Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Child and Fool in The Western Wisdom Tradition
Child and Fool in The Western Wisdom Tradition
ABSTRACT:
been hard to find in the wisdom traditions of the world. Lao Tzu's infant's
"bones are soft, its muscles are weak, but its grip is powerful. . . . so complete
informed have worked for almost two millenia with the radical
pronouncements of Jesus about children and spiritual knowledge; in the
African tradition, the newborn child carries a message from the world from
which he has come, which is the source of all wisdom. 2 The Fool is defined,
averse to playing the fool, if it will further his complicated, irony-ridden search
for wisdom.3 And in ancient, sacred story, the preternaturally wise wonder
child Taliesen, or Hermes, combines the fool, the child, the god, and the hero.4
Because they are both outsiders to, and subversive of the positive, adult
male tradition of knowledge, the child and the fool will always be connected.
In the Old Testament Book of Proverbs, for example, which is very much in the
blessed with prosperity and length of days, while "folly is bound up in the
heart of the child," who must be purged by strong discipline, and the "fool"
and the "wicked" are difficult to distinguish. Yet in the Christian tradition which
develops out of Judaism, the child becomes a symbol for a kind of knowledge
which the adult male finds, at the moment of his greatest spiritual need,
unavailable to him; and in the Shakespearean wisdom, the fool turns out to be
the only adult in whom (because he is a "child"), an old, failing king at the
mercy of his enemies can find any wisdom. It is the fool who presides over
the old king's rebirth, and his reassumption of childhood. This same reversal
occurs in the Greek and Hellenistic world, where both the wisdom-as-technical
knowledge tradition which had one culmination in the sophists, and its close
Stoicism, fall to the radical Socratic aporia. I want to explore this reversal--to
seek the psychological and epistemological moment at which the child and
the fool become powerful, if enigmatic, signs of wisdom for the Western
tradition, and significant symbols for the mythic structure of Western self-
understanding.
Specifically, I want to argue that the child and the fool, as they are
of self in its relation to whole, or cosmos. This crisis is in fact the very one
"practicing" it as the most important thing a person could do, rather than, like
a sensible man, avoiding it in any way possible. This reversal leads him into a
noetic metaworld where, like the wandering fool of the Tarot, he is busily
ever new realms of explanation, none of which every proves to be the final,
encompassing one.
also the child's part, who also, if in quite a different way, calls into question
the ability of any adult discursive tradition ever to reach this level of
understanding called "wisdom." But the child of the Western tradition also
epistemological source, has reached this level already. Both the child and the
symbolic of a unity of knowledge and being, which in fact is the goal of the
The Tradition
In the West, wisdom is understood to be a form of knowledge of a
certain kind. In the early Greek and Solomonic traditions, it seems first to
have meant a kind of divinely ordained technical ability, whether of the purely
practical or morally prudential sort. The wise man is supernaturally gifted: the
skills of the builder, the goldsmith, the statesman or the general are gifts of
Haephestos, Apollo, and for the poets and musicians, the muses. Typical of
the heroic age, wisdom is an aristocratic and even agonistic ideal, in that the
gifting of the gods is distributed unevenly, and sometimes even wrested from
them through trickery, although the latter case is often ultimately tragic.
The wisdom tradition of the ancient near east, which has deeply
influenced the West through its expression in the Wisdom books of the Bible,
is related to this notion of divine gifting, but universalizes and regularizes it.
The goddess Maat of the Egyptians, for example, is daughter of the sun god,
who "came down to men as the right order of all things in primal time." Thus
the term maat, difficult to translate, connotes truth, rightness, cosmic order.
The very possibility of such a term depends on the conviction that there is no
distinction between divine and human or heavenly and earthly right and
order--that there is only one order obtaining throughout the whole universe.
And the goal of the Near Eastern wisdom teachings is to grasp and align
outwardly and inwardly, and avoiding all excitement." His opposite is the
rash, heated person who, like the "fool" of the Hebrew tradition, described
turns on the possibility of the success of the wise man through coming into
correspondence, or right relationship, with the order of things. The whole idea
of astrology, and of its eastern analogue, the I Ching, as practical tools has to
theory of action. It is also a theory of morality, in that it must assume that the
"fool," or that radicalization of the fool, the "wicked" man, must, because he
breaks the fundamental order of the cosmos, end badly, and the wise must
prosper, through the discipline and skill of self-alignment with cosmos and the
during Solomon's reign, when the wisdom teaching became the culture and
morality of the ruling class, but it was also Israel which brought that same
tradition into crisis and transformation, with Job, Ecclesiastes, the Prophets,
As in the Near East, the Ionian tradition of wisdom as techne, i.e. of the
wise person as gifted by the gods with skill, insight, the capacity for right
action, gave way in the natural philosophers to the idea of a higher, more
systematic technique--the ability to grasp the general laws of all things, and to
investigate their nature, origins, and modes of becoming. Leaving aside for a
moment the developments of the Sophists and of Socrates and Plato, we see
wisdom had always been associated, and sophia with the wisdom of the
philosophers. The latter is the "most precise and perfect form of knowledge . .
consummation, the science of the things that are valued most highly."7 Thus
something divine in his nature. Its objects are those things which cannot be
different from what they are and so never change. Implicit in this wisdom
for the natural is clearly revealed. For Aristotle wisdom is not "rational" in the
positive, cataphatic8 ideal. For Aristotle, for whom the moon and stars were
divine, for whom "man is not the best thing in the universe," for whom
ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean civilization, which understands it, like
maat, to be an alignment between the natural and the divine, except that for
contradiction between the two. In this way Aristotle lays the basis for Western
revelation of cosmos which reveals the place of the human in it, and thereby
leads to a fundamental balance.10
The Reversal
early, at least as early as the Book of Job in the Near East, and with Socrates
positive tradition, if (in a technocratic age) overshadowed by it, and thus may
be called the "left handed" part of the Western tradition. It was codified and
concludes that the closest he can come is to prove that no one is wise,
which claimed the ability to teach the virtues. Sophism is actually the ancient
command, if I think that anyone is wise, whether citizen or stranger, and when
I think that any person is not wise, I try to help the cause of God by proving
that he is not," and he adds, fool that he is, "my service to God has reduced
would amount to wisdom is unteachable. Not only that, but, as Gadamer has
put it:
must inquire beyond, and see beyond, all the widespread presumed
In this reversal, the seeker who would "inquire beyond" comes under the sign
Socrates:
none of the gods are seekers after truth. They do not long for wisdom,
because they are wise--and why should the wise be seeking the wisdom
that is already theirs? Nor, for that matter, do the ignorant seek the
wisdom with paradoxes and aporias. Wisdom becomes associated with the
passionate search for it--the gods, it is intimated, may not even have the word
in their vocabulary, since they have no other kind of knowledge with which to
contrast it.14 The good, which is the object of wisdom as knowledge, becomes
So one sets out to find out what one already knows, in a modality which is not
The Near Eastern reversal is first evident before the Socratic reversal in
Job's refutation of the Hebrew academic wisdom tradition. Job in his agony
melts the theodicy, the positivistic assurance of the prosperity of the man-
great virtue of maat in his biting reply to his counselors: "Oh that you would
be completely silent, and that it would become your wisdom!" In Job, the
cosmic moralism of the Near Eastern wisdom tradition--the idea that the good
man experiences good and the wicked, evil from the hand of God--meets a
humiliating defeat. Job represents the falsification of the wisdom theory, the
case which will not fit the model, and Job's counselors are demoted from the
the huge caldron of this experience emerges a new concept of the location of
God in the spiritual economy, of the knowability of God, and of the ability of
humans to fit the divine into an ordered scheme. In Job 28, "man" is
miner, who "puts an end to darkness, and to the farthest limit he searches out
the rock in gloom and deep shadow," "overturning the mountains at the
base." But homo faber is helpless before the mystery of good and evil. Job
says,
.......
.......
And to man He said, `Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
And to depart from evil is understanding.' (Job 28: 12-14, 20-23,28)
under the sign of Eros, of the longing for the divine whose first and most
for which the recognition will be a major dimension. Job in his torment and
longing for the healing of the personal cosmos which is lying ruin about him,
cries out, "Oh that I knew where I might find Him,/That I might come to His
seat!" (23:3-4) yet in that very longing recognizes for the first time the
tremendous noetic gulf set between himself and the Source and Order of the
universe:
And the cry is multiplied as Job's crisis deepens. As his longing to see God
a break with the anthropomorphism that had, up to that time, made of the
wisdom tradition the legitimation of the status quo. So Elihu, the pneumatic
prophet who precedes the appearance in the narrative of God Himself, says:
..........................
Thus both Socrates and Job reverse the ancient logos principle, the
notion of a cosmic order which humans can understand and align themselves
success as blessing and salvation, the assurance that a good act always end
in good, and a bad in evil, is shaken, along with the assumptive value of
prudent and instructed conduct in the ethical or religious sense. The aporia
deepens in Ecclesiastes, where, at the very moment of the ascendance of the
himself--testifies: "and I saw every work of God, I concluded that man cannot
discover the work which has been done under the sun. Even though man
should seek laboriously, he will not discover; and though the wise should say
revealed at the end of Job as the mind of God itself, "a breath in man, the
of any sort.
The next blow to the positive wisdom tradition comes in the form of the
Hebrew prophets, who, like Job, connect wisdom with that sacred awe, called
the "fear of God," which is analogous to the Socratic eros. The prophets
radicalize the reversal by disdaining, in the name of God, the official cultus--"I
hate your burnt offerings"--and thus becoming fools in the eyes of men. While
Socrates played the fool by leading every search for truth into hopeless
aporia, thereby demonstrating negatively the mystery of the good, the
Lord; like a young child's, his is an involuntary wisdom--he acts out the cosmic
order in dramatic play.17 He turns life, existence itself, into oracle, but it
wisdom, and the carrier of God's riddles. The prophet's is a negative wisdom,
a picture of the truth presented in a mirror, a reflection of something which
unknowable. This is inevitable because the human and even the natural order
are fallen, are distortions of the divine order, and the fool, because he does
not fit in this order, demonstrates its fallenness, and points mutely and
Christ As Fool
whose narrative the logos itself in the form of a man is executed as a common
is with the rise of Christianity in the West that the reversal moves into the
and also precondition for the ultimate glorification of resurrection--is its final
symbol. So Jesus' disciple Paul later refers to the "wisdom of the cross," the
reversal is the appearance of the First Cause in the world and its not being
breaks with the tradition of Jewish Apocalyptic speculation as well, for which
grasped the Law, which is the logos, the rule of cosmos.18 But Christ comes as
the "end of the Law" (Romans 10:4), i.e. the end of any clear and obvious
correspondence between the divine and the natural. In Christ God personally
immediate and non-discursive, before (or after) the "wisdom of the wise,"
which knows everything except the most essential thing to know, and
therefore is "foolish in the eyes of God." It has, as Simone Weil has said,
"passed beyond what men call intelligence, and into the beginning of
wisdom."19
guiding metaphor for the Western search for wisdom. God, the great I Am, is
appearance, whose finitude belies his infinite character. Like the youngest son
in the classic Indo-European fairy tale, Christ the fool reverses the terms of
the argument, and wins through losing. Analogous to Lear's Fool, and the Fool
strikes the remote chords of the lost cosmic correspondence. The words of the
fool have tremendous portent, but we are not sure of what: they emerge as
resurrection") or disgusting riddles ("unless you eat the flesh of the Son of
Man and drink his blood . . ." John 6:53). Those whom the Platonic eros draws
to this martyr and saint of the wisdom reversal know him and see his real
is a threat, an alien from the transgressive world of the unconscious. The fool
a curtain drawn by so-called normal people to shield their eyes from the
abyss.
The fool is analogous to the child. Whereas the latter is a pre-adult, the
thought mad. He has abandoned history, and returned to nature and to the
the heath, expresses the chaos of the storm raging around him, which in turn
king's family. But the Fool's babble is not babble at all--its very chaos, like the
chaotic language of the unconscious in dreams, does not just express, but
inform the events of King Lear. The Fool's discourse, as effortless and
The effect of Jesus as culture hero in the West has been to establish the
fool as an honored and significant psychological archetype, and to associate
him with the archetype of the Hero, of which his life is also an exemplary
instance.21 The heroes who follow him, like St. Anthony and St. Francis,
become "fools for Christ." The higher knowledge—or wisdom—is shown in the
a speculative grasp of the universal order. In the fool, who lives in a different
"deification," and sees it as resulting from a long acesis, which returns the
redeemed, in whom, in Peter Brown's words about the early desert saints,
"the tensions of the `evil heart' would have been eliminated." 22 The Christian
quest is to regain the "single eye" of childhood, but on a spiritual rather than a
natural level. The New Eden of the Kingdom is a result of a restoration of the
acetic:
Those whose feet already trod the slopes of Paradise in this life, by
opting for the “angelic” existence of the monk or the virgin, might pass
the villages, and through the crowded towns, mingling unrestrained with
carriers of a wisdom which confounds the "wisdom of the wise," the theology
of the reversal planted a master seed for the deconstruction of class, gender,
and even ethnicity which has become a Western hallmark. So in the Gospels it
is women, the so-called "weaker vessel," who seem to have the clearest
recognition of the Christ, and make the least attempt to use him in the
crippled, the dumb, the blind, and even the social outcast and the addict who
understanding.
So Jesus says, "I praise you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because
you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them
his triumphal entry into Jesusalem, he enters the Temple, it is the children
who are "shouting in the temple area, `Hosanna to the Son of David'." This
makes the chief priests and teachers of the law "indignant." "Do you hear
what the children are saying?" they ask him. He answers by quoting the only
to permanently codify into the Western wisdom tradition: "Yes. Have you
never read, `From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise'?"
(Matthew 21: 12-16). Here indeed is the countertradition in a nutshell. For the
chief priests and scribes are indignant, not only at the blasphemy of him being
called the Messiah (Son of David), but that it should be those most
insignificant of knowers, children, who should make such a claim. For we can
imagine these children are participating in the chant, not with any "real"
Children, like fools, embody the reversal because they too are marginal
figures, outsiders, like women, slaves, the "mad," or aboriginals. Children are
misunderstand them. They are "originals," those that the culture of adulthood
has not yet made over. Thus the child is Nature, which is always "just there,"
without a voice, as well. So the "singing voice of a child" behind the garden
wall in Augustine's conversion experience, which "again and again . . .
repeated the refrain, `Take it and read, take it and read'," 26 is like a natural
Whole speaking, in the language which, after the reversal, has become
the play of the world itself, it is, in a mysterious way, a representation of its
essences. As Ricoeur has characterized it, "The child who disguises himself as
as Kuhn says, "they forget just as soon as they are old enough to tranmit it." 29
In her play, the young child represents perfect understanding, or wisdom, but
it is a wisdom she can only be, and not have. Perhaps this is the crucial
The crisis in the positive wisdom tradition which the child of the Jesus
for example, interpreted the well-known New Testament pericope in which the
disciples are told, "unless you are converted [lit. "turned"] and become like
little children [paidia] you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew
18:3) as meaning that the Christian is like a little child only in his or her
similar way, modern literary critics and historians of the Enlightenment tend
the wisdom crisis, whether as represented in the picaresque hero of the The
whom the Existentialists are in many ways the antinomian heirs, the child
knowledge and being first stated for the West by Christianity, and now
ignorance which is the wisdom of a mind which "has come to the end of its
intelligence, such as it was, and has passed beyond it." 32 So the Romantic
Novalis speaks of the mature person as the "highest synthetic degree of the
development, which is the goal of the human life cycle. Children, in the
"mystery of their luminous innocence,"34 point to a return, through the
vicissitudes of the life cycle, to a nature spiritualized--to the single eye, to the
child is the first statement of a higher integrity which must be earned through
development.35
the real child and the child as prophetic statement. Schiller, for example, calls
the child "a lively representation to us of the ideal, not indeed as it is fulfilled,
again in the words of Coleridge, "make the external internal and the internal
reason reachieves at the end of the scale the unity of the beginning, but in a
In that both child and fool express the goal of development "not fulfilled,
but enjoined," they show us how the reversal posits the goal of cosmic
noumenal ego drive him through an endless progress from lower to higher
stages toward an end from which he is inescapably cut off by the finite bounds
of his phenomenal ego. The ultimate goal of man is utterly unattainable."39
The child and the fool do not embody the goal, but are stand-ins for it. They
Maat. It is the same unified cosmos of the wisdom traditions of the ancients,
mythic time before they were sundered by reflection, and, in Hegelian terms,
time before the sundering of consciousness by reflection, and the fool, along
with the Romantic genius, represents the return to it, which in the modern
Coleridge: "To have a genius is to live in the universal, to know no self but
that which is reflected not only from the faces of all around us, our fellow
creatures, but reflected from the flowers, the trees, the beasts, yea from the
very surface of the waters and the sands of the desert." 44 To "know no self"
means that all of nature becomes self, and corresponds with Blake's intuition
Schelling, "the world of thought becomes the world of nature," for mind and
whereby "Paradise and groves Elysian" become "a simple produce of the
common day."46
Diotima's Eros reunited with wisdom is, then, a return to what Novalis referred
to as "the primal world, the golden age," where "men, beasts, plants, stones
and stars, flames, tones, colors must at the end act and speak together as a
Wordsworth called the "Imagination," and indicates, not some new world, but
Traherne, poet of childhood, said, "You never perceive the world aright till the
sea itself runs through your fingers, and you are clothed with the heavens and
crowned with the sun."48 For the Romantic, Imagination is a codeword for the
belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginitive living, and to creative
heaven and earth unified, which is promised in the Christian revelation. The
and the eye that sees."50 Thus the Romantic wisdom ideal is represented, not
Romantics the sign of wisdom is "joy," which Coleridge described as "the spirit
and the power, which wedding nature to us, gives us in dower a new Earth
In the "marital union" between mind and nature, Wordworth, Coleridge, and
Novalis directly invoke the end of history, but envision it as emerging from
within the hearts and minds of persons. And Schiller looks for a "third joyous
realm of play and of appearance, in which man [is released] from all the
looked for a "new age in which mankind will achieve on earth the fullness of
freedom, community, joy, and intellect."53 The new age will be governed by
Conclusion
The crisis of the ancient wisdom tradition which this paper has been
concerned to trace does not relinquish the ideal of that tradition, which is the
overwhelming drive for what Schiller called "an existence according to its own
laws, its inner necessity, its eternal unity with itself." 56 The difference is that it
and the unknowable--between the part and the whole--its goal is the
and non-discursive, which only begins when we have "come to the end of our
the tradition, for it is already implicit in the founding moment within the
Western mythic code. It stands for the separation, the division implicit in
put mythically in Genesis in the expulsion from the Garden, result of the felix
culpa, or happy fault, which begins the crisis. The Western cultural command
there almost from the beginning, and to make our way back to the Garden
through a dialectical journey, which ends not just in a restoration of an
original, but of a higher unity. This in fact is the plan of the Christian
a higher level. This is also the plan of Lear's developmental journey towards
(ironically) that corruption itself seems to have been necessary to activate the
absolute, of total meaning—and in it, "intelligence reaches its end." The child
and the fool represent that last resort. Both are in a relationship with a non-
rational whole. The child lives before rationality, and the fool lives after it.
Both point, in their very modes of being, symbolically both backward and
are what we were; they are what we are to become again. We were, like
them, nature, and our culture shall lead us, by the road of reason and
freedom, back to nature again. The goal which man strives towards by means
nature."58
Neither child nor fool have lost their significance for Western self-
They are perhaps even more powerful symbols in the modern imagination
point to the realm of the fool. The recent attention given in psychotherapeutic
"paradise of common day." The Romantic use of the child as symbol for
it becomes ever more painfully clear that wisdom is not a form of expertise.
So even as the child and the fool become increasingly marginalized by the
ENDNOTES
. Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988),
Ch.55.
2
. See Pierre Erny, Childhood and Cosmos: The Social Psychology of
the Black African Child (Washington, DC: Black Orpheus Press, 1973).
3
. Socrates strongly evokes the Fool when he refers to the
philosopher as one who, "standing aside from the busy doings of
mankind, and drawing nigh to the divine, . . . is rebuked by the
multitude for being out of his wits, for they know not that he is
possessed by a deity." Phaedrus, 249d, in Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1961.
4
. See "Childhood of the Human Hero," in Joseph Campbell, The Hero
with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949),
pp. 318-334; and C.G. Jung and Carl Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of
Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
5
. Quotations are from the article "Sophia," in Theological Dictionary
of the New Testament Volume VII, Gerhard Friedrich, ed., Geoffrey W.
Bromiley, trans. and ed., (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), p. 479.
6
. I will not take up directly the association of wisdom with a
goddess--whether Prajnaparamita of the Indian tradition, Maat of Egypt,
or the Semitic Ishtar or Astarte--i.e. a divine principle in the world. The
goddess motif was incorporated into the Hebrew wisdom tradition in
Hellenistic times, with the advent of Sophia, or the Wisdom of Proverbs
Chapters 1-8, where she is represented as bride and life-companion,
pre-existent and instrumental in creation, seeking dwelling and union
with man. Wisdom as the goddess would be a crucial area to explore in
a more complete treatment of the tradition, but is not necessary to an
understanding of the role of the child and the fool in the tradition, which
is what I am after here.
7
. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Martin Ostwald, trans.
(Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1962), p. 156.
8
. Cataphatic is a term from Orthodox theology, which refers to a
positive knowledge of God which proceeds by affirmations. This is
considered a lesser way, and is opposed to "apophatic," or negative
theology, which proceeds by negations, and is "fitting in relation to God,
who is of His very nature unknowable." Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical
Theology of the Eastern Church (Cambridge, James Clark, 1957), p. 25.
9
. Aristotle, pp. 156, 209.
10
. "Sophia," pp. 473 & 475.
11
. Apology 21a-23b,in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1961), pp. 7-9.
12
. Hans Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-
Aristotelian Philosophy, P. Christopher Smith trans.(New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986), p. 24.
13
. Symposium 203e-204b, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Edith
Hamilton & Huntington Cairns, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1961), p.556.
14
. Ibid, 204a, p. 556.
15
. Gadamer, p. 52.
16
. Ibid, p. 57.
17
. See for example, the prophets use of the waistband in Jeremiah
13:1 ff, or the yokes, 13:27, 28.
18
. "Sophia," p. 503.
19
. Simone Weil, "Human Personality," in Two Moral Essays, Ronald
Hathaway, ed. (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1981), p. 29.
20
. For a summary of the tradition, widespread in the early Church, of
understanding Christ of the New Testament as incarnation of the
goddess Sophia, or Wisdom, see Susan Cady, Marian Ronan, Hal
Taussig, Sophia: The Future of Feminist Spirituality. New York: Harper
and Row, 1986.
21
. See Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
22
. Peter Brown, "Person and Group in Judaism and Early
Christianity," in A History of Private Life Volume I: From Pagan Rome to
Byzantium, Paul Veyne, ed, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 254.
23
. Ibid, pp. 290, 298. And see The Body and Society: Men, Women,
and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988), pp. 238-239, where Brown describes the acetic
as one who senses physical beauty "with unaccustomed intensity, but
without temptation," a state analogous to the unconscious, diffuse, and
polymorphous, sexuality of the young child.
24
. Women assume a striking new role in the Christ narrative from
the moment of crucifixion on. It is women who find the empty tomb, it
is a woman to whom Christ appears, and who is the messenger of the
resurrection to a group of initially unbelieving males.
25
. It is in fact the Hebrew wisdom literature which gives us the
Proverb, "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod will
drive it far from him."
26
. Saint Augustine, Confessions trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 177. Augustine, sequestered in a
closed garden, was at the height of his crisis, "weeping all the while with
the most bitter sorrow in my heart, when all at once I heard the singing
voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or
a girl I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain, `Take it
and read, take it and read'. At this I looked up, thinking hard whether
there was any kind of game in which children used to chant words like
these, but I could not remember ever hearing them before. I stemmed
my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a
divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first
passage on which my eyes should fall."
27
. Reinhard Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western
Literature (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), p. 20.
28
. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, John "B.
Thompson trans. and ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), p. 187.
29
. Corruption in Paradise, p. 64.
30
. Find in The Anti-Nicene Fathers
31
. See for example Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural
Despair: Theme and Variations in Seventeenth Century Literature
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), which interprets the
theme of childhood in Herbert, Vaughn, Marvell, and Traherne, and the
Romantic movement of the early 19th century as well, as a failure of
nerve in the face of rapid social and political change. Or see Jean
Hagstrom, Eros and Vision (New York: Norton, 1988), in which he refers
the Romantic concern with childhood as reflecting "a consuming
nostalgia for the past, the persistence of boyhood into manhood, and
the regression from adult responsibility and mature and personal social
relations to a condition that sometimes looks like arrested
development" (p. 57). And George Boas, in The Cult of Childhood
(Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1990, originally published 1966),
interprets the Western fascination with childhood as cultural primitivism
tout court.
32
. See note 17 above.
33
. Quoted in M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and
Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 379.
34
. Kuhn, p. 50.
35
. Abrams, p. 270.
36
. Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the
Sublime, Julius A. Elias, trans. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), p. 87.
37
. Coleridge quote or paraphrased in Abrams, pp. 267, 269, and 270.
38
. Quoted in Kuhn, p. 169.
39
. Abrams, p. 216.
40
. Lossky, pp. 87-88.
41
. Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man In a
Series of Letters (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965 [originally published
circa 1795]), p. 74.
42
. Lossky, p. 28.
43
. See the discussion of Hegel in Abrams, p. 232.
44
. Coleridge, quoted in Abrams, p. 276.
45
. See Abrams discussion of the Ninth Night of Blake's Four Zoas, p.
259.
46
. Schelling quoted in Abrams, p. 222, and Wordsworth in
Abrams p. 337.
47
. Quoted in Abrams, p. 252.
48
.
56
Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, p. 85.
57
. See note 19 above. In the same passage, Weil refers to a kind of
thinking which "has learned to grasp thoughts which are inexpressible
because of the number of relations they combine, although they are
more rigorous and clearer than anything that can be expressed in the
most precise language . . ." This, I suppose, as close as one can come to
Plato's highest form of knowledge, noesis, when speaking of thought in
quantitative or logical terms.
58
. Naive and Sentimental Poetry, p. 85.