Children of God: The Child as Source of Theological Anthropology [1 ed.] 1138118613, 9781138118614

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Children of God The Child as Source of Theological Anthropology

Edmund Newey

Children of God

For my parents Brian Newey and Margaret Newey (1943–1996) in gratitude and love

Children of God

The Child as Source of Theological Anthropology

Edmund Newey Diocese of Birmingham, UK

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Edmund Newey 2012 Edmund Newey has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Newey, Edmund. Children of God : the child as source of theological anthropology. 1. Theological anthropology--Christianity--History of doctrines. 2. Children--Religious aspects--Christianity. 3. Traherne, Thomas, d. 1674. 4. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778. 5. Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 1768-1834. 6. Peguy, Charles, 1873-1914. I. Title 270'.083-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Newey, Edmund. Children of God : the child as source of theological anthropology / Edmund Newey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3410-8 (hbk) 1. Children--Religious aspects--Christianity. 2. Theological anthropology--Christianity. I. Title. BT705.N49 2013 233--dc23 ISBN 9781409434108 (hbk) ISBN 9781315571515 (ebk)

Contents Note on Translations   Acknowledgements   List of Abbreviations  

vii ix xi

1

Introduction   Theological Anthropologies of the Child   Methodology   Jean-Yves Lacoste   A Brief Theological History of the Child   Outline of the Project   Structure of the Book  

1 2 5 7 9 13 15

2

‘God made Man Greater when He made Him less’: Traherne’s Iconic Child   Rediscovering Traherne   ‘Communicating most Enriching Truths’   ‘Sin! O only fatal Woe’   Traherne’s Orthodoxy   ‘The Maner is […] of greatest Concernment’   Conclusion  

19 20 25 28 31 36 38

3

‘Sense Deified’: Humanity in Divinity   Introduction   ‘Enjoying the World’: Augustine’s uti/frui Distinction Reconfigured  Self-love and the Self in Relation   The First and Second Adam: Anthropology and Christology   ‘Humanity […] the Handmaid of true Divinity’   Conclusion  

39 39 39 44 48 51 56

4

‘L’Élève de la nature’: The Rousseauvian Shift   Introduction   The Question of Genre   ‘Un art […] d’être ignorant’    Immediacy and Mediation   Émile and the Tutor   Conclusion  

61 61 63 66 72 76 79

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vi

5

‘Die reine Offenbarung des Göttlichen’: Who is Schleiermacher’s Child?   Introduction   Schleiermacher and Romanticism   Evoking a Mood: Die Weihnachtsfeier   Childhood and Gender   Christology or Anthropology?   Sophiology   Conclusion  

87 87 88 92 96 101 105 109

6

‘Einheimisch’ or ‘Neugeboren’?: The Whereabouts of Schleiermacher’s Child   Introduction   Hermeneutics and the Child   Mediation, Immediacy and Incarnation   Ambiguities   Conclusion  

113 113 114 119 128 130

7

‘La théologie détendue’: Péguy’s Liturgical Child   Introduction   The Child as Theological Figure   Incarnation   Typology   Conclusion  

133 133 135 142 148 155

8

‘L’Éternel dans le temporel’: The Child as Icon of Hope   Introduction   ‘Modernism’ and ‘Anti-modernism’   Henri Bergson   Incarnation: Trinity and Humanity   Conclusion  

161 161 164 169 175 182

9

Conclusion   Introduction   The Child’s Place in Theological Anthropology Today: Balthasar and Lacoste   Traherne, Rousseau, Schleiermacher and Péguy: Commonalities and Contrasts   Conclusion: Eschatology and Iconicity  

187 187

Bibliography   Index  

190 198 202 209 223

Note on Translations Texts by Rousseau, Schleiermacher, Péguy and by the primary authors referred to in Chapter 9 have been quoted in the original language and translations have been provided. Where they are available, I have used published translations and acknowledged them in the footnotes, though, as indicated, I have sometimes altered them slightly. All other translations are my own. I have cited secondary sources in the English translation if one is available; otherwise I have quoted them in the original language and provided a translation.

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the C.S. Gray Fund of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and to the dioceses of Manchester, St Edmundsbury and Ipswich and Birmingham for their financial assistance during my research. My doctoral supervisor, Graham Ward, has been a source of encouragement and inspiration, as well as a wise and patient critic. His guidance, along with that of Catherine Pickstock, Janet Martin Soskice and Michael Hoelzl, has been invaluable. I should also like to thank those friends and colleagues who have helped me more than they may realize: Mark Birch, Kenneth Clark, John Paul Hoskins, Andreas Löwe and Yazeed Said, who at Westcott and since have been loyal friends and guides; Jeremy Caddick and Jeremy Morris; Bill Raines and the people of Holy Innocents’, Fallowfield; Geoffrey Smith, Melvyn Skelton, Michael Forster, Janet Ramsay-Helie and the people of St Mary’s, Newmarket and St Agnes’, Exning; John Austen, Josephine Houghton, Henley James, the people of St Andrew’s, Handsworth and my other colleagues in the Handsworth Deanery. Thanks of a slightly different sort are due to John Pridmore. Though I have never met him and his name appears only once in the footnotes, his reflections on children, notably in the pages of the Church Times, have invariably refreshed my own. In the often solitary work on this project, three people have been constant supports: Ben King, my chief theological interlocutor, who has been uniquely willing to spend an hour on the telephone talking theology across the Atlantic; my father, Brian Newey, who amidst all his voluntary work, has listened, advised and enthused; and Emma, my wife, who has accompanied this book through all its twists and turns and kept it and me firmly on the rails. For your wisdom, patience and love – and for reading the whole work! – thank you. Finally I must thank our children, Eleanor and James, for bringing me down from the realms of academic abstraction. Edmund Newey Candlemas 2012

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List of Abbreviations CE

Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation, trans. Terence Tice (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1990) CM Centuries of Meditations in Thomas Traherne, Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings, ed. Anne Ridler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) CPT Thomas Traherne, Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings: Volume II, Poems and Thanksgivings, ed. H.M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958) Émile Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman, 1993) HK Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977) Innocents Charles Péguy, The Holy Innocents and Other Poems, trans. Pansy Pakenham (London: The Harvill Press, 1956) KGA Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. H.J. Birkner et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984–) OC Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres completes, 5 vols, (Paris: Pléiade, 1959–1995) OP Charles Péguy, Œuvres en prose 1909–1914 (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) OPC Charles Péguy, Œuvres poétiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) PCT Thomas Traherne, Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings, ed. Anne Ridler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) Portal Charles Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, trans. David Schindler (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) Prose Charles Péguy, Œuvres en prose completes, 3 vols, (Paris: Gallimard, 1987, 1988, 1992) SM Thomas Traherne: Select Meditations, ed. Julia Smith (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997) Works Thomas Traherne, The Works of Thomas Traherne, 4 vols [of a projected eight], ed. Jan Ross (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005, 2007, 2009)

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Whatever that vision, it is not a child’s; it is what a child’s vision can become. from Geoffrey Hill, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy Let the idol fall on its face in the presence of the hidden child. (Yea, but beware.) Thomas Merton, Learning to Love

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Chapter 1

Introduction What does it mean for human beings to see themselves as ‘children of God’?1 What difference does it make to the lives of Christians when they identify and locate themselves in such terms? Who do they become and where do they find themselves? These are the large questions that this book seeks, if not to answer, then at least to unfold and explore. I have not chosen to approach them directly. Instead, by a close theological reading of the work of four authors in the modern era – Thomas Traherne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Charles Péguy – I seek to show how ‘children of God’ is not an empty phrase. Rightly understood, it has the potential to take us to the heart of humankind’s ‘non-heteronomous’ dependence on God.2 The letter of John seems clear-cut: ‘See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are’.3 Yet this clarity in fact points us directly into the heart of the mystery. Theologically, to be ‘children of God’ must necessarily be to be the offspring of a mystery. As Janet Soskice writes, ‘to say “man is in the image of God” is to say that “man is a mystery” because God is mystery’, and any satisfactory theological anthropology has to begin and end with this recognition.4 As we shall see through our critical theological study of these authors, the child may become for humankind an icon of God in Christ, in whose perfect humanity we are promised a share. Yet, as even a cursory study of Christian usages of the term ‘children of God’ over the centuries shows, the pitfalls on this path are many and our progress must necessarily be steady and careful.5 1   The phrase is used at several points in the New Testament: Matthew 5: 9, Luke 20: 36, John 11: 52, Romans 8: 16 & 21, 9: 8, 26; Galatians 3: 26; I John 3: 1, 2, 10, 5: 12. As we shall see below, the Pauline and Johannine passages, relating the phrase to an understanding of adoption in Christ, are most relevant to my critical and constructive theological investigations here. 2   ‘Non-heteronomous dependence’ is a phrase of Paul Ricoeur (‘Towards a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’, in Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation (London: SPCK, 1980), pp. 115-117), developed by Rowan Williams in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 146. 3   I John 3: 1. 4   See also Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 39: ‘to say “man is in the image of God” is to say that “man is a mystery” because God is mystery’. 5   Two examples suffice. In late nineteenth-century London the followers of Mary Ann Girling, also known as the Walworth Jumpers, formed a world-denying cult called the

2

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Theological Anthropologies of the Child Perhaps the clearest lesson to emerge from the history of modern attempts to enter into the experience of the child is that they are inevitably partial: both incomplete and subjective. Half a century ago Phillipe Ariès suggested in his widely influential work, Centuries of Childhood, that our very concept of childhood was the invention of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.6 That his thesis has remained the focus of heated debate is an indication of how fundamental an understanding of childhood is to our contemporary sense of who we are. Whatever weaknesses there may be in Ariès’s case, what he does clearly show is the degree to which the child in the modern period has provided a backcloth, against which the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of what is believed to be distinctively human can be assessed.7 Yet the child always eludes adult pretensions to objectivity. As portrayed by the mature human being, the child is an imaginary construct, never innocent of the author’s cultural preconceptions. The texts examined in this book are no exception. Thomas Traherne, JeanJacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Charles Péguy are united by a common fascination with the child, but the child they depict is not, and was not intended to be, an objective transcription from experience. It is in just such terms, however, that their work has characteristically been read. The two earlier authors have often been seen as laying the foundations of a true apprehension of the child’s experience; and Schleiermacher and Péguy’s child figures have commonly been evaluated against a criterion of verisimilitude and found wanting. Of course, each of these particular imaginings of the child is informed by the author’s experience, but their principal concern is less with the child per se than with the child as an image of humanity as a whole.8 In particular, to the believing author (and all these authors professed forms of Christian belief) the turn to the child is a theological turn, because it enables reflection on humanity made in God’s image. Whether or not they regard the child as free from sin and its consequences, these authors, each ‘Children of God’; in late 1960s California, the ‘Children of God’ was the founding name of the cult now known as ‘The Family International’. The sexual abstinence of the former and the sexual liberation of the latter both led to aberrations. See ‘Mary Ann Girling’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 22, pp. 347–8 and David Van Zandt, Living in the Children of God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 6   Philipe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). 7   Such a process of projection need not in itself be harmful, although, in religious and secular milieux alike, it can evolve into a dangerous sanctification or demonization of the child. See Robert Orsi, ‘A Crisis about the Theology of Children’, Harvard Divinity Bulletin 30: 4 (2002), pp. 27–9. 8   This is true even in the case of Rousseau, often seen as the ‘inventor’ of childhood as a distinctive period. As will become clear in Chapter 4, his interest in the child is finally subservient to a concern for the perfection of human adulthood that will ensue.

Introduction

3

in their own way, see the child as bearing the imago Dei in uniquely untarnished form. Thus, put at its simplest, in each of these authors the ways in which the child is imagined, the ways in which humanity is imagined and the ways in which God is imagined are mutually determined. Reversing the order, what they offer us can be termed a theological anthropology of the child. The starting point of this book, then, is that the works discussed here offer a series of different imaginative constructions of the child that allow us to trace a parallel series of shifts in the way the human relationship with God is understood. From Traherne in the Welsh Marches of the mid-seventeenth century to Péguy in left-bank Paris of the early twentieth century, these authors were all responding to the networks of theological and anthropological understanding their particular cultural situations offered them. These networks have been defined by Charles Taylor as ‘social imaginaries’: ‘the ways in which [people] imagine their social existence […] that common understanding which makes possible common practices’, which may be ‘expressed in theoretical terms’ or ‘carried in images, stories, legends, etc.’9 However, the relationship between these ‘social imaginaries’ and the authors working within them need not be seen deterministically: any imaginary is formed by, as well as formative of, those within its orbit. We do these authors a disservice if we simply quarry their work for useful insights into the reality of contemporary childhood, as if their writings were more or less successful attempts to construct an anthropology of the child on the modern pattern.10 It may, for instance, be true that Traherne offered ‘the first convincing depiction of childhood experience in English literature’,11 but to see this as the purpose for which he wrote would be deeply misleading. In the Centuries of Meditations and other writings Traherne was recrafting a Christian theological anthropology in the light of the new perspectives on humankind that were being opened up by early modern science and philosophy. As he did so, he found in the child what is best described as an icon of humanity, by means of which the mystery of human nature might be unfolded in relation to the still greater mystery of God’s nature. A similarly theological pattern can be seen both in Schleiermacher’s dialogue Die Weihnachtsfeier, where the child Sofie acts as the dynamic centre of the novella’s meditation on the incarnation, and in Péguy’s varied depictions in prose and poetry of the child as an emblem of the virtue of hope. Even in the case of Rousseau, the least overtly theological of the authors, the child is embedded in a network of relationships that are ultimately 9   Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 16. 10   Examples, from differing perspectives, are: Kurt Alt, Kinderwelten: Anthropologie – Geschichte – Gegenwart (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2002) and Elaine Morgan, The Descent of the Child: Human Evolution from a New Perspective (London: Souvenir Press, 1994). 11   Margaret Drabble (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 992.

Children of God

4

grounded in a conception of God. In the Émile Rousseau reimagined God in immanent terms, but Émile’s education remains a process in which theological questions continually arise, even if in untraditional, modified or parodic form. Thus, in each case, the child is not of purely anthropological interest; or, rather, is so only through being at the same time also of theological interest, as a figure through whom the question of humanity coram Deo (before, or in relation to, God) may be raised. Plainly this book cannot be a comprehensive account of the theological anthropology of the child in the modern period, but it does offer a series of soundings that indicate the shifts in understanding over the period from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. In each case my reading of the child these authors imagine is a theological one. Theology here is understood in broad but orthodox terms. On the Thomist model, it is the study of all things in relation to God; and it is orthodox, not in the sense of insisting upon a narrowly defined body of right belief, but as believing that the classical Catholic tradition of East and West continues to offer the grammar that best informs our ongoing attempt to speak, learn and live with and before God.12 Within these parameters, we shall see that the focus on the child invariably leads to a particular concentration on Christology and the doctrine of the incarnation. As Jean-Yves Lacoste puts it, the affirmation of the incarnation means that any Christian study of humanity must also be a study of divinity: Se manifestant comme home, Dieu manifeste aussi l’homme à lui-même […]. C’est dans un champ concret d’analogie que Dieu et l’homme nous sont accesibles en Christ. L’anthropophanie est inséparable de la thophanie. [Becoming manifest as a human being, God also manifests humankind to itself […]. It is in a concrete field of analogy that God and humanity are accessible to us in Christ. Anthropophany is inseparable from theophany.] 13

And, if the revelation of humanity is inseparable from the revelation of God, this means that certain evaluative criteria are necessarily involved in the close theological readings that I carry out below. Exploring the theological anthropologies implied by the different ‘imaginings’ of the child, we shall also find ourselves drawn into assessing how coherently they express a Christian doctrine of salvation, in which God and humanity, though ontologically distinct, are analogically related in Christ, through whom humankind is invited to share in the life of God. For classical Christian thought, this share in the divine life is   Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. The English Dominican Province (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963), Ia, I, 7; orthodoxy is ‘a tool, not a goal’, Rowan Williams, ‘What is Catholic Orthodoxy?’ in Leech and Williams (eds), Essays Catholic and Radical (London: Bowerdean Press, 1983), pp. 11–25 (p. 25). 13   Jean-Yves Lacoste, Note sur le Temps: Essai sur les raisons de la mémoire et de l’espérance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), p. 166. 12

Introduction

5

never an achieved state, but always an endlessly renewed relationship of grace. Whilst seeking fully to appreciate the diversity and originality of the theological anthropologies proposed by Traherne, Rousseau, Schleiermacher and Péguy, finally it will be according to these doctrinal criteria that they will be evaluated. And, to anticipate the conclusion, it seems clear that a theological anthropology in which the child holds a constitutive place, though a modern phenomenon, is far from incompatible with orthodox Christian doctrine. In fact, as the grammar of classical doctrine is respected, so the child is neither idealized nor demonized, but acknowledged as sharing in the unobjectifiable openness to God that is the hallmark of redeemed humanity. Methodology I have identified the intention of this book to explore a theological anthropology of the child – or rather a series of such anthropologies. To use such a term, however, is already to enter upon disputed ground. An important school of recent theology, represented most prominently by Hans Urs von Balthasar, tends to reject the notion of theological anthropology as inherently inadequate, an intrusion of modernist thought forms that cannot help but import a secular agenda. Perhaps the best summary of Balthasar’s concern is to say that he objects to the relegation of theology to merely adjectival status, because it appears to make God a secondary function of humanity’s speech about itself. Whether one agrees with it or not, his questioning of the concept of theological anthropology on theological grounds in fact shares much with a critique of anthropology itself offered by two of his contemporaries from a secular perspective. The first is Michel Foucault, who in The Order of Things points to modernity’s ‘anthropological sleep’, in which humanity expands to become the exclusive object and subject of all discourse.14 As part of his alternative taxonomy of human self-understanding, Foucault identifies the nineteenth century as the age in which anthropology became dominant to the point of drowning out all other discourses. Whereas ‘Renaissance humanism and Classical rationalism were able to allot human beings a privileged place’ within the order of the world, post-nineteenth-century modernity has seen humanity as entirely constitutive of the world.15 This observation is closely paralleled by that made a little earlier by Martin Heidegger in his own critique of anthropology: 14   Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 330–374. Genevieve Lloyd draws attention to a parallel gendered captivity in the modern period, which, after Foucault, might be termed an ‘andrological sleep’, Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993). I am conscious that, for reasons of space, other than in the chapters on Schleiermacher, this book pays little attention to the role of gender in these figurings of the child. 15   Foucault, Order, p. 347.

6

Children of God

‘Anthropology is an interpretation of man (sic) that already knows at bottom what man is, and cannot ask who he is’.16 The readings this book offers seek to be alert to such issues. They recognize that, insofar as Foucault is correct in his analysis of the post-nineteenth-century ‘anthropological sleep’ of humankind, the later works studied here will inevitably fall within its soporific ambit. However, using one of the most acute of Heidegger’s contemporary theological heirs, Jean-Yves Lacoste, as guide, I shall also seek to show that it is precisely to the extent that they succeed in remaining thoroughly theological that these authors are able to escape the confines that Foucault charts. The assumption here is not that theology offers some magical avenue out of the anthropological impasse. It is rather that theology, when true to itself, can never share the claim of anthropology (as Heidegger saw it) to know ‘what man is’. Instead it seeks to display a twofold respect: a respect before the mystery of God; but, equally important, a respect before the mystery of humanity. Good theology always operates within an apprehension of the wonder and the terror of God and God’s creation, and just as it cannot claim an absolute knowledge of God, so it cannot claim an absolute knowledge of humanity. If, with Thomas Aquinas, theology does not know what God is – only that God is and what God is not – equally, with Heidegger, it does not know ‘what man is’.17 The denial that we know what it is that we are studying might appear to be a particularly unpromising start to a book, even a theological one. How can constructive study begin from a position of unknowing? This starting point is not, however, one of radical nescience, merely one that denies the absolute perspective that has been termed ‘the view from nowhere’. Rather than seeking to establish what the child is in these four authors, and thus investigating their anthropologies, I shall proceed by asking two less absolute, more contextual questions: ‘who?’ and ‘where?’ The first question, ‘who is the child?’, will involve a close reading of the texts these authors present and the particular ways in which they configure the child. The second, ‘where is the child?’, will be concerned with the networks of understanding referred to above as ‘social imaginaries’. I regard ‘who?’ and ‘where?’ as more helpful questions because, avoiding the abstractions of anthropology as Heidegger understood it, they recognize the ‘situatedness’ of the child. Rather than claiming to view the child objectively in relation to a humanity deemed absolute (Foucault’s ‘anthropological sleep’), they see him or her as part of a mystery that can be unfolded but never explained. For Heidegger, with his 16   Martin Heidegger, Questioning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 153. 17   Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia, 2, 2; ‘notre rapport a Dieu n’a pas lieu sur le mode hégélien de la comprehensio, mais sur le mode de l’inchoation, un mode qui ouvre à ce rapport un avenir proprement infini’ [‘our relationship with God does not take place in the Hegelian mode of comprehensio, but in the mode of inchoation, a mode that opens onto a future that is properly infinite’], Jean-Yves Lacoste, Présence et parousie (Geneva: Ad Solem, 2006), p. 335.

Introduction

7

atheistic perspective, this mystery was that of Dasein, the wonder of ‘self and world belong[ing] together in a single being’.18 For Christian theology, however, the mystery is that of the relation of human beings to a God who gives being, a mystery unfolded (but again not explained) in the life of Christ. My heuristic method in this book could be described as a modified form of phenomenology, one that has gained considerable currency in recent French theology and that has proved fruitful in illuminating the area of study traditionally known as theological anthropology. One of the foremost proponents of this school of thought is Jean-Yves Lacoste, who draws upon the pioneering work of Martin Heidegger. As it is Lacoste in particular who informs my own methodology, I shall briefly outline the trajectory of his work, before indicating its impact on my own research and its intended scope. Jean-Yves Lacoste Lacoste’s most substantial and influential work to date is Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, published in 1994. In his preface the author explains the apparent tautology of his subtitle. Here and throughout the book he avoids using the term anthropology for precisely the reasons identified by Heidegger. He substitutes for it either the Latin disputatio de homine or his coinage ‘l’humanité de l’homme’ to signal that his disputed questions are not about what but about who humanity is – in other words, in Lacoste’s terms, they are phenomenological (and theological), not anthropological, questions. In particular, his purpose is a phenomenological investigation of liturgy, understood as ‘the logic that presides over the encounter between God and man writ large’.19 Liturgy thus emerges as the central term in Lacoste’s thought, holding a place analogous to that occupied by Dasein in Heidegger. If Dasein refers to beingin-the-world, which is the basic condition for Heidegger, liturgy for Lacoste reveals the difference in Christian theology between the world and creation. As he puts it in a pair of early essays, liturgy opens up access to the world as creation, distinguishing as it does so between ‘utility’ (‘être utile’) and ‘being’ (‘être’), between ‘being-there’ (‘être là’) and ‘being-towards-the-other’ (‘être vers

  Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 142. ‘Self and world are the basic determination of Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world’, Laurence Hemming, ‘The Subject of Prayer: Unwilling Words in the Postmodern Access to God’ in Ward (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 444–57 (p. 452). 19   Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 2; Lacoste, Expérience et Absolu: Questions disputées sur l’humanité de l’homme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), p. 2. 18

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l’autre’).20 In his more recent work, this same point is made with the term coram Deo, referring to the existence of humanity for or in the sight of God: ‘liturgy leaves the world behind it, because it subordinates the relation of inherence (Insein) to a relation of encounter (coram)’.21 Lacoste’s work is an instance of what has been termed ‘the theological turn of French phenomenology’.22 The chief objection levelled at the work of this school is that it necessarily abandons the methods of phenomenology when it moves from phenomena to foundation, or when it challenges the primacy of the subject and its horizon. What seems intolerable to phenomenology, conventionally understood, is that intentionality might not be basic, that ‘a phenomenon is possible which is not reducible to the I of consciousness; that a phenomenon might give itself absolutely without regard for the anterior condition of a horizon’.23 Lacoste might well question criticism of this sort by asking whose definition of phenomenology is being used. He distinguishes between Husserl’s phenomenology, for whom intentionality is indeed basic (‘intentionality denotes the basic link between the I (in the form of consciousness) and what one takes or receives as an object’) and Heidegger, in whose own phenomenology ‘opening or disclosure, Erschlossenheit, designates a still more basic link’.24 Lacoste adopts the latter approach, though he freely admits that his work takes leave of Heidegger without forgetting his ‘lesson of sobriety’.25 The break with Heidegger comes in his contention that liturgy and prayer are phenomena which open out not only onto the world (Heidegger’s Dasein) but also onto what is beyond the world: ‘By giving itself, from within the world, a horizon not of the world, liturgy proves that the world is not intranscendable’.26 The point here is that a phenomenology that has made the ‘theological turn’ is not asserting new extra-phenomenological foundations, but investigating the openings within phenomenology onto a non-foundational reality,a mystery, that exceeds the world.27

  Jean-Yves Lacoste, ‘Le lieu hors-monde’, Communio IX, 1 (1984), pp. 86–9 (p. 88); ‘De la technique à la liturgie’, Communio IX, 2 (1984), pp. 26–37 (p. 34). 21   Jean-Yves Lacoste, Le Monde et l’absence d’œuvre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), p. 17. 22   Dominique Janicaud (ed.), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham, 2000), pp. 3–103. 23   Jeffrey Kossky, ‘Translator’s Preface: The Phenomenology of Religion: New Possibilities for Philosophy and for Religion’ in Janicaud (ed.), Phenomenology, pp. 107– 20 (p. 109). 24   Lacoste, Experience, p. 40; Expérience et Absolu, p. 49. 25   Lacoste, Experience, p. 21; Expérience et Absolu, p. 25. 26   Lacoste, Experience, p. 43; Expérience et Absolu, p. 53. 27   Lacoste’s term is liturgy. Jean-Louis Chrétien focuses instead on prayer: ‘to collapse prayer into dialogue with oneself is [to do…] violence to the phenomenon’, Janicaud (ed.), Phenomenology, p. 151. 20

Introduction

9

What emerges from this is the claim that, whereas atheism is the a priori condition of existence, the excess of liturgy indicates that ‘the limits of the existential are not the limits of humanity’.28 For Heidegger there is no human identity, only location; no what, only a where. Lacoste makes this point most radically in his collection, Le Monde et l’absence d’œuvre, where he stresses that ‘there is nothing beyond the world that bears upon the interpretation of beingin-the-world’, and that ‘a transcendental (or existential) atheism is the prime fact’.29 He goes on from this, however, to interrogate the all-sufficiency of the existential by means of liturgy and to suggest that the horizon of Dasein is not co-extensive with the horizon of humanity. Subsequent to this existential atheism, the phenomena of prayer and liturgy (which he terms ‘existentiel’) open upon a wider horizon. This is the horizon of the originary rather than the initial, the originary being not a time before time, but the relation of the I to itself which sees the eschaton as fulfilment not annulment. It is not appropriate here to take further the debates concerning the philosophical validity of this theological turn in French phenomenology, and I shall in any case return to Lacoste’s thought in the concluding chapter. For the present, the brief outline above serves to indicate the method adopted in this book. What Lacoste’s thought offers the present book is a thoroughly theological anthropology (I retain the term for the sake of simplicity, Balthasar’s and Lacoste’s reservations having been noted). Such an anthropology is thoroughly theological because it is based on the originary difference between Creator and creation. Once aware of that constitutive ontological difference, an anthropology ceases to offer any claim to exact knowledge of its subject matter. And because such knowledge of what humanity is has been precluded, the possibility returns of asking the less objective, more contextual, relational and theological questions identified above: who and where? A Brief Theological History of the Child Having thus identified the understanding of theological anthropology that informs the method of this book, I shall now give a brief outline of the history of theological understandings of the child as a figure of humanity and explain the reasons for my focus on the modern period and these authors in particular. The child has an ambivalent status in Christian thought. Hugh Pyper summarizes this well by pointing to the connotations of the two adjectives ‘childlike’ and ‘childish’: both are characteristic of Christian responses to the

  Lacoste, Monde, p. 105.   ‘Il n’y a pas d’au delà du monde qui pèse sur l’interprétation de l’être-dans-le-

28 29

monde’; ‘un athéisme transcendental (un athéisme existentiale [sic], si l’on veut) est le premier des faits’, Lacoste, Monde, p. 6.

10

Children of God

child.30 On the one hand is the famous statement of Jesus: ‘Truly, I tell you, unless you change and become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 18: 3). This passage, along with its synoptic parallels, has been a repeated focus of debate from Clement of Alexandria to the present. On the other hand, the New Testament contains an equally important vein of criticism of the child for immaturity and selfishness. Paul repeatedly stigmatizes the child, above all in I Corinthians. He berates his addressees for remaining ‘babes in Christ’ (I Corinthians 3: 1), enjoining them to ‘put away childish things’ (I Corinthians 13: 11) and not to be ‘children in your thinking; rather be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults’ (I Corinthians 14: 12). This has led to a somewhat schizophrenic outlook on the place of children in Christian life, in which an impossibly high ideal is paired with a stern disapproval of the reality. In his article, Hugh Pyper identifies three basic attitudes to children in the Christian tradition. The first sees the child as the model of innocence, trust and loving dependence on God. The second sees the child as pre-rational, ‘a tabula rasa to be schooled into the responsibilities and possibilities of adulthood’. The third sees the child as the prey of original sin, a reminder of human weakness and mortality, and a distraction from the seriousness of the spiritual life.31 The genesis of each of these attitudes can be found in the New Testament, but to them I would add a fourth vitally important scriptural perspective on the child. This is the image of adoption in Christ by God, easily overlooked because it uses the child as an image for humanity as a whole. With different emphases, this image of the child is found in the Johannine writings (John 1: 12, I John 3: 10, 5: 19), the synoptic gospels (Matthew 5: 45, Luke 6: 35), the Pauline corpus (Romans 8: 14–21, Galatians 4: 5–6 and so on) and Hebrews (Hebrews 2: 10–14, 12: 5–7). It is not within this book’s remit to trace, even briefly, a history of Christian representations of the child from the New Testament to the present. In fact, such an enterprise has never been attempted, though aspects of it have been approached indirectly in some recent collaborative projects. Stephen Barton’s edited volume The Family in Theological Perspective brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to look at the place of the family in theology.32 Though the child is not its prime focus, several chapters offer helpful background. A different perspective is offered by The Church and Childhood, a volume resulting from the proceedings of two meetings of the Ecclesiastical History Society. The historical focus of this volume brings a series of insights, the most notable for my purposes being that 30   Hugh Pyper, ‘Childhood’ in Adrian Hastings (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 110. See also John Pridmore, ‘Salvation’ in Anne Richards and Peter Privett (eds), Through the Eyes of a Child: New Insights in Theology from a Child’s Perspective (London: Church House Publishing, 2009), pp. 185–201. 31   Pyper, ‘Childhood’, p. 110. 32   Stephen Barton (ed.), The Family in Theological Perspective (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996).

Introduction

11

of István Bejczy in his essay on ‘The sacra infantia in Medieval Hagiography’.33 This draws attention to the topos of the holy childhood in mediaeval saints’ lives, which shows some overlap with the ‘figurings’ of the child in the four authors I discuss. More recently, Marcia Bunge has edited The Child in Christian Thought, which is primarily concerned with the attitudes to children expressed by key representatives of Christian theology from John Chrysostom to Barth, Rahner and contemporary feminist thought.34 It illuminates the huge diversity of responses to the child over the history of Christian thought, showing the ways in which the divergent tendencies present in the New Testament have been taken up. Some of the perspectives offered in each of these three symposia are drawn together in an issue of the journal Theology Today and in Angela Shier-Jones’ edited volume, Children of God: Towards a Theology of Childhood, though neither of these last works seeks to be systematic, offering instead a variety of individual perspectives on the place of the child in Christian life and thought.35 Alongside these edited volumes, a number of monographs have been written on the child and theology. S. Légasse’s Jésus et l’Enfant is an exhaustive study of the witness of the synoptic tradition. O.M. Bakke’s When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity traces the growing awareness of children in Patristic thought, as contrasted with their relative invisibility in Greco-Roman culture. Gustav Siewerth’s Metaphysik der Kindheit and Ferdinand Ulrich’s Der Mensch als Anfang: Zur philosophischen Anthropologie der Kindheit are philosophical investigations of the child from a Christian perspective. More systematically, Jerome Berryman’s Children and the Theologians offers brief summaries of the teachings of 25 thinkers in the history of the Christian Church, while David Jensen’s Graced Vulnerability: A Theology of Childhood and Martin Marty’s The Mystery of the Child offer sensitive reflections on the need to grant children a full and equal standing in Christian theology and practice. Jensen in particular emphasizes vulnerability as a forgotten dimension of the imago Dei and, whilst recognizing the dangers of romanticizing the child’s dependence on others, offers it as a model for human beings’ relationships both with one another and with God.36   István Bejczy, ‘The Sacra Infantia in Mediaeval Hagiography’ in Diana Wood (ed.), The Church and Childhood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), pp. 143–52. 34   Marcia Bunge (ed.), The Child in Christian Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); see also Marcia J. Bunge (ed.), The Child in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). 35   Theology Today 56:4 (2000); Angela Shier-Jones (ed.), Children of God: Towards a Theology of Childhood (Werrington: Epworth, 2007). 36   S. Légasse, Jésus et l’enfant: ‘Enfants’, ‘Petits’ et ‘Simples’ dans la Tradition synoptique (Paris: Lecoffre, 1969); O.M. Bakke, When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); Gustav Siewerth, Metaphysik der Kindheit (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1957); Ferdinand Ulrich, Der Mensch als Anfang (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1970); Martin Marty, The Mystery of the 33

12

Children of God

Outside theological circles the key work is still Phillipe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood, first published in French in 1960.37 For Ariès, childhood is essentially a modern invention, a concomitant of the increasing privatization of life he identifies with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the mediaeval period, he argues, children, once they had passed from their infancy, at about the age of seven merged imperceptibly with adult society. The discovery of a particular period of human life identified as childhood was, he believed, a function of the increasing educational control of adults over children, which defined childhood over and against maturity in order to build a particular understanding of the civilized citizen. Ariès was not a professionally trained historian and his work was avowedly written out of an attempt to understand what he felt to be the contemporary distortion of relationships between children and adults, ‘the oppressive and intolerant nature of modern family life’.38 His judgements have been subjected to much questioning, but all would perhaps agree that our contemporary concept of childhood as a distinct and precious state cannot simply be accepted as ‘natural’ or definitive, even if the chronology of its emergence is disputed. This is not the place to analyse the validity of Ariès’s conclusions in detail. It is no doubt inaccurate to deny that there was any consciousness of a distinctive period of childhood in the premodern era, but there is a clear sense in which Ariès is right. The rare references to the child in premodern theological literature are not to the child as of interest for its own sake.39 Thus Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus, in its first book especially, places the Christian believer in the position of a child trusting his father with complete simplicity and sincerity.40 But Clement’s praise of the child is, in fact, best seen as an extended commentary on Jesus’s words at Matthew 18, rather than a novel treatment of the child per se. Similarly the mediaeval English poem Pearl is, on one level, a lament for a lost child, but is more importantly a poetic meditation on the related passage describing Jesus’s welcoming of the children: ‘Then to them Jesus sweetly said,/“Let these little ones come unto me,/For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven made”’.41 In the modern period a cultural shift undoubtedly occurred. As childhood became separated as a stage in life isolable and distinct from adult maturity, so the child emerged as a subject to be treated in devotional or ‘spiritual’ writings. Child (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007); David Jensen, Graced Vulnerability: A Theology of Childhood (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005); Jerome Berryman, Children among the Theologians: Clearing the Way for Grace (New York: Morehouse, 2009). 37   Ariès, Centuries. 38   Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (Harlow: Longman, 1995), p. 6. See also the summary of critiques of Ariès in Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 3–10. 39   Bakke, When Children Became People, p. 284. 40   Clement, The Instructor (Ante-Nicene Fathers) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), pp. 209–36, esp. p. 212. 41   Brian Stone, Mediaeval English Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 161.

Introduction

13

Gradually these began to be written specifically for a child readership. In England, for example, the emblem books of the seventeenth century, with their mixed audience of children and adults, can be seen as a transitional phenomenon, followed by the arrival in the eighteenth century of the collections of children’s hymns by Isaac Watts, Christopher Smart and others.42 In the premodern period such devotional writing had been hard to distinguish from general works of doctrine – spiritual literature was not an obviously recognizable genre. The separation of the two seems to have coincided with the emergence of the distinction between child and adult and is therefore perhaps a part of the shift to educational control observed by Ariès. The modern era is thus not merely a period of particular interest for this book. It is in fact the only period in which the concerns noted here – with the child as the focus of a theological anthropology – could be pursued comparatively. Only from the seventeenth century onwards, as childhood started to be separated out as a distinct stage in human life, did a range of authors, beginning with Thomas Traherne and Henry Vaughan, display a sustained interest in the child as the locus for a theological anthropology.43 Outline of the Project This research project began from my interest in the use made of images of the child in the work of Thomas Traherne (?1637–1674) and Charles Péguy (1873–1914). Traherne in the isolation of the Welsh marches, and Péguy in a different kind of isolation in the rue de la Sorbonne 250 years later, display remarkable continuities as well as equally significant differences in their theological anthropologies of the child. I was struck by how badly both writers’ imaginings of the child seemed to fit with the most prominent trajectory of modern attitudes to the child; that associated with Rousseau, Wordsworth and the Romantic Movement. This trajectory tends to render the child quasi-divine, seeing him or her as an embodiment of natural innocence, and is characteristically assumed to be a development from the first of the scriptural categories identified by Pyper above. It seemed clear to me, however, that neither Traherne nor Péguy fitted this paradigm well, and that 42   The most famous of the emblem books is Francis Quarles’s Emblems Divine and Moral (Edinburgh: William Patterson, 1888); Isaac Watts, Divine and Moral Songs: attempted in easy language for the use of children (London: Ellis and Pitman, 1849), Christopher Smart, Hymns for the Amusement of Children (Oxford: Blackwell, 1947). 43   Especially in England, this process was a peculiar blending of tradition and innovation. ‘The seventeenth-century poets borrowed from the new, but only to affirm the old […] they gave children unprecedented poetic emphasis, but out of loyalty to an essentially late-mediaeval social order’, Leah Marcus Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth Century Literature (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1978), p. 40. Nonetheless, as we shall see, Traherne’s use of the child figure offers a constructive response to the emerging culture, rather than a nostalgic reaction.

Children of God

14

previous commentary had struggled to make them do so. Traherne’s dates and the fact that the relevant parts of his writing were not known until the twentieth century mean that, on the standard view, his work has to be taken as an inspired adumbration of Romantic thought – a view which in itself anachronistically adopts a Romantic image of the author-genius. And Péguy, for all his admiration of Victor Hugo (perhaps the key figure of French Romanticism), pointedly and systematically resisted the individualism and secularism he commonly associated with Romanticism. The innocence of the child in Romanticism is generally seen in terms of a natural communion with God enjoyed by the individual at infancy. It is true that something resembling this view can be found in the Patristic East, where infants are sometimes regarded as, if not sinless, then at least morally neutral.44 Yet moral neutrality is not synonymous with unimpaired natural communion with God; and orthodox Christian theology, in East and West alike, has regarded natural communion with God as impossible except in Christ, who alone unites the divine and the human natures. Traherne and Péguy are both clearly committed to this latter view, though they express it in different ways. What began to emerge from my reading, then, was a fundamental theological difference between the way in which Romanticism perceives the child and the way the child is seen by Christian orthodoxy, broadly understood. Somewhat paradoxically, given its conscious reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism retains from the Enlightenment a suspicion of orthodox Christology and a redefinition of the divine as immanent in humanity. Thus, whereas the Romantic child, treated in isolation from Christ, is a figure of divinity inherent in humanity (the young Wordsworth’s child ‘trailing clouds of glory’),45 in Traherne and Péguy the child is always treated in relation to Christ. Part of my purpose, then, was to elucidate the way in which these authors’ depictions of the child are in fact theological anthropologies of the child – in other words, how the child is the central image in their subtle redrawings of the place enjoyed by humankind in orthodox Christian theology. As the research project developed, my preliminary aim – to distinguish the child in Traherne and Péguy from the Romantic background in which it had become enmeshed – began to develop and point to a wider investigation of the role the child figure plays in their respective theologies (here I began to make the move from ‘who?’ to ‘where?’). In this process it became clear that a number of other authors would help to illuminate the continuities and discontinuities at play between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Among those whose works would repay further study in this area are: Christopher Smart (1722–71) with his complex variations on the theme of childlike gratitude; Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) whose fragmentary thought regularly returns to the child as a question mark set against the certainties of mature adulthood; William Blake   Bakke, When Children Became People, p. 281.   William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, eds Hutchinson and Selincourt (Oxford:

44 45

Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 460.

Introduction

15

(1757–1827) with his insight into the social politics of the child; and William Wordsworth (1770–1850) whose early pantheistic thought continues to be highly influential in British cultural conceptions of the child. It became clear that to do all of these authors justice would require a much longer book and I eventually chose to narrow my focus, identifying Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) as the key transitional figures, leaving me with the basic shape of the present book. Structure of the Book The book’s seven central chapters adopt the distinction outlined above between the questions ‘who?’ and ‘where?’. The first question – who is the child? – is intratextual and its simplest answer is: ‘not the author’. By a close reading of the texts, this question seeks to clarify who the child is and what imaginative work the author’s particular figuring effects. With the partial exception of Schleiermacher, the autobiographical fallacy has plagued interpretation of the writings of each of these authors. They are, of course, to some extent drawing on their memory and observation of the self and of others as children. Yet the children they depict are not transcriptions from personal experience, but figures to enable the exploration of the qualities each author sees as characteristic of human life before God. The second question – where is the child located? – is intertextual and sheds light on the ‘social imaginaries’ that nurture the particular pictures of the child.46 In investigating the presuppositions that lie behind the different configurations of the child, the focus broadens to illuminate the place of the child in each writer’s wider cultural and theological context. The chapters on Traherne seek to free his child figure from multiple misconceptions. In Chapter 2, I re-examine the distinctiveness of the child portrayed by Traherne in the light of his equally distinctive theological anthropology. Traherne’s chief preoccupation has traditionally been believed to be with the child as a figure of innocence. The weight of references to innocence cannot be ignored, but equally they should be seen in the context of his developed, but widely overlooked, understanding of the pervasiveness of human sin. The child, for Traherne, is a figure who leads to a truer apprehension not only of lost innocence, but, more importantly, of freedom gained in the sacrifice of Christ for human sin, and, by prolepsis, of the future state of glory, which will surpass all that has been known previously. Not merely a figure of innocence, the child is an icon of the whole human condition, living in via in the twofold ‘estate of misery and grace’, which lies suspended between the prior (protological) ‘estate of innocency’ and the hoped-for (eschatological) ‘estate of glory’.47   See Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, cited above.   Thomas Traherne, Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings, ed. Anne Ridler

46 47

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 286, CMIII:43.

16

Children of God

In Chapter 3, I establish in greater detail the theological background against which Traherne’s child figure is set. A comparison with Augustine draws out both the novelty of Traherne’s thought in the newly emerging context of scientific and philosophical modernity and its deeper continuity with that of the Church father. I then examine the centrality of theosis, the teaching of humanity’s redemptive participation in God, to his theology. From this, a fuller understanding emerges of the pattern of Traherne’s thought as a whole, but most especially of his originality in deploying the child as the imaginative centre from which to articulate an orthodox theological anthropology in the new idiom of the early modern era. Chapter 4 elucidates from a theological point of view the major shift in attitudes to the child brought about by Rousseau, notably in his immensely influential work, Émile ou De l’éducation. In this chapter I address the questions ‘who?’ and ‘where?’ simultaneously. Though not writing as a theologian, Rousseau in the Émile believes himself to be a proponent of Christianity against its atheist and deist detractors. Yet at the same time he redraws the boundaries of the faith to exclude any form of revelation beyond the field of nature: theological anthropology becomes natural anthropology. My argument proceeds in five stages, the first two seeking to appreciate the scale of Rousseau’s achievement, the third and fourth exploring its deficiencies and the last outlining some key critiques. First, I identify the Émile as belonging to a hybrid genre that, as with its author’s personality, seeks to hold apparent contradictions in creative tension and, secondly, I explore the negative theory of education that makes immediate experience of the natural world the key to the child Émile’s upbringing. The third and fourth stages of the argument involve a broader study of Rousseau’s implicit theology as manifested in two forms: his understanding of the relationship between mediation and immediacy; and the role played by Émile’s tutor. The paradox here is that Rousseau’s hostility to all forms of mediation in Émile’s upbringing nonetheless depends on the ubiquitous tutor, whose constant oversight governs the child’s supposedly unmediated relationship with nature. In conclusion, drawing out these tensions, I move towards a critique of Rousseau’s anthropology of the child, informed by Foucault’s theory of ‘bio-power’, Karl Barth’s discussion of the rise of anthropology and Rousseau’s own incipient self-critique. Probing the instabilities and contradictions in his texts, I indicate how they expose the child to new levels of adult manipulation and argue that this is the unintended consequence of his advocacy of a purely natural theology, which has deprived both theology and anthropology of their own (previously interdependent) integrity. In Chapters 5 and 6, I turn to Friedrich Schleiermacher, focusing particularly on his 1806 novella, Die Weihnachtsfeier. Schleiermacher makes an instructive counterpart to Rousseau. The Romantic Movement, of which Rousseau was perhaps the chief progenitor, is a major influence on Schleiermacher, but where Rousseau sees the child as a figure of autonomy, Schleiermacher stresses the immersion of the child in the human community. Chapter 5 begins by locating the origins of Schleiermacher’s portrait of Sofie in early German Romanticism, while also indicating how the Romantic Movement is not simply opposed to Kantian

Introduction

17

Enlightenment thought, but in fact shares key concerns with it. The form and content of the novella express the three modes of theology later identified in The Christian Faith: the poetic, the rhetorical and the didactic. The child, though she is most akin to the first of these modes, is the means by which they are brought into dialogue, embodying the ideal of freie Geselligkeit, the spontaneous response to fellow people and to God that Schleiermacher sees as the essence of human life. I then raise two controversial questions that have been put to Schleiermacher: first that of gender, pointing to the ways in which Schleiermacher’s depiction of Sofie both colludes with and questions common gender stereotypes; and secondly that of the degree to which his theology is in thrall to a prior anthropology. The chapter concludes with an excursus that draws upon the insights of twentiethcentury Russian theology, asking if the portrait of Sofie can be read as an incipient sophiology. In Chapter 6, I broaden the scope of my study to include Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical thought, in which the child and its acquisition of language is a key image. In this light Sofie can be seen as an embodiment of the hermeneutical process: her function in the novella embodies the process that Schleiermacher terms ‘divination’, the point of entry into the hermeneutical circle that, though invisible, is yet most nearly understood in the child’s acquisition of language. The potential of Schleiermacher’s linguistic thought has begun to be rediscovered in recent years, but the resemblance it bears to his theology has not been widely noticed. In pointing out these structural resemblances, I also indicate the doctrinal difficulties that follow from the attempted transcription from the immanent sphere of language to the realm of theology, in which the immanent depends upon the transcendent. Finally, revisiting Schleiermacher’s understanding of the doctrine of the incarnation, I point out its tendency both to universalize the particularity of Christian revelation and to compromise the difference between God and creation. The theological anthropology exemplified by the portrait of Sofie seems finally unable to escape the ambiguities of Enlightenment and Romantic thought that follow from the Rousseauvian shift. In Chapters 7 and 8 we arrive in the early twentieth century with Charles Péguy, in whose later work the child is a recurrent image. Chapter 7 indicates the thoroughly theological nature of Péguy’s child figure. Less fully realized as a person than Rousseau’s, Schleiermacher’s or Traherne’s, Péguy’s child is an embodiment of the theological virtue of hope. I begin with a close reading of ‘la petite espérance’48 of the late poems and the childlike description of the Jewish writer, Bernard-Lazare. Having begun with the specific, I then draw out more fully the category of incarnation, which underlies Péguy’s theological anthropology. Here I show how a Patristic typological pattern informs Péguy’s thought: in the light of the incarnation, all human lives lived in hope are figures or types of Christ himself, the antitype, who continually revivifies the human race in the image of God. Finally I clarify the ongoing liturgical process of anamnesis enacted by the   Péguy, Œuvres Poétiques Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 538f.

48

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Children of God

poetry and prose alike, and show how, for Péguy, it is most fully embodied in the free, yet dependent, figure of the young child. In Chapter 8, I further investigate Péguy’s association of the child with the incarnation by exploring the broader theological and cultural context in which his child figure is situated. In the Modernist controversy that dominated French Catholic theology at this period, childlike innocence was a virtue championed by the anti-Modernist party against the scientific-intellectual emphases of the Modernists. Péguy, however, cannot be identified with either side in the controversy. He believed himself to be, like his friend and ally Henri Bergson, fighting a battle on two fronts. By recognizing the place of the child in the context of his response to current ecclesiastical politics and contemporary philosophy, I show that it is misleading to associate Péguy’s child with the taint of sentimentality and nostalgia. For Péguy, children and those who resemble them are particular instances of his theological and poetic category of resurgement, manifesting the calling of all creation, renewed and redeemed in the incarnation of Christ. The conclusion draws together the strands identified in the book’s central chapters and looks at them afresh in the light of contemporary theology. Few major recent theologians have considered the subject of the child, the notable exception being Hans Urs von Balthasar, who wrote a short book and a number of important essays on the child. I examine his work and bring it into conversation with that of Jean-Yves Lacoste. Lacoste develops two fruitful avenues of thought: first, his christologically fulfilled anthropology; and, secondly, his understanding of ‘l’homme minimale’ (also identified as the child or the ‘fool’) as the characteristic participant in the liturgical encounter between God and humanity. His work, when seen alongside Balthasar’s, draws together many of the strands that have emerged in the main part of the book and offers theological criteria by which to evaluate the four authors’ work and assess its constructive potential for today. In this theological light, childhood is seen not as a discrete period, closed and protected, but, after the manner of an icon, as illustrative of the openness and incompleteness that characterizes all human being before God. The childlike co-existence of dignity and vulnerability is seen supremely in the cross of Christ. Here, in the focal point of the incarnation, the movement of divine and human kenosis in Christ becomes also the movement of huiopoeisis (adoption) or theosis (deification), by which humankind is drawn into the divine life, through adoption as God’s children. The governing questions of this book are seen to pose themselves to humanity as an inseparable pair: ‘to the question “who am I?” I can only answer by confessing as a matter of urgency where I am’;49 yet, as liturgy and prayer show, these questions always point beyond their apparent existential limits to the theological horizon of God: ‘Who, then, am I and where am I when I pray?’50 49   ‘A la question “qui suis-je?”, je ne puis que répondre en avouant de toute urgence où je suis’, Lacoste, Monde, p. 6. 50   Lacoste, Experience, p. 42; Expérience et Absolu, p. 52.

Chapter 2

‘God made Man Greater when He made Him less’: Traherne’s Iconic Child Our Saviors Meaning, when He said, He must be born again and becom a little Child that will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven: is Deeper far then is generally believed. (CMIII:5)1

The theme of childlikeness, the gospel imperative to be ‘to the Thoughts Customs and Opinions of men in this World as if we were but little children’ (CMIII:5), lies at the centre of Thomas Traherne’s theological imagination. Famously, it is the recurrent preoccupation of his poetry, but it is also the major subject of his prose Centuries of Meditations, and a central theme in much of the recently discovered material gradually appearing in print, notably Select Meditations, Seeds of Eternity and The Kingdom of God. Understandably, given the weight of this material, a great deal of critical effort has been put into ascertaining the nature of the experiences, mystical or otherwise, that informed his writing. There is little doubt that Traherne was a man whose whole life was marked by a vision of the beautiful unity that he recalled from his childhood, when he saw all things ‘in the light of Heaven’ (SMIII:29). However, powerful though this recollected vision undoubtedly was, in what follows it will not be the focus of my interest. Rather than treating him as a putative mystic, my concern is with the theological ends served by his depiction of the child. Whatever the initial impetus may have been, the child, for Traherne, is at once a poetic trope and a theological icon; and the force that animates its depiction is not sentimental recollection, but the future yearning that Denise Inge has termed ‘rejuvenation’.2 In this chapter I seek to distinguish Traherne’s child figure from the assumptions that have frequently obscured it. Though certain similarities between the authors cannot be denied, I avoid the well-worn critical path that links Traherne’s poetic child to those of Vaughan before him and Wordsworth after him.3 Instead, I show how the prelapsarian bliss of Eden is only one part of a rich complex of states that 1   Thomas Traherne, Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings, ed. Anne Ridler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 266. References to the five books of Centuries of Meditations and the four extant books of Select Meditations (ed. Julia Smith) (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997) will hereafter be given by book and numbered entry in the text. 2   Denise Inge, Wanting Like a God: Desire and Freedom in Thomas Traherne (London: SCM, 2009), p. 248. 3   As one example: Kenneth Hopkins, English Poetry: A Short History (London: Phoenix House, 1962).

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Traherne associates with the child. Implicitly modelling his writing on Augustine’s thought in Confessions, Traherne establishes the child as the imaginative focus through which to explore the state of communion with God that, he believes, is characteristic of humankind, created in the divine image. The child does not enjoy this communion by natural right, but, despite the interruption of sin, through grace may afford (and be afforded) a foretaste of heavenly glory. We shall see how the child is not merely a figure of innocence, but an icon of the whole human condition, by which Traherne puts forward a theological anthropology that is both innovative in its mode of expression and consistent with the classical Christian tradition. The child represents the human being as a pilgrim, living in via in the twofold ‘estate of misery and grace’, which lies suspended between the prior (protological) ‘estate of innocency’ and the hoped-for (eschatological) ‘estate of glory’. The following chapter then broadens this picture, showing where the child fits into the pattern of Traherne’s thought as a whole. Here we shall see how Traherne propounds a theological anthropology (albeit an unsystematic one) that is at once original and faithful to the classical Christian tradition. Recasting traditional teaching in the light of the emerging scientific and philosophical world-views of the early modern period, he offers a constructive articulation of theosis, the teaching of humanity’s redemptive participation in God, which effectively addresses his mid-seventeenthcentury context. Rediscovering Traherne In the Jacobean age, as Maureen Sabine has noted, ‘the child was not widely esteemed; indeed was just emerging from the social obscurity to which he had traditionally been relegated’.4 Certain English poets, such as George Herbert, Robert Herrick and Richard Crashaw,5 writing in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, had begun to take an interest in the child, but it was with Henry Vaughan, 15 years Traherne’s senior, that the child first became a prominent theme. In his poems, ‘The Retreat’ and ‘Child-hood’, published in 1650 and 1655 respectively, Vaughan portrays the child as a model for human happiness: Happy those early days! When I Shined in my Angel-infancy. (‘The Retreat’) Since all that age doth teach, is ill, Why should I not love child-hood still? […] Those observations are but foul 4   Maureen Sabine, ‘“Stranger to the Shining Skies”: Traherne’s Child and his Changing Attitudes to the World’, Ariel 11: 4 (1980), pp. 21–35 (p. 21). 5   See Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, pp. 94–152.

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Which make me wise to lose my soul. And yet the practice worldings call Business and weighty action all, Checking the poor child for his play But gravely cast themselves away. (‘Child-hood’)6

The similarities between Vaughan and Traherne are great. As mid-seventeenthcentury Anglican poets from the Welsh borders, they shared a similar education and churchmanship, yet the differences between them are more instructive than the resemblances. In Vaughan’s poetry, childhood is one topos, albeit a significant one, among many. It is not the imaginative centre of his writing and, when invoked, it is with one specific poetic aim: childhood, for Vaughan, is imagined as a lost paradise, instructive to adults simply as a reminder of the degree of their removal from past blessings.7 This nostalgic mode contrasts strikingly with Traherne, for whom childhood is a future hope and a present reality, rather than simply a recollected past. As Ellrodt observes, there is in Traherne, ‘point de réminiscence, point de mémoire’ [‘There is no reminiscence, no recollection’]; instead it is to ‘une “reviviscence” de l’impression grâce à sa permanence profonde’ [‘it is to a “revivifying” of the impression, thanks to the depth of its permanence’] that the child points.8 Thus whereas for Vaughan the child functions primarily as a reminder of the Fall, for Traherne the child is an image by which the whole story of the human race, from creation to eschatological glory, can be viewed. The first childish innocence of Adam and Eve, in which young children share,9 was lost at the Fall, but, through the grace offered in its sinful state of misery, humanity can come to a second, mature childlikeness, which grants a foretaste of glory: To infancy, O Lord, again I com That I my Manhood may improv. […] and therefore fly (A lowly State may hide A man from Danger) to the Womb, That I may yet New-born becom.10

  Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 172,

6

288.

  Robert Ellrodt, L’Inspiration personnelle et l’esprit du temps chez les poètes métaphysiques anglais (Paris: José Corti, 1960), p. 348, ‘no reminiscence, no recollection’, ‘a re-enlivening of the impression, thanks to its underlying permanence’; Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, p. 173. 8   Ellrodt, L’Inspiration personnelle, p. 349. 9   ‘Ah! Happy Infant! Wealthy Heir!’, Traherne, ‘Right Apprehension’, Poems, p. 114. 10   ‘The Return’ in Traherne, Poems, p. 79. This pattern is at its clearest in the triptych of poems, ‘The World’, ‘The Apostacy’, and ‘Shadows in the Water’ (Traherne, Poems), 7

22

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Traditionally, Traherne’s positive appropriation of childhood has been explained autobiographically as the outworking of his personal experience. The deceptive simplicity of his style and the fact that most of his work was not intended for publication make it especially tempting to treat him as a naïve genius, artlessly transcribing his experiences in a form of poetic rapture; to see him, in Gladys Wade’s words, as ‘one of the most radiantly, most infectiously happy mortals this earth has known’.11 Taken to an extreme, this approach has led to attempts to establish ‘whether Traherne qualifies as a “true” mystic’ by a psychological analysis of his writings, treating them as essentially autobiographical.12 All of this has been part of a general critical tendency to disregard the seriousness of Traherne’s thought, to isolate it from theological tradition, and instead to stress its originality as ‘the first convincing description of childhood experience in English literature’.13 Two recent developments have helped to reveal how misleading this approach has been. The first is the discovery of a series of significant new manuscripts. Select Meditations was the first of these to be published, in 1997, and is in some respects a draft of ideas later incorporated into the Centuries of Meditations. The comparison of the similarities and the differences between the two has made it much harder to read the latter as personal reminiscence in any simple sense.14 Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, recent scholarship in the area of mystical theology has begun to question the category of ‘mystical experience’, which an earlier generation applied unquestioningly. For Evelyn Underhill, in 1961, the mystic was a person ‘who lives at a different level of experience from other people’.15 More recently, however, Michel de Certeau and others have pointed out that this experiential understanding of ‘mysticism’ is a specifically modern phenomenon.16 In Certeau’s analysis, texts that since the early modern period have been assigned to the category of the ‘mystical’ were previously largely indistinguishable from pp. 83–8 and 116–18, discussed in Sabine, ‘Stranger to the Shining Skies’, pp. 22–31. 11   Gladys Wade, Thomas Traherne (Princeton: Univeristy Press, 1944), p. 3. 12   Franz Wöhrer, Thomas Traherne: The Growth of a Mystic’s Mind (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1982), p. 171. Salter too argues that Traherne is ‘a mystic before he is a poet’ (p. 113), and that his poetry is ‘less fine than the experience’ it describes (p. 119), K.W. Salter, Thomas Traherne: Mystic and Poet (London: Edward Arnold, 1964). 13   Drabble, English Literature, p. 992. 14   Among other recently published works, Seeds of Eternity and The Kingdom of God also contain passages of childhood recollection that again differ significantly from CM and SM. Traherne, The Works of Thomas Traherne: Vol. 1, ed. Jan Ross (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 2005), pp. 236, 391 (hereafter Works). 15   Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York: Dutton, 1961), p. 76. 16   Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Mark McIntosh, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

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scriptural commentary or doctrinal theology. By the sixteenth century, however, as the psychological examination of the experience of encounter with God grew ever more complex, so ‘the less transparent to the divine source it [became]’.17 Moreover, for Certeau, it is precisely as God’s cosmological presence in the world became less evidently credible that the psychological drama of inner experience became the guarantor of God’s reality: To the extent that the world is no longer perceived as spoken by God, that it has become opacified, objectified, and detached from its supposed speaker [the] I who speaks in the place of (and instead of) the Other […] requires a space of expression corresponding to what the world was in relation to the speech of God.18

Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, Traherne is of course already an early modern figure, but in the terms of Certeau’s analysis, his work is fascinatingly transitional. Recent scholarship has shown that Traherne was not, as was once thought, isolated from the thought of his contemporaries: he cites the Cambridge Platonists, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, praises Richard Hooker and George Herbert, and (in a recently published manuscript) engages in critical scholarly dialogue with three mid-seventeenth-century works of English divinity.19 Yet the major theological influences on his work are scriptural, Patristic, mediaeval and Renaissance, particularly the Florentine Neoplatonism of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and, through them, the corpus of writings, dating probably from the first to the third centuries AD, ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus.20 Though the importance of these influences has been recognized, the degree to which they reorientate Traherne’s thought away from Certeau’s psychological captivity and towards theological anthropology has not been sufficiently appreciated in most recent commentary.21 There is certainly an experiential element in his work, but, equally, his meditations bear many of the hallmarks of the premodern pattern of theology, in which the experiential and autobiographical are subordinated to the doxological. What is often referred to as the ‘solipsism’ of his writing – its continual return to the ‘I’ as the centre of its universe – is not so much an instance of the phenomenon noted by Certeau as a transcription into English seventeenth-century idiom of the thought-patterns of Augustine’s Confessions. As with any author, elements of personal experience inform Traherne’s work, but if we seek a heuristic model to give us a grasp on the purpose and scope of his endeavour, Augustine’s understanding of confession is far more serviceable than     19   20  

McIntosh, Mystical Theology, p. 68. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 188. Traherne, ‘A Sober View of Dr Twisses his Considerations’ in Works I, pp. 45–230. Jean-Louis Chrétien, La Joie spacieuse: essai sur la dilatation (Paris: Minuit, 2007), p. 174, Ellrodt, L’Inspiration personelle, pp. 268–74. 21   Chrétien begins to point in this direction. 17

18

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the categories of mystical writing or modern autobiography. It is for this reason that attempts, such as Wöhrer’s, to fit Traherne into a readymade category of ‘mystic’ are unsatisfactory. For Augustine, the verb confiteor encompassed the threefold pattern of admission of sin, profession of faith and praise of God,22 and a similar understanding is at work in Traherne’s meditations. As we shall see below, the ‘I’ of Traherne’s writings is not the ‘I’ of psychological solipsism, but the focal point of a confessional relationship with God: a lived example of what Kuchar calls a ‘sacramental phenomenology’,23 in which human participation in the life of God is instantiated. Traherne shares with Augustine two related premodern assumptions: about causation and about the relationship of the individual to God. Like Hooker a few decades before him, Traherne holds to the mediaeval assumption that causa est in causato, explaining causality by the concepts of inherence and similitude: ‘The Cause is in the Effect, and the Effect in the Cause’.24 Likewise, his relentless focus on the ‘I’, like Augustine’s inward turn in Confessions, is motivated not by a modern search for self-authenticating sincerity, but by the conviction that God is at once interior intimo meo [nearer to me than I am to myself] and superior summo meo [higher than the highest that is within me] – an Augustinian motto referred to several times by Traherne and cited directly in CMII:81.25 Their writing is thus grounded in a theology of the participation of creation and humanity in God. Rather than being primitive and unsatisfactory instances of the modern genre of autobiography, what we find in both authors is an exploration of the general communication between God and humanity seen through the lens of one particular life. Denys Turner identifies this as a ‘hybrid genre’, neither philosophy nor autobiography, but a vehicle to convey the ‘conviction that our deepest centre, the most intimate source from which our actions flow, our freedom to love, is in us but not of us, is not “ours” to possess, but only ours to be possessed by’.26 My discussion of Traherne’s understanding of this participatory relationship between God and humanity will largely be reserved for the next chapter. In what follows, while drawing on his other writings, I shall focus principally on the   See, as one of many instances, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Saint Augustin et les actes de parole (Paris: Presses Universitaires De France, 2002), p. 121, and James O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions II. Commentary on Books 1–7 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp. 3–7. 23   Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), p. 184. 24   Richard Hooker, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (ed. W. Speed Hill) (Harvard: Belknap Press, 1977–90), Vol. 1, 5.2, p. 73; Traherne, Works I, p. 337. For the centrality of this understanding of causation in Augustine, and its contrast with later Cartesian readings of Augustine, see Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 90–105. 25   Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), III vi, p. 43. 26   Turner, Darkness, pp. 54, 251. 22

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Centuries of Meditations, seeking to show that Traherne’s writing about the child and childlikeness is both rhetorically and theologically sophisticated. The formal simplicity of his prose and the avoidance of metaphor in his poetry are deliberately adopted strategies. His theology, far from being rudimentary, intriguingly recasts traditional themes in a form intelligible to the emerging world of seventeenthcentury scientific and cosmological enquiry, and as it does so, proposes the child as an icon of human openness to God. ‘Communicating most Enriching Truths’ The theological purpose of the Centuries of Meditations is made clear from the opening paragraph: An Empty Book is like an Infants Soul, in which any Thing may be Written. It is capable of all Things, but containeth Nothing. I hav a Mind to fill this with Profitable Wonders. And since Love made you put it into my Hands I will fill it with those Truths you Love, without knowing them: and with those Things which, if it be Possible, shall shew my Lov; To you, in Communicating most Enriching Truths; to Truth, in Exalting her Beauties in such a Soul. (CMI:1)

The analogy of Traherne’s first sentence commits the as yet blank pages of the book to the attempt to express the mystery of human life in relation to its origin and end in God, to whose ever-greater mystery humanity relates as a book to an author. To read the opening meditation in this theological light may at first seem unwarranted, especially as there is no explicit mention of God. Yet careful attention to the vocabulary and its continuity with the following meditations makes it clear that this first section is not merely an exposition of the work’s theme for its dedicatee and instigator, Susanna Hopton. On one level, the ‘you’ is undoubtedly Susanna, but, as in his poetry, Traherne’s pronouns in the Centuries are notoriously unstable.27 The ‘Love’ that has placed the book in its author’s hands, as well as being Susanna’s kindness, is the creative love of God which has established all that is. It is a divine Love that calls forth a reciprocating human love, which in turn becomes the vehicle for ‘Communicating most Enriching Truths’, and in the process reveals the human soul as ‘Capable of all Things’. Continuing this God-ward development, in the second meditation, Traherne observes that there is ‘in us a World of Lov to somewhat, tho we know not what in the World that should be’ (CMI:2). Here the parallels with Augustine’s discussion of the aporia of

27   See, for instance, Deneef’s discussion of the ambiguity of the pronoun ‘Him’ in ‘The Vision’, A. Leigh Deneef, Traherne in Dialogue: Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), p. 146.

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learning, the fact that ‘the soul knows, and yet does not know, the truth it seeks’,28 are unmistakeable. In a thoroughly Neoplatonic fashion, Traherne sets up the economy of desire for the still unnamed God, with the question: ‘Do you not feel your self Drawn with the Expectation and Desire of som Great Thing?’(CMI:2). It is in the third meditation that what has so far been implicit finally begins to emerge more clearly. Traherne reveals his subject to be the paradoxical presence of God in the world, of divinity in humanity, a subject that requires him to imitate Christ: I will open my Mouth in parables: I will utter Things that have been kept Secret from the foundation of the World. Things Strange, yet Common; Incredible, yet Known; Most High, yet plain; infinitly Profitable, but not esteemed. (CMI:3)

This succession of paradoxical adjectives sets the tone for the rest of the Centuries, which are, in the broadest terms, an exploration of ‘the Fellowship of the Mystery, which from the beginning of the World hath been hid in GOD’ (CMI:3). From the outset, then, the Centuries reveal themselves to be a form of extended parable, meditating on the great theological theme of participation in God. Participation, though it has often been overlooked in scholarly commentary, is of central importance in much Anglican writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notably in writers who influenced Traherne, such as Hooker and the Cambridge Platonists.29 Unusually however – and significantly for the argument of this book – Traherne almost invariably chooses to express his theology of participation in the Pauline vocabulary of the adoption of human beings as God’s children. Already in the third meditation of the first century, he asks, ‘Is it not a Great Thing, that you should be Heir of the World?’, thus posing a question that, like that cited above from the second meditation (‘Do you not feel your self Drawn with the Expectation and Desire of som Great Thing?’), will echo throughout the work to be answered most fully in the fourth century: ‘by this Lov do we becom

  Louis Martz, The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, Milton (Yale: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 45. 29   See A.M. Allchin, Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition (London: DLT, 1988) and Edmund Newey, ‘The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth and Jeremy Taylor’, Modern Theology 18: 1 (2002), pp. 1–26. Traherne draws on Hooker in the ‘Meditations and Devotions on St. Michael’s Day’ in the Church’s Year-Book (The Works of Thomas Traherne: Vol. IV (ed. Jan Ross) (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009), p. 207), citing Hooker’s chapter on angels in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, I, 4.1 (Works, Vol. I, p. 69). In The Kingdom of God he praises Hooker unreservedly and cites at length Ralph Cudworth’s ‘Sermon before the House of Commons’, in which participation is the central theme (The Works of Thomas Traherne: Vol. I (ed. Jan Ross) (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 369, 305). 28

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Heirs of all Mens Joys, and Coheirs with Christ’ (CMIV:57) and an ‘Heir of the Whole World, and the Friend of GOD’ (CMIV:90). Who, then, is the child for Traherne? Clearly there are autobiographical and experiential elements, but at root the child in the Centuries is an iconic illustration, communicating the ‘enriching truth’ of the human status as sons and daughters of God. In discussing this topic, commentators have tended to see the child as an Edenic figure, embodying the state of Adam and Eve prior to the Fall. Clearly there is much textual evidence, especially in the poetry and in the Centuries, to support this: ‘Certainly Adam in Paradice had not more sweet and Curious Apprehensions of the World, then I when I was a child’ (CMIII:1). Yet when the Centuries are re-read in the light of the recently discovered writings, a fuller picture emerges of the child as an image of the whole human condition from birth, through sin and death, to eternal life, and from Eden, through the Fall, to grace and the hope of future glory. The most famous sections of the Centuries are those that evoke the intimation of a prelapsarian world: All appeared New, and Strange at the first, inexpressibly rare, and Delightfull, and beautifull. I was a little Stranger which at my Enterance into the World was Saluted and Surrounded with innumerable Joys. My Knowledg was Divine: I knew by Intuition those things which since my Apostasie, I Collected again, by the Highest Reason. (CMIII: 2)

The cumulative effect of passages such as this, read in isolation, has been to foster an image of Traherne as at once the heir of Vaughan’s nostalgic presentation of childhood and at the same time the anticipator of the Romantic sensibility found in Wordsworth over a century later. The early Wordsworth, writing after the key transitional influence of Rousseau, adds to Vaughan’s nostalgia for a lost past the conviction that the child is at one with the wholeness and harmony of the natural world. As ‘Nature’s priest’, the child enjoys an intimate and innate relationship denied to the adult: The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.30

The assimilation of Traherne’s work into a hypothetical tradition of this sort is not, however, warranted by a balanced reading of his work. Despite the prominence 30   Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, Poetical Works, p. 460.

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of passages evoking prelapsarian delight, there is everywhere in Traherne’s presentation of the child both a clear acknowledgement of human sin (and of God’s saving grace working upon it) and a sense of eschatological hope. In the following sections I shall first look in more detail at the place of sin in Traherne’s theology as a whole, before indicating how his attention to human fallenness at the same time allows him to give full weight to the adoption of human beings as God’s children, through the incarnation of Christ. Just as in the scriptures and in the writings of the theologians on whom he draws, Traherne’s child is at times an ambivalent figure, manifesting the changeableness, fallibility and ignorance that are the signs of sin’s universal scope. Yet, precisely by not eluding sin’s grasp, the child points the way to a fuller understanding both of sin’s inescapability and of its ultimate eschatological defeat. ‘Sin! O only fatal Woe’ The Christian Ethicks, published shortly after the author’s death, is the nearest thing we have to a systematic doctrinal treatise from Traherne’s hand. In it he sets himself to write of the virtues rather than the vices, ‘to make the glory of God appear in the blessedness of man, by setting forth its excellency’.31 The opinions of influential critics notwithstanding, this need not be taken as a sign that, here or elsewhere, Traherne’s writings, preoccupied with a blithe affirmation of the glory of humankind, lack any serious awareness of sin.32 The point is merely that, in writing of the virtues, he believes that he has given himself both the harder and the nobler task. The vices, he writes, are ‘far the more easie Theme’ and ‘vice as soon as it is named in the presence of these virtues will look like poison and a contagion’.33 The same general pattern is found in the Centuries, where he brings to the foreground the blessings humanity has known, in order to show more clearly the scale of what has been lost and subsequently restored in Christ. Thus the child is a figure not only of the natural childhood enjoyed by Adam and Eve before the Fall, but also of the more wonderful adoptive relationship with God brought about in Christ. One common approach to Traherne’s thought here has been to draw a sharp contrast between two schools of theology, usually defined as ‘Irenaean’ and ‘Augustinian’, the latter being characterized by a much stronger doctrine of the Fall and a much more concrete understanding of the genetic inheritance of   Traherne, Christian Ethicks, ed. Carol Marks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 3. 32   Bush, for example, writes of the ‘large element of facile, expansive, emotional optimism, the kind of optimism which in the next generation passed easily into deistic sentimentalism’, Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 158. 33   Traherne, Ethicks, p. 3. 31

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original sin than the former. With very rare exceptions, scholars have assigned Traherne’s thought to the ‘Irenaean’ school, and it is true that the importance of Irenaeus to Traherne cannot be doubted. He cites him repeatedly, both explicitly and indirectly, and in Roman Forgeries, the one work published in his lifetime, his whole schema is framed on the example of Irenaeus’s treatise Against Heresies.34 There are, moreover, similarities with Irenaeus’s picture of Adam and Eve as children in the Garden of Eden prior to the Fall.35 Being children, their fall from grace is, as Patrick Grant writes, for Irenaeus, ‘a less serious and catastrophic event than the repeated and malicious sins of mature individuals against God’.36 Yet it is misleading to see Traherne in purely ‘Irenaean’ terms for two reasons. First, because the opposition between Irenaeus and Augustine has frequently been overdrawn – the two Church fathers’ understandings of sin are clearly distinct, but the contexts in which they wrote demanded different expositions – and secondly, because Traherne himself at times espouses an attitude to the child as sinner that would fall under the general category of ‘Augustinian’.37 This is most evident in Christian Ethicks, where human beings, from the moment of birth, are cast in a light that, at first sight, seems best characterized as ‘Calvinist’: Tho the first Man […] in his corruption might possibly retain a Sence of that Nature, and Life which he enjoyed in his integrity: Yet all his Posterity, that are born Sinners, never were sensible of the Light and Glory of an Innocent Estate, and for that cause may be wholy ignorant both of GOD and themselves, utterly unable to conceive the Glory of the World, or of that Relation, wherein they should by Nature have stood towards all Creatures.38

This passage is not typical of Traherne, but neither is it wholly unrepresentative. Select Meditations also devotes considerable space to the damage wrought by sin, especially towards the end of the third century, where the human being is described as ‘Blind and Seared […] a filthy Peece of Insensat Dirt, a careless Stupid and Repining Devil […] a Hell unto Himselfe’ (SMIII:96). And in The Kingdom of   Traherne, Roman Forgeries, by a Faithful Son of the Church of England (London:

34

1673).

  See M.C. Steenberg, ‘Children in Paradise: Adam and Eve as “Infants” in Irenaeus of Lyons’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 12:1, 2004, pp. 1–22. 36   Patrick Grant, The Transformation of Sin: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), p. 181. 37   Augustine’s doctrine of sin, which can seem heavy-handed to modern eyes, was motivated by the desire to preserve an ‘Irenaean’ understanding of participation in God against the purely imitative implications of the Pelagian position (see Hanby, Augustine, pp. 103–5). Moreover, Augustine admits to doubts about his position on the sin of unbaptized infants in Sermon 294, and wrote an unanswered letter to Jerome, seeking advice on precisely this question (see Bakke, When Children Became People, p. 102). 38   Traherne, Ethicks, p. 38. 35

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God in particular, there are several passages emphasizing ‘the Blindness of my Childhood’ and the fallibility of those ‘Childish Apprehensions [that] take Lustre, and Splendour to be the Greatest Glory, because it most affecteth the Ey with Material Beauty’.39 When Traherne’s thought is taken as a whole, his attitude to sin can only be described as ‘Irenaean’ if that term is not defined purely in opposition to Augustine:40 his child is clearly very far from a purely innocent Edenic figure. In fact the key to Traherne’s understanding of sin is his conception of the ‘fourfold estate’ of humankind.41 At the heart of the Centuries of Meditations he refers explicitly to ‘Man […] in his fourfold Estate of Innocency, Misery, Grace and Glory’ (CMIII:43): the estate of innocence before the Fall is succeeded by the parallel estates of misery and grace on earth, to be taken up into the estate of glory in heaven. While it is certainly true that in his pursuit of the via affirmativa Traherne chooses to stress the goodness of human nature, he does so, not because he is oblivious to sin, but because he is locating it in what he believes to be its correct context, as an interruption, an impediment, to full and God-given humanity. Sin, for Traherne, is not an inevitable fact of human nature, because humans in the image of God ‘are made [that is, created] to lov’ (CMII:66) and because the perfection of humanity has been made known in Christ, who was without sin. Sin is, however, an ever-present impediment, drawing humans out of their proper place in relationship with God. It is thus, in effect, sin that Traherne describes when he writes of the sense that ‘All Things were in their Proper Places, [and] I alone was out of frame and had need to be Mended’ (CMIII:60). What we see here is not a denial of original sin, but merely a rejection of the most extreme ‘Augustinian’ understanding of the doctrine. In an often-quoted phrase he observes that ‘it is not our Parents Loyns, so much as our Parents lives, that Enthrals and Blinds us’, before adding ‘Yet is all our Corruption Derived from Adam: inasmuch as all the Evil Examples and inclinations of the World arise from His Sin’ (CMIII:8). Sin is inextricably entwined in the present constitution of the world, but, he believes, is not essential to it. Douglas Bush’s charge of ‘facile […] optimism’42 has had to be further revised in the light of the recent discoveries. Initial critical commentary tended to respond to Traherne’s newly identified earlier work by characterizing it as the product of a more inhibited, doctrinally strait-jacketed author, who later achieved the confidence to express his true vision. Seelig, for instance, writes that the ‘persona […] who emerges [from Select Meditations] is […] a more traditional, conservative Christian [with] a stronger sense of sin and man’s fallibility and a greater interest   Traherne, Works I, pp. 445, 498; cf. p. 491 and CMIII:23.   Grant is careful to use the broad definition of ‘an Irenaean type of theology’,

39 40

Transformation of Sin, p. 195. 41   A classification that recurs throughout Traherne’s works and is found in other writers roughly his contemporaries, though the estates of misery and grace are often elided into one. See the note by Marks and Guffey in Traherne, Ethicks, p. 307. 42   Bush, English Literature, p. 158.

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in morality and duty’.43 Whilst it is true that Select Meditations does present a vision of the world that is both more pessimistic and more soberly expressed than that of the later Centuries of Meditations, in fact the theological inconsistencies are much less significant than suggested. Seelig’s acceptance of the view of the later Traherne as a mystic visionary, an ‘ecstatic’ and a ‘rhapsodic preacher’, fails adequately to appreciate the place held by sin in the later work. In fact, at the heart of the Centuries of Meditations there is an extended excursus on sin, beginning with a poem lamenting its grip on human life and ending with a prose reflection on how even one sin is ‘a Dreadfull Stumbling Block in the way to Heaven’ that ‘breeds a long Parenthesis in the fruition of our joys’ (CMIII:51). And, in the 50th meditation, Traherne makes a vivid affirmation of the doctrine of Christ’s atoning death, which has given power to resist and overcome the evil of sin: His Blood, thy bane; my Balsam, Bliss, Joy, Wine; Shall Thee Destroy; heal, Feed, make me Divine. (CMIII:50)

In the particularity of that death on the Cross, the fourfold Estate of humanity is set forth. The human state of misery becomes the state of grace, and at the same time the memory of the lost state of innocence is restored and the future state of glory anticipated: The Cross is the Abyss of Wonders, the Centre of Desires, the Schole of Virtues, the Hous of Wisdom, the Throne of Lov, the Theatre of Joys and the Place of Sorrows; It is the Root of Happiness, and the Gate of Heaven. (CMI:58)

Traherne’s Orthodoxy For all the importance of redressing the balance of much Traherne criticism by recognizing how consistently he acknowledges the ubiquity of sin, it must also be recognized that there are aspects of his thought that do, at least at first sight, seem to move away from the orthodox Christian tradition. This is most apparent not in his theology of grace, sometimes inaccurately described as ‘Pelagian’,44 but in his occasional tendency to panentheism in implying both an infinity in creation and, 43   Sharon Seelig, ‘Origins of Ecstasy: Traherne’s Select Meditations’, English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979), pp. 419–31 (p. 420). 44   The theology of grace was, of course, an area of great controversy in the midseventeenth-century Church of England. As with his contemporary Jeremy Taylor, Traherne’s position was characterized by his opponents as ‘Pelagian’, but is in fact better seen as an attempt to re-express the patristic and mediaeval synthesis. See especially Deus Justificatus in Taylor, The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor (London: Longman, 1839), Vol. IX, pp. 309–64, and the comments in Newey, ‘Form of Reason’, pp. 15–18.

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consequently, a mutual dependence between God and humanity. Thus, if ‘Abyss’ is the term Traherne uses for the Cross, revealingly it is also a term he adopts in rhetorically doubled form for the human soul: ‘The Soul is a Miraculous Abyss of infinit Abysses, an Undrainable Ocean, an inexhausted fountain of Endles Oceans, when it will exert it self to fill and fathom them’ (CMII:83). Here, as in a number of other passages, Traherne comes close to asserting an infinity in the human constitution that risks compromizing the ontological difference between God and creation characteristically affirmed by Christian orthodoxy. Modern commentators have often drawn attention to this incipient panentheism, but the earliest criticism is found in the marginalia on some of the recently discovered manuscripts, such as Inducements to Retirednes. Here the observations of an unidentified amanuensis seek to temper some of the author’s speculations, particularly where he speaks most boldly about the human capacity to reflect the image of God.45 At some points in his manuscripts, particularly those where the undoubted influence of the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus is most apparent, Traherne does use panentheistic formulations. Thus, discussing the relationship between God and humanity in The Kingdom of God, he likens God to the fountain of which human beings are the stream: ‘streams are Necessary to the very Fountain; yea so necessary, that without them the Fountain hath no Existence’.46 Taken together with the better known passages in Centuries of Meditations, which speak of ‘wants’ in God and of the world as ‘the Body of GOD’ (CMI:41; II:21), such statements seem to imply a necessary and mutually dependent relationship between God and creation, and have led a number of critics to see in Traherne an anticipation (fruitful or malign, depending on the author’s perspective) of later panentheistic theology.47 Yet the assumptions that underlie such statements are in fact not panentheistic, but participatory. Even if the manner of expression is at times unguarded, Traherne’s purpose is not to blur the boundary between God and humanity, but to find a multitude of images by which the dependent participation of the latter in the former can be rendered intelligible. In the passage where he writes of the world as God’s body, for instance, the statement is not one of simple identification, but an image used analogically and epiphanically to draw the reader towards a fuller understanding of God’s simultaneous presence in and absence from creation: Since therefore this visible World is the Body of GOD, not his Natural Body, but which He hath assumed; let us see how Glorious His Wisdom is, in Manifesting Himself therby. It hath not only represented His infinity and Eternity which we thought impossible to be represented by a Body, but his Beauty also, His

  Traherne, Works I, p. 32.   Traherne, Works I, p. 442. 47   This is apparent in the assimilation of Traherne to Wordsworth (referred to above) 45 46

and to more recent movements such as ‘Creation spirituality’; see Graham Dowell, Enjoying the World: The Rediscovery of Thomas Traherne (London: Mowbray, 1990), p. 5.

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Wisdom, Goodness, Power, Life and Glory, His Righteousness, Lov, and Blessedness: all which as out of plentifull Treasurie, may be taken and collected out of this World. (CMII:21)

Creation, for Traherne, is not identical with God, but ‘represents’ God analogically. Here Traherne expounds a doctrine of creation’s participation in the life of God, which is intended to emphasize rather than compromise the ontological difference between God and the world. The human being is, for Traherne, creation’s indispensable link with the Creator, ‘the Hymenaeus Marrying the Creator and his Creatures together’ (CMIV:74). As a unity of body and soul, the human being both reflects the finitude of creation and shares, though only by the gift of divine grace, in the infinity of God. Thus the use of the same term ‘Abyss’ for the Cross and the human soul is far from coincidental. Like the Cross, the soul is the means by which the human being is brought into communion with God. Yet, as with the Cross, this human-divine communion depends upon the specificity of a particular embodiment in time and space. In contrast to certain forms of Platonism, the body for Traherne is not an impediment to participation in God, but its indispensable means, ‘the glorious Instrument and Companion of the soul’.48 Traherne’s writing is remarkable for its capacity to praise body and soul together. His repeated praise of the human body49 is complemented by an equal delight in the human soul, and his wonder at the union of the two emerges perhaps most fully in this passage from The Kingdom of God: For two Natures infinitly distant are united in [Man], no Man can tell how, after a way and Manner so Mysterious, that it is far Easier to Explicate the Nature of his Soul, and Body, and open all the Endowments of either of them apart, then to reveal the Secret, or unfold the Manner of their Mysterious Union, which I dare boldly Say, is the Greatest Depth in the World.50

By virtue of this union, humanity enjoys a dignity greater than that of the angels and supreme among creation: ‘MAN was created, As the Golden Clasp (as Hermes calls him) uniting all Extremes, and as the Sovereign Head wherin all Visibles, and Invisibles are fitly concentred, and Meet together’.51

  Traherne, Works I, p. 240.   A characteristic of all his works and termed an ‘apologie des sens’ by Ellrodt,

48 49

L’Inspiration personelle, p. 323. See especially the interdependent Thanksgivings for the Body and Thanksgivings for the Soul, Traherne, Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings: Vol. II, Poems and Thanksgivings, ed. H.M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 214–44. 50   Traherne, Works I, p. 483. 51   Traherne, Works I, p. 483.

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If human beings in general enjoy this dignity, then the child in particular acts as its iconic focus, not by being presented as exemplary of an unfallen quasi-divine perfection, but by a particularly unconstrained inquisitiveness and enthusiasm, which in Platonic terms would be called eros or desire.52 Recalling his thirst for knowledge of ‘Humanitie’ as a child in Seeds of Eternity, Traherne describes his later frustration with the worthy dullness of philosophical treatises. Yet equally he admits the ‘Blindness’ and superficiality that characterized his childhood insight.53 The point is not to praise childlike innocence at the expense of adult learning, but to see how childhood, observed and recollected, presents us with an image of the relationship with God to which all human beings are called, a relationship best characterized in the scriptural language of adoption as children. This can be seen especially clearly in Select Meditations, where the child is the vehicle through whom Traherne illuminates his fourfold understanding of the human condition. In the incomplete text that we have, both childhood and the name of Jesus are first mentioned in the context of adoption: ‘my understanding […] is like Jesus Christ, my Elder Brother, by whom it is Restored to its first power, an[d] again Called to be a Son of God, by Him who Bringeth int[o] His Eternall Glory’ (SMI:91). This language of adoptive sonship sets up the pattern for the remainder of the work, and the theme recurs at regular intervals: ‘How glorious is God who is a father in a family of such children’ (SMIII:46); ‘Sons of God and the Freinds of God […] heirs […] equal to the Angels’ (SMIII:58). It is in this context that the more famous passages on recollected childhood are set. When Traherne recalls that ‘there was a time when I was unconfined: and saw every Kingdom mine which mine ear heard of. in a clear light it appeared as mine own possession tho beyond the seas’ (SMIII:26), he is in a sense remembering the collective history of humanity prior to the Fall. He is also, however, indicating the ability of childhood to anticipate the glory bestowed by divine adoption, the kingdom that, ‘tho beyond the seas’, is yet the human inheritance in Christ. In the third century of Select Meditations there are several sections such as this, each recalling the lost innocence of childhood. Yet, as we have already seen, none of them implies that the child is sinless (SMIV:52; III:96). Moreover, whatever the attractions of the recollection of Eden, they are pale in comparison with the reality of redemption: ‘The Trees of Eden and the flowers there are Poverty to these [of heaven]’ (SMIV:24). The child in Select Meditations, then, is a figure who lays bare the condition of humanity, caught between the recollection of innocence and the anticipation of glory, in the middle state where misery and grace coexist. This same pattern is evident in the Centuries of Meditations, though famously they dwell at much greater length on the depiction of childhood happiness. ‘God made Man Greater when He made Him less’ (CMIII:19), writes Traherne, yet, as in Select Meditations, the purpose here is not to isolate childhood as a time of lost 52   Denise Inge identifies this ‘want’ as the ‘leitmotif and spring of action’ in Traherne’s thought (Inge, Wanting Like a God), p. 3. 53   Traherne, Works I, pp. 445, 498.

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innocence to be lamented, but to see it as illustrative of the divine blessing that underlies all human life, but which is generally overlaid by adult preoccupations. Thus, when he states in a poem incorporated into the third century, ‘That Childhood might it self alone be said/My Tutor Teacher Guid to be’, he does so only because it is then that ‘He [God]… with us Walks’. And even then, in childhood, God ‘cold Acceptance in us finds./We send Him oft grievd away,/Who els would shew us all His Kingdoms Joy’ (CMIII:4). In fact, when the celebrated passages on childhood innocence, reflecting the estate of innocence in general, in the third century are read in context, it becomes evident that the joys they describe, captivating though they are, are lesser than those known in later life. This is made clear in a passage in the fourth century: In the Estate of Innocency the Lov of Man, seemed nothing but the Beams of Love reverted upon another – for he loved no person but of whom he was beloved. All that he loved was Good, and nothing evil. His Love seemd the Goodness of a Being expressed in the Soul, or apprehended in the Lover, and returned upon it self. But in the Estate of Misery, (or rather Grace;) a Soul loves freely and purely of its own self, with Gods Love, things that seem uncapable of Lov, Naught and evil. For as GOD shewed his Eternity and Omnipotency, in that he could shine upon Nothing, and love an Object when it was Nought, or Evil; As he did Adam when he raisd him out of Nothing, and Mankind when he redeemd them from Evil: so now we can lov sinners, and them that Deserve nothing at our Hands. Which as it is a Diviner Lov, and more Glorious then the other, so were we redeemed to this Power, and it was purchased for us with a Greater Price. (CMIV:87)

Whereas the ‘Estate of Innocency’ is a fixed state of reciprocal love, ‘the Estate of Misery, (or rather Grace)’ is a dynamic process of growth into the divine likeness. Here Traherne locates the image of God in the human being’s ability, through grace, to offer love as a gift without the certainty that it will be returned:exercising this freedom to love, humankind begins to share by analogy in God’s creation ex nihilo. There is, then, a progression through the estates, in which at each stage a greater blessing is given and, in which, despite the Fall, God is more nearly participated. In the estate of misery and grace, human beings may love with the love of God, a freely given love that was denied in Eden; and, as the comparatives of the final sentence hint, they may glimpse proleptically the love which will characterize the estate of glory, when a ‘Diviner Lov, and more Glorious’ will be seen face to face.54

  The same pattern is found in Traherne’s theory of language, expounded in Commentaries of Heaven: the Pentecostal gift of speaking in many languages exceeds the monoglot uniformity of Eden. See the entry ‘Babel’ in Traherne, Works, III, pp. 440–443 and Cynthia Saenz, ‘The Quest for Prelapsarian Speech in the Writings of Thomas Traherne’ 54

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‘The Maner is […] of greatest Concernment’ Given the theological sophistication that we have traced in this chapter, the deliberate and at times stubborn simplicity of Traherne’s literary style may surprise. His style has long been a vexed question among critics and, because it is apparently rather rudimentary, has often caused his theological depth and complexity to be overlooked. Perhaps the most notable feature of his meditative prose is its prolonged, repetitive and rhetorically unadorned form. This is frequently attributed to the fact that most of his writings were not intended for publication. It is clear, however, that the manuscripts were not jottings intended only for personal use, but were circulated fairly extensively among friends and subjected to several stages of critical revision both by Traherne and others.55 We have to assume, then, that Traherne’s style is not accidental and that, in his prose just as much as his poetry, form is inseparable from content. In fact digression is an essential part of his method. It is a device to which he at times draws attention and, as Martz notes, it is analogous to Augustine’s style in Confessions.56 Words and phrases repeated, but deployed differently on each occasion, gradually form patterns of association that disclose meaning indirectly. By indirections, directions are found out. Martz likens this to the ‘darting movement of passage’ he finds in Augustine.57 Traherne’s prose thus adopts a variable pace that is best seen as the formal parallel to his discussion of childlikeness. Digression, repetition and exaggeration, the hallmarks of the child’s speech, are its basis. Always there is a preference for stylistic simplicity, in notable contrast to the baroque embellishment of contemporaries such as Jeremy Taylor. This is not, of course, to say that Traherne somehow eschews all rhetoric. Part of the childlike quality of his prose is found in the fact that he delights in the manipulation of words, but he does so in a way that, as far as possible, chooses the most transparent rhetorical strategies, commonly using emphasis in capital letters or italics and amassing lists of nouns and adjectives. His poetry too shows the same preference for a simple and unadorned style. He professes to be suspicious of rhetorical artifice, writing in ‘The Person’: ‘The Naked Things/Are most Sublime’ and ‘Metaphores conceal,/And only Vapours prove’. Instead he prefers ‘An easy Stile drawn from a native vein,/A clearer Stream than that which Poets feign’ (‘The Author to the Critical Peruser’).58 Critics such as Deneef have seen in this in Jacob Blevins (ed.), Re-reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays (Tempe: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007), pp. 88–9. 55   Julia Smith, ‘Traherne, Thomas (c.1637–74)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 55, pp. 205–8. 56   ‘This Digression steals me a little further’ (CMIV:7). 57   Martz, Paradise, p. 49. 58   Traherne, CPT, pp. 76, 2. There is irony in the fact that this critique of metaphor is itself thoroughly metaphorical. Yet this poetic irony is akin to that found in all theological discourse, which, even as it insists that created language is inadequate to God, has to use it

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avoidance of metaphor a sinister attempt to remove the ‘clothing’ of deceptive and concealing specificity, and to retreat to the more abstracted realm of generalities.59 This accusation is more fairly made of Traherne’s poetry than his prose, but, even there, his purpose is to establish a deeper particularity which reveals the true nature of all things’ relationship with God. Stylistic complexity and poetic metaphor are suspect to Traherne, because they both risk emphasizing human ingenuity at the expense of openness to the divine. In the opening stanza of his programmatic poetic statement ‘The Author to the Critical Peruser’ he sets out his purpose thus: The naked Truth in many faces shewn, Whose inward Beauties very few hav known, A Simple Light, transparent Words, a Strain That lowly creeps, yet maketh Mountains plain, Brings down the highest Mysteries to sense And keeps them there; that is Our Excellence: At that we aim; to th’ end thy Soul might see With open Eys thy Great Felicity, Its Objects view, and trace the glorious Way Wherby thou may’st thy Highest Bliss enjoy.60

The transparency sought here (in contrast to the absolute clarity to which, as we shall see, Rousseau will later aspire), is best understood not as plain sight, but as sacramentally mediated after the manner of an icon. Simplicity and transparency are not ends in themselves, but means by which ‘the highest Mysteries’ are expounded. To bring these mysteries down ‘to sense’ is not, for Traherne, to dissolve them, but to render them perceptible not just to the soul, but to the body, and thus to the whole human being, which becomes an icon or image of God. This process is partially described by Kuchar, who, in contrast to Deneef, argues that Traherne’s style ‘work[s] to inspire a sense that every part of creation can serve as the occasion for being summoned to divine authority’, proposing ‘a devotional vision that is centred on an invisible yet immanent force that charges everything with mystery – even the body’.61 Yet Kuchar’s literary analysis of Traherne’s texts as a rhetorical performance that ‘seeks to mitigate the potentially disenchanting effects of […] early modern thought’62 does not sufficiently take account of his theology of participation in God. In Traherne’s writing the human being emerges not just as the subject of divine authority, but as the adoptive child of God, called to speak of God. Traherne’s ‘avoidance’ of metaphor can thus be seen as a literary parallel to the theological imperative to hold together the via negativa and the via affirmativa. 59   Deneef, Traherne in Dialogue, p. 74. 60   Traherne, CPT, p. 2. 61   Kuchar, Divine Subjection, p. 218. 62   Kuchar, Divine Subjection, p. 182.

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to embody God’s image. Language, then, does not stand alone, but forms part of the whole human constitution in its fourfold state. As human, language is fallen; but equally, as human, it was created good and remains open to the workings of divine grace, being capable of reflecting divine glory. The ultimate purpose of human language is coextensive with the purpose of humanity as a whole: the praise of God, from whom ‘[man] receiveth Benefits, to return in praises’ (CMII:94). Traherne’s avoidance of ‘Zamzummim words […] tongues that sound like BabelHell’63 and his option for stylistic simplicity are the formal counterparts to his theological teaching that the estates of misery and grace run hand in hand. His style is thus sacramental, giving form to his thoughts, as the body images the soul; it is, so to speak, the adverb (‘Well’) performing the noun (‘Good’): ‘The Maner is in evry thing of greatest Concernment. Whatever Good thing we do, neither can we pleas God, unless we do it Well’ (CMIII:38); and the manner of writing most pleasing to God is one that seeks to emulate the simplicity of a child’s desire, seeing the value of everyday things, and loving them infinitely ‘but in God, and for God: and God in them’ (CMII:66). Conclusion In this chapter I have sought to correct some of the imbalances of previous Traherne scholarship. Publication of the recently discovered manuscripts has helped demonstrate that the child figure of the Centuries and the poems cannot be read as merely autobiographical. Rather, seen in context, the child emerges as an iconic figure, through whom a developed and largely traditional theological anthropology is laid out. In the passage chosen as this chapter’s epigraph, Traherne writes, ‘Our Saviors Meaning, when He said, He must be born again and becom a little Child that will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven: is Deeper far then is generally believed’ (CMIII:5). This apparently straightforward citation of the scriptures is in fact a synthesis of two different biblical strands, the synoptic and the Johannine. Here, in his blending of Matthew 18:3 and John 3:3, he juxtaposes Jesus’ command to become like little children with the Johannine teaching on adoption in Christ. The child, then, is a figure leading to a truer apprehension not only of lost innocence, but, far more importantly, of freedom gained in Christ from human sin, and, by prolepsis, of the future state of glory, where there will be ‘A perfect Indwelling of the Soul in GOD, and GOD in the Soul. So that as the fulness of the GODHEAD dwelleth in our Savior, it shall dwell in us’ (CMIV:100). In the next chapter we shall turn to a fuller exploration of the significance of this participative relationship of indwelling in Traherne’s theology.

  Traherne, PCT, p. 2.

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Chapter 3

‘Sense Deified’: Humanity in Divinity Introduction The previous chapter sought to show that the child figure in Traherne’s meditations and poetry is misunderstood if prised apart from its intended context. The child is an iconic parable, by means of which Traherne illustrates humanity’s location in the middle of the fourfold estate, and the focal point for the articulation of his theological anthropology. It is unhelpful to see his writing on the child as a prototype for later centuries’ attempts to give artistic expression to childhood experience, or to try to fit the Select Meditations and the Centuries of Meditations, in particular, into the modern category of autobiography. Instead I have argued that his writings are better seen as discursive meditations on the model of Augustine’s Confessions, exploring from a particular personal standpoint the ongoing relationship between God and humanity. This chapter seeks to establish in greater detail the theological background against which Traherne’s child figure is set, and thus to establish where the child is located within the overall pattern of his thought. This is done, first, by returning to Augustine for a more detailed comparison, in which both the novelty of Traherne’s thought and its deeper continuity with that of the Church father will be made clear; and secondly, by examining the centrality of theosis, the teaching of humanity’s redemptive participation in God, to his theology. From this a fuller understanding emerges of the pattern of Traherne’s thought as a whole, but most especially of his originality in deploying the child as the imaginative centre from which to articulate an orthodox theological anthropology in the new idiom of an emerging era. ‘Enjoying the World’: Augustine’s uti/frui Distinction Reconfigured Augustine’s Confessions were written relatively early in his career at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries. In them he set out to narrate the intertwining of nature and divine grace in his own life, which becomes a paradigm of the history of salvation. His method is summed up in the central verb, confiteor, which, as we have seen, carries the threefold implication of acknowledgement of sin, proclamation of faith and praise of God. These three movements are inseparable, so that admission of sin, confessed in faith, becomes an occasion for glorifying God.1 1   Chrétien, Saint Augustin, p. 121; Edmund Newey, ‘Augustine and the Kyrie Confession’, Theology, CX, 858 (2007), pp. 417–25 (pp. 421–23).

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In this respect the pattern of Traherne’s writing closely resembles Augustine’s. The human condition that Augustine sees summed up in the verb confiteor is the same condition Traherne discerns in the middle ‘state’ of misery and grace, the state in which Christ by his life, death and resurrection has renewed the broken relationship between God and humanity. For the later writer this parallel state of misery and grace, in which sin persists, but grace abounds, is summed up in the image of the Cross cited in the previous chapter: The Cross is the Abyss of Wonders, the Centre of Desires, the Schole of Virtues, the Hous of Wisdom, the Throne of Lov, the Theatre of Joys and the Place of Sorrows; It is the Root of Happiness, and the Gate of Heaven. (CMI:58)

But the Cross, for Traherne, is not merely an event in the life of the earthly Jesus; set at the heart of created time and space, it is a manifestation of the triune love of God. Shortly after the passage cited above, he writes of the Cross as: a Tree set on fire with invisible flame, that Illuminateth all the World. The Flame is Lov. The Lov in His Bosom who died on it. In the light of which we see how to possess all the Things in Heaven and Earth after His Similitud. For He that Suffered on it, was the Son of GOD as you are : tho He seemed a Mortal Man. He had Acquaintance and Relations as you hav, but He was a Lover of Men and Angels. Was He not the Son of GOD and Heir of the Whole World? To this poor Bleeding Naked Man did all the Corn and Wine and Oyl, and Gold and Silver in the World minister in an Invisible Maner, even as he was exposed Lying and Dying upon the Cross. (CMI:60, spacing adapted)

Here Traherne expounds more fully the sense in which the Cross is an ‘Abyss of Wonders’. In the first three sentences cited, he refers not only to the encounter of Moses with the burning bush, an encounter with God the Father, ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ (Exodus 3: 6), but alludes also to the Holy Spirit, who in John’s gospel is given to the disciples as Christ dies on the Cross and who, in Acts, descends upon them in tongues of flame at Pentecost.2 Having indicated this ‘vertical’ dimension of the Cross as the manifestation of the triune God, in the final two sentences he points to its ‘horizontal’ axis, by which Christ, as the only perfect human being, represents the consummation of the created world, to whom all creation’s gifts minister. But, most interestingly, in the two transitional sentences he plays with the twofold sense of the term ‘Son of God’. The place to which each human being is called is the intersection of the 2   John 19: 30, Acts 2: 1–13; see also McIntosh, Discernment and Truth: The Spirituality and Theology of Knowledge (New York: Crossroad, 2004), p. 12.

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vertical and horizontal axes of the Cross, where, adopted in Christ, with him each person may become ‘the Son of GOD and Heir of the Whole World’. The Cross is thus the means by which humankind begins to perceive both its own nature and the nature of God, seeing ‘all things as the delighted gift of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father in their Spirit’.3 Though a specific historical event, it is also one with which all believers are made contemporary: Here [at the Cross] you learn all Patience, Meekness, Self Denial, Courage, Prudence, Zeal, Lov, Charity, Contempt of the World, Joy, Penitence, Contrition, Modestie, Fidelity, Constancy, Perseverance, Holiness, Contentation and Thanksgiving. With whatsoever els is requisit for a Man, a Christian or a King. This Man Bleeding here was Tutor to King Charles the Martyr: and Great Master to S. Paul the Convert who learned of Him Activity, and Zeal unto all Nations. Well therefore may we take up with this Prospect, and from hence behold all the Things in Heaven and Earth. Here we learn to imitat Jesus in his Lov unto all. (CMI:61)4

This Trinitarian understanding of the Cross as the focal point of both creation and redemption is a vital corrective to the common tendency to see Traherne’s theology as concerned almost exclusively with the affirmation of the glory of creation.5 There is no doubt that scholars who have emphasized the predominance of the doctrine of creation do have much material on which to base their argument. Whole sections of the Centuries, Select Meditations, the Thanksgivings and The Kingdom of God, in particular, are taken up with praise of creation. Yet this profusion of words is best seen as the elaboration of liturgical praise in the manner of the psalms, repeatedly cited by Traherne, and the Sanctus: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy Lord GOD of Hosts, Heaven and Earth are full of the Majesty of thy Glory’.6 I have argued in the previous chapter that, despite his occasional verbal carelessness, Traherne’s theology is not panentheistic. Instead what we find in Traherne is a resolute pursuit of the via affirmativa, by which all created things are held to speak of God even in their very difference from the Creator. The distinctiveness of this via affirmativa is seen most clearly in Traherne’s insistence in almost all his works on enjoyment, the learning of happiness, which he more often calls felicity. Here a further comparison between Augustine and Traherne is instructive. In one of his later works, De Doctrina Christiana, completed in 426/7, Augustine makes a highly influential distinction between the use (uti) and

  McIntosh, Discernment and Truth, p. 12.   The themes of this passage are treated at greater length in the entry ‘The Second

3 4

Adam’ in Traherne, Commentaries of Heaven, Works II, pp. 230–231. 5   A misapprehension found in, for example, Salter, Thomas Traherne, Wade, Thomas Traherne and Dowell, Enjoying the World. 6   Traherne, Works I, p. 327.

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the enjoyment (frui) of the things of the world.7 He concludes that human beings are always to be the object of uti, never of frui, except in a restricted sense as an anticipation of the fruitio in Deo that, in earthly life, is always still to come.8 Even a cursory reading of Traherne’s work makes clear that this distinction does not form a part of his theology. The word ‘enjoyment’, often capitalized, occurs with such frequency in his writings that it cannot be overlooked. As Elizabeth Jennings puts it: ‘where Augustine said the world was created for man’s use, Traherne believed that it was intended for man’s enjoyment’.9 Yet the differences between Traherne and Augustine are less deep-seated than might appear. As Williams observes, for Augustine ‘absence and deferral are the means whereby God engages our desire so that it is freed from its own pull towards finishing, towards presence and possession’.10 In this light, Augustine can be seen as a theologian of the via negativa, emphasizing the difference between God and humanity. Traherne, by contrast, points to the image of God that he finds everywhere in creation and, above all, in humankind. But just as Augustine’s theology is not correctly read if it is seen to devalue creation, so Traherne is misunderstood if he is believed to detract from the ontological difference between God and creation. The end of blessing for Traherne is not that humans should become God as God is God, but that they should share worthily in God by becoming the creatures they were made to be: ‘it more concerneth you to be an Illustrious Creature, then to hav the Possession of the whole World’ (CMI: 38). Thus the enjoyment of the world, to which Traherne accords such prominence, takes its value only from God who has entered the world to reconcile it to God’s self: ‘By Assuming us unto thy Selfe, and making us fellow workmen Thou hast Raised us to thy Throne who had we been onely Passiv, we had been Good for nothing’ (SMIII:54). In the recently published manuscript, The Kingdom of God, Traherne directly addresses his apparent differences with Augustine: We do not nicely distinguish between Use and fruition, becaus in the Use of Riches there is a fruition. I know that to use and to Enjoy are words having a different Signification. For according to St Augustine the Means are used, the End is Enjoyed. In which sence Treasures are never Enjoyed, because they are the Means only to a further End: But the Essence of God is an Act so pure, that to use and Enjoy in him are one. In using them he Enjoyeth the Treasures of his Kingdom: And in Enjoying, he useth them: Which if I may speak my mind

  Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 8–29. 8   Raymond Canning, ‘Uti/Frui’ in Allan D. Fitzgerald (ed.) Augustine through the Centuries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 859–61 (p. 860). 9   Elizabeth Jennings, Every Changing Shape: Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems (London: Deutsch, 1961), p. 89. 10   Rowan Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana’, Journal of Literature and Theology, 3 (1989), pp. 138–51 (p. 148). 7

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freely, is common to Men. They also may Enjoy their Treasures in Using them, if they pleas. Tho oftentimes they are so corrupt, that even in using them they Enjoy them not, and so Imperfect, and rather Incapable indeed of using them allwayes, that Many times, they Enjoy them, when they use them not: and for the most part hav them, without Either using, or Enjoying Them.11

Here, though the intellectual rigour of Augustine’s distinction has been lost, Traherne disavows any fundamental disagreement with the bishop. At root, Traherne’s intention is to reassert the Augustinian theme of human participation in God. Perhaps motivated by opposition to the extreme Calvinist doctrines of human depravity held by some of his contemporaries,12 he does not reserve enjoyment for the life to come, but believes that, by grace, a foretaste is granted in the present human condition. Yet, because of the blindness of sin, this enjoyment is always partial and its fullness will not be known except in the state of glory, of which we have anticipatory knowledge only by ‘the Cross of Christ […] the Jacob’s ladder by which we Ascend into the Highest Heavens’ (CMI:60). The theological distinctions here are analogous to those made in the previous chapter with regard to Traherne’s child figure. Often seen in proto-Romantic terms as an embodiment of divine truth, the child is rather, as Gladys Wade writes, ‘a living parable, an embodiment of truth; […] not the truth itself, as some would have us believe’.13 Although the child represents the innocence of humankind’s state before the Fall, for Traherne the grace encountered through redemption in Christ surpasses the grace we knew in our prelapsarian state. The memories of childhood clarity and simplicity take us back to Eden and give us a foretaste of the glory to come, but they remain partial and limited. Expressed in terms of his understanding of the fourfold estate, this means that the order of the states as experienced by humankind is an order of ascent. For all its delights, the state of innocence before the Fall is a less blessed condition than the parallel states of misery and grace, which in turn are a pale reflection of the state of glory in heaven.14 As he observes in the fourth century, in the state of innocence human love is ‘nothing but the Beams of Love reverted upon another – for he loved no person but of whom he was beloved’. In Eden there is no evil and so we love because love is all there is, but in the intermediate states of misery and grace, ‘a Soul loves freely and purely of its own self, with Gods Lov, things that seem   Traherne, Works I, p. 439.   See the treatise, A Sober View of Dr Twisses His Considerations, in Traherne,

11

12

Works I, pp. 45–230. 13   Wade, Thomas Traherne, p. 170. 14   Thus the four estates do not succeed one another dialectically, but posses a ‘continuity-in-transformation’, Michael F. Suarez, ‘Thomas Traherne and the “inward work” of conversion’, in John C. Hawley (ed), Reform and Counterreform: Dialectics of the Word in Western Christianity since Luther (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), p. 91.

44

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uncapable of Lov, Naught and evil’ (CMIV:87). This love, because it is freely given in Christ and freely received by us is ‘a Diviner Lov, and more Glorious then the other’ (CMIV:87). This is the strange happiness of human sin – the felix culpa – the fact that, since the Fall, humankind lives in the state where misery and grace meet. Human beings ‘are now Worse yet more to be Beloved […] so that Mens unworthiness and our vertu are alike increased’ (CMIV:26). Self-love and the Self in Relation The contrast with Augustine makes itself most apparent in Traherne’s discussion of self-love. Self-love, for Augustine, is reprehensible when it conflicts with the true love that is the love of God. ‘The earthly city [has been created] by love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly [city] by love of God extending even to contempt of self’, as he writes in The City of God; because the final wellbeing of humanity lies in God, to love God is the greatest service the human being can do to him or herself.15 Traherne, by contrast, sees self-love as the ladder to the love of God. In the context of mid-seventeenth-century English thought, appeals to self-love inevitably brought with them the spectre of Hobbes, for whom self-interest is the prime motive force in all human action. That Traherne was aware of this is apparent in an oblique reference to Hobbes in the fourth century: som Men have taken occasion […] to affirm that there is no true Lov in the World. But it is all self Lov whatsoever a Man doth. Implying also that it was self lov in our Saviour, that made Him to undertake for us. (CMIV:63)

Traherne’s own conception of self-love contrasts sharply with this: far from being identical to selfishness, self-love is the indispensable basis on which all true love is established. In fact the ability to love oneself is, for Traherne, part of what it means to reflect the image of God. In one of the third person meditations in the Centuries, he writes: It is true that Self Lov is Dishonorable, but then it is when it is alone. And Self endedness is Mercinary, but then it is when it endeth in oneself. It is more Glorious to lov others, and more desirable, but by Natural Means to be attained. That Pool [of Self Lov] must first be filled, that shall be made to overflow. He was ten yeers studying before he could satisfy his Self Lov. And now finds nothing more easy then to lov others better then oneself. (CMIV:55)

Though the subject of this meditation is concealed, it seems likely that the reference is to the childhood years as a time when the gift of self-love is accepted, before it 15   Augustine, The City of God, trans. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 632, (XIV, 28).

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has been corrupted into selfishness. It is in the search for a new childlikeness as a child of God that this self-love is able to overflow into a love of all creation in God. What is emphasized above all here is the central place of relationality in the constitution of human life. This can best be seen by looking more closely at Christian Ethicks, a treatise which, although it did not appear until after Traherne’s death, was revised by him for publication and so gives us a good indication of the formal structures of thought within which he was operating. At one level the book presents itself as a fairly conventional moral treatise, offering what Cefalu terms a ‘straightforwardly Aristotelian theory of ethical habituation’.16 Arguing against some of the more speculatively Platonic readings of Traherne, Cefalu proposes a more empirical basis to Traherne’s thought. Yet, though he clearly shares some of the scientific perspectives of the early investigations of the Royal Society, Traherne’s empiricism is, I believe, better seen as part of the alternative tradition identified by John Milbank, a tradition, ‘which construes empiricism as openness to the strange and unclassifiable, and pragmatism as surrender to the surprise of that which is mediated through us […] from a transcendent source’.17 Thus, in the preface to Christian Ethicks, Traherne describes ‘the design of this Treatise [as] to elevate the Soul […] to excite [the readers’] desire, to encourage them to travel, to comfort them on the journey, and so at last to lead them to true felicity’. The more Platonic ring of this aim is developed as Traherne, echoing Irenaeus, states his purpose ‘to make the Glory of GOD, appear in the Blessedness of Man, by setting forth its infinite Excellency’.18 Traherne’s Christian Ethicks takes the form of a discourse upon the virtues, which he describes as ‘sublime and mysterious Creatures […] which depend on the Operations of Mans Soul’.19 At the opening of the Centuries of Meditations he writes, in a passage already quoted, that ‘an Empty Book is like an Infants soul’ (CMI:1) and in the Select Meditations he uses a similar image, describing the human faculty of comprehension as a ‘Rasa Tabula Prepared in Him for the Drawing afterward of all the Pictures in Gods Kingdom’ (SMIV:2). With these conceptions of the soul and mind as blank slates, Traherne has sometimes been held to anticipate the views of John Locke and to reject the view of the Cambridge Platonists that there are innate ideas in the soul.20 In fact, though the phrase tabula rasa is best known from Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, not published until 1693, the references are both drawn from the Summa Theologiae, where Aquinas quotes Aristotle on the human intellect as ‘at first like a clean   Paul Cefalu, ‘Thomistic Metaphysics and Ethics in the Poetry and Prose of Thomas Traherne’, Literature and Theology 16:3 (2002), pp. 248–69 (p. 249). 17   John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 2. 18   Traherne, Ethicks, p. 3; cp. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. I (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), IV, 20, 7. 19   Traherne, Ethicks, p. 4. 20   Thus, Julia Smith in SM, p. 173. 16

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tablet [tabula rasa] on which nothing is written’.21 Here Aquinas is contrasting God’s pure activity with the initial passivity of the human mind in the process of understanding. Although Traherne elides Thomas’s distinction between mind and soul, it seems clear that, far from arguing for a proto-Lockean empiricism, he is emphasizing that the soul contains nothing except the capacity for relationship. The world-view of scientific modernity has tended to prioritize the noun over the verb, but here Traherne remains more mediaeval in his belief that the faculty of comprehension is ‘an inward Theatre of all [Gods] Actions: An infinit Mirror of His Divine Glory’ (SMIV:2). In this sense the soul is nothing apart from the relationships it forms, first with God and then with other human beings. Just as Adam was created by God, so fallen humanity is recreated in Christ. In the gift of love, freely given and freely received, humans learn to find their home in God: The Soul is shriveld up and Buried in a Grave that does not Lov. But that which does love Wisely and Truly is the Joy and End of all the World, the King of Heaven and the Friend of GOD, the shining Light and Temple of Eternity: The Brother of Christ Jesus, and One Spirit with the Holy Ghost. (CMII:50).

The infant soul, then, is pure, but only because it is pre-relational. As the relational gift of language grows, so does the capacity for sin: ‘I then my Bliss did, when my Silence, break’,22 and it is in the purification of desire through grace that the new and greater childlike state can be found. This is the context for the discussion of virtue in Christian Ethicks. Traherne regards the virtues not as innate dispositions, but as functions of the human soul being indwelt by the gracious presence of the Holy Spirit. Yet, equally, he emphasizes that this divine indwelling does not obliterate our freedom: To be Good, to be Holy, to be Righteous is freely to delight in Excellent Actions; which unless we do of our own Accord no External Power whatsoever can make us, Good or Holy or Righteous: because no force of External Power can make us free. Whatever it is that invades our Liberty, destroys it. GOD therefore may be infinitely holy, and infinitely desire our Righteous Actions, tho he doth not intermeddle with our Liberty, but leaves us to our selves.23

In this free pursuit of the good, humans learn to imitate God, because ‘GODLINESS, or GOD-LIKENESS is the cement of Amity between GOD and MAN’.24 It is in this context that Traherne’s egocentrism must be understood. The apparent ‘solipsism’ of his writing is not a manifestation of the inward turn of Christian mystical literature observed by Certeau, but is better seen as a     23   24   21

22

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia, 79, 2, citing Aristotle, De Anima, III, 4. ‘Dumnesse’, PCT, p. 40. Ethicks, p. 93. Ethicks, p. 285.

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sophisticated response to the agenda set out by Hobbes.25 For Hobbes the selfishness of the individual human being is primary, and the gospel is reduced to the need to do as you would be done by: ‘This is that law of the Gospelle: Whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them’.26 Thus for all its apparent conservatism with regard to the role of the Church, Hobbes’s philosophy is effectively atheistic, employing religion simply as a pragmatic regulative force in human affairs.27 For Traherne, by contrast, the prime reality is God, in whose image human beings are created. The attribution of wants or desires to God is a recurrent theme of Traherne’s writing: the God of Israel, who ‘from all Eternity Wanted like a GOD’. Yet, as we saw in the previous chapter, these ‘wants’ are not to be understood panentheistically. They do not tie God and the world into a relationship of mutual dependence, because they are not necessary to God’s being, but consequent to God’s free choice to create the world: He Wanted the Communication of His Divine Essence, and Persons to Enjoy it. He wanted Worlds, He wanted Spectators, he wanted Joys, He wanted Treasures. He wanted, yet he wanted not, for he had them. (CMI:41)

God does not need creation, but does desire its free response, and it is by exercising this freedom to respond in gratitude to God that human beings come to reflect God’s image. Thus in the chapter ‘Of Gratitude’ in Christian Ethicks, Traherne writes of self-love: ‘Even Jacobs Ladder will not bring us to Heaven, unless we begin at the bottom. Self-love is the first round, and they that remove it, had as good take away all: For he that has no love for himself can never be obliged’.28 Self-love, in this light, is the acceptance of an obligation, the recognition that humans are made in God’s image and restored to it in Christ, a recognition that, for Traherne, is the prerequisite of any attempt to love God or one another in return: Self-love is so far from being the impediment, that it is the cause of our Gratitude, and the only principle that gives us power to do what we ought. For the more we love our selves, the more we love those that are our Benefactors. It is a great mistake in that arrogant Leviathan, so far to imprison our love to our selves, as to make it inconsistent with Charity towards others.29

  See p. 44 above.   Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: A Critical Edition, ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Karl

25 26

Schumann (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2003), p. 105. 27   Here I follow the critique of Hobbes’ atheism first offered by his contemporary, Bishop John Bramhall, though I am aware of alternative theological readings, such as that proposed by Martinich, linking Hobbes’ thought to ‘Calvin’s doctrines of predestination and belief in the omnipotence of God’ (A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 3). 28   Traherne, Ethicks, pp. 260–261. 29   Traherne, Ethicks, p. 261.

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Here Traherne reframes the assumptions of Hobbesian thought by broadening their perspective. Hobbes’s self-referential anthropology, from which any sense of relationship with God has been effectively excised, is recast as a theological anthropology. The state of nature described in Leviathan, in which there is ‘such a warre, as is of every man, against every man’ is, in Traherne’s terms, the state of misery shorn of its interconnectedness with the states of innocence, grace and glory.30 Thus, whereas for Hobbes, the relationship between individual human beings is one of competition, a threat to the peace of the state, for Traherne it is one of complementarity: Souls are Gods Jewels […] becaus his Image – and mine for that reason. So that I alone am the End of the World. Angels and Men being all mine. And if others are so, they are made to Enjoy it for my further Advancement. God only being the Giver, and I the Receiver. […] God gave me alone to all the World, and all the World to me alone. (CMI:15)

Self-love, then, is neither a threat to human community nor an end in itself, but, by grace, an apprenticeship in the workings of God’s love. As Jean-Louis Chrétien has shown, for Traherne the very act of saying ‘I’ is ‘une anticipation de notre accomplissement eschatologique, une lueur dès à présent de la vie éternelle, car c’est en tant qu’image de Dieu que nous pouvons le prononcer ainsi’.31 If, in the state of misery to say ‘I’ is to be bound up in the consequences of the Fall, in the parallel state of grace it is a sign of the blessings that will be known fully in the state of glory: Here I am censured for Speaking in the Singular number, and Saying I […] There it shall be our Glory and the Joy of all to Acknowledge, I. I am the Lords, and He is mine. Every one shall Speak in the first Person, and it shall be Gods glory that He is the Joy of all. Can the freind of GOD, and the Heir of all Things in Heaven and Earth forbear to say, I. (SMIII:65)

The First and Second Adam: Anthropology and Christology Traherne’s anthropology is thus eschatologically orientated. To be capable of selflove is already to be caught up in the workings of God’s grace and directed towards the future state of glory. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, self-love, for Traherne, is never to be enjoyed in isolation. Far from being a selfish or solipsistic state, selflove is the first step in a process whose unfolding is, ultimately, infinite. Initially its direction seems to be towards the world (and therefore finite): to learn to love   Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 101.   Chrétien, La Joie Spacieuse, p. 182, ‘an anticipation of our eschatological

30 31

fulfilment, a glimmer from the present of eternal life, because it is in as much as we are made in God’s image that we are able to utter the word “I”’.

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oneself is to be restored in the divine image that was lost at the Fall and to enjoy the relationship with the created world known by Adam: all the Riches and Honors in the World are ours in the Divine Image to be Enjoyed. That a Man is tenderly Belovd of God and always walking in his fathers Kingdom, under his Wing, and as the Apple of his Ey! (CMIV:90)

But this opening perspective on Eden restored is only part of a deeper unfolding, which is directed towards God (and, in consequence, infinite). As well as being ‘the heir of the Whole World’, in Christ the human being also becomes ‘the Freind of GOD’ (CMIV:90): ‘By this Lov do we becom Heirs of all Mens Joys, and Coheirs with Christ’ (CMIV:57). To borrow Traherne’s own imagery, cited above, the pool of self-love, being filled, overflows into love for the finite creation and then into love for the infinity of God; yet these are not so much consecutive stages as concurrent movements, in which God is revealed to be at once the end and the means of enjoyment: ‘God is the Object, and God is the Way of Enjoying […] Eternity and Time, Heaven and Earth […] are in him to be enjoyed’ (CMV:1). As well as being eschatologically orientated, the process unfolded from the principle of self-love is christologically grounded. To share in Christ is, for Traherne, to enjoy both the restoration of Adam’s condition and the greater (because infinite) gift of adoption as a child of God. The world is bestowed as a gift ‘to every Infant’ because ‘GOD is Liberal’ (CMII:2), but it is a gift received not by natural right, but only through adoption in Christ. When Traherne writes that ‘the Son of GOD is the first Beginning of evry Creature’ (CMIV:4), he appears simply to be reformulating the scriptural and Patristic teaching that redemption is best conceived of as a new creation. Created ‘naturaly the Sons of GOD, (I speak of Primitiv and upright Nature)’ (CMIV:4), after the Fall it is only in Christ as ‘Son of GOD’ that humans can learn again what it is to be a creature: salvation is thus conceived of in Pauline terms, as a new creation.32 Yet the language Traherne employs here and elsewhere adds a new depth to this scriptural theme by indicating the ways in which creation, when redeemed, enjoys a previously unknown share in the infinity of God. Even so sensitive an interpreter as Jean-Louis Chrétien, has found a theological failing here, suspecting that Traherne’s anthropology risks dissolving the finitude of humankind in the infinity of God.33 Yet I believe that Traherne’s apparently blasphemous fascination with describing humanity in terms of infinity must be seen as a description not of humanity in itself, but of humanity redeemed in Christ. Properly understood, Traherne’s theological anthropology relativizes human finitude rather than dissolving it. In the parallel states of misery

32   A theme picked up earlier in the seventeenth century by Lancelot Andrewes, who uses the term palingenesis (Iain MacKenzie, God’s Order and the Natural Law: The Works of the Laudian Divines (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 136). 33   Chrétien, La Joie Spacieuse, p. 190.

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and grace, the twin mysteries of human sin and divine redemption, humanity finds the created limitations of its nature opening up into the infinity of God. This is seen especially clearly in the paired entries, ‘Adam’ and ‘The Second Adam’ in Commentaries of Heaven, a work in which Traherne set out to expound ‘The Mysteries of Felicitie’, ‘EVRY BEING Created and Increated being Alphabetically Represented In the Light of GLORY’.34 Writing, in the first entry, of the ‘several Estates’ of Adam, Traherne describes the state of misery after the Fall in terms of Adam’s self-willed de-creation: In the Estate of Miserie He was the object of infinit Hatred, that overcame it self by infinit Love: infinitly deformed with Guilt and living under the Burden of infinit Wrath. All Creatures that served him before now Witnessed against him, and became ministers of Gods wrath, and the Engines of his Execution.35

Here we see the vicious cycle of sin, which is the parodic counterpart of the virtuous unfolding of grace outlined above. Human sin, as the object of divine wrath, opens vertiginously onto the sphere of infinity: though a temporal phenomenon, it has consequences that are potentially eternal. Yet, even as he vividly describes this state of deformity, Traherne alludes to the continuing availability of ‘infinit Love’. This love alone can break the vicious spiral of sin, but it does so by acting within, not upon, human nature. Thus, in the vocabulary that was so hotly disputed in his era, Traherne sides with theologians such as Richard Hooker, for whom God’s grace acts not solely by external imputation, but by ‘habituall and reall infusion’.36 Later in the same entry he writes of the vocation of redeemed humanity to ‘live as the Adaequat object of Eternal Love and behave thy self in all Things as behooveth a Lord of the World, and Heir of Eternal Glory’.37 In this sentence it is the choice of the adjective ‘Adaequat’ that is most unexpected: to be ‘the Adaequat object of Eternal Love’ is to be equal to God. Yet, in context, this apparently heretical statement is merely a bold rephrasing of the orthodox belief that human nature is capax Dei, an Augustinian teaching alluded to elsewhere by Traherne.38 Unlike Hooker, Traherne does not spell out his teaching systematically, but their assumptions are the same. Even after the Fall humanity retains an aptness for God’s grace; on its own this can achieve nothing, but when restored in Christ, it becomes once again an ability, which allows graced humanity to grow in communion with God. Thus   Traherne, Works II, p. 3. Unsurprisingly this work remained incomplete, terminating abruptly with the entry ‘Bastard’. 35   Traherne, Works II, p. 223. 36   Hooker, Works, Vol. II, 56.11, p. 243. Traherne praises ‘the judicious Hooker, that Glorious Beam of the English Church’, Works I, p. 369. 37   Traherne, Works II, p. 224. 38   ‘For becaus God is infinitly able to do all Things, there must of Necessity be an infinit Capacitie to answer that Power’, CMV:4. 34

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humans are capaces Dei, ‘not from any natural necessity […] but from the will of God, which doth both freely perfect our nature in so high a degree, and continue it so perfected’.39 In the same way, consistent with the purpose of Commentaries of Heaven to represent all things ‘In the Light of GLORY’, Traherne’s intention is to show that, in Christ, the mortal human being may enjoy a foretaste of the encounter with God’s immortality that is promised in the state of glory: ‘Eternity is in us, and we in it, we have the same glory with Jesus Christ’.40 For Traherne, then, it is impossible to say all that must be said about the truth of the human condition in abstraction from that condition’s beginning and end in Christ: his anthropology is both eschatologically and christologically determined. ‘Humanity […] the Handmaid of true Divinity’41 Having explored in some detail the content and context of Traherne’s theological anthropology, we must now examine more explicitly the theme of theosis or human participation in God, which has been alluded to indirectly. This theme is, I believe, the keystone binding together Traherne’s understanding of the study of humanity and divinity, but it has not generally been given the scholarly attention it deserves. Typically his references to the deification of humanity have been taken either as rhetorical excesses or as a sign of his shortcomings as a mystic. Thus, on the one hand, Deneef writes that ‘it often seems that, to Traherne, man is divine’ and that ‘he insists upon a literal and optimistic coordination of the divine and the mortal’.42 For Deneef this is a function of Traherne’s avoidance of metaphor and preference for the literal: because Traherne’s poetic theory ostensibly rules out metaphor in favour of ‘the naked Truth’,43 if he wishes to speak of God he is left with no option but to pursue a path which ultimately identifies God and humanity. On the other hand, the French literary critic Robert Ellrodt rightly identifies Traherne’s language as belonging within the theosis tradition, but judges it to be lacking in authenticity. There is, he argues, ‘un authentique pressentiment mystique’ in Traherne, but no genuine ‘intuition ou expérience mystique’: Sa complaisance naïve à se sentir honoré, magnifié, déifié ne rapelle en rien cette transformation qui donne à l’homme d’être par grâce ce que Dieu est par nature selon Eckhart ou selon saint Jean de la Croix.

    41   42  

Hooker, Works, Vol. I, 11.3, p. 113. See also Newey, ‘Form of Reason’, pp. 5–9. Traherne, Works II, p. 234. Traherne, Works I, p. 233. Deneef, Traherne in Dialogue, p. 26; elsewhere the same author argues that Traherne is ‘extremely close to arguing that as man is fulfilled by God, so God must be fulfilled by man’, p. 165. 43   Traherne, PCT, p. 2. Of course ‘naked Truth’ is itself a metaphor: as we saw in the previous chapter, the metaphorical is never truly abandoned. 39 40

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[The naïve complacency by which he feels himself honoured, magnified, deified, does not in any way recall that transformation, in which the human being is given to be by grace what God is by nature, as found in Eckhart or Saint John of the Cross.]44

For Ellrodt, Traherne’s thought is, in this respect, a theology in decline, part of a movement towards the domestication of God’s transcendence through a belief in the human soul’s innate capacity for infinity.45 Against both these lines of thought, I wish to argue for the fundamental coherence and theological validity of Traherne’s use of the theosis theme. In doing so, I draw upon the limited quantity of scholarship on the doctrine of participation in Anglican seventeenth-century thought.46 This has shown theosis to be an important theme in the work of theologians such as Richard Hooker and the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, each of whose influence on Traherne has been demonstrated by recent manuscript discoveries.47 I am also mindful of the growing body of literature devoted to theosis outside what was once taken to be its natural home in Eastern Orthodox thought.48 In particular, I take account of Gösta Hallonsten’s survey article, with its useful identification of three interconnected but different phenomena, each of which can be referred to by the term theosis, but which for the sake of clarity need to be distinguished. Hallonsten describes theosis: first as a theme, ‘often connected with similar scriptural themes like adoption and filiation [and] surely to be found in most Christian writers throughout the ages’; secondly, as connected to a certain anthropology ‘always teleologically orientated in a dynamic way toward the prototype [of Christ]’; and thirdly, as ‘a comprehensive doctrine that encompasses the whole of the economy of salvation’, this last being reserved for the ‘integral doctrine of deification as presented by the Eastern tradition’.49 Certain aspects of Hallonsten’s categorization call for questioning. It is doubtful whether theosis, even as a theme, is found ‘in most Christian writers’; and, as I shall argue, his contention that the second and third types ‘belong intimately together’ while the first is more independent, does   ‘A genuine presentiment of mysticism’, but no ‘mystical intuition or experience’; Ellrodt, L’Inspiration personelle, p. 371. 45   Ellrodt, L’Inspiration personelle, p. 372. 46   Allchin, Participation, Newey, ‘Form of Reason’. 47   See, for instance, Traherne, Works I, p. 305, where he makes an unattributed citation of Cudworth’s ‘Sermon preached before the House of Commons’ at length and p. 369, where he refers to Hooker. 48   Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov (eds), Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2006), Michael Christensen and Jeffery Wittung (eds), Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Tradition (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). 49   Hallonsten, ‘Theosis in Recent Research: A Renewal of Interest and a Need for Clarity’ in Christensen and Wittung, Partakers, pp. 281–93 (p. 287). 44

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not fit the pattern found in much Anglican thought of the seventeenth century. Hooker, Cudworth and, more fully still, Traherne himself each develop a theology in which theosis is clearly both an underlying theme and constitutive of an anthropology, even if it cannot be called a comprehensive doctrine. Nonetheless, Hallonsten offers a helpful reminder that the mere presence of the vocabulary of deification is not evidence of a fully-fledged doctrine. In the final stanza of a poem concluding one of the chapters of The Kingdom of God, Traherne refers to theosis in the context of his doctrine of the four estates: Natures Corruption he doth hate Seeking his former State; Or rather that Exalted one, Which truly is Divine, To be Enjoyd, when on the Throne Of Glory he doth Shine. Where all his Body Shall be purified Flesh turnd to sense, and sense be DEIFIED.50

These lines demonstrate how closely interwoven are the studies of humanity and divinity for Traherne: or, put differently, how thoroughly theological his anthropology is. In this compact stanza we see the themes of sin and self-love, enjoyment, eschatology and Christology all brought together under the rubric of theosis. The ‘Wise Man’, the poetic subject, who has been ‘transfigurd’ by divine grace51 learns to turn from sin by the self-love which causes him to seek his former state of created innocence. But, immediately it is embarked upon, this movement of finite self-love is caught up in the unfolding of infinite divine love characteristic of the ‘Exalted’ state. This being ‘Enjoyd’, he comes to share, by prolepsis, in the reign of Christ’s heavenly glory. Yet the bold present tense of ‘doth Shine’ is reframed by the future tenses of the final lines, which locate the resurrection of the body (when, in Pauline terms, ‘this mortal body must put on immortality’)52 still as hope, not achievement. The capitalized final word ‘DEIFIED’ thus remains both a realized state in Christ and, as yet, only a future possibility for the subject. From the human perspective Traherne’s is an inaugurated eschatology; only in Christ has it been realized. Though this use of the verb ‘deify’ is rare, the theme of theosis is found widely in Traherne’s writing. In the short treatise Seeds of Eternity, a discourse on the human soul, he refers to the central scriptural text on theosis: ‘Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust,   Traherne, Works I, p. 408.   Traherne, Works I, p. 407. 52   I Corinthians 15: 53. 50 51

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and may become participants of the divine nature’.53 The reference occurs in the culminating sentence of a long series of rhetorical questions about the destiny of the soul: Shall it be a Vessel of Glory, Equal to the Angels, bought with a Price, redeemed with the Blood of Jesus Christ, a Partaker of the Divine Nature, an Heir of Eternal Glory, the Sovereign Object of Gods Lov and shall we not ponder how meet it is for these things?54

On one level, this series of questions is a recitation of scriptural texts in which, to use Hallonsten’s terms, deification is merely one theme among many. Yet, as the treatise develops, the participation of the soul, by grace, in God emerges as its overall theme. The concluding paragraph, though its abruptness implies that Traherne would have worked further on the manuscript, indicates this clearly: By all this it is manifest […] that Man is Superior to all the Beasts, that he is made capable by Nature of union with God. And since all the Things in Heaven and Earth proceed from Love not from Hatred in their first Original, and in their last End were directed to the Glory and Happiness of those that Enjoy it.55

Here the phrase ‘capable by Nature of union with God’ seems to support Ellrodt’s criticism that Traherne’s understanding of theosis oversteps the mark by attributing to human nature what is rightly seen as the gift of God’s grace alone. The doctrine Traherne is referring to, however, is the teaching that humankind, unlike the animals, is made in the divine image, and thus has, by nature, a passive aptness for union with God that only by grace can be realized as an ability.56 A similar pattern to that in Seeds of Eternity is found in Thanksgivings for the Blessedness of God’s Ways, where 2 Peter 1: 4 is again referred to in a list of scriptural titles amplifying the notion of the divine likeness in humankind: In thy Likeness, In Communion with Thee, As Sons and Heirs, Kings and Priests, Brides and Friends, Coheirs with Christ,

    55   56   53

II Peter 1: 4. Traherne, Works I, p. 239. Traherne, Works I, p. 244. A doctrine propounded notably by Richard Hooker in chapters 50 to 56 of the Fifth Book of the Laws. See Hooker, Works, Vol. II, p. 209f and the discussion in Olivier Loyer, L’Anglicanisme de Richard Hooker: Thèse présentée devant l’université de Paris III (Paris: Université de Paris III, 1979) and Newey, ‘Form of Reason’. 54

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Partakers of the Divine Nature, To the Praise of thy Glory, Joy of thy Son, By the Power of thy Spirit, Dwelling in us.57

Here, however, the christological grounding of deification is reconfigured in Trinitarian terms. The indwelling Holy Spirit becomes the agent of theosis, developing the thought expressed in the Centuries that ‘as my Body without my Soul is a Carcase, so is my Soul without thy Spirit’ (CMI:93). This concise, but carefully worded, expression of the theosis theme contrasts with the looser terminology found at certain points in Select Meditations. In this, generally considered to be one of his earliest surviving works, the influence of the Corpus Hermeticum (the series of works attributed to the mythical Egyptian sage, Hermes Trismegistus)58 is most apparent. At times this leads Traherne to a more generalized conception of human participation in God than is consistent with Christian orthodoxy, as in this passage, where despite concluding with a reference to Psalm 82: 6, one of the chief scriptural texts associated with theosis, deification seems to float free of its christological moorings: A creature that can enjoy Infinite Blessedness has unlimited comprehensions for all Eternity: and very clear and distinctive powers to penetrate the Bowels of every centre: in every point of which He findeth a Diety [sic], yet one God in the whole Sphere. And is Himselfe a God to God. that [sic] is a Delight, an Image magnified and Exalted to the utmost Height: I have Said ye are Gods, but ye Shall Dye like men, and fall like one of the princes. (SMII:26)59

More typically, however, Traherne carefully maintains the christological grounding of deification, in particular by associating it with the related topic of adoption. In Patristic thought, the pair of terms huiopoiesis and theopoiesis (literally ‘sonmaking’ and ‘God-making’) are closely associated with the doctrine of theosis,60 and Traherne’s thought, as it matures, increasingly follows this pattern. In Select Meditations he uses the adoption theme, but more freely and with less scriptural reference: ‘we are made [God’s] heirs. every Son is his Fathers Image, and being   Traherne, CPT, p. 259.   Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge,

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1979), p. 14f. This was mediated to Traherne through the Florentine Neoplatonism of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino. 59   Elsewhere in SM, theosis is referred to in the more orthodox vocabulary of ‘Sealing Seal and […] Seal Sealed’, borrowed from the Cappadocians, SMIV:6. 60   Trevor Hart, ‘Redemption and Fall’ in Colin Gunton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 189–206 (p. 198).

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Heirs shall Inherit all Things’ (SMIV:4). In The Kingdom of God it is developed more fully with the imagery of divine sonship taken from the first letter of John61 and in the Centuries of Meditations it receives perhaps its fullest expression: To be the Sons of God is not only to Enjoy the Privileges and the freedom of His Hous, and to bear the Relation of Children to so Great a father, but it is to be like him and to share with Him in all His Glory and in all his Treasures. To be like Him in Spirit and Understanding, to be Exalted above all Creatures as the End of them, to be present as He is by Sight and Lov, without Limit and without bound with all his Works, to be Holy towards all and Wise toward all as He is. (CMIII:97)

Conclusion If, then, Traherne does not espouse a full doctrine of theosis, as Hallonsten would define it, it is nonetheless clear that, far from being simply an incidental motif or theme, it is constitutive of his anthropology. The sonship of Christ, in which redeemed humanity shares by grace, transforms both the human being, body and soul, and the created world into a means of communion with God. God’s presence in the world does not therefore consist of proofs implanted in the things of nature, but in the establishment of a right relationship between nature and humans: ‘The Consideration also of this Truth, that the World is mine confirmeth my faith. GOD having placed the Evidences of Religion in the Greatest and Highest Joys’ (CMII:6). The things in which humankind must learn to delight mediate God only because they have first received from God: ‘All things do first receiv, that giv’.62 It is in the verb rather than the noun, in the relationship rather than the thing, that the presence of God is found. Kuchar’s comments on Traherne’s picture of the human body as a ‘living hymn’ thus apply equally to the world, transformed by grace: ‘the body thus functions [sacramentally] as a kind of gerund, an action that has taken on substantive form […] thereby resituating the body’s relationship to Being as an ongoing, ever-renewing, highly mysterious process’.63 One way of situating Traherne’s distinctive approach in its cultural context has been proposed by Jonathan Sawday. Sawday argues that Traherne is seeking ‘to create a new language of the body’, in response to both the newly emerging scientific method and the materialistic implications of the philosophies of Bacon, Hobbes and Descartes. He asks how it would: be possible to create a new language of the body which, whilst it acknowledged the discoveries within the microcosm, could retain the dimensions of sacred

  Traherne, Works I, p. 479.   ‘The Circulation’ in Traherne, PCT, p. 154. 63   Kuchar, Divine Subjection, p. 197, p. 200. 61 62

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anatomy? […] to simply deny the force of Cartesian analysis was hopeless. But to reinvent the body as its own peculiar, reserved space, was an altogether different possibility.64

While concurring with Sawday on the background that stimulated Traherne’s response, Kuchar has rightly criticized the idea that the human body in his work occupies in any sense a ‘reserved space’. On the contrary, he argues, the body ‘is not an object in itself as such, but a medium of experience, an integral part of sacramental communion’.65 For Kuchar, this reimagination of the human body in sacramental terms is the key to Traherne’s attempt ‘to mitigate the potentially disenchanting effects’ of the scientific and philosophical suspicion of analogical thought, an attempt that places him at the outset of the ‘[phenomenological] critique of Cartesian dualism’.66 However, what both Sawday’s and Kuchar’s predominantly literary and philosophical analyses fail to recognize is that Traherne’s sacramental initiative is thoroughly theological in its motivation. Rather than being seen as a reaction to the threat posed by the new science and philosophy, it is better seen as a reframing of some of their insights in the broader perspective afforded by theology. Thus, while he delights in the new perspectives on life opened up by the microscope and telescope and even expresses a qualified approval of Hobbesian social contract theory,67 these new developments are situated within the context of his theological anthropology, which also provides the criteria by which they are evaluated. There is throughout Traherne’s work an appreciation of the eschatological orientation of all things. It is for this reason that Salter’s likening of Traherne’s thought to that of Francis Bacon is misconceived.68 Whereas the scientific empiricism of Bacon promoted the value of a free-standing science of nature, Traherne views the study of nature as a subset within the great all-encompassing twin studies of humanity and divinity. In other words, in the middle state of misery and grace the natural world is constantly being transfigured by divine grace: the sacramentality of the physical world and of humankind is released through the encounter of creation and Creator begun and continuing in Christ. As Diogenes Allen observes, the emerging perspectives of Hobbes, Bacon and Locke push God out of the present life of the world, assigning to God the role of absent Creator: ‘The work of creation done, God now rests, leaving nature to itself’.69 For Traherne, by   Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 262. 65   Kuchar, Divine Subjection, p. 184. 66   Kuchar, Divine Subjection, pp. 182, 217. 67   See, for instance, the excerpt on ‘The Fly’, Traherne, Thomas Traherne: Poetry and Prose, ed. Denise Inge (London: SPCK, 2002), pp. 111–12; ‘The Authority of Kings’, Traherne, Works III, pp. 423–5. 68   Salter, Thomas Traherne, p. 56. 69   Diogenese Allen, Philosophy for Understanding Theology (London: SCM, 1985), p. 166. 64

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contrast, as for the orthodox Christian tradition, God is the beginning and the end of all things, and all creation is held in being by God. His understanding of the four estates (of innocence, misery, grace and glory), and thus of the participation of graced humanity in God, structures all of his thought; and the Centuries in particular take this as the pattern for their exploration of the origin of everything in God and its return to God. His thought is thus neither wholly original, nor beholden to one isolated tradition, but instead borrows freely, seeking God at all times and in all places, by perceiving the reality of things with the second naïvety of childlikeness. The child in its infancy mirrors the innocence of humankind at the outset of creation and, through the experience of misery and the workings of deifying grace, can come to a second childlikeness that gives a foretaste of the eschatological state of glory. In Confessions Augustine famously finds that God has been within him even as he sought him beyond himself, concluding that God is at once interior intimo meo and superior summo meo, ‘more inward to me than my inmost part and higher than the highest element within me’.70 Traherne makes a similar journey but in an opposite direction, conscious first of the presence of God within him as a child and then coming to recognize the divine transcendence in all things: ‘God more near to us then we are to ourselves’, as he writes in the Centuries of Meditations, ‘without us is the Chamber of our Infinit Treasures, and within us the Repositorie, and Recipient of them’ (CMII:81). The picture that emerges from his thought, and from the theme of childlikeness that is its vital centre, is one of a remarkable wholeness. At the heart of the Centuries lies his emphasis on the value of learning, but learning for Traherne is neither the scholastic repetition of dogma nor the Renaissance programme of humanist enlightenment, but the twofold study of God and humankind: ‘And therefore of all Kind of Learnings, Humanity and Divinity are the most Excellent’ (CMIII:41). This learning is mutually informing. In the study of humanity ‘we search into the Powers and Faculties of the Soul’ and ‘this leadeth us to Divinity’ (CMIII:42), and in divinity ‘we are entertained with all Objects from Everlasting to Everlasting’ and so come to the study of ‘Man, as he is a creature of GOD’ (CMIII:43). There is thus a reciprocity between the two studies. At times this appears to shade into a heretical reciprocity between God and creation, which seems to say that God receives from us as we receive from God, but at root Traherne’s beliefs remain orthodox, because he understands that all the good that humans do is done in God: ‘man […] receiveth Benefits, to return in Praises. For Praises are Transformed and returning Benefits’ (CMII:94). It is in this process that humankind learns to leave behind the false desires of childishness – ‘doth not Saint Paul command us in understanding to be Men?’ (CMIV:6, cf. CMIII:23 and CMIV:4)71 – and learn the childlikeness that allows it,   Augustine, Confessions, III vi, p. 43.   See also Deneef, Traherne in Dialogue, p. 117, on the ‘specular confusions’ of

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childhood.

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with Augustine, to recognize that ‘GOD is there, and more near to us then we are to our selvs’ (CMII:81). It is for this reason that his writing is so characteristically imbued with the openness of prayer, praise and thanksgiving. Gratitude is, for Traherne, the greatest of the human virtues. It is, as he writes in Christian Ethicks, a virtue ‘mixt of satisfaction and praise’ and it expresses the essence of the childlike spirit, to which all Christians are called. In moving towards the true end of gratitude, desire is an indispensable means. ‘Want’ or desire is a constant refrain in Traherne’s work and, as Deneef has shown in his Lacanian analysis, it structures the thought of the Centuries, so that, as for Lacan, ‘all questions about [humankind’s] being are spoken from within the discourse of desire’.72 But what Deneef’s study misses is the degree to which this economy of desire is consistent with Christian tradition. In Christ, humanity is offered the gift of true reciprocity, a gift in which God receives nothing, but which establishes our human share in the loving life of the Trinity.73 In this process, desire is not an evil to be extirpated, but a good to be taught its origin and goal in God, ‘who wanted, tho he wanted not’ (CM1:41). And so Traherne’s speculations, rash though they sometimes appear to be, find their place within a long tradition, which sees human life as constantly sharing in the exitus of all things from God and their reditus to God. The reorientation of our ‘wants’ in Christ, the discovery of God in all things, the sharing of ‘intermutual Joys’ and the evocation of our gratitude, are all for Traherne expressed in obedience to the dominical command of childlikeness, the exploration of which is a lifetime’s work. Human beings are blessed with an aptness for God at their entry into the world; baptized into Christ, they are welcomed into the renewing gift of his grace; through their free acceptance of this grace, they may escape the vicious cycle of sin and enjoy a foretaste of that uninterrupted communion with God that will be theosis in its fullness: For a Babe by virtu of his Great Capacitie is meet to be a Temple of the Holy Ghost, and a Partaker of the Divine Nature.

Yet: Raw Christians are also compared unto Babes, that have need of Milk and not of Strong Meat. 1. Cor. 3.1. They that are dead in Sins and Trespasses are not yet New-borne: they are sensible of Nothing in Gods Kingdom: But they that begin to live a Spiritual Life awaken like Babes to behold the Glory of the Visible World, and begin to be Sensible of their own Value: but are not Men, till they

  Deneef, Traherne in Dialogue, p. 126.   John Milbank, ‘Can a gift be given? Prolegomena to a future Trinitarian metaphysic’,

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Modern Theology 12: 1 (1995), pp. 119–61 (p. 154) and ‘The Soul of Reciprocity. Part Two: Reciprocity Granted’, Modern Theology 17:4 (2001), pp. 485–507 (pp. 504–5).

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are acquainted with the Mysteries of all Ages, and enter into Eternity and Gods omnipresence by their Meditations.74

This entry from Commentaries of Heaven summarizes the picture we have been tracing in this and the previous chapter. The child is the imaginative focus for Traherne’s whole theological anthropology. Looking at this verbal icon, the reader is invited into an ongoing relationship of grace. Yet there is nothing inherently divine about the child: the transparency of the iconic child is, as with all humanity, obscured by sin; only when adopted in Christ and born again can the living icon and those who behold it know ‘their own Value’ as children of God. Traherne offers here a powerful re-expression of a theological anthropology in line with the scriptural, Patristic and mediaeval synthesis. His achievement was, however, rare and profoundly threatened by the emerging ideological paradigm of early modernity. In these chapters I have argued against the view that Traherne’s thought shares in the movement towards immanence and empiricism, characteristic of those strands of seventeenth-century science and philosophy that subsequently become dominant. Rather than either advocating such moves or reacting against them, he reframes them theologically, showing how the world is best valued when understood as God’s creation and the human body most fully appreciated when seen to be inseparable from its immortal soul. In the next chapter I turn to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, a century after Traherne, again finds in the child a figure through whom to illustrate a particular understanding of human nature. With his uniquely focused imaginative concentration on the education of one child, Rousseau has often been seen as the inventor of the modern understanding of childhood. Yet, as we shall see, for all his opposition to pure Enlightenment rationality and his defence of religious belief, Rousseau’s isolation of the child from relationship with others (and in practice of human beings from relationship with God) has potentially malign consequences not only for a theological anthropology, but for anthropology tout court.

  ‘Babe’ in Traherne, Works III, pp. 438–9.

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Chapter 4

‘L’Élève de la nature’: The Rousseauvian Shift Introduction In the previous chapters I traced the distinctively theological features of Traherne’s child. Rooted as he is in the soil of premodern and Renaissance culture, Traherne nonetheless develops out of his early modern context a new imaginative construction of the child. Yet, as we have seen, Traherne’s child is notable as much for its differences from, as for its similarities to, the post-Romantic image of the child, which continues to hold a significant place in contemporary popular thought. In this chapter I move forward a century to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Of the four authors studied in this book, Rousseau is the key transitional figure. Through the immense popularity of Émile ou De l’éducation he was the figure who first gave currency to the notion of the child as ‘qualitatively different’ from the adult.1 Moreover, his significance in the history of perceptions of the child goes hand in hand with an equally formative role in the emergence of modernity. The literary critic Tzvetan Todorov writes that ‘perhaps more than anyone else (particularly in France), he both discovered and invented our modernity’, and Karl Barth places him centre stage in his account of the eighteenth-century background to modern theology.2 However, for reasons that will become clear during the course of this chapter, Rousseau stands apart from the main themes of my research. Though he is the key link in the evolution of conceptions of the child from Traherne to Schleiermacher, this chapter will argue that, unlike the other authors studied here, ultimately Rousseau does not propound a recognisably theological anthropology of the child. As a consequence, though the governing methodology remains the same, this chapter will adopt a different formal structure, seeking to show how the shift exemplified in Rousseau alters the cultural and pedagogical context in which the child is subsequently seen. To say that Rousseau has no theological anthropology of the child is not to contest the place Karl Barth rightly accords him as a (brilliantly heterodox) theologian, but rather to point to the secularisation of the classical Christian paradigm enacted   Alan Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 9. 2   Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), p. 2; Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (London: SCM, 2001), pp. 160–219. 1

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in his advocacy of a natural religion. In common with many of his Enlightenment contemporaries, Rousseau propounded a religion without transcendence. For Traherne, the child is an image of humanity redeemed by God; after Rousseau, Schleiermacher and Péguy propose their own distinctive recuperations of a genuinely theological anthropology. In Rousseau’s own work, however, we meet what might best be termed a natural anthropology. The theological interplay of divine grace and human nature becomes instead an exchange between two senses of nature: the nature of the human being, and the nature that is the unspoiled natural world. Rousseau’s first and favoured term for God in the Émile is ‘l’auteur des choses’,3 and, despite his often bitter disagreements with atheist and deist alike, the effect of his natural religion is to install nature as the only reality with which humankind is in potentially transforming relationship. God is left a merely residual place as the guarantor of nature’s purity and coherence.4 As we shall see, Émile – along with his various avatars elsewhere in Rousseau’s writing – is the child of nature, not of God, and his redemption takes the form of a purely human educational process. In a parody of the classical Christian understanding of divine adoption his tutor remarks, ‘Je [l’]adopte avant qu’il soit né’, and the process results not in a redemptive relationship with a transcendent God but in the selfsubsistent ideal of a quasi-divine Stoic autarchy.5 As he puts it in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire: ‘M’y voilà au fond de l’abime, pauvre mortel infortuné, mais impassible comme Dieu même.’ [‘There I am at the bottom of the abyss, a poor and hapless mortal, but free from suffering like God himself.’]6 With Rousseau we are thus witnessing a representative shift of cultural paradigms, a shift of which the twenty-first century is still, to a large extent, the heir. After Rousseau it is no longer evident that the child – and thus the human being – is to be identified in relationship with God; the analogy of Christ ceases to be the key to human self-understanding. This is not to say that subsequent theological anthropologies are rendered impossible, only that the context in which they emerge is altered and that, as we shall see in the chapters on Schleiermacher, the logic of Rousseauvian immanence will always threaten to reassert itself nolens volens. Rousseau himself need not be seen as the sole instigator of this change, being part of the phenomenon as much as its cause, but he does express it in a very full, varied and exemplary fashion. In this chapter, as I seek to elucidate this Rousseauvian shift, the methodological questions (‘who?’ and ‘where?’) remain central to the enquiry, but here they are subordinated formally to a thematic study   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres Complètes (5 vols) (Paris: Pléiade, 1959–) IV, p. 245 (hereafter OC). 4   The pattern here, well expressed in Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) pp. 32–3, is typical of much Enlightenment thought. 5   OCIV, p. 266; ‘I adopt him before he is born’. 6   OCI, p. 999, emphasis added; cf. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago: University Press, 1988), p. 25. 3

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of the Émile and its place in Rousseau’s œuvre. Rousseau believed the Émile to be his most significant work,7 and it presents a fascinating blending of genres and themes, circling around the principal topos of the education of its eponymous exemplary child. To help clarify the scope and the aims of the book, I shall first address the much-debated question of the Émile’s genre. I shall then examine the pedagogical theory it propounds. Through examining the understandings of education, nature and innocence at work in the Émile, it will become possible to see the particular ways in which the natural pedagogy to which Émile is subjected precludes the operation of transcendent divine grace. I shall then turn to a broader study of Rousseau’s theology as manifested in two forms: first, his understanding of the relationship between mediation and immediacy; and secondly, the role of the tutor. The paradox here is that Rousseau’s hostility to all forms of mediation in Émile’s upbringing nonetheless depends on the ubiquitous tutor, whose constant oversight governs the child’s supposedly unmediated relationship with nature. In conclusion, drawing out these tensions, I shall move towards a critique of Rousseau’s anthropology of the child, informed by Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘bio-power’ and Karl Barth’s discussion of the rise of anthropology. Finally, we shall see how Rousseau’s highly reflexive writing contains the seeds of a selfcritique: probing the instabilities and contradictions that he introduces into his texts, we shall see what they imply both for his own depiction of the child and for subsequent theological reactions to it. The Question of Genre The contradictions in Rousseau’s personality, as in his writing, are widely known. He was at once a thoroughgoing proponent of the light of reason and a forebear of Romanticism;8 an advocate of participation in (Du Contrat social) and withdrawal from (Rêveries du promeneur solitaire) ordered society;9 a self-confessed friend of children,10 yet prepared to abandon his own offspring to an orphanage. It is no surprise that assessments of him should be equally varied: as we have seen, he is, for Todorov, one of the foremost inventors of modernity, yet with equal validity Joseph Featherstone sees him as the first great counter-modern intellectual, the ‘despairing pathologist of modernity’.11 To point to Rousseau’s contradictions is not to dismiss him. He was well aware of the vying impulses at work within him and they manifested themselves as much in his life as in his writing. In   OCI, p. 573.   The conflict here, as the chapters on Schleiermacher indicate, is perhaps more

7 8

apparent than real. 9   OCIII, pp. 349–470; OCI, pp. 993–1099. 10   The ninth promenade of the Rêveries contains the clearest statement: OCI, p. 1087. 11   Joseph Featherstone, ‘Rousseau and Modernity’, Daedelus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 107:3 (1978), pp. 167–92 (p. 192).

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fact, Starobinski identifies contradiction as a constitutive element in Rousseau’s thought, describing him as a therapist for whom the pharmakon is both disease and remedy. Starobinski traces this homeopathic pattern from his first major work, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, in which he indicts the dominance of scientific study, only to see its remedy in the establishment of a true community of scholars who will overcome from within the degeneracy of the arts and sciences, all the way through to his final obsessively self-justificatory Dialogues in which he nonetheless resolves to say all that can be said in favour of his persecutors.12 If this contradictoriness is true of his life and work generally, it is equally apparent in his views on children in particular. Rousseau is the one figure who clearly established and popularized the notion of the child as ‘qualitatively different’ from the adult.13 Prior to the influence of Rousseau, the period of childhood was largely ignored in the mainstream literary tradition.14 As Alan Richardson points out, Fielding’s Tom Jones of 1749 is a typical instance: the hero grows from two to fourteen in two paragraphs. Émile ou De l’éducation was published in 1762. Rapidly translated, it had widespread influence both in France and abroad, and in its wake the new literary genre of the Bildungsroman rose to prominence. Émile’s success was not only literary, however. Numerous treatises on the education of children in the Rousseauvian manner were rapidly published, and in 1788 Restif de la Bretonne complained of a new and unruly breed of children brought up according to its naturalistic principles: ‘c’est l’Émile qui nous amène cette génération taquine, entêtée, insolente, impudente, décideuse.’ [‘It is the Émile which is responsible for this provoking, obstinate, insolent, impudent, arrogant generation.’]15 Yet, in spite of the undoubted originality and influence of Rousseau’s conception of childhood, it is no simple matter to define it accurately. In the Émile the child is valued, but constrained; given the undivided attention of a tutor, but never let off the leash. In the same way, the book regards childhood as a self-contained period with its own modes of being, but also treats it instrumentally as the time during which the perfected natural adult can be nurtured. Such contradictory tendencies set up strains within the Rousseauvian picture of the child, which are compounded by the lack of clarity, both in Rousseau’s own remarks and in subsequent critical commentary, about the genre of Émile. The book is part treatise on education, part autobiography, part novel and part philosophical discourse on human nature. This 12   Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; Or, the Morality of Evil (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), p. 119, 149, referring to OCIII, pp. 3–107 and OCI, pp. 657–992. 13   Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, p. 9. 14   The interest in seventeenth-century England, most fully expressed by Traherne, is exceptional. Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, pp. 42–93, discusses the particular cultural circumstances that gave rise to this interest. 15   Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, Les Nuits de Paris, Œuvres, vol. I, edited by Henri Bachelin (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1978), p. 191. I am grateful to Peter Wagstaff for locating this reference.

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rather Protean quality, combined with the fact that Rousseau’s thought in general was notoriously and purposefully unsystematic, means that the problem of analysis is not just (as with Traherne) that the writing eludes conventional classification. Rousseau in the Émile is self-consciously setting out into new territory, and in doing so he adopts multiple strategies simultaneously. It is generally accepted that the book was first conceived as a treatise on education, as its subtitle implies. In itself this was a new departure for Rousseau, whose earlier thoughts on education were confined to a brief and derivative memoir, written after a short period as tutor to the children of a Monsieur de Mably and the even shorter Projet pour l’éducation de M. de Sainte-Marie.16 There is, however, considerable overlap between two letters towards the end of his novel La Nouvelle Heloïse published a year earlier and the first two books of Émile. Here perhaps are the beginnings of the novelistic side to Émile, which becomes increasingly apparent as the work progresses. The book opens with sweeping statements on education and human nature. The tutee child is first generalized and nameless, but then, unobtrusively, the named figure of Émile emerges, becoming less of an ideal construct and more of a character, so that by the fifth and final book with its tale of Émile’s and Sophie’s love, Émile has taken on most of the characteristics of a novel. The autobiographical dimension to Émile is apparent in two forms: first in the descriptions of the unspecified rural locale where Émile is brought up, in which Rousseau anticipates the idealized accounts in the Confessions (written between 1764 and 1770) of his childhood holidays at Bossey in Switzerland; and secondly, in the personae of the tutor and the Vicaire Savoyard, both of whom are at times mouthpieces for experiences and opinions otherwise associated with the author. Finally, Émile is a philosophical treatise – and to some extent also a theological one. Rousseau does not adopt the technical vocabulary or academic rigour of contemporaries such as Kant, but recent analyses of his writings have rightly stressed that his work must be treated as serious philosophy, and from that perspective Émile is its author’s principal outline of a philosophy of human nature.17 A helpful avenue through this thicket of competing genres is suggested by Todorov. The French critic argues that the Émile represents a third way between the two genres most commonly employed by Rousseau: the systematic treatise, characteristic of his political works, and the autobiographical writing typified by the Confessions and the Rêveries. Others have thought that the Émile is in some sense a companion to Du Contrat social, published in the same year: whilst Émile is concerned with the reformation of the individual, Du Contrat Social takes as its concern the reformation of society.18 But Todorov argues persuasively that in   OCIV, pp. 3–51.   Timothy O’Hagan, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 1999); Robert Wokler, Rousseau

16 17

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 18   Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 359.

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the Émile Rousseau has invented a new genre, ‘at once personal and impersonal, fiction and reflection’.19 Developing this insight, one can argue that this hybrid genre is the ideal vehicle by which to convey the formation of Émile, who is himself a hybrid of civilization and savagery: ‘un sauvage fait pour habiter les villes’.20 Admittedly the genre distinctions in Rousseau’s œuvre are not perhaps as clear as Todorov implies – the Confessions, for instance, are, as Ann Hartle argues, a quasi-novel as much as a strict autobiography.21 Yet, most clearly among his works, the genre of Émile is an instance of Starobinski’s ‘antidote in the poison’: an artistic construct that seeks to strip away the malign effects of human artifice, an educational treatise that sees education as principally the discovery of the art of ignorance. ‘Un art […] d’être ignorant’ ‘Un art […] d’être ignorant’22 is the phrase Rousseau uses to summarize his principle of negative education, by which the pupil learns not knowledge itself but the principles for its acquisition. Rousseau’s procedure in the Émile owes much to his one great predecessor in Enlightenment educational thought, John Locke, whose Some Thoughts Concerning Education was first published in 1693.23 Locke’s treatise was the overriding influence on Rousseau’s early educational writing and the author of the Émile is still the inheritor of Locke’s insistence that sense experience rather than tradition is the great teacher.24 Yet, whereas Locke places a more or less exclusive stress on what we would now call ‘environmental’ factors in education, Rousseau in the Émile emphasizes innate structures of human understanding. As Featherstone observes, the refrain of the former is always ‘check the impulse’, that of the latter invariably ‘honour the impulse’. Featherstone writes that Locke is ‘the quintessential moderniser, proclaiming that human beings are in some fashion free, equal and rational’.25 For Locke, the child is a ‘flawed and inferior being’,26 an incomplete adult, but, through appropriate rational and empirical training, can overcome the constraints of nature. Rousseau shares Locke’s faith in experience and in the freedom, equality and rationality   Todorov, Frail Happiness, p. 56.   Rousseau, OCIV, p. 484; ‘a savage made so that he may inhabit the towns’. 21   Ann Hartle, The Modern Self in Rousseau’s Confessions: A Reply to Saint Augustine 19 20

(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 21. 22   OCIV, p. 370, ‘an art […] of being ignorant’. 23   John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). 24   OCIV, p. 370; ‘tout ce qui entre dans l’entendement humain y vient par les sens’, ‘Everything that comes into the human mind enters through the gates of sense’, Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman, 1993), p. 106 (hereafter Émile). 25   Featherstone, ‘Rousseau and Modernity’, p. 167. 26   Featherstone, ‘Rousseau and Modernity’, p. 167.

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of the human being, but identifies these qualities as the starting point rather than the end product. Unlike Locke, with his famous conception of the child as tabula rasa, Rousseau acknowledges the presence of innate sentiments in the infant,27 but also believes that, the more the child is exposed to human society, the greater is the likelihood that such qualities will be disastrously perverted. Locke does not employ the vocabulary of original sin, but he views the child as born in ignorance and made fully human through education. Rousseau, on the other hand, with his fundamental belief in original innocence – ‘il n’y a point de perversité originelle dans le cœur humain’28 – sees the general course of human development as one not of progress but of decline: a primary innocence that threatens to evaporate on contact with society. Ignorance, for Rousseau, is a virtue to be fostered, not a vice to be overcome, the means by which the depredations of acquired ‘perversité’ can be evaded. In offering the first presentation of the child as qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from adult humanity, the Émile emphasizes the intrinsic value of the child as something more than a deficient adult. In line with this, the fundamental principle of Rousseau’s approach to the child is the importance of isolation. The author of the Émile believes himself to be presenting childhood on its own terms, not those of adults. The mother is advised to ‘forme de bonne heure une enceinte autour de l’ame de ton enfant’.29 Here the image is one of a sanctuary, almost of a second womb, so that just as the child is provided with all that it needs in the controlled environment of the mother’s womb, so, once it is born, it is to be surrounded by the nurturing environment of nature. Nature, throughout the Émile, is conceived of in strict opposition with society. It is society which is held to corrupt the original goodness of the child.30 Rousseau famously inveighs against the Christian teaching on original sin, dismissing it as not only mistaken but also unbiblical. In rejecting original sin, he has to look elsewhere to explain the corruption of humanity and it is the influence of others, especially the lives of others organized in human culture and society, that he identifies. ‘Ce n’est que dans cet etat primitif que […] l’homme n’est pas malheureux’, he believes, and this primitive, pre-social condition is the one he seeks to recreate for his pupil.31   James Byrne, Glory, Jest and Riddle: Religious Thought in the Enlightenment (London: SCM, 1996), p. 194. 28   OCIV, p. 322; ‘there is not a trace of original perversity in the human heart’. 29   OCIV, p. 246; ‘raise a wall round your child’s soul’, Émile, p. 6. 30   The exception is the brief passage in the final book of the Émile, which effectively summarizes Du Contrat social. Here, as in the treatise, a form of political community is propounded in which society is not evil but virtuous, whilst elsewhere in the Émile the model of virtue is the solitary individual. The two positions are not fully reconcilable, though they share the common end of restoring to human beings (collectively or individually) their lost state of innocence. See Starobinski, Transparency, p. 13f, O’Hagan, Rousseau, p. 19f. 31   Rousseau OCIV, p. 304; ‘Man is only not unhappy in his primitive condition’, Émile, p. 32. 27

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Here Rousseau takes the religious myth of the Fall and sets it in historical time, in the life of each individual.32 For Traherne, the innocence of the poetic child figure is an inspired intimation of the prelapsarian state, but it is always shadowed by the actuality of the universal fall, which can be overcome only christologically and eschatologically. For Rousseau, by contrast, innocence is the factual foundation of all human beings prior to the influence of society. Innocence, not the Fall, is the birthright of every child. He criticizes Augustine’s doctrine of original sin as unscriptural. Augustine cites the howling baby in the cradle as evidence of human egotism and sin: the baby needs to be led away from its selfenclosure as it grows to maturity.33 For Rousseau, by contrast, self-enclosure is the necessary condition for the child to retain its innocence. By appreciating that babies have ‘une grammaire de leur âge, dont la syntaxe a des régles plus générales que la nôtre’,34 we can accept the child on its own terms, stop ourselves projecting our own acquired evil habits on to it and help it to flourish. However, innocence, for Rousseau, is not synonymous with ignorance. After Plutarch and the Bible, Plato is the authority most frequently cited in Rousseau’s writings, and the influence of his theory of innate ideas is clear in Rousseau’s belief that each infant is born with a character and talents uniquely its own.35 What is not innate in the child, however, is evil or even the propensity for evil. Evil is external to the nature of each individual as originally constituted, and, if it were possible for human beings to remain children of nature, their innocence would remain indestructible. Children are born weak and in need of help, and it is this state of dependence that is the avenue by which evil enters. In the first book of the Émile, Rousseau writes: Toute mechanceté vient de foiblesse; l’enfant n’est méchant que parce qu’il est foible; rendez-le fort, il sera bon; celui qui pourroit tout ne feroit jamais de mal. [All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is only naughty because he is weak; make him strong and he will be good; if we could do everything we should never do wrong.]36

32   Autobiographically, Rousseau’s childhood at Bossey becomes Eden, and the Fall is the entry of vice into his life through contact with others. Cf. Starobinski, Transparency, p. 12. 33   ‘The feebleness of infant limbs is innocent, not the infant’s mind’, Augustine, Confessions, I vii, p. 9. 34   OC, p. 293; ‘a grammar of their own, whose rules and syntax are more general than our own’, Émile, p. 43. 35   Here he argues against the Lockean position of his contemporary, Helvétius, whose dictum ‘l’éducation peut tout’ contrasts starkly with Rousseau’s ‘negative education’. See Wokler, Émile, p. 123. 36   OCIV, p. 288; Émile, p. 39.

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Later he observes: ‘il y a deux sortes de dépendance. Celle des choses qui est de la nature; celle des hommes qui est de la societé’ [‘that there are two kinds of dependence: dependence on things, which is the work of nature; and dependence on men, which is the work of society’].37 Generally, in Rousseau’s work dependence is, as we have seen, an evil in itself. In this instance, however, he distinguishes. ‘La dépendance des hommes […] engendre tous [les vices]’, but, keep the child dependent on things only, and ‘vous aurez suivi l’ordre de la nature dans le progrès de son éducation’ [‘Dependence on men […] gives rise to every kind of vice’; ‘by this course of education you will have followed the order of nature’].38 In fact the implication seems to be that dependence on nature is not dependence at all. In the cases of the innocent child and the idealized ‘natural man’, nature is no longer external to the self: ‘it ceases to be what is most remote from us in the past and becomes what is most central to our very existence’.39 Nature, however, is not an entirely unproblematic category for Rousseau. The tension remains between his reverence for nature as a given and his recognition that human access to nature does not, in present social conditions at least, occur of itself. The child, for Rousseau, is not simply a ‘noble savage’, but must be guided to learn from nature. The skill, then, is to follow Plato in seeking to ‘épurer le Cœur de l’homme’,40 to purge the heart, rather than to turn it from its natural course, as, in Rousseau’s opinion, a conventional upbringing inevitably will. In a passage no doubt intended to contrast provokingly with the opening lines of Du Contrat social, Rousseau observes that: L’homme civil nait, vit et meurt dans l’esclavage: à sa naissance on le coud dans un maillot; à sa mort on le cloue dans une biére […] Vous contrariez [les enfants] dès leur naissance. [Civilized man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin […] From birth you are always checking them.]41

These verbs of restraint and obstruction (coudre, clouer, contrarier) show how profound is Rousseau’s intolerance not only of society, but of all forms of mediation. Arts, letters and sciences are repeatedly condemned, and Émile is to read no books. The solitary exception to this rule is Robinson Crusoe. The castaway’s plight, though different from Émile’s, is commended as the yardstick by which to measure all other conditions.42 Unlike other literature, Robinson Crusoe is seen as     39   40   41   42   37

38

OCIV, p. 311; Émile, p. 58. OCIV, p. 311; Émile, p. 58. Starobinski, Transparency, p. 19. OCIV, p. 250. OCIV, pp. 253, 255; Émile, pp. 11, 12. OCIV, p. 455.

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exemplary in its practicality. Most human activity, Rousseau believes, is popularly valued for its irrelevance – ‘il y a une estime publique attachée aux différens arts en raison inverse de leur utilité réelle’ [‘The different arts are publicly valued in inverse proportion to their real usefulness’] – but Defoe’s novel teaches ‘ce que sont les choses en elles-mêmes, [non pas] ce qu’elles sont à nos yeux’ [‘things as they really are […not] how they appear to us’].43 Despite the recurrent stress on nature – ‘il prend ses leçons de la nature et non pas des hommes’44 – it is important to recognize that it is not the preservation of the ‘noble savage’ of popular myth that Rousseau is advocating. It is not external nature alone that is educative, but its interaction with the inner nature of the individual. Rousseau has great respect for the primitive humanity he associates with the ‘savage’. He contrasts ‘savages’ positively with peasants, arguing that the savage’s strength and reason increase together, each helping the other to develop, whilst peasants are trapped in the customs of their ancestors.45 In this sense, ‘savages’ are indeed noble because they are free, whilst peasants lack both reason and liberty. Émile, however, is more than a ‘noble savage’. This is not merely because he is being prepared for life in society. On this point, Rousseau, with his ambivalent attitude to society, is actually decidedly unclear, saying that, although Émile is ‘un sauvage fait pour habiter les villes’,46 he must learn to live among its inhabitants, whilst not being of them. More significant is the fact that the nature which is Émile’s schoolmaster includes both the nature which surrounds him and his own innate nature. In the interaction between them Émile is not left unaltered in his primitive state. Rather, nature helps him to become what he already is and, thus, in a sense changes him, though the education it offers is purely negative, designed to ‘garantir le cœur du vice et l’esprit de l’erreur’.47 The favourite image for this process is one of gardening. In an oblique reference to the conquistador ‘plantant son étendard sur les côtes de la mer du sud’,48 the cultivation practised by the tutor is contrasted with the aggressive domination of colonialism. The implication is that the tutor is alongside rather than set above or over and against the pupil, acting as ‘son garçon jardinier’, his under-gardener, to dig the ground for him until his arms are strong enough to do it.49 Commentators have rightly observed that, despite the claims to equality between tutor and pupil, the paternalism here is only thinly veiled. We shall return to this issue below, but at this stage the important point is to see that, like Locke, Rousseau holds that children can be taught only by experience, whilst differing from him in his stress on the particularity of children. This is why the tutor must have been trained for his     45   46   47   48   49   43

44

OCIV, p. 456; Émile, pp. 178, 179. OCIV, p. 361; ‘nature, not man, is his schoolmaster’, Émile, p. 99. OCIV, p. 360. OCIV, p. 484; ‘a savage who has to live in the town’, Émile, p. 201. OCIV, p. 323; ‘to preserve the heart from vice and the spirit from error’, Émile, p. 68. OCIV, p. 331; ‘planting his banner on the coasts of the southern sea’, Émile, p. 74. OCIV, p. 330.

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pupil, so as to guide him appropriately, and why also the particular advice suited to Émile may not be appropriate to other children.50 Experience, then, is the category that links external nature with the innate nature of the child, and it is the tutor who must facilitate this encounter. His role is not to interpose himself between the child’s nature and the external world, but to allow experience alone to teach: ‘nos premiers maîtres de philosophie sont nos pieds, nos mains, nos yeux’.51 All other learning is not only irrelevant but actually harmful because it would distract from this principle: the pupil must acquire ‘un art […] d’être ignorant’, learning, as we have seen, not knowledge itself, but the necessary tools for its acquisition.52 The cumulative result of the cultivation of the senses in the pupil is the gradual emergence of an ill-defined sixth sense: une espéce de sixième sens appellé sens commun, moins parce qu’il est commun à tous les hommes que parce qu’il résulte de l’usage bien réglé des autres sens et qu’il nous instruit de la nature des choses par le concours de toutes leurs apparences. [‘called common sense, not so much because it is common to all men, but because it results from the well-regulated use of the other five, and teaches the nature of things by the sum total of their external aspects.’]53

The footnote to the Pléiade edition notes that this sixth sense is a commonplace of philosophy from Aristotle onwards, but we should also remark that in the Émile its Aristotelian status has been subtly transmuted. On one level it is, for Rousseau, simply the sign of the successful completion of the pupil’s negative education, the sign that the ‘raison puérile’ of the child has given way to the ‘raison humaine’ of the adult. Yet, on another level, this sixth sense, which teaches the nature of things, can be seen as the immanent quality which has supplanted the supernatural grace of traditional revealed theologies.54 Just as Rousseau describes the birds as at home in their environment, raising their chorus of praise to greet ‘le père de la vie’,55 so Émile, now that this sixth sense has found its home in him, has been taught by external nature and fulfilled the potential of his own nature. Through the harmonious interaction of these

  OCIV, p. 465.   OCIV, p. 370; ‘our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands and eyes’,

50 51

Émile, p. 106. 52   OCIV, p. 370. 53   OC, IV, p. 417; Émile, p. 145 (emphasis added). 54   We shall see more fully later how the immanence prized by Rousseau has its own forms of quasi-transcendence, Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 128. 55   OC, IV, p. 431; ‘the Father of life’.

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two forms of nature, he now bears unblemished ‘la trace de la nature’: reading nature’s book, but also able effectively to command it.56 Immediacy and Mediation This harmonious reciprocity between human nature and external nature, which results from the successful cultivation of the art of ignorance, is not, however, a secure, achieved and unproblematic state. It remains constantly under threat, most obviously from human society, but also, as Rousseau at times (almost in spite of himself) obliquely admits, from the very methods employed to foster it. In the concluding section of this chapter I shall look more closely at the instabilities that Rousseau introduces both within the Émile and, much more explicitly, in its brief sequel Émile et Sophie ou Les Solitatires. At this stage I shall examine further the dualistic opposition of nature and culture that pervades Rousseau’s thought and constantly threatens to intrude into the second term of the external nature/human nature relationship, rendering the carefully achieved harmony dissonant. In his book, We Have Never Been Modern, the philosopher of science, Bruno Latour, exposes the characteristic pattern of modern thought that constructs explicit dualisms, whilst seeking to bury the processes of mediation on which these dualisms necessarily depend. He argues that much of the apparent conceptual clarity of Enlightenment thinking depends on this dynamic, and it can be observed especially clearly in the pairing of nature and culture. There is obviously a heuristic validity to the distinction between nature and culture, but what Latour diagnoses is the modern tendency to treat the dualism as ontologically substantial. ‘Nature and Society do not offer solid hooks to which we might attach our explanations’, he writes, ‘but are part of what is to be explained […] the very notion of culture is an artefact created by bracketing Nature off’.57 Rousseau’s thought in the Émile, though not specifically studied by Latour, clearly follows this pattern: the dualism of nature and culture is established, and the second term rejected, but the sphere of pure nature remains inaccessible without the cultural mediation, however discreet, of the tutor. We have already seen that, from Rousseau’s perspective, nature and culture, far from being interdependent and reciprocally determining terms, are in fact diametrically opposed. Robinson Crusoe represents the ideal precisely because it alone, among novels, excludes culture to the maximum possible extent. The difference, for Rousseau, between the man and the citizen is the same as the difference between the innocent child and the vicious adult, and between nature and

56   OCIV, p. 408; ‘S’il lit moins bien qu’un autre enfant dans nos livres, il lit mieux dans celui de la nature’, p. 421; ‘on diroit que la nature est à ses ordres’, Émile, p. 423. 57   Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 95, 104.

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society. In the title of his study of Rousseau, La Transparence et l’obstacle,58 Jean Starobinski identifies what he regards as the exemplary opposition in Rousseau. Transparency is the characteristic of the child, of nature and of the natural man, whilst in society and conventional adulthood the truth and the reality of things are obstructed, veiled and obscure. In Starobinski’s estimate, the constant unifying theme, both in Rousseau’s complex life with its many changes of direction and in his vast literary output, is the struggle to preserve or restore ‘the compromised state of transparency’.59 This search for transparency, as Starobinski recognizes, is inseparable from the search for lost innocence and for a condition of unmediated reflective sincerity. In this quest, on which Rousseau’s whole proto-Romantic project is based, nature is, as we have seen, the chief pedagogical resource available to humankind, and culture is that pedagogy’s chief enemy. There are dangers, however, in assimilating Rousseau’s thought too readily to the model of later high Romantic thought. Rousseau was certainly a major influence on the Romantics, but, as Samuel Taylor has shown, the distinctions between him and his successors are as significant as the continuities.60 It is sometimes suggested that Rousseau contrasts reason with feeling, valuing the latter over the former. In fact, despite his disagreements with some of his more thoroughgoing rationalist contemporaries among the philosophes, Rousseau remained a believer in reason. In the Émile, natural religion, the religion taught and revealed in nature, is the source of the resolution of the apparently opposing realms of reason and feeling. This emerges most clearly in the famous ‘Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard’ in the fourth book. As Timothy O’Hagan points out, the Vicaire, ‘caught up in the combat between [his] natural feelings […] and [his] reason’, finds his self-contradictions resolved by the ‘new lights’ of natural religion.61 The real contrast in Rousseau’s life and work, then, is not between reason and feeling, but between immediacy and mediation. The Fall from innocence is invariably described as much as a loss of immediacy as a loss of transparency, and its return is always envisaged in terms of unmediated contact with nature, with other people and with God. As the Vicaire observes critically of established religion: ‘Que d’hommes entre Dieu et moi!’.62   Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). I continue to refer to the English translation, cited above. 59   Starobinski, Transparency, p. 13. 60   Rousseau himself never used the term ‘romantique’ nor was it used of him by his contemporaries: in fact the term had no literary significance in France until 1802 when Sénancour used it to connote melancholia and nostalgia. See Samuel Taylor, ‘Rousseau’s Romanticism’ in S. Harvey (ed.), Reappraisals of Rousseau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), pp. 2–23 (p. 3). 61   O’Hagan, Rousseau, p. 265. 62   OC, IV, p. 610, ‘How many men between God and me!’. Interestingly, the gospels are accepted by Rousseau because they are seen as immediate: in them ‘there are no men between the proof and me’. This, however, is very far from a recognition of the revealed 58

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This desire for immediate contact with nature, to show the child ‘things as they really are’, also informs Rousseau’s attitude both to the religious education of Émile and to theology in general. Rousseau’s theological shift is not so much a rejection of revealed religion as a reduction of it. Revelation is made synonymous with nature; or, as Starobinski succinctly expresses it, the forest replaces the Church.63 Christian tradition had spoken of God’s two books: the scriptures and the creation. For Rousseau, however, the cultural particularity of the Bible makes it untenable as a source of revelation. The book of nature alone has the universal and unmediated authority to be transparent and therefore revelatory. Influenced by Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, begun in 1749, and by the abbé Pluché, whose Le Spectacle de la nature (1732–49) had treated creation as primitive revelation,64 Rousseau moves a stage further and effectively identifies creation and revelation, subsuming them both in his conception of nature. This is apparent in his recommendation that natural religion is as far as he should go with Émile: ‘s’il doit avoir une autre [religion], je n’ai plus en cela le droit d’être son guide; c’est à lui seul de la choisir’ [If he must have any other religion, I have no right to be his guide; he must choose for himself.’]65 It is a natural religion of this sort that is the underlying theological assumption from the outset in the Émile. Explicit reference is made to God in the first sentence, but the God referred to is always conceived of purely as creator, as ‘l’auteur des choses’. In fact, what appears to be a reference to the Christian doctrine of creation gradually reveals itself as a natural theology: Tout est bien, sortant des mains de l’auteur des choses: tout dégénère entre les mains de l’homme. Il force une terre à nourrir les productions d’une autre; un arbre à porter les fruits d’un autre. Il mêle et confond les climats, les élemens, les saisons. [God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another; one tree to bear another’s fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place and natural conditions.]66

In these opening sentences Rousseau offers a compressed recasting of the creation narrative of Genesis, but whereas in Genesis, prior to the Fall, humankind is one part, albeit the culminating one, of the creation of the natural world, in the Émile, nature and human nature are opposed from the first. And it is not the illicit act of status of the scriptures. As Rousseau says in his letter to the Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, it is his inspired interpretation of them that recognizes the divine spirit: ‘j’y reconnois l’esprit divin: cela est immédiat autant qu’il peut être’, OCIV, p. 994. 63   Starobinski, Transparency, p. 40. 64   Robert Grimsley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), p. 60. 65   OC, IV, p. 636; Émile, p. 333. 66   OC, IV, p. 245; Émile, p. 5.

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eating from the tree that corrupts humanity, but rather human society that corrupts nature. Rousseau, then, collapses the biblical narrative of creation, fall and redemption (told in God’s two related and mutually interpreting books of creation and scripture) into a story of the book of nature, standing alone: Il […] est un seul [livre] ouvert à tous les yeux, c’est celui de la nature. C’est dans ce grand et sublime livre que j’apprends à servir et adorer son divin auteur: nul n’est excusable de n’y pas lire, parce qu’il parle à tous les hommes une langue intelligible à tous les esprits. [There is one book which is open to everyone – the book of nature. In this good and great volume I learn to serve and adore its Author. There is no excuse for not reading this book, for it speaks to all in a language they can understand.]67

Here we see how Rousseau believes that he has found in natural religion a universal language by which humankind can rediscover a lost unity. In the persona of the Vicaire Savoyard the author confesses his recognition that ‘l’homme n’est point un’,68 but that the evil that divides and corrupts is not an external but an internal force: ‘Il n’existe point d’autre mal que celui que tu fais et celui que tu souffres et l’un et l’autre te vient de toi’.69 It is here that the kernel of Rousseau’s secularization of theology is to be found – his reduction of the pattern of sin and redemption to the saeculum in which human nature and the natural world interact, free from the intervention of divine grace. The mysterium iniquitatis of the classical Christian tradition, still assumed by Traherne, is replaced by evil as a purely social phenomenon. For Rousseau, evil is absent in the natural world and absent too in human nature as originally constituted. It springs from the disorder of society, which then spreads to disorder individual lives, and is thus the work of humankind itself. The contradiction with Rousseau’s statement, cited above, that ‘toute méchanceté vient de foiblesse’70 is only apparent, because it is Rousseau’s belief that society makes the individual weak and dependent. The remedy against this disorder and disunity is to be found in nature. Nature teaches the autonomy which alone allows humans to overcome their self-alienation and the alienation from their environment that they experience in society. Thus the Vicaire Savoyard exhorts: ‘obéissons à la nature; nous connoîtrons avec quelle douceur elle régne’.71 Here the kingdom of nature   OCIV, p. 624–5; Émile, p. 324.   OCIV, p. 583. 69   OCIV, p. 588; ‘There is no evil but the evil you do or the evil you suffer, and both 67 68

come from yourself’, Émile, p. 293. 70   OCIV, p. 288. 71   OCIV, p. 597; ‘Let us obey the call of nature; we shall see that her yoke is easy’, Émile, p. 301.

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has explicitly supplanted the scriptural kingdom of God and Christ as the means of salvation from sin. This recasting of the terms of Christian doctrine culminates in the ambivalence shown towards the person of Christ by Rousseau, both explicitly and in the persona of the Vicaire Savoyard. The Vicaire contrasts the life and death of Socrates with those of Jesus and readily confesses that whilst the former are those of a philosopher (un sage), the latter are those of a God (un Dieu).72 At the same time, however, he remains agnostic about the claim that the gospels embody truth, seeing so many reasons for and against that he cannot make up his mind.73 Rousseau himself sought to find a middle way between what he took to be the unacceptable extremes of deist and atheist scepticism on the one hand, and Roman Catholic intolerance on the other. For him, Christ is divine, but only in an exemplary way, which all in theory could emulate: Christ exemplifies humanity in the state of reconciliation with nature.74 To be more precise, he reveres Christ as the human embodiment of nature, not because of any unique grace of union with God. In classical Christian theology the incarnation is both the supreme instance of mediation between God and humanity, and the revelation and ground of the potential participation of all humanity in God. But, for Rousseau, all forms of mediation are seen as corrosive of natural truth and goodness, and any form of revelation other than nature is rejected as particular and thus exclusive. In Rousseau’s religious scheme, therefore, God as absent creator does not communicate except in the immanent form of nature, and natural man (as exemplified by the figures of Émile, the tutor and Christ) has, as the Vicaire puts it, the power within himself to be free, good and happy as God is.75 The mysteries of redemption in classical Christian thought are rendered clear – ‘Le Dieu que j’adore n’est point un Dieu de ténébres’,76 as the Vicaire Savoyard says – and reconciliation takes place within the sphere of immanent nature alone, rendered quasi-divine. External divine grace is replaced by personal sincerity, because only such sincerity can allow the qualities of immediacy, transparency and unreflective spontaneity, which Rousseau prioritizes as the hallmarks of humanity at one with itself and with nature. Émile and the Tutor In relation to the figure of the child, these changes make themselves apparent in the shift in the conception of innocence described earlier. Innocence ceases to be seen as a christologically mediated grace, and becomes instead a natural property to be reclaimed through the tutelage of nature, embodied in the figure of the child     74   75   76   72 73

OCIV, p. 626. OCIV, p. 625, O’Hagan, Rousseau, p. 240. Starobinski, Transparency, p. 68. ‘libre, bon et heureux comme [Dieu]’, OCIV, p. 587. OCIV, p. 614; ‘the God whom I adore is not a God of shadows’.

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Émile. Just as Rousseau’s conception of self-revealing nature is a conflation of the two books of creation and scripture, so Émile is a conflation of Adam and Christ, the Messiah and second Adam of Christian tradition. The paradigm of orthodox Christian thought has been to see in Christ the antitype to Adam.77 Christ is seen not only as fully human, but as the only fully human person whose perfection restores the lost innocence which has been the universal experience of humanity since Adam’s sin. This second Adam Christology is still assumed in Traherne and is reclaimed for the new context by Schleiermacher and Péguy. By contrast, Rousseau’s scheme, with its denial of original sin, necessarily involves a denial of the first Adam’s trespass, but also, in its resistance to particular revelation, rejects the possibility of a redemptive Christ or second Adam.78 In their place it proposes the figure of Émile, whose education at the hands of nature is an immanent version of the Christian narrative of salvation. As we have seen, the narrative of Émile’s education is a solitary one. In contrast to the story of communal salvation told by the Church, the Émile is concerned with the perfection of one human nature in isolation: ‘Un auteur illustre dit qu’il n’y a que le méchant qui soit seul; moi je dis qu’il n’y a que le bon qui soit seul’ [‘A distinguished author says, “None but the wicked can live alone”. I say, “None but the good can live alone’’’].79 Even towards the end of the book, Émile’s relationship with Sophie is little more than a complementary extension of his personality, as he settles down with her in rural retirement. Their union is just that, an idealized instance of personal autonomy, a transparent and immediate relationship in which the lost unity that the Vicaire laments (‘l’homme n’est point un’) has been regained. Émile and Sophie are not dependent on one another, because they have merged into identity (or, rather, Émile has subsumed Sophie: her femininity is merely the complement to his masculinity). In their idyll, their only dependence is their benignly immediate relationship with nature; otherwise they are entirely free and autonomous and it is precisely in being those things that they together form the prototype of Rousseau’s ideal natural man. Of course the exception to this emphasis on solitude is the tutor. In a system which rejects dependence on the mediation of other people as inherently corrupting, the tutor is inevitably an anomaly. He is an ambiguous figure, frequently functioning as kind of benign puppeteer. Commenting on her garden, Julie in La Nouvelle Heloïse says that ‘la nature a fait tout, mais sous ma direction’,80 and in the same way in the Émile the tutor is the hidden guiding hand who orchestrates nature’s tuition. At times, however, the tutor’s tactics are less benign, making use   The source of this tradition is Saint Paul: I Corinthians 15: 22, 45.   Vincent McCarthy neatly summarizes this as a shift from Christ as Christus (the

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anointed of God) to Chrestus (morally ‘useful’); McCarthy, The Quest for a Philosophical Jesus: Christianity and Philosophy in Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Schelling (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1986), p. xiv. 79   OCIV, p. 341n; Émile, p. 82n. 80   OCII, p. 388; ‘nature has done it all, but under my guidance’.

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of precisely the corrupting pattern of obstructive mediation from which Émile is to be kept. Perhaps the most significant such episode is Émile’s encounter with a conjuror at a fair. Rousseau uses this meeting to raise many broader themes, such as the distinction between appearance and reality and the growth of a moral sense in the child, but it is also an especially clear example of the tutor’s deception. As Rousseau explained in a handwritten note, the ‘humiliation and disgrace’ to which Émile is subjected here are entirely devised by the tutor, so that even when he ‘appears to share [Émile’s] embarrassment and instruction it turns out that he was deceiving him all along’.81 Something similar can be observed in the fifth book with its account of the love between Émile and Sophie. As Starobinski observes, the tutor ‘enjoys the pleasure of being the one through whom the current of love [between Émile and Sophie] must pass’. He is the mediator of their relationship, participating in it vicariously, whilst remaining detached and free from commitment: ‘He is the mediator, without having to relinquish the immediate pleasure of benevolence […] He is neither the lover nor the beloved but the point of contact between the two’.82 Thus, as Kavanagh puts it, Émile’s education is effectively a conspiracy, ‘because the tutor readily enlists and carefully prepares any number of third parties to act in the various morality plays he stages for his pupil’s edification’: ‘On l’enchaîne, on le pousse, on le retient avec le seul lien de la necessité sans qu’il en murmure’ [‘Without a murmur he is restrained, urged on, held back, by the hands of necessity alone’].83 Beneath these surface inconsistencies and contradictions in the tutor’s relationship with Émile and Sophie lie deeper currents. Sociologically, in the terms of Latour’s diagnosis, the tutor is very clearly an instance of hybridity, the means by which the dualism of nature and culture is secretly overcome, even as it is explicitly reinforced.84 And theologically, in the absence of transcendent revelation and participation in God through Christ, both of which Rousseau’s theological assumptions have excluded, the tutor acts as an immanent surrogate for the divine. He is cast in the image of the invulnerable and omnipotent God. For all the insistence that the tutor be called master (gouverneur) rather than teacher (précepteur) – ‘parce qu’il s’agit moins pour lui d’instruire que de conduire’ – in almost the next sentence the tutor’s power over the pupil is expressed in quasidivine terms: ‘je [l’] adopte avant qu’il soit né’.85 What is developed here is, as I have argued above, a secularization of the Christian doctrine of creation and redemption. The transcendent God of Christian tradition is replaced by immanent nature, treated as divine because it alone has the power to restore lost transparency   OCIV, p. 1421; O’Hagan, Rousseau, p. 77.   Starobinski, Transparency, p. 177. 83   Thomas Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley: 81 82

University of California Press, 1987), p. 89; OCIV, p. 321; Émile, p. 66. 84   Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 34. 85   OCIV, p. 266; ‘since it is a question of guidance rather than instruction’; ‘I adopt him before he is born’, Émile, p. 66, p. 22.

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and personal unity. Adoption loses its theological sense and the tutor takes the place of Christ and the Church, mediating not between Creator and creation, but between pristine nature and alienated humanity. And, as Émile grows and is educated, he comes to resemble the tutor ever more closely, until he himself becomes ready to act as tutor in turn. Critics such as James Byrne have seen in Rousseau the anticipation of Nietzsche’s announcement, a century later, of the death of God.86 In fact, it is more accurate to see here a prefiguring of some of the later recastings of Christian faith as a purely this-worldly concern. Rousseau’s search for a universally credible and effective form of religion leads him to discount transcendence, except as an account of the world’s origins, and in its place to establish the divinity of nature as the means to human self-reconciliation. Rather than abolishing the divine per se, he abolishes its transcendence, relocating it in the immanent sphere as nature. In the principles of religion that he outlines in Du Contrat social, the one negative principle is the exclusion of anyone who adheres to the dogma traditionally formulated as extra ecclesiam nulla salus: ‘quiconque ose dire, hors de l’Eglise point de Salut, doit être chassé de l’État’.87 The unstated principle behind this is that in the world of nature, universal revelation is encountered in immanent form: supernatural grace is ruled out, and there is therefore, one might say, extra naturam nulla salus. Conclusion The philosophy of human nature that emerges from the Émile has been highly influential and as a result it contains much that seems congenial and self-evident to twenty-first-century eyes. ‘Child-centred’ learning, belief in original innocence, respect for nature and what can be learned from it are largely assumed. Yet the absolute value placed on nature, combined with a radical rejection of society, brings to bear an immense weight on the idealized child Émile, ‘l’élêve […] de la nature’88, who is also the perfect exemplar of humanity. In Rousseau’s own terms it is very clear that Émile is isolated from society for his own benefit. Yet it is precisely by virtue of his pre-social manipulability that the young Émile becomes exemplary. Isolated from the destructive influence of society, the child bears the full weight of Rousseau’s anthropological ideal and, as he does so, becomes the subject of a process of manipulation at the hands of the adult tutor. Admittedly the tutor himself is presented as an instance of the ideal natural and childlike adult – Rousseau writes: ‘je voudrois qu’il fut lui-même enfant s’il étoit   Byrne, Glory, p. 193.   OCIII, p. 469; ‘whoever dares to say ‘Outside the Church there is no salvation’

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must be driven from the state’, cf. OCIV, p. 628, Émile, p. 327. As we shall see below, Schleiermacher will later reframe this as an inclusive, rather than an exclusive, dogma. 88   OCIV, p. 361.

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possible’89 – but this evidently impossible wish conceals a series of more or less explicit machinations, which cannot be read in an exclusively benign light. In this concluding section I shall explore more fully these shadowy incursions into the Rousseauvian ideal of transparency, initially by means of the critiques of Michel Foucault and Karl Barth, then by tracing the hidden pattern of negation by which Rousseau himself brings his own affirmations into question. a) The Laboratory of Nature The isolation in which Émile is educated has its context in the tradition of modern scientific experimentation inaugurated by Galileo, Descartes and Newton. Eighteenth-century thought largely took for granted this inheritance from seventeenth-century science,90 but Rousseau in the Émile extends its remit into the area of human nature. The child Émile, placed alone in the environment of nature, is, in effect, a human experiment. The natural world surrounding him is not nature in the raw, but nature controlled and manipulated by the Tutor, as if in mimicry of the controlled atmosphere of a scientific laboratory. Émile is isolated from society to avoid the distortions which are believed to arise from it, but the young adult who emerges from the laboratory at the end of book three is almost a parody of the modern autonomous individual: ‘Il se considère sans égard aux autres et trouve bon que les autres ne pensent point à lui’.91 In the process of realizing this quasi-scientific perfection, the role of the tutor is indispensable. There is no suggestion that Émile, if abandoned to nature without the tutor’s guidance, would achieve the same goal. As Melzer observes, ‘education in Émile is a masterpiece of psychological engineering […] raising him in absolute freedom whilst also controlling virtually everything he does’.92 In this light the experimental isolation of Émile takes its place within the developing category of bio-power, which Michel Foucault sees coming to prominence in the eighteenth century. Bio-power, in Foucault’s definition, is ‘the insertion of bodies into the machinery of production’, which for the first time ‘brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations’.93 The manipulation of Émile and his environment by the tutor is a small-scale instance of this broader phenomenon, and there is some irony in the fact that its covert presence is felt in a work that seeks to treat children on their own terms. Foucault sees the emergence   OCIV, p. 265; ‘were it possible, he should become a child himself’, Émile, p. 21.   Lucien Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: The Christian Burgess

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and the Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 24. 91   OCIV, p. 488; ‘Émile thinks only of himself and prefers that others should do the same’, Émile, p. 204. 92   Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), p. 92. 93   Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 140, 143.

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of bio-power as a sign that a society has crossed the threshold of modernity, and it appears here that the manipulation of the child’s life by the control of its natural environment is a sign of society and humanity come of age. There is a sense, then, in which treating childhood as a separate time with its own rationality leads to a greater, not a lesser, degree of adult manipulation. Once childhood is defined as a period in its own right, the child becomes more easily absorbed into a strategy for the development of an ideal form. Émile is thus ‘the perfection of childhood’, who, when he reaches maturity at the close of the book, will then become the perfect tutor for the next generation. In his earlier work, The Order of Things, cited in the introduction, Foucault locates in the nineteenth century the onset of humanity’s ‘anthropological sleep’ in which humankind expands to become the exclusive object and subject of all discourse.94 Yet already in the Émile, alongside the onset of bio-power, this pattern of anthropological exclusivity is beginning to emerge. In spite of the evident reverence for nature, in the Émile, external nature is displaced and rendered subservient as the means to the fashioning of perfected human nature.95 In this process Émile learns how to manipulate nature, exercising dominion over it as of right: on diroit que la nature est à ses ordres, tant il sait aisément plier toute chose à ses volontés. Il est fait pour guider, pour gouverner ses égaux: le talent, l’expérience lui tiennent lieu de droit et d’autorité […] sans vouloir commander il sera le maitre, sans croir obéir ils obéiront. [you might say, ‘Nature obeys his word’, so easily does he bend all things to his will. He is made to lead, to rule his fellows; talent and experience take the place of right and authority […] without wishing to command he will be the master, and they will obey him unawares].96

A more explicitly theological anticipation of Foucault’s critique is offered by Karl Barth. In Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century he devotes his longest chapter to a discussion of Rousseau, in effect enthroning him as the great, unacknowledged theologian of the eighteenth century. For Barth, Rousseau is ‘a man of the new era, in eighteenth-century garb’,97 one who foresaw many of the themes that would dominate nineteenth-century theology. Chief among them,

  Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 330–374.   Genevieve Lloyd sees this shift in gender terms. As Lloyd observes, complementarity

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in Rousseau reveals itself as merely ‘a more subtle version of female inferiority’ (Lloyd, Man of Reason, p. 104). In exactly the same way, the supposed reciprocal complementarity between human nature and external nature in the formation of Émile can be seen as heralding Foucault’s ‘anthropological sleep’. 96   OCIV, p. 42; Émile, p. 150 (translation adapted). 97   Barth, Protestant Theology, p. 162.

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in Barth’s view, is what he terms a ‘completely new discovery in the realm of anthropology’, the seeking after and discovery of the inner nature of man: If Rousseau believed that his heart was good he did so because he imagined that in the midst of a society whose whole striving and interest were directed outwards, he had discovered quite anew that man has a heart, and what the human heart actually is. The heart is simply the man himself, discounting everything he produces or which confronts him as an alien existence or as the work of alien hands. This is what Rousseau has found: himself.98

The rhetoric here shows Barth’s desire to portray, as sympathetically as possible, the movement of Rousseau’s thought. In fact, of course, Rousseau is for Barth the chief figure in his chronicle of decline and fall, but the degree to which his critique anticipates that of Foucault is remarkable. Barth writes that nature, for Rousseau, is ‘very simply man himself’,99 and that, in this newly all-encompassing entity called man, reason and revelation are subsumed along with nature: The theological significance of this discovery [of man] was nothing less than the settlement of the conflict between reason and revelation, since by it man was encouraged to look upon himself alternately now as reason and now as revelation. For this it was not first necessary that the word ‘God’ should take on a new sound. It was enough that the word ‘Man’ had now for the first time acquired its full, whole tone.100

b) Rousseau’s Self-critique The critiques of Foucault and Barth offer a consensus, then, bearing out the claim made at the opening of this chapter that, unlike the other three authors studied in this book, Rousseau does not propound a theological anthropology. In the figure of Émile, human nature has displaced external nature, the male gender has subsumed the female and, finally, anthropology has lost its qualifying adjective and become a self-justifying discourse. It is in a clear awareness of this context that Schleiermacher began his own reassertion of a theological anthropology in On Religion of 1799, developing it more fully, as we shall see in the next chapter, in the Christmas Eve dialogue of 1806. Yet, before moving on, in concluding this chapter it is important to acknowledge the instabilities inherent in Rousseau’s own thought, instabilities which bring into question the coherence and sustainability of the anthropological exclusivity we have identified. Certainly it was not Rousseau’s explicit intention to bring about the displacements we have traced. He saw himself as an outsider, seeking to correct   Barth, Protestant Theology, pp. 211–2.   Barth, Protestant Theology, p. 213. 100   Barth, Protestant Theology, p. 218. 98 99

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and clarify the thought of his age from his own unique perspective. Yet Rousseau’s authorial persona of detached and privileged insight is never far removed from a contrasting parallel personality, which sees itself as the victim of others’ machinations. This second persona is encountered most fully in the late works, the Dialogues and the Rêveries. The former in particular, with its alternative title, Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques, is a self-justificatory account of his life and opinions against his critics. The same tone is occasionally found in the footnotes and digressions of the Émile, but, for our purposes, it is most evident in the two letters Rousseau wrote as a sequel to the Émile. These letters, entitled Émile et Sophie ou Les Solitaires, were written soon after the completion of the Émile, though they were first published posthumously in 1780.101 The first letter recounts the rapid unravelling of the idyllic union of Émile and Sophie after their move from rural seclusion to the life of the city. Through a series of misfortunes, Sophie commits adultery and, in his distress, Émile leaves her, eventually in the second letter deciding to cut the bonds that attach him to his own country by setting off on a sea voyage: ‘En rompant les nœuds qui m’attachoient à mon pays je l’étendois sur toute la terre, et j’en devenois d’autant plus homme en cessant d’être Citoyen’ [‘In cutting the cords that attached me to my country, I extended its bounds to the whole earth, and I became all the more a man in ceasing to be a Citizen’].102 In Les Solitaires we see the same equation of true humanity with the escape from society that was found in the Émile, but the difference is found in the fact that, now that Rousseau is writing from Émile’s perspective, the authorial voice is one of victimhood not mastery. As Kavanagh observes, ‘Les Solitaires reveals Rousseau’s discomfort in appropriating the voice of the master’.103 In the letters, written as if by Émile to his tutor, we do not observe an act of rebellion against his education, but rather an appropriation of that education from within, which allows him, in the face of adversity, to exercise true self-mastery. Émile becomes the ‘eminently meritorious victim’,104 who, even in slavery in Africa, rises to prominence and, after the pattern of Joseph in the book of Genesis, becomes personal slave to the Dey of Algiers. In one sense Les Solitaires recapitulates the themes of the Émile, showing the evil effects of society and the fundamental importance of individual self-mastery and self-containment as exemplified in the heroism of the captive Émile. More importantly, however, it brings into question the very possibility of the natural religion that appears to be the tutor’s achievement at the close of the Émile: the harmonious interplay of nature and human nature, Émile and Sophie, and, even, in the pages that recapitulate Du Contrat social, of individual and society. At the conclusion of Les Solitaires this harmony is unveiled as illusory and the ideal of     103   104   101 102

OCIV, pp. 881–924. OCIV, p. 912. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth, p. 89. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth, p. 89.

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true liberty is achieved only for the solitary Émile and, even then, only by ‘total submission to another as master’.105 Significantly, the sequence of events that leads to Émile’s capture by pirates is set in train by the use (or misuse) of a magnet. The corrupt captain, in the pay of the pirates, conceals a magnet in the binnacle of the ship’s compass to divert its course. It is precisely at the point when Émile discovers this deception that the ship’s lookout sights the ‘voile barbaresque’ of the ship that will enslave them.106 This episode in Les Solitaires reprises the theme of magnetism, which was the key to the encounter, cited above, between Émile and the conjuror in the Émile. There Émile is first fascinated by the skill with which the conjuror makes a model duck follow the movements of his fishing rod. Later in private the tutor explains the workings of magnetism, which lie behind this illusion, and Émile returns to the fair and publicly exposes the conjuror’s method. The following day, however, the magician invites Émile back and performs a series of tricks with the toy ducks that Émile cannot repeat or understand, thus humiliating him in just the way that Émile had humiliated the conjuror.107 In the Émile, this episode at the fair can be seen a metaphor for the educational process the pupil undergoes. It later transpires that the whole encounter has been planned by the tutor who manipulates both Émile and the conjuror with a hidden power analogous to that of magnetism. As Kavanagh observes, magnetism is thus the ‘archetype for the visible patterns of manipulation through which the tutor controls his pupil’s every act’.108 Following Latour, however, the power of magnetism can also be read as an instance of the persistence of hybrids, crossing the heavily policed border between nature and culture. A natural force, magnetism nonetheless only enters the sphere of Émile’s consciousness in the hands of the conjuror, a representative of the potentially corrupting influence of human culture. In the Émile the encounter with magnetism is in the end presented as benign as Émile learns from his humiliation and emerges unscathed from this instance of social corruption: the hybrid emerges briefly, only to be buried. Yet, of course, the whole episode of the tutor’s manipulation is an intrusion of the demonized cultural realm and it is this darker background that is laid bare in Les Solitaires. In the posthumous work it is because of the abuse of magnetism, and thus of nature, that Émile is enslaved. Rather paradoxically, Émile presents this state of slavery as in fact one of freedom: ‘Je suis plus libre qu’auparavant’, he writes, ‘le tems [sic] de ma servitude fut celui de mon régne’.109 This ideal of liberty is a radicalization of that found in the Émile

    107   108   109  

Kavanagh, Writing the Truth, p. 99. OCIV, p. 915. OCIV, pp. 437–9. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth, p. 85. OCIV, pp. 916, 917; ‘I am more at liberty than hitherto’, ‘the time of my slavery was that of my reign’. 105 106

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– ‘L’homme vraiment libre ne veut que ce qu’il peut et fait ce qu’il lui plait’110 – yet by its context in the isolation of slavery it is hard not to read it as an ironic commentary on the optimistic tone of the Émile’s conclusion, a tacit admission that the conceptual clarities of the earlier work are bought at a price. In his reading of the ‘Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard’, Paul de Man points out how it can ‘literally be called “unreadable” in that it leads to a set of assertions that radically exclude one another’. It is at once a theistic and an atheistic text, using the arguments of both religion and unbelief in an endlessly repeating circle that ‘compels us to choose while destroying the foundations of any choice’.111 Taken as a pair, the same is true for the Émile as a whole and for Les Solitaires. The immensely influential imaginative achievement of the former is effectively undone by its author’s own self-critique in the latter. The possibility at the close of the Émile that its child hero may emerge to a state of achieved human sociality and interdependence is comprehensively undermined by the sequel, which leaves open only the drift towards solipsistic interiority that is the movement of Rousseau’s autobiographical writings. In what can be seen as an inchoate anticipation of later dialectical thought, Rousseau’s own œuvre thus contains a self-critique that, to reverse Starobinski’s formula, finds the poison in the remedy. In allocating the child a unique place in human development, Rousseau has also opened up the possibility of the child’s subjection in newly threatening ways; and in dismantling a theological anthropology, in removing the interplay between God and humanity and placing the latter in exclusive relationship with the book of nature, he has permitted the development of the increasingly unrestricted dominance of human nature over external nature. This is the nexus of ideas inherited by Schleiermacher who, though he does not refer directly to Rousseau, is clearly writing in a context pervaded by his influence.112 As we shall see in the next chapters, it is never fully clear that Schleiermacher, despite his explicitly Christian stance, escapes the theological difficulties attendant upon the Rousseauvian shift.

  OCIV, p. 309; ‘That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires’, Émile, p. 56. 111   Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 245. 112   Schleiermacher’s library contained Rousseau’s works and he cites him in early writings. See, for instance, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. H.J.Birkner et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984–) I/1:30, p. 133 and the comments in Dawn DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Childhood’ in Bunge, Child in Christian Thought, pp. 329–49. 110

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Chapter 5

‘Die reine Offenbarung des Göttlichen’: Who is Schleiermacher’s Child? Introduction Unlike the other authors discussed in the main part of this book, Friedrich Schleiermacher is not generally known for his interest in the figure of the child. However, among the more widely read of his minor works is Die Weihnachtsfeier: Ein Gespräch, a novella of 1806, which has as its pivotal character the child Sofie, a girl of about ten years old. This uncharacteristic work will be my chief subject matter in this and the following chapter. The present chapter offers a close reading of significant aspects of the dialogue, seeking to establish who the child is for Schleiermacher and what she reveals about his conception of humanity. Reference will be made to a number of the author’s other works, but lengthier discussion of the dialogue’s relationship with Schleiermacher’s thought in general, and his hermeneutics in particular, will be reserved for the next chapter. Earlier commentary on Die Weihnachstfeier has tended either to treat it as a moving but essentially marginal devotional work, or alternatively to analyse the set-piece contributions of its adult characters for evidence of the author’s own theological views. The failure of both approaches lies in their blindness to the central place the author gives to the child Sofie. My reading, by contrast, sees Sofie as the key to the novella, but in doing so seeks to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize her. Admittedly, even allowing for the different cultural climate in which it was written, there are elements in her portrayal that encourage such a response, but the interest for our purposes is in what Sofie and the conversation (Gespräch) that grows up around her tell us about Schleiermacher’s developing understanding of human nature before God, his theological anthropology. I begin by locating the origins of Schleiermacher’s portrait of Sofie in the setting of early German Romanticism, while also indicating how the Romantic Movement is not simply opposed to Kantian Enlightenment thought, but in fact shares key concerns with it. We shall see how the form and content of Die Weihnachtsfeier express the three modes of theology later identified in The Christian Faith: the poetic, the rhetorical and the didactic. The child, though she is most akin to the first of these modes, is the means by which they are brought into dialogue, embodying the ideal of freie Geselligkeit,1 the spontaneous response to fellow humans and 1   Dilthey discusses Schleiermacher’s use of this term in Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers: Schleiermachers System als Philosophie und Theologie, 2. Band

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to God that Schleiermacher sees as the essence of human life. I then raise two controversial questions that have been put to Schleiermacher: first that of gender, pointing to the ways in which Schleiermacher’s depiction of Sofie both colludes with and questions common gender stereotypes; and secondly, that of the degree to which his theology is in thrall to a prior anthropology. The chapter concludes with an excursus that draws upon the insights of twentieth-century Russian theology, asking if the portrait of Sofie can be read as an incipient sophiology. Schleiermacher and Romanticism What prompted Schleiermacher to write Die Weihnachtsfeier? Certainly at the close of the eighteenth century the novella had begun to emerge as a significant new genre in German literature, but Die Weihnachtsfeier is neither a typical instance nor, from a literary point of view, a particularly outstanding one, and for a professional theologian and philosopher it certainly constitutes an idiosyncratic gesture. The author describes its conception (Empfängnis) in a sudden inspiration, prompted by a concert given by the celebrated blind flautist, Dülon.2 It was drafted in a few weeks and originally intended for publication at Christmas 1805 as a gift to family and friends. This testimony alerts us to a vitally important aspect of Schleiermacher’s cultural inheritance, the formative influence upon him of early German Romanticism. In the history of theology he is widely regarded as the founding father of modern theology, the first systematic translator of Enlightenment categories of thought into Christian self-understanding.3 Called to Berlin in 1809 to be a professor at the new university, he was instrumental in the development of the modern understanding of theology as a scientific discipline to be pursued alongside the other Geisteswissenschaften, outlining this programme in his Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (Brief Outline of the Study of Theology (1811))4 and developing it in his major work, Der Christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche dargestellt (The Christian Faith (1821)).5 Yet, prior to his return to Berlin, his writings followed a notably different trajectory. In the closing years of the eighteenth century he was closely associated with the early Romantic Movement and his first major work of 1799, Über die Religion (On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers),6 was written with the (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967), pp. 331–4. 2   Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. H.J.Birkner et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984–) I, 5, p. XLV (hereafter KGA). 3   In his introduction to the Glaubenslehre, Richard Niebuhr calls him ‘the Kant of modern Protestantism’; Schleiermacher, Christian Faith (New York: Harper and Row) 1963, I, p. ix. 4   KGA, I/6. 5   KGA, I/7. 6   KGA, I/2.

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circle around Friedrich Schlegel (prior to his conversion to Catholicism) as its intended audience. Die Weihnachtsfeier belongs to a transitional period. From his time in Berlin until 1802, the influence of early German Romanticism was still profound, but, with his move first to Stolp and then to a professorship at the University of Halle, other influences and professional priorities came to bear. Redeker identifies his move to Stolp as the beginning of his systematic period,7 but it would be misleading to make such division too rigid by isolating an early Romantic phase in contradistinction to a later systematic one. Though his writings and lectures from 1802 onwards cover the whole range of theology, and though he made major contributions in numerous related fields including ethics, political theory, hermeneutics and the history of philosophy, Schleiermacher’s self-image was not that of a builder of systems. In contrast to his contemporary, Immanuel Kant, with his single-minded and systematic approach to intellectual endeavour, Schleiermacher saw himself as an amateur. Moreover, given the status The Christian Faith now holds as the first work of modern systematic theology, it is important to recognize that it was conceived by its author in more modest terms. He intended it to be an exercise in dogmatic theology, understood as ‘the task of interpreting the present condition of Christianity’, with dogma being defined as ‘the expressions of the religious selfconsciousness current in a specific Church in a particular place and time’.8 In this light, though it may be helpful to identify the author’s time in Stolp and Halle as the point of transition between his early and his mature work, to see this period as the watershed between the Romantic and the systematic Schleiermacher is misleading. In fact, recent scholarship on early German Romanticism has tended to call into question its popular image as a consciously unsystematic and emotional movement. Its indebtedness to Kant’s system, even as it criticizes it, has been highlighted, and the comprehensiveness of Enlightenment rationality has emerged as the background against which the more affective, allusive and fragmentary insights of the Romantic Movement appear. Thus, scholars such as Manfred Frank and Jean Grondin have argued against the prevailing habit of viewing Kant and German Romanticism as contrary poles.9 The basic point here is that in the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between things as they appear to us and as they are in themselves, is found what Grondin calls

7   Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), p. 6. 8   Dawn DeVries, ‘Schleiermacher’ in Gareth Jones (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 311–26 (p. 318). 9   See, for example, Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), Stephen Prickett, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism (New York: SUNY Press, 2004).

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‘one of the secret roots of Romanticism’.10 From this distinction emerged both the newly prominent science of hermeneutics, Schleiermacher’s contribution to which will be examined in the next chapter, and the aesthetic or poetic understanding of religion characteristic of Friedrich Schlegel, which was deeply influential on Schleiermacher’s theology. The complex intertwining of these two influences remained decisive throughout Schleiermacher’s career and many of his main preoccupations are best understood in the light of his desire not to compromise between them, but to complicate their relationship and then to reconcile them.11 It is important to be aware of this dual inheritance because it highlights the major cultural shift between Rousseau’s Émile of 1762 and the context in which Schleiermacher was working. As will emerge below, there are significant differences between the two authors’ depictions of the child, not least in the fact that, where Rousseau stresses above all the isolation of Émile, Schleiermacher insists upon the immersion of the child in the wider community, for the mutual benefit of both. Rather paradoxically, Rousseau is both more a man of the Enlightenment and more of a ‘Romantic’ in the popular sense than Schleiermacher. The former’s exaltation of the ideal of pure transparency stands directly in the Enlightenment tradition, whilst his quasi-Manichaean separation of benign nature from malign culture has led to him being seen as a progenitor of Romanticism in the popular sense. Neither of these Rousseauvian themes, however, plays a major part in the ‘social imaginary’ of early German Romanticism. An exemplary contrast with Rousseau is found in the figure of Novalis (1772– 1801). His Hymnen an die Nacht (1800) see obscurity rather than transparency as the truth of the human condition. ‘Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnissvollen Nacht’, he writes in the first hymn, and throughout the work the night is the locus of encounter with the endless mystery of the divine: ‘Doch unenträthselt blieb die ewge Nacht,/Das ernste Zeichen einer fernen Macht’.12 Moreover, nature, for Novalis, does not stand in isolation from the humans who inhabit it and whose culture constitutes it. Thus he sees nature too as suffering from the Fall: Des jungen Geschlechts Lustgarten verwelkte – hinauf in den freyeren, wüsten Raum strebten die unkindlichen, wachsenden Menschen. Die Götter verschwanden mit ihrem Gefolge – Einsam und leblos stand die Natur.

  Grondin, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 64.   Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the

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Knowledge of God (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1988), p. 121. 12   Novalis, Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1987), pp. 11, 19; ‘Downwards wend I my way/To Night, holy, inexpressible’, ‘Yet still unfathomed stayed eternal Night,/The solemn symbol of a far-off Might’, Novalis, Hymns to the Night, trans. Mabel Cotterell (London: Phoenix Press, 1948), pp. 21, 41.

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[The happy garden of the youthful race withered away; out into freer spaces strove the full grown, unchildlike mankind. The gods and their acolytes disappeared – nature stood alone and lifeless.]13

As Henri de Lubac has shown, a mystical-prophetic tradition from Plotinus through Eckhart and Jakob Boehme comes to bear on Novalis, where, alongside a veneration for nature, there is also an expectation of mystical encounter with the transcendent divine.14 Thus whereas Rousseau commends natural over revealed religion and remains agnostic about the divinity of Christ, Novalis and his contemporary Friedrich Hölderlin both espouse revealed Christianity, even if in distinctly idiosyncratic forms: ‘Denn zu sehr/O Christus! Häng’ ich an dir’.15 There is no record that Novalis and Schleiermacher ever met, but through Friedrich Schlegel they enjoyed a lively long-distance dialogue and read and responded to one another’s work. In Die Weihnachtsfeier the younger writer, who had died in 1801, is a major presence, musical settings of his works being sung on two occasions, and the novella’s focus on the child is undoubtedly deeply indebted to Novalis. Both the Hymnen an die Nacht, with their insistence on a renewed childlikeness in the prophesied transformation of the human race, and the fragments known as Vermischte Bemerkungen or Blüthenstaub (1798) present many of the themes of Die Weihnachtsfeier in inchoate form: [42] Die Gesellschaft ist nichts, als gemeinschaftliches Leben – Eine unteilbare denkende und fühlende Person. Jeder Mensch ist eine kleine Gesellschaft. [48] Jede Stufe der Bildung fängt mit der Kindheit an. Daher ist der am meisten gebildete, irdische Mensch dem Kinde so ähnlich. [96] Wo Kinder sind, da ist ein goldnes Zeitalter. [[42] Society is nothing but communal life – an indivisible, thinking and feeling person. [48] Each human being is a miniature society. Every stage of education begins with childhood. Therefore the most educated earthly human being so closely resembles the child. 13   Novalis, Gedichte, p. 19; Novalis, Hymns, pp. 41–3 (translation adapted and emphasis added). 14   Henri de Lubac, La Posterité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore I: De Joachim à Schelling (Paris: Lethielleux, 1978), pp. 343–52. 15   ‘For all too much, O Christ, do I depend on you’, ‘Der Einzige’ in Friedrich Hölderlin, Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1999), p. 345. Novalis’s Geistliche Lieder (Novalis, Gedichte, pp. 28–50) and his ‘Rede’, Die Christenheit oder Europa (Novalis, Fragmente und Studien (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984)), pp. 67–89, show this most clearly.

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[96] Where children are, there is the age of gold.]16

One of the two hymns quoted by Schleiermacher in the novella is the last of the Geistliche Lieder (1799–1800), ‘Ich sehe dich in tausend Bildern’. This hymn to Mary encapsulates one of the great themes of the collection, that of the universal motherhood of Mary, which allows all human beings to relate to her alongside her son as fellow children. It is immediately preceded by the final stanza of the penultimate song (which Schleiermacher does not quote), but which makes explicit the theme of childlikeness: Darf nur ein Kind dein Antlitz schaun, Und deinem Beistand fest vertraun, So löse doch des Alters Binde, Und mache mich zu deinem Kinde: Die Kindeslieb’ und Kindestreu Wohnt mir von jener goldnen Zeit noch bei. [Only a child may see your face And trust in your support, So loose me from the bonds of age And make me into your child; The love and trust of the child Dwells with me still from that golden age]17

The significance of Novalis’s influence on Schleiermacher should not be overdrawn. The two authors disagreed, notably over the account given by Novalis of the argument of Über die Religion, but the work of this exemplary figure of early German Romanticism clearly shows the extent to which the depiction of the child in Die Weihnachtsfeier is representative of the ‘social imaginary’ of the Romantic movement.18 Evoking a Mood: Die Weihnachtsfeier Aside from a few passing references in Über die Religion, the first work in which Schleiermacher touches upon the theme of the child is his Monologen (1800), the most avowedly Romantic of all his writings. Here he professes his attachment to ‘eternal youth’, declaring it to be an attitude that should remain with the human being throughout life, but not conceived of in opposition to maturity:   Novalis, Fragmente, pp. 14, 16, 30.   Novalis, Gedichte, p. 50. 18   Likewise, Hölderlin, the other great figure of the early Romantic Movement, 16 17

praises ‘die Harmonie der Kindheit’. See Lubac, Posterité, p. 337.

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Es erniedrigt sich selbst wer zuerst jung sein will, und dann alt, wer zuerst allein herrschen lässt, was sie rühmen als jugendlichen Sinn, und dann allein folgen, was ihnen der Geist des Alters scheint; es verträgt nicht das Leben diese Trennung seiner Elemente. [He debases himself who wishes first to be young, and then old, who first allows what is called the spirit of youth to dominate, and only afterwards wishes to follow what is considered the counsel of maturity. Life cannot bear this separation of its elements.]19

Thus we see that childhood, in Schleiermacher’s thought – the contrast with Rousseau is striking – is less a unique and protected period than a stage in human life which, for all its particular preciousness, has its chief value in being drawn into relationship with life’s other stages. The Monologen were clearly conceived by Schleiermacher in the spirit of Romanticism. He presents them as the free outpouring of the inner workings of his mind,20 an attempt to communicate the inner life of one person to another: Es töne Dein innerer Gesang harmonisch zum Spiel meiner Gefühle! Es werde was jetzt magnetisch sanft Dich durchzieht, jetzt wie ein elektrisher Schlag Dich erschüttert bei der Berührung meines Gemüthes, auch Deiner Lebenskraft ein erfrischender Reiz. [Let your inner song harmonize with the play of my feelings! Then what for now passes through you with a gentle magnetism, will, at the touch of my soul, shake you like an electric shock and refresh your life with new vitality.]21

Die Weihnachtsfeier, by contrast, adopts a more detached, reflective tone. In contrast to the ‘electric shock’ administered by the earlier work, it seeks to evoke in literary form the quiet warmth and emotional depth of a family celebration of Christmas in the calm bourgeois framework of Biedermeier Germany.22 The dialogue (Gespräch) takes place over the course of one evening in the friendly atmosphere of a drawing room decorated for Christmas Eve. There are eleven   KGA I/12, p. 390.   KGA I/12, p. 328, ‘Keine vetrautere Gabe vermag der Mensch dem Menschen

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anzubieten, als was er im Innersten des Gemüthes zu sich selbst geredet hat’; ‘No more precious gift may be given from one human being to another than the gift of what they have spoken to themselves in their innermost being’. The preface is entitled ‘Darbietung’, which has connotations of both ‘offering’ and ‘performance’. 21   KGA I/12, p. 328. 22   The family atmosphere reflects the different circles in which Schleiermacher had begun to move, notably perhaps the household of the composer and music journalist, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, in Halle. See KGA I/5, p. LI.

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participants, of whom five are female and six male. In this setting there is relative unanimity among the adults in their adherence to Christian faith and their belief in the central importance to it of Christmas. Only Leonhardt, with his sceptical turn of mind, represents a challenge to the consensus. Of the three children, the two young boys have insignificant parts and their presence quickly fades. The other child, however, can be seen as the central character in the novella, even if major interpreters have often overlooked or dismissed her.23 Sofie is the daughter of the hosts, Ernestine and Eduard, a girl about ten years old. At once startlingly precocious and endearingly naïve, as she moves around the room she becomes both a participant in and a topic for the adults’ discussions. Though she says comparatively little, she is in fact the linchpin of the dialogue, the character who acts as the focal point for the older participants’ reflections and, as will emerge, she is the interpretative centre for the network of ideas developed in the dialogue. Whereas the Émile, despite the ambiguity of its genre, boldly proclaims its pedagogical message and its originality, Die Weihnachtsfeier is a reticent work, making few explicit claims. Its author intended it neither as systematic explanation of Christmas nor as a concise summary of his theology. It is best seen as an attempt to evoke the mood of Christmas, the celebration of the birth of the Christ-child, in which children are held to have a central and exemplary role. Originally written as an unbroken text, with only sparing paragraph breaks,24 the dialogue nonetheless falls into three broad sections. In the first section the atmosphere of the gathering is evoked. The opening sentence immediately sets the tone of harmony: Der freundliche Saal war festlich aufgeschmükkt, alle Fenster des Hauses hatten ihre Blumen an ihn abgetreten; aber die Vorhänge waren nicht herunter gelassen, damit der hereinleuchtende Schnee an die Jahreszeit erinnern möchte. [The friendly drawing room was all decked out for Christmas Eve. Flowers had been brought to it from every window ledge in the house. The curtains were kept tied up to let the glistening snow give testimony to the season.]25

Here nature and culture are consciously brought into interplay: the flowers and the snow outside become part of the interior scene. The adjectives in particular are significant: ‘freundlich’ and ‘festlich’ recognize that the feast to be described is a celebration of human community, while ‘hereinleuchtend’ leaves an opening 23   Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen Winter Semester of 1923/24 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982) and Emilio Brito, La Pneumatologie de Schleiermacher (Leuven: University Press, 1994), for instance, barely mention her presence. 24   The chapters introduced by some editors are not original and disrupt the continuous flow which is part of the author’s intended effect. 25   KGA I/5, p. 43; Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation, trans. Terence Tice (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1990), p. 27 (hereafter CE).

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to the world outside the framework of the novella’s setting, gesturing to the feast’s origin in an unmerited divine gift, a theme that will repeatedly emerge at an implicit level during the course of the dialogue. Into this setting, which, it is revealed, has been carefully prepared by the hostess Ernestine, the dramatis personae are introduced as a close-knit party of both sexes and all ages.26 Then, in the second section, three female adult characters, Ernestine, Agnes and Karoline, tell stories that shed light upon the Christmas celebration, while their friend Friederike improvises music on the piano to accompany their narrative; and in the third and final section the three men, Leonhardt, Ernst and Eduard, each make speeches with the same object in mind. I shall discuss in more detail below the implications of the structuring of gender roles here, but at this point it is helpful to note the way in which the three sections of the dialogue correspond to the three modes of theology that Schleiermacher was later to outline in The Christian Faith: ‘the poetic, the rhetorical […] and the descriptively didactic’ (which he also terms dogmatic).27 Dawn DeVries persuasively argues that the first section corresponds to the poetic language of prophecy, the second to the rhetorical language of preaching and the third to the didactic language of dogmatics.28 In The Christian Faith, though each of these modes is seen as indispensable, there is a sense in which the progression from one to the next is seen as a decline: poetic language is closest to immediate feeling (and in Schleiermacher’s terms therefore closest to the divine source); rhetoric is the language appropriate to the representation of religion to others in preaching; and didactic discourse is the most abstract mode, seeking to describe religious belief and practice with the rigour of a scientific discipline. In Die Weihnachtsfeier, too, though each section contributes to the total effect, there is a similar sense of decline and it is highly significant that at the end of the dialogue the poetic returns in the form of the expected but delayed guest, Josef. Thus the novella begins and ends in the poetic mode, the implication being that it is this mode which is closest to the spirit of Christmas. Further light is shed on the way Schleiermacher conceived the mood he wished to evoke in an essay published in 1799, his Versuch einer Theorie des gesellingen Betragens, which seeks to define the ideal conditions for sociable interaction between human beings. The key term Geselligkeit is defined as ‘ein freies Spiel der Gedanken und Empfindungen, wodurch alle Mitglieder einander gegenseitig aufregen und beleben […]. Alles soll Wechselwirkung seyn’ [‘The free play of thoughts and feelings, through which all members mutually excite and stimulate one another […]. All is to be reciprocal activity’].29 This ideal is seen as 26   Schleiermacher, KGA I/5, p. 43, ‘eng verbundene […] Kreis [der] Männer und Frauen, Jünglinge und Mädchen’. 27   Schleiermacher, KGA I/13.1, pp. 127–136. 28   Dawn DeVries, ‘Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve Dialogue: Bourgeois Ideology or Feminist Theology?’, Journal of Religion, 69: 2 (1989), pp. 169–83 (pp. 172–4). 29   KGA I/2, p. 170.

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the atmosphere most conducive to Bildung, education or formation in its widest sense, in which the members of the group both give (through Selbsttätigkeit) to and receive (through Selbstbeschränkung) from one another.30 This essay begins to sound some of the themes that will emerge more clearly in Schleiermacher’s later hermeneutical reflections, the two latter terms being comparable to the relationship between spontaneity and reciprocity in the hermeneutical circle examined in the next chapter. Here, however, the essay’s theoretical observations are particularly pertinent because they allow us to see Die Weihnachtsfeier as a worked example of Geselligkeit. As modern commentators have observed, the setting for the dialogue is a socially restricted one, but it must also be remembered that in its contemporary context the depiction of such a free conversational exchange on theological themes between the sexes was a rare novelty.31 What is still more remarkable, however, is the place accorded to a female child as participant in the conversation the novella frames. The child Sofie plays a central part in the ‘reciprocal activity’ of the dialogue, not only fostering but to some extent embodying the ideal mood of Geselligkeit. The sceptic Leonhardt’s ironic description of Sofie as ‘unsere kleine Prophetin’,32 unintentionally indicates that it is she who is principally responsible for maintaining the continuity of the poetic language of prophecy over the course of the dialogue. Even in the second and third parts of the dialogue, when the rhetorical and didactic modes take the foreground, Sofie remains present as a witness to the primacy of the poetic. At times this is literally the case, as in the poem of Novalis, ‘Ich sehe dich in tausend Bildern’.33 At points such as these, Sofie, singing to Friederike’s accompaniment, explicitly represents the poetic mode. More generally, however, her presence in the background, darting apparently ‘ohne grosse Theilnahme’ in and out of the company, is a constant sign of the mood of Geselligkeit and the free play of the imagination it cultivates.34 Childhood and Gender To see Sofie as merely an ‘objective correlative’ of the poetic mode in Die Weihnachtsfeier is, however, insufficiently precise for our purposes. To seek a fuller understanding of her role, I shall move now to her encounter with Leonhardt in the middle of the novella. Leonhardt is the one representative in the dialogue   KGA I/2, pp. 165–84. See also Ruth Richardson, ‘Schleiermacher’s 1800 “Versuch über die Schaamhaftigkeit”: A Contribution toward a truly human ethic’, in Ruth Richardson (ed.), Schleiermacher in Context (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1991), pp. 65–108. 31   Marilyn Massey, Feminine Soul: The Fate of an Ideal (Boston: Beacon, 1985) makes this criticism. For a defence of Schleiermacher, see DeVries, ‘Bourgeois Ideology?’. 32   KGA I/5, p. 67; ‘our little prophetess’, CE, p. 51. 33   KGA I/5, p. 74; ‘I see thee in a thousand forms’, CE, p. 59. 34   KGA I/5, p. 50, ‘without much involvement’. 30

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of rationalist scepticism. His perspective is by no means atheistic, but, in contrast to the piety of the company around him, he introduces a shaft of pure Kantian reasoning. His contributions to the debate mirror closely the perspectives offered in Kant’s work of 1793, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. There Kant had emphasized the overriding importance of the human dimension in religion, examining religion from the point of view of why its ideas might be meaningful for human beings, rather than in respect of an objective reality (God) to whom they might relate: For here too the principle holds, ‘It is not essential, and hence not necessary, that every human being know what God does, or has done, for his salvation’; but it is essential to know what a human being has to do himself in order to become worthy of this assistance.35

This is the general position held by Leonhardt, the burden of whose main address in the third section of the novella is that, though we may not know what we have received in the person of Christ or from whom it comes, we may know the importance Christmas holds in the ordering of human affairs.36 Initially the way in which he links the celebration of Christmas with the spirit of childhood seems consonant with the views of the other participants. In identifying the emotions as the focus of the appeal of Christmas, however, his approach sidelines the question of the transcendent reference of the feast, and of Christianity with it. Leonhardt’s sceptical strategy here, in a gathering otherwise unanimous in its Christian devotion, is to separate childhood from adulthood, and the female from the male gender. He lauds the feast and the faith it celebrates, but only so as to isolate them as centred on an emotional Schwärmerei, which in his view makes them appeal only to children: Denn wie ein Kind der Hauptgegenstand desselben ist, so sind es auch hier die Kinder vornehmlich, welche das Fest, und durch das Fest wiederum das Christenthum selbst, heben und tragen. [Just as a child is the principal object of [the celebration], so it is also the children above all who bear it and proclaim it – and through it Christianity itself.]37

In describing the women as ‘idealistische […] Schwärmerinnen’,38 Leonhardt is employing a contemporary term of abuse, usually levelled at extreme forms of 35   Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, A.W. Wood and G. di Giovanni (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 96. 36   KGA I/5, pp. 83–8. 37   KGA I/5, p. 88; CE, p. 75. 38   KGA I/5, p. 66.

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Pietism. Here, however, he uses Schwärmerei to characterize the phenomenon described elsewhere in the dialogue by the positive term, Phantasie.39 Such convictions run entirely counter to the context established in Die Weihnachtsfeier, and the mismatch between Leonhardt’s views and the setting he finds himself in has in fact already emerged in his conversation with Sofie earlier in the dialogue. In his exchange with her he seeks to demonstrate the distortion (Verschrobenheit),40 which he believes is the consequence of treating the different ages and genders on an equal level. Alarmed by Sofie’s childish piety, he likens her to a bud that never blooms because of a premature and excessive inner impulse: ‘eine Knospe, die durch zu starken Trieb in sich selbst vergeht, ehe sie sich aufschliesst’.41 As with Rousseau, he wishes to insist on the separation of childhood from maturity and of one gender from another, to allow them to develop in their own specific ways. The rigidity of his position here stands out by its argumentatively logical style, which contrasts with the conversational flow characteristic of the other participants. It is perhaps because of this that, despite his insistence on age and gender difference and his impatience with the generalizations of his fellow adults, his own attempts at communication with Sofie notably fail. Although he addresses her as ‘Kleine’, ‘Little one’, his manner of speech with its adult formulations leaves her uneasy and unable to respond. For his part, Leonhardt, unable to appreciate her incomprehension, then casts her in an adult light, describing her as ‘a little sphinx’ for evading his line of questioning. The paradox that Schleiermacher seems to be pointing his readers towards here is that, though Leonhardt is committed to a Rousseauvian conception of the distinctiveness of childhood, it is in fact the other adults, treating Sofie as an equal, whose communication with her achieves mutual comprehension. Alongside Leonhardt’s desire to assign Sofie to a particular category of age, that of infancy, to which Christmas is supposed to be especially close in spirit, he shows a parallel tendency to categorize her according to her gender and again associate Christmas with the feminine. This emerges not so much explicitly as implicitly and cumulatively during the course of the three men’s speeches. Already in the second section of the novella, the women themselves have raised the issue of gender difference. At several points the natural continuity between children and women is commented on positively. Karoline cites a proverb, according to which ‘wir [Frauen] immer Kinder bleiben. Dagegen ihr [Männer] umkehren müsst, um es wieder zu werden’, and Friederike identifies intuition or natural insight as a

  Phantasie is Schleiermacher’s preferred term for the imagination, used rather than the more technical term Einbildungskraft employed by Kant (Prickett, Origins of Narrative, p. 195). 40   KGA I/5, p. 53. 41   KGA I/5, p. 52; ‘a bud that perishes from too forceful an influence within before it opens’, CE, p. 37. 39

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hallmark specifically of women, who in her opinion are ‘am reinsten empfänglich und am höchsten erfreut’.42 Dawn DeVries, in an article which I shall discuss in more detail below, has suggested that Schleiermacher may well have intended elements of irony in these observations.43 Nonetheless they are not taken in such a spirit by the men, whose speeches assume gendered differences in personality and outlook. Thus Ernst, the second of the male speakers after Leonhardt, differentiates between two types of human being: those who happily dwell in the flux of time, and those who, while unable to elude its grasp fully, nonetheless seek to move beyond the merely transitory. Ernst himself does not specifically distinguish these two categories on gender lines, but Agnes in her response does make the link. Leonhardt in turn seizes upon her comment and interprets it at face value: Man könnte eben nur kurz weg sagen, und es ist so anschaulich als möglich, dass die Frauen für sich alles leicht ertragen, und nach wenigem Genuss streben, dass aber, wie ihr innerstes Leiden Mitleiden ist, so auch ihre Freude Mitfreude ist. [One could simply say right off – and it is as plain as could be – that women bear everything lightly regarding themselves and strive after little self-gratification, but that just as their innermost suffering is literally suffering-with, sympathy, so their joy too is shared joy.]44

To twenty-first-century ears the gender essentialism here is troubling, but the contrast with Rousseau, with his (in the Émile at least) almost total disregard for the female gender is instructive. What Schleiermacher wishes to emphasize in particular is what he sees as the female ability empathetically to grasp the inner life of others. In the dialogue Friederike most clearly demonstrates this, as she accompanies the stories told by the women with improvisations on the piano – ‘eure Erzählungen fantasieren’, as she puts it.45 Her imaginative skill is lauded a few pages later, when the narrator tells us that it was as if she already knew each story, ‘so genau begleitete ihr Spiel die anmuthige Erzählung, und brachte jedes Einzelne gleich in Übereinstimmung mit dem Totaleindrukk des Ganzen’ [‘so aptly did her playing accompany its graceful telling. Each part was made to harmonize with the total impression given’].46 The consummation of this gift is reached when at the end of Ernestine’s story Friederike seamlessly modulates   KGA I/5, p. 71; ‘We women go right on being children while you men must first be turned about to become so again’, ‘most purely receptive and get the most heightened enjoyment’, CE, pp. 55–6. 43   DeVries, ‘Bourgeois Ideology?’. 44   KGA I/5, p. 93; CE, p. 80. 45   KGA I/5, p. 72, ‘improvize on your narratives’; CE, p. 57. The verb phantasieren is of course related to the noun Phantasie. See note above. 46   KGA I/5, p. 74; CE, p. 59. 42

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her accompaniment into a hymn tune and is joined by Sofie, as they sing together Novalis’s verses to the Virgin Mary: ‘Ich sehe dich in tausend Bildern’. Here we have the musical and poetic analogue to the spirit of childlikeness that the novella seeks to impart. This musical apotheosis of the novella is anticipated earlier on in a discussion among the participants of the role of music. Music is seen as achieving its perfection only in the religious sphere, and, conversely, the implication is that music best conveys the heart of the religious impulse: ‘vom Chor der Engel ward Jesus empfangen, und so begleiten wir ihn mit Tönen und Gesang bis zum grossen Halleluja der Himmelfahrt’ [‘As Jesus was welcomed by the choir of angels, so we accompany him with the sound of instruments and singing, on through to the great hallelujah of the ascension’].47 In music it is the Ton not the Wort that conveys meaning, and, citing the contemporary novelist Jean Paul, Eduard suggests that music brings all of life together in a marvellous harmony in which only the major and minor chords are to be distinguished: die einzelnen Ereignisse wären für sie nur durchgehende Noten, ihr wahrer Inhalt aber die grossen Akkorde des Gemüths, die wunderbar und in den verschiedensten Melodien wechselnd, sich immer doch in dieselbe Harmonie auflösen, in der nur Dur und Moll zu unterscheiden ist, Männliches und Weibliches. [particular events are only the passing notes for music. Its true content is the great chords of our inner nature, which marvellously and with the most varied voices ever resolve themselves into the same harmony, in which only the major and minor keys are to be distinguished, only the masculine and feminine.]48

Here Eduard clearly assimilates the major and minor keys to the male and female genders, but, before accepting this characterization at face value, it is helpful to take into account the suggestions made in Dawn DeVries’s article. In posing the question, ‘bourgeois ideology or feminist theology?’, DeVries’s purpose is to ask whether Die Weihnachtsfeier may in fact contain within it the resources to break out from the confines of its restricted social milieu and gender roles. In reading the exchanges between the adult participants in the dialogue she suggests that we should not overlook the element of irony. As she observes, in the novella’s first section the conventional role models for men and women are held up for discussion. On one level the comments made by the male and female characters about the innate religious genius of women may seem to serve a patriarchal ideological purpose, but it can also be argued that the loose structure and undidactic tone of the novella actually provide an opportunity for such assumptions to be questioned. Masculine and feminine, DeVries believes, can legitimately be seen here as the   KGA I/5, pp. 64–5; CE, p. 47.   KGA I/5, p. 65; CE, p. 47.

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types of a composite spiritual personality, not rigidly associated with male and female, so that the novella’s ideal is not ‘the complementarity of the sexes, where women supply what is missing, but the ideal of androgyny’.49 Developing this reading, one can argue that once again the character of Sofie is of central significance. As DeVries observes, Sofie is not in all respects ‘the conventional good little girl’: she dislikes sewing, plays with mechanical toys and is not abashed by taking part in adult conversation. In fact she displays the first signs of an ability to articulate her views in each of Schleiermacher’s three levels of religious language. The skill with which she has redesigned the Christmas model to draw out the key moments in the history of the faith and the articulacy with which she comments on her artistry show that the rhetorical and didactic modes are at least incipiently present in her personality alongside the poetic. Moreover, as her father Eduard remarks, she is no longer just a child (‘kein blosses Kind’), but a young girl.50 Thus to the extent that she embodies the spirit of childlikeness, of Geselligkeit, and of poetic prophecy, she does so not by being the ideal representative of childhood or femininity, but by mediating between assumed polarities and helping her interlocutors to do the same. Her spontaneous enthusiasm for music in both major and minor keys is just one sign of her ability to represent the mutual interdependence (as opposed to complementarity) that Schleiermacher sees as the human ideal and the message of Christmas: ‘Musik! […] O grosse Musik! Weihnachten für ein ganzes Leben! Ihr sollt singen, Kinder, die herrlichsten Sachen.’ [‘Music! Oh, wonderful music! A whole lifetime of Christmasses! “You shall sing, O children of God, the most glorious things!”’].51 Christology or Anthropology? The child Sofie, then, can be seen as Schleiermacher’s ideal of humanity, a reflection of the ‘unendliche Menschheit, die da war, ehe sie die Hülle der Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit annahm’ [‘the infinite humanity, which existed before it assumed the cloak of manhood and womanhood’], as he put it in his Idee zu einem Katechismus der Vernunft für edle Frauen (Outline of a Reasonable Catechism for Noble Women) of 1798.52 Some commentators have thought, however, that this idealization is pushed too far and in fact shades over into an essentialization of the child as a privileged locus of divine revelation. This concern is expressed most sharply by Karl Barth, who believes that Schleiermacher blurs the boundaries between Christology and anthropology: ‘Schleiermacher does know a Christmas miracle, it is the true existence of man himself as this is most purely and beautifully depicted in the relation of mother and child, it is the feeling     51   52   49 50

DeVries, ‘Bourgeois Ideology?’, p. 182. KGA I/5, p. 68. KGA I/5, p. 46; CE, p. 31. KGA I/2, pp. 153–4.

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for life which is kindled by seeing this relation, which is elevated by the feast, and which lovingly seeks and finds fellowship’.53 According to Barth, this is an aberrant Chrstology, in that ‘Christ, the divine child, has nothing that we do not already have fundamentally, the difference being only one of degree’.54 Schleiermacher’s prominent place in the chronology of decline and fall recounted in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century is well known, but Barth’s knowledge and appreciation of Schleiermacher’s works was thorough and his assessment cannot be lightly dismissed. In seeking to identify who the child is for Schleiermacher in Die Weihnachtsfeier, it is then important to establish to what extent Christology and anthropology do merge and whether there is a sense in which the child is rendered quasi-divine. On a number of occasions in Die Weihnachtsfeier, the child is certainly seen as revelatory of the divine. This is of course uncontroversially true of the Christchild, a figure who surfaces intermittently in the narrative as a guiding motif – as Eduard puts it, Christmas is the celebration of the immediate union of the divine with the being of a child: ‘[die] unmittelbare Vereinigung des Göttlichen mit dem Kindlichen’.55 Here Eduard adapts the terms of the Chalcedonian definition to the theme of his dialogue: truly God and truly man becomes truly God and truly child. However, this basically orthodox christological perspective at times develops into an anthropology of the child, which sees children in general as possessing innately divine qualities in a way that adults do not. In Karoline’s story of the young baby who had narrowly recovered from death, the child is described as ‘ein besonderes Gnadengeschenk, ein himmlisches Kind’.56 As the child’s mother says, ‘Er bleibe auch so ein Engel […] er ist geläutert durch die Schmerzen, er ist wie durch den Tod hindurchgedrungen und zu einem höheren Leben geheiligt’ [May he continue to be such a little angel […] purified by the pain, as though he had passed triumphant through death and had been consecrated to a higher life.’].57 The heightened language here is partly a function of the pathos of the circumstances, but there is a fairly clear tendency to see the baby as not only angelic, but heavenly. Earlier in the novella, Ernestine describes her response to her own daughter Sofie’s childish devotion in similar terms. Describing Sofie as ‘engelrein’ – pure as an angel – she assents to Sofie’s enthusiastic and half-comprehending statement that in their joy mother and daughter share in the joy of Mary and her divine child: ‘Du könntest ebensogut die glückliche Mutter des göttlichen Kindleins sein’.58 Ernestine comments:   Barth, Theology of Schleiermacher, p. 62   Barth, Theology of Schleiermacher, p. 67. 55   KGA I/5, p. 71; ‘the immediate union of the divine with the being of a child’, CE, 53 54

p. 55.

  KGA I/5, p. 81; ‘a special gift of grace, a heavenly child’, CE, p. 67.   KGA I/5, p. 81; CE, p. 67. 58   KGA I/5, p. 49; ‘Oh, Mother, you might just as well be the happy mother of the 56

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divine babe!’, CE, p. 33.

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Wahrlich, ich fühle es, dass sie in Einer Hinsicht nicht zu viel gesagt hat, als sie sagte, ich könnte wol auch die Mutter des angebetenen Kindes sein, weil ich in der Tochter, wie Maria in dem Sohne, die reine Offenbarung des Göttlichen recht demüthig verehren kann, ohne dass das rechte Verhältnis des Kindes zur Mutter dadurch gestört würde. [In a way I felt that she did not say too much when she thought that I might well be the mother of the blessed child. For I can in all humility honour the pure revelation of the divine in my daughter, as Mary did in her son, without in the least disturbing the proper relation of mother and child.]59

‘Die reine Offenbarung des Göttlichen’, the pure revelation of the divine, is from the point of view of classical Church teaching, a troublesome phrase, seemingly implying the revelation in the child not only of the image of God, but of the divine per se. The heterodoxy suggested here is apparent also in the conversational exchanges cited above in which women, like the children with whom they are associated, are cast as immune from the need for conversion. In the same way that children are seen in terms of the Christ child, so women are compared to the adult Christ. As Karoline again comments: Christus selbst […] hat sich nicht bekehrt. Eben deshalb ist er auch immer der Schutzherr der Frauen gewesen, und während Ihr [Männer] euch nur über ihn gestritten habt, haben wir ihn geliebt und verehrt. [But Christ himself […] was not converted. For this very reason he has always been the patron and protector of women; and whereas you men have only contended with him, we have loved and honoured him.]60

Not surprisingly this is a passage that Barth criticizes with particular force: ‘her unconversion, unconvertibility, and her need of no conversion makes woman with her “heart full of love and joy”, an instrument for the direct communication [Organ direkter Mitteilung] of [the true content of the message of Christmas]’.61 It would be wrong, however, to take the words Schleiermacher places in the mouths of his characters as a straightforward statement of his own theology. Schleiermacher wrote Die Weihnachtsfeier not as formal theology, but as a literary representation   KGA I/5, p. 51; CE, p. 36.   KGA I/5, p. 70; CE, p. 55. 61   Barth, Theology and Church: Shorter Writings 1920–1928 (London: SCM, 1962), 59 60

p. 158; Barth, ‘Schleiermachers Weihnachtsfeier’, Zwischen den Zeiten 3:1 (1925), pp. 38– 61 (p. 61), cited in Wolfgang Sommer, Schleiermacher und Novalis: Die Christologie des jungen Schleiermacher und ihre Beziehung zum Christusbild des Novalis (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1973), p. 123.

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of a speculative discussion among a group of educated Christians. Certainly in the open exchange of ideas characteristic of freie Geselligkeit, explorations of the boundaries of classical Christian orthodoxy are to be expected, but in his more systematic writings Schleiermacher does not advocate a blurring of the boundary between Creator and creation in this way. Indeed some of the revisions made to Die Weihnachtsfeier itself indicate that its author wished to avoid such confusion.62 It is thus inaccurate to ascribe to Schleiermacher, as Barth does, an abolition of the doctrine of original sin and a transcription of Rousseau’s belief in original innocence into a more specifically Christian idiom. Both in Die Weihnachtsfeier, and more clearly in his longer writings, Schleiermacher, loyal to the Pietists who influenced him such as Johann Arndt, August Francke and Nicolas von Zinzendorf, finds signs of sin and self-will even in young children. What can be traced, however, is a tendency, possibly under the indirect influence of Rousseau, to redescribe the traditional notion of original sin.63 It comes to be seen not as the ‘corruption inherited from Adam and Eve but as the evil social structures into which individuals are born – even before they make any individual sinful choices’.64 This shift is a commonplace of modern theology, but it is here in Schleiermacher that it first becomes apparent. However, Schleiermacher’s belief in the mutual relationship of nature and culture prevents him from adopting Rousseau’s dualism of innocent nature and corrupting culture – like Novalis he sees the effects of the Fall in nature and culture alike. There are, nonetheless, aspects of Barth’s critique that still find purchase. It is inaccurate to accuse Schleiermacher of a wholehearted reduction of theology to anthropology: as we shall see more clearly in the next chapter, the sense of immediate dependence on God (which after 1822 he termed the ‘Gefühl der schlechthinnigen Abhängigkeit’) does not assert an identity between God and humanity, but is intended rather to ground all immanent human interdependence in an absolute dependence on the transcendence of God. Yet the passages in Die Weihnachtsfeier that Barth criticized do point to a tendency in Schleiermacher’s thought to emphasize in Kantian fashion the human experience of the divine rather than God in Godself. Once again this is a characteristic of the modern theology on which Schleiermacher has had such influence and certainly does not connote an abandonment of any understanding of revelation, as the Barthian account might imply. It remains problematic, however, in ways that Emilio Brito has subsequently explored with greater subtlety than Barth. Brito’s study, La Pneumatologie de Schleiermacher, modifies Barth’s critique by identifying Schleiermacher’s error not in Christology but in pneumatology. Brito traces in Schleiermacher a close   In Ernst’s speech, for instance, the shift from the general ‘Christenthum’ to the specific ‘Christus’ is telling. See KGA I/5, p. 92. 63   See, for instance, KGA I/1, pp. 30, 133, and the comments in Dawn DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Childhood’ in Bunge (ed.), The Child in Christian Thought, pp. 334–5. 64   DeVries, ‘Be Converted’, p. 341n. 62

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relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Church, between pneumatology and ecclesiology.65 This in itself accords with classical Christian teaching, which locates the Church in the third, pneumatological, section of the creed. In the Glaubenslehre, however, Brito points to a restriction of the scope of the Holy Spirit so that it becomes effectively the Spirit of Christ, thus overlooking the scriptural emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in creation, in the Old Testament and in the incarnation.66 What follows from this is a movement towards too close an identity between the human nous and the divine pneuma, a suggestion expressed most succinctly in the Christliche Sittenlehre, where Schleiermacher talks of the Holy Spirit as ‘only the superior development of what we call reason’.67 Thus, whereas his Pietist forebears such as Zinzendorf saw the human spirit working within the Church as inspired by, but not identical with, the Holy Spirit, Schleiermacher tends to conflate them and thus to compromise the possibility of an in-breaking (rather than an inherence) of divine grace in human life. Sophiology Brito’s critique, offering as it does a significant nuancing of Barth’s, is highly instructive, though it is unfortunate that, when discussing Die Weihnachtsfeier, he restricts himself exclusively to a discussion of the doctrinal content of the three men’s speeches. His appreciation of the ways in which Christology, pneumatology and ecclesiology intertwine in Schleiermacher’s thought does, however, offer a helpful angle on the issues raised by the portrayal of Sofie in Die Weihnachtsfeier. In concluding this chapter, prompted by the broad thrust of Brito’s pneumatological observations, I shall investigate one further aspect of Sofie, as yet left unexamined: her name. It is uncontroversial to point to the link between Sofie’s name and the Greek sophia, though previous commentary has not drawn significance from this. Among Schleiermacher’s contemporaries the most important influence here is Novalis, much of whose poetry was inspired by a young woman named Sofie. In Novalis’s case, of course, unlike Schleiermacher’s, Sofie can be identified with a historical figure: she was the poet’s fiancée, Sofie von Kühn. He enjoyed playing on the resonances of her name: ‘My favourite study is, in essence, called the same as my bride. Her name is Sofie – philosophy is the soul of my life and the key to my deepest self’, he wrote; and in his poem ‘An Sophiens Geburtstag’ he alludes in the opening line to the scriptural image of wisdom as a good wife.68 After her death in 1797 at the age of 15 she remained a major figure in his poetry, notably   Brito, Pneumatologie, p. 506.   Brito, Pneumatologie, p. 511. 67   Schleiermacher, Sämtliche Werke (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1834–1864), I/XII, 65 66

p. 313, cited in Brito, Pneumatologie, p. 574. 68   Novalis, Schriften: Band IV (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), p. 188; Novalis, Gedichte, p. 57.

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in the Hymnen an die Nacht, cited above. In the third hymn he recounts the vision he experienced at her grave, a vision that provides much of the imaginative force for the theme of childlike renewal that is central to the rest of the collection. Thus, in Schleiermacher’s immediate sphere of influence we have a clear source of inspiration for the Sofie of Die Weihnachtsfeier. The differences between the two authors’ Sofies are nonetheless clear: Schleiermacher’s Sofie is a child; she is not depicted in erotic terms; and, whereas Novalis’s Sofie fits into the conventional pattern of poetic muse, the younger Sofie is a source of inspiration in a more generalized, collective sense. At the level of the narrative her role is to unify the different sections of the novella and constantly to draw the focus back to the birth of the Christ child and the mood of joy the Christmas feast evokes. This formal narrative function is conjoined to the central place she holds in the novella’s content, where she instantiates Jesus’ action in Mark 9: 36 (and parallels).69 Sofie, then, is the little child set in the midst of the community of disciples, acting as their collective inspiration – subject of, participant in and governing metaphor for their conversation. These general observations can be sharpened, albeit anachronistically, by the insights of the sophiological strand in twentieth-century Russian theology. Mainstream Western Christian thought, basing itself on I Corinthians 1: 24,70 has tended to associate the scriptural teaching on sophia with Christ, but a hidden tradition with a much broader understanding of sophia has recently been brought to light through the contemporary Western reception of the sophiological thought of Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) and Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944). Their teaching explores sophia as the term that links heaven and earth, the divine and the created. In a famous passage Bulgakov imagines the response of Russian ambassadors entering the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople for the first time: they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth! Indeed they were neither in heaven nor on earth, they were in St Sophia – between the two: this is the metaxu of Plato’s philosophical intuition. St Sophia is the last silent testimony to the future ages of the Greek genius: a revelation in stone.71

Elsewhere Bulgakov, writing of the incarnation, states that, for all its centrality in the Church’s teaching, it is still ‘not primary, but derived’, being dependent

  ‘Then [Jesus] took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me”’. 70   ‘Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God’. 71   J. Pain and N. Zernov (eds), Sergius Bulgakov: A Bulgakov Anthology (London: SPCK, 1976), p. 14. 69

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on ‘the primordial God-manhood […] as unfolded in sophiology’.72 Such views were highly controversial and led to Bulgakov’s excommunication by some of the Orthodox churches, but they bear upon many of the same questions raised in our discussion of Sofie. Clearly the sophiology found in these writers is developed well beyond anything found in Die Weihnachtsfeier, but in several ways continuity can be seen between them. At the level of influence, Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) and Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) were important background figures for both Schleiermacher and the Russian sophiologists. Bulgakov was struck by Schelling’s teaching on the virgin Sophia and saw this as representing what he termed ‘the secret dynamic of the philosophy of Hegel, Schelling, F. Baader and the romanticicists [sic]’.73 And, as Redeker argues, perhaps the single most influential figure on Schleiermacher in the period from 1803–11 was Schelling. More important than these common influences, however, is the insight Russian sophiology offers into the ambivalences we have been discussing in Sofie. Soloviev’s understanding of sophia, like Schleiermacher’s portrait of Sofie, has been criticized for its lack of realism, its fanciful and sentimental tendencies; and Bulgakov’s more theologically rigorous thought has been accused both of conjuring up a novel middle term between God and creation and of being unscriptural.74 These latter criticisms resemble fairly closely the reservations expressed about Schleiermacher’s thought by Barth and Brito. The possibility must remain, though, that in Die Weihnachtsfeier Schleiermacher is offering the outlines of an incipient sophiology. The central point of Bulgakov’s sophiology is that in sophia we have a term that, uniquely, can encompass God and humanity, Creator and creation, without conflating the two. Sophia is thus, he argues, the ground of the incarnation: ‘the basis for the relation of the two natures in Christ lies in the mutual relation of divine and created Wisdom’.75 This, far from being a departure from Chalcedon, he believes, simply makes explicit the analogy of being implicitly contained in the negations of the definition of 451. For our purposes it is particularly significant that Bulgakov identifies the portrayal of 72   Sergius Bulgakov, The Wisdom of God: A Brief Summary of Sophiology (London: Williams and Norgate, 1937), p. 35. 73   Bulgakov, Wisdom, p. 19. Much work remains to be done on the lines of influence between Schelling and the Russian sophiologists, but it is well beyond my scope here. On Soloviev see Xavier Tilliette, L’Eglise des Philosophes: De Nicolas de Cuse à Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Cerf, 2006), pp. 209–11; on Bulgakov see Rowan Williams (ed.), Serrgii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology, with a commentary by Rowan Williams (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), p. 19. 74   Vladimir Lossky, Spor o Sofii [The Contorversy about Sophia] (Paris: Confrèrérie de Saint Photius, 1936); in English, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1991), pp. 62, 80, 112. 75   Bulgakov, Wisdom, p. 132. See also Bulgakov, The Lamb of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 157–211.

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the Virgin and child as the supreme image of the God-manhood of sophia. The ‘fullest manifestation of the Holy Spirit’ is seen in the ‘spirit-bearing “blessed” Virgin Mary’ and in the birth of Christ from the Virgin ‘an eternally abiding bond between Mother and Son’ is established.76 Bulgakov’s thought goes far beyond the letter of Schleiermacher’s text, of course, but the commonality between their perspectives is suggestive. The effect of Schleiermacher’s novella, as with Bulgakov’s sophiology, is to reorientate the trajectory of theology away from a cerebral ‘scholastic’ (the term applies as much to the ‘orthodox’ Reformed Protestantism of Schleiermacher’s day as to the rather ossified traditionalism of Bulgakov’s) account of divine action, but also away from a Rousseauvian insistence on natural religion alone. In their place the novella seeks to offer a model in which the reality of divine revelation is embodied in present encounter and enacted in dialogue: rather than being limited to a past historical moment, revelation is seen as a generative invitation to participate in the ongoing event of Christ’s incarnation. Read sophiologically, this model can be seen as a deployment of what Novalis called the ‘Zauberstab der Analogie’,77 to expound the likeness and unlikeness of God and creation along the lines of the maior dissimilitudo of the Fourth Lateran Council: ‘Whatever similarity there may be between the creature and God, the dissimilarity is always greater’.78 This goal is reflected in both the form and the content of Die Weihnachtsfeier: its loosely controlled narrative structure is the formal counterpart to the mood of Geselligkeit. Schleiermacher’s definition of this mood was cited above: it is ‘the free play of thoughts and feelings through which all members mutually excite and stimulate one another. All is to be reciprocal activity.’79 When this definition is extended from the scope of interpersonal relations to the relationship between God and humanity, it can be seen that Schleiermacher’s freie Geselligkeit bears many of the hallmarks of sophia. And Sofie herself is the embodiment of both. Throughout the dialogue she acts as a catalyst who unselfconsciously reminds the adults of the seasonal call to childlikeness, which is also a call to freie Geselligkeit and, through sophia, a call to share in the ongoing event of incarnation.80

  Bulgakov, Wisdom pp. 183, 176.   Novalis, Fragmente, p. 80, ‘the magic wand of analogy’. 78   Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. from the Thirteenth 76 77

Edition of Henry Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum (London: B. Herder, 1957), p. 171. 79   KGA I/2, p. 170. 80   Significantly, the points at which the dialogue moves to a more structured form are the points at which Leonhardt exercises his influence on events, first in his failed debate with Sofie, and secondly in his suggestion that each of the adults perform an ordered series of Christmas reflections or vignettes. He thus emerges as the negative counterpart both to freie Geselligkeit and to sophia.

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Conclusion In answering the question ‘who is the child?’ for Schleiermacher, then, the initial point was that she is the embodiment of the spirit of spontaneity and gratitude, a spirit focused in the Christmas festival, but characteristic, for Schleiermacher, of the ideal human response to God. Through a reading of Leonhardt’s encounter with Sofie, we then examined more closely the structuring of gender in the novella and saw the ways in which the elements of irony in the novella rescue it from an ideological captivity to its social context. Here it became clear that Schleiermacher does not present Sofie’s qualities as natural attributes attaching to childhood in general. The two other (male) children in Die Weihnachtsfeier, Anton and his brother, make only a brief and insignificant appearance in the novella, and are merely pleasant but unexceptional infants. Sofie, by contrast, in her parents’ opinion possesses special gifts, notably her instinctive ability to penetrate to the heart of things, ‘ihr fast dreistes Unterscheiden der Hauptsache in allen Dingen vom Schein und von der Umgebung’ [‘her way of distinguishing between what is primary and what is only appearance or appurtenance’].81 In this respect at least she is rather like Rousseau’s Émile – an idealized instance of all that a child can be, ‘alles neugierig beschauend und eifrig rühmend’.82 But whereas Rousseau’s idealized male child, Émile, is isolated from society in order that he may grow in virtue naturally, Schleiermacher’s idealized female child is immersed in society. Admittedly her social context is the restricted one of a circle of close and likeminded friends of one social class, but the constant contact with other people, children and adults alike, contrasts sharply with Rousseau’s policy of isolation. For Schleiermacher, nature and society are not opposed, but mutually constituted. Sofie, in her parents’ estimate, is a natural child precisely because she has been brought up to relate to others.83 Focusing still on Sofie, our enquiry then examined the extent to which she becomes an essentialized locus of divine revelation, this being the specific instance in Die Weihnachtsfeier of a more general criticism of Schleiermacher’s thought for reducing theology to anthropology. What emerged was the appearance in Schleiermacher of two major strands in modern theology: the restatement of the doctrine of original sin in terms of the pervasive influence of the structures into which the individual is born and a Kantian focus on divine immanence. The risk here is to become caught in the impasse of opposing interpretations that assert either Schleiermacher’s complicity in the modern anthropological captivity of theology, or, alternatively, his creative opening-up of the tradition. In order to move beyond this, following a direction indicated by Emilio Brito, we then offered a concluding sophiological reading of the novella and its aims. The risk of   KGA I/5, p. 55; CE, p. 39.   KGA I/5, p. 46; ‘eagerly looking at everything and exulting in it’, CE, p. 30. 83   KGA I/5, p. 54. 81 82

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anachronism here is great, but the insights of sophiology offer a fruitful heuristic lens through which to appreciate the central place of Sofie in Die Weihnachtsfeier. Seen in this sophiological light, some of the more troublesome passages of the novella appear rather differently. In particular Ernestine’s description, cited above, of the feelings prompted in her by Sofie’s words, can be seen as an iconic reflection in the sphere of creation of a relationship fully realized in the mutual love of Christ and his mother: Wahrlich, ich fühle es, dass sie in einer Hinsicht nicht zu viel gesagt hat, als sie sagte, ich könnte wol auch die Mutter des angebetenen Kindes sein, weil ich in der Tochter, wie Maria in dem Sohne, die reine Offenbarung des Göttlichen recht demüthig verehren kann, ohne dass das rechte Verhältnis des Kindes zur Mutter dadurch gestört würde. [In a way I felt that she did not say too much when she thought that I might well be the mother of the blessed child. For I can in all humility honour the pure revelation of the divine in my daughter, as Mary did in her son, without in the least disturbing the proper relation of mother and child.]84

Here Ernestine and Sofie together form a created (sophiological) analogy for the sophiological relationship of Creator and creation in the Virgin and child. That this is not rendered explicit in Die Weihnachtsfeier means, of course, that such an interpretation has to be proposed tentatively. It is, however, not far from the underdeveloped comments found in the late work of Schleiermacher’s contemporary, Novalis. In Die Christenheit oder Europa, which, though it was not published until 1826, was circulated in manuscript from 1799, Novalis laments the disenchantment of human spiritual life, which he traces to the Reformation. As a remedy, he proposes in particular the use of the ‘Zauberstab der Analogie’, the magic wand of analogy, which awakens ‘eine höhere Sehnsucht an die Höhen des Himmels […] eine Beziehung auf das Weltall’.85 Thus analogy, like sophia, is the means by which heaven and earth are brought into relationship. As a Protestant, albeit one open to the insights of Catholicism, Schleiermacher had reservations about the historical and philosophical sequences of cause and effect that Novalis sketched in Die Christenheit, but the younger poet’s imaginative recourse to analogy has much in common with our sophiological reading of Die Weihnachtsfeier. Whether such a reading of Die Weihnachtsfeier can be sustained is as yet unclear, but it does seem apparent that, if it cannot, then Brito’s criticisms, and to some extent Barth’s also, do stand, leaving us with a Sofie in whom divine pneuma and human nous have effectively become one. With respect to Agnes’s   KGA I/5, p. 51; CE, p. 36.   Novalis, Fragmente, p. 80, ‘a higher longing for the heights of heaven […] a

84 85

relationship with the cosmos’.

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words, the interpretation put upon the verb glauben becomes all important. Agnes observes that the parental love of a child is not directed towards what children can be formed into, but towards ‘das Schöne und Göttliche was wir in ihnen schon glauben’,86 to what we believe to be already beautiful and divine in children. Such a perspective is most instructive when the verb glauben is stressed – that is when the beautiful and the divine in the child are perceived not ontologically but sophiologically, when the child is seen as an image of the divine potential in humanity rather than as divine in herself. The degree of success with which that distinction is maintained will be examined further in the following chapter.

  KGA I/5, p. 66, ‘what we believe to be lovely and divine in him already’; CE, p. 48.

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Chapter 6

‘Einheimisch’ or ‘Neugeboren’?: The Whereabouts of Schleiermacher’s Child Introduction In the previous chapter I concluded that Schleiermacher’s fictional child, Sofie, is an idealized instance of all that humankind can be, particularly by virtue of the quality of freie Gesellingkeit that she embodies: a spontaneous responsiveness to other human beings and to God. Sofie was contrasted positively with Rousseau’s Émile, in particular because of the emphasis placed on her socialization – in the sense both of her location in society and her personal embodiment of sociality. Karl Barth’s concerns about Schleiermacher’s abolition of original sin and his reduction of Christology to anthropology were taken into account, and the weight of the modified version of this critique found in Emilio Brito was acknowledged. Human nous and divine pneuma risk becoming identified; and divine grace tends to become inherent in the world rather than, on the orthodox model, at once external to creation in origin and intrinsic to creation in operation. In the case of Die Weihnachtsfeier these tendencies were seen in the apparent portrayal, at several points in the novella, of the child as ontologically revelatory of the divine: as instantiating ‘die reine Offenbarung des Göttlichen’.1 However, a reading of Sofie through the lens of twentieth-century Russian sophiology offered a means of appreciating the ways in which Schleiermacher’s portrait of Sofie may be read iconically rather than ontologically, that is as offering an image of God rather than being intrinsically divine. In this chapter I shall examine how the characteristics of the child (and of humanity, of which she is an ideal form) are reflected in and modified by the author’s wider œuvre. This is a two-way process in which the child figured in Die Weihnachtsfeier helps illuminate Schleiermacher’s scholarly works and those works in turn reframe our understanding of the novella. The theological problematic identified above will be examined again in the latter part of this chapter. In the first instance, however, I am concerned with the author’s hermeneutical thought, which has significant parallels with the chief concerns of Die Weihnachtsfeier, notably in relation to the role of Sofie. Via his understanding of the relationship of mediation and immediacy, I then investigate Schleiermacher’s understanding of the doctrine of the incarnation. In conclusion his Christology is related to the ambiguities inherent in his understanding of the child and to the wider ambiguity of his work   KGA I/5, p. 51, ‘the pure revelation of the divine’; CE, p. 36.

1

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as a whole, which both resists and mirrors the tendency of the Enlightenment to flatten and reduce the scope of Christian theology. Hermeneutics and the Child The prominence of the terminology of feeling and sentiment in Schleiermacher’s work, especially in his earlier writings, is generally traced to his association with the Pietist and Romantic strands of German religious culture. His relationship to Pietism has been much debated. In later life he claimed that he remained at heart one of the Herrnhuter brethren among whom he had been educated,2 and, as we shall see below, the Pietism of his youth remained especially influential on his ecclesiology. However, as Andrew Bowie points out, ‘the widespread image of Schleiermacher as the theorist of empathetic interpretation’ is mistaken. ‘Anschauung’ and ‘Gefühl’, the terms usually translated as ‘intuition’ and ‘feeling’, do not in his work have the primarily emotive connotations of their English equivalents, and it is important not to see his work as simply a theological transcription of a misconceived Romantic cult of feeling and spontaneity.3 The picture is further complicated in that, as we saw in the previous chapter, recent commentary has shown that, far from being its opposite pole, Kant’s philosophical revolution was in fact one of the catalysts that facilitated early German Romanticism. As Stephen Prickett says, the general movement of Schleiermacher’s thought can be seen as an ‘eroticisation of Kant’, Über die Religion being essentially his ‘commentary on and disagreement with Kant’.4 It is not necessary here to adopt a position in the continuing debate about whether Schleiermacher was, or remained, in any meaningful sense a Romantic. What is important is to take account of the complexity of the philosophical and cultural context in which his work was written. Not the least of his achievements was to draw together in the loose system5 of his work a whole range of influences often seen as contradictory, and, if not to reconcile them, then to facilitate their peaceable coexistence. This aspect of his work is one reflected in Die Weihnachtsfeier, whose subtitle Ein Gespräch indicates a fundamental principle of its author’s approach: dialogue with opponents (Über die Religion), with friends (Monologen and Die 2   Francesca Rowan, The Life of Schleiermacher as Unfolded in His Autobiography and Letters (London: Smith Elder and Co, 1860), pp. 283–4. 3   See Schleiermacher, Schleiermacher: Hermeneutics and Criticism, ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. xiii (hereafter HC). 4   Grondin, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 64. Prickett, Origins of Narrative, pp. 225, 194. 5   The reservations expressed in the previous chapter notwithstanding, system remains an appropriate word, even if Schleiermacher’s achievement is much more loosely organized than Kant’s or Hegel’s; see Jean Greisch, Hermeneutik und Metaphysik: Eine Problemgeschichte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993), p. 151.

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Weihnachtsfeier), with the Church (Glaubenslehre), with society in general (as in his work as co-founder of the University of Berlin) and indeed with himself (in his repeated practice of revising his own earlier work). In Schleiermacher’s writings the centrality of dialogue is made clear in the pairing of hermeneutics and dialectics, which is at the heart of his understanding of human life. What he calls the ‘art’ of hermeneutics arises out of his belief that misunderstanding is an inevitable and universal constituent of human communication: ‘das Nichtverstehen [wird] sich niemals gänzlich auflösen’.6 The apparent pessimism of this perception of universal misunderstanding, however, only makes sense in the light of a concomitant and positive desire to understand. Thus for Schleiermacher the ‘art’ of hermeneutics has an ethical character: it is indivisible from the general movement of human life towards intercommunication and mutual understanding. As Berner puts it: Prendre conscience que je ne comprends pas, c’est prendre conscience que je voulais comprendre. Et on trouve ici, présupposée dans l’herméneutique et à son fondement, une caractéristique éthique de la tendance à la communauté, à la communication, à la communication de soi, à la comprehension d’autrui. [To realize that I do not understand is to realize that I wish to understand. We find here, as the presupposition of hermeneutics and at their foundation, an ethical characteristic of the tendency towards community and communication, to self-communication and the understanding of others.]7

For Schleiermacher, hermeneutics does not stand alone; the ‘fondement’ to which Berner refers is a foundation in the dialectical (and ethical) encounter with other people. The conviction that hermeneutics has a ‘dialectical ground’ emerges clearly in Schleiermacher’s use of conversation as a model to demonstrate the necessity of the hermeneutical task: Wer könnte mit ausgezeichnet geistreichen Menschen umgehn, ohne dass er ebenso bemüht wäre, zwischen den Worten zu hören, wie wir in geistvollen und gedrängten Schriften zwischen den Zeilen lesen, wer wollte nicht ein bedeutsames Gespräch, das leicht nach vielerlei Seiten hin auch bedeutende Tat 6   Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 328: ‘non-understanding will never finally dissolve’ (hereafter cited as HK). Manfred Frank has shown how this assumption is part of the philosophical currency of the early Romantics, ‘Metaphysical foundations: a look at Schleiermacher’s Dialektik’ in J. Marina (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 15–34 (pp. 15–16). 7   Christian Berner, La Philosophie de Schleiermacher: Herméneutique, Dialectique, Ethique (Paris: Cerf, 1995), pp. 59–60.

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werden kann, ebenso genauer Betrachtung wert halten, die lebendigen Punkte darin herausheben, ihren innern Zusammenhang ergreifen wollen, alle leisen Andeutungen weiter verfolgen?

[Who is it that in their intercourse with especially gifted people does not make

the effort to listen between the words, just as we read between the lines of rich and complex texts; who would not deem a meaningful conversation worthy of interpretation (a conversation that in many respects can also be a meaningful deed) that does not think it all the more important to pluck out the heart of the matter, grasp its inner connection, follow out all the faint hints?]8

The scene imagined here fits almost perfectly that of Die Weihnachtsfeier. If not explicitly, then certainly unconsciously, what Schleiermacher does in the novella is to provide a worked example of the ‘art’ of hermeneutics in practice: the art of understanding being practised in the context of free conversational exchange, the freie Geselligkeit discussed in the previous chapter. What is missing from the above quotation is any reference to the child: the focus seems to be exclusively on the conversation of mature and gifted adults. Yet elsewhere in his hermeneutical writings, Schleiermacher does use the child as an example. There is much to learn, he says, from the hermeneutical example of children, because in their struggles with language we see plainly the hidden processes that adults continue to employ in their attempts at communication and understanding: ‘dieses Geschäft des Verstehens und Auslegens ist ein stetiges, sich allmählich entwickelndes Ganze’, stretching unbroken from ‘[die] riesenhaften Anfängen der Kindheit’ to the most sophisticated of adult acts of interpretation.9 His fullest reflections on this are found in the 1829 lecture fragments grouped by Schleiermacher’s editor, Manfred Frank, under the title Über den Begriff der Hermeneutik. Drawing on this work, in what remains of this section I shall set out a brief outline of Schleiermacher’s understanding of the hermeneutical process, pointing out at each stage the ways in which the child exemplifies its operation. The ‘art’ of hermeneutics for Schleiermacher is a process without beginning or end, well described by the term ‘circle’ that is often applied to it. It is an art (Kunst or Kunstlehre)10 because, although it has rules, it cannot be mechanized.11 As was observed above, it arises out of the universal predicament of misunderstanding, but it carries with it, in a phrase Schleiermacher repeatedly returns to, the positive goal   Schleiermacher, HK, pp. 315–6; translated in Grondin, Philosophical Hermeneutics,

8

p. 74.

  Schleiermacher, HK, p. 327; ‘this business of understanding and exposition is a constant, gradually developing, whole’, ‘the colossal beginnings of childhood’. 10   As Bowie says, the term can be variously translated ‘art’, ‘technique’ (picking up on the Greek techne) or ‘method’, HC, p. xxxix. Here I have preferred ‘art’ for the sake of consistency. 11   Schleiermacher, HK, pp. 80–81; Schleiermacher, HC, pp. 11–14. 9

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of understanding a discourse ‘first as well as and then better than its author’.12 The point here is not that the interpreter achieves a superior and detached viewpoint from which to assess any utterance. Rather, the principle is to be understood in the modest sense that, given precisely the universality of misunderstanding that makes hermeneutics necessary, interpretation will be an unending process. In this process the author of a text can become its own interpreter – a point also made in the concluding fragment of Novalis’s Vermischte Bemerkungen13 – though in Schleiermacher’s view, his or her own interpretations will be no more valid than any other. This interpretation of the maxim is borne out by Schleiermacher’s own practice of repeatedly revising his own earlier work, as well as by his reticence in publishing his hermeneutical writings in particular: their fragmentary form reflects the unfinishable nature of the interpretative task they describe. These points are well illustrated by the example of the child. The infant, the as yet speechless (infans) child, is confronted with a situation of radical misunderstanding. Yet, because of their ‘innere Beweglichkeit zur eignen Erzeugung’, which goes hand in hand with an ‘ursprüngliche […] Richtung auf das Aufnehmen von andern’, children’s ability to interpret the discourse of others gradually matures.14 As they do so, they show in limited respects glimpses of the ability to understand a discourse ‘better than its author’. In their attempts at communication they produce new forms of language and, though these often miss the mark, they also display an energy absent from adult speech. As Schleiermacher observes in Über den Begriff der Hermeneutik: [Es kommt mir vor], als belächelten wir die falschen Anwendungen, welche die Kinder […] von den aufgenommenen Sprachelementen machen, nur, um uns über dieses Übergewicht einer [divinatorischen] Energie, welche wir nicht mehr aufzuwenden vermögen, zu trösten oder auch dafür zu rächen. [It seems to me that we only smile at the wrong use children make of the elements of language they have acquired […] in order to console ourselves for or revenge ourselves on this preponderance of a [divinatory] energy which we ourselves no longer possess.]15

The twofold character of this energy – the ‘inner mobility towards creation on their own part’ and the ‘directedness towards the reception of others’ – is the fruit of a process Schleiermacher terms ‘divination’. The mystical resonances of this term have led to misinterpretation, but its use does not imply either an unmediated   Schleiermacher, HK, pp. 94, 104; Schleiermacher, HC, pp. 23, 33.   Novalis, Fragmente, p. 37. 14   HK, p. 327, ‘inner mobility towards creation on their own part’, ‘directedness 12 13

towards the reception of others’, translated in Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 207. 15   HK p. 327; Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, p. 208 (translation adapted).

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recourse to the divine or a loose invocation of innate empathy to bridge the gap between the interpreter and the material to be interpreted. Rather, as its Latin etymology suggests, the term implies the act of guessing, ‘the ability to arrive at interpretations without determinative rules’.16 The necessity of divination thus clarifies the fact that hermeneutics is an ‘art’, pointing to its irreducible constituent element of artistry or style, such that in every act of communication ‘es bleibt immer etwas nicht zu Beschreibendes darin, was nur als Harmonie kann bezeichnet werden’ [‘something which cannot be described always remains in it, which can only be designated as harmony’].17 This musical image emphasizes the way in which divination for Schleiermacher arises in the harmonious blending of the inward and the outward. Neither an innate quality nor a socially nurtured skill, the child’s ability to practise divination is the human being’s invisible point of entry into the hermeneutic circle. Thus divination is a term intended to explore rather than explain the aporia at the root of communication. When Die Weihnachtsfeier is read in the light of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, divination is clearly seen to be represented by the child Sofie. Unlike the two younger children, whom the novella leaves effectively speechless, Sofie and her childlike adult counterpart Josef demonstrate precisely the ‘preponderance of a [divinatory] energy’ described in Über den Begriff der Hermeneutik. In the adults’ extended discussion of Sofie, a series of significant comments is made in response to Leonhardt’s concern that the child’s emotions have become distorted by an excess of religious fervour. As we saw in the previous chapter, Leonhardt’s exaggerated rational maturity is the negative counterpart to Sofie, but there is also a sense in which he represents in extreme form the loss of the divinatory gift apparent in her. This is not because divination is a quality unique to childhood – Schleiermacher insists that it is a crucial element in every act of understanding. Rather, the fault lies with the loss in Leonhardt’s character of the necessary interaction between hermeneutics and their dialectical ground. At the conclusion of the novella Josef characterizes Leonhardt as ‘der denkende reflectierende, dialektische, überverständige Mensch’.18 His failed attempts at communication indicate that he embodies the loss of hermeneutical sensitivity that Schleiermacher associates with the accumulation of knowledge. One side of Leonhardt’s personality has been overdeveloped at the expense of the other. In Novalis’s words: ‘je bornierter ein System ist, desto mehr wird es den Weltklugen gefallen’;19 and Leonhardt exemplifies the worldly-wise, in whom: ‘die Seele, je mehr sie schon besitzt, auch im umgekehrten Verhältnis ihrer Empfänglichkeit

  HC, p. xi.   HK, p. 177; HC, p. 100. 18   KGA I/5, p. 97; ‘this contriving, reflective, dialectical, superintellectual man’, CE, 16 17

p. 85.

19   Novalis, Fragmente, p. 31; ‘the more limited a system is, the more it will please the worldly-wise’.

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träger wird in ihren Bewegungen’ [‘the more the soul possesses, the more its receptivity becomes sluggish in its movements’.]20 Sofie, by contrast, is described by her parents as capable of ‘[ein] fast dreistes Unterscheiden der Hauptsache in allen Dingen vom Schein und von der Umgebung’ [‘[an] almost audacious ability to distinguish the primary in all things from the background and from mere appearance’].21 This ability, noted in the previous chapter, applies not only to her face-to-face encounters, but also to her understanding of the Bible. Whereas Leonhardt fears that to acquaint children prematurely with the scriptures is to make the Bible into a millstone around their necks, Sofie in fact shows a remarkable level of understanding of the stories she has heard. Here Leonhardt’s own words later in the dialogue, though they are intended to confine Christmas to the realm of childhood, actually point to the way in which the divinatory energy represented by Sofie is indispensable to the understanding of Christmas and Christianity: Denn wie ein Kind der Hauptgegenstand desselben ist, so sind es auch Kinder vornehmlich, welche das Fest, und durch das Fest wiederum das Christenthum selbst, heben und tragen. [Just as a child is the main object of our celebration, so it is also the children above all who elevate the festival and carry it forth – and through it Christianity itself.]22

In the light of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, then, what emerges from Die Weihnachtsfeier is the particular significance of Sofie as a figure of the hermeneutical process. In contrast to Leonhardt with his desire to fix meaning – seen especially clearly in the conversation with Sofie discussed in the previous chapter – Sofie represents both the negative and positive impulses of hermeneutics, both its necessity in a context of inevitable misunderstanding and its capacity nevertheless to facilitate mutual comprehension. Mediation, Immediacy and Incarnation In this next section I examine Schleiermacher’s understanding of the relationship between mediation and immediacy, with a view to tracing the parallels between his hermeneutics and his theology. The interaction between mediation and immediacy is a key element in his hermeneutical writings, but is also a vital constituent of his interpretation of the doctrine of the incarnation. In the previous chapter I drew attention to Schleiermacher’s sense of the importance of mutuality in human life –   HK, p. 328.   KGA I/5, p. 55; CE, p. 39. 22   KGA I/5, p. 88; CE, p. 75. 20 21

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the desire to maintain a balance between masculine and feminine, expressed in Die Weihnachtsfeier by the analogy of major and minor musical scales. This emphasis on mutually interdependent binary pairs is a major undercurrent of his thought, not least in his hermeneutical writings. In each of these pairings we see the centrality of mediation: the one cannot exist without the mediation of its counterpart. The binaries present in the hermeneutics, each falling into a masculine or feminine category, are represented in Table 6.1 below. Table 6.1 Masculine/Feminine Binaries in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics Grammatical interpretation (1)

The Logical element in Comparative/ language (3) documentary criticism (5)

MASCULINE

Individual/ Psychological/ Technical interpretation (2)

The Musical element in language (4)

FEMININE

Divinatory criticism (6)

The first pairing contrasts two ways in which language can be viewed: grammatical interpretation (1) looks at an utterance from the point of view of a given language community, seeking to elucidate an expression by reference to ‘the total context constituted by the possibilities of a language’,23 while individual/psychological/ technical interpretation (2) – Schleiermacher employed all three terms – looks at the special art (techne) an author or speaker employs, its purpose being to understand the individual mind that discloses itself in the language it brings forth. Both these methods of understanding require an ability to appreciate the full sweep of any discourse: that is both the logical (3) and the musical (4) elements in language. What distinguishes (1) from (2) is thus context, rather than content. The distinction between comparative/documentary (5) criticism and divinatory criticism (6) works on similar lines, but again, although comparative criticism may be a more common component of grammatical interpretation and divinatory criticism more common in technical interpretation, their jurisdictions overlap. Schleiermacher writes that the comparative method ‘first of all posits the person to be understood as something universal and then finds the individual aspect by comparison with other things included under the same universal’, whilst in the divinatory method ‘one transforms oneself, so to speak, into the other person and tries to understand the individual element directly’.24 Finally, both the comparative 23   Grondin, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 69. In this section I draw upon the accounts of Grondin, pp. 69–72 and Berner, La Philosophie de Schleiermacher, pp. 75–76. 24   Schleiermacher, HC, pp. 92–3; HK, p. 169.

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and the divinatory methods can themselves be divided into the objective and the subjective, yielding a further four categories. The precise operation of this categorization is not of immediate concern – it was in any case subject to changes of emphasis as well as terminology in the different stages of Schleiermacher’s thought. What is relevant here is the consistency with which he insists on such pairings as indispensable to the hermeneutical process and characterizes them as masculine and feminine. Repeatedly he points out their radical interdependence, so that the one side requires the other not only for proper comprehension, but for any understanding at all. Interestingly, however, there is one pairing – the most fundamental one in the operation of hermeneutic circle – that Schleiermacher does not characterize along masculine and feminine lines. This is the duality of spontaneity and receptivity, the former being ‘the activity of the mind which renders the world intelligible by linking together different phenomena’, the latter being ‘the way the world is given to the subject’.25 Stereotypical gender assumptions might wish to characterize the former as masculine and the latter as feminine, but Schleiermacher’s refusal to pursue this approach significantly recasts the whole presentation of his hermeneutics. The subject’s spontaneous activity and its receptive passivity are for him the primary human characteristics, and they constitute the hermeneutical circle at its simplest level; the subsequent series of gendered, but not sexually predetermined, inflections outlined above is thus secondary. Here we find the same concept of an original androgyny in human nature that Schleiermacher expounded in his Outline of a Reasonable Catechism for Noble Women (1798), cited in the previous chapter, where the ‘infinite humanity, which existed before it assumed the cloak of manhood and womanhood’ is stressed.26 The particular significance of this in relation to our discussion of the relationship between mediation and immediacy in Schleiermacher’s thought is that it emphasizes the inescapable nature of mediation in all human linguistic transactions. The burden of his hermeneutics, as of his philosophy as a whole, is to stress that there is no unmediated human experience and therefore no privileged gender or age or level of intellect that escapes mediation. And just as the pairing of spontaneity and receptivity is at the root of his hermeneutical circle, so also it is at the root of the account of human self-consciousness he gives in the Glaubenslehre: In dem Selbstbewusstsein ist nur zweierlei zusammen, das eine Element drükkt aus das Sein des Subjektes für sich, das andere sein Zusammensein mit anderem. – Diesen zwei Elementen, wie sie im zeitlichen Selbstbewusstsein zusammen sind, entsprechen nun in dem Subjekt dessen Empfänglichkeit und Selbstthätigkeit.

  Bowie in HC, p. ix.   KGA I/2, pp. 153–4, ‘die unendliche Menschheit, die da war, ehe sie die Hülle der

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Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit annahm’.

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[In self-consciousness there are only two elements: the one expresses the existence of the subject for itself, the other its co-existence with an Other. Now to these elements, as they exist together in the temporal self-consciousness, correspond in the subject its Receptivity and (spontaneous) Activity.]27

From this account Schleiermacher proceeds to indicate the universal nature of interdependence in human life. Even those relationships that seem at first to be purely ones of dependence, such as that between a child and its parents, are ‘vom Anfang an nicht ohne Beimischung einer auf die Eltern gerichteten Selbstthätigkeit’.28 The same also holds, he believes, in the relationship between human beings and nature: Dasselbe ist der Fall auf der Seite der Natur, wie wir denn selbst auf alle Naturkräfte, ja auch von den Weltkörpern kann man es sagen, in demselben Sinn, in welchem sie auf uns einwirken, auch ein kleinstes von Gegenwirkung ausüben. So dass demnach unser gesammtes Selbstbewustsein gegenüber der Welt oder ihrer einzelnen Theile zwischen diesen Grenzen beschlossen bleibt. [Towards all the forces of Nature – even, we may say, towards the heavenly bodies – we ourselves do, in the same sense in which they influence us, exercise a counter-influence, however minute. So that our whole self-consciousness in relation to the World or its individual parts remains enclosed within these limits [of reciprocity].]29

Whichever duality we identify, then, both sides of it remain firmly reciprocal: the human condition is one of inescapable mediation. Against this background it might seem logical to suppose that Schleiermacher, like Hegel after him, has no room for immediacy in his thought. In fact, however, he insists that the self-consciousness characteristic of humanity does require the notion of immediacy. ‘Immediate self-consciousness’, in his thought, is the necessary basis of the self’s ability to understand itself, or as Bowie puts it, ‘the ground of unity between different moments of thought’.30 This ground is not accessible to reflective consciousness, which, being confined within the scope of reciprocity, can only apprehend particular acts of thought. ‘Immediate selfconsciousness’ is thus a transcendental concept: rather than being an intrusion into the reciprocal circle of spontaneity and receptivity, it is the condition of the possibility of that circle.   KGA I/13.1, p. 34; The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), p. 13.   KGA I/13.1, p. 37; ‘never from the start free from the admixture of spontaneous

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activity towards the parents’, Christian Faith, p. 14. 29   KGA I/13.1, p. 37; Christian Faith, p. 14. 30   In Schleiermacher, HC, p. xxiv.

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The theological counterpart to Schleiermacher’s philosophical notion of ‘immediate self-consciousness’ is the feeling of absolute dependence (‘Gefühl der schlechthinnigen Abhängigkeit’).31 The term Gefühl here does not imply the modern sense of a subjective psychological state; rather, it is closely related to ‘immediate self-consciousness’, referring to the mode through which the ‘inner givenness of the self achieves expression and enters into consciousness’.32 As he puts it elsewhere, ‘beginning in the middle is inevitable’33 – there can be neither absolute freedom nor absolute dependence within the mediated sphere of human experience – but the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ is the precondition for a beginning to be made. Where the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ differs from the notion of ‘immediate self-consciousness’ is in its specifically theological reference. Both function as transcendental notions,34 but the former is the basis of Schleiermacher’s discussion of the use of the word ‘God’ in the introduction to the Glaubenslehre, where God is identified as the whence of the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’: Wenn aber schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit und Beziehung mit Gott in unserem Satze gleichgestellt wird: so ist dies so zu verstehen, dass eben das in diesem Selbstbewusstsein mit gesetzte Woher unseres empfänglichen und selbstthätigen Daseins durch den Ausdrukk Gott bezeichnet werden soll, und dieses für uns die wahrhaft ursprüngliche Bedeutung desselben ist. [As regards the identification of absolute dependence with ‘relation to God’ in our proposition: this is to be understood in the sense that the Whence of our receptive and active existence, as implied in this self-consciousness, is to be designated by the word ‘God’, and, that this is for us the really original signification of that word.]35

Hegel’s famous criticism of this passage held that it made the relationship between the human subject and God like that between a dog and its owner.36 However, as Nicholas Lash points out, ‘it is precisely this element of reciprocity of influence which the notion of absolute dependence is intended to exclude’.37   A term he first used in 1822. See Frank, Philosophical Foundations, p. 72.   R.R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion (New York: Charles Scribner,

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1964), p. 121. 33   ‘Das Anfangen aus der Mitte ist unvermeidlich’, KGA II/10/1, p. 186. 34   The latter can also be termed transcendent, rather than transcendental, because of its reference to God. See Schleiermacher, Dialektik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), vol. 2, p. 302f. 35   KGA I/13.1, pp. 38–9; Christian Faith, p. 16. 36   G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Vorrede zu Hinrichs Religionsphilosophie’ in Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (eds) Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), vol. 2, p. 42. 37   Lash, Easter in Ordinary, p. 126.

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In Schleiermacher’s own words ‘jedes Gegebensein Gottes [bleibt] völlig ausgeschlossen, weil alles aüsserlich gegebene immer auch als Gegenstand einer wenn auch noch so geringen Gegenwirkung gegeben sein muss’ [‘any possibility of God being in any way given is entirely excluded, because anything that is outwardly given must be given as an object exposed to our counter-influence, however slight this may be’].38 This relationship between mediation (the context for all human interaction) and immediacy (the transcendental ground of its possibility; or, theologically, the feeling of absolute dependence on the transcendence of God) forms the basis for Schleiermacher’s understanding of the incarnation. In the Dialektik he writes that ‘Wir wissen nur um das Sein Gottes in uns und in den Dingen gar nicht aber um ein Sein Gottes ausser der Welt oder an sich’ [‘We only know about the being of God in us and in things. We know nothing whatever about a being of God outside the world or in himself’].39 With this in mind his resolutely christocentric theology takes as its centre the doctrine of the incarnation: he said of the Glaubenslehre that it was written ‘so that at every point the reader would be made aware that the verse John 1: 14 is the basic text for all theology’.40 In his earlier writings, with which we are chiefly concerned, commentators sometimes draw a distinction between Über die Religion of 1799 and Die Weihnachtsfeier of 1806. The earlier work is remarkable for its reticence about Christ, who is first referred to at length only in the concluding pages of the fifth and final speech, whereas the novella refers frequently and directly to the incarnation. However this difference does not, I believe, indicate a significant shift in Schleiermacher’s theology; it is largely due to the distinct rhetorical purposes of the two books, the one written for sceptical outsiders to Glaubenslehre, the other as a Christmas gift for friends. In the earlier work, it is highly significant that in the key passage in the fifth speech Schleiermacher sees mediation as the central aspect of Christ’s incarnation: So bewundere ich nicht die Reinigkeit seiner Sittenlehre […], nicht die Eigenthümlichkeit seines Charakters […] aber das wahrhaft Göttliche ist die herrliche Klarheit, zu welcher die grosse Idee, welche darzustellen er gekommen war, sich in seiner Seele ausbildete: die Idee, dass Alles Erdliche einer höheren Vermittelung bedarf, um mit der Gottheit zusammenzuhängen. [I do not admire the purity of his ethical teaching…the uniqueness of his character…But the truly divine is the splendid clarity with which the great idea

  KGA I/13.1, p. 40; Christian Faith, p. 18.   KGA II/10/1, p. 143. 40   Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr Lücke (Chicago: 38 39

Scholars Press, 1981), p. 59.

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he had come to exhibit was formed in his soul, the idea that everything finite requires higher mediation in order to be connected with the divine.]41

Here, before he had gone on to elaborate the hermeneutical and theological positions outlined above, Schleiermacher identified Christ in terms highly reminiscent of his later conceptions of ‘immediate self-consciousness’ and the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’. The incarnation is seen in continuity with the original divine act of creation, but as its perfection, as the gift of religious self-consciousness to that creation: Wenn alles Endliche der Vermittlung eines Höheren bedarf, um sich nicht immer weiter von dem Ewigen zu entfernen und ins Leere und Nichtige hinausgestreut zu werden, um seine Verbindung mit dem Ganzen zu unterhalten und zum Bewusstsein derselben zu kommen: so kann ja das Vermittelnde, das doch selbst nicht wiederum der Vermittlung benöthigt sein darf, unmöglich bloss endlich sein; es muss beiden angehören, es muss des göttlichen Wesens theilhaftig sein, eben so und in eben dem Sinne, in welchem es der endlichen Natur theilhaftig ist. Was sah er aber um sich als Endliches und der Vermittlung Bedürftiges, und wo war etwas Vermittelndes als Er? Niemand kennt den Vater als der Sohn, und wem Er es offenbaren will. Dieses Bewusstsein von der Einzigkeit seines Wissens um Gott und Seins in Gott, von der Ursprünglichkeit der Art, wie es in ihm war, und von der Kraft derselben sich mitzutheilen und Religion aufzuregen, war zugleich das Bewusstsein seines Mittleramtes und seiner Gottheit. [If everything finite requires higher mediation in order not to stray even farther from the universe and become dispersed into emptiness and nothingness, in order to retain its connection with the universe and come to conscious awareness of it, then indeed what mediates cannot possibly be something merely finite that, in turn, itself requires mediation. It must belong to both; it must be part of the divine nature just as much as and in the same sense in which it is part of the finite. But what did [Jesus] see around himself except what was finite and in need of mediation, and where was there something better able to mediate than himself? ‘No one knows the Father but the Son and any one to whom he chooses to reveal it’. This consciousness of the uniqueness of his religiousness, of the originality of his view, and of its power to communicate itself and arouse religion was at the same time the consciousness of his office as mediator and of his divinity.]42

41   KGA I/12, p. 291; Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, (ed) Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 119–20. 42   KGA I/12, pp. 291–2; Schleiermacher, On Religion, p. 120.

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Thus, in terms of his later thought, the incarnate Christ enables within his followers the discovery of the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’, of which he is the embodiment. In Die Weihnachtsfeier the same stress on Christ’s role as ‘mediator of immediacy’,43 or better, as the divinely immediate ground of human mediation, is apparent. The emphasis on the incarnation is clearest in Eduard’s speech, which begins with a discussion of the Johannine prologue. He emphasizes the centrality of ‘das Fleisch gewordene Wort’ as the appearance of the divine in human form.44 In John’s gospel, though, alongside the focus on the incarnation, Eduard also discerns a constant sense of childlike joy. In this pervasive joy he sees a conception of the incarnation as a gift that allows us to see humanity from the divine point of view, so that Christmas becomes the occasion for the celebration of human wholeness: Was wir sonach feiern, ist nicht anders als wir selbst, wie wir insgesamt sind, oder die menschliche Natur, oder wie ihr es sonst nennen wollt, angesehen und erkannt aus dem göttlichen Princip. [Accordingly, what we celebrate is nothing other than ourselves as whole beings – that is human nature, or whatever else you want to call it, viewed and known from the perspective of the divine.]45

Eduard here makes Christmas an occasion for the celebration of human community. He deliberately subordinates the focus on the particularity of Christ to the broader principle of the Word becoming flesh, in the encounter with which the individual sees himself as part of a broader community of human becoming. In fact, he insists that it is only when humans have within them a consciousness of their communal location that they have knowledge of the life of God: Nur wenn der einzelne die Menschheit als eine lebendige Gemeinschaft der Einzelnen anschaut und erbaut, ihren Geist und Bewusstsein in sich trägt, und in ihr das abgesonderte Dasein verliert und wiederfindet, nur dann hat er das höhere Leben und den Frieden Gottes in sich. [Only when a person sees humanity as a living community of individuals, cultivates humanity as community, bears its spirit and consciousness in his life,

  Sommer, Schleiermacher und Novalis, p. 115.   ‘So sehe ich am liebsten den Gegenstand dieses Fests, nicht ein Kind so und so

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gestaltet und aussehend, von dieser oder jener geboren; sondern das fleischgewordene Wort, das Gott war und bei Gott’, KGA I/5, p. 94; ‘This is how I prefer to regard the object of this festival: not a child of such and such an appearance, born of this or that parent, here or there, but the Word made flesh, which was God and was with God’, CE, p. 82; cf. Also KGA 1/13.2, pp. 68–70, Christian Faith, p. 397. 45   KGA I/5, p. 94; CE, p. 82.

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and within that community both loses his isolated existence and finds it again in a new way – only then does that person have the higher life and peace of God within himself.]46

This apparent equation of the divine with the sum of human community across time and space is the prelude to a corresponding redefinition of the nature of the Church. The Church is defined as the fellowship of those who have recognized this priority of community and also the means by which this consciousness is passed on and realized: ‘Diese Gemeinschaft aber, durch welche so der Mensch an sich dargestellt wird oder wiederhergestellt, ist die Kirche’.47 Here ecclesiology flows from Christology, following the pattern Eduard adverts to in his musical analogy: ‘Was das Wort klargemacht hat, muss der Ton lebendig machen’.48 The Word proclaimed in Christ is brought to life by the Church’s members, as a song gives life to a text. Here we can note, in passing, the way in which the Pietist environment in which Schleiermacher was schooled clearly comes to bear on his ecclesiology. Analyses of Pietist ecclesiology have often followed the influential typology proposed by Ernst Troeltsch in Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches).49 Troeltsch identified three ecclesiological types – Church, sect and mysticism – and regarded Pietism as an amalgam of the two first types, in which the sect was predominant. More recently, however, Harry Yeide has proposed a fourth type, the ecclesiola model, which offers a better picture of the ecclesiological self-understanding of the German Pietists. This model of the ‘little church’, or church within a church, recognizes the way in which Pietism tended to see itself as ‘organizing for the sake of the whole Church’, often being more inclusive than the church body within which it originated and combining ‘churchly universalism with an impulse to transform the world’.50 Yeide does not apply his analysis to Schleiermacher, but his model of the ecclesiola fits well with Die Weihnachtsfeier in particular, where the gathering of pious adults is both a little church in itself and a representative sign of the latent ecclesiality of society as a whole.

  KGA I/5, p. 95; CE, p. 83.   KGA I/5, p. 95; ‘This community […] by which man-in-himself is thus exhibited

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or restored is the church’, CE, p. 83. 48   KGA I/5, p. 64; ‘what the word has declared the tones of music must make alive’, CE, p. 46. 49   Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981). 50   Harry Yeide, Studies in Classical Pietism: The Flowering of the Ecclesiola (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 30–31.

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Ambiguities It would, of course, be misleading to identify Eduard’s interpretation of the incarnation with Schleiermacher’s. What is clear, though, is that Eduard’s exposition fits closely with the ideal of community exemplified in the dialogue. In this community, devotion and love are paramount,51 and the participants in it feel themselves to be in the presence of divine revelation in and through their relationship with one another. This is made especially clear in the description of the mother-child relationship: Darum sieht jeder Mutter, die es fühlt, dass sie einen Menschen geboren hat, und die es weiss durch eine himmlische Botschaft, dass der Geist der Kirche, der heilige Geist in ihr wohnt, und die deshalb gleich ihr Kind im Herzen der Kirche darbringt, und dies als ein Recht fordert, eine solche sieht auch Christum in ihrem Kinde, und eben dies ist jenes unaussprechliche, alles lohnende Muttergefühl. [Thus it is that every mother who, profoundly feeling what she has done in bearing a human being, knows as it were by an annunciation from heaven that the Spirit of the church, the Holy Spirit, dwells within her. As a result, she forthwith presents her child to the church with all her heart, and claims this as her right. Such a woman also sees Christ in her child – and this is that inexpressible feeling a mother has which compensates for all else.]52

The discussion above, and the last quotation in particular, return us squarely to the two related theological problems posed at the end of the last chapter: first, Schleiermacher’s tendency to blur the boundaries between human nous and divine pneuma in such a way that the in-breaking of divine revelation risks being disallowed; and secondly, the concomitant problem of a tendency towards an ontological rather than an iconic understanding of the divine in the child. Eduard’s words identify the child’s place in the family as a microcosm of the relationship between Christ and the world. As we might expect, the verb ‘fühlen’ is of key importance: ‘thus every mother who feels that she has given birth to a person […] sees Christ in her child’. The tendency to read the verb in the modern terms of subjective psychology should be avoided. The sense Schleiermacher intends is much more likely to be consistent with his practice in his more systematic works, where feeling, as we have seen, is the faculty of self-reflective consciousness. It is thus feeling that allows the mother to reflect on the way in which her own childbearing has mirrored the pattern of the incarnation. The difficulty this raises is symptomatic of the broader theological difficulties raised by Schleiermacher’s thought as a whole: does this not bind the presence of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit so closely to a natural human process that the transcendence of   ‘Andacht und Liebe’, KGA I/5, p. 96; ‘devotion and love’, CE, p. 84.   KGA I/5, p. 96; CE, p. 84.

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their divinity is lost? Do not the boundaries of the Church thereby become at once co-extensive with the world and yet too narrow for their divine ground? Does this not restrict the operation of the divine to the unbroken sphere of human mediation? None of these ambiguities was intended by Schleiermacher. In the last version of the Glaubenslehre, as was stated above, he specifically excludes any possibility that God can be given as an object among others in the world. Yet the inflection he gives to the doctrine of the incarnation seems bound to run this risk. In particular, the problem lies with the analogy we have seen between the hermeneutical process and his Christology, especially as revealed by the roles played by the child in both. If, as this analogy implies, the place of Christ’s incarnation in Christianity is as the prime instance and embodiment of the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’, this is consistent with the view in the Glaubenslehre that ‘die Erscheinung des Erlösers in der Geschichte ist als göttliche Offenbarung weder etwas schlechthin übernatürliches noch etwas schlechthin übervernünftiges’ [the appearance of the Redeemer in history is, as divine revelation, neither an absolutely supernatural nor an absolutely supra-rational thing’].53 Here, having explicitly rejected the terms of Chalcedon, Schleiermacher sees the divinity of Christ as residing in his perfect God-consciousness: ‘das Gottesbewusstsein in ihm [war] ein schlechthin klares und jeden Moment ausschliessend bestimmendes, welches daher als eine stetige lebendige Gegenwart, mithin als ein wahres Sein Gottes in ihm, betrachtet werden muss’ [‘the God-consciousness in Him was absolutely clear and determined each moment, to the exclusion of all else, so that it must be regarded as a continual living presence, and withal a real existence of God in Him’].54 This perspective arrives at a Christology that sees the divinity of Christ consisting without remainder in his perfect humanity and thus at one remove from both the transcendence of God and the immanence of creation (imperfect humanity). If the incarnation is so understood, the only way redemption can be realized among human beings is by imitating Christ in his God-consciousness. Certainly this seems to be the implication of Eduard’s speech, but it can be seen more broadly in the contributions of each of the adults in the main part of the novella. Dawn DeVries draws attention to the parallels in content between the three women’s stories and the three men’s speeches.55 She argues that the message of the first pair (Ernestine’s story and Leonhardt’s speech) is that the true meaning of Christmas lies not in the Church or the Bible, but in experience; that the second pair (Ernst and Agnes) both suggest that the reality of present and future requires the past, as the foreseeing of the whole person in the infant requires the Redeemer’s victory; and that the third pair (Karoline and Eduard) point to Christmas as the celebration of ourselves and the experience of new birth. DeVries is certainly correct to point out these parallels, but I would wish to extend her point in a critical direction. Each of the three pairings describes the radical extension of the scope of a different   KGA I/13.1, p. 106; Christian Faith, p. 62.   KGA I/13.2, p. 69; Christian Faith, p. 397. 55   DeVries, ‘Bourgeois Ideology?’, p. 178. 53

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theological locus consistent with Schleiermacher’s view of the incarnation. The perspective represented by Ernestine and Leonhardt universalizes the scriptures to embrace all authentic records of human experience; that of Ernst and Agnes universalizes Christ to embrace all humanity; and that of Karoline and Eduard does the same with the Church. In this last case we see an ecclesiological transcription of the identification of human nous and divine pneuma discussed in the previous chapter. Each of these developments can in fact be found elsewhere in Schleiermacher’s work. The universalisation of Christ has been traced above; that of the Bible is evident in the claim in On Religion that ‘the holy writings have become scripture by their own power, but they prohibit no other book from also being or becoming scripture’;56 and that of the Church is seen in the redefinition of extra ecclesiam nulla salus offered both in On Religion and Die Weihnachtsfeier: ‘Jeder also, in dem dieses Selbstbewusstsein aufgeht, kommt zur Kirche’.57 Each of these shifts has the positive intention of following through the logic that in the incarnation the distance between world and God has been overcome; but the manner in which Schleiermacher does this seems to require that the difference between the world and God should be compromised. In the philosophical context of his hermeneutics the relationship between immediate self-consciousness as the ground of the hermeneutic circle and the inescapably mediated operation of that circle is less problematic. But when this pattern is transferred to theology (with its need to maintain both sides of the paradox of the irreducible ontological difference between Creator and creation and the reality of the saving entry of the former into the latter) it inevitably forces a departure from the norms of classical Christian thought. Conclusion In Die Weihnachtsfeier it is important to recognize that, despite their prominence, the speeches of the six main adult characters are rendered penultimate by the belated arrival of Josef. Josef, as I observed in the previous chapter, is in many ways the embodiment of the childlike spirit that the novella as a whole seeks to convey. Alongside Sofie and Friederike’s music, he has an important prophetic, almost eschatological, function in the dialogue. Just as in the confined bourgeois world of the novella, he arrives as a reminder of the provisional nature of all that has been said, so amidst its prevailing spirit of immanence he is a pointer 56   Schleiermacher, On Religion, p. 121. Similar, though keeping an emphasis on the Spirit, is Novalis’ slightly earlier phrase in Blüthenstaub: ‘Wenn der Geist heiligt, so ist jedes echte Buch Bibel’, ‘if the Spirit makes holy, then every true book is a Bible’, Novalis, Fragmente, p. 32. 57   KGA I/5, p. 95; ‘Everyone, therefore, in whom this genuine self-consciousness of humanity arises enters within the bounds of the church’, CE, p. 83. KGA I/12, p. 190; On Religion, p. 77; compare also the observations above on the Pietist influence on Schleiermacher’s ecclesiology.

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towards the transcendent. To an extent, he is a prophet of emotion, consonant with the Romantic spirit as popularly understood. But in the same way that he opens a break from the narrow world of the dialogue, he also opens it out from its overriding concern with the God of community to an awareness of the God who creates, redeems and sustains the world as a whole: Ich fühle mich einheimisch und wie neugeboren in der besseren Welt, in der Schmerz und Klage keinen Sinn hat und keinen Raum. Mit frohem Auge schaue ich auf alles, auch auf das Tiefverwundene. Wie Christus keine Braut hatte als die Kirche, keine Kinder als seine Freunde, kein Haus als den Tempel und die Welt […] so scheine ich mir geboren, auch darnach zu trachten. [I feel at home, as if born anew into the better world, in which pain and grieving have no meaning and no room any more. I look upon all things with a gladsome eye, even what has most deeply wounded me. As Christ had no bride but the church, no children but his friends, no household but the temple and the world, and yet his heart was full of heavenly love and joy, so I too seem to be born to endeavour after such a life.]58

Josef’s words here point in two directions simultaneously: first towards the sense of homecoming that the birth of Christ instills (‘ich fühle mich einheimisch’); but also, contrastingly, to the homelessness of Christ on earth (‘kein Haus als den Tempel’). This paradox brings an unexpected eschatological edge to the conclusion of the novella, which has been preoccupied almost exclusively with the immanent realm of mediated human interrelationship. In so doing, it opens up a new perspective in which the child is exemplary not so much for what she is as for what she is becoming, for what she reveals of the qualities of a citizen of the kingdom, into which all are invited, to be both ‘einheimisch’ and ‘neugeboren’. These brief final pages of Die Weihnachtsfeier do to a large extent recast all that has gone before. Paradoxically, because they lay bare the specific cultural location of the dialogue, they also make its understanding of human community in relation to God far more universal. The theological problem remains, though, that, in the novella as a whole the dominant emphasis is so much on the achievement of community that human nature seems to contain within itself the seeds of its own salvation and divinization. What is innate (‘einheimisch’) appears to have priority over the in-breaking of grace (‘neugeboren’). Just as the operation of the hermeneutical circle points to God only at its inexplicable origin, so the overall logic of Die Weihnachtsfeier seems only to allow a place for God as the ground of a human community that subsequently becomes the locus of the divine in itself. That this was not Schleiermacher’s intention seems clear: his work certainly contains much that resists this tendency, and the sophiological reading proposed in the last chapter offers a way out of the anthropological impasse. The problem   KGA I/5, pp. 97–8; CE, p. 86.

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remains, however, that in the novella, read in the light of Schleiermacher’s wider work, a proper emphasis on the incarnation – the articulation of God’s Word in human form – frequently shades over into an equation of the divine with perfected humanity: every book can be the Bible, every person can be Christ and everyone, everywhere can be the Church. If these aspirations are expressed with eschatological reserve – if, that is, they are hoped-for states rather than achieved realities – then they remain compatible with the classical Christian tradition. But, for all the narrative significance of Josef in recasting the figure of the child in Die Weihnachtsfeier, the dominant impression left by his words is still that the quasi-divinity of childlike perfection is already a reality, ‘Alle Menschen sind mir heute Kinder, und sind mir eben darum so lieb’.59 The ambiguities here are in line with the ambiguity in Schleiermacher’s work as a whole, which often seems both to mirror and to resist the tendencies of the Enlightenment to flatten and reduce theology by rendering immanent and private the scope of Christian discourse.60 These contrary tendencies are finally hard to reconcile and, as we shall see, contrast starkly with the self-consciously anti-Enlightenment stance adopted by Charles Péguy a century later, in whom the child is primarily the embodiment of (eschatological) hope.

59   KGA I/5, p. 97, emphasis added; ‘Today all men are children to me, and are all the dearer on that account’; CE, p. 85. 60   See, for example, Graham Ward, True Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 97; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2007), pp. 221–95.

Chapter 7

‘La théologie détendue’: Péguy’s Liturgical Child Introduction Turning to the last of our four authors, the poet and essayist Charles Péguy, the specificity of Rousseau’s and Schleiermacher’s portraits of the child seems at first to have been lost. Émile and Sofie, though they may not be fully rounded literary characters, do at least have names and coherent personalities. In Péguy’s writing, by contrast, the child is not so much a character in her own right as a figure, a recurrent trope through which the author seeks to uncover and display the potential reality of human nature. Most famously, in his 1911 poem Le Porche du Mystère de la deuxième Vertu he develops an extended image of a female child, ‘la petite espérance’,1 the youngest of three sisters who together represent the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. Not just here, however, but throughout his writing from 1910 onwards, the figure of the child and the theme of childlikeness are seldom far from the surface and often are explicitly present. The risks involved in such a project are clear: to choose (as he generally does) an unspecific female child as the vehicle by which claims are made about the nature of humanity in general can be accused of wish fulfilment, sentimentality and manipulation. Biographical accounts tend to see here nostalgic representations of the author’s own childhood, prompted perhaps by the strains of married life and unfulfilled aspirations for his own children: ‘Tout est joué avant que nous ayons douze ans’, as he wrote in 1913.2 However, following the approach I have taken with the earlier authors, I wish to resist being drawn too far in the direction of autobiographical analysis. In any case, to construe Péguy’s writings as a series of nostalgic meditations on the

  Péguy, Œuvres poétiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 538f (hereafter

1

OPC).

2   Charles Péguy, Œuvres en prose 1909–1914 (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 1045 (hereafter OP). I have chosen to cite Péguy’s prose works from this more easily accessible edition, but have provided cross-references to the current Œuvres en prose completes, vol. III (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) (hereafter Prose III), in this instance p. 785; ‘The game is up before we are twelve’. See Marjorie Villiers, Charles Péguy: A Study in Integrity (London: Collins, 1965), Robert Burac, Charles Péguy: La Révolution et la Grâce (Paris: Laffont, 1994).

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lost innocence of childhood, whether his or anyone else’s, is deeply misleading. 3 As we shall see, the child is so important a figure for Péguy because he believes he has found in her a means of portraying the relationship of free dependence on God that is opened up by the continuing dynamic of Christ’s incarnation. His child is, above all, a theological figure, illuminating humanity’s place as the focal point of the Creator’s relationship with creation. In what follows I shall be concentrating on the works of the last five years of Péguy’s life. It is in this period from 1910, after his gradual return to the Catholic faith,4 that he began to see the child as the key to his understanding of the relationship between God and humanity. The theme becomes apparent in Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc, published in January 1910,5 but is first fully developed in the long semi-dramatic poems, Le Porche du Mystère de la deuxième Vertu of 1911 and its closely-related sequel, Le Mystère des Saints Innocents of 1912.6 The lengthy prose essays contributed by him to the journal he edited from 1900, Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, will also be important sources, especially Notre Jeunesse (1910), Victor-Marie, comte Hugo (1910), Un nouveau théologien, M. Fernand Laudet (1911), L’Argent (1913), the Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne (1914) and the Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne (1914), the last left unfinished at his death.7 These latter, though they bear titles implying a particular critical or academic focus, must be seen as literary works alongside the poems and, like them, return repeatedly to the figure of the child. I shall begin by examining two particular instances of Péguy’s child figure. The purpose here is to establish that there is a specific and substantial theological rationale informing his depiction of the child. As Thierry Dejond has pointed out, ‘la théologie de Péguy […] fait une place centrale aux “figures” humaines qui

3   ‘Péguy n’est pas un poète doucement attendri devant la “petite espérance”, devant la souple jeunesse’, ‘Péguy is not a poet who melts sentimentally before “dear little hope”, before the suppleness of youth’, Charles Moeller, Littérature du vingtième siècle et christainisme IV: L’espérance en dieu notre père (Tournai: Casterman, 1960), p. 502. 4   In September 1908 he declared privately to his friend, Lotte, ‘J’ai retrouvé la foi […] Je suis catholique’, but this was not made public until the publication of Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc in 1910, OPC, p. xxxviii. 5   OPC, pp. 363–525. Revealingly, throughout this work, Péguy calls the heroine by the diminutive form, Jeanette, whereas in the three-part drama Jeanne d’Arc of 1897 the young Jeanette quickly grows into the adult Jeanne. 6   OPC, pp. 526–670; OPC, pp. 671–823. These will be referred to in the text below as Porche and Innocents. 7   OP, pp. 501–65 (Prose III, pp. 5–159); OP, pp. 659–838 (Prose III, pp. 161–345); OP, pp. 841–1041 (Prose III, pp. 392–592); OP, pp. 1045–106 (Prose III, pp. 785–847); OP, pp. 1259–91 (Prose III, pp. 1246–77); OP, pp. 1301–496 (Prose III, pp. 1278–477).

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représentent’.8 By attending closely to two particular figural representations of the child – first ‘la petite espérance’ in Le Porche du Mystère de la deuxième Vertu, then Péguy’s friend Bernard-Lazare in Notre Jeunesse – we can see how the child, far from being the symptom of a generalized nostalgia for an imagined past, in fact confronts the reader with the specific demands of the theological virtue of hope. Having begun with the specific, I shall then seek to draw out more fully the category of incarnation, which underlies Péguy’s theological anthropology. Here we shall see how a Patristic typological pattern informs Péguy’s thought: in the light of the incarnation, all human lives lived in hope are figures or types of Christ himself, the antitype, who continually revivifies the human race in the image of God. Finally I shall clarify the ongoing liturgical process of anamnesis enacted by the poetry and prose alike, and show how for Péguy it is most fully embodied in the free, yet dependent figure of the young child. The Child as Theological Figure a) ‘La petite espérance’ The theological and liturgical resonance of Péguy’s poem Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu is indicated even before its opening line in the dedication to his late friend, Eddy Marix. Its epitaph, ‘non solum in memoriam sed in intentionem’,9 signals that the author wishes his poem to take its place as a work of prayer, offered like a votive mass in intercession rather than mere commemoration. The title too has liturgical significance. Porche refers to the narthex found at the western end of many French churches, the point of intersection between the sacred and secular or – more accurately, since Péguy refuses that distinction – the threshold at which the realms of the temporal and the eternal coincide.10 And Mystère alludes to the Greek musterion (translated sacramentum in the Vulgate), as well as to Péguy’s earlier Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc, in which some of the same personae appear. Such an overt theology also marks the first appearance of the child in the poem. At the end of the opening canticle-like strophe in praise of God’s presence in creation, the child appears at the climax, as the coping stone of God’s world: J’éclate tellement dans ma création […] Et surtout dans les enfants.

  ‘Péguy’s theology gives central place to representative human “figures”’, Thierry Dejond, Charles Péguy: L’Espérance d’un Salut Universel (Namur: Culture et Vérité), p. 106. 9   OPC, p. 529, (emphasis added). 10   Joy Humes, Two Against Time: A Study of the Very Present Worlds of Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), p. 95f. 8

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Here the child is a stimulus to the faith, a transparent sign of God’s care in and for creation. In the following verses, faith, the first theological virtue, is gradually elided with the third theological virtue, love. Once again, the child is the focus. The voices of children and their loving gaze are exemplary of the love of which the human heart is capable: ‘le cœur de l’homme, qui est ce qu’il y a de plus profond dans le monde’.12 As the poem gathers momentum, however, it becomes clear that these opening references to faith and love are allusively preparing the ground for the true subject of the poem, la deuxième vertu, hope. Hope has in fact been referred to in the opening line, but these initial digressions into the other virtues indicate both Péguy’s (traditional) belief in the inseparability and convertibility of the three theological virtues, and his (more original) suggestion that hope is their linchpin. Unlike the other virtues, hope is seen as a surprise even to God: Mais l’espérance, dit Dieu, voilà ce qui m’étonne. Moi-même. Ça c’est étonnant. [But hope, says God, that is something that surprizes me. Even me. That is surprising.]13

Initially hope is seen, fairly conventionally, as a virtue displayed particularly by children. But, after another densely written strophe packed with images of hope, suddenly the virtue termed ‘la petite espérance’ emerges in personal form: Ce qui m’étonne, dit Dieu, c’est l’espérance. Et je n’en reviens pas. Cette petite espérance qui n’a l’air de rien du tout. Cette petite fille espérance. Immortelle. [What surprizes me, says God, is hope. And I can’t get over it. This little hope who seems like nothing at all. 11   OPC, p. 531; Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, trans. David Louis Schindler (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 3 (hereafter Portal). 12   OPC, p. 532; ‘The heart of man, which is what is most profound in the world’, Portal, p. 4. 13   OPC, p. 534; Portal, p. 6.

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This little girl hope. Immortal.]14

Here, for the first time, we see the centre of the poem with full clarity: hope imagined through the analogy of a little girl. But, though ‘la petite espérance’ is the poem’s centre, she is by no means the full extent of its depiction of the child. Rather she is the chief image and focal point for a whole series of other figures conceived in childlike terms: the skilled workman, the agricultural labourer, the parish priest, the village schoolmaster, the masons of Chartres cathedral; each of whom embody in their lives the childlike quality of hope.15 Slowly and through a playful profusion of images, idioms and forms of syntax, the little child hope begins to flesh out, to incarnate, the otherwise potentially ethereal virtue of hope. This very gradualness and multiplicity is theologically significant. The leisurely, repetitive style (not only of Porche, but of all Péguy’s work), gradually builds momentum and discourages short cuts, thus underlining the theological importance of chronological time in creation, incarnation and salvation. As with the litanies of Péguy’s childhood, and, above all, as with the liturgy of the mass, the purpose is to enact sacramentally the redemption of the world in Christ. At times the scriptures, prayers and liturgies of the Church are cited directly, but more often Péguy hides them in the weave of his text’s fabric. Here we see reflected the incarnational coincidence of the temporal and the eternal: rather than being opposed to one another, chronos and kairos are seen to intertwine. Péguy follows Catholic tradition in understanding redemption as both the punctiliar intersection of God in creation in the incarnation of Christ and the ongoing generative reality that flows from that unique event; and his style, in prose and poetry alike, seeks to perform what it describes. The diversity of content, form, vocabulary and syntax is designed to reflect the full breadth of created reality, redeemed in Christ. Thus the child, rather than being preferentially venerated for its innocence, instead becomes a figure of the general human vocation to hope for salvation in (rather than from) time. It is unsurprising that Péguy favours the three theological virtues over the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice. The theological virtues, he believes, are, specifically, the virtues which relate us to God, the fruit of the mediation between God and humanity that is grace. As such they are the virtues which accept and manifest the creaturely status of humankind and are derived not from the immanent relations of natural law, but from revelation, from the transcendent encounter between God and creation. We might wonder, however, at Péguy’s invariable tendency to highlight among the virtues the centrality of hope. Following Saint Paul, Christian tradition has taught that love is the chief virtue, but, in one of the toyings with heterodoxy which made him a suspect figure   OPC, p. 535; Portal, p. 7.   In the prose writings these figures are supplemented by personified categories such

14 15

as the plays of Corneille and the poetry of Victor Hugo. See, for instance, Victor-Marie, comte Hugo, Prose III, pp. 276–311.

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to many leading Catholics of his time,16 Péguy repeatedly suggests that hope in fact has priority among them: – ‘c’est elle qui fait marcher les deux autres’.17 Here he imagines hope leading her older sisters, faith and love, as she skips ahead of them in a liturgical procession of the virtues. Later in the poem he radicalizes this point. He writes: ‘singulière vertu de l’espérance, singulier mystère, elle n’est pas une vertu comme les autres, elle est une vertu contre les autres’ [‘Remarkable virtue of hope, strange mystery, she’s not a virtue like the others, she is a virtue against the others’].18 To make the point in these terms seems to reject both the scriptural witness and the traditional understanding of the convertibility of the virtues, whereby faith, hope and love mutually inform one another. Here, however, the consistent association of hope with the figure of the child is of the essence. Hope is not a virtue that easily finds a home in the world of adult experience. Faith and love, Péguy argues, are more mature virtues that speak for themselves, but hope is a response to something received: La foi va de soi. La foi marche toute seule […] Pour ne pas croire il faudrait se violenter, se torturer, se tourmenter, se contrarier […] La Foi […] est une bonne vieille paroissienne […] La charité va malheureusement de soi. La charité marche toute seule […] pour ne pas aimer son prochain il faudrait se violenter, se torturer, se tourmenter, se contrarier. La charité est une mère et une sœur […] Mais l’espérance ne va pas de soi. L’espérance ne va pas toute seule. Pour espérer, mon enfant, il faut être bien heureux, il faut avoir obtenu, reçu une grande grâce. [Faith is obvious. Faith can walk on its own […] In order not to believe you would have to do violence to yourself, frustrate yourself. Harden yourself […] Faith […] is a nice old woman from the parish […] Unfortunately Charity is obvious. Charity can walk on its own […] not to love you would have to do violence to yourself, torture yourself, torment yourself, frustrate yourself […] Charity is a mother and a sister […] But hope is not obvious. Hope does not come on its own. To hope, my child, you would have to be quite fortunate, to have obtained, to have received a great grace.]19

    18   19   16

17

See Villiers, Péguy, p. 222, Dejond, Péguy, p. 36. OPC, p. 540; ‘But in reality it is she who moves the other two’, Portal, p. 12. OPC, p. 611; Portal, p. 80. OPC, pp. 537–8; Portal, pp. 9–10.

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Hope’s place among the virtues is thus like the place of the child among adults: easily overlooked, yet vital not only in itself but also in relationship. In the paradox of hope as a virtue ‘contre les autres’, Péguy is in fact reasserting the interdependence of the theological virtues, because it is hope that allows faith and love to remain faithful and loving: ‘Quand ils descendent elle [l’espérance] remonte et ainsi elle les double, elle les décuple, elle les agrandit à l’infini’.20 In this capacity to transform the human outlook, ‘to double, to multiply tenfold (“décupler”), to enlarge ad infinitum’, we see the future orientation of the virtue of hope. In his early adulthood Péguy had ceased to practise the Catholic faith of his youth, principally it seems because he was revolted by the notion of eternal damnation. The utopian vision of social emancipation, to which he was drawn in his secular phase, found expression in Marcel: Premier Dialogue de la cité harmonieuse, a sketch of the ideal society.21 As his thinking matured, he began to see that, for all the attraction of such utopias, their lack of grounding in the actuality of time, place and lived experience made them not only unreal but dangerously optimistic. Jean Onimus characterizes this shift in Péguy’s thought as a move from hope as optimism to hope as a virtue: ‘Péguy est passé de l’espoir à l’espérance: ces deux mots définissent sa trajectoire’.22 Yet, in recognizing this trajectory, it should be emphasized that its direction remained incarnational, directed towards rather than away from the realities of human life. Hope, for Péguy, is the key to the theological virtues because it is most evidently anchored in the dense complexity of human affairs: the least logical of the virtues, it catches, as we saw above, even God unawares. It is not natural, but neither is it idealistic or optimistic. It is against nature, but not because it denies the reality of things. Hope, like the child that figures it, sees the way things are with the world and with humanity, but is not determined by it: Et les enfants quand ils pleurent. C’est infiniment plus mieux que quand nous rions. Car ils pleurent en espérance. Et nous ne rions qu’en foi et en charité. [And children when they cry. It’s infinitely ever-better than we when we laugh. Because they cry in hope. And we laugh only in faith and in love.]23

Thus the virtue of hope holds particular importance in Péguy’s thought, because it encompasses as fully as possible the coexistence of freedom and dependence   OPC, p. 612   Villiers, Péguy, p. 87. 22   Jean Onimus, Introduction aux ‘Trois Mystères’ de Péguy (Paris: Cahiers de 20 21

l’Amitié Charles Péguy, 1962), p. 73, ‘Péguy moved from [secular[ optimism to [Christian] hope: these two words define the trajectory of his life’. 23   OPC, p. 561; Portal, p. 33.

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which he believes to be at the heart of human life, both in itself and in relation to God. Hope has an orientation to past and future alike: to what has been received through divine grace and human interaction, and to the future realities anticipated by the potentially infinite process of eschatological prolepsis. Anchored in the reality of temporal human existence, hope at the same time opens out into the eternal reality of God, making it, for Péguy, not just the linchpin of the theological virtues, but the point of intersection where chronos and kairos meet and are mutually transformed. b) Bernard-Lazare While I have argued against a sentimental reading of Péguy’s child figure, the fact that the imagined milieu of the poetry is the French countryside of the midnineteenth century can still leave an impression of nostalgia. For this reason it is important to supplement our reading of Péguy’s child with a study of the prose works. Most of the later essays have recourse at several points to the image of the child, but I have chosen to focus here on Notre Jeunesse, Péguy’s fullest reflection on the Dreyfus affair and its implications for the spiritual health of France. Here, as in all his prose works, he confronts the contemporary world and its deficiencies with a directness that his poetry lacks. In Notre Jeunesse Péguy pays homage to Bernard-Lazare, a minor French writer, whose Une erreur judiciaire: la vérité sur l’Affaire Dreyfus had in 1896 first identified the Affair as an anti-semitic fabrication rather than a simple miscarriage of justice.24 Péguy’s essay can be read in many ways. Most obviously it is an editorial reply to Daniel Halévy, with whose account of the Dreyfus Affair in an earlier edition of the Cahiers Péguy had disagreed. For Péguy the affair was not an isolated incident, but a systemic crisis in the history of Israel, France and Christianity alike.25 On another level, the essay is the confessional portrait of a friendship in the tradition of Montaigne’s famous account of his intimacy with Etienne de la Boëtie in De l’Amitié.26 Finally it is an account, to be amplified later in writings such as Un nouveau théologien, M. Fernand Laudet (1911) and L’Argent (1913), of the onset of ‘le monde moderne’, seen principally in terms of the degradation by which a mystique collapses into a politique: ‘Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique’.27 The title Notre Jeunesse is generally and correctly read as a reference to the decisive impact of the Dreyfus Affair on the lives of the young Péguy and his contemporaries, especially his collaborators on the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. At the heart of the essay, however, is the figure of Bernard-Lazare, portrayed not as a conventional hero, but as an embodiment of hope in the moral quagmire of an affair which, in Péguy’s view, often tainted the supporters of Dreyfus as much as his     26   27   24 25

Bernard-Lazare, L’Affaire Dreyfus: Une erreur judiciaire (Paris: Allia, 1998). OP, p. 535 (Prose III, p. 40). Michel de Montaigne, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 181–93. OP, p. 516 (Prose III, p. 20), ‘Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics’.

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opponents. Over the course of the essay Bernard-Lazare becomes the embodiment of ‘notre jeunesse’, assuming figurative status as the repository of a republican mystique against the depredations of a politique, to which Péguy’s earlier socialist heroes, such as Jean Jaurès, had in his opinion succumbed. As with the child figure of the poems, there is a tendency to read Péguy’s mystique/politique dichotomy as a nostalgic distinction between the purity of an idea recollected in abstraction and the compromises of its realisation. Péguy’s purpose, however, is to establish the gulf that separates the fondateurs from the profiteurs, as he puts it later in the same essay.28 The distinction between mystique and politique is not that between the ideal and the real, but is best seen as a transcription into secular terms of the relationship between virtue and sin. His statement in Notre Jeunesse that ‘notre affaire Dreyfus aura été la dernière des opérations de la mystique républicaine’29 is intended to show once again that secular and sacred are continuous and that the pursuit of politique under the guise of mystique is the hallmark of the human selfenslavement that, in theological terms, is original sin.30 That Bernard-Lazare is chosen, rather than Dreyfus himself, is to be explained by Péguy’s rather harsh judgement that Dreyfus had abandoned his own cause: by accepting a pardon, Dreyfus himself had become complicit in the politique of the affair. Bernard-Lazare, by contrast, invested his whole being in the cause of exposing the truth about the affair and the cultural conditions that had made it possible. Despite Bernard-Lazare’s frankly professed atheism, Péguy chooses to depict him in theological terms. He is a prophet, a father charged with responsibility for his children, a mouthpiece for the eternal word of God: ‘Cet athée, ce professionnellement athée, cet officiellement athée en qui retentissait, avec une force, avec une douceur incroyable, la parole éternelle’ [‘This atheist – professionally atheist, officially atheist – in whom the eternal word resounded with such incredible strength and sweetness’].31 Most significantly, however, it is with the language of childlikeness that Péguy concludes his appreciation of Bernard-Lazare’s commitment. In the midst of the affair, suffering from the illness, poverty and estrangement from his acquaintances that were the consequences of his stance, Péguy describes his ‘joie enfantine inépuisable’, how he sat alone in his bedroom, ‘heureux comme un enfant’.32 Anticipating the meditations on charity and hope he was to produce in the three Mystères of 1910–12, Péguy asks where Bernard-Lazare drew his strength and consistency from:   OP, p. 619 (Prose III, p. 124). In the terms of the poetry this is a distinction between child-like hope and adult calculation. 29   OP, p. 506 (Prose III, p. 10); ‘Our Dreyfus affair will have been the last operation of the republican mystique’. 30   Cf. OP, p. 1267 (Prose III, p. 1254). 31   OP, pp. 551, 572 (Prose III, pp. 56, 78, 77). See also Jean Onimus, Incarnation: Essai sur la pensée de Péguy (Paris: Amitié de Charles Péguy, 1952), p. 165. 32   OP, pp. 574, 576 (Prose III, pp. 80, 81); ‘his inexhaustible childlike joy’, ‘happy as a child’. 28

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Il était impossible de savoir si c’était par un miracle d’espérance (temporelle) (et peut-être plus) qu’il espérait encore ou si c’était par un miracle de charité, pour nous, qu’il faisait semblant d’espérer. Son œil même, son œil clair, d’une limpidité d’enfant, était comme un binocle […] de douceur et de bonté, de lumière et de clarté. Impénétrable. Parce qu’on y lisait comme on voulait. [It was impossible to know whether it was by a miracle of (temporal) hope (and perhaps more than that) that he still hoped, or if it was by a miracle of charity, for us, that he made as if to hope. Even his eyes, clear with the clarity of a child, were like a glass […] of sweetness and goodness, light and clarity. Impenetrable. Because one could read into them what one wished.]33

With this last sentence, Péguy both recognizes the subjectivity of his portrait and at the same time indicates how the Bernard-Lazare of Notre Jeunesse has become, for him, a living embodiment of ‘la petite espérance’ of his poetry. Identifying the basis of Bernard-Lazare’s position in his defence of common law and justice, he does so with precisely the phrase with which he was later to describe hope in Porche: ‘qui n’a l’air de rien’.34 Against the exceptions of pardons and special tribunals, he favoured only the level playing field of justice: Il était contre […] la loi d’exception, qu’elle fût pour ou contre, persécution ou grâce. Il était pour le niveau de la justice […] [il était] partisan du droit commun […] Cela n’a l’air de rien, cela peut mener loin. Cela le mena jusqu’à l’isolement dans la mort. [He was against […] emergency laws, whether they were for or against, for persecution or for mercy. He was in favour of the level field of justice […] [he was] a partisan of common rights […] It may look like nothing, but it can take you a long way. It took him to the isolation of death.]35

Incarnation Attending to Péguy’s portrait of the Jewish atheist, Bernard-Lazare, who ‘était resté gamin, d’une gaminerie invincible’,36 confirms our reading of ‘la petite espérance’ in Porche, indicating clearly that Péguy’s child is a figure intended to   OP, p. 574 (Prose III, pp. 79–80).   OPC, p. 535. The same pattern of resemblances can be seen in the portrait of Victor

33 34

Hugo in the Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle, where the poet and novelist is another figure of childlike hope; OP, pp. 311–17 (Prose III, pp. 597–602). 35   OP, p. 576 (Prose III, pp. 80, 81) (emphasis added). 36   OP, p. 566 (Prose III, 72); ‘who had remained youthful, with an invincible youthfulness’.

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emphasize active engagement with the whole of human reality. As we shall see, however, it is not in its own right, but by virtue of its participation in the incarnation of Christ, that the child has this representative role. A contrast with Rousseau is instructive here. Clearly, Péguy’s cultural context places him under the direct influence of Rousseau and his Romantic followers. Equally clear, however, are the fundamentally different theological patterns underlying the thought of Rousseau and Péguy, and the latter’s failure at any point to engage with the former can only be seen as a deliberate choice. As we saw in the fourth chapter, Rousseau retains a belief in God as protological Creator, but, for him, God as Creator is now effectively absent from an ongoing relationship with the world, and appears only at the end of the educative process as an optional addendum. Péguy, by contrast, places the incarnation at the centre of both his theology and his anthropology,37 and consequently sees God as continually and generatively involved with the activity of creation. Rather paradoxically, both authors are suspicious of the tendencies of conventional education. Rousseau describes the tutor’s relationship with the pupil as one primarily of negative education, and Péguy, apparently in the same vein, stresses the need to ‘apprendre à désapprendre’.38 The assumptions behind these statements are, however, diametrically opposed. For Rousseau, conventional education leads to conformity to the unnatural ways of society. His ideal is of the mature Émile, the autonomous individual freely determining his own path through life and his own religious commitment. Péguy, by contrast, sees just this sort of autonomy as the chief danger of conventional education. For Péguy, education characteristically leads away from God towards a false self-reliance, a petrified sense of self-determination that obscures the dependence on others and on God that is fundamental to human creatureliness. Thus, whereas Rousseau’s interest is in the child as natural, and the education of Émile is designed to preserve and enhance the qualities of naturalness that are considered innate in children, Péguy considers the child as unnatural in the sense of going against the grain of adult wisdom, but supremely creaturely in the combination of dependency with freedom. Unlike Émile, Péguy’s child is not an heroic individual, the herald and instigator of a new society and a more perfect humanity. She is one of a family, a headstrong younger sister, ‘la petite fille espérance’, who at the same time images a Christian understanding of creatureliness. The theological distinction here centres on the doctrine of original sin: for Rousseau, sin is equated with human society and the remedy lies in isolation; for Péguy, sin is part of the constitution of every human being and endemic in human society, yet equally it is overcome in Christ. One of the lexical refrains of Notre Jeunesse is the pairing of the verbs instaurer and restaurer. ‘Nous voulions instaurer, restaurer un ordre nouveau, ancien’, writes Péguy, looking back on the efforts made by him and his secular socialist contemporaries at the turn of   On incarnation as the central category of Péguy’s thought, see Onimus, Incarnation.   OPC, p. 788; ‘learn to unlearn’.

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the century.39 But, as the Pauline resonances of the verb restaurer indicate, such political efforts were always also theological (or so Péguy believes as he looks back). After his return to the faith, Péguy refused to speak of himself as a convert. He believed that his so-called ‘conversion’ was actually an approfondissement, a deepening rather than an abandonment of the social and political commitments of his young adulthood. And, above all, this approfondissement was a deepening of his sense of the all-encompassing truth of the incarnation, in which nature and grace are interwoven: Et l’arbre de la grâce et l’arbre de nature Ont lié leurs deux troncs de nœuds si solennels, Ils ont tant confondu leurs destins fraternels Que c’est la même essence et la même stature. [And the tree of grace and the tree of nature Have joined their two trunks with such solemn knots, They have so merged their brotherly destinies That they are of the same being and the same stature.]40

Whereas, for Rousseau, belief in the incarnation is simply a matter of personal choice, for Péguy, to believe in the incarnation is to trust in the creative and redemptive presence of God within and outside the boundaries of the visible Church. Not by nature an optimist, Péguy sees clearly that ‘le facile et la pente est de désespérer’,41 but wherever the mystique of the virtue of hope is found, there he finds also an instance of divine grace. Grace is that ‘ordre nouveau, ancien’ opened by Christ’s incarnation and restored in the gift of childlikeness: Car il y a dans l’enfance une grâce unique. Une entièreté, une premièreté Totale. [For in childhood there is a unique grace, A wholeness and a newness That is total.]42

To talk of ‘une grâce unique’ is of course, within the terms of Christian orthodoxy, to make a christological reference. Here again, as in his discussion of the three theological virtues, Péguy is playing with traditional theological idioms, not to undermine or deconstruct them, but to reclaim them. There is an uncontroversial, 39   OP, p. 601 (Prose III, p. 106); ‘we wished to instigate, to re-instigate an order at once new and ancient’. 40   OPC, p. 1041. 41   OPC, p. 538; ‘the easy thing and the tendency is to despair’, Portal, p. 10. 42   OPC, p. 788.

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banal sense in which children are ‘des créatures neuves’,43 but in choosing such terms, Péguy is making clear reference to the salvation, called by Saint Paul the ‘new creation’, brought about by Christ.44 The suggestion is not that children somehow repeat the incarnation, which would imply the rejection of its singular particularity and the confusion of creation with the Creator. The point, rather, is that, since the incarnation, the world has been transformed to be to humanity a theatre of sacramental signs. In Péguy’s theology the sacraments are not miniature instances of divinity in a secular world, but signs of the divine activity in a world savingly reunited with its Creator. As a consequence, children and those who resemble them are sacramental, not because they are quasi-divine but precisely because they are fully human – more human, more creaturely and thus ‘nearer’ to God than their self-reliant elders. ‘[Les enfants] viennent directement et proprement de moi’,45 says God in Innocents, but they do so as created sacraments and recipients of grace: signs of Cette naissance Perpétuelle. Cette enfance Perpétuelle. [This birth. Perpetual birth. This childhood. Perpetual childhood.]46

brought about in the incarnation of Christ and conferred anew by his unique grace. A specific instance of Péguy’s concern with the incarnation as the hidden reality at the heart of all human life is found in his interest in the childhood of Jesus. In his 1911 essay, Un nouveau théologien: M. Fernand Laudet, he launches a polemical attack on what he sees as the pseudo-scientific, narrowly historical concerns of modern academic theologians. Fernand Laudet, in himself a relatively insignificant figure, stands as a representative of the modern current in theology, with its tendency to dismiss all that does not conform to its narrow conception

  OPC, p. 789.   ‘So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away;

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see, everything has become new!’, II Corinthians 5: 17. 45   OPC, p. 789; ‘[children] come directly, properly and precisely from me’. 46   OPC, p. 551; Portal, p. 23. Despite the resemblances to Wordsworth’s phrasing in poems such as ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, the emphasis is different. As we have already seen, for Wordsworth, after Rousseau, ‘The Youth, who daily from the east / Must travel, still is Nature’s priest’ (Wordsworth, Poetical Works, p. 60). Péguy, like Traherne, sees the child through the categories of creation and sacrament, rather than hypostasized ‘Nature’.

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of rationality.47 Péguy is particularly incensed by Laudet’s dismissal of the first 30 years of Jesus’ life: ‘[Laudet] était fatalement conduit à retrancher de la vie de Jésus toute la vie privée, toute la vie obscure, toute la vie non publique de Jésus’ [‘Laudet was fatally drawn into excising from the life of Jesus all that was private, obscure and not public’].48 Whereas Laudet argues that the private life of Jesus is of no concern to us, Péguy, by contrast, criticizes the disjunction between public and private, especially in relation to the sacred wholeness of the human life of Jesus. To dismiss the private life of Jesus is not merely to omit the great events enumerated in the gospels and recalled in the liturgical year – Péguy lists, ‘la Visitation, l’Annonciation, L’INCARNATION; la Nativité; la Circoncision; la Purification de la Vierge; Jésus assis parmi les docteurs’49 – it is also to undermine the humanity of Jesus. ‘Pour nous chrétiens’, he argues, ‘le surnaturel et la sainteté, c’est cela qui est l’histoire’; ‘publier le privé, c’est le principe même, c’est la méthode ecclésiastique même’ [‘For us Christians […] the supernatural and the holy are historical’, ‘to publish what is private is the principle, the method, of the Church’].50 In Porche, published in the same year, he emphasizes that it is these private events of Jesus’ life that make him most recognizable. For all the reasonable plausibility of Laudet’s position, to excise Jesus’ childhood from our contemporary response to him is as elitist as it is docetic, because it is in the ordinariness of his childhood and early life that he lived out ‘la grâce de chaque jour’, just as his contemporary followers are called to do. The measured and meditative pace of his verse, modelled on the litanies learned by heart in his childhood, enacts the incarnational immersion of the sacred in the secular, encouraging believers to ‘aller petitement dans la petite procession des jours ordinaires’:51 Quand Jésus travaillait chez son père Tous les jours il faisait la même journée […] C’est pourtant le tissu, dans ces mêmes jours, C’est le réseau de ces mêmes journées Qui constitue, qui éternellement constitue La Vie admirable de Jésus avant sa prédication

  ‘Modern’ here has specific reference to the ‘modernism’ condemned as heretical by Pius X in 1907. Nonetheless, as we shall see in the following chapter, Péguy by no means conforms to the reactionary pattern of papal anti-modernism. On the papal decree, Lamentabili, and the encyclical, Pascendi, see Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (Yale: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 326f, Darrell Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context (Cambridge: CUP, 2000). 48   OP, p. 851–2 (Prose III, p. 403). 49   OP, p. 852 (Prose III, p. 403), Péguy’s capitals. 50   OP, p. 845 (Prose III, pp. 397, 426). 51   OPC, p. 649; ‘What matters is to go simply in the simple procession of ordinary days’, Portal, p. 117. 47

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Sa vie privée Sa vie parfaite, sa vie modèle. Celle qu’il offre en exemple, en Modèle inimitable à imiter A tout le monde, sans aucune exception, ne laissant qu’à quelques-uns A quelques rares élus (et encore c’est en outre et non pas au contraire) Les exemples de sa vie publique à imiter Les modèles inimitables de sa Prédication Et da sa Passion et de sa Mort. [When Jesus worked at his father’s shop Every day he relived the same day […] and yet this is the fabric, within these days of sameness, This is the web of the same workdays That make up, that eternally make up The admirable Life of Jesus before his preaching His private life His perfect life, his model life. The life he offers as an example, as an inimitable Model to imitate To everyone, without a single exception, only leaving to certain ones To certain rare chosen ones (and still it’s in addition and not to the contrary) The examples of his public life to imitate The inimitable models of his Preaching And of his Passion and of his Death.]52

Péguy’s quarrel with Laudet betrays many of his chief concerns, which have no particular bearing on the subject of this book, most notably his irritation with ‘le parti intellectuel’ for what he saw as their uncritical and arrogant dismissal of whole areas of faith in the name of critical rationality. But he also portrays his opponents in terms that relate directly to the theme of childlikeness. What Laudet evinces is that quality of false maturity that for Péguy is one of the hallmarks of the sin of pride. Like Leonhardt in Schleiermacher’s Weihnachtsfeier, Laudet is the negative counterpart to the child. Where the atheist Jew Bernard-Lazare embodies the virtue of childlike hope, the Christian theologian Fernand Laudet stands for the modern tendency to replace hope with a narrowly conceived adult rationality. There is, Péguy argues, in one sense, no progress in matters of faith and, whereas ‘M. Laudet a l’air de croire […] que l’homme aurait moins besoin de Dieu et de Jésus qu’au quinzième [siècle]’ [‘M. Laudet gives the impression of believing […] that modern man has less need of God and Jesus than in the fifteenth century’], Péguy believes that: ‘nous sommes aussi bêtes que saint Augustin et que saint Paul, que saint Louis et saint François, et que Jeanne d’Arc, et pourquoi ne pas le dire, que Pascal et que Corneille’ [‘We are every bit as stupid as Saint Augustine

  OPC, pp. 652–3; Portal, p. 120.

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and as Saint Paul, as Saint Louis and Saint Francis, and as Joan of Arc and, why not say it, as Pascal and Corneille’].53 Typology What Péguy in the passage just cited calls ‘bêtise’ is very close to what Saint Paul and Christian tradition after him intend by the folly of the Cross.54 But this ‘bêtise’ or folly is distinguished from mere credulity by the virtue of hope, which is what transforms it from stupidity into childlike simplicity: ‘sans l’enfant espérance la foi s’habituerait à la créance, au monde, a Dieu. Et sans l’enfant espérance la charité s’habituerait à l’amour; au pauvre; a Dieu’ [‘without the child hope faith would grow accustomed to belief, to the world, to God. And without the child hope charity would grow accustomed to love; to the poor; to God’], as he writes in the Note Conjointe.55 Thus it is childlike hope that prevents faith and love from becoming mere credulous habit. In the concluding section of this chapter we shall see how Péguy develops this insight in terms of liturgical anamnesis, focusing on the present moment as ‘le premier point non encore engagé’.56 First, however, I shall indicate the scriptural and liturgical background from which his typological portrayal of the figure of childlike hope emerges, a further instance of the ‘ordre nouveau, ancien’57 that informs all of Péguy’s thought. In Porche there are two direct references to the saying of Jesus in Matthew 18:10: ‘Voyez à ne pas mépriser un de ces petits: en effet je vous le dis, que leurs anges dans les cieux voient toujours la face de mon Père, qui est aux cieux’ [‘Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven’].58 In Innocents, however, Péguy considers directly the passage slightly earlier in Matthew’s gospel, on which Porche and Innocents alike offer an implicit commentary, where Jesus enjoins the disciples ‘to become as little children’ (18:2f.): Et appellant Jésus un petit enfant, le plaça au milieu d’eux, Et dit: En vérité je vous le dis, si vous ne convertissez point, et ne vous rendez point comme ces petits enfants, vous n’entrerez pas dans le royaume des cieux. [And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set him in the midst of them.

    55   56   57   58   53 54

OP, p. 916 (Prose III, pp. 466–7). I Corinthians, chapters 1–3. OP, p. 1351 (Prose III, p. 1329). OP, p. 1430 (Prose III, p. 1409), ‘the first point not as yet tackled’. OP, p. 601 (Prose III, p. 106), ‘the order at once new and ancient’. OPC, pp. 577, 585.

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And said: Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.]59

Here the point is to stress the radical otherness of the kingdom of heaven, which, as Péguy goes on to reiterate, requires above all the quality of innocence in those who are fit to enter it: ‘talium est enim regnum caelorum. De tels en effet est la royaume des cieux’.60 Péguy’s decision to focus on the quality of innocence in the later poem is open to misinterpretation. It can seem to advocate not only a sentimental view of children, but actually the heterodox teaching that they are naturally without sin.61 A doctrinal distinction is necessary here. Theologically, innocence has a twofold meaning. On the one hand, it is defined in contradistinction to sin: the freedom from sin that, among human beings, is unique to Christ. On the other hand, innocence is contrasted with experience as the quality of creaturely being given to everyone at birth, but rapidly lost sight of in the growth to maturity. According to the incarnational logic of the poem, Christ alone fulfils both senses, as at once the uniquely innocent one, in respect to whom all are sinful, and also the exemplary antitype of innocence in the second sense. It is on the second sense, however, that Péguy concentrates in Innocents. Just as the little girl of Porche is the figure of hope, so the Holy Innocents, the young children massacred by Herod after Jesus’ birth, are the figure for the second sense of innocence in the later poem. Together the poems form a diptych, showing how hope and innocence are effectively synonymous, yet both inevitably shadowed by the violence and violation of human sin. To illustrate his point, in Innocents in particular, Péguy has recourse to the scriptural and Patristic technique of typology.62 Conventionally, typology is understood as the interpretation of the narratives of the OT as allegorical anticipations of the story of Christ. Péguy, however, uses this technique more loosely. Following his incarnational logic, he blends the OT with the NT, and both with the liturgy and the lives of the saints, referring them all to the central principle of the incarnate Christ. The parable of the Prodigal Son is one that Péguy returns to with particular frequency, its opening refrain, ‘un homme avait deux fils’ becoming a leitmotiv both in Porche and Innocents. For our purposes, however, the later poem is especially instructive. In Innocents, the parable of the Prodigal Son is 59   OPC, p. 786 (Péguy’s italics); Péguy, The Holy Innocents and Other Poems, trans. Pansy Pakenham (London: The Harvill Press, 1956), p. 136 (hereafter Innocents). 60   OPC, p. 792; ‘of such is the kingdom of heaven’. 61   Onimus’s generally helpful discussion runs this risk. See Onimus, Incarnation, p. 162. 62   Daniélou briefly discusses Péguy’s use of typology, describing Innocents as his most patristic work, but does not indicate how typology, for Péguy, is an incarnational technique; Jean Daniélou, ‘Péguy et les Pères de l’Eglise’ in Littérature et Société: Receuil d’études en l’honneur de Bernard Guyon (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1973), pp. 173–9 (p. 176).

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linked by Péguy to the OT story of Joseph. It is introduced (somewhat elliptically for those unfamiliar with the earlier poem) with the refrain from Porche, which is then varied a few pages later: ‘un homme avait douze fils’.63 The Joseph story is seen as the Jewish ancestor that prefigures the chief parable of hope in the NT: Ainsi devant toute histoire et devant toute similitude du Nouveau Testament Marche une histoire de l’Ancien Testament qui est sa parallèle et qui est sa pareille. Un homme avait deux fils. Un homme avait douze fils. Et ainsi devant toute sœur chrétienne S’avance une sœur juive qui est sa sœur ainée et qui l’annonce et qui va devant. [So ahead of every story and every parable in the New Testament Goes a story in the Old Testament which is its parallel and likeness. A man had two sons. A man had twelve sons. And so ahead of every Christian sister Advances a Jewish sister who is her elder sister and who announces her and goes in front.]64

Péguy then proceeds to retell the story of Joseph at length, interspersing it with comments from the narrator, Mme Gervaise and from Jeanette (the heroine of Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc who, though absent from Porche, returns here), and with references to the NT. At the conclusion of this section Mme Gervaise observes that in the story of Joseph we see the first anticipations of New Testament hope: Un homme avait douze fils. Tel fut, mon enfant, Ce fut la première fois qu’un enfant s’est perdu. Ce fut la première fois qu’une brebis s’est perdu. Ce fut la première fois qu’une drachme s’est perdu. [A man had twelve sons. So it was, my child, This was the first time that a child was lost. This was the first time that a sheep was lost. This was the first time that a drachma was lost.]65

But she also draws attention to the difference between the OT and the NT, which is less an absolute dichotomy than a question of degree: ‘Dans l’ancien testament il y a toujours un regard, une pensée vers le gouvernement./Et dans le nouveau testament il y a toujours un regard, une pensée vers l’obéissance’ [‘In the Old Testament there is always a glance, a thought in the direction of government./ And in the New Testament there is always a glance, a thought in the direction of   OPC, p. 747.   OPC, p. 748; Innocents, pp. 127–8. 65   OPC, p. 776; Innocents, p. 128. 63 64

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obedience’.]66 It is as if the two testaments form an organic whole, one complete building: Ou encore l’ancien testament est cette voûte qui monte en une seule arête, En une seule nervure et le nouveau testament C’est la même voûte qui retombe, Qui redescend en toute une nappe. Et l’arête qui monte part de la terre et c’est une arête charnelle. Mais cette nappe qui redescend vient de l’esprit Et c’est une nappe spirituelle. Et l’arête et la nervure qui monte part du temps et est une temporelle arête. Mais la nappe qui redescend vient de l’éternité et c’est Une éternelle nappe Et la clef de cette mystique voûte. La clef elle-même Charnelle, spirituelle, Temporelle, éternelle, C’est Jésus, Homme, Dieu. [Or again, the Old Testament is this vault which rises in a single rib, In a single groin and the New Testament Is the same rib that returns, That descends again without interruption. And the rib that rises stems from the earth and it is a fleshly rib. But the stone that returns comes from the spirit And it is a spiritual stone. And the rib and groin that rises stems from time and it is a temporal rib. But the stone that returns comes from eternity and it is An eternal stone. And the keystone of this mystic vault, The keystone itself, Fleshly and spiritual, Temporal and eternal, Is Jesus, Man, God.]67

Here in the complex weave of ascent and descent that is conveyed through the language and syntactic rhythm, the poetry develops the imagery of John’s gospel, but it is finally in the synoptic image of Jesus as the cornerstone, ‘la clef de cette   OPC, p. 777; Innocents, p. 129.   OPC, p. 784.

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mystique voûte’, that the architectural metaphor is completed.68 Christ is pictured as the keystone (clef) uniting the stones (nappes) that ascend from earth and descend from heaven.69 This, of course, is an image illustrating Jesus’ claim that he comes not to abolish but to fulfil the law, so that OT and New Testament are united in him as are earth and heaven.70 But it is also an image that shows the coincidence of apparent opposites in the incarnation of Christ. In Mme Gervaise’s terms, the OT preoccupation with gouvernement is an adult perspective, whilst the New Testament concern with obéissance shows the outlook of a child, but they are united in the person of Jesus, whose whole life points ‘vers la simple condition d’homme’.71 This vivid image of ecclesiastical architecture stems from Péguy’s sense of unbroken continuity with his peasant ancestors, the French stonemasons of the Middle Ages, who, though unlettered, understood the faith and were able to bridge the gap between the scriptures and the lived reality of the present.72 But, for Péguy, brought up in the traditions of rural French Catholicism, this was a gap that was crossed supremely in the liturgy. For him the liturgy was neither a sacred nor a secular phenomenon, but a means of revealing the inseparability of the two spheres. In his 1913 essay, L’Argent, Péguy evokes the manifold forms in which the liturgy influenced the pattern of life in the country. Criticizing what he sees as the infection of capitalism, which has banished the notion of the ‘juste prix’, he contrasts with it the older ways, when there was a conception of the ‘piété de l’ouvrage bien faite’.73 This, he believes, was the same piety that contributed to the making of the great mediaeval cathedrals, which, as we have seen, are themselves images of the incarnation. The skill with which the chairs in the households of his youth were repaired displayed the same piety which constructed Notre Dame de Chartres. And the connection between the two was the liturgy, which determined the rhythm of life, almost as it would do in a monastery: ‘Tout était un rythme et un rite et une cérémonie depuis le petit lever. Tout était un événement; sacré’ [‘From 68   John 3: 13, 3: 31, 6: 50; Matthew 21: 42 and parallels. See also the slightly different reading in Julie Higaki, Péguy et Pascal: les Trois Ordres at l’ordre du cœur (Clermont Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2005), pp. 268–76. 69   Cf. Frédéric Sarter, ‘Péguy bâtisseur’ in Romain Vaissermann (ed.), Péguy, l’ecrivain et le politique (Paris: Editions d’Ulm, 2004), pp. 77–91 (p. 79): ‘l’architecture est une image qui permet de dire l’homme et le rapport de l’homme à Dieu’, ‘architecture is an image allowing one to speak both of humanity and of the relationship between humanity and God’. 70   Matthew 5: 17. 71   OPC, p. 777, ‘towards the simple condition of the human being’. 72   ‘Les maçons et les vitriers de Notre-Dame, qui sont mes grands-pères directs, n’étaient point docteurs et Pères de l’Eglise’, ‘The stonemasons and glaziers of Notre Dame, who are my direct grandparents, were not doctors and Fathers of the Church’, Péguy, Lettres et Entretiens (Paris: Editions de Paris, 1954), p. 121. 73   OP, p. 1050 (Prose III, p. 790), ‘The piety of the work done well’.

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breakfast onwards, everything was a rhythm and a rite and a ceremony. Everything was an event and sacred’].74 Children were incorporated into this liturgical pattern both in the processions that he frequently alludes to, and in their learning of the catechism, which he sees as the grammar of their faith.75 Despite the clear separation of religious and secular education in the French republic,76 he believes that, above all in rural areas, ‘ce que les curés disaient, au fond les instituteurs le disaient aussi’.77 The sacred and secular realms were, despite appearances, united, and the children saw no contradiction between the lessons provided by the schoolmaster and the catechism taught by the priest: ‘nous les aimions du même cœur, et c’était d’un cœur d’enfant’.78 This refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of a polarization of sacred and secular is the recurrent theme of Péguy’s later thought,79 and it is perhaps as a result of what he saw as the enforcement of such a false distinction in the educational reforms of 1882 that he identifies 1880 as the dawn of the modern era in France. In his view, life in l’ancienne France was sacramental and therefore at once secular and sacred, just as the incarnation is. The 1910 essay, Victor-Marie, comte Hugo, is especially pertinent here. Discussing Victor Hugo’s poem, ‘Booz endormi’, he acclaims it as a unique instance of a pagan treatment of the incarnation: ‘le seul témoignage païen que nous ayons de cette opération essentiellement, centralement chrétienne’ [‘The only pagan testimony that we have to this operation that is essential, central, to Christianity’].80 The reason he finds this so important is because he believes that Christians inevitably tend to view the incarnation from the divine side. Christians see the incarnation as ‘une histoire qui est arrivée à Jésus’, but what is needed is a greater appreciation that it is also ‘une histoire arrivée à la terre, d’avoir enfanté Dieu’.81 The incarnation emerges from Péguy’s interpretation of Hugo’s poem as an event in the story of humanity as well as an event within the ‘story’ of God, once again emphasizing the continuity between creation and redemption, and the incarnation’s axial location in the history of God and humankind. 74   OP, p. 1052 (Prose III, p. 792). This is the rhythm that is constantly evoked in his poetry, as also in much of his later prose. 75   OP, p. 1064 (Prose III, p. 805). 76   Discussed more fully in the following chapter. 77   OP, p. 1070 (Prose III, p. 810); ‘What the parish priests said was at root the same as what the schoolteachers said’. 78   OP, p. 1064 (Prose III, p. 805); ‘we loved them with the same heart and it was the heart of a child’. 79   Expressed differently it is found, for instance, in his posthumously published essay, Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle (OP, pp. 309–458; Prose III, pp. 594–783), as ‘l’infini mouvement vers le siècle’. See Dejond, Péguy, p. 111. 80   OP, p. 750 (Prose III, p. 255). 81   OP, p. 730 (Prose III, p. 235); ‘a story that has happened to Jesus’; ‘a story that has happened to the earth, to have given birth to God’.

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Paired with Hugo’s ‘Booz endormi’ is the other work of French literature which Péguy most consistently praises, the seventeenth-century dramatist Pierre Corneille’s play, Polyeucte. Polyeucte is, for Péguy, the supreme achievement of French drama. Whereas ‘Booz endormi’ is the triumphant literary evocation of the incarnation in pagan terms, Corneille’s play is its supreme literary realization in a Christian context. This, he argues, is because it successfully transfers the heroic virtue characteristic of pagan tragedy from the temporal to the spiritual plane. Quoting the couplet ‘Si mourir pour son prince est un illustre sort,/Quand on meurt pour son Dieu, quelle sera la mort?’ [‘If dying for one’s prince brings one an illustrious fate,/Then, dying for one’s God, what power has death’s weight?’], he sees the play as an exploration of the embodied nature of Christian sanctity, in which the realms of the temporal and the eternal, of nature and grace coincide: [En Polyeucte ce n’est] point un surnaturel antinaturel ni surtout extranaturel, (ce qui est le grand danger), mais un surnaturel naturel et supernaturel, littéralement surnaturel; y représentant en achèvement, en couronnement non point un héroïsme éternel […] en l’air, (ce qui est l’immense danger), mais […] un héroïsme de sainteté qui monte de la terre mais qui n’est point préalablement déraciné de la terre; qui n’est point préalablement lavé de l’eau stérilisée […] Cette insertion, cette articulation de l’éternel dans le temporel, du spirituel dans le charnel, du saint dans le héros. [In Polyeucte it is not] a supernatural that is opposed to nature or external to nature (which is the great danger), but a natural supernatural, that is literally super- natural; representing nature as its culmination, its crowning. Not an eternal heroism […] suspended in the air (which is the immense danger), but […] a saintly heroism that arises out of the earth, yet is not detached from the earth; which is not first washed with sterilized water […] That insertion, that articulation of eternity in time, of the spiritual in the fleshly, of the saint in the hero.]82

Once again, the theological focus remains resolutely incarnational. Anticipating themes that, later in the century, were to characterize the work of the nouvelle théologie, he insists on the involvement of the supernatural as a true involvement in and not above human nature.83 Salvation is not bestowed by fiat, but is worked out in human flesh by the incarnation of Christ. This insight into the interpenetration of nature and grace underlies and unifies Péguy’s whole incarnational theology, and it is in the figure of the child that it is   OP, pp. 719–20 (Prose III, p. 224).   None of the writers of this movement wrote at length about Péguy, though Lubac’s

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works contain numerous references and Daniélou wrote three brief articles on him (see bibliography). It is only with the work of Balthasar (discussed more fully in the next chapter) that the indebtedness of the nouvelle théologie to Péguy is made explicit.

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best seen at work. It is significant that the child in the Corpus Christi procession in Porche first appears before the sacrament, and is then described as skipping around it like a little dog. The child’s status is ambivalent here. In secular terms she takes precedence over the sacrament by coming before it, though in ecclesiastical terms she might be seen as simply acting as the herald preparing the way for the Lord. But as she irreverently dances around the sacrament, her playfulness embodies the free dependency of childlikeness, which Péguy believes to be the characteristic of the kingdom of which the sacrament is the foretaste. And, without being a direct mediation of divine freedom from sin, the child in its innocence is a sacramental figure of the human openness to the transformation of divine grace made possible by the incarnation. Conclusion In this chapter we have traced the pattern of Péguy’s thinking about the child. Far from being an idealized and sentimental character, we have seen how the child acts as a figural focus for the virtue of hope that is central to Péguy’s theological anthropology. The many different forms in which the child and the theme of childlikeness are addressed are united by the underlying doctrinal affirmation of the incarnation. For Péguy the incarnation is the blessing of creation, whereby the disrupted relationship between God and humanity is restored, but it is as much a present reality as a past event: L’incarnation n’est qu’un cas culminant, plus qu’éminent, suprême, un cas limite, un suprême ramassement en un point de cette perpétuelle inscription, de cette (toute) mystérieuse insertion de l’éternel dans le temporel, du spirituel dans le charnel qui est le gond, qui est cardinale, qui est, qui fait l’articulation même, le coude et le genou de toute création du monde et de l’homme, j’entends de ce monde, le coude et le genou, l’articulation de toute créature, (de toute créature humaine, matérielle, de toute créature de ce monde), le coude, le genou, l’articulation de tout homme, le coude, le genou, l’articulation de Jésus, le coude, le genou, l’articulation de l’organisation de toute vie, de toute vie humaine, de toute vie matérielle, de toute vie de ce monde […] [T]oute sanctification qui est grossièrement abstraite de la chair est une opération sans interêt. Mais et homo factus est. [The incarnation is only the culminating instance, super-eminent, supreme, a limit case, a supreme drawing-together in one point of this perpetual inscription, this (wholly) mysterious insertion of eternity in time, of the spiritual in the fleshly which is the hinge, the cardinal point; which is, which makes, the very articulation, the elbow and the knee of the creation of the world and of humanity; by which I mean that it is of this world, the elbow, the knee, the articulation of every creature (of every human creature, every material being and creature

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of this world); the elbow, the knee, the articulation of the ordering of all life, of every human life, of every material being, of every life in this world […] Any form of sanctification that is abstracted from the flesh is an operation of no interest at all. But he was made man.]84

The insistent repetitions of this passage are just one instance of the constant emphasis Péguy places on the everyday nature of the human encounter with the incarnate Christ: for him it is the realm of abstraction that is vulgar (grossier) and the reality of fleshly embodiment (‘le coude, le genou’) that is of paramount interest. The next chapter will explore further this emphasis on the incarnation as a reality present at the heart of human life, referring particularly to the thought of Henri Bergson. In concluding this chapter, though, I wish to demonstrate the centrality of the liturgical category of anamnesis to a proper understanding of the child whom Péguy portrays. For Péguy, in the Note conjointe, the present moment is ‘le premier point non encore engagé’,85 but, lest this be seen as a truism, a little earlier in the same essay he has redefined the human relationship to the present, not as passive reception but as active participation. The key phrase is ‘le ministère du présent’. After an extended series of reflections on the scriptures, the lives of the saints, and the liturgy by which they are mediated, he writes: Le ministère du présent n’est pas seulement un ministère de date. Il n’est pas seulement un ministère chronologique. Le présent est un certain point d’une nature propre. Il est un point de nature et un point de pensée. Le ministère du présent n’est pas seulement de regarder passer. Il est de faire passer. Le ministère du présent n’est pas seulement de regarder vieillir. Il est de faire vieillir. Il n’est pas seulement le spectateur, qui regarde passer le temps. Il est le centre et l’agent même et le point de passée du temps. Le point de passage et déjà en même temps le point de passée. [The ministry of the present is not just a ministry of dates. It is not just a chronological ministry. The present is a certain point with a particular nature. It is a point of nature and a point of thought. The ministry of the present is not just to watch things pass by. It is to make them pass by. The ministry of the present is not just to watch things grow old. It is to make them grow old. It is not just the spectator who watches time pass by. It is the centre and the very agent and the

  OP, pp. 729–30 (Prose III, p. 234).   OP, p. 1430 (Prose III, p. 1409); ‘the first point not yet engaged with’.

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point of the passage of time. The point of passing and at the same time the point of what has passed.]86

As used by Péguy here, the noun ‘ministère’ implies both a ministry in general and its personification in the particular human being who carries it out, becoming ‘le centre et l’agent même et le point de passée du temps’. The context of this passage implies the incarnate Christ as the supreme embodiment of the ‘ministère du présent’, but also that a whole host of other characters from the scriptures and the history of the Church – from Moses to Mary at the annunciation, to Joan of Arc or Bernard-Lazare – have shared in this ministry. Participating in the grace of Christ, their active involvement in the present moment (faire passer […] faire vieillir) anticipates, realizes or renews his incarnation in a sacramental process of mediation. Though the word is not used, this process is well expressed by the term anamnesis. Theologically, anamnesis normally refers to the Eucharistic action by which Christ’s passion, death, resurrection and exaltation are called to mind. In Catholic theology this is not merely an act of recollection, but a response to Christ’s command, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’87 that makes present in the Eucharistic assembly the salvation effected once and for all. Péguy, however, employs the sacramental tension of anamnesis, in which an action in the present becomes the vehicle by which eternity is mediated to time, as the essence of his understanding of the incarnation. Precisely because he believes Christ to have come once and for all, he believes also that the ‘ministère du présent’ is the vocation of all human beings. As Jean Daniélou observes, Péguy’s theology is not a ‘théologie savante’.88 Rather than being the fruit of academic study, rigorously and systemically deployed, its sources are in the architecture of the cathedrals, in the catechism, the lectionary and above all in the liturgy, which, adopting a phrase of Georges Sorel, he sees as ‘la théologie détendue’.89 And it is the liturgical process of anamnesis, experienced in his youth and appreciated with ever greater depth after his return to the faith, that Péguy holds to be vital to the appropriation of the incarnation in the present moment. Commenting on his understanding of sainthood, Joy Humes writes that, for Péguy, a ‘saint is first of all a human being, attached to a certain time and place – his present’.90 But, as the passage cited above indicates, this attachment to the present is the vocation of all human beings. Paradoxically, the call to childlike hope is also a call to ‘vieillir’, to grow old by immersion in the reality of the present, which is also the reality of the incarnation. Thus Bernard-Lazare, who in Péguy’s eyes invested his whole being in the cause     88   89   90   86 87

OP, p. 1428 (Prose III, p. 1408). Luke 22: 19, I Corinthians 11: 24, 25. Daniélou, ‘Péguy et les Pères’, p. 176. Prose III, p. 1221; perhaps best translated as ‘dressed-down theology’. Humes, Two Against Time, p. 151.

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of proving Dreyfus’s innocence, growing old and ill in the process, is as much an embodiment of childlike hope as ‘la petite espérance’ of the poetry. The high pitch of Péguy’s response to Jesus’ command to ‘become as little children’ is reached just before his explicit quotation of Matthew 18: 2 in Innocents. Stretching the words of Jesus slightly, by under-emphasizing the ‘comme’ in ‘comme ces petits enfants’, Péguy writes: Mon fils le leur a assez dit […] Heureux non pas même, non pas seulement celui Qui serait comme un enfant, qui resterait comme un enfant. Mais proprement heureux celui qui est (un) enfant, qui reste un enfant. Proprement, précisement l’enfant qu’il a été. Puisque justement il a été donné à tout homme D’être […] Puisqu’il a été donné à tout homme cette bénédiction. Cette grâce unique. [My Son said it to them often enough […] Happy, not even, not only he Who is like a child, who remains like a child. But truly happy is the man who is a child, who remains a child, Strictly, precisely the child that he himself was. Because truly it has been granted to every man To be [… ] Because every man has been granted that benediction, That unique grace.]91

It might be thought that Péguy here risks reinstating the kind of stasis he generally associates with adulthood. To remain a child, rather than to become like a child, seems to remove the dynamism of the analogy in favour of the attempt to preserve identity with a past state. The point that Péguy seems to be reaching for, however, is the need to recognize the blessing of childlike hope in the fleeting vulnerability of the present moment.92 ‘Cette grâce unique’ is at once the uniqueness of Christ, into which the Christian is incorporated at baptism, but also (importantly for Péguy whose own sons were not baptized until after his death) the grace of Christ’s incarnation, by which he believes God’s blessing has been offered to all humankind. The kingdom of heaven, which this section of Innocents proceeds to explore, though not fully known until the eternal present of heaven, is to be found now only in the present moment, hence the placing of the present tense of the   OPC, pp. 785–6; Innocents, pp. 135–6.   Here Péguy avoids the implication, criticized in Schleiermacher in the previous

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chapter, that childlike perfection is an achieved state. For Péguy, childlikeness anticipates, fleetingly but no less really, a state that will be grasped only in heaven.

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verbs ‘être’ and ‘rester’ at the heart of the passage just cited: ‘proprement heureux celui qui est (un) enfant, qui reste un enfant’. In the following chapter I shall discuss more fully the theological context of this incarnational world-view, but here it suffices to note the return of theology to the very heart of the presentation of the child. In Rousseau the child is clearly treated, in detachment from ongoing theological considerations, as a figure of nature. For Schleiermacher, despite his consciously incarnational focus, the child is predominantly illustrative of human perfection, facilitated through the human response to God’s grace, but in Die Weihnachtsfeier valued principally in immanent anthropological terms. Here, however, rather as in Traherne though with different emphases, the child is once more figured theologically. The statement of Péguy’s with which this chapter opened – ‘Tout est joué avant douze ans’ – has sometimes been taken to herald a nostalgic lament for childhood: hope shadowed by loss.93 There is undeniably a sentimental tinge to some of Péguy’s writing, but the predominant theological themes are ones of hope not nostalgia, of humankind made new in the incarnation of Christ. This can be seen clearly in the contrast between ‘la petite espérance’ and Schleiermacher’s Sofie. Sofie, though hardly a fully realized personality, is much more identifiable as a character than Péguy’s little girl hope. However, despite her apparently greater specificity, she is also something of a blank screen onto which the adults around her project their own images. Péguy, by contrast, clearly establishes ‘la petite espérance’ as an image rather than an individual, using her as the prototype from which the numerous other images of childlikeness flow. Far from being idealized, she informs each of the widely varying instances of childlikeness in Péguy’s work, from the picture of ‘un chien maltraité, qui revient toujours’ in Porche,94 to the Old Testament story of Joseph in Innocents, and the dramas of Corneille in Victor-Marie, comte Hugo and Bernard-Lazare in Notre Jeunesse. As a figure of hope, the child and those who resemble her illuminate by anamnesis the renewed relationship between God and the created world brought about by the incarnation.

  Onimus, Incarnation, p. 178.   OPC, p. 626; ‘a mistreated dog that constantly comes back’, p. 747.

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Chapter 8

‘L’Éternel dans le temporel’: The Child as Icon of Hope Introduction Of Péguy’s contemporaries, perhaps the most perceptive commentator on his work was the novelist André Gide. Though he did not share Péguy’s faith, Gide saw clearly the anamnetic quality of Péguy’s prose and poetry alike. Anamnesis (making present) is, as the previous chapter sought to show, at the heart of Christian faith and practice, and it is this quality that Gide clearly discerned: ‘Représenter c’est bien le mot; […] Péguy n’explique rien; il re-présente; c’est à dire, il remet au présent ce passé. Nul archaïsme’ [‘Re-presentation is precisely the word; […] Péguy explains nothing; he re-presents; that is to say, he relocates the past in the present. There is no trace of archaism’].1 Gide’s comments here are made with specific reference to the sanctity of l’ancienne France as portrayed in Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc. What Gide does not develop, however, is the sense in which Péguy’s writing as a whole is an anamnetic performance, unveiling the centrality of the incarnation not simply as a historical datum, but as a gift continually repeated sacramentally in the present. Perhaps because of his Protestant inheritance, Gide tends to see ‘re-présentation’ principally in terms of the re-enactment of the past in the present. For Péguy, by contrast, in the light of Christ’s incarnation, anamnesis expresses the heart of the Christian life.2 This is the gift of the ‘ministère du présent’, discussed in the previous chapter, the incarnation as ‘le centre et l’agent même et le point de passée du temps’,3 in which the child, ‘la petite espérance’, plays an exemplary role. In this chapter my purpose is to develop this association of the child with the incarnation by exploring the broader theological and cultural context in which Péguy’s child figure is situated and to show how, as the focal point of his theological anthropology, she acts as an icon of the whole human relationship with the triune God. I begin by examining the ‘Modernist’ controversy that dominated French Catholic theology at this time: in this period childlike innocence was a   Gide, ‘Journal sans dates’, Nouvelle Revue Française III, 1 (March, 1910), pp. 399–410 (p. 402). 2   Péguy does not use the word, but the verbs by which he most frequently characterizes his work are, in his usage, thoroughly anamnetic: approfondissement, jaillissement, resurgement. 3   OP, p. 1428 (Prose III, p. 1408). 1

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virtue championed by the anti-Modernist party against the scientific-intellectual emphases of the ‘Modernists’. Péguy, however, cannot be identified with either side in the controversy. He believed himself to be, like his friend and ally Henri Bergson, fighting a battle on two fronts. By tracing the place of the child in Péguy’s response to current ecclesiastical politics and contemporary philosophy, I show that it is misleading to associate his child figure with the taint of sentimentality and nostalgia. For Péguy, children and those who resemble them are particular instances of his theological and poetic category of resurgement, manifesting the calling of all creation, renewed and redeemed in the incarnation of Christ. Péguy wrote neither as a trained theologian nor for a theologically educated audience, and he frequently betrayed his disdain for the ‘parti intellectuel’. Yet, for all that he loved to ‘jouer au paysan de la Loire’,4 his influence on subsequent French thought has been considerable, if also controversial. He was one of the most important influences on the school of thought characterized by its opponents as la nouvelle théologie, being one of the rare figures of the previous generation who was able to assist its quest for ressourcement, the return to the springs of Catholic tradition. Recalling the early gatherings of those in his circle in the 1940s, Henri de Lubac wrote that ‘Péguy présidait à nos réunions, chaque conférence le citait’5 and Jean Daniélou saw him as a living representative of the Patristic era so prized by the ressourcement theologians: ‘c’est [Péguy] qui est en notre temps le vrai continuateur des Pères de l’Eglise’.6 What seems especially to have appealed to these thinkers is his insight into the continuity between creation and redemption, nature and grace; that (in the words of Lubac) ‘there is a genuine parallelism between that first gift of creation, and the second, wholly distinct, wholly super-eminent gift – the ontological call to deification which will make of man, if he responds to it, a “new creature”’.7 That Péguy’s influence is not restricted to the discipline of theology is demonstrated by the important place he holds in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Péguy is the first author cited in Deleuze’s key work, Difference and Repetition, as the writer who most fully opens up language from within, revealing its inexhaustible excess: Péguy’s technique […] forms a before-language, an auroral language in which the step-by-step creation of an internal space within words proceeds by tiny differences […] [it] substitute[s] a positive repetition, one which flows from the

  Daniélou, ‘Péguy et les Pères’, p. 174, ‘playing the part of a Loire valley peasant’.   Henri de Lubac, La Politique de la Mystique: Hommage à Mgr Maxime Charles

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(Limoges: Criterion, 1984), p. 13, ‘Péguy was the presiding genius at our gatherings, he was quoted at every conference’. 6   Daniélou, ‘Péguy et les Pères’, p. 179, ‘it is Péguy who, in our day, is the true inheritor of the Church fathers’; see also Daniélou, ‘Le people chrétien selon Péguy’, Études, September, 1965, pp. 175–86. 7   Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967), p. 98.

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excess of a linguistic and stylistic Idea, for a repetition by default which results from the inadequacy of nominal concepts or verbal representations.8

Though he does not cite him, Deleuze here is in fact glossing the comment made on his own work by Péguy in a review, published anonymously in 1914, of his poem, Ève. There Péguy identified resurgement as the characteristic quality of his work, explaining: Nous désignons par ce néologisme le jaillissement de création propre à Péguy. C’est ce que les critiques actuels appellent, on ne peut plus improprement, répétition. En fait – et pour qui sait lire – il n’y a pas une seule répétition dans l’œuvre du maître. [By this neologism we intend the upsurge of creation that is Péguy’s own insight. This is the quality that today’s critics – and they could not be more wrong – call repetition. In fact – and for anyone who knows how to read – there is not a single repetition in the master’s œuvre.]9

For Deleuze as a philosopher, Péguy’s insights into the creative power of repetition are finally undermined by his Christian faith, which brings an inadmissible teleological stasis: ‘faith invites us to discover once and for all God and the self in a common resurrection […] overcoming the speculative death of God and healing the wound in the self’.10 Yet, seen in Péguy’s own theological terms, it is precisely this ‘jaillissement de création’ that prevents the processes of difference and repetition from arriving at final resolution. The theological importance of resurgement will be explored in the concluding section of this chapter. Péguy’s child is not, as may be the case with Schleiermacher’s Sofie, identified as quasi-divine in her own right; nor is she, against Deleuze’s critique, the hallmark of some ‘once and for all’ resolution of God and the self. Rather, as ‘créatures neuves’, children are particular instances of Péguy’s category of resurgement, manifesting that ‘premièreté/Totale’ of creation, renewed and redeemed in the incarnation of Christ.11 Before making this argument, however, it is vital to examine some of the cultural and theological background to Péguy’s ‘petite espérance’. His depiction of the child did not arise from nowhere. Inevitably it was conditioned by the ‘social imaginaries’ of its time, yet it also broke new ground beyond their constrictions. To shed light on this context, first I shall briefly sketch the so-called ‘Modernist’ crisis which engulfed the Roman Catholic Church in France at the turn of the century. As we shall see, the terms in which this crisis has been understood have often been inadequate to its   Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 25.   OPC, p. 1573. 10   Deleuze, Difference, p. 118. 11   OPC, p. 788. 8 9

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complexity, not least in the case of Péguy, who eludes unproblematic classification on either side of the debate. In the crisis a certain (anti-‘Modernist’) valuation and (‘Modernist’) devaluation of the child is clearly identifiable, against both of which Péguy’s own approach is distinctive. From this more generalized picture of the cultural context I shall then turn to a closer examination of the particular influence on Péguy of Henri Bergson. It would be wrong to regard ‘Bergsonism’ as the philosophical apparatus underlying all of Péguy’s thought, but among his contemporaries Bergson’s influence was undoubtedly the most significant and lasting. Lastly I shall look at the afterlife of Péguy’s writing in Catholic thought. Particularly in the increasingly secular context of French culture, Péguy, as representative of the Church in partibus infidelium, has helped illuminate the ways in which the boundaries between sacred and secular are called into question by the incarnation of Christ.12 In dialogue with Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Trinitarian reading of Péguy’s theology of incarnation, we shall see how the child can be read iconically, not as divine per se, but as re-presenting the grace of the incarnation and proleptically indicating the way of salvation it has opened. ‘Modernism’ and ‘Anti-modernism’ To have studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the 1890s was, in Péguy’s view, to have been overwhelmed by a spirit of barren Kantian rationality.13 This reigning scientism was, at least in part, the consequence of the German victory in 1870, which had seemed to lay bare the technological deficiencies of French education and society.14 Successive reforms to the education system sought to close the perceived gap between France and Prussia, by shifting the balance away from the humanities to the sciences. The pace of these changes should not be exaggerated. 12   In this context the pattern of his relationship with Jacques Maritain is particularly informative. Initially their friendship was close, but after Péguy’s conversion to Catholicism Maritain was unable to tolerate what he felt to be Péguy’s stubborn refusal to move beyond the threshold of the Church: ‘Vous êtes resté lamentablement au dehors’ (Letter of 2 February 1910, cited in Jean-Luc Barré, Jacques et Raïssa Maritain: Les Mendiants du Ciel (Paris: Stock, 1995), p. 129). For personal as well as doctrinal reasons, Péguy believed the threshold to be the place where he could best pursue his Christian vocation in critical solidarity with Church and world. 13   In his early writing, Péguy had been an advocate of Kantianism against Catholicism; Prose I, p. 34. After his return to faith, though in a minority, Péguy was not alone in resenting the continuing dominance of Kant, above all at the Sorbonne; see François Azouvi, La Gloire de Bergson: Essai sur le magistère philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), pp. 31–4. A decade earlier, Maurice Blondel had made the same criticism; see Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. xviii. 14   Villiers, Péguy, p. 6, Philippe Grosos, Péguy Philosophe (Chatou: La Transparence, 2005), p. 42; Azouvi, Bergson, pp. 117–8.

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It was not until 1902 that the scientific path to the school-leaving baccalauréat was given equal status with the traditional general humanist education,15 but, for Péguy at least, they were ‘un signe de barbarie’.16 One of the major consequences of these reforms was a rapid shift in power away from the Church to the state, a shift not unlike that brought about by the earlier Kulturkampf in Prussia, which had restricted the influence of the Church on national life. From 1879 anti-clericals were in a majority both in the Senate and in the Chamber of Deputies and frequent legislation put the Church and the government at loggerheads.17 In the sphere of education this process culminated in the lois Ferry of 1881 and 1882, which made education free and compulsory, but also forbade all forms of religious instruction in state schools. The effect of these measures, combined with the expulsion of the Jesuit order, which ran many schools, was to promote a fevered atmosphere of conflict between the secular ‘laicist’ party and the Church, ‘one side fearing that church schools were not forming children in loyalty to the Republic while the other side regarded state schools as seedbeds of atheism’.18 It was against this background that the ‘Modernist’ controversy in France unfolded. ‘Modernism’ cannot be seen as a single school of thought. It arose independently in several European countries and the term itself gained currency only with the promulgation of the 1907 papal encyclical Pascendi, which gave retrospective shape to the movement even as it condemned it.19 Perhaps the most helpful schematization of the movement is that proposed by Alexander Dru.20 Focusing specifically on the French context, Dru divides the crisis into two consecutive periods. The first from 1902 to 1907 was dominated by reaction to the perceived ‘Modernist’ agenda and was effectively brought to a close by the encyclical Pascendi and the associated decree, Lamentabili, of the same year. In the second ‘Veterist’ phase from 1907 to 1926, the reactionary agenda appeared to have been given official sanction, until its excesses were eventually also condemned by Pius XI’s intervention against the right-wing Action Française movement. Dru traces the roots of the controversy back to the two strands in French Catholic thought represented by the conflict between Fénelon and Bossuet in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This dispute fed, in the nineteenth century, into that between the liberals (Acton, Montalembert) and the Ultramontane party 15   Robert Anderson, ‘Education’ in Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Literature in French (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 271–3 (p. 272). 16   Marcel Péguy, Le Destin de Charles Péguy (Paris: Perrin, 1946), p. 52, ‘a mark of barbarism’. 17   Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 308. 18   Fergus Kerr, ‘French Theology: Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac’ in David Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 105–17 (p. 105). 19   Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity, p. 11. 20   Alexander Dru, ‘Introduction: Historical and Biographical’ in Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1994), pp. 13–79.

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(Veuillot), which then developed, in the particularly conflictual context of turn-ofthe-century France, into the two positions Dru characterizes as ‘Modernist’ and ‘Veterist’. In many ways these two positions are a dialectical pairing: the first advocating a critical reading of the scriptures in the light of German scholarship, a rejection of the dominance of scholastic Thomism in Catholic intellectual life, and a focus on history as a pattern of progressive enlightenment; the second tending to reject each of these things. But it is also important to recognize that as the controversy progressed, so its focus tended to shift from the abstract to the practical, ‘down to the level of politics and social questions’.21 Thus the two phases of the controversy, each brought to an abrupt end by papal decree, focused on different spheres. In the ‘Modernist’ phase from 1902 to 1907 (Pius X’s encyclical), intellectual, educational and ecclesiastical questions were to the fore, whilst in the ‘Veterist’ phase from 1907 to 1926 (Pius XI’s condemnation), the predominant focus was on politics, notably the reassertion of a right-wing Royalist Catholicism associated with the Action Française movement of Charles Maurras. As recent scholarship has made clear, in this constantly shifting battle it is no simple matter to identify the personalities, let alone the agenda, associated with what the papal statements tend to treat as two clearly identifiable movements.22 This is particularly true in the case of Péguy. At first sight his condemnation of ‘le monde moderne’ has much in common with the reactionary tone of both the encyclical Pascendi and the rhetoric of L’Action Française. Yet he was an outspoken critic of Maurras, the dominant figure in L’Action Française, and, for all that he deplored the dominance of intellectualism, his criticism of hidebound scholasticism was every bit as sharp as that of the ‘Modernists’. To understand the distinctiveness of Péguy’s position in his intellectual and socio-political context, it is important to recognize how he stood apart from its categories: a lifelong Socialist who believed that his return to the Catholic faith was a deepening, not a conversion, of his politics; a man who devoted his life to writing, printing and publishing, yet saw himself as continuing the legacy of his illiterate peasant ancestors; an outspoken critic of fanaticism both Catholic and secular, yet whose own passion for his cause exceeded that of his opponents. In almost all the chief controversies of his time, Péguy saw himself fighting on two fronts. His stance in the Dreyfus affair, discussed in the previous chapter, is typical: outraged both by the beliefs and actions of the anti-Dreyfusards and by what he felt to be the subsequent complicity of Captain Dreyfus himself with those who had defamed him. These twofold campaigns often left Péguy personally isolated and open to the accusation of wilful inconsistency.23   Dru, ‘Introduction’, p. 25.   Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity, p. 15. 23   Most of his close intellectual alliances, with the exception of that with Henri 21 22

Bergson, ended through intense disagreement. Most notable in this context is Georges Sorel, a close collaborator from 1898 to 1912, with whom Péguy broke after Sorel’s alignment with anti-Semitic nationalism of Charles Maurras became increasingly pronounced. See

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The internal rationale of Péguy’s position was founded, however, on what was for him the firm theological ground of the incarnation. As we have seen, this is a constant theme of his later thought, but in relation to the ‘Modernist’ crisis it emerges most clearly in the posthumously published manuscript known as Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle (also known as Véronique and Clio I), on which he was working between 1909 and 1912. The central part of this essay can helpfully be seen as Péguy’s reflection on the controversies of ‘Modernism’ and ‘Veterism’ and his response, typically, is to call a plague on both houses: Nous naviguons constamment entre deux curés […]; les curés laïques, qui nient l’éternel du temporal, qui veulent défaire, démonter l’éternel du temporel, de dedans le temporal; et les curés ecclésiastiques qui nient le temporel de l’éternel, qui veulent défaire, démonter le temporel de l’éternel, de dedans l’éternel. Ainsi les uns et les autres ne sont point chrétiens, puisque la technique même du christianisme […] c’est un engagement […] du temporel dans l’éternel […] et de l’éternel dans le temporel. [We are constantly navigating between two types of ‘clergy’ […]; the lay ‘clergy’, who deny what is eternal in the temporal who want to undo, to dethrone, the eternal from the temporal, from within the temporal and the ecclesiastical clergy who deny what is temporal in the eternal, who want to undo, to dethrone, the temporal from the eternal, from within the eternal. In this way neither the first nor the second are Christian at all, because the very method of Christianity […] is an engagement of the temporal in the eternal […] and of the eternal in the temporal.]24

Péguy’s judgement on both of these ‘bandes de curés’ was harsh, but, on balance, it was the latter group whose influence he regarded as particularly inimical to Christianity.25 For all that he admits that as many as five-sevenths of the French clergy are ‘Modernists’ (an anecdotal and historically dubious assessment, as Duployé has argued),26 the greater danger came in his view from the ‘Veterist’ camp. Thus, alongside the famous denunciation of the reductionism of the ‘Modernist’ spirit in Un Nouveau Théologien: M. Fernand Laudet – a typical ‘curé laïque’, even if within the Church – stands his equally fierce attack on the ‘curés ecclésiastiques’. Above all, it is their effective denial of the sphere of history that makes them ‘le plus profondément inchrétien’. As Clio, the muse of history who is the narrator of the essay, says, ‘me mépriser, me nier, mon ami, quelle pente, quelle tentation facile. Ainsi nous naviguons toujours entre deux curés […] les ceux qui J.R. Jennings, Georges Sorel: The Character and Development of his Thought (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 147. 24   OP, p. 384 (Prose III, pp. 668–9). 25   OP, p. 387 (Prose III, p. 671). 26   Pie Duployé, La Religion de Péguy (Paris: Klincksieck, 1965), p. 91.

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me font tout et les ceux qui veulent que je ne sois rien’ [‘to despise me, to deny me, my friend, what a slippery slope, what an easy temptation. Thus we are still navigating between two groups of ‘clergy’ […] those who make me everything, and those who want me to be nothing at all’].27 And of the two it is the latter who are farther from the Christian faith, precisely because they deny ‘l’histoire’ and ‘l’âme charnelle’ the centrality granted them in the incarnation. As ever with Péguy, in the working out of this incarnational rationale, the figure of the child is seldom far from the surface. In the last chapter we saw how such ‘Modernist’ figures as Fernand Laudet tended to marginalize the childhood of Jesus and thus, in Péguy’s view, also to marginalize the child. With the child thus excised, Christianity became, he believed, a form of rationalism. In contrast to this, Péguy might have been expected to embrace the renewed emphasis on the child characteristic of the reign of Pope Pius X (1903–14). Alongside Pius X’s intransigent ‘anti-Modernism’ went a series of pastoral reforms, focusing particularly on the liturgy and education. These included a sustained campaign to encourage the more frequent reception of communion, involving the admission of children to communion from the unprecedentedly early age of seven. On one level, this was clearly a move that valued the place of children in the Catholic Church, but, as Eamon Duffy has pointed out, these child-communions became the focus of ‘a celebration of innocence and the family […] which rapidly entered Catholic folk culture’.28 It is this tendency to identify innocence as the primary characteristic of the child and co-opt it into the service of an adult agenda to which Péguy objected. In the Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle it is just this point that he makes. First Clio cites the teachings of the clergy, the repetitions underlining the irony: Tous les curés du monde nous ont toujours appris dans tous les cathéchismes, les curés nous ont enseigné, les curés nous ont affirmé […] que c’est le modèle des enfants, doux, docile, propre, soumis, bon, le célèbre petit Jésus, docile à la Vierge et à ses maîtres et généralement à toutes les grandes personnes, et à saint Joseph. [All the clergy in the world have always taught us in all the catechisms, the clergy have instructed us, they have insisted to us […] that Jesus was the model child: sweet, docile, clean and tidy, submissive, good, the famous little Jesus, obedient to the Virgin and to his masters and in general to all important people, and to Saint Joseph.]

But then she reminds the reader that it is not docility and innocence that are the primary qualities of Jesus as a child but his total engagement with life:   OP, p. 387 (Prose III, pp. 671–2).   Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 323.

27 28

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Ce qui est incontestable, c’est que de l’enfant Jésus à l’homme Jésus […] il a gardé, de toutes les vies du monde, la vie la plus engagée dans le monde, nullement une vie de règle, une vie régulière, mais une vie de siècle, une vie séculière, et la plus engagée qu’il puisse y avoir dans le siècle. [What is incontestable is that from Jesus the child to Jesus the man […] he maintained, of all lives in the world, the life that was most engaged in the world; in no way an ordered, cloistered life, but an open, secular life, as engaged as it possibly could be in everyday life.]29

The point here is that it is both unfaithful and inaccurate to isolate one debateable aspect of Jesus’s childhood and impose it as a model. The lesson taught by the life of Christ is one of continual openness,30 continual incarnation, seeking to follow the pattern set by ‘la vie […] la plus engagée qu’il puisse y avoir dans le siècle’. Henri Bergson The ‘Modernist’ controversy and its ‘Veterist’ aftermath dominated the French Church for the first quarter of the twentieth century. Péguy died too early, and was in any case too obscure a figure to have any significant influence on the crisis during his lifetime. Yet, with Maurice Blondel,31 he proved in retrospect to be one of the thinkers who had most clearly revealed the controversy to be an ideological culde-sac, and had also shown the way forward for the Catholic intellectual renewal pursued by the nouvelle théologie. In his lifetime Péguy was highly suspect in most Catholic circles. His loyalty was questioned because his return to the Church was felt to be incomplete. Though he attended mass, he did not receive the sacrament; his wife, whom he had married in a secular ceremony, had not converted with him; and their children, in accordance with his wife’s wishes, had not been baptized. Moreover, his continuing socialism, his friendship with secularists such as Julien Benda and Georges Sorel and his commitment to the philosophy of his friend Henri Bergson (whose work was placed on the Index) put him intellectually as well as ecclesiologically on the margins. It was this marginality, however, that granted him a degree of critical, not to say prophetic, insight into the Church. Péguy saw himself as a soldier doing battle on the boundaries of the Church, concerned not with its internal debates and civil wars, but with the intellectual and spiritual frontiers on which the Church related to the world. In this engagement the key philosophical interlocutor was Henri Bergson and it is to his influence on Péguy’s thought that I now turn.   OP, p. 380 (Prose III, p. 665).   ‘être libéral, c’est précisément le contraire d’être moderniste’, ‘to be liberal is

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precisely the opposite of being modernist’, OP, pp. 1079–80 (Prose III, p. 820). 31   Despite their intellectual affinity, Péguy makes no reference to Blondel’s work.

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On one level Péguy and Bergson were unlikely allies. Where Péguy’s life was one of constant political and religious commitment, in which he was publicly involved in the ideological struggles of his day, Bergson was reluctant to enter into controversy, even when it concerned the direct criticism of his own work.32 Yet, despite its detachment, Péguy considered Bergson’s thought to be thoroughly revolutionary. The heart of Bergson’s philosophical revolution, he believed, was to be found in the distinction between the tout fait and the se faisant. These were the terms used by Bergson to distinguish between the type of philosophical reflection which aims principally at the construction of coherent rational systems and that which seeks to keep itself open to the flux and plenitude of reality. For Péguy, Bergson exemplified the latter. ‘Le bergsonisme n’est point une géographie, c’est une géologie’, he wrote, meaning that its method was one of approfondissement. Bergson’s thought sought to understand, not by distorting reality into a logical system, but by delving deeper into the particular: ‘il ne s’agit pas que l’un soit l’autre. Il s’agit d’approfondir l’un, et d’approfondir l’autre. Le bergsonisme ne fait pas des cartes compartimentées’ [‘Bergsonism is in no respect a geography, it is a geology’, ‘it is not a matter of the one becoming the other. It is a case of deepening the one and deepening the other. Bergsonism does not draw up compartmentalized maps’].33 This, Péguy believed, was Bergson’s instauratio magna,34 the radical insight that made him, with Plato and Descartes, one of the three great philosophers. An unguarded statement such as this is of course highly debateable, but, as we shall see, it is another of Péguy’s polemical exaggerations, intended to shock the reader into a reassessment. The serious point that underlies it is the redefinition of what constitutes a great philosophy: Une grande philosophie n’est point une philosophie sans reproche. C’est une philosophie sans peur. Une grande philosophie n’est pas une dictée. La plus grande n’est pas celle qui n’a pas de faute […] Une grande philosophie n’est pas celle qui pronounce des jugements définitifs, qui installe une vérité definitive. C’est celle qui introduit une inquiétude, qui ouvre un ébranlement. [A great philosophy is not a philosophy above all reproach. It is a philosophy that is fearless. A great philosophy is not a [faultless] dictation. The greatest is not the one that has no errors […] A great philosophy is not one that pronounces definitive judgements or installs a definitive truth. It is one that introduces a disquiet, that sets off a disturbance.]35 32   A.E. Pilkington, Bergson and his Influence: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 30. 33   OP, p. 1260 (Prose III, p. 1247). 34   OP, p. 1266 (Prose III, p. 1253). 35   OP, pp. 1277, 1282 (Prose III, pp. 1264, 1269).

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Though these references occur in the Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne, in context the reference is to Descartes. Throughout this posthumously published essay Péguy is putting forward a comparison of the thought of Descartes and Bergson that seeks to undermine the preconceptions that see the former as the great rationalist and the latter, in contrast, as an opponent of rationalism. In Péguy’s view, it is in the questions he raised, not the system he constructed, that Descartes’ greatness consists. It is his methodical attention to detail that is radical: ‘si le Discours de la méthode a un sens, c’est bien qu’il faut aller pas à pas et avec une extrême prudence’ [‘if the Discourse on Method has a meaning, it is that one should proceed step by step with extreme prudence’].36 Having spent the majority of the essay establishing this reassessment of Descartes, he then returns to Bergson and argues that, far from reacting against Descartes’ approach, he is in fact radicalizing it: Le cartésianisme ne remontait, ne refoulait qu’une habitude, qui était l’habitude du désordre. Le bergsonisme a entrepris de refouler toute une habitude comme telle, toute l’habitude organique et mentale […] Le bergsonisme n’a jamais été ni un irrationalisme ni un antirationalisme. Il a été un nouveau rationalisme. [Cartesianism was resisting, repulsing only one habit: the habit of disorder. Bergsonism has sought to resist habit as such: everything to which we are accustomed, organically and mentally […] Bergsonism has never been either irrational or anti-rational. It has been a new rationalism.]37

In contrast to Bergson’s own political quietism, Péguy’s deployment of the older man’s philosophy was profoundly connected with the political struggles in which he was engaged. At a relatively superficial level, his advocacy of Bergson went hand in hand with his rejection of the dominance of German philosophy, which had been particularly marked in the years between 1905 and 1909 when he had spoken of the French as ‘le seul peuple qui eût conservé la tradition de l’intelligence contre la philologie; la tradition de philosophie contre le bafouillage hégélien’ [‘the only people who have conserved the tradition of intelligence against the dominance of philology; the tradition of philosophy against the gibberish of Hegelianism’].38 With his return to the faith, this polemical opposition of two schools of philosophy was transposed into a larger theological and political context, though now with greater subtlety and refinement. In fact Péguy made Bergson’s thought his chief intellectual support in his battle against the ‘deux bandes de curés’ of the Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle. In the Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la   OP, p. 1278 (Prose III, pp. 1264–5).   OP, pp. 1285, 1287 (Prose III, pp. 1272, 1274). 38   Prose II, p. 115; see Grosos, Péguy Philosophe, pp. 41–2. 36 37

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philosophie cartésienne, written in 1914 and published after his death, he writes of the two groups of people opposed to Bergson. On the one hand are the positivists, materialists and determinists whose opposition to Bergson is self-evident and who conduct: ‘une bataille loyale et à l’endroit’.39 These, clearly, are the equivalents of the ‘curés laïques’ of the earlier essay. On the other hand are those who might be expected to be his allies, but who believe he has failed to go far enough. For Péguy, these are the more dangerous foe, the equivalents of the ‘curés ecclésiastiques’, who co-opt his thought but then reject it as insufficient. He identifies them as a triple alliance of socialists, right-wing advocates of Action française and neoscholastic theologians, who together oppose Bergson, fighting ‘une bataille à l’envers’: que l’homme qui a réintroduit la liberté dans le monde ait contre lui, et à ce point, les politiciens de la liberté; que l’homme qui a arraché la France aux servitudes intellectuelles allemandes ait contre lui, et à ce point, les politiciens d’une action dite française; que l’homme qui a réintroduit la vie sprituelle dans le monde ait contre lui, et à ce point, les politiciens de la vie spirituelle, voilà ce que je nomme […] un scandale voulu et une bataille à l’envers. [That the man who reintroduced freedom into the world should have ranged against him, and to such an extent, politicians who proclaim freedom; that the man who snatched France from German intellectual servitude should have ranged against him, and to such an extent, politicians espousing a so-called Action Française; that the man who reintroduced spiritual life into the world should have ranged against him, and to such an extent, the politicians of the spiritual life; there you have what I call […] a deliberate scandal and a back-to-front battle.]40

Thus Bergson unites against him both ‘les ennemis de l’Ancien Monde’ and ‘les ennemis du Nouveau Monde’.41 Clearly Péguy identified personally with this encounter with opposition on two fronts and regarded it as a sign of the solidarity between him and Bergson. However, he also appreciated the way in which Bergson had resisted letting his positive argument be shaped by his opponents. In the face of those who argued against him from the point of view of the tout fait, Bergson had continued to exemplify the spirit of the se faisant. For Péguy, the positivists, materialists and determinists were self-evidently advocates of the tout fait, but so, in a more insidious way, were the other group of opponents, perhaps especially the theologians. These Catholics granted Bergson ‘une utilité préalable, préliminaire, préparatoire’42 in combating the first group, but, having used him against them, they substituted their own system, that of a rigidified Thomism. Here Péguy is referring     41   42   39

40

OP, p. 1352 (Prose III, p. 1330); ‘a faithful and straightforward battle’. OP, pp. 1352–3 (Prose III, pp. 1330–1331). OP, p. 1353 (Prose III, p. 1331). OP, p. 1464 (Prose III, p. 1444); ‘a prior, preliminary, preparatory usefulness’.

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to the neo-scholastic revival brought about by Leo XIII who, beginning with the encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879, had effectively canonized Aquinas’s thought, bringing about an ossification that saw Thomism as the end, not the beginning, of Catholic enquiry.43 Péguy’s objection is not to Aquinas per se, but to the attitude to his work which treats it as canonical and therefore, paradoxically, blunts its purchase on the present. For Péguy, true theology, like true philosophy, is resistant to ‘l’habitude, [le] vieillissement, [le] durcissement’ and works against the natural human desire to ‘fixer l’esprit’. Bergson’s opponents have this in common, that ‘ils veulent avant tout être tranquilles’,44 but the lesson his philosophy teaches is that it is precariousness, not tranquillity, that is to be sought: ‘car il nous remet dans le précaire, et dans le transitoire, et dans ce dévêtu qui fait proprement la condition de l’homme’ [‘for it places us back amidst what is precarious and transitory, amidst the nakedness that is proper to the human condition’].45 In his deployment of Bergson’s thought, Péguy does not choose to make explicit use of the figure of the child. However, his recurrent use of vocabulary associated with the child figure in the poems makes the underlying connection in his thought clear. At the conclusion of the Note sur M. Bergson, Péguy redraws the distinction between the tout fait and the se faisant in ethical terms as the difference between ‘raideur’ and ‘souplesse’: Les morales raides sont infiniment moins sévères que les morales souples […] La raideur est essentiellement infidèle et c’est la souplesse qui est fidèle […] Et ce sont les morales souples […] qui exigent un cœur perpétuellement tenu à jour […] un cœur perpétuellement pur. [Rigid moralities are infinitely less severe than supple ones […] Rigidity is essentially unfaithful and it is suppleness that is faithful […] and it is supple moralities […] that demand a heart that is continually being brought up to date […] a heart that is perpetually pure.]46

Here the image of the continually open heart, the heart that is pure, is associated with the child, but equally it is an incarnational image, as the final sentences of the essay indicate: ‘C’est pour cela que le plus honnête homme n’est pas celui qui entre dans des règles apparentes. C’est celui qui reste à sa place, travaille, souffre, se tait’ [‘It is because of this that the most honourable person is not the one who abides by the rules one can see. He is the one who remains in his place, who works, suffers and keeps counsel’].47 Thus the souplesse that Péguy has in mind is not   Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 314.   OP, p. 1346 (Prose III, pp. 1324, 1415); ‘habit, ageing, sclerosis’; ‘pin down the

43 44

spirit’; ‘above all they want tranquillity’. 45   OP, p. 1464 (Prose III, p. 1444). 46   OP, pp. 1289–90 (Prose III, pp. 1276–7). 47   OP, p. 1291 (Prose III, p. 1277).

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a quality to be preciously guarded, but to be continually expended and renewed in engagement with the reality of the present moment. It is this unsurpassable importance of the present that, for Péguy, is Bergson’s key philosophical insight, the present being ‘le premier point non encore engagé’ and thus the only time where the se faisant can take precedence over the tout fait. Péguy’s deployment of Bergson’s thought is controversial and certainly makes use of its spirit as much as its letter. In particular, his belief that Bergson’s philosophy illuminates and is illuminated by the incarnation draws out the theological implications of Bergson’s thought in a way that Bergson would not have subscribed to personally until the end of his life.48 Nonetheless, Bergson valued the younger man’s ability to interpret his thought: ‘he has come to know my most secret thoughts as I have never expressed them myself but as I would have wanted to express them.’49 Bergson’s thought was, for Péguy, the catalyst that facilitated the approfondissement by which he moved from the principle of human solidarity in his secular socialist period to the virtue of Christian hope that animated his later work. As Duployé has shown, Bergson supplied Péguy with the vocabulary to express this deepening,50 even if the latter’s theological and political commitments were wholly his own. For Péguy, the return to Christianity was a reaffirmation, not a rejection, of his commitment to political action. The advent of Christ was nothing short of a revolution, of which later political revolutions were partial reflections: La Révolution française a été une opération, un événement historique énorme parce qu’elle a fait semblant de désentraver le monde d’un semblant de servitude politique. Et enfin tout l’immense appareil de l’incarnation et de la rédemption n’a-t-il pas été dressé pour désentraver l’homme, pour l’empêcher de rester tombé dans l’esclavage et j’ai presque envie de dire dans l’habitude du péché originel. Car le péché était surtout devenu une immense habitude. Et l’esclavage est l’habitude pour ainsi dire la plus habituée. [The French Revolution was an operation, a huge historical event, because it made as if to free the world from the semblance of political servitude. And, finally, the immense apparatus of the incarnation and redemption – was this itself not designed to free humanity, to prevent the human race from remaining in slavery and, I almost want to say, the habit of original sin? For sin has in particular become an immense habit. And, of all habits, slavery is the most ingrained.]51

  In his last years Bergson may have been secretly baptized; certainly the argument of Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion in 1932 shows a profound sympathy with the Catholic faith; see Leszek Kolakowski, Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 86. 49   Cited in Balthasar, Glory of the Lord III, p. 422. 50   Duployé, Religion de Péguy, p. 279. 51   OP, p. 1267 (Prose III, p. 1254). 48

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Incarnation: Trinity and Humanity Having traced the incarnational inflection given by Péguy to Bergson’s philosophy, in this final section I return to the place of the incarnation in Péguy’s own thought. Some interpreters, rightly recognizing the centrality of the incarnation, have tended to grant it exclusive status as Péguy’s one great theological theme.52 Thus overloaded, the doctrine of the incarnation risks becoming a form of minimally theological humanism, a hastily baptized version of the principle of human solidarity. Here I shall argue that, on the contrary, it is precisely because it is the heart of his theology that the doctrine of the incarnation includes rather than excludes the other great Christian doctrines. It is ‘l’immense appareil de l’incarnation et de la rédemption’ together,53 the action of the triune God rather than the incarnate Son alone, that is the revolution to which Péguy points. The place of the incarnation in theology is like that of hope among the virtues: central, but utterly dependent on the doctrines that surround it. In the same way that ‘la petite espérance’ walks hand in hand with faith and love, so the doctrine of the incarnation, which teaches the saving relationship between God and humanity, cannot be separated from the doctrines of God (as Trinity) and humanity (creation and fall) that accompany it. Though he is generally reticent about formal theology, Péguy’s understanding of the incarnation is informed by the Chalcedonian definition, which is referred to explicitly in the Note conjointe sur M. Descartes: ‘[Jésus] est une seule personne en deux natures: il est homme, et il est Dieu’.54 This is not just a flat assertion of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, but an attempt to show the ways in which that orthodoxy enables a truer conception of the integrity of Jesus both as a human being and as God. Péguy believes that ‘il ne faut pas considérer Jésus comme un summum des summums et comme un maximum des maxima’ [‘Jesus should not be considered as a summum of summa and a maximum of maxima’].55 Such terminology may be helpful when speaking of Jesus as God, but when speaking of him as man, Chalcedon asserts the full humanity of Christ, in which he was subject to all the limitations of human life, ‘notamment les limitations dans le temps et dans le lieu. Et la limitation dans les catégories de classements’ [‘notably limitations in time and space. And limitation in the categories of classification’]: [Jésus] se range parmi les hommes […] Il se range le premier, mais il se range […] Il est la première étoile au ciel de la sainteté. Mais la première étoile est celle qui brille le plus, qui brille la première, non pas une qui absorberait l’éclat et la matière et pour ainsi dire la personne et l’être de toutes les autres.

  Onimus, Incarnation.   OP, p. 1267 (Prose III, p. 1254). 54   OP, p. 1418 (Prose III, p. 1397), ‘[Jesus] is a single person in two natures: he is 52

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man, he is God’. 55   OP, p. 1417 (Prose III, p. 1396).

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[[Jesus] takes his place among human beings […] He takes his place as the first, but still he takes his place […] He is first among the stars in the firmament of sanctity. But the first star is the one that shines most brightly, that shines first, not one that absorbs the brightness and the matter and, so to speak, the person and the being of all the others.]56

The incarnation of Christ for Péguy, then, is not some miraculous intrusion against the grain of creation, but is rather, seen from the human side, an event within creation, which renews it and inaugurates its restoration to the prelapsarian state. The significance of the Chalcedonian definition, for Péguy, is that it reveals the incarnation to be a revolution that is internal not just to humanity but also to God. This is expressed most powerfully in the poems, notably Porche, where the relationship opened up by the humanity of Christ is held to bring newness to God as well as to humankind – the newness of childlike hope that surprises even God:57 quelle ouverture sur la pensée de Dieu. Sur la volonté de Dieu. Sur les intentions (dernières) de Dieu. Abîme d’espérance […] quelle ouverture sur l’Espérance même de Dieu. Elle a introduit au cœur même de Dieu la théologale Espérance. Voilà, mon enfant, quel secret […] C’est qu’une pénitence de l’homme Est un couronnement d’une espérance de Dieu […] D’un Dieu comme nouveau […] D’un Dieu éternellement nouveau. [What an entry into the thoughts of God. Into the will of God. Into the intentions, (the ultimate intentions), of God. Abyss of hope […] What an entry into the very Hope of God She introduced into God’s heart the theological virtue of Hope. Therein, my child, lies the secret […] That a man’s repentance should be the crowning of God’s hope As if it were of a new God […] Of an eternally new God]58

  OP, pp. 1419–20 (Prose III, pp. 1398–9).   OPC, p. 534. 58   OPC, pp. 605, 609, 610; Portal, pp. 74, 78, 79. 56 57

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It is easy to hear passages such as this as implying a change in God and thus a rejection of the classical teaching on divine immutablility. But, allowing for the looseness of poetic language here, the implication of Péguy’s thought as a whole is rather that what the incarnation radically redefines is the human understanding of God’s inner life, not that life itself. Incarnation, and the redemption that flows from it, are anchored fully in the reality of creation, but they are rooted also in the reality of God. Punctiliar events in human history, they are also generative realities that open up the inner life of God. This binding of God and humanity in one is, for Péguy, the great Christian mystery, and it is all the more mysterious because it cannot be short-circuited by the exclusion of either pole. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation does not imply the subsuming of humanity into God or of God into humanity. Instead, by bringing both into fuller relation, the dynamic of the incarnation reveals God and humanity ever more completely as themselves. As Julie Higaki has written: Péguy […] ne perd point de vue les deux pôles opposés de la réalité: l’incommensurabilité et l’intégration des ordres, non plus que les points de vue existentiel et eschatalogique de la marche humaine, qui, ensemble, les guident dans la quête du point central unificateur. [Péguy never loses sight of the two opposing poles of reality: the incommensurability and the integration of the orders; nor does he lose sight of the existential and eschatological perspectives on human progress, which together acts as guides on the search for a central unifying point.]59

It is Péguy’s great gift – and one that marked him out from both sides of the Modernist/Veterist controversy – to see that, because of the relationship of the incarnation to the doctrines of God and creation, these apparent opposites belong together. In the same way that time is cut from the fabric of eternity,60 so humankind is made in the image and likeness of God. Yet in neither case does the latter overwhelm the former. As Hans Urs von Balthasar, the most famous interpreter of Péguy’s theology, observes: Ultimately all creation is an interruption of God’s eternity […] the return of time to eternity, however, is not a philosophical problem, but rather a problem that is theological through and through; for its resolution nothing less is required than the entire history of salvation: the history of human death, but also of God’s love, which empties itself even to death on a cross, of the infinite weariness of the evening of Good Friday, in which God himself sinks back into his own eternal life – death as the noiseless opening of the eternal gates.61

  Higaki, Péguy et Pascal, p. 343.   ‘J’ai découpé le temps dans l’éternité, dit Dieu’, OPC, p. 781. 61   Balthasar, Glory of the Lord III, p. 505. 59 60

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In this commentary we can hear clearly some of the chief themes of Balthasar’s own theology. Yet, perhaps more fully than in Balthasar’s own work, Péguy’s writing shows how time, history and the constant pattern of human work and growth are not incidental, but actually vital to the work of redemption. In endlessly various forms, Péguy’s prose and poetry iterate the incarnation by presenting us with a series of iconic representations of Christ and, as they do so, the hidden Trinitarian dynamic of his thought emerges. As Thierry Dejond has argued, despite the fact that the Spirit is so rarely mentioned in his work, its presence is everywhere: il est sans doute peu d’œuvres théologiques – ou littéraires – qui manifestent à ce point [l’] action [de l’Esprit…] L’enfance, l’espérance, le rôle déterminant des femmes dans l’histoire de l’humanité, […] l’Eglise, l’importance des sacrements, l’omniprésence de la prière: autant de signes non équivoques de la présence de l’Esprit. [without doubt there are few theological – or indeed literary – works that manifest to this point the work [of the Spirit] Childhood, hope, the crucial place of women in the history of humanity […], the Church, the importance of the sacraments, the omnipresence of prayer: a mass of signs that unequivocally indicate the presence of the Spirit.]62

Each of these iconic representations of Christ is animated by the Spirit. Some of these icons (or ‘figures qui représentent’, as Dejond calls them) take the form of particular people, some appear to be more abstract, but in each case they are encountered only as embodied in individual human lives. Here we see exemplified Balthasar’s insight that the Spirit is the exegete of the Son, manifesting by her presence the place within the life of the triune God opened up in the life, death and resurrection of the incarnate Son.63 Thus, redemption, like creation, is for Péguy a thoroughly Trinitarian process, and as such both are present realities as much as past events. In the Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle Péguy links the creation of the world with Jesus’ obedience in Gethsemane (and that of Mary at the incarnation) that sets in train the redemption of humanity: Lux fiat. Voluntas fiat. Au commencement, au premier commencement un Dieu dans tout l’éclat […] de sa création, de sa première création; et plus de cinquante siècles de progrès, d’un progès, de votre progrès conduisent à ceci, à ce deuxième commencement: un Dieu tombé en avant sur la face, procidit in faciem suam, un

  Dejond, Péguy, p. 105.   Developed especially in the section ‘Der Ausleger’ in Balthasar, Theologik III:

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Der Geist der Wahrheit (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1987), pp. 57–98, though without reference to Péguy.

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Dieu prostré sur la face de la terre, un Dieu le même, un Dieu humble, un Dieu soumis, dans toute la détresse et plus que dans toute l’humilité de l’homme. [Let there be light. Let thy will be done. At the beginning, at the very beginning a God in all the brightness […] of his creation, of his first creation; and more than fifty centuries of progress, of a kind of progress, of your progress, lead us to this point, to this second beginning: a God fallen face down, procidit in faciem suam, a God prostrate on the face of the earth, a God all the same, a humble God, a submissive God, in all the anguish and more than all the humility of humankind.]64

Here it is as if Clio, the muse of history, at this point in the dialogue abandons her claim to ownership of the past. As we saw above, Péguy had used Clio to argue for the unavoidable importance of history in Christian faith. Now, however, she recognizes that, by its very nature, the discipline of history forces the reality of redemption into the past, whereas creation and redemption can both only be expressed adequately in the anamnetic processes of approfondissement and resurgement. History is forced to: rendre cet événement passé (quand il est partout présent) […]; le catéchisme a le rendre rituel […]; et le calendrier n’a pas pu faire autrement que de le mettre au printemps, au cœur de la saison où la nature a l’illusion d’une renaissance éternelle. [make this a past event (when it is everywhere present) […]; the catechism to make it ritual […]; and the [liturgical] calendar has been unable to do better than to place it in spring, at the heart of the season when nature gives the illusion of an eternal renaissance.]65

Each of these methods of recollection improves on the last. Whereas history tends to ossify salvation in the past, the ritual idiom of the catechism begins to relate it to the lives of present day Christians and the liturgical calendar associates it with spring, the season of re-birth. But it is in the lives of the saints that the contemporaneity of creation and redemption are best glimpsed: as Balthasar writes: ‘It is not dry manuals […] that plausibly express to the world the truth of Christ’s Gospel, but the existence of the saints, who have been grasped by Christ’s Holy Spirit’.66 Péguy’s writing anticipates Balthasar’s conviction, but also expands it beyond the confines of ecclesiastically acknowledged sanctity. As we saw through the example of Bernard-Lazare in the previous chapter, Péguy sees the Gospel at work   OP, p. 473 (Prose III, p. 758).   OP, p. 461 (Prose III, pp. 745–6). 66   Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord I, p. 494. 64 65

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within and outside the visible boundaries of the Church in all whose lives are icons of hope and thus signs of the Spirit. For Péguy, the incarnation of Christ reveals the true nature of creatureliness. Christ’s life is a living icon of the life of God, and so, by the grace of the Spirit, the lives of those who follow him become icons of Christ. Margery Villiers has observed that Péguy’s shorter Tapisserie poems record his pilgrimage to Chartres in the same way that his vast final poem Ève records the pilgrimage of all creation.67 We could add, however, that pilgrimage is a key theme in all of his work, by which he expresses poetically the continual renewal of the ‘ministère du présent’.68 The fleets of prayers besieging God in Innocents are an image of pilgrimage, as are the processions and litanies that occur throughout his writing. And if creation is a pilgrimage for Péguy, then so is the incarnation, which, as much as it is the insertion of the eternal in the temporal at one point in time, is also the recapitulation of that insertion in the present moment throughout time. This, again, is the reason for his insistence, against modernist theologians such as Laudet, on the centrality of Jesus’ childhood, during which, just as much as during his public life, he incarnated God. The hidden, ‘private’, time of his childhood was just as much part of the saving work of incarnation as his public teaching, his death and resurrection: ‘per mysterium sanctae Incarnationis tuae […] Per infantiam tuam […] libera nos, Jesu’ [‘by the holy mystery of your incarnation […] by your infancy […] deliver us, O Jesu’.]69 Yet the litany does not stop here and neither does Péguy. Alongside the capitalized invocation of the infancy of Christ, he gives equal place to ‘Per divinissimam vitam tuam; per LABORES tuos’ [‘By your most holy life; by your LABOURS’]. The key word ‘LABORES’ is the hinge of the litany. In its brief space it encompasses all that was most holy about Jesus’ life: his works, not only those done in public and recalled in the Church’s calendar, but also those done in private, of which there is no record. Here we encounter once again the paradoxical point met in the previous chapter: that ultimately, for Péguy, the qualities of youthfulness and ageing, of play and work, are not in opposition but in apposition. That they belong alongside one another is a truth that seems hopelessly paradoxical to the modern mind, but, Péguy believes, it is the lesson taught by the Christian faith and the philosophy of Bergson alike. In the same way that God is ‘jeune ensemble qu’éternel’,70 so human beings are both most fully themselves and most fully images of God when they have learned that youth and naïvety, hope and optimism are not identical. Thus it is that Mary most fully exemplifies what it is to be human and therefore what it is to hope. Mary, ‘la mère des septante et   Villiers, Péguy, p. 343.   See Chapter 7 below. Pilgrimage is thus another poetic theme by which Péguy

67 68

expresses the Bergsonian ‘se faisant’. 69   OP, p. 1032 (Prose III, p. 583). Here he cites the Litanie du saint nom de Jésus, approved by Pius IX in 1862. 70   ‘Young as well as eternal’; a refrain in many of the quatrains of Ève, OPC, pp. 939–42.

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des septante fois septante douleurs’ is also the one who is ‘toute Espérance’ and her answer to God’s command, ‘fiat voluntas’, is the model for the appropriate human response to God, which allows the redemptive action of the incarnation to continue.71 In the ongoing pilgrimage of life, the two categories of human being who show the way are the child and the saint. For Péguy these categories to a large extent overlap. The saint who features most prominently in his writing, Jeanne d’Arc, is invariably pictured by him in childlike terms, and is referred to repeatedly as ‘mon enfant’. She, like any saint, is, in words cited above, ‘first of all a human being, attached to a certain time or place, his present’.72 And the saints are like children in that they operate not as heroic individuals, but as members of a corporate body. Gillet observes that Péguy’s conception of human perfection is the very opposite of that proclaimed by secular modernity, reaching its apogee in Nietzsche: ‘Péguy, c’est l’anti-Nietzsche, l’antidote parfait, le contraire du surhomme’.73 At the end of Péguy’s final poem Ève, Jeanne in paradise is described as having ‘le regard plus ouvert que d’une âme d’enfant’.74 Similarly the Blessed Virgin Mary in Porche is lauded thus: celle qui est infiniment grande Parce qu’elle est infiniment petite Infiniment humble Une jeune mère. [she who is infinitely great. Because she’s also infinitely small. Infinitely humble. A young mother.]75

In the figure of the child and the childlike saint, then, Péguy finds the embodiment of all that humanity is called to be. Humanity realizing its capacity for faith and love, because transfigured by ‘la petite espérance’; both humbled and empowered by acceptance of its creatureliness; aware of its sinful nature, but also confident in the power of grace to restore lost innocence, as in Ève: Car le surnaturel est lui-même charnel, Et l’arbre de la grâce est raciné profond 71   ‘The mother of the seventy sorrows and of the seventy times seventy sorrows’; ‘entirely Hope’, OPC, pp. 564, 569. 72   Humes, Two Against Time, p. 150. 73   Louis Gillet, Claudel, Péguy (Paris: Sagittaire, 1949), p. 15; ‘Péguy is the antiNietzsche, the perfect antidote, the opposite of the Übermensch’. 74   OPC, p. 1173, ‘an expression more open than the soul of a child’. 75   OPC, p. 568; Portal, p. 39.

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Et plonge dans le sol et cherche jusqu’au fond, Et l’arbre de la race est lui-même éternel. [For the supernatural is itself carnal And the tree of grace is deeply rooted And thrusts down into the soil and seeks the very bottom, And the tree of the race is itself eternal.]76

Conclusion The fundamental opposition in Péguy’s thought is not between the child and the adult, but between the child and ‘le monde moderne’, allowing for all the resonances (the dominance of science and technology, the division between secular and sacred) he detects in that phrase. As Julie Higaki has written: Un des messages ‘révolutionnaires’ de Péguy […] consiste en ceci: il importe à l’époque moderne d’affirmer l’opposition radicale non pas entre ‘le charnel et le spirituel’ ou entre ‘la nature et la grâce’, mais entre ‘l’argent’ et ‘l’enfant’, entre ‘la politique’ et ‘la mystique’. [One of Péguy’s ‘revolutionary’ messages […] lies in this: the modern era has found it vital to affirm the radical opposition not between ‘the carnal and the spiritual’ or between ‘nature and grace’, but between ‘money’ and ‘the child’, between, ‘politics’ and ‘mystery’.]77

As Péguy observes in the paired essays of 1913, L’Argent and L’Argent Suite, the modern world is one where the pressures of capital have made the doctrine of the incarnation all but unintelligible.78 Thus to give a child a money box is to give her the breviary of the modern world,79 but such an encouragement of individualistic financial prudence is profoundly unchristian: Je ne reconnais qu’une charité chrétienne, mon jeune camarade, et c’est celle qui procède directement de Jésus, (Evangiles, passim, ou plutôt, ubique): c’est la constante communion, et spirituelle, et temporelle, avec le pauvre, avec le faible, avec l’opprimé. [I only recognize one form of Christian charity, my young comrade, and that is the one that comes directly from Jesus (the Gospels, throughout, or rather,

    78   79   76 77

OPC, p. 1041. Higaki, Péguy et Pascal, p. 300. OP, pp. 1045–106, pp. 1109–255 (Prose III, pp. 785–847, pp. 848–996). OP, p. 1461 (Prose III, p. 1442).

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everywhere): it is constant communion, both spiritual and temporal, with the poor, the weak and the oppressed.]80

In this modern world it is the child who constantly invites humankind to the deeper and fuller understanding of itself inaugurated by Christ’s incarnation. This is not because the child is innocent or quasi-divine, but because, implicated in sin though they inevitably are, children have not yet learned the resistance to divine grace that tends to come with maturity. Péguy’s description of himself applies equally to his understanding of the child: Moi, je ne travaille pas dans le péché. Je suis un pécheur, mais il n’y a pas un péché dans mon œuvre […] Je suis un pécheur qui a des trésors de grâce et un ange gardien étonnant […] Je vois des choses toutes simples. Ça épate les curés; la liturgie […] est pleine [de ces choses simples], ils ne les ont jamais vues. [As for me, I do not work in sin. I am a sinner, but there is no sin in my work […]. I am a sinner who has treasures of grace and an astonishing guardian angel […]. I see things with absolute simplicity. That shocks the clergy; the liturgy […] is full [of simple things]; they have never noticed them.]81

Even after his return to the faith, Péguy chose to locate himself on the margins of the Church, in partibus infidelium.82 His later writing explores this territory in which the incarnational mingling of sacred and secular, grace and nature, redemption and creation is most visible. Against the tendencies of ‘le monde moderne’ to secularize the sacred (Modernism) or sacralize the secular (Veterism), Péguy sought to unveil the icons of Christ which he believed to be always present, even if unremarked, and thus to point to the incarnational indivisibility of God and humanity, which is the source of salvation. I began this chapter by citing Péguy’s contemporary, André Gide. Gide was unique in being able to see the originality that lay behind the superficial eccentricity of Péguy’s idiom in prose and poetry. The slow, repetitive and colloquial style of Péguy’s writing is not incidental; it is the consequence of his attempt to discover a form appropriate to his understanding of the Christian life as a pilgrimage in time. The digressions of his prose and the slow cadences of his verse are the formal counterpart of his theological stress on the gradual interpenetration of nature and grace in and through time. Joy Humes rightly draws attention to the fact that Péguy ‘speaks in the humble language of the peasant or child, he is often ungrammatical,   OP, p. 1147 (Prose III, p. 886).   Péguy, Lettres et Entretiens (Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1927), pp. 170, 158–9,

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168. Cf. Balthasar, Glory of the Lord III, p. 507. 82   Balthasar, Glory of the Lord III, p. 404.

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and like them, who have time at their disposal, he talks at length, developing his thoughts slowly and without much concern for sequential logic’.83 What she does not advert to, however, is that every so often in the lengthy development of his thought, images and ideas crystallize with great clarity. These are not so much seams of ore in apparently barren rock as revelations of the extraordinary everywhere present in the ordinary, of grace revealed in nature. As André Gide puts it: Le style de Péguy est semblable aux cailloux du désert qui se suivent et se ressemblent, où chacun est pareil à l’autre, mais un tout petit peu différent; d’une différence qui se reprend, se ressaisit, se répète, semble se répéter, s’accentue, s’affirme, et toujours plus nettement; on avance! Qu’ai-je à faire de plus de variété? [Péguy’s style resembles the stones of the desert, which repeat and resemble one another, where each is similar to the other, but just a tiny bit different; different with a difference that recommences, rallies, repeats itself, seems to repeat itself, emphasises, affirms, each time a little more precisely; onwards we go! What greater variety could one look for?]84

What Gide points to here is the process that Péguy described variously as approfondissement, jaillissement or resurgement: the movement, at once downward and upward, inward and outward, by which humankind discovers its place in God’s continual creative and redemptive will. His writing embodies the incarnational coincidence of chronos and kairos touched upon in the previous chapter. Conventionally, these might be referred to as secular and sacred time, except that Péguy refuses that distinction. He believes that the sacred is present in all created things, beneath the overlay of secularism, and that it can be unveiled above all in the child, who in every age is a sacramental analogy of the incarnation of Christ. Children, for Péguy, do not come ‘trailing clouds of glory’, but they do re-present the grace of the incarnation and proleptically indicate the way of salvation it has opened, illustrating how, in Christ, humanity has been savingly drawn into the inner life of the triune God. Yet it is in the end perhaps not the young child who best reveals this grace, but the grown child, in whom, as in Christ, espérance and vieillissement coexist: Demandez à ce père s’il n’y a point une heure secrète, Un moment secret, Et si ce n’est pas Quand ses fils commencent à devenir des hommes, Libres,

  Humes, Two Against Time, p. 166.   Gide, ‘Journal sans dates’, p. 403.

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‘L’Éternel dans le temporel’: The Child as Icon of Hope Et lui-même le traitent comme un homme, Libre, L’aiment comme un homme, Libre, Demandez à ce père dont les enfants grandissent. Demandez à ce père s’il n’y a point une élection entre toutes Et si ce n’est pas Quand la soumission précisément cesse et quand ses fils devenus hommes L’aiment, (le traitent), pour ainsi dire en connaisseurs, D’homme à homme, Librement, Gratuitement. L’estiment ainsi. Demandez à ce père s’il ne sait pas que rien ne vaut Un regard d’homme qui se croise avec un regard d’homme. [Ask this father if there is not a secret hour, A secret moment, And if it is not When his sons begin to become men Who are free, And treat him like a man Who is free, Love him like a man Who is free. Ask this father whose children are growing up. Ask this father if there is not a time of election above all others And if it is not When submission ceases and when his sons, become men, Love him, (treat him), knowingly, so to speak As man to man, Freely, Gratuitously. Esteem him as such. Ask this father if he does not know that nothing is worth as much As the glance of a man meeting the glance of a man.]85

  OPC, pp. 738–9.

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Chapter 9

Conclusion Introduction The Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov describes the human being as a ‘zôon eikonikon’, an iconic being, who thinks, perceives and acts in images.1 The central chapters of this thesis have examined four different responses to (and constructions of) the child as zôon eikonikon, each of which sees the child as an imaginative focus through which to explore the nature of human life before God. What I have offered has not been a comprehensive survey of theological anthropologies of the child in the modern period, but a representative series of soundings. In each case we have seen how the child is not an incidental or passing image, nor simply the product of autobiographical reflection, nor, for that matter, an escape from the demands of intellectual rigour into the realm of sentimentality. By asking, first, who the child is and, secondly, where the child thus identified fits into the broader pattern of their thought, we have seen how these authors are each proposing a theological anthropology of the child. The difficulties with this term were discussed in the Introduction (and in Chapter 4 we saw how the adjective is only minimally applicable in the case of Rousseau). For all its failings, however, the term does communicate the seriousness and coherence with which each author believes that the child can illuminate our understanding of all human existence before God. Clearly it would be wrong to imply that the child offers them the key to a complete theological anthropology. There are aspects of human life before God – sexuality, gender relations, ageing and the whole sphere of politics and economics, for instance – for which the child may not be the best vehicle of understanding.2 Yet in each case the inherent dynamism of the child, its continually growing sense of itself and its environment, provides a flexible and fruitful figure for humanity as a whole.3 The standpoint from which this book is written is an avowedly Christian one, taking with full seriousness both the scriptures and the Church’s doctrinal grammar that interprets them; seeing also the world as created, and humanity   Sergius Bulgakov, L’Icône et sa vénération (Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 1996), p. 107.   This is not to say that it is of no value. In each of these areas our authors do hold the

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child to have something to contribute: Rousseau on sexuality, Schleiermacher on gender, Péguy on ageing, politics and economics. 3   On the dialectic of dynamism and dependency in the child, see Jeremy Worthen, ‘Babes in Arms: Speechlessness and Selfhood’ in Shier-Jones, Children of God, pp. 41–61, cited more fully below.

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as redeemed, by the triune God’s self-revelating action. This does not imply an uncritical attitude either to the Bible or to the Church. The scriptures, though divinely inspired, do not disclose God unproblematically, and the Church that interprets them is a fallible human institution, even as it also believes itself to be the body of Christ. It does, however, mean that the works discussed here are evaluated according to theological criteria, in the belief that the mystery of humanity can be fully appreciated only in relation to the mystery of God in Christ.4 As I proposed in the Introduction, these writers are, in the broad sense of the word, theologians, consciously dealing with the nature of humanity coram Deo. Thus, though it might, for instance, seem fairer to treat Traherne and Péguy primarily as literary figures and Rousseau as a philosopher and anthropologist, the theological implications of their work cannot be denied. Insofar as the purview of theology covers all things in relation to their origin and end in God,5 a theological analysis is not only justifiable but necessary, and will carry with it criteria of reference that are both protological and eschatological, relating humanity to the ongoing pattern of creation and redemption in God. This is well expressed by Janet Martin Soskice, in what she describes as an ‘eschatological anthropology’: By contrast to the secular, social-scientific discipline of anthropology, ‘Christian’ anthropology understands our human nature not only in terms of what we are, but of what we might be. We have the potential to become what we are not yet, or are not fully. […] Anthropology in the Bible is never wholly separate from eschatology, nor creation from redemption, because ‘what we will be’ is not separable from what we are made to be and what we now are.6

In this concluding chapter I shall point to the ways in which the research undertaken in this book can be carried forward. The aim is not the systematic one of arriving at a contemporary theological anthropology of the child, but the more modest one of showing how fruitful it is to allow our contemporary understanding of human existence before God to be enriched by taking proper account of the child. In this tentative move from past into present, and from the analytical to the constructive, I shall draw upon some of the work carried out over the past 50 years on the place of the child in theology. The field here has grown significantly in the last decade, but is still surprisingly small; even within it, however, I shall be selective. Prominent   ‘The mystery of man [sic] becomes clear only in the mystery of the incarnate Word’, Paul VI, Gaudium et Spes: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1966), p. 23. 5   ‘In sacra doctrina all things are treated under the aspect of God, either because they are God Himself, or because they refer to God as their beginning and end’, Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, I, 7. 6   Soskice, The Kindness of God, pp. 36, 181. 4

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among those not discussed are Hugo Rahner and Karl Barth, as well as a number of feminist theologians and pastoral theologians. In each of these cases, however, the focus is principally on issues related to the child rather than on the child itself: Hugo Rahner and Barth, in his writings on Mozart, concentrate on the subject of play, and the latter group on pressing but tangential issues such as reproductive choice, poverty and the abuse of children by adults.7 Instead I shall concentrate on two authors, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jean-Yves Lacoste, whose thought is broadly aligned with the twentieth-century French Catholic school known as la nouvelle théologie. Among the theologians of la nouvelle théologie, the most prolific and perhaps the most prominent scholar was Henri de Lubac. Lubac’s own writing seldom touches on our theme, though, when it does, it shows a rare appreciation that the relationship between Christ’s teaching on the child and Paul’s may be more complementary than contradictory: The more the Christian becomes an adult in Christ, as Saint Paul understands this, the more also does the spirit of childhood blossom within him, as Jesus understands it. Or, if you prefer, it is in deepening this childlike spirit that the Christian advances to adulthood […]. In the spiritual life […] all progress is, in the proper sense, renewal.8

In the work of Lubac’s friend Hans Urs von Balthasar, however, the child holds a more consistently prominent place. In the first section of my conclusion I shall briefly survey his writings on the child, before relating them to the recent work of Lubac’s pupil Jean-Yves Lacoste. Balthasar’s scattered articles, relating Christology to a theology of the child, and Lacoste’s christological and liturgical anthropology both illuminate and are illuminated by the themes emerging from the main part of my book.9 None of the works I shall refer to here discusses my four main authors,10 but, in sketching a contemporary theological anthropology in 7   Hugo Rahner, Man at Play (London: Compass, 1965); Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); for a survey of recent Christian feminist thought on the child see Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on the Child’ in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought; pp. 446–73; also Pamela Couture, Seeing Children, Seeing God: A Practical Theology of Children and Poverty (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000); Bonnie J. MillerMcLemore, Let the Children Come: Reimagining Childhood from a Christian Perspective (San Francisco: Josset-Bass, 2003). 8   Henri de Lubac, The Motherhood of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982) pp. 72–3. 9   Though, as we saw in the introduction, Lacoste would be unhappy with the term ‘anthropology’. 10   Aside from a passing reference to Péguy in Balthasar, Homo Creatus Est: Skizzen zur Theologie V (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1986), p. 179.

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which the child plays a constitutive role, they provide theological criteria by which to evaluate the conclusions drawn in the central part of the book and to assess their constructive theological potential in the contemporary age. This will be the burden of the second section of my conclusion. Finally I shall turn to a question raised in passing at several points earlier in this book: that of the child’s iconicity. To the adult, the child may be an icon revealing the imago Dei in which all human beings have been created. I shall argue that, in implicitly recognizing the status of the human being as a zôon eikonikon, Traherne and Péguy in particular present pictures of the child that are able to convey with great finesse the paradoxical pairing of dynamism with dependence that characterizes human relationships with each other and with God. The Child’s Place in Theological Anthropology Today: Balthasar and Lacoste Found on his desk at the time of his death was the completed manuscript of Balthasar’s last book, Wenn ihr nicht werdet wie dieses Kind, published in German in 1988 and translated into English in 1991.11 Much has been made of the great theologian’s return at the end of his life to this apparently simplest and humblest of themes. In fact, Balthasar had been concerned with the subject of childhood from considerably earlier, and this book is actually rather less illuminating than some of his earlier writings. I shall focus in particular on his 1963 work, published in English as Man in History and on two untranslated articles, collected in the fifth volume of Skizzen zur Theologie, and originally published in 1985 and 1983 respectively.12 Mention should also be made, in passing, of the work of Balthasar’s associates Gustav Siewerth and Ferdinand Ulrich, each of whom wrote significant philosophical monographs on the child that were published by Balthasar’s publishing house, Johannes Verlag. Though largely unacknowledged, their post-Heideggerian investigations into the significance of childhood to human life underlie Balthasar’s theology, but they cannot be discussed in detail here as their concerns are principally philosophical.13   Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992). 12   Balthasar, Man in History: A Theological Study (London: Sheed and Ward, 1968), ‘Das Kind Jesu und die Kinder’, pp. 165–74, ‘Jung bis in den Tod’, pp. 175–80 in Balthasar, Homo Creatus Est. John Saward gives a good, if eulogistic, introduction to the sources in ‘Youthful unto Death: The Spirit of Childhood’ in Bede McGregor and Thomas Norris (eds), The Beauty of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), pp. 140–160. 13   For Siewerth, the child is an embodied image of humanity’s forgotten relationship of dependence with the mystery of Sein and, far more tentatively, with the greater mystery of divine love (Siewerth, Metaphysik der Kindheit, pp. 13, 38, 131–35). Ulrich expresses 11

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The earlier of these works might be seen as a first move, prior to the writing of his great systematic trilogy, towards a theological anthropology. On the whole, however, Balthasar, like Lacoste after him, avoids the term anthropology, principally, it seems, because of its anthropocentric implications. In fact the book sets out on a thoroughly theological footing by seeing the distensio of time that characterizes all human experience as fulfilled in its extensio secundum intentionem. Here he is following Augustine in Confessions, in drawing attention to ‘the tread of the believer through time towards the risen Christ […as] the true progress of the world’; ‘as faith it does not seek to replace sight (2 Cor. 5: 7); as hope it does not seek to take possession now, otherwise it would not be hope with patience (Rom. 8: 24–5)’.14 The echoes of Péguy’s poetry with its themes of pilgrimage and hope are clear, and, significantly for the theme of childhood, the focus on Christ as the end of human life is joined with a stress on Christ as life’s beginning and its constant companion. The most important chapter for our purposes, however, is that entitled ‘Man as the language of God’. Humankind here is not treated anthropologically, whether in the abstract or through case studies of individuals. Instead the focus is christological, but, as with Lubac’s studies of the workings of grace and nature, the concern is always to see the humanity of Christ as the field of divine selfdisclosure: ‘[Christ’s] temporal utterance, spoken or lived, has always been the words of eternal life (John 6: 68), the words of God which with temporal and mortal sounds and contents (with the help of man) pronounce eternal truths’.15 The qualifications and parentheses of that last sentence show how keen Balthasar is to avoid implying that Christ overpowers humanity with divine truth.16 This, in fact, might be seen as the central point of his theology of the child. Just as human childhood is a reminder of both the fragility and the wondrous potential of human life, so the human childhood of God in Christ teaches the paradoxical coinherence of powerlessness and glory in the incarnation: ‘the Child-Word in his quiet powerlessness can be so easily and by a thousand means rejected and got

a similar point in different terms: in the child we see crystallized the paradoxical nature of humanity, in which Sein and Nichts coincide, and, through this, glimpse a distant reflection of the divine kenosis (Ulrich, Der Mensch als Anfang, pp. 32–6, 140–153). For both authors the child offers an insight into the paradoxical combination of freedom and dependence at the heart not only of human interrelationships, but also of the human relationship with God. Balthasar, following Ulrich, develops this theme further under the theological rubric of kenosis. 14   Augustine, Confessions, XI, 29, p. 244; Balthasar, Man in History, p. 335. 15   Balthasar, Man in History, p. 243. 16   An implication not always successfully avoided in his work as a whole. See Tina Beattie, New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (London: Routledge, 2006), especially pp. 91–183, though she does not take into account the corrective tendencies found in Balthasar’s theology of the child.

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rid of, almost without believers noticing it’.17 And the vulnerability seen in the childhood of Christ, Balthasar believes, is never left behind: ‘the grown up son will look back at his own childhood, which is still with him, and taking a child in his arms will embrace the eternal state of childlikeness and emphasize above all its helpless openness to the will of the Father, to the kingdom of heaven that is coming’.18 If this is the condition of the incarnate Word, then, Balthasar goes on, it is also the condition that characterizes humanity. Following the eternal childlikeness of Christ, humans recognize themselves as ‘the fruitful, receptive, and bearing soil for the Word’. Here he likens the growth of the divine Word in the human being to the Marcan parable of the seed growing secretly: The seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain of the ear. (Mark 4: 27–28) That is the secret of the supernatural fruitfulness of the soul: that it is aroused entirely by the seed of God (1 John 2: 9) and yet cannot do without the assent of the natural powers of the mind; that its willing cooperation, once the Word has been received, is the sine qua non of its growth.19

Lubac’s work on the interpenetration of nature and grace is here carried over into a christologically focused anthropology.20 Related themes are drawn out with greater focus on the subject of the child in Balthasar’s later work. The first of the articles in the fifth volume of Skizzen, ‘Das Kind Jesu und die Kinder’, begins by emphasizing the radical nature of Jesus’ childlikeness in the ancient world, where, as the usage of the Greek pais shows, childhood was effectively synonymous with slavery or servitude. From this sociolinguistic observation Balthasar quickly moves to a far more radical theological point, arguing that human childhood (and the ongoing state of childlikeness) taken into God in the incarnation of Christ is the ground of the distinction between the immanent and the economic Trinity: ‘die ökonomische Gestalt der Trinität (für die Dauer des Lebens und Sterbens Jesu)[…], aufgrund der angenommenen Knechtgestalt des Herrn, [ist] nicht identisch mit der Gestalt der immanenten Trinität’ [‘Because the Lord has taken on the form of a servant, the economic form of the Trinity (for the duration of Jesus’ life and death) is not identical with the form of the immanent Trinity’].21 The incarnation here is seen as the acceptance into God of the state of childlike servitude. He then traces through Jesus’ life the hallmarks of the childlike (kindhaft) that remained constitutive up until and on     19   20  

Balthasar, Man in History, p. 251. Balthasar, Man in History, p. 253. Balthasar, Man in History, p. 250. Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967), especially pp. 131–53. 21   Balthasar, Homo Creatus Est, p. 170. 17 18

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the Cross. Even here, at the end of Christ’s earthly life, Balthasar sees the last cry from the Cross as the cry of a child: ‘“Warum?” Kinderfrage, und die Weisheit Gottes ist hier ein fragendes Kind, das im Augenblick keine Antwort erhalten kann’ [‘“Why?”, a child’s question, and the wisdom of God is here a questioning child, who for this instant can receive no answer’].22 In this question the similarity between the vulnerability of childhood and the vulnerability of dying is revealed. Both are charcterized by Übergabe, which could be translated both as ‘handing over’ and ‘letting go’. The childlikeness of the Son of God is shown in his pointing not to himself, but beyond: ‘meine Lehre ist nicht die meine, sondern die dessen, der mich gesandt hat’ (Joh 7, 16) … Kind und Tod sind nahe beisammen: ihrer beider Wesensgeheimnis heisst schlicht: Übergabe. Leiblich nackt erscheint das Kind in der Welt, geistig nackt muss er es sich machtlos dem Mysterium des Vaters anvertrauen. [‘My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me’ (John 7: 16) … childhood and death are closely related: in both cases their essential mystery is just this: handing over. The child appears in the world naked in body and, naked in soul, it must entrust itself powerlessly to the mystery of the Father.]23

The second, shorter, article in Skizzen strengthens the line of argument traced in the first, concentrating in particular on the coexistence of being and becoming in the incarnate Christ: Er ist und bleibt Kind [des Vaters]. Ein Kind, das nicht entwachsen kann, weil es je-jetzt, immer, ewig, am Gezeugt-und Geborenwerden ist. Er ist seit immer (‘ehe Abraham ward, bin ich’ Joh 8, 58), aber sein Sein ist ein ewiges Ebenjetzt-Werden. [He is and remains the child [of the Father]. A child that cannot grow up, because he is – here and now, always, eternally – in the process of being begotten and born. He is from the beginning (‘before Abraham was, I am’), but his Being is an eternal “Even-now-Becoming’’.]24

What is being drawn out here is a development of the thought of Siewerth and Ulrich. Sein is interpreted christologically as simultaneously a becoming (Werden): in the incarnation the Sein of Christ in his divinity is inseparable from the Werden of his humanity. Thus in Christ we meet what Balthasar calls ‘ein Abgrund von

  Balthasar, Homo Creatus Est, p. 173.   Balthasar, Homo Creatus Est, pp. 173–4. 24   Balthasar, Homo Creatus Est, p. 177. 22 23

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Neuheit’, in which the eternity of God is ‘ewig jung und überraschend’.25 And, through faith in this abyss of childlike newness, Balthasar affirms, citing Irenaeus, that humankind too is constantly renewed: Von der Kirche haben wir den Glauben erhalten und hüten ihn sorgfältig, denn immerfort wird er vom Heiligen Geist wie ein in einem kostbaren Gefäss Hinterlegtes verjugendlicht und er lässt auch das Gefäss, das ihn erhält, sich mitverjugendlichen. [We have received from the Church the faith, which we preserve and faithfully guard; a faith which is always being renewed in its youth by the Spirit of God, as if it were a deposit in a precious vessel, which causes the vessel containing it to renew its youth also.]26

In these scattered writings, then, Balthasar offers a variation on Traherne’s theme of the Cross and the human soul as each opening up onto the abyss of divine fullness.27 Reflecting on the childhood of Christ, in which, through the incarnation, the life of every human child has a share, humanity may be drawn consciously into a present relationship with the eternal God. This proleptic encounter with the eschatological reality of theosis is also an implicit theme in the work of Jean-Yves Lacoste, to which I now turn. In turning to Lacoste we shall initially appear to lose our concentration on the child. Lacoste’s writing is both less extensive and less focused on the subject of childhood than Balthasar’s: nor does it, on an explicit level, draw upon the earlier theologian’s work. It does, however, both offer us a more systematic presentation of Balthasar’s christogically focused anthropology and finally open up a contemporary angle on the liturgically orientated picture of the child drawn by Péguy, returning us at the same time to the underlying methodological assumptions that have shaped this book. In an early article, ‘Nature et personne de l’homme’, Lacoste establishes the uniquely christological grounding of his method.28 At the outset it should be made clear that Lacoste does not deny the possibility of a non-theological account of humanity – an anthropology in the modern sense. What he does claim, however, is that any Christian move in this direction must be theological, and therefore christological. Christ, for Christian theology, is the paradigm of the human, revealing ‘l’humanité totalement humain’, a humanity that all other human beings lack. He radicalizes this approach by drawing upon the post-Chalcedonian Christology of   ‘An abyss of newness’, ‘God is eternally young and astonishing’, Balthasar, Homo Creatus Est, p. 178. 26   Balthasar, Homo Creatus Est, p. 179, citing Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III 24, 1. 27   See Chapter 2 above. 28   Lacoste, ‘Nature et personne de l’homme (d’un paradoxe christologique)’ in Henri de Lubac (ed.), La Politique de la Mystique: Hommage à Mgr Maxime Charles (Limoges: Criterion, 1984), pp. 129–38. 25

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Leontius of Byzantium, Leontius of Jerusalem and John of Damascus, according to which the human nature of Christ has no personal existence (it is anhypostatic) independent of the divine Word with which it enjoys union (enhypostasia).29 As Lacoste observes, this teaching leaves the apparent contradiction that Christ is at once ‘vraiment homme et privé de l’existence personnelle’,30 but it is from this paradox that Lacoste’s exposition of ‘la nature et personne de l’homme’ proceeds. The argument of the article is dense, but I summarize it here as concisely as possible, the numbering being Lacoste’s: 1. Christ is defined fully by his filial relation to God and his fraternal relation to humankind. 2. This christological self-definition applies also to humanity at large, in which a person is fully herself by ‘une présence humaine à soi, au monde et à Dieu’.31 Humans can and do refuse these relations, but in doing so they lack what Jesus can never lack. 3. Human existence before God is characterized by its fragility. 4. In this state of fragility the human being is marked by a desire for ‘alliance’ with others and with God. Sin, in which all humans are entwined is the contrary desire to live entirely for oneself (à soi), but in the sinlessness of Jesus of Nazareth, humankind is shown what it means to exist in full humanity. 5. Jesus’ mode of existence is thus more authentic than any other. Humanity is possible without relation to God, but in Christ the theological (that is, the divine) end of the human being is revealed: ‘L’on sait radicalement, par Jésus de Nazareth, que l’homme peut n’être qu’humain, et paradoxalement que l’humanité de Dieu nous affronte au seul homme ‘seulement homme’ qui soit’.32 6. Full humanity is thus eschatological, and the event of Christ calls the human being beyond self-enclosure to a divine horizon. 29   See the citations from Leontius of Jerusalem and John Damascene in David Ford and Michael Higton (eds), Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)), pp. 126–9. The usage of the terms anhypostasia and enhypostasia has been much debated recently. They returned to prominence through Karl Barth, who, however, innovated by deploying them in dialectical fashion (see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: I.ii The Doctrine of the Word of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), p. 153f.). In the Patristic authors, as in Aquinas, the terms anhypostasia/enhypostasia imply a participatory relationship between Creator and creation, with whose implications Barth was uncomfortable. See Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 9–15. 30   ‘Truly a human being yet without a personal existence’, Lacoste, ‘Nature’, p. 131. 31   Lacoste, ‘Nature’, p. 132, ‘A human presence to herself, to the world and to God’. 32   Lacoste, ‘Nature’, p. 134, ‘One knows radically, through Jesus of Nazareth, that the human being is capable of being merely human, but that paradoxically the humanity of God confronts us in the one human being who is fully and uniquely human’.

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7. Human beings are continuous with Christ through grace, but discontinuous with him in his divine uniqueness. 8. Therefore the first task of Christology is to attest that, in Jesus, God has full experience of humanity; but the second, attendant upon it, is that Christ critiques all measures of humanity that are merely human: Christ is at once truly man and truly man, ‘verus homo’ and ‘verus homo’.33 9. Christology thus reveals the insufficiency of all previous definitions of humanity. In it the boundaries of the metaphysics of the person are exceeded; the anhypostasia of the Son’s humanity is not a deficiency in his personality, but its opening onto an eschatological fullness. 10. In this light, it must be denied that purely personal, even interpersonal, existence is the highest achievement of humankind. As Jesus’ humanity is affirmed by christological doctrine to be not his own but the Father’s, so all humanity has its highest end in God. 11. Thus, finally, borrowing the terminology of Luther, Lacoste affirms that the nature of humankind is seen fully only in homo coram Deo, not in homo incurvatus in se. It is God who enables the personal existence of the human being, but precisely this fact points the human being to an end beyond the purely personal – in God.34 What Lacoste is propounding here is a radically christological reading of humanity. This is at once a development and a criticism of the philosophies and theologies of dialogue (though he does not cite him, he is perhaps thinking principally of Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship here). Such styles of thought rightly teach that ‘en l’absence de la relation à l’autre homme, le sujet personnel n’est plus qu’une intolérable abstraction’ [‘in the absence of a relationship to another human being, the personal subject is no more than an intolerable abstraction’], but in focusing solely on the relational hypostasis of the person, they foreclose the relationship with the suprapersonal God, to which the anhypostasia of Christ’s humanity points.35 The highly compressed argument in ‘Nature et personne de l’homme’ makes no reference to the child, but it underlies the account of ‘l’homme minimale’ developed in Expérience et Absolu, published ten years later. ‘L’homme minimale’ is a term Lacoste has taken from the work of Dietrich Ritschl. Ritschl uses it to argue that ‘Jesus became what he was […] not through anything additional to the life of significant human beings or even ourselves, but as it were through the reduction and concentration of human achievements’.36 Lacoste, however, takes the term from its primarily christological locus in Ritschl and applies it to all human existence before God. Contrasting the sage with the fool, and the mature     35   36   33 34

Lacoste, ‘Nature’, p. 136. Lacoste, ‘Nature’, pp. 129–38. Lacoste, ‘Nature’, p. 137. Dietrich Ritschl, The Logic of Theology (London: SCM, 1986), p. 175.

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adult with the child, he points to the ‘marginality [or minimality] of any human being who subordinates worldly being to being-before-God’. Criticizing Hegel’s valuation of conceptual knowledge as the supreme mark of humanity, Lacoste argues that such a view inevitably renders large categories of humanity somehow less than fully human: One should thus clearly recognize an aporia that culminates in Hegel, but which has haunted every philosophy of history, and which unbalances the Hegelian edifice – all the more so to the extent one perceives it as a theological structure powerless to let us think the experience of the child, or of the experience that resembles it, otherwise than as embryonic. In terms that Hegel shares with the whole metaphysical tradition of the West, childhood can be defined only as lack.37

Against this prioritization of the conceptual mode of knowing, Lacoste proposes a liturgical mode that is as much a mode of being as of knowing.38 Liturgy, for Lacoste, is not confined to the collective worship of the Church, but is a farreaching term designating ‘the logic that presides over the encounter between man [sic] and God writ large’.39 In this ‘jeu liturgique’,40 participation is characterized not by knowledge or proficiency, but by an openness to the transcendent that acknowledges both the gift and the provisionality of the present: The child and the ‘simple’ person do not, of course, know [savent] everything they do when they pray. They are unaware that they thereby question their belonging to the world. They do not realize the subversive power of their acts. But because they know enough to encounter a God whose benevolence they know [connaissent], it must be said that they have it within their power to make gestures of definitive value, and to implicate (doubtless without their knowledge) properly eschatological modes of being in the provisional.41

The purpose of Lacoste’s argument here is to permit an understanding of ‘l’humanité de l’homme’ that is thoroughly theological, that takes seriously

37   Lacoste, Experience, p. 184 (translation slightly adapted); Lacoste, Expérience et Absolu: Questions disputées sur l’humanité de l’homme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), p. 221. 38   This is akin to Tina Beattie’s ‘prayerful way of knowing’: ‘becoming aware of our being among beings, […] we become aware of the question of Being, which leads us to the mystery of God’, Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, p. 68. 39   Lacoste, Experience, p. 2; Lacoste, Expérience et Absolu, p. 2. 40   ‘Liturgical play’, Lacoste, Experience, p. 185; Lacoste, Expérience et Absolu, p. 223. 41   Lacoste, Experience, pp. 184–5; Lacoste, Expérience et Absolu, p. 222.

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all of humanity, but that (in terms he borrows from Bonhoeffer)42 sees human life as at once penultimate (immanent) and sharing liturgically in the ultimate (transcendent). Expérience et Absolu ends, as the earlier article would lead one to expect, christologically. An anthropologia crucis is proposed, according to which the experience of ‘l’homme minimale’, the child and the ‘fool’, is taken not as marginal to full humanity but as constitutive of it. Just as the ‘fool’ shows ‘himself to us as one who removes the mask each of us wears to leave visible the true human face’ so the Cross is seen as ‘the place of inexperience’ that reveals the end of true humanity in God.43 The experience of ‘l’homme minimale’ is one that exceeds the yardsticks of conventional anthropology. It is literally ‘without measure’ – that is incommensurable according to human criteria – but, precisely as it is incommensurable, it encompasses ‘the greatest proximity there is between the (mortal) human being and God’.44 Traherne, Rousseau, Schleiermacher and Péguy: Commonalities and Contrasts For Balthasar, following Ulrich, the child is an embodied image of the coinherence of powerlessness and glory that is displayed supremely in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Christ’s childhood and continuing childlikeness are reminders that the incarnation is a Trinitarian event, in which God takes on the state of human servanthood. And the Cross of Christ, where the extremity of loss meets the consummation of love, opens up an ‘abyss of newness’, through which (in Irenaeus’s image) humankind may be constantly and savingly renewed. Lacoste deepens these christological insights by arguing that it is the incompleteness (the lack of self-sufficiency) of Christ’s personhood in purely human terms that makes him the paradigm of humanity coram Deo. In so doing, he helpfully modifies Balthasar’s problematic tendency to identify childhood and servitude. For Lacoste, the fully human life is neither a state of slave-like self-abnegation nor the Aristotelian ideal of self-sufficient autonomy, but a state of openness both to the present moment and to its transcendent ground that is most fully encountered in the category of liturgy. As the supreme instance of ‘l’homme minimale’, Christ invites his followers to recognize the experience of the child and the ‘fool’ as central, not marginal, to human life. By a purely human measure their experience may seem deficient, but this incompleteness allows them to participate more fully

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (London: SCM, 1964), pp. 130–134.   Lacoste, Experience, translation adapted, pp. 189, 191; Lacoste, Expérience et

42 43

Absolu, pp. 227, 230. 44   Lacoste, Experience, translation adapted, p. 188; Lacoste, Expérience et Absolu, p. 226.

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in the liturgical encounter with God that is always characterized by the state of ‘inchoation’, not comprehension.45 Implicitly or explicitly, many of the themes drawn out by Balthasar and Lacoste have been at issue in the main part of this book and they will now allow us to revisit from a contemporary standpoint the conclusions drawn from the four main authors. As we look at the four authors’ pictures of the child in this new light, we shall be better able to evaluate their potential fruitfulness in allowing the child a determinative place in a contemporary theological anthropology. The chapters on Traherne sought to free his portrait of the child from some common misconceptions. Traherne uses the child as a concentrated image for the whole of human life: the present parallel states of misery and grace, as much as the recollected protological state of innocence and the anticipated eschatological state of glory. In doing so, he vividly realizes the scriptural image of salvation as an adoptive relationship with God. Rather than either reacting against or simply embracing the newly emergent fields of modern scientific experimentation and empirical philosophy, Traherne relocates them within the context of a participative relationship with the infinity and eternity of God. In attending to the child he identifies the sense of wonder that, obscured by sin but healed by grace, is the ground of the transforming gift of theosis that relates humanity to its origin and end in God. Chapter 4 identified the paradigm shift epitomized by Rousseau. Breaking with the assumptions of earlier pedagogy, in the Émile Rousseau argues that children must not be understood as incipient or deficient adults. He sees the child as naturally gifted and free from the burdens of socially mediated sin. However, despite Rousseau’s own religious faith, the terms in which he imagines the child in the Émile are circumscribed within the limits of nature alone. A logic of immanence effectively replaces Traherne’s understanding of creation’s dependent participation in divine transcendence; nature supplants the Church, and the tutor takes the place of God, now conceived of purely as primordial Creator. Thus cut off from an ongoing, transformative relationship with God, the child Émile becomes the object of a quasi-scientific process of experimental manipulation. In an unconscious parody of classical Christian teaching, Émile is ‘adopted’ by the tutor from before his birth. Though Rousseau’s novel approach professes to privilege the child, it is precisely by isolating childhood as a unique time with different values and priorities from those of adult society that the child is rendered newly vulnerable. These twin movements towards isolation – of humanity from ongoing relationship with God, and of the child from adulthood – make the cultural environment in which Schleiermacher is writing, around 50 years after Rousseau, markedly different from Traherne’s seventeenth-century context. In pointed contrast to Émile, Schleiermacher’s Sofie is located at the heart of a loving human community. Indeed, she embodies the spirit of such community, reflecting that ‘infinite humanity, which existed before it assumed the cloak   Lacoste, Présence et Parousie, p. 335.

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of manhood and womanhood’.46 Yet, despite this fundamental difference, there are elements of Schleiermacher’s depiction of Sofie that seem to remain caught in Rousseau’s logic of immanence. By reinterpreting the doctrine of the incarnation in terms of Christ’s perfect ‘God-consciousness’, Schleiermacher risks compromising the classical Christian understanding, which teaches both the infinite qualitative difference between God and creation and the transformative analogical relationship between them. As the figural focus for this understanding of the incarnation, the child Sofie can be read as implying that the fullness of divinity is found in the immanent sphere alone, by the achievement of unimpaired freie Geselligkeit. We saw that, in some respects, Schleiermacher’s theology anticipates the insights of twentieth-century Russian sophiology, which, for all its controversial status, clearly preserves a participative relationship between God and creation. Yet the overall movement of Schleiermacher’s thought seems to render the possibility of such a relationship questionable. In particular we saw that the logic of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, when transferred to the sphere of theology, inevitably threatens to compromise the constitutive ontological difference between God and creation. Turning, in Chapters 7 and 8, to the work of Charles Péguy, we traced a series of images, in which the child is located at the heart of a theological vision of humanity. Despite his occasional tendency to sentimentality, Péguy’s varied and repeated use of the figure of the child offers him a perspective on human life in which theological categories are constitutive. Viewed liturgically, humanity and the natural world are held to share in an ongoing relationship with God. The child and those who resemble her are, for Péguy, icons unfolding to humankind both its own mysterious nature and the ever-greater mystery of God. By the liturgical process of anamnesis the child points to the ways in which the opposed categories of modern rationality in fact intersect: secular and sacred, everyday and eternal, chronos and kairos, private and public, nature and grace. In each of these areas Péguy sees not a barren contradiction, but a fruitful paradox or mystery, by which humanity may at once deepen its own self-understanding and be drawn out of itself into a transformative relationship with God. The one dualism that remains at the heart of his thought, however, is that between the child and the false maturity of the modern world.47 With this variation on the more famous contrast between mystique and politique, Péguy’s purpose is not to oppose an unsullied and otherworldly ideal of innocence to the compromised degradation of experienced reality. Rather, it is to point to the ways in which either pole of the modern dualisms enumerated above, will in isolation become a self-enclosed vicious cycle; but that, when seen through the eyes of a child as a relational whole, the polarities will open up into a virtuous spiral. 46   Schleiermacher, KGA 1/2, pp. 153–4, ‘die unendliche Menschheit, die da war, ehe sie die Hülle der Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit annahm’. 47   Or, as Julie Higaki puts it, between ‘l’enfant’ and ‘l’argent’, Higaki, Péguy et Pascal, p. 300.

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Despite their differences, the four authors have at least this in common: they each turn to the child in search of a clearer understanding of humanity as a whole. Their child figures offer them a lens, through which to examine the characteristics they believe to be most central to full human life. In one sense each of these approaches to the child cannot help but serve an ideological purpose by co-opting the child into a vision that is necessarily defined from an adult perspective. Yet, whilst conceding this inevitability, we can nonetheless find in Balthasar’s and Lacoste’s conclusions a means to evaluate the four authors’ work for its potential to yield a theological anthropology that neither isolates nor idolizes childhood, but sees the child as central to a proper understanding of the whole of human life. Lacoste indicates the ways in which the loss of a transcendent horizon is not a matter of indifference for our understanding of humanity. He suggests that, though a focus on the empirically observable immanent sphere and a reticence in the face of a transcendence deemed unknowable may appear to offer greater anthropological objectivity, in fact such moves threaten the reality of the human as much as the divine. At the same time, neither Lacoste nor Balthasar seek to hypostasize the child as the representative of a higher and purer state, thereby yoking together the human and the divine in a necessary, panentheistic, relationship. In the childhood and childlikeness of Christ – and the childhood and childlikeness of those who resemble him by sharing in him – we see most clearly the nature of human life coram Deo. Thus, in Christian theology, children cannot be treated as angelic messengers from a lost realm in which humanity and divinity, the immanent and the transcendent, enjoy unimpaired communion. Instead the turn to the child offers an insight into the paradoxical combination of freedom and dependence, glory and powerlessness that lies at the heart not only of human interrelationships, but also of the human relationship with God. By these criteria, the most satisfactory understandings of the child are clearly those proposed by the first and the last of our four authors. For Traherne and Péguy the child is invariably seen against a transcendent backdrop, yet is not held to be in any sense divine per se. In the seventeenth century the Anglican priest expresses this paradox through the image of theosis, while the Catholic layman, 250 years later, employs the liturgical pattern of anamnesis, but both these theological categories are united by a commitment to the underlying reality of human analogical participation in the life of God. Rousseau, by contrast, consciously rules out a transcendent dimension to his picture of the child. For him, a relation to the transcendent can only be a freely chosen belief, rather than a constitutive reality: nature alone provides the theatre for human self-understanding. Yet, following the analysis of modernity’s origins proposed by Latour,48 there is a sense in which Rousseau reinstates a form of quasi-transcendence in the immanent sphere, by identifying the child, over and against the adult, as a model of uncompromised purity and unmediated transparency. Writing 50 years later, Schleiermacher consciously resists Rousseau’s exclusion of transcendence, but as we have seen, even as he does so he risks a deeper complicity with the Rousseauvian shift by   Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 127–9.

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again proposing a form of transcendence that sometimes seems to consist in unimpeded inter-human sociality and a picture of the child as instantiating the perfection of an ‘infinite humanity’. Conclusion: Eschatology and Iconicity In the concluding pages of his Habilitationsschrift, Act and Being, Dietrich Bonhoeffer turns to the child as a model of eschatological living, ‘a neighbour to the eschata’: Willingness to be determined by the future is the eschatological possibility of the child. […] the grown man, willing to be determined only by the present, lapses into the past, into himself, into death and guilt. It is only out of the future that the present can be lived.49

This eschatological orientation of the child is also a theme in Karl Rahner’s reflections on childhood in the Theological Investigations,50 and it must form an integral part of any properly theological anthropology. It is the absence of this dimension in Rousseau’s portrait of Émile that renders his anthropology of the child theologically deficient; and it is on the issue of whether Die Weihnachtsfeier’s eschatological conclusion is essential or dispensable in relation to the dialogue as a whole that the question of the coherence of Schleiermacher’s theological anthropology with that of the classical Christian tradition turns. Janet Martin Soskice identifies the scriptural conception of the imago Dei as the necessary centre of her proposed ‘eschatological anthropology’, but warns of the ways in which the doctrine has been misinterpreted in the modern period. The imago Dei is not an isolable divine spark in the human soul (as Descartes misconceived it), but, realized fully only in Christ, ‘is not something we wholly and simply possess’.51 As Vladimir Lossky puts it, it is not ‘a certain something’, distinct from the rest of human nature, but expresses a continuum: Thus the image – which is inalienable – can become similar or dissimilar, to the extreme limits: that of union with God, when deified man [sic] shows in himself by grace what God is by nature, according to the expression of St. Maximus; or indeed that of the extremity of falling-away which Plotinus called ‘the place of dissimilarity’.52

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being (London: Collins, 1962), p. 182.   Karl Rahner, ‘Ideas for a Theology of Childhood’, in Theological Investigations,

49 50

VIII (London: DLT, 1971), pp. 33–50 (pp. 33–7). 51   Soskice, Kindness of God, p. 38. 52   Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), p. 139.

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The child possesses the imago Dei no more and no less than the adult human being. However, by its newness and openness, it points to the way in which the human being as the image of God is both a mystery in itself and a reflection of the mystery of God.53 Newness and openness may seem, to adult eyes, like signs of inexperience and incompleteness as human beings, but, theologically, they are both qualities that are encountered in the incarnation of Christ and shared in by grace. In the Christian understanding the human being is a viator,54 a pilgrim on the way, and it is precisely for this reason that a theological anthropology cannot aspire to answer the question ‘What is the human being?’. ‘Who?’ and ‘where?’, the questions asked by this book, are the proper theological questions because they acknowledge that the human being cannot be treated in isolation, but only in relation to an origin and end which are always in eschatological excess. In this theological light childhood is seen not as a discrete, protected period, but as illustrative of the openness and incompleteness before God that, from a Christian perspective, must characterize all human being. Jeremy Worthen has described the way in which the infant (the baby prior to the acquisition of language) grows through a dialectic of dynamism and dependence: The human infant is both profoundly dependent and vulnerable, yet also possesses the dynamism to move through stages of development that are without parallel in other species, including the capacity for articulated self-reflection. […] And somehow it would seem that the depth of infant dependence is necessary to ‘clear the space’ for this dynamism to be nurtured into actuality, while on the other hand the dynamism itself – towards appropriate autonomy, towards the perceived goods of the adult others – drives the infant to move beyond its original dependence towards the eventual interdependence of human maturity.55

The link between this dynamism and dependency, he suggests, is desire: Such desire is both trust and thirst, and is the root of the selves constructed from infancy on and of our conscious relatedness to the divine through these variously constructed selves. From the perspective of Christian theology, all human desire – including the desire of the unspeaking, ‘unselved’ infant – strives towards the horizon of God who created us for Godself, beginning and ending in trust in that God and in God’s self-gift.56

  Soskice, Kindness of God, p. 39.   In ‘Reflections on the Concept of the Status Viatoris’ Josef Pieper elucidates this

53 54

theme in Aquinas, but, scripturally grounded, it is found throughout the Christian tradition (Pieper, On Hope (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986) pp. 11–21). 55   Worthen, ‘Babes in Arms’, p. 45. 56   Worthen, ‘Babes in Arms’, p. 47.

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Though he does not express it in these terms, what Worthen is offering here is a rearticulation of the doctrine of the imago Dei, showing how even the pre-linguistic child shares in the mysterious workings of God’s grace.57 The infant’s dialectic of dynamism and dependence, mediated by desire, is a means by which to conceive of the human relationship with God. It is not identical with that relationship, but shares in it by analogy according to the logic of the maior dissimilitudo: ‘Whatever similarity there may be between the creature and God, the dissimilarity is always greater’.58 Yet the relationship that Worthen identifies in the infant is one that this book has shown to be equally present in the growing child. As we recognize the ways in which the child can inform, if not entirely govern, our understanding of human existence coram Deo, we may begin to appreciate how Jesus’ injunction to ‘become as little children’ may be the heart of a theological anthropology. The child reminds the adult that all human being is given as ‘part of a becoming that cannot be grasped’, in which vulnerability and dignity coexist, and through which, as when praying before an icon, we glimpse the eschatological union with God that is theosis, knowing that our ‘identity is eschatological, not foundational’.59 At several points in the main part of the book I have referred in passing to the child’s iconicity. In the case of Traherne I argued that the child is an icon, through which we may see the dependent, yet free, open and inquisitive relationship with God to which all human beings are called by grace. In a different way, I proposed that Péguy’s varied images of the child as hope offer a range of iconic ‘figures qui représentent’,60 each of which participates by anamnesis in the reality of the incarnate Christ. In both authors we see manifested Bulgakov’s iconological definition of the human being as zôon eikonikon. Bulgakov was unusual among Orthodox theologians in denying that the debates between iconoclasts and iconophiles in the seventh and eighth centuries were about Christology or the doctrine of the incarnation. Rather, he believed, they were about the mysterious conformity of humanity to God, summarized in the scriptural teaching about the imago Dei: la question portait sur la ‘conformité’ de l’homme à Dieu, sur la révélation de l’Image de Dieu dans l’image de l’homme. En d’autres termes, l’icône proclame non l’opposition, mais l’union du monde divin et de l’humain. [the question bore upon the ‘conformity’ of the human being to God, on the revelation of the Image of God in the image made by a human being. In different

  ‘Everything in creation, by virtue of being a creature, shares in the transcending goodness of the creator; and everything in creation is nonetheless radically open to the mystery of evil’, Worthen, ‘Babes in Arms’, p. 52. 58   Denzinger, Enchiridion, paragraph 806, p. 361. 59   James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes (New York: Crossroad, 1998), p. 170. 60   Dejond, Charles Péguy, pp. 106, 104. 57

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terms, the icon proclaims not the opposition, but the union of the divine world with the human.]61

In Bulgakov’s terms, then, we could argue that, just as a painted icon proclaims the union of the apparently divided spheres of humanity and divinity, so the iconic child allows us to glimpse that graced conformity of humanity to God that, for Bulgakov, is best expressed by the term sophia. Even within Eastern Orthodoxy, Bulgakov’s teaching on sophia is contested, but his reading of iconography through the lens of sophiology is not, in fact, incompatible with the broad Orthodox consensus on the nature of icons. Iconography depends upon an understanding of knowledge as participation – participation both in the object that is known and, by extension, in the omniscience of God. Thus, in the definition of the Second Council of Nicaea of 787AD, deploying a much earlier phrase of Saint Basil, ‘“the honour shown to an icon applies directly to its living model [prototype]”. He who venerates the icon, therefore, venerates in it the person [hypostasis] of the one so depicted’.62 In a highly suggestive article Daniel Sahas has argued, less controversially and aggressively than Bulgakov, that, whatever its undoubted christological implications, the icon is first and foremost an event or phenomenon within Christian anthropology: ‘L’icône a affaire avec anthropos, soit en relation à l’homme lui-même, soit en relation avec Dieu’.63 In Lacoste’s terms, the icon puts to the person who prays before it the questions ‘who and where are you?’, unfolding the mystery of the imago Dei and the vocation to an ongoing relationship with God.64 In contrast to the predominantly imitative function of secular art, the icon’s purpose is to present the integration of human nature both in itself and in relation to God. It represents the middle way between a veneration of humankind for its own sake, which theologically would be tantamount to idolatry, and the misguidedly discarnate piety of iconoclasm: L’icône byzantine est une fenêtre, non une porte; elle ne nous emmène pas hors du lieu où nous sommes, mais nous permet de nous regarder, nous-même et notre contexte de vie avec des yeux différents, sous une lumière différente qui émane d’un royaume au-delà du monde. [The Byzantine icon is a window, not a door; it does not carry us beyond the place in which we find ourselves, but allows us to look at ourselves and the

  Bulgakov, L’Icône, p. 107.   Cited in Christoph Schönborn, God’s Human Face: The Christ-Icon (San Francisco:

61 62

Ignatius, 1994), p. 202. Cp. Denzinger, Enchiridion, paragraph 601, p. 277. 63   Daniel Sahas, ‘Icône et Anthropologie Chrétienne: la Pensée de Nicée II’ in Nicée II, 787-1987: Douze Siècles d’Images Religieueses (Paris: Cerf, 1987), pp. 434–49 (p. 436), ‘the icon is bound up with the anthropos, whether in relation to human beings themselves or in relation to God’. 64   Lacoste, Experience, p. 42; Lacoste, Expérience et Absolu, p. 52.

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context of our lives with different eyes, in a different light that comes from a realm beyond this world.]65

This is precisely the function of the child figure in the theological anthropologies of Traherne and Péguy. Neither quasi-divine nor sinless, the child nonetheless enables human beings to picture themelves in a new light: Christ is the door, but by his grace, the child may become, for all human beings, a window through which to see their vocation to life with and in God. Not worshipping the child, but venerating the image of God that they perceive there, they may come to recognize their own human dignity as children of God. Sahas writes, in words that resonate with Lacoste’s theological anthropology: laissez l’icône tomber dans l’oubli et l’homme devient un objet. En défendant la possibilité de l’icône, Nicée II a défendu l’humanité de l’homme, son origine sacrée et son affinité avec Dieu, et le caractère sacré de l’art. [Neglect the icon and the human being becomes an object. By defending the possibility of the icon, Nicaea II also defended the humanity of the human being, our sacred origin and our affinity with God, and [at the same time] the sacred character of art.]66

In the liturgically-orientated portrayal of the child in the works of Traherne and Péguy we have a literary analogue to the icon, which, in the face of the objectifying pressures of modernity, proclaims both ‘l’humanité de l’homme’ and our status as capax Dei. In these figurings of the child, as in an icon, the vocation to theosis is made visible, reminding us that, inaugurated in Christ, deification is a material as much as a spiritual process, involving the whole of human nature, body, soul and spirit.67 By contrast the portraits drawn by Rousseau and (more debatably) Schleiermacher are too densely empirical and this-worldly to exemplify the imago Dei and admit the insufficiency of human nature in itself. Yet, just as good theology has to hold together the via affirmativa and the via negativa, so a satisfactory theological anthropology must recognize its christological grounding in the events of the Cross and the resurrection, where kenosis and theosis coincide.68 An overlooked, if vital, theme in Traherne’s work, the Cross is at once the sign of the end of humanity without God and the beginning of humanity in God. Citing Maria Montessori, Gustav Siewerth notes that the cry of the newborn child is like the cry of Christ from the Cross, and Balthasar     67   68   65

Sahas, ‘Icône’, p. 447. Sahas, ‘Icône’, p. 444. Sahas, ‘Icône’, p. 444. Here I develop the theme expressed in Lacoste’s anthropologia crucis, Lacoste, Experience, pp. 189–91; Lacoste, Expérience et Absolu, pp. 227–9. 66

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points out that Christ’s final ‘why?’ is the characteristic question of the child.69 Here kenosis becomes the key movement of human as well as divine life, not as pure self-abandonment and servitude, but as a sharing in the vulnerable glory of divine love.70 It is in this movement that the Holy Spirit, superficially absent from Lacoste’s account, is made known as Traherne’s ‘flame of love’: The Cross of Christ is the Jacobs ladder by which we Ascend into the Highest heavens […] a Tree set on fire with invisible flame, that Illuminateth all the World. The Flame is Love. The Lov in His Bosom who died on it. In the light of which we see how to possess all the Things in heaven and earth after His Similitud. For He that Suffered on it, was the Son of GOD as you are: tho he seemed a Mortal man. He had Acquaintance and Relations as you hav, but He was a Lover of Men. Was He not the Son of GOD and Heir of the Whole World? (CMI:60)

Here the movement of divine and human kenosis in Christ becomes also the movement of theosis, by which humankind is drawn into the divine life, through adoption as the children of God, revealing, in Irenaeus’s words, ‘that Christ brought all newness with him, by bringing himself’.71

  Siewerth, Metaphysik der Kindheit, p. 25; Balthasar, Homo Creatus Est, p. 173.   Following Sarah Coakley’s redefinition of kenosis: ‘what Christ […] instantiates

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is the very “mind” that we ourselves enact, or enter into, in prayer: the unique intersection of vulnerable, “non-grasping” humanity and authentic divine power, itself “made perfect in weakness”’, Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 38. 71   Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 34, 1.

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Schleiermacher, Friedrich, The Christian Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1963) Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977) Schleiermacher, Friedrich, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr Lücke (Chicago: Scholars Press, 1981) Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. H.J. Birkner et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984–) Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation, trans. Terence Tice (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1990) Schleiermacher, Friedrich, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, ed. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Schleiermacher: Hermeneutics and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Dialektik (2 vols), ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001) Charles Péguy Péguy, Charles, Lettres et entretiens (Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1927) Péguy, Charles, Lettres et entretiens (Paris: Editions de Paris, 1954) Péguy, Charles, The Holy Innocents and Other Poems, trans. Pansy Pakenham, (London: The Harvill Press, 1956) Péguy, Charles, Œuvres en prose 1909–1914 (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) Péguy, Charles, Œuvres poétiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) Péguy, Charles, Œuvres en prose complètes (3 vols) (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–92) Péguy, Charles, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, trans. David Louis Schindler (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 2) Secondary Adereth, M., Commitment in Modern French Literature (London: Gollancz, 1967) Alison, James, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes (New York: Crossroad, 1998) Allchin, A.M., Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in the Anglican Tradition (London: DLT, 1988) Allchin, A.M. (ed.), Profitable Wonders: Aspects of Thomas Traherne (Oxford: Amate Press, 1989) Allen, Diogenes, Philosophy for Understanding Theology (London: SCM, 1985) Alt, Kurt W., Kinderwelten: Anthropologie – Geschichte – Gegenwart (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2002) Anderson, Robert, ‘Education’ in Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Literature in French (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 271–3

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Index

adoption 1, 10, 18, 26, 28, 34, 38, 49, 52, 55, 62, 79, 207 adult, adulthood 12–14, 21, 27, 34–5, 61, 64, 67, 71–3, 79–81, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100–103, 108, 116–118, 127, 130, 138, 139, 141 n.28, 143, 147, 152, 158, 168, 189–90, 197, 199, 201, 203–4 Alison, James 204 n.59 Allchin, A.M. 26 n.29, 52 n.46 Allen, Diogenes 57 Alt, Kurt W. 3 n.10 analogy 4, 25, 35, 45, 62, 107, 110, 120, 127, 129, 137, 158, 184, 204 Anamnesis 17, 135, 148, 156–9, 161, 200, 201, 204 Anderson, Robert 165 n.15 anti-modernism 135, 146 n.47, 164, 168 Ariès, Phillipe 2, 12–13 Aristotle 45, 46 n.21, 71, 164 St Augustine 16, 20, 23–5, 29, 30, 36, 39–44, 58, 68, 147, 191 Azouvi, François 164 n.13, 164 n.14 Bakke, O.M. 11–14 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 5, 9, 18, 154 n.83, 164, 174 n.49, 177–9, 183, 189–94, 198, 199, 201, 206, 207 n.69 Barré, Jean-Luc 164 n.12 Barth, Karl 11, 16, 61, 63, 80–82, 94, 101– 5, 107, 110, 113, 189, 195 n.29 Barton, Stephen 10 Beattie, Tina 191 n.16, 197 n.38 Bergson, Henri, 18, 134, 156, 162, 164, 166, 169–74, 180 Bernard–Lazare 17, 135, 140–142, 147, 157, 159, 179 Berner, Christian 115, 120 Berryman, Jerome 11 Blevins, Jacob 36 n.54

Blondel, Maurice 164 n.13, 165 n.20, 169, Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 198, 202 Brito, Emilio 94 n.23, 104–105, 109, 110, 113 Bulgakov, Sergius 106–8, 187, 204–5 Bunge, Marcia J. 11 Burac, Robert 133 n.2 Bush, Douglas 28 n.32, 30 Byrne, James 67 n.27, 79 Canning, Raymond 42 n.8 Cefalu, Paul 45 Certeau, Michel de 22–3, 46 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 8 n.27, 23 n.20, 24 n.22, 39 n.1, 48, 49 Christensen, Michael 52 n.48 Christology 4, 14, 48–51, 53, 77, 101–5, 113, 127, 129, 189, 194, 196, 204 chronos/kairos 137, 140, 184, 200 Clement of Alexandria 10, 12 Coakley, Sarah 207 n.70 communion (with God) 14, 20, 33, 50, 56, 59, 201 confession 23, 24, 140 coram Deo 4, 8, 188, 196, 198, 201, 204 Couture, Pamela D. 189 n.7 creation 6, 7, 9, 17, 18, 19–38, 39–60, 74–79, 87–112, 113–32, 133–60, 161–86, 188, 195, 199, 200, 204 cross (of Christ) 18, 31–3, 40–43, 52, 148, 177, 193–4, 198, 204, 206–7 culture 11, 61, 67, 72, 73, 78, 84, 90, 94, 104, 114, 164, 168 Cunningham, Hugh 12 n.38 Daniélou, Jean 149 n.62, 154 n.83, 157, 162 deification see theosis Dejond, Thierry 134, 138 n.16, 153 n.79, 178, 204 n.60

224

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Deleuze, Gilles 162, 163 Deneef, A. Leigh 25 n.27, 36, 37, 51, 58 n.71, 59 Denzinger, Heinrich 108 n.78, 204 n.58, 205 n.62 dependence, 1, 10, 11, 32, 47, 68, 69, 77, 85, 101–5, 119–130, 134, 139, 143, 190, 191, 201, 203, 204 desire 26, 31, 34, 38, 40, 42, 46, 47, 58, 59, 85, 115, 195, 203, 204 DeVries, Dawn 85 n.112, 89 n.8, 95, 96 n.31, 99–101, 105 n.63, n.64, 129 dignity 18, 33, 34, 204, 206 Dilthey, Wilhelm 87 n.1 Dowell, Graham 32 n.47, 41 n.5 Drabble, M. 3 n.11, 22 n.13 Dreyfus Affair 140–141, 158, 166 Dru, Alexander 165–6 Duffy, Eamon 146 n.47, 165 n.17, 168, 173 n.43 Duployé, Pie 167, 174 education 4, 12, 13, 16, 61–86, 91, 96, 143, 153, 164–6, 168 Ellrodt, Robert 21, 23 n.20, 33 n.49, 51, 52, 54 emblem 3, 13 eschatology 53, 188, 202–7 eucharist 157 evil 10, 30, 31, 35, 43, 44, 59, 67 n.30, 68, 69, 74, 75, 83, 104, 204 n.57 Fall (the) 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 38, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 55, 68, 73, 74, 75, 82, 90, 94, 102, 104, 175 Featherstone, Joseph 63, 66 Finlan, Stephen 52 n.48 Ford, David 195 n.25 Foucault, Michel 5–6, 16, 63, 80–82 Frank, Manfred 89, 115 n.6, 116, 123 freedom 15, 24, 35, 38, 46, 47, 56, 66, 80, 84, 123, 139, 143, 149, 155, 172, 191, 201 ‘Freie Geselligkeit’ 17, 87, 95–6, 101, 104, 108, 116, 200 gender 5 n.14, 17, 81 n.95, 82, 88, 95, 96–101, 109, 121, 187

Gide, André 161, 183, 184 Gillet, Louis 181 Goldmann, Lucien 80 n.90 grammar 4, 5, 68 n.34, 153, 187 Grant, Patrick 29, 30 n.40 gratitude 14, 47, 59, 109 Greisch, Jean 114 n.5 Grimsley, Robert 74 n.64 Grondin, Jean 89, 90 n.10, 114 n.4, 120 n.23 Grosos, Philippe 164 n.14, 171 n.38 Hallonsten, Gösta 52–56 Hanby, Michael 24 n.24, 29 n.27 Hartle, Ann 66 Hegel, G.W.F. 107, 114 n.5, 122, 123, 197 Heidegger, Martin 5–9 Hemming, Laurence 7 n.18 hermeneutics 87, 89, 114–121, 130, 200 Higaki, Julie 152 n.68, 177, 182, 200 n.47 Hobbes, Thomas 44, 47, 48, 56, 57 Hölderlin, Friedrich 91, 92 n.18 Hooker, Richard 23, 24, 26, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54 hope 3, 17, 21, 27, 28, 53, 132, 133–60, 161–86, 191, 203, 204 Hopkins, Kenneth 19 n.3 Humes, Joy 135 n.10, 157, 181 n.72, 183, 184 n.83 icon 1, 3, 15, 18, 25, 27, 34, 37, 38, 39, 60, 110, 113, 128, 161, 164, 178, 180–183, 187, 190, 200, 204–6 imago Dei 3, 11, 190, 202–6 imagination 96, 98 n.39 immanence 60, 62, 71 n.54, 109, 129, 130, 199, 200 immediacy 16, 63, 72–6, 113, 119–127 incarnation 3, 4, 17–18, 28, 76, 105–8, 113, 119–130, 132, 133–60, 161–86, 191–194, 198, 200, 203, 204 infancy 12, 14, 20, 21, 58, 98, 180, 203, 204 Inge, Denise 19, 34 n.52, 57 n.67 innocence 10, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19–38, 39–60, 61–86, 94, 104, 134, 137, 149, 155, 158, 161, 168, 181, 199, 200

Index St Irenaeus 29, 45, 194, 198, 207 Janicaud, Dominique 8 n.22 Jennings, Elizabeth 42 Jennings, J.R. 167 n.23 Jensen, David H. 11 Jodock, Darrell 146 n.47, 165 n.19, 166 n.22 kairos/chronos 137, 140, 184, 200 Kant, Immanuel 16, 65, 87, 89, 97, 104, 114, 164 Kavanagh, Thomas 78, 83–4 kenosis 18, 191 n.13, 206–7 Kerr, Fergus 165 n.18 Kharlamov, Vladimir 52 n.48 Kolakowski, Leszek 174 n.48 Kossky, Jeffrey 8 n.23 Kuchar, Gary 24, 37, 56–7 Lacoste, Jean-Yves 4, 6, 7–9, 18, 189, 190–199, 201, 205–7 Lash, Nicholas 90 n.11, 123 Latour, Bruno 62 n.4, 71 n.54, 72, 78, 84, 201 Légasse, S. 11 liturgy 7–9, 18, 137, 149, 152, 156, 157, 168, 183, 197, 198 Lloyd, Genevieve 5 n.14, 81 n.95 Locke, John 45, 57, 66, 67, 70 Lossky, Vladimir 107 n.74, 202 Loyer, Olivier 54 n.56 Lubac, Henri de 91, 92 n.18, 154 n.83, 162, 189, 191, 192 McCarthy, Vincent 77 n.78 McIntosh, Mark 22 n.16, 23 n.17, 40 n.2, 41 n.3 Mackenzie, Iain 49 n.32 Man, Paul de 85 Marcus, Leah 13 n.43, 20 n.5, 21 n.7, 64 n.14 Martinich, A.P. 47 n.27 Marty, Martin 11 Martz, Louis 26 n.28, 36 Massey, Marilyn 96 n.31 maturity 12, 68, 81, 92, 93, 98, 118, 147, 149 183, 200, 203

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mediation 16, 63, 69, 72–8, 113, 119–127, 129, 137, 155, 157 Melzer, Arthur 80 metaphor 25, 36–7, 51, 84, 106, 152 Milbank, John 45, 59 n.73 Miller McLemore, Bonnie J. 189 n.7 Modernism 146, 164–9, 169, 183 Moeller, Charles 134 n.3 Montaigne, Michel de 140 Morgan, Elaine 3 n.10 mystique/politique 140–1, 144, 182, 200 nature 16, 27, 39, 48, 57, 61–86, 90, 91, 94, 104, 109, 122, 145 n.46, 199, 201 Newey, Edmund 26 n.29, 31 n.44, 39 n.1, 51 n.39, 52 n.46, 54 n.56 Niebuhr, R.R. 88 n.3, 123 n.32 nostalgia 18, 27, 73 n.60, 135, 140, 159, 162 Novalis 90–92, 96, 100, 103–6, 108, 110, 117 O’Donnell, James 24 n.22 O’Hagan, Timothy 65 n.17, 67 n.30, 73, 76 n.73, 78 n.81 Onimus, Jean 139, 141 n.31, 143 n.37, 149 n.61, 159 n.93, 175 n.52 Orme, Nicholas 12 n.38 Orsi, Robert 2 n.7 orthodoxy 4 n.12, 14, 31–5, 55, 104, 144, 175 Pain, J. 106 n.71 panentheism 31–2 participation (in God) 16, 19–38, 39–60, 76, 78, 143, 156, 197, 199, 201, 205 Paul VI 188 n.4 pedagogy 63, 73, 199 Péguy, Charles 1, 2, 3, 5, 13, 14, 17, 18, 62, 77, 132, 133–60, 161–86, 187–208 Péguy, Marcel 165 n.16 phenomenology 7–9, 24 Pieper, Josef 203 n.54 Pilkington, A.E. 170 n.32

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Plato/Platonism 23, 26, 33, 34, 45, 52, 55, 68–9, 106, 170 pneumatology 104–5 prayer 8, 9, 18, 59, 135, 137, 178, 180, 197, 207 Prickett, Stephen 89 n.9, 98 n.39, 114 Pridmore, John 10 n.30 protology 15, 20, 143, 188, 199 Pyper, Hugh 10, 13 Quarles, Francis 13 n.42 Rahner, Hugo 189 Rahner, Karl 11, 202 reciprocity 58, 59, 72, 96, 122–3 Redeker, Martin 89, 107 redemption 34, 41, 43, 49, 50, 55, 62, 75–6, 78, 129, 137, 153, 161–86, 188 repetition 36, 58, 156, 162–3, 168 Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme 64 Richardson, Alan 61 n.1, 64 Richardson, Ruth 96 n.30 Ricoeur, Paul 1 n.2 Ritschl, Dietrich 196 Romanticism 13, 14, 16, 17, 27, 43, 61, 63, 64, 73, 87, 87–93, 107, 114–5, 131, 143 Roussau, Jean-Jaques 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 15, 16, 17, 27, 37, 60, 61–86, 90–93, 98, 104, 109, 113, 133, 143–4, 159, 187–208 Rowan, Francesca 114 n.2 Sabine, Maureen 20, 22 n.10 sacraments 24, 37–8, 56–7, 135, 137, 145, 153, 155, 157, 169, 178, 184 Saenz, Cynthia 35 n.54 Sahas, Daniel 205–6 Salter, K.W. 22 n.12, 41 n.4, 57 salvation 4, 39, 49, 52, 76, 77, 79, 97, 131, 137, 145, 154, 157, 164, 177, 179, 183–4, 199 Sarter, Frédéric 152 n.69 Saward, John 190 n.12 Sawday, Jonathan 56–7 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 1, 2, 3, 5, 15–17, 61, 62, 77, 79 n.87, 82, 85, 87–112,

113–32, 133, 147, 158–9, 163, 187–208 Schönborn, Christoph 205 n.62 Seelig, Sharon C. 30–31 selfishness 10, 44, 45, 47, 48 self-love 44–9, 53 sentimentality 18, 133, 162, 187, 200 Shier-Jones, Angela 11, 187 n.3 Siewerth, Gustav 11, 190, 193, 206 sin 2, 10, 15, 20, 21, 24, 28–31, 34, 39–60, 60, 67–8, 75–7, 104, 109, 113, 141, 143, 147, 149, 155, 174, 181, 183, 195, 196, 199, 206 Smart, Christopher 13, 14 Smith, Julia 19 n.1, 36 n.55, 45 n.20 social imaginaries 3, 6, 15, 163 Socialism 169 Society 12, 45, 61–86, 91, 109, 113, 115, 127, 139, 143, 164, 188, 199 solipsism 23–4, 46 Sommer, Wolfgang 103 n.61, 126 n.43 sophiology 17, 88, 105–9, 110, 113, 200, 205 Sorel, Georges 157, 166 n.23, 169 Soskice, Janet Martin, 1, 188, 202–3 Starobinski, Jean 62 n.6, 64, 66–9, 73, 74, 76, 78, 85 Steenberg, M.C. 29 n.35 Suarez, Michael F. 43 n.14 tabula rasa 10, 45–6, 67 Taylor, Charles 3, 15 n.46, 65 n.18, 132 n.60 Taylor, Jeremy 26 n.29, 31 n.44, 36 Taylor, Samuel 73 theosis 16, 18, 20, 39, 51–59, 194, 199, 201, 204, 206–7 St Thomas Aquinas 4 n.12, 6, 45–6, 173, 188 n.5, 195 n.29, 203 n.54 Tilliette, Xavier 107 n.73 Todorov, Tzvetan 61, 63, 65–6 Traherne, Thomas 1, 2, 3, 5, 13–17, 19–38 39–60, 61–2, 65, 68, 75, 77, 145 n.46, 159, 187–208 transcendence 9, 17, 45, 52, 58, 62–3, 71, 78–9, 85, 91, 97, 104, 124–9, 131, 137, 197–202 transparency 37, 61–86, 90, 201

Index Troeltsch, Ernst 127 Turner, Denys 22 n.16, 24 typology 127, 148–155 Ulrich, Ferdinand 190, 193, 198 Underhill, Evelyn 22 Vaughan, Henry 13, 19, 20–21, 27 Veterism see anti-modernism vice 28, 67, 69, 70 Villiers, Marjorie 133 n.2, 138 n.16, 139, 164 n.14, 180 Virtue 3, 17, 18, 19–38, 39–60, 67, 79, 109, 113, 133, 133–60, 161–86 vulnerability 18, 158, 192–3, 204 Wade, Gladys 22, 41 n.5, 43 Wagstaff, Peter 64 n.15

Ward, Graham 132 n.60, 195 n.29 Watts, Isaac 13 Williams, Rowan 1 n.2, 4 n.12, 42, 107 n.73 Wittung, Jeffrey 52 n.48 Wöhrer, Franz 22 n.12 Wokler, Robert 65 n.17, 68 n.35 Wordsworth, William 13, 14, 19, 27, 32 n.47, 145 n.46 worship see liturgy Worthen, Jeremy 187 n.3, 203–4 Yates, Frances 55 n.58 Yeide, Harry 127 Zandt, David Van 2 n.5 Zernov, N. 106 n.71

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