“without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand.” W. H. Auden, Vespers
I haven't thought about this poem at all for a long time if at all before now, though I'm pretty sure I must have read it. Reading a reference to it in an old article by Alan Jacobs lamenting the lack of Christian intellectuals such as were found before around and after WWII, this morning, I looked for the text online and found, instead, a Youtube of Auden reading it.
I listen to it and think that I wouldn't much like either of the two people, Auden or his quasi-Marxist technocratic antagonist.* Though I certainly agree with the conclusion that Auden came to, while I wouldn't say it the same way, I do believe that equality and the democracy that is its legal and political form "our dear old bag of a democracy" is founded on the content of, the central claims of the Gospel, The Law (which Jesus said he was here to fulfill) the Prophets, even when the actual source of those Moses, the Prophets, Jesus, the witnesses to Jesus, are rejected and the teachings remain, for a time, a force, though without the source of them inevitably an ever diminishing one. I think that the turn to fascism in America is a direct result of a. secularism rejecting that heritage, b. fundamentalism having rejected it in the vital issue of racial, gender LGBTQ etc. equality is an equally modernist endangerment of egalitarian democracy. I have no faith in secularism to fight against it because I don't believe there is any evidence that it can sustain the necessary prerequisites to do that.
I have to say that that is my conclusion of a quarter of a century since taking up reading the Gospels and, after that, the rest of Scripture again, also studying history, also reading a large number of theologians, essayists . . . Marilynne Robinson, who Jacobs is very critical was especially important to me. It was through his criticism of her that I found the article to start with.
I have to say that since anyone who has read a lot of what I've posted here will know she has been a huge influence on me, I don't agree with everything she's written or stands for. I agree with her that American liberalism, the liberalism of white abolitionism (though not so much the more potent Black abolitionism) was a product of the Scriptures as understood through the lens of Calvin's commentary and translation in the Geneva Bible, I think she is right about that and that that fact being forgotten, liberalism in any good sense of the word is in danger of disintegrating. I don't get her affection for Emerson who I think was one of the main figures in that disintegration, every time I look into him I dislike him more. And I have to say that I'm deeply skeptical of humanism as an intellectual project as I am all ideologies, I prefer that people be a lot more modest than to mistakenly figure they are the measure of all things, though our capacities certainly contain the limits of that which we can measure or think or talk about.
I think Jacob's criticism of her - that she didn't lecture Obama about his inability to carry off the closing of the Bush II concentration camp at Guantanamo - is kind of silly. That was far more a problem of Republicans and cowardly Democrats refusing to house the inmates deemed too dangerous to release and making it impossible for Obama to do what he wanted to do. Anyone who ever forgets that politics is the art of the possible is inviting their marginalization. The right place to put that criticism would have been those Republicans, those Democrats and, especially, the whore house that the American free-press is who made it impossible.
I don't know where I'm going with this, I would encourage you to listen to the poem a few times, I listened with the speed lowered and the automated captions on (it will amuse you by getting a number of the words wrong) and to read Jacob's article. The majority of it doesn't deal with Robinson or Cornel West who he holds up as someone more to his liking. I would limit any criticism on these counts to Robinson's essays and not, as some have, to her novels - one of the things I read this morning criticized her for getting the chronology of events wrong in one of those, perhaps, speculating, that it was for an artistic purpose. I think it's OK to do that to a minor extent in a novel, though I don't care for the practice. Though, considering how much falsification of history is done through fiction, these days mostly the movies and TV, perhaps I shouldn't overlook that. I have to say that every time I fact checked what she said in her essays, she was entirely accurate in her presentation of facts and her insights into them have seldom been something I could find fault with. Given her devotion to accuracy and the truth in her expository writing, it's a minor sin in her entire work.
* You shouldn't think by that that I am hostile to W. H. Auden or his point of view or his poem which is a very fine piece of work and chock full of points and things worth thinking about. The idea that you have to love everything about someone and their work in order to love any of them is childish and stupid and one of the dumbest things in current, modern culture. As someone I read pointed out, modern, science worshiping secularism is as fundamentalist as fundamentalist religion and the Puritan Church in late 17th century Salem were in that. I think Calvin may have, actually, been less ready to judge in that way than those two modernist ideologies and demonstrably way more than even the Spanish Inquisition was.
No comments:
Post a Comment