Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Auden at Golgotha

Having just written that, I read the following in W.H.Auden's wonderful commonplace book, A Certain World. This is not, like most of the book, a cherished quotation, it is written by Auden. As with much of what he writes - or, indeed, Mozart composes - the tone is deceptive; he uses lightness to disguise depth. This, to me, is an exalted form form of good manners. The passage is a very profound justification humility and of the religious perspective.

'Just as we are all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all, potentially, in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday before there was an Easter, a Pentecost, a Christian, or a Church. It seems to me worthwhile asking ourselves who we should have been and what we should have been doing. None of us, I'm certain, will imagine himself as one of the Disciples, cowering in agony of spiritual despair and physical terror. Very few of us are big wheels enough to see ourselves as Pilate, or good churchmen enough to see ourselves as a member of the Sanhedrin. In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all too familiar sight - three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, 'It's disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can't the authorities execute people humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?' Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the True, the Good and the Beautiful.'

16 comments:

  1. well, that's more like it today.

    but did you listen to beyond belief? A pagan woman was asked what she made of the experiences of a western christian woman touring Israel (on pilgrimage, I assume). ''Like a story from a far away land'' I think she said. Well done!, I thought. Yes, the big what if. If only each to his own.

    If we're going to reinvent God, which I think most people are trying to do these days, can we make him our own.

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  2. Back with a bang then, Bryan!

    Great stuff... Nonobvious great stuff, you might say.

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  3. This made me think of reactions when walking past a certain plinth in Trafalgar Square. Looking up, one sees a bloke atop the plinth reading a newspaper. Save for a few pigeons, he is surrounded by a non-crowd of no-jeering. One thinks, "It's disgusting the way they pass this stuff off as modern art these days. Why can't they put a proper sculpture up there?" before resuming discussion of the "Corot to Monet" expo a hundred yards away. Why have a plinth at all and who am I to pronounce on modern art? How eagerly we take appearances to be fixed and queue to buy the pass in life!

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  4. Looking at the faces of the murderers of baby P this morning and summing them up, this one looks stupid and cruel, that one vicious and domineering then reading this blog, head scratching really.

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  5. This is a description of the literary perspective, not the religious. You need not believe in the divinity of Jesus to have these thoughts, and, in fact, in this passage Auden does not describe any religious feelings or come to any metaphysical conclusions. We know that Auden became increasingly religious (as his poetic powers decreased, conincidentally ot not) but if we didn't, we wouldn't be able to guess it from this.

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  6. I became religious as my artistic - I was a painter - impulse subsided. Or rather religion took off from where my art had shrivelled up. As though art was leading me to there, it was what I was striving for, unconsciously or otherwise, and seemed the next logical step (Bryan's book 'Aliens...' aided this but I won't go into the full reaons why here). Religion transcended the art which is what may have happened to Auden, how he felt because art isn't a big deal - that big a deal when compared to religion.

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  7. Many formerly not-very-religious people became extremely religious after WW II; I know another poet who became, briefly, a Catholic in response to the horrors he had lived through. Auden couches this as two intellectuals disgusted by prisoners being tortured by death, so one brings up Socrates who was allowed to die relatively humanely (at least in Plato's version). But I think the unwritten text here has to do with people in Europe during the Holocaust who saw and knew things and were disgusted, but let them continue. "Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do." (Or, for the later believer, "Who I Am.")

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  8. Religion transcended the art which is what may have happened to Auden, how he felt because art isn't a big deal - that big a deal when compared to religion.

    Yes, I would agree with that. I think the desire fulfilled by God is just a larger scale version of the desire for art. I think it's possible for them to co-exist, but I can see how one might replace the other.

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  9. Last comment was me, by the way.

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  10. I don't see the relevance of your sexuality to this topic.

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  11. Even a Hellenistic Jew would know it was Passover. There was no Easter then, even for Jesus.

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