Being in a pandemic gets one thinking. I recall a conversation I had with a friend earlier this year at the onset of the pandemic about how we should conceive of the whole affair. Is it something radical, a cataclysmic event that will change how the world will be from henceforth? Or perhaps it is a sort of unmasking — an event that is not so much an upheaval of the status quo but revelatory of it. Thus, for example, many have suggested that the pandemic serves to reveal something about the deeply unjust inequalities that have been festering at the heart of society, and others have suggested that it reveals in starkly that we are ever only mortal. As with most such dichotomies, I think both are obviously true. However, I want to think about the latter option here.
Everyone’s experience of the pandemic has been different and I should confess that mine has been relatively painless. The most salient feature of the pandemic for me has been one of waiting. Waiting for restrictions to lift, waiting for elusive travel bubbles to be formed, waiting to return home. The act of waiting makes one feel deeply powerless. I make certain plans or promises about what I want to do, only to find those plans repeatedly foiled. The possibility of performing certain kinds of actions really depends on a whole system of other things and persons cooperating — something we take for granted in ordinary times.
I think this is revelatory. It may be that all of our agency is always a sort of dependent agency, but that this is something we forget in the ordinary rush of life. All of life is simply an extended act of waiting. In what follows, I examine this idea through something that I have been looking at recently: a narrative of emotional development, and then relate this to the nature of Christian faith.
From Omnipotence to Dependence
I provide a rough sketch here of emotional development drawn loosely from Nussbaum’s fascinating account in Upheavals of Thought. Nussbaum herself constructs this account from the writing of primarily attachment theorists (Bowlby and Winnicott among others) and a few ancient writers. I no doubt modify and omit many details from her rich story, but the rough structure is sufficient for my purposes.
When the child is first born, she begins with no clear sense of the distinction between herself and the world. She is fed and nurtured by a caretaker, but has no sense that he is a separate being from her. She is held and made secure and has her needs met by someone, but is in no position to understand her position. Instead, she subjectively experiences the world as revolved around her wants — this is a position of infantile omnipotence.
The child experiences a primitive form of gratitude as her needs are met by the world and frustration when her needs are not met, reflecting almost an implicit entitlement to the things of the world. Gradually she comes to realise that behind the satisfaction and frustration of her goals have external sources, indeed they stem from external agents. Anger and gratitude come to take determinate external objects instead of being generalised moods. A crisis, however, is soon provoked in the infant’s life which triggers a transformation in the child’s emotional development. The child realises that the gratitude and love she feels for the agent that has supplied her wants is also the same agent to whom she is angry with when her needs are unmet. One of the things the child thus sees is that, “she depends almost totally upon a person or persons who do not need her at all, who can walk away at any time, leaving her immobilized and helpless, and who indeed at times choose other relationships” (212)
The child feels the gnawing pain of frustrated desire. At the same time, knowledge of the fact that this hatred is directed at the one she loves triggers the experience of guilt: “the very person who had saved me from the wasps was the one whom I had bitten; this meant that my own love was tainted with badness.” How the caretaker and the child to respond to this crisis of ‘ambivalence’ sets the stage for the subsequent emotional development of the child. A caretaker who is neglectful or demands perfection from the child might cause the child to seek to restore their omnipotence through an assertion of their independence. The result of this is a refusal to rely on others or a deep sense of shame when one’s attempts to act have been frustrated — paralysing the child when she is confronted with helplessness. The alternative is a context in which the child feels’s secure enough to recognise her dependence on her caregiver. When the parent acknowledges his imperfection and provides a safe space for mistakes, a relationship is created in which the child can relinquish her demand for the safety of an independent omnipotence. The right kind of conditions allow the child to develop ‘mature interdependence’:
“the child is able to accept the fact that those whom she loves and continues to need are separate from her and not mere instruments of her will. She allows herself to depend upon them in some ways, but she does not insist on omnipotence; and she allows them, in return, to depend in certain ways upon her; she commits herself to being responsible for them in certain ways.” (224-5)
There is much in this story to mine but I want to draw out certain key stages of this narrative. First, it begins with the infant experiencing a kind of complete omnipotence, with the world structured around her needs, which is later revealed to be one of total dependence. Second, the child’s frustration when her needs are unmet eventually generates a crisis of ambivalence in which she recognises that the source of her omnipotence is at once the source of her frustration, and that the one whom she loves is the one with whom she is angry. Finally, how she resolves this ambivalence sets the stage for her resulting emotional development, but the ideal means of resolving this is one in which she comes to recognise her weakness and learns to exercise her agency through dependence on the other. In this way the fracture that is caused by the crisis of ambivalence is healed and the original omnipotence and dependence is restored.
Finding Faith
The careful reader may hear echoes of religion in this story and indeed Nussbaum points out some of these parallels herself. She notes how the stage of infantile omnipotence parallels the ‘myth of the golden age’ found in many cultures, a distant past for which the chaotic present yearns. In Christian terms, this reflects the fact that we are, in Steinbeck’s phrase, east of eden. And she points out too how the reconciliation that resolves the conflict is akin to the religious idea of redemption. Redemption in this story is one that restores the relationship that was lost at the beginning, but at the same time it is not mere repetition of that relationship. Instead, the journey through conflict is ultimately transformative. The nature of agency that the mature child expresses at the end of the process is one that recognises and expresses that relationship of dependence and mediated omnipotence.
There are interesting questions here about the implications of such a story for the from a religious perspective. On the one hand, some may take it as debunking of religious stories a la Freud. This developmental story shows merely that religious narratives are constructs overlaid over distressing childhood events for perhaps some therapeutic purpose. On the other, we may see this story as actually recapitulating the historical narrative of this world and the means by which our personal stories partake in the grand narrative and find their ultimate fulfilment in them. As some biologists used to claim, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the development of the individual organism repeats the historical development of the species. To defend the latter view conclusively is impossible here, but regardless I think it is worth examining the final posture which is assumed by the child.
Is there a name for this posture of dependence and agency? I think this is nothing other than what we would call faith. Faith is both acting and waiting, it is both a recognition of the reality of dependence but at the same time a laying hold of omnipotence, it is best expressed by that profound phrase of the Apostle Paul of his status “as having nothing, yet possessing everything” (2 Cor 6:10). In this context, one may see the Protestant doctrine of sola fide — salvation by faith alone — in new light. The doctrine was meant to uphold the fact that salvation belongs to the Lord and that individual persons contribute nothing. To add to faith — to attempt to contribute and earn one’s salvation — is to detract from it. For faith is meant to express total reliance on God, anything less would be an assertion of one’s independent impotence.
Let’s turn back to out world and think about what lessons can be drawn here. One of the things that the pandemic revealed is that, whether we recognise it or not, much of the things we do and the actions we presume to undertake depend on countless other things that we have no control over. The crisis of ambivalence extends from the child and her caretaker to us and this world. On our own, we can accomplish nothing — though we often like to pretend that this is not the case.
The question arises then as to how we may respond to this. One possibility is to try to assert our independence or attempt to control this world and others. Of course, this action would fail to reflect the reality of our dependence on others and sooner or later we may recognise the futility of such action. The other possibility is faith: the action through which we express our dependent nature and reliance on others. As faith is the solution to resolve the chasm between the child and her caretaker, so it is the solution that allows for the possibility of action in a world in which we are not God.
In a world without God, of course, such faith can never be total or if it is it would be false. For faith, as we have seen, is a reliance on other persons. Yet in a world without God the ultimate conditions for our action include the blind fates against which we must attempt to exert our own futile agency. And the blind fates, as we have seen in this pandemic, have the potential to overwhelm every human effort at self-determination.
Christmas Again
We have focused somewhat on the character of faith, but we turn at the end to ask about its proper object. The object must obviously be powerful and trustworthy. But I think there is another feature of the object that the narrative above reveals to us. One of the conditions for the child’s mature interdependence is that the caretaker must be one that acknowledges his own weakness and so shows the child that it is alright to relax her own grip on perfection. There is a kind of paradox here: the object of faith must be both strong and weak. Strong for us to depend on, and weak in order to draw out our dependence. A simple solution here would be that the object should be strong but not too strong, and indeed I think that this must be true of all earthly parents. They need to be dependable, and yet willing to accept imperfection in both themselves and their child. But the fates loom here again — against whom all human power pales in comparison. Omnipotence is demanded, but then what about weakness?
I think Chesterton helps us here:
To an open house in the evening
From The House of Christmas
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
beingsoberminded 