Avenues of Faith

Conversations with Jonathan Guilbault

Charles Taylor, Yanette Barbaroux

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781481312509, 9781481312509
• eBook ISBN: 9781481314121
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism

Death opens the gates to resurrection. The pathways to faith are diverse, but all carry components of death and renewal. In Avenues of Faith: Conversations with Jonathan Guilbault, Charles Taylor takes readers through a handful of books that played a crucial role in shaping his posture as a believer, a process that involved leaving the old behind and embracing the new.

In a dynamic interview-style structure, Taylor answers questions from Jonathan Guilbault about how each book has informed his thought. The five sections of Avenues of Faith briefly introduce authors and their principal works before delving into the associated discussion. Taylor and Guilbault engage Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry, Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Brother Émile's Faithful to the Future: Listening to Yves Congar.

By exploring themes such as faith, the church, freedom, language, philosophy, and more, this book engages both literary enthusiasts and spiritual seekers. Scholars of Taylor will recognize the philosopher's continuation of his reflections on modernity as he expresses his faith. Avenues of Faith gives readers unprecedented access to a world-renowned philosopher's reflections on the literary masterpieces that have shaped his life and scholarship and that continue to stand the test of time.

Second Discussion

Friedrich Hölderlin

Poems

Born on March 17, 1770, in Lauffen, Baden-Württemberg, Friedrich Hölderlin, who was an early reader of Schiller, was first predestined by his mother to become a pastor. As an adult he studied theology at the Grand Evangelical Seminary in Tübingen together with Hegel and Schelling, the two greatest thinkers of German idealism. From 1793 onward, he worked in various positions as a private tutor, in France and in Germany. In addition to writing his own poems, he translated the works of the Greeks Pindar and Sophocles. In 1806, he was forcibly placed in a mental institution, but, having been considered “incurable,” he was released the following year. He spent the rest of his life in Tübingen, in the custody of a foster family, in a building that was named “the Hölderlin tower” after his death on June 7, 1843.

Main Works Available in English

• Hyperion: Or the Hermit in Greece (1797–1799)
• Odes and Elegies (1800–1803)
• The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning-Play (unfinished)

J.G. The second literary work that contributed to making you the believer you are, and that you chose to tell us about here, is Hölderlin’s poetry.

C.T. I started reading Hölderlin to better read Hegel, his classmate in Tübingen. He had such an effect on me, however, that I started reading him for his own sake. Let me explain myself: after my studies at Oxford, my indignation at the reductionist thought that was raging there and my Merleau-Pontian “awakening,” which was the subject of our first discussion, I was approached by the Penguin publishing group to collaborate on a series of brief introductions to the great philosophers. I was entrusted with Hegel. In the end, the work took on such proportions that it couldn’t be added to the collection of pamphlets published by Penguin. So, I had to find myself another publisher. However, to properly cover the core elements of Hegel’s thought, I felt I couldn’t avert immersing myself completely in German Romanticism. I dove in with all the more enthusiasm for having developed a special affinity for Romanticism during my studies. A professor of English literature had introduced me to Keats, Shelley, and the other English Romantics, and reading them had enthralled me. Consequently, when I looked into Herder and Hermann, followed by the other German poets, I wasn’t in uncharted territory. Many of them moved me, but it was Hölderlin who struck me most. In a way, this is surprising since, for a long time, he wrongfully didn’t obtain the same renown as his peers. Goethe remains an indispensable poet to this day, but take Schiller, for example: to me, his evocations seem quite conventional today, in comparison with those of Hölderlin, a true German Pindar who contorts language to create gripping effects. Not only does Hölderlin’s poetry show us and convince us that everything is held together in the world, it also gives us the very strong impression of touching this mystery, of being fully incorporated in it. His art does more than reveal: it also creates a relationship that makes us partake in something. It’s hard to remain exterior to the realities that Hölderlin sets into motion in a poetic way. There’s a famous poem by Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” that contains more or less the same elements as many Hölderlinian poems. But, for me, what lacks in Shelley’s poetry is this ability to carry me away, to absorb me entirely into the poem.

How would you describe the context in which the work of the German Romantic poets is set?

The background against which German Romantic poetry bloomed is one that reasserts, beyond the rationalism of the Lumières and the development of science, something that proclaims that the world is composed of signs. This is quite obvious with Hölderlin, for example, in a poem like “Rousseau”:

You’ve lived! You too, you too

Are made happy by the light of a distant sun,

The radiance of a better age. The messengers

Who sought your heart have found it.

You’ve heard and understood the language of strangers,

Interpreted their souls! For those who yearn,

A hint is enough, and ever since the ancients,

Hints are the words of the gods.

Prior to this, various attempts had been made to approach the mystery of the world’s organization. On the Jewish side, the Kabbalah claimed that the literal sense of the Hebrew Bible could reveal the secret of the structure of creation. On the Greek side, most philosophers saw the world as a cosmos, as a whole, the coherence of which could be deciphered. For Plato, for instance, this was carried out by contemplating Ideas. But the credibility of his attempts vanished once the scientific revolution took place. Indeed, science brought to light an aspect of things that didn’t harmonize well with systems that conferred precise metaphysical significations to beings. Consequently, Romantics couldn’t reconnect with past visions of the world. Nonetheless, they also rejected the view that was gradually imposing itself and that was based on reducing the world to what could be apprehended by reason, or, more specifically, by scientific rationality. For them, it was clear that the world was more than a universe governed by causal laws offering no moral, existential meaning. Thus, they tried to differ from their predecessors to explain how beings relate to nature.

In this matter, Johann Georg Hamann was probably a decisive pioneer. For him, creatures and natural elements are indeed signs for mankind, but the latter doesn’t have the ability to grasp them as such, as if they were objective knowledge, which the mind could clearly take over. Hamann’s genial intuition was that signs have to be translated. Without personal investment, without the use of language, the signs that nature is riddled with will remain ineffective for us. A duty of translation, which here includes an aspect of creation, befalls us. Nature is no longer a dictionary but a score that needs to be interpreted, in the most active sense of the term. For the Romantics, art is the supreme means of translation. It serves not only to reveal but also to connect man with his own nature, in particular, and with cosmic nature in general. This binding aspect is all but trivial: in the Romantics’ eyes, man has lost touch with the significant forces of nature, and this must be fixed. This quest for communion, rather than for understanding through reason, was beautifully echoed in England, for instance, by Wordsworth, for whom the poetic language, enigmatic by nature, derives directly from a contact with what he called “the power which flows through all things.” Wordsworth’s expression shows us that, in contrast to the Greek cosmos, the Romantic cosmos is less static. It evolves at the same time as man and requires his participation. Romantics conceive the world not as a perfect order but as an order that builds and perfects itself over time. Since man tends toward his complete fulfillment, the same is true for the macrocosm in which he lives and of which he is an irreplaceable part.

Christian theology is familiar with this dynamism at a cosmic level; it speaks of redemption as being “already here but not yet.” Similarly, Saint Paul writes: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; . . . in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:19-21). And Jesus often refers to the kingdom of God as a growing reality. Nevertheless, Christian theology was very much influenced by Greek metaphysics, in such a way that it retained certain elements that make meanings seem set once and for all. Yet in the twentieth century, Teilhard de Chardin had the courage to confront Catholic orthodoxy in order to defend a very dynamic, evolutive conception of the creation. Thereby, he tried to reconcile scientific data, Romantic intuitions, and the Christian revelation. Are you familiar with his thoughts?

A little, yes, and I think you’re right to draw a line connecting the Romantics to him. Teilhard de Chardin took into full account the change of cosmology brought about by the Romantics, a cosmology that left a lot of space for the future. Greek thinkers such as Heraclitus had done this too, and even much earlier, but without succeeding in imposing their views like Plato had done. According to the latter, the future finds refuge almost exclusively in the adventure of the individual soul; the cosmos, on the other hand, is irremediably fixed.

Does this change of cosmology not condition a shift in the way God is conceived? In a fixed world, the idea of a perfectly impassible God is self-evident; in a world in constant evolution, even if his privilege of transcendence is preserved, the idea of a more dynamic God becomes more intelligible. The Trinitarian Christian God, in perpetual loving exchange, fits well with this shift of the cosmological paradigm.

I fully agree with you. This paradigm shift is a revolution in the history of Western thinking, and it’s normal that it should have repercussions on theology. It doesn’t introduce any absolute novelty into Christian faith, but it highlights other elements of the Revelation that enrich our understanding and thus our faith. As you’ve mentioned, the Bible already amply mentions a direct, dynamic, and creative relationship to the world and to God. But this aspect was somewhat left in the dark by Latin Christianity, as if, after Constantine, the church had gradually deemed that the main part of God’s reign that could be considered as “already here” had been instituted. Christians then only had to adhere to the forms defined once and for all. The common belief was that the institutional church could no longer change, and that each individual was responsible for taking on his or her share of the future . . . essentially by being converted, and by becoming ever more orthodox. This becomes obvious when you look at the debates that raged during the Protestant Reformation: Christianity was torn apart mainly by questions about individual salvation. However, nowadays, I think that a personal faith—or a theological reflection that’s based primarily on the question “how can I be saved?”—misses the point of Evangelical teachings. One no longer converts in order to be granted eternal salvation but because one is struck by a love in which one wants to play an active part. This is a lot more dynamic. A sign, by the way, that our contemporaries are no longer sensitive to the questions that used to trouble the premoderns: there’s hardly any mention of hell in today’s homilies, religious literature, etc.

Beyond any political considerations, if the church fought so much about the question of salvation, in my opinion, it was primarily to safeguard the vertical aspect of faith. Beyond this life, another awaits me, and this hope, or even this concern, informs me about my earthly life. Otherwise, does faith not evolve into a mere form of relatively agnostic humanism? Does its invitation to self-transcendence, to sacrifice, not lose some of its power of attraction?

This might be the case for some people. But the verticality of faith can also mainly rely on the fact that God became incarnate and that he built his kingdom with us. Believing in this makes our life cease to be plainly horizontal, like that of an atheist humanist: it becomes rooted in this world, horizontal if you wish, but at an “elevated horizontality.” The martyrs who gave their lives for the kingdom of God to progress don’t inspire us because they sacrificed themselves to gain their individual salvation or to defend a doctrine. If that were the case, they wouldn’t exert more fascination than Socrates, Kant, etc.—people who lived and sometimes died remaining admirably loyal to their principles. No, they inspire us because they experienced an overwhelming love story with a personal, spiritual force that transfigured their lives.

Changing our way of considering the world modifies our outlook on God, but does it not also have an effect on the way the church perceives itself? Before Vatican II, drawing inspiration from Aristotle’s political works, the church considered itself as a “perfect society,” autarkic compared to the other perfect society, namely the state. Such a sharp distinction between the temporal and spiritual orders has rendered services in the past, but its main drawback is staring us in the face today: it easily glides toward a standoff between two sides that don’t deem it necessary to learn from each other. The image of the Pilgrim People of God, which has always been part of Christian imagery, but which was pushed to the foreground by Vatican II, seems humbler to me and, at the same time, more open to the secular world.

Yes, especially since the danger, with the expression “perfect society,” is to come to think that there is such a thing as a state of perfection in the church, a state that could only be compromised by an opening onto the world or to new initiatives. The church never thought of itself explicitly in these terms, but this idea might have influenced it at a subconscious level. Continuity would then win over creative rupture. The main craftsmen of Vatican II fully understood that, to remain faithful to its mission and its tradition, the church had to move away from the status quo by revisiting its past and opening up to the just things that modernity had to offer. It was a matter not of questioning tradition but of creating an appropriate relationship to it. A more flexible relationship, inevitably, because the world is far less static than it used to be.

As you mentioned previously, Hölderlin was a fellow student of Hegel, who thought of history in a dialectic way, as a game of the Spirit trying to realize itself through the various phases of humanity. Thus, it’s possible for Hölderlin to have been influenced by this understanding of the purpose of the human adventure. Is this what explains the poet’s fascination for Ancient Greece? He sometimes expresses himself as if, at that very place and time in history, men had benefited from a singular proximity to the sacred—a proximity that would have to be revived beyond the gains of Christianity and post-Kantian modernity. In “Bread and Wine,” a poem with a typically Christian title, Hölderlin exclaims:

Holy Greece! Home of all the gods—so it’s true,

What once we heard when we were young?

(translated by David George)

By mingling paganism and Christianity here, is the poet not trying to reconcile two worlds? The Greek youth, fusional, Dionysian, and later celebrated by Nietzsche; and the wisdom of the cross, more Apollonian, capable of distinguishing a healthy relationship w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• First Discussion
• Second Discussion
• Third Discussion
• Fourth Discussion
• Fifth Discussion
• Bibliography