summing up 1943

The following is the text of a talk I was supposed to give three years ago and didn’t because my back went out the day I was supposed to fly to the location of the meeting. Then I forgot about it. I just came across it the other day and decided that I may as well post it.

The first thing to be said about the five figures I wrote my book about — oldest to youngest: Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil — is that they failed to do what they set out to do, which was to reshape the educational system of the Allied societies in a way that would both respect and form genuine persons.

The technocrats who won the war — the “engineers of victory” — reaped the spoils: that is, they got to dictate the shape of the postwar social order. As Auden put it, in “the other war” the sons of Apollo defeated the children of Hermes. The Hermetics did not altogether give up, mind you; but they became a force of guerilla resistance rather than a conquering army. So it goes.

The Christian humanists I wrote about — who formed an important sub-family of the children of Hermes — did not gain control over postwar society in large part because they were, to borrow a distinction made by Rebecca West, idiots rather than lunatics. That is a compliment, not an insult. Seriously faithful Christians tend to be on the idiot end of the idiot-lunatic spectrum, because they take seriously the task of tending the garden of faith that they have inherited. They are custodians, caretakers. It’s demanding work, and it can make one a little slow to notice the larger movements of society. That can be unfortunate at times, but it beats becoming the kind of lunatic who is always “blown about by every wind of doctrine.”

The gardener of faith knows the history of the garden she tends. This gives her temporal bandwidth, and temporal bandwidth is directly proportionate to personal density. Without that temporal bandwidth you will be blown about by every wind of doctrine, because you don’t have the personal density to give you ballast. You’re light as a mote of dust.

The characters I wrote about had that temporal bandwidth, which not only made them attentive to the moral dimensions of the social and political choices facing them — each of them, it’s worth noting, understood the profound kinship that linked German National Socialism and Soviet communism — but also could see those choices in historical perspective, which gave them enormous diagnostic power. And we today are the beneficiaries of that power.

I could give many examples, but I will content myself with taking a brief look at Auden’s long poem For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. As explained briefly here, this was Auden’s first major work after he returned to the Christian faith of his childhood, and he sought in it to understand the public world into which he was born — and the Christian understanding of salvation history. In a sense, the poem is an attempt to unite the insights of two books that were very important to Auden at that time: Charles Norris Cochrane’s magisterial Christianity and Classical Culture and Charles Williams’s idiosyncratic Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

Auden’s great initial insight, I believe, was that we today live in what one might call the Late Roman Empire, drawing with surprising directness on a 2000-year-old political inheritance that always stands in tension with the Christian Gospel. (I have written a bit about Cochrane’s importance for our time in these posts.) As Auden wrote in a review of Cochrane’s book,

Our period is not so unlike the age of Augustine: the planned society, caesarism of thugs or bureaucracies, paideia, scientia, religious persecution, are all with us. Nor is there even lacking the possibility of a new Constantinism; letters have already begun to appear in the press, recommending religious instruction in schools as a cure for juvenile delinquency; Mr. Cochrane’s terrifying description of the “Christian” empire under Theodosius should discourage such hopes of using Christianity as a spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city.

“Spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city” is a brilliantly incisive phrase, and suggestive of Auden’s next key insight: that to think in such terms is to agree to adjudicate the competing claims of the Lordship of Caesar and the Lordship of Christ on the ground of technological power. The key characteristic of Caesarism in the Late Roman Empire is Caesar’s control over the creation and deployment of technology, which is why the union of government and the financial sector and the big technology companies is the great Power — very much in a Pauline sense — of our moment.

The amazing thing, to me, is that Auden saw all this coming in 1942, as we can see from his poem’s great “Fugal Chorus”. It should be read with care. Notice that the Seven Kingdoms that Caesar has conquered are a series of reductions: the reduction of

Philosophy to semantics;

Causation to scientistic determinism;

Quantity to mechanical calculation;

Social relations to rational-choice economics;

The inorganic world to mechanical engineering;

Organic life to biotechnology;

Our inner lives to manipulation by propaganda.

And all of these reductive conquests are achieved through technological means. Auden did not manage to redirect the momentum of this comprehensive achievement, but he gave us tools with which we, in our time, may understand it and articulate our own response. He has provided tools that we can, and should, use to cultivate our gardens.

Another phrase for this is “redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:16) — buying it out of its bondage to the Powers. It is hard, slow work; not the kind of work that a lunatic is likely to have patience with. We should therefore be thankful for our disposition to idiocy. And perhaps we should also meditate on these words, with their echo of that Pauline phrase I have just quoted, from the last pages of Auden’s great poem:

To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.