The Mother’s Smile, Called into Being

       

DaVinci, so rare to see Mary smiling, reminded me of Von Balthasar's remarkable insight :

The infant is brought to consciousness of himself only by love, by the smile of his mother. In that encounter, the horizon of all unlimited being opens itself to him, revealing four things to him: (1) that he is one in love with the mother, even in being other than his mother, therefore all being is one; (2) that that love is good, therefore all Being is good; (3) that that love is true, therefore all Being is true; and (4) that that love evokes joy, therefore all Being is beautiful.

He has another similar quote from Love Alone is Credible :

"After a mother has smiled at her child for many days and weeks, she finally receives her child’s smile in response. She has awakened love in the heart of her child, and as the child awakens to love, it also awakens to knowledge: the initially empty-­‐sense impressions gather meaningfully around the core of the Thou. Knowledge (with its whole complex of intuition and concept) comes into play, because the play of love has already begun beforehand, initiated by the mother, the transcendent.”

John Macmurray, in the opening chapter of his Persons in Relation argues that the fundamental unit of existence and identity is not, “I,” but “you and I.” To be is to be in communion.

Macmurray writes: “The first knowledge, then, is knowledge of the personal Other—the Other with whom I am in communication, who responds to my cry and cares for me. This is the starting-point of all knowledge and is presupposed at every stage of its subsequent development…The knowledge of the Other is the absolute presupposition of all knowledge.”

All of human knowing, which I was laboring to expound, comes to be in the gaze of the loving other. All knowing has the interpersonal as its fundamental tenor. Knower and yet to be known are person-like.

The mother’s smile isn’t just epistemically formative; it forms us ontologically—in our very being.

                                                     

D.C. Schindler in his essay, “Surprised by Truth” also begins with a memorable claim of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s:

“The little child awakens to self-consciousness through being addressed by the love of his mother.”

Schindler elaborates: “The personal gesture that the mother addresses to the child is what gives rise to his capacity to respond in kind.”

This affirms that the soul’s conditions of possibility are not fixed prior to and thus independent of the (receptive) encounter with what is other than consciousness, but instead occurs in the encounter. They arise, as it were, not wholly from below [or within] but as a gift from above, which, precisely because of its generosity, creates the space for the ‘from below’ capacity to receive it.

In other words, because the mother’s smile is a gesture of love that ‘welcomes’ the other, her child, it does not impose itself as an opaque and indeed violent demand, but as an enabling invitation.

Schindler quotes Balthasar again: “the child responds to a directive that cannot in any way have come from within its own self … The entire paradise of reality that unfolds around the ‘I’ stands there as an incomprehensible miracle: it is not thanks to the gracious favor of the ‘I’ that space and the world exist, but thanks to the gracious favor of the ‘Thou.’”

The mother’s gesture of generous, self-giving, welcome, is a personal address, and can only be responded to in kind—with the baby’s returned smile. With this the newborn launches beyond himself ecstatically into communion with his world.

Balthasar argues in effect that you can gauge the relative defectiveness of this or that religious form as it falls short of the originary person-forming gesture of the mother in her smile. Any human being the world over, any human being who survives and engages life intelligently, that is, has been the ontologically constituting recipient of their mother’s smile.

There is a second principle Schindler draws from Balthasar: the mother’s smile is a Gestalt. It is a deeply integrated, and integrating, pattern. And this pattern is the mother’s beauty.

“When the other smiles at her child, she is in fact presenting him with a Gestalt in which she makes her person accessible to him as a loving gift. The gesture is not simply an opaque picture, which can adequately be read as it were ‘off the surface.’ Instead, the whole has a meaning because of ‘something’ that is both not any particular part of what she shows him and at the same time transparently present everywhere within it, namely, herself, i.e., her freedom. This freedom is what makes the smile radiant, or in other words genuinely beautiful.”

                                                                

Now, the philosopher Theodore Adorno locates a foundational stratum of being in some pre-linguistic bodily ‘knowledge’ to which women (like birds, like Sirens) have privileged access.

This mysterious force of nature – the hypnotic effects associated mythically with the singing of the Sirens, would become important to Adorno’s argument as, in collaboration with Max Horkheimer, he subsequently developed it, in Dialectic of Enlightenment: the Sirens who, as Barbara Engh points out, are described as half woman, half bird.

Adorno sees Odysseus’s encounter with them as standing for that fateful moment which marks the way (male) logos would learn to resist the blandishments of (female) pathos – if only by stopping up the ears and immobilising the body

                                                                  

In fact, in Adorno’s account, female voices cannot even truly be recorded !

This is because they need the physical presence of their originating bodies, whereas the male voice – quintessentially for him that of Caruso – works precisely because here voice is identical with self, with logos we might say.

Love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential "mood" that intends the world as beauty and can so receive it.

As I've argued HERE only once the senses are “rendered rational” by ascetic education is the "ontologically erotic" gaze, which loves and desires being, able to receive creation as gift within the vision of love.

Without the gaze of love - positive regard - one is scarcely a person, but feels only a deformed individual, ever struggling to achieve a place in the world.

                                                         

So, encompassed by the finite world of death and decay, is there another way to “see” the world ? David Bentley Hart says this;

“What one sees, and the “more” that one sees within what one sees, is always determined by prior intentions (both simple eidetic intentions and hermeneutically richer linguistic and cultural prejudices), and no mood escapes this necessity.

The “ontologically erotic” gaze that loves and desires being is more attentive to what constitutes or “en-acts” the seen than is an anxious awareness of the nothingness that shyly hides itself behind the seen; love sees each thing’s fortuity, its mystery, its constancy within a “transfinite” unity, its immediate particularity, its radiant inherence within its own “essence,” its intelligibility, and its way of holding together in itself the diversity of its transcendental aspects as a realized unity amid, and in unity with, multiplicity and change. 

                                                          

The gaze of love seeks the being of things in the abiding source in which they participate; it is a way of seeing that is acquainted with moments of enchantment, which awaken it, however briefly, to a recognition of the persistence of being’s peaceful and sustaining light (utterly unlike either the violence of time and nature or the stillness of an ultimate ground) and of this light’s “gratuitous necessity”; and these moments, however fleeting or imperfect, compel thought to risk a conjecture toward the infinite.

This gaze of love, that is to say, sees being as an infinite font of manifestation, showing itself in the existence and essences of things, kenotically allowing (and so without alienation from its own diffusive goodness) the arrival in itself of what is, in itself, nothing: the pure ontic ecstasy of contingent existence."