W.H. Auden’s Christianity is the subject of a fascinating article by Edward Mendelson in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. “In apparently secular poems, he kept hidden what was often their religious starting-point.” That Auden kept his religious awakening under wraps at first, so as not to call down the wrath of his rationalist friends, is understandable. But fellow Christians would hardly have been any happier with Auden’s version of Christianity:
Auden took seriously his membership in the Anglican Church and derived many of his moral and aesthetic ideas from Christian doctrines developed over two millennia, but he valued his church and its doctrines only to the degree that they helped to make it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself. To the extent that they became ends in themselves, or made it easier for a believer to isolate or elevate himself, they became—in the word Auden used about most aspects of Christendom—unchristian.
Even the pivotal doctrine of the Resurrection seemed to Auden beside the point. It was the moral imperative to love one’s neighbor as oneself that was pivotal. Needless to say, it’s an unorthodox position. Once my husband asked his childhood friend, who grew up to become a theology professor at a conservative Baptist seminary, why that teaching of Jesus (which, as a commandment, was to supposed to supercede the entire Old Testament) or the Sermon on the Mount wasn’t privileged over the rest of the New Testament, say, Paul’s injunctions, or the Levitican injunctions (e.g. against homosexuality). Bemused, the theology professor would only reply, “You can’t create a canon inside the canon.”
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Malcolm Bull’s The Mirror of the Gods is a book about how representations of Greek and Latin gods erupted in the Renaissance, filling a vacuum in Christian imagery (usually having to do with erotic or secular power). Bull contends that the Renaissance introduced the idea of fictiveness, a third category beyond truth or deception, into a Christian culture concerned with truth and dismissive of the imagination’s tendency to the fantastical and chimerical.
It was also useful & interesting to consider Bull’s characterizations of classical versus Christian art, their different emotional tenors: in the classical realm, lust and aggression reign; Christian art depicts affection and suffering. Sacra conversaziones would never have emerged from pagan mythology, any more than Aphrodites would have arisen from Christianity.
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Auden converted—or reverted—to Christianity in response to the anti-humanism sulfuring the air of the late 1930’s. Mendelson’s account leaves no doubt in my mind that Auden practiced a highly principled Christianity, “fundamentalist” in a way that believers in Biblical inerrancy would never condone: he lived by the commandments that Jesus explicitly said were the greatest ones. The philosophy is unassailable, it seems to me, and the most ardent socialists and pacifists I know seem directly descended from this kind of Christianity: they are the people who believe that the stranger sitting diametrically opposite you on the globe is your neighbor, whose interests are your interests absolutely.
While never mentioned in Malcolm Bull’s book, Auden’s The Shield of Achilles must be the most concise statement of the contrasting pagan and Christian worldviews ever put to paper. I also tend to think of it as the apex of a conservative poetics that favors a transparent philosophical stance impeccably crafted in well-turned stanzas:
…
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
“[W]here … one could weep because another wept.” This is the quintessential moral stance that paganism lacks.
Which brings me to the point at which I reveal that I’m the devil. Yes! I am moved by the Christian Auden at times, most often in The Sea and the Mirror where he wrestles with the implications of Christian “truth” versus artistic frivolity (if art mirrors nature, and nature mirrors “the real,” art is just a mirror of a mirror—frivolous). But I am not so moved by “The Shield of Achilles.”
That man can show mercy to man, that woman can forgive woman—this is, as I have said, undoubtedly good and morally unassailable. As a philosophy, I commend it. In fact, I endorse it: I take my children to Episcopal services every Sunday, partaking of Auden’s belief that the rite “is the link between the dead and unborn.”
But as a poet, I am moved by the Melvillian vision of works like this:
In all, the number that was on board
Was five hundred and sixty-four,
And all that ever came alive on shore
There was but poor ninety-five.
The first bespoke the captain of our ship,
And a well-spoke man was he;
‘I have a wife in fair Plymouth town,
And a widow I fear she must be.’
The next bespoke the mate of our ship,
And a well-bespoke man was he;
I have a wife in fair Portsmouth,
And a widow I fear she must be.’
The next bespoke the boatswain of our ship,
And a well-bespoke man was he;
I have a wife in fair Exeter,
And a widow I fear she must be.’
The next bespoke the little cabin-boy,
And a well-bespoke boy was he;
‘I am as sorry for my mother dear
As you are for your wives all three.
‘Last night, when the moon shin’d bright,
My mother had sons five,
But now she may look in the salt seas
And find but one alive.’
‘Call a boat, call a boat, you little Plymouth boys,
Don’t you hear how the trumpet[s] sound?
[For] the want of our boat our gallant ship is lost,
And the most of our merry men is drownd.’
Whilst the raging seas do roar,
And the lofty winds do blow,
And we poor seamen do lie on the top,
Whilst the landsmen lies below.
(“The Mermaid,” English and Scottish Popular Ballads)
It’s my canon within the canon—a poetry that stumbles (no impeccable prosody here) into pitiless acknowledgement of our false floors. It’s not particularly moral, but it’s not safe, lyrical individualism either.
There’s something about “The Shield of Achilles” that makes it almost too neat an argument for liberal rights-centered individualism, tying the idea of compassion (and the tidy prosody) to the idea of rights. I think it’s a wonderful poem, but not Auden’s best, exactly because there’s very little about it that’s mysterious.
If that’s the defect the poem bears as a poem, it also looks to me symptomatic of a defect (Trilling had a lot to say about this) in works of art meant to support liberal ideals more generally: it’s a protest poem, telling us to object to inhumane conditions, as the poet himself objects. It’s easier to get poetry out of such situations than out of the more prosaic dilemmas of actually trying to make and hold down the compromises and third-best choices involved in representative government– “the slow boring of hard boards,” as somebody else around here quoted Max Weber as saying. Auden in his spot-on late prose was quite aware of this problem, but I’m not sure that he solved it– he may not have been temperamentally able to solve it, since he was so repelled (understandably given the times and his sexuality, among other reasons!) by the very idea of putting himself in the place of judges or police. But it’s still a problem. If I may make a bad, hasty paraphrase of Auden’s own occasional argument: There is a liberal poetry of the rights-bearing individual under oppression, who prompts our objections– and there are poetries of revolution and counterrevolution– but is there a poetry, a good contemporary poetry, of compromise and government, of building the city rather than defending or razing it?
Ange, Interesting point about Auden! Wasn’t he a “Christian Humanist?” I believe they held “Love your neighbor as yourself’ above all other teachings. What you describe as his belief system seems similar to those written about by Erasmus (who ridiculed Church power structures that belittled human beings’ dignity back in the 1500’s) and Blaise Pascal…
Auden’s ethical attitude reminds me of this passage from another very odd Episcopalian, Philip K. Dick :
“A man came to the great Rabbi Hillel – he lived in the first century, C.E. – and said, ‘I will become a proselyte on the condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot.’ Hillel said, “Whatever is hateful to you, do not do it to your neighbor. That is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary. Go learn it.’”
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As for your “canon within a canon”, Ange : a clear-eyed, disenchanted Melvillean naturalism is certainly advantageous for some registers of literature (ie. danger & suspense add plot interest); yet this too can get boring (cf. some of the lugubrious longueurs of Thomas Hardy).
Diaghilev’s “Astonish me!” – Urs von Balthasar’s concept of “glory” – Nabokov’s butterflies – some of Emily Dickinson’s happier moments – the plot of comedy, generally – and Resurrection – instances of writing in a different key – the pitch of a yet-more-startling plot.
Then, too, there’s Eliot’s more discursive Four Quartets…
Hi Ange,
Thanks for this stimulating post–I guess I need to subscribe to read the article, but I should probably do that anyway…
I’m not sure I would read “The Shield of Achilles” as somehow contrasting a pagan and a Christian world view. (Though I admit I am always for some reason a little pulled up by the overt Christian reference of the three posts in a poem about Achilles… ) After all, what Thetis wishes to see (in those dancing organic trimeters) is exactly the sort of pre-lapsarian pastoral scenes we expect on a Homeric shield–functioning as those epic similes do–, while what we get instead is the mechanized violence of the Modern World (in lock-step iambic pentameter, in those tight rime royal ? stanzas).
I guess I have always read “that one could weep because another wept” as, among other things, a direct reference to book 24 of the Iliad, where Achilles lets go of his anger and vengance and weeps really because Priam weeps–they weep together. Yet this Achilles, Auden’s Achilles, is not going to have that spark of humanity in him, he in fact prefigures a pitiless and inhuman 20th century. I don’t know–I guess I read it more as a poem about the value of Humanism, classical roots and all. Maybe Auden sees Christianity as springing from that?–I don’t know–probably I would know more if I read the article!
It is certainly a very planned poem and a tour de force of technique. I am still moved by it though, especially the end, even seeing all its intricate gears at work through the crystal case.
The ballad is marvellous in another kind of way altogether…
My husband and I constantly quote this Auden poem–whenever we are in a dreadful paved square or an airport or a mall, one of us says to the other, “nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down…”
Thanks so much for this fine feast of a post–Auden, the Sermon on the Mount, Renaissance iconography, Scots balladry. Much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving!
Hmmm… just looking back over my comments–don’t mean to suggest that Christianity springs from Humanism, of course, but that Christian Humanism (as Jeannine brings up here) has roots in the Classics as well as the New Testament…
A bit of free association, partly because I’m sick, partly in holiday excitement…
I wonder if some fraction of Auden’s “Christian Humanism” evolved (for lack of a better word!) from the 19th century Hellenism of Arnold and Pater, which he would have imbibed while young.
(Eliot said in The Use of Poetry that “the vision of the horror and the glory was denied to Arnold…” – but it was certainly given to Auden.)
Just for fun, this, from Auden’s 1939 review of Trilling’s book about Arnold:
“Arnold was the first English critic to see that the personal fate of the artist and the nature of his work is intimately bound up with the fate and nature of society as a whole… He saw clearly that there was something about modern communities which made modern poetry unbalanced, short-winded, gloomy and immature, and this perception itself stifled him as a poet. Lacking it, Tennyson could remain in the ivory tower of technique and private grief, Browning exploit his eccentric personality, but Arnold disapproved of the only kind of poetry which it was possible for him as an upper class Victorian Englishman to write. His natural poetic taste was for the romantic, mysteriously evocative poetry which is the product of precisely that anarchical industrial society which he condemned, as against the poetry of order: Pope and Racine.
Perhaps, unconsciously, he realised that the latter was the poetry of a class within the state. He wanted the poetry of a united state. Hence his admiration of the Greeks.
But no one can escape his age. A poet in an industrialised class-divided society can only write either the poetry of isolation like Rilke, or the poetry of a class like Kipling. Arnold attempted the impossible task of writing as if Victorian London were Fifth Century Athens, and in consequence his inspiration ran dry.”
Hello Ange,
First time caller, long-time listener.
Your opening paragraph contains a presumption about the Great Commandment (as it is usually called) that deserves to be clarified; namely, Christ’s injunction to “love thy neighbor,” using the King James phrasing.
This commandment appears twice in the Gospels: Matthew 22:37-39 & Mark 12: 29-31. Mark was written no earlier than 70 CE, the earliest of the four Gospels. Matthew was written ~80-85 CE (scholarly opinion varies). Since Mark is included almost completely in Matthew, one could presume Mark to be the source of this statement, which, in full, reads: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all they soul, and with all they mind… Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matt. 22: 37, 38, 40) (Mark concludes: There is none other commandment greater than these.)
But the earliest appearance of part of this commandment in the New Testament is Paul’s Letter to the Galatians 5: 14. This letter was written between 50-55 CE. But Paul, like the Mark & Matthew authors after him, was quoting. His source was the oft-maligned Leviticus, namely Leviticus 19:34, which reads: “But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
Which is to say, like much else in the typologically shadow-casting Bible, the Great Commandment is arguably one of its central tenets, not in any way superceded by the Resurrection, but perhaps fulfilled by it. (If you’re thinking about these things in Christian terms.)
What this says about Auden, well, I’m not equipped to answer, but happy to listen in.
Cheers!
Hello Ange,
First time caller, long-time listener.
Your opening paragraph contains a presumption about the Great Commandment (as it is usually called) that deserves to be clarified; namely, Christ’s injunction to “love thy neighbor,” using the King James phrasing.
This commandment appears twice in the Gospels: Matthew 22:37-39 & Mark 12: 29-31. Mark was written no earlier than 70 CE, the earliest of the four Gospels. Matthew was written ~80-85 CE (scholarly opinion varies). Since Mark is included almost completely in Matthew, one could presume Mark to be the source of this statement, which, in full, reads: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all they soul, and with all they mind… Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matt. 22: 37, 38, 40) (Mark concludes: There is none other commandment greater than these.)
But the earliest appearance of part of this commandment in the New Testament is Paul’s Letter to the Galatians 5: 14. This letter was written between 50-55 CE. But Paul, like the Mark & Matthew authors after him, was quoting. His source was the oft-maligned Leviticus, namely Leviticus 19:34, which reads: “But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
Which is to say, like much else in the typologically shadow-casting Bible, the Great Commandment is arguably one of its central tenets, not in any way superceded by the Resurrection, but perhaps fulfilled by it. (If you’re thinking about these things in Christian terms.)
What this says about Auden, well, I’m not equipped to answer, but happy to listen in.
Cheers!
Thanks for all the thoughts — it’s much more interesting than cleaning the house for Thanksgiving!
“I think it’s a wonderful poem, but not Auden’s best, exactly because there’s very little about it that’s mysterious.”
That’s what I think too, Steve, but I can already imagine objections to that criterion as being too Bloomian, too dependent on the notion of the poem as oracle. And yet I can’t help subscribing to it, as I can’t help going back more often to “Caliban’s Speech to the Audience” or “In Praise of Limestone.”
(Can we have a good contemporary poetry about compromise and government? You & Dan Bouchard on a double bill could be quite persuasive.)
Don, Mendelson’s article starts off with the contrast between Auden’s and Eliot’s views of Christianity; I suppose “The Four Quartets” is closer to my own early (childhood) religiosity, and partly why Auden’s Xtian humanism is a bit alien to me. Funny that I can’t really be a Christian for the same reason I can’t really be a good liberal! But that is a very fascinating bit you quote re: Arnold.
Alicia, I’m not so sure I can read “The Shield of Achilles” anymore without that specifically Christian overlay — the “three posts” image really does strike such a jarring note otherwise. You’re right that the scene of Achilles & Priam weeping must figure into things, but Mendelson notes “that one could weep because another wept” comes out of the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself, and stands against anti-humanist — Nazi — dismissals of Xtianity with its affirmation of pity as a virtue.
But, yes, you’re right that it’s a bit of an oversimplification to suggest that the poem is “about” the contrast of pagan and Christian; there are differing notions of pagan too, as you point out, the Arcadian one that Thetis imagines, and the merciless “might makes right” one, shot through with images of modern mechanized hell.
It’s not that I think it’s not a good poem. I’m just being a grumpy Coleridgean.
… and thanks to Peter for the theological clarification, which I just saw now. The “oft-maligned Leviticus” holding the key to the Great Commandment — who would’ve thought? It must figure into the current thinking on the Old Testament as the long narrative of a slow relinquishment of sacrifice.
Since this thread seems to have entered hermeneutical terrain–it’s worthwhile (maybe) to recall that this commandment (love God/neighbor) is also the answer in the Good Samaritan parable, the answer provided by the probing, and also much maligned Pharisee who then questions Jesus to explain concretely just what that vaguest of commandments means. And, of course, the answer goes well beyond the Audenian quest for kept-promises and empathetic weeping. He would have to pay for Achilles funeral and help out monetarily the his grieving family.
Peter,
I don’t think you need the obscure passage from Leviticus to confirm the centrality of the ethic of the Great Commandment for both Jewish & Christian belief & practice. Religion is not quite the same as literary criticism (despite th 20th-cent. addiction to close reading & historicism). (Jesus’ only recorded act of “writing” was doodling in the sand while the adulteress was being readied for stoning.)
What I mean is, there’s a little phrase you left out of the Gospel quotation, ie. “Thou shalt love the Lord your God… AND THE SECOND IS LIKE UNTO IT, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Thus the 2 phrases of the great commandment on which hangs all the law and the prophets are not simply duplex : the two halves are “like” each other, they mirror one another. And this is simply an ethical summation of the “old” testament, showing God as present wherever there are acts of unselfish mercy and justice.
Auden might possibly have held the most heretical, idiosyncratic & baroque personal religious beliefs, or he might not. But his emphasis on the “Great Commandment” was, in my view, simply an example of great poet’s rhetorical chops. He was appealing to the widest audience, with the most universal ethic, by way of a proverbial nutshell (which was only what the Gospel was doing, too). It’s been called “the Golden Rule”.