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
Orthodox Press, 2007), 10.
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