Sunday 19 November 2017

Looking at the Sun: Chapter Summary

From Selfhood to Personhood: Personal Flourishing in the Trinitarian Likeness

by Daniel Gustafsson

As a poet, I am interested in the contributions that poetry, as well as theology, can make to our understanding of personhood. The aim of this paper is to invigorate personalist thought by engaging the poet and painter William Blake in dialogue with contemporary Orthodox theology. What follows is a brief summary of the main narrative of the paper, which broadly follows the story of Albion in Blake’s masterpiece of illuminated poetry, Jerusalem: the emanation of the giant Albion.

Introduction
I am in you and you in me. mutual in love divine [1]

Blake’s existential and ontological profession of mutuality testifies to a rare and profound attainment: a triumph of a genuine inter-personal existence over a solipsistic and self-centred one. We need to think away from the idea of selves to the idea of persons. We need to live away from the confines of an individualist-collectivist dichotomy to the expansive reality of personal relations – in the image and likeness of a God who, as Trinity, is not only personal, but crucially also a relation; in the words of David Bentley Hart, “a perichoresis of love, a dynamic coinherence of the three divine persons, whose life is eternally one of shared regard, delight, fellowship, feasting, and joy.” [2]

The Spectral Self
Albion, when we meet him, is separated from his beloved Jerusalem, and subjected to the oppressive influence of his Spectre. The agent of reductionism and over-rationalisation, the Spectre is at the same time industry and individualism, solipsism and scientism; a composite figure of the ills and evils that threaten the personal mode of existence.
Albion is in a state of ‘Selfhood’; the very opposite of a flourishing Personhood. Thus, his situation resonates with Christos Yannaras’ diagnosis of modern man. According to Yannaras, “The ’modern age’ [in the shadow of Western philosophy] is characterised by humanity’s imprisonment in complete subjectivity and at the same time by its effort to obtain absolute objectivity, centred, in both cases, on the individual.”[3] This is an apt philosophical diagnosis of the condition in and against which both Blake and his characters labour. Albion is a victim of the Western philosophical tradition. This is a fallen state: a shrunken state. Sundered from the relations that both sustain and enrich him, he is less than what he can and is called to be.

The Trinitarian Person
For Christian thought, the question of what it means to be a person is the question of what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God. Here, a proper Trinitarian vision of God, as against a monistic or philosophically abstract conception, will have significant implications for how we understand human personhood. “Since the image of God in man is a Trinitarian image,” writes Kallistos Ware, “it follows that man, like God, realises his true nature through mutual life. The image signifies relationship not only with God but with other men.”[4]
The person in thrall to his Selfhood, however – and indeed whole disciplines developed under the influence of the Spectre – not only entertains a false image of himself and of others, but also creates a false image of God. Crucially, therefore, the critique of notions of the person as a self-subsisting and self-enclosed entity, goes hand in hand with a critique of the abstractly conceived god of the philosophers. The true God of dialogue and communion is Jesus, whom Blake has addressing us thus:   
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me[5]
The problem is that, as this God of relation and revelation has been supplanted by the philosopher’s god, this has resulted also in a static and monistic idea of man. What is needed, for a richer view of personhood, is a God who is both second-personal and Trinitarian; both in relation to us and relation in himself. Only such a divine image and likeness, I argue, can sustain the profoundest intuitions of personalist thought; such as this claim by Mounier: “One might almost say that I have no existence, save in so far as I exist for others, and that to be is, in the final analysis, to love.”[6]

Self-annihilation
Blake knows that for the fruition of our personhood we must perpetually break out of ourselves in ek-static affirmation of divine goods and in love of others – such, indeed, is our true mode of existence:  
Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually
Annihilate himself for others good […] & put off
In Self-annihilation all that is not of God alone[7]

Conclusion: Mutual Freedom and Mutual Love
“True being,” writes John Zizioulas, “comes only from the free person, from the person who loves freely […] by means of an event of communion with other persons.[8] This is a profound insight for personalist thought. It is also one of the fundamental meanings of Blake’s art, where redemption through self-annihilation is rooted in freedom and where personality is transfigured in mutual love.      
Importantly, mutual love entails mutual sacrifice; and Blake’s Jesus here reveals God as truly a self-emptying God of love:  
if God dieth not for Man & giveth himself
Eternally for Man Man could not exist. For Man is Love:
As God is Love […]
nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood[9]
Thus we may look to the thinkers here engaged with as profound sources of inspiration – for the affirmation of a person called to attain the likeness of a Trinitarian God of abundant relationality; a person whose mode of existence is dialogic and ecstatic, and who flourishes in communal transfiguration. A person, in short, who may in truth profess:

                                                      I am in you and you in me. mutual in love divine




[1] William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 301.
[2] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 155.
[3] Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline: Holy Cross
Orthodox Press, 2007), 10.
[4] Ware, The Orthodox Way, 53.
[5] Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books, 301.
[6] Mounier, Personalism, 20.
[7] Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books, 287.
[8] Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 18.
[9] Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books, 393.

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