Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy: Wordsworth, Kant, and the Making of the Post-Christian Imagination

Introduction

s 1 The Making of the Post-Christian Imagination Introduction Romantic Redemption Suppose we think of redemption not in its rich and complex Christian sense, as a “buying back” of humanity from sin by a Redeemer who is divine but must nevertheless, by God’s grace, still pay the price of his own very human life to save us all; but more broadly, in thinner, secular terms, as any kind of saving, cleansing, absolving, or restoring of the erring or transgressing human spirit by the making of some great personal sacrifice. (I am not suggesting that redemption is the central concept of Christianity: but it is a central one.) Much is inevitably changed in this translation of redemptive into neo- or quasiredemptive activity. To whom, for example, would this sacrifice, this payment, now be made? For whose sake would it be made? Could one person possibly make it for his own sake? From a prior position of Christian faith, this would be to think of redemption as being enacted not by God in Christ—that is, not through the agency of some inscrutable grace, first permissive and divine, then sacrificial and incarnate —but by man himself, for himself. Yet the very fact that a man (or woman) might or should presume to do this for himself (or herself), or even for others, especially for others, would be the first and greatest sin he needed absolving from, because to do this, of all things, for himself, would be to make himself into his own Redeemer and his own God. To presume to do it for others would be an act of possibly even s 2 Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy greater pride than to do it for himself. From the prior position of faith all this would be a sin almost beyond comprehension. “Father, forgive them,” says the Redeemer at the moment of sacrifice. But just to start with, how could you possibly forgive yourself? Surely forgiveness, like gratitude, or grace, implies an outward movement of feeling toward another? And if self-forgiveness is unfathomable, how much harder it must be to understand self-redemption. Who could think of himself as sinner, self-sacrificer and divinity, all at once? Of course this prior position, together with the unanswerable questions it raises, has already been occluded or forgotten in many Western societies; and yet the redemptive need and response do nevertheless still arise, in damaged or troubled spirits that would formerly have been consoled or even healed, in a Christian society, by their faith. Under these circumstances the damage or trouble must be at some unconscious level partly a recognition of that displacement. This makes the predicament specifically post-Christian; it can arise only in a society which was once Christian.1 The faith can no longer offer itself, even to the memory or the imagination, as a sufficient response, and yet the redemptive reflex is still there: the sense that one has erred, that we all do, and that the only way to repair one’s spirit, to atone for what we all do to ourselves and each other, is by paying a great price, on behalf either of others or of oneself.2 Nor is this just a matter of making amends; redemption is not reparation. The price to save a soul may still be a life. So how to express this quasi-redemptive or post-redemptive reflex? What kind of agency, what coinage, might be available to such postChristians , when the redemptive turn appears to be the only way to relieve their painful consciousness of uncleanness, crookedness, evil— including their own? How can they come to terms with committing this “sin,” in the terms of an old faith still perhaps operative at some deep level in their minds, by which they make themselves the redeemers of sin? Assuming that to propose oneself as the redeemer (really the Second Redeemer) of others’ sins is an act of pride of satanic proportions :, then how are we at least to convert “I know that my Redeemer liveth” into a more modest and secular “I must redeem myself”? Jesus paid with his life; that was his coinage. Of course, even for a non-Christian, something like that has always been possible. Many s Introduction 3 have indeed paid like this, or with comparable forms of personal sacrifice , so that others may have morally better lives, or be somehow redeemed from their...