Glenn Hughes, The Politics of the Soul: Eric Voegelin on
   Religious Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
   Littlefield, 1999) and Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of
   Eric Voegelin (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri
   Press, 1993).

9. William A. Barry, S.J., “Mysticism in
   Hell,” in God’s Passionate Desire and Our Response (Notre
   Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1993), 81-89.

10. Etty: De
    nagelaten geschriften van Etty Hillesum 1941-1943, ed.
    Klaas A. D. Smelik (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 1986)
    and Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-
    1943, ed. Klaas A. D. Smelik, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans
    (Ottawa, ON: Novalis Saint Paul University — William B.
    Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002). Abbreviations
    are: “EH” and “Ehe.”

11. For faith and culture see Eric
    Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” in Jesus and Man’s
    Hope, vol. 2, edited with an introduction by Donald G.
    Miller and Dikran Y. Hadidian (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh
    Theological Seminary Press, 1971), 59-101. See
    also Published Essays 1966-1985, edited with an introduction
    by Ellis Sandoz, Vol. 12 of The Collected Works
    of Eric Voegelin (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State
    University Press, 1990), 172-212. Available from the
    University of Missouri Press.

12. Cf. Eric Voegelin,
    Hitler and the Germans, Vol. 31 of The Collected Works of
    Eric Voegelin, trans. and ed. Brendan Purcell and Detlev
    Clemens (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press,
    1999), 51-69.

13. Meins G. S. Coetsier, Etty Hillesum and
    The Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis (Columbia,
    MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008).

14. Alexander
    Solzhenitsyn, “The Smatterers,” in From Under the Rubble
    (Fontana Collins: 1976), 272-73.

15. D. Pollefeyt, “The
    Trauma of the Holocaust as a Central Challenge of
    Levinas’ Ethical and Theological Thought”, in Marcia L.
    Littell, E. Geldbach & G.J. Colijn (red.), The Holocaust:
    Remembering for the Future II on CD-ROM. Erinnerung an
    die Zukunft: Vom Vorurteil zur Vernichtung? Analysen und
    Strategien gegen Totalitarismus, Antisemitismus, Fremdenangst
    und Ausländerfeindlichkeit (Papers presented at the
    International Annual Scholars’ Conference held in
    Berlin, 13-17 May, 1994), Stamford (Connecticut), Vista
    InterMedia Corporation, 1996.

16. See Ria van den
    Brandt & Klaas A.D. Smelik (red.), Etty Hillesum in facetten
    (Budel: Damon, 2003); Ria van den Brandt, Denken met
    Etty Hillesum (Zoetermeer: Meinema, 2006); Klaas A.D.
    Smelik, “Het godsbeeld bij Etty Hillesum,” Rondom het
    Woord 26 (1984), nr. 2, 82-88; idem, “Geen heilige maar
    een begenadigd schrijfster,” Werkschrift 14 (1994), nr. 1,
    26-32.; idem, “Volledig leven tot de laatste ademtocht:
    Etty Hillesum, heilige of martelares?,” VolZin 3 (2004),
    nr. 2, 28-32.

17. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time:
    Reflections on the Cinema (The Great Russian Filmmaker
    Discusses His Art), translated from the Russian by Kitty
    Huntler-Blair. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
    1986), 239.

18. Jos Snijders, Ik heb zo lief: De menselijke en
    gelovige groei van Etty Hillesum (Den Bosch, KBS &
    Averbode, Altiora, 1993).

19. See also Alphonsus de
    Liguori, How to Converse Continually and Familiarly with
    God, translated by L. X. Aubin, C.SS.R. (Boston: St Paul
    Editions, 1981).

20. Denise de Costa, Anne Frank & Etty
    Hillesum: Spiritualiteit, Schrijverschap, Seksualiteit
    (Amsterdam: Balans, 1996); English edition: Anne Frank
    and Etty Hillesum: Inscribing Spirituality and Sexuality (New
    Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

21. Eric
    Voegelin, “The Eclipse of Reality,” in The Collected
    Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 28, “What is History?” and
    Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck
    and Paul Caringella (Columbia, MO: University of
    Missouri Press, 1999), 111. See also Martin Buber,
    Gottesfinsternis: Betrachtungen zur Beziehung zwischen Religion
    und Philosophie (Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1953).

22. For Equivalence see Eric Voegelin, “Equivalences of
    Experience and Symbolisation in History,” in Eternità e
    Storia: I valori permanenti nel divenire storico, edited with an
    introduction by Luigi Pareyson (Florence: Vallecchi.,
    1970), 215-34. Reprinted in Philosophical Studies (National
    University Ireland) 28 (1981): 88-103. See also
    Published Essays 1966-1985, edited with an introduction
    by Ellis Sandoz, Vol. 12 of The Collected Works of Eric
    Voegelin (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University
    Press, 1990), 115-33. Available from Columbia, MO:
    University of Missouri Press, 1999.

23. Martin Buber,
    Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and
    Philosophy (New York: Humanity Books, 1988).

24. Plato, Complete Works, edited, with Introduction and
    Notes, by John M. Cooper, Associate Editor D.S.
    Hutchinson (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing
    Company, 1997); Platon, Gorgias in Oeuvres,
    Littérature grecque ancienne – “Les Grecs” Introduction,
    traduction, commentaire (Athènes: Kaktos, 1992).

25. David J. Walsh, After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual
    Foundations of Freedom (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
    University of America Press, 1990). For Walsh, see also
    The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Columbia, MO: University
    of Missouri Press, 1997).

26. Hannah Arendt, The Origins
    of Totalitarianism (New York: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich,
    1968).

27. J. L. Ackrill, A New Aristotle Reader (Oxford:
    Clarendon Press, 1987); Eric Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle
    in Vol. 3 of Order and History, ed. Dante Germino, Vol.
    16 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia, MO:
    University of Missouri Press, 2000).

28. Emmanuel
    Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, (The Hague,
    Nijhoff, 1968). In English: Totality and Infinity, translation
    by A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
    1969).

29. Eric Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience,”
    Southern Review, N.S. 10, no 2 (1974): 237-64. In
    Anamnesis, translated and edited by Gerhart Niemeyer,
    (Notre Dame, IN and London: University of Notre
    Dame Press, 1978), 89-115. See also Published Essays 1966-
    1985, edited with an introduction by Ellis Sandoz, Vol.
    12 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Baton Rouge,
    LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 265-91.
    Available from University of Missouri Press.

30. Eric
    Voegelin, The Drama of Humanity, three speeches: “Man
    in the Cosmos”; “The Revolt of Man”; “The Epiphany
    of Man.” Atlanta, Georgia: Walter Turner Candler
    Lectures, Emory University (April 1967), 17-20. See also
    The Drama of Humanity and other Miscellaneous Papers 1939-
    1985, edited with an introduction by William Petropulos
    and Gilbert Weiss, Vol. 33 of The Collected Works of Eric
    Voegelin (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press,
    2004). See also Brendan Purcell, The Drama of Humanity:
    Towards a Philosophy of Humanity in History (Frankfurt am-
    Main: Peter Lang, 1996).