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2. The Primordial Child
- State University of New York Press
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2 The Primordial Child “Comment vivre, sinon édeniquement?” —Eugene Ionesco1 The Divine Child The passage from childhood to adulthood is one of the grand narratives of the modern West. Its subplots are various and complex, and can be traced in the history of manners, in the transition to universal literacy, in colonialism and all its hidden and explicit assumptions, in the ideology of evolutionary theory, in the eternal politics of what is knowable and what is not, in forms of spirituality, in attitudes toward the body and the natural world, and in the ongoing reconstruction of subjectivity. The story Enlightened Westerners tell each other about themselves is about “growing up,” about leaving childhood behind. Paradoxically enough, but in keeping with the hermeneutical relation sketched in Chapter 1, it is also about discovering (or inventing) childhood, to which the designation of the twentieth century as the “century of the child” attests. This apparent contradiction seems to indicate some sort of dialectical movement. The modern West received its original command to “grow up” from the same tradition—Christianity—which heaped honors on childhood in its own right by connecting it with divinity. Both can be seen as psychocultural messages that traveled from the ancient into the modern world through their formulation in Judaic and Christian scriptures and Stoic philosophies. St. Paul’s injunction to “put away childish things,” 27 and his emphasis on watchfulness and self-control carry forward the classical Greek and Roman disdain for, even impatience with, childhood . Paul’s adult as not-child became a subjective template for Christian adulthood that did not reach full effect until the rise of the modern world in Protestantism, the centralized state, “Enlightenment,” universal education, capitalism, and the emergence of a form of subjectivity characterized by different self-other and self-world boundaries. On the other hand, God came as an infant in Jesus, thereby exemplifying the archetype of the puer aeternus, or primordial child—that recurrent motif of myth, scripture, dream, and fairy tale—as an infant or young child, often of divine origin, usually an orphan or a foundling, who, in C.G. Jung’s formulation, is a “paradoxical union of lowest and highest.”2 The adult Jesus also identified himself clearly with the poor and the marginalized—among whom he counted children, who were characteristically minor, lesser, not worthy of full adult attention. This unequivocal identification with the underclass, in a world in which only freeborn Greek or Roman men were recognized as full persons, was revolutionary , and may be understood as a legacy that the West is still struggling to appropriate. Certainly it problematized childhood, which could no longer be seen as a state—like the animal’s—without reason. In fact Jesus’ famous saying “for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,”3 suggests a higher reason—something akin to the Platonic intellectus, which is beyond ratio, or mere reasoning. The form of knowledge that Jesus associates with young children is taken up again by Paul in 1 Corinthians, where he develops the inversion further in the notion that the wisdom of God is “hidden,” and “spoken in a mystery,” and that it is “foolishness” to the Greek rationalist tradition. Paul calls on the one who “thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, to become a ‘fool’ so that he may become wise.”4 Thus in the life and practice and teaching of Christ, the child and the fool—both of whom subvert adult models of knowledge and conduct—become models of spiritual knowledge and development. This particular epistemological tradition of an other, subversive knowledge, held by those who seem to be least in the adult world, is not only perennial in the West—where it has taken philosophical as well as theological forms—but is found in cultures throughout history.5 Like the tendency to view children either as quasi-animals or little adults, that tradition which sees childhood—and in particular early childhood—as either embodying, or as prophetic of, a form of knowledge that is qualitatively different from that of adults, is also based on experience, although perhaps of a less common variety. The tradition of the young child as knower of an expanded world that shrinks and frag28 The Well of Being [44.222.104.49] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:38 GMT) ments in adulthood is typically associated with religious or spiritual traditions , whether expressed in scriptures, gnomic sayings, folkloric and mythological motifs, psychoanalytic data, various wisdom...