Charlotte Mason’s Paradoxical Principle, Part 1
Personhood Explored: The Doctrine of Personhood
From the time I was very young, I felt strongly that I was a person. I felt I was a unique individual, with undiscovered depths within me waiting to shine forth. One way I attempted to “shine forth” my unique personhood as a child was in climbing a large spruce tree that edged my church parking lot: I would climb as high as I dared and wait for gusts of wind to sweep around me, hoping to participate in the rush and wonder of wind and air. Every once in a while, a particularly forceful gust would enfold me, and I would almost feel the way I wanted to. (I will also admit that this tree-climbing was a vigorous assertion of my tomboyishness, necessary due to the pretty dresses I both was required to wear to church and secretly delighted in.)
Disney songs were another mode of expressing the depths of my heart, my sense of needing to become the beautiful person within me. How many times did I wander about my basement dreamily singing “I wanna be where the mermaids are” (my extremely creative rendition of Ariel’s “I want” song)?[1] A year or two later, this was traded in for Mulan’s “When will my reflection show who I am inside?” I resonated strongly with this sense of something inside me needing to be actualized—something more than I currently was.
In high school, my desire to unearth my personhood took a more concrete form; I started taking piano lessons with a particularly gifted teacher and found, to my delight, that I was a particularly gifted student. Since being a dryad or a wind goddess or a martial hero was impractical (I think martial hero the most impractical of the three), I decided to settle for an inspiring music professor and performer. What expresses the greatness of the soul better than music? And what could be greater proof that God intended me for this great path than my talent and drive? I had found “who I was inside” and I was pretty impressed with that person.
My parents, however, were unlike the other parents of talented children I witnessed as I competed in music festivals. These other parents were clearly prepared to move mountains for their children to pursue music, while my parents, though happy for me, were mostly wary. I might almost say nonplussed. They were displeased that my interests were narrowing, that I seemed to be so taken up with my ambitions. “You’re inward, Laura,” my dad told me earnestly during one chat in grade 12. “All you see is this,” and he would place both hands directly in front of his nose, covering his face. “Dad, you don’t understand! I’m really good at piano. God gave me this gift. Doesn’t that mean anything?” “Sure, fine, so you’re pretty good at piano. You could be good at lots of things,” and he would wave aside my claim to greatness, infuriating me with what I felt was his dismissal of something so precious to me, so precious in me.
And yet I knew there was darkness in me too. I’ve always known I am a sinner (to use rather old-fashioned language) and have been oppressed from childhood with a sense of my dreadfully disappointing self. It made perfect sense to me that I had to die to myself and live to Christ. But … what about this deep sense and desire for greatness?
I begin this article (the first of three) with these stories to say that Charlotte Mason’s concept of personhood has been personally significant. Despite sensing that Mason had tapped into something deeply biblical and life-giving about personhood, it took a long period of intellectual wrestling for me to make sense of things; Mason’s writings are unwieldy, and I have often been confounded by the seemingly contradictory ways she treats children’s personhood. For example, she commended mothers for jealously guarding the personalities of their children, insisted we not force our opinions on them, and restricted our “tools” of character formation to atmosphere, discipline, and life.[2] So much liberty, so much scope, so little restriction is to be the child’s lot, for a child’s personhood must not be violated! On the other hand, Mason believed children should be completely obedient to their parents, should not express (and certainly not develop) their personal likes and dislikes for things, should be taught to have just opinions, and above all, parents were to teach their children to believe and follow Christ with unswerving loyalty.[3] Where is the respect for personhood here? As I read others explain Mason’s philosophy or try to implement it, it seems I am not the only one who has struggled to understand these apparent contradictions.
But there has been a second challenge to understanding Mason that I think is deeper, and it goes back to Mulan’s song, Reflection. This beautiful song that Mulan sings is nothing if not a song about personhood. The statement “who I am inside,” simple as it seems, is a philosophical claim about the nature of personhood. It was this vision of personhood that stole into my child-heart, silently and unawares, as I sang songs, read books, watched movies, and generally lived in our modern Western world. It is this view of personhood that makes understanding Charlotte Mason, I believe, nigh impossible. My hope is that, by the end of this series, you will have the tools to understand Mason properly—to make sense of why she thinks it is absurd to ask a child what her favourite colour is or what food he’d like to eat. I will discuss personhood using Mason’s own wholistic method of idea, discipline, and atmosphere. This first article will analyze Mason’s doctrine of personhood. The second article will discuss how Mason believed the doctrine of personhood requires the formation of particular habits, and the third article will discuss how personhood transforms the very “feeling” of reality.
What did Charlotte Mason mean by “Children are born persons”?[4] First, Mason was objecting to the belief that, just as the physical capacity of an adult human was not yet present in a child, so the full spiritual capacity—the capacity for feeling, thinking, sinning, communing with the world and God—was not yet present.[5] If one believed that children were not yet fully persons, one wouldn’t expect them capable of the relational depth with the world, man, and their Maker as adults experienced. But Mason, in her own experience with children and from Scripture itself, found that the idea that children were not fully formed persons (a view that has been historically the norm) was utterly false.[6] They were “ignorant” and “weak,” but persons nonetheless, and in many ways, their personhood was less compromised than that of adults.[7] Hence, Jesus commands all to become as little children if they are to enter the kingdom of heaven, and Jesus surely wants us to become more human, not less.
Children are persons, even as adults are. So far so good. But what did Mason mean by “person”? Briefly, a review of God’s personhood.
Charlotte Mason believed that the Christian God is fundamentally revealed as a person, meaning he is a relational being who created other persons for the purpose of relationship—for love. As a person, he is not a tool to be used for humanity’s own purposes, thus turning God into a subjective entity that has meaning, value, and purpose only insofar as he serves our needs. Rather, he is absolutely objective:
To use the language of philosophy, religion, as we know it, is subjective, not objective; that is, our religious idea is directly opposed to the genius of Christianity. Oh, the appalling egoism of “Christian” literature! while … that enthralling Personality which is capable of ever-fresh unfoldings to meet the needs of all the ages, we hear, only, as it is subservient to our poor uses. “For me” is the keynote of one great school of religious thought; “By me” that of another; but how seldom is Christ Himself, for Himself—not for what He is for us, or has done for us, or worketh in us—placed in the foreground of religious thought![8]
Mason believed that the distinguishing trait—the “genius of Christianity”—was precisely that God invited us, not to use him or be used by him (contra all pagan religions before), but to love him and be loved by him. While the language of relationship may seem to turn the Christian religion into a subjective, emotional affair, it in fact does the exact opposite. Just as a husband who wishes to have a good relationship with his wife must reckon with the real, objective woman rather than an ideal he has in his mind—that is, he must deal with a reality outside of him (his wife) rather than a reality inside him (his needs/desires)—so we also when we encounter God, encounter an individual with real feelings[9], real characteristics that must be reckoned with.
Thus God. An objective, a personal, a relational reality. And thus also Mason describes the human person, “The Great Self”:
There is only one authoritative estimate of the greatness of the human soul. It is put into the balances with the whole world, and the whole world, glorious and beautiful as it is, weighs as nothing in the comparison. But we lose the value of this utterance of our Lord’s because we choose to think that He is speaking of a relative and not an intrinsic value.[10]
The “authoritative estimate of the human soul” Mason is referring to is Jesus’ statement in the gospels: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?”[11] And, of course, this understanding of the inherent value of the human soul originates in God’s statement in Genesis: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”[12] We are imago Dei, God-images, bearing the unique characteristic of God—personhood.[13] And while Mason never presumed to describe all that this imago Dei might entail, she certainly believed that it was an objective reality—“we lose the value of this utterance of our Lord’s because we choose to think that He is speaking of a relative and not an intrinsic value”—that had as its aim a Godward movement. All of creation, but humanity in a particularly unique way, was meant to participate in this Godward movement: “this free and joyous development, whether of intellect or heart, is recognised as a Godward movement.”[14]
What are the implications of this very lovely, yet very abstract idea of the objective person?
First, Mason believed that, as objective persons made in the image of God, we have a given nature that is vast, glorious, and existing quite apart from our own notion of ourselves. Mason would have fully agreed with C. S. Lewis’s statement that “You have never talked to a mere mortal,” that, “the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship”.[15] However, this glorious objective person, made by God and intended to be glorious, is fallen. And therefore, the glorious objective person now only exists in potential: “It may be that all the properties of the soul are present in everyone, developed or undeveloped… So Christ seems to have taught; and many a poor and insignificant soul has been found to hold capacity for Him.”[16] Thus, the human person is not what God intended; we have all been broken into a potential and a realized self. The realized self is often, to those around us and especially to ourselves, deeply disappointing: “The realised self of each of us is a distressfully poor thing”.[17] This realised self, Mason also describes as “that tiresome other self—the subjective self”. [18] By this, she means that we experience within ourselves the struggle of two realities, what she calls the dual self: we have the objective self, with all of its power and glory and potential, even if it is not actualized.[19] And we have the subjective self, the realized self that is poor and pitiful, changeable and weak. The objective self is what God intends us to be and is marked by an objective orientation to God and the world. The subjective self often mistakenly asserts its right to be recognized and treated with all the respect and admiration which only belong to the objective self and is marked by a subjective orientation to God and the world.
I would like to pause here for a moment to provide a more concrete, artistic understanding of the notion of the subjective and objective person, since it is admittedly a bit difficult. And I can’t think of anyone who does it better than Lewis. Like Mason, he believed that the subjective orientation was fundamentally destructive and anti-God. Below I have sections from his books Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. In the first section, Satan is tempting a new Eve (of sorts) to sin and is beginning to corrupt her mind by curling her in on herself, by making her subjective in orientation. Satan hands her a mirror, something she has never seen before:
“What is it? What am I to do with it?” she said.
“Look in it,” said the Unman [Satan].
“How?”
“Look!” he said. Then taking it from her he held it up to her face…
“Oh—oh,” she cried. “What is it? I saw a face.”
“Only your own face, beautiful one,” said the Unman.
“I know,” said the Lady, still averting her eyes from the mirror. “My face—out there—looking at me. Am I growing older or is it something else? I feel … I feel … my heart is beating too hard. I am not warm. What is it?” She glanced from one of them to the other…
“But there is no cause for fear in this little thing: rather for joy. What is fearful in it?”
“Things being two when they are one,” replied the Lady decisively. “That thing” (she pointed at the mirror) “is me and not me.”
“But if you do not look you will never know how beautiful you are.”
“It comes into my mind, Stranger,” she answered, “that a fruit does not eat itself, and a man cannot be together with himself.”
“A fruit cannot do that because it is only a fruit,” said the Unman. “But we can do it. We call this thing a mirror. A man can love himself, and be together with himself. That is what it means to be a man or a woman—to walk alongside oneself as if one were a second person and to delight in one’s own beauty. Mirrors were made to teach this art.” …
She stood like one almost dazed with the richness of a daydream. She did not look in the least like a woman who is thinking about a new dress. The expression of her face was noble. It was a great deal too noble. Greatness, tragedy, high sentiment—these were obviously what occupied her thoughts. Ransom perceived that the affair of the robes and the mirror had been only superficially concerned with what is commonly called female vanity. The image of her beautiful body had been offered to her only as a means to awake the far more perilous image of her great soul. The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy’s true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.[20]
Notice Lewis’s powerful language of a fruit that eats itself. Likewise, when a person becomes taken over by their subjective self and looks at the world through the lens of how it can serve them, they are “eating themselves.” In this next passage from That Hideous Strength, the character, Jane, who is becoming acquainted with God and hence herself, is beginning to understand her objective self, the self that God created quite apart from her control, and that therefore her “self” might be something quite other than what she imagined:
Supposing one were a thing after all—a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one’s true self?[21] Supposing all those people who, from the bachelor uncles down to Mark and Mother Dimble, had infuriatingly found her sweet and fresh when she wanted them to find her also interesting and important, had all along been simply right and perceived the sort of thing she was? Supposing [God] on this subject agreed with them and not with her? For one moment she had a ridiculous and scorching vision of a world in which God Himself would never understand, never take her with full seriousness.[22]
It is beginning to dawn on Jane that if she is created by “Someone Else,” she is an objective reality that she herself must submit to, that she herself may have mis-identified. She has been enslaved to her subjective self and has therefore failed to be herself.[23]
Yet Mason does not entirely shun the subjective self. Certainly it is troublesome, but it is also very present and must be dealt with. What role does it have?
Mason understands the subjective self as responsible for governing the person for the purpose of actualizing the objective self, the imago Dei. Comparing the objective self to a great land that has the potential to become rich and bountiful, the subjective self is the government that fails or succeeds to govern the land aright.[24] There are a few things to be kept in mind. One, the government clearly doesn’t exist for the government’s sake. Likewise, the subjective self must not aim at fostering and protecting the subjective self. This is simply a way of saying that self-government is objective in orientation. Second, the government must rule according to God-given laws; there are ways of trespassing those laws both through negligence and tyranny. In either case, a crime is being committed against the great “land.” Third, the government must be able to distinguish between what the land is and what it is intended to be. Otherwise, the government may do a great deal of work, a great deal of huffing and puffing, and work against the King’s purposes and designs. Points two and three thus require knowledge, a correct view of God’s laws and aims. Fourth, so long as the laws are obeyed and the right ends pursued, the government is duty-bound to pursue every good and destroy every evil. That is, if there is an area that can be improved, it should be improved. There is to be no weak nostalgia for the second-rate—the field that is unproductive or the tree that is malformed and rotting. Lewis would describe this as a little boy in his ignorance refusing a day at the beach because he can’t give up his mudpies in the slums.[25] We are, indeed, “far too easily pleased.”[26] In other words, since the goal of the Christian is to be like Christ, we have no right to say of certain faults in ourselves (or our children) that they are simply the way God made us, or inevitable, or tolerable. God wants to make us creatures capable of life eternal and pleasures forevermore, and we hold miserably to our sad, underdeveloped selves. The principle to remember is that, while the subjective self is the government, the true ruler of the land is a King, and the government holds power only as a steward who must give an account for all his acts. For, “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.”[27] And, as we have already discussed, this self is truly glorious; no one has ever seen its limits or known just how beautiful it can become, and we have no business limiting its scope. Ever the goal is likeness to Christ for the sake of nearness to Christ. Ever the goal is relationship.
We have developed Mason’s idea of what personhood is: a person is someone made in the image of God for relationship with him. A person is an objective thing, a creature (i.e., a created thing) with characteristics that were made on purpose and with delight. But all human persons have fallen and now are not full expressions of their intended selves; their true selves are compromised, corrupt, and incomplete. We thus experience ourselves in a dual way; we feel within ourselves both our potential, objective selves—the part that God intends us to be and what we must aim at, and our realized, subjective selves—the part that must submit and pursue the objective self but too often makes itself its own aim. This is Mason’s doctrine of personhood. How it is pursued in practice will be the discussion of the next two articles.
Laura Teeple is a piano teacher and homemaker. She recently completed her Graduate Diploma in Christian Studies from Regent College, garnering the Board of Governors’ Prize for Proficiency. While she enjoys theological reading, she finds her most important theological insights come from Tolkien, Lewis, and Austen. Laura lives in Cold Lake, Alberta where her husband, Nathanael, is stationed as a fighter pilot.
©2024 Laura Teeple
Endnotes
[1] The “I want” song is described by Howard Ashman as the song in a musical where the lead character sings about their deepest wants and desires: The Disney Archives, “The Little Mermaid – Howard’s Lecture,” April 12, 2023, 12:12 to 13:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h06FSVoqr4.
[2] Charlotte M. Mason, Home Education, p. xiii.
[3] Mason, Home Education, p. 161; Parents and Children, p. 57, p. 180; Ourselves, Book I, p. 181.
[4] Mason, Home Education, p. xiii.
[5] Mason, Home Education, pp. 12–20.
[6] Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, pp. 33–36.
[7] Mason, Parents and Children, p. 166, p. 253.
[8] Mason, Home Education, Third Edition (1904), p. 304 (first emphasis mine, others original).
[9] Some may object to the idea of God having “feelings” on theological grounds. I choose to use this word because the Bible is so insistent on communicating to us that God feels, not less than we do, but more. God is angry, grieved, regretful, joyful, etc. His feelings are undoubtedly of a different quality than ours—they are not volatile or disjointed parts of him as they are with us. They are completely coherent with his will and mind, and are therefore perfect expressions of a unified being (i.e., the “simplicity of God” idea).
[10] Mason, Ourselves, p. xli.
[11] Matthew 16:26, NIV.
[12] Genesis 1:27, ESV.
[13] “Thus, Mason’s anthropological conception finds its source in the person’s participation in the essence of God.” Pedro Lara Astiaso, Susana Miró López, Susana Sendra Ramos. “‘Take heed that ye offend not—despise not—hinder not—one of these little ones’: Charlotte Mason and her educational proposal,” International Journal of Christianity & Education vol. 26 no. 2 (2022): p. 174.
[14] Mason, Parents and Children, p. 275.
[15] C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 45–46.
[16] Mason, Ourselves, pp. xlii–xliii. It is also significant to understand that Mason understood herself as writing this book Ourselves to young girls and women within the Anglican Church. That is, she believed she was talking to baptized Christians. What she is describing, thus, is not how we are saved, but the part a saved person plays in becoming more like Christ, our true, objective selves.
[17] Mason, Ourselves, p. xliii.
[19] Mason, Ourselves: Introduction.
[20] C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, (Quebec: Samizdat, November 2015), pp. 112–114 (bold mine).
[21] This idea of “what one had decided to regard as one’s true self” is an excellent description of the “subjective self” and the modern idea of personhood. Note that Jane is the one who had, previously, decided to call something about herself the “true self.” Nothing could be more subjective in orientation.
[22] C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, (Quebec: Samizdat, November 2015), p. 294.
[23] I think this differentiation of the objective and subjective self is particularly helpful for understanding the Romantic impulse. Where Romanticism is at its best, it is the celebration of the glory of personhood (imago Dei), which is why some people have said that you couldn’t have had Romanticism without Christianity (“Christianity … by mingling with the affections of the soul, has increased the resources of drama, whether in the epic or on the stage,” François-René de Chateaubriand, as quoted in “Romanticism,” in The Dictionary of Historical Theology, ed. Trevor Hart (Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 500–501). That is, no religious system has ever expressed such a lofty view of the person, and thus without Christianity, you could never have had writers like the Brontës, who wrote stories that shocked readers with their portrayals of the beauty and horror of the human soul (“in Emily Bronté we have an example of the immeasurable range of the soul,” Mason, Ourselves, p. xlii). Thus, you have Christian authors like Mason, Lewis, Tolkien, or more recently, Malcolm Guite and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, who show great affinity to the Romantics. (Mason particularly relies on Wordsworth, and did anyone ever more consistently explore this theme of the potential greatness of man than Lewis? He is forever pursuing the human yearning for glory, showing that it is a sign of God’s intent for us.) This Romantic impulse could be seen as a continuation of the Christian tradition that believes that God can be pursued through all objective realities, because all real reality leads to God. Thus, Augustine could come to God through exploring his objective self. On the other hand, the twistedness of Romanticism is realized as soon as its focus becomes the subjective self, a path that leads only deeper into “self” and away from everything else. (This “self” is usually expressed in contrast to a traditional view of self. In other words, it is expressed as the negation of something. Remember that the Christian view of good and evil is not that evil is an active force, but ever and always the corruption or absence of the good. So the negative Romantic self is actually an anti-self.)
[24] Mason, Ourselves, Book I, p. 5.
[25] Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p. 26.
[26] Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p. 26.
[27] 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, NIV.
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