Children of God

The Child as Source of Theological Anthropology

Edmund Newey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138118614
• eBook ISBN: 9781317167792
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Children of God uncovers the significant, but largely unnoticed, place of the child as a prototype of human flourishing in the work of four authors spanning the modern period. Shedding new light on the role of the child figure in modernity, and in theological responses to it, the book makes an important contribution to the disciplines of historical theology, theology and literature and ecumenical theology. Through a careful exploration of the continuities and differences in the work of Thomas Traherne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Charles Péguy, it traces the ways in which their distinctive responses to human childhood structured the broader pattern of their theology, showing how they reached beyond the confines of academic theology and exercised a lasting influence on their literary and cultural context.

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

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, Jean-Jacques 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 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 re-crafting 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 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 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: ‘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 knowl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note on Translations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘God made Man Greater when He made Him less’: Traherne’s Iconic Child
• 3 ‘Sense Deified’: Humanity in Divinity
• 4 ‘L’Élève de la nature’: The Rousseauvian Shift
• 5 ‘Die reine Offenbarung des Göttlichen’: Who is Schleiermacher’s Child?
• 6 ‘Einheimisch’ or ‘Neugeboren’?: The Whereabouts of Schleiermacher’s Child
• 7 ‘La théologie détendue’: Péguy’s Liturgical Child
• 8 ‘L’Éternel dans le temporel’: The Child as Icon of Hope
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index