The Child As the Guardian of Being Fr. Antonio Lopez If, As Some Have
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The Child as the Guardian of Being Fr. Antonio Lopez If, as some have shown, coming to terms with the meaning of divorce and its effects on children requires dealing with the nature of marriage,1 marriage itself is impossible to understand without questioning the meanings of person and love, as well as their relation to their ultimate origin. Once we see what the human person is and what is characteristic about human love and its distinctive fruitfulness, it will be possible to grasp more clearly that what is at stake in the family—and hence what divorce renders problematic for both parents and children—is the person’s participation in the truth of love. I will proceed in five steps. First, I will show that, ontologically speaking, the form of the human person is filial. Nietzsche’s anthropology will clarify by contrast our understanding of the child and show that we cannot adequately consider childhood apart from the mystery of our own birth. Second, I will speak of the unity of love proper to married love, its dynamic relation of giving and receiving and its fruitfulness. Exploring the nature of love will help us to grasp better the homelessness that results for parents and, above all, children when this unity is broken (sections 3–4). I will conclude by reflecting on the sacrifice required for the unity of human love to be true. 1. Memory and Childhood In her best seller, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: The 25 Year Landmark 1 Elizabeth Marquardt, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005), 22. Study, Judith Wallerstein cogently argues against the claim that “divorce is a temporary crisis that exerts its most harmful effects on parents and children at the time of the breakup.”2 Indeed, children of divorced parents have to learn to live the rest of their lives with the wounds their parents’ breakup inflicts on them. The literature on children of divorced parents is also an eloquent witness to another frequently neglected fact: the past cannot be canceled. Even if parents can partially justify dismissing their past life together, the presence of their children is a permanent reminder that the past remains present. Although the past—that is, the exchange of vows, and the children as fruit of their union—can be denied, it cannot be deleted. This brief remark on time and divorce opens for us an ontological dimension of the human person that normally goes unnoticed. The past abides, and the effects of divorce are enduring because the form of the person is filial.3 In other terms, the filial relation and the effects of divorce are ontological: they regard what the person and love are. As we shall see later, the child is the fruitful unity of the parents’ love. At the beginning of this chapter we can indicate positively that the child’s identity arises qua the loving unity between the parents. We thus cannot extirpate his relationship with his parents and with the trinitarian mystery their nuptial love represents. Children dwell in their parents and parents dwell in their children. This filial relation is constitutive, that is, ever defining and ever new. Negatively speaking we can say that, when parents divorce, the ontological identity of the child is called into question in a profound sense. Quite literally, the divorce poses anew for the child the question: “Who am I?” What does it mean to say that the filial relation is ontological? The human being is and remains childlike. To clarify this claim, I would like to turn to Nietzsche’s contrasting, albeit 2 Judith S. Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: The 25 Year Landmark Study (New York: Hyperion, 2000), xxx. 3 Andrew Root addresses the ontological dimension of the effects of divorce on children. Andrew Root, The Children of Divorce: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 43–65. deceivingly similar, thesis, which apprehends the human person without any reference to his origin. Nietzsche’s account, in fact, describes very accurately the way we still think and operate. At the beginning of his epoch-opening book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the German philosopher writes: “Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.”4 Since the remarkably deep and powerful description of Zarathustra’s path through life is well known, it suffices now to make explicit the points that are pertinent to our reflection. Zarathustra, like everyone who dares to embrace the dangerous but indispensable adventure of becoming an overman, has first to appropriate all the values, moral imperatives, beliefs, ideas, words, and traditions that history and family bequeath.5 One begins by receiving all these values and beliefs like a camel does: kneeling and letting oneself be well loaded. The spirit-camel soon discovers that all these “grave words and values” are alien to him. Because they do not come from him, “life seems a desert to him.”6 The spirit thus needs to roar at all this inheritance with the strength of a lion and destroy it through laughter. Only the one who breaks the inherited tables of values and worldviews, that is, uncompromisingly questions everything, realizes that every value comes from oneself.7 The spirit-lion, however, is still unable to create a new table of values and be content with the fact that this table is its own. Only the spirit that becomes a child has the courage of the new, the unstoppable energy to discover what is authentic, and the joy that desires and knows how to reach the highest peaks. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 137. Hereafter cited as TSZ. 5 For the meaning of the overman see, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), nos. 143, 283, 289, 292, 309, 310, 324, 342, hereafter cited as GS; TSZ, Prologue, no. 3; bk. 1, no. 20; bk. 2, no. 4; Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), nos. 804, 866, 983, 1001, 1027, 1060, hereafter cited as WtP. 6 TSZ, 305. 7 “We should be able also to stand above morality—and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling any moment, but also to float above it and play. How then could we possibly dispense with art—and with the fool? And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourselves, you do not yet belong with us” (GS, no. 107). It is clear here that Nietzsche’s radical questioning never wonders about the truth of one’s own table of values. The overman and his will to power are the measure of all things. The child, Nietzsche tells us, is “innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self- propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed: the spirit now wills his own will and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.”8 For Nietzsche, the child does not encounter values. Rather, he bestows value on the world in which he lives.9 Only the child is able to “create for himself a sun of his own.”10 The creator-child is the one who is able to play the game of forging one’s own values and of determining what is good and evil.11 Nietzsche contends that the courage of the new and the energy to build a worldview express the child’s power to create. Nietzsche’s spirit-child is the epitome of the will to power, that is, of the eternal striving to overcome oneself. The child is the real human being (the overman) inasmuch as he wills his own will. Contrary to what we may think, this will to power is not concerned with controlling others—hurting others is a sign that one still lacks power.12 Nor does the will to power aim at an eschatological realization of oneself. Rather, it is a constant fight, a permanent striving to perfect oneself, to master oneself. This human height consists in the unity in which the different drives of life (passions, reason, etc.) have been sublated, that is, 13 preserved, canceled, and lifted up. The mastery of oneself, therefore, is not the canceling out of 8 TSZ, 139. 9 GS, no. 301. 10 Ibid., no. 320. He further wrote: “Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good, and let us stop brooding about the ‘moral value of our actions’!” (ibid., no. 335). 11 Heidegger, who spent much time reading Nietzsche, wrote that “there are also great children. By the gentleness of its play, the greatest royal child is that mystery of the play in which humans are engaged throughout their life, that play in which their essence is at stake. The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.” Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 113.