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“What, then, is innocence?” The question echoes that of Augustine on time, and
there are no quick and easy answers. Yet the essays in this book, as an exem-
plary exercise in the interdisciplinary study of literature and religion, offer a rich
and challenging response to that question. Beginning with the Bible, they engage
with the problem of innocence though a range of literary texts that recover or
explore the scriptural and historical roots of the idea of innocence that are too
often forgotten in Christian theology. Rooted in these literary texts the book is
aglow with theological and imaginative insights.
David Jasper, Professor of Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow
This page intentionally left blank
Innocence Uncovered

Innocence is a rich and emotive idea, but what does it really mean? This
is a significant question both for literary interpretation and theology – yet
one without a straightforward answer. This volume provides a critical over-
view of key issues and historical developments in the concept of innocence,
delving into its ambivalences and exploring the many transformations of
innocence within literature and theology. The contributions in this volume,
by leading scholars in their respective fields, provide a range of responses
to this critical question. They address literary and theological treatments
of innocence from the birth of modernity to the present day. They discuss
major symbols and themes surrounding innocence, including purity and
sexuality, childhood and inexperience, nostalgia and utopianism, morality
and virtue. This interdisciplinary collection explores the many sides of inno-
cence, from aesthetics to ethics, from semantics to metaphysics, examining
the significance of innocence as both a concept and a word. The contribu-
tions reveal how innocence has progressed through centuries of dramatic
alterations, secularizations and subversions, while retaining an enduring
relevance as a key concept in human thought, experience, and imagination.

Elizabeth S. Dodd completed her doctorate on Thomas Traherne’s poetics of

innocence at Cambridge University, under the supervision of Professor David
Ford, and published it as Boundless Innocence in Thomas Traherne’s Poetic
Theology (2015), along with a collection of essays on Thomas Traherne and
Seventeenth-Century Thought with Cassandra Gorman (2016). Her research
interests lie in the area of theological aesthetics, and she is currently working
on a monograph on the lyric voice in English theology. She lectures in theology,
imagination and culture and in the ministry programmes at Sarum College in
Salisbury and is programme leader for the ministry MA.

Carl E. Findley III received his Ph.D. from the John U. Nef Committee on Social
Thought at the University of Chicago. His research and publications (includ-
ing works on Robert Musil, Dostoevsky, and Schiller) explore the labile bor-
ders that ideas traverse, probing diverse literary traditions and the translation
of theoretical forms into avant-garde literary practices. Findley’s work inter-
rogates the relationship between ideas and bodies, and the aesthetic and ethical
possibilities from the collapse of intellectual praxis, religious paradigms, and
gendered realities in 19th- and 20th-century Austrian, German, Russian, and
American novels. He is currently Lecturer of Liberal Arts at Mercer University
in Macon, Georgia.
This page intentionally left blank
Innocence Uncovered
Literary and theological perspectives

Edited by Elizabeth S. Dodd

and Carl E. Findley III
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Elizabeth S. Dodd and Carl E.
Findley III; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
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recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dodd, Elizabeth S., editor.
Title: Innocence uncovered : literary and theological perspectives /
edited by Elizabeth S. Dodd and Carl E. Findley III.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016023491 | ISBN 9781472489692 (hardback :
alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Innocence (Theology) | Innocence (Psychology)
in literature.
Classification: LCC BV4647.I5 I56 2016 | DDC 233—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023491
ISBN: 978-1-472-48969-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-44256-3 (ebk)
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Contents

Preface ix
ELIZABETH S. DODD

Introduction 1
CARL E. FINDLEY III

1 Affirmation and negation: The semantic paradox

at the heart of innocence 21
ELIZABETH S. DODD

2 The innocence of George MacDonald 41

JOHN R. DE JONG

3 The seduction of innocence: Erotic aesthetics from

Kierkegaard to decadentism 58
MICHAEL SUBIALKA

4 The repentance of language: Geoffrey Hill, Gerard

Manley Hopkins, and poetic integrity 76
DEVON ABTS

5 Imaginative innocence and conscious utopia in

Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities96
CARL E. FINDLEY III

6 The innocences of revolution: Failed utopias and

nostalgic longings in Evgenii Zamyatin’s We and
Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog114
CHRISTOPHER CARR
viii  Contents
7 A.I. – Artificial intelligence: Genealogies of
the posthuman child 132
ROBERT A. DAVIS

8 Can there be innocence after failure? 147

BEN QUASH

9 Moral innocence as the negative counterpart

to moral maturity 167
ZACHARY J. GOLDBERG

Afterword 183
ELIZABETH S. DODD AND CARL E. FINDLEY III
Contributors 185
Index 189
Preface
Elizabeth S. Dodd

Introduction
Innocence is a term that is used in a wide variety of contexts: literary, philo-
sophical, theological, ethical, psychological and judicial. An emotive idea
in contemporary art, literature and music, innocence is a term that is often
used uncritically and is rarely precisely defined. Is it a form of ignorance,
a result of inexperience, a kind of holiness, a natural state of being? Is it a
source of strength or of vulnerability? Is it an abstract ideal or a universal
attribute? In many of the contexts in which it is used, innocence is a subject
of controversy. This includes debates surrounding representations of child-
hood and its sexualisation.1 It includes the problematisation of claims to
innocence within the context of oppressive relationships, particularly from a
post-colonial or post-patriarchal perspective.2 It also includes disputes over
the nature, extent and provability of legal ‘innocence’.3 Given the urgency of
some of these questions, innocence is and will remain an important subject
of study.
This volume cannot provide a comprehensive or final answer to all of
these debates, but aims to open up key themes and questions raised by the
interplay between literature and theology. These two fields have had a sig-
nificant impact upon each other in the interpretation of innocence. Modern
literary treatments of innocence remain heavily indebted to a long Christian
tradition of which they are often unaware, while the place of innocence in
theology owes much to imaginative interpretations of Judaeo-Christian nar-
ratives of Eden, Abraham, David, Job, Mary, the infant Christ and gospel
parables and teachings, among others. The intersections between literature
and theology provide a fertile ground for this study, combining as they do
questions of sense and meaning with questions of style and aesthetics. The
contributions to this collection demonstrate that in investigating innocence
one is exploring the history of both a concept and a word.
This book uncovers new perspectives on innocence in literature and theol-
ogy, fills in gaps in understandings of its development and its diversity, and
provokes questions to encourage further study in this area. The Introduc-
tion traces the often forgotten scriptural and historical roots of the Latin
tradition of innocence in Christian theology and literature, focussing on the
x  Elizabeth S. Dodd
influence of early patristic theology. Findley outlines the development of
this tradition from the Hebrew scriptures up until the seventeenth century.
This provides the background for the main chapters of the volume, which
begin in the seventeenth century and move forward chronologically to the
present day.

Chapter summary and historical overview

Chapter 1 begins where Findley leaves off, in seventeenth-century Britain, a
period which sits on the cusp of modernity, and in which literature and the-
ology are not always easily distinguishable. The metaphysical poets of this
period wrote theology in poetry, the imaginative and transgressive language
of poiesis giving apt expression to heartfelt devotion and to the ambiguities
and nuances of theological reflection.4 Space for ambiguity and nuance in
this period was particularly important in a context of shifting theological
orthodoxies and intellectual mores. The transition from an Augustinian pre-
occupation with original sin and human frailty to an optimistic humanism
confident in our propensity to virtue and capacity for innocence is a long-
held presumption in literary and intellectual history on the period.5 This has
also been defined as a time in which a medieval concern with moral purity
progressed, via the wranglings of puritan spiritual introspection, to a mod-
ern desire for individual self-actualisation, in which innocence no longer
meant adherence to a moral law but to be ‘true to oneself’.6 While many
counter-examples could be drawn against such grand theories of intellec-
tual development, and their implicit narrative of progressive secularisation
has been heavily critiqued, this period can nevertheless be characterised as
one of change and uncertainty.7 It saw both the zenith and swansong of a
premodern imagination of innocence, exemplified by the paradisal litera-
ture of the early to mid-seventeenth century.8 One can also detect motifs
that would reappear in the modern context, albeit in muted tones. Thomas
Wilson’s threefold definition of innocence might soon give way to more
two-dimensional secularised versions and subversions of the theme, but the
metaphysical poetry of George Herbert, John Donne and Henry Vaughan,
and his poetry of childhood, was revived a century later by the Roman-
tics. Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood’ remembers a time when ‘The earth, and every common sight,/
To me did seem/ Aparell’d in celestial light’, while Vaughan, looking back
at this same time ‘cannot reach it; and my striving eye/ Dazzles at it, as at
eternity.’9 What might have changed between priest-poets such as Vaughan
and transcendentalists such as Wordsworth is the Christological reference-
point for innocence, which places it within a soteriological framework and
which ensures that the celebration of childhood innocence is not merely a
lost memory but a Eucharistic anamnesis which brings the past to live in the
present.
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment saw a developing conviction in
the innocence of human nature unfettered by the corrupting influences of
 Preface  xi
society. The ‘state of innocence’ became a ‘state of nature’, which for Hobbes
in his Leviathan (1651) was a state of war but in Rousseau’s Emile (1762)
became a state of freedom and equality, that of the ‘noble savage’.10 Build-
ing on Locke’s epistemology of the mind as a tabula rasa on which thought
is inscribed through education, Rousseau and others could look longingly
back to the purity of the blank page.11 This bud flowered in the Romantic
poetry of childhood, which celebrated innocence not only as a natural purity
but as the pure sight of the spiritual imagination, taught by nature to know
God, as the child of Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ will ‘see and hear/ The
lovely shapes and sounds intelligible/ Of that eternal language, which thy
God/ Utters’.12 The newly born mute infant’s pre-Babel state, temporarily
immune from the blandishments of verbal culture, could achieve a joyful
and unmediated unity with the world, as in the ‘Sweet joy, but two days old’
of Blake’s ‘Infant Joy’.13 The semi-supernatural perfections of the Romantic
infant hark back to the ‘divine child’ or the puer aeternus of classical mythol-
ogy.14 A similar theme can be found from the perspective of German ideal-
ism and in the literary theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve
Dialogues, in which the chid is a metaphor for truth, wisdom and connec-
tion to the ultimate.15 Schleiermacher has been accused of sentimentalism,
but his treatment of childhood was primarily concerned with the adult con-
version to childlikeness.16 He advocated not only children’s humble status
but their openness to the world and their subsistence in the eternal present,
as he stated in a sermon on Mark 10:13–16: ‘each moment exists only for
itself, and this accounts for the blessedness of a soul content in innocence’.17
Jong does not tackle the early Romantic poets of innocence: Wordsworth,
Blake and Coleridge, but explores their legacy in late Victorian literature
through the Congregationalist pastor, preacher and poet George MacDon-
ald. Transposed into this later context, the Romantic ideal of the innocent
child took on religious and moral significations at serious odds with the
actual state of most children. The realities of abuse and exploitation in Vic-
torian childhood lie at the root of many subsequent critiques of the Roman-
tic ideal of childlike innocence, since this idealisation failed to protect them,
and may have hampered their cause by taking away their humanity and
their agency.18 Nevertheless, the child remained an important metaphor for
the Christian life until the end of the century. The Oxfordshire tractarian
John R. Illingworth (1848–1915) framed the child-figure as a response to
the modern world: ‘a complex age which loves its own complexity. It is hos-
tile to that simplicity and purity of heart and mind which constitute what
in theological language is called Innocence.’19 Such happy ignorance is a
rebuke to Immanuel Kant’s ‘sapere aude!’ (dare to know), so its innocence
is that of ignorance. However, the child was both a rich and diverse image of
innocence. Placed in the midst as an object of contemplation and reflection,
it was the ideal, exemplar, parable, metaphor, sacrament, icon or even, as
Jong puts it, catalyst for innocence, and as such took many forms.
MacDonald’s was an imaginative theology in the spirit of the Romantics.
His fantastical style, and his link to similar fantasies on childhood such
xii  Elizabeth S. Dodd
as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), is testament to that. The
innocence of Carroll’s Alice is no model of safe moral purity but is trans-
gressive, even dangerous in its naïveté, much like that of the figures of Don
Quixote, Prince Myshkin or Billy Budd. That of MacDonald’s Sir Gibbie
is more straightforwardly moralistic, but its spiritual heart lies in its reca-
pitulation of the medieval imitatio Christi, finding in the innocent child a
fusion of devotion to the Christ child and to Christ’s innocent self-sacrifice.
MacDonald thus restores the Christological reference-point of innocence
perhaps missing from earlier Romantic transcendentalism and its model of
natural innocence. Jong also highlights the radical implications of MacDon-
ald’s theology of the child, in which it is not only the pious Christian, or the
Christ-child, but God the Father and creator of the universe who is like an
innocent child. Like Milton, who undertook to ‘justify the ways of God to
men’, it was the innocence of God as much as that of human beings which
was MacDonald’s concern.20 For MacDonald, childlikeness does not simply
denote special qualities but is indicative of a filial relationship to God, which
intimates a return to Hebraic notions of innocence not as a static state but a
status before God. His anti-Calvinist message about the possibility of inno-
cence reinforces the development of modern optimism outlined above, but
self-actualisation is understood rather as a self-emptying as one grows into
the image of Christ. MacDonald is a poetic theologian, not a creator of
systems but a writer of words that move the heart and inspire the imagina-
tion. Jong highlights the continuity between ‘bad literature’ and ‘bad theol-
ogy’ and notes the dangers of a literary idealisation of childhood innocence
because of its theological implications.
Developments in the theology and literature of innocence are inextricably
bound up with questions of language and poetic style. Seventeenth-century
literary culture was enraptured by the myth that Adam and Eve spoke a
pure angelic language, one in which sign and signified were coterminate
and nothing could be spoken but the truth. It was this language that was
confused and muddled at the tower of Babel, and perhaps restored through
the Spirit at Pentecost. Inspired by this story, the pure language of Eden
was discovered in the utterances of natives in newly discovered lands, in the
Latin of the vulgate Bible, in the logic of mathematics or in the wordless wis-
dom of infants.21 Poets such as Thomas Traherne claimed to turn away from
the ‘curling metaphors’ of the Petrarchan lyric in a desire to communicate
simple truth.22 A descendant of this impulse can be found in the Romantic
poets’ appeal to ‘literary sincerity’, which drew a link between innocent
truthfulness and simple language.23 The question remains, however, as to
whether it is at all possible to reverse Babel, and what the most innocent
form of language might be in a fallen world.
Abts explores these issues through the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
and the literary criticism of Geoffrey Hill. Both of these poets resist the
lure of literary sincerity, instead finding the opacity of a sometimes unintel-
ligible style the only path towards a truly ‘honest speech’. Inspired by the
apophatic theology of Rowan Williams, Abts defends the limits of speech,
 Preface  xiii
arguing that simplicity is not a virtue when it comes to poetic language.
Given that original sin affects not only the object of writing but also the
writer and the very language through which they write, it is not possible to
speak, and would be disingenuous to seek, an original ‘innocent’ language.
Instead, Hill and Hopkins enact a linguistic integrity which is possible only
through sacrifice or kenosis: a sacrifice of intelligibility and a kenosis or self-
emptying of the poet. This argument is reminiscent of Larry D. Bouchard’s
theological, ethical and literary analysis of integrity. Bouchard challenges
the notion of integrity as denoting wholeness, perfection and authenticity,
all terms equally associated with innocence, by outlining the integrity of the
actor who performs truth by emptying themself into the role of another.24
Abts interprets ‘kenotic integrity’ through a theology of repentance (the
poet’s decision to confront their moral weakness through the poem) and
through Maritain’s notion of integrity as seeking ‘the good of the work’
above all. The language of such poetry is ‘vital’, resisting the laziness of
conventional utterance by submitting to the gravitational pull of words that
carry weight both in the sense of being weighed down by sin and in the sense
of being pregnant with meaning. For Abts, such language cannot be called
‘innocent’ because it does not strip away the semantic accoutrements of time
in order to return to pure simplicity of meaning, rather finding truth in the
density of layered terms. However, it can perhaps be deemed ‘innocent’ in
the sense of a language which turns away from the corruptions of custom
in order to seek truth. Like innocence also, through its very unintelligibil-
ity to the world, integrity inspires humility and wonder. The language of
repentance, exemplified by Hopkins’s ‘Carrion Comfort’, is not innocent in
itself, but does seek restoration to the purity of innocence through honest
self-reflection. The integrity of Hill and Hopkins might therefore mirror the
innocent style through a shared commitment to truth.
Alongside and within the Romantic celebration of innocence there arose
an emerging modern critique played out through various versions and sub-
versions of the paradise myth. For example, in The Concept of Anxiety
(1844), Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis frames innocence
within a story of felix culpa as a state of anxiety. Innocence in this exis-
tentialist scheme is the state of possibility, an anxious or a dreaming state
before choice leads into action. So its loss is inevitable and even to be com-
mended, because it is only through the Fall or leap into existence through
the activity of free will that self-consciousness and moral responsibility
emerge.25 From this perspective, the desire to return to innocence is mere
infantilism. Innocence is not guiltlessness but guilelessness or ignorance, the
opposite of experience and not of sin.26 Defined thus, the decline of inno-
cence will become inevitable, both in terms of the narrative of its irreversible
loss through maturation and in terms of innocence’s fall from favour as an
ideal worthy of praise.
Subialka addresses the slow decline of innocence through the decadent
aestheticism of Gabriele d’Annunzio and Oscar Wilde, in whose works ‘the
innocent’ is an object of erotic desire. This literature draws upon themes
xiv  Elizabeth S. Dodd
of the persecution of the innocent, the separation of the innocent from the
world, and associations between innocence and sexuality. An understand-
ing of innocence as sexual naivety can be found in Augustinian interpreta-
tions of Genesis 2:25 in which Adam and Eve were ‘both naked . . . and
were not ashamed’. It is easy to see how an interpretation of Genesis 2–3
as a story of humanity’s fall into sin might consequently link innocence
with sexual purity. Associations between virginity and innocence appear
in various forms in Christian history, exemplified by the symbols of the
pearl: an image of purity and of treasure, and of the dove: an image of
spirit, of love and of innocent sacrifice.27 It is found in early devotion to
Mary, whose virginity was an aspect of the miracle of the incarnation.28
Later feminisations of this virgin ideal are not evident in the ascetic theology
of the Cappadocian fathers, who preferred the purity of a single life entirely
devoted to God to the worldly concerns of the married.29 The eroticization
of innocence, or the conflation of sexual inexperience with sexual desir-
ability, is another aspect of this tradition that can be traced back to ancient
narratives such as the rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13). Amnon’s desire for
his virgin sister turns to disgust after he rapes her, the abuse of the inno-
cent going hand in hand with the destruction of innocence itself through
shame.30 In Milton’s Paradise Lost, as Satan views Adam and Eve in the gar-
den, he is touched by their innocence while resolving to destroy it, declaring:
‘should I at your harmless innocence/ Melt, as I do, yet public reason just-/
Honour and empire with revenge enlarged/ By conquering this new World –
compels me now/ To do what else, though damned, I should abhor.’31 Simi-
larly, in nineteenth-century aestheticism, the erotic desirability of innocence
is a catalyst for its fall. There are two underlying factors here: the fascina-
tion of evil with innocence, on the one hand, and its attendant temptation
to corrupt and destroy innocence, and on the other, the vulnerability of
innocence to corruption brought about by its very innocent openness to
the world. Subialka frames the former in the context of nineteenth-century
subjectivism, as a vampiric desire for self-actualisation through the subli-
mation of the other.32 The latter theme turns the stories of d’Annunzio and
Wilde from simple morality tales into a metaphor for the development of
art, whose movement from simple creativity to criticism is expressed in the
tone of irony, and is a kind of fall. Subialka describes this as an ‘unusual
phase in the history of innocence’, but it comes out of a long association
between innocence and the erotic, and is part of a broader disenchantment.
The fall of innocence in the aesthetic sphere can be linked to the rise of
criticism in philosophy. This is exemplified by the ‘masters of suspicion’:
Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, who rejected and deconstructed the illusions
of a bourgeois, tyrannical and repressive religion. Such developments were
manifest in art in the disenchantment of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’
(1867) or the lament of Philip Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’ (1964): ‘never such
innocence again’. Within this context, Findley illustrates one way in which
the premodern Christian language of innocence was translated into mod-
ernist terms in Musil’s unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, from
 Preface  xv
a form of righteousness to an a-moral innocence. In this framework, inno-
cence emerges not through conformity to a religio-moral ideal but through
sexual or even criminal transgression. Innocence in this post-moral context
is akin to Nietzsche’s ‘second innocence’, which signifies the loss of reli-
gious guilt not through a return to original purity but through the abandon-
ment of religion and its morality through atheism.33 In many ways, this is
the antipathy of the Christian ‘second’ or postlapsarian innocence, which
is the restoration of a purity of heart within a religio-moral framework.
The dramatic transformation of innocence when translated from religious
into secular terms is evident in the obvious distinctions to be made between
Musil’s erotic utopia and the Christian eschaton in which the lion lies down
with the lamb. Nevertheless, the former still draws upon the latter tradition,
and so there are still comparisons to be made between them. It is instructive
to compare, for example Schiller’s German idealist notion of ‘recaptured
naïveté’ and Paul Ricoeur’s more theologically framed ‘second naïveté’. The
former signifies a contemplation of nature as simple and pure being, a strip-
ping back to essential existence. The latter is a post-critical return to the
symbolic world of primordial humanity, a recovery of abundance elevated
to a higher plane.34 We see in both of these ideas an impulse towards return,
restoration or renewal, which imparts a semi-cyclical progression to liter-
ary and theological treatments of innocence. This structure suggests that it
is appropriate to express innocence through eroticism, since it follows the
movements of desire which laments for the innocence that is lost but still
hopes for that which might be found.
With the decline of the Eden myth and of models of Christian innocence,
modern literary treatments of the theme became disengaged from their root
narratives of human origins and of the spiritual life, and so became disas-
sociated from history and human experience.35 Divided from these core nar-
ratives, innocence could be expressed through a more amorphous sense of
nostalgia or utopianism, or could be seen through the lens of universal psy-
chological archetypes.36 Where Eden was once a geographical and historical
entity and innocence was the gift and goal of every Christian believer, now
it could be little more than an abstract ideal. Carr explores the interplay
of nostalgia and utopianism in early twentieth-century Russian literature
dealing with the fallout of revolution and the transformation of society.
Whether yearning for a past golden age or pulled towards a perfect future,
the trajectories of the reactionary or the revolutionary are initiated by the
same impulse to find an absent paradise through the escape from present
ambiguities to the simplicity of the ideal. Carr describes how the trauma of
revolution caused a sense of homelessness and an attempt to seek what had
been lost.37
Carr draws a distinction between the naïve self-deception of poets such
as Alexander Blok who wholeheartedly accepted the socialist myth, and the
revolutionary innocence of Evgenii Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov. He finds
in the latter two authors, not self-deception, but rather a search for identity
and a commitment to individuals over ‘isms’. The radical innocence of the
xvi  Elizabeth S. Dodd
individual against society is also a feature of nineteenth-century representa-
tions of the ‘American Adam’, seen in characters such as Mark Twain’s Huck-
leberry Finn.38 The rise and fall of the American Adam mirrors the rise and
fall of Romantic innocence, as a nineteenth-century ideal fallen into disrepute.
It is a process captured by W.B. Yeats in ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’: ‘The
soul recovers radical innocence/ And learns at last that it is self-delighting,/
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,/ And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will.’39
From an assertion of the freedom and self-determinism of the individual and
a hopeful celebration of their capacity for greatness despite the challenges
presented by the world, American innocence has come to be seen as a form of
myopic self-righteousness which justifies oppression and abuse by a culture of
power through a dualistic demonizing of their enemies.40
In the context of 1920s Russia, radical innocence signifies an innocence
of nature, the creativity and freedom of the irrational as opposed to the
uniformity of reason. The innocence of Zamyatin’s character D-503 is not
found in the health and wholeness of simplicity and self-consistency – in a
being with no foreign bodies inside of it – but his story rather unleashes the
animal at the heart of humanity, unveiling the division of the soul from itself
which is at the heart of human nature. Against the revolutionary rhetoric of
the new and the modern, Zamyatin’s innocence is that of the pastoral idyll,
although it is not found in the freshness of the green leaf but the darkness
of the forest shade. He contrasts the blank innocence of the tabula rasa, set
up by the authorities of the United State as the ideal form of human experi-
ence, against the well of the discovered soul, which creates itself through the
imprints of the world upon it. Theirs is an inner innocence of the individual
soul which responds to the call of Greek philosophy to ‘know thyself’. For
Carr, the utopian/nostalgic ‘innocences of revolution’ represent a retreat
from reality, but he recognizes the centrality of the myth of the return to our
common lives, which ensures their enduring relevance.
In a Western culture obsessed with sexual abuse and the sexualisation of
childhood, innocence is perhaps a more pressing subject now than ever.41 Dis-
cussions of child sexuality reflect a broader anxiety concerning the nature and
status of childhood.42 Much work has been done in recent years to provide
a more nuanced understanding of the child, beyond the simple dichotomy
of innocent angel or demonic savage.43 Davis’s contribution to this volume
builds on his previous work in this field, recovering ‘lost histories of inno-
cence’ from obscurity.44 He now turns to look forward to the robots of tomor-
row for insights into changing late modern representations of the innocent
child, namely through Spielberg’s A.I. – Artificial Intelligence (2001). Davis
looks back to the Romantic ideal of the child which has so heavily shaped
modern Western approaches to childhood and innocence. The robotic child
arguably provides an opportunity to move beyond this dominant ideal, and
yet the story which is told is still deeply rooted in these traditions.
Two key questions emerge out of the discussion so far. The first is: is
innocence possible in a fallen world, and if so what does it look like? The
second is, what is innocence: a form of ignorance or inexperience, or a form
 Preface  xvii
of righteousness? The final two chapters address these questions from a
more theoretical perspective. Quash looks at the question of postlapsar-
ian innocence and asks whether it is something that can be ‘learned’ or
‘achieved’, or whether it is only ever a gift of grace. Through a comparison
of Renaissance theologian Nicholas of Cusa with twentieth-century theolo-
gians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Ricoeur, Quash distinguishes between
the notion of a ‘learned innocence’, a ‘learned simplicity’ and a ‘learned
naivety’. The former, advocated by Cusa, is a developmental innocence, seen
as the restoration of unity with God through spiritual discipline – a process
of learning and unlearning. For Bonhoeffer, true innocence is only ever a gift
of grace and so what can be learnt is not innocence but a discerning simplic-
ity; this guards against a moralisation of innocence as the goal of the saintly.
Ricoeur’s second naïveté is not innocence as such but an epistemological
category for a post-critical world. Following Rowan Williams and Martin
Luther, Quash suggests instead a ‘second innocence’ that is appropriate to
the historically situated being who is simul justus et peccator (at the same
time both justified and a sinner). This innocence is both a memorial of what
has been lost and a proleptic sign of the kingdom to come. As such it is nei-
ther nostalgic nor utopian but, embedded within and existing in spite of the
vagaries of history, is a call to a different way of being. The prime model of
this form of innocence is not Adam but Christ, and Peter’s walking on the
water in Matthew 14:22–3 represents the human imitation of this model
through an innocent act of faith. This theological discussion has important
implications for the literature of innocence. The innocence of Peter involves
a forgetting of the self and a purity of intention which is fixed upon Christ.
As such it resonates with literary critical discussions of the literature of sin-
cerity discussed above.
Goldberg adopts a more philosophical approach to these themes, defin-
ing innocence in ethical terms and addressing the common association of
innocence with ignorance. Biblical narratives remain at the heart of this
discussion, as they remain an undercurrent in much modern literature of
innocence. Goldberg references Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, as a sacrifice of
moral certainties for the sake of the development of critical self-conscious
morality. He defines innocence in ethical terms not as perfection or purity
but as a ‘moral immaturity’ whose view of the world is founded on the illu-
sion of the possibility of perfection. This approach reinforces the common
critique of innocence as sentimental or naive. He approaches this discus-
sion through a Kantian version of the doctrine of original sin and through
Kierkegaard’s notion of innocent or unreflexive rule-keeping as a barrier to
‘moral maturity’. By identifying moral maturity with transgression, reflexiv-
ity and personal agency, and innocence with their opposites, Goldberg sets
out a framework through which innocence becomes not a virtue or an ideal
but a form of moral weakness. This notion is evident in the history of the-
ology in Augustine’s understanding of infants in the Confessions I.7 and is
found in modern novels such as Kurt Vonneghut’s Slaughterhouse Five, or
The Children’s Crusade (1969).
xviii  Elizabeth S. Dodd
Moral innocence is a radical state, not categorised by the bounds of ethi-
cal law but sitting outside it and preceding it. It can be capable of atrocities
and not be held responsible because it lies not in obedience but in ignorance
of the law or in obedience to a simpler law of good versus evil, or a law of
nature. Such might be the character of Boo Radley in Harper Lee’s To Kill
a Mockingbird (1962), or the children of William Golding’s Lord of the
Flies (1954). This model becomes toxic when responsible adults lay claim to
childlike innocence. Such moral innocence is rooted in a denial of original
sin which in theological terms might be called Pelagian, but for Nietzsche
was a hypocritical denial of personal moral responsibility: ‘the most dis-
tinctive feature of modern souls is not lying but their inveterate innocence
in moralistic mendaciousness’.45 Goldberg frames innocence as a form of
inexperience that must be lost. The progression to moral maturity involves
a divestment of the simplistic illusions of youth in the face of experience, as
in Voltaire’s Candide (1759). We see this ethical framework in many mod-
ern literary treatments of innocence, such as Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of
Darkness (1899). However, most of the contributions to this volume illus-
trate the ambiguities and complexities of this framework in ways that refine
and even contradict this dominant model.
The chapters in this volume do not settle the question of innocence, but
illustrate from diverse perspectives various ways in which, in the literature
of innocence, theological questions and biblical narratives interact with
literary themes and theories. They address issues surrounding the ongoing
influence of Judaeo-Christian models on modern literature, their subver-
sion, decline and secularisation. They ask how innocence is presented in
a fallen world – whether it remains a state to which humanity is called or
is relegated to the fantasy realms of nostalgia, utopianism and sentiment.
They explore the definition of innocence, the various frameworks through
which it is understood: whether religious, moral, theological, literary, and
the diverse lenses through which it is seen: those of the virgin, the child,
or the garden of paradise. They challenge popular understandings of inno-
cence in literature and theology, exploring the ways in which it can defy
dominant representations of wholeness, cleanness and purity and finding
innocence rather in brokenness, mixedness and ambiguity. These contribu-
tions show that innocence is a question not just of doctrine or ethics but of
language and literature, and that good literature and good theology often
go together.

Notes
1 See below, p. viii, xi–xii, xiv.
2 See below, p. xii.
3 See, e.g., Krieger.
4 On the Anglican poetic tradition, see Countryman; on the theological possibili-
ties of poetic language, see Williams (1977).
5 For an influential form of this theory in literary criticism, see Hulme; on the
theological debates, see Jacobs.
 Preface  xix
6 On these developments, see Martin; Guilhamet, 6, 280–1; Trilling, 2–3, 12–13.
7 Acosta presents a more nuanced interpretation, charting both the changes and
continuities during this period.
8 On the literature of paradise, see Giamatti; Evans; Luttikhuizen.
9 Wordsworth, ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Child-
hood’; Vaugan, ‘Childe-hood’.
10 On Hobbes’s state of nature, see Thornton.
11 Locke, bk I, ch. 2, para. xx, see also II.1.ii.
12 Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’; on innocence in Romanticism see Dabundo, 18,
45–6, 89–91, 106, 406.
13 Blake, 140.
14 See Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk IV:1–30; 3–12; Woodman; Sandner, 3–12.
15 Schleiermacher, ed. Tice (1990).
16 See Devries.
17 Schleiermacher, 1834 homily on Mark 10:13–16 (1834–64), cited in Devries,
339.
18 See Cunningham; Plotz.
19 Illingworth, Sermon no.7, ‘Innocence’, 101.
20 Milton, Paradise Lost, I.25–6.
21 On this theme, see Leonard; Saenz.
22 Traherne, ‘The Author to the Critical Peruser’; cf. George Herbert, ‘Jordan (II)’.
23 On the Romantics, see Perkins; on the ideal of literary sincerity, see Peyre; Read;
Caws.
24 Bouchard.
25 Kierkegaard, ch.1.iii.
26 Cf. Schneider, who detects a similarly ‘anxious innocence’ in Blake, 356.
27 See, for example, the medieval ‘Pearl’ poem; on the dove, see Tertullian, Against
the Valentinians chs 2–3, cited in Bromiley, vol. 6, 71; on the history of the pearl
image, see Fredrikson.
28 See, for example, the discussion of Mary’s role in Irenaeus’ 2nd-century theology
of Christ’s incarnation as a recapitulation of Adam and Eve, in Dunning.
29 See, for example, Gregory of Nyssa, ‘On Virginity’. Medieval theology retained
a notion of celibacy as a heroic masculine virtue, see, e.g., Arnold. Virginity as a
distinctively feminine ideal is perhaps seen most strikingly in the Victorian ideal
of feminine innocence; see, for example, Lloyd Davis. On the development of the
virgin ideal, see Bernau.
30 Cf. less eroticized versions of the innocent as an object of admiration and devo-
tion found in the figure of Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy, or in the courtly
love tradition of medieval poetry such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
31 Milton, Paradise Lost, IV.388–92.
32 Cf. seventeenth-century love poetry in which the writer also takes on the per-
sona of the tempting serpent, but states that the innocent will achieve their own
self-actualisation by submitting to desire, e.g., John Donne, ‘The Flea’; Andrew
Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, 81–4.
33 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘Second Essay: Guilt, Bad
Conscience, and Related Matters’, para. 20.
34 On re-enchantment, see Taylor.
35 On the decline of Eden and the shift to a golden age, see Duncan; on the transi-
tion from Eden as history to symbolism, see Delumeau; on this transition as a
shift from utopia to ethics, see Doueihi.
36 See, e.g., Jung, ‘The Psychology of the Child Archetype’, 151–81. On the Jung-
ian paradisal archetype, see Jacoby. On utopianism, see Manuel; Manuel and
Manuel; Molnar.
37 For a treatment of the literary theme of childhood which similarly locates it at
times of trauma and uncertainty, see Marcus.
xx  Elizabeth S. Dodd
38 See Lewis. On the radical innocence of the American Adam see also Hassan;
Diaz and Patea.
39 Yeats, ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’.
40 For this interpretation of American innocence, see, for example, Hoffman;

Brooks Thistlethwaite; Cothran.
41 On the dangers of child sexual abuse and sexualisation, see, for example, Kitz-
inger; Renold, Ringrose and Egan.
42 On changing images of childhood see Higonnet; on contemporary culture’s

attack on the child, see Williams (2000); on the commodification of childhood
and the loss of innocence, see Vanobbergen; on the modern construction of
childhood, see Zhao.
43 For example, Berryman; Wall; Jensen; Bunge; Dillen, and Pollefeyt, ‘Introduc-
tion’, see also Miller-McLemore in this volume; see also Duschinsky.
44 Robert A. Davis (2011).
45 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals. III.19.

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