Wim Wenders’ 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire starts with Peter Handke’s St. Paul-inspired poem, “Song of Childhood.” Upending our expectations, the poem gives voice to a longing for the innocence and vastness of children’s experience instead of calling us to renounce our infantile past in favor of eternal life. This type of reversal is not uncommon in Pauline hermeneutics, where the origin and the eschaton are essentially the same.
Wings of Desire draws on central concepts in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy; Wenders is explicit about this. The point of origin – chronologically and ontologically – in both the film and Benjamin’s thought has received insufficient attention. I am going to approach the question of origins through the concepts of childhood, youthfulness, purity, and filiation, asking how they illuminate Benjamin’s politics.
Yotam Hotam has skillfully explored the linkage between Benjamin’s attraction to youthfulness and Meister Eckhart’s mystical journey of detachment. Hotam’s thesis rests on the premise that Benjamin’s aim is to secularize the theological category of youthfulness in order to put it to work in his political theory.
Let us assume that Benjamin, far from attempting to transform a mystical concept of youthfulness into a purely political metaphor, is in fact seeking to resuscitate the theological content of youthfulness from its dormant state. Instead of turning the sacred into the profane, Benjamin radicalizes the return to the mystical so that it results in material change as well as spiritual rebirth. In a dialectical fashion, Benjamin claims that one is not possible without the other.
In his Introduction to Benjamin’s Early Writings, Howard Eiland highlights an important aspect of the symbolism of youthfulness: “Youth is the capacity for experience that exceeds the rational framework of life, readiness for a ‘radically new way of seeing,’ whereas the ‘philistine’ or ‘bourgeois’ conception of experience is precisely the outgrowing of youth – youth as merely a transition to the practical realities of adulthood.” Coupled with Benjamin’s later attention to children’s toys and their ludic value in One-Way Street and Arcades Project, it seems that his interest in the redemptive potential of youth remained a central symbol for him.
Youth harbors a type of subjectivity that goes against the tide of the capitalist work ethic precisely as the materialist historian counters the progressivist narratives of historicism. Benjamin doesn’t see youth as something that is lost with age. He focuses, rather, on a state of purity and child-like wonder that is radically opposed to the commodified experience of adulthood.
The adult is enclosed and preoccupied with practical matters: their life consists entirely of deriving value from objects. The adult disdains the youngster because they resist the logic of the capital and wander the world with no practical end. Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy points out that, from Benjamin’s perspective, children are not only capable of reconciling technology and ancient symbolism, but also of finding new meanings in literal junk.
Similarly, the discarded debris of historical events shelters the true essence of political redemption. Two accounts of time can be derived out of this contrast: on the one hand, there’s the profane time that is defined by its ephemeral and fractured nature, while on the other hand, there’s divine time as eternal synchronicity. The essence of youthfulness consists in divine time. Youth heralds an eruption of eternity into the very fabric of immediate reality. Lost in time and limited by it, the bourgeois subject is tainted with a blind trust in the future and its novelty.
No wonder that in Wings of Desire only children can perceive angels: their minds are not yet impoverished with the contingencies of adult life and adult systems of meaning. The grown-up universe is essentially made of reified relations of production that the child is able to break through because of their curious and flexible mind. Everywhere, adults laugh at children for their giddy games, but it is adults who are blind to the ways in which their own pretend play shapes every aspect of their lives and leads to exploitation and injustice.
Hotam notes that Meister Eckhart employs the same contrast Benjamin does: the young man, as opposed to the old widow, is called upon to receive the Spirit by virtue of an empty soul. For Eckhart, emptiness by no means signifies lack but instead refers to a process of renouncing images derived from the creaturely realm. As the soul rids itself of earthly affairs, it returns to a state of child-like purity that allows its ground to fuse with the ground of God.
Eckhart invokes the opposition between the worn-out soul preoccupied with the external world and the eternally young nature of the pure soul with a number of symbols, including Martha and Mary. This opposition serves as the backbone for Benjamin’s subsequent critique of bourgeois ideology, as youthfulness stands for the capacity to resist the historical imperatives of one’s existence.
Eckhart writes, “If He is our Father, we are His children, and then the honor or the disrespect He is shown goes to our hearts. When a child sees how its father loves it, then it knows what it owes him, such as living in purity and innocence.” Further, “Purity of heart is what is apart from and detached from all material things, collected and enclosed within itself, and then plunging from this purity into God and being united with Him. David says those works are pure and guileless which are pursued and perfected in the light of the soul, and those are still more innocent which abide within, in the spirit, and do not come out.”
At first glance, interiority looks like the exclusive domain of salvation, since the inmost part of the soul is where union with God unfolds. The vocabulary Eckhart uses here heavily implies enclosure, suggesting that the inner citadel is the place of the utmost isolation. Along these lines, Hotam argues for a form of Gnostic opposition between the transcendent and the profane that places Eckhart and Benjamin at the antipodes of the same spectrum.
Likewise, it might be argued that Eckhart’s mystical path is based on a personal relationship with God that cannot pave the way for a shared experience of community. But this reading misinterprets the relationship Eckhart envisions between God and creature, as well as his Christology. By looking through the same lens of reversal, we see how this separation is only a moment in the larger process of mystical transformation.
The answer to the paradox born out of the tension between transcendence and the created world is found by following Eckhart’s mystical journey, not just its poetic symbolism. If it seems like the divine is located within human experience, that is because Benjamin sees the inward aspect of the human as the metaphorical locus for the Kingdom of God. Thus, the divine and the creaturely shouldn’t be separated through a conceptual schism; they should be joined through the mystical rebirth of human subjectivity – such as the one proposed by Meister Eckhart through the birth of the Son. This event is singular not in a historical sense but in an ontological sense, binding together the redemption of one’s soul with the redemption of the immanent world through action..
Human experience, particularly the experience of the young, in whom the ground of the soul and the ground of God come together in an overflowing of light, constitutes the basis for the radical immanence of God within the world. Neither Benjamin nor Eckhart are Gnostic thinkers, hence a view of redemption that implies either the complete renunciation of earthly life in favor of transcendence or the complete location of the divine in the creaturely would misinterprets the messianic mission in both of their accounts.
Reiner Schürmann tackles this problem by proposing a threefold interpretation of the Eckhartian mystical itinerancy in Wandering Joy. Schürmann argues that the union between God and the soul unfolds in three stages: detachment, release, and dehiscence. It is the third stage that makes Eckhart differ sharply from the Neoplatonic approach to transcendental asceticism. The state of release is an important point from both perspectives, but for Eckhart, far from constituting the telos, release is just a preparatory moment that leads to the destruction of the instrumental hierarchy between things. By letting go, the human soul renounces all possessiveness and thinking in terms of utility, restoring things to their original freedom. As Schürmann puts it, “God is not useful: he never explains nor motivates anything.” The widow and the adult are both thinking of objects in terms of their ends. But the child is immune to this worldly pragmatism, wandering the earth in equal awe at every aspect of creation.
Thus, both Eckhart and Benjamin see ekstasis as a means of redeeming the world of objects instead of pure quietism. Dehiscence is divine light exploding into the world through the soul. Eckhart turns to St. Paul’s revelation as an example: St. Paul mentions the inmost light erupting into his soul to the point of it being visible to those around him. The light of God is made visible outside of one’s soul, figuratively, through virtue and equanimity toward the created world. As long as an individual soul has been reborn as the Son and received the eternal truth of God, that soul can enjoy the world of images by recognizing the remains of God’s presence in it. For Meister Eckhart, the man who acts in the image of God is never concerned with the why, as living without a why is the direct effect of accepting one’s “present now” (Schürmann’s phrase).
In a similar manner, Benjamin sees the messianic power of every person as the actualization of the divine through the vessel of human action. Essentially, it is the inner child that rescues the sanctity of the world from its fallen state. Just as with Eckhart, all that is required in order to redeem creation is to make one’s soul available to the light of divine justice, just as the child does in their innocent openness. Although most of his published writings retain some ambiguity, Benjamin reveals the essence of this thought a 1913 letter to Carla Seligson:
“Almost everybody forgets that they themselves are the place where spirit actualizes itself. But because they have made themselves inflexible, turned themselves into pillars of a building instead of vessels or bowls that can receive and shelter an ever purer content, they despair of the actualization we feel within ourselves. This soul is something eternally actualizing. Every person, every soul that is born, can bring to life the new reality. We feel it in ourselves and we also want to establish it from out of ourselves.”
