Auden's God

A couple of weeks ago we attended the funeral of an aunt. We'd had tea with her maybe a month before, but didn't know she had an aortal aneurysm that could have killed her at any time. We loved her, wish we'd seen more of her, and miss her now.

The celebrant was an Episcopalian priest who didn't know her and didn't pretend to. He conducted a short, dignified, and to me a memorable ceremony. His voice was gently sonorous and his diction precise. He did not declaim but simply spoke, yet the effect, if in no way the act, was as a musical performance, like listening to a string quartet and being carried away by the complex and familiar sounds. I felt dreamy-contemplative, one part of me communally present and the other privately wandering. He spoke the words of the King James version of the Bible, so familiar to him that he did not so much read as render them from memory. And so familiar to me that the words did not convey their usual prosaic meanings but rather, as when hearing a difficult poem, they had a collective, emotional impact more than a commonplace intellectual one.

I listened more attentively when the priest quoted Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. The letter says we are transformed when called into heaven. "All flesh is not the same flesh." As people, beasts, fishes, and birds all differ, "so also," the passage reads, "there is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars." When a person dies, he says, the "natural body" "is raised a spiritual body."[1]

Thinking about the "spiritual body" I recalled a homily once heard at Mass in which the priest said God is eternal, immaterial, without dimension and outside time. This description conforms to Spinoza's definition of a being that is infinite, necessary, uncaused, and indivisible.

W.H. Auden's concept of God was similar. He felt that God as father, lord, or other anthropomorphic descriptors was an artifact of language. We can't comfortably request blessings from Spinoza's God, can't envision such a being in our prayers, can't invoke what's basically indescribable in normal discourse. It followed for Auden, as Spinoza, that the immaterial God for which the anthropomorphized one stands isn't outside us but lies as much within as without. However, where Spinoza said all religion is superstition, Auden found a way to craft belief — and a commitment to religious observance — out of his faith. It mattered to him greatly that it was an act of this God to breathe into his Adam not just life, but consciousness, understanding of time's motions, and the ability to plan, make judgments, and cause things to happen.

Auden called this gift "making, knowing, and judging."[2] He believed that the way to God was through God's human creatures. Although Saint Matthew has Jesus say there are two fundamental commandments, Auden says they are one: "love thy God" (the first) is "like" (meaning identical with) "love thy neighbor" (the second).[3] Auden wrote "If it [i.e., an expression, a poem or other work of art] praises the Creator, it does so indirectly by praising His creatures..."[4] This gift which Auden's God gave humans was a terrible one; not terrible in the sense of wrongly done, but terrible in the sense of unimaginably frightening. This gift — the freedom of humankind to perceive themselves as separate beings, to make individual judgments, to create and to destroy — was once thought to have God-imposed limits, but events of the 20th century, particularly from the rise of Nazism onward, proved this belief to be a false one.

Auden considered this subject more than once, probably most memorably in a poem called Friday's Child.[5] The poem was a tribute to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who was executed by hanging on April 9, 1945, for his efforts to assassinate Hitler. He was one of a very few religious leaders who not only opposed National Socialism but actively worked to subvert it.

In writing about Bonhoeffer Auden concealed in a kind of joke the depth of his feeling about what seems have been a cosmic injustice. Concerning the power that totalitarian states use in order to destroy the lives of millions the poem asks:

What reverence is rightly paid
To a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom He made
Perform the Acts of God?

The poem says the God-given human mind (the "self-observed observing Mind") has little skill in using the freedom it possesses:

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

The poem ends with a sorrowful meditation on Good Friday.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.

Auden agreed with what Bonhoeffer said: "To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism.., but to be a human being. It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world." The awful freedom which humans possess necessarily entails suffering. For Auden, the pain endured by God and humankind is mutual. We have the freedom not to experience this, but he believes we are wrong when we so choose.

These words make Auden seem profoundly pessimistic, but he was not. He believed in laughter, in getting on with life. He recognized that he had a choice between hope and despair and he chose hope and therefore learned to "bless what there is for being:"

That singular command I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?[6]

As Hannah Arendt said of him, his response to "the curse" was a "praise that pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man's condition on this earth and sucks its strength out of the wound." Arendt wrote this as a comment on lines in Auden's poem on W.B. Yeats.[7] Addressing Yeats, Auden makes a request:

With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse.

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

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Some sources:

canzoni

"w. h. auden - family ghosts" website by Nicholas Jenkins, Department of English, Stanford University

Auden and Christianity by Arthur C. Kirsch (Yale University Press, 2005)

Auden’s Memorial to Yeats by Katherine Bailey

W. H. AUDEN’S WISDOM, FAITH, AND HUMOR by Walter G. Moss (pdf)

Auden and God by Edward Mendelson, reviewing Auden and Christianity by Arthur Kirsch (pdf)

"Reflection on the Right to Will": Auden's "Canzone"and Arendt's Notes on Willing by SUSANNAH YOUNG-AH GOTTLIEB

"The Quest for Auden" by Austin Warren in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Spring, 1979), pp. 229-248. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27543545

"Auden's Religious Leap" by Justin Replogle in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter - Spring, 1966), pp. 47-75. Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207210 .

Auden and the Limits of Poetry by Alan Jacobs

Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity 2011 April 12,
by Joshua Miller

Regions of sorrow: anxiety and messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford University Press, 2003)

"Auden in the Fifties: Rites of Homage" by Monroe K. Spears in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1961), pp. 375-398. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27540685 .

The Bible Is Dead; Long Live the Bible by Timothy Beal

Auden Explains Real Function of All Ritual published in the April 1, 1944 issue of the Phoenix

Prose: 1939-1948 by W.H. Auden, Vol. 2 (Princeton University Press, 2002)

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Notes:

[1] This is I Corinthians 15:39-41, 44. It concludes,

And so it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being.' The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.

[2] "Making, Knowing, and Judging" by W.H. Auden, from The Dyer's Hand, Part IV

[3] Matthew 22:36-40 (King James Version)

Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him,

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

[4] Auden wrote this in The Dyer's Hand ("Making, Knowing, and Judging"). Here is the context:

The impulse to create a work of art is felt when, in certain persons, the passive awe provoked by sacred beings or events is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship or homage, and to be fit homage, this rite must be beautiful. This rite has no magical or idolatrous intention; nothing is expected in return. Nor is it, in a Christian sense, an act of devotion. If it praises the Creator, it does so indirectly by praising His creatures among which may be human notions of the Divine Nature. With God as Redeemer, it has, so far as I can see, little if anything to do.

[5] Here is the whole poem. It's available on a number of web sites. I don't mean to abuse copyright, however, and will remove it if shown that I've put it here improperly.

Friday's Child

(In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945)

He told us we were free to choose
But, children as we were, we thought---
"Paternal Love will only use
Force in the last resort

On those too bumptious to repent."
Accustomed to religious dread,
It never crossed our minds He meant
Exactly what He said.

Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves,
But it seems idle to discuss
If anger or compassion leaves
The bigger bangs to us.

What reverence is rightly paid
To a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom He made
Perform the Acts of God?

It might be jolly if we felt
Awe at this Universal Man
(When kings were local, people knelt);
Some try to, but who can?

The self-observed observing Mind
We meet when we observe at all
Is not alarming or unkind
But utterly banal.

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

Since the analogies are rot
Our senses based belief upon,
We have no means of learning what--
Is really going on,

And must put up with having learned
All proofs or disproofs that we tender
Of His existence are returned
Unopened to the sender.

Now, did He really break the seal
And rise again? We dare not say;
But conscious unbelievers feel
Quite sure of Judgement Day.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,`
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.

[6] This comes from Auden's poem Precious five of 1950.

[7] On this, see my last blog post: insufflation.

two sermons

My cousin Allen ministers to a congregation in West Brooksville, Maine, and this past Sunday he preached on the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It's a challenge to create a new way to treat this oh-so-very-familiar story, one he met head on and overcame. Weaving together four first-person narratives, he told of an accident on the back roads of rural Maine — (1) a family overturned in a van, injured and unable to help themselves; (2) a woman late for work; (3) a preacher late for service; and (4) a berry picker, lost and fearful that he and his mates would lose their jobs. The stories are spare but precise and have a personal intensity that gives them an unusually strong emotional impact. Overall, it's a simple moral tale, like the parable, and one which makes it hard for readers to be smug about themselves: you can't easily deny its message with a facile "no fear, I wouldn't be the one to pass by." This link takes you to his words on the church blog: What Must We Do?.

This is where he does his pastoring.



Not long ago he treated much the same subject from a different angle. He told his hearers that he'd been preparing for a difficult physical challenge: he was training for an attempt to row his sixteen-foot Norwegian workboat the whole thirty-three miles around Deer Isle in a single day. In that sermon he used this training experience — the discipline, endurance of pain, sense of accomplishment as training progresses, and hope of ultimate success — to illustrate the points he wished to make about some lines from Paul's Letter to the Romans: "suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us."

Without belittling his own immense efforts or theirs, he says what he and other athletes face is actually somewhat trivial compared to the challenges and hardships that most all of us are forced to cope with, sooner or later. He lists these traumas — personal crises, loss of loves ones, "the end of a cherished relationship, separation from one’s children or grandchildren or friends by distance or alienation" — and says that as we confront our own pain and loss we enlarge our capacity for sympathy. We can overcome the deadening sense of isolation that we feel and find meaning where there seems to be none. The key lies in our ability to acknowledge with compassion our "commonality in suffering" with sufferers among us. It's this message of compassion which links this sermon to his later one on the Good Samaritan. Here's a link to it: The grace in which we stand.

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Allen's training paid off and, with support from wife and friends, completed his solo circumnavigation. Here are photos of that achievement and links to published accounts of it.

This link takes you to a brief account from a local newspaper — Brooklin Man Rows Traditional Boat Around Deer Isle.

This map shows the route. He rowed counterclockwise the 33 miles around both Deer Isle and Little Deer Isle.



These photos are all by Bob Harris who takes lots of photos for the Facebook page of the Deer Isle-Sunset Church, UCC.

{It's 2:45 AM, the sun won't be up until 5:00, and Allen's guiding himself by compass and the lights of the Deer Isle Bridge.}

{Hours later, Allen has rounded the western end of Little Deer Isle and is turning into the sunrise.}

{I think this shows him rounding the eastern end of the island and turning north.}

{Mid-morning, headed north, moving through the Lazyguts Islands off Stonington.}

{Allen has turned round the eastern end of Deer Isle and now has rising sun in his face.}

{Resting for a moment.}

{Another rest, this one along the eastern shore of the Sunshine section of Deer Isle just before he heads into Eggemoggin Reach for the last leg of his voyage.}

{Returning to his starting point after ten hours of rowing.}

{Caption: One very happy man!}

On this detail from a 1904 topographic map, the green box shows where the van carrying Leigh Anne and her family overturned.



This detail from the same topo map shows West Brooksville and the location of the church. I've stitched this image together from two adjoining sections of map.



Here is a link to the topo map section of which the right half of the above map is a detail: Bluehill 1904: Bluehill, Brooklin, Brooksville, Deer Isle, Penobscot, Sedgwick.

writing in sand

This week's gospel reading in Roman Catholic churches is a passage from John in which scribes and Pharisees confront Jesus with an adulterous woman. I'd forgotten, if I ever knew, that in this familiar story he deflects the hostility of the sectaries by concentrating on something that he is writing. He has been seated in the temple court, speaking to a group that has gathered to hear him; when the scribes and Pharisees show up, he bends down and writes in the dust of the packed earth. As the King James Version tells it, he "stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not."

Although this is the only occasion on which Jesus is shown to be writing, it's in keeping with practices of the time that he'd use the dust to do it. Writing materials were scarce and expensive and those few who could write would, at that time, have done most of it in this ephemeral way. In fact, most writing would then have involved commercial transactions and most of that would have been quick calculations for tallying sums. Many merchants used sand boards for the purpose, portable platforms like checkerboards on which they would strew sand. These had a sturdier and more efficient counterpart in boards that even more closely resembled checkerboards on which counters would be placed for abacus-style calculations. It would be many centuries before writing materials, particularly paper, would become cheap enough to use for tallying sums and recording transactions and writing in sand is too practical entirely to have disappeared even in modern times. Witness this sequence of photos that Dorothea Lange took in rural North Carolina during July 1939.





Her caption for these shots reads "Roadside meeting with Durham County farmer. North Carolina. He gives road directions by drawing the dirt with a stick." My source is the Prints and Photos Div. of the Library of Congress. The photos are in the collections of the Farm Security Administration, Lange's employer at the time.

{This image appears on a blog called andybraner.typepad.com; the author does not credit its source.}

It's a bit of a disappointment to learn that the account of Jesus and the adulterous woman is now considered to be a late, uncanonical, addition to John's gospel. Like most of the best Bible stories it's compact and hangs together well but is also ambiguous, unsimplistic, morally nuanced. The good guy triumphs over the bad guys but we're left asking what's meant by bad and good. The woman is saved from a horrible death and, we suppose, also learns to save herself from damnation in the afterlife, but I think we have to ask how far to take this idea in which repentance cancels due punishment for those convicted of crimes. And there's question of what is due punishment (which should be taken historically — can't be just be what we now consider appropriate, right?).

Commentators generally take the bending down to write as a rhetorical device. As the interpolation in KJV has it: "as though he heard them not." One could suppose this turning away buys some time in which to consider how to respond. Some say Jesus is demonstrating that he knows the sins of the men who have come to attack him and, as he writes them, they see that he knows. In the brief research I did for this post I didn't find a commentary that says he's demonstrating he knows the law (not the oral but the written law) and knows that stoning is not the approved punishment for adulterous women, but that's a possible interpretation.

For me it's not the dramatic turning away so much or the content of the writing that interests, but the implication that what Jesus has been teaching requires concentration, is important enough that it shouldn't be interrupted. His accusers address him as teacher and teaching is what he's engaged in when they begin their attack. He's using the earth as his blackboard, it's important to him to get across his point, he doesn't want to lose the thread of his argument. He wants to finish what he's doing before he turns his full attention on the scribes and Pharisees with their abject captive. The fact that, after responding to their question, he stoops back down to continue his writing supports this interpretation a bit. But then, if the teaching is so important, why does the story have the students all depart with the accusers so that Jesus is left alone with the woman? I don't think this uncertainty cries for resolution; it it just encourages me to keep thinking about the passage. In the end what sticks in my mind is the focus on writing as a central element in the account and the reminder that much that is written is unfixed, not retained; it is transitory, wiped off the blackboard, scuffed off the ground.