Incarnation and shame: Reading Richard Swinburne on Jesus’ “divided mind” in light of Christian phenomenology and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Abstract

This paper examines philosopher Richard Swinburne’s recent account of Jesus’ humanity in order to assess the reasonableness of cognitivist renderings of the religious mystery of Incarnation. Swinburne’s reading is positioned alongside a phenomenological and a literary rendering of this mystery in order to show up the potential limitations of representing Jesus’ Incarnation as a matter of mind, rather than a matter of pathos and embodied weakness. The paper also contrasts Swinburne’s description of mind with recent neurobiological accounts of the mind. Shame is one concept in the literary and philosophical renderings of Incarnation that privileges such affective states as pathos and weakness. Swinburne’s reading of Jesus in terms of “mind”, “consciousness” and what he describes as Jesus’ “divided mind” brackets shame by denying the Incarnate God any possibility of “do[ing] wrong” (45) while admitting that “in the situation of temptation, he [Jesus] could have felt as we do” (45). After reading Swinburne alongside phenomenological accounts of this mystery, the second half of the paper contrasts Swinburne’s reading of incarnation with T.S. Eliot’s literary rendering of a similar incarnational “divided mind” in Four Quartets.

Keywords

• t.s. eliot
• richard swinburne
• incarnation
• christian phenomenology
• shame