Ruminations & Review: Childhood & The Imagination (Part I)
A Review of Ferdinand Ulrich’s Man In The Beginning: Toward a Philosophical Anthropology of Childhood
As will be the habit of this site and page, we will be frequenting the Theological Imagination. I want you to consider this as a hiking trail throughout a vast, green, mountainous land. Thus despite your repeated walking along this familiar path, the scenery itself will consistently invite you into a feeling of newness and a sense of awe and wonder.
Before getting into the book that will actually be reviewed, I wanted to share a quote which struck me as the dynamics and concepts overlapped well.
“The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste.”
-John Keats, Preface to Endymion
Scripture presents to us an interesting contrast: the ideas behind maturity and childhood (we will return to these a bit later). These concepts are ones also philosophically considered by our central author today: Ferdinand Ulrich. Ulrich is a fascinating modern philosopher who offers a Thomistic metaphysical account of ideas as he deals with thinkers like Karl Marx, G.W.F. Hegel, and Sigmund Freud.
His writing is steep and he seemingly refuses to be read “passively.” He does not deal with thoughts like other modern figures. Usually when engaging and critiquing, there are clear grammatical and structural forms so that the readers knows very certainly when ideas are critiqued or commended. Ulrich it seems, will have none of that. The primary thinker he engages with in this work is Hegel. His dealings with the thought of Hegel are as dynamic as a conversation happening in real time: critique, commendation, cultivation, challenges, elaboration, all flowing in and out of one another. You must be on guard as the reader, ready to engage in this sort of “living conversation” if you should so choose to undertake it.
Metaphysical Tension in Hegel
Ulrich notes there is a general metaphysical tension being wrestled with by Hegel in the concepts of childhood, development, and adulthood. The tension is this, either:
Childhood represents ‘nothingness’ of personhood:
a. Therefore development into adulthood and ‘fullness’ is meaningful.
b. But this means childhood is a nothingness of personhood.
Childhood represents a ‘fullness’ of personhood:
a. Therefore affirming the full being of a child.
b. But this renders the process of development and adulthood to be a meaningless process whereby the child becomes what he already is and determined to be.
Ulrich also utilizes the terms poverty & wealth rather than nothingness or fullness. He does not mean financially but poverty of being (child) or wealth of being (adult).
Ulrich notes this similar tension in the relationship that creates childhood: husbands and wives. He states that this relationship is also one that exists within the tension of wealth and poverty, of fullness and emptiness; thus if it is a relationship that is to exist in any healthy manner it is one that must exhibit two factors:
Self-maintained self-giving.
This sentence feel off, so let me explain. When we say self-maintained, we mean the distinction between “husband” and “wife” must be maintained. There must be a sense in which the self is upheld, the “fullness” of being maintained in oneself. If, say, the husband leans too far into the poverty of self, Ulrich says, “This would doom them to permanent immaturity . . . wherein the husband would be reinterpreted as the ‘son’ of his wife” (pg. 91). Thus the husband would collapse into needing the care and attention as a child rather than upholding the fullness of self of that of a husband/father (or visa versa for the wife).
On the flip side however, if one does not maintain the second part of the phrase, self-giving, the relationship again collapses. If either party leans too far into the fullness of self and sees no poverty in themselves, thus not needing the other, they withhold themselves from the other and become solus pater or sola mater. Ulrich notes that it is not merely the martial relationship that collapses but also childhood itself. See here,
“[Husband], as solitary father, lays his hand on the child (from beyond the mother) and gives thanks for the child to himself alone, while she, as solitary mother, claims the child for herself as a right. From neither side is the child ‘himself,’ but is instead empty reflection of the solus pater and sola mater. Childhood is destroyed from its root” (pg. 96).
The key underlying assumption being wrestled with in all of this is that dependency (or lack) is something to be overcome. This assumption is what Ulrich sees as the handicap to Hegel’s thinking where he ends up stuck between two insufficient ends. This tension can be actually maintained, however, if ones does not see the ideas of poverty and wealth as competing, and also sees the ideas of reception and self-giving as the metaphysical structures that binds them together. It is not that we are either a wealth of being or poverty of being but rather we are both, and the concepts of reception and self-giving provide the necessary structure to not just hold our wealth and poverty together, but also to provide the fertile soil in which we might develop and become more of ourselves.
I believe this is not only reflective of our time in childhood but also in our adulthood as creatures of God. Do we see if/where in Scripture it holds in tension these two ends?
On one hand, we are called to move beyond the basic principles seen as milk to a baby and move to solid foods for the mature (Heb. 5:12–14), and that we ought to “grow in every way into Him who is the head—Christ” (Eph. 4:15). Yet, on the other hand, we are taught to pray to God as Father (Matt. 6:9), to recognize that, as a Father, He is the source of all good gifts (James 1:17), and that we must receive the Kingdom of God like a child (Mark 10:15). Notice how the tension of growing and childhood is maintained within God’s giving and our reception.
If we are to grow in any sense of our understanding or practice of the theological faculty of the imagination, if we are to know or understand any significance of its role in our formation, if we are to understand at all who we are or what we will become, we must understand ourselves as creatures in need, therefore recipients of God’s self-giving.
oh that we might grow and mature. Oh that we might sprout up tall and strong, that our roots might deepen, our trunks thicken . . .
. . . but oh how young and frail we are before Him who is the Ancient of Days, Him who is the Root of David, of Him who is the unperishing Vine.
To this truth may our hearts quicken.
Next time we will dive more into our ontological poverty, and the role of the imagination. Until that time, may we dwell on this:
“Now, with God’s help, I shall become myself.”
-Soren Kierkegaard
