Auden’s faith

My friend Edward Mendelson knows more about Auden than anyone ever has, and probably more than anyone ever will. Certainly he knows far more about Auden than I do. Keep that in mind through what follows.

Some years ago Mendelson wrote an essay about Auden’s secret acts of kindness and charity, an essay that contains this passage:

Auden’s sense of his divided motives was inseparable from his idiosyncratic Christianity. He had no literal belief in miracles or deities and thought that all religious statements about God must be false in a literal sense but might be true in metaphoric ones. He felt himself commanded to an absolute obligation — which he knew he could never fulfill — to love his neighbor as himself, and he alluded to that commandment in a late haiku: “He has never seen God / but, once or twice, he believes / he has heard Him.” He took communion every Sunday and valued ancient liturgy, not for its magic or beauty, but because its timeless language and ritual was a “link between the dead and the unborn,” a stay against the complacent egoism that favors whatever is contemporary with ourselves.

I think that Mendelson is wholly wrong about all this and I shall now explain why I think so. In making my case I will refer only briefly to the poems, in which Auden might be telling a story — a poet could write For the Time Being without believing that Jesus is the Incarnate Word, though I cannot imagine why one would — or playing a part. Instead, I will focus on public writings (some of them given as addresses or even sermons) in which he speaks in propria persona.

Let’s start with the haiku that Mendelson quotes, which certainly seems to contradict the view that “all religious statements about God must be false in a literal sense”: I see no reason to think that the haiku is an “allusion” to the commandment to love your neighbor. Rather, it means what it straightforwardly says: it is a report that Auden believes that he has “once or twice” heard the voice of God — a God he refers to with a personal pronoun.

And we have reason from other statements by Auden to conclude that he did not believe that “God” is a mere nom de convenance for the “absolute obligation” to love your neighbor. In 1966 he wrote,

Some modern theologians who have realised most clearly the death of Zeus seem to me in danger of depriving the True God of the one quality which he shares with the Zeus concept (and all polytheism), Personality, and presenting us with a crypto-platonic or Buddhist to theion which may be the subject of man’s concern but can show no concern for men. I can see clearly enough what leads Tillich, for example, to speak of God as the “Ground of Being,” but if I try to pray ”O Thou Ground, have mercy upon me”, I start to giggle.

Note the key assumptions of this passage: That there is a “True God” and that it would be a “mistake” to depersonalize that God — to turn Him into, for instance, an “absolute obligation.” It would seem, then, that for Auden it was a personal God who has “concern for men” or nothing.

Somewhat later he wrote,

The Gospels put the command to love God before the command to love our neighbor, not because it is more important, but because until we know who God is and how He loves us, we cannot grasp who our neighbor is or how we are to love him. The Word was made Flesh so that we might know, and the first thing which Christ forces us to realise is that the True God and the love he bears us are not at all what we expected or want: indeed, we thoroughly dislike both.

Emphasis mine. The love of God necessarily precedes the love of neighbor. I do not see how statements such as these can be reconciled with Mendelson’s view that Auden “had no literal belief in … deities” and that when he spoke of the love of God he meant it merely as a metaphor for the love of one’s neighbor. Moreover, given Auden’s starkly realistic portrayal of what it is actually like to perceive the love of God — as the author of Hebrews says, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” — it is difficult to see why he would go to the trouble of invoking, describing, and commending such a God if he did not believe that God exists.

So how could Mendelson come to the conclusion he does? I think perhaps this passage, also from 1966, might shed some light on the subject:

At all times, the Gospel is a stumbling-block to the Jew and a foolishness to the Greek in each of us, but the particular element which scandalises varies from one age to another. To the Gnostics of the Third Century and to the liberal humanists of the Eighteenth, the scandal was the Cross. The former said: “Jesus was the Christ; therefore he cannot really have been crucified”. The latter said: “Jesus was crucified; therefore he cannot have been the Christ”. Today, we find Good Friday easy to accept: what scandalises us is Easter. Modern man finds a “happy ending”, a final victory of Love over the Prince of this world, very hard to swallow.

Again, in earlier centuries, believers were inclined to imagine that God was, in a human sense, nearer to them, more like them, than he really is and, consequently, were in danger of falling into idolatry and magical practices. Today, our characteristic religious experience is of God’s “otherness”, his distance from and unlikeness to ourselves, so that the temptation for us is atheism. For many of us, I think, Simone Weil’s remark holds good: “We have to believe in a God who is like the True God in everything except that he does not exist, for we have not reached the point where God exists”.

That line by Weil is one he returned to:

Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians will do well to be extremely reticent on this subject [the love of one’s neighbor]. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn’t one, either in faith or morals. Where faith is concerned, very few of us have the right to say more than — to vary a saying of Simone Weil’s — I believe in a God who is like the True God in everything except that he does not exist, for I have not yet reached the point where God exists. As for loving and forgiving our enemies, the less we say about that the better. Our lack of faith and love are facts we have to acknowledge, but we shall not improve either by a morbid and essentially narcissistic moaning over our deficiencies. Let us rather ask, with caution and humor — given our time and place and talents, what, if our faith and love were perfect, would we be glad to find it obvious to do?

Now, what are we to make of these statements? Do they support Mendelson’s view?

In the first passage Auden writes in general terms of “our” experience, by which he clearly means that of the modern person “today,” as opposed to figures from the third or eighteenth centuries. He does not explicitly say that this is his own experience, but I think the whole tone of the passage strongly suggests that he knows whereof he speaks.

He expressly identifies this experience as a “temptation,” and of course temptations are to be resisted and if possible overcome.

In the second passage the “lack of faith and love” is likewise described as a deficiency, a shortcoming — to be sure, not one to moan about: As he writes elsewhere, “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.” But being blunt means acknowledging one’s deficiencies, admitting that one has succumbed to temptation. Everything about these passage indicates that it would be good to have strong faith in God and love of God and one’s neighbor.

The slight amendment, in the second passage, of Weil’s provocative statement is noteworthy: Weil writes “we have not reached the point where God exists,” to which Auden adds one word: He imagines someone saying “I have not yet reached the point where God exists.” But to say “not yet” is to name faith as one’s goal, as the desired destination: it is hope for faith — and I would say that hope for faith holds already a modicum of faith itself. And I think Auden is acknowledging this in his late haiku, in which he says that he believes that he has heard God, as though to say: “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.”

I said earlier that I wouldn’t say much about the poems, but here I do want to bring one of them in: “Friday’s Child.” Now, we know that Auden believed that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical person who “was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” There’s a funny story Mendelson has told about a lecture that Joseph Campbell gave at Smith College, when Auden was teaching there, in which he spoke of the oneness of Jesus and the Buddha, each of whom had spears thrust at him, though in the case of the Buddha they were transformed into flowers. Auden shouted from the back of the room, “ON GOOD FRIDAY THE SPEARS WERE REAL.”

So let us posit that Jesus was crucified. What then? The poet puts the question straightforwardly in “Friday’s Child”: “Now, did He really break the seal / And rise again?” And his answer: “We dare not say.” The word “we” is the key here: We moderns? “We the inconstant ones”? We poets? I am inclined to the last explanation, for Auden often wrote that poetry “lacks the Indicative Mood. All its statements are in the subjunctive.” (See also.) It is not to be used for factual declaration. And after all, we may assume that Auden, a regular churchgoer, did say, in that environment, “On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures.”

But the point of the poem, even in the subjunctive mood, is not simply to answer the question. What matters is what Auden then goes on to say, in the poem’s conclusion:

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.

(Re: “saving the appearances,” see this.) The poet may not “dare” declare a historical fact, but he declares this: That on that cross everything was gained, or everything was lost. If Jesus of Nazareth perished as a mere animal there, then we are left alone with the wreckage of our lives. I do not know whether Auden would have agreed with the Dostoevskian idea that if there is no God then everything is permitted: I am inclined to think that even without God a decent case can be made that, on prudential and practical grounds, one should not become Pol Pot, or Jeffrey Epstein, or Mark Zuckerberg — or for that matter Aunt Norris from Mansfield Park — and perhaps Auden would have felt the same way. But in any case there can be in such conditions no “absolute obligation,” because there is no one and nothing to oblige us absolutely.

But if He did “break the seal / And rise again,” then there is One who can oblige us absolutely, love us unconditionally, and offer us forgiveness when we fall short. Did Auden believe in such a One? As I have indicated, I think he did. More precisely: He repeatedly affirmed such belief in public when he did not need to do so, and wrote powerful poems that vividly imagine a world in which through Jesus Christ we ordinary sinners can be reconciled to God and to one another. (See especially the last two poems of the “Horae Canonicae.”) If he believed in no deity, what appearances was he saving by writing in this way?

Did he believe all this with unwavering faith? Certainly not. Often, it seems, his affirmations were more aspirational than full of conviction. (I know the feeling.) But the aspiration was real: he perceived his small faith and small love as deficiencies, felt himself tempted to acquiesce in faithlessness and lovelessness, and earnestly desired a deeper faith and a greater love. He regularly received Communion not, I think, for the reasons given by Mendelson but because he understood that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” And so also he prayed

That we, too, may come to the picnic
With nothing to hide, join the dance
As it moves in perichoresis,
Turns about the abiding tree.

P.S. For a relatively complete treatment of Auden’s theology, see my essay on the subject in Auden in Context — which will be paywalled for many of you. But there’s a preprint version here.