A Mead-Swing Lecture by Jennifer Herdt, Gilbert L Stark Professor of Christian Ethics and Religious Studies at Yale University.

In German Pietism of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in Goethe and the Bildungsroman, he created, and in Hegel’s philosophy in the early 19th century, we witness three different moments of an effort to come to terms with dawning consciousness of the scope of human self- and culture-forming agency. If we are to form ourselves, in what relation does this self-forming stand to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, the relationships in which we stand, and the experiences we undergo—that is, to the ways in which we are formed prior to any forming we may be said ourselves to undertake? Is anything comparable to the inner telos of plant life available to human beings?

If human beings are not to be reformed after the image of God in Christ, lost or damaged in the Fall, after whose image, then, and how can any form or norm that is imposed on the self become what the self truly is?

The Pietists called for utter passivity to God’s converting Spirit. Goethe declared Promethean independence, while appropriating Pietist narrative and psychology and flirting with entelechy. Hegel, meanwhile, recovered in a new idiom the Neoplatonic exitus and reditus of creation, insisting that authentic human agency has a participatory character.

Reception in the Lobby of Craig Lecture Hall from 4:30 − 5:00 PM

Sponsored by the Mead-Swing Lectureship and the ASOC