Comments on: The Canon within the Canon

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:45:35 +0000

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”.

By: myshkin2

myshkin2 — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:55:05 +0000

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.

By: Ange

Ange — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:35:33 +0000

… 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.

By: Ange

Ange — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:13:39 +0000

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.

By: Peter O'Leary

Peter O'Leary — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:56:30 +0000

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!

By: Peter O'Leary

Peter O'Leary — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:56:30 +0000

By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:42:33 +0000

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.”

By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:09:16 +0000

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…

By: myshkin

myshkin — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:46:25 +0000

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!

By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:12:23 +0000

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…”