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The Widened Heart

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Richard R. Niebuhr
Richard R. Niebuhr
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
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Extract

Believing belongs to experience. It does not generate itself. When men today repeat the Lord's Prayer, saying Jesus' words after Jesus, “Lead us not into trial but deliver us from evil,” they are giving voice to their believing for a reason. The reason is the experience of being diminished and enlarged in the world of death, beauty, and renewal — in the great world of action that is the “circumpressure” of God. Believing (literally, holding dear) arises in times of testing in which human faithfulness takes shape and becomes tangible as an affection. How faithfulness becomes palpable is the subject matter of the following account.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , April 1969 , pp. 127 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1969

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References

1 Homo Christianus is the man who was once defined theologically as the baptized, justified, or elected man but who today is distinguished, in a descriptive psychological view, by the fact that in his sporadic self-examination and meditation on the world and God he invokes the name of Jesus. He has Christ on his conscience, not in the sense that he feels himself personally guilty because an innocent Messiah suffered and was crucified in the reign of Tiberius — or at least not in that sense alone — but in the broader sense that he cannot think of himself without imagining Christ to be one of those who are looking at him. Christ, in however vivid or shadowy a form, has become an indelible face in the “generalized other” that reflects him back upon himself and shapes and informs his self-consciousness. In this sense, homo Christianus “follows” a Christian way, follows after Jesus of Nazareth.

2 The English fear is associated with the German Gefahr and fahren, the Latin experior, and the Greek poros. (Skeat, W. W., An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language [Oxford, 1963])Google Scholar A pair of examples from Englishmen, in which both fear and dread appear for similar states of mind, illustrate the inconvenience of attempting to reserve these words for such distinct conditions. The first is taken from a letter written by John Donne. “I observe the physician with the same diligence as he the disease. I see he fears, and I fear with him. I overtake him. I overrun him in his fear, because he makes his pace slow; I fear the more, because he disguises his fear, and I see it with the more sharpness because he would not have me see it.… I fear not the hastening of my death, and yet I do fear the increase of the disease.” The Life and Letters of John Donne, ed. Gosse, Edmund (London, 1899), vol. 2, 184Google Scholar.

The other example is S. T. Coleridge's, in his notebooks: “It is a most instructive part of my Life the fact, that I have been always preyed on by some Dread, and perhaps all my faulty actions have been the consequence of some Dread or other on my mind / from fear of Pain, of Shame, not from prospect of Pleasure / — So in my childhood & Boyhood the horror of being detected with a sorehead; afterwards imaginary fears of … having the Itch in my Blood — / then a short-lived Fit of Fears from sex — then horror of Duns, & a state of struggling with madness from an incapability of hoping that I should be able to marry Mary Evans (and this strange passion of fervent tho' wholly imaginative and imaginary Love uncombinable by my utmost efforts with (any regular) Hope — / possibly from deficiency of bodily feeling, of tactual ideas connected with the image) had all the effects of direct Fear, & I have lain for hours together awake at night, groaning & praying — Then came that stormy time / and for a few months America really inspired Hope, & I became an exalted Being — then came Rob. Southey's alienation / my marriage — constant dread in my mind respecting Mrs. Coleridge's Temper, &c — and finally stimulants in the fear & prevention of violent Bowel-attacks from mental agitation / then (almost epileptic) night-horrors in my sleep / & since then every error I have committed, has been the immediate effect of the Dread of these bad most shocking Dreams — any thing to prevent them / — all this interwoven with its minor consequences, that fill up the interspaces — the cherry juice running in between the cherries in a cherry pie / procrastination in dread of this — & something else in consequence of that procrast. &c — and from the same cause the least languor expressed in a Letter from S.H. drives me wild / & it is most unfortunate that I so fearfully despondent should have concentered my soul thus on one almost as feeble in Hope as myself. 11 Jan. 1805.” The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coburn, Kathleen, Vol. 2 (New York, 1961), No. 2398.Google Scholar

3 SK wrote as follows about his melancholy: “In addition to the wide circle of my acquaintances with whom I am, on the whole, on a very formal footing, I still have an intimate, confidential friend — my melancholy, and in the midst of my pleasure, in the midst of my work, she beckons me, calls me aside, even though physically I remain where I am, she is the most faithful mistress I have known. But what wonder then that I must be ready to follow her at any moment of the day.” Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Dru, A. (Oxford, 1951)Google Scholar, No. 359. For a discussion of the Romantic idea of melancholy as a sign of genius, see Klibansky, Raymond et al., Saturn and Melancholy (London, 1964)Google Scholar. Note here the place that Kant occupies in the history of the discussion of melancholy. “The ‘sadness without cause’” indicated “possession of a moral scale which destroyed personal happiness by the merciless revelation of his own and others' worthlessness.” (122)

4 Memoirs of the Rev. David Brainerd, ed. Edwards, Jonathan (New Haven, 1822), 160Google Scholar.

5 W. H. Auden has investigated the literary symbolism of despair, water and desert, in certain works of fiction and poetry, as opposed to diaries, journals, etc. See The Enchajed Flood, or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (New York, 1950)Google Scholar. Water recurs in many of the quotations below.

6 The Life and Letters of John Donne, vol. i, 191.

7 The Words, trans. Frechtman, B. (New York, 1964), 93fGoogle Scholar.

8 There are other examples too numerous to quote and analyze. Among those that are especially striking are the following: John Calvin's authentic descriptions of the fearing state of mind in his chapters on providence; The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk. I. John Bunyan's many references to and accounts of his anxiety about salvation in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners; Bunyan several times compares his powerlessness to that of a child; cf. par. 102 and par. 198, op. cit., ed. Sharrock, Roger (Oxford, 1962)Google Scholar. A paragraph of particular interest appears in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It expresses the helplessness of ethical and religious man insofar as he is the captive of nature, the self-contained world of cause and effect. “We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This domain is our island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth — enchanting name! — surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.' Trans. N. K. Smith (London, 1950), 257. Nothing could be farther from a diary than the first Critique, but the language Kant uses here is dramatic and stands in the sharpest of contrasts with its context.

Also, S. T. Coleridge gives an account of his dreading as a child, which I have quoted above.

William James' Varieties of Religious Experience is, of course, the best single collection of verbal manifestations of dread, but the most interesting of all is James's account of his own experience, which he includes as the contribution of an anonymous Frenchman ( op. cit. [New York, Modern Library, n.d.], 157f.)Google Scholar, be-cause it is the most contemporary. Albert Camus' diary and note-books include pertinent examples, such as his notes on the psychosis of arrest; cf. Carnets 1942-1951: Camus' diary and working note-books, trans. Thody, P. (London, 1966), 4f.Google Scholar, to be read together with p. 37, on the accidental, fragile nature of human relation-ships.

Dag Hammarskjöld's entries in Markings seem for the most part too self-consciously modeled on KIERKEGAARD when he touches on dread, but at least one such entry is noteworthy, the second dated Easter 1960; op. cit., trans. Sjoberg, L. and Auden, W. H. (London, 1964)Google Scholar.

9 Inquiring Spirit, 40. Another passage Miss Coburn has taken from COLERIDGE'S manuscripts illustrates what he described in these words: “I work hard, I do the duties of common Life from morn to night, but verily I raise my limbs, like lifeless Tools I The organs of motion and outward action perform their functions at the stimulus of a galvanic fluid applied by the Will, not by the Spirit of Life that makes Soul and Body one.” Ibid., 37.

10 The Emotions, Outline of a Theory, trans. Frechtman, B. (New York, 1948)Google Scholar

11 Herbert Read does so in The Voice of True Feeling (New York, 1953), 184ffGoogle Scholar. The context is a long note on Richard Woltereck's Ontologie des Lebendigen (Stuttgart, 1940)Google Scholar, in which Woltereck criticizes the exclusive preoccupation of Heidegger with Angst and of JASPERS with Angst and Scheitern. Shipwreck is Read's translation of Scheitern. Scheitern certainly shares some of the value of the English shipwreck, but shipwreck, on the other hand, is a far more concrete and graphic word. Furthermore, Jaspers's use of the term does not suggest, so far as I am aware, any appreciation of the literary significance of the symbol. See Jaspers, Karl, Philosophie (Berlin [2nd ed.], 1948), 863ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Read's long note occurs at the end of his chapter on Coleridge as a critic, and so he does not connect the existentialists' Scheitern or shipwreck with Coleridge's own poetic employment of the image to express the fear of The Ancient Mariner.

The frequency with which the image of shipwreck occurs both in the spontaneous entries of journals and in the literary works, where the mood of anxiety is being evoked, is connected with the natural symbolism of water for defeating, destructive power. Beyond Donne's and Brainerd's use of it, the image of shipwreck occurs directly or allusively in Bunyan's autobiography (Grace Abounding, par. 186; also, of course, the “miry bog,” par. 82), in Kierkegaard's Journals (the “commune naufragium,” No. 163), in William James' quotation from Jouffroy's personal account of his “counter-conversion” (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 173f.), and in the following confession of Mussolini: “Yes, Signora, I am finished. My star is set. I still work, but I know that everything is farce. I await the end of the tragedy, strangely detached from it all. I don't feel well, and for a year have eaten nothing but slops. I don't drink. I don't smoke.…The agony is atrociously long. I am like the captain of a ship in a storm; the ship is broken up, and I find myself in the furious ocean on a raft which it is impossible to guide or to govern. No one hears my voice any more.” Toland, John, Twilight of a Tyrant, Look, 18 May 1965Google Scholar. The appearances of the image in poetry and fiction are too many to list (see Auden's study for a begining), but among the most forceful is Emily Dickinson's employment of it in “I felt a funeral in my brain": “And I and silence some strange race, / Wrecked, solitary, here.”

12 Paul Tillich made the distinction popular in theological anthropology; see The Courage To Be (New Haven, 1952)Google Scholar, chap. 3. It is correlated with his ideas of being and non-being.

13 The Friend, The Works of S. T. Coleridge, Vol. 2, ed. Shedd, (New York, 1854), 464Google Scholar.

14 The only criticism today of Heidegger's and Sartre's one-sided emphasis on anxiety or forlornness by a Christian philosopher comes from Stephan Strasser in his book, Das Gemüt. Strasser builds on the basis of previous phenomenology. Paul Tuxich, of course, sets courage over against anxiety in The Courage To Be. Faith replaces courage in his Systematic Theology. But Tillich does not conduct any explicit criticism of Heidegger nor does he attempt to show the affectional nature of either anxiety of courage / faith. Among others who cannot be theologically identified, Otto Bollnow criticizes Heidegger for neglecting the intensifying, exalting affections; see Das Wesen der Stimmungen (Frankfurt am Main [3rd ed.], 1956). Richard Woltereck is among these critics also; see note 11 aboveGoogle Scholar.

If we include Christian thinkers before the age of phenomenology, then of course many other names may be mentioned, but foremost among them Augustine, Edwards, and Schleiermacher. Of earlier philosophers, Spinoza is the most acute psychologist of the affective life, in both its negative and positive aspects.

15 Inquiring Spirit, 61. Presumably this fragment dates from the period following Coleridge's “loss” of his poetic creativity.

16 Aquinas recognizes joy as a specific kind of pleasure, pleasure as such being for him a general category in which both “brutes” and angels have a part. “…but the name of joy has place only as applied to that delight which follows upon reason.” Summa Theologica, I, IIae, Q XXXI, A III. Hobbes also makes joy the name of the “pleasures of the mind.” His brief allusion to joy in chapter VI should be supplemented with his discussion of dejection and melancholy among the “contrary defects” of the chief intellectual virtues in chapter VIII of Leviathan.

17 The Words, 153.

18 Ibid., 193f.

19 Markings, 71.

20 Ibid., 84.

21 Loc. cit., no. 207, 59.

22 Tchaikovsky wrote, “Without any special reason for rejoicing I may be moved by the most cheerful creative mood, and vice versa, a work composed under the happiest surroundings may be touched with dark and gloomy colours.” The Life and Letters of P. I. Tchaikovsky, ed. Newmark, R. (London, 1906)Google Scholar, quoted by Harding, R. E. in An Anatomy of Inspiration and an Essay on the Creative Mood (Cambridge [2nd ed.], 1954), 368Google Scholar.

23 Loc. cit., I, 1, iii; Calvini, Joannis, Opera Selecta, ed. Barth, and Niesel, (2nd ed., 1957)Google Scholar, vol. III. J. Glenn Gray writes about the astonishment that battle breeds in the following way: “When I could forget the havoc and terror that was being created by those shells and bombs among the half-awake inhabitants of the villages, the scene was beyond all question magnificent. I found it easily possible, indeed a temptation hard to resist, to gaze upon the scene spellbound. … As I reflect further, it becomes clear, however, that the term ‘beauty,’ used in any ordinary sense, is not the major appeal in such spectacles. Instead, it is the fascination that manifestations of power and magnitude hold for the human spirit. Some scenes of battle, much like storms over the ocean or sunsets on the desert or the night sky seen through a telescope, are able to overawe the single individual and hold him in a spell. He is lost in their majesty. His ego temporarily deserts him, and he is absorbed into what he sees. An awareness of power that far surpasses his limited imagination transports him into a state of mind unknown in his everyday experiences… This raptness is a joining and not a losing, a deprivation of self in exchange for a union with objects that were hitherto foreign.” The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York, 1967), 33Google Scholar.

24 Psalm 48, vv. 3f., Psalter of the Book of Common Prayer. Coleridge comments on the abruptness of transition between certain states of mind. “… Liking, Regard, Esteem, are continuous; and the Increase is so gradual as not to destroy the continuity. It is a1 a2 a3 a4. Love starts up or leaps in, and takes place of Liking. And even so it is, I suspect, with Alienation. There is a sudden Death of Love, or as sudden a Translation…” Coleridge is speaking first of all about affections in which the will is deeply involved, but he connects this observation with the phenomenon of religious conversion. Inquiring Spirit, 60. — Paul Tillich, almost alone among recent theologians, made use of the phenomenon of astonishment, in a some-what disguised fashion, in his well known correlation of revelation and ecstasy.

25 This age-old double perception of existence expresses itself in the collect familiar to all users of the Book of Common Prayer: “Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who settest the solitary in families…”

26 The Life of Schleiermacher, as unfolded in his Autobiography and Letters, trans. Rowan, F. (London, 1860), Vol. 2, 43f. (Translation altered.)Google Scholar

27 Ethics, Part III, prop. LIX, “Definition of Affections of the Mind.” (See Strasser's, S. discussion of this transitional quality of joy in Das Gemüt, 233ff.)Google Scholar

28 “At bottom life is beautiful only because of its tensions … I recall only a few rare occasions that gave me a joy as tense as that which fills me now …” Letter of Julius Leber from Lübeck prison; Dying We Live, ed. Gollwitzer, et al., trans. Kühn, R. C. (London, 1962), 155Google Scholar.