Adam Phillips has a brilliant piece in the latest London Review of Books about difficult children! He asks 'When you play truant you have a better time. But how do you know what a better time is, of how do you leanr what a better time is?'
He argues that you have to be bad in order to discover what good is - a kind of self discovery through sin. Adults who look after adolescents are in the vexatious position of wanting them to behave badly, so that they can learn, and of wanting to stop them. In order to do this we need to have 'traunt minds' - to see the value of the experiment, the experience and the trespass. The adolescent is 'the person who needs to experiment with self-betrayal, to find out what it might be to betray oneself.'
If a child is never really difficult, then, or is difficult and has adults who just cave in, he never really grows into adulthood, because he never finds the limits. And he always envies the adolescent his freedom to tresspass...
Phillips makes an intriguing reference to Romans 7 in which Paul noted the function of the law was to increase the trespass. The rules are an invitation to find out what sort of person you are... only for Paul of course (and Phillips misses this) the transgression of the rules actually 'unself' him. They don't lead to his self-discovery at all; or, they do, and it is a complete mess. Which means that true self-discovery is the realisation that grace is needed...
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I always enjoy Adam Phillips' contributions, and found this one especially thought-provoking: I'd like to read it again a few more times.
Of course his concerns and Paul's are rather different. And I do wonder if he's not so much missing Paul's point as creatively misinterpreting (or whatever the phrase is) Paul's whole passage. Phillips is talking, amongst other things, about coming to psychological maturity, knowing what one wants without being driven by it, and so on ... something neither central to Scripture nor completely detached from it.
It's often seemed to me that this is something we, in our tradition, are not especially good at, and lack good categories for thinking about. Maybe the reaction against psychology in an earlier generation is part of it; or the felt need to relate everything to Scripture in a straightforward way.
It sounds a bit like the method the Preacher follows in Ecclesiastes, doesn't it?
Well exactly. I had been going to garnish my post with a comment along the lines, "and this is related to our weakness on the Wisdom literature", but held back because I felt it was a chiché. But it's a cliché, of course, because it's true.
It's also not a million miles from the concept of sin in the genesis story.
We want our kids to "eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" then?
But Sally this is my point: Phillips and Genesis (or to take his example, Paul) are not talking about the same sort of thing in the first instance; whereas by contrast the concerns in Ecclesiastes are rather similar.
The article is on the LRB website and is well worth reading; unfortunately you need a subscription to read all of it. However the first paragraph is I think publicly available, and includes this observation about self-discovery:
"One of the things you might have to discover is that some virtues are against the grain: it may not feel real to you to say sorry, or to be grateful, for example."
That may not be St Paul talking, but nor is it the serpent.
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 is unequivocal. Unruly children should be stoned. No exceptions.
Sorry - was agreeing with you, wasn't responding to you but to Phillips' original idea.
I also had a thought that as beings created in the image of the Trinity - our identity is not found by Self discovery but by Other discovery. We find who we are not by observing ourselves in different experiences but by observing God and our neighbour and in learning to love them.
"We find who we are not by observing ourselves in different experiences but by observing God and our neighbour and in learning to love them."
I think that's right in what it affirms, but I suspect it's wrong in what it denies. We're complex; we have depths; not everything about us is apparent to our surface inspection, but that's something we can get better at with practice or, dare I say, through experience. Because we see different aspects of ourselves in different circumstances, and we develop over time and come to express past choices, and disciplines (or their absence), and formative experiences and relationships, and ...
... and all of this is very platitudinous. I mention it here because these are all accepted matters of wisdom yet they're not derivable in any obvious way from core theological ideas (and, given the doctrine of creation, it's not clear that we should expect them to be). And they're more assumed than actively taught in Scripture, the Wisdom Lit. apart.
But it's still right. In my experience we can talk ourselves into a place where we can't see that, or where this common stock of thought becomes difficult or seems exotic, or a problem that needs to be squared with the gospel in some awkward way. I'm sorry if I'm seizing on your point (which is maybe true as far as it goes) but I think there are real dangers in this direction, maybe in our culture generally, but the evangelical tradition certainly is prone to them.
Bruce, I don't know you but I have appreciated your comments over the past few years. So often you are a squeeze of lemon on the waffle (and I speak as a chronic waffler) dished out by the rest of us. If that zest is a product of being difficult, all power to it!
Paul: Thanks for your kind remarks; they're appreciated.
Bruce - I think you're right (sort of) - I did think twice before posting that. But I think we're missing eachother.
What I was trying to get at is the obsession with Self that's in my generation at least and the way we see self exploration as being some how above or extra to ethical concern (exemplified in Michael's original post)... I'm not against deep introspection but I think it is done in a way that is most Godly (and most effective) when it is a bi-product of being in the context of following the Great Commandment, no?
I reckon I could make a fairly strong case for this from either scripture or doctrine.
I'm not sure I understand the dangers you refer to.
"true self-discovery is the realisation that grace is needed..."
Amen to that.
Self-examination for the Christian is not 'searching within', but measuring oneself against the setsquare that is the ascended Christ. Inherently, it is looking away from self to another.
The Knowledge of Good and Evil is judicial knowledge. It is the 'king'-dom of Solomon, and comes by experience (Heb 5:14). The mortification of sin is a judicial practice that images God.
Sally thanks for coming back to me on this. You said, "I'm not sure I understand the dangers you refer to": in honour of Phillips' topic, why not start with adolescent rebellion? You will be hard-pressed to build a theory of this straight from Scripture, and I can remember a specific example where practical wisdom on adolescence, in a (topical; not-from-the-pulpit) talk at my church back in the day, was denounced from the floor as so much worldliness, contrary to godly nurturing and teaching and obedience as set out in Scripture etc. etc. etc.
One can bracket those sorts of comments as well-meaning and uninformed: patronising and ignoring the critic, in effect. (Many people no doubt did this at the time.) But the critic was being set up for this foolishness by our tradition, specifically its de-emphasis of wisdom and its felt need for tract-ready grounding in Scripture. There are certain problems that just can't be addressed that way. To me, it's not enough that we should be (as it were) accidentally wise, embracing prudence in dealing with adolescents while continuing to use rhetoric that makes this policy unintelligible to plain people.
Because if you don't get wisdom as a category, and you have an expectation of being able to explicitly base practice in standard theological talk and in Scripture (with the Wisdom literature subtracted), then how exactly do you deal with an issue like this, which (however much grounded in our common nature) has a culturally relative shape?
One could go on to rejection of psychology as another, related example ... but is my concern more clear now, just from this first case?
As for "introspection [being] done in a way that is most Godly (and most effective) when it is a bi-product of being in the context of following the Great Commandment": I don't want to actively deny this, but I'm not sure I understand the need to say it. You are wanting to guard against the self-obsession in our culture, but it's a commonplace among secular commentators that we nevertheless lack self-understanding; and Phillips is concerned with this latter category, not with self-preoccupation. No doubt it's possible to integrate the need for better self-understanding (in Phillips' sense) and self-knowledge (in an older, and explicitly Christian sense), but I would not be in a hurry to do it, or to latch onto formulae about it.
Along these lines, I don't care for such phrases as "true self-discovery is the realisation that grace is needed ..." because I don't think the sort of thing Phillips is talking about is false or second-rate self-discovery; I would claim that his sort of Freud-descended talk has real purchase on the phenomena he's discussing. I don't think it's necessarily contrary to a Christian understanding, Phillips own views perhaps to the contrary. But its agenda is different.
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