Erin Plunkett’s essay “Temporal Houses, Eternal Mysteries: Leaving the Faith, Seeking Faith” is a wonderful biographical extension of something Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil (and others, like Christian Wiman, who has often quoted both of these) were getting at when they spoke of, in Weil’s description, a second kind, or a second aspect, of atheism.

Here’s Bonhoeffer, writing to his friend Eberhard Bethge, April 30th, 1944:

I often wonder why my “Christian instinct” frequently draws me more toward nonreligious people than toward the religious, and I am sure it’s not with missionary intent; instead, I’d almost call it a “brotherly” instinct.

I wonder whenever I read that letter whether Bonhoeffer thought of scratching out the “almost.” He goes on to say that the use of religious terminology, and even the naming of God, has become a source of confusion and anxiety for him — when it is done among religious people.

Here’s Weil:

A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God does not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion.

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

[…]

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense atheism is a purification.

My own experience is not as extreme as Plunketts’s, but I wrote a little about my experience with Bonhoeffer’s “almost-brotherhood of secularity” a few years ago. I’m probably due for an update to this thinking, but I don’t think I’ve yet gotten very far beyond this “poem, prose, & praise” from the year before.

That said, when I hear stories like the one I heard a couple months ago about a devout Muslim girl who moved closer to some Christians just to have some friends who actually believe in something, I get that too. And I don’t find these impulses contradictory.