Spacious Joy

An Essay in Phenomenology and Literature

J.L. Chretien, Anne Ashley Davenport

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786610584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

In this important volume, French philosopher and poet J.L. Chrétien boldly and subtly applies his vast experience in phenomenology to poetry and literature – showing indeed how to bridge the boundary with philosophy. His real aim is implicit and brave: to show that spiritual authors from Augustine to Claudel surpass Bergson in their philosophical grasp of intuition and joy. He thus claims new turf for spiritual authors in the context of examining an important human constellation of emotions. The approach is exquisitely multi-disciplinary and makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the phenomenology of religious experience. Available in English for the first time, his work will be of immediate interest to philosophers, theologians, literary critics, psychologists, art historians and sociologists.

Chapter 1

Saint Augustine and the Wide Offshore of Desire

How could a body of work as vast and oceanic as Saint Augustine’s be born of anything but of an unremitting desire to expand? And how could his desire have remained so constant if it had not been the very desire to expand desire? Moreover, what more radical form is there of desire, and of the desire to expand desire, than the desire for the One who alone is able to stretch desire beyond its natural limits, which is to say the desire for Him whom human beings call God? The desire for expansion cannot be reduced to a mere thirst for space. It includes a desire for liberation — for taking leave of our own narrowness, our smallness, our constrictedness. It includes a desire to be released from the multiple prison sentences that we serve inside of the airless dungeons that we have built for ourselves or inherited from our parents. Confinement is not what prompts us to desire freedom. Rather, it is our desire for freedom that prompts us to dislike the confinement of prison. Indeed we see daily that a dwarfish desire accommodates itself perfectly well to a dwarfish dwelling, concerned only about making it as cozy as possible. It is from considering desire that Saint Augustine’s relentless meditation emerged regarding all that shackles us and deadens us, which in biblical language he calls “sin.” The desire for expansion is not some sort of psychological idiosyncrasy on Augustine’s part, far from it. It is the measureless standard of what, on his view, the human condition can and must be.

It follows by inner logic that extension, expansion, and dilation will figure at the heart of Augustine’s thought. There is a particularly important passage in a sermon, one of great simplicity. After noting the homophony between caro and caritas, between “flesh” (as in “carnality”) and “charity,” which are so proximate with regard to sound, and yet so distant with regard to meaning in our present condition (in hoc tempore), Augustine says to his audience: “Where there is charity, the heart is expanded and the flesh is restrained (cor dilatatur, caro angustitur). However, since charity itself suffers because of the flesh, and since the capacious expanses of divinity have not yet welcomed you, o dearly beloved brethren, you must reflect upon the capaciousness of this building, as long as weakness still fetters you!”¹ Evoking the size of the church in which he is speaking in a voice that is not loud enough to be properly heard by everyone is meant humorously, no doubt, especially since he evokes it in order to get the audience to quiet down (“The path of my voice is your silence”). Yet Augustine’s two appeals to spaciousness resonate together. Until we are able to run around freely in God’s capacious heaven for all eternity, it is a comfort, as well as a chance to take a deep breath, that we find ourselves in a spacious sanctuary reflecting on God’s word! Capaciousness calls for capaciousness. We move spontaneously from one to the other.

The opposite approach is adopted in the famous descriptions of the powers and actions of memory in Confessions, Book X. There, to borrow Henri Michaux’s expression, we go from the vastness of outside space to “inside space.” What makes it possible for us to leave external space without regret or nostalgia is that “inside space” is vaster still. Rather than forsake external space altogether, it includes it in a new, internalized mode. In the quest for God that Augustine both describes and conducts, he turns in Book X to the present, having made his confessions regarding the past in earlier books. Augustine first surveys the spaces of the world (mentally, so already by means of memory) in the hope of finding Him. In these spaces he finds only the mute, yet eloquent, witness that the beauty of created things bears, inviting him through a visible voice to turn to their luminous source. This is when he turns toward himself, still seeking, and writes: “I now come to the expanses and large palaces of memory.”² We find here the same word, campi, meaning open and free spaces, that was used in the sermon we saw earlier for the purpose of evoking God’s own capaciousness. The first thing that we learn about memory, which to Augustine is the very basis and ground of spiritual life, is its capaciousness. Memory exceeds a simple commemoration of the past even if it takes its start in such commemoration.

The capaciousness of memory, however, is the capaciousness of a dwelling, which is to say of a place that is our own to be inhabited, inviting us to endless exploration through a multiplicity of secret corners and recesses. In a further passage, Augustine speaks of “the immense courtyard of my memory. There, indeed, the earth, sky and sea are present (praesto) to me, with all that I’ve been able to sense in their midst.” And again, “in the immense fold of my memory,” the future that I imagine, await, and hope for, is “as though present” to me, to the same degree as the remembered past.³ The vast world in which I no longer move and to which I have shut my eyes reemerges at once, intact, whole, with its oceans and its mountains, “with spaces as immense as if I were seeing them outside.”⁴ The pathway to interiority is thus not a loss of immensity, but a dive into an immensity that is even more disconcerting since its disproportion is in me, is me. The privileged emphasis that Augustine places on interiority is not based on excluding externality but on including and exceeding it. What my memory gathers from the world and transfigures by transforming it into itself, into spirit, is no less large or less spacious than memory itself. There is, in this regard, an exact parallel between Augustine’s approach and the role that Rilke assigns to human being, and more particularly to the poet, at the end of the ninth Duino elegy. After distinguishing naturally existing things from industrial objects that are, as such, interchangeable and disposable, Rilke affirms that things aspire obscurely at being saved by us, at being transformed into us. They want to be lifted up to the realm of spirit. Rilke extends this desire to the earth itself: “Earth, is not what you want to be born again invisibly in us? — Is it not your dream/ to be invisible at least once? Earth! Invisible! What mission do you impose if not transformation?”⁵ Rilke concludes the elegy with the very Augustinian word of “heart” in order to evoke increased capaciousness: “Neither childhood nor the future decreases. An overabundant existence wells up in my heart.”

According to Augustine, we are so little confined in the “vast and limitless sanctuary” of inner space that it is this very lack of confinement that allows us to discover our narrowness, our angustia. How is that? What I experience as narrow, triggering dread and even stupor, is precisely that I cannot grasp or embrace more than a tiny part of the immensity of memory and spirit that I myself am, or that is “in” me. The conscious gaze of my mind is as though lost in the open stretch that extends beyond it. My own capaciousness frightens me because it is largely unknown to me. One might perhaps be able to go full circle around the world (which would only be one circle among others), but one cannot circumnavigate the space of one’s own heart, or go full circle around the self or oneself. How is it possible that I contain my own capacity if it is limitless? How is it possible that I am unable to embrace my own capaciousness? To experience immensity is also, by a strict necessity of logic, to experience limitation. To know dilation is to know constriction.

All of this explains why there is no contradiction between Augustine’s description of the immensity of human interiority and the ardent prayer that opens the Confessions: “Narrow is the dwelling of my soul. In order for you to enter it, let it be dilated by you (dilatetur abs te)!”⁶ God’s dilation of the soul for the purpose of dwelling in it constitutes the summit, the fulfillment and, therefore, also the organizing principle of Augustine’s meditation on inner space. What is at stake for Augustine here is not some casual image. It is the highest possible prayer to be said and the deepest possible desire to be kindled. We do not discover our narrowness simply by examining the self that we are. The discovery comes from being raised up to God who is present everywhere. The discovery is the recoil that the heart endures, just as there is a recoil in the case of firearms. The desire for God is alone what discloses that our heart is neither capacious enough nor pure enough to host Him. And since the desire for God is kindled only by God Himself, it is true in every sense of the term to say that God’s immensity alone is what sheds light on our constriction. In the form of anticipation and even of prevention, the first pages of The Confessions reveal the whole momentum of the work, which ends on the words “will be opened” (aperietur). As a case in point, the initial prayer asking God to dilate us comes immediately after a meditation on the divine immensity that contains everything, on God who is present everywhere in His creation and, therefore, in us. This meditation is really a prayer of invocation that is reflected back upon itself: to invoke God, etymologically speaking, is to call on Him to come, to come here, to come to us, where in fact He already is, as Creator who sustains all things in their being. God fills the world by containing it, not by being contained in it.⁷ To the One who is present in all things as Creator, who is no more present to one creature than to the next (which is precisely what later theology will call God’s “presence of immensity”), we ask that He come into us through grace, according to a personal mode of presence, as our savior. If such a presence were to take place, it could only be excessive, raising us to a state that is beyond what is ordinary and natural. Augustine depicts it as a state of drunken elation: “Who will gift me with your incoming presence into my heart, that you may inebriate it?”⁸ What is involved is always the passage from vastness to an even greater vastness. Augustine starts by the end in order to delineate the horizon of his work.

In Book X, as a matter of fact, the vast open expanse of the world that inspires our admiration reveals itself to be narrow, so to speak, in light of the vast open stretch that is memory and the human spirit. In Book I, man’s inner space, later to be described as capacious, appears as a wretched little shack relative to God’s vast open sea. Yet we desire Him to enter into it, with a desire that seems at first blush to be impossible — a desire that would indeed be absolutely impossible if our heart had no capacity to be dilated beyond measure. To Augustine, what is most at stake in dilation, and in meditating upon dilation, is nothing other than this divine ingress into the heart. Although The Confessions provides a clear answer to the question, the most explicit statements using spatial terms occur in sermons, articulated with the down-to-earth directness that characterizes Augustine’s speech when he seeks to communicate to ordinary audiences without talking down to them. Thus a sermon devoted to the Beatitudes evokes the happiness of the pure of heart to whom the promise is made t hat they will see God.⁹ The desire to welcome God inside of us cannot fail to include a purification of the heart, lest our divine guest find in it only disorder and injustice. The question is whether we are capable of accomplishing this preliminary purification by our own means.

Perhaps you find it difficult to purify your heart: invoke the very One who will not disdain to purify this place for himself and who will condescend to dwell in you. Might it be that you fear to welcome such a great power and that it stresses you, just as men of low rank typically dread the idea of having to welcome travelling dignitaries at their homes? Nothing indeed is greater than God: do not worry about your many constrictions, receive him and he dilates you (suscipe illum, et dilatat te). Do you have nothing to offer him to eat? Receive him and he will feed you — and what is sweeter yet to know is that he will feed you with himself. He himself will be your food since he himself has said: I am the living bread come down from heaven.

The only solution to this terrifying and impossible hospitality, as there is a radical disproportion between our cramped dwelling, our wretched inside, and the grandeur of the awaited guest, is precisely that God Himself provides for the conditions of His own hospitality by enlarging us, dilating us. What is unhoped-for is not only a matter of the identity of the visitor but also of how he arrives and irrupts.

Another sermon develops the same theme from a different perspective, as is Augustine’s wont. It vividly puts in place the parameters of Augustine’s meditation on the dilation of the heart. “The heart of the faithful is not too narrow for the One for whom Solomon’s Temple was narrow.”¹⁰ Augustine then appeals to Saint Paul’s words stating that we ourselves are God’s temple, the living temple of the living God. He pursues in the same familiar vein:

If a dignitary of great rank were to say to you: “I will live in your house,” what would you do? Given the cramped space of your home, you would likely become stressed, you would feel anxious in the extreme, and you would hope that it would not happen. Indeed you would not like to welcome someone so exalted into such a narrow room, someone for whom your wretched hut could never suffice. Do not fear the arrival of your God, do not fear God’s affection: he will not belittle you when he comes, on the contrary, he will dilate you as he comes to you. In order that you may know that he will expand you, he has not only promised that he would come (by saying) I will dwell among you, he has also promised amplitude (latitudinem) by adding: And I will walk in your midst. And if you love, you see this promised amplitude. Precisely because fear has its torments and its constrictions (angustias), love, conversely, has its amplitude.

After evoking the capaciousness of love, literally its breadth, Augustine adds: “You seek a place for him. Let the one who dwells in your heart expand it himself (Ipse inhabitator dilatet).” He pursues further by distinguishing between a security and a deposit, as he so often doe...

Table of contents

• Translator’s Note
• Introduction: Spaciousness, Joy, and the Legacy of the Word “Dilation”
• 1 Saint Augustine and the Wide Offshore of Desire
• 2 Saint Gregory the Great: Amplitude within a Narrow Confinement
• 3 The Dilated Runners of Psalm 118, from Henri Michaux to Saint Teresa
• 4 Mystical Dilations
• 5 Bossuet on the Open Roads
• 6 Amiel and the Pathology of Dilation
• 7 Return to Eden with Thomas Traherne
• 8 Whitman, Voyager without Limits
• 9 Paul Claudel’s Cosmic Respiration
• Further Reading
• Index
• About the Author and Translator