The Canon within the Canon

W.H. Auden’s Christianity is the subject of a fascinating article by Edward Mendelson in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. “In apparently secular poems, he kept hidden what was often their religious starting-point.” That Auden kept his religious awakening under wraps at first, so as not to call down the wrath of his rationalist friends, is understandable. But fellow Christians would hardly have been any happier with Auden’s version of Christianity:

Auden took seriously his membership in the Anglican Church and derived many of his moral and aesthetic ideas from Christian doctrines developed over two millennia, but he valued his church and its doctrines only to the degree that they helped to make it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself. To the extent that they became ends in themselves, or made it easier for a believer to isolate or elevate himself, they became—in the word Auden used about most aspects of Christendom—unchristian.

Even the pivotal doctrine of the Resurrection seemed to Auden beside the point. It was the moral imperative to love one’s neighbor as oneself that was pivotal. Needless to say, it’s an unorthodox position. Once my husband asked his childhood friend, who grew up to become a theology professor at a conservative Baptist seminary, why that teaching of Jesus (which, as a commandment, was to supposed to supercede the entire Old Testament) or the Sermon on the Mount wasn’t privileged over the rest of the New Testament, say, Paul’s injunctions, or the Levitican injunctions (e.g. against homosexuality). Bemused, the theology professor would only reply, “You can’t create a canon inside the canon.”
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Malcolm Bull’s The Mirror of the Gods is a book about how representations of Greek and Latin gods erupted in the Renaissance, filling a vacuum in Christian imagery (usually having to do with erotic or secular power). Bull contends that the Renaissance introduced the idea of fictiveness, a third category beyond truth or deception, into a Christian culture concerned with truth and dismissive of the imagination’s tendency to the fantastical and chimerical.
It was also useful & interesting to consider Bull’s characterizations of classical versus Christian art, their different emotional tenors: in the classical realm, lust and aggression reign; Christian art depicts affection and suffering. Sacra conversaziones would never have emerged from pagan mythology, any more than Aphrodites would have arisen from Christianity.
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Auden converted—or reverted—to Christianity in response to the anti-humanism sulfuring the air of the late 1930’s. Mendelson’s account leaves no doubt in my mind that Auden practiced a highly principled Christianity, “fundamentalist” in a way that believers in Biblical inerrancy would never condone: he lived by the commandments that Jesus explicitly said were the greatest ones. The philosophy is unassailable, it seems to me, and the most ardent socialists and pacifists I know seem directly descended from this kind of Christianity: they are the people who believe that the stranger sitting diametrically opposite you on the globe is your neighbor, whose interests are your interests absolutely.
While never mentioned in Malcolm Bull’s book, Auden’s The Shield of Achilles must be the most concise statement of the contrasting pagan and Christian worldviews ever put to paper. I also tend to think of it as the apex of a conservative poetics that favors a transparent philosophical stance impeccably crafted in well-turned stanzas:
…
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
“[W]here … one could weep because another wept.” This is the quintessential moral stance that paganism lacks.
Which brings me to the point at which I reveal that I’m the devil. Yes! I am moved by the Christian Auden at times, most often in The Sea and the Mirror where he wrestles with the implications of Christian “truth” versus artistic frivolity (if art mirrors nature, and nature mirrors “the real,” art is just a mirror of a mirror—frivolous). But I am not so moved by “The Shield of Achilles.”
That man can show mercy to man, that woman can forgive woman—this is, as I have said, undoubtedly good and morally unassailable. As a philosophy, I commend it. In fact, I endorse it: I take my children to Episcopal services every Sunday, partaking of Auden’s belief that the rite “is the link between the dead and unborn.”
But as a poet, I am moved by the Melvillian vision of works like this:
In all, the number that was on board
Was five hundred and sixty-four,
And all that ever came alive on shore
There was but poor ninety-five.
The first bespoke the captain of our ship,
And a well-spoke man was he;
‘I have a wife in fair Plymouth town,
And a widow I fear she must be.’
The next bespoke the mate of our ship,
And a well-bespoke man was he;
I have a wife in fair Portsmouth,
And a widow I fear she must be.’
The next bespoke the boatswain of our ship,
And a well-bespoke man was he;
I have a wife in fair Exeter,
And a widow I fear she must be.’
The next bespoke the little cabin-boy,
And a well-bespoke boy was he;
‘I am as sorry for my mother dear
As you are for your wives all three.
‘Last night, when the moon shin’d bright,
My mother had sons five,
But now she may look in the salt seas
And find but one alive.’
‘Call a boat, call a boat, you little Plymouth boys,
Don’t you hear how the trumpet[s] sound?
[For] the want of our boat our gallant ship is lost,
And the most of our merry men is drownd.’
Whilst the raging seas do roar,
And the lofty winds do blow,
And we poor seamen do lie on the top,
Whilst the landsmen lies below.
(“The Mermaid,” English and Scottish Popular Ballads)
It’s my canon within the canon—a poetry that stumbles (no impeccable prosody here) into pitiless acknowledgement of our false floors. It’s not particularly moral, but it’s not safe, lyrical individualism either.