Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse Studies in Religion and the Arts

Editorial Board

James Najarian (Boston College) Eric Ziolkowski (Lafayette College)

volume 8

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sart Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse

Edited by Erik Tonning Matthew Feldman David Addyman

LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio. Medium: Gouache, pencil, indian wash ink and indian ink on paper. Dimensions: 51 x 35.5 cm, Date: 1945. Reproduced courtesy of the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London. Inscription: Signed b.l. ‘Chagall’

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Modernism, Christianity, and apocalypse / edited by Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman, David Addyman. pages cm. -- (Studies in religion and the arts, ISSN 1877-3192 ; VOLUME 8) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-27826-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Modernism (Christian theology) 2. Apocalyptic literature--History and criticism. I. Tonning, Erik, editor. BT82.M625 2014 230.09’04--dc23 2014032789

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

Acknowledgements ix List of Illustrations x List of Contributors xii

Introduction 1 Erik Tonning

Part 1 Christianity, Modernist Culture, and Visions of Apocalypse

1 Versions of the Wasteland The Sense of an Ending in Theology and Literature in the Modern Period 29 Paul S. Fiddes

2 The Cup of Sufffering Dietrich Bonhoefffer’s Discipleship and German Expressionism 53 Jacob Phillips

3 Christian Prehistories of Literary Modernism in G.K. Chesterton and Allen Upward 67 Suzanne Hobson

4 Modernist Anti-Modernists T.E. Hulme, “Spilt Religion” and “The Religious Attitude” 8㻜 Henry Mead

5 Between the Bang and the Whimper Eliot and Apocalypse 97 Katherine Ebury

6 Ezra Pound’s Eriugena Eschatology in the Periphyseon and the Cantos 109 Mark Byron

7 Péguy’s Apocalypse 123 Brian Sudlow vi Contents

Part 2 Cultural Transitions and Political Apocalypses, 1900–1945

8 The Reason of Nature Revolution of Principles Around 1900 141 Hans Ottomeyer

9 Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists in the Third Reich 166 Gregory Maertz

10 James Strachey Barnes and the Fascist Revolution Catholicism, Anti-Semitism and the International New Order 187 Paul Jackson

11 “Till Armageddon, No Shalam, No Shalom” Ezra Pound and the Consecration of Politics in the Italian Press During wwii 206 Andrea Rinaldi

12 The Moot, the End of Civilisation and the Re-Birth of Christendom 222 Jonas Kurlberg

13 Old Dogmas for a New Crisis Hell and Incarnation in T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden 236 Erik Tonning

14 Apocalypse Deferred W.H. Auden’s Anti-Totalitarian Vision 260 Hedda Lingaas Fossum

Part 3 Still Waiting for the End? Post-World War II Readings of Apocalypse

15 Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation; Or, “It is 1956 Fascism” 279 Matthew Feldman Contents vii

16 “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” “The Auroras of Autumn” and the Christian Apocalypse 301 Benjamin Madden

17 “History is Done” Thomas Merton’s Figures of Apocalypse 321 Mary Bryden

18 Apocalypse in Early ufo and Alien-Based Religions Christian and Theosophical Themes 339 Carole M. Cusack

19 The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 354 Malise Ruthven

Index 385

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to acknowledge the Bergen Research Foundation and its patron Trond Mohn for funding the “Modernism and Christianity” project at the Department of Foreign Languages in the University of Bergen, thereby facilitating both the 2012 international conference where the essays in this volume were fĳirst presented, and the editing process itself. In the articles by Andrea Rinaldi, Erik Tonning and Matthew Feldman, previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound is Copyright © (2014) by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Used by permission. In Jonas Kurlberg’s article, permission to publish quotations from archival material has kindly been granted by the Special Collections at the Institute of Education, London, the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds, and Edinburgh University’s New College Library. Katherine Ebury’s article partially reproduces material from her “‘In this Valley of Dying Stars’: Eliot’s Cosmology,” Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring 2012): 139–157. Mark Byron’s article partially reproduces material from chapter 1 of his monograph Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (Bloomsbury: London, 2014). Erik Tonning’s article partially reproduces material from chapter 3 in his monograph Modernism and Christianity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). List of Illustrations

The authors of the articles below acknowledge the following institutions for kind permissions to reproduce images: Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin; Kunsthaus, Zürich; The Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, Alsace; tate Britain; The British Museum; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington. In all other cases, the images in this volume are in the public domain.

Figures

8.1 Children’s Work in the Largest Factory of Coloured Paper in Aschafffenburg, Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung, 13. 11. 1858, p. 309 141 8.2 Robert Zünd, Der Eichwald, 1859, Zürich, Kunsthaus 143 8.3 Beech wood, Grumsiner Forest, 2012 143 8.4 Versailles, Petit Trianon, Belvedere and artifĳicial rocks with waterfall by Richard Mique, 1777 145 8.5 Castle and park “Liselund” by Andreas Kirkerup, 1792/93, Island of Møn, Denmark 146 8.6 Franz Müller-Münster, “Arrestiert” (“Arrested”), from: Die Schönheit (1906/07), issue 1, p. 31 148 8.7 Ernst Haeckel, Seeanemonen (Actiniae) from: Kunstformen der Natur, Leipzig und Wien 1904, plate 49, lithograph 154 8.8 Ernst Haeckel, Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda Radiaria). Eine Monographie, Berlin 1862, plate 22 155 8.9 Karl Blossfeld, seed capsule of a Scabiosa prolifera, eightfold enlargement, from: Wunder in der Natur. Bild-Dokumente schöner Pflanzenformen, Leipzig 1942, p. 31 156 8.10 Model of a Coccolith, Geocenter Møns Klint, Island of Møn, Denmark 157 8.11 Glass window by Tifffany, Lyndhorst, Tarrytown, New York 158 8.12 Art nouveau vase with mistletoe, New York, Metropolitan Museum 159 8.13 Art nouveau vase with seahorse, New York, Metropolitan Museum 160 8.14 House and Garden of Emil and Ada Nolde, Seebüll, Schleswig-Hohlstein, designed by the artist in 1927 161 8.15 Hugo Höppener (Fidus), “Lichtgebet,” 1924, oil on canvas, 150 x 100cm, Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum 162 9.1 Oskar Martin-Amorbach, Madonna, 1933. Whereabouts unknown 181 9.2 Richard Heymann, Des Volkes Lebensquell, 1937. Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum 182 List Of Illustrations xi

9.3 Ferdinand Spiegel, Kameraden, 1937. Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum 184 9.4 Deposition from the Cross. 17th Century. Strasbourg Cathedral 185 15.1 Mussolini’s “Believe, Obey, Fight” 281 15.2 First page of Virginians on Guard 296 15.3 “Ezra Pound returned to Italy today and hailed his adopted nation with a Fascist salute,” The New York Times, 9 July 1958 297 16.1 Stills from footage of Operation Doorstep, showing one of the model houses demolished by a shock wave, 1953. Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada Field Offfĳice 304 16.2 Scenes from inside one of the Operation Doorstep houses, before and after the nuclear detonation, 1953. Photos courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada Field Offfĳice 305 16.3 Matthias Grünewald, Resurrection panel from the Isenheim Alterpiece, 1512–16, in the Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, Alsace 310 19.1 John Martin, The Last Judgement c. 1849–53. Oil on canvas 198.8 × 325.8 cm 364 19.2 John Martin, The Plains of Heaven 1851–3. Oil on canvas 198.8 × 306.7 cm 364 19.3 John Martin, The Fall of Babylon 1831 Mezzotint with etching 46.4 × 71.9 cm 366 19.4 The Senate House, University of London 366 19.5 John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon, exhibited 1816. Oil on canvas 150 × 231 cm 367 19.6 Albert Speer, “People’s Hall” [“Volkshalle”] seen through the triumphal arch. Model for the “Welthauptstadt Germania” [“World Captial, Germania”] project 367 List of Contributors

David Addyman was awarded his PhD in 2008 for his thesis, ‘Beckett and Place: The Lie of the Land’, which was supervised by Professor Andrew Gibson at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Archival Research Fellow in the Bergen “Modernism and Christianity” project, 2011–2014, and a co-editor of the present volume. He has published articles on Beckett in various edited volumes, journals, and published conference proceedings. He is currently working on a book, Modernism and Place.

Mary Bryden is Professor Emeritus of French Literature at the University of Reading, where she is also an Adviser to the Samuel Beckett International Foundation. She is currently Vice-President of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French in Britain and Ireland. She has published widely, notably on Beckett and Deleuze. Her latest book is Samuel Beckett and Animals (ed., Cambridge University Press, 2013). Earlier books include Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust (co-ed., Palgrave, 2009); Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature (Palgrave, 2007); Deleuze and Religion (ed., Routledge, 2001); Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (Palgrave, 1998); Samuel Beckett and Music (ed., Oxford University Press, 1998); Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama (Palgrave, 1993). She is currently completing a monograph on T.E. Lawrence.

Mark Byron is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Sydney. His current work is in developing digital scholarly editions of complex Modernist texts and their manuscripts, most notably the Watt module of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, and is developing a cognate critical and theoretical study of scholarly editing techniques. He is also currently working on the intersection of Modernist literature and early medieval philosophy, and is the author of Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Carole M. Cusack is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney. She trained as a medievalist and her doctorate was published as Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (Cassell, 1998). Since the late 1990s she has taught in contemporary religious trends, publishing on pilgrimage and tourism, modern Pagan List Of Contributors xiii religions, new religious movements, the interface between religion and politics, and religion and popular culture. She is the author of Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Ashgate, 2010), and The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 2011. Her edited volumes include (with Christopher Hartney) Religion and Retributive Logic: Essays in Honour of Garry W. Trompf (Brill, 2010) and (with Alex Norman) New Religions and Cultural Production (Brill, 2012). With Christopher Hartney (University of Sydney) she is editor of the Journal of Religious History (Wiley). With Liselotte Frisk (Dalarna University) she was foundation editor of the International Journal for the Study of New Religions (Equinox) from 2010–2013. She is co-Series Editor (with James R. Lewis) of the Brill Handbooks of Contemporary Religion series, and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Sophia Monograph Series (Springer), and the Sacred and Secular History Series (Palgrave Macmillan). She is a member of the Editorial Boards of the journals The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies (Equinox) and Literature & Aesthetics (Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics).

Katherine Ebury is a Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Shefffĳield. Her fĳirst book, Modernism and Cosmology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) addresses representations of the new physics, specifĳically the science of cosmology, in the work of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett.

Matthew Feldman is Reader in Contemporary History at Teesside University, where he co-directs the Centre for Fascist, Anti-fascist and Post-fascist Studies. He currently co-edits Wiley-Blackwell’s journal Religion Compass: Modern Ideologies and Faith and, with Erik Tonning, the Bloomsbury book series Historicizing Modernism and the forthcoming Modernist Archives; he was also the co- convener (with Erik Tonning) of the annual Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies seminar at the University of Oxford 2005–2010. His ongoing research interests include “political religions” and the role of the sacred in the modern world; revolutionary violence and extremist ideologies, and revolutionary forms of modernism generally. This extends to a large cultural inflection in his research, extending to the literary history of fĳigures such as Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, and especially Samuel Beckett. His most recent publications include the monograph Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945 (Palgrave, 2013); and the co-edited volumes Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of the Far-Right since 1945 (Ibidem-Verlag, 2014), and Broadcasting in the Modernist Era (Bloomsbury, 2014) xiv List of Contributors

Paul S. Fiddes is Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Oxford, and Director of Research at Regent’s Park College in the University. He was Principal of his college from 1989 to 2007, and has served as Chair of the Faculty Board of Theology in the University. He is an ecumenical canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. His books include The Creative Sufffering of God (1988), Past Event and Present Salvation: the Christian Idea of Atonement (1989), Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue between Literature and Christian Doctrine (1991), The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature (2000) and Participating in God. A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (2000), Seeing the World and Knowing God: Hebrew Wisdom and Christian Doctrine in a Late-Modern Context (2013).

Hedda Lingaas Fossum recently completed an ma in English Literature at the University of Oslo. She is a former editor-in-chief of the student magazine Lasso and has served on the editorial board of the literary magazine Bøygen.

Suzanne Hobson is a Senior Lecturer in 20th Century Literature in the English Department at Queen Mary, University of London. Her fĳirst book, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), considers a variety of angels rendered strange or untimely by their appearance in self-consciously “modern” contexts. She is co-editor with Rachel Potter of The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (Salt, 2010) and has published on the topic of belief and modernism in Literature Compass (2007), Literature and Theology (2008), and Miranda (2010).

Paul Jackson is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton, where he now specialises in the history of British fascism and far right politics. His monograph Great War Modernism and the “New Age” Magazine was published by Bloomsbury in 2012, and he is the Editor of Bloomsbury’s book series A Modern History of Politics and Violence. He is currently writing a biography of Colin Jordan, Britain’s pre-eminent neo-Nazi of the post-war years.

Jonas Kurlberg is a PhD candidate on the “Modernism and Christianity Project” at the Department of Foreign Languages in the University of Bergen. He is the author of “Resisting Totalitarianism: The Moot and a New Christendom,” Religion Compass, Vol. 7, No. 12 (2013). List Of Contributors xv

Benjamin Madden has studied at the University of Adelaide and the University of York, where he received his PhD,with a thesis focusing on constructions of the ordinary in James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens. His work has appeared in Notes & Queries and The Wallace Stevens Journal. He was the managing editor of Modernism/modernity, and is a Research Associate in the University of York’s Centre for Modern Studies. He is currently outlining a book based on his doctoral research, and pursuing a research project on sexuality and the ordinary in contemporary American literature.

Gregory Maertz is Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. He has published widely on artistic production in National Socialist Germany (with two major projects forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, Modernism and Nazi Painting and Art of the Third Reich). In addition, he organized a major exhibition in 2007 at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen) in Berlin and is co-curating an exhibition at the Bergen Kunstmuseum (Art in Battle) that will open in 2015.

Henry Mead completed his doctorate at Worcester College, Oxford in 2012 and is Research Associate at Bergen University and at Teesside University. He has published on the religious aspects of modernist literature and politics in the European Journal of English Studies and Religion Compass. He recently co-edited the Bloomsbury volume Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, and he is preparing a book on T.E. Hulme for publication in 2015.

Hans Ottomeyer studied at the Universities of Freiburg, Berlin, London, Munich and Paris from 1967 to 1976. His Ph.D. at the University of Munich was on “Charles Percier and the Origin of the Empire Style” in 1976. He worked for the Bavarian Museum of History and the Bavarian Royal Castles and was Curator of Furniture and Deputy Director from 1983 to 1995 at the Munich Stadtmuseum. From 1995 to 2000 he was Director of the Staatliche Museen Kassel (Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, Neue Galerie, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Museum für Astronomie und Technikgeschichte and Schloss Friedrichstein). Since 2000 he was Director General, from 2009 to 2011 President of the German Historical Museum, Berlin. He has published extensively on Neoclassicism especially the Empire and Biedermeier styles, Munich Art Nouveau, ormolu and silver objects and their display, history of architecture, interior decoration and furniture, political iconography, European xvi List of Contributors court ceremonial, the history of dining, design and the art of advertising. He has curated exhibitions on the Kings of Bavaria, Catherine of Russia, the history of time, Calvinistic culture, the romantic movement and Historicism.

Jacob Phillips did his ba in Theology at Heythrop College, University of London, and his ma at King’s College London, where is currently doing doctoral research on Dietrich Bonhoefffer and Philosophical Hermeneutics.

Andrea Rinaldi is a PhD candidate on the “Modernism and Christianity Project” at the Department of Foreign Languages in the University of Bergen. His latest publication on Ezra Pound was in Rebeldes y reaccionarios. Intelectuales, fascismo y derecha radical en Europa (2011), edited by Ferran Gallego and Francisco Morente. He has also co-authored an essay (with Dr. Matthew Feldman) called “‘Penny-wise…’: Ezra Pound’s posthumous legacy to fascism,” in a forthcoming Palgrave collection on translational fascism.

Malise Ruthven is an independent writer, teacher, and journalist. His publications include Fury for God: the Islamist Attack on America (Granta, 2002) and Fundamentalism: the Search for Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2004). He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.

Brian Sudlow is Lecturer in French with Translation Studies at Aston University in Birmingham, uk. He is the author of Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England 1880–1914 (mup, 2011). His current research interests stretch from René Girard’s mimetic theory, to Christian reflection on technology after wwii, and to the theories of French traditionalist Catholics after Vatican II.

Erik Tonning is Research Director of the “Modernism and Christianity” project at the University of Bergen. His publications include Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen 1962–1985 (2007), Sightings: Selected Literary Essays (2008) by Keith Brown (editor: Tonning) and Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies (Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 22, 2010: editor). He recently completed a monograph for the Palgrave series “Modernism and…,” called Modernism and Christianity (2014). He is also Series Editor (with Dr Matthew Feldman) of the two book series Historicizing Modernism and Modernist Archives with Bloomsbury Academic. Introduction

Erik Tonning

This volume attempts to bring into dialogue a new view of “Modernism and Christianity” as a distinct fĳield of study, on the one hand, and the diverse and evolving scholarly approaches to “apocalypse” on the other.1 The latter range of approaches—via theology, biblical studies and the history of religion, but also within literary theory and, in history and sociology, via the study of “political religions” and millenarian violence—all have a bearing on the fĳield of “Modernism and Christianity Studies,” conceived as focusing upon the formative and continuing impact of Christianity on the cultural movement of modernism. This is because the modernist impulse to “make it new”2 in art, in thought, in society and politics is itself an incipiently apocalyptic one, poised between imaginative representations of an Old Era or civilization and the experimental promise of the New. Thus modernists could not avoid a formative confrontation with Christianity, for, as I have argued in Modernism and Christianity (2014),

the very idea of an epochal cultural transformation at this time would necessarily involve some confrontation with the still-dominant religion and cultural paradigm of the West. How was the Christian past to be assessed; was it worth preserving, or should it be overcome once and for all? How to relate to Christianity’s present influence, both socially and individually? And did it have a future?3

In some cases this tension led to a modernist paradox, whereby ideas and imagery drawn from the Book of Revelation were deployed to produce an alternative, rival “apocalyptic” pattern, designed to supersede or reinterpret Christianity in the name of a New Era. D.H. Lawrence’s last, sprawling book, Apocalypse (1931)—a neo-pagan reinterpretation of Revelation as capable of

1 The essays are a selection of papers from the conference Modernism, Christianity, and Apocalypse (Bergen, 18–20 July 2012), organised by Erik Tonning (Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen, Norway), and Matthew Feldman (School of Arts and Media, Teesside University, uk). Funding for this international event was provided through the research project Modernism and Christianity: Literature, History, Archive, which was established by a generous four-year grant (2011–2014) from the Bergen Research Foundation. 2 See Ezra Pound, Make It New (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). 3 Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282285_002 2 Tonning reinvigorating the ‘eternal vital correspondence’4 between man and cosmos as prelude to a new epoch—is but one instructive example here. This highlights the fact that Christianity was not just any system of belief for the modernists, but the repository of religious tradition in the West. It was also a powerful cultural and political force with which they had to contend. Indeed, Christianity was itself liable to be imaginatively transformed in ways that could attract new followers among the modernists by establishing its own revitalizing drive and alternative cultural analysis of modernity. Such analyses by modernist Christians were in their turn no less likely to contain apocalyptic elements, especially as the challenge of totalizing political religions and ideologies (communism and fascism) began to loom on the international scene in the aftermath of the Great War of 1914–18. My recent account of the fĳield of “Modernism and Christianity Studies” takes Roger Grifffĳin’s groundbreaking work inModernism and Fascism (2007) as its point of departure; and Grifffĳin’s argument is also an important inspiration behind a number of essays in this collection. His synoptic study proposes that a sense of apocalyptic decadence-and-renewal—involving a revolt against Western modernity construed as disintegrative and moribund, in the name of a future regeneration—characterises both “epiphanic” (or aesthetic) and “programmatic” (or socio-political) modernism.5 Grifffĳin accordingly considers fascism and Nazism, with their “palingenetic” programmes of national cleansing and renewal as prelude to a mythical New Era, to be types of programmatic modernism. Both artistic and socio-political modernisms are, for Grifffĳin, governed by a religious or ersatz-religious impulse: to fĳind or construct new sources of overarching, “transcendental” cultural meaning in the face of the perceived breakdown of the “Sacred Canopy” (or common horizon of meanings) in the West, inaugurating an increasingly technocratic, urbanized, socially atomized, individualistic and utilitarian modernity. After the catastrophe of the Great War, a feeling that this civilization was a decaying and spiritually empty one became more and more pressing, not just for artists and intellectuals, but for larger segments of the European population as well. Of course, the proposed cures were immensely diverse, but a felt need for some regenerative cure—and a corresponding openness to radically experimental, “creatively destructive”6 forms in both arts and politics—was growing more and more widespread.

4 D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (London: Penguin, 1974), 29. 5 See Roger Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), especially Chapter 2. 6 See Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 54. Introduction 3

While Grifffĳin’s overall portrait of the modernist crisis and the religious moti- vations at work in that crisis is a tremendously useful one, I have argued that it also underestimates Christianity as a cultural force that continued to shape modernism.7 Christianity was not simply an outmoded world-view that could no longer provide a stable “Sacred Canopy” for the West: it remained a competitor and a live alternative, and even its enemies needed to confront its past, present and possible future incarnations. Indeed, the whole development of Western modernity itself could be given a theological genealogy, and when the modernists saw fĳit to appropriate theological or biblical themes, they often did so with detailed knowledge of what they were trying to transform or uproot. To “overcome” Christianity at this time would still be costly and challenging for the individuals and movements concerned; and scholars should attend to the tense intellectual dramas involved in such “overcoming.” Conversely, “Christian modernists” were prepared to play topsy-turvy by suggesting that their fellow- modernists had chosen the wrong kind of cure for the cultural crisis. They argued instead that a more radical, challenging Christianity—perhaps even a new Christendom—was the tonic needed to revitalize modernity.

There are many reasons why the fĳield of “Modernism and Christianity Studies” might benefĳit from engagement with the rich scholarly literature on “apocalypse.” One area of importance here is the study of political religion; and in particular the study of “millenarianism” as a driving force, not just of religious sects but also of many political movements, both historically and today. Roger Grifffĳin is clear that his analysis of modernism in terms of “crisis,” “decadence” and the dream of renovation and a New Era draws on both Norman Cohn’s classic study of prophetic, revolutionary socio-religious movements from medieval to early modern times in Omens of the Millennium, and Frank Kermode’s influential lecture series The Sense of an Ending, which fĳirst examined myths of “transition” (decay to renewal) in twentieth century literature.8 As Grifffĳin points out, these studies identifĳied broad paradigms of crisis in apocalyptic movements:

Following this line of thought, it makes sense that the eschatological myth of the imminent inauguration of a new era fĳirst originates among those who are the most marginalized and hence the most disafffected

7 See Tonning, Modernism and Christianity, 4–5, and Chapter 1 generally for the fuller argument summarized in this paragraph. 8 See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its bearing on modern totalitarian movements (New York: Harper, 1957), and Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). 4 Tonning

with the existing order. The readiness to commit acts of extreme violence stems from the millenarian fantasy that, paradoxically, by intensifying the chaos and violence of the present dispensation, they are bringing to a head the crisis of the old order and accelerating the advent of the new one of peace, harmony, and justice. The millenarian revolt against existing society thus assumes the cathartic, cleansing quality of a “holy war” against a sinful world fought by those charged with a divine mission to be the interpreters of divine will now that the Church itself has become corrupt.9

However, Grifffĳin argues that “millenarian fantasies of inaugurating a new aevum have origins long predating Joachim of Floris and even Christianity: the chiliastic movements that Cohn has studied […] are surely to be seen as relatively modern Western manifestations of the archetypal revitalization movement”;10 one that has always been part of human culture, whether in the form of rites of passage,11 or strategies for “Terror Management”12 when faced with the breakdown of regular patterns of cultural transition. Similarly, Grifffĳin takes Kermode to task for analyzing the roots of the twentieth century modernist crisis “in the narrow terms of Judeo-Christian eschatology.”13 This move towards the “archetypal” could, however, risk explaining too little by explaining too much: if all human culture is, in some sense, driven by lim- inal, “apocalyptic” transitions, how does one distinguish a revolutionary, chiliastic movement from any other historical development? Richard Landes’s recent study Heaven On Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience14 tries to establish a more precise terminology in this fĳield, even while broadly agree- ing with Grifffĳin that the “millennial experience” is present as a possibility in all human societies; indeed, most of his examples are deliberately taken from a variety of non-Judeo-Christian societies thousands of years apart. Landes’s principal interest is the dynamics of what he calls apocalyptic millennialism: an imminent expectation of a destruction of the present era that will instigate a millennial kingdom, a version of heaven on earth (whether secular or supernatural). To a greater degree than general “eschatological” beliefs (envisaging a

9 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 101. 10 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 106. 11 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 102–106. 12 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 85–88. 13 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 102. 14 Richard Landes, Heaven On Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Introduction 5 fĳinal end to the cosmos, either through a global catastrophe or a divine Last Judgment), in Landes’s terms millennial beliefs “call for active participation in revolutionizing history”; in an intensifĳied crisis believers will enter “apocalyptic time,” in which “everything quickens, enlivens, coheres. They become semi- otically aroused—everything has meaning, patterns.”15 Landes plots “millennial styles” along the linked axes of “restorative” versus “innovative,” and “hierarchical” versus “demotic”; furthermore, “apocalyptic styles” are plotted from “active” to “passive” and from “cataclysmic” to “transformative.”16 He goes on to graph the anatomy of a typical “apocalyptic wave,” as a movement from normal to apocalyptic time: at the start, the so-called “roosters” who crow loudly about an imminent cataclysm are able to gather followers and perhaps seize power in the public square, but after the disconfĳirmation or failure of their predictions there is a period of intense “cognitive dissonance”—where strategies of compensation or reinterpretation may come into play—followed by a loss of power and the increased influence of “owl”-like sceptics. This leads most often to a re-entry into normal time and a retreat to the private sphere for the would-be apocalyptic community.17 Landes’s model provides tools for historical comparison of the revolutionary, apocalyptic dynamics in some modernist movements with similar outbreaks both before and since. It is also potentially useful for mapping the specifĳic styles and levels of intensity engaged by individual modernist movements and their leaders and followers at diffferent times. Such a diffferentiated picture would undoubtedly reveal as many “owls” as “roosters” among the modernists, and would include a range of complex, evolving responses to the variety of apocalyptic and millenarian styles forming such a prominent aspect of contemporaneous cultural and political debates. There are, then, some distinct analytical advantages to moving from a spe- cifĳically Judeo-Christian tradition and history towards more general apocalyptic dynamics and patterns, that are discernible throughout history. Nonetheless, modernism did not emerge in a cultural vacuum: as highlighted before, the Christian tradition was still a force to be reckoned with by all, and any imagined “apocalyptic” transition into a New Era at this time would be profoundly coloured by, indeed articulated through, the vocabulary and images drawn from Christian history. For example, while both Grifffĳin and Landes read the advent of Nazism as an apocalyptic movement centred around Hitler as messianic prophet, they do not sufffĳiciently emphasize the degree to which Christian rhetoric still played a part in its articulation and in the very structure

15 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 14. 16 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 22–36. 17 Landes, Heaven on Earth, Chapter 2. 6 Tonning of its conversion stories, imagery and rituals. Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch’s thorough study Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus quotes a great host of such examples, for instance this striking moment from that lapsed Catholic, Joseph Goebbels’s diary from 1926:

“And now these remain: Faith, Hope and Love, these three! But Love is the greatest of them” […] I love my Volk and my fatherland!18

It is obvious that St Paul’s famous eschatological words from Corinthians 1:13 are violently torn from their context, and one can readily agree with Grifffĳin that “Christianity conditioned the religious discourse, symbolology, and ritual adopted by this movement and the way the powerful afffective response to Hitler’s prophetic persona was articulated, but the psycho-dynamics of his charismatic leadership was not Christian.”19 Still, this seems less of a conclusion than a scholarly challenge: what is the precise signifĳicance of this active, formative tension between Nazism and Christianity? In the present volume, Gregory Maertz’s essay surveys some approaches to that challenge and argues that Christian collaboration and Nazi appropriation of Christian imagery is far more complex and dynamic than it might appear. In general, it seems clear that examining such cases of ongoing tension will yield a more accurate historical understanding of modernism as a movement that just is essentially and inescapably influenced by Western Christianity. To take another example, from the fĳield of artistic rather than political modernism, in considering W.B. Yeats’s famous lines

What rough beast, its hour come round at last Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born20 the critic can hardly neglect the whole complex tradition sketched in Bernard McGinn’s Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil,21 or even more broadly, in the three excellent volumes of the Encyclopedia of

18 Joseph Goebbels, diary entry, 9 June 1926 [my translation], quoted in Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002), 323. 19 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 273. 20 W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in Yeats’s Poems, edited by A. Norman Jefffares (London: Macmillan, 1989), 294. 21 Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (San Francisco: Harper, 1996). Introduction 7

Apocalypticism.22 Even though Yeats is closest to such distinctly heretical fĳig- ures as Emmanuel Swedenborg and William Blake in his understanding of the Book of Revelation and its symbolism, these fĳigures are still part and parcel of a history of Christian exegesis and response. As Leon Surette has argued about modernist occultism more generally, the common invocation of an alternative “secret history” of esoteric knowledge—supposedly handed down through the generations under threat of persecution but now ready to be cataclysmically reborn in the modern age—“cannot be taken seriously”:

It is, in fact, an attempt to recover older, pagan beliefs and practices from within Christianity. It is for this reason that occultists characteristically attribute the survival of their cult to secret, underground societies and are typically hostile to the Christian church and often to Christian beliefs as well. Their understanding of historical process tends to derive from the paradigmatic case of an archaic wisdom or practice suppressed—and often oppressed—by authorities committed to a degenerative or corrupt version of the true, pure, archaic faith.23

Again, of course, the question arises: what precisely are the historical dynamics of such a reaching-beyond Christianity from within in individual cases— working across even such very diffferent examples as those of a Goebbels and a Yeats?

If accounting for the role of Christianity really is essential to a contextual understanding of modernism, it also may benefĳit scholars of modernism to pay closer attention to “apocalypse” as an essential theological theme within Christianity. It is necessary to understand the continuing appeal the Book of Revelation and related texts to believers, right up to the twentieth century. In fact, themes from Revelation could still function for many Christians as a source of challenge and critique of both the institutional church and the whole direction of Western modernity, preventing ossifĳication and worldly

22 John J. Collins (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Volume 1. The origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity (New York and London: Continuum, 2000); Bernard McGinn (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Volume 2. Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (New York and London: Continuum, 2000); Stephen J. Stein (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Volume 3: Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age (New York and London: Continuum, 2000). 23 Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and the Occult (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 50. 8 Tonning conformity and fuelling revitalization in ways that continued to retain believers and to attract converts, also among modernist thinkers and artists. According to the renowned New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham, the very idea that the Book of Revelation predicts a specifĳic sequence of events to occur at the fast-approaching endpoint of history represents a complete misunderstanding of the contents and genre of this text. To read the text on its own terms is to realize that “eschatological delay is as much a feature of Revelation as eschatological imminence.”24 Furthermore, the “kaleidoscope of images” through which John depicts the End do not depict history-in-advance but are instead “concerned with its nature and meaning.”25 That is, these images explore “the character of the beast’s power and deceit, the inefffective- ness of mere judgments to bring about repentance, the power of sufffering to convince of truth, the relationship of the church’s witness to that of Jesus”; and together, “they give the church the heavenly perspective on the meaning of the conflict” needed to persevere through time.26 Revelation belongs to the genre of biblical prophecy, and demands to be read in continuity with that tradition. Bauckham singles out three core features of this genre: fĳirst,discernment of the contemporary situation and its deceitful ideologies in order to reveal how things look from the perspective of God’s heavenly rule; secondly, prediction concerning how the contemporary situation must change for God’s kingdom to come; and thirdly a demand for response to its vision.27 This third element is crucial because it “ensures that the predictive element in biblical prophecy is not fatalistic,” thus leaving room for human freedom; John’s prophecy does not “predetermine the outcome of the church’s calling to witness to the nations.”28 All biblical prophecy in fact “combines a contextual specifĳicity of relevance to its fĳirst readers with a kind of eschatological hyperbole that intrinsically transcends their context.”29 Thus the text of Revelation can remain relevant. The image of Rome as the Great Whore of Babylon, for instance, expands beyond contemporary Rome to critique any system of political and economic oppression: “The city which the prophetic cap fĳits must wear it,”30 even today. Bauckham’s insightful discussion of the continuing relevance of Revelation can alert the scholar of modernism to some of its possible uses for Christian

24 Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 [2013]), 157. 25 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 150–151. 26 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 151. 27 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 148–149. 28 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 149. 29 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 155. 30 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 153. Introduction 9 modernists in conceptualising their cultural crisis and call for renewal in the church. A prime function of Revelation, he suggests, has been to “purge and refurbish the Christian imagination”31 by unmasking dominant cultural constructions of the world, and by serving as a focus for resistance to any abso- lutising of this-worldly power or ideals. By emphasizing openness to transcendence, it reminds the church of its call to be counter-cultural and reject the idolatry that deifĳies “military and political power (the beast) and economic prosperity (Babylon).”32 Revelation envisions an alternative future (a new creation and the New Jerusalem) seen from the perspective of God’s heavenly justice. Yet this is also linked with “a perspective from below, that is, from the standpoint of the victims of history.”33 Furthermore, “Revelation’s prophetic critique is of the churches as much as of the world”:34 there is always a danger of the church itself compromising with idolatry and perhaps shirking its universal appeal and mission through “withdrawal into a sectarian enclave that leaves the world to its judgment while consoling itself with millennial dreams.”35 Instead, argues Bauckham, Revelation insists on active participation in the world. The theology of Revelation, closely linking the doctrines of creation, redemption and eschatology, sustains this call to steadfast witness- ing, for it is only God as Creator who can ultimately “renew his creation, taking it beyond the threat of evil and nothingness into the eternity of his own presence.”36 The God of Revelation withholds His glory from a world in which evil still holds sway, while revealing the true character of that glory through the sacrifĳicial love of Christ, the slaughtered Lamb upon the throne. Finally, Bauckham notes, in Revelation “God’s rule does not contradict human freedom, as the coercive tyranny of the beast does, but fĳinds its fulfĳilment in the participation of people in God’s rule: that is, in the coincidence of theonomy and autonomy.”37 It is easy to see how such an insistently transcendental vision could appeal to those frustrated with a modernity experienced as spiritually empty and alienating, in thrall to material and technological “progress,” and, in 1914–18, disintegrating into an industrial, dehumanizing war. Furthermore, Revelation’s prophetic call for a universal church counteracted the identifĳication of the

31 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 159. 32 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 160. 33 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 161. 34 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 162. 35 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 161. 36 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 163. 37 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 164. 10 Tonning churches with nationalism; and its vision of history “from below” served to critique contemporary alignments of the church and oppressive secular power. In this way, reading Revelation could foster a counter-cultural drive in the churches or in individual Christians, helping them respond to the modernist crisis. Moreover, Christian modernists tended not simply to adapt but also to probe and challenge the language and imagery of Revelation. In the Catholic poet David Jones’s prose-poem In Parenthesis (1937), for instance, the Great War is depicted as the locus of a defĳinitive civilizational Break: “We feel a rubi- con has been passed between striking with a hand weapon as men used to do and loosing poison from the sky as we do ourselves.”38 Modernity is, for Jones, essentially at odds with the nature of human beings as artists and sign-makers: the efffect of industrial warfare is but one aspect of a larger crisis. Against such dehumanization, Jones pits the language of sacrament and liturgy, as a persistent reminder of how human poeisis continues to mirror and recall the Creator. In Thomas Dilworth’s summary:

In Parenthesis opens in the weeks before Christmas and closes in the summer’s battle. On this opening and closing, liturgical analogues impose patterns of inception and completion, promise and fulfĳilment. […] Evocations of the Nativity at Christmas are answered during the battle by allusions to Good Friday. Advent anticipates apocalypse in the fĳirst half of the poem: battle metaphorically fulfĳils that anticipation.39

Yet the treatment of the fĳinal battle also articulates a persistent anxiety in this poem: what if the earthly battle is all there is; its chemically generated explosions a bleak parody of the Day of Judgement, the “prearranged hour of apocalypse”40 a mechanical simulacrum followed by no general Resurrection?

Riders on pale horses loosed and vials irreparably broken an’ Wat price bleedin’ Glory Glory Glory Hallelujah41

38 David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), xiv. 39 Thomas Dilworth, The Liturgical Parenthesis of David Jones (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1979), 4. 40 Jones, In Parenthesis, 135. 41 Jones, In Parenthesis, 160. Introduction 11

Dilworth here identifĳies the horsemen of Revelation 6:8, and the “seven golden vials full of the wrath of God” from Revelation 16. But is “glory” just a bleedin’ song—a propaganda exercise? On the other hand, song remains a form of human poesis, one long associated with liturgical praise. The imagery of Revelation is deeply ambiguous in this poem, yet it does also manage to evoke a perspective beyond the self-enclosed hell of war, pointing towards the necessity for God’s intervention and justice, and a “glory” appropriate to saints rather than soldiers.

It thus seems clear that attending to the continued fascination, complexity and ambiguity of apocalyptic yearnings, language and imagery is a sine qua non for the scholar of modernism. As noted above, a fĳirm grasp of theological interpretations is one useful resource, but there are also distinct insights to be gained from the fĳield of rhetoric and literary theory. Stephen D. O’Leary’s Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric analyses apocalyptic rhetoric as a public, social practice intended to persuade and move an audience: in other words, its irreducibly argumentative dimension. O’Leary argues that “apocalyptic functions as a symbolic theodicy, a mythical and rhetorical solution to the problem of evil, and that its approach to this problem is accomplished through discursive construction of temporality.”42 At the broadest level, the problem addressed by apocalyptic scenarios is one common to all cultures, for the idea that there is no justifĳication or explanation for evil whatever is “rarely upheld in its pure form, since no human society can maintain its cohesiveness in the face of such nihilism.”43 Apocalyptic discourse is able to persuade when its mythical depiction of the temporary nature of evil and a prophesied future alternative is felt by an audience to provide morally sufffĳicient reasons for the presence of evil in the world. Apocalypse argues that time itself will stop—as will chance, change, death and decay—and the ultimate end of creation will redeem the existence of evil. These interlinked rhetorical topi of evil and time also lead to a third, that of authority. For if we human beings, “lacking the cosmic perspective, can only dimly imagine the ultimate outcome that justifĳies evil,”44 then we are dependent upon revelation (Ἀποκάλυψις) and its authorized interpretation in order to achieve some glimpse of that cosmic reconciliation and the way in which it will come about.

42 Stephen D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 14. 43 O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, 33. 44 O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, 41. 12 Tonning

Following Max Weber, O’Leary distinguishes three types of authority: traditional, legal (or rational), and charismatic.45 Charismatic authority here involves the acceptance of a particular prophetic vision of the End as authentic by a specifĳic audience; traditional authority entails the enshrinement of such a vision as canonical, and mediated by time-honoured interpretations; while the legal or rational concerns the attempt to justify a particular understanding of the apocalyptic vision through such methods as scriptural exegesis and chronological calculation, often with intense attention to the appearance of rationality and tightly constructed, logic-driven arguments. As O’Leary points out, the trope of authority has given immense political urgency to apocalyptic rhetoric throughout Christian history: the Reformation accusation that the papacy was no true authority, but represented the Antichrist, being only the most vivid example here. It is thus not incidental but essential to apocalyptic in the Christian tradition that it involves “a mythic narrative about power and authority, an afffĳirmation of divine and spiritual power over and against the idolatrous claims of state authority. The problem of evil is not only a question of why God allows the innocent to sufffer, but also of why the wicked are allowed to rule and how believers may resist their power.”46 In this light, the modernist crisis may aptly be described as a crisis of authority.47 Whose vision or dogma or interpretation is to be embraced in a world of radically clashing and multiplying world-views? The immense cultural ferment of this period is shadowed by a radical uncertainty, and therefore a radical argumentativeness too: is there any way of deciding between visions of future regeneration, or who best explains present evils? Is one to trust a charismatic authority (present or past), or a traditional one (and whose tradition?), or is one to rely upon exegesis and reasoning (risking a challenge to one’s premises or method)? Even where individual modernists were non-religious, the rhetoric of justifĳication for their own particular cultural projects was nonetheless able to take on distinctly apocalyptic features, and O’Leary’s analysis of the fundamental topoi and rhetorical dynamics of apocalypse can thus potentially render an important service to modernist scholars.

Another relevant consequence of the modernist crisis of authority in the present context is a widespread and artistically productive uncertainty as to what really constitutes an acceptable “ending.” Put another way, are some ways of depicting “the end” in literature and the other arts to be seen as outmoded or objectionable? Does the search for open or uncertain endings imply a competing

45 O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, 52. 46 O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, 55–56. 47 For a fuller discussion of this theme, see Tonning, Modernism and Christianity, 99–103. Introduction 13 teleology, a desire for diffferent ends? Or instead some form of endlessness, or chaos of indeterminate, indecipherable, alternate endings? Or again, even an apophatic desire for an ending that cannot be encompassed by words at all? Literary theorists have long connected these questions to distinctly apocalyptic themes. An incisive guide to this fĳield is a study by one of the distinguished contributors to this volume, Paul S. Fiddes. His book The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature draws upon critics and philosophers like Frank Kermode, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur in order to facilitate a dialogue between theology and literature on the topic of eschatology.48 Fiddes’s comparative perspective is helpful not least for highlighting both the strengths and limitations of each of these thinkers. As Fiddes points out, Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending relies upon an elaborate analogy between book and world, between organising time within fĳiction and fĳinding a pattern for time within world history: “The sense that the story is working towards an ending turns mere chronos (the ‘tick-tock’ of the clock) into moments of kairos, points of time fĳilled with the signifĳicance of being part of a larger fulfĳilment.”49 In the Christian tradition, apocalypse is the paradigm of this attempt to project a coherent, consoling pattern onto time; in Kermode’s reading, it is the ultimate “concord-fĳiction.” Yet for Kermode, that paradigm has been challenged by disappointment and disconfĳirmation through history, to the point of having become radically demythologised in the modern period: in the fĳirst place, people have become more preoccupied with their personal end in death than with the end of the world; and secondly, “the sense of an ending to history has been modifĳied into a sense of perpetual ‘transition’ from one age to another.”50 On account of this lost confĳidence in a “concordant” end to history, “there will be a deep suspicion about providing an end to any story.”51 Increasingly, if a narrative is “too concordant and consolatory”52 it may be perceived as false to the contingency and discord of reality. In turn, this tension increases exponentially in modern literature. Fiddes objects to Kermode’s implication that “all concord fĳictions, including literary ones, must somehow be consoling deceptions”;53 yet Kermode’s framework nevertheless indicates how fĳictions may enable us to “place our own death within the

48 Paul S. Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 49 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 9. 50 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 10. 51 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 11. 52 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 11. 53 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 13. 14 Tonning

context of the whole,” for literature does indeed have “the power to recreate the sense of an ending, to awaken us through its endings to the greater endings of death and apocalypse.”54 According to Fiddes, Kermode neglects “the new world of possibility that a literary text can create,” and thereby “its power to redeem as well as console.”55 A contrasting perspective on endings is provided by Northrop Frye,56 who would be suspicious of Kermode’s identifĳication of a normative correspondence between closures in fĳiction and the real world: “According to Frye, a novel or poem does not reflect the reality of the world around us, but points to a world that is desired.”57 The text is “a kind of utopian dreaming, an alternative to the world in which we live.”58 Accordingly, the two fundamental patterns for Frye are the tragic and the comic: “Tragedy is about human isolation, and comedy about human integration. A ‘comic’ ending expresses the fundamental desire for harmony, and a tragic ending is a broken comedy where the desire remains unfulfĳilled.”59 Fiddes observes about this distinction that “while for Kermode the end is open because actuality forbids too much consolation, for Frye the end is open just because it is not actuality.”60 Apocalypse, for Frye, entails a vision of excess and overcoming: “Thus the cataclysmic end to the order of nature symbolizes a destruction of the way of seeing that order which keeps us confĳined to the world of time and history as we know them.”61 Yet another theorist fascinated by St John’s Apocalypse is Jacques Derrida.62 He takes the repeated invocation “Come” throughout the Book of Revelation as the starting point of his reading. In Fiddes’s summary,

“Come” cannot be made into an object to be examined or categorized, it points to an absent place that is not described, and it is addressed to

54 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 13. 55 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 14. 56 Fiddes discusses both Northrop Frye, The Great Code. The Bible and Literature (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983); and Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 57 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 15. 58 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 16. 59 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 16. 60 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 17. 61 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 18. 62 See especially Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” transl. J. Leavey, in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (eds.), Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); and Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” Diacritics 14/2 (1984). Introduction 15

recipients who are not identifĳied in advance. […] “Come” is the apocalyptic tone itself, the apocalypse of the apocalypse, without message, without messengers, without senders or destinations. […] The Book of Revelation depicts the end of the cosmos, and provides what seems to be the defĳinitive ending to a story; but even this ending deconstructs itself, and so disperses meaning rather than completing it.63

This invocation stands in Derrida’s text for the infĳinite deferral of meaning in all texts. Unlike Kermode’s basic idea that the end of a text attempts to make whole or concordant, for Derrida, “the text opens everything up, postponing meaning into the future.”64 Fiddes’s favourite theorist is Paul Ricoeur,65 who “picks up the idea of ‘surplus’ or ‘excess’ of meaning from Derrida, but gives it another direction from the endless straying and playing which Derrida commends; the result of the surplus in human life is not to defer but to give us hope.”66 Ricoeur’s perspective also goes beyond that of Northrop Frye in this respect: “For Frye, the desired world is already buried in the consciousness from whence it can be resurrected. For Ricoeur, human being is possibility itself, and out of this fecund capacity the imagination can create genuinely new possibilities which are not simply repetitions of the past and present; symbol and myth refer to a reality which is yet to come and which they help to create.”67 Indeed, to this end Fiddes points out that Ricoeur greeted Jürgen Moltmann’s book Theology of Hope68 with great enthusiasm: “Moltmann points out that in the Jewish- Christian experience, history is generated by the expectation of fulfĳilment, and when the fulfĳilment of promise comes it is perceived as being not an end of the promise but the renewal of it; Ricoeur comments that ‘this designates an increase, a surplus, a ‘not yet’ which maintains the tension of history.’”69 Fiddes’s discussion of these theorists shows that all interpretation of complex and ambiguous fĳictional endings invariably raises questions that are closely related to theological ones. Closure, concordance, transition, harmony and dis- harmony, endlessness, deferral, representations of death, hope, transcendent desire and the imagination of the “not-yet”: these are all capable of eschatological

63 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 34–35. 64 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 35. 65 See especially Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (3 vols.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 66 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 41. 67 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 41. 68 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, transl. J. Leitch (London: scm Press, 1967). 69 Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, 45. 16 Tonning inflections, and it comes as no surprise that all these theorists keep returning to the theme of apocalypse, and to the Book of Revelation in particular. Thus, examining the ongoing tension in modernist texts between competing versions of apocalyptic themes can offfer the critic specifĳic linkages between an author’s aesthetic or cultural theorising and his or her artistic practice. As such, this area represents yet another fertile opportunity for interdisciplinary scholarly dialogue centred precisely upon the three keywords of the present volume.

Modernism, Christianity, and Apocalypse is accordingly a collection with a distinct identity, but at the same time one that can fruitfully be read in conjunction with related approaches, exemplifĳied in volumes such as The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics (eds. Roger Grifffĳin, Robert Mallett and John Tortorice), Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World (ed. Malcolm Bull), or European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth Century: Ends of Time (eds. Colin Crowder and David Jasper).70 The fĳirst of these collections offfers incisive essays in defence of the concept of “political religion,” especially in interwar Europe, and also includes a chapter on Christian interactions with such movements. Yet the latter topic is not a prominent focus in the volume, nor is there any sustained discussion of either modernism or apocalypse. The second collection offfers wide-ranging historical and theoretical discussions on the idea of “apocalypse,” from Zoroastrianism via the Christian tradition to philosophers like Kant and Hegel and to key twentieth-century theorists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno. It does not, however, examine either “political religion” or modernism in any signifĳicant detail. The third of these volumes contains a series of interesting case studies on twentieth- century modernist and post-modernist literature in conjunction with theological inflections of “apocalypse.” But it does not deal with political religion or general apocalypse theory, nor is there any systematic attempt to address the culture and concept of modernism as being in itself “apocalyptic.” By strad- dling the fĳields of “Modernism and Christianity” and “Apocalypse studies,” the present volume aims to bring together and advance the debates begun by these previous collections in a new and productive way. However, it is in the nature of a true dialogue that there should be multiple voices, and the editors have not imposed an intellectual template on the

70 Roger Grifffĳin, Robert Mallett and John Tortorice (eds.),The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics: Essays in Honour of Stanley Payne (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Malcolm Bull (ed.), Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Colin Crowder and David Jasper (eds.), European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth Century: Ends of Time (London: Macmillan, 1990). Introduction 17

nineteen contributions to this volume. Nonetheless, their interdisciplinary conversation divides naturally into three main threads. Part I, Christianity, Modernist Culture, and Visions of Apocalypse, highlights the continuing influence of Christianity upon modernism; an interrelationship that, as we have seen, inescapably involves the rhetoric and imagery of apocalypse. Part II, Cultural Transitions and Political Apocalypses, 1900–1945, focuses upon the socio-political developments that led to an acute perception of “transition,” “crisis,” and the threat of social “apocalypse” within the modernist cultures of the period; with special emphasis upon the interwar political religions of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, and upon Christian responses to these new phenomena. Finally, Part III, Still Waiting for the End? Post-World War II Readings of Apocalypse, extends these themes into the post-1945 period. This era may be described as “post-apocalyptic” in the sense of emerging from a world-wide cataclysm, which compelled urgent critical reflection upon the visions and rhetoric of the political religions that had caused the war. The post- war world, then, comes “after” the pervasively apocalyptic climate of debate within modernist culture itself, and at the same time must contend with the very real threat of man-made apocalypse represented by nuclear weapons. Yet it also draws on pre-established apocalyptic and Christian imagery to articulate its own fears (or hopes) of the End: whether invested in the looming, collective idea of nuclear war, or in more eccentric movements (aliens, the “rapture”) that draw upon and develop images from popular culture. The opening essay of the collection, by Paul S. Fiddes, astutely juxtaposes three visions of the modernist “waste land” in W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and David Jones with contemporary German theological developments of the theme of “apocalypse” by Karl Barth, Paul Althaus and Rudolph Bultmann. Fiddes contrasts the writers’ prophetic visions of an apocalypse within history with the theologians’ emphasis upon the in-breaking of the transcendent into time, arguing that both groups can claim biblical precedent, and that critical appreciation of both types of discourse might benefĳit from their being brought into closer dialogue. Jacob Phillips’s paper then goes on to examine a related kind of dialogue between the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoefffer and the expressionist movement in Germany. Phillips argues that, moving beyond Karl Barth’s or Paul Tillich’s writings—which have previously been linked to this branch of apocalyptic German cultural modernism—Bonhoefffer’s work seems to offfer “more of a thoroughgoing interchange, in that the very ambiguity and crisis described so forcefully in expressionist prose is not neutralised or resolved by theological discourse.” Suzanne Hobson’s essay, likewise, in recounting Christian “pre-histories” of modernism in the novels of G.K. Chesterton and Allen Upward, stresses non-resolution and the “oppositional 18 Tonning force and romance” of religious diffference. Chesterton and Upward thus paradoxically join plots of anarchist-terrorist revolution to traditional but non- mainstream “sectarian” groups in Britain (Catholicism, Non-conformism), in order to challenge the incipiently modernist view of “religious experience” as neutral and universally available (for instance, in Theosophy). For Hobson, Chesterton and Upward’s drive to explode the “muddy” modern consensus that would merge all creeds and denominations hints at an alternative, “agonistic modernism” able to “permit the return of religious diffferences from the underground to the public sphere.” Indeed, this analysis points forward to the attraction to a full-fledged revolutionary rebirth of Christendom as a response to the indiffferentism andanomie of modernity in later “Christian modernist” writers such as T.S. Eliot and David Jones. In turning towards these themes, Henry Mead’s essay examines another forerunner in this respect, namely T.E. Hulme, who in his posthumous 1915–16 “Notebook,” published in The New Age magazine, made clear his distaste for “Romanticism in literature, Relativism in ethics, Idealism in philosophy and Modernism in religion.” Mead recounts Hulme’s intellectual struggle with both French Bergsonism and the Vatican’s theological anti-modernism, in the process of carving out yet another paradoxical position: “The anti-modernist modernist was a traditionalist of the avant-garde.” Katherine Ebury’s ensuing analysis of T.S. Eliot’s ambivalent attraction towards twentieth-century relativistic science and its popularisers (such as Arthur Eddington and James Jeans) interrogates another spectrum of modern/anti-modern(ist) ambiguity. Ebury focuses on images of entropy—the “scientist’s apocalypse”—in the transitional, pre-conversion poem “The Hollow Men” (1923), arguing that Eliot’s famous juxtaposition of the “bang” and the “whimper” enacts a career-long ambivalence: “The poem’s dream of an infĳinite cosmic and divine fĳire, or ‘perpetual star,’ takes place in a space of slow, entropic decay.” Like his friend Eliot, Ezra Pound too had, Mark Byron notes, a “predisposition towards totalising, and even eschatological systems: primary among the models for the structure of his Cantos is Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its teleological movement to transcendence and unity with the divine.” Pound’s surprising interest in the ninth-century Irish theologian Scotus Eriugena’s “monumental Neo-Platonist eschatology, the Periphyseon or De divisione naturae” is located in the poet’s eclectic and syncretist search for divine “light” in and through historical patterns, as well as in art and literature. For Pound, Eriugena represented a semi-occult wisdom suppressed by Christian orthodoxy, and he was willing to do battle with Eliot on this point. However, his hope that Mussolini’s Italian Fascism would revive the true, neo-pagan religion of Europe collapsed with the apocalyptic fall of the Axis in 1945, and in the Pisan Introduction 19

Cantos Eriugena became, Byron fĳinds, “an emblem of the writing of exile and isolation,” and “a visionary whose eschatology raises the threats to Pound’s own being to the register of epic statement.” The fĳinal essay in this section, Brian Sudlow’s “Péguy’s Apocalypse,” ably sets out the three “apocalyptic paradigms” governing the French Catholic poet’s thought, namely cultural crisis and “dissolution,” moral “judgment,” and “selection” (heaven or hell). However, the stress is squarely placed upon Charles Péguy’s “intellectual dynamism” and “human inconsistencies and hesitations” in his restless journey “from irenic indiffference to a belief in grace, and from the denial of hell to the imaginative portrayal of the Last Judgment” (in his last major poem, Eve, 1913). As with similar case studies covered here, intellectual dynamism, historical speci- fĳicity and a great deal of human inconsistency and ambivalence complicates the interactions of “modernism, Christianity and apocalypse” in this period.

The second section of this volume emphasises socio-political contexts for the modernist crisis, and its fĳirst contribution is by the former Director of the German Historical Museum, Hans Ottomeyer. He charts the so-called “Life Reform” movement, which began to criticise the “apocalyptic and disastrous” living conditions in fĳin-de-siècle Europe, suggesting a vitalist alternative based around a kind of nature-worship. Healing, and the overcoming of Western society’s decadence and alienation from nature, was the movement’s overrid- ing aim. The religious overtones employed may be gauged from the fervour of a fĳigure such as the zoologist and Darwinian populariser Ernst Haeckel, whose neo-pantheistic doctrine of Monism aimed zealously at replacing Christian faith. In the wake of the often eccentric “Life Reform” movement, more troubling developments would eventually emerge in Germany: the quasi-science of eugenics, a cult of the healthy body that disdained the weak, and fĳinally the fully-fledged Nazi idea of the Volkskörper, or “body of the people,” from which diseased—Jewish and other “dysgenic”—elements needed to be purged. In his essay on “Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists in the Third Reich,” Gregory Maertz scrutinises the ideological and practical strategies deployed by the nsdap in order to enlist Christian artists into working for the regime. Maertz contests the reading of Nazi political religion as exclusively preoccupied with eccentric neo-pagan or even occultist ideas, and emphasises instead the “dynamic capacity for formation by syncretic adaptation” of key ideological components within Christianity as part of the process of Gleichschaltung or national co-ordination. The sinister, yet often subtle, transformation of Christian into Nazi iconography is evident in the artists who allowed themselves to be enlisted by the “new Germany,” such as Oskar-Martin Amorbach, Wilhelm Emil Eber, Richard Heymann and Ferdinand Spiegel. 20 Tonning

But there were also, as Paul Jackson’s essay on the Catholic and fascist propagandist James Strachey Barnes makes clear, professed Christians who joined the fascist cause without any prompting. Making use of Roger Grifffĳin’s approach to “generic fascism,” Jackson argues that Strachey Barnes’s views are uneasily placed between advocating fascism as a “universal” philosophy and the notion of “palingenetic” rebirth for a specifĳic national community, while also straddled between the idea of a “re-establishment” of the past values of European civilisation (from ancient to Catholic Rome) versus an emphasis on social revolution. Barnes, in fact, took up relatively idiosyncratic views, combining, Jackson writes, a “synthesis of Catholicism and Italian Fascism,” and “the strong promotion of ‘universal fascism’ via this fusion being developed across Europe,” yet at the same time adding “relatively hostile commentary on German Nazism.” Another enthusiastic and idiosyncratic propagandist for fascism, both that of Mussolini and, later, of Hitler, was none other than the modernist patriarch, Ezra Pound. Andrea Rinaldi’s essay emphasises the way in which Pound’s intensifying belligerence in the years leading up to World War II—and especially during the conflict itself—was rooted in the idea of a vast apocalyptic civilisational conflict, one pitting the international “usuriocracy” against what he saw as the authentic religion and culture of Europe. This European “paideuma”—a term Pound adapted from the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, a strong inspiration in the 1930s—was avowedly anti-Semitic and religiously syncretist rather than monotheistic. However, Pound also came to include the Roman Catholic Church, especially in its Trecento and Quattrocento glory in Italy, as an examplar of the “European paideuma”; for it patronised the arts, condemned usury, and supposedly ensured the subterranean survival of the pagan “Elusinian” mysteries with its colourful rituals and local traditions. Rinaldi connects Pound’s neo-paganism with the offfĳicial fascist cult of “the grain,” which, on Pound’s reading, sprang from native Italian religious traditions. The three fĳinal essays in this section, by Jonas Kurlberg, Erik Tonning and Hedda Lingaas Fossum, chart Christian responses to the rise of totalitarianism and the troubling phenomenon of “political religions” between the world wars. Kurlberg’s account of the Christian think-tank “The Moot”—which, in addition to its founder J.H. Oldham, included fĳigures as diverse as Christopher Dawson, Karl Mannheim, Adolf Löwe, Sir Walter Moberley, Fred Clarke, John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot, H.A. Hodges, John Baillie and Michael Polyani— argues that it aimed to develop a “blueprint for a Christian revolution in Western societies during the years 1938–47.” As such, “The Moot” may be clas- sifĳied, if imperfectly, as a species of “political modernism” in Roger Grifffĳin’s Introduction 21 sense: it may be read, Kurlberg claims, “on the one hand, as a reaction against the decadence of modernity and, on the other, as self-consciously offfering an alternative to the pagan totalitarian regimes.” Tonning’s essay also starts from the political crises of the 1930s and the looming sense of civilizational breakdown: Christianity could now be seen afresh, as a “bulwark against impending chaos and a vital source of values; and as offfering its own regeneration cure for the ills of social atomism and injustice, a technocratic, despiritualized civilization, and an impersonal and malfunctioning industrial capitalism.” Tonning’s chapter thus examines the creative rediscovery of “old dogmas” for this “new crisis”—specifĳi- cally, “Hell” for T.S. Eliot and the Incarnation for W.H. Auden. For these convert poets and increasingly public intellectuals, Christian dogma could articulate social and aesthetic visions that could directly contribute to saving the West from totalitarianism: in Eliot’s case, a culture that would rediscover the awe of the transcendent God and the “daily terror of eternity”; while in Auden’s, a regenerated liberal democracy that acknowledged the burden of fallibility and sin, alongside a persisting need for the redemption of our common humanity. Another preoccupation of Auden’s was the dogma of Original Sin, which, as Hedda Lingaas Fossum details in her text, fuelled a critique of Western “romanticism” and its view of human perfectibility that took aim at both the failings of liberal humanism on the one hand, and on the other, of Adolf Hitler as a “troubling symptom of a modern, misdirected system of metaphysics unwilling to come to terms with the source of human evil.” Fossum’s analysis of the complex trajectory in Auden’s theological-political thought, notably via Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr, concludes that his position entails “an abandonment of the hope for a human-made Parousia (or Apocalypse), and indeed the very idea that human beings are capable of achieving their own transcendence. The eschatological horizon, instead of looming over the present, is shifted into the beyond, to be realized only with the coming of a redeemer.”

The war, however, was ultimately won by manpower, materials and technology, not ideas. Yet those who found themselves on the losing side, like the modernist-turned-propagandist, Ezra Pound—fĳirst incarcerated for treason in Pisa and then confĳined for twelve years to St Elizabeths hospital for the criminally insane in Washington—did not always see it that way. As Matthew Feldman’s essay on “Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Gener- ation” demonstrates, Pound continued to believe in a vast international conspiracy of usurers and Jews. The latter were now at work efffecting a “blackout on history”; a phrase alluding to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which Pound had fĳirst read in April 1940 and later incorporated into his award-winning poetic sequence, the Pisan Cantos. Pound’s teleological reading 22 Tonning of history as pointing forward to a new fascist epoch may have sufffered a devastating blow at the collapse of the Axis, but he held on to the apocalyptic dream that, even in the face of disaster, a faithful (radical right) remnant could sow the seeds of eventual redemption. As Feldman painstakingly documents, Pound was willing to collaborate with anyone who would listen. That included continuing his literary activism into the 1950s for Oswald Mosley’s Union movement (the successor to the British Union of Fascists), in the pages of The European, a new “intellectual” house journal designed to make fascism more acceptable to the post-war era. But it also included directly supporting the propaganda effforts of violent biological racists and outright neo-Nazis like John Kasper and Eustace Mullins. Pound’s obstinate refusal to abandon the pattern he perceived in history contrasts with a new, collective fear gripping the post-war world: that human history had no pattern whatever, and might end in a bomb crater. The two essays following Feldman’s, by Benjamin Madden and Mary Bryden, both probe the challenge of representing the Bomb and its threat of a potentially meaningless end of history, one crowning human technological hubris with universal death. At the same time, as Madden’s essay focusing on Wallace Stevens’s late poem “The Auroras of Autumn” points out, atomic power was depicted imaginatively long before it became a reality, nor did the frequent invocation of the trope of “inexpressibility” prevent new creative attempts: “Thus the topoi of Christian apocalyptic formed one of the main rhetorical means by which the development of the atomic bomb came to be textualised.” While Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn” has often been read as expressing a “personal apocalypse,” critics have been hesitant to claim that its imagery directly responds to the nuclear age. Madden suggests, however, that it is the poem’s very reticence, and Stevens’s afffĳirmation of the ordinary over the apocalyptic, that offfers “both a counter-apocalyptic politics and a counter- apocalyptic poetics”; one that is engaged in “measuring the adequacy of the various consoling fĳictions we have devised to cope with the nuclear threat.” From a diffferent angle, as Mary Bryden’s essay on “Thomas Merton’s Figures of Apocalypse” indicates, the Bomb posed a new challenge to Christian theology. Merton came to emphasise a “realised eschatology” by the 1960s, understood as the transformation of life and human relations by Christ in the here and now, rather than through a cosmic eschaton. Bryden sensitively traces Merton’s preoccupation with the violent and indeed “apocalyptic” twentieth century, whose crises and cataclysms he could not help but take personally, engender- ing a passion to write and speak his mind that sometimes put him at odds with his monastic superiors. In his “Christian existentialism,” Bryden argues, Merton “declares his commitment to the immediacy of the unfolding moment, with its Introduction 23 challenge to make a choice, not just in the domain of the spiritual, but also in the domains of the political and ethical.” The case of Merton adds a distinct, post-war twist to the topics of transcendence and history, prophecy and the necessity for choice, which loom large in many of the contributions to this volume. The two fĳinal studies by Carole M. Cusack and Malise Ruthven explore the impact of apocalyptic themes upon popular culture and mass movements. Both offfer timely reminders of how culturally diverse and syncretic that impact has been, extending far beyond the intellectual world. Cusack’s analysis of Christian and theosophical themes in post-war ufo and alien-based religions shows how these religions “marry modern notions of science and progress to elements from traditional religions, and develop apocalyptic visions that draw upon, and are influenced by, popular culture and the conspiracist subculture.” On one hand, this movement therefore points back to the formative tensions between occultism, Christianity and a science-driven modernity explored, for instance, by Leon Surette in The Birth of Modernism and Alex Owen in The Place of Enchantment.71 Yet on the other hand, they are also embedded in a specifĳically post-war context: “The themes of apocalypse and conspiracy were particularly congruent with the Cold-War atmosphere of paranoia and scapegoating; thus the notion that the appearance of ufos and the visitations by extra-terrestrials were signs that—unless peace on earth be achieved—the end times were at hand gained currency.” Broadening the picture further, Ruthven’s wide-ranging text on “The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary” draws on the work of D.S. Russell, Richard Landes and others in order to highlight the impact of apocalyptic movements and thought from Jewish Scripture and early Christian messianism, via medieval and Reformation chiliasm, to modern fĳigures like the “painter of apocalypse,” John Martin, as well as in political movements like Communism and Nazism, and fĳinally in Christian Zionism and the “premillennialist” theology of “rapture” that underpins the popular success of Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye’s book series Left Behind. Ruthven’s panoramic survey recalls the persistent ambiguities of apocalyptic as an ingredient in the social imaginary: it may at times point to a message of social justice and inclusiveness, appealing to the deprived, the marginalised and the dispossessed; or it may lead to the demonization of perceived enemies and the imposition of utopian social revolutions at enormous human cost. Ruthven’s conclusion thus underlines the

71 See Surette, The Birth of Modernism; and Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 24 Tonning contemporaneity of the stories he has been telling, and the on-going need to scrutinise the complex of issues examined in this volume:

Under conditions of settled secular governance, great panoramic canvases such as Martin’s, modern disaster movies, Black Metal music and Left Behind thrillers may act as psychic opiates, offfering cathartic release for feelings of pity and fear, alleviating anger at the world’s injustices. But when traumas created by famine, war, disease or other social upheavals reach a critical point, fantasy and reality have a dangerous tendency to merge. Real time eschatologies are actualised. Violent endings happen.

Bibliography

Bärsch, Claus-Ekkehard. Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002. Bauckham, Richard. The Theology of the Book of Revelation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Bull, Malcolm, ed. Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its bearing on modern totalitarian movements. New York: Harper, 1957. Collins John J., ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Volume 1. The origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity. New York and London: Continuum, 2000. Crowder, Colin and David Jasper, eds. European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth Century: Ends of Time. London: Macmillan, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” Diacritics 14/2 (1984). ——. “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy.” Translated by J. Leavey. In Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Dilworth, Thomas. The Liturgical Parenthesis of David Jones. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press 1979. Fiddes, Paul S. The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. ——. The Great Code. The Bible and Literature. London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983. Grifffĳin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Introduction 25

——, Robert Mallett and John Tortorice, eds. The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics: Essays in Honour of Stanley Payne. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Jones, David. In Parenthesis. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Landes, Richard. Heaven On Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Lawrence, D.H. Apocalypse. London: Penguin, 1974. McGinn, Bernard. Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. San Francisco: Harper, 1996. ——, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Volume 2. Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture. New York and London: Continuum, 2000. Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology of Hope. Translated by J. Leitch. London: scm Press, 1967. O’Leary, Stephen D. Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pound, Ezra. Make It New. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative (3 volumes). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Stein, Stephen J., ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Volume 3: Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age. New York and London: Continuum, 2000. Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and the Occult. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Tonning, Erik. Modernism and Christianity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Yeats, W.B. Yeats’s Poems. Edited by A. Norman Jefffares. London: Macmillan, 1989.

Part 1

Christianity, Modernist Culture, and Visions of Apocalypse

∵

chapter 1 Versions of the Wasteland The Sense of an Ending in Theology and Literature in the Modern Period

Paul S. Fiddes

Introduction: Apocalyptic and Modernism

Every generation thinks that its own crisis is the most severe that there has ever been. The poet Robert Frost wrote scathingly in 1935 that “We have no way of knowing that this age is one of the worst in the world’s history…It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobilised by God.”1 Perhaps there is a pointed criticism here of many poets in the previous decade of the 1920s, who seem to have lived with an apocalyptic vision, lamenting decadence, haunted by the sense that western civilisation was coming to an end and envisaging the disintegration of all things. As the critic Frank Kermode judges, if there is a pervasive world-view in the modernist movement, “we should have to call it apocalyptic.”2 The modern imagination, as he diagnoses it, chooses to be at the end of an era, ready to accept all kinds of evidence that its crisis is a genuine end and a genuine beginning.3 In this paper I am taking some snapshots of the cultural scene of the 1920s, some slices of the complex phenomenon of modernism. I select three versions of an apocalyptic image, that of a wasteland, from W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and David Jones’ prose-poem In Parenthesis. Alongside this poetry from the British Isles, I want to place some theological writing from Germany in the same period—Protestant accounts of apocalyptic and eschatology. These examples of poetry and theology are connected in so far as they all reflect the period in which they were fostered. All show a reaction to two tumultuous events of the earlier twentieth century— the Great War and the Russian Revolution. All confront the decline of imperial power and the loss of confĳidence in the progress of Christian civilisation that was strong in the previous century. All grapple with the breaking-up of an

1 Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (eds.), The Selected Prose of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 105. 2 Frank Kermode, “The Modern,” in Kermode, Continuities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 2. 3 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 96.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282285_003 30 Fiddes established mind-set by such disturbing spirits as Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. However, I am not attempting to produce a map of the cultural history of the period. If I were, I would need to examine Catholic and Orthodox theologians, as well as modernist poetry in the United States and in Europe outside England and Ireland.4 I am simply taking examples of the way that a sense of apocalyptic developed in this modern period, in order to observe that the poetry and the theology I review appear to point in quite diffferent directions. What these poems and this theology mean by “the end” seems to diverge markedly. This is at least a curious phenomenon worth investigating, and (as a theologian) I want to draw some conclusions for the impact of apocalyptic on the theological scene today.

The Wasteland of a Desert

Turning fĳirst to the poetry, Yeats’ poem (1921) gives us a wasteland of desert sands. Eliot’s poem (1922) offfers a wasteland of urban streets. Jones’ prose- poem depicts the wasteland of the trenches just before the battle of the Somme. Jones’ In Parenthesis was in fact published later than the other two pieces, in 1937, but he began work on it in 1927,5 and so I want to include it as reflecting the mood of the decade of the 1920s, especially as Jones admits he was influenced by Eliot’s own poem.6 To take another overview, Yeats portrays the crisis he feels as the loss of a centre, Eliot describes it as a fragmentation, and Jones as warfare—though it is important to add that this is mechanised, industrial war. All draw on imagery from the Christian tradition of apocalyptic to depict the catastrophe they believe they are experiencing. In Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,”7 the poet begins with the picture of a falcon spiralling up into the air away from the falconer on the ground. As it reaches the top of its spiral, it breaks free from the control of the fĳigure at the centre:

4 But see below on Catholic modernism and anti-modernism. 5 See David Blamires, David Jones. Artist and Writer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 3, 6, 8, 63. 6 In a private letter, cit. John H. Johnston, English Poetry of the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 322. 7 In Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), in W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems. Second Edition (London: Macmillan, 1950), 210. Versions Of The Wasteland 31

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…

The image communicates the sense of crisis whether or not the reader is aware of Yeats’ mystical philosophy of history, in which the spiralling movement of the falcon represents successive “gyres” or cones of world-events; as one gyre disintegrates, it intersects with a new gyre starting in the opposite direction. So one era winds to its end and is replaced by another, in what Yeats calls in his A Vision an “approaching antithetical influx.”8 In a further confĳiguration of Yeats’ hermeticism, this moment is symbolised by the last crescent of the old moon, awaiting the new. When the fĳirst volume of Oswald Spengler’s influential book Decline of the West (1918) appeared in English in 1926,9 predicting the end of western civilisation, Yeats greeted it as confĳirming his own theory of a series of impersonal and inescapable historical cycles in which humankind is haplessly caught.10 So the poem proceeds with Yeats’ vision of the coming of the new age, in imagery drawn partly from Christian apocalyptic. The “second coming” is at hand, a term usually indicating the Christian hope for the Parousia of Christ; but in a subversion of expectation the avatar of this coming is a sphinx-like fĳigure who is more like one of the “beasts” in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts who are portrayed as hostile to the people of God:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The genes of this beast include the beasts whose various forms are portrayed in the biblical imagery of the Books of Daniel and Revelation, representing savage imperial powers—for example the beast of Revelation 13 which had several heads speaking human words, but was “like a leopard, its feet like a bear’s and its mouth as a lion’s mouth.”11 In Yeats’ view, the last two millennia, dominated by the coming of Christ, have been a “nightmare” for the human race. Now humanity is to awake to a new era, antithetical to Christianity, full of new

8 W.B. Yeats, A Vision. Second Edition (1937) (London: Macmillan, 1981), 263. The fĳirst edition was published privately by Werner Laurie in 1925. 9 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. Volume 1: Form and Actuality, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (Allen and Unwin, 1926). In 1922 Spengler published in Germany a revised version of the fĳirst volume along with a second volume, published in English in 1928. 10 Yeats, A Vision, 18. 11 Revelation 13:1–6. 32 Fiddes potential. But the birth of this age can only be out of a present moment which is arid as the desert under a pitiless sun:

somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs…

This is indeed a waste land, characterised by loss of a centre and loss of tradition: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” In accord with apocalyptic, the new world can only come through decadence and the terrors of the end-times. Here, in a general way, Yeats draws on the tradition of the Great Tribulation which is to come before the end of all things; as depicted in the apocalyptic discourses of the Gospels this is marked by “wars and insurrections, great signs from heaven and people’s hearts failing them for fear.”12 Since this situation is the only entrance into the new era, Yeats is uncertain about whether to welcome it or not, admiring and being repulsed by the rough beast in equal measure, here perhaps showing some of his ambiguous reaction not only to recent events in Eastern Europe but even more to the violence of the Irish Civil War following the Easter uprising in 1916. “A terrible beauty is born” he wrote about that year,13 but the “slouching” of the beast carries overtones of casual arro- gance and cruelty such as depicted in Yeats’ later poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” (1928).14 While he came later to fĳix the uprising in a solid heroic mythology, at the time his feelings were ambivalent, as he regretted the passing of the era of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.

The Wasteland of the City

In Eliot’s poem (1922),15 a year later than “The Second Coming,” the wasteland again appears as a desert:

Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road…

12 Luke 21:9–10, 26. 13 Yeats, “Easter 1916 (1921),” in Collected Poems, 203. 14 Yeats, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen (1928),” in Collected Poems, 232–237. 15 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” in The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 60–80. Versions Of The Wasteland 33

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock…16

At the same time the wasteland is the streets of the city, the “Unreal City” where crowds flow without sense of direction, and one wasteland is the analogue of the other. Both are places of sterility and lack of flourishing (“dry, sterile thunder without rain”), both are portrayed with the help of biblical apocalyptic imagery, and both are symbols of a fragmented civilisation. First there is the natural Waste Land, full of the echoes of God’s judgement upon the Israelite nation long ago as delivered by the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images…17

So God addresses Ezekiel as “Son of man” (later to be an apocalyptic title), and points to the heap of dry bones in the valley just as Eliot regards the “heap of broken images.” Later in the poem we read, “dry bones can harm no one.”18 As the poet asks whether roots and branches can grow out of the stones, so the prophet Ezekiel asks “will he not pull up its roots and cut offf its branches?”19 and warns that “inhabited cities shall be laid waste.”20 As the poet urges that “there is shadow under this red rock/ Come in under the shadow of this red rock,” and “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,”21 so Isaiah bids “enter into the rock and hide in the dust from the terror” and promises “streams of water in a dry place/like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.”22 The agony of the wasteland is compared to the experience of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, “the agony in stony places.”23 In the light of the Gospels’ account of Christ’s warnings, before his death, about a great tribulation to come,24 Eliot turns even a recollection of his resurrection into an image of catastrophe. The story of Christ walking beside the two disciples on

16 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” lines 331–337. 17 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” lines 19–22. 18 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” line 390. 19 Ezekiel 17:9–10. 20 Ezekiel 12:20. 21 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” lines 25–26, 30. 22 Isiah 2:10, 32:2. 23 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” line 324. 24 Matthew 24:4–36; Mark 13:5–37; Luke 21:8–36. 34 Fiddes the road to Emmaus (“Who is the third who walks always beside you?”)25 modulates into revolution and disintegration in Eastern Europe. The “hooded fĳigure” on the road, whom Eliot associates with the “Hanged Man” of the Tarot pack, is multiplied into the “hooded hordes swarming/ over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth,” and the destruction of Jerusalem foretold by Jesus according to the Gospels26 is multiplied into the “falling towers” of other great cities.27 The images of the Biblical wasteland interweave with another image of natural wasteland, that of the fertility myth as recounted by Jessie Weston in her book From Ritual to Romance,28 to which Eliot confesses himself heavily indebted. Weston recalls the ancient myth of a waste land, ruled by a King whose impotence, usually due to a grievous wound, has afffected the fertility of the land and reduced it to a barren wasteland; only his healing, or perhaps his return to life after death, can loosen the blocked waters and restore the land. She associates this myth with the search for the Holy Grail in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, where King Pellam had received a “dolorous stroke” from Sir Balin, using unwittingly the spear that had pierced the side of Christ. The wounded King is the keeper of the Grail, and has been reduced to fĳishing in the river near his castle to keep alive because of the ruin of his lands.29 According to Malory “there encresed nother corne, ne grasse, nother well-nye no fruyte, ne in the watir was founde no fyssh. Therefore men calle hit…the Waste Londe, for that dolerous stroke.”30 If we simplify Malory’s somewhat confused story, Galahad and Percival fĳind the Grail after a journey through the wasteland to the Chapel Perilous, and heal the wounded Fisher-King. Echoes of the story that Jessie Weston tells resound throughout Eliot’s poem. The land and the city lack fertility. The poet makes his journey across the wasteland to “the empty chapel, only the wind’s home,” and exclaims:

25 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” line 359; Luke 24:13–16. 26 Matthew 24:1–3; Mark 13:1–4; Luke 21:5–7. 27 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” lines 373–376. 28 Jessie Laidlay Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: The University Press, 1920), Chapters 9 and 13 passim. 29 Or a second royal fĳigure, his son Pelles, does the fĳishing and is the Fisher-King. The situation is confused, due to multiple sources. At times it seems to be Pelles rather than Pellam who is the maimed king, and perhaps a third, anonymous royal fĳigure is the one healed by Galahad. 30 Malory, The Tale of the Sankgreal, in Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), XVII.3, 581. Versions Of The Wasteland 35

I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down…31

So there is the second area of Waste Land, the city. Its middle and upper class inhabitants live trivial and indulgent lives, chase after charlatans like Madame Sosostris in their shallow sophistication, and have sterile relationships. Its working class, although with a more lively pub culture, have children they do not want or value. They have all lost the traditions by which to live. The city is full of “crowds of people, walking round in a ring” (as Mrs. Sosostris sees them)32 until all fall down. The river carries the detritus of urban life—“empty bottles, sand- wich papers/Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends/Or other testi- mony of summer nights.”33 In Eliot’s lament over the city (“O city, city!”) we can hear the echoes of the apocalyptic image of the fall of Babylon in Revelation 18:

Alas, alas, the great city, Babylon the mighty city! For in one hour your judgement has come.

In Revelation, those who lament over the city are notably the merchants and the sailors. We read: “The merchants weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore.” The sailors cry out, “What city was like the great city, where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth!” In Eliot’s poem Mr. Eugenides, the merchant from Smyrna shifts into the shape of the drowned Phoenician sailor, who has forgotten the “profĳit and loss.”34 His death by water is parallel to the degeneration of the city-dwellers: in a quotation from Dante, Eliot reflects “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many/I had not thought death had undone so many.”35 In the published text of the poem there is no explicit reference to the Book of Revelation, but in his earlier draft, after Mrs. Sosostris had exclaimed “I see crowds of people walking round in a ring” Eliot had quoted from Revelation 22:8, “I John saw these things and heard them.”36

31 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” lines 423–426. 32 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” line 56. 33 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” lines 177–179. 34 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” line 314. 35 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” line 63. See Dante’s Inferno, Canto III. 36 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Draft, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 9. 36 Fiddes

Both the scenes of wasted landscapes and the city scenes are evoked by fragments—broken pieces of experience, shreds of myths, snatches of quotations from past authors.37 The poem thus communicates in its very form the fragmentation that Eliot perceives as being at the heart of present civilisation, and the nature of the wasteland. The modern consciousness is swamped by many images and concepts from the past, but is unable to hold them together in any kind of continuous tradition. There appears to be nothing to connect the pieces, no sense of what might be of permanent value, only a wasteland strewn with rubbish, a “heap of broken images.”

The Wasteland of the Trenches

In the prose poem of David Jones, the wasteland is the trenches of the First World War, in which Jones fought as a common soldier. In Parenthesis38 tells the story of Jones’ alter ego, Private John Ball, from training with his company in England in December 1915, to participation in the Somme offfensive in July 1916 when his platoon was destroyed and he himself was wounded. Jones picks up the same myth as Eliot, and depicts the advance of his platoon to its catastrophic engagement with the enemy as a journey through the Waste Land, heading Part 4 of the poem with a quotation from Malory: “King Pellam’s Launde” (Land). Jones writes:

The untidied squalor of the loveless scene spread far horizontally, imag- ing unnamed discomfort, sordid and deprived as ill-kept hen-runs that back on sidings on wet weekdays where wasteland meets environs and punctured bins ooze canned-meats discarded, tyres to rot, derelict slow- weathered iron-ware disintegrates between factory-end and nettle-bed. Sewage feeds the high grasses and bald clay-crop bears tins and braces, swollen rat-body turned-turtle to the clear morning.39

There is obvious resonance with Eliot’s “stony rubbish,” detritus on the river and the rat that “crept softly through the vegetation.”40 Moreover, there is an

37 Among others: Shakespeare, Dante, Augustine, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Isolde, the Bible, Baudelaire, Webster, Milton, Ovid, Virgil, Middleton, Verlaine, Goldsmith, Gerard de Nerval and the Upanishads. 38 David Jones, In Parenthesis (1937) (London: Faber and Faber, 2010). 39 Jones, In Parenthesis, 75. 40 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” lines 20, 87. Versions Of The Wasteland 37 analogue between natural wasteland and city, “where wasteland meets environs.” Here the trench system is organised as a kind of city, as the soldiers give street names to the trench lines. One man instructs a visiting offfĳicer: “it’s a plumb straight road—you’ve three hundred yards to the communication trench—turn left into Sandbag Alley—right at the O.B.L.—left into Oxford Street.”41 In this natural and urban wasteland, the Welsh soldier Dai boasts that he is the epic soldier throughout history, and claims that:

I was the spear in Balin’s hand that made waste King Pellam’s land.42

As the soldiers advance into battle, there runs into Ball’s consciousness the ironic comment, “who gives a bugger for the Dolorous Stroke”—that is the blow that wounded the Fisher-King.43 But as he observes his comrades falling around him, he reflects on all those heroes who “fructify the land” by their deaths,44 including “Peredur of steel arms,” the Welsh knight whom Jones iden- tifĳies with Percival. There is the hope that through their sacrifĳice the water will flow again in the wasteland and fruitfulness will return. Jones now explicitly uses apocalyptic language from the Gospels and Revelation to depict the disastrous assault on the German lines. As in Eliot, the scene of Jesus in Gethsemane evokes waiting for the end, to which Jones adds the words of Jesus on the way to the cross, predicting the destruction of the city to the daughters of Jerusalem: “Weep for yourselves and for your children… they will say to the mountains ‘fall on us’ and to the hills, ‘cover us’.”45 Thus one soldier repeats the experience of Jesus:

He found him all gone to pieces and not pulling himself together nor making the best of things. When they found him his friends came on him in the secluded fĳire-bay who miserably wept for the pity of it all and for the things shortly to come to pass and no hills to cover us.46

As the soldiers prepare to attack, it is “zero minus seven minutes. Seven minutes to go…and seventy times seven times to the minute/this drumming of the

41 Jones, In Parenthesis, 40. 42 Jones, In Parenthesis, 79. 43 Jones, In Parenthesis, 62. 44 Jones, In Parenthesis, 163. 45 Luke 23:28–30. 46 Jones, In Parenthesis, 153. 38 Fiddes diaphragm.”47 As “the last minute drums its taut millennium out” so “in the fullness of time…the world falls apart.”48 Jones has in mind the opening of the seven seals of the scroll in Revelation Chapter 5, which will unleash disasters upon the world; in Revelation the opening of the seals is preceded by a chorus of praise to the lamb of God in heaven, and the opening of the fĳirst four releases the four horses of the apocalypse—white, red, black and pale. So Jones reflects through his soldier, John Ball:

Riders on pale horses loosed and vials irreparably broken an’ Wat price bleedin’ Glory Glory Glory Hallelujah and the Royal Welsh sing: Jesu lover of me soul…to Aberystwyth.49

As the machine guns perforate the chalk, Ball sees the white horse: “white creature of chalk pounded/ and the world crumbled away.”50 The advance begins with the “pale horse” which is death, and then:

…red horses now—blare every trump without economy, burn boat and sever every tie every held thing goes west and tethring snapt, bolts unshot and brass doors flung wide and you go forward, foot goes another step forward.51

The whining shells are the trumpets of the last judgement, and each person “is sensible of their particular judgement,” sent to “everlasting partition.”52 But the “end” that Jones has in view is not just the personal apocalypse of death, nor even the holocaust of a nation. As he reflects on his experience of the months before the Somme he detects another kind of end coming to civilisation as it has been, a turn of an epoch. At the beginning of his time as a soldier he had known a personal community among comrades who—whether

47 Jones, In Parenthesis, 155. 48 Jones, In Parenthesis, 159. 49 Jones, In Parenthesis, 160. 50 Jones, In Parenthesis, 156; cf. the “White Hart,” In Parenthesis, 163. 51 Jones, In Parenthesis, 163. 52 Jones, In Parenthesis, 162. Versions Of The Wasteland 39 they were from London or Wales—expressed a continuity with the roots of their traditions. Jones writes that “every man’s speech and habit of mind were a perpetual showing” of their inheritance from the past, of the folk-life in which they had been nurtured. “Together,” he comments, “they bore in their bodies the genuine tradition of the Island of Britain…These were the children of Doll Tearsheet…both speak in parables, both are natural poets.” Even the wasteland could be, he writes, “a place of enchantment” where—in the words of Malory, the landscape spoke “with a grimly voice.”53 This culture is what was lost in 1916, when the mechanisation of the war took hold: Jones recalls that “things hardened into a more relentless, mechanical afffair…how impersonal did each new draft seem arriving each month and all these new-fangled gad- gets to master.”54 It was no longer possible to fĳind any spiritual or heroic dimension in the meaninglessness of their plight. So, in the urban wasteland of the trenches, the poem exposes the increasing technocracy in the laying of communication cable and the frequent refrain “mind the wire here.” Much of the slaughter of the platoon was due to the technical errors of “our own heavies fĳiring by map reference,” and in the turning of nature into a wasteland, Jones observes:

…cork-screw stapled trip-wire to snare among the briars And iron warp with bramble weft with meadow-sweet and lady-smock…55

Jones thus associates the mechanisation of war with the shift from the era of the artist to the technician: “Even while we watch the boatman mending his sail, the petroleum hurts the sea.”56 Later he refers to a “break” in our civilisation, as a moment when images that were meaningful in the past no longer have potency.57 The human desire to make artefacts humane, particular to the individual artist-craftsman, has been replaced by the lifeless manufacture of objects from machines, or what is merely “utile”—for use.58 Like Eliot, Jones sees the wasteland of modern society as littered with broken images. While the

53 Jones, In Parenthesis, x–xi. 54 Jones, In Parenthesis, ix. 55 Jones, In Parenthesis, 165. 56 Jones, In Parenthesis, ix. 57 David Jones, “The Preface to The Anathemata” (1951), in Jones, Epoch and Artist. Selected Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 114–122. 58 David Jones, “The Utile (1958),” in Jones, Epoch and Artist, 180–185. 40 Fiddes process began with the industrial revolution it had intensifĳied in the early twentieth century, and for Jones it reached an apocalyptic pitch in a war that was chemical and mechanical. As Frank Kermode observes, according to modern apocalyptic sensibility, the period before the “end,” or the “time of transition” between epochs can be lengthened into an indefĳinite time;59 whenIn Parenthesis was completed and published in the 1930s, Jones felt he was still living in the transition he had detected around him in 1916.

Beyond the Apocalypse: An End in History

At this point we should ask, however, in what sense we have been using the word “apocalyptic.” The apocalypse painted by Yeats, Eliot and Jones is clearly not the literal end of the world. They are using a language of overwhelming catastrophe, of fĳinality, of the dissolution of all things—a discourse often drawn from biblical texts—in order to depict not the end but an end. This is not the end of history but an end in history, a turn of an epoch, the ending of one phase of civilisation and the beginning of another. As Kermode again points out, “We project ourselves—a small, humble elect, perhaps—past the End so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle.”60 This use is in fact in accord with many biblical texts that appear to speak of the total passing away of the world, or the abolition of time and space as we know it. While the world-view of early Judaism and Christianity does include a futurist eschatology, it also displays what we might call a “prophetic eschatology” which uses end-of-the-world language for events in history. When Israelite prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah or Ezekiel spoke of “the Day of the Lord,” or “that day” or “the latter end of times,”61 they had in view a decisive turn of events in history, a day when Yahweh would act to vindicate his faithful people and judge both their oppressors and the unfaithful in the nation itself. The imagery of cosmic disturbance and dissolution which accompanies this expectation is not to be taken literally; it is “end of the world” imagery applied metaphorically to a historic event. Jeremiah, notably, describes the “Day of the Lord” as the sky rolling up like a scroll and the stars falling, but we realise as we read on that this picture of cosmic collapse is metaphor for a foreign army coming

59 Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 101–103. 60 Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 8. 61 See for example Amos 5:18–20, 8:8–9; Isaiah 2:12–21, 13:9–11; Jeremiah 4:23–26; Zephaniah 1:14–16; 2:1–4; Joel 1:15, 2:28–32. Versions Of The Wasteland 41 over the hill and razing Jerusalem to the ground.62 As biblical scholars such as Stanley Frost and G.B. Caird have argued,63 it was appropriate to use such dramatic imagery, as the Day would be a moment after which nothing would ever be the same again. It was not until later, about the mid-third century bc, that an “apocalyptic” appeared in which the end was now considered to be the passing away of the present order of reality altogether—that is, the end of history and its replacement by something else.64 New Testament scholars today dispute how much of the apocalyptic language of the Gospels and the Book of Revelation refers to a completely new creation like this, and how much to a new event within history. It is no longer assumed, for instance, that Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels as predicting the immediate end of the world, and that fĳirst he and then the early Church sufffered a severe crisis of disappointment when the Kingdom of God failed to come. Perhaps the classic statement of this purely future eschatology was set out by Albert Schweitzer in his The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906), and it remained influential until new thinking about eschatology emerged in the 1920s. I do not have space to explore the biblical texts in their own right, but simply to point out that the way they were used by the modernist poets was not, in many cases, essentially against the intention of the biblical writers. In interpreting the images as applying to an end in the course of history, the poets seem to have been better exegetes of biblical poetical texts than the theologians. Our three poets are thus feeling beyond the immediate catastrophe to some kind of new epoch, which would either come in fullness, or feed into an age of transition. For Yeats, according to his prose work A Vision, the new age was to be marked by subjectivity in contrast to what he regarded as the objectivity of the Christian era. Christianity had abandoned rationality in its reliance on abstract thought, a transcendent deity, miracles and an attitude of self-denial— characteristics exhibited by the Queen in Yeats’ play The Player Queen (1922). The new age would fĳind divinity in the human mind, typifĳied by the resource- ful Decima in the same play, an actor who assumes the throne.65 The new period, Yeats supposed, would begin in 1927, and would be marked by thought which was concrete in expression, deriving from immediate experience,

62 Jeremiah 4:23–26, cf. 1:14–15, 10:22. 63 See Stanley Frost, Old Testament Apocalyptic. Its Origins and Growth (London: Epworth Press, 1952), 32–35, 234–238; G.B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Duckworth, 1980), 113–115. 64 D.S. Russell provides a useful classifĳication of these apocalypses in The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic 200bc–ad100 (London: scm Press, 1964), 36–40. 65 W.B. Yeats, Collected Plays. Second Edition (London: Macmillan, 1952), 430. 42 Fiddes wherein it would no longer be possible to separate the idea of God from human genius and human productivity. The establishment of this civilisation might require autocratic rule for a while. In A Vision he sets out the contrast:

A primary dispensation looking beyond itself towards a transcendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace its means and end; an antithetical dispensation obeys imminent power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical.66

Since he concludes this description with part of the second stanza of “The Second Coming,” his attitude to the “rough beast” has been opaque to his interpreters. On the one hand the beast symbolises the turmoil and the terrors that accompany the “approaching antithetical flux,” rather than the new age itself; on the other hand, some of the marks of the expected epoch (“masculine, harsh”) seem to be reflected in the beast itself. Perhaps this ambivalence belongs to a period of transition between the gyres. Eliot’s Waste Land gives only a few clues to the coming age he desired—and “desire” is the term since he does not follow Yeats in seeing humanity as trapped within inevitable cycles of history. The critic I.A. Richards, praising Eliot’s poem in 1925 as giving “a perfect emotive description of [the] state of mind” at the present time, thought he knew what Eliot was recommending: this was, in his view, “in the destructive element immerse. That is the way.”67 With greater perspective we can now see that this was a misreading. Eliot is not commending a self-abandonment to a sense of “desolation, uncertainty and futility” (as Richards supposed), though he is tentative about what can be hoped for. The underlying fertility myth of the wasteland offfers at least the hope for a unifĳication of scattered traditions. There is an implied unity in the myth itself, even if the rain has not yet come to the parched land. The mysterious fĳigure of Tiresias similarly offfers the hope that broken pieces can be held together; in his notes, Eliot tells us that Tiresias is “the most important person in the poem, uniting all the rest.” As F.R. Leavis suggests, he holds all the varied consciousnesses of the poem in his own—“I Tiresias/Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest”—and out of this communal consciousness there comes the unity of the poem which is not an argument but like a piece of music, with repetition and variation.68

66 Yeats, A Vision, 263. 67 I.A. Richards, “A Background for Contemporary Poetry (1925),” incorporated into his Science and Poetry (New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1926), 9–14 (14). 68 F.R. Leavis, “The Waste Land,” in Hugh Kenner (ed.), T.S. Eliot. A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Clifffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 89–103 (91–92). Versions Of The Wasteland 43

The penultimate line of the poem, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,”69 may be an admission of the brokenness of tradition, now inevitably fragmented into pieces that cannot be glued together. Or Eliot may be anticipating the possibility of relating to genuine human tradition in a way that overcomes fragmentation, while discarding the pseudo-traditions that have grown up over the years and which modernism needs to debunk. We have not yet reached the Christian calm of the ending of “Little Gidding,” that “all shall be well and/All manner of things shall be well” but the Hindu blessing “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih” that ends The Waste Land does mean something like “peace” or wholeness. Though it comes with an ironic tone after all that precedes it, it may also in its very onomatopoeia offfer the sound of the rain that has been lacking in the wasteland. David Jones, facing an age in which art is undermined by technology, nevertheless thinks that art can still “lift up the sign”: it can continue to hold up a representation of reality in stone, paint or ink, elevating it above the mere util- ity of its surroundings, despite the unpropitious nature of the times. Human beings are sign-making animals, artists by nature, re-presenting, or showing things under other forms. As Jones later expresses it, human beings are “sacra- mental” animals, since he believes (as a Catholic) that all lifting up of signs was consecrated and validated by the lifting up of the cup at the last supper, the lifting up of Christ on the cross, and the elevation of the host in every Eucharist.70 Beyond the apocalypse, there remains the Eucharistic nature of life, pouring out water and blood on the dry land. So in In Parenthesis the sign of the Eucharist appears even in the wasteland of the trenches, to support what he calls the “perpetual showing” forth in the habits and speech of the common soldiers. In King Pellam’s Land, the Lance-corporal’s distribution of the ration of spirits is compared to the Eucharist and communion:

…dole out the issue. Dispense salvation strictly apportion it, let us taste and see, let us be renewed, for Christ’s sake, let us be warm. O have a care—don’t spill the precious O don’t jog his hand—ministering…

69 Perhaps echoing Ecclesiastes 12:1–12 which had influenced Eliot’s earlier poetry. 70 David Jones, “Art and Sacrament,” in Epoch and Artist, 161–166. 44 Fiddes

Each one in turn, and humbly, receives his meagre benefĳit. This lance- jack sustains them from his iron spoon; and this is thank-worthy… Each one turns silently, carrying with careful fĳingers his own daily bread.71

Reflecting upon this time of a shift from comradeship and personal, hand-to- hand warfare to a mechanistic “loosing poison from the sky,” Jones thinks it may be possible in time to recognise the creations of mechanics and chemicals as “true extensions of ourselves.” Mechanical devices require “a new and strange direction of the mind,” but he thinks that it may be possible to “feel for them a native afffection, which alone can make them magical for us.”72 As he admits in another poem, it is easy to miss Christ “at the turn of a civilisation.”73

An Eschatology of Crisis

Now, while these three modernist poets were using apocalyptic imagery to express a turn of events in history (or prophetic eschatology), major Protestant theologians were using it for a diffferent kind of eschatology that is often called “theology of crisis,” or “transcendental eschatology.” In brief, they proposed that every moment could become open to God’s eternity and be changed by it, and that this was what traditional apocalyptic language was expressing. Here the theologians lean on the literal meaning of apokalupsis as an “unveiling.” In 1922, the year of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Karl Barth published the second edition of his momentous commentary on The Epistle to the Romans, a book that is often regarded as having changed the theological landscape of the twentieth century.74 Like Eliot, he was responding to the failure of nineteenth-century optimism about the progress of civilisation, which had come to a catastrophe in the Great War, and which had an unknown future in the violence of the Russian Revolution. The theological version of the myth of progress had been the building of the Kingdom of God, based in Hegel’s confĳidence in the reconciling and unifying movement of Absolute Spirit through history.

71 Jones, In Parenthesis, 73. 72 Jones, In Parenthesis, xiv. 73 Jones, “A, a, a Domine Deus (begun 1938 [fĳirst published 1967]),” inThe Sleeping Lord (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 9. 74 There is no reference to this event in Kevin Jackson’s monumental Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One (London: Hutchinson, 2012) nor to any theological writing of the period, whether Christian or Jewish. Versions Of The Wasteland 45

With his commentary on Romans, Barth fĳinds the only hope for the Christian church to be in listening to the revealed Word of God for which the human personality has no potential, and which is not developed from history, but which strikes vertically into life with its infĳinite demand. Eschatology, or the doctrine of the “last things,” thus refers to a breaking of the eternal moment into time; a crisis happens when a person is faced with a call by God’s Word to a decision about what matters ultimately here and now. “This [he writes] is the secret of time which is made known in the ‘Moment’ of revelation, in that eternal Moment which always is.”75 In a moment between past and future, between the times, “eternity is now” (nunc aeternam) and so “qualifĳies” this moment in time; all earthly time is defĳined and transfĳigured by the presence of eternity. Barth writes, “Being the transcendent meaning of all moments, the eternal Moment can be compared with no moment in time.”76 Eschatology has, in this view, nothing to do with the various catastrophes or changes of epoch in history: the “end of history” is not a future event, but happens here and now at the horizon where time meets eternity in the self-disclosure of the eternal God. The Parousia of Christ is his presence here and now,77 and to stand in that presence is to know the nearness of the “last hour.” Commenting on Paul’s phrase, “the day is at hand,”78 Barth writes:

Far too nigh at hand is the Kingdom of God, far too near is the overhang- ing rock-face of eternity—in every stone and flower, in every human face!—far too oppressive is the boundary of time—memento mori!—far too insistent is the presence of Jesus Christ as the turning-point of time… the form of this world passeth away.79

Also in 1922, the theologian Paul Althaus published his book on “The Last Things.” What appears in Barth’s commentary as a transcendental eschatology is here called “axiological eschatology.” The eternal that confronts us in time is the axiom of values, or the absolute norm. The First World War, he stresses, shows us that all human values nurtured in the progress of history are doomed. “The Last Things,” he writes, “have nothing to do with the fĳinal epoch of history.”

75 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, translated from the Sixth Edition by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 497. The sixth edition (German 1928) is essentially a new impression of the second edition of 1922. 76 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 498. 77 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 499. 78 Romans 13:12. 79 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 501. 46 Fiddes

Any link between the “last things” of eschatology and the “last historical things” has to be cut. Like Barth, he thinks that the Parousia is supra-temporal and non-historical.80 In 1928, a third theologian—Rudolf Bultmann—who had already been writing about eschatology, published an essay entitled “The Eschatology of the Gospel of John.” As with Barth, the eschaton is the eternal moment when hearers of God’s Word are called to a radical decision about God’s direct claim on human life. Bultmann, however, gives this decision an existential flavour, picking up the philosopher Heidegger’s description of “being in the world” and relating it to Jesus’s discourses about the world in John. The Last Thing is the call to decision about our own authentic existence, in the light of the New Testament kerygma of Christ the Revealer. “With the coming of the Revealer,” he writes, “a crisis occurs…the hour comes and is already here…The crisis thus becomes the judgement…[and] the two possibilities are the grasping of death and life.”81 When human beings are faced with the “ultimate, radical decision” to understand themselves and their relation to the world, this must be the “fĳinal hour.”82 It is “the end of the world” because—while we remain in the world—the world and its structures can cease to hold any power over us. As Bultmann later puts it, “history has been swallowed up by eschatology.”83 Talk about the last day must be replaced by talk about our death84 which—as Heidegger also maintains—is the horizon of human existence. Protestant theology of this period thus represents a kind of “anti-modernism,” at least in so far as it reacts against its own liberal eschatology of the nineteenth century, confĳident as this was of the progressive coming of the kingdom of God in history. Theological modernism is, however, a highly complex phenomenon. There is no space here to trace the Roman Catholic form, characterised by the openness of human spirit to God, confĳident in an immanent union of God and humanity, and stressing a dynamism of act and event over against a philosophy of static being.85 Catholic “anti-modernism” was

80 Paul Althaus, Die letzten Dinge. Entwurf einer christlichen Eschatologie (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1922), 64, 174. 81 Rudolf Bultmann, “The Eschatology of the Gospel of John,” Zwischen den Zeiten 6 (1928), 4–22; in Bultmann, Faith and Understanding I, ed. Robert W. Funk, trans. Louise P. Smith (London: scm Press, 1969), 170. Later, see Bultmann, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), 155–157. 82 Bultmann, “The Eschatology of the Gospel of John,” 175–176. 83 Bultmann, “History and Eschatology,” 16. 84 Bultmann, “Karl Barth. ‘The Resurrection of the Dead’,” Theologische Blätter 5 (1926), 1–14; in Bultmann, Faith and Understanding I, 91–94. 85 For these themes, see Maurice Blondel, Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice (1893), trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984), Versions Of The Wasteland 47 thus entirely diffferent from the Protestant version, taking the form of papal and magisterial defence of dogma, institution and revealed propositions. For Barth, Althaus and Bultmann, the striking of human life by the eternal moment is truly apocalyptic. But, while detaching itself from any myth of progress in history, this eschatology has lost contact with history altogether. The Last Day, the End of the World, has become a matter of the inner, individual consciousness—of its authentic decision here and now and its facing of personal death. But, as Jürgen Moltmann has pointed out, to perceive the future as individual futurity does not dispose of the communal future of the world and history. People are still caught in struggles of history, and they exist in relation to others in community.86 It seems then that modernist apocalyptic with its prophetic eschatology may have something to say to theology.

Two Eschatologies?

We have seen that the modernist poets use apocalyptic imagery to express a historical crisis, while theologians of the same period use it only for exposure to the inbreaking of the eternal Moment. Perhaps the stance of the theologians is due to their being haunted by the failure of Christian civilisation, the failure of hopes for the coming of the Kingdom of God in history. Yet the contrast between these two approaches to apocalyptic is not as acute as I have made out, at least from the side of the poets. In the fĳirst place, all three poets have a sense of the revealing of a kind of mystery which transcends everyday life. There is witness to an unveiling, which has some afffĳinity to what the theologians call an eternal moment. For Yeats, “surely some revelation is at hand,” and the image of the beast floats up from the depths of the Anima Mundi, a storehouse of images that transcends time. For Eliot, there is “what the thunder said,” and thunder is an image of revelation, even if the disclosure of the three Sanskrit words “Give,” “Sympathise,” “Control” is then treated ironically, for in present civilisation there is a lack of all three. After Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholic Christianity in 1927, apocalyptic increasingly becomes the breaking of the eternal moment into time, and the Four Quartets virtually re-write The Waste Land with this in mind, afffĳirming “the intersection of the timeless moment…Never and always” and fĳinding

324–331, 402–424; Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (1938), trans. L. Sheppard (London: Burns & Oates, 1962), 116–119, 181–183, 198–202. 86 Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God. Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: scm Press, 1996), 15, after reviewing the eschatology of Barth, Althaus and Bultmann. 48 Fiddes history to be “a pattern/Of timeless moments.”87 However, the seeds of this later development are not absent from the earlier poem. In David Jones’ prose- poem, the eternal Eucharistic moment of sacrifĳice continually breaks into the historic event of the battle with the force of illumination. A second lessening of the gap between prophetic and transcendental eschatology lies in the sense that the poets are not taking the historic crisis entirely literally. As Kermode puts it, they are continually calling their rhetoric of fĳinality into question.88 Yeats critiques his own scheme of historical cycles in a companion-poem, “A Prayer for my Daughter,” where he wonders whether the crisis he anticipates is only “the great gloom that is in my mind”; it is because of this that he has “heard the seawind scream” and imagined that “the future years had come.” Even in the hermetic dogmas of A Vision, he introduces his quotation from “A Second Coming” with the qualifĳication: “Something of what I have said it must be, the myth declares, for it must reverse our era and resume past eras in itself; [but] what else it can be no man can say.”89 By his own account, what his spirit-guides are essentially giving him are “metaphors for poetry.”90 In an essay of 1930, Eliot appears to be making a veiled criticism of his earlier poetry when he writes: “We are apt to expect of youth only a fragmentary view of life; we incline to see youth as exaggerating the importance of its narrow experience.”91 Perhaps, then we should read The Waste Land as much about a disillusionment in the consciousness as a crisis in society.92 As far as Jones is concerned, nobody can doubt the actual historical catastrophe of the Somme in 1916, but in retrospect it seems to be almost subsumed into the subjective crisis faced by the artist in a world of technocracy. For all these qualifĳications, however, a diffference between the poets and the Protestant theologians of the 1920s remains. The poets sensed that the power of apocalyptic language extends beyond the individual to society and into the nature of the epoch in which we are living. The apocalyptic vision gives meaning to our historic existence as well as our consciousness. Theology today has taken up that perception, but less in reference to the modernist poets than to Jewish religious thinkers who were also writing at the very same time. Notably,

87 Eliot, “Little Gidding (1942),” in Complete Poems, 192, 197. 88 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 98, 104–109. 89 Yeats, A Vision, 263. 90 Yeats, A Vision, 8. 91 Eliot, “Cyril Tourneur (1932),” in Eliot, Selected Essays 1917–1932 (New York; Harcourt Brace, 1932), 166. 92 Cf Eliot’s reported remark that “The Waste Land” was “rhythmical grumbling.” Valerie Eliot (ed.), The Waste Land, a Facsimile, 1. Versions Of The Wasteland 49

Ernst Bloch in his Spirit of Utopia (1918, second edition 1923) proposed that expecting an unknown and desired future event, such as God’s new creation portrayed in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic, could have power to transfĳigure the present. Hope in the “not yet” lives in the human spirit as the “spirit of the Messiah,” prompting an “awakening” that calls us to “active intervention” and that “breaks out against every kind of domination.”93 This event which is “not yet” does not emerge out of history, but comes from beyond the historical process, evoking something genuinely new, a possibility not yet present. Hope for this new thing which is promised can create a habit of mind in the present which transforms not just the individual but society. Other Jewish thinkers offfered variations on this “messianic idea” in the same period.94 Already in an essay of 1921 Walter Benjamin had contrasted the “mythical violence” of law-making in society with a “divine violence” that is law-destroying and whose inbreaking we must always await.95 In his “Political- Theological Fragment” (dating from 1920–21) he writes that “nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic” but that “The Messiah himself consummates all history.”96 In his Star of Redemption (1921), Franz Rosenzweig contrasted the Christian idea of redemption through historical events with Jewish hope for a reality that will “interrupt” history from “outside,” although he fĳinds this hope transfĳiguring the present less through providing a motivation for political action—as in Bloch and Benjamin—than in the opening up of “eternal moments” in the Jewish consciousness.97 Christian theologians of the present day, such as Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg, have taken up this “messianic” note. Moltmann follows Bloch when he writes that “promise announces the coming of a not yet existing reality from the future of the truth,”98 and he agrees with Bloch that the object

93 Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (1923), trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 191–192, 247–249, 268–272, 278. 94 See Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), passim. 95 Walter Benjamin, “A Critique of Violence (1921),” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), 297–300. 96 Benjamin, “Theological-Political Fragment (1920–21),” in Reflections, 312. 97 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (1921), trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 306–312, 326–328, 357–359. 98 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope. On the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. J. Leitch (London: scm Press, 1967), 85 [My emphasis]; cf. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Three Volumes, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight 50 Fiddes of hope is not a “calculable” future extrapolated from present actuality, but a “desirable” future which contradicts the power structures of the present. So the future is a “new pattern of transcendence,” creating a revolutionary consciousness,99 always making us uneasy with the status quo and fomenting protest against it. This “future transcendental eschatology” is not one that is easily discernible in our modernist poets. We might regard it as a third strand, which had not yet appeared either in the poetry or the Protestant theology of the 1920s, though hidden away in Jewish messianism of the time. However, the way that our three poets combine a crisis in the consciousness with a sense of a crisis in history can move us towards this kind of apocalyptic which has proved so fruitful for theology of the present day. Whether it is as fruitful for poetry I must leave for the poets to say.

Bibliography

Althaus, Paul. Die letzten Dinge. Entwurf Einer Christlichen Eschatologie. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1922. Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated from the Sixth Edition by Edwyn C. Hoskyns. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz, Translated by E. Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1986. Blamires, David. David Jones. Artist and Writer. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Three Volumes, Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. ——. The Spirit of Utopia (1923). Translated by Anthony A Nassar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Blondel, Maurice. Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice (1893). Translated by Oliva Blanchette. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984. Bultmann, Rudolf. History and Eschatology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957.

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), vol. 1, 235–249, written 1938–47. See also Wolfhart Pannenberg, “The God of Hope,” in Basic Questions in Theology, Volume Two, trans. George Kehm (London: scm, 1971), 234–239. 99 Jürgen Moltmann, The Future of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: scm Press, 1979), 9–12. Versions Of The Wasteland 51

——. Faith and Understanding I. Edited by Robert W. Funk, Translated by Louise P. Smith. London: scm Press, 1969. Caird, G.B. The Language and Imagery of the Bible. London: Duckworth, 1980. Cox, Hyde and Edward Connery Lathem, eds. The Selected Prose of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. Eliot, T.S.. Selected Essays 1917–1932. New York; Harcourt Brace, 1932. ——. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. ——. The Waste Land, a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Draft. Edited by Valerie Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1971. Frost, Stanley. Old Testament Apocalyptic. Its Origins and Growth. London: Epworth Press, 1952. Jackson, Kevin. Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One. London: Hutchinson, 2012. Johnston, John H. English Poetry of the First World War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. Jones, David. The Sleeping Lord. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. ——. Epoch and Artist. Selected Writings. Edited by Harman Grisewood. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. ——. In Parenthesis (1937). London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. ——. Continuities. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. Leavis, F.R. “The Waste Land,” in Hugh Kenner (ed.), T.S. Eliot. A Collection of Critical Essays, 89–103. Englewood Clifffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Lubac, Henri de. Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (1938). Translated by L. Sheppard. London: Burns & Oates, 1962. Malory, Thomas. Works. Edited by Eugène Vinaver, Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954. Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology of Hope. On the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology. Translated by J. Leitch. London: scm Press, 1967. ——. The Future of Creation. Translated by Margaret Kohl. London: scm Press, 1979. ——. The Coming of God. Christian Eschatology. Translated by Margaret Kohl. London: scm Press, 1996. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Basic Questions in Theology, Volume Two. Translated by George Kehm. London: scm, 1971. Richards, I.A. Science and Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1926. Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption (1921). Translated by Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Russell, D.S., The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic 200bc–ad100. London: scm Press, 1964. Scholem, Gershom. The Messianic Idea in Judaism. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. 52 Fiddes

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. 2 Volumes. Translated by Charles F. Atkinson. Allen and Unwin, 1926–28. Weston, Jessie Laidlay. From Ritual to Romance. Cambridge: The University Press, 1920. Yeats, W.B.. Collected Poems. Second Edition. London: Macmillan, 1950. ——. Collected Plays. Second Edition. London: Macmillan, 1952. ——. A Vision. Second Edition (1937). London: Macmillan, 1981. chapter 2 The Cup of Sufffering Dietrich Bonhoefffer’s Discipleship and German Expressionism

Jacob Phillips

Introduction

Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, published in 1918 and 1922, requires little introduction. It is generally regarded as a zero moment of twentieth-century theology—an explosive text, which left in its wake the contours which later theologians would have to navigate.1 Karl Adam famously summed-up its impact at the time by saying, “a bomb has fallen on the playground of theologians.”2 In the secondary literature, Barth’s Romans is commonly interpreted as a theological counterpart to the modernist movement of German Expressionism. Hans Frei, for example, describes Barth’s style and rhetoric as being “strikingly reminiscent of Expressionism.”3 Some go even further, claiming Romans is actually “a form of expressionist theology.”4 An interest in Expressionism is also found in the theology of Paul Tillich, where it is incorporated into his “method of correlation.”5 For Tillich, the fact that Expressionism seemed to expose a world in ambiguity and crisis offfered an opportunity to provide a corresponding “answer” in the shape of his reading of Christian revelation. This is not to say that Expressionism was seen by Tillich as posing questions about the cultural situation which defĳined the contours of revelation entirely. That is, although the questions posed by the ambiguity and crisis articulated in Expressionism are not seen by Tillich as containing or pre- determining the “answer” of revealed truth, it is still the case that the answer is seen as meaningful only when correlated with the “question.”6 Of course this would not satisfy Barth, and as his theology developed he moved further and

1 Cf. Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 2. 2 Karl Adam, “Die Theologie der Krisis,” in Hochland: Monatschrift für alle Gebiete des Wissens, der Literatur und Kunst, XXIII (Munchen: Kempten, 1925/26), 271–286. 3 Hans Frei, Types of Christian Theology (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 152. 4 Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology, 53. 5 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 8. 6 George Pattison, “Idol or Icon? Some Principles of An Aesthetic Christology,” in Journal of Literature & Theology, 3:1 (March 1989), 7.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282285_004 54 Phillips further away from thinking that could be interpreted in this “correlative” way. Insofar as God’s revelation is seen as requiring a correlation in human experience, Barth would consider that it does not do justice to the thoroughgoing transcendent freedom of revelation over and against human beings. In this paper, I wish to raise the question of whether another work exhibits a transaction of sorts between German Expressionism and theology, a work not usually seen in this way: Dietrich Bonhoefffer’s Nachfolge, or Discipleship. Some aspects of this book seem to evince a certain interchange with aspects of Expressionism, in a way which difffers from both Barth’s Romans and Tillich’s “method of correlation.” That is, whilst Barth invokes the expressionist revolt against Wilhelmine society, only to drown it out with the authoritative voice of revelation, and Tillich uses expressionist concerns to pose questions which are then answered with “revealed” positions—Bonhoefffer offfers a transaction with German Expressionism which seems to be more of a thoroughgoing interchange, in that the very ambiguity and crisis described so forcefully in expressionist prose is not neutralised or resolved by theological discourse. The locus of the expressionist elements to Discipleship are found in “the cup of sufffering” in Nachfolge, a vessel of ambiguity and crisis, from which followers of Christ drink deeply, whilst living in the promise of revelation.7

Bonhoefffer on Expressionism

It may seem an unlikely task to look for traces of Expressionism in Bonhoefffer, because his general inclinations were somewhat conservative.8 His background was the Berlin milieu of the Bildungsbürgertum, the academically cultivated upper-middle class—and he expressed little interest in the obvious variants of radical political or social thinking which were on offfer in the Weimar Germany of his youth. On the other hand, however, he was a remarkably independent-minded thinker, who embraced Barth’s Romans wholeheart- edly, aligning himself early on with this theologically radical orientation, despite its incongruity at his home institution of Berlin.9 Moreover, in the church struggle Bonhoefffer took an unwaveringly uncompromising stance,

7 Dietrich Bonhoefffer,Dietrich Bonhoefffer Works 4: Discipleship, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 90. 8 Cf. George A. Lindbeck, “The Demythologizing of Dietrich Bonhoefffer,” in Commonweal 96:22 (September 1972), 527–528. Lindbeck claims that Bonhoefffer’s views on marriage “reek with cozy, upper-class Prussian and Lutheran patriarchialism” (527). 9 Cf. Cliffford Green, A Theology of Sociality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 239. The Cup Of Suffering 55 and was considered rather extreme in his pronouncements, even by his fel- lows.10 And, when it comes to Bonhoefffer’s pacifĳism, he showed himself more than willing to take an unusual, controversial and unpopular position if he felt it necessary.11 Something of a key juncture in navigating between these two sides to Bonhoefffer’s thinking comes to a head in the early 1930s. At this time, his mildly conservative inclinations give way to a more explicitly radical, uncompromising expression of Christian witness. There is some scholarly discussion on what the prime motivating factors were here,12 but one thing is clear: it was provoked at least in part by the growth of National Socialism—which forced Bonhoefffer to assess and reassess how he and his allies could offfer efffective resistance to the spread of Nazi tyranny and terror. Indeed, if we turn to a lecture Bonhoefffer gave in 1928, we fĳind a loosely dismissive attitude to Expressionism, of the sort we might expect in light of the more conservative side to his thinking. He states, “it would be difffĳicult to fĳind a period in history that has experienced as radical a change” in literature as “the period between 1910 and…1925.”13 This is the so-called “Expressionist Decade” and its aftermath. He describes this period rather disapprovingly, saying, “never before…have so many and such crudely obscene things been written or been brought to the stage.” There is a footnote to the recent critical edition of this lecture, claiming that Bonhoefffer “avoided reading” expressionist literature for “his entire life.”14 Unfortunately for us, this footnote is not substantiated with any references from Bonhoefffer’s other writings. But even taking only this 1928 lecture, it seems a little injudicious. Despite Bonhoefffer’s condemnation of the cultural shifts of 1910 to 1925, he states, “we cannot deny the presence of an ethical concern within the overall undertaking,” even if it moves “in the wrong direction.” He writes that “[t]he central idea…[in] all this literature is that of truth,” as it intends “to mount an assault on a culture that…has become inwardly untrue.”15 Here I wish to raise the question of whether Bonhoefffer’sNachfolge (published in 1937) in some way offfers a response to the concern for truth Bonhoefffer

10 Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoefffer, Theologian, Christian, Contemporary (London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd), 318. 11 Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoefffer, Theologian, Christian, Contemporary, 155. 12 Cf. Green, A Theology of Sociality 105f; Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoefffer, Theologian, Christian, Contemporary, 191f. 13 Dietrich Bonhoefffer, “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic,” in Dietrich Bonhoefffer Works 10: Barcelona, Berlin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 361. 14 Bonhoefffer, “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic,” 361 n5. 15 Bonhoefffer, “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic,” 361 n5. 56 Phillips detected in German Expressionism in 1928, a concern which he found harder to dismiss given the historical circumstances of the early 1930s. In what follows, I wish fĳirstly to point out how Nachfolge can be considered to display some of the stylistic interchanges we fĳind in Barth’sRomans , and yet also some of the more thematic elements which, although present in Romans, are ultimately overlaid with revelation; while in Tillich, these are incorporated into a “method of correlation.” Then I want to look into some of the theological substance underneath these transactions, using a rare direct reference to expressionist literature in Bonhoefffer’s work, a sermon with references to a poem by Gottfried Benn. This sermon points forward to the cup of sufffering, which shows Bonhoefffer offfering an alternative mode of transaction between modernism and Christianity to both Barth and Tillich.

Stylistic Interchanges

The expressionist writers of 1910 to 1925 were attacking, largely, the Wilhelmine society which flourished in the pre-war years. Expressionism “emerged as a reaction to the entrenched stolidity of prosperous, pre-war German bourgeois culture.”16 This generally “adversial stance” is obviously shared by Barth’s Romans, which has in view the establishment liberal theology, associated particularly with Adolf von Harnack.17 Nachfolge was written in a three- to four- year period beginning some eleven years after the second edition of Romans was published. The adversary is not, then, Wilhelmine society, but more broadly, the Bildungsbürgertum, and its reaction to the growth of the nsdap. We can read Nachfolge as a sustained critique of the thinking which gave rise to the more placatory theological responses to Nazism, which were deeply antithetical to Bonhoefffer. Before looking more closely at Nachfolge itself, I wish to describe briefly the nature of the expressionist orientation of Barth’s Romans, as it has been understood in some of the secondary literature. This will bring the distinction between the Romans and Nachfolge more sharply into focus. The application of Expressionism to Romans is commonly associated originally with Hans Urs von Balthasar.18 The sense of a shared orientation between Barth’s early

16 Neil H. Donahue, “Introduction,” in A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism (Rochester n.y. and Woodbridge, Sufffolk: Camden House, 2005), 2. 17 Cf. Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology, 78f. 18 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung Seiner Theologie (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976), 90. The Cup Of Suffering 57

theology and this modernist movement has been given some attention more recently by Bruce L. McCormack. McCormack draws our attention to the “anti- bourgeois” spirit of the early Barth, and the general tenor of his early writing, whose roots are found, we read, “in the subterranean currents” of German expressionist “counter culture.”19 This is acknowledged in the fĳirst reviews of Romans, one of which spoke of the text as “saturated with radical intellectual streams.”20 However, it is important to be clear, the general sense of shared orientation between Romans and Expressionism does not indicate any fĳirm interdependence between the two. What is most commonly understood in this connection is a shared “anti-bürgerlich” spirit, which shows itself in Barth’s use of certain stylistic elements that are found in expressionist literature. Gary Dorrien, for example, mentions Barth’s “heavy use of repetition, exaggeration, hyperbole, exclamation points and dashes.”21 A generally adversarial stance, shown forth in stylistic interchanges, is also found in Bonhoefffer’s prose in Nachfolge. More specifĳically, these interchanges can be seen to arise from a shared concern between Bonhoefffer and certain expressionists to refute the tradition of Innerlichkeit in German intellectualism. Innerlichkeit can be seen to refer to the generally inward disposition of the German tradition throughout the nineteenth Century—with roots in romanticism and idealism, but gaining a more political reference with the disenfran- chisement of the Bildungsbürgertum from the Wilhelmine administration. It refers to “a tendency [of artists and intellectuals] to withdraw from…politics, and look inward,” the deliberate avoidance of “[political] power” because it was seen to be a “derogation” of one’s “calling.”22 Innerlichkeit can be seen to have its origins in the clampdown on academic philosophy following the dis- turbances of 1848.23 A fear of political involvement by the academy is seen some years later in a ministerial decree forbidding any such activities by public Reich offfĳicials from 1862.24 This is connected with the deeply non-political stance of liberal bürgerlich theology, such as is found in von Harnack, who argued that the “Kingdom of God” is nothing other than the rule of God in the

19 Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 32. 20 Wilhelm Loew, “Noch einmal Barths Römerbrief,” in Die Christliche Welt 34 (1920), 587. 21 Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology, 54. 22 Peter Watson, The German Genius (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 403–404 (quoting Gordon Craig). 23 Cf. Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ix. 24 Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism, 152–153. 58 Phillips inward “hearts of individuals,” and that Jesus’s words forbid “all direct and formal interference of religion in worldly afffairs.”25 It was precisely this tendency that became combined with Luther’s “Two Kingdoms doctrine”—which separated out the political, worldly realm from the theological, churchly realm— and went into the theologies Bonhoefffer is attacking in Nachfolge, for it provided an approach which allowed theologians to avoid taking issue with the political controversies of the day. That is, under the guise of orientating Christian theology in a non-politicised Innerlichkeit, theologians (such as Emmanuel Hirsch26), could offfer placatory responses to the controversies of the Nazi era. A key example of expressionist writing that offfers stylistic techniques to iterate a non-inwardly orientated stance, is the work of Alfred Döblin. Döblin’s work has been called an exercise in “objectivism” due to its “attempts to elimi- nate…subjective perspective[s]”; seeking to describe “nothing more than things…as they are.”27 He claimed to be seeking the “de-selfĳing” Entselbstung( ) of writing.28 This concern manifests itself stylistically, through techniques such as “syntactic brevity,” ellipsis, and parataxis. The use of such techniques mean that “[s]ubordinate clauses explaining or describing motivation are missing, and syntax is reduced to its most basic elements”—we see here what is called Döblin’s “anti-psychological” stance, for he seeks simply to lay bare sequences of events, without any sense of inward navigation. He explicitly rejects psychology “for it seeks to explain, comment, [and] deduce.”29 Such stylistic methods are common in expressionist literature, along with certain other techniques with an anti-Innerlichkeit orientation—or, in Walter Sokel’s terms “the disavowal of the subject [of Innerlichkeit], the transformation of self [away] from a deduced, defĳined, and isolated entity.”30 Alfred Lichtenstein, for example, used short paradoxical formulations, which seemed to undercut established means of orientating the self. An example is: “in order to live decently, one must be a villain” (Um anständig leben zu konnen, muss man ein Schuft sein). This bears some similarity to the aphorisms which flourish in the expressionist writings of Carl Einstein, whose prose exhibits a sense of “brevity and pithiness” through succinct “aphoristic generalisation.” That is,

25 Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity? trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 115. 26 Cf. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoefffer, Theologian, Christian, Contemporary, 377. 27 Walter H. Sokel, “The Prose of German Expressionism,” in A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, 71. 28 Alfred Döblin quoted by Sokel, The Prose of German Expressionism, 71. 29 Alfred Döblin quoted by Sokel, The Prose of German Expressionism, 73. 30 Alfred Döblin quoted by Sokel, The Prose of German Expressionism, 85. The Cup Of Suffering 59 the use of short, uncompromising statements about life, which work to cut short the requirements of inward orientation, that refuse to give heed to the kind of persuasiveness through which a worldview might be assimilated subjectively. Many of these techniques are found in Nachfolge. Let us take for example “syntactic brevity” or terseness of expression. Here are some very short sentences taken from the book: “costly grace is the incarnation of God,” or “simple obedience was required,” or, “everything had to go through Christ” and so on. Moreover, Bonhoefffer constructs some pithy, paradoxical aphorisms, which seem to mirror the sort favoured by Lichtenstein and Einstein. The best example of this is: “Only the believer obeys, and only the obedient believes” which works much better in German: “Nur der Glaubende ist gehorsam, und nur der Gehorsame glaubt.” There are plenty of other stylistic examples, which space does not permit me to include, and these techniques serve to present Nachfolge as a book which shares one of the defĳining features of expressionist prose, the “central characteristic” of which is intensity given through compression: “a tendency to short forms as way of concentrating and condens- ing afffects.”31 These stylistic moves share an anti-psychological motivation with Nachfolge, aptly expressed in a passage where Bonhoefffer discusses the immediate response to Jesus’s command, “follow me.” Bonhoefffer states, “the text is not interested in psychological explanations,” and he will only allow this text to witness to the “unconditional, immediate and inexplicable” command of Christ, with no room for subjective considerations. These stylistic parallels mirror the expressionist characteristics of Barth’s Romans. Hans Frei, for example, has drawn our attention to the expressionist character of Barth’s “abrupt,” “staccato” and “provocative” style.32 However, a deeper look at Romans shows the stylistic interchanges there to be, in and of themselves, rather superfĳicial. Despite Barth’s palpable anger at the establishment, the negative sense of a cultural crisis in Romans is clearly overshadowed by the more positive substance of Barth’s theological response.33 Using one of Barth’s dialectical approaches as an example, we see that the “old world” of Adam, which might be aligned with the expressionist lament, is fĳirmly overcome in the “new world” of Christ, for “grace has already won out.”34 Barth speaks of those “in Adam” being subject to the “breaking in of relativism,” of rendering the “impress of

31 Alfred Döblin quoted by Sokel, The Prose of German Expressionism, 9 n7. 32 Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 152. 33 McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 245. 34 McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 267–268. 60 Phillips revelation” merely as a “human, worldly virtue,” and destroying any claim to “superiority” on the grounds of their “religiosity, morality [Sittlichkeiten] and worldviews.”35 He goes on to say this is met by being “in Christ,” but Christ and Adam are not to be thought of as an “equilibirium” (Gleichgewicht). That is, the old world of Adam described with expressionist-style prose, difffers in “power and signifĳicance” from the new world of Christ. The “crisis” involves a turning from the “divine No to the divine Yes.”36 So, in order to make the case for Nachfolge as exhibiting a more thoroughgoing interchange with Expressionism than Romans, perhaps we should look at the thematic interchanges found in the former.

Thematic Interchanges

To speak of shared thematic features between Nachfolge and Expressionism, would seem to suggest that the interchange in question is similar to that of Tillich’s “method of correlation.” Thematic elements are of course found in Barth’s Romans, but as with the stylistic elements found there, these are simply assimilated into the movement of his theology, and not allowed to stand on their own terms. That is, Expressionism is not used to articulate efffectively the ambiguity and crisis facing human civilisation at this time, but as a type of description of human “pain, sufffering, and ignorance” which can simply be wielded in the service of proclaiming God’s revelation. With Tillich, things are rather diffferent. German Expressionism is thought to reveal “the deep meaning of the cultural situation,” which “exposes the estranged, alienated, fallen aspect[s] of humanity.” It is allowed to stand on its own terms, as descriptive and indicative of crisis; albeit unable to “speak the word which redeems” it.37 So the question here is, do the thematic interchanges between Nachfolge and Expressionism suggest Bonhoefffer is allowing the expressionist articulations to stand on their own terms? Such thematic elements would include, for example, sweeping-away the debris of the past. Expressionism displays a desire to engage in what has been described as “peeling away…the bourgeois accretions of an over-civilised, over- cerebral existence.”38 This parallels Bonhoefffer’s concern to push aside what

35 Barth, Der Römerbrief 1922 (Zurich: Theologische Verlag, tvz, 1987), 53 (my trans). 36 Barth, Der Römerbrief 1922, 169 (my trans). 37 Pattison, “Idol or Icon? Some Principles of An Aesthetic Christology,” 6. 38 Raymond W. Williams, “Prosaic Intensities: The Short Prose of German Expressionism,” in A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, 92. The Cup Of Suffering 61 he considers bourgeois “pseudotheology.” He claims that the word of Jesus struggles to get through the burden of accumulated “formulations and concepts” which are weighing it down.39 The expressionist writers saw their forceful sweeping-away as laying bare a more primal, direct realm underneath; a realm of creative expression and revolutionary spontaneity. They deliberately practised distortion and disruption, “in the interests of revealing a hidden essence”—this essence was considered “primitive”—something hidden by “bourgeois values” and convention.40 This parallels Bonhoefffer’s desire to get back to a childlike level of Christian faith; the demand for straightforward action in accordance with the commands of Christ, which he sees as buried under “pseudotheology,” something which serves only to justify “the deliberate avoidance of simple, [childlike], literal obedience.”41 The expressionist writers considered themselves to be unearthing a forgotten realm of experience through their disruptive compositions, and this gave rise to a theme of “shock,” or a sort of “bolt of realisation,” as received modes of understanding give way to what has been described as “presenting the world afresh, as it really is.”42 There is little doubt that Bonhoefffer sees himself as seeking to cultivate a disposition in his readers that might allow for a similar lightning-bolt moment in the shape of the call to unreserved discipleship. He speaks of Jesus’s call breaking through the forces which stand in its way, of a moment whereby “everything old has passed away, and everything has become new.”43 Insofar as we can see these shared thematic characteristics between Nachfolge and German Expressionism as suggesting that the articulation of crisis in expressionist culture is allowed to stand on its own terms—we might suggest Bonhoefffer is making a move like Tillich’s—allowing the cultural crisis to articulate needs and questions which are then answered by Christian revelation. Those familiar with Bonhoefffer’s work will sense that this “correlative” move is unlikely to be one he would make. Yet, I wish to suggest that Bonhoefffer’s

39 Bonhoefffer,Discipleship , 37 (for “pseudotheology,” cf. 79). 40 Williams, “Prosaic Intensities: The Short Prose of German Expressionism,” 103 (describing Ehrenstein’s Tubutsch of 1911). 41 Bonhoefffer,Discipleship , 79. Of course, there are certain issues with linking too closely Bonhoefffer’s desire for a childlike primitivism of faith to expressionist primitivism, not least due to the overtly sexualised nature of the latter in painting, particularly. However, there are good grounds to suggest that Bonhoefffer was explicitly seeking a more primitive expression of Christian faith in this period, which shared a certain expressionist orientation, as mediated through Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. 42 Williams, “Prosaic Intensities: The Short Prose of German Expressionism,” 106–107. 43 Bonhoefffer,Discipleship 93. 62 Phillips writing from this period does point to more of an openness to the articulation of a cultural crisis in Expressionism than simply a replication of the Barthian assimilative move, such as is found in Romans. To this end, I wish to turn to one of Bonhoefffer’s sermons, which was given in 1932, the year in which the more radical side to his thinking came to the fore.44 Bonhoefffer uses as material for this sermon a poem by the most publicly avowed expressionist writer: Gottfried Benn.

The Unceasing

Before looking at this sermon, it is necessary to make some remarks about Benn. To align his thinking with Bonhoefffer’s too closely would be a serious error. Benn can be taken as an exemplar of the literary expressionist, being the only writer of that era to claim the designation until his death in 1956.45 His name remains tarnished by the enthusiasm he expressed for National Socialism around 1933, most famously in his work New State and the Intellectuals.46 Indeed, his own hope that Expressionism would become closely aligned with Nazism is outlined in his “Confession of Faith in Expressionism” from that same year. Ironically, despite his initial enthusiasm, some of Benn’s works were banned in the Third Reich. In 1934, George Lukàcs admonished the expressionist movement as exhibiting a necessary tendency toward fascist ideology, in Expressionism: Its Signifĳicance and Decline. This picture is further complicated by an ambiguity in Nazi circles towards Expressionism. Goebbels, famously, wished to co-opt certain elements of the avant-garde, including Expressionism, for the Nazi cause, whereas Rosenberg is said to have despised Expressionism as a prime instance of “degenerate art.” This tension was not settled until September 1934, when Hitler himself made it clear that there could be no modernist experimentation in the Third Reich. There is no evidence that Bonhoefffer read the poetry of Benn, and given his literary inclinations, it would seem to be rather unlikely. However, before Benn’s period of enthusiasm for National Socialism, and crucially, before there was any ambiguity in a possible connection between Expressionism and

44 Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoefffer: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, trans. Isobel Best (London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2010), 109f. 45 Susan Ray, Beyond Nihilism: Gottfried Benn’s Postmodern Poetics (Oxford: P. Lang, 2003) 7–8. 46 Cf. J.M. Ritchie, German Literature Under National Socialism, (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1983), 50f. The Cup Of Suffering 63

Nazism, Bonhoefffer had heard Otto Klemperer direct the Berlin Philarmonic in an adaptation of a poem by Benn, called The Unceasing (Der Unaufhörliche), in 1931.47 Bonhoefffer refers to imagery from this poem in two sermons from June 1932. That Bonhoefffer employed imagery from an expressionist work by Benn, on the very cusp of the point when an ambiguity on the relationship between Expressionism and National Socialism came to the fore, is rather striking. But it is made even more so when one bears in mind Benn’s generally nihilistic tendencies,48 and the dark, brooding tone of Der Unaufhörliche itself, a tone indicative of a pessimistic, or fatalist side to expressionist literature, perhaps best summed up in Oswald Spengler’s 1918 work, The Decline of the West. The connection between Benn’s thinking and Spengler’s is clear. Karl Barth was explicit about having no room at all for Spengler’s pessimism, which was clearly intolerable to his triumphal theological vision. However, a fellow traveller in Barth’s theological circle, Friedrich Gogarten, took a rather diffferent approach. He went so far as to say that “we rejoice in Spengler’s book” for it indicates that the “hour is here when this fĳine, intelligent culture [i.e. Wilhelmine culture]…receives the death-blow.”49 The essay where this assertion was made, Zwischen den Zeiten, was the one that gave the early Barthian dialectical theology movement the title for its flagship journal, which later was disbanded amongst the tension of diffferent attitudes to Nazism being taken by members of the editorial board. This included Barth wanting to distance himself from Gogarten, who had spoken at meetings of the Nazi-supporting, so-called German Christians.50 Against this background, Bonhoefffer’s ability to co-opt elements from Benn’s poem is all the more surprising. Bonhoefffer is not only able to use expressionist elements to articulate his own wrestling with the dramatic and volatile political situation of the day, but to use elements from precisely the fatalistic, pessimistic side to Expressionism which were clearly too much for someone like Barth, and were associated by 1934 with proto-fascist tendencies by Lukàcs. The biblical text of the sermon was Colossians 3.1-4, and it concentrates fĳirstly on Paul’s claim in those verses that we “have been raised with Christ.” Bonhoefffer asks: “how can one preach such things?” He points to the strangeness of the text, before describing how politicians publicly claim to be speaking “in the name of God, Amen”, but are only “giving worldly business a bit

47 Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoefffer: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, 110. 48 Cf. Ray, Beyond Nihilism. 49 Friedrich Gogarten, “Between the Times,” in Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1968), 280. 50 Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology, 102. 64 Phillips of religious sheen.”51 He then goes on to discuss how society really places its trust in human progress, not God, but asks whether if we ever actually suc- ceeded in, say, fĳinding a cure for cancer, would we not still fĳind ourselves “constantly acting and working against each other”—that is, left with incomprehensible difffĳiculties and questions of another sort? At this point he brings in Gottfried Benn. Bonhoefffer says that in human progress we are marching into the “unceasing,” the Unaufhörliche, which was, for Benn, a realm of nothingness. Benn’s poem involves the image of two cups. One is a cup of contentment, and the other a dark cup of destruction, which expresses the nihil of the Unaufhörliche. Bonhoefffer adopts a line from Benn’s poem and returns to it several times: “Do you not taste the cup of nothingness, the dark drink?” Now, Bonhoefffer states that simply retreating from the emptiness at the heart of human endeavour, by saying “in the Name of God, Amen,” is merely to avoid reality by choos- ing the cup of contentment. But those who taste the dark drink of nothingness (including, of course, expressionist writers), are “infĳinitely closer,” he says, to God’s promise “than they…could [possibly] imagine.”52 If we call to mind Barth’s and Tillich’s diffferent appropriations of Expressionism here, we can see them both as analogous to a recoiling back from nothingness, to a drinking of the cup of contentment. Barth does not take the cultural crisis seriously, he merely takes up its tools to proclaim God’s revelation all the louder. Tillich lis- tens to the ambiguity and questioning, and then presents revealed truth, as an answer to “resolve” it. So how can Bonhoefffer preach this biblical passage without standing accused of retreating to the cup of contentment? Here, he brings in Paul’s statement that “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Rather than take our being risen as something to neutralise the expressionist revolt, he envisages a situation whereby one’s visible life is shot through with ambiguity, crisis and meaninglessness, yet simultaneously raised to new life with Christ. He states that “right next to each other” we fĳind “the completely contradictory”; life is described as “at the same time” both “elevated” and “hopeless,” as a “dream” and a “curse.” There are good grounds to suggest this imagery of Gottfried Benn’s cup of “nothingness” is carried into Nachfolge, as Jesus’s cup of sufffering at Gethsemane. He states that the Father will allow this cup to pass from us, but only by drinking it, not avoiding it. Sufffering and joy are intermingled through

51 Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology, 102. 52 Dietrich Bonhoefffer,Dietrich Bonhoefffer Works 11: Ecumenical, Academic, Pastoral Work: 1931–1932 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 455. The Cup Of Suffering 65 the disciples vicariously bearing the sufffering of others.53 This is an understanding of discipleship which envisages followers of Christ radically laid open to the sort of worldly sufffering which Expressionism so forcefully articulated. Here, I would suggest, we see something of a readjustment to Bonhoefffer’s attitude to Expressionism seen in the 1928 lecture. There, he claimed that it displayed a “concern for truth,” but was moving in “the wrong direction.” This sermon, and Nachfolge, present aspects of the expressionist concern for truth, in which it is seen to be moving in precisely the right direction, compared to various theological options of Bonhoefffer’s contemporary situation. That is, living in openness to the futility at the heart of human experience was seen by Bonhoefffer as more true than simply covering it up with “pseudotheology” and pious religious formulations. Bonhoefffer presents a response to this cultural movement which requires that followers of Christ drink deeply of the ambiguity and crisis it expresses— and yet considers it to be shot through with the promise of revelation—in a way which does not in any way resolve or neutralise the reality of human experience. It is precisely this mutual interpenetration of futility and hope which offfers, I suggest, a way of understanding this transaction between Christianity and modernism as something diffferent to the more commonly recognised interchanges associated with Barth and Tillich, and therefore suggesting, contrary to our expectations, that Nachfolge can be viewed accurately as a highly appropriate theological counterpart to the modernist movement of German Expressionism.

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Adam, Karl. “Die Theologie der Krisis,” Hochland: Monatschrift für alle Gebiete des Wissens, der Literatur und Kunst, XXIII. München: Kempten, 1925/26: 271–286. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung Seiner Theologie. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976. Barth, Karl. Der Römerbrief 192. Zurich: Theologische Verlag, tvz, 1987. Bethge, Eberhard. Dietrich Bonhoefffer, Theologian, Christian, Contemporary. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, 1977. Bonhoefffer, Dietrich. Dietrich Bonhoefffer Works 4: Discipleship. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. ——. Dietrich Bonhoefffer Works 10: Barcelona, Berlin. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.

53 Bonhoefffer,Discipleship , 90. 66 Phillips

——. Dietrich Bonhoefffer Works 11: Ecumenical, Academic, Pastoral Work: 1931–1932. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012. Donahue, Neil H. “Introduction,” in Neil H. Donahue (ed.), A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, 1–35. Rochester n.y. and Woodbridge, Sufffolk: Camden House, 2005. Dorrien, Gary. The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology. Louisville, Kentucky and Westminster: John Knox Press, 2000. Frei, Hans. Types of Christian Theology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Gogarten, Friedrich. “Between the Times,” in James McConkey Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, 279–297. Westminster: John Knox Press, 1968. Green, Cliffford. A Theology of Sociality. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. von Harnack, Adolf. What Is Christianity? Translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957. Köhnke, Klaus Christian. The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Lindbeck, George A. “The Demythologizing of Dietrich Bonhoefffer,”Commonweal 96:22 (September 29, 1972): 527–528. Loew, Wilhelm. “Noch einmal Barths Römerbrief,” Die Christliche Welt 34 (1920): 453–457. McCormack, Bruce L. Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Pattison, George. “Idol or Icon? Some Principles of an Aesthetic Christology,” Journal of Literature & Theology 3:1 (March 1989): 1–15. Ray, Susan. Beyond Nihilism: Gottfried Benn’s Postmodern Poetics. Oxford: P. Lang (2003). Ritchie, J.M. German Literature under National Socialism. Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1983. Schlingensiepen, Ferdinand. Dietrich Bonhoefffer: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance. Translated by Isobel Best. London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2010. Sokel, Walter H. “The Prose of German Expressionism,” in Neil H. Donahue (ed.), A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, 69–88. Rochester n.y. and Woodbridge, Sufffolk: Camden House, 2005. Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. Watson, Peter. The German Genius. London: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Williams, Rhys W. “Prosaic Intensities: The Short Prose of German Expressionism,” in Neil H. Donahue (ed.), A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, 89–109. Rochester n.y. and Woodbridge, Sufffolk: Camden House, 2005. chapter 3 Christian Prehistories of Literary Modernism in G.K. Chesterton and Allen Upward

Suzanne Hobson

The background to this essay is the growing sense that the dividing line between the secular and the religious in modernism no longer holds. The tendency has been to play one offf against the other, with secular writers seen as normative, and their religious counterparts exceptional, idiosyncratic and faintly embarrassing to an academy which after theory tended to dismiss religion as ideology. Virginia Woolf’s reaction to T.S. Eliot’s conversion to Anglo- Catholicism was seen as typical in this regard: “I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fĳire and believing in God.”1 As critics have remarked, the sharpness of the divide has been an obstacle to understanding how images and concepts shuttle “with ease” between the religious and the aesthetic in modernism.2 Further, as Cristanne Miller points out, the religious/secular divide has tended to overshadow smaller, and arguably more meaningful distinctions, not just between the major organized religions but within these religions too: “studies of the period would benefĳit from more fĳine- tuned information—for example, contextualization of literary texts not in relation to Christianity but in relation to particular Protestant church functions in specifĳic periods and places.”3 There is, I think, an argument to be made in favour of the use of “religion” as a catch-all category in modernism. It would be difffĳicult to further refĳine the term “religious experience” as used by Pericles Lewis to describe the modernist novel’s attempt to reinvent the sacred for a secular age.4 And “religion” conveniently speaks to the possibility of a meaningful spiritual life outside an organized belief system as well as a synthesis of diffferent belief systems as seen, for example, in writing by W.B. Yeats, H.D.

1 Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 11 February 1928, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 1923–1928, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 458. 2 Damon Franke, Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883–1924 (Columbus: Ohio State, 2008), xii. 3 Cristanne Miller, “Religion, History and Modernism’s Protest Against the Uncompanionable Drawl of Certitude,” Religion and Literature 41:2 (2009): 259–269 (259). 4 Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 30.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282285_005 68 Hobson and D.H. Lawrence.5 And yet, if modernism at its most developed fosters the concept of a catch-all religion, if it dreams with the Theosophists of a religious element that might be distilled from all world religions at all times, there is another, proto-modernism which takes its oppositional force and romance from religious diffference—from sectarian or interdenominational conflict and argument. In using the word denominational, I am locating this other modernism in a Christian context. Although its advocates make frequent reference to other major world religions the tendency is to treat these religions as if they were denominations directly comparable to, say, Congregationalism or Quakerism. This essay focuses on G.K. Chesterton’s and Allen Upward’s early constructions of modernist literary history, whereby modernism features as the schismatic party in an already divided Christian Church and national culture. My starting point is similar to Robert Caserio’s in his essay on the theme of the anarchist-terrorist plot in 20th century literature. Beginning with Chesterton, Caserio follows the trail of anarchism as it leads inside and outside modernism, linking Conrad’s Secret Agent, Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican, Woolf’s “Outsiders Society” in Three Guineas, Doris Lessing, Muriel Sparks, Charles Williams and Don DeLillo.6 Where I depart from Caserio is in the emphasis I would give to religious diffference both as the alibi for revolutionary action and the determinant factor in its ethical and political make-up. In Upward’s case religion, specifĳically Catholicism, entirely changes the politics and the nature of the revolutionary plot; we are not anarchists, he has one character say to another, but “the exact opposite”—Legitimists dedicated to the restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne and, in England, to the cause of Stuart succession.7 Upward’s plotters are not revolutionaries but counter-revolutionaries and it is Catholicism that makes all the diffference. Religion, I would argue, is also the key to understanding how these early prehistories of modernism difffer from later accounts and why they very rarely make an appearance in this context. As critics such as Lewis, Damon Franke and Lee Oser have pointed out, mainstream modernism tends to avoid the “sharp edge” of theological dif- ference, preferring to “sublimate religious experience into formal concerns” or to see “synthesis” (rather than schism, which fascinated the Victorians) as the

5 See Alex Owen, “‘The Religious Sense’ in a Post-War Secular Age,” Past and Present 1 (2006): 159–177 (159). 6 Robert L. Caserio, “G.K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God Outside Modernism,” in Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (eds.), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel 1900– 30 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000): 63–82 (67–68). 7 Allen Upward, High Treason (London: Primrose Press, [1903]), 13. Christian Prehistories of Literary Modernism 69

primary mode of modernist transgression.8 Lewis even goes so far as to suggest that in order to qualify as modernist, a novel might fĳirst be required to sublimate its religious content; this might explain, he continues, why a novel with an obvious religious theme such as Radclyfffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness is not usually considered modernist.9 In Chesterton and Upward, by contrast, modernism’s religious interests are made explicit and so too is the sectarian nature of these interests—a sectarianism which is not incidental for these writers so much as it is the source of modernism’s counter-cultural and antagonistic energies. Chesterton’s and Upward’s insistence on this last point has implications for how they understand the geographical origins and territorial ambitions of modernism. In contrast to Theosophy, which aims to be a world religion “without distinction of race, creed, sex or colour,” the religions they associate with the moderns are specifĳic to nation and/or region.10 Thus modernism itself comes to seem decidedly regional, either because it originates in localized, internecine conflict or because, crossing from one place to another, it represents a threat to the distinct religious identities of the regions of the British Isles. Chesterton and Upward never present their work as a study of the schismatic origins of modernism, nor is this ever the prime focus of any single text. But it is, I would argue, an integral part of the Edwardian social landscape as featured in the novels they published between 1906 and 1909: Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and The Ball and the Cross and Upward’s Lord Alistair’s Rebellion.

***

The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) is famously one of Chesterton’s most radical novels, claimed by Caserio, for instance, to be his most “modernist” in terms of prose style.11 The story follows the adventures of an undercover detective Symes who infĳiltrates the Central Council of Anarchists only to discover, one by one, that his comrades are also members of the police and that the Anarchist

8 Lee Oser, The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien and the Romance of History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 3. 9 Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, 18. 10 See Annie Besant, An Introduction to Theosophy (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1985), 5. 11 Caserio wonders if Chesterton’s “double-writing” in The Man Who Was Thursday might be the obverse side of the same coin as modernist ambiguity. See “G.K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God Outside Modernism,” 67. Mark Knight considers the difffĳiculty of accommodating Chesterton within modernism in Chesterton and Evil (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 4. 70 Hobson leader, the provocatively titled Sunday, is the very man who recruited Symes to the cause of law and order. The Man Who Was Thursday is full of reversals, plot twists and unexpected revelations, in which, for example, Symes is pursued by a cripple, who seems suddenly to acquire superhuman powers of locomotion, and is challenged to a duel by an apparently invulnerable “Devil,” who turns out to be a police inspector wearing a mask.12 In these respects, The Man Who Was Thursday forms a suggestive trio with Chesterton’s second novel, The Ball and the Cross (serialized in The Commonwealth in 1906–7), and his pamphlet, Orthodoxy (also published in 1908). All three take as their subject matter the lived experience of orthodox belief under modern conditions described in The Man Who Was Thursday as “spiritual topsy-turvydom.”13 The catalyst for the action in The Ball and the Cross is an act of vandalism—a Catholic from the Isle of Skye, Evan MacIan, smashes the window of the Editorial Offfĳices of The Atheist on Ludgate Hill. The Editor, Turnbull, fĳirst seeks redress through the courts and then, on fĳinding the magistrate indiffferent to his case, agrees to settle his diffferences with MacIan in a duel. This plan, however, is never carried out because wherever the two men travel, and by whatever means, they are pursued and discovered by the forces of law and order who are single-minded in their effforts to prevent this violent and very public display of a strongly felt conviction. Enmity gradually turns to friendship as MacIan and Turnbull realize that two men with a strong belief (even if one is Atheism and the other belief in God) have far more in common than either one of them has with the indiffferent and unbelieving world at large. Finally, inOrthodoxy , Chesterton recounts his own turn to Christianity and explains how Christianity seemed best to account for his thoroughly contradictory intuitions about the world: how it could seem more regular yet more surprising, more accommodating yet less systematic than we usually assume to be the case: “Life is not an illogical- ity; yet it is a trap for logicians. […] [I]ts exactitude is obvious, but its inexacti- tude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”14 This paradoxical experience of modernity is accentuated by the technologised and urbanised conditions of the modern world, which leads Chesterton to conclude—creating another paradox in the process—that Christianity is a “natural” fĳit with the present moment. It seems in and of itself unlikely and fantastic that a man should fĳind Christianity in Birmingham, Notting Hill or Battersea, just as it seems unexpected and wonderful that a man should descend into the underground and

12 G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: Penguin, 1986), 76, 117. 13 Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday, 117. 14 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ed. Peter Milward (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1969), 67. Christian Prehistories of Literary Modernism 71 emerge in Baker Street rather than Bagdad.15 This last example belongs to Symes in The Man Who Was Thursday; the “illogical” fĳirst outcome (Bagdad) would be merely dull, he claims, while the second (Baker Street) is truly magical. Allen Upward has received most attention as an influence on Ezra Pound and as a contributor to the Imagist anthologies. This is perhaps as he would have wanted. Upward states in his autobiography, Some Personalities (1921), that he would rather be remembered as a poet, despite publishing remarkably little poetry, than as a “well-known” novelist, which is how he was regarded in his lifetime.16 Upward was raised in the Plymouth Brethren, although, to go by his own none-too-reliable account, he changed his religious convictions according to circumstance and his inclination to controversy. As a barrister in Ireland, he struck out against both the Protestant and Catholic cause by becoming “a Buddhist, a poet, a home ruler and labour agitator.” Later, in Wales, he fĳinds a home among the Baptists though, quote, “I wasn’t a bigoted Baptist. I have preached a sermon in a Congregationalist chapel.” Upward identifĳies his religion with his politics at the same time as he confesses the expedient nature of these identifĳications and anticipates the difffĳiculty this would pose to a future biographer: “My true ecclesiastical status is certain to be the subject of future controversy.”17 Lord Alistair’s Rebellion, published just a year after The Man Who Was Thursday in 1909, draws on elements of Upward’s own religious background for its portrait of Alistair Stuart, a minor Scottish aristocrat fallen on hard times. The novel follows Alistair as he rebels against his strict Protestant upbringing, converts to Catholicism and joins a group of anarchist poets with links to a mysterious terrorist cell promoting the Legitimist cause. The novel started life in 1903 as a “storyette,” High Treason, in a series titled The Romance of Politics published by Upward himself under the imprint of Primrose Press.18 In High Treason, the romance derives from a Catholic plot which aims to challenge the succession of Edward VII and restore the Stuart line to the English throne. The formula is recognizably that of the spy-novel (another of Upward’s contributions to the series is titled On His Majesty’s Service) and of anti-Catho- lic propaganda, which often featured the same kinds of flamboyant European aristocrats and scheming Anglo-Catholic priests as Upward’s story. Lord Alistair’s Rebellion reworks the central plot of High Treason and adds a signifĳi- cant amount of comment on the state of the nation besides; the novel discusses

15 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 69–70; and, The Man Who was Thursday, 12–13. 16 Allen Upward, Some Personalities (London: John Murray, 1921), 128. 17 Ibid, 87–88, 111, 119. 18 See Upward, Some Personalities, 210. 72 Hobson the fate of Ireland and the British Empire, the Catholic revival in English schools and churches, the “new note” in literature and the new science of anthropology and its implications for the study of human degeneracy.19 Chesterton’s and Upward’s novels are, I think, exemplary of an early discursive modernism that is, not least in its fascination with schismatic Christianity, distinctively English in character. By discursive modernism, I mean to evoke Michael Levenson’s recent distinction between the kind of modernism that demands engagement with the ideas fĳirst of all, and the kind that, by means of radical content or form, seeks to challenge the reader’s expectation as a prerequisite to new understanding.20 Although Chesterton and Upward only rarely transcend the generic conventions of their time, their novels speak frequently of an idea of a revolution in the arts. They give a strong meaning to the idea of modernism as a code-switch or epochal break describing in detail the ways in which Upward’s “new note” in literature difffers from the note struck by the literature of the previous age. “It was the close of the Victorian age,” declares the narrator of Lord Alistair’s Rebellion before launching into a forthright attack on the hypocrisy of the nineteenth-century Imperium: “A great Pirate Empire ravaged the seas, with a crucifĳix at the masthead, and stole pagan continents.”21 Chesterton draws attention to the same double standards in The Victorian Age (1925), in which he pits the rebellious nineteenth-century writer against the “Victorian compromise”—an attempt to reconcile Christian values with mercantile and imperialist ambitions.22 The Man Who Was Thursday focuses on the next generation of rebels: the “moderns,” poets and anarchists whose protest is at once greater in ambition and, in Chesterton’s view, less likely to leave its mark on history than that of their predecessors.23 The measure of the moderns’ ambition, as well as the sign of their inevitable failure, is their promise to go much further than has ever been seen before in the history of dissent and rebellion in England. And yet this Nietzschean politics of ultimacy seems ill served by the parochial examples of Nonconformism on which the moderns mostly draw. The aim of the group, the chief anarchist argues, is emphatically not to produce yet another schism in an already divided church: “We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist but it

19 Allen Upward, Lord Alistair’s Rebellion (London: Alston Rivers, 1909), 102, 237. 20 Michael Levenson, Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 19. 21 Upward, Lord Alistair’s Rebellion, 302. 22 G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1925), 48, 251. 23 Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday, 46, 64. Christian Prehistories of Literary Modernism 73 is a mere branch of the Nonconformists.” Rather, as he states a short while later, they strive for revolution of the order and romance not seen since the early days of Christianity when a persecuted minority defĳied the odds to become the dominant Church across the Roman Empire: “For it is deep, deep under the earth that the persecuted are permitted to assemble, as the Christians assem- bled in the Catacombs.”24 The diffference between a “mere” branch of Nonconformists and the early Christians, however, is one of degree not of kind. After all, in their own time, the Christians in the Catacombs seemed nothing other than a minority sect. The references to Nonconformism multiply in the novel and are sometimes more particular than those already cited. When Symes presents himself to the President of the Anarchist Council he does so as if he were a member of a dissenting sect: “the truth is I am a Sabbatarian spe- cially sent here to see that you show a due observance to Sunday.” In England, Sabbatarians were sometimes known as “Seventh-Day Men,” a title which chimes with that of the Anarchist Council itself, “The Council of the Seven Days.”25 Thus, for all that they protest otherwise, Chesterton’s moderns seem, by means of their own logic, fated to be lost to history as just another schism in the Christian Church. (In fact, as they all turn out to be undercover police offfĳi- cers, they do not even amount to so much.) In Orthodoxy, Chesterton argues that the history of Christianity is nothing other than the struggle of orthodoxy against this impulse to sectarianism. Here, and in The Man Who Was Thursday, modernism (in theology and art) is just the latest manifestation of that impulse:

It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. […] It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom—that would indeed have been simple. […] But to have avoided them all has been one whirl- ing adventure.26

Upward’s moderns strictly speaking are the symbolists and decadent poets who take their inspiration from Maeterlinck, D’Annunzio and W.B. Yeats—all three of whom are named as influences on the new literature in the “storyette” version of Lord Alistair.27 The watchword of this “sect,” so Upward explains, is hatred of the middle classes and its campaign is waged predominantly against

24 Ibid, 23, 33. 25 Ibid, 30, 74. 26 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 95. 27 Allen Upward, High Treason (London: Primrose Press, [1903]), 13. 74 Hobson

“the Victorian Age, on its religion, on its art, on its commercialism, but above all on its Puritanism.”28 Lord Alistair holds his stern Victorian upbringing in the Evangelical tradition chiefly responsible for “choking” his creative genius; Calvinism, he claims, forced him to write as if he were Robinson Crusoe on a desert island: “for the ears of savages.”29 The reaction against Protestantism makes Catholicism the modernist religion of choice and it is through his connections with poets and artists that Lord Alistair comes into contact with the Legitimists who are busy infĳiltrating English politics and education. The fĳinal element in Lord Alistair’s modernist training is his exposure to the poetry and drama of the movement, which aims, in this fĳictional guise, to produce the same kinds of cultural and religious syntheses as seen in the real-world equivalent. The leading light of the new poetry, Egerton Vane, is much taken, as were Ezra Pound and Upward himself, with the Oriental influence and Vane’s most celebrated poem, “Sonnet to a drawer in a Chinese Cabinet” might easily pass for one of the verses Upward contributed to Des Imagistes from his collection Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar.30 Vane also writes and directs a miracle play, which brings the Oriental influence to bear on the most English of poets, Milton, adding in some paganism for good measure. It seems to the startled audience of this play “as if a conscientious Buddhist had rewritten Paradise Lost endeavouring to make it illustrative of the doctrine of metampsychosis.”31 It is tempting to read this description anachronistically as an ungenerous comment on the achievement of T.S. Eliot in The Four Quartets. Elsewhere the novel is more deliberate, and again uncannily accurate, in its anticipation of a future “institution” in literature; Alistair explains to his brother that Vane’s work is “not stufff that today passes for literature but tomorrow he will found a school; even an institution.”32

***

Reading Lord Alistair’s Rebellion is rather like reading a history of modernism through a glass darkly. The novel is remarkably prescient in its account of the rise of the new note in literature, anticipating later histories in numerous aspects even before modernism had found its chief exponents Pound and Eliot. Where Upward difffers from later commentators and where he joins with

28 Upward, Lord Alistair’s Rebellion, 11. 29 Upward, Lord Alistair’s Rebellion, 133. 30 Upward, Lord Alistair’s Rebellion, 95. 31 Upward, Lord Alistair’s Rebellion, 128. 32 Upward, Lord Alistair’s Rebellion, 102. Christian Prehistories of Literary Modernism 75

Chesterton, however, is in his insistence on interdenominational conflict as giving both shape and sustenance to the rebellious nature of the new literature. Scholars have often remarked on the historical echoes between modernism’s fractured beginnings in groups separated only by the narcissism of minor diffference and the schismatic history of Christianity. (Levenson, for example, points to the fact that both avant-garde and religious groups enact a move away from individual to collective efffort, which does not, of course, prevent these groups from being used as launch-pads for individual careers.33) But I would argue that the relations between interdenominational conflict and literary modernism run deeper than these structural analogies suggest. The missing link is the opportunity that sectarianism provides for imagined resistance to one of the dominant narratives of modernization: the privatisation of religion to expel religious conflict from the public sphere. This is, as William Connolly suggests in Why I am not a Secularist, a “paradigmatic” version of the work of secularism: “the secular tactic for taming conflict: the idea is to dredge out of public life as much cultural density and depth as possible so that muddy ‘metaphysical’ and ‘religious’ diffferences don’t flow into the pure water of public reason. Finally, the word ‘religion’ now becomes treated as a universal term, as if ‘it’ could always be distilled from a variety of cultures in a variety of times.”34 Chesterton’s and Upward’s agonistic modernism aims to arrest this process in order to permit the return of religious diffferences from the underground to the public sphere. What seems “muddy” to Chesterton and Upward is not the cultural density of competing religious truth claims but the result of trying to thin out this material in the interests of public consensus. Neither are fans of new or “undenominational religions” which in Chesterton’s words “profess to include what is beautiful in all creeds [and instead] make a thing like mud.” This blend, he continues, “is often something worse than one creed taken separately, even the creed of the Thugs.”35 Upward articulates similar fears about the mixing of creeds. He blames the “boom of esoteric Buddhism” ( suggesting the synthesis of Christian mysticism and Eastern philosophy found in Blavatsky’s Theosophy) for making a genuine Buddhist propaganda impossible.36 And, in Lord Alistair, he identifĳies anthropology as theology of “the new scientifĳic kind,” which aims to isolate a single “religious instinct itself”

33 Levenson, Modernism 30. 34 William Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1999), 22–23. 35 G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (London: Bodley Head, 1919), 92–93. 36 Upward, Some Personalities, 74–75. 76 Hobson from all world religions at all times. As Alistair sees it, anthropology merely repeats the error made by orthodox Christians when they see alternative belief systems as “blasphemous parodies contrived by the devil in order to discredit the true faith.”37 For Chesterton, as for Connolly, the synthesis of religions is a strategy for achieving public consensus at the expense of strongly held convictions and meaningful religious disagreement. The predicament in which the Atheist, Turnbull, and the Catholic, MacIan, fĳind themselves in The Ball and the Cross is the direct result of public disinterest in, and distaste for, religious diffference. There is simply nowhere left in the British Isles where they can air their argument in public. The magistrate to whom Turnbull applies at the beginning of the book cannot bear to hear the name of God mentioned in his courtroom: “‘Be quiet’, said the magistrate angrily, ‘it is most undesirable that things of that sort should be spoken about—a—in public, and in an ordinary Court of Justice. Religion is—a—too personal a matter to be mentioned in such a place [sic]’.”38 The dispute receives equally short shrift in the British newspapers:

The “Daily Telegraph,” for instance began, “There will be little diffference among our readers or among all truly English and law-abiding men touching the etc., etc.” The “Daily Mail” said, “People must learn in the modern world, to keep their theological diffferences to themselves.”39

Upward, perhaps thanks to his experience of politics and the legal profession in Ireland and Wales, is noticeably less ready to complain of a lack of religious argument in public life. (And it is important to note that Chesterton name- checks the Dreyfus case as an example of the continued influence of sectarian religious interests on public life.40) But Upward does, in Lord Alistair at least, show how long-forgotten religious causes might survive underground and join forces with other counter-cultural causes in a joint attack on the complacency of the bourgeoisie. Chesterton and Upward write the Christian prehistory of modernism in order partly to determine its future direction. In many ways, history has proved them wrong: one of the reasons this version of the new literature sounds strange to contemporary ears is precisely because it dispenses with the

37 Upward, Lord Alistair’s Rebellion, 237. 38 G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross (New York: Dover, 1995), 18. 39 Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross, 31. 40 Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross, 35. Christian Prehistories of Literary Modernism 77 seemingly benign and inclusive notion of “religious instinct” in favour of the “sharp edge” of theological diffference.41 Franke argues compellingly that modernist literature aimed primarily at a totalising synthesis of the world and that synthesis is what links modernist literature with late Victorian decadence, the fĳirst doctrines of literary criticism and the Modernist controversy in the Catholic Church.42 (Franke points out that Modernist heresy was synthesis or the attempt to reconcile scientifĳic and scholarly discoveries with Christian belief.) Chesterton and Upward might have agreed that synthesis is the dominant tendency in the modern world and they say as much in their assessment of undenominational religions, esoteric Buddhisms and the new theology of anthropology. And yet, they also recognize that, whether religious or irreli- gious, consensus comes at a cost—and that part of this cost might be the very possibility of a rebellious or revolutionary literature. What the new literature seems to require, both as a model and an alibi for its antagonistic action, is religious diffference, which, in Chesterton’s and Upward’s accounts, provides a source of friction with the establishment and other literary sects, a committed politics, and the romance of an idea. For Chesterton these resources were fast becoming scarce in a public culture which had sacrifĳiced even the very concept of religious argument itself to the need for consensus. In Heretics (1919), he argues that heresy is rapidly on its way to becoming the new orthodoxy. What can it mean to be a heretic, he asks, in an age in which more positive worth is attached to heresy than to orthodoxy? Firstly, it implies a form of bad faith because the real heretic (the Arian or the Antinomian for example) never thought of himself as such, but as the last remaining custodian of truth.43 Secondly, for the creative writer especially, it suggests an easier conformism because it is far simpler to aim for “Revolt in the abstract” than for the truth that inheres in a commitment to a particular religion or politics.44 The result, Chesterton continues, is the purging of politics from literature and literature from politics: “Literature has purposely become less political; politics have purposely become less literary.” (It is tempting to speculate that Upward’s Romance of Politics series was intended to make up for both defĳiciencies.) Or, to put it another way, the result of the separation of literature from politics is literary modernism, albeit in a reductive and caricatured form: “the ceaseless multiplication of mere innovation for its own sake.”45

41 Franke, Modernist Heresies, xi; and Upward, Lord Alistair’s Rebellion, 217. 42 Franke, Modernist Heresies, xi. 43 Chesterton, Heretics, 11–12. 44 Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, 13. 45 Chesterton, Heretics, 17, 11. 78 Hobson

Arguably, Upward’s and Chesterton’s critique of the synthetic impulse in modernism outlives the politics and poetics of religious diffference which motivates this critique in their own books. Oser, for example, suggests that Eliot borrowed his schema of orthodoxy and heresy in After Strange Gods from Chesterton.46 Eliot’s summary of the dubious achievement of modernism in this book is uncannily similar to that of Chesterton: “the glorifĳication of [origi- nality and novelty] for its own sake.”47 In fact, Chesterton was by no means the fĳirst to use the term “heresy” in the context of literary criticism. Ezra Pound also uses the phrase in a review of Upward, “Allen Upward Serious,” published in 1913: “Let us search for Mr. Upward’s dangerous and heretical doctrines. Most mild is their aspect.”48 Pound’s irony is directed at the idea that Upward’s books are mere heresy in the abstract, a cheap exercise in provocation and lacking in serious intent. Like Eliot, he recognizes that something of the radical force of the new writing is lost if it can easily be explained away as empty protest articulated in the now meaningless language of religious dispute. Chesterton and Upward might have agreed, up to a point. In their prehistories of modernism, the problem faced by the new writing is similar to that discovered by Eliot and Pound: how to write against a consensus which had blunted the edge of even the most persistent of theological arguments (between the Atheist and the Catholic for example) and/or forced these disputes from the stage of public culture. But their imagined solution is altogether diffferent. Chesterton and Upward imagine a modernist art that turns back to the scene of interdenominational dispute and conflict in order to reinvest modern art with a politics and a romance for which they can fĳind no adequate substitute in the secular world.

Bibliography

Besant, Annie. An Introduction to Theosophy. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1985. Caserio, Robert L. “G.K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God Outside Modernism,” in Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (eds.), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel 1900–30, 63–82. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Chesterton, G.K. Heretics. London: Bodley Head, 1919. ——. The Victorian Age in Literature. London: Williams and Norgate, 1925.

46 Oser, The Return of Christian Humanism, 41. 47 T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber, 1933), 23–24. 48 Ezra Pound, “Allen Upward Serious,” The New Age, 23 April 1914, 379. Christian Prehistories of Literary Modernism 79

——. Orthodoxy, edited by Peter Milward. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1969. ——. The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare. London: Penguin, 1986. ——. The Ball and the Cross. New York: Dover, 1995. Connolly, William. Why I am not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Eliot, T.S. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber, 1933. Franke, Damon. Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883–1924. Columbus, Ohio State, 2008. Knight, Mark. Chesterton and Evil. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Levenson, Michael. Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Miller, Cristanne. “Religion, History and Modernism’s Protest against the Uncompan- ionable Drawl of Certitude,” Religion and Literature 41:2 (2009): 259–269. Oser, Lee. The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien and the Romance of History. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Owen, Alex. “‘The Religious Sense’ in a Post-War Secular Age,” Past and Present 1 (2006): 159–177. Pound, Ezra. “Allen Upward Serious,” The New Age, 23 April 1914: 379. Upward, Allen. High Treason. London: Primrose Press, 1903. ——. Lord Alistair’s Rebellion. London: Alston Rivers, 1909. ——. Some Personalities. London: John Murray, 1921. Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 3. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1975–80. chapter 4 Modernist Anti-Modernists T.E. Hulme, “Spilt Religion” and “The Religious Attitude”

Henry Mead

It is a seeming paradox that some of the leading writers associated with the literary modernist movement were more or less explicitly opposed to “modernism” in its earlier, theological sense. The term was fĳirst employed by Pope Pius X to denote a liberalising movement that, to his mind, posed a threat to the Catholic Church in the opening years of the twentieth century. The writers identifĳied as Catholic “modernists” proposed that direct access to God could be achieved through forms of non-rational understanding, disarming the positivist tendency of modern thought by re-locating spiritual meaning within the immanent world. They also sought alternatives to overly inflexible Biblical interpretation, emphasising the historical roots of Christian faith. The movement’s general trend was to bolster a sense of spiritual life by reconciling it with prevailing materialist attitudes. In his encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis (1907), Pius X denounced these attitudes as a “synthesis of all heresies,” which challenged the Church’s rigidly dualistic view of human and divine activity and the fĳixed character of divinely ordained institutions. In defĳining and nam- ing the “modernist” movement, Pius X set in motion its suppression, which was achieved within the Catholic Church by 1908, although the term remained in Catholic and Protestant discourse to refer to forms of liberalisation in belief and religious practice. Cultural modernism remains a more complex, multifaceted, and difffuse phenomenon than its theological namesake, and its full meaning remains a matter of vigorous debate. In the broadest view, it refers to a vast range of cultural responses to the condition of modernity.1 Yet despite effforts to expand our understanding of the term, a longstanding association persists, engrained through years of critical shorthand, between “modernism” and the

1 See Roger Grifffĳin for a survey of defĳinitions of “modernity” by David Harvey, Stephen Kern, and Zygmaunt Bauman, among others, together with Grifffĳin’s proposed “ideal type” defĳini- tion taking in various changes in consciousness regarding time, space and historical truth prompted by modernisation. This ties into Grifffĳin’s discussion of cultural modernism as one variant of a larger “ideal type” of responses to modernity, including theological and political forms. See Modernism and Fascism: A Sense of a Beginning Under Hitler and Mussolini (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 43–69.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282285_006 Modernist Anti-modernists 81 conservative, religiously orthodox worldview best represented by T.S. Eliot. This position is most clearly set out in Eliot’s “Preface” to For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), where he described himself as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion,”2 a formula that remains a touchstone in accounts of literary modernism. For Michael Levenson, it marks the emergence of a “high modernism,” “conservative, reactionary, and anti-individualist” in character.3 Integrating literary, political, and religious principles, Eliot’s credo strongly implies his opposition to liberal theology, a position he acknowledged to his friend John Hayward in a letter of 1939: “You know my aversion to Modernism in all forms.”4 Eliot shared these views with T.E. Hulme, a pioneer of cultural modernism, who had linked his avant-garde practice with a religious and political conser- vatism since 1911. Hulme, Eliot, and Ezra Pound are often presented as collab- orative theorists of a “classical,” “hard,” modern poetics.5 Although Pound remained immersed in a tradition of Neoplatonism, all three writers grappled with a similar dilemma, in that they recognised the artist’s need to re-describe those forms of subjective experience which, in the Romantic tradition, lay behind the creative process, to accommodate or defuse a prevailing, materialist episteme that, in turn, was closely related to the anomie of social modernity.6 These poets, seen together, present a composite portrait of the modernist artist whose attempts to record the “epiphany” hover on a borderline between the materialist and the mystical, conveying a spirituality that, from one angle, appeared broadly Neoplatonic; from another, sophisticatedly pragmatic; from yet another, conducive to a strictly observed Catholicism or Anglo-Catholicism.7

2 T.S. Eliot, “Preface,” For Lancelot Andrewes (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), ix. 3 Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 79. 4 T.S. Eliot to John Hayward, 27 January 1937 [unpublished letter]. Quoted in Finn Fordham, “Between Theological and Cultural Modernism: the Vatican’s Oath Against Modernism, September 1910,” Literature and History 22/1 (2013): 8–24 (8). 5 Rebecca Beasley provides a comparative study of the three poets and their rhetoric of “hard- ness” in Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound (London: Routledge 2007). 6 See Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004); Ian F.A. Bell, Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (London: Methuen, 1981); and Martin Kayman, The Modernism of Ezra Pound: The Science of Poetry (London: MacMillan, 1986). 7 For a detailed analysis of this ambiguity, see Patricia Rae, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997), 39, n. 63, n. 240. 82 Mead

I focus here upon Hulme, whose career encapsulates the paradox of “modernist anti-modernism.” His thinking closely resembles Eliot’s in its attention to pre-war French intellectual debate, and, in particular, to the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson and the Neo-Royalist politics of Charles Maurras, both of which informed the unfolding Catholic Revival.

Catholic Modernism and Bergsonian Vitalism

From 1878 to 1903, Pope Leo XIII sought to bolster the Church’s role in an increasingly secularised Europe, in part by encouraging a revival of the scholastic tradition as an alternative to modern rationalist philosophy. Towards the 1890s, a number of Catholic thinkers, scattered across the continent, grew disillusioned with Leo XIII’s negotiation with modernity.8 They included the Frenchmen Maurice Blondel and Alfred Loisy; the Anglo- German Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the Anglo-Irish priest George Tyrrell, and the English nun Maude Petre.9 Modernism in its predominantly French setting revolved around a discussion of religious knowledge led by Blondel, and a historical approach to biblical studies developed by Loisy. In the fĳirst of these—the primary focus here—the Thomist view that religious knowledge proceeded from a complex balance of faith and reason was supplanted with an emphasis on subjective experience. The theological historian Alec Vidler succinctly recounts Blondel’s philosophy, as set out in his seminal thesis of 1893 entitled Action:

the attainment of truth involves the activity of the whole of our being— willing and feeling as well as knowing. Faith accordingly does not consist in accepting with our intellect dogmas, which are revealed to us from entirely beyond our experience, and, as it were, imposed upon us from outside. We approach and realise the supernatural from within. Faith is not a fĳinal or static condition: it is an attitude or orientation of the whole personality […] the philosophy of action is anti-intellectualist in the sense that it denies that ultimate truth can be reached simply through

8 Leo XIII had called for a revival of scholastic theology while emphasising the need for social cohesion. 9 For details of all these fĳigures and others within the modernist circle, see Darrell Jodack, “Introduction II: The Modernists and the Anti-Modernists,” in Darrell Jodack (ed.), Catholics Confronting Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 20–27. Modernist Anti-modernists 83

intellectual processes, dialectic, etc., and fĳinally secured by such means in abstract formulas.10

This theory of “vital immanence” in Catholic modernism was formulated just as the principles of Bergson’s philosophy were reaching a wider public. In a series of books from 1889, Bergson had developed his theory that an intuitive substratum underlay human consciousness, but he took a further step in his 1907 work Creative Evolution, by describing this intuitive life as a manifestation of a universal, creative, spiritual spark. This theory of the élan vital brought Bergson a new celebrity as the “liberator” of the soul from the shackles of oppressively mechanist modern science. The similarity between Bergson’s thinking and modernist theology was apparent to many Catholics. Henri Massis and Alfred Tard, writing as “Agathon” in their famous survey of French student opinion, reported the widespread view that “it was Bergson who opened up a new road which we followed in the wake of Le Roy, Blondel, and Father Laberthonniere. Our reason is thus able to grant to our emotions those religious efffusions they need.”11 Catholic modernists acknowledged these afffĳinities: Loisy, appointed to chair at the Collège de France in 1898 with Bergson’s support, found Creative Evolution “forceful and beautiful.”12 Although cautious to distinguish his own work from Bergson’s, Blondel wrote that “[He] made me dream about the spring-like flowering of Ionian thought,” and inspired “the sudden awakening of a vigorous upheaval from the weight of twenty-fĳive centuries of science, a science whose sediments threatened the mind with asphyxiation.”13 This rhetoric recurs in many readers’ accounts of Bergson’s impact, including those by key fĳigures in the rise of cultural modernism. William James described his impression in 1907:

Open Bergson and new horizons loom on every page you read. It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds. It tells of reality itself,

10 Alec Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 186–187. See Maurice Blondel, Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice (1893), trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984). 11 Agathon, Les Jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1913), 83–84. 12 Alfred Loisy, Mémoires (Paris: Emile Noury, 1931), 367, 381; quoted in R.C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988), 152, n. 170. 13 Frédéric Lefèvre, L’Itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Éditions Spes, 1928), 47–48. 84 Mead

instead of merely reiterating what dusty-minded professors have written about what previous professors have thought.14

Hulme similarly described his fĳirst reading ofCreative Evolution:

I felt the exhilaration that comes with the sudden change from a cramped and contracted to a free and expanded state of the same thing. It was an almost physical sense of exhilaration, a sudden expansion, a kind of mental explosion. It gave one the sense of giddiness that comes with a sudden lifting up to a great height.15

The clearest links between vitalist and theological discourse were developed by Edouard Le Roy, Bergson’s colleague and successor at the Collège de France: the keenest Bergsonian of the Catholic modernists. In his essay “What is Dogma?” (1905), later expanded as Dogma and Criticism (1907), he describes institutionalised laws being overthrown by a vital fĳire. This was a very Bergsonian reading of the relation between fĳixed, authoritative, intellectual religious law, and the living faith beneath. Le Roy’s images of dogma as a form of mummifĳication, an encrusted shell that might be broken open to reveal a fĳiery core, called to mind Bergson’s use of similarly vivid metaphors, as did Charles Péguy’s similar description of Thomist dogma as a “sclerosis”—a hard- ening of the arteries.16 A distinction between surfaces and depths, intellect and intuition, was apparent in Bergson’s books from Time and Free Will (1889) onwards, but grew sharper in his “Introduction to Metaphysics” in 1903 and Creative Evolution. In his earlier work, Bergson had retained a place for intellectual life, describing an interactive relationship between the stream of consciousness and the reasoning faculty: intuition constantly breaking up and reforming the static, crust-like intellect. Le Roy elaborated upon this contrast by suggesting that the intellect was redundant, an encumbrance that must be shaken offf. Moreover, he identifĳied the intellect with “dogma,” thus drawing a direct link between Catholic Modernist rejection of Thomism and the Bergsonian rejection of the intellect. Bergson had not gone so far, but he praised Le Roy’s

14 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (London: Longmans, Green, 1907, 1909), 265. 15 T.E. Hulme, “Notes on Bergson I,” New Age 9/25 (9 Nov 1911), 587; in The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 126. 16 See Jérome and Jean Tharaud, Notre cher Péguy (Paris: Plon, 1926), I, 118–119; quoted in Grogin, Bergsonian Controversy, 147. Modernist Anti-modernists 85 writing,17 and his later works similarly seem to denigrate the intellect in favour of intuition.18 Having sketched this intimacy between Catholic modernism and Bergsonism, it is worth noting how Bergsonian terminology also informed a range of avant-garde aesthetics. In France, Tancrède de Visan, Remy de Gourmont, and a range of late Symbolist poets were increasingly justifying their practice of vers libre through reference to vitalist philosophy. In the visual arts, Maurice Denis, the Fauves, and the Rhythm Group, just to name a few, developed theories of art based on Bergson’s principle of intuition. Mark Antlifff has recounted the impact of Bergson on a swathe of European art.19

Hulme’s “Lecture on Modern Poetry” (1908)

Hulme drew upon the Bergsonian vogue in France when in 1908 he delivered, to the somewhat staid London “Poets’ Club,” his provocative “Lecture on Modern Poetry.” Several years’ intense intellectual development had taken Hulme from a youthful love of science and mathematics through an abrupt disillusion with “positivism” to a fascination with forms of vitalism, particularly those expressed through modern French poetry. His lecture signalled recognition of this poetry’s afffĳinities with certain thinking in the Church in a rhetorical question: “from this standpoint of extreme modernism, what are the principal features of verse at the present time?”20 This was asked of an audience of educated Englishmen just a year after the publication of Pascendi dominici gregis.21 Closer to home, Tyrrell had, only two months before, condemned the encyclical and declared his support for “modernism” in the

17 For Bergson on Le Roy, see Isaak Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Paris: Éditions Delachaux & Niestlé, 1942), 21; Grogin, Bergsonian Controversy, 157. 18 Sanford Schwartz has shown how Bergson, in his “Introduction à la metaphysique” (1903) and L’Évolution Créatrice (1907), “exten[ds] the idea of real duration from the human psyche to the external world.” See “Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism,” in Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (eds.), The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 291. See also Grogin, Bergsonian Controversy, 156–158. 19 See Mark Antlifff,Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 20 T.E. Hulme, “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” in Hulme, Collected Writings, 54, italics added. 21 The lecture has been dated convincingly to around November 1908. See Ronald Schuchard, “‘As Regarding Rhythm’: Yeats and the Imagists,” in Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 2 (1984), 209–226; quoted in Hulme, Collected Writings, 49. 86 Mead pages of The Times.22 Hulme was one of the fĳirst to apply the term to forms of “free verse” that would later be considered foundational in the literary modernist canon. Despite the use of this term, the subtle positioning of Hulme’s lecture suggests degrees of afffĳinity with both “modernist” and “anti-modernist” positions—more specifĳically, it shows his resistance to positivism (a feature of both sides), his rejection of dogma (a “modernist” stance), but also, a rejection of romantic immanence (an “anti-modernist” stance). In his opening remarks, Hulme identifĳied his new aesthetic as an implicit rejection of a materialist or positivist outlook. He did so by comparing the emerging revolution in modern poetry to the Symbolist rejection of the earlier, mid-century French school of poets known as the Parnassians.23 The latter, best represented by Leconte de Lisle, Catulle Mendès, and Sully-Prudhomme, modelled their poetics on the precise, descriptive language recommended by positivist philosophers such as Hippolyte Taine. By breaking with the Parnassians, the Symbolists were rejecting an aesthetic in hock to scientifĳic materialism. Hulme aligned his “modern poetry” with this revolt against positivism.24 Second, Hulme argued that modern poetry was opposed to the spirit of permanence in art, correlating with “dogma” in belief. The new poetry was expressive, spontaneous, and intuitive, as opposed to the art and worldview of the “ancients,” which clung to established formal constructions. As Hulme put it,

[t]he ancients endeavoured…to construct things of permanence which would stand fast in this universal flux which frightened them…Materially in the pyramids, spiritually in the dogmas of religion…They believed they could realize an adjustment of idea and words that nothing could destroy…Now the whole trend of the modern spirit is away from that; philosophers no longer believe in absolute truth…We frankly acknowledge the relative…we seek for the maximum of individual and personal expression, rather than for the attainment of any absolute beauty.25

22 George Tyrell, “The Pope and Modernism” [Letter], The Times, 30 Sep 1907, 4; “The Pope and Modernism” [Letter] The Times, 1 Oct 1907, 5. 23 Hulme, “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” 51. 24 T.E. Hulme, “L’Attitude du lyrisme contemporain,” New Age 9/17 (24 Aug 1911): 400–401; in Hulme, Collected Writings, 57–58. The association is implicit in the “Lecture,” but it was spelt out again in 1911 in Hulme’s review of Tancrède de Visan, who also stressed the point in his contrast of positivist Parnassianism and vitalist Symbolism. 25 Hulme, “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” 53, italics added. Modernist Anti-modernists 87

This expressivist position resonated both with Bergsonian and theological modernist rhetoric—but a certain ambivalence towards the purely “expressive” was also close at hand. The third, and most intriguing characteristic of Hulme’s “extreme modernism” was its anti-romanticism. The lecture opened with the confrontational statement: “A reviewer writing in The Saturday Review last week spoke of poetry as the means by which the soul soared into higher regions, and as a means of expression by which it became merged into a higher kind of reality.” This was not to Hulme’s liking; indeed, he declared, “that is the kind of statement that I utterly detest.”

I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way. The President told us last week that poetry was akin to religion. It is nothing of the sort. It is a means of expression just as prose is, and if you can’t justify it from that point of view it’s not worth preserving.26

Modern poetry was expressive where the Parnassians were drily empirical; it was spontaneous and intuitive where the “ancients” were dogmatic; but it also fĳixed the eye on things in the real world—whether the poet’s feelings and ideas, or pigs. Ultimately, Hulme’s poetry gained power by delimiting its own expressive spontaneity, restricting it to the human realm, to a rich, tumultuous, but ultimately limited span of cerebration, from the intake of external sense impressions, through their complex, rich weave with contiguous and remembered phenomena, to the birth of the hard-edged concept. There was a barrier between man and God in this aesthetic. Hulme was already drawing the dividing lines that came to distinguish his cultural modernism from that of the liberal theological movement. Human expression could gesture towards, but could not claim the status of, the divine.

Anti-Modernism

The roots of Hulme’s “anti-modernism” lie in the pre-war interfusion of theological and political radicalism centred on Paris. The Papal condemnation of modernism coincided with a shift of opinion, especially among young intellectuals of the avant-garde, from progressive to conservative politics. The Vatican had by 1910 issued a list of circumscribed statements, an encyclical, and an oath against modernism required of all Catholic

26 Hulme, “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” 49. 88 Mead clergy—measures that efffectively suppressed the Modernist movement within the Church.27 These interventions coincided with a fashion for nationalist politics, revived largely by Maurras’s group Action Française. The Neo- Royalists’ keyword was “classicism,” by which they referred to a national spirit—a rationalist decorum, Hellenic in root, but sustained through a Catholic tradition, which had shaped French culture until the revolution of 1789. In opposition to this, they demonised “romanticism”: a foreign ideology, cultivated by Rousseau, which brought France low, prompting a series of revolutions and the compromise of liberal democracy.28 As young people took up this cause, the Catholic Revival gained momentum: signifĳicantly, Maurras recommended allegiance to the Church, an institution that he considered central to the French national spirit, despite his own avowed atheism.29 Meanwhile the Bergsonian vogue continued, but its followers on the right began to have doubts. The philosopher had initially been hailed among Catholic traditionalists as well as modernisers. But his increasing emphasis on intuition over intellect was offfensive to those taught in the Neoscholastic tradition to value ratiocination as an important means, integrated with faith, to achieve knowledge of the divine. Moreover, the identifĳication of the élan vital as operating simultaneously in human consciousness and in nature was dis- turbingly pantheistic, breaking the Thomist barrier between “nature” and “supernature.” Young Catholic intellectuals who considered Bergson a formative influence—most prominently, Jacques Maritain—began to withdraw or qualify their approval. At the same time, Bergson was subject to attack by Maurras and his close ally, Pierre Lasserre, on diffferent grounds—as a for- eigner, a Jew, a purveyor of un-French philosophy. The Catholic cause and the Action Française cause became blurred for a period, although there were clearly problems with this alliance—particularly in light of Maurras’s positivist atheism.

27 Lamentabili sane exitu (“With truly lamentable results”) (3 July 1907), Pascendi dominici gregis (“Feeding the Lord’s Flock”) (8 September 1907), and Motu Proprio Sacrorum antistitum (“The Oath against Modernism”) (1 September 1910). These are available online, respectively, at Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/ p10lamen.htm; http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10pasce.htm and http://www .papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10moath.htm, accessed 10 December 2012. 28 For long, polemical defĳinitions of romanticism, see Maurras’s essays collected in Romantisme et revolution (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1922), and Pierre Lasserre, Le Romantisme français. Essai sur la révolution dans les sentiments et dans les idées au XIXe siècle (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1907). 29 Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962). Modernist Anti-modernists 89

By 1911, Hulme, disapproving of the Liberal reform of parliament in Britain, was intrigued by the potency of the French radical right. He was unsettled, however, to hear of Lasserre’s attacks on Bergson, particularly the charge that the élan vital undermined a sense of historical precedent that was the bedrock of conservative thinking. This irresponsibility Lasserre associated, slyly, with Bergson’s suspect ethnicity as a half-English Jew.30 Hulme at fĳirst disregarded this attack: despite hearing it directly from Lasserre in April 1911, he made no comment until November that year, by which time he had become troubled by Bergson’s increasing celebrity and popularity on the left. It was then that he, with some ambivalence, recounted Lasserre’s argument that Bergson compro- mised the roots of social and cultural tradition. Still reserving judgement, Hulme’s response to Lasserre was not to reject Bergson, but to modify his reading of that philosopher: “one has to cut all the sentiments expressed at the ends of Bergson’s chapters, but I believe that it preserves most of the essentials.”31 Hulme had grown suspicious of one element of Bergson’s thinking: the identi- fĳication of the élan vital within both human consciousness and the “creative evolution” of the larger universe. Clarifying his position, Hulme indicated that the intuitive life described by Bergson could be combined with a level of rational control—much as the philosopher had originally stated in Time and Free Will. Indeed, this balance between the rational mind and an underlying stream of intuitions was somewhat reminiscent of the Thomist balance between faith and reason. This was, intriguingly, also the conclusion drawn by Maritain, whose book- length critique distinguished between a “Bergsonism of Intention” and a “Bergsonism of Fact.”32 In this view, there was a good purpose behind Bergson’s thinking, which sought to break up the stifling limits of nineteenth-century scientism; however, his line of thought had become associated, through the propagation of a “Cheap Bergsonism,” with a kind of fatuous pantheism.33 Maritain’s conditional admiration of Bergson, and his ambivalence to the

30 Pierre Lasserre, “La Philosophie de M. Bergson,” L’Action française mensuelle 246 (15 March 1911), 165–183. Hulme’s ambivalence to Lasserre’s argument can be seen in a letter to the New Age, “Bergsonism in Paris,” 190. He reports it more favourably in his article “Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics,” New Age 10/2 (9 Nov 1911), 40; in Hulme, Collected Writings, 160–165 (164–165). 31 Hulme, “Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics,” 40; Hulme, Collected Writings, 165. 32 This distinction was made in an article entitled “Les Deux bergsonismes,” in the Revue Thomiste (July–August 1912), later included in Maritain’s seminal work La Philosophie bergsonienne: études critiques (Paris: Marcel Rivière et Cie., 1914), 285. 33 Raissa Maritain, Adventures in Grace (New York: Longmans, Green, 1945), 197; quoted in Grogin, Bergsonian Controversy, 160. 90 Mead

French right as represented by Maurras, present suggestive parallels with Hulme’s thinking.34 Hulme’s continued interest in forms of vitalist and pragmatist philosophy clearly ran contrary to Maurras’s positivism and atheism.35 Moreover, he expressed contempt for the evaluation of philosophical ideas on the strength of their supposed “racial” character.36 Ultimately, Hulme remained committed to the notion of intuition as the basic principle of human cognition, albeit one that might work in conjunction with ratiocination.37

“Romanticism and Classicism”

Hulme’s 1912 lecture, “Romanticism and Classicism” captures a conjunction between Bergsonian expressivism and Maurrasian classicism. Although often cited as evidence of Hulme’s debt to Action Française, the text signifĳicantly adapts and modifĳies Maurras’s ideas. The piece is, however, clearly conservative in spirit. “There the two views,” Hulme asserted,

One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very fĳinite and fĳixed creature, I call the classical.38

Hulme cites the theological concept of “original sin” in several essays of this period, at fĳirst to convey a political attitude rather than a dogmatic belief. It provided a convenient tag for an idea that occurred in non-religious, conservative ideologies, such as Maurras’s. Hulme’s use of the term became ever more serious, however, and its appearance in his work from 1912 seems to be part of

34 On Maritain, see Bernard Doering, Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 6–36. 35 This is clear in his numerous articles and lectures on Bergson dating from Spring 1911 through until his last “Note on Bergson” for the New Age in February 1912. See Hulme, Collected Writings, 83–204. 36 See his letter “Bergsonism in Paris,” 190, and Edward Marsh to Michael Roberts, 4 Nov 1937, Keele University Archives, Hulme Collection, hul 53. 37 This is spelt out in “A Notebook” (signed “T.E.H”), New Age 18/8 (23 Dec 1915): 186–188, esp. 187; in Hulme, Collected Writings, 433–440, esp. 435. 38 T.E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” in Hulme, Collected Writings, 59–73 (61). Modernist Anti-modernists 91 a general tendency towards a religious commitment. The term also provided a useful contrast with the view of man as a “reservoir full of possibilities.” Romanticism, in this view, resulted fĳirst from an anthropocentric rationalism that denied the necessity of a transcendent power working beyond human agency or comprehension; and then from a resurgent, deep-rooted desire for such a power, now reconciled with a positivist worldview through the reckless ascription of spiritual energy to earthly phenomena. As Hulme put it:

You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth… concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best defĳinition I can give of it, is spilt religion.39

Hulme’s attack on romanticism came out in a poetry that dealt in precise expression, which struggled to specify the nature of sensory and emotive experience, rather than permitting the identifĳication of such human experience with a romantic spiritual force. Paradoxically, Hulme cited as the best theorist of this anti-modernist aesthetic the philosopher so often blamed for the latest wave of romanticism; recounting his classical aesthetic, he observes that the notion of “intensive” aesthetic experience beyond rational comprehension “is all worked out in Bergson,” and in particular in the notion of intuition.40 The tensions contained in this essay indicate that Hulme’s goal was to reconcile his interest in pre-rational cognition with his taste for the order of the analytical mind. The art that he would recommend combined these attributes in tension, seeking to seize moments out of the confused flux of immediate experience, to freeze and immortalise them. The result was a synthesis: an expressivist classicism—a philosophy that combined both the intuitive and the intellectual—somewhat similar, in fact, to the combination of faith and reason that Thomists had long recommended. Indeed, Bergson himself, prior to his “Introduction to Metaphysics,” had advocated such a necessary, functional interaction of instinctive and intellectual life. For Hulme, this could form the basis of a visual aesthetic also, and, in several essays of this period, he admired degrees of tension between raw sensory data and abstracting analysis captured in works by Walter Sickert, David Bomberg, and Jacob Epstein.41

39 Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” 62. 40 Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” 72. 41 These are gathered in Hulme, Collected Writings, 191–204, 251–309. 92 Mead

“A Notebook”

The distinction between pure reason and pure élan vital is drawn even more clearly in Hulme’s last philosophical writings, published as “A Notebook” in the New Age between late 1915 and early 1916. Here, he refĳines his position as a “religious attitude,” a wilful commitment to theological authority, to “the absolute values of ethics and religion.”42 Hulme drew upon the “Neo-Realist” philosophy of G.E. Moore to argue the case for such values—but he also increasingly cited Blaise Pascal, whose much earlier advocacy of non-rational faith in religious truths now provided many Catholics with an acceptable pathway back from modernist heresy. This early modern anti-intellectualism was not unlike Bergson’s, but retained the approval of the Vatican.43 Dorothy Eastwood has shown how Pascal’s recognition of the limits of reason and the need for assent in faith appealed to modernists, chiming not only with the work of Bergson, but also with the “illiative sense” recommended by Cardinal Newman, and the philosophy of “Action” recommended by Blondel.44 Despite his attractiveness for liberals like Blondel, Pascal escaped offfĳicial censure. Even a leading neo-Thomist like Maritain, though he found Pascal’s apologetic imperfect, considered him “endowed nevertheless with the authentic value of the highest order.”45 It was paradoxically the Augustinian harshness of Pascal’s thinking, as a follower of the Jansenist tradition, which distinguished his theory from the philosophy of “action,” and the vague outlines of modernism. The opening article in Hulme’s “Notebook” series recalls how, in the famous “wager,” Pascal instructed the individual who “would like to attain faith and do not know the way…to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it,” recommending the observance of rites: “Follow the way by which [believers] began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.”46 Hulme cites this approvingly, carefully stressing that the process went beyond

42 Hulme, “A Notebook,” in Collected Writings, 437, 444. 43 Blaise Pascal, Pensées et Opuscules, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Hachette, 1897), fragment 233; Pensées, trans. by W.F. Trotter (1908, New York: Dutton, 1958), fragment 233. 44 See Dorothy Eastwood, The Revival of Pascal: A Study of his Relation to Modern French Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), on Newman, 136; on Blondel, 88–117; on Bergson, 37–47. 45 Eastwood, Revival of Pascal, 144. See Maritain’s essay “Pascal apologiste,” Revue hebdomadaire 32/28 (14 July 1923), 184–200. Reprinted as Chapter 4 of Réflexions sur l’intelligence et sur sa vie propre (Paris: Nouvelle librairie nationale, 1925). 46 Pascal, Pensées, fragment 233; quoted in Hulme, “A Notebook,” New Age 18/5 (2 Dec 1915), 112; in Hulme, Collected Writings, 420. Modernist Anti-modernists 93 mere pragmatism to a real commitment to faith.47 Perhaps most crucially for Hulme, Pascal made a distinction between zones of human experience; fragment 792 of the Pensées proposes that experience can be divided into “three orders,” the worldly order of body, the realm of the mind, or of self-consciousness; and that of the supernatural, or of “charity.” These realms were discontinuous: “The infĳinite distance between body and mind symbolizes the infĳinitely more infĳinite distance between mind and charity, for charity is supernatural.”48 This principle, as J.H. Broome notes, lies at the centre of Pascal’s thinking, permitting the reconciliation of his mathematical intelligence with his commitment to religious faith.49 As Eliot perceptively noted in his introduction to a 1931 edition of the Pensées, this passage also sheds light on the modern “religious attitude” recommended by Hulme.50 It provided a precedent for accommodating, without absolutely rejecting, the conflicting world- views through which Hulme had passed during his career: fĳirstly, the scientifĳic, secondly, the vitalist, thirdly, the religious. Hulme provides a map for his intellectual journey in “A Notebook,” envisaging the three zones as concentric circles, like rings on a tree: “(1) The inorganic world, of mathematical and physical science, (2) the organic world, dealt with by biology, psychology and history, and (3) the world of ethical and religious values.”51 This map allows Hulme to diagnose the main intellectual errors of the previous century:

The attempt to introduce the absolute of mathematical physics into the essentially relative middle zone of life leads to the mechanistic view of the world…The attempt to explain the absolute of religious and ethical values in terms of the categories appropriate to the essentially relative and non-absolute vital zone, leads…to the creation of a series of mixed or bastard phenomena…(Cf. Romanticism in literature, Relativism in ethics, Idealism in philosophy, and Modernism in religion.)52

47 Hulme, “A Notebook,” 420. 48 Pascal, Pensées, fragment 792. 49 J.H. Broome, Pascal (London: E. Arnold, 1965), 102. 50 Eliot noted that “These three [orders] are discontinuous; the higher is not implicit in the lower as in an evolutionary doctrine it would be. In this distinction Pascal offfers much about which the modern world would do well to think.” He adds in a note “An important modern theory of discontinuity, suggested partly by Pascal, is sketched in the collected fragments of Speculations by T.E. Hulme.” T.S. Eliot, “Introduction,” Pascal’s Pensées, trans. Wilfred Trotter (1931; New York: Dutton, 1958), xix. 51 Hulme, “A Notebook,” 424. 52 Hulme, “A Notebook,” 426–427, italics added. 94 Mead

Thus, Hulme made explicit his objection to “Modernism,” another name for what he called “spilt religion.” Instead of flowing together, “[t]here must be an absolute division between each of the three regions, a kind of chasm.”53 Like Pascal, Hulme would make a leap of faith, registering not just the division between the rational mind and its intuitive substratum, but also another gulf, between the intuitive life and an absolute faith in an unknowable God. This “discontinuity” reconciled the intuitive consciousness described by Bergson with the rational procedures of modern science, and subordinated both to the third category of willing assent in belief. Hulme’s map thus presents a worldview not incompatible with the Thomist integration of reason and faith. Neither a positivist, like Taine or Spencer, nor a vitalist, like Bergson or Nietzsche, could guide Hulme satisfactorily through the entirety of his intellectual journey; but at its terminus, he had in fact re-assimilated these writers’ attitudes under an absolute theological law. The anti-modernist modernist, then, did not so much reject modern thought out of hand, but rediscovered in Christian dogma a fair, balanced provision for the human needs (to reason, to intuit) that these modern philosophies purported to satisfy, but in fact exag- gerated out of proportion. It was not that there was no place for rationalism in religion, nor that there was no place for spontaneous apprehension, but that true faith drew upon and reconciled these apparently opposing faculties in one focused direction. The anti-modernist modernist was a traditionalist of the avant-garde.

Bibliography

Agathon. Les Jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1913. Antlifff, Mark. Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica: A Concise Translation. Translated by Timothy McDermott. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1989. Beasley, Rebecca. Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound. London: Routledge, 2007. Bell, Ian F.A. Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound. London: Methuen, 1981. Benrubi, Isaak. Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson. Paris: Éditions Delachaux et Niestlé, 1942. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F.L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910.

53 Hulme, “A Notebook,” 425. Modernist Anti-modernists 95

——. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan, 1911. ——. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T.E. Hulme. London: MacMillan, 1913. Blondel, Maurice. Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice [1893]. Translated by Oliva Blanchette. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984. Broome, J.H. Pascal. London: E. Arnold, 1965. Doering, Bernard. Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals. London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983. Eastwood, Dorothy. The Revival of Pascal: A Study of his Relation to Modern French Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Eliot, T.S. “Preface,” in For Lancelot Andrewes, ix–x. London: Faber and Faber, 1928. ——. “Introduction,” in Pascal’s Pensées, vii–xix. Translated by Wilfred Trotter. New York: Dutton, 1958. Fordham, Finn. “Between Theological and Cultural Modernism: The Vatican’s Oath Against Modernism, September 1910,” Literature and History 22/1 (2013): 8–24. Grifffĳin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Grogin, R.C. The Bergsonian Controversy in France 1900–1914. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988. Hulme, T.E. The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme. Edited by Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. London: Longmans, Green, 1907, 1909. Jodack, Darrell. “Introduction II: The Modernists and the Anti-Modernists,” in Darrell Jodack (ed.), Catholics Confronting Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti- Modernism in Historical Context, 20–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kayman, Martin, The Modernism of Ezra Pound: The Science of Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1986. Lasserre, Pierre. Le Romantisme français. Essai sur la révolution dans les sentiments et dans les idées au XIXe siècle. Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1907. ——. “La Philosophie de M. Bergson,” L’Action française mensuelle 246 (15 March 1911): 165–183. Lefèvre, Frédéric. L’Itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel. Paris: Éditions Spes, 1928. Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Liebregts, Peter. Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Loisy, Alfred. Mémoires. Paris: Emile Noury, 1931. Maritain, Jacques. La Philosophie Bergsonienne: Études Critiques. Paris: Marcel Rivière et Cie., 1914. 96 Mead

——. Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. 1955; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Maritain, Raissa. Adventures in Grace. New York: Longmans, Green, 1945. Maurras, Charles. Romantisme et Revolution. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1922. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées et Opuscules. Edited by Léon Brunschvicg. Paris: Hachette, 1897. ——. Pascal’s Pensées. Translated by Wilfred Trotter. 1908; New York: Dutton, 1958. Pius X.”Lamentabili Sane” (3 July 1907). Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed 10 December 2012: . ——. “Pascendi Domnici Gregis: On the Doctrine of the Modernists” (8 September 1907). Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed 10 December 2012: . ——. “The Oath Against Modernism” (1 September 1910). Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed 10 December 2012: . Rae, Patricia. The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Schuchard, Ronald. “‘As Regarding Rhythm’: Yeats and the Imagists,” Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 2 (1984): 209–226. Schwartz, Sanford. “Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism,” in Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (eds.), The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, 288–299. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Tharaud, Jean and Jerome. Notre cher Péguy. Paris: Plon, 1926. Tyrell, George. “The Pope and Modernism” [Letter], The Times, 30 September 1907: 4. ——. “The Pope and Modernism” [Letter], The Times, 1 October 1907: 5. Vidler, Alec. The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934. Weber, Eugen. Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962. chapter 5 Between the Bang and the Whimper Eliot and Apocalypse

Katherine Ebury

Introduction: Cosmology in “Thoughts after Lambeth”

As Peter J. Bowler has argued,1 the twentieth century had its own drive to reconcile science and faith; in fact, after Einstein, such effforts could be said to have a fĳirmer grounding. Those committed to religion were not dealing with such an unassailable, positivist science as had dominated the nineteenth century, but with something altogether more slippery. In fact, in the 1930s partly due to scientifĳic popularisations of relativistic science by scientists such as Arthur Eddington, a devout Quaker, the Anglican Church felt that the current attitude of science was more open to faith than it had been for many years. However, some, including T.S. Eliot, were resistant. In “Thoughts After Lambeth” (1931), the post-conversion Eliot responds to the Church’s attitude, displaying his knowledge of the popular science of Eddington and James Jeans, only to ridicule such “peeps into the fairyland of Reality.”2 Eliot is particularly scathing about these authors’ claims for the moral and religious value of their cosmic vision: “I feel that the scientists should be received as penitents for the sins of an earlier scientifĳic generation, rather than acclaimed as new friends and allies.”3 At the same time, Eliot quietly remarks that he “does not disagree with the literal sense of the pronouncement” by the Church that “there is much in the scientifĳic and philosophic thinking of our time which provides a climate more favourable to faith in God,” but merely takes issue with the faith’s current tone of “excessive amiability” toward science.4 He reminds us that, after all, “these writers cannot confĳirm anyone in the faith; they can merely have the practical value of removing prejudices from the minds of those who have not the faith but who might possibly come to it.”5

1 Peter J. Bowler Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth Century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 17. 2 T.S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1951), 371. 3 T.S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” 371. 4 T.S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” 370–371, my italics. 5 T.S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” 371.

As a prelude to looking at Eliot’s interest in apocalypse in terms of science and cosmology, it is worth considering “Thoughts after Lambeth” and the strangeness of his avowed resistance to reconciliations of science and faith. We might take him more seriously when on the following page after his critique of such science, Eliot introduces a footnote in which he quotes an article from The Times on Einstein’s acceptance of non-static cosmology. Eliot prefaces this reference with the acid reflection that “when a scientist gets loose into the fĳield of religion, all that he can do is to give us the impression which his scientifĳic knowledge and thought has produced upon his everyday, and usually commonplace, personal and private imagination.”6 The footnote is worth quoting from, if only for the pleasure of reading the words of Eliot and Einstein in such close proximity:

Under the heading Nature of Space: Professor Einstein’s Change of Mind, I read in The Times of 6th February, 1931, the following news from New York: “At the close of a 90-minute talk on his unifĳied fĳield theory to a group of physicists and astronomers in the Carnegie Institution at Pasadena yesterday, Professor Einstein startled his hearers by smilingly declaring, ‘Space can never be anything similar to the old symmetrical spherical space.’ That theory, he said, was not possible under the new equations. Thus he swept aside his own former hypothesis that the universe and the space it occupied were both static and uniform and that the concept of his friend the Dutch astronomer, De Sitter, that though the universe was static it was non-uniform, which De Sitter had based upon the hypothesis that instead of matter determining space it was space that determined matter, and hence also the size of the universe. Astronomers who heard Professor Einstein make his declaration said it was an indication that he had accepted the work of two American scientists, Dr. Edwin P. Hubble, an astronomer in the Mount Wilson Observatory, and Dr. Richard C. Hace Tollman, a physicist of the California Institute of Technology, who hold that the universe is non-static although uniformly distributed in space. In the belief of Dr. Hubble and Dr. Tollman the universe is constantly expanding and matter is constantly being converted into energy.” Our next revelation about the attitude of Science to Religion will issue, I trust, from Dr. Hubble and Dr. Tollman.7

6 T.S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” 372. 7 T.S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” note 1, 372. Between The Bang And The Whimper 99

The fascinating strangeness of fĳinding a detailed footnote on non-static cosmology in an essay of Eliot’s is not contained by his flippant tone; in fact, the level of detail about contemporary cosmology is far in excess of the sarcastic point he is making at the expense of fashions in science. Contrary to what Eliot has led us to expect, Einstein’s voice and the voice of scientifĳic commentators are actually dominant here, despite the irony that tries to envelop it at beginning and end. It seems that Eliot has already said all that he needed to say about the new physics and its popularisation; so, we ask ourselves, why this passage? I would go so far as to suggest that a real fascination with the new physics, and with intersections between religion and science, is evidenced, despite Eliot’s best effforts at misdirection, in this passage. This is a theme I will return to later in my discussion.

“The Twinkle of a Fading Star”: Scientifĳic and Religious Apocalypse

Here, I will respond to the strangeness of that moment in “Thoughts After Lambeth” by looking back to a point before Eliot’s conversion, suggesting intersections between scientifĳic and religious apocalypse as depicted in T.S. Eliot’s poetic cosmology and astronomy. The primary focus of my essay is a close reading of “The Hollow Men,” as I argue that the poem is awkwardly placed between the “whimper” of astronomical entropy and the “bang” of a longed-for divine apocalypse.8 Moreover, I will suggest that the cosmic agony of “The Hollow Men” extends beyond Eliot’s conversion, setting up a dilemma that it takes him until Four Quartets, with its ultimate melding of art, faith and science, to fully resolve. Ultimately, I will suggest that, despite Eliot’s protesta- tions, the greater openness toward religion displayed by contemporary science, particularly the more comforting, Christian visions of the end of the universe depicted by the Quaker scientist Arthur Eddington were as much a part of this eventual poetic resolution as Eliot’s conversion. In May 1923, some time before his avowal of contempt for English popular science, Eliot wrote to Eddington, the astronomer and cosmologist, inviting him to contribute to The Criterion,9 as “The Criterion would be very greatly honoured by a contribution from you on some subject within your own fĳield which educated and intelligent persons of only the ordinary mathematical

8 T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2002) 82. 9 T.S. Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. vol. 2 (London: Faber, 2009), 158–159. 100 Ebury training could understand.”10 At this time, Eddington was Einstein’s most prominent English populariser, though Jeans later became more important. Eliot’s awareness of his work and sense of its value in this early period of Einstein’s dissemination is particularly telling as relativity had only received its fĳirst experimental proof in 1919 and would not be declared conclusively proven until 1924. We might link this interest with the poem of cosmic and human entropy, “The Hollow Men,” begun in draft around this time and published two years later, and to the poetry written thereafter. Cosmology and apocalypse are the key topics for this essay and I will look at “The Hollow Men” in most detail, because it occurs at a crucial period of transition for Eliot, both poetically and in relation to his scientifĳic thinking. At this point, we might be able to see contemporary science performing one particular role for Eliot; what he calls, “the practical value of removing prejudices from the minds of those who have not the faith but who might possibly come to it.”11 Some critics have begun to address Eliot’s engagement with science, including Michael Whitworth and Daniel Albright, who have written on his complex reaction to the new physics that became a powerful force in contemporary culture during the 1920s and 1930s. As Albright points out, Eliot commented upon Einstein’s visit to England in The Dial in July 1921, albeit in a tone somewhat similar to “Thoughts After Lambeth”:

Einstein the Great has visited England, and delivered lectures to uncom- prehending audiences, and been photographed for the newspapers smil- ing at Lord Haldane. We wonder how much that smile implies; but Einstein has not confĳided its meaning to the press. He has met Mr Bernard Shaw, but made no public comment on that subject. Einstein has taken his place in the newspaper with the comet, the sun-spots, the poisonous jellyfĳish and octopus at Margate, and other natural phenomena.12

Further, Whitworth’s most recent work “Within the Ray of Light,” his essay on light and modernist simultaneity, and in his chapter on “Natural Science” in T.S. Eliot in Context, are both very helpful in suggesting ways in which Eliot might have used science and, in particular, the science of relativity. For example, he argues that Eliot’s notion of the contemporaneousness of all poets in a “tradition” may be sourced in an understanding of Einsteinian physics

10 T.S. Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot, 159. 11 T.S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” 371. 12 Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9. Between The Bang And The Whimper 101

(to which he proves Eliot had early exposure, in part due to his graduate studies in philosophy). Despite the potential of this interdisciplinary approach to much of Eliot’s work, no similar study has been done on Eliot’s interest in astronomy and cosmology; this is surprising since both the proof and results of relativity fed directly into astronomy, creating a new public excitement about the wider universe. As John North puts it in The Norton History of Astronomy and Cosmology, “The inter-war period was a golden age for the development of an extraordinary number of new and exciting cosmological ideas.”13 To give a short history of cosmology during this period, it began to seem that materialist interpretations of the universe were no longer tenable and “clockwork” models of the universe gave way to more complex models influenced by the new physics. From 1920 to 1935, there was a development from static cosmic models, such as those of Einstein and Willem De Sitter, to non-static models and fĳinally to the expanding universe proposed by Aleksandr Friedmann and Georges Lemaître. We see this work referenced in Eliot’s footnote to “Thoughts After Lambeth.” In 1931 Lemaître fĳirst proposed the hypothesis of cosmic origins that eventually became known as the Big Bang Theory. Scientifĳic popularisations such as Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World (1929) and Jeans’s The Universe Around Us (1929) made these continuing cosmological debates accessible to the public. In this context, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to Eliot’s repeated use of astronomical imagery and the otherworldly, even extraterres- trial, setting of “The Hollow Men.” Previous focus has been on the hollow men themselves, not the world of the poem as a “valley of dying stars.” The poem has been read in a spiritual light, but not in the light of a problematic relation between religion and science. Even Albright, with his interest in Eliot’s science, does not accept the predicament of the hollow men as Eliot presents it, refusing to acknowledge the decaying landscape and starscape of the poem: instead he interprets this situation psychologically and metaphorically, writing that the hollow men dwell in a state of “metaphysical sloth” and “they have simply become too debilitated to hold their world together.”14 What criticism has so far failed to notice is that stars are mentioned four times in a short poem; we see “a fading star,” “the twinkle of a fading star,” “this valley of dying stars,”15 together with the contrasting dream of a “perpetual star.” This omis- sion is perhaps because many readers regard the poem as an extension of

13 John North, The Norton History of Astronomy and Cosmology (New York: Norton & Company, 1995), 514. 14 Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism, 246. 15 T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2002), 80, 81. 102 Ebury

The Waste Land, which leaves no place for a consideration of vast diffferences in its focus, tone and setting. Further, even though the end of “The Hollow Men,” “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper,” is perhaps, as Russell Elliott Murphy puts it, “the most quoted line in 20th century English verse,”16 no critic has yet addressed these lines as a depiction of cosmic entropy. After all, entropy is the scientist’s apocalypse, a secular version of the End Time scenario (though, as we will see later, there were attempts to make entropy more spiritual in emphasis). Interestingly, when interviewed in the 1950s Eliot said directly that he now felt his choice of these lines was unfortunate: “One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrel- evant to it, it would today come to everyone’s mind,” while, surprisingly, the other problem is apparently to do with scientifĳic accuracy, not aesthetic merit, as “Another [reason] is he is not sure the world will end with either [a bang or a whimper].”17 I place astronomy at the heart of this desolate cosmos, reading for the “whimper” that works against and alongside the “bang” of an apparently longed-for cosmic, and perhaps creative, apocalypse. In many ways “The Hollow Men” defĳies our attempts to give a coherent account of its movement. However, I will now offfer a short overview of the poem. Section 1 opens with an epigraph from Conrad18 and an allusion to the Gunpowder Plot (“A penny for the Old Guy”), followed by a statement in the voice of the hollow men:

We are the hollow men We are the stufffed men Leaning together Headpiece fĳilled with straw. Alas!19

16 Russell Elliott Murphy, Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2007), 257. 17 T.S. Eliot interviewed by Henry Hewes “T.S. Eliot at Seventy and an Interview with Eliot,” in Michael Grant (ed.), T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1982), 705. 18 In “Heart of Darkness and the Early Novels of H.G. Wells,” Journal of Modern Literature 13.1 (1986): 37–60, Patrick A. McCarthy has convincingly read Heart of Darkness in relation to entropy, suggesting that contemporary readers would have been aware of this parallel (39); Eliot’s epigraph can thus be seen as part of a general literary economy of entropy in the poem. Eliot’s famous attempt to use “The Horror! The Horror!” as epigraph to The Waste Land (until Pound objected) suggests that the landscape of decay and fragmentation depicted in this poem is also likely to be entropic in part. 19 Eliot, Collected Poems, 79. Between The Bang And The Whimper 103

Eliot’s lines place them in a formless, decaying world, which is apparently not the normal world of the living. In Section 2 we see the fĳirst reference to “a fading star,”20 while in Section 3 we see a further reference to fading stars, both suggesting entropy:

Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man’s hand Under the twinkle of a fading star.21

Section 4 then returns to the “eyes” unmet and shrunk from in Section 2 and, crucially for my reading of the poem, defĳinitively locates the hollow men in “this valley of dying stars.” The speaker then refers to longed for eyes, which become the Dantean “perpetual star/multifoliate rose/of death’s twilight kingdom,” the counter to all the fading and dying stars in the poem. However, this is presented as a vain longing. Finally, Section 5 erupts into a version of “Here we go round the mulberry bush,” with the mulberry bush replaced by a “prickly pear.” The rest of the poem outlines the entropic force of “the Shadow,”22 as another voice repeats lines from the Lord’s Prayer:

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom.23

The “Shadow”24 could be read as a combination of the increasing interstellar darkness implied by the dying stars and of the force of entropy. We see it widen- ing astronomical and physical distances and forcing everything apart, including “the idea/and the reality” and “the motion/And the act.” The poem thus seems to imagine a universe approaching heat death, the end state of an entropic universe, as an objective correlative, or physical equivalent, for the human and spiritual nadir of the “empty” and “dying” hollow men. Or perhaps even vice versa.

20 Eliot, Collected Poems, 80. 21 Eliot, Collected Poems, 80. 22 Eliot, Collected Poems, 81. 23 Eliot, Collected Poems, 81. 24 Eliot, Collected Poems, 81. 104 Ebury

The attempt to articulate then briefly breaks down into fragments “For Thine is/Life is/For Thine is the,”25 and is recovered by its fĳinal lines, the close of which invokes an imminent, albeit whimpering, apocalypse:

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

As we see from this overview of the poem, a benevolent God is very far from this cosmos, which repeatedly invokes the idea of destruction. From bonfĳires, the Gunpowder Plot and straw-men through “dry grass” to “dying stars,” “The Hollow Men” can be seen as a dream of combustion, just as The Waste Land is a dream of rain. The poem’s dream of an infĳinite cosmic and divine fĳire, or “perpetual star” takes place in a space of slow, entropic decay. The poem multiplies perspectives on the cosmos, or perhaps even invokes several alternative universes, through Eliot’s confusing play with the word “kingdom”: thus, the hollow men are situated in “death’s dream kingdom” but are aware of “death’s other kingdom,” where others, “with direct eyes” have crossed. Eliot’s strategy here deliberately disorientates the reader, presenting us with a moribund poetic universe without stable mark- ers of time and place; this may reflect a sense of cosmic instability resulting from the revelations of Einsteinian physics. The situation of the hollow men in a “valley of dying stars,” rather than in “the valley of the shadow of death” implies that it is not the death of the hollow men that matters most, but rather the slow death of the stars; in this poem human emptiness and death are weighed against that of the wider cosmos. It might even be possible to argue that the empty fĳigures in “The Hollow Men” are victims of materialist science. The very voices of the hollow men, which form the poem, partake of cosmic entropy and are compared with the fading stars:

And voices are In the wind’s singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star.26

Like the stars or the voices of the hollow men, the poem itself exhibits a kind of exhaustion; for example, David Spurr points out that Eliot’s “technique of

25 Eliot, Collected Poems, 82. 26 Eliot, Collected Poems, 80. Between The Bang And The Whimper 105 constant repetition and negation” means that the poem “employ[s] only about 180 diffferent words in a work 420 words long.”27 In fact, though Spurr does not put it this way, as an aesthetic cosmos the poem itself is entropic in efffect, gradually exhausting its store of words, opening distances between one word and another and waiting for its “whimper” to fade out. In the closing stanza we see a collapse between religious and scientifĳic versions of apocalypse as Eliot implies that even a divine apocalypse (or “bang”) would be preferable to the continuing “whimper” of the slowly ending universe and the cosmos of “The Hollow Men” as a whole. The benevolent God of the fragments of the Lord’s Prayer which appear at the close of the poem has no place in this world: Eliot suggests that God could only enter this cosmos as destroying fĳire, as “perpetual star” contrasted with the “dying stars” of the hollow men.28 The “bang” (82) that is imagined may even be imagined as a kind of stellar explosion. The close of “The Hollow Men” dreams of a universe that ends suddenly, with fĳire, but shows that this hope is only a damp squib, like the failed Gunpowder Plot. This idea of apocalypse may be directly linked with Eliot’s modernist aesthetic. Later in life Eliot told an interviewer, Henry Hewes, that he no longer liked “The Hollow Men” because “it represents a period of extreme depression about his future work.”29 If Eliot really felt at the time that the poem represents, rather than merely being afffected by, creative depression, then that suggests that the longed-for apocalypse is not merely scientifĳic reality or spiritual dream, but an aesthetic dream or nightmare, manifest in Eliot’s sense of his need to destroy his previous poetic cosmos in order to continue to create, and of his fear that this cannot be done. After all, the entropic Shadow also falls “Between the conception/And the creation.” A fĳinal context for a collapse between religious, scientifĳic and aesthetic versions of apocalypse in the poem are Eliot’s allusions to Dante, which many critics have identifĳied as crucial to the poem’s meaning. These allusions contribute to the poem in two ways; fĳirstly, as has been widely noted, they serve a spiritual purpose, marking out the absence of God from the poem and the longing both for a sight of the “multifoliate rose” of the faithful and for the “perpetual star” of the trinity. Secondly, they demonstrate the loss of a secure, ordered and eternal cosmos such as Dante depicts and the fall into the unstable, fĳinite and decaying cosmos of contemporary science. After all, in the Paradiso the “multifoliate rose,” “the vast flower graced/with many

27 David Spurr, Conflicts in Consciousness: T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984), 52. Italics Spurr’s. 28 Eliot, Collected Poems, 81. 29 Henry Hewes, “T.S. Eliot at Seventy and an Interview with Eliot,” in Michael Grant (ed.), T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2. (London: Routledge, 1982), 705. 106 Ebury petals,”30 represents not only divine love, but also an ideal of order and eternity, as the faithful have their continuing life assured within the rose, while in “The Hollow Men” eternity is denied them and “the perpetual star/multifoliate rose” is “the hope only/Of empty men.” This loss has aesthetic ramifĳi- cations; without this ordered cosmology underlying his poetry, Eliot as poet, like the hollow men, can only dream of Dante’s celestial rose as symbol of eternity and unity. Much later, in Four Quartets, the rose image would be rehabilitated by Eliot; however, it arguably would not exist in the poetry without Eliot’s conversion, which offfered a return to a securer cosmos both spiritually and poetically.

“Not Very Satisfactory”: Conclusion

In fact, the cosmic agony of “The Hollow Men” sets up a dilemma that it takes Eliot until Four Quartets, written between 1936 and 1942, to fully resolve. There, he seems to revisit “The Hollow Men” asserting fĳinally in “Little Gidding” the unity of the fĳire and the “perpetual star/multifoliate rose,” as “the fĳire and the rose are one.” Although such fĳire is more often nurturing by the time ofFour Quartets, even apocalyptic cosmic fĳire, such as the Hollow Men seem to long for, is present in “East Coker,” though apocalyptic rhetoric is now revealed as “a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:/A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion”:

Thunder rolled by the rolling stars Simulates triumphal cars Deployed in constellated wars Scorpion fĳights against the Sun Until the Sun and Moon go down Comets weep and Leonids fly Hunt the heavens and the plains Whirled in a vortex that shall bring The world to that destructive fĳire Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.31

The point of this almost self-parodic passage seems to be to demonstrate the lack of aesthetic necessity for this kind of apocalyptic cosmos. Ultimately, in

30 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Everyman, 1995), canto xxxi, 10–11. 31 T.S. Eliot, “East Coker,” in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2002), 186. Between The Bang And The Whimper 107 the expansive cosmic vision of Four Quartets, the stars and humanity are linked not because they are both “dying” from a slow entropy as in “The Hollow Men,” but because they are both living, as “The dance along the artery/The circulation of the lymph/Are fĳigured in the drift of stars.”32 Even the “Shadow,” the fearful interstellar space of “The Hollow Men,” is fĳinally fĳilled, with the righteous dead (“They all go into the dark/The vacant interstellar spaces”), like Dante’s rose in the Paradiso, and with “the darkness of God.”33 Although much of the apparent optimism in Eliot’s later cosmology owes its existence to his religious faith, I would argue that also much of it exists because of science’s greater optimism, which Eliot turned to his own personal, spiritual and creative advantage. Hence Eliot’s lingering fascination with the words and ideas of Einstein in “Thoughts After Lambeth.” In an expanding universe, entropy is less fearsome, and although popularisers continued to talk of the end of the universe, it is no longer seen in such fateful terms. For example, both Jeans and Eddington reclaim a potential spiritual meaning in entropy, as a cyclical universe would remove the possibility of a last judgement. As Eddington put it, “It seems rather stupid to keep doing the same thing again and again.”34 Hence, we see an absolute collapse between religious and scien- tifĳic versions of apocalypse; entropy is mobilised in order to make valid an idea of the last judgement. Moreover, both Jeans and Eddington suggested a new idealist, rather than materialist universe, in which the cosmos was “a great thought” and God “a great mathematician”; if, Jeans put it in Mysterious Universe, “if the universe is a universe of thought, then its creation must have been an act of thought.”35 I would argue that this was part of what enabled Eliot to fĳinally abandon such bleak late-Victorian cosmic visions as appear in “The Hollow Men.” Although in “Thoughts After Lambeth,” Eliot was aware of and apparently dismissed reconciliations of spirituality and cosmology, I would argue that they were ultimately creatively enabling for him. As we have seen, the lengthy footnote included in that very essay exposes his rejection of reconciliations between religion and science as a mere misdirection. Essentially, a collapse of the boundary between religion and science allows Eliot to develop an aesthetic equivalent for the secure, though mysterious, cosmology that Dante possessed, and a personal sense that the world may yet end with a divine bang, not with an entropic whimper. Or perhaps even, as Eliot later suggested, with neither.

32 Eliot, Collected Poems, 178. 33 Eliot, Collected Poems, 187. 34 Eddington, Arthur Stanley, The Nature of the Physical World (London: Dent, 1929), 92. 35 James Jeans, The Universe Around Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 144. 108 Ebury

Bibliography

Albright, Daniel. Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Everyman, 1995. Bowler, Peter J. Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth Century Britain. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Eddington, Arthur Stanley. Space, Time and Gravitation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. ——. The Nature of the Physical World. London: Dent, 1929. Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1951. ——. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 2002. ——. The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume 2. Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. London: Faber, 2009. Grant, Michael (ed.), T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2. London: Routledge, 1982. Henry, Hewes. “T.S. Eliot at Seventy and an Interview with Eliot,” in Michael Grant (ed.), T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2. London: Routledge, 1982. Jeans, James. The Universe Around Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929. McCarthy, Patrick A. “Heart of Darkness and the Early Novels of H.G. Wells: Evolution, Anarchy, Entropy.” Journal of Modern Literature 13:1 (1986): 37–60. Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1966. Murphy, Russell Elliott. Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2007. North, John. The Norton History of Astronomy and Cosmology. New York: Norton & Company, 1995. Spurr, David. Conflicts in Consciousness: T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Whitworth, Michael. Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ——. “Natural Science,” in Jason Hardin (ed.), T.S. Eliot in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ——. “‘Within the Ray of Light’ and Without: The New Physics and Modernist Simultaneity,” in Valeria Tinkler-Villani and C.C. Barfoot (eds.), Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow: Literature’s Refraction of Science, vol. 2, 683–703. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. chapter 6 Ezra Pound’s Eriugena Eschatology in the Periphyseon and the Cantos

Mark Byron

The American poet Ezra Pound engaged with an extraordinary range of intellectual and historical sources in the course of his writing career. Perhaps few sources were as unlikely, on fĳirst sight, as that of the ninth-century Irish theologian, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, who was court poet to Charles the Bald (grandson of Charlemagne) and scholar of Greek in the Palatine school at Laon. In light of the duration and formal range of Pound’s writing career, it is not surprising that he drew on vastly eclectic sources: he composed his modern epic The Cantos over the course of half a century, and nominated it, as epic, “a poem including history.”1 The poem spans an impressive range of literary, artistic, cultural and historical material—from the ancient, medieval and modern West to the dynastic history of China, the Revolutionary era and early Republican history of the United States, as well as aperçus of sub-Saharan Africa, the ancient eastern Mediterranean, and so on—and the poem ranges across numerous literary forms and more than a dozen languages. In this poem, Pound integrates his earlier poetic investments in literary experimentation and the critical recalibration of historically grounded poetic genres: Troubadour lyric forms, Greek and Latin classics (Homage to Sextus Propertius), Anglo–Saxon poetry (The Seafarer, The Wanderer), Dante and his great elder contemporary, Guido Cavalcanti, and Chinese and Japanese genres and forms, to name only the most prominent of his non-Anglophone poetic sources. Such aspiring encyclopaedism is indicative of Pound’s predisposition towards totalizing, and even eschatological systems: primary among the models for the structure of his Cantos is Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its teleological movement to transcendence and unity with the divine; and the narrative impulse of νόστος (nostos or homecoming) of the Odyssey also profoundly informs Pound’s epic. His stated aim was to write a poem that celebrated what he saw as the best social and cultural achievements throughout history, as well as to adumbrate the most egregious impediments to historical and economic progress, all in aid of a redemptive vision of human social and spiritual capability. From its beginning the poem is oriented towards a vision of a paradiso terrestre, and from the 1930s it becomes increasingly grounded in an

1 Ezra Pound, “Date Line,” in Make It New (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 19.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282285_008 110 Byron anti-capitalist, overtly Fascist poetics. Pound’s sense of curiosity and contrari- ness also saw him disposed towards fĳigures he regarded as eminent but unfairly marginalised in mainstream intellectual history. His major prose works of the 1930s such as Make It New (1934) and Guide to Kulchur (1938) exert substantial intellectual energy in buttressing such counter-traditions and in championing their guiding lights. Eriugena was perhaps the most important Neoplatonist in Christian Europe between Proclus in the fĳifth century and Gemisthus Plethon in the fĳifteenth: he translated and wrote a commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo- Dionysius and submitted a refutation of Gottschalk’s argument for predestination.2 His most signifĳicant work is the monumental Neoplatonist eschatology, the Periphyseon or De divisione naturae. Eriugena was also a Carolingian court poet who composed in Greek as well as Latin at a time when Greek learning in Western Europe was confĳined to a small number of mostly Irish scholars and their students. His work sufffered ecclesiastical condemnations in the ninth, thirteenth and sixteenth centuries,3 and was overshadowed by a scholastic philosophy dominated especially by the Aristotelian disposition of Thomas Aquinas. By the twentieth century Eriugena’s work had fallen out of favour in Anglophone philosophy curricula, and even recent attempts to produce adequate editions of the Periphyseon remain incomplete. But Pound’s championing of Eriugena extended beyond that of rectifying a curricular oversight: he saw in this fĳigure a profound inheritance of Platonic thought also found in medieval Arabic philosophers such as Avicenna, Averroes and Al-Farabi. By keeping alight the Neoplatonic flame, Pound saw in Eriugena a European fore- bear of its effflorescence in the Italian Renaissance, and an early proponent of the light philosophy deployed at thematically signifĳicant points in the Cantos. The strategic importance of Eriugena for Pound is evident in the way his name (and its spelling) arises at specifĳic points in Pound’s poetry and prose, coinciding with Pound’s two major phases of research into Eriugena’s writings and thought. He fĳirst read of Eriugena some time before 1928, in the 1879 edition of Francesco Fiorentino’s philosophy textbook, Manuale di Storia della

2 See the Introduction to Johannis Scotti Eriugenae, Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae), Book 1, ed. and intro. I.P. Sheldon-Williams (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1968), 1–10. 3 Eriugena’s Periphyseon was banned at the University of Paris in the condemnation of 1209, as it was seen to exhibit, with other texts, shades of pantheism. Eriugena’s work was again swept up in the condemnation of 1277: this event concerned controversial aspects of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, especially Averroes’ commentaries on De Anima. See Olaf Pedersen, The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 280–286. Ezra Pound’s Eriugena 111

Filosofĳia.4 Pound then began to integrate Eriugena properly into his writing in the 1930s in the context of heresy and Troubadour poetry.5 Pound’s second phase of research began in earnest in late-1939, evident in letters to T.S. Eliot, George Santayana and Otto Bird. He consulted volume 122 of the Patrologia Latina containing Eriugena’s texts and translations in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice before returning to Rapallo to work from another copy sourced in Genoa.6 This second phase is concerned principally with Eriugena’s Neoplatonic light philosophy, evident in his Latin translation of the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius, and in his masterwork, the Periphyseon. Citations of Eriugena in later decads of the Cantos such as Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959) recapitulate or simply cite the earlier, more extensive meditations. Pound introduces and defends Eriugena’s thought in two corresponding phases in the Cantos: fĳirstly in Canto XXXVI, immediately following Pound’s translation of Guido Cavalcanti’s famous canzone, Donna mi prega, where he associates the Papal condemnation of Eriugena in the thirteenth century with the Albigensian Crusade; and secondly in the Pisan Cantos sequence, drafted in large part when Pound was detained in the Pisan United States Army Detention Training Center in mid-1945, where he calls upon Eriugena’s light philosophy

4 Although Pound fĳirst adopts Fiorentino’s variant spelling of Eriugena (now considered to be the more orthodox rendering) he later assumes the most widely accepted, if strictly incorrect form: Erigena. Pound’s attempt to get the name right is thwarted by the fact that “Erigena,” in any of its variants, is not strictly applicable to John Scotus except with reference to his pseudo-Dionysian translation (see Sheldon-Williams 1). 5 See his essay “Ecclesiastical History,” in Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. and intro. William Cookson (London: Faber, 1973), 61–63; this essay was fĳirst published in The New English Weekly, 5 July 1934. 6 Pound wrote to Otto Bird on 9 January 1938 to request information from Bird or Etienne Gilson regarding Eriugena’s serial condemnations. He wrote to Santayana on 8 December 1939 and 16 January 1940, and to Otto Bird on 12 January 1940. Pound’s letter to Eliot of 18 January 1940 from Rapallo suggests his possession of the Patrologia on his return from Venice. See The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D.D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber, 1950), 304–305 and 330–335. Two sets of notes, pertaining to research in Venice and Rapallo respectively, are located in the Beinecke Library Ezra Pound Collection: ycal mss 43 Box 77, Folder 3383 and Box 77, Folder 3406. I am grateful to Professor Ronald Bush for kindly permitting me access to a draft essay, “Between Religion and Science: Ezra Pound, Scotus Erigena and the Beginnings of a Twentieth-Century Paradise,” in which he establishes and describes the incorporation of these materials into early drafts of unpublished cantos, especially the Italian drafts of early 1945, which are pivotal documents in the textual genesis of The Pisan Cantos. This history will form part of the Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos (Oxford University Press) under the direction of Ronald Bush and David Ten Eyck. 112 Byron in the Periphyseon as a way of dealing with his own privations and the immediate threat to his physical being (Pound was under arrest on a grand jury indictment of treason). Eriugena fulfĳils an eschatological vision for Pound at this point in his personal saga, providing a thread of light and the possibility of sublimation from physical privation. More generally, Eriugena’s work stands for a totalizing principle of enlightenment, a constituent idea in the paradiso terrestre Pound envisioned in his poetry and sought to transmit into the world of politics and the clamour of history.

Canto XXXVI and Cavalcanti’s Donna Mi Prega

Canto XXXVI contains Pound’s translation of Cavalcanti’s famously esoteric canzone, Donna mi prega, followed by the fĳirst extended reference to Eriugena in Pound’s epic poem. Canto XXXVI is located midway through the suite of cantos published in 1934 as Eleven New Cantos (XXXI–XLI): by this time Pound tended to publish his poem in decads, or instalments of roughly ten cantos. The location of this canto in this decad is strategic and its use of source materials is decisive in determining its signifĳicance. The four previous cantos in Eleven New Cantos concern the establishment of the American Republic, and dwell upon the extensive correspondence between Thomas Jeffferson and John Adams in particular, as well as the activities of other major actors in the Revolution and the Continental Congress, such as James Madison, James Monroe, and Benjamin Franklin. In the cantos immediately following XXXVI, Pound’s “poem including history” returns to the early years of the American Republic, comparing the terms of governance and especially the role of money in national politics and international relations to other times and places, such as eighteenth-century Italy and France. The poem then turns to contemporary economics centred on the arms trade and what Pound saw as the economic basis of the First World War, before a brief Homeric diversion to the island of Circe in Canto XXXIX, an abridged translation of Hanno’s Periplus in Canto XL,7 and a fĳinal panegyric to Mussolini in the fĳinal canto of the sequence. Pound actually begins Canto XLI with Mussolini’s fabled response to Pound’s poetry: “Ma questo,” said the Boss, “è divertente.” Pound took this comment— “Most diverting!”—to signify a deeper appreciation of his poetry on behalf of Il

7 This abridgement is Pound’s adaptation from Wilfred A Schofff, trans.,The Periplus of Hanno (Philadelphia: Commercial Museum, 1912). See Carroll F. Terrell (ed.), A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993 [1980]), 165. Ezra Pound’s Eriugena 113

Duce than was probably intended. Pound’s prose at this time had turned decisively to matters of politics and economics, measuring Mussolini’s Italy against Revolutionary and early Republican America. Pound’s desire to draw analogy is evident in such texts as Jeffferson and/ or Mussolini published in the following year (1935). The question remains: why Cavalcanti at this point in the Cantos, and why Eriugena? As a modern epic poem the Cantos draws on several large-scale structuring devices, not least its emulation of Homeric and Dantean narrative frames. In a letter to his father of 11 April 1927, Pound provides an account of the meta-structure of the poem:

A.A. Live man goes down into world of dead. C.B. “The repeat in history.” B.C. The “magic moment” or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidian into “divine or permanent world.” Gods, etc.8

This overarching structure of a descent to the underworld—nekuyia, or kata- basis—followed by a metamorphosis and transcendence, occurs within several decads of the poem, including Eleven New Cantos. Pound’s poetic narrator, having navigated through the perils of American revolutionary aspiration and international politics, enters into a mystical zone of contemplation, seeking out what is permanent amidst the diurnal. This is one of several glimpses of the poem’s paradiso from the viewpoint of purgatorio. Cavalcanti’s famously difffĳicult canzone serves this function in providing a meditation on the nature of love, or amor, and especially its interactions with the faculty of reason and perceptive experience. The poem is replete with an hermetic vocabulary, inspiring a long tradition of tendentious schematic readings of which Pound’s own is an excellent example. He sees in the poem a thread of mystical knowledge conveyed by a kind of Gnostic vocabulary directed to an elect audience. This vocabulary draws out the more speculative elements of ancient fertility rites as well as Neoplatonism, conserving mystery in an otherwise quotidian zone of being. Such a mode of engagement might be considered roughly analogous to reading Beatrice as an allegory of divine love in Dante’s poem, except that in Pound’s translation of Cavalcanti, the masculine amor is the active subject and vehicle of mystical knowledge, conveyed to its “knowers” in a schematic conceptual system of virtu, the diafan of light, and the intellect possible. Pound fĳirst encountered Cavalcanti’s poem during the research for his short monograph The Spirit of Romance (1910), and he returned to it many times in

8 Paige, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 210. 114 Byron subsequent years. He made several translations, culminating with Canto XXXVI, and tried to publish a critical edition of Cavalcanti’s poems on at least three occasions with diffferent presses: Maynard (1912), Aquila Press (1929), and Marsano (1932). Pound’s critical apparatus and commentary, published variously in journals during the 1910s, also appeared within the essay “Cavalcanti” in his 1934 volume, Make It New. Cavalcanti’s poem is crucial to Pound as an emblem of enduring truth, of amor understood as contemplation rather than emotion, symbolised in light and represented in a language of hermetic iconic- ity. For Pound, “the whole poem is a scholastic defĳinition in form,” in contrast to what he saw as the lifeless scholasticism of Aquinas.9 Pound retains the formal structure of the canzone in his translation of Cavalcanti in Canto XXXVI. This poetic genre developed in the Sicilian court of Federico II in the thirteenth century, and was prized for its exacting formal requirements: the hendecasyllabic line (eleven syllables); stanzas of dense internal rhyme (52 of 154 syllables rhyme in each stanza); and, peculiar to Cavalcanti’s example, a dense and abstruse rhetorical and philosophical argument. Pound retains many of these features, as well as the envoi that completes the poem, at which point the canto moves into two extra stanzas dealing, respectively, with Eriugena and the Mantuan Troubadour Sordello da Goito. Pound cleverly combines the poetic dexterity of the canzone with the philosophical force of the trobar clus (“closed form”), a poetic mode taken from Provençal and the Troubadour tradition of poetic composition for initiated readers. Ronald Bush formulates the central problematic of Pound’s translation as: “a medieval synthesis of two apparently disparate philosophical systems— Aristotle’s rigorous defĳinition of substance, matter, and form, in which memory plays a key role in the soul’s acquisition of enduring and impersonal forms of knowledge, and the Neoplatonists’ understanding of the emanation and return of divine intelligence (nous), in which memory helps the soul re-ascend to its divine home.”10 The poem telescopes an entire history of reception of and commentary on Aristotle’s physical theories, especially the Averroist perspectives on De Anima that precipitated book-bannings and condemnations in thirteenth-century Paris. The poem also engages Neoplatonic notions of emanations, partly stemming from Avicenna and Averroes, but equally suggesting a preliminary link with Eriugena via the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius. Rhetorically, the canzone is a response to a question concerning the nature of amor: what is love, and how can its truth be known to human agents? This

9 Ezra Pound, “Cavalcanti,” in Make It New (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 360. 10 Ronald Bush, “La fĳilosofĳica famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the ‘Form’ of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” Textual Practice 24.4 (2010): 670–671. Ezra Pound’s Eriugena 115 disarmingly simple premise combines with Pound’s careful internal rhymes and alliteration to produce a serene poetic surface in the fĳirst stanza that belies the intensity of its philosophical vocabulary: “reason,” “afffect,” “knowers,” “natural demonstration,” “proof,” “power,” “being,” and so on.

A lady asks me I speak in season She seeks reason for an afffect, wild often That is so proud he hath Love for a name Who denys it can hear the truth now Wherefore I speak to the present knowers Having no hope that low-hearted Can bring sight to such reason Be there not natural demonstration I have no will to try proof-bringing Or say where it hath birth What is its virtu and power Its being and every moving Or delight whereby ‘tis called “to love” Or if man can show it to sight.11

This vocabulary indicates a complex philosophical discourse at work in the poem, absorbing a range of responses to Aristotle’s admittedly vague prescrip- tions in De Anima on the active intellect (νοῦς ποιητικός) and potential intellect (νοῦς δυνάμει): the human capacity for thought, and the source of that power. The Arabic commentators provided a range of views on the matter, but generally concurred with the Celestial Hierarchy in seeing the active intellect as an emanation from the supreme being, which inspires thought in the possible intellect in the human subject by way of “conjunction.”12 As images emanating from the active intellect “graze” the individual possible intellect, memory is activated, and the subject is made aware of the divine by way of sensory experience: the locus of amor, “Where memory liveth.”13 Pound’s translation of Cavalcanti’s poem adumbrates this process, where a sequence of light

11 Ezra Pound, Canto XXXVI, in The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1996), p. 177, ll.1–15. Citations hereafter are taken from this edition, and will follow the canto/ page formula: thus (XXXVI/177). 12 Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4. 13 Pound, The Cantos, XXXVI/177. 116 Byron

imagery—“a diafan from light on shade,” “shadow cometh of Mars,” “Decendeth not by quality but shineth out”—represents the way amor embodies a thread from earthly experience to the divine realm. The emphasis on “natural demonstration” and reason by way of experience mitigates any temptation to fĳigure amor as abstract or purely transcendent. Love installs itself in the human subject just as light rouses the potential for colour in objects: “Being divided, set out from colour,/ Disjunct in mid darkness/ Grazeth the light.” The register and ingrained philosophical impetus of the poem lends it an hermetic allure, intended for the “knowers” to whom the words register like light, or the way love grazes the possible intellect. Pound bridges his translation of “Donna mi prega” and consideration of Eriugena’s potential heresy by reference to the Thrones of the Celestial Hierarchy (and the emanations described in the Arabic commentaries). This line is translated—but inserted in the “voice” of quotation—from Dante’s Paradiso, “Sù sono specchi, voi dicete Troni,/ onde refulge a noi Dio giudicante”:14

“Called thrones, balascio or topaze” Eriugena was not understood in his time “which explains, perhaps, the delay in condemning him” And they went looking for Manicheans And found, so far as I can make out, no Manicheans So they dug for, and damned Scotus Eriugena “Authority comes from right reason, never the other way on” Hence the delay in condemning him Aquinas head down in a vacuum, Aristotle which way in a vacuum?15

Pound draws an association between the hermetic vocabulary and contemplative truth of Cavalcanti’s poem and the unjust besmirching of Eriugena’s reputation following his death. Critical attention this passage centres upon the question of exhumation:16 Pound mentions it again in later cantos: “and they

14 “Above there are mirrors, you call them/ Thrones, and from them God’s judging shines to us” (Canto IX, ll. 61–62), quoted in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, ed., intro. and trans. Robert M. Durling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 190–191. 15 Pound, The Cantos, XXXVI/179. 16 See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1975), 451; Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 203–223; Peter Ezra Pound’s Eriugena 117 dug him up out of sepulture”;17 “so they dug up his bones in the time of De Montfort.”18 Scholars agree that this fĳirst mention—“dug for, and damned Scotus Eriugena”—is meant metaphorically, but that the later passages indeed refer to bodily exhumation, albeit erroneously. Eriugena sufffered no such indignity, and it seems that Pound conflates Eriugena with Amalric of Bene, a scholar at the University of Paris in the early thirteenth century who was indeed exhumed during the Aristotelian controversy of 1210. The Council of Paris decreed that copies of Eruigena’s Periphyseon were to be burned along with Aristotle’s texts, another factor, perhaps, in Pound’s conflation of the two fĳigures. The mention of Aquinas and Aristotle toward the end of this verse paragraph in Canto XXXVI might seem to imply a connection with Amalric: at the very least, it installs Pound’s conception of Eriugena as a counterweight to the straitened scholastic logic of Aquinas, as one who saw reason as the basis for authority, rather than deferring to the Church Fathers and institutional power. Pound was reading deeply in medieval Islamic philosophy at the time he composed Eleven New Cantos, so it is not surprising that diaphanous light imagery associated with Neoplatonism should appear at this point in his poem, and further, that direct associations should be drawn with Cavalcanti’s canzone. Pound was also reading Robert Grosseteste, whose treatise De Luce et de Icohatione Formarum was an enormously influential cosmogony in the early thirteenth century, and from whose works Pound was exposed to the great Islamic philosophical tradition. That Pound cites Eriugena in the canto, instead of Avicenna, Averroes, Alfarabi or Grosseteste is telling: at the time Pound had only read Eriugena second-hand in Italian high school philosophy textbooks, and was not to consult the relevant volume (122) of Migne’s Patrologia Latina until several years later in 1939–40. The direct quotation from Eriugena in Canto XXXVI (“Authority comes from right reason/ never the other way on”) is Pound’s translation from Francesco Fiorentino’s Manuale di Storia della Filosofĳia,19 and it became a formula he repeated elsewhere in his

Makin, “Ezra Pound and Scotus Erigena,” Comparative Literary Studies 10 (1973): 60–83; Walter B. Michaels, “Pound and Erigena,” Paideuma 1.1 (1972): 37–54; and A. David Moody, “‘They Dug Him Up out of Sepulture’: Pound, Erigena, and Fiorentino,” Paideuma 25.1–2 (1996): 241–247. 17 Pound, The Cantos, LXXIV/449. 18 Pound, The Cantos, LXXXIII/548. 19 “Auctoritas ex vera ratione processi ratio vero nequaquam ex auctoritate,” in Francesco Fiorentino, Manuale di Storia della Filosofĳia ad uso dei licei, diviso in tre parte (Napoli: Domenico Morano, 1879), 217. 118 Byron prose.20 Given the intensifying political context of his epic poem—American Revolutionary history and Italian Fascism in the shadow of modern warfare and its economic underpinnings—Pound saw Eriugena as an appropriately sacrifĳicial fĳigure in formulating a radically bold but equally misunderstood Neoplatonist system of thought. Eriugena functions as a kind of synecdoche for the so–called “conspiracy of intelligence” beyond orthodox intellectual networks. Pound’s admiration was magnifĳied by virtue of Eriugena having done this vox sola (or even vox clamantis in deserto), without a structured network such as the School of Chartres for William of Conches and John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, or Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Academy in Quattrocento Florence.

Auctoritas in Canto LXXIV

Following two decads of cantos surveying Chinese dynastic history (LII–LXI) and the life of John Adams (LXII–LXXI), and a brief foray into Fascist themes in two Italian cantos (LXXII–LXXIII), Pound turns again to Eriugena in the Pisan Cantos. The conditions in which Pound wrote the Pisan Cantos are perhaps the most infamous in all of twentieth century poetry in English. Following his sustained wartime broadcasts on Italian radio,21 Pound was placed under arrest in Genoa in May 1945 by the Allied Forces, and was taken to the us Army Detention Training Center outside of Pisa and incarcerated in a steel cage, until a physical breakdown had him transferred to the camp infĳirmary. He had begun work on new cantos in Italian before his arrest, but his time in the dtc saw him compose what became the Pisan Cantos. He did so without the ben- efĳit of materials beyond his copy of James Legge’s edition of the Four Books of Confucius, a basic Chinese dictionary, a us Army issue Bible and M.E. Speare’s Pocket Book of Verse, which he found against all odds in the camp latrine.22 Pound faced an end of days in more than one sense: his belief in the Fascist order has crumbled along with Mussolini’s government; and he faced the very

20 See “Ecclesiastical History,” in Selected Prose 1909–1965, 61; and Guide to Kulchur (London: Faber, 1938), 74, 168, and 333. 21 For a recent, groundbreaking reappraisal of the extent of Pound’s wartime radio broadcasts, see Matthew Feldman, “The ‘Pound Case’ in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview,” Journal of Modern Literature 35.2 (2012): 83–97. 22 See Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Delta, 1988), 667; and Ronald Bush, “Late Cantos LXXII–CXVII,” in Ira B. Nadel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 114–115. Ezra Pound’s Eriugena 119 real prospect of his own mortality, having being indicted by grand jury for the capital offfence of treason. His poetic defence of the “conspiracy of intelligence” was conducted in straitened circumstances, and so it is not surprising that he should turn to models of transcendence and eschatology, including Eriugena and particularly the Periphyseon. It is fĳitting that light should be employed as a major philosophical and poetic device in these cantos. Light offfers transcendent certainty, writing in the spirit whilst the hand and the typewriter may only offfer fragile temporal missives. Eriugena’s “authority comes from right reason” is strategically important for Pound in writing the Pisan Cantos. He draws on this formula repeatedly as an emblem of Eriugena’s system of thought, and adapts it as an eschatological device behind which we fĳind thePeriphyseon and its governing concept of redi- tus or return of creation to the godhead. Pound repeatedly deploys another emblem from Eriugena in the Pisan Cantos: “onmia quae sunt lumina sunt”: “All things that are are lights.”23 This too functions as a kind of virtual archive, a kind of shorthand encoding of texts to which Pound did not have access and to which he might refer with precarious philological precision. Light can exist without attribute, as Eriugena states in his translation of Pseudo-Dionysius: “godlike minds, angelically entering (according to their powers) unto such states of union and being deifĳied and united, through the ceasing of their natural activities, unto the Light Which surpasseth Deity, can fĳind no more fĳitting method to celebrate its praises than to deny it every manner of Attribute.”24 Pound’s isolation and estrangement in the Pisan dtc has him paraphrase notions of authority from memory. The Pisan Cantos locates authority in Neoplatonic light rather than in the textbooks of the Church Fathers or of literary history. Pound adumbrates his “conspiracy of the intelligence” by accumulating networks of reference, linking Eriugena and Neoplatonism with his abiding interest in Confucian thought. The fĳirst reference to Eriugena as a light philosopher in Canto LXXIV is glossed by an ideogram referring directly to Confucian doctrine—the fĳirst publication of the Pisan Cantos had the Ming2 character but this was changed to Hsien4 in the 1958 New Directions edition and the 1975 Faber edition.25 The ideogram is framed by the phrases “the silk worms

23 Pound, The Cantos, LXXIV/449. 24 C.E. Rolt, trans., Dionysius the Areopagite on the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, ed. W.J. Sparrow-Simpson (London: spck, 1920), 60, quoted in Michaels, “Pound and Erigena,” 47. 25 Ming2 [Mathews number 4534] is usually translated to mean “light” or “brightness.” Pound defĳines it as: “the sun and moon, the total light process, the radiation, reception 120 Byron early/ in tensile,” and itself is a gloss to the text which follows: “in the light of light is the virtù/ ‘sunt lumina’ said Erigena Scotus/ as of Shun on Mt Taishan.”26 On the same page is Eriugena’s signature phrase for his light philosophy in both Latin and English translation:

Light tensile immaculata the sun’s cord unspotted “sunt lumina” said the Oirishman to King Carolus, “omnia, all things that are are lights” and they dug him up out of sepulture soi disantly looking for Manichaeans. Les Albigeois, a problem of history27

Pound’s phrasing of Eriugena derives from his 1939 notes on the Periphyseon, whilst the “light tensile immaculata” refers to the Confucian text, The Unwobbling Pivot (better known as The Doctrine of the Mean), on which Pound was working during his detention in Pisa. The passage presents the light philosophy and the “digging up” of Eriugena (actually the burning of his texts) as brushstrokes within an ideogram of wrongful accusation by Church hierarchy and blindness to metaphysical insight. Eriugena is mentioned again in Canto LXXXIII, which opens with an extended set of images of water, fĳire and light. Pound draws on the Neoplatonism of Gemistus Plethon, where Neptune is the prime being from which all else derives: “ὔδωρ/ hudor et Pax/ Gemisto stemmed all from Neptune/ hence the Rimini bas reliefs.”28 Plethon was instrumental in the reintroduction of Platonic thought into Western Europe in the fĳifteenth century, attending the Council of Florence in 1438–39 and prompting Cosimo de’ Medici to open the Platonic Academy in that city. The transmission of ideas from East to West is signifĳied in the changing manifestation on the

and reflection of light; hence the intelligence. Bright, brightness, shining. Refer to Scotus Erigena, Grosseteste and the notes on light in my [essay of 1934] Cavalcanti.” See Confucius, The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects, translation and commentary Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1951), 20. Hsien4 [M2692] is translated as “manifest” or “clear” and represents a more general notion of illumination. For further discussion see Mark Byron, “‘This Thing That Has a Code + Not a Core’: The Texts of Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” in Hélène Aji (ed.), Ezra Pound and Referentiality (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003), 225–238. 26 Pound, The Cantos, LXXIV/449. 27 Pound, The Cantos, LXXIV/449. 28 Pound, The Cantos, LXXXIII/548. Ezra Pound’s Eriugena 121 page: the fĳirst word, in Greek, is swiftly transliterated into Roman script and capitalised for emphasis; the word is then combined with the Latin word for peace before the canto changes again into English and French. Fire comes to replace light as the prime source—“lux enim/ ignis est accidens”—and this is combined with Erigena’s “Hilaritas…the virtue hilaritas.”29 The shift from light philosophy to prime matter—fĳire, light, water—is signifĳicant for the development of Pound’s principle of intelligence. But it is equally signifĳicant that Eriugena arises within this evolved arrangement: his installation at crucial points in the opening and closing cantos of The Pisan Cantos signifĳies the degree to which his thought, especially that of eschatological redemption, motivates and transcends Pound’s acutely imperilled poetic composition. Eriugena functions as a long-term reference point for Pound as a gesture towards paradise. In Canto XXXVI Eriugena’s thought and legacy functions as a European conduit of late-classical Neoplatonism, as part of a suppressed tradition that runs counter to the dominant Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas, and that illuminates the hermetic nature of amor implied in Cavalcanti’s poem, “Donna mi prega.” Eriugena then becomes an emblem of the writing of exile and isolation in the Pisan Cantos: a holder of the flame of learning during the Carolingian epoch, and a visionary whose eschatology raises the acute threats to Pound’s own being into the register of epic statement. Medieval light philosophy is not, in the end, merely a unifying device for Pound’s eclectic sources and interests. Pound’s recourse to light and the authority of reason in his intellectual genealogy provides him with more than just simple consolation. It unites the major threads of his thinking into a singular “ideogram”: Eriugena’s Neoplatonic eschatology, the divine mystery of amor, the august poetic heritage of Guido Cavalcanti and Dante, Confucian ethics and metaphysics, and what Pound saw as the civilizing forces of American Revolutionary thought and Mussolini’s Fascism. He was grievously wrong about at least some of this: perhaps making the Pisan Cantos a true consolation, in the Boethian sense, as Pound awaited his temporal fate in the ruins of what he calls, in the opening line of the Pisan Cantos, “the enormous tragedy of the dream.”30

Bibliography

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy, Paradiso. Edited and translated with an introduction by Robert M. Durling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

29 Pound, The Cantos, LXXXIII/548. 30 Pound, The Cantos, LXXIV/445. 122 Byron

Bush, Ronald. “Late Cantos LXXII–CXVII,” in Ira B. Nadel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, 109–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ——. “La fĳilosofĳica famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the ‘Form’ of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” Textual Practice 24.4 (2010): 669–705. Byron, Mark. “‘This Thing that has a Code + Not a Core’: The Texts of Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” in Hélène Aji (ed.), Ezra Pound and Referentiality, 225–238. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003. Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. New York: Delta, 1988. Davidson, Herbert A. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Dionysius the Areopagite. The Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. Translated by C.E. Rolt and Edited by W.J. Sparrow-Simpson. London: spck, 1920. Eriugenae, Johannis Scotti. Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae), Book 1. Edited with an introduction by I.P. Sheldon-Williams. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1968. Feldman, Matthew. “The ‘Pound Case’ in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview.” Journal of Modern Literature 35.2 (2012): 83–97. Fiorentino, Francesco. Manuale di Storia della Filosofĳia ad uso dei licei, diviso in tre parte. Napoli: Domenico Morano, 1879. Hanno. Periplus. Translated by Wilfred A Schofff. Philadelphia: Commercial Museum, 1912. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. London: Faber, 1975 [1972]. Liebregts, Peter. Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Makin, Peter. “Ezra Pound and Scotus Erigena,” Comparative Literary Studies 10 (1973): 60–83. Michaels, Walter B. “Pound and Erigena.” Paideuma 1.1 (1972): 37–54. Moody, A. David. “‘They Dug Him Up Out of Sepulture’: Pound, Erigena, and Fiorentino.” Paideuma 25.1–2 (1996): 241–247. Pedersen, Olaf. The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pound, Ezra. Make It New. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. ——. Guide to Kulchur. London: Faber, 1938. ——. The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. Edited by D.D. Paige. London: Faber and Faber, 1950. ——. Translation and commentary. Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects. New York: New Directions, 1951. ——. Selected Prose 1909–1965. Edited with an introduction by William Cookson. London: Faber, 1973. ——. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1996. chapter 7 Péguy’s Apocalypse

Brian Sudlow

When Lieutenant Charles Péguy, the French Catholic polemicist and poet, marched away to war in August 1914, he can hardly have realised he was entering an Apocalyptic phase of his own life and a war that many would see as Apocalyptic. There is no evidence of prophetic foresight in Péguy, nor of his knowing that death would soon strike. Although Péguy might have received the sacraments at the front—we only know for certain that he attended Mass on 15th August1—this was surely because for him, as for all frontline troops, death was a real and immediate possibility. Moreover, if he had Apocalyptic visions while on the frontline, we will never know what they were. His war journal disappeared along with a wagonload full of French military luggage before his corpse was even cold. The fact that the Apocalypse fĳirst evokes proto-gothic visions of horned beasts, women crowned with stars, and celestial cities might lead us still more to think that there is little Apocalyptic in Péguy’s imaginary, in spite of his pen- chant for medievalism. Nonetheless, could the concept of Apocalyptic express other meanings, beyond its etymological sense of revelatory or its popular, imaginative connotations? In answering our question, we should bear in mind that of all the books of the Bible the Book of the Apocalypse, with its densely mystical text and eschatological predictions, especially urges the reader to avoid the traps set by inflexibly univocal defĳinitions. More to the point, if we undertake a reading of this book in the context of other New Testament texts— most notably, the principal Apocalyptic gospel passages of Matthew 24–45 and Mark 13—there emerge other Apocalyptic paradigms which add further depth to our understanding of what Apocalyptic can mean. While, therefore, the most startling dimensions of the Book of the Apocalypse fĳind no tangible echo in Péguy’s writings, there is no need to conclude that his work is not in some ways Apocalyptic. These other Apocalyptic paradigms can be simply enunciated. First, the Apocalypse evokes the prospect of dissolution or destruction. In Mark 13, for example, the overlapping of prophecies about the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem and the end of the world suggests strongly that Apocalyptic dissolution sits somewhere between crisis, understood as a menacing collapse, and

1 Robert Burac, Charles Péguy: la révolution et la grâce (Paris: Lafffont, 1994), 306.

κρίση in its Greek sense of judgment. The Book of the Apocalypse itself captures such themes in the image of the seven bowls of wrath that are poured out in Chapter 16, and in the judgment of Babylon which is proclaimed by an angel in Chapter 18. At the climax of history, the Apocalypse calls an end to the ceaseless dialectic of interpretations and ideologies and proposes defĳinitive judgment on all. Second, and as a result of crisis and judgment, Apocalypse also evokes the irrevocable selection of human beings in the processes of salvation or damnation. This sifting results not merely from the ethical distinction between good and evil, but from a belief in the immeasurable consequences that such a distinction has for individual destiny. In this regard, the vision of the Last Judgment in Matthew 24 and 25 foregrounds the sorting of the just and the wicked—the separation of the sheep from the goats—which appears in Chapter 20 of the Book of the Apocalypse. Having proposed judgment, the Apocalypse designates still further the fĳinal lines of the grand human narrative. In the light of these other Apocalyptic paradigms—of dissolution, judgment and selection—we may wonder to what extent Charles Péguy, well before encountering death in the Apocalyptic conflict of World War One, had already lived out the Apocalypse imaginatively or rhetorically. In other words, could his Apocalyptic experience of armed combat in the conflagration of the First World War difffer only in mode from the polemical conflicts, heights of creativity and existential challenges he witnessed in his writing career, especially when these are seen through the twofold Apocalyptic model set out above? In seeking to elaborate an answer to such a question, this chapter will engage with a range of writings from Péguy’s poetic and polemical oeuvre, taken from before and after his conversion to Catholicism in or shortly before 1908.2 Contrary to the approach adopted by many Péguy scholars, most recently Laurent-Marie Pocquet du Haut-Jussé and Nicolas Faguer, this chapter refuses to accept that Péguy’s thought represents some integrated and entirely coherent system;3 like his endlessly hypnotic and iterative prose, it evolves, and in spite of his claims to the contrary, is sometimes contradictory. Such was indeed

2 Majorie Villiers, Charles Péguy: A Study in Integrity (London: Collins, 1965). The exact date is uncertain but Péguy confessed to his friend Joseph Lotte in autumn 1908 that he had returned to Catholicism. 3 Laurent-Marie Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, Charles Péguy et la modernité: essai d’interprétation théologique d’une oeuvre littéraire (Perpignan: Artège, 2010) and Nicholas Faguer, “Un constant approfondissement du cœur.” L’unité de l’œuvre de Péguy selon Hans Urs von Balthasar (PhD thesis, Paris-IV La Sorbonne, 2012). Péguy’s Apocalypse 125 the view of his friend and collaborator Romain Rolland according to whom Péguy was “a world in movement […] a multiplicity who did not fear to show himself contradictory […] who took delight in confusing his friends.”4 Our aim here is not to attempt to demonstrate the importance of the Apocalypse to Péguy’s creativity. Rather, it is to explore the extent to which these secondary Apocalyptic paradigms help illuminate Péguy’s work, foreshadowing the subsequent Apocalypse in which he met his untimely death, aged 41, during a fĳire fĳight in a beetroot fĳield near Villeroy on 5 September 1914, the eve of the Battle of the Marne.5

Dissolution, Crisis and Judgment

In spite of being frequently associated with the politics of the French extreme right, the mature Péguy, after his return to Christianity, paradoxically maintained his commitment to the idea of the social revolution.6 In his magnifĳicent treatise, La Religion de Péguy, Pie Duployé afffĳirms a widely held opinion in stating that Péguy saw Christianity as one of grand revolutionary movements of humanity.7 Nevertheless, the mature Péguy can hardly be said to have shared the anthropology of Enlightened revolutionary movements. Rather, in his late extended poem Eve (1913), the work which Péguy regarded as his poetic masterpiece, we are confronted instead with a view of humanity constantly in a process of decadence and decline. The poem dramatizes an address of Christ the Saviour to Eve, mother of the fallen human race. The tone is tender but the vision of humanity is largely dark, outlining the condition of Eve after the fall of original sin, especially as reflected in a natural world no longer submissive to human designs: “You know nothing now but a harsh fate / You no longer know the earth at peace / You know nothing now but a hidden love / And an earth uncrowned.”8 Péguy’s Eve gives voice to his conviction that even attempts at order are frequently beset by self-inflicted wounds: “Nothing which submits is ever wholly submissive / But

4 Romain Rolland, Péguy (Paris: Albin Michel, 1944) 10. 5 Burac, Charles Péguy, 311. 6 Blame is laid at the door of Bernard-Henri Lévy for turning Péguy into a proto-fascist villain in his Idéologie française (Paris: Grasset, 1981) but Marcel Péguy unwittingly did the spade work with Le Destin de Charles Péguy (Paris: Perrin, 1941). 7 Pie Duployé, La Religion de Péguy (Paris: Edition Kincksieck, 1964), 567–571. 8 Charles Péguy, Eve (1913), in Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Marcel Péguy (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 933–1174 (944). All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 126 Sudlow that which revolts is truly in revolt…And life and death and the stubble of the fĳields and the Palace of the Louvre / Nothing rises up and everything comes crashing down.”9 Perhaps one reason why Péguy never wholly abandoned the revolutionary tradition is that he was far too sceptical, as the passage cited implies, about the exigencies of order on the lips of many of his Catholic or reactionary contemporaries.10 This general dissolution of humanity is concretised for Péguy in the more particular political, social and intellectual crises of the period. It would be easy enough to dismiss such negativity as symptomatic of the French wing of the anti-Enlightenment tradition, then in its pomp under the influence of luminaries such as nationalist Maurice Barrès, anti-Semitic polemicist Edouard Drumont or the neo-royalist Charles Maurras.11 Indeed, Péguy’s denunciation of his own age as “le monde moderne [the modern world]” could lend cre- dence to such a hypothesis since it seems to correlate with the denunciations of modernity voiced by so many right-wing authors of the period.12 Yet, Péguy’s critique of his contemporaries, even when directed fully at le monde moderne, unceasingly evokes the Revolution and the coordinates of the Left. As Péguy’s fĳinest biographer Robert Burac observes, Péguy’s positions should not be confused with those of Maurras or Maurice Barrès in whom Zeev Sternhell has seen a kind of proto-fascism.13 Furthermore, such an observation is corrobo- rated by the particular political and religious crises that Péguy observed around him, as we will now see. First, Péguy sees party and country in the throes of a grave crisis. In the early days of his political activism, Péguy aligned himself with the socialist cause, founding his review Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine in 1900, as part of the campaign for the creation of a socialist society.14 For Péguy, the great symbolic cause of this movement was the innocence of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in favour of which Péguy protested alongside the likes of École Normale Supérieure librarian Lucien Herr, socialist politician Jean Jaurrès and journalist Bernard Lazare.15

9 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques 1032. 10 Richard Grifffĳiths,The Reactionary Revolution: the Catholic Revival in French Literature 1870–1914 (London: Constable, 1966), 317. 11 Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2010). 12 Grifffĳiths,The Reactionary Revolution, 225. 13 Burac, Charles Péguy, 177. See Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire 1885–1914 (Paris: Folio, 1998). 14 Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, Charles Péguy et la modernité, 113. 15 See Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Afffair that Divided France (London: Allen Lane, 2010). Péguy’s Apocalypse 127

Yet the expedience with which the socialists wished to assume a strict (and, for Péguy, bourgeois) party discipline, fĳirst at the Socialist Congress of 1899, and later in accepting Captain Dreyfus’s pardon in 1900, was symptomatic of a process by which the liberating mystique of Dreyfusardism (which feverishly professed Dreyfus’s innocence) had descended into a slavish politique of pragmatism (when Dreyfus was pardoned rather than exonerated for his alleged crime).16 This baseness in the party—the decline from mystique to politique— was for Péguy only the reflection of a more widespread decline to be found in the French Republic which, from the 1880s onward, was in the process of separating itself from its great traditions, both the Ancien Régime’s and the Revolution’s. Most Catholic authors of this period saw 1789 as the year of the great rupture in French history.17 Péguy paradoxically placed the rupture in 1881, as the fĳirst secularising legislation of the Third Republic began to undermine what Péguy perceived to be the conjoined republican and Christian traditions of France. Reflecting on the Dreyfus Afffair in 1910, ten years after Dreyfus’s pardon and four years after his full exoneration, Péguy would write: “The movement to derepublicanise France is deep down the same movement as that which leads to its dechristianisation.”18 By 1910, this disintegration of his country could only appear to Péguy as a new critical phase in humanity’s general tendency to intellectual and moral entropy. It is important to note that, for Péguy, the dissolution of humanity and the crises in party and country had their parallels in his new-found religion. Péguy was naturally an enemy of theological modernism after his conversion, though his accusations of modernism against others were not always well founded. He was stung into an analysis of the issue by a review of his play Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1910) in which François Le Grix of La Revue hebdomadaire had questioned from a historical perspective the theological discourses which Péguy had placed in the mouth of the play’s principal characters. In his response to this argument, Péguy—who wrongly believed the reviewer’s name to be a pseudonym of Fernand Laudet, La Revue hebdomadaire’s chief editor19—denounced his critic’s methodology as theologically modernist, and condemned the modernists for disregarding the saving mysteries of the

16 Charles Péguy, Notre Jeunesse (1909), in Oeuvres en prose complètes Volume 3, ed. Robert Burac (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 5–159. 17 Brian Sudlow, Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England 1880–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 126. 18 Charles Péguy, Oeuvres en prose complètes vol. 3, 10. 19 In the aggrieved Laudet’s bitterly ironic response to Péguy, he claims Péguy had turned the very real Le Grix into a myth, thereby implicitly accusing Péguy of the modernism which he sought to denounce (La Revue hedomadaire 32: 8 (21 August 1911), 271–280). 128 Sudlow

Saviour’s life, the role of the saints and the value of poverty and family.20 As wildly inaccurate as he was in accusing Fernand Laudet of such sins, for Péguy is was patently clear that the theological modernists shared in the intellectual methods that he denounced elsewhere in secular luminaries such as Ernest Renan and Auguste Comte. In a strange parallelism, the crisis abroad in party and country had thoroughly taken root in the Church. Nevertheless, Péguy did not stop there in criticising the Catholic constituency. Just as there was a theological modernism of the mind, there was also a modernism of the heart by which those whose religious orthodoxy was otherwise impeccable seemed to Péguy to be covert militants of le monde moderne. Péguy’s language against this constituency borrows much from the tradition of anticlerical republicanism. Yet it is the basis of this “Catholic anticlericalism” which is important. Péguy denounced many of the clergy precisely for their infĳidelity to the Church and for their immersion in the habits and mores of the increasingly unchristian atmosphere of the Belle Epoque. In other words, Péguy lambasted the clergy not for what they were, but for their failure to live up to who they were supposed to be. It is not without reason that the strongest of Péguy’s jeremiads about this crisis among the Catholic clergy remained unpublished in his lifetime.21 The more Péguy saw himself surrounded by dissolution and crisis, the more he seemed resolved to arrive at some defĳinitive judgment on the matter: the moment of an Apocalyptic κρίση. In this light, it is clear why various critics have referred to Péguy as a kind of prophet.22 That his work often assumes the form of a judgment on le monde moderne, or on its protagonists, is realised perhaps most clearly in a series of articles for Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine published in 1906 and 1907. If the Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle is Péguy’s judgment against the Catholic clergy, the articles whose titles all begin De la situation faite à…are Péguy’s judgment on the secular clerisy, now the intellectual and political leaders of the Third Republic. As Claire Daudin has observed, the essence of these Situations concerns Péguy’s judgment on the positivist historical method and the impact that it was having on all the social sciences during the Belle Epoque.23 For Péguy, echoing a sentiment that was

20 Péguy, Un nouveau théologien, M. Fernard Laudet (1911) in Oeuvres en prose complètes vol. 3, 392–591. 21 Péguy, Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle (1912) in Oeuvres en prose complètes vol. 3, 596–783. 22 André Rousseaux, Le Prophète Péguy (Paris: Editions de la Baconnière, 1942). See also Duployé, La Religion de Péguy, 521–599. 23 Claire Daudin, De la situation faite à l’écrivain dans le monde moderne (PhD thesis, Paris-X Nanterre, 1995), 45. Péguy’s Apocalypse 129 increasingly important during the period, such intellectual materialism was sterile, an impediment to understanding reality, rather than an authentic method leading to true knowledge.24 This judgment on the intellectual crisis fused with his wider views on late nineteenth-century France, as is attested across his pre- and post-conversion writings. Early on, he came to believe that modern France had become the slave of efffĳiciency and was now heavily burdened by sclerotic systematisa- tion.25 This modern France was in fact a new invention, difffering more from pre-1880s France, than the France of 1789 difffered from the France of the thirteenth century. Later in his writings, the mature Péguy intensifĳied the Apocalyptic undercurrent in his judgment on the modern world, most tangibly in the L’Argent suite (1913), which pits it against the Christianity Péguy had come to embrace:

The quarrel of saints and heroes against [the protagonists of the modern world] is the same quarrel…Their system is a constant process of disag- gregation. They always work for the same end which is that of diminu- tion. All that humanity loses is a gain for them.26

As we will see below, in this clash between the saints and the modernists (of the mind as of the heart) we can already detect the seeds of Péguy’s growing conviction about the Apocalyptic possibility of separating the just from the rest. From crisis to judgment, and thence to separation of the wicked, there is a logical progression. Péguy’s writings on le monde moderne are of continuing interest to criticism, especially regarding how modernité is conceptualised.27 Placing them in an Apocalyptic light, however, allows us to see in them an expression of Péguy’s need not only to come to a judgment about the crises of which he was the witness, but also to make sense of the extent of the breakdown that he perceived. In this regard, Péguy’s work seems overshadowed not by extraordinary Apocalyptic signs and portents, but by the inexorable, internal dynamics of crisis and judgment that drive the Apocalypse forward.

24 On the reaction to intellectual materialism in the Belle Epoque, see H. Stuart Hughes, Society and Consciousness (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2002). 25 Charles Péguy, Notre Patrie (1905) in Oeuvres en prose complètes Volume 2, ed. Robert Burac (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 10–61 (56). 26 Péguy, Oeuvres en prose complètes vol. 3, 879–880. 27 See Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, Charles Péguy et la modernité. 130 Sudlow

Damnation and Salvation

The second of the Apocalyptic paradigms which illuminates Péguy’s work is the separation of the just and wicked and the destinies of heaven and hell. Several leading critics have tried to come to terms with the implications of Péguy’s writings on heaven and hell, most notably Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Françoise Gerbod.28 Moreover, Von Balthasar’s reading of Péguy has acquired enduring importance to Péguy scholarship, both for its portrayal of his views on hell and for its conviction concerning the internal coherence of Péguy’s oeuvre.29 Still, his methodological weakness is arguably his determination to take at face value Péguy’s claim—expressed in Un nouveau théolo- gien, M. Fernand Laudet—that in returning to the Church he was foreswearing none of his past. On the contrary, if we consider the doctrine of heaven, there seem to be clear and undeniable diffferences between Péguy’s pre- and post-conversion views. In his view of hell, on the other hand, there is a varied trajectory, passing from unbelief to grappling with the consequences of hell as a Christian doctrine, and then, fĳinally, as we will argue here, to some acceptance of a more classical theology of the separation of the wicked from the just. Unquestionably, the early Péguy rejected the Christian ideas of both heaven and of hell. In his Marcel: premier dialogue de la cité harmonieuse, fĳirst published in 1898, Péguy draws the picture of an ideal socialist society which, in its all-encompassing perfections, seems to emulate the new heaven and the new earth described in Chapter 21 of The Book of the Apocalypse. The cité harmonieuse, however, specifĳically rejects the kind of judgment which requires the defĳinitive sifting of humanity:

For its citizens the harmonious city embraces all living things which are souls, all living beings, since it is not harmonious, nor is it fĳitting that some souls should be outsiders, since it is not fĳitting that there should be living beings who are outsiders. Thus all men…of all lands…of all peoples, all men of all races…all men of all beliefs, of all religions, of all

28 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Péguy,” The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol III: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, trans. Andrew Louth et al., ed. John Riches (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1986), 400–517. François Gerbod, “Enfer, grâce, salut chez Péguy,” Cahiers de l’Herne: Charles Péguy, ed. Jean Bastaire (Paris: Herne, 1977), 268–276. 29 Nicholas Faguer, “Un constant approfondissement du cœur.” L’unité de l’œuvre de Péguy selon Hans Ursvon Balthasar (PhD thesis, Paris-IV La Sorbonne, 2012). Péguy’s Apocalypse 131

philosophies…have become citizens of the harmonious city since it is not fĳitting that there should be men who are outsiders.30

If there is any election to the cité harmonieuse, it is simply by virtue of human nature, every individual being bound to every other through solidarity, and not raised up through grace or predestination. In this respect, Péguy’s harmonious city takes its place in the genealogy of nineteenth-century socialist utopias, though it is most clearly marked by the influence of Jean Jaurès which was to begin to wane soon after this work was fĳinished.31 Nonetheless, in opposing the Christian view of heaven, this text curiously invests the citizens of the cité harmonieuse with some of the qualities of the saints in glory. These citizens know no unruly passions, they live in perpetual peace, and their happiness has come about not through the annihilation of their individuality but through its harmonisation with the net sum of all other individualities. Most importantly, they know no rivalry and feel no jealousy. The paradox here is not just that Péguy thus seeks to suppress the dialectic of class war which marks so many other socialist utopias. Rather, the eschewal of emulation in Péguy’s cité harmonieuse is the sign that even in escaping the burdens of the Apocalyptic Last Judgment, Péguy is paying tribute to his Christian inspiration.32 If Péguy’s conversion makes a diffference to this principle of solidarity, it lies in its transformation into communion, a unity which binds not only the saints to God in heaven, but also the saints in heaven to the faithful on earth. Such a shift is patently discernible. On the one hand, Peguy’s cité harmonieuse is estranged from the cité bourgeoise. There is no need for justice tempered by mercy and he explicitly rejects charity, justice and equality as being signs of the bourgeois spirit at work. In Péguy’s understanding the city is harmonious thanks to the universal embrace of irenic and undiffferentiated solidarity (though there is a marked hostility to the bourgeois); by the same token we might call it anti-Apocalyptic. On the other hand, in the Church triumphant, imagined in Péguy’s 1910 play Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc, there is a continuation of the tasks which also preoccupy the Church sufffering in Purgatory and the Church militant on earth:

30 Charles Péguy, Marcel: premier dialogue de la cité harmonieuse, in Oeuvres en prose com- plètes Volume 1, ed. Robert Burac (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 55–117 (55–66). 31 Patrick Charlot, “Péguy contre Jaurès: l’afffaire des ‘fĳiches’ et la ‘délation aux droits de l’homme’,”Révue française d’histoire des idées politiques, 17 (2003), 73–91. 32 On Christianity as a counter-mimetic culture, see René Girard, Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Grasset, 1977). 132 Sudlow

This is not just a rule or a law. It is our natural tendency (mouvement). It is also our very love. It is communion itself. It is our proper tendency. It is the proper tendency, the natural tendency of our love. The tendency of our charity. Of our human love, our familial love, of our fĳilial love. Of our charity.33

While this transformed view of heaven is pre-Apocalyptic in nature— because it envisages the simultaneity of life in the Church militant (in time) with life in the Church triumphant and Church sufffering (in eternity)—an Apocalyptic view of heaven, rooted in classical eschatology, clearly shapes some of Péguy’s other reflections on paradise, most notably in his subsequent mystery play Le Mystère des saints innocents (1911). Most explicit allusions to The Book of the Apocalypse in Péguy’s writings refer to Christ’s spewing forth those of lukewarm or uncommitted faith in Chapter 3: 15–16. In Le Mystère des saints innocents, however, Péguy considers the role of the children slaughtered by King Herod in an attempt to assassinate the child Jesus (Matthew2: 16–18), and identifĳies them repeatedly with John’s vision of the just inThe Book of the Apocalypse, Chapter 14: 2–5. This vision of the innocents is for Péguy an anticipation of the paradise of God to whom Péguy gives voice in the play’s conclusion:

“This is my paradise,” says God. “My paradise is of the simplest kind… These children play with their palms and their martyrs’ crowns. That is what happens in my paradise.”34

We are some considerable distance here from the socialist cité harmonieuse. Péguy’s heaven incorporates election and distinction (the martyrs’ crown), and, most signifĳicantly, leaves behind the seriousness of Péguy’s socialist utopia, to replace it not with some solemn vision of celestial choirs, but with a depiction of a playful state of beatitude. Péguy’s Catholic paradise has none of the ethical strains which seem to underlie the cité harmonieuse, evoking instead a mystery which is entirely gracious (taken in its etymological sense) in nature. Our second Apocalyptic paradigm illuminates Péguy’s evolving views on hell and the separation of the wicked from the just. In Pie Duplopyé’s otherwise flawless study of Péguy’s religion, he makes the surprising claim that not a sole word in Péguy’s oeuvre is at odds with Catholic theology. Perhaps

33 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 430. 34 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 823. Péguy’s Apocalypse 133 what he means is Péguy’s post-conversion writings, though it is not clear that the proposition holds true even then. As we have already noted, the evidence in his earlier writings points elsewhere. Indeed, if there was one doctrine that the lapsed Péguy was clearly and resolutely averse to, it was the doctrine of hell. In an article written just a couple of years after the cité harmonieuse, Péguy imagines a death bed scene during which two individuals are discussing hell:

“But my friend, it is an article of faith.” “So, I will attack the Christian faith. What is most hateful and barba- rous and what we will never agree with, what has haunted the best Christians is this strange combination of life and death called damnation, this strange reinforcing of presence through absence and the crush- ing of everything by eternity. No citizen who practises simple solidarity will ever agree to that. We are in solidarity with the damned of the earth.”35

The importance of solidarity to the cité harmonieuse fĳinds its corollary here in Péguy’s refusal to accept the separation of those whose names are not written in the book of life and their fĳinal submersion in a lake of fĳire (Apocalypse 22, 13–15). For Péguy, damnation together in solidarity would be better than separation in death. Following his reconversion to Christianity, the initial shift in Péguy’s view on hell is made clear in the substantial 1910 revision of his dramatic work about Joan of Arc.36 The revised play recapitulates only the action of the fĳirst act of the earlier play wherein we listen to a dialogue between Jeanne, her friend Hauviette and Madame Gervaise, a wise nun. Both plays depict Jeanne’s deep anxiety at the thought of damnation and the damned, and even her desire to embrace damnation herself, if such a sacrifĳice could possibly rescue others from their damned fate: “And if I had to abandon my soul to the Eternal Absence to save the damned driven mad by the Eternal Absence, then let my soul enter that Eternal Absence.”37 The diffference between the two plays, at least on this topic, is how Jeanne’s anxiety is resolved. In the fĳirst play, Jeanne, while admitting that her complaint is wrong, still challenges God in a kind of promethean moment:

35 Péguy, Oeuvres en prose complètes vol. 1, 464. 36 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 23–326 and 363–525. 37 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 38 and 426. 134 Sudlow

My God, when I think there are souls who are damned…forgive me if this is blasphemy but I can no longer pray. Thinking of the damned makes my soul rebel.38

In the later play, however, we see a diffferent outcome. Gervaise recognises the immense sufffering of the damned but, she explains to Jeanne, they would not be lost if their sufffering was not lost:

Then they would sufffer like us, it would be the same sufffering as ours. Then they would be like us. They would have grace. Now, they are not like us. There is a diffference and it is infĳinite. There is, there has been judgment.39

In this moment the Mystère allows us to locate a shift in how Péguy conceives of solidarity. The problem of solidarity with those sufffering no longer applies to all human beings gathered in some abstract, universal concept of the human. Humanity is rather divided into those who sufffer in the grace of Christ and those whose suffferings are unconnected to Christ. Péguy does not arrive at this conclusion out of any complex doctrinal deliberation but rather out of a deep, intuitive engagement with what the Incarnation implies. One might resume this new vision of Péguy rhetorically: if Christ came to save, he must have come to save humanity from something! The later Jeanne d’Arc thus shows Péguy clearly embracing the possibility of Apocalyptic selection. Il y a le jugement: there is judgment. Nonetheless, this shift in Péguy’s view of Apocalyptic selection is not entirely clear cut. Von Balthasar’s reading of Péguy points to the possibility that while the mature Péguy accepted de jure the existence of hell, he did not accept de facto the actual damnation of individuals. Those who share Von Balthasar’s reading base their arguments largely on Péguy’s late mystery plays Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième virtu (1911) and Le Mystère des saints innocents (1912) which appear strongly to support a theory of universal salvation. The virtue of hope, the very theme of the former play, is contrasted constantly in the latter play with judgment, and is shown again and again to outweigh it. Both plays quote the parable of the prodigal son in which forgiveness for the prodigal son dissolves the punishment he might have deserved for wasting his inheritance. In Le Mystère des saints innocents there is a long meditation on the Patriarch Joseph who forgives his brothers for having beaten him and sold him into

38 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 43. 39 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 426. Péguy’s Apocalypse 135

slavery. While God’s role is summed up in the quality of mercy, humanity’s role resides in the virtue of hope. Christ, the sufffering saviour, is a “hope of salvation”;40 and, Péguy places these words in the mouth of God:

“It is only by my little hope that eternity will exist. And beatitude will exist. And Paradise will exist…She alone from the remains of Judgment and the ruins and debris of time will make a new eternity spring forth.”41

Without hope, Péguy’s God says, “all my creation would be but dead wood…all my creation would be but an immense cemetery.”42 In the light of these quotations, it is easy to see why Françoise Gerbod concludes that Péguy’s view of God’s love leads to hope for universal salvation, and why she, writing in the 1970s in the context of the catechetical upheavals following the Second Vatican Council, sees in Péguy an enemy of dogma and a herald of catechetical reform.43 Still, Gerbod’s position, like Von Balthasar’s, shows fundamental weaknesses. She confuses hope for universal salvation with unbelief in hell—something which Von Balthasar was too careful a theologian to assert. Rather curiously, she also claims that Péguy’s last word on this question should be seen in his Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle, even though this work, written in 1909 albeit published posthumously, was followed by many other important texts that speak of the issue. Lastly, Gerbod’s is an interpretation which would render Péguy—who had lambasted Fernand Laudet for theological modernism just months before publishing Le Mystère du porche and Le Mystère des saints innocents—not so much intellectually incoherent (a view which is perfectly plausible) but quite simply hypocritical. More importantly, Péguy’s last major poem Eve (1913) clearly contemplates the Apocalyptic Last Judgment with a sense of the coming end of humanity’s narrative and a real divergence of outcomes. The year before Péguy went to his own death, it seems he was reflecting again on the implications of the separation required by judgment. One extended passage of Eve deploys a cascade of images that are repeated and recapitulated with subtle variations, carefully drawing a picture of humanity rising from the grave and coming before God’s throne on the last day (Apocalypse 20:12).44 Péguy reflects on the equality of the dead before God’s judgment “when the king of France / Is no longer but a

40 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 682. 41 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 746. 42 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 681. 43 Gerbod, “Enfer, grace, salut,” 276 44 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 975–995. 136 Sudlow poor, miserable fĳigure.”45 When the Church’s liturgy of mercy and hope has come to an end;46 when there are no more Christmases with the arrival of the Child Saviour;47 when the tombs of every city spew forth “the horror of their sepulchral chambers”;48 then, in Péguy’s vision:

[Humanity] will advance in that solitude, As yet hardly used to walking once more, When they will go forth to a fĳinal death Or to the fĳirst day of beatitude.49

In these words and the images surrounding them, there is little of the dogmatic rebel and catechetical innovator described by Gerbod. Rather, in these few brief lines, Péguy gives us a classic Apocalyptic vision of the fĳinal separation of the just and the wicked. If there is no categorical afffĳirmation of damnation here, it cannot simply be ascribed to Péguy’s resistance to the idea or even to a hope for universal salvation. In fact, in poetic terms his sentiments approach those of the Roman liturgy which he acclaims in Le Mystère des saints innocents as the heir to the Jewish prophesies of the Old Testament and Christ’s own preaching in the New Testament.50 In Péguy’s poem Eve, as in the Dies Irae, the Roman liturgy’s own hymn about the Last Judgment, there is no glori- fĳication of damnation or revelling in the absence of certain names from the book of life. In Eve, as in the Dies Irae, there are prayers for mercy on the sinner. Just as the Dies Irae prays, “Iudicandus homo reus / Huic ergo parce Deus,” Eve expresses the hope that humanity “might not be judged as pure spirits/…not weighed on an eternal balance.”51 Even if in Eve there are none of the extraordinary images of damnation such as we fĳind in Chapter 22 of The Book of the Apocalypse or indeed in the Dies Irae itself, nonetheless, the real possibility of “the fĳinal death” is stated baldly and explicitly. If the language of the earlier Mystères focuses on God’s mercy almost exclusively, the language of Eve clearly, albeit briefly, evokes its very limits.

* * *

45 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 976. 46 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 977. 47 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 977–978. 48 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 979. 49 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 981, my emphasis. 50 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 796. 51 Péguy, Oeuvres poétiques, 1033. The Latin of the Dies Irae is literally translated: “The guilty man who is to be judged. / Spare him therefore, God.” Péguy’s Apocalypse 137

The image of Péguy that some critics prefer to draw tries all too often to simplify the reality, to systematise the evidence and to reclaim Péguy for one cause or another. In the light of the Apocalyptic paradigms, identifĳied here as dissolution, judgment and selection, a fuller picture of the intellectual dynamism and the human inconsistencies and hesitations of Péguy can be perceived. Like his hypnotic, iterative prose, Péguy never ceased to probe and inquire, to examine and to move forward, in a journey which led him from irenic indiffference to a belief in grace, and from the denial of hell to the imaginative portrayal of the Last Judgment. Whatever his claims to never having changed his stance, the evidence is there to show that Péguy set his search for God and for truth above the more self-interested goal of being consistent with himself. To some, such beliefs will no doubt appear to be as farfetched as horned beasts and celestial cities. To Péguy, perhaps, they arguably made sense of his new- found faith in what salvation implies, and of his walk with death in September 1914, as the western nations entered one more Apocalypse.

Bibliography

Burac, Robert. Charles Péguy: la révolution et la grâce. Paris: Lafffont, 1994. Charlot, Patrick. “Péguy contre Jaurès: l’afffaire des ‘fĳiches’ et la ‘délation aux droits de l’homme’,” Révue française d’histoire des idées politiques 17 (2003): 73–91. Daudin, Claire. De la situation faite à l’écrivain dans le monde moderne. PhD diss., Paris-X Nanterre, 1995. Duployé, Pie. La Religion de Péguy. Paris: Edition Kincksieck, 1964. Faguer, Nicholas. “Un constant approfondissement du cœur.” L’unité de l’œuvre de Péguy selon Hans Urs von Balthasar. PhD diss., Paris-IV La Sorbonne, 2012. Gerbod, François. “Enfer, grâce, salut chez Péguy,” in Jean Bastaire (ed.), Cahiers de l’Herne: Charles Péguy. Paris: Herne, 1977. Girard, René. Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde. Paris: Grasset, 1977. Grifffĳiths, Richard. The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature 1870–1914. London: Constable, 1966. Harris, Ruth. The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Afffair that Divided France. London: Allen Lane, 2010. Hughes, H. Stuart. Society and Consciousness. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Lévy, Bernard-Henri. Idéologie française. Paris: Grasset, 1981. Péguy, Charles. Oeuvres poétiques. Edited by Marcel Péguy. Paris: Gallimard, 1957. ——. Oeuvres en prose completes. Edited by Robert Burac. vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. ——. Oeuvres en prose complètes,. Edited by Robert Burac. vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. ——. Oeuvres en prose completes. Edited by Robert Burac. vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. 138 Sudlow

Péguy, Marcel. Le Destin de Charles Péguy. Paris: Perrin, 1941. Pocquet du Haut-Jussé Laurent-Marie. Charles Péguy et la modernité: essai d’interprétation théologique d’une oeuvre littéraire. Perpignan: Artège, 2010. Rolland, Romain. Péguy. Paris: Albin Michel, 1944. Rousseaux, André. Le Prophète Péguy. Paris: Editions de la Baconnière, 1942. Sternhell, Zeev. The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition. Translated by David Maisel. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2010. ——. La Droite révolutionnaire 1885–1914. Paris: Folio, 1998. Sudlow, Brian. Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England 1880–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Villiers, Majorie. Charles Péguy: A Study in Integrity. London: Collins, 1965. Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. “Péguy,” The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol III: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles. Translated by Andrew Louth et al. and Edited by John Riches. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1986. Part 2

Cultural Transitions and Political Apocalypses, 1900–1945

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chapter 8 The Reason of Nature Revolution of Principles Around 1900

Hans Ottomeyer

Some imagine the end of the 19th century as a long-lasting summer day as evoked by images of world-famous impressionist paintings. Renoir, Manet and Monet transformed reality into a dream of light and happiness for the leisure class by means of their art. But the contrary is true. For many the last decades of the century were apocalyptic and disastrous because of the seven plagues: poverty, poor working conditions, housing and nutrition, rickets, epidemics of cholera and tuberculo- sis. [Figure 8.1.] The centres of production were darkened by smog and had overcrowded and dirty streets. Children might stumble with bare feet in the garbage of the suburbs of the industrial towns. These inhuman living conditions were heavily criticised by social philosophers and politicians. Some

Figure 8.1 Children’s Work in the Largest Factory of Coloured Paper in Aschafffenburg, Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung, 13. 11. 1858, p. 309.

recommended a return to the safe old system of the 16th century wherein the classes were subjected to the strictest regulations of labour.1 In the last decade of the 19th century, as the year 1900 approached, Lebensreform (Life Reform) was demanded in the name of man and nature, and explicit new programmes were written for the future. The expectation of a new century generated this reform movement with its novel organisation of lifestyles. The reform movement focussed on a total transformation of an industrial civilisation wherein cheap means of production were used to create a maximum of wealth for the proprietors. Its aims were a better quality of life more in accordance with “nature.” Reason and the laws of nature became the principles of the new reform. Sun, fresh air and clean water were the remedies that would heal the diseases engendered in the hell of industrial production. The reform reshaped urban structures, housing, domestic life, food, clothing, body care and medicine and made a stand against the deprivations of the late 19th century. In German speaking countries (especially Germany, Austria and Switzerland), the focus of the reform movement was Life Reform; but the movement also had close links to England, North America and Scandinavia. It was based on the work of philosophers and writers, realised in the creations of architects and artists, and propagated by small groups with an almost religious attitude towards nature, sun and light. [Figures 8.2 and 8.3.] This fĳirst reform movement had no base in state organisations, political parties or the traditional Churches. The latter strongly opposed and in some cases persecuted nudism, free love and pacifĳism. Romanesque, Mediterranean and Catholic cultures did not join in the Life Reform movement. The fĳirst task of the Life Reform movement was to expose the injustice of a society which embraced the pride and luxury of an aristocratic lifestyle at the expense of the misery of the working class. The industrial cities, their factories and suburbs full of fumes, foul water, and ridden also by disintegration of the family unit and all the vices of despair, were widely described and criticised in literature and graphic arts. What emerged was a shadow land where the poor lived in narrow muddy streets and in small rooms crammed full of people, which seldom saw sunlight. In a bizarre way this found its equivalent in the palaces, houses and apartments of the rich. Here, in keeping with the style of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the rooms were deliberately darkened by velvet curtains, the walls covered with sombre brocade tapestries and

1 F.A. Brockhaus (ed.), Allgemeine deutsche Real-Enxyclopädie […] Conversationslexikon, 9th Edition (Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1846): see “Kommunismus, Socialismus.” See also: Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (München: Beck, 2009). The Reason Of Nature 143

Figure 8.2 Robert Zünd, Der Eichwald, 1859, Zürich, Kunsthaus.

Figure 8.3 Beech wood, Grumsiner Forest, 2012. photograph: Esther Sünderhauf 144 Ottomeyer sparsely lit by shaded petroleum lamps, gas fĳires and candles.2 In the houses of the rich and poor alike, nothing could be properly cleaned or washed. As a consequence, dust and grime from candles, open fĳireplaces and oil lamps together with the fumes from cigars and pipes impregnated the atmosphere. Between 1867 and 1883 Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, with new high per- formance microscopes, discovered that bacteria could cause illness and disease. Max von Pettenkofer discovered bacteria in polluted water. It became clear that bacteria often propagated in the invariably dirty and dusty interiors of nineteenth-century cities. Thus, the newly created middle class, living in dark, airless rooms in an attempt to imitate the aristocracy and thus legitimise their newly acquired wealth, exposed themselves to the risk of bacterial infec- tions, which thrived in such environments. The invention of an ancient pedi- gree by quoting styles from the past thus became a real danger to the health and life of the nouveau riche inhabitants of these sombre retreats with their museum lifestyles. Awareness of this situation led to the development of new ideals. Still, the ideal of nature as the measure and rule for mankind was not entirely new. It carried on the principle of a growing opposition against the academic advocacy of classicism and the traditions of the ancient world. This counter-trend originated around 1710, in the early years of the Enlightenment, as an insistence upon the primacy of nature, with genius and invention following nature. Rococo and Rocaille were non-classical, naturalistic styles valuing rocks, plants and animals of fantastic combinations; a proclivity sometimes taken to surprising and even bizarre extremes. This art of inventions both using and deliberately surpassing nature can be found in picturesque landscape gardens and landscape paintings, rustic “primitive” cottage buildings, artifĳicial waterfalls, grottoes, terraces and the works of art (“capricci”) in the grotesque style. [Figure 8.4.] As early as 1704 it was called “goût de nôtre siecle” or “goût moderne.”3 Much of its meaning and interpretation remained hidden and was kept obscure under the watchful eye of the fĳigure of the Sphinx, “the strangler,” sitting prominently on porches and garden gates.

2 Die zweite Schöpfung. Bilder der industriellen Welt vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart, exhibition catalogue edited by Sabine Beneke and Hans Ottomeyer (Berlin: Ed. Minerva, 2002). See also: Stefan Muthesius, The High Victorian Movement in Architecture 1850–1870 (London/Boston: Routledge, 1972). Hans Ottomeyer, Rückbezug und Fortschritt. Wege des Historismus 1848–1880, in Ulrike Laufer and Hans Ottomeyer (eds.), Gründerzeit 1848–1871, exhibition catalogue dhm Berlin (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2008), 319–327. 3 Vergoldete Bronzen, vol. 1, ed. Hans Ottomeyer and Peter Pröschel (Munich: Klinghardt & Biermann, 1986), introduction to Chapter 2: “Rocaille.” The Reason Of Nature 145

Figure 8.4 Versailles, Petit Trianon, Belvedere and artifĳicial rocks with waterfall by Richard Mique, 1777. photograph: Hans Ottomeyer

“Back to nature” became a universal cry against a demoralised civilisation and the perceived disintegration of family values. The contemporary admiration for the aristocracy and leisured classes, with their almost perverse consumption of luxuries, came in for particular critique. Some of the “physio- cratic” gardens embodying this critique still exist, replete with shepherd coves, fĳishermen’s huts, farms, poultry courts, dairies, mills, fĳields, and flocks of sheep all artifĳicially arranged and built to look as natural as possible. They were not ornamental but functional pedagogic tools which demonstrated what was considered natural. The trend started in Stowe House and Stourhead in the uk, was carried on in Rambouillet and Petit Trianon (France) and is to be found in a simplifĳied manner in Wörlitz and Paretz (Germany) and Liselund on the Island of Møn (Denmark), to give only a few examples of these idealised microcosms of nature and “human nature” as well. [Figure 8.5.] We should consider the “picturesque” landscape garden as an explicit realisation of the new philosophy of nature. “Everything is good coming from the hands of a creator and degenerates in the hands of men,” comments Jean- Jacques Rousseau, who took a strong position against traditional culture and 146 Ottomeyer

Figure 8.5 Castle and park “Liselund” by Andreas Kirkerup, 1792/93, Island of Møn, Denmark. photograph: Ottomeyer

science.4 He proposed a return to the origin of mankind, which supposedly by that time had been corrupted by the development of civilisation. His belief was not rooted in church religion; indeed, the man from Geneva converted from Calvinism to Catholicism many times to and fro. His belief that nature and emotion are always right (but never reason and civilisation) was expressed in hundreds of works on the visual arts and in all kinds of literature. But this position towards nature and mankind did not survive the French revolution and Empire. It disappeared in the restoration of the monarchy and the Church and became a forgotten undercurrent of western thought and philosophy under the strict reign of Hegel’s idealism. The Life Reform movement, which started in the 1850s and came to a fĳirst standstill in 1914, was an avant-garde movement practised by perhaps fĳive per cent of western society, with the intention of healing body and soul from the diseases of industrial civilisation. Healing was expected through exposure to

4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social où principes du droit politique (Amsterdam: 1762). See also: Dieter Sturma, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (München: Beck, 2001). The Reason Of Nature 147 sun, light, air, outdoor activities and sports, by eating unprocessed food and by following the laws of nature, whose origins could be found in the “natural” state itself. Healing then was the principal impulse and aim of the movement. The diseases of the century were, so the theory went, rooted in disregard of the human body and the shame so often attached to it. This produced an artifĳicial need always to cover it, perpetuating further physical weakness because of lacking exposure to nature, along with a moral awkwardness perhaps fuelling prostitution and the related ills of venereal disease and pornography. The exposure of the naked body to the sun, together with swimming and “bathing” the body in the air became the ultimate cures associated with “Freikörperkultur.” As early as 1854 Arnold Rikli (1823–1906) from Switzerland founded a sun- healing or tanning sanatorium in Slovenia. The “sanatorium” had terraces and balconies and became a new model institution in the reform of hospitals.5 At the community level, the cult of sunlight was propagated by “Naturheilvereine,” which encouraged a new style of living. Its extreme form was group nudism, or “Freikörperkultur”; this was only tolerated in fenced-offf areas outside the cities, certainly not in the countryside, and was organised by clubs called “Vereine.” Naked gardening and gymnastics were features of the Monte Verità colony above Ascona in Switzerland where northern Europeans gathered from about 1900 in the mild climate to practise their “vegetable Cooperative.”6 From 1902 the magazine “Die Schönheit” published in Berlin propagated nakedness as the fundamental step towards a new lifestyle. The nudist movement was heavily criticised by state organisations in Prussia, and in 1906 a pornography lawsuit was organised against the nudist movement’s publications, which had insisted that only the naked man and woman can become the healthy, beautiful and moral “Neue Mensch” of the future by cultivating awareness of the body.7 [Figure 8.6.]

5 See also: Klaus Wolbert (ed.), Die Lebensreform. Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, exhibition catalogue Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt (Darmstadt: Häusser media/ Häusser Verlag, 2001); Friedhelm Kirchfeld, Wade Boyle, Nature Doctors. Pioneers in Naturopathic Medicine (Portland, Oregon and Ohio: Medicina Biologica, 1994); and Michael Grischko (ed.), Freikörperkultur und Lebenswelt. Studium zur Vor- und Frühgeschichte der Freikörperkultur (Kassel: Kassel Univ. Press, 1999). 6 See also: Andreas Schwab (ed.), Monte Verità—Sanatorium der Sehnsucht (Zürich: Orell Füssli, 2003); Robert Landmann (ed.), Monte Verità. Die Geschichte eines Berges (Berlin: Schulz, 1930); Harald Szeemann (ed.), Monte Verità—Berg der Wahrheit (Milan: Electa Ed., 1979); Eberhard Mros (ed.), Phänomen Monte Verità, vol. 1: Die Siedler (1900–1920) (Ascona: E. Mros, 2007). 7 See also: Florentine Fitzer (ed.), Gesünder leben. Die Lebensreformbewegung im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006); Esther Sophia Sünderhauf, Griechensehnsucht und Kulturkritik 148 Ottomeyer

Figure 8.6 Franz Müller-Münster, “Arrestiert” (“Arrested”), from: Die Schönheit (1906/07), issue 1, p. 31.

Natural clothing and the right kind of textiles were another concern of the apostles of nature: a concern which in fact divided the movement into rigid positions on what precisely should be considered true to the principles of nature. It was clear that the cut of women’s and men’s clothes had to follow loosely the forms of the body without stays and frills. Corsets, Cul de Paris and all things unnecessary were out of the question. But several questions remained in dispute. For example, what is more natural: cotton, linen or wool? The German zoologist, physiologist and hygienist Dr Gustav Jäger published in 1886 a work entitled Selections From Essays on Health-Culture and the Sanitary Woolen System. He proposed densely knitted jersey wool for everything. The still extant menswear and womenswear label “Jaeger” located in Regent Street, London, was named after him in 1884. The most famous spokesman for Jäger’s views on dress was George Bernhard Shaw.

(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), Chapter 3.1: “Die Rolle der Antike für die Lebensreform,” 139–173; Eva Barlösius, Naturgemäße Lebensführung (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1997); Michael Köhler and Gisela Barche (eds.), Das Aktfoto. Ansichten vom Körper im fotografĳischen Zeitalter, exhibition catalogue (München/Luzern: Bucher, 1985). The Reason Of Nature 149

An important result of the lifestyle reform movement was the total change in the ideal of the human body, especially its colour and shape. Until 1900 in the northern hemisphere the complexion was expected to be of a noble paleness. Woman kept their skin swan-white by dozens of techniques developed over the centuries. Scarves, veils, fans, umbrellas and hats were used in combination so that no sunray could spoil the lily-white skin. Rides and walks outside were only undertaken completely covered. A slight tan was acceptable among men. Offfĳicers could be recognised by their sunburnt faces. The working classes worked outside in courts, in buildings, on streets, and on the fĳield, and were thus exposed to the sun, even though they always wore hats or bonnets. They were thus instantly recognisable by their markedly tanned complexion. Cosmetics such as lead or zinc white and mercury red helped to enhance the diffference between the white upper class, and the tanned lower classes. But a new trend started some time before 1900. The leisure class now adopted outdoor sports and started swimming and sunbathing during long holidays under southern skies. Skiing in winter kept the now fashionably tanned skin the desired colour. The body ideal of the white, fleshy woman of luxury disappeared within a decade, having lasted probably some ten thousand years. The new century’s exclusive bodily ideal was to be seen in the slim, tanned forms of sporty men and toned women. The pale ones suddenly were to be pitied and were assumed to look ill. Paleness now became associated with industrial workers confĳined to mines and factory halls. This revolution in the ideal of the body is in its result so close to us that it is hardly ever commented upon in cultural history. Another feature of the Life Reform enterprise was a new form of settlement, the so-called “garden-cities,” built outside the capitals to promote life in harmony with nature, with small garden plots around every house. A garden community north of Berlin was named “Eden” and was designed to enable men to live as before the Fall. Founded in 1893 it had up to 850 inhabitants all living offf the soil. It is still extant and partly restored to its former state as an example of the good life. Berlin led the movement in Germany and another garden city or “Gartenstadt” called “Westend” was founded nearby in 1865. Alsen, Wannsee and Lichterfelde followed in the next year. Friedenau, Zehlendorf, Nikolassee, Dahlem, Grunewald, built in forests, were founded after 1889. On the initiative of the entrepreneur Johann Anton Wilhelm von Carsten (1822–1896) it was proposed to develop the industry-free south-west of industrial Berlin into garden cities. Other German cities followed: examples are Pasing near to Munich, where the architect August Exter founded the “Villenkolonie I” in 1892, to be followed by “Kolonie II,” Laim, Gauting and Gröbenzell all conforming to the 150 Ottomeyer

“Gartenstadtbewegung,” which became a new feature of urban planning in about 1900.8 Even more important—since not many believed in consistent nudism in northern climes, nor had the money to build a house or to buy a garden—was the reform of eating habits towards consuming only “natural food.” (“Only,” it should be remarked, is not a word that quite covers the single-mindedness intended in German by a sentence such as “Er ißt nur rohes Gemüse.”) In German-speaking countries there emerged dozens of groups which became more and more restrictive about the kind of food they would eat. Beginning by refusing all food that was industrially-produced, artifĳicial or processed, they later rejected all produce from animals, until fĳinally they would eat nothing cooked. According to those espousing such principles, “wrong food” was considered to lead necessarily to illness and early death. The pharmacist Theodor Hahn was one of the fĳirst to criticise the eating habits of industrial society, and as early in 1858 proposed water, a vegetarian diet and an active life as the cure. A ban on tobacco, alcohol, sugar, cofffee and strong spices was common among most reformers. This ban, initially self-imposed, was later extended to the family, to the community and fĳinally population-wide through the state’s supervi- sion of the consumption of less puritan and restrained citizens. Despite these well-advertised lifestyle boons, in which we may recognise our own time as in a distant mirror, it should perhaps be remembered that the most evil man in the last century, who brought the world to the brink of apocalypse, was a committed non-smoker, strictly forbade the consumption of alcohol in his presence and was a strict vegetarian, but in the afternoon consumed sugary cakes to excess. After his last meal of cake he shot himself in April 1945. The driving force behind the food reform movement was always a constructed idea of the true nature of mankind. But what is man? A hunter, fruit- and root-collector, carrion eater, cereal gatherer? Or should he live on vegetables alone—eating “Vollwertkost” (full-value diet) as Gustav Struve demanded in 1869? The fĳirst vegetarian restaurants began to appear in northern Europe at this time. In central and northern Europe the movement was widely accepted, taken over in principle in North America, but rejected in Latin countries. One can still see this today if one looks for black rye bread in France, or oats in the shops of Rome, or a vegetarian main course on the menu at a Paris restaurant. In Germany, by contrast, some people will eat muesli at each meal, acting out their devotion to nature like secular monks.

8 Anon., Die deutsche Gartenstadtbewegung. Zusammenfassende Darstellung (Berlin: Verlag der Deutschen Gartenstadt Gesellschaft, 1911). See also: Kristiana Hartmann, Deutsche Gartenstadtbewegung. Kulturpolitik und Gesellschaftsform (Munich: Moos, 1976). The Reason Of Nature 151

In addition to centres such as Berlin and Munich, Weimar also became a centre of the life-reform movement. Weimar was the spiritual capital of Germany, residence of the Grand Dukes of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, where Goethe, Schiller and Herder lived and built a community around them called the “Goetheaner,” which continued into the second half of the nineteenth century. They preached a strong belief in the principles of nature laid down in Goethe’s writings on natural history. Goethe specialised in the history of volcanic stones, the nature of sunlight, principles of plant growth and the form of leaves; he also compared animal and human skulls. It was a school of ideas based on the “Anschauungslehre,” apprehension by looking, “which means direct understanding by use of the visual sense and the other senses to obtain by this means a clear idea,” as it was laid down in the most widely used German dictionary Brockhaus in 18469 and defĳined as the royal road to new knowledge. From Goethe’s writings on natural history to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s (1746–1927) teachings on Anschauung, visual perception became an accepted method, which of course had to be proved by experiments and other rational means. “Es gibt endlich auch eingebildete Anschauungen, welche zwar einen weiten Spielraum für das Phantasieren, aber keine haltbare Grundlage für das erkennende Denken darbieten [These are fĳinally imagined perceptions, which give much scope for fantasy, but no solid basis for rational thinking].”10 “Morphologie,” the systematic comparison of forms and structures, was an avant-garde method for gaining knowledge. It was practised before and after the discovery of the evolution of the species in 1859 by Charles Darwin. Evolution was based on the discovery of a slow diversion of forms of the cosmos, earth, oceans, botanical and zoological forms. It was considered that creation took hundreds of thousands of years instead of seven days. The man who brought together the methods and results of the comparative approach of Anschauungslehre and the hypothesis of evolution was the zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). He was full of admiration for the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin. He lectured in Jena, the university town close to Weimar, between 1865 and 1908 and worked on the tree of evolution of all known species. Following Goethe’s Pantheistic philosophy he argued that there is not matter and spirit in the cosmos, but that the material

9 Entry “Anschauung,” in: Brockhaus. Allgemeines Konversationslexikon (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1846), vol. 1, 268–269. See also Johann Friedrich Herbart, Pestalozzis Idee eines abc der Anschauung (Göttingen: Röwer, 1804); Johann Friedrich Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (Königsberg/Leipzig: Unzer/Voss, 1816). 10 See footnote 9. 152 Ottomeyer world is identical with the spirit of the cosmos. He called his theory “Monism,” in contradistinction to Dualism and Pluralism. Monism became the accepted explanation for reducing all phenomena and developments in the visual world to one principle of creation and growth. The thought is not new, Lucretius’s (98–55 b.c) De rerum natura, written in the middle of the fĳirst century b.c., is an example which is itself summarising earlier Greek philosophers, but the name “Monism” is a neologism coined by Haeckel to name this new late nineteenth-century faith. In addition, Haeckel insisted, importantly, that mankind was an integral part of nature and the cosmos, meaning that humans were subjected to the reason and laws of nature without exception. Nature becomes the ultimate measure and defĳines the limits within which mankind fĳinds its defĳinition of right or wrong. What is natural? What does nature want? What does nature tell us? These became the crucial questions—however difffĳicult to answer they might be.11 As such, Haeckel and his “Monistenbund” fought against the impending world war, against the plague of chauvinism in Europe; but, on the other hand, he (along with many others) promoted ideas of euthanasia. In 1904, during a controversial “Freidenker” convention in Rome, he was elected by the other 2000 freethinkers as the “Antipope” and crowned on the Campo dei Fiori on the very same spot where Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake by the Catholic Inquisition in the year 1600. Haeckel’s fame was based on a dozen major publications which were printed and translated many times. Beside his early work on marine organisms it was his Generelle Morphologie of 1866, with its theory of descent by comparison of forms, that made his reputation. It was followed two years later by Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, a reflection on the nature of mankind, which ran to eleven editions and was translated into twelve languages. He reconstructed a “Picanthropus primigenius” twelve years after the Neanderthal man was discovered and fĳirst discussed. HisAnthropogenie , published many times between 1874 and 1891, presented in 730 pages the evolution of life from the most simple forms to the ancestors of man. His books were so successful because Haeckel was able to draw and illustrate all his example specimens himself and had them printed in large colour plates. Die Welträthsel, published in 1899, was

11 Amher E. Lenz and Volker Mueller (eds.), Darwin, Haeckel und die Folgen. Monismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Neustadt: Lenz, 2006). See also: Adrian Brückner, Die monistische Naturphilosophie im deutschsprachigen Raum um 1900 und ihre Folgen (Berlin: wvb, 2011). Gerhard Hederer, Ernst Haeckel und seine wissenschaftliche Bedeutung (Tübingen: Heine, 1934). Walther May, Ernst Haeckel. Versuch einer Chronik seines Lebens und seines Wirkens (Leipzig: Barth, 1909). The Reason Of Nature 153 from the editorial point of view a breakthrough, its price of one Mark making it a bestseller. In it, Haeckel developed his approach towards a “Weltanschauung” by building bridges between the sciences by means of his “Naturphilosophie.” He endorsed some residual form of religion with his belief in a creator. He considered Jesus of Nazareth as a teacher and the history of religion became for him the key to understanding religion. In this attitude he was close to David Friedrich Strauss’ Der alte und der neue Glaube of 1872. Haeckel explained his aims explicitly in the 1892 work Der Monismus als Bund zwischen Religion und Wissenschaften, a reconciliation between science and religion, motivated not least by the hope of overcoming the extreme ugliness of industrial civilisation through new, natural forms which could re-shape (“Neuausformung”) the conditions and surroundings of man. The “new man,” “der Neue Mensch,” became the ultimate aim. “The ugly has become unbearable. We demand beauty in images and in our life.”12 His fĳinal book was Kunstformen der Natur (1899; new editions 1900, 1903, 1904), drawn and composed by himself. [Figures 8.7 and 8.8.] It summarised his work by looking back to the fĳirst steps of his career. For instance, the studies of microscopic radiolarae became a source of inspiration for new structures and forms in art and construction. These sources are still valid and can be used today in bionic design. This impulse was taken up by the sculptor Karl Blossfeld (1865–1932) who published black and white photo- graphic close-ups of plants in 1928, treating them as wonders of nature and models of beauty. [Figures 8.9 and 8.10.] These photographs had didactic pur- poses: “Meine Pflanzenurkunden sollen dazu beitragen, die Verbindung mit der Natur wiederherzustellen, Sie sollen den Sinn für die Natur wieder wecken, auf den überreichen Formenschatz in der Natur hinzuweisen [My documenta- tion of plants will add to the connection with nature. They shall awaken awareness of nature and make the rich treasure of forms available].”13 Blossfeld here regards the forms of nature as master forms for art and technique. But back to Haeckel. He developed in his last book Die Lebenswunder of 1904 his vision of the future and was full of hope that close familiarity with the laws and principles of nature could teach mankind reason and wisdom. The ethics of monism demanded the end of war, duelling, and all church dogma and

12 See also: Alexander von der Gleichen-Russwurm, Klassische Schönheit (Jena/Leipzig: Diederichs, 1906), Heinrich Bulle, Der schöne Mensch im Altertum (München/Leipzig: Hirth, 1898); cf. Sünderhauf, Griechensehnsucht und Kulturkritik. 13 Karl Blossfeld (ed.), Wundergarten der Natur (Berlin-Friedenau: Verl. für Kunstwissenschaft, 1932), based on: Karl Blossfeld, Urformen der Kunst (Berlin: Verl. für Kunstwissenschaft, 1928); English edition: Art Forms in Nature. The Complete Edition (Munich: Schirmer Art Books, 1999). 154 Ottomeyer

Figure 8.7 Ernst Haeckel, Seeanemonen (Actiniae) from: Kunstformen der Natur, Leipzig und Wien 1904, plate 49, lithograph. The Reason Of Nature 155

Figure 8.8 Ernst Haeckel, Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda Radiaria). Eine Monographie, Berlin 1862, plate 22. 156 Ottomeyer

Figure 8.9 Karl Blossfeld, seed capsule of a Scabiosa prolifera, eightfold enlargement, from: Wunder in der Natur. Bild-Dokumente schöner Pflanzenformen, Leipzig 1942, p. 31. involved the hope that supreme courts would, in future, settle all disputes between nations. Money would then be freed up to be spent on education instead of armies. Haeckel joined Bertha von Suttner in the peace movement to dissuade the armies preparing for what would become the Great War. Haeckel believed that pity and empathy were the only virtues of man, which distinguish this species from others and are the most noble functions of the human brain. The Reason Of Nature 157

Figure 8.10 Model of a Coccolith, Geocenter Møns Klint, Island of Møn, Denmark. photograph: Ottomeyer 158 Ottomeyer

Beyond Haeckel, the general reform of art from 1850 onwards had promoted the idea of nature as an ideal and a guide to new territories of the mind that would allow humanity to escape the monsters and bizarre creatures of the mythological past. So nature in form, structure and ideal became the governing principle of production in arts and crafts. [Figures 8.11–8.13.] This meant that the creative forces of nature had to be revived: movement, growth, youth, sun, light and clean air. This was the last and only chance that humanity had of getting away from authoritarian empires, academic dogmatism, the masquer- ade of styles, dirty industrial towns, gloomy interiors and moral depravation.14 Many weekly and monthly art journals propagated such changes, with lavish illustrations. In England the magazine The Studio was published from 1893 onwards; this influenced Die Jugend founded in Munich 1896, and Pan in Berlin 1895. As part of this trend, artists cultivated large flower gardens and kept flowers in their ateliers to have their natural models at their fĳingertips. Emil Nolde— like Louis Comfort Tifffany, Émile Gallé, Claude Monet, or Liebermann— worked by translating unmediated nature into works of art. [Figure 8.14.] Likewise, imitating the ordinary beauty of natural things was the aim of design- ers, who admired the structure of growth and the plain nature of the unadorned.

Figure 8.11 Glass window by Tifffany, Lyndhorst, Tarrytown, New York. photograph: Sünderhauf

14 Hans Ottomeyer (ed.), Wege in die Moderne. Jugendstil in München (Verona/Kassel: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1998). The Reason Of Nature 159

Figure 8.12 Art nouveau vase with mistletoe, New York, Metropolitan Museum. photograph: Ottomeyer

Studies of nature also became a constant source of inspiration for the applied arts. Many motifs and iconographies showed the change of seasons, the elements, the hours of the day as expressed in poetry in elegies, Sinngedichte, and the most admired Japanese Haiku.15 The “Garden of Eden” was a popular motif here, depicted as the land of ardent desire. Japanese art was often the eclectic translator between beauty in nature and artistic stylisation by means of simplicity.

15 Hans Ottomeyer (ed.), Geburt der Zeit. Eine Geschichte in Bildern und Begrifffen (Kassel: Ed. Minerva, 1999); cf. chapter “Um 1900. Lebensformen,” 482–517. 160 Ottomeyer

Figure 8.13 Art nouveau vase with seahorse, New York, Metropolitan Museum. photograph: Ottomeyer The Reason Of Nature 161

Figure 8.14 House and Garden of Emil and Ada Nolde, Seebüll, Schleswig-Hohlstein, designed by the artist in 1927. photograph: Sünderhauf

The perception of nature as the measure of human life cumulated between 1900 and 1913 but lapsed rather than ended when the Great War broke out in 1914, and young men lost their life in the trenches, in machine gun fĳire, in gas attacks and other appalling forms of industrialised war. Tanks, planes, airborne bombs and hailstorms of shells seemed to end all hopes for peace and understanding among the nations. But some ideas lived on even while hunger, poverty and bankruptcy put an end to the ideal of culture and nature in close union. In Germany after 1933 all organisations and “Vereine” other than the National Socialist Party (nsdap) and its subdivisions were forbidden and all displays of a lifestyle other than a militant nationalism suppressed. What survived? Nudism, “Naturheilmedizin,” the “natural food” movement in “Reformhäuser” with products called “Eden,” garden cities, the youth movement, outdoor sports, sun bathing, open air swimming pools, vegetarianism and an obsession with health food. Much of what the Lebensreform movement developed as guidelines and principles sank to the level of mere undercurrent out of sight and mind between 1914 and 1960, to be revived in the last fĳifty years by the health movement, which was of course invigorated by the youth-orientated hippie culture. In its American form, this lifestyle cherished Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854, which propagated living as close as possible to nature. The new cult of youth and nature in the 1970s strove for a life in the sun, ecological awareness, vegetarianism and veganism. It was not, 162 Ottomeyer

Figure 8.15 Hugo Höppener (Fidus), “Lichtgebet,” 1924, oil on canvas, 150 x 100cm, Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum. The Reason Of Nature 163

however, a revival so much as a reorientation informed by Indian Hindu beliefs and exotic religious practices. Acting and living close to nature, protecting nature and seeking advice from nature has today become a common belief practised both by those with and without faith a creator or even a Life Force. Nature has become the ultima ratio for all decisions in the fĳields of the human mind. We are thus distant heirs of the Lebensreform movement. However, it was not an ecological or global movement, but rather one oriented towards the individual and his freedom to use the resources found freely in nature. The life-reform movement was certainly not concerned with solving global warming and did not fear using up supplies of water and energy. “Lebensreform” was based in modern communities that wanted to live as close to nature as possible and not in industrial capitals considered to be the nadir of human living conditions. Nature became the Supreme Court, which decided on right or wrong. [Figure 8.15.] Is there a moral to be drawn? As always we need to be aware of false prophets and to look for clear or proven principles.

Bibliography

Anon. Die deutsche Gartenstadtbewegung. Zusammenfassende Darstellung. Berlin: Verlag der Deutschen Gartenstadt Gesellschaft, 1911. Barlösius, Eva. Naturgemäße Lebensführung. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1997. Beneke, Sabine and Hans Ottomeyer, eds. Die zweite Schöpfung. Bilder der industriellen Welt vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Ed. Minerva, 2002. Blossfeld, Karl. Urformen der Kunst. Berlin: Verl. für Kunstwissenschaft, 1928. Blossfeld, Karl, ed. Wundergarten der Natur. Berlin-Friedenau: Verl. für Kunstwissenschaft, 1932. Blossfeld, Karl. Art Forms in Nature. The Complete Edition. Munich: Schirmer Art Books, 1999. Brückner, Adrian. Die monistische Naturphilosophie im deutschsprachigen Raum um 1900 und ihre Folgen. Berlin: wvb, 2011. Bulle, Heinrich. Der schöne Mensch im Altertum. München and Leipzig: Hirth, 1898. Fitzer, Florentine, ed. Gesünder leben. Die Lebensreformbewegung im 20. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006. Gleichen-Russwurm, Alexander von der. Klassische Schönheit. Jena and Leipzig: Diederichs, 1906. 164 Ottomeyer

Grischko, Michael, ed. Freikörperkultur und Lebenswelt. Studium zur Vor- und Frühgeschichte der Freikörperkultur. Kassel: Kassel Univ. Press, 1999. Hartmann, Kristiana. Deutsche Gartenstadtbewegung. Kulturpolitik und Gesellschaftsform. Munich: Moos, 1976. Hederer, Gerhard. Ernst Haeckel und seine wissenschaftliche Bedeutung. Tübingen: Heine, 1934. Herbart, Johann Friedrich. Pestalozzis Idee eines abc der Anschauung. Göttingen: Röwer, 1804. Herbart, Johann Friedrich. Lehrbuch zur Psychologie. Königsberg and Leipzig: Unzer and Voss, 1816. Kirchfeld, Friedhelm and Wade Boyle. Nature Doctors. Pioneers in Naturopathic Medicine. Portland, Oregon and Ohio: Medicina Biologica, 1994. Köhler, Michael and Gisela Barche, eds. Das Aktfoto. Ansichten vom Körper im fotograf- ischen Zeitalter, exhibition catalogue. München and Luzern: Bucher, 1985. Landmann, Robert, ed. Monte Verità. Die Geschichte eines Berges. Berlin: Schulz, 1930. Laufer, Ulrike and Hans Ottomeyer, eds. Gründerzeit 1848–1871. Exhibition catalogue dhm Berlin. Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2008. Lenz, Amher E. and Volker Mueller, eds. Darwin, Haeckel und die Folgen. Monismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Neustadt: Lenz, 2006. May, Walther. Ernst Haeckel. Versuch einer Chronik seines Lebens und seines Wirkens. Leipzig: Barth, 1909. Mros, Eberhard, ed. Phänomen Monte Verità, vol. 1: Die Siedler (1900–1920). Ascona: E. Mros, 2007. Muthesius, Stefan. The High Victorian Movement in Architecture 1850–1870. London and Boston: Routlegde, 1972. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. München: Beck, 2009. Ottomeyer, Hans, ed. Wege in die Moderne. Jugendstil in München. Verona and Kassel: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1998. Ottomeyer, Hans, ed. Geburt der Zeit. Eine Geschichte in Bildern und Begrifffen. Kassel: Ed. Minerva, 1999. Ottomeyer, Hans and Peter Pröschel, eds. Vergoldete Bronzen. Vol. 1/2, Munich: Klinghardt & Biermann, 1986. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du contract social où principes du droit politique. Amsterdam: 1762. Schwab, Andreas, ed. Monte Verità—Sanatorium der Sehnsucht. Zürich: Orell Füssli, 2003. Sturma, Dieter. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. München: Beck, 2001. Sünderhauf, Esther Sophia. Griechensehnsucht und Kulturkritik. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004. The Reason Of Nature 165

Szeemann, Harald, ed. Monte Verità—Berg der Wahrheit. Milan: Electa Ed., 1979. Wolbert, Klaus, ed. Die Lebensreform. Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900. Exhibition catalogue Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Darmstadt: Häusser media/Häusser Verlag, 2001.

Lexika

Brockhaus, F.A. ed., Allgemeine deutsche Real-Enxyclopädie/Conversationslexikon. 9th Edition. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1846. chapter 9 Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists in the Third Reich

Gregory Maertz

The mobilisation of Christian artists and Christian iconography in the visual arts of the Third Reich was anticipated by the absorption of leading elements of the Christian belief system and ritual practice into National Socialist ideology. This included the adoption into the Nazi origination myth of the main arc of the Christian narrative of salvifĳic redemption. According to the revised Nazi version, the salvation narrative followed a familiar tripartite pattern: the prophecy of a German messiah-fĳigure, the emergence out of obscurity of the longed- for Führer, and his deliverance of the German people from poverty, injustice, and servitude. In this way, by hijacking Christian eschatology, National Socialism reanimated the Hegelian idea of German history by postulating the coming of the Führer and the reunion of the German Volk with the divine as occurring within the Volksgemeinschaft or national racial community.

Christianity and the Origins of National Socialist Ideology

The popular version of the origination myth of National Socialism ideology as the work of apostate intellectuals who nonetheless infused the new godless system with the tone, feeling, and rituals of discredited religious practice requires revision in light of recent, quite compelling research. Like many failed attempts to explain the origins of National Socialism, religion in the Third Reich has been understood in terms of a binary structure of discourse— Christian versus pagan. From a Derridean perspective,1 the Western philosophical tradition, which culminates in National Socialist Germany (as the philosopher and Nazi Party member, Martin Heidegger, fervently believed and taught2), rests on arbitrary pairs of binaries—sacred/profane, mind/body, sig- nifĳier/signifĳied, innocence/experience, civilized/savage, pure/impure, Aryan/

1 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1976). 2 Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (New Haven: Yale up, 2009).

Jew, healthy/diseased. All of these pairings in the National Socialist lexicon are ultimately descended from the binary structure of Western logocentrism, suggesting the limitations affflicting philosophical discourse in this tradition. Michel Foucault3 demonstrates how even the oppositional members in such binary formations are ultimately complicit with the power represented by the dominant entity in the binary, thus reinforcing rather than threatening or contesting its dominance (or the binary structure itself). In the Nazi/degenerate and the Aryan/Jew binaries each entity is utterly absolutist in defĳining the categories they stand for and yet is also utterly dependent on the other, supposedly subordinate or inferior entity, for its own identity: each is precisely what the other is not and vice-versa. Modernism as a semiotics of discourse and iconography holds these binaries in suspension—incubates, nourishes, sustains, and situates opposing forces and entities in creative oppositional relation. Presented in National Socialist critical rhetoric as vehemently opposed to Modernist tendencies toward abstraction, artistic fĳiguration in the Third Reich is coextensive with symbolic/mythical/religious forms of representation. This accounts for the heavily allegorical component in National Socialist representation (see Figure 9.2) as well as the syncretic ease with which National Socialism adopted the typological method of reading historical events as prefĳigured in Holy Scripture. Typology as a mode of reading and writing history could also be applied to post-biblical events, as secular history becomes the arena in which divine revelation will be manifested. A leading example of this approach is the Puritan system of typology which in some ways presaged National Socialist readings of history—the leading example of which is Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925–26). Nazi typology scrutinised individuals as well as social and ethnic groups as to whether or not they fulfĳilled the völkisch prophecy of a messiah who would serve as the vehicle of national salvation. After centuries of sufffering, the German Volk is disclosed as the “new Israel,” the re-embodiment of the chosen people blessed by destiny. Such a rebranding of the “chosen people” became necessary because the Jews were now outside of the favour and protection of divine providence. Similarly, when National Socialists identifĳied Adolf Hitler as the longed for Führer, they were interpreting post-biblical history according to a typological template adapted from the Christian tradition—a template that Hitler himself appropriates in Mein Kampf. The hijacking and adaptation of Christian eschatology by National Socialism made possible the reunion of the German Volk with the divine and the end of

3 See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006). 168 Maertz ordinary time. The Nazi utopia would be a timeless zone similar to the era of the Second Coming of Christ. But instead of the elect or saved, the Nazi paradise would be populated by the racially pure. Rather than equality based on religious purity, the elect in Hitler’s paradise are bound together by the community of blood. The elimination of the Jews and, with them, racial impurity— a horrible inversion of the rebirth and eternal life associated with conversion to Christianity—and the “rescue” of Nordic blood by the kidnapping of blonde and blue-eyed children in the zone of Nazi conquest—were preconditions for the Aryan salvation prophesied by Hitler. Apocalypse, for religious as well as secular thinkers, despite its suggestion of a prophesied millennial catastrophe, is associated as much with the destruction of the old as with the emergence of a new world, with cultural rebirth, with the disclosure of hidden meaning that had been masked from human perception during periods dominated by falsehood and deception, and with the appearance of an emissary from God bearing His message. Eschatology and related speculation characterised late nineteenth-century German theology and dominated cultural discourse during World War I. Thinkers and others associated with this kind of speculation include Richard Wagner, Oswald Spengler, Johann Plenge, Wilhelm Stapel, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Nonetheless, historians have persistently approached National Socialism as antithetical to Christianity. Any useful analysis of the relationship between National Socialism and Christianity must renounce a binary template at the very outset. On closer examination, the evidence (long available but ignored by critics) contradicts the influential secularist intellectual history approach popularised by Fritz Stern, who postulated that the ideological roots of Nazism could be traced to the crisis of faith identifĳied by Nietzsche as the “death of God,” and that attempts made by conservative, völkisch, and proto-Nazi writers to replace Christianity with a quasi-religious worship of the state would necessarily retain the “tone” of religion “even after the religious faith and the religious canons had disappeared.”4 In Stern’s view, as paraphrased by Richard Steigmann-Gall, “Nazism…served as a replacement faith…for a defunct Christianity”5 rather than as a co-ideological, syncretising system of beliefs, ethics, and guide for behaviour that existed in parallel with National Socialism. Thus a long post-war tradition of characterising National Socialism as a

4 Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), xxv. 5 Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6–7. Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists 169 secular, alternate religion has obscured both the reciprocal nature of this relationship and the robustly destructive and simultaneously creative dimension of Nazism’s mobilisation of Christianity. National Socialism’s dynamic capacity for formation by syncretic adaptation, exemplifĳication, and absorption of the structural, semiotic, and ideological components of Christianity, by adapting its beliefs and practices to fĳit within the hard exoskeleton of existing ideologies and bureaucracies, exemplifĳies the mechanism of Gleichschaltung (mobilisation). In practice Gleichschaltung worked in both directions. Each party—the parasitic Nazi organisation as well as the victimised host—engages in a process of mutual accommodation, a process that benefĳits and defĳines both as each mutually and reciprocally absorbs aspects of the other. Rather than by decapitating pre- existing leadership fĳigures Gleichschaltung seeks to convert the membership of the pre-existing organisation—that is, those deemed worthy in racial terms and are thus salvageable for service to the national racial community. The appointment of Nazi acolytes might, in exceptional circumstances, be deemed necessary to duplicate and thus bolster the existing leadership structure, such as in the Vidkun Quisling-Josef Terboven coadunation in Norway. Their parallel offfĳice structure serves as a prime example of the polycratic redundancy of bureaucracies within the German empire. In almost every case,6 either domestically or in the lands the Nazis conquered, the elimination of pre- existing elites was deemed much less preferable than encouraging the incentivised collaboration of pre-existing leadership structures as well as the reten- tion of most rank-and-fĳile members of the organisations or bodies targeted by the Nazis for mobilisation. Insufffĳicient numbers of qualifĳied or experienced Party members in most learned or technical professions made this process a necessity. In all instances of mutual collusion, the risk as well as the potential rewards of collaboration were shared equally by the Nazis and the pre-existing elites. Both the recruiter and the recruited were similarly invested in making this relationship work. Of course, National Socialism’s mobilisation of Christianity is remarkably analogous to Christianity’s assimilation of Judaism and elements of Greco- Roman and Germanic paganism into its belief system and ritual practices. But then National Socialism and Christianity are similar in structure and organisational behaviour—syncretistic, messianic, evangelistic, and heavily dependent on propaganda for increasing the number of their adherents via conversion. As the avowed enemy of the Jews, National Socialism burnished its credentials at the same time as a defender of Christianity and touted the typological

6 Poland is the major exception to this pattern. 170 Maertz identity of Hitler as a latter day saviour of the German nation, blood, and religion. Moreover, there are many prominent symbolic and ritual correspondences between Christianity and National Socialism, including the typological parallels between Christ’s struggle and the Führer’s Kampfzeit; the central role of self-sacrifĳice/willing death which is central to their shared central message of resurrection/rebirth; a shared obsession with blood—the sacredness of blood (race), spilling blood, drinking sacrifĳicial blood with blood serving as medium of purifĳication and the transfer of energy; a shared obsession with controlling certain symbolic artefacts such as in the display of the Blutfahne or “blood flag” (a Nazi banner stained with the blood of the martyrs of the 8 November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch), the Spear of Destiny, and other relics associated with Christ’s crucifĳixion, such as fragments of the True Cross; the Nazi appropriation of the baptismal blood ceremony of the Teutonic Knights in the ritual initiation of Himmler’s Schutzstafffel. Finally, there is the relationship between the central symbol of Christianity (the cross) and the Hakenkreuz or “hooked cross” of National Socialism.

Nazi Neo-Paganism

As stated above, there has, however, been a signal tendency in scholarship on the Third Reich and established Christian churches to mischaracterise Nazi attitudes toward Christianity. More recent critics, such as Richard Steigmann- Gall, Wolfgang Altgeld, and Helmut Walser Smith, have nonetheless revealed that much of the völkisch and racist content of Nazi ideology had already found a receptive home “among particular varieties of Christian belief well before the arrival of Nazism and even before the turn of the twentieth century.”7 Indeed, Altgeld has revealed that the concept of a “national religion” was received favourably within Protestant circles as early as the Wars of Liberation in the early nineteenth century.8 Indeed, Romantic poets and thinkers, such as Theodor Körner and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, create the link between Christian faith, cultural production, and extreme German nationalism. Then, starting in the late nineteenth century, prominent features of völkisch ideology merged with Christianity. Both the proto-Nazi völkisch movement and German Protestantism were radicalised by World War I as elements from both the völkisch Aryanosophic wing of the fledgling Nazi Party and the nationalistic

7 Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, 7. 8 Wolfgang Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum (Mainz: M.-Grunewald Verlag, 1992), 52. Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists 171

Protestant state church came together in the 1920s to give National Socialism its unique style and belief system. Such ideological radicalisation was widespread and crossed political—liberal, conservative, Socialist, and Communist— as well as cultural—völkisch and Modernist—lines. For all these groups the common enemy was the West—Western civilisation, parliamentary democracy and fĳinance capitalism, which was further demonised by association with the Jews. In contrast to the conventional and now superseded view held by church and intellectual historians of the tense cohabitation of ideas of nationalism and Christianity, Altgeld and others have revealed that “the relationship between being Christian and being national was marked more by synthesis” rather than hostility.9 Indeed, it must be understood that any potential conflict between the Nazi state and, for example, the Roman Catholic Church was over the Church’s history of engagement in politics rather than over Catholic theology. There is an overwhelming body of evidence supporting this interpretation, such as statements Hitler made in speeches before the Reichstag. First, on 1 February 1933, following his appointment as Reich chancellor: “The National government…regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.”10 And then, on 23 March 1933, in his speech justifying the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) Hitler proclaimed that Christianity is “the unshakeable foundation of the moral and ethical life of our people.”11 Hitler kept faith with his stated position on Christianity in sign- ing the Concordat with the Holy See on 20 July 1933. In exchange for bishops swearing an oath of loyalty to the state and ending all political activity associated with the Church, which meant dismantling the politically influential Catholic Centre Party, the Church retained autonomy of religious institutions and practices. Even though a number of Christian theologians recognised in Nazi ideology a dangerous adversary, there were many prominent Church leaders who advocated accommodation with the Nazi regime, including Archbishop Konrad Gröber of Freiburg, Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück, and Cardinal Adolf Bertram. Many leading Nazis, Hitler and Henrich Himmler fĳirst and foremost, were born into observant Catholic families. Others include Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Julius Streicher, Reinhard Heydrich, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, the industrialist and top donor to the nsdap Fritz Thyssen, and Rudolf Hoess, the ss commandant of Auschwitz.

9 Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, 7. 10 Max Domarus, The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary, ed. Patrick Romane (Wauconda, Illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2007), 211. 11 Domarus, The Essential Hitler, 236. 172 Maertz

Certainly, conflict over the political power exerted by Christian churches, particularly the Roman Church, led to measures that sought not only to curtail church influence but also to mobilise church bureaucracy on behalf of the national racial community. Hitler addressed this matter in a Reichstag Speech delivered on 30 January 1939: “On one point there must be no uncertainty: the German priest as servant of God we shall protect, the priest as political enemy of the German state we will destroy.”12 These actions must, however, not be confused with offfĳicial state hostility towards Christianity. And the personal anti-Christian bias of prominent Nazis did not generally bleed into professional behaviour or impede the discharge of their duties. In fact, all the major leadership fĳigures in the regime, Hitler included, expressed tolerance and even admiration for Christianity, from the Kampfzeit of the early twenties right up until the collapse of the regime.

Nazi Neo-Pagans

Another cause for the lingering misunderstanding about the relationship between National Socialism and Christianity is the disproportionate media attention focused on the bizarre world of Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstafffel (ss). Studies that emphasise the collaboration of Christian leaders and institutions with the Hitler state—such as that of John Cornwell and Daniel Goldhagen13—are routinely dismissed as extreme since “everyone” knows that the Nazis were neo-pagans at heart and ideologically predisposed to take anti- Christian positions that led inevitably to the persecution of Christians and dra- conian effforts to suppress and/or supplant Christianity with a new pagan “religion” of National Socialism. Of course, there were countless cases of persecution. Most horrifĳically, thousands of Roman Catholic priests—chiefly Polish clergy—were subjected to abuse and arbitrary murder. Dietrich Bonhoefffer, the most prominent Protestant fĳigure to resist the regime, was arrested and executed in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Still other atrocities—such as the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses for their refusal to acknowledge the authority of the Nazi state—can be cited to make the case that the Nazi regime was hostile to Christianity. But these acts of state violence and repression obscure a more important truth—that the relationship between the Nazi

12 Frankfurter Zeitung, 1 February 1939. Cited in Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, 253. 13 See, for example, John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999) and Daniel J. Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfĳilled Duty of Repair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists 173 regime and established Christian Churches in Germany was mutually benefĳi- cial to the Nazi state and to the state-supported Churches. The co-ideological relationship between National Socialism and Christianity is exemplifĳied in the fusion of extreme German nationalism and fervent Catholicism that motivated Claus Schenk Graf von Staufffenberg’s attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler. Staufffenberg’s belief system coalesced during his association with the poet Stefan George and was confected into the notion of the mystical “sacred Germany,” a phrase that was on Staufffenberg’s lips as he was shot by fĳiring squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock on the night of 20 July 1944.14 The post-war canonisation of Staufffenberg and his co-conspirators reached its zenith with the release of the hagiographic Hollywood fĳilm,Valkyrie (2008), starring Tom Cruise, which blatantly airbrushed away Staufffenberg’s initial enthusiasm for Hitler’s war of conquest and his intention to continue the war following the coup d’etat. But however lurid the ss associations with paganism, Himmler’s obsessions had little bearing on actual Nazi policy with respect to Christianity. It must be understood that, for all their sublime wackiness, the leading neo-pagans in the regime—Himmler, Rosenberg, Bormann, and von Schirach—constituted a tiny minority in Nazi leadership circles and even they were more tolerant of Christianity and their observant personnel than is generally understood. In fact, according to Richard Steigmann-Gall, Himmler feared that “the average ss man would not be able to distinguish between attacks on the churches”—as political entities and thus as potential rivals or sources of opposition to Nazi rule—“and a preservation of Christ.”15 Moreover, in a 1937 memorandum addressed “to all ss leaders from Standartenführer [full colonel] on up” Himmler directed that “in ideological training I forbid every attack against Christ as a person, since such attacks or insults that Christ was a Jew are unwor- thy of us and certainly untrue historically.”16 National Socialism’s ambivalence toward Christianity was also reflected in the views of another leading neo- pagan, Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth and the Gauleiter of Vienna. In a speech given in December 1933 he remarked: “They say of us that we are an anti-Christian movement. They even say that I am an outspoken pagan…I solemnly declare here, before the German public, that I stand on the basis of Christianity…In no manner does the Hitler Youth restrict the religious activities of its members.”17

14 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 640. 15 Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, 131. 16 Cited in Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, 131. 17 Cited in Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, 143. 174 Maertz

Although he was a vegetarian and teetotaler, Hitler was no Nancy Reagan when it came to tolerating the occultist fantasies of his “treuer Heinrich.” Indeed, in Mein Kampf and the transcripts of his Table Talk and in remarks reported by Albert Speer, Hitler is blistering about the occult beliefs of his sub- ordinates. For example, Hitler brusquely dismissed Himmler’s obsession with German pre-history and the work of the ss Ahnenerbe [Ancestral Heritage] offfĳicers: “Isn’t it enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he fĳinds.”18 Dietrich Eckart, an early mentor of Hitler’s and one of the most important early Nazi ideologues, embraced Jesus Christ as the precursor fĳigure of the coming Führer and a crucial role model in the midst of the post-war chaos affflicting Germany: “In Christ, the embodiment of all manliness, we fĳind all that we need. And if we occasionally speak of Baldur, son of Odin, our words always contain some joy, some satisfaction, that our pagan ancestors were already so Christian as to have indications of Christ in this ideal fĳigure.”19 Similarly, in remarks recorded in the Table Talk on 21 October 1941 Hitler said that Jesus Christ “must be regarded as a popular leader who took up his position against Jewry. He set Himself against Jewish capitalism, and that is why the Jews liquidated Him.”20 The trope of the revolutionary leader betrayed by a corrupt establishment was obviously borrowed for Mein Kampf, as was the mythic quality of Hitler’s rise from obscurity to leadership of the Party and the Reich and defender of the national racial community against the imputed corrupting influence of the Jews. The facts are that whatever their anti-Christian inclinations, the neo-pagans in the regime did little to alienate ss men, Party members or the still largely Christian identifĳication of the vast majority of the German populace. Himmler’s avowed paganism and the regime’s incentivised recruitment of religious collaborators and the murderous Nazi persecution of Christian religious and laity that followed the Machtergreifung have, however, obscured the remarkable creative alliance forged between Christian artists and their Nazi patrons. The participation of Christian artists in major Nazi-sponsored exhibitions was central to the formation of the distinctive Nazi Modernist aesthetic. Indeed,

18 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 94–95. 19 Dietrich Eckart, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1924), 36. 20 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–44: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens (London, 1953), 76. Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists 175

Christian artists made signifĳicant and previously unaccounted for contributions to the invention of National Socialist iconography, most notably in converting traditional Christian imagery (e.g., the Madonna and Child as well as the Deposition from the Cross) into distinctively fascist palingenetic emblems.21

War, Apocalypse, and Nationalist Christianity

During World War I—a period charged with eschatological signifĳicance and seen as a test of faith and a signal of Germany’s special destiny, tropes that were appropriated by National Socialism—it was commonplace for priests and pastors in the pulpit, politicians in the Reichstag, and intellectuals in the media to invoke biblical correspondences with the momentous events of the present. From the outset, German Christians of all denominations saw the war “as apocalypse, as a last judgment to be carried out by the Volk itself in God’s service.”22 Convinced of Germany’s moral, spiritual, and cultural superiority the German populace discounted the fact of Western material dominance in the outcome of the war. Ideology trumped the reality of the war in the trenches, especially after the intervention of the United States in 1917. The war was deemed neither an afffliction nor a necessary evil—terms that would describe common attitudes among the Western allies. In Germany the war was seen as a spiritual test and killing was deemed not merely an unfortunate necessity of war, but a vehicle of transcendence. There was even a studied anachronism in the symbolism of the uniforms and headgear that German troops wore in battle. Their steel Siegfried helmets combined medieval symbolism and religious overtones allied with the modern technology of steel fabrication. Intellectuals and literati on the left and right closed ranks in support of the German war efffort. Max Weber wrote: “However it turns out, this war is great and wonderful.”23 For Thomas Mann the war meant “purifĳication, liberation, and an immense hope.” Moreover, war removed the “wolfĳish-mercantile” materialism, the “can-can-shimmy morality,” and the “cockroaches of the spirit” of industrial society.24 Heinrich Mann, who is usually considered a martyr by the

21 “Palingenesis” is Roger Grifffĳin’s coinage to denote the central role of resurrection and rebirth in fascist ideology and symbolism. See especially Roger Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 22 Macgregor Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33: Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships (Cambridge up, 2007), 172. 23 Cited in Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 170. 24 Both passages cited in Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 170, 171. 176 Maertz left, asserted that “under military dictatorship, Germany has become free!”25 Hitler recalled his response to the declaration of war: “stormy enthusiasm; I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.”26 The leading proponent of war as transcendental experience was the novelist and much-decorated war hero, Ernst Jünger. (He sustained fourteen wounds and earned Germany’s highest honour for gallantry, the Pour le Mérite.) He asserted that “machines cannot win battles, even if battles are won with machines—a very great diffference…Here every day proves that the will knows no impossibilities…The overpowering desire to kill gave my feet wings.” Invoking Heraclitus, the Nazis’ favourite pre-Socratic philosopher, Jünger noted that war, “father of all things, is also our father; it has hammered, hewn, and tempered us into what we are.”27 His contemporary and fellow Frontsoldat (combat veteran) and novelist Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz confĳirmed his generation’s total identifĳication with the war: “They told us [in 1918] the war was now over. We laughed. For we ourselves were the war.”28 Defeat in World War I was consecrated by nostalgia for the shared sacrifĳice and comradeship of the trenches. The sacred past of the Fronterlebnis and the sense of community formed there laid the foundation for the national racial community. The hagiography of the trenches served as the crucible in which extremist German politics, nationalist religion, and art and literature, especially the work of the Expressionists, was forged into tropes that were readily available for appropriation by National Socialism as a way of resacralizing and reauthorizing Nazi policies, heroes, and fantasies. This shared experience of life at the front superseded all social, class, and cultural barriers on both right and left (e.g., Jünger’s novels of the right and Remarque’s of the left demonstrate the ecumenism of the Fronterlebnis), transforming the body politic into a biomass based on consanguinity. Indeed, following the reformation of the nsdap in 1925, Hitler “promised the German people that National Socialism would recreate Germany as a “cohe- sive Volk-community…that fondly recalled the authentic Volksgemeinschaft” of 1914.29 Germany’s economic calamity in the post-war years heightened the perception of crisis to such an extent that Hitler’s extreme apocalyptic remedies

25 Cited in Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 171. 26 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton-Miffflin, 1943), 161. 27 Cited in Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 282. 28 F.W. Heinz, Sprengstofff (Berlin: Frundsberg Verlag, 1930), 7. 29 Cited in Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 358. Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists 177 appeared reasonable and fully consistent with the millenarian rhetoric and imagery circulating during the war years and the Weimar Republic. Indeed, the apocalypse of defeat ushered in and legitimised extremist responses such as the Pan-German League’s Bamberg Proclamation that fused nationalist Christian and völkisch elements and was issued as the National Assembly met in Weimar on 16 February 1919. Embodying the “völkische Weltanschauung,” the Bamberg Proclamation described the concept of race as “the key to world history,” the “struggle for survival” as the foundation of existence, and Jews as the “lowest of races,” a “ferment of decomposition,” “fungus of putrefaction,” and “parasite of the peoples of the Aryan race.”30 The coming conflict between the German Volk and the Jews would take the form of a cosmic struggle between good and evil.

Christianity, National Socialism, and Modernism/Modernity

One crucial aspect of the relationship between Christianity and National Socialism is their shared ambivalence toward Modernism and modernity. From a modernizer’s perspective, both Christianity and National Socialism could be seen as utterly anti-modern, anachronistic forces that posed an immense obstacle to social progress. On the other hand, even though anachro- nisms were built into the dna of the National Socialist project, the Nazis saw themselves as a revolutionary force that would modernise all sectors of society, including mainstream religious observance. By this, the Nazis meant, of course, to Germanise and wholly “de-Jewify” the state Churches, but this process had actually begun decades prior to the Machtergreifung and intensifĳied as extreme nationalism impacted all belief systems and ideologies during World War I. In this way we see National Socialist ideology and Christianity becoming increasingly conflated, overlapping, and consanguine—not identical twins but exhibiting a strong family resemblance. For the Nazis, modernity was identifĳied with freedom and the possibility of escape from an historical present in which defeated Germany was demonised as a pariah state. Modernity also served as the launching pad for Germany’s futural utopia and in many areas—especially in communications technology, aviation, rocketry, and design—the Nazis introduced aspects of the utopian future to the present. It is also in modernity that the signature iconographies and rhetorical styles of Christian art, völkisch nationalism, and avant-garde Modernism dovetail as a consequence of their shared preoccupation with

30 Cited in Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 285. 178 Maertz apocalyptic crisis and imminent rebirth. The fusion of Christian and National Socialist iconography and symbolism contradicts the widespread but mistaken belief in a general Weimar cultural libertinism—a myth perpetuated by standard scholarly accounts of avant-garde culture and by popular fĳilms such as Cabaret (1970)—that depicts Modernist culture in isolation from its more complex socio-political background. Indeed, as Knox explains, “for all of Weimar’s celebrated toleration of aesthetic, sexual, and political experimen- talism, its organisational subcultures remained almost uniformly German- national or even overtly völkisch in flavour, with the exception of organisations within the Socialist or Communist orbits.”31 The overwhelmingly nationalist, proto-fascist cultural and political bias of these institutions and their leadership is prima facie evidence of the complex and interdependent, symbiotic relationship between the avant-garde and their afffĳiliated or supporting artist organisations, exhibition juries, and patrons. Examples include such transformational fĳigures in the modernist canon (and among the few genuine conservatives) as the painter Emil Nolde, the novelist Ernst Jünger, the poet Stefan George, and even the pre-Machtergreifung Thomas Mann, whose attacks on the Western powers during World War I and scepticism toward parliamentary democracy during the Weimar Republic are virtually indistinguishable in their vehement bellicosity from attacks emanating from the Nazi and völkisch camps. Even his brother and fellow novelist Heinrich Mann, darling of the left, expressed views consonant with the anti-republican consensus on the right. That Modernist practice in the arts was not incompatible with crypto-fascism is not all that surprising, given that “right-wing” and “left-wing” Modernisms were both engendered in the same nurturing matrix of German nationalist cultural politics. Even prior to the Machtergreifung, when the newly Nazifĳied state took over the traditional outsized role of government patronage that dated back to Bismarck, artists of all ideological persuasions and stylistic schools gravitated toward the nsdap not in a spontaneous act of opportunism but in response to long-held grievances by members of the educated professions. As World War I shifted the centre of economic gravity from agriculture and traditional craftsmanship to heavy industry, increasingly distraught and dispossessed farmers, artists, soldiers, and artisans emerged as the main targets of National Socialist propaganda. The adverse economic impact of the war was exacerbated, fĳirst, by hyperinflation, and then, by the Great Depression, leading to the pauperisation, chiefly, of intellectuals and artists as well as others in skilled occupations. Economic collapse combined with technological advances, such

31 Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 267. Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists 179 as photography and the cinema, directly threatened the status of artists working in traditional media, and the objects they produced as consumer goods, none more so than easel paintings and handmade prints. Ironically, artists’ livelihoods were threatened by the very technological advances in media championed by and identifĳied with National Socialist propaganda and cultural production—photography and fĳilm. Once again, the Janus-like nature of National Socialism reveals itself in its simultaneous embrace of the most futur- istic technologies—radio, cinema, and ballistic missiles—and the anachro- nisms of easel painting and woodcut printing. No other artists were courted by the nsdap more assiduously than those working in the most traditional media and subject matter. Thus painters, watercolorists, and printmakers formed a core Nazi constituency whose support for Hitler was contingent on state and Party patronage after the Machtergreifung. Such expectations are reflected in the pre-1933 political afffĳili- ations and voting patterns of a representative sample of artists who accepted Hitler’s personal patronage. Despite a diversity of backgrounds as to region of origin, training institution, political afffĳiliation, religious confession, and war service, German artists in disproportionately large numbers gravitated toward the nsdap. They also adjusted their work as needed to conform to Nazi aesthetic standards in order to attract the patronage of the Führer, Nazi elites, and ordinary museum-goers whose taste was shaped by the collective experiences of war, economic austerity, and nationalist politics. As for Christian artists seeking to negotiate a viable career path in the Hitler state, it was imperative for them not to squander their talent but to enlist it in the service of the national racial community. Thus there were compelling social, economic, and political-ideological reasons for artists to collaborate with the patronage system put in place under National Socialism. Already in the latter years of the Weimar Republic, in the 1930, 1931, and 1932 annual Munich art exhibitions, academic and avant-garde elements coexist, cohabit, and comingle, as do secular and religious conventions. Then, from 1933 onwards, the inclusion of Christian-themed works of art in German exhibitions presupposed their thorough Aryanisation, which was in keeping with the Positive Christian insistence that Jesus was not Jewish. By the 1937 opening of the fĳirst nsdap-sponsored Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition), the mobilisation of Christian iconography into the lexicon of National Socialist imagery had become so complete that even traditional Christian subjects, such as the Madonna and Child and the Deposition from the Cross—which once more narrowly functioned as devotional images or scenes from the life of Jesus—had been wholly mobilised and transformed into icons of Nazi modernity. The following objects demonstrate 180 Maertz this mobilisation process, resulting in the fusion of Christian and National Socialist iconography. In Oskar Martin-Amorbach’s (1897–1987) Madonna [Figure 9.1], exhibited in Munich in 1933, the Aryan identity of the mother and the Christ child is unam- biguous, based on the Nordic facial features and blonde hair of both subjects. In its self-consciously archaizing style, subject matter, flattened perspective, matte surface, and medium (he worked in egg tempera in his easel paintings, an ancient medium associated with devotional paintings on wood panel) Martin-Amorbach’s Madonna functions both as an homage to the Nazarenes, the devoutly Catholic German artists who, in the early nineteenth century, sought to revive Christian art by adopting the old Italian and German masters as their role models, and as an anticipatory representation of German racial purity that was the objective of Nazi Germany’s homicidal social engineering. Severely wounded in World War I, where he survived as a messenger at the front for two years, in 1920 Martin-Amorbach accepted an invitation to study as a “master student” with Franz von Stuck at the Munich Academy of Art. At this point in his career Martin-Amorbach’s trajectory was identical to that of many better-known Modernist artists, such as Albert Weisgerber (1878–1915), who also studied with Stuck and fought in the trenches, as well as the foreign- born non-combatants Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, who are Stuck’s most famous students. Prior to the Machtergreifung Martin-Amorbach emerged as a leading practitioner of Christian painting. Indeed, after installing his twenty- fĳive meter square frescoCrucifĳixion in the interior of the Glaspalast, the chief exhibition space for contemporary art in Munich from 1853 to 1931, he received a steady stream of church commissions throughout Bavaria, principally for large format paintings on panel as well as wall frescoes. After the Nazis came to power Martin-Amorbach’s career trajectory was similar to that of Wilhelm Emil (Elk) Eber (1892–1941), also a Stuck student, Nazi Party member, and Hitler favourite. During the transitional years between January 1933 and the Great German Art Exhibition of 1937, Martin-Amorbach branched out from the parochial confessional niche where he made his reputation to emerge as one of the most celebrated artists associated with National Socialism, who produced some of the most iconic Nazi symbols, all of which objectify and propagate Nazi ideology.32 By contrast, Richard Heymann (1900–1973) worked in exclusively secular genres before the Machtergreifung, but then afterwards emerged as a producer of some of the most potent Nazi imagery, featuring the ingenious conver sion of

32 See, for example, The Sower (1937), Harvest (1938), and Peasant Beauty (1940). Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists 181

Figure 9.1 Oskar Martin-Amorbach, Madonna, 1933. Whereabouts unknown.

Christian iconography into multivalent political topoi. Heymann’s Des Volkes Lebensquell (The Life Source of the People) (1937) [Figure 9.2], an object exhibited four years after Hitler came to power at the inaugural Great German Art Exhibition of 1937, demonstrates the total Nazifĳication of this traditional Christian trope. The expansion of the family group suggests the politically- correct maternal fecundity and domesticity associated with motherhood in Nazi Germany. The landscape with the sun breaking through the clouds and the mother fĳigure’s clothing allude to the rural countryside as incubator of the healthy Nordic race and the symbolically signifĳicant role of the peasantry in 182 Maertz

Figure 9.2 Richard Heymann, Des Volkes Lebensquell, 1937. Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum.

National Socialist propaganda. The introduction of the boy with the model air- plane in the Deutscher Jungvolk uniform (the section of the Hitler Youth for boys under the age of fourteen), gazed upon with evident pride by his beaming younger sister, accomplishes the dual purpose of indicating the nsdap’s role as a unifĳier of society and the patron of modern technological advances. While Heymann was also a product of the Munich arts scene and only three years younger than Martin-Amorbach, his career path difffered in signifĳicant ways from that of his near contemporary. A Lutheran in majority Catholic Bavaria and too young to have seen service in World War I, Heymann was not Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists 183 associated with völkisch or nationalistic political or cultural organisations. Indeed, prior to the Machtergreifung, Heymann voted for the Social Democrats, whereas Martin-Amorbach joined the nsdap (in 1938).33 Another fascinating example of a traditional Christian trope that has been wholly absorbed into the lexicon of National Socialist iconography is found in Kameraden (Comrades) (1937) [Figure 9.3] by Ferdinand Spiegel (1879–1950). Depicting a German soldier in the trenches of World War I carrying a wounded comrade over his shoulder, Spiegel’s painting has transformed the canonical Deposition from the Cross (compare Figure 9.4, a relief sculpture adorning the exterior of the Strasbourg Cathedral) into a scene that succinctly and dramatically captures the origination myth of the nsdap as the product of the camaraderie of the front and, with it, the bonds reinforcing the national racial community that would be realised with the completion of the Nazi revolution. The revised Deposition from the Cross by Spiegel exemplifĳies the synthesis that occurs in the Nazi mobilization of Christian iconography: the suggestion of the traditional Christian connotations—sacrifĳice, pathos, agapé—remain intact and are enriched by the addition of more context specifĳic associations with the Fronterlebnis, such as the ubiquitious impact of the war, austerity, and related hardships. Spiegel, like Martin-Amorbach, a Roman Catholic and war veteran, knew such sufffering fĳirst-hand (and won the Iron Cross in 1915). While sixteen years Martin-Amorach’s senior, Spiegel nonetheless followed a similar career path as he also trained at the Munich Academy of Art and joined the nsdap. In early twentieth-century Germany, Christian artistic iconography, prior to its mobilisation by National Socialism, could, when restricted to its customary doctrinally determined semaphorism, seem anachronistic, degenerate, anti-Modern, and even Jewish when illustrating Old Testament narratives without National Socialist modifĳication (i.e., Aryanisation). One has to only consider such apocalyptically charged images as Lovis Corinth’s Ecce Homo (1925) or Emil Nolde’s Crucifĳixion (1912), both of which are masterpieces of German Expressionism and derive much of their energy and emotional charge from the soon-to-be banned Modernist style and technique in which they were

33 All details of the personal and professional lives of Martin-Amorbach, Heymann and Spiegel are taken from the Fragenbögen (denazifĳication questionnaires) that they, as ben- efĳiciaries of the patronage of Adolf Hitler (who purchased many of their paintings in the name of the German Volk), were required to fĳill out in the fĳirst years of the Allied occupation of Germany. These documents are housed in the Bayerisches Hauptstaatarchiv (bhsa) in Munich. The author was given permission to examine these documents and to make citations from their contents. 184 Maertz

Figure 9.3 Ferdinand Spiegel, Kameraden, 1937. Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum. executed. This impression of a division between Christian and secular art was intensifĳied by the strict separation, in pre-Machtergreifung German art exhibitions, of the two types of art into diffferent categories and exhibition spaces. This bifurcation not only reflected traditional divisions within the profession based on chosen media, such as oil painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Indeed, organisational afffĳiliations were also determined by other factors, including one’s region of origin, the institutions where artists received their training, and, perhaps most importantly, whether artists identifĳied with the Nazi Modernism and the Mobilisation of Christian Artists 185

Figure 9.4 Deposition from the Cross. 17th Century. Strasbourg Cathedral. Photograph: Gregory Maertz academic tradition or the avant-garde. Finally, there were professional bodies for artists who specialised in depicting or sculpting animals and others for artists who worked as copyists, a thriving if somewhat arcane discipline in the early 1930s. Christian art was also a thriving if arcane discipline during the latter days of the Weimar Republic. But after Christian iconographic elements were adopted, modifĳied, and incorporated into the Nazi symbolic lexicon formerly anachronistic, sectarian religious icons become powerful symbols of Nazi modernity and futural utopianism.

Bibliography

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Eckart, Dietrich. Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin. Munich: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1924. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilisation. Edited by Jean Khalfa. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. Heinz, F.W. Sprengstofff. Berlin: Frundsberg Verlag, 1930. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. Boston: Houghton-Miffflin, 1943. Hitler, Adolf. Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–44: His Private Conversations. Edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953. Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Macmillan, 1970.

Secondary Sources Altgeld, Wolfgang. Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum. Mainz: M.-Grunewald Verlag, 1992. Cornwell, John. Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. New York: Viking, 1999. Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich at War. London: Penguin, 2008. Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. Translated by Michael B. Smith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. Goldhagen, Daniel J. A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfĳilled Duty of Repair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Grifffĳin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Knox, Macgregor. To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33: Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Stern, Fritz. The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. chapter 10 James Strachey Barnes and the Fascist Revolution Catholicism, Anti-Semitism and the International New Order

Paul Jackson

“Fascism may be defĳined generally as a political and social movement having as its objective the re-establishment of a political and social order, based upon the main current of traditions that have formed our European civilisation, traditions created by Rome, fĳirst by the Empire and subsequently by the Catholic Church.”1 So declared James Strachey Barnes, one of the convinced “universal fascists” of the interwar period.2 As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, examination of the “fascist intellectual”—a publicist fĳigure theorising the relevance of the ideology—takes us into a realm of microanalysis where some of the assumptions developed by generic theories of what “fascism” is can be prob- lematised. For example, despite his presentation of Italian Fascism in the defĳinition above as a restoration of old values, we should note that Barnes’s vision simultaneously embraced wholesale political and social revolution too. Moreover, closer scrutiny reveals that Barnes’s theme of promoting internationalism is somewhat at odds with a narrow and radical vision of the “palingenesis,” or rebirth, of the national community that generic fascism theorists often highlight as forming the core of all true fascisms. Yet as we will see, despite this tension Barnes’s anti-Semitism in particular revealed his reliance on resurgent nation states as a bulwark against the decadence and decay he found promoted by a corrupt international order driven by liberalism and to a lesser extent communism. Curiously, Barnes’s own story reveals a transient life, though gravitating around Italophile sentiments he acquired in his youth. Born in India, he grew up in Italy before entering formal education in Britain. He adhered to the Roman Catholic Church, wrote books supporting Italian Fascism, and by the late 1930s contributed to American periodicals too, especially Social Justice, before becoming a publicist for the Fascist regime after its entry into the war. Following the Second World War, Barnes eventually settled in Italy, where he

1 James Strachey Barnes, The Universal Aspect of Fascism (London: Williams and Norgate, 1928), 35. 2 See: Michel Ledeen, Universal Fascism; the Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928–1936, (New York: H. Fertig, 1972); and Roger Grifffĳin, International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (London: Arnold, 1998).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282285_012 188 Jackson lived until his death in 1955. His idiosyncratic embrace of a pro-Fascist politics during this period synthesised an international vision outlining the rejuve- nation of “strong” and “young” nations with an evocative theme of a pan- European Catholic revival. Furthermore, Barnes’s endorsement of Italian Fascism as a politically revolutionary force conforms to what some analysts of fascism now refer to as “political modernism” too. In sum, Barnes set out a worldview steeped in a “sense of an ending,” as well as envisioning a radical sense of a “new beginning.” This allowed him to set his assertions for a new confĳiguration for Europe in an apocalyptic tenor, while also believing himself to be living through a time of elemental renewal and regeneration. As we will see, he stressed that Fascism in Italy and elsewhere represented the politics of the future, while liberalism and communism, driven by hidden Jewish forces, were the corrupt ideologies of a dwindling era. Yet before grounding such themes in samples of Barnes’s publicism, in particular as Europe entered into war around 1939, it is fĳirst useful to set out in more detail parameters for the qualitative analysis of such fascist writings. Firstly, regarding the issue of the nature of “fascism” as a generic phenomenon, the approach embraced in this chapter will broadly conform to the now- dominant view of the ideology as one combining a sense of nationalised spiritual revolution with a populist, anti-liberal and anti-capitalist politics, and calling for the constitutional reordering of the modern nation-state.3 Moreover, it will engage and expand on this approach to raise a series of larger research questions. Indeed, although setting out a core set of qualities can help to give focus to enquiry, such general defĳinitions offfer a mere skeletal approach for understanding fascism as a complex intellectual trend that can be identifĳied as a product of modernity. So to build on such a core working defĳinition, we can employ a more expansive framework, drawing on further observations set out by a range of cultural theorists who have examined fascism. This will establish a heuristic “cluster” of analytical themes for contex- tualising a sample of the materials developed by Barnes in the wider milieu of interwar fascisms.4

3 The major texts setting out this approach include: Roger Grifffĳin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993); Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–45 (London: Routledge, 2001); Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Pimlico, 1993). 4 For a more detailed exposition on the value of this approach for developing qualitative analysis of fascist ideology, see Roger Grifffĳin, “Cloister or Cluster? The Implications of Emilio Gentile’s Ecumenical Theory of Political Religion for the Study of Extremism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6.1 (June 2005): 33–52. James Strachey Barnes And The Fascist Revolution 189

As successive analysts of fascist ideology and culture have shown, when examining the phenomenon we need to be especially careful about being dismissive of the complexity of fascist thinking, and recognise that it was a powerful, generic political force that gave, in its own terms, “positive” visions to its many adherents. In an implicitly anti-fascist contemporary context—at least within Anglophone academia—it is all too easy to write offf those attracted to fascisms in their interwar historical context as wrong-headed, or simply mad. Yet such a dismissive approach is limiting when trying to understand fascist intellectual milieus. For example, rather than scorning those who self- identifĳied as fascists for jumping between a variety of ultimately incompatible ideas, we can take note of one of the early analysts of fascist culture, George Mosse, especially his observation that fascism is a “scavenger ideology.”5 This recognition of the heterogeneous nature of fascist cultures has been aug- mented by Roger Eatwell’s stress on the “syncretic” nature of these milieus.6 This again helps us recognise that individual renderings of fascism are the product of protagonists fusing together many difffuse strands of radical thought, drawing on the left as well as the right. This synthesising of radical stances is developed in order to evoke the trope of the nation entering a new era. A strong language of national redemption thus runs through fascisms, a point we can examine further via reference to Emilio Gentile’s influential work exploring evocations of the sacred in fascist movements and regimes.7 Thus, we can add to the theme of syncretism the notion of fascism as a form of “political religion”—that is, an experimental worldview that tries to shore up the existential gap generated by secularising modernity by blurring numinous and ideological qualities to both evoke a religious aura and develop a radical political agenda. Fascist political religions of the interwar period offfered experimental political forms that attempted to address ontological disenchantment, while gravitating around overcoming national humiliation by spinning out a wide variety of redemptive meta-narratives for the nation and its future. Such concern with fascism as a force trying to re-sacralise modernity has also been explored by Roger Grifffĳin, whose more recent commentaries on fascist cultures identify a need for people experiencing profound existential crises under the conditions of modernity to generate for themselves what he

5 For further elaboration here, see George Mosse’s collection of essays The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 2000). 6 See also, Roger Eatwell, “Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism,” Journal of Theoretical Politics, 4.2 (1992), 161–194. 7 For his most detailed elaboration of this approach, see Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 190 Jackson calls a new “sacred canopy” to stave offf the meaninglessness of existence, a pattern including, but not limited to, fascisms.8 Echoing Frank Kermode’s classic analysis of the intellectual climate of the early twentieth century, A Sense of an Ending,9 Grifffĳin has used the phrase “the sense of a new beginning” to highlight this attempt to generate new “sacred canopies” to restore a sense of ontological security to the conditions of modernity. Kermode himself explored what he considered an apocalyptic sensibility found in modernisms, and stressed that, among ideologues attracted to radical politics of the era of modernism too, there was a tendency to rifff on a mood of living through a period of elemental transition, decay and renewal. So following from this memorable analysis, Grifffĳin’s approach claims that early twentieth-century fascists were profoundly engaged in such a radical milieu, and intellectuals attracted to its politics were excited by tensions between the decline and fall of an old order, and promise of revolutionary renewal. As Grifffĳin and others also point out, fascists were thus steeped in a mind-set that identifĳied decadence in the type of modernity generated by liberal democracies, as well as by communism. Yet rather than merely retreating to an earlier time they wanted to develop “a sense of a new beginning” by proposing a radically new “alternate modernity,” one offfering a new “sacred canopy” centred around reviving past glories in a way that would transcend the crisis-ridden present and offfer a new future. Indeed, the philosopher Peter Osborne has proposed that fascism was a form of “political modernism,” a term subsequently used by Grifffĳin too. For such theorists, fascism’s appeal lay in the fact that it offfered a radical evoca- tion of the new, what Osborne calls a futural vision, driven by a need to escape the conditions of an “actually existing modernity” seen as, somehow, going wrong.10 Thus for fascist “political modernists” the ideology appeals as it offfers a radical break with the present, does not merely want to return to the pre-industrial past, and rather proposes a new and diffferent modernity, fusing a mythicised, imagined past with a vision of elemental regeneration and a new and enlarged role for the state. With these wider concerns in mind that we can now begin to ask not only who James Strachey Barnes was, but, more

8 Roger Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), especially Part 1. 9 For more discussion on this theme, see Paul Jackson, Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine (London: Continuum, 2012) especially Chapter 1. See also Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 10 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2011). James Strachey Barnes And The Fascist Revolution 191 importantly, examine what he saw in fascism that led him to view it as the only solution to the crisis of the modern age. To summarise Barnes’s own backstory, he was born in India before being brought up in Italy by his grandparents, and later went to public school in England. This included attending Eton, before studying at King’s College, Cambridge. He served in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, and was well connected among the London cultural elite at this time. After the end of the First World War he worked for the Foreign Offfĳice as part of the South European delegation to the Paris peace conference—claiming a particular expertise on Albania.11 Drawn back to Italy in the interwar years, he became attracted to the ideas of Italian Fascism. This embrace of Italian ultra-nationalism developed into high-profĳile activism when, in 1927, Barnes became the Secretary General for a new institution, the International Centre for Fascist Studies (cinef), set up in Lausanne, Switzerland.12 Here, he published two books, and a range of other material, promoting the ideals of “universal fascism.” This was a visionary project that fĳinally came to an end in the wake of Mussolini’s isolation from the wider international community following the invasion of Ethiopia. Yet “universal fascism” had really waned by the early 1930s, after it was clear that the new Nazi regime was not interested in seriously pursuing such themes. The fĳirst of Barnes’s volumes calling for “universal fascism,” The Universal Aspect of Fascism, was published in 1928 and received further offfĳicial endorsement as a later edition included a Preface by Barnes’s hero, Mussolini. A key text for Anglophone fascist sympathisers, as well as the curious, the volume was widely read in England and elsewhere. Indeed, as Thomas Linehan points out, both Barnes’s theoretical volumes had a second print run.13 The Universal Aspect of Fascism set out an intellectualised justifĳication of the Italian variant of fascist ideology, and a model for its wider adoption. Looking at the tenor of the early reception, we can also note that Barnes’s fĳirst book got a fair airing, as a quote from a review of the text in The Times suggests:

Fascism is a system of thought, and as such is destined to dominate this century as surely as Liberalism dominated the last. Mr Barnes’ book

11 For full details on the life and times of Barnes, we can refer to his two volumes of autobiography Half a Life (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1933), and Half a Life Left (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937). 12 Thomas Linehan, British Fascism 1918–39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), especially 128–129. 13 Linehan, British Fascism, 128. 192 Jackson

is, in the main, a closely reasoned amplifĳication of this…contention… Originally it was a party of action with a mission to correct the incompe- tence of the old regime. That accomplished, it had to ask itself by what principles the strength of Italy could be maintained and developed. Philosophic Fascism is the answer to this question […].14

The book developed Barnes’s core reason for endorsing Italian Fascism, stressing the idea that it was the only political ideology that could overturn the forces of liberal “agnosticism” and communist “atheism,” core themes in his subsequent theorising. Moreover, Barnes did not see Italian Fascism as an alternative to the sacred authority of the Catholic Church, but rather as an augmentation of it in an age that was tearing away the security offfered by a truly religious worldview. So here Barnes clearly develops a critique of modernity that styled modern life as losing its spiritual identity, as falling into decadence, while also highlighting that the contrasting strength of the new Fascist state in Italy was its embrace of the Catholic Church. Unsurprisingly, he would later regularly celebrate the Lateran Pacts of 1929. In sum, here Barnes framed Fascism not only as a new political philosophy for the twentieth century, but also one that would uniquely foster not merely a restoration of the spiritual unity offfered by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, but would somehow transcend this era. We can see these themes extended when turning to Barnes’s second theoretical monograph, simply titled Fascism. Here too, Barnes offfers much detail on how he regarded the early twentieth century as a time marked by a “sense of an ending,” thus creating the possibility for a radically new order to emerge. He again stressed that the political milieu that surrounded him was characterised by competition between three key ideologies: liberalism, communism and fascism. Typically, he styled the fĳirst two as essentially similar, grounded in the promotion of agnosticism and materialism respectively. Indeed, he decried both as “a shocking doctrine—a grossly immoral attitude.”15 Yet unlike these products of the nineteenth century, Barnes stressed that the core feature of Italian Fascism was that it was truly modern and revolutionary. Liberalism and communism, meanwhile, would only hold back the development of the world into a purer, and thus more moral, realm. So it is important to underscore that Barnes’s appreciation of fascism stressed it offfered an alternate modernity, not merely regression into the past.

14 “Book of the Day. The Fascist State: A Philosophic Justifĳication,” The Times, 17 January 1928, 8. 15 James Strachey Barnes, Fascism (London: T. Butterworth, 1934), 110. James Strachey Barnes And The Fascist Revolution 193

It was this future orientated vision, which, claimed Barnes, allowed Mussolini and other Fascists to justify violence too. Force was vital to forging the new era. As Mussolini deployed violence in a revolutionary context, one that was trying to create a new future for western society, it was deemed acceptable and was presented as a regenerative force—as were the other, repressive aspects of the Fascist regime. Such action was necessary to stave offf the larger scale violence that would be unleashed by forces of reaction if liberalism and communism were left unchecked. Typically, Barnes set this out while describing Mussolini as a revolutionary leader in passages such as the following: “Mussolini has said: there is a liberty for times of war, another for times of peace; a liberty for times of revolution, another for normal times; a liberty for times of prosperity, another for times of stringency.”16 Furthermore, praise for Mussolini’s guidance of the revolution extended to celebrating the what he saw as the relatively non-violent quality of the Italian experience: “There is little doubt indeed, were it not for Mussolini, that the fascist revolution, like most other revolutions, would have progressed in a trail of blood.”17 So for those who criticised Italian Fascism for being violent, or for reducing liberties, this was the answer. The wellbeing of the national community, and securing its future, were being put fĳirst by Mussolini, and these ideals were ultimately more important than individual freedoms. Moreover, we again see Barnes’s speaking of Mussolini’s regime in terms of a project bringing about revolutionary change. To further evoke a sense of the present as a time of radical change, Barnes often drew on the reference point of the Renaissance too. For example claiming that the fascist

movement, unlike that of the Renaissance, possesses a quite defĳinite and conscious aim…no less than the gradual construction of a new world civilisation, which would be the reflection of the Greek and Roman spirits, a conciliation of the ideals of the modern era with those of the old.18

So it was right to silence those who did not agree with repression in the name of Italian Fascism’s modern “Renaissance,” while Barnes was happy to explain how many in Italy who rejected Fascism were swayed by what he dismissed as “the prejudices acquired during their youth.”19 We even learn that, in his estimation, it would take at least another generation—one fully socialised in

16 Barnes, Fascism, 111. 17 Barnes, Fascism, 242. 18 Barnes, Fascism, 53. 19 Barnes, Fascism, 243. 194 Jackson

Fascist schooling and supported in adulthood through the culture established by the Fascist leisure clubs—to fully value the positive socio-cultural changes being brought about by Mussolini’s revolution. In other words, repression of dissenters would be required for some time. Finally, such suppression of freedoms, and promotion of state authority, had a sacred justifĳication too. The strongly hierarchical state now run by a new Fascist elite was developed in the mould of the Catholic Church, and was entirely compatible with it. As Barnes argued:

A government…founded on [the Fascist authoritarian] principle, would, indeed, be one strictly in accordance with Roman tradition and the government of the Roman Church offfers a perfect example of such a government in being.20

After his time promoting “universal fascism” via cinef came to an end, Barnes worked as a reporter for Reuters during Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Again, his politicised position became clear as contemporary commentators found his views notably partisan.21 After this turning point in interwar European history, Barnes then moved his Anglophone, pro-Fascist publicism to an American setting. He established himself as a regular writer for the American Catholic publication Social Justice. This was the political organ of Father Charles Coughlin, the populist Catholic broadcaster and leader of the anti-New Deal organisation the National Union for Social Justice.22 By tapping into the large audiences cultivated by Coughlin’s iconoclastic views, Barnes’s work for Social Justice gave him a new voice. To give a sense of scale, at its height Social Justice had a circulation of approximately one million, and in the late 1930s Father Coughlin’s broadcasts themselves were seen as influential media events, promoting populist nationalism alongside isolationist themes, and were seen as a potential source for cultivating anti-Roosevelt votes. Aside from Barnes’s own anti-Semitism, which will be explored in more depth below, it is worth stressing that Social Justice voiced deeply hostile attitudes toward Jewish people too. Strikingly, it published the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, while

20 Barnes, Fascism, 113. For a longer discussion on relationships between British forms of fascism, including Barnes’ ideas, and Christianity, see Paul Jackson, “Extremes of Faith and Nation: British Fascism and Christianity,” Religion Compass, 4.8 (2010): 507–517. 21 For example, this was noted in his obituary in The Times, “Major Strachey Barnes: A Paladin of Fascism,” The Times, 29 August 1955, 9. 22 For more on Coughlin, see Donald Warren, Charles Coughlin: The Father of Hate Radio (New York: The Free Press, 1996). James Strachey Barnes And The Fascist Revolution 195

Coughlin himself was a supporter of Nazism as a bulwark against the rise of Communism, for example defending Kristallnacht. Indeed, according to Coughlin, Roosevelt was part of the same Jewish plot that had willed the Russian Revolution, and was now crippling America through its control of capitalism. Within this populist, pro-Catholic and anti-Semitic milieu, we fĳind a less coded attitude towards anti-Jewish sentiment coming to the fore, when compared to Barnes’s earlier texts. Indeed, via his fears regarding the corruption of a spiritual European ideal as a result of liberalism and communism, the hidden forces of Jewish plotting appear at the forefront of his pro-isolationist commentary. He devoted a number of articles to this topic. For example, 1938 saw Italy introduce anti-Semitic legislation based on Nazi ideals. Responding to this development, Barnes was keen to claim that the new Italian approach to sup- pressing Jews was superior to the Nazi model of anti-Semitic legislation. Strikingly, he also stated that Jews “have always been the protagonists of racial purity (and, for that matter, also of racial superiority),” so Jews should not be surprised when “other races, hitherto careless in this respect, have at long last wakened up to the importance of racial purity.” Moreover, aside from blaming Jews for the need for anti-Semitic legislation, Barnes developed further ad hominem commentary on the invisible threat posed by Jewish infĳiltration of institutions, typical of anti-Semitic arguments: “The Jew has a way of insinuating himself into key positions of influence and of taking advantage of the positions thus gained to exploit the Gentile and forward the policies favouring his own racial ambitions.”23 Putting flesh on the bones of such prejudice, in a subsequent article we fĳind the root cause of Jewish liberation in the modern world being linked to the French Revolution, described as “the spark which made Liberalism a political reality.” Barnes’s retelling of the story of the rise of liberalism during the nineteenth century then set out how its gradual adoption was also a narrative of ever-growing freedoms for Jews. This “march was only arrested,” he asserted, “when its ultimate logical consequences became more and more apparent, namely, the blurring of national personality (running counter to the contemporary intensifĳication of the nationalist movement), the breakdown of the Christian religion into agnosticism and atheism, and class warfare.”24 So here, when it comes to describing the alleged Jewish conspiracy, we see Barnes asserting that strong national cultures were both being deni- grated and were the natural counterweight to the decadence-inducing forces of liberalism and communism. Despite his earlier internationalism, we do see

23 “Italy’s Race Campaign,” Social Justice, 26 September 1938, 4. 24 “The Jewish Question and Its Solution,” Social Justice, 27 February 1939, 3. 196 Jackson a strong promotion of the national ideal in Barnes’s ideology: powerful nations are capable of overturning the secularizing impact of a modernity ultimately promoted by Jews. Barnes also believed that the solution to the Jewish threat was ultimately nothing less than the removal of Jews from Europe. A major social revolution, based on race not class lines, was needed in Europe to remove the corrupting milieu promoted by Jewish people. Yet though his ideas stressed mass relocation, we fĳind no mention of endorsing mass killing in these articles. According to Barnes in repeated statements on the topic of “solving” the largely hidden threat posed by Jews, the country that needed to act, and to bear the full cost of mass relocation of Europe’s Jews, was Great Britain. Before September 1939 at least, Barnes stressed that Britain needed to create a new, Jewish homeland— not in Palestine, but rather in Northern Rhodesia. He felt that Britain would benefĳit commercially from the new colony, thus the country “could well affford to shoulder the entire cost of removing the whole of the present white population to Southern Rhodesia and resettling them there fully compensated.” Moreover, he concluded his article outlining the need for the mass movement of millions of European Jews to the space in Northern Rhodesia thus created as follows: “It would be a glory to our civilisation and an achievement that would fĳill us all with new hopes and confĳidence for the future of civilised mankind.”25 With the coming of war in the summer of 1939, Barnes was also keen to stress that the secret forces of world Jewry were ultimately causing a general conflict to develop in Europe. In one article on the outbreak of war in Europe, he argued that there is “a certain class of Jews who, quite naturally, desire to see the overthrow of Christendom,” and so the unfolding war could be understood as a war of ideas between “the Church of Christ…and the lodges of Lucifer in rebellion against God!”26 A few weeks later he reiterated this hidden, but nonetheless powerful, role allegedly played by Jews in the outbreak of the conflict as follows:

If there had been any question of Palestinian Zionism solving the Jewish problem in a national sense, the majority of Jews would never have given it any support whatever. A national solution of the Jewish problem is the very last thing these Jews desire. Their solution is the international solution. Their solution is to promote by every means in their power the anarchy of Liberalism and the consequent emasculation of Christianity,

25 “The Jewish Problem—and a Solution,” Social Justice, 17 April 1939, 7, cont. 15. 26 “Tragedy of Chamberlain,” Social Justice, 24 July 1939, 7. James Strachey Barnes And The Fascist Revolution 197

so that on the ruins of Christendom they may construct a new Jerusalem: an international Order dominated by their own compact international, racial and esoteric religious organization, which is the essence of Jewish power today… International Jewry—for the time being anyhow—has abandoned Zionism, because international Jewry is now throwing all its weight into provoking a European conflict, into bringing about a war to crush “Fascism.”27

With this existential war being posed, ultimately between international Jewry and national fascism, we again detect clear endorsement of an extreme nationalist agenda in Barnes. Finally, following the German invasion of Poland, we can even fĳind Barnes suggesting that, when it came to terms whereby the Nazi regime could compensate Poland “for their losses, few things would give them [i.e. the Polish] greater satisfaction that relieving them of their Jewish population.”28 Yet the issue of what to say about Nazism, for Barnes ultimately an alternate form of fascism, was a complex one. On the one hand he was regularly critical of the anti-Catholic policies developed by the Nazi regime, yet on the other he felt the need to defend Nazism as part of the same family of youthful, nationalist movements as represented by Fascist Italy. So Nazism was certainly seen as broadly akin to the type of regime he approved of, and a believed was also emerging in Italy, and in Spain and Portugal. Yet the latter three were distinct from, and superior to, Nazism because of their clearly pro-Catholic profĳiles. So Barnes’s strategy was to present Nazism as an erring member of the family of fascisms, and likely to mend its ways and come under the greater influence of Catholicism soon. In doing so, it would moderate its more extreme, sometimes openly pagan, tendencies. For Barnes, the influence of his own hero fĳigure, Mussolini, would be signifĳicant to the process too. As he, somewhat hopefully, described the influence of Mussolini over Nazism:

German Catholics…do not wish to return to “democracy.” Their effforts are being directed to establish their religious rights within the framework of the Nazi State. And since, as a whole, they constitute a courageous and steadfast community, and while behind them stands Catholic opinion throughout the world, it is probably only a question of time for the evil counsellors of Hitler to give way… The Catholic hierarchy in Germany are

27 “The ‘British White Paper’ on Palestine,” Social Justice, August 14, 1939, 9. 28 “After Peace What?” Social Justice, 30 October 1939, 9. 198 Jackson

working hard for it; and it is a well known fact that Mussolini is doing his best to bring about a satisfactory solution by mediation.29

Thus, despite religious diffferences with Nazism, he regularly stressed there were core similarities between the ideals of Hitler’s state and Fascism in Italy. The more important division in Europe, meanwhile, was as follows: the “old” regimes of France and Britain (corrupted by Jewish liberalism) were the true cause of strife, while Italy and Germany “claim that they represent fresh vital civilizing forces,” and were also justifĳied to expand “because they are young and vital, they feel time is working on their side. These young nations have aimed at getting what they want without war, if possible.” So we fĳind here too an interesting, quite mythic language juxtaposing age and decay, attributed to liberal states, with one of youth and vitality, ascribed to fascist ones. Moreover, this can be seen as an iteration of the isolationist viewpoint of Social Justice more generally at this time. There was also discussion on the abilities of these “young” states to more authentically reflect the will of the people, while also being autocratic: “if we look below the surface, the Nazi, and still more, the Fascist regimes are more democratic than the Liberal, which are dominated by the money-interests.” Here, he links back to a sub-text of anti-Semitism and a critique of global capitalism corrupting the “old” liberal states. In this approach, we also fĳind jus- tifĳication of the need to temporarily suspend full liberties in the “young” regimes, due to the revolutionary nature of the times. As he stressed, “Inevitably in times of revolution, and in times of strife, liberty must be curtailed in the public interest; and only because Germany and Italy have been passing through a revolutionary period has it been deemed necessary to curtail certain liberties which in normal times would be readily granted.”30 In other words, fascist excesses are legitimised via a language of radical transition and renewal, and so paradoxically such states could even be both more authoritarian and more democratic at the same time. Yet despite his sympathy for aspects of Nazism, following the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939, Barnes did begin to put more distance between the aggression of Nazism and the ideals of Fascism in Italy. Nevertheless, he was keen to highlight that, however “much we may dislike certain aspects of Naziism [sic], it is not the same as Bolshevism; for Naziism is neither atheist nor destructive of individual wealth or personality.” Furthermore, there was a strong, geopolitical factor that legitimatised Germany’s actions, as “Germany is

29 “Mussolini’s Warning,” Social Justice, 27 June 1938, 9. 30 “The Real Issues of the War,” Social Justice, 9 October 1939, 7. James Strachey Barnes And The Fascist Revolution 199

Europe’s main defense against the spread of Bolshevism,” and thus offfered “the best hope of preserving Catholic civilisation in Poland. With all Germany’s grave faults therefore, and not withstanding the war, she is still fulfĳilling an important European function.”31 So again, even following the Nazi Soviet Pact of August 1939 and Germany’s subsequent invasion of a Catholic country, we fĳind in Barnes’s commentary a rationale for Nazi violence that links to war against “Jewish” threats, especially as posed by the spread of Bolshevism, while styling Germany as an, albeit erring, promoter of Catholic values. Justifying isolationist views, we see Barnes shifting ultimate blame for European conflict back to the “old” liberal states, and we can even fĳind him suggesting that Britain and France had willed the outbreak of war in Europe in order to defeat “the new youthful nations who in 30 years time, unless crushed in the interval, will have developed an overwhelming strength.” Consequently, the outbreak of hostilities in Europe crystallised the war of ideas between:

Liberalism, which represents the outworn nineteenth century materialist ideology, Bolshevism, which is the logical development of Liberalism (since it is founded on the same essentially materialistic conception of life), and Fascism, which represents the new twentieth century philosophy of the State and may be considered sound or unsound in proportion to the degree in which it allows itself to be animated by the universal values and the fĳixed principles of the Church.32

So while war was on the one hand about staving offf threats from both “old” imperialism and an allegedly related spread of communism, for Barnes it was also a conflict for the right form of fascism—which for him was one fully animated by the values of the Catholic Church. To help explain all this to his American audience, there was also much commentary on why liberalism was incompatible with Catholicism, leaving Fascism as the only credible ideology for true Catholics. For example, one Social Justice article stressed that an encyclical by Pope Leo XIII had claimed liberalism was a “vile perversion,” and so it was high time that “Christians began to undertake a spring cleaning of their minds in relation to it. Many of us would be surprised at the quantity of dirt that we have unconsciously absorbed.”33 Then, once war had broken out, Barnes stressed that the future for the continent lay with a much more widespread rebirth of a Catholic Europe.

31 “Big Drive to India: Soviet Aim in 1940,” Social Justice, 8 January 1940, 3. 32 “The Real Issues of the War,” Social Justice, 9 October 1939, 7. 33 “The Jewish Question and Its Solution,” Social Justice, 27 February 1939, 3. 200 Jackson

This regular trope clearly connects to the theme of spiritual rebirth, or palingenesis, commonly found in fascist discourses of all types. As Barnes set out this visionary position shortly ahead of Italian entry into the conflict:

Italy is the hope of Europe—that is, of civilized Christian Europe. Acting in the closest collaboration with her is Catholic Spain. Out of this war therefore, there may yet dawn a new and more glorious era. If so, it will be due to the renewed vitality of the Roman conception of religion and statecraft which Italy, the land of the Caesars and the home of the Popes, will have rendered possible.34

Barnes sketched out further dimensions to this leading role for Italy and Catholicism in a coming new era. He stressed that Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland comprised a core of Catholic Europe, with the fĳirst three already conforming to what he considered an international form of fascism. Here, he also discussed the potential future of other Catholic states, including a constitu- tionally reordered France in Western Europe, and Poland and Hungary in Central and Eastern Europe, and how they might become further bases for international fascism and strongholds for Catholicism in the coming years. As he opined in 1940, the war in Europe “could be the beginning of a “united states of Europe” no more dominated by sinister international fĳinancial interests nor contaminated by usury. A Europe freed of the neo-Judaic spirit, a Europe that would…bring back into a common fold all the errant sheep of a now divided and scattered Christianity.”35 We also see criticism of Germany developed in this visionary analysis for the Catholic future for the continent. Indeed, Barnes stressed that “a peace imposed by Germany would not be but a copy upside down of the peace of Versailles. All the good that can safely be said for a German victory is that it would release in Germany the forces of Christianity for the work of transforming Naziism [sic] into something better.”36 Finally, returning to the theme of Italian Fascism as a modern, political revolution, the close synergy between the role of the Catholic Church and the Fascist state was also a frequent topic in Barnes’ articles for Social Justice. The Lateran Pacts were regularly referred to as a positive example of the Church and the state overcoming tensions that Italian liberals were unable to resolve.37 Moreover, Barnes was keen to discuss the ideals of the corporate

34 “The War Profĳiteers,”Social Justice, 11 December 1939, 11. 35 “Hope of Christian Europe lies in Rome,” Social Justice, 5 February 1940, 7. 36 “The Prospects of a Good Peace,” Social Justice, 18 March 1940, 9. 37 “Hope of Christian Europe lies in Rome,” Social Justice, 5 February 1940, 7. James Strachey Barnes And The Fascist Revolution 201 state. These principles were not only regularly praised as a radically new type of modern state system, but also clearly linked to the pro-Catholic nature of Italian Fascism. As he put it, the “Holy Father, himself a conservative, has recommended the ‘Guild’ or ‘Corporative’ organisation of society as the specifĳic Catholic solution to the problem of the relationship between Labor and Capital.”38 Elsewhere, his discussion on the Fascist state raised the positive impact of the corporate state model on Italian living standards too, while again pronouncing that the liberal states of the previous century was a tool to tear down the religious social order, and so formed a stark contrast with Fascism’s renewed promotion of it. Moreover, he argued that Mussolini’s new state as the fĳirst of its kind, and so was still an on-going “experiment,” one seeking to fĳind perfect confĳiguration for corporate structures, the introduction of progressive social measures, and a revitalisation of the Catholic order. Thus, Mussolini needed to be given more time to fully resolve tensions being generated by introducing a revolutionary new system. Yet despite such teething problems, in this context too Barnes praised Italy’s dictatorship for creating a new and more “democratic” link between worker, employer and the state—even steeping such commentary in a reference to successfully re-creating Aristotle’s notion of the “polity” for the modern age. Despite the lack of meaningful elections, he claimed workers were better represented than under liberal systems. Moreover, the enlarged state played a central role in the wider life of the individual under Fascism, ranging from promoting recreation to offfering social security, boons that Italian liberalism had failed to fully develop. A further, central example of how Barnes viewed Fascism as taking Italian life to new standards was an article from 1939 dedicated to expanding the benefĳits of Italy’s new school charter.39 Analysis here again stressed the harmonious relations developing between Church and State in Fascist Italy, and highlighted how the Fascist regime offfered policies that not only improved the educational standards of the Italian masses, but also strengthened the role of the family in the public life of the regime too. Indeed, this crystallised the message found in Barnes’s embrace of the Italian Fascist social order: Fascism offfered a radical blend of traditional Catholic values and a revolutionary experiment in organising a modern state, thus transcending the corruption of the liberal era, and so offfering Grifffĳin’s “sense of a new beginning.” With Italy poised to enter the war, Barnes stopped writing for Social Justice, though he still remained an active supporter of Italian Fascism. Indeed, though

38 “Mussolini’s Warning,” Social Justice, 27 June 1938, 9. 39 “Italy’s New School Charter,” Social Justice, 31 July 1939, 7. 202 Jackson beyond the scope of this discussion, later in the war period Barnes continued his active promotion of Italian Fascism by becoming a propagandist for the regime. This fascinating chapter of the Barnes story needs to be told via reference to a detailed diary that he developed while working as a propaganda broadcaster, which again allowed him to develop material steeped in his sustained ideological syncretism between Italian Fascism and Catholicism. However, detailed exposition of Barnes’s publicism later on during the Second World War cannot be explored here, and, although publication of an annotated reproduction of this diary is imminent, at the time of writing this material has yet to be placed in the public domain. Once Barnes’s wartime diary has been published, future study of this striking fascist intellectual will be able to pick up where this analysis has left offf, and explore further the development of Barnes’s ideas during wartime.40 So to bring this chapter to a conclusion, we can return to the core themes set out in the “cluster concept” for exploring a fĳigure such as Barnes developed at the outset of this analysis. From the themes taken from Eatwell and Mosse in particular, we can see that Barnes’s version of fascism was an ideology that incorporated a wide range of ideas and views, yet used these to evoke a revolutionary political agenda. In particular, the trope of transcending liberalism and communism as part of a new constitutional experiment, especially his embrace of the modern corporate state concept, clearly promoted the ideals of a political revolution for nation states such as Italy. Moreover, this language of political revolution, and the creation of the corporate state, was often used to justify repression and violence too. As Eatwell’s work stresses, fascists view their ideology as offfering a “holistic third way” between capitalism and communism. Moreover, as Mosse contends, there is no “authentic” variant of the ideology, merely a wide variety of ad-hoc iterations, each flavoured by the particular interests of the protagonists concerned. The synthesis of Catholicism and Italian Fascism, the strong promotion of “universal fascism” via this fusion being developed across Europe, and the relatively hostile commentary on German Nazism, all clearly evoke this sense of Barnes as a radical, but inde- pendently willed, supporter of Mussolini’s Italy. He was clearly a fascist commentator who was quite able to reach his own idiosyncratic positions. Indeed, his distinctive perspective was also expressed, most forcefully perhaps, via his arguments on alleged threats posed by Jews, and his radical—though again not unique—proposals for the mass removal of Europe’s Jews via the creation of a new Jewish homeland in Northern Rhodesia. Moreover, this aspect

40 Forthcoming Claudia Baldoli ed., A British Fascist in the Second World War: The Italian War Diary of James Strachey Barnes, 1943–1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). James Strachey Barnes And The Fascist Revolution 203 of his work also shows him embracing a social revolution based on racial lines, which would call for the uprooting of millions of Europeans based on their identity alone. Meanwhile, from fĳigures such as Gentile and Grifffĳin, we derive approaches that stress how fascist ideologies are trying to grapple with the problems of secularisation, and overcoming a crisis of modernity, by combining radical politics and a language of myth and faith, in order to create new, experimental “political religions.” Again, this seems quite clear in Barnes, though again his solutions are typically “syncretic” ones. As discussed earlier, fascists attempt to achieve a sense of higher purpose to their political cause by developing approaches that, somehow, propose to re-establish a form of sacred unity thought to exist in earlier periods, though doing so in a modernised format too. The trope of a return to a unifĳied community, one being shattered by the forces of capitalist modernisation, is rife in many fascist commentaries, and we can see this clearly in Barnes’s writings too. He is both deeply nostalgic for an imagined earlier time, one felt to possess a stronger sense of sacred community, as well as calling for a new type of state, and a new international order. To achieve this rebirth, his synthesis between politics and the sacred aura of an earlier incarnation of the Catholic Church can also be seen as a combination fused together to offfer a new “sacred canopy” to stave offf the radical forces of modernity. As fĳigures such as Kermode also contend, the early twentieth century was a time of profound cultural crisis, and the traumas of transition to modernity were exacerbated further by the legacy of the First World War. This was the damaged cultural milieu in which fascist movements across Europe emerged, and sometimes thrived. They were thus steeped in the “sense of an ending” that Kermode suggests is crucial to understanding the thinking of this era, yet they combined this identifĳication of an end of an era with the vision of a new beginning that Grifffĳin addresses. Peter Osborne describes this nexus between calling for a radical sense of renewal and a programmatic political project of “political modernism.” Following this approach, we can describe Barnes as a typical political modernist. Not only was his ideology derived from a rejection of the liberal and communist visions of modernity that surround him, but it strove to create a new and “alternate” modernity too—one combining a new “sacred canopy” to evoke the spiritual order of he believed could be found in pre-reformation Christendom, which he synthesised with the modern ideal of the corporate state. And fĳinally, while Italian Fascism represented the “rooted” European ideal, the ultimate bogeyman for Barnes was, unsurprisingly, the “international” fĳigure of the Jew. As for so many fascists, Jewishness came to crystallise all the threats posed by modernity to national identity, and could be presented as the 204 Jackson hidden, international force controlling both liberalism and communism. As Europe entered into a second general war in 1939, this Jewish conspiracy theory gave Barnes a further, crucial mechanism to explain the why the world was tearing itself apart, and even offfered a vision for its purifĳication too. Thus, defeating Jews was crucial to establishing the Catholic revival that he believed was the historical mission of fascism. So to conclude on this issue, we can make some sense of the delusional “inner logic” found in Barnes’s writings on the “real” conflict that gripped the world as the Second World War broke out:

Christendom must reject the solution to the Jewish problem advocated by the majority of Jews today, namely Liberalism of which Communism is one logical outcome and the dictatorship of the moneyed interests the other. This indeed is the supreme issue today: The great war of ideas in which we are all willy nilly involved, wherein nation is divided against nation and even individual loyalties are set at daggers… If Liberalism grows, Jew and Christian are bound to come into conflict. The result of that conflict means either the smashing up of Christendom and of all the ideals of Christian society or the persecution of the Jews in a manner hitherto undreamed of. It has already become a matter of paramount importance to Christendom to put an end to the influence of Jewry as the protagonist of Liberalism, or we shall be swept by Jewry into a world war which will have for its purpose the establishment of Liberalism with, in many parts of the world, all the horrors of Communism as a half-way house.41

Bibliography

Baldoli, Claudia, ed. A British Fascist in the Second World War: The Italian War Diary of James Strachey Barnes, 1943–1945. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Barnes, James Strachey. The Universal Aspect of Fascism. London: Williams and Norgate, 1928. —— . Half a Life. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1933. —— . Fascism. London: T. Butterworth, 1934. —— . Half a Life Left. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937. Eatwell, Roger. “Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 4/2 (1992): 161–94. —— . Fascism: A History. London: Pimlico, 1993.

41 “The Jewish Question and Its Solution,” Social Justice, 27 February 1939, 3. James Strachey Barnes And The Fascist Revolution 205

Gentile, Emilio, Politics as Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Grifffĳin, Roger, The Nature of Fascism. London: Routledge, 1993. —— . International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus. London: Arnold, 1998. —— . “Cloister or Cluster? The Implications of Emilio Gentile’s Ecumenical Theory of Political Religion for the Study of Extremism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6/1 (2005): 33–52. —— . Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Jackson, Paul, “Extremes of Faith and Nation: British Fascism and Christianity,” Religion Compass 4/8 (2010): 507–17. Jackson, Paul. Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine. London: Continuum, 2012. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Ledeen, Michel. Universal Fascism: the Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928–1936. New York: H. Fertig, 1972. Linehan, Thomas. British Fascism 1918–1939: Parties, Ideology and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Mosse, George. The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism. New York: Howard Fertig, 2000. Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London: Verso, 2011. Payne, Stanley. A History of Fascism, 1914–45. London: Routledge, 2001. Sternhell, Zeev. The Birth of Fascist Ideology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Warren, Donald. Charles Coughlin: The Father of Hate Radio. New York: The Free Press, 1996. chapter 11 “Till Armageddon, No Shalam, No Shalom” Ezra Pound and the Consecration of Politics in the Italian Press During wwii

Andrea Rinaldi

“Decisive Peace”

Vegetius’ notorious motto “si vis pacem, para bellum” shows that since ancient times warmongers have presented war as a necessity to guarantee peace and stability. In that sense the rhetoric and the propaganda with which the Axis forces announced the beginning of World War II was nothing new. On 10 June 1940, Benito Mussolini announced to a jubilant mass of people the entrance of the Kingdom of Italy in the war, saying that the use of weapons was necessary to “fĳinally bring justice and peace to Italy, Europe and the whole world.”1 Peace and the victory of fascist Italy were recurrent topics in Ezra Pound’s writings, too: for instance, one article he wrote in March 1942 was entitled “Pace Decisiva” (“Decisive Peace”):

La pace decisiva signifĳica, prima di tutto, una Vittoria del Fascismo nell’Italia stessa. Vittoria spirituale e la fĳine del pensiero mercantilistico-usuraio. Ma la vittoria decisiva non si limita ad una vittoria limitata dalle fron- tiere politiche dei tre imperi, Italiano, Giapponese e Tedesco. Nella vittoria integrale non si lascia al nemico la facoltà di rintanarsi nel ghetto di Londra e nelle retro-botteghe di Wall St. Quindi la mia voce non tace. (Decisive peace means, fĳirst of all, the victory of Fascism within Italy herself. Spiritual victory and the end of the habit of mercantilist-usurious thought. But decisive victory should not be restricted to the borders of the three Empires: Italian, Japanese and German. Integral victory means not to leave to the enemy the chance to take refuge in the ghetto of London or in Wall Street back shops. That’s why I won’t shut up.)2

1 Natalia E. Gronskaya, Valery G. Zusman and Tatiana S. Batishcheva, “Totalitarian Language: Reflections of Power (Russian, German, Italian case studies),” in Paola B. Helzel and Arthur J. Katolo (eds.), Autorità e crisi dei poteri (Padova: cedam, 2012), 277–290 (288). 2 Ezra Pound, “Pace decisiva,” Meridiano di Roma (15 March 1942). All Pound’s articles quoted in this text are collected in the nine volumes of Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions

Pound associates peace with the right to pursue enemies even outside the state boundaries. After all, for him the real responsibility for starting the war lay with the international usurers and the arrogant politicians of the liberal- democratic countries that protected them:

Questa guerra aveva lo scopo di rendere il mondo sicuro per l’usura; per erigere la<>al posto della Lega delle Nazioni, alias<>; ossia per rendere tutto il mondo schiavo di una banda di usurai irresponsabili, internazionali e non al cento per cento ariani. […] Ad un certo punto il<>(trufffa) oro ed il<>dello sfrutta- mento universale usuraio, si congiungono in un’unica e terribile minaccia contro tutta l’Europa, contro tutti gli abitanti delle terre che non producono questi metalli, cioè la Spagna, la Francia, l’Italia e la Germania. (This war had the purpose of making the world safe for usury; to erect the “Federal Union” in place of the League of Nations, alias “The Bank of International Settlement”; that is, to make all the world slave to a gang of irresponsible usurers, international and not 100% Arian…The “racket” of the gold and the “racket” of the usurers’ universal exploitation join together, forming one terrible threat for Europe, against all the inhabitants of lands that can’t produce these metals [gold and silver], namely Spain, France, Italy and Germany.)3

It is hardly necessary to linger on the evident analogies between Pound’s theories and the topics of Axis propaganda, which also repeated the idea that the war was (here in Hitler’s words) “the result only of the greed of a few international warmongers and the Jewish democracies behind them.” This use of propaganda helped to convince large sections of the public under the Nazi and fascist regimes that they were fĳighting “not only for our [their] own existence, but to free the world of a conspiracy which knows no scruples in subordinating the happiness of nations and man to its base egotism.”4 During the war years Pound really felt he was taking a part in a sort of fĳinal battle between two opposing civilisations:

to Periodicals, 1885–1972, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz and James Longebach (New York, London: Garland, 1991). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 3 Ezra Pound, “Perché certe nebbie esistono ancora,” Meridiano di Roma (28 July 1940). 4 Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on May 4, 1941, in Max Domarus (ed.), Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932–1945: The Chronicle of a Dictatorship (London: Tauris, 1990), 2426. 208 Rinaldi

Due principi si oppongono. Il principio infame dello strozzamento d’una parte, il principio dell’autarchia dall’altra. L’aratro contro l’usura. Il podere contro l’ipoteca. La razza contro la razza tiranna. […] Bisogna vedere questa guerra come una fase del<>che dura dal 1694. (To principles stand opposed to each other. On the one hand the infamous principle of strangulation, and on the other autarchy. Plough against usury. Farm against mortgage. Race against tyrannical race…We might look at this war as a phase of the “process” that has lasted since 1694.)5

This article will examine three of the instruments of propaganda that Pound honed and emphasised in his Italian writings: Leo Frobenius’ reading of civilisation through the lens of the “Paideuma”; the resonance of the mythology of “grain” in Italian fascist propaganda and in Pound’s own thought; and Pound’s emphasis on the need for a “fascist library” that could destroy hostile intellectual tendencies.

The European Paideuma

Pound refĳined his concept of civilisation during the 1930s, after being influenced by the work of the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius. In the very last years of the nineteenth century, Frobenius developed the idea of “Kulturkreise” (Cultural areas). He defĳined this model during his frequent trips to central Africa, which he described as an ensemble of diffferent cultural zones, each one including tribes with common cultural features. Frobenius’s 1921 work, Paideuma, was surely his most important contribution to ethnography; here, he described two diffferent “Paideumas” as the two main and opposite forces at work in cultural development: the “cave mentality” and the “open space mentality” (Hohlengefühl and Weitengefühl); peoples of Hamitic origins together with the Semites from the Middle East belonged to the former, whereas Ethiopians and Germans were part of the latter.6 Pound fĳirst read Frobenius in 1929, and he was immediately captivated by the concept of “Paideuma,” which the poet later defĳined as an active “complex of ideas” in a given culture that is both a pattern for what is best in that culture,

5 Ezra Pound, “Mondiale,” Meridiano di Roma (5 April 1942). 6 Available in a later edition: Leo Frobenius, Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur-und Seelenlehre (Dusseldorf: Diederichs, 1953). “till Armageddon, No Shalam, No Shalom” 209 and “germinal” for the future. Pound was particularly impressed by the defĳini- tion of culture as an independent organism, whose development is strongly influenced by the material conditions of the environment. According to Frobenius, human beings are thus to be seen more as the objects or products of their culture, than as subjects or producers of culture.7 The American poet came to associate this with the Italian context, where regional identities have always had a strong influence in defĳining one’s culture. For instance, Pound’s private correspondence with his friend, the leading Italian intellectual Camillo Pellizzi, reveals his attempts to defĳine Italy as a variety or multiplicity, and Italian literature as an ensemble of pulsing bodies and living organisms.8 Italy represented for Pound the centre of true European civilisation, and the starting point of the coming European rebirth. This conviction was strengthened by Pound’s peculiar understanding of the Roman Catholic Church, which he saw as a historical receptacle for the survival of ancient polytheism, for instance in the cult of Saints and the Mother of God, the rite of sacrifĳice during the Mass or the Corpus Christi processions. The latter of these Pound had portrayed in the fĳirst of the “Ur-Cantos” as a reminiscence of paganism, in honour of the god of the grain, rather than as a Christian festivity.9 Actually, Pound distinguished two diffferent types of religion, similar to the two types of “Paideuma,” the monotheist and the polytheist; and he clearly expressed his preference for the latter. In his article “Terra Italica,” Pound asserts that: “the glory of polytheistic ‘anschauung’ is that it never asserted a single and obligatory path for everyone.”10 William Cookson states in his introduction to Pound’s Selected Prose that the antipathy of the poet for monothe- ism “is part of the [his] struggle against intolerance, monopolies and uniformity”; while Clark Emery declared in his Ideas into Action that Pound

7 Ezra Pound, “For a New Paideuma,” The Criterion (January 1938); Ezra Pound, “Servizio di comunicazioni. Signifĳicato di Leo Frobenius,” Broletto (April 1938). 8 Camillo Pellizzi, Le lettere italiane del nostro secolo (Milano: Libreria d’Italia, 1929), 416; quoted in Ezra Pound, Carte italiane 1930–1944, ed. Luca Cesari (Milano: rcs Libri, 2005), 51. 9 Roger Grifffĳin’sModernism and Fascism argues persuasively that fascist neo-paganism claimed to be the solution to Occidental decay, the only force able to revitalize the Western World; Roger Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 104–107, 210–213 and 250–278. On Pound’s idiosyncratic approach to religion, see Andrea Colombo, Il Dio di Ezra Pound: cattolicesimo & religioni del mistero (Milan: Ares, 2011), which contains previously unpublished letters by Pound and an interesting introduction by his daughter Mary de Rachewiltz. 10 Ezra Pound, “Terra Italica,” New Review, 1. 4 (Winter 1931/1932): 386–389. 210 Rinaldi opposed any kind of “monopoly of faith,” and viewed all attempts to impose this monopoly as an abuse of power.11 For Pound, following (as Emery notes) the Polish Classicist Thaddeus Zielinski, Christianity was not an extension of the culture of the Hebrew Scriptures, but an outgrowth of classic paganism. Mediterranean culture, what Pound called “the Mediterranean sanity,” was inherently syncretistic in tendency. And this belief leads the poet into a reinterpretation of the whole religious history of the West.12

Il buon senso, e il senso religioso romano, rifĳiutò in atto [italic] di seguire il comandamento mosaico. La falsifĳicazione verbale preparò l’indebolimento dell’amministrazione ecclesiastica. […] Dobbiamo riesaminare tutta la storia del movimento iconoclasta; poi, la lotta fra Guelfĳi e Ghibellini; poi, l’Oxford Moviment [sic] (chi ci dice che il movimento di Oxford, nell’ottocento, non fu ebraico?). Finalmente si arriva alla congiura di Londra fra ebrei, anglicani e cattolici anglicizzati, collo scopo di munire l’usura internazionale di tutte le comodità d’una religione universale sotto il commando giudaico. O, Si! La combutta pluto-democratica si serve del principio democratico. Nel consiglio della nuova Ecclesia [italic] sta l’ebreo e l’anglicano giudaiz- zato, in maggioranza di due a uno, contro il cattolico inglese. Quindi siamo perfettamente nella tradizione albionica, nell’isola dove il rapporto fra il corpo di Cristo e il pane fu<>. (Common sense, and the religious sense of Romans, refused to follow the Mosaic commandment. Verbal falsifĳication prepared the way for the weakening of ecclesiastic administration… We might reconsider the whole history of the iconoclastic movement; then the fĳight between Guelfs and Ghibellines; then, I suppose, the Oxford Movement (who can assure us that the Oxford Movement was

11 Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 9; Clark Mixon Emery, Ideas into Action: A Study of Pound’s Cantos (University of Miami Press, 1958), 8. 12 Tadeusz Zieliński, La Sibylle: trois essais sur la religion antique et le christianisme (Paris: F. Rieder, 1924), quoted in Emery, Ideas into Action, 9. Pound’s broadcasting for the eiar, Continuity and Superstition, in Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II, Contributions In American Studies 37, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, London: Greenwood Press, 1978). “till Armageddon, No Shalam, No Shalom” 211

not Jewish during the 19th century?). Finally we arrive at the conspiracy of London between Hebrews, Anglicans and Catholics anglicised, with the purpose of providing international usury the comfort of a universal religion under Jewish control. Oh, YES! The pluto-democratic collusion makes use of the democratic principle. In the new Ecclesia council, Jewish and judaised Anglicans stand against the English Catholic with a majority of two against one. Thus we are perfectly in the tradition of Albion, in the island where the relation between Christ’s corpse and bread “was changed fĳive times in seventy years with a royal decree or a Parliamentary act.”)13

In the architecture and the decoration of diffferent Italian churches, Pound saw evidence that Roman paganism left a crucial inheritance to Catholicism, not least because of their syncretistic style, as for instance in Santa Maria in Trastevere (Rome) or the Basilica of San Vitale (Ravenna). Another example is the well-known church of St. Francis in Rimini, also known as the Tempio Malatestiano. Sigismondo Malatesta commissioned the famous architect Leon Battista Alberti to renovate the temple in 1450. During the 1930s Pound visited the Temple and was amazed by the fact that the priest paid much more attention to the care of an elephant statue, which was the symbol of the Malatesta family, than to the altar itself.14 This was for him clear proof that Italian culture tended naturally towards devotion to diffferent symbols and icons. Pound saw Italy as the defensive bulwark of the “open space mentality” against the dangerous expansion of the “cave mentality,” embodied in the “international usuriocracy” which was using the allied army as a bridgehead. In this sense, a war defeat would represent catastrophe, as he announced in 1942 while he was commenting on the battle for Malta.

Se non si strappa Malta agli inglesi non ci sarà giustizia, non ci sarà avve- nire, non ci sarà Europa. Non ci sarà giustizia, né un domani onesto, neanche per gli stessi matti ed ottusi inglesi.

13 Ezra Pound, “Dalle parole alla strage,” Meridiano di Roma (1 January 1943). 14 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 301. Pound visited the Tempio for the very fĳirst time May of 1922, while he was collecting information for his “Malatesta Cantos,” but this is episode is related to a later visit, when he was writing his Guide to Kulchur (1938). James J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 51 and 130–131. On the relevance of the cathedral of Rimini see Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (eds.), The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood Press), 281–282. 212 Rinaldi

Per Hitler centro di una politica fu il problema della razza. Per Mussolini centro fu il problema dell’Italia imperiale. In tutti questi problemi il dovere è uno solo: non snaturarsi. (If Malta is not ripped away from the English, there will be no future; there will be no Europe. There will be no justice, nor an honest tomorrow, not even for the crazy and obtuse Englishmen themselves. For Hitler the politics revolved around the problem of race. For Mussolini it revolved around the problem of Imperial Italy. In all these problems one single obligation: not losing one’s own nature.)15

However, an Axis victory would be assured only by the rediscovery of the true European culture, which should be purifĳied of all the influences coming from the Middle East, the Jewish ones as well as those proceeding from Arab culture that Pound declared completely extraneous to his version of European culture. The march for peace must pass through Armageddon, and there was no chance of accepting a peace whose meaning was not fully European, or it would be marred by a flabby terminology from the Talmud or the Koran.

The Relevance of “Grain”

“Only a WHEAT GOD can save Europe.”16 In this “hieratic” sentence is contained a great part of Pound’s religious beliefs and cultural projects. Building on the assumption that the physical environment permeates a people’s authentic culture, Pound declared “Grain” to be one of the central symbols of authentic Italian culture and, at the same time, the most important material and in some ways a spiritual contributor to Italian civilisation. There could be no doubt that wheat had a strong economic signifĳicance since ancient Roman times, although “many do not know that cheap grain import from Egypt ruined Italian agriculture during the old Roman Empire.”17 Let us recall here that after the seizure of power in 1922, and a period of stabilisation within the institutions of the Italian Kingdom, the fascist regime began to put into action its plans for the reformation of the Italian economy. The main purpose of the regime was to build an autarchic, or self-sufffĳicient,

15 Ezra Pound, “Idee fondamentali,” Meridiano di Roma (10 May 1942). 16 Ezra Pound, “The Inedible [i.e. gold],” Townsman 3.10 (February 1940), 2. 17 Ezra Pound, “È un peccato ma…,” Il Popolo di Alessandria (9 March 1944). Thanks to Professor Ronald Bush for drawing my attention to the importance of the theme of grain in Pound’s thought. “till Armageddon, No Shalam, No Shalom” 213 society. One of the most relevant parts of this plan was the so-called “Battaglia del grano” (Battle for grain). But more than a mere economic fact, the “battle for grain” was also a key point of fascist propaganda, which aimed to revitalise the traditions of Italian country life, following the idea that Italy was diffferent in spirit from the industrialised countries. As Pound stated in one of his articles for the Meridiano di Roma:

Il grano è sacro. Il grano è il corpo di Dio. Questa verità sacra è verità Europea. […] Alla Chiesa Cattolica e Romana spetta la gloria d’aver conservato il mistero sacro del grano, per secoli oscuri, secoli tempestati dai barbari e dall’ignoranza. Contro questa verità sacra per diecinove secoli una forza bieca ha oper- ato nella note. Una mitologia bassa, il concetto selvaggio di un dio assassino; rifĳiuti del culto dei macellai ovini, hanno cercato di contaminare la concezione Europea [italic] della bontà divina. (Grain is sacred. Grain is God’s corpse. This sacred truth is European truth…To the Catholic and Roman Church belong the glory of having preserved the sacred mystery of grain through dark centuries, tempestuous centuries of barbarians and ignorance. Against this sacred truth for nineteen centuries a crooked force operated during the night. A low mythology, the savage concept of an assassin god; refused by the cult of the ovine butchers, they tried to contaminate the Europe of divine goodness.)18

Mussolini’s speech exalting a proletarian and fascist Italy that stands up against the nations supposedly led by the “usuriocracy” took deep root in Pound’s mind despite his diffferent cultural background. Ricciardi states in her introduction to Idee Fondamentali (a collection of all Pound’s articles published in Merdiano di Roma) that the Italy of the interwar period was, for the North American “exile,” a land of “utopia,” where he saw the possibility of realizing the economic system of his dreams. Italy also genuinely experimented with and tried to establish a new social system. This was for Pound an unrepeatable opportunity to realise his ideal of a State founded on a religious and ethical sensibility in which his own economic gospel and the pagan worship of “grain” could join hands to eradicate the plague and mere sterility of “gold.” Italy could be the land where economists used a correct and uncorrupted terminology,

18 Ezra Pound, “Il Grano,” Meridiano di Roma (7 September 1941). 214 Rinaldi and where men’s memory would not be fleeting; these conditions would in turn make possible the flourishing of art.19 Pound had always believed that the arts, economics, religion, and ethics were all strictly linked together and one could not prosper if the others had degenerated. Furthermore, he thought that serious religions should give believers “clear” precepts about behaviour in economic and material life. That is what he wrote in March 1936, in a letter to Sylvia Goodwen, member of the editorial stafff of “The Neo-Christian,” a monthly magazine edited in the us:

I have complete contempt for any system of ethics or religion that is too lazy or cowardly to carry ints [sic] principles down into the details of economic action. I can not believe in the honesty of any writers on ethics and religion who refuse this action. The great religious teachers did not shun concrete example. The teaching of the Catholic Church is CLEAR. Any man who refuses to examine the teaching of that Church on USURY is a coward, and I doubt his honesty, mental or spiritual. The pracitices [sic] of contemporary banking, including fountain collection of interest on fountain pen money, are contrary to the Church dogma on USURY.20

Make a New Fascist Library!

For Pound the mythology of “grain” had a necessary counterpart in what he called the “fascist library.” This was Pound’s plan for reforming the Italian literary context through the publication of new “real” books written by, on the one hand, mostly unknown Italian authors, and, on the other hand, foreign contemporary writers, which customers could not fĳind in Italian bookstores. The example of the writings of Frobenius, already seen, joins both these interests, but Pound’s concept goes beyond any single author. His project was intimately linked with the idea of reforming Western society as a whole, a task that

19 Ezra Pound, Idee fondamentali: Meridiano di Roma, 1939–1943, ed. Caterina Ricciardi (Roma: Lucarini, 1991), xiii; Ezra Pound, “Utopia,” Meridiano di Roma (13 September 1942). 20 The letter is preserved by the Beinecke Library, University of Yale, “Ezra Pound Papers” (ycal mss 43: Box 37, Folder 1536). I wish to thank New Directions Publishing (acting on behalf of Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar Pound) and the Yale Beinecke Archives for kind permission to quote from unpublished manuscripts. “till Armageddon, No Shalam, No Shalom” 215 could only begin in earnest with Axis success in the war. Pound was convinced that only the most cultured and skilled nation could succeed in the battle between ideologies.

La guerra ideologica ha bisogno non solamente di ufffĳiciali, ha bisogno di soldati. Voglio dire, per vincere l’usurocrazia, occorre che un numero enorme di privati comprendano fĳino in fondo I trucchi della fĳinanza internazionale; bisogna che comprendano la natura e le possibilità della moneta. Quando l’Europa verrà pervasa d’una luce di comprensione di questo genere, gli americani apprenderanno per contagio. (Ideological war not only needs offfĳicials, but soldiers too. I mean, to beat the usuriocracy, we need a massive number of private citizens capable of properly understanding the tricks of international fĳinance; they must understand money’s nature and its possibilities. When a light of understanding of this type starts to pervade Europe, Americans will understand by contagion.)21

Pound’s proposal for creating a new library was a militant act in itself, as can clearly be seen from Pound’s words in the article “Per una biblioteca fascista” (For a fascist library).

Il vero antidoto contro il fango velenoso dei pseudo-autori è la conoscenza dei libri veri; dei libri creatori; dei libri registratori del pensiero nuovo e del pensiero preciso (ovvero perfezionato). La xenofobia facilona non ci serve. La xenofobia non ci protegge. Esclude i nemici dei nostri nemici ma lascia in circolazione i traditori, i nemici nostri più perfĳidi, cioè quelli di casa nostra, quelli interni. Con cento libri veri, magari con una dozzina, si fa la cura preventiva. Nessun conoscitore di Henry James è mai stato infettato di ammirazione per quell’ebreuccio pederastico-snob di Marcel Proust. Dobbiamo tradurre e dobbiamo importare coloro che ci sono fratelli. Dobbiamo rendere accessibili i libri di coloro che sono spiriti del nostro spirito come fu con Anthony Trollope; dei nemici dei nostri nemici, come Brooks Adams, Wyndham Lewis, Henry James e Renè Crevel; di coloro le cui osservazioni chiaroveggenti forniscono dati utili alla nostra battaglia come E.E. Cummings e Leo Frobenius. Anch’io ho scritto un centinaio di pagine che meritano di essere presentati [sic] in questa schiera.

21 Ezra Pound, “Pace decisiva.” 216 Rinaldi

[…] Vedi Mein Kampf e gli scritti di Mussolini, con dovuta priorità cronolog- ica. […] Lasciamo il tono elegiaco. Creiamo una biblioteca (a 12 lire il volume) degna dell’Era Fascista. Domandiamo una dozzina di libri vivi, stampi- amone tre per inizio; senza aspettare traduzioni. Ogni libro sarà una bomba lanciata sul nemico, ogni libro un distruttore del pensiero floscio. (The real antidote against the mud of the pseudo-authors is knowledge of real books, of creative books, of books registering new thought and precise thought (i.e. improved). A careless xenophobia does not help us. Xenophobia does not protect us. It excludes the enemies of our enemies but leaves betrayers free to circulate and move within our society, our worst enemies, the most perfĳidious, the ones who live within us, internal foes. With one hundred real books, with a dozen perhaps, we can prevent this disease. Nobody who knows Henry James has ever been infected by that little Jew pederast snob Marcel Proust. We must translate and import our brothers. We must make accessible books by those of the same soul as ourselves, as Anthony Trollope was; by the enemies of our enemies, such as Brook Adams, Wyndham Lewis, Henry James and René Cravel; by those whose observations are useful for our fĳight, such as E.E. Cummings and Leo Frobenius. I myself too wrote a hundred pages that deserve to be mentioned in this context. Look at “Mein Kampf,” and Mussolini’s texts, with the right chronological priority…Let’s abandon the elegiac tone. Let’s create a library worthy of the Fascist Era (at 12 pennies per volume). Let’s claim a dozen living books, and print three of them; without waiting for the translations. Each book will be a bomb dropped on the enemy, each book a destroyer of flabby thought.)22

Pound aimed for a wide circulation of this “fascist library,” both to common soldiers and private citizens, in order to create a massive popular base. This mass had to be conscious and faithful to the ideology of the regime, and would rigorously support an Axis victory. The poet claimed his cultural plan of rebirth was fundamental to a successful end to the war, as he often stated in the Italian press.

Ritengo che ogni ora, ogni cinque minuti di studio letterario, fĳilologico, economico, si vivifĳicherà s’intensifĳicherà dal momento che lo studioso sia

22 Ezra Pound, “Per una biblioteca fascista,” Meridiano di Roma (5 April 1942). “till Armageddon, No Shalam, No Shalom” 217

pienamente cosciente dello SCOPO della guerra stessa, della necessità di vincerla per conservare alla vita civile, la nostra civiltà, e alla civiltà la vita dell’anima mediterranea ed europea. (I believe that every hour, every fĳive minutes of the study of literature, philology and economics, will be more vivifying, more intense the moment the student becomes aware of the real PURPOSE of the war, of the necessity of the victory to preserve our civilisation, the vital soul of the Mediterranean and European life.)23

Conclusion

Pound wrote an enormous amount for the fascist press, about ninety pieces for the Merdiano di Roma alone, and many others for smaller magazines, including Il Popolo di Alessandria, the most important propaganda organ of the Salò Republic. Nobody can read those articles without being struck by Pound’s dedication and his strong conviction of the rightness of the fascist cause, as well as his steadfast belief in the possibility of success for the Axis. He kept promoting these ideas in his writing right up until the last days of the war, before his capture, as this quote from late January 1945 shows:

Gli italiani cominciano a capire che sono stati avvelenati, magari, dalla pocheria [sic] libreraria [sic] importata dall’estero [italic]. Dateci ancora un decennio, o forse due, si comincerà a capire che I veri libri inglesi ed americani furono nascosti per spesa dei padroni Churchill e Roosevelt [italic], e che i rari esemplari importati in Italia non destavano curiosità in maniera dovuta. […] I veri libri [in italic] rimasero ignoti o ignorati. È un po’ [sic] tardi per cercare il controveleno. I veri libri [italic] scarseggiano nella Penisola; alcuni sono rimasti Lungotevere [sic], altri Lung’Arno [sic]. […] La cos detta [sic in italic] intelligenza ha preferito un Walpole a un E.E. Cummings, e un Woodhouse a un Brook Adams. Adesso voi pagate il fĳilo, ma la colpa non è del manipolo di scrittori esteri che hanno scritto i veri libri [italic], è una colpa che il sistema d’impor-italiana condivide colla porche- sia [sic in italic] estera. Gli usurai sono tutti cugini l’uno dell’altro [italic].

23 Ezra Pound, “Idee e libri per la vittoria dell’asse,” Meridiano di Roma (20 December 1942). 218 Rinaldi

(Italians are starting to understand that they have been poisoned by the poor reading matter imported from abroad. Give us one more decade or maybe two and people will start to understand that the real American and English books were hidden by the effforts of the despots Churchill and Roosevelt, and the few copies that were imported did not arise the interest they should have…The true books have remained unknown. It is a little too late to fĳind a counter-poison. True books are run out of the Peninsula; some of them remained in the Lungotevere [Rome], some others in the Lung’Arno [Florence]. The so-called intelligentsia of the Peninsula preferred a Walpole to some E.E. Cummings, a Wodehouse to a Brooks Adams. Now you pay the price, but that’s not the fault of the bunch of foreign writers who wrote true books, it’s a fault that the Italian importing system has in common with the foreign bourgeois rubbish.24 Usurers are all cousins of each other.)25

The old literary motto “Make it New” which in the London years had mostly a literary sense, took on a wider signifĳicance during Pound’s time in Italy, when it became a fĳiercely partisan battle cry in the late 1930s and through the war years. In Pound’s writings the combination of modernity and tradition has a complex and dialectic relationship, and the two concepts have a mutual influence.26 The poet explored the past and he did not simply recycle ideas, but his research was intended to modify the way his contemporaries considered European history. In a similar way, the desire for both tradition and modernity was also an integral part of fascist politics. All the fascist parties declared they were the only forces capable of renewing and reinvigorating society, but through appropriations of tradition: supposedly creating a “third way” between Leninist revolution and the liberal-democratic bourgeois status quo. Against this background, Pound’s writing takes on very specifĳic resonances, and his work can be safely identifĳied as systematically in line with Axis propaganda.27

24 This last word is one of Pound’s neologisms and sounds more or less like ‘bourubbish’. 25 Ezra Pound, “Oro e princisbecco,” Il Popolo di Alessandria (23 January 1945). 26 Ezra Pound, Make it New (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). 27 On the complexity of the relationship between modernity and tradition in Pound’s writings see, among others: Ernesto Livorni, Avanguardia e tradizione: Ezra Pound e Giuseppe Ungaretti (Firenze: Le lettere, 1988). On the duality of fascism as both modernis- ing and conserving force see: Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism; Jefffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2005); Ferran Gallego and Francisco Morente (eds.), Rebeldes y reaccionarios: intelectuales, fascismo y derecha radical en Europa, 1914–1956 (Mataró: El Viejo Topo, 2011); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, La cultura fascista (Il Mulino: Bologna, 2000). “till Armageddon, No Shalam, No Shalom” 219

According to Ricciardi, Pound established a formal conjunction between his prose and his poetry. Pound’s Italian texts are quite hard to understand precisely because he uses essentially the same method of composition as in his poetry, generating a chain of diffferent analogies often evident only to the poet’s eyes. Ricciardi defĳines this as a highly stratifĳied writing that can give the reader an impression of “intellectual magma” but has the purpose of discovering a sequence of “luminous details.” This technique, which dominates the Cantos, derives directly from the study of ideograms yet is hardly manageable in prose, and especially in the very prolix Italian style adopted by Pound.28 One diffference between his English and Italian writings is that when Pound writes to an Italian audience he can apply the idea of “making it new” in much more specifĳic political terms, since he could draw on a living political referent, not to be found in the contemporary Anglo-American context. And this is con- fĳirmed by the fact that in England and the U.S. he composed his articles almost exclusively for literary magazines, whereas in Italy he had the opportunity to express himself in newspapers with a much wider distribution, including among a popular readership. Pound the exile, and Pound the intellectual and stylistic eccentric, seems in this period to have felt in some respects more at home writing in Italian for an audience more sympathetic to his views than anywhere else.

Bibliography

Primary Sources/Printed Documents Domarus, Max. Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932–1945: The Chronicle of a Dictatorship. Translated by Mary Fran Golbert. London: Tauris, 1990. Frobenius, Leo. Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur-und Seelenlehre. Dusseldorf: Diederichs, 1953. Pellizzi, Camillo. Le lettere italiane del nostro secolo. Milano: Libreria d’Italia, 1929. Pound, Ezra. Selected Prose. Edited by William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973. Zieliński, Tadeusz. La Sibylle: trois essais sur la religion antique et le christianisme. Paris: F. Rieder, 1924. —— . “Terra Italica,” New Review, I. 4 (Winter 1931/1932): [386]–389 [English]. —— . Make it new (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). —— . Letter to the editors of “Neo-Christian” (March 1936), in “Ezra Pound Papers,” Beinecke Library, University of Yale, call No. ycal mss 43, Box 37, Folder 1536, “Neo-Christian.”

28 C. Ricciardi in Pound, Idee fondamentali, xii. 220 Rinaldi

—— . “For a New Paideuma,” The Criterion, January 1938. —— . “Servizio di comunicazioni. Signifĳicato di Leo Frobenius,” Broletto, April 1938. —— . “The Inedible [i.e. gold],” Townsman, III 10, February 1940: 2. —— . “Perché certe nebbie esistono ancora,” Meridiano di Roma, 28 July 1940. —— . “Il Grano,” Meridiano di Roma, 7 September 1941. —— . “Pace decisiva,” Meridiano di Roma, 15 March 1942. —— . “Mondiale,” Meridiano di Roma, 5 April 1942. —— . “Per una biblioteca fascista,” Meridiano di Roma, 5 April 1942. —— . “Idee fondamentali,” Meridiano di Roma, 10 May 1942. —— . “Utopia,” Meridiano di Roma, 13 September 1942. —— . “Idee e libri per la vittoria dell’asse,” Meridiano di Roma, 20 December 1942. —— . “Dalle parole alla strage,” Meridiano di Roma, 1 January 1943. —— . “È un peccato ma…,” Il Popolo di Alessandria, 9 March 1944. —— . “Oro e princisbecco,” Il Popolo di Alessandria, 23 January 1945. —— . Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970. —— . Ezra Pound Speaking, Radio Speeches of World War II. Edited by Leonard W. Doob. Westport, London: Greenwood Press, 1978. —— . Ezra Pound’s poetry and prose: contributions to periodicals, 1885–1972. Edited by Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, James Longebach. New York, London: Garland, 1991. —— . Idee fondamentali: “Meridiano di Roma,” 1939–1943. Edited by Caterina Ricciardi. Roma: Lucarini, 1991. —— . Carte italiane 1930–1944. Edited by Luca Cesari. Milano: rcs Libri, 2005.

Secondary Sources Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. La cultura fascista. Il Mulino: Bologna, 2000. Emery, Clark Mixon. Ideas into Action: A Study of Pound’s Cantos. University of Miami Press, 1958. Gallego, Ferran, F. Morente et al., eds. Rebeldes y reaccionarios: intelectuales, fascismo y derecha radical en Europa, 1914–1956. Mataró: El Viejo Topo, 2011. Grifffĳin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Gronskaya, Natalia E., V.G. Zusman and T.S. Batishcheva. “Totalitarian Language: Reflections of Power (Russian, German, Italian case studies),” In Paola B. Helzel, Arthur J. Katolo (ed.), Autorità e crisi dei poteri. Padova: cedam, 2012. Herf, Jefffrey. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Livorni, Ernesto. Avanguardia e tradizione: Ezra Pound e Giuseppe Ungaretti. Firenze: Le lettere, 1988. “till Armageddon, No Shalam, No Shalom” 221

Paxton, Robert. The Anatomy of Fascism. London: Allen Lane, 2005. Tryphonopoulos, Demetres, P. Stephen J Adams, et al., eds. The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005. Wilhelm, James J. Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972. University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. chapter 12 The Moot, the End of Civilisation and the Re-Birth of Christendom

Jonas Kurlberg

Introduction

The Moot was an exclusive group of intellectuals who endeavoured to produce a blueprint for a Christian revolution in Western societies during the years 1938–47. It was the brainchild of J.H. Oldham, a lay theologian and pioneering ecumenist, who dreamt of a new lay Order that would catalyse a Christian social and political movement. Its membership was a motley crew consisting of the Roman Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, the secular Jew and sociologist Karl Mannheim and his fellow émigré economist Adolf Löwe, the educationists Sir Walter Moberly and Fred Clarke, literary fĳigures such as John Middleton Murry and T.S. Eliot, the philosopher H.A. Hodges, the theologian John Baillie, the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi and others. In addition, the group dialogued with and was frequented by a network of prominent Christian thinkers both in Britain and beyond. The argument of this paper is that the Moot constitutes a Christian expression of “political modernism.” Drawing upon Roger Grifffĳin’s conceptualisation in Modernism and Fascism, modernism will be understood in the broader sense as a series of socio-political movements reacting to the social and moral fragmentation of modern societies. Accordingly, modernism involved the attempt to recreate a “sacred canopy,” or set of overarching meanings, that had been lost through the demise of Christianity and the proliferation of laissez- faire liberalism in Europe during the Enlightenment. As such, modernism as a project sought to create a new world by revitalising late-modern society through the re-appropriation of a mythical past and the appeal to transcendent values against a perceived collapse of cultural coherence.1 A comprehen- sive overview of the vast amount of Moot material is not feasible in this short paper.2 Instead, I will limit my attention to the group’s discussion and

1 Roger Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 116–117. 2 The Moot gathered for a total of 24 weekends. Prior to each gathering between two and four confĳidential papers were circulated, giving each member the opportunity to submit

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282285_014 The Moot, the End of Civilisation 223 adaptation of French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s ideas in True Humanism, to argue that the Moot was a “Christian” expression of modernism precisely in its utilisation of pre-modern Christian tradition in its venture to revitalise a decadent modern society.

The Crisis in Western Civilisation

The group’s analysis of the malaise of modern society reflects the modernists’ gloom: the nineteenth-century ideology of Progress seemed to them suspect; the 1930s economic crisis revealed the weaknesses of capitalism; liberalism, unable to provide a coherent worldview, had resulted in social fragmentation and nihilism; industrialisation had caused inhumane living and working conditions for large segments of society; and secularisation had left civilisation hollow and empty.3 However, the accent of the Moot’s analysis was on the spiritual roots of the peril around them. In an open letter addressed to the nation after the Munich agreement, published in The Times on 3 October 1938, Oldham states, “The basal truth is that the spiritual foundations of western civilisation have been undermined…”4 Tracing the origins of their societal crisis, the Moot singled out a slow paradigmatic shift over the centuries since the Reformation, from a theocentric to an anthropocentric worldview. Oldham writes of the distress caused by this shift in a paper presented in an early Moot meeting: “May not the deepest cause of the present evils in the world be that man has sought the meaning and end of his existence in himself and thereby denied and perverted his true nature as a being created by God and for God?”5

their critique. The minutes from the meetings were recorded virtually verbatim. A near complete set of the minutes were published by Keith Clements in 2010. All citations from the minutes refer to his volume. As for the archival material referred to in this paper I am indebted to David Addyman for making this available to me. Permission to publish quotations from archival material has kindly been granted by the Special Collections at the Institute of Education, the Brotherton Collection at University of Leeds, and Edinburgh University New College Library. 3 For a treatise on the ubiquitous sense of civilisational crisis in Britain see Overy’s compelling survey of the interwar years, where he states that, “the prospect of imminent crisis…became a habitual way of looking at the world.” Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939 (London: Penguin Books, 2010, 3). 4 J.H. Oldham, The Times, 3 October, 1938. 5 J.H. Oldham, “The Problems and Tasks of the Council on the Christian Faith and the Common Life,” Oldham Papers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University New College Library, 13/8/73 (1938). 224 Kurlberg

Furthermore, liberal societies, unable to appeal to metaphysical authority, had lost the rationale for a shared value base. The “neutrality” of liberal secular society had failed to provide a shared worldview and without a shared “idea”— a social philosophy—to live by, the individual members were increasingly lost. This analysis of modern society in terms of “decadence” chimes with Grifffĳin’s model in Modernism and Fascism: and the Moot, like so many contemporary groups, feared that modern society was approaching an apocalyptic calamity. The outbreak of the war merely increased the sense of urgency and impending disaster. Karl Mannheim, expressing the sentiment of the Moot in a prepara- tory paper, writes: “Intellectually we can see that the world is on the edge of an abyss and only a new social order, a new kind of man can help.”6 As far as the Moot was concerned, Western Civilisation stood at a crossroads between the paganism epitomised by the totalitarian regimes on the continent, or a revitalised Christianity.7 Emilio Gentile in his 2006 Politics as Religion correctly groups Oldham with several other Moot-associated Christian thinkers who saw the totalitarianism of Communism, National Socialism and Fascism as a direct threat against Christianity and the values implied by a Christian society.8 The Moot’s members saw the rise of these pagan semi- religions as a consequence of the inherent weaknesses of modern society. The new movements provided the masses with a compelling moral vision, which a utilitarian, technocratic liberalism had failed to offfer; they were thus able to fĳill the spiritual vacuum through the sacralisation of class, race or nation. The fear of the potency of totalitarianism was amplifĳied for the Moot by the idea that a drift towards totalitarianism was inherent in industrialised societies. Since such societies require a greater level of co-ordination and thus centralisation they tend to bring about conditions favourable for totalitarianism.9 The historian Christopher Dawson concluded that it is not that modern man is more capable of cruelty than in previous generations, rather society itself has come under the dominion of inhuman mechanisms, rendering it inhumane.10

6 Karl Mannheim, “Topics for the Next Meeting of the Moot,” Records of the Moot, London: Institute of Education, MOO/32 (1941). 7 Cf. T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1939), 13; J.H. Oldham, The Resurrection of Christendom (London: Christian News-Letter Books, 1940), 50. 8 Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 74f. 9 Cf. Karl Mannheim, “Planning for Freedom,” Oldham Papers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University New College Library, 14/3/57 (1939); John Middleton Murry, “Towards a Theory of a Christian Society,” Oldham Papers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University New College Library, 14/5/37 (1938). 10 Christopher Dawson, Beyond Politics (London: Sheed & Ward, 1939), 5f. The Moot, the End of Civilisation 225

In this light the Moot could be seen, on the one hand, as a reaction against the decadence of modernity and, on the other, as self-consciously offfering an alternative to the pagan totalitarian regimes. Communism, National Socialism and Fascism continuously feature in the Moot discourses as the evil Other, representing a competing ideology yet arousing an element of admiration for their efffĳiciency and therefore, perhaps and in part, to be emulated.11

Maritain and a New Christendom

Although it was a concern for the continuous impact of Christianity on society that had brought the group together, it would be a mistake to assume that they simply envisioned a return to past ideals. A Christian challenge to the burgeoning paganism of late-modern society had to consider the present and future as much as it looked to the past. John Middleton Murry writes in a paper presented at the second Moot meeting: “A modern theory of a Christian society must be a theory of a modern Christian society.”12 It is worth quoting again from that same Oldham letter published for The Times mentioned above:

May our salvation lie in an attempt to recover our Christian heritage, not in the sense of going back to the past but of discovering in the central afffĳirmations and insights of the Christian faith new spiritual energies to regenerate and vitalise our sick society.13

This sentiment was echoed by Mannheim who during a meeting inferred: “We [are] required to revitalise the traditional elements and re-adapt them to new social needs.”14 Even T.S. Eliot believed that a stable society needed a living tradition, which balanced continuity of the past with a dynamic creativity of the present.15 In short, the Moot sought to revisit pre-modern Christian theologies and reapply them in new ways to revive modern society.

11 For example, during the fĳirst meeting H.H. Farmer suggests that there was lessons to be drawn from success of the Nazi party moving from a “position of minority to dominance.” Keith Clements, The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom and Society 1938–1944 (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 44. 12 Murry, “Towards a Theory of a Christian Society,” (author’s emphasis). 13 Oldham, letter to The Times. 14 Clements, The Moot Papers, 96. 15 T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer on Modern Heresy (London: Faber & Faber, 1934). 19. See also Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 17. 226 Kurlberg

One of the primary theological and socio-political sources of the Moot members’ varying but overlapping social theorising was Neo-Scholasticism.16 In particular, the French theologian and philosopher Jacques Maritain became in the early days something of a sage for the group. Maritain’s vision of a New Christendom was one of the few ideas that the group unanimously endorsed. The concluding comment from the minutes of the third meeting, before and during which Maritain’s True Humanism was studied in detail, states: “The discussion revealed no fundamental criticism of Maritain; all were disposed to accept his central position as the basis for the work of the Moot.”17 The ideas of Maritain were perhaps not entirely original but it was the force by which they were argued and the coherence of his grand vision that impressed the Moot members, who wrestled with the same issues. Alec Vidler, one of many Moot members to have submitted comments on True Humanism, writes: “I have been immensely struck by the coherent way in which Maritain’s book seems to gather up and follow on what was said and felt at the last meeting of the Moot.”18 The many ideas of Maritain correlate to those discussed in the Moot meetings and were co-opted in the publications of individual Moot members. An analysis of Maritain’s work is therefore an entry point into understanding the central lines of exploration in the Moot. Returning to Grifffĳin’s framework of political modernism, it is perhaps also the clearest example of how the Moot sought to re-appropriate “the mythical past” into a present-day vision of a regenerated society. In what follows I will look at some instances of Maritain’s ideas overlapping with those of the Moot. Firstly, as man’s rebellion against God was for the Moot the key to understanding the modern crisis, Maritain’s “theocentric humanism” provided an attractive alternative anthropology. Maritain argues that the modern world had assumed an anthropocentric humanism that rejected God in search of human autonomy, thereby cutting itself offf from the fĳirst cause of all good and grace. This would lead to a contemporary inhuman “humanism.”19 The consequence of the anthropocentric humanism of the Renaissance was dualism, division and disintegration, ultimately paving the way for totalitarian ideologies.

16 This by no means entailed a wholesale acceptance of scholastic thought. H.A. Hodges, for one, rejected the metaphysical argumentation of Thomas Aquinas as a legitimate basis of apologetics in the modern world. H.A. Hodges, “Towards a Plan for a New Summa,” Oldham Papers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University New College Library, 14/2/25 (1939). 17 Clements, The Moot Papers, 145. 18 Alec R. Vidler, “Comments on M. Maritain’s True Humanism,” Papers Concerning the Moot, Leeds: University of Leeds Library, Section 1 (1939). 19 Jacques Maritain, True Humanism (London: The Centenary Press, 1938), 19. The Moot, the End of Civilisation 227

Maritain’s alternative social philosophy was a theocentric humanism, which held that man’s true destiny and fulfĳilment is ultimately foundin God. Maritain called for a neo-Thomist “integral humanism,” which might rehabili- tate man from the secular/sacred divide haunting him since the Reformation, by recovering his true nature as temporal-and-spiritual being. Imbued with divine love, the “new man who is from God” is able to act sacrifĳicially and as a responsible agent in the earthly city bringing about “a veritable socio- temporal realisation of the Gospels.”20 This is what Maritain calls Christian heroism. The symbol of his New Man is thus not the übermensch but the saint. Maritain writes:

What I wish to put forward is that this attitude of the saint, which is truly one of no contempt for things, but rather the raising up, the transfĳigura- tion of things in a love which is higher than they, this standpoint taken as generalised, as become common, as become a commonplace of christian [sic] psychology, corresponds to the rehabilitation of the creature in God which I see as characterising a new age of Christendom and a new humanism,—essentially diffferent from humanism in the ordinary interpretation of the term, from anthropocentric humanism, whose typical fĳigures are the Renaissance hero or the “honest gentleman” of the classic age, while the type of theocentric humanism is the saint: nor, indeed, can it be realised unless undertaken by saints.21

The “saint” as a political fĳigure is the instigator of the New Christendom, and for Maritain as for the Moot a renewal of the temporal world could only materialise through a spiritual revitalisation of man. This idea of spiritually renewed and socially conscious Christians played well with the Moot members. For example, in his programme for the ecumenical organisation, the Christian Council of Faith and the Common Life, Oldham, clearly borrowing from Maritain, writes that the task of the Church in contemporary society was fĳirstly “to seek to replace an anthropocentric humanism by one that fĳinds its centre in God.”22 In the following quote from Oldham’s booklet A Reborn Christendom, which he intended as the movement’s manifesto analogous in its impact to

20 Maritain, True Humanism, 86. 21 Maritain, True Humanism, 66 (emphasis in original). 22 Oldham, “The Problems and Tasks of the Council on the Christian Faith and the Common Life.” The ccfcl was a more formal organisation than the Moot, founded by Oldham after the 1937 Oxford Church, Community and State Conference to reflect on Christian responses to social issues of the time. 228 Kurlberg

Mein Kampf,23 the exploitation of Maritain verges on plagiarism. The booklet was presented at the 5th Moot gathering and was later published as The Resurrection of Christendom.

If it is God’s purpose out of the strife and suffferings of our time to bring to birth a society in which the true ends of man’s life are more fully achieved, the human response to that purpose must be that of Christian heroism. A vitally Christian renewal will be the work of saint- hood. The only way in which a new social order can be born is that multitudes of individual men and women should fĳind a new specifĳic vocation in the dedication of themselves to the service of God in the sphere of citizenship. If there is to be a New Christendom, the Christian cause must have its storm-troops—its adventurers of the spirit, pioneers and martyrs. A community of free and responsible persons makes larger demands than any other on the character and loyalty of its members.24

Even Karl Mannheim, who complained that Maritain “seldom passes from idea to action,”25 was largely sympathetic towards the propositions of True Humanism. As a secular Jew and sociologist Mannheim held a functionalist view of religion.26 He had fĳirst-hand experience of the power of political religion as an integrating force and a moral motivator in Nazi Germany. Thus, a spiritual revival was an essential factor for the fulfĳilment of his otherwise more empirical and instrumental programme of “Planning for Freedom.” Mannheim insisted on a necessary shift from a laissez-faire liberal society to a planned democracy, which would both recognise the need for central co-ordination in modern society, whilst also resisting totalitarian tendencies through safeguard- ing spheres of freedom and cultivating a strong civil society.27 Christianity, as the “religion of love and universal brotherhood” would in his planned democracy offfer an alternative sacred canopy to “the recent philosophy with the

23 Oldham’s admiration for Mein Kampf was based purely on its ability to capture the imagination of the masses. Clements, The Moot Papers, 145. 24 J.H. Oldham, “A Reborn Christendom,” Records of the Moot, London: Institute of Edcuation, MOO/2 (1939). 25 Karl Mannheim, “Some Remarks on ‘Humanism Intégral’ by Jacques Maritain,” Papers Concerning the Moot, Leeds: University of Leeds Library, Section 1 (1939). 26 A functionalist defĳines religion according to its function in society. 27 Cf. Karl Mannheim, “Planning for Freedom,” Oldham Papers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University New College Library, 14/3/57 (1939). The Moot, the End of Civilisation 229 demonic image of man” (a reference to fascism)28 while supplying the integra- tive values lacking in a liberal society. The transition to a new Christian Weltanschauung could only successfully transpire through the penetration of genuine religious experience. Therein also lay the appeal of Maritain’s ideal of the saint; it added a vitalism to his otherwise technical and bureaucratic scheme.29 Secondly, the Christendom of the Middle Ages was for Maritain and the Moot a historical realisation of a Christian society from which they could draw lessons. As Murry’s reactions show, however, the attitude towards medievalism was ambivalent. On the one hand he professes that “We generally idealize the medieval Church,”30 but on the other hand, when envisaging the nature of a future Christian society, he suggests that “Medieval Christendom can, at best, give us only a clue…”31 In Maritain’s words, medieval Christendom was an imperfect society which nevertheless was a “liveable” society, more efffectively channelling the “world of grace,” than the present order.32 Maintaining his allegiance to Aquinas, Maritain held that the fundamental principles of medieval Christendom could only analogously be re-applied to modern society, for “the Christendom of the Middle Ages was only one of its possible forms of realisation.”33 Consequently, although wishing to re-create the principle of unity of the temporal and sacred spheres, he rejects medieval Christendom’s “consecra- tional conception of the temporal order” and the sacrum imperium. Instead he calls for a “secular Christian order” contextually appropriate for the modern age.34 In this secular Christian order the temporal and sacred spheres unite, not through ecclesial consecration of the state, but through the organic proliferation of a Christian ethos throughout society by the activism of a Christian lay movement and Christian fraternity. Maritain calls this a “minimal unity”

28 Karl Mannheim, “The Crisis in Valuation,” Records of the Moot, London: Institute of Education, MOO/77 (1942). 29 In a letter to the Moot, dated 16th April 1939, Maritain comments on Mannheim’s “Planning for Freedom” and fĳinds little that is incompatible with his own ideas. Jacques Maritain, “Letter from M. Jacques Maritain,” Papers Concerning the Moot, Leeds: University of Leeds Library, Section 10, 14 April 1939. The letter thus confĳirms the convergence of Maritain’s ideas with those of the Moot. 30 John Middleton Murry, “Comments on Maritain’s True Humanism,” Papers Concerning the Moot, Leeds: University of Leeds Library, Section 1 (1939). 31 John Middleton Murry, “Paper Read at the Moot, Sept. 23–26, 1938,” Oldham Papers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University New College Library, 14/5/1 (1938). 32 Maritain, True Humanism, 105. 33 Maritain, True Humanism, 131. 34 Maritain, True Humanism, 156f. 230 Kurlberg allowing for pluralism and yet attaining a measure of societal unity through a shared orientation towards common action based on Christian principles.35 The relative autonomy of the secular sphere, i.e. the separation between church and state, was a further necessary consequence in a society where Christians found themselves in a minority and where adherence to Christian dogma could not be expected to be a prerequisite for political leadership. T.S. Eliot writes in The Idea of a Christian Society, a book heavily influenced by Maritain’s True Humanism, “It is not primarily the Christianity of the states- man that matters, but their being confĳined…to a Christian framework…”36 It was, however, this issue, the relation between Church and State, that caused contention during the second meeting of the Moot in the discussion of Murry’s thesis “Towards a Christian Society.” Contra Maritain, Murry held that for the Church to retain its influence in modern society a fusion with the State was vital. Insisting on the autonomy of the Church, Murry contends, would, in a centralised society where the State was increasingly ubiquitous, merely serve to further marginalise the Church.37 With the exception of Löwe and Mannheim, the written comments on Murry’s paper react negatively to this particular aspect of his thesis. In reply to Dawson’s protest that the homogene- ity of the secular and the spiritual within medieval Christendom had failed, Murry replied, “I believe it will have to be tried again.”38 In some ways, then, Murry may have had a more medieval outlook than others in the Moot.39

35 Maritain, True Humanism, 166–167. 36 Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 27. Eliot had long been an admirer of Maritain. They met as early as June 1926 and remained in regular correspondence: cf. T.S. Eliot, “Letter to His Mother, 24 June 1926,” in The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume 3: 1926–1927, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Hafffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 2012). The preface ofThe Idea of a Christian Society explicitly singles out True Humanism as a major source of influence (Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 6). 37 Murry, “Towards a Theory of a Christian Society.” This idea is further developed in Middleton Murry’s The Price of Leadership (London: scm, 1939). 38 Murry, “Paper Read at the Moot.” It is therefore curious that Murry does not raise any objections when commenting on Maritain’s True Humanism a few months later. 39 There is a realist’s acceptance of the statism of modern industrialised society in his paper “Towards a Theory of a Christian Society.” However, in a memorandum, circulated in early 1940, attacking the centralisation implicit in Mannheim’s “Planning for Freedom,” Murry states, “I see no solution except through a painful process of disintegration of our centralised industrial society,” and suggests the alternative of decentralised “self-supportive Christian communities,” an idea he sought to embody in his experimental farming community at Lodge Farm: John Middleton Murry, “Memorandum by J. Middleton Murry,” Records of the Moot, London: Institute of Education, MOO/129 (1940). Murry’s apparent afffĳinity for Guild Socialism sheds further light on his romanticising of the Middle Ages. The Moot, the End of Civilisation 231

A third idea that Maritain shared with the Moot concerned the practical mechanism of the inauguration of a New Christendom. Maritain argued that for a New Christendom to be realised a new form of politics was necessary. Maritain’s proposal consisted in a network of cells made up of lay Christian visionaries amounting to a “third party,”

which will be purely secular and so difffer from the religious orders… heretofore, and which will be founded on the principle of respect for human personality and the spiritual force of evangelical love, so difffering from a secular and atheistic order like, for example, the Communist Party of to-day.40

Despite the exclusive focus on the temporal Maritain’s “third party” still evokes the role of the religious orders in the Middle Ages. The associates of the new political formation were expected to put into practice the precepts of the gospel with a fervour that went beyond that of the ordinary member of society. They would act as the guardians of a Christian society, an idea elaborated in Eliot’s Idea of a Christian Society as well.41 The formation of a new type of lay Order was throughout its existence perhaps the most repeated item on the Moot agenda. It appeared in the Moot under various guises—cells, party, Fraternity of the Spirit, clerisy, Community of Christians—but essentially the idea remained the same. The Order was to be a Christian elite consisting of a network of intellectuals who were spiritually attuned and yet actively seeking the difffusion of Christian principles into all levels of society. Oldham described the essence of the Order as follows: “There was need of something analogous to ‘the Party,’ but wholly diffferent from the Nazi or Communist. It must refrain from becoming an organisation, so as to be free to vitalise all existing organisations.”42 They would be united by an adherence to a shared social philosophy while at the same time assume a measure of plurality as opinions on the practical application of the philosophy might vary. The Order was to be initiated from within the Moot but would work more practically towards a New Christendom.43 Oldham invested much of his energies on the creation of an Order; however, disagreement on the appropriate level of commitment meant that it never materialised.44 After the eleventh meeting of the Moot the

40 Maritain, True Humanism, 266. 41 Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 28f. 42 Clements, The Moot Papers, 208. 43 Clements, The Moot Papers, 189. 44 The comments submitted on Oldham’s “Suggestions for the Constitutions of an Order” (Oldham Papers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University New College Library, 13/8/01 [1939]) 232 Kurlberg emphasis shifted slightly and Oldham began to speak of the Moot being part of a more loosely associated “school of thought” joining forces with a growing number of Christian intellectuals who shared the same convictions and analysis of society.45 Oldham’s search for a common “idea,” around which Christians could rally culminated in a statement titled “The Christian Witness in the Present Crisis.”46 Oldham was so confĳident of the force of the statement that he believed it radical enough to cause a Copernican Revolution in Christian social thought.47 The document was widely commented upon by Moot members and others and can be seen as a synthesis of the ideas entertained in the Moot over the years. To increase its impact it was published in the Christian News-Letter on 29 December 1943, an edited version by Archbishop William Temple, an enthusiastic supporter of the Moot.48 In letters to close collaborators in ecumenical movement Oldham deemed the document highly signifĳicant and acknowledged the inspiration of Maritain and a few other thinkers upon it.49 Evidently, Maritain’s influence was lasting.

Conclusion

The ambitious aspirations of the Moot never came to fruition. At best some of the ideas formulated and formed in the Moot found their way into the public

are predominantly positive, but opinion difffers over what the function of such an Order would be. During the eighteenth meeting Eric Fenn inferred that the Order had failed to materialise due to lack of agreement on the required level of commitment (Clements, The Moot Papers, 640). 45 Clements, The Moot Papers, 487. 46 J.H. Oldham, “The Christian Witness in the Present Crisis,” Oldham Papers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University New College Library, 9/5/19 (1943). 47 Clements, The Moot Papers, 639. 48 William Temple, “What Christians Stand for in the Secular World,” Christian News-Letter Supplement, no. 198, 29 December 1943). The Christian News-Letter was a weekly bulletin edited by Oldham. Its purpose was to “to pool our available resources of Christian insight and understanding” and address a decaying Western Civilisation (J.H. Oldham, “Why a Christian News Letter?” Christian News-Letter, no. 0, 18 October (1939), 2). Its strong connection to the Moot meant that it became the main forum in which Moot members could publish and further their ideas. 49 J.H. Oldham, “Letter to H.P. Van Dusen,” Oldham Papers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University New College Library, 9/5/38, 18 November 1943; J.H. Oldham, “Letter to W.A. Visser‘t’Hooft,” Oldham Papers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University New College Library, 9/5/41, 30 December 1943. The Moot, the End of Civilisation 233 discourse through publications and the influential positions held by members. For instance, the ideas of the Moot can be traced in post-war British educational policy.50 Still, a study of the Moot offfers a valuable glimpse into a segment of the British intelligentsia during the Second World War and also an interesting theoretical perspective upon present studies on political modernisms. The argument presented in this paper is that, as per Roger Grifffĳin’s defĳinition, the Moot exhibits the core characteristic of political modernism. Grifffĳin does intend for his framework to be used heuristically. Yet, given that for Grifffĳin the fascist state epitomises this alternative modernism51 and that he at least implicitly assumes that secularisation by the fĳirst half of the 20th century has rendered Christianity obsolete, applying his modernist framework to this explicitly Christian venture is perhaps ironic. However, the characteristics of Grifffĳin’s political modernism correspond to Christian and—not least—Pauline concepts. The lament of the corruption of the present age; expectations of the imminent advent of apocalyptic times; the eschatological vision of the inbreaking of a new aeon; the Pauline phrases of “new creation” and “the old has passed away, the new has come”;52 a new community constructing a alternative sacred canopy—these are all themes rooted in the Christian meta- narrative. As the Moot exemplifĳies, a re-vitalised Christianity can therefore sit quite comfortably in Grifffĳin’s modernist framework.53 What diffferentiated the modernism of the Moot from the Fascist religio-political counterparts was the conviction that the key to re-vitalising modern society was an orthodox Christianity as expressed in Maritain’s concept of integral humanism.54

50 William Taylor, “Education and the Moot,” in Richard Aldrich (ed.), In History and Education: Essays Presented to Peter Gordon (London: Woburn Press, 1996). 51 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism. 1. 52 2 Cor. 5:17, English Standard Version. 53 Grifffĳin rejects Frank Kermode’s claim that the germ of the modernists’ apocalyptic outlook is Christian millenarianism (Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York Oxford University Press, 2000)) and instead argues that by “looking beyond the parameter of Christian history” one fĳinds that the primordial practice of rite of passage is more fruitful interpretation of the root of the modern apocalypse (Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism, 102). The validity of the argument in this paper per se is not contradictory to Grifffĳin’s position, as he merely asserts that the apocalyptic is not limited to the Christian discourse. 54 The argument that Christianity was a possible source of modernist renewal has been forcefully made by Erik Tonning in Modernism and Christianity (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). 234 Kurlberg

Bibliography

Clements, Keith. The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom and Society 1938–1944. London: T & T Clark, 2010. Dawson, Christopher. Beyond Politics. London: Sheed & Ward, 1939. Eliot, T.S. After Strange Gods: A Primer on Modern Heresy. London: Faber & Faber, 1934. ——. The Idea of a Christian Society. London: Faber & Faber, 1939. ——. “Letter to His Mother, 24 June 1926,” in Valerie Eliot and John Hafffenden (eds.), The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume 3: 1926–1927. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. Gentile, Emilio. Politics as Religion. Translated by George Staunton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Grifffĳin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Hodges, H.A. “Towards a Plan for a New Summa,” in Oldham Papers, Edinburgh University New College Library, 14/2/25, 1939. Kermode, Frank. Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Mannheim, Karl. “Planning for Freedom,” in Oldham Papers, Edinburgh University New College Library, 14/3/57, 1939. ——. “Some Remarks on ‘Humanisme Intégral’ by Jacques Maritain,” in Papers Concerning the Moot, University of Leeds Library, Section 1, 1939. ——. “Topics for the Next Meeting of the Moot,” in Records of the Moot, London: Institute of Edcuation, MOO/32, 1941. ——. “The Crisis in Valuation,” in Records of the Moot, London: Institute of Education, MOO/77, 1942. Maritain, Jacques. True Humanism. London: The Centenary Press, 1938. ——. “Letter from M. Jacques Maritain,” In Papers Concerning the Moot, Leeds: University of Leeds Library, Section 10, 14 April 1939. Murry, John Middleton. “Paper Read at the Moot, Sept. 23–26, 1938,” in Oldham Papers, Edinburgh University New College Library, 14/5/1, 1938. ——. “Towards a Theory of a Christian Society,” in Oldham Papers, Edinburgh University New College Library, 14/5/37, 1938. ——. “Comments on Maritain’s True Humanism,” in Papers Concerning the Moot, University of Leeds Library, Section 1, 1939. ——. The Price of Leadership. London: scm, 1939. ——. “Memorandum by J. Middleton Murry,” in Records of the Moot, London: Institute of Education, MOO/129, 1940. Oldham, J.H. “Letter,” The Times, 3 October 1938. ——. “The Problems and Tasks of the Council on the Christian Faith and the Common Life,” in Oldham Papers, Edinburgh University New College Library, 13/8/73, 1938. The Moot, the End of Civilisation 235

——. “A Reborn Christendom,” in Records of the Moot, London: Institute of Edcuation, MOO/2, 1939. ——. “Suggestions for the Constitution of an Order,” in Oldham Papers, Edinburgh University New College Library, 13/8/01, 1939. ——. “Why a Christian News Letter?” Christian News-Letter, no. 0 (1939). ——. The Resurrection of Christendom. London: Christian News-Letter Books, 1940. ——. “The Christian Witness in the Present Crisis,” in Oldham Papers, Edinburgh University New College Library, 9/5/19, 1943. ——. “Letter to H.P. Van Dusen,” in Oldham Papers, Edinburgh University New College Library, 9/5/38, 18 Nov 1943. ——. “Letter to W.A. Visser’t’Hooft,” in Oldham Papers, Edinburgh University New College Library, 9/5/41, 30 December 1943. Overy, Richard. The Morbid Age: Britian and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939. London: Penguin Books, 2010. Taylor, William. “Education and the Moot,” in Richard Aldrich (ed.), In History and Education: Essays Presented to Peter Gordon, 159–186. London: Woburn Press, 1996. Temple, William. “What Christians Stand for in the Secular World,” Christian News- Letter Supplement, no. 198 (1943). Tonning, Erik. Modernism and Christianity. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Vidler, Alec R. “Comments on M. Maritain’s True Humanism,” in Papers concerning the Moot, Leeds: University of Leeds Library, Section 1, 1939. chapter 13 Old Dogmas for a New Crisis Hell and Incarnation in T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden1

Erik Tonning

In 1939, on the cusp of war, W.H. Auden could, in Michael North’s words, “sum- marize in one paragraph what had become a familiar indictment”:2

The most obvious social fact of the last forty years is the failure of liberal capitalist democracy… By denying the social nature of personality, and by ignoring the social power of money, it has created the most impersonal, the most mechanical and the most unequal civilisation the world has ever seen, a civilisation in which the only emotion common to all classes is a feeling of individual isolation from everyone else, a civilisation torn apart by the opposing emotions born of economic injustice, the just envy of the poor and the selfĳish terror of the rich.3

The social and political crises of the 1930s—from the Economic Crisis and widespread unemployment to the rise of totalitarian regimes in Russia, Italy, and Germany, war in Spain, and a ruptured international order leading to global war—were felt by intellectuals like Auden to place a whole civilisation on trial. The verdict remained uncertain. Would “liberal capitalist democracy” survive, and did it even have a right to exist? Would one of the new political religions, socialism or fascism, sweep all before it in revolution or total war, to create a new order, and perhaps a New Man altogether? The term “political religion”4 is used here to point to the fact that for many interwar intellectuals, an exclusively political analysis of this situation would

1 My thanks to Palgrave Macmillan for allowing me to reprint parts of Chapter 3 of my monograph Modernism and Christianity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 2 Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2. 3 W.H. Auden, Prose: Volume II: 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, nj: Princeton, University Press, 2002), 6–7. 4 Emilio Gentile is the leading proponent of this term, especially within the modern historiog- raphy of interwar totalitarianism; but he also points out how contemporary observers themselves consistently characterised these movements as political religions. See Emilio Gentile, “The Sacralisation of Politics: Defĳinitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,” translated by Robert Mallett, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 18–55 (40–49).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282285_015 Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 237 have seemed insufficient: the crisis also came to be seen as a religious one, raising with great urgency the question of the survival of Europe’s Christian heritage, as against a possible post-Christian future. In his classic The Sense of an Ending (1967), Frank Kermode drew attention to the apocalyptic mood of Decadence and Transition so widespread in modernist writing. More recently, the historian of fascism, Roger Griffin, has vastly expanded this insight by arguing that the whole cultural and political movement we call “modernism” can be understood as a revolt against modernity-as- decadence: a terrifying crisis of values eroding the Sacred Canopy5 of established meanings in the West, and evoking an unprecedented range of effforts to diagnose this cultural illness and propose some means of revitalisation or rebirth.6 However, Griffin treats Christianity itself too lightly, associating it more or less exclusively with a shattered and definitively past “Sacred Canopy.”7 But in a looming interwar crisis, Christianity could also plausibly be opposed to ersatz secular religions of all kinds. For some, it provided an independent critique and historical analysis of all political “isms”; it could be seen as a bulwark against impending chaos and a vital source of values; and as offering its own regeneration cure for the ills of social atomism and injustice, a technocratic, despiritualised civilisation, and an impersonal and malfunctioning industrial capitalism. Thus, ancient Christian dogmas could be given a new lease of life by being interpreted and re-applied to this new crisis. This essay examines the surprising creative investment by two prominent modernist convert-poets in Christian dogma in light of the interwar crisis: Hell, or final damnation, in T.S. Eliot; and the Incarnation in W.H. Auden’s work. In their political thought, their cultural theory, and their aesthetics, these poets did not simply apply traditional formulae: they tried in their own way to define a whole new start for an ailing and threatened culture.

5 As Grifffĳin points out, this term was coined by Peter Berger in his studyThe Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (London: Doubleday, 1967). See Roger Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan 2007), 74–76. 6 See GrifffĳinModernism and Fascism, Chapters 2 and 3. 7 Of course, Christianity is not Grifffĳin’s main subject in Modernism and Fascism, and he refers to it mostly in passing (e.g. p. 110, “the crisis of the credibility of both Christianity and the progress myth as stable sources of transcendence deepened”). Thus the idea of Christianity itself as a potentially “revitalising” force for modernist writers, thinkers or cultural activists is nowhere considered, although such an emphasis does not discredit his theory. 238 Tonning

T.S. Eliot: The “Daily Terror of Eternity”

In an essay from 1930, T.S. Eliot’s paradoxical reading of that apostle of decadence, Charles Baudelaire, as engaged in “discovering Christianity for himself” with something like “theological innocence”8 focuses on the use of blasphemy and the threat of damnation as germs of discovery in Baudelaire’s work.9 Eliot argues that: “Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian. It is a way of afffĳirming belief.”10 Baudelaire is thus concerned

not with demons, black masses, and romantic blasphemy, but with the real problem of good and evil… In the middle of the nineteenth century, the age which (at its best) Goethe had prefĳigured, an age of bustle, programmes, platforms, scientifĳic progress, humanitarianism and revolutions which improved nothing, an age of progressive degradation, Baudelaire perceived that what really matters is Sin and Redemption…11

In fact, Eliot continues,

the recognition of the reality of Sin is a New Life; and the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebi- scites, sex reform and dress reform, that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation—of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives some signifĳicance to living…12

And,

so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true that his glory is his capacity for damnation […]13

8 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 422. 9 See Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford, 1999), 131–147 for a fĳine reading of Baudelaire’s signifĳicance for Eliot. 10 Eliot, Selected Essays, 421. 11 Eliot, Selected Essays, 427. 12 Eliot, Selected Essays, 427, my italics. 13 Eliot, Selected Essays, 429, my italics. Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 239

Eliot’s vigorous attachment to the dogma of the human capacity for fĳinal damnation by God’s supernatural authority in a real afterlife became a driving force for him, both on an intellectual and a deeply personal level. In a letter to his friend Paul Elmer More (2 June 1930) in response to More’s comments on Eliot’s 1929 Dante essay, we fĳind the following:

But, equally seriously, I am perturbed by your comments on Hell. To me it is giustizia, sapienza, amore. And I cannot help saying…that I am really shocked by your assertion that God did not make Hell. It seems to me that you have lapsed into Humanitarianism… To me, religion has brought at least the perception of something above morals, and therefore extremely terrifying; it has brought me not happiness, but the sense of something above happiness and therefore more terrifying than ordinary pain and misery; the very dark night and the desert. To me, the phrase “to be damned for the glory of God” is sense not paradox; I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children’s game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes in the end. And I don’t know whether this is to be labelled “Classicism” or “Romanticism”: I only think that I have got hold of the tip of the tail of something quite real, more real than morals or than sweet- ness and light and culture.14

What we have here is finally something quite extreme: ennui is more violently feared than Hell itself; in fact it is simply unbearable.15 But the perception is not merely a negative one, a flight: for Eliot, dogma also gives access, through faith, to “something above morals,” the mysterium tremen- dum et fascinans, the “dark night and the desert” of a St. John of the Cross, the transcendent Justice, Wisdom and Love responsible (as in Dante’s Inferno III) for definitively limiting and confining evil to Hell. Eliot’s embrace—the word is not too strong—of the reality of Hell gives us something like a key to the underlying unity of his various activities after his 1927 conversion and into the 1930s: not just as poet and dramatist, but also as churchman, social commentator, and critic.

14 Quoted in Manju Jain, T.S. Eliot and American Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 227–228. 15 Compare Eliot’s well-known letter to Paul Elmer More on 20 February 1928, discussing “the void that I fĳind in the middle of all happiness and human relations”: “only Christianity helps to reconcile me to life, which is otherwise disgusting” (quoted in Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, 152). 240 Tonning

Eliot’s increasing emphasis on the reality of Hell in this period in fact marks a gradual but fundamental change from his pre-conversion preoccupation with Original Sin, less as a Christian doctrine than as a marker of a certain cultural politics espoused by Charles Maurras and the Action Française in France, and T.E. Hulme in Britain. Maurras advocated a reversal of the French revolution and a return to an aristocratic, non-democratic society that would be “classique, monarchique, catholique.” A plank in this ideology was the conception of human beings as corrupt and in need of restraint by civilising forces and institutions. Maurras distinguished absolutely between “the forces of chaos: unbridled emotion, equality, individualism, and revolution,” and “the forces of order: reason, hierarchy, community, and tradition.”16 Pitched on the side of chaos were the French revolution and its alleged intellectual progenitor, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But Rousseau was just one example of a general disintegrative principle of “romanticism,” which Maurras traced back to Luther’s Protestant insistence on private judgement, and onwards into the nineteenth- century ideologies of progress, liberalism, democracy and laissez-faire capitalism. On the side of “Order” for Maurras was nothing less than the great “classical” tradition of Western civilisation—from its origins in Greece via Rome to the Roman Catholic Church and to Latin Europe and especially France.17 Or, in Hulme’s less narrowly French formulation of these ideas, Original Sin entails “the conviction that man is by nature bad or limited, and can consequently only accomplish anything by disciplines, ethical, heroic, or political.”18 After the publication of the second volume of Eliot’s letters (1923–25), there can be no doubt that Eliot conceived his own cultural role as a mediator of this cultural politics in a more subdued, literary form. In a letter to Maurras from October 1923, Eliot tried to enlist the Frenchman as a contributor to the Criterion:

Only The Criterion frankly proclaims a philosophy which “democrassery” is bound to fĳind reactionary, although, in our view, it is the only philosophy which offfers the slightest hope of progress at the present time. I am certain that the Criterion group represents the body of opinion nearest to l’Action Française…19

16 Kenneth Asher, T.S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23. 17 Asher, T.S. Eliot and Ideology, 23. 18 Quoted in Asher, T.S. Eliot and Ideology 36. 19 T.S. Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 2: 1923–1925, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Hafffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 238. Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 241

As Ronald Bush has emphasised in a review of the letters,20 Eliot had also written to the Daily Mail in January of the same year to complement the paper on a recent series on Italian Fascism that lauded the “rescue” of Italy as a “romance,” which was “one of the most important events of our time.”21 In Eliot’s Baudelaire essay, there is certainly evidence for the continuing relevance of this cultural politics: rejection of the “progressive degradation” of the nineteenth century with its ideology of Progress, its humanitarianism, its democratic reform, all slot into this picture. So does the overwhelming sense of ennui and despair at the whole condition of nineteenth-century modernity, described as so menacingly insignifĳicant as to make damnation seem a kind of salvation. Furthermore, as is well known, the very terms in which Eliot famously made public his conversion in For Lancelot Andrewes (1928)—“classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”—echo the Maurrasian credo. Nevertheless, two crucial diffferences mark a separation between Eliot and Maurras: the fĳirst present from the beginning, and the second increasingly dominant in Eliot’s thought across the 1930s. The former may be indicated by Eliot’s praise of a “decadent” modern poet, Baudelaire, whose style was very far from the decorum and restraint demanded by the Maurrasian line.22 Indeed, Eliot’s own experimental poetry, and the whole generation of writers he praised and promoted seem at odds with Maurras’s ideals in this respect. By no stretch of the imagination, for instance, could The Waste Land be described as “classicist” in Maurras’ sense; indeed, if romanticism is “disintegrative,” what better example of this tendency than such chaotic, palimpsestic form? However, as critics have long realised, the poem can also be read as being about a world crying out for order and regeneration, its juxtaposed fragments of broken civilisation, ritual and myth strictly orchestrated to this end, and the whole an illustration of the “mythical method” that can survey and perhaps re-organise “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”23 The latter famous comment from the essay “Ulysses, Order and Myth” (1923) shows how, both before and after his conversion, Eliot was prepared to defend experimental, hyper-modern writing even if it contained indecency (Joyce) or even blasphemy and outright Satanism (Baudelaire).

20 Ronald Bush, “‘An Easy Commerce of the Old and New?’: Recent Eliot Scholarship,” Modernism/Modernity 17, no. 3 (September 2010), 677–681 (678–679). 21 Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 2, 7. 22 See Asher, T.S. Eliot and Ideology, 25–28. 23 T.S. Eliot, Selected Prose, edited by Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 107. For a reading of The Waste Land along these lines, see Asher, T.S. Eliot and Ideology, 42–44. 242 Tonning

The important thing was that the writing could be construed as displaying the correct tendency. In a less well-known contribution in The Forum from 1928,24 Eliot defended Joyce and D.H. Lawrence against a charge of indecency by Granville Hicks, by arguing that these writers were on the right side of

a transition, a revolt against the paganism of progress of the nineteenth century, toward a rediscovery of orthodox Christianity. Even “Freud- ianism,” crude and half-baked as it is, is a blundering step toward the Catholic conception of the human soul. The religious faith which Mr Hicks suggests has been destroyed by “science” was a faith much better destroyed. Perhaps the most interesting example…is the spectacle of the grandson of Thomas Huxley discovering that human nature is fundamentally corrupt. This seems to me a healthy sign.

Joyce, Lawrence and Aldous Huxley could thus be enlisted as engaged in a ben- efĳicial, future-oriented creative destruction, targeting the liberal, bourgeois faith of the nineteenth century as a prelude to the revitalising rediscovery of Christian orthodoxy.25 The question of faith here brings us to the second, more decisive point of diffference with Maurras. Eliot’s conversion led him to a relentless, uncompromising afffĳirmation of Christian supernaturalism, where faith in the dogma and reality of Hell became a litmus test of orthodoxy.26 In light of this, his early intellectual influences were also found wanting. Although Eliot defended the Action Française against papal condemnation in 1926, he was under no illusion with regard to Maurras’s own lack of faith and subordination of Christianity to politics; in fact, Eliot’s emphatic supernaturalism should be read as an explicit distancing of his own stance from that of Maurras on this point.27 The letter to

24 Eliot, letter to The Forum, 16 November 1928, in The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 4: 1928–1929, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Hafffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), 320. 25 For “creative destruction” in modernism, see GrifffĳinModernism and Fascism, 54. 26 In his contributions to the think-tank The Moot (1938–1947), Eliot would repeatedly apply this litmus test: for instance, commenting (1 January 1941) on J.H. Oldham’s proposal for a “Fraternity of the Spirit,” Eliot argued that Oldham’s vague, inclusive use of the word “spirit” tended to ignore the Evil Spirit (ms 9/3/81, J.H. Oldham Papers [Moot Papers], New College Library, University of Edinburgh; thanks to Jonas Kurlberg for this reference); see also Eliot’s comments on J.M. Murry’s idea of a National Church, quoted below. 27 Asher argues that the shift to supernaturalism was Eliot’s way of “elevating his [political] preferences to the level of mythology,” in a partly strategic move; but this to me understates Eliot’s earnestness and intellectual commitment. See Asher, T.S. Eliot and Ideology, 63. Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 243

More quoted above thus marks the realignment of Eliot’s views. The categories of Classicism versus Romanticism were now viewed as distinctly secondary, along with “culture” and even “morals.” It is impossible to over- state the effect on Eliot of the sense of God as utterly transcendent Other, terrifying in His grandeur, glimpsed in “the dark night and the desert.” Eliot repeatedly claimed to have undergone mystical experiences,28 and again it is crucial to note that after his conversion, belief in “dogma” no longer served a political and cultural “Order.” Instead, it was for him about access to divine self-revelation. Eliot ultimately came to see Maurras as a kind of Virgil-figure, a virtuous Pagan capable of leading him to the Earthly Paradise, but unable to ascend further.29 It is therefore interesting to glance at the treatment of this very moment in Eliot’s Dante essay from 1929, which was dedicated to Maurras: at this point (the close of Purgatorio XXVII), Dante is crowned and mitred king and bishop over himself, and Eliot deduces that “political and ecclesiastical organisation are only required because of the imperfections of the human will.”30 These institutions were necessary, but not an end in themselves: they too would pass away. Eliot’s properly Christian dogmatic faith relativises everything else, including his own political preferences, for as he cautioned in The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), “whatever reform we carry out, the result will always be a sordid travesty of what human society should be—though the world is never left wholly without glory.”31 This is not, however, meant to foster any Olympian complacency:

If this is a world in which I, and the majority of my fellow-beings, live in that perpetual distraction from God which exposes us to the one great

28 See Eliot’s letter to Geofffrey Faber, 18 September 1927: “There is another ‘good thing’ of life too, which I have had only in flashes. It is the sudden realisation of being separated from all enjoyment, from all things of this earth, even from Hope; a sudden separation and isolation from everything; and at that moment of illumination, a recognition of the fact that one can do without all these things, a joyful recognition of what John of the Cross means when he says the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union until it has divested itself of the craving for all created beings”: T.S. Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 3: 1926–1927, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Hafffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 712–713; emphasis in original. 29 For this statement from the 25 April 1948 issue of the journal Aspects de la France et du Monde, see Asher, T.S. Eliot and Ideology, 130–131. 30 Eliot, Selected Essays, 261. 31 T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Defĳinition of Culture (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, 1976), 47. 244 Tonning

peril, that of fĳinal and complete alienation from God after death, there is some wrong that I must try to help to put right […]32

The aim for the post-conversion Eliot, then, is a whole culture that walks “in the daily terror of eternity,” a point Eliot made explicitly in one of his contributions to the think-tank The Moot in 1938:

My comments have chiefly been concerned with the necessity for safe- guarding Christianity itself, in our enthusiasm for society. And I think we need to remember, in the heat of social zeal, that the point of living is to be found in Death, and that we are concerned as Christians with what happens to us after that. I mean that the fear of Hell is not merely a matter of individual temperament, but is essential for collective Christianity.33

One consequence of this fundamental shift in Eliot’s thinking may sound peculiar to received opinion: the younger Eliot (often seen as more “radical,” less “reactionary,” than Eliot the convert) was demonstrably more sympathetic to movements of the Right (chiefly the Action Française, but also early Italian Fascism), than the consciously Christian Eliot would later become. Post- conversion, Eliot criticises Fascism in the same breath as Communism, for setting itself up as a competitor, an alternative “supernatural faith”: this is sheer “humbug.”34 In a letter to the Church Times (30 January 1934), he pointedly raised the question of whether the Christian idea and fascist ideology were compatible, implying a negative answer via quotations from Mussolini on the nobility of war as such; scepticism towards ecclesiastical authority; the State as an absolute; and imperialist aggression. Even more strikingly, in the aforementioned review of a number of books (both laudatory and critical) on Fascism from 1928, Eliot offfered a guarded defence of Maurras’s bête noire, democracy:

Now it is manifest that any disparagement of “democracy” is nowadays well received by nearly every class of men, and any alternative to “democracy” is watched with great interest… I cannot share enthusiastically in this vigorous repudiation of “democracy”… It is one thing to say, what is

32 1937 bbc Broadcast, reprinted in Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 75. 33 ms 14/6/21, J.H. Oldham Papers (Moot Papers), New College Library, University of Edinburgh; quoted in Tonning, Modernism and Christianity, 67. Eliot’s paper was written between the fĳirst (1–4 April 1938) and the second meeting (23–26 September 1938). My thanks to Jonas Kurlberg for this dating, and for drawing the quote to my attention. 34 T.S. Eliot, “The Literature of Fascism,” Criterion 8 (December 1928), 280–290 (282). Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 245

sadly certain, that democratic government has been watered down to nothing. It is one thing to say, what is equally sad and certain, that from the moment when the sufffrage is conceived as aright instead of as a privilege and a duty and a responsibility, we are on the way merely to government by an invisible oligarchy instead of government by a visible one. But it is another thing to ridicule the idea of democracy. A real democracy is always a restricted democracy, and can only flourish with some limita- tion by hereditary rights and responsibilities… The modern question as popularly put is: “democracy is dead; what is to replace it?” whereas it should be: “the frame of democracy has been destroyed, how can we, out of the materials at hand, build a new structure in which democracy can live?”35

In his most considered response to the European crisis, written a few months before the outbreak of war in 1939, Eliot gave his own view of how such a new structure might be constructed upon specifĳically Christian foundations. The premise of The Idea of a Christian Society is that what is needed is “not a programme for a party, but a way of life for a people.”36 Statesmen in such a reformed Christian society would be “confĳined, by the temper and traditions of the people which they rule, to a Christian framework within which to realise their ambitions,” and although they may perform un-Christian acts or be unbelievers themselves, “they must never attempt to defend their actions on un-Christian principles.”37 The people thus governed would largely express their Christianity in behaviour more or less unconsciously governed by social norms, including customary religious observances, and a traditional code of conduct towards one’s neighbour: they should be able to perceive “how far their lives fall short of Christian ideals,” yet their religious and social life should form a whole such that “the difffĳiculty of behaving as Christians should not impose an intolerable strain.”38 Eliot also envisaged an elite “Community of Christians,” both clerical and lay, of “intellectual and spiritual superiority,”39 able to offfer a continuous critique of society as a whole from fĳirmly held dogmatic principles. Two areas falling under their aegis would be education and economics (a sharp critique of consum- erism runs through the book). Finally, the Church itself would speak with

35 Eliot, “The Literature of Fascism,” 287. 36 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 14. 37 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 22. 38 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 23. 39 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 28. 246 Tonning defĳinitive authority within this society in matters of dogma, faith and morality, and may be expected to frequently rebuke the state.40 Within some such system of cultural checks and balances, a non-totalitarian Christian democratic system should be workable. Yet Eliot emphasised that his ideal did not assume any particular form of government: any such identi- fĳication would be a “dangerous error,”41 confusing the permanent with the transi- tory. What he urges throughout the book is that it is not just the totalitarian regimes of Italy, Germany, or Russia that ultimately boil down to versions of Paganism or materialism: following Liberal principles to the end (seen as a largely negative loosening of restraint) might lead to “that which is its own negation: the artifĳicial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.”42 Eliot attacked what he saw as two inadequate attitudes to the European crisis in Britain: fĳirst, the complacent assumption that because the Germans profess a semi-pagan “national religion,” they, by contrast, are self-evidently Christians; and secondly, “worst of all,” the advocacy of Christianity (by the Moral Rearmament movement; but also, one notes, by Maurras) “not because it is true, but because it might be benefĳicial.”43 Where Christianity is merely a means to some other end, society as a whole is drifting towards a non- Christian endpoint: and the rhetorical thrust of Eliot’s book is intended to wake his readers up to this fact, for if those presently “neutral” are brought to imagine a future without Christianity—keeping totalitarian alternatives vividly in mind—they might recoil from the consequences before it is too late. One might dub Eliot’s view “dogmatic rearmament,” for he too aims to tap into the national sense of a failure of moral nerve in England after the Munich appease- ment treaty abandoning the Czech Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938. Instead of short-term emotional appeals, however, he advocated educational reform on fĳirmly Christian principles. Ultimately, if an all-pervasive cultural change is needed, “A nation’s system of education is much more important than its system of government.”44 Eliot’s cultural and political aims fuse in the desire for “a literature which should be unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defĳiantly, Christian.”45 This is far from the enforced, public mythology of the contemporary totalitarian

40 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 38. 41 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 45. 42 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 12. 43 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 46. 44 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 33. 45 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 392. Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 247

“political religions.” However, what does it mean for an orthodox Christian writer to promote “a way of life for a people” that exists no longer, or not yet—within a culture that is not in fact “unconsciously Christian”? Is he forced, willy-nilly, to be merely defĳiant in the face of contemporary ills? If The Waste Land cried out for Order, Eliot’s post-conversion literature cries out for the intrusion of the radical Otherness and transcendence of God into history; indeed, into the ever-unsatisfactory medium of language itself. This is perhaps most explicit in Murder in the Cathedral (1935), which depicts a wrenching public ritual of cleansing by martyrdom and blood, progressing despite all worldly impediment. The Chorus marks its stages. First, uneasy awareness of undesired change: “Leave us to perish in quiet”; “We do not wish anything to happen.”46 Then, just before the murder of Thomas á Becket, this spiritual sterility changes into a salutary awareness of judgement and, of course, the reality of Hell:

And behind the Judgement the Void, more horrid than active shapes of hell; Emptiness, absence, separation from God…47

After the murder: “We are soiled with a fĳilth that we cannot clean.”48 And fĳinally: “We thank thee for thy mercies of blood, for Thy redemption by/ blood.”49 Into this progress, however, Eliot inserts a sharp disruption, as the knights speak in contemporary prose, implicating the audience in the murder:

if you have now arrived at a just subordination of the Church to the wel- fare of the State, remember that it is we who took the fĳirst step…if there is any guilt whatever in the matter, you must share it with us.50

The Knights appear to have won the long-term battle, for in a present-day culture “worm-eaten with Liberalism”51 it may well seem, in the words of the First Priest following Becket’s murder, that “The Church lies bereft/Alone,

46 T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 243. 47 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 272. 48 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 276. 49 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 281. 50 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 279. 51 T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 13. 248 Tonning desecrated, desolated, and the heathen shall build on the ruins,/Their world without God.”52 The answer, however, is not mere defĳiance of the World, but sacrifĳice, the immolation of self that allows God to work: “For the Church is stronger for this action,/Triumphant in adversity. It is fortifĳied/By persecution: supreme, so long as men will die for it.”53 Immolation is also the keynote of the wartime poem “Little Gidding” (1942), where, famously, the German bombers at the height of the Blitz are associated with Pentecostal (and Purgatorial) fĳire:

The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre— To be redeemed from fĳire by fĳire.54

The theological-political project advanced in The Idea of a Christian Society— jolting Britain into awareness of the need for self-purgation if the totalitarian enemy is to be efffectively confronted—still shadows these lines: “[a Christian society] involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience and discomfort: but here as hereafter the alternative to hell is purgatory.”55 Yet at the same time, the initiative does not lie with human beings at all (“Who then devised the tor- ment? Love”),56 nor is it within their power to remove the “intolerable shirt of flame.”57 The perspective is relentlessly eschatological, marked by the repeated mantra from Julian of Norwich: “Sin is Behovely, but/All shall be well, and/All manner of thing shall be well.”58 The way of Christian purgation goes through sin and error, as “the rending pain of re-enactment/Of all that you have done, and been,”59 combines with a sense of the futility and sterility of all words not wrought by the Pentecostal flame (“Every poem an epitaph”),60 to fuel a longing for a “condition of complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything)”61

52 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 280. 53 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 280. 54 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 196. 55 Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 19. 56 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 196. 57 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 196. 58 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 195. 59 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 194. 60 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 197. 61 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 198. Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 249 and for the Dantean blossoming of cleansing fĳire into mystic rose.62 In “Little Gidding,” the poetic speaker is cast in the role of sacrifĳicial victim, redeeming the time.

W.H. Auden: The Would-Be Christian

The rise of Nazism and the onset of war was a key factor in W.H. Auden’s gradual rediscovery of Christian faith about 1939–40. In particular, seeing a news- reel in early December 1939 on the conquest of Poland—cheered on by attending Germans residents in Manhattan with shouts of “kill the Poles”— shook Auden into a fundamental consideration of the values by which his own civilisation claimed to exist.63 As he later summarised it, even the Communists had claimed to believe, with liberalism, in some version of the universal brotherhood of man and neighbourly love, but

The novelty and shock of the Nazis was that they made no pretense of believing in justice and liberty for all, and attacked Christianity on the grounds that to love one’s neighbour as oneself was a command fĳit only for efffeminate weaklings, not for the “healthy blood of the master race.” Moreover, this utter denial of everything liberalism had ever stood for was arousing wild enthusiasm…in one of the most highly educated countries in Europe…. Confronted by such a phenomenon, it was impossible any longer to believe that the values of liberal humanism were self- evident. Unless one was prepared to take a relativist view that all values are a matter of personal taste, one could hardly avoid asking the question: “If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?”64

In contemporary essays and reviews from 1939 and into the war, this dilemma is frequently reinvestigated:

For the past hundred years Occidental liberalism has lain snug in the belief that the relation of its arts and sciences, of its ethical and political

62 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 198; cf. Paradiso XXXI. 63 See Edward Mendelson, Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, 89–90, for details. 64 W.H. Auden, Prose: Volume III: 1949–1955, edited by Edward Mendelson (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2008), 578. 250 Tonning

values, to the Christian faith was simply historical. It has taken Hitler to show us that liberalism is not self-supporting…65

Like Eliot, Auden saw liberalism’s value-system as ultimately dependent upon the legacy of Christianity. Also like Eliot, he saw the challenge of Hitler precisely in making this fact so evident that it called for a basic stand on the future of the civilisation that had emerged from Christianity. However, Auden did not share Eliot’s wish to re-establish Christendom via the cultural activism of well- educated guardians of orthodoxy: instead, he sought out new theological ideas that might ground liberal democracy more fĳirmly by reconnecting it with its Christian roots, while still shunning claims to be “in possession of the fĳinal truth.” The latter phrase, from a pre-conversion review published in March 1939, forms part of an accusation that Fascism and Catholicism, while seemingly at odds, are united in this claim to possession of the Truth. By contrast, the “fĳirst principle of democracy, on the other hand, is that no one knows the fĳinal truth about anything”; there can be only partial and particular “approxi- mation” to it.66 One aim of Auden’s theological speculation was to secure and revitalise liberal democracy itself, most notably by pointing to how such approximations do still relate to a transcendent Absolute, and how brotherly love must fĳinally be infused with Christianagape to become efffective and con- vincing. Thus for Auden, the “special revelation” on which Christianity’s “real claim to supremacy is founded”67 is that most paradoxical of doctrines, the Incarnation, where the Word is made Flesh,68 and Christ enters into our frail and limited condition by “taking the form of a servant, being made in the like- ness of men.”69 Both in his occasional essays from the war years and in the long Christmas oratorio For the Time Being, written 1941–42, Auden explored what exactly a commitment to this doctrine might mean in his own time, while consciously guarding against what he calls “the way of dogmatic belief backed by force.”70 Auden was able to bridge the gap between recommending faith in Christian dogma, on the one hand, while maintaining that no one is in possession of fĳinal truth on the other, via his concept of the “would-be Christian”:71

65 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 131. 66 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 10. 67 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 133. 68 John 1:14. 69 Philippians 2:7. 70 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 29. 71 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 163. The following paragraph synthesises Auden’s views from a number of wartime essays, not always chronologically, in order to clarify connections Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 251

There is no such thing as a Christian or a Christian society for no one can say: “I am a Christian,” only “I am a sinner who believes that Jesus is the Christ whom I am required to become like. I shall not be a Christian or even understand fully what the word Christian means until I have become like him.”72

As Edward Mendelson explains, Auden’s reading of Søren Kierkegaard (from March 1940 on) was fundamental to his theological outlook. A key phrase for Auden was Kierkegaard’s “Before God I am always in the wrong”: “Kierkegaard’s existential Christianity offfered two strengths that psychoanalysis and politics could not: it perceived its relation to an absolute value; and it understood that it could never claim to know or embody that value.”73 As Auden would put it in a 1944 review of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, “the existential philosopher begins with man’s immediate experience as a subject, i.e. a being in need, an interested being whose existence is at stake.” Therefore, what Kierkegaard teaches is “an approach to oneself, not a conclusion, a style of questioning to apply to all one’s experience.”74 Neediness and imperfection are of course universal, and the only way for someone to communicate to a fellow human being “why he believes Jesus to be the Christ”75 would be through suggesting that Christ uniquely appeals to and challenges this common predicament. Thus, while it is true that the would-be Christian “cannot believe this without meaning that all who believe otherwise are in error, yet at the same time he can give a no more objective answer than the lover,” namely that “I believe because He ful- fĳills none of my dreams, because He is in every respect the opposite of what He would be if I could have made Him in my own image.”76 Embracing Christ’s love here means to subject oneself to a constant moral and intellectual self- examination: it is a style of questioning that places the whole of one’s existence at stake. The act of trying-to-believe Christian dogma in order to become like Christ is not an abandonment, but an intensifĳication of such questioning: “for it is as difffĳicult to be orthodox, i.e. not merely recite but fully assent to all the articles, as it is to be humble or chaste.”77 Auden continues:

between his ideas that often remain implicit in individual formulations. The chronology is retrievable in W.H. Auden, Prose: Volume II. 72 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 193. 73 Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). 74 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 213–218; quoted in Mendelson Later Auden, 131. 75 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 196. 76 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 196–197. 77 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 250. 252 Tonning

A heresy is an attempt to make God in one’s own image; that is why there have to be so many diffferent ones, to suit each person’s idea of himself. The sanguine man fĳinds the Incarnation easy to believe but is offfended at the Cross; the choleric man is attracted by the heroism of the Cross, but repelled by the command to turn the other cheek; the melancholic man fĳinds Original Sin an obvious truth, but the forgiveness of sins a difffĳicult mystery.78

From Auden’s perspective, therefore, his kind of Christianity was profoundly in keeping with democratic procedure, since “Protestantism, like democracy, is based upon the assumption that controversy is a form of coöperation, and ultimately the only way of arriving at truth.” However, co-operation required an active and engaged citizenry, and assumes that “the average man is sufffĳiciently energetic and interested in truth to take his part in looking for it.”79 In an earlier review called “Democracy is Hard,” for instance, Auden argued that democracy cannot be “sustained or defended unless one believes that pride, lying, and violence are mortal sins, and that their commission entails one’s damnation.”80 Democratic procedures need to be supported by individual spiritual practice: “Frankly, democracy will only work if as individuals we lead good lives, and we shall only do that if we have faith that it is possible and at the same time an acute awareness of how weak and corrupt we are.”81 The principles of self-examination and fallibility here become the basis for an extraordinary anti-totalitarian credo that blends democracy, agape, and the scientifĳic method:

There is one way to true knowledge and only one, a praxis which, if defined in terms of human relations, we should call love. For what is the scientific attitude but that of the love which does not reject the humblest fact, resists not evil (recalcitrant evidence) nor judges, but is patient, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things? And what is its opposite but the way of dogmatic belief backed by force? Skepticism, then, in belief. Absolute faith in the way and in the existence of truth.82

78 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 250. 79 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 86. 80 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 28. 81 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 29. 82 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 28–29. Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 253

Like Eliot, Auden stressed the anti-romantic theme of “original sin,”83 and humanity’s “natural bias toward evil.”84 Yet Auden’s account of the political implications deriving from this stance amounted to a determined revision of the reactionary emphasis on Order, Hierarchy and Monarchy that Eliot inherited from Maurras and Hulme:85 “No individual or class, therefore, however superior in intellect or character to the rest, can claim an absolute right to impose its view of the good upon them. Government must be democratic, the people must have a right to make their own mistakes and to sufffer for them, because no one is free from error.”86 This emphasis on error and sin confronted in fear and trembling nevertheless represents only one half of Auden’s theological-political vision. A decisive influence on Auden’s theological thought was the British writer Charles Williams, whose The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church he read in February 1940. Williams’ impact is (as Edward Mendelson has pointed out) immediately evident in The New Year Letter, which he was writing at the time; but we will focus here on Williams’ idea of “co-inherence” in Auden’s next long poem, For the Time Being (begun October 1941 and fĳin- ished in July 1942).87 By taking on human nature, Christ enters into an intimate exchange with his creatures, a “new state of being, a state of redemption, of co-inherence, made actual by that divine substitution, ‘He in us and we in him’.”88 For the Christian, then, co-inherence involves bearing one another’s burdens in this life: a vision of a mystical—yet still emphatically corporeal— community of sacrifĳicial agape, which afffected Auden immediately upon encountering it. In Auden’s view, therefore, “only faith in the Incarnation can conquer man’s original anxiety,”89 in order to establish an agape-community on earth, “that invisible coinherence of souls in the love of Christ which is the Church Catholic and Universal.”90 Hence for Auden, startlingly, a fully revitalised democracy would ultimately need to be modelled on the Church.

83 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 99. 84 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 98. 85 Mendelson remarks that Auden found the influence of the Action Française “pernicious”: Mendelson, Later Auden, 150. 86 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 98. 87 Mendelson, Later Auden, 124–127 gives an excellent account of Auden’s borrowings from Williams in The New Year Letter, though these come late in the writing process, and arguably the greater impact is upon For the Time Being. 88 Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (London: The Religious Book Club, 1939), 8–9. 89 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 134. 90 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 172. 254 Tonning

In For the Time Being, it is the “Meditation of Simeon” that most explicitly sets out the Incarnational theology at the heart of Auden’s Christmas Oratorio:

The Word could not be made Flesh until men had reached a state of absolute contradiction between clarity and despair in which they would have no choice but either to accept absolutely or to reject absolutely…91 But here and now the Word which is implicit in the Beginning and in the End is become immediately explicit, and that which hitherto we could only fear as the incomprehensible I AM, henceforth we may actively love with comprehension that THOU ART.92 And because of His visitation, we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present. Therefore at every moment we pray that, following Him, we may depart from our anxiety into His peace.93

The dramatic tension explored across this text is between an anxious state of “absolute contradiction between clarity and despair” and the necessary surrender into His peace. Auden’s technique is to manipulate a continuous parallel between the historical moment of Incarnation (using the iconic reference-points of the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Flight into Egypt) and those predicaments large and small, contemporary and perennial, which the Incarnation addresses and redeems by substitution and co-inherence. Simeon’s speeches setting out the preconditions for the Incarnation therefore have a double reference, to what needed to happen in history before Christ could appear, and to what still needs to be repeated in the minds of the present generation: “Before the Unconditional could manifest Itself under the conditions of existence, it was necessary that man should fĳirst have reached the ultimate frontier of consciousness, the secular limit of memory beyond which there remained but one thing for him to know, his Original Sin.”94 As Auden revealingly wrote to his father, “I was trying to treat it as a religious event which recurs every time it is accepted.”95

91 W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 387. 92 Auden, Collected Poems, 387–388. 93 Auden, Collected Poems, 390. 94 Auden, Collected Poems, 387. 95 Quoted in Mendelson, Later Auden, 186. Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 255

The backdrop for Incarnation in Auden’s wartime play, then, is an ominous atmosphere of conflict, and of spiritual desert, applicable both to ancient Palestine and Anno Domini 1942:96 “The evil and armed draw near/The weather smells of their hate”—“no nightmare/Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void”— “For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not fĳind it/Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere/that is not a desert.”97 Yet a counter- point impulse of prayer and praise also emerges from within this near-despair:

Though written by Thy children with A smudged and crooked line, Thy Word is ever legible, Thy meaning unequivocal, And for Thy Goodness even sin Is valid as a sign.98

Whereas Auden had used the word “crooked” in his 1937 poem “As I Walked Out One Evening” (“You shall love your crooked neighbour/With your crooked heart”),99 its homosexual slang undertone100 survives into For the Time Being with a key diffference. Where the former poem stresses unconquerable Time and indelible earthly imperfection, in the latter crookedness and even sin are capable of divine inscription. Homosexuality is presented here as but one type of human “crookedness,” and Auden’s oratorio is immensely inventive in cata- loguing the sheer multiplicity of spiritual conditions that the Incarnation must address and enter into in order to truly make the Word legible to all. Thus, the three wise men need redemption from their intellectual vices: science as (Baconian) “inquisition” of nature; the (Bergsonian) philosophy of time-as-flow; or a (Platonic) ethical idealism of the pure Ought and the Greatest Good, which “left no time for afffection.”101 The “shepherds,” for Auden “the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat,”102 are tempted to despair by the sense of being mere pegs in an inhuman machine: they are shown the joy of existence

96 McDiarmid, makes a similar point: see Lucy McDiarmid, Auden’s Apologies for Poetry (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990), 88–89. 97 Auden, Collected Poems, 350, 352, 353. 98 Auden, Collected Poems, 374. 99 Auden, Collected Poems, 135. 100 See Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 225–226 for a discussion of the word “crooked.” 101 Auden, Collected Poems, 369. 102 Auden, letter to his father, 13 October 1942, quoted in Mendelson, Later Auden, 186. 256 Tonning as arbitrary gift, as they rush toward Bethlehem. More sinister is the fĳigure of Herod, who congratulates himself on the civic improvements made in his reign (“Allotment gardening has become popular…Things are beginning to take shape”)103 and boasts of his ability to uphold Rational Life and Civilisation as against the “incoherent wilderness of rage and terror” outside the Empire. Yet incomprehensibly, his subjects want more than sweet reasonableness, a “wild prayer of longing” still rises up everywhere, and one day Herod is confronted with three men who say God has been born.104 This dangerous rumour must be stamped out, “Civilisation must be saved even if it means sending for the military.”105 Even if true, the idea of a God-Man would still be intolerable, since it would raise a transcendent ethical standard which fĳinite humanity could not attain—inducing “madness and despair.”106 Herod’s whole philosophy is that the overwhelming terror and incoherence “outside” can only be fought piecemeal, while the limited civilised order is always under threat. The new vision of a universal, radical divine love that transcends and upends this picture therefore endangers that efffort and vigilance. Thus Herod, and with him contemporary liberalism, is fĳinally impaled on the paradox of having to uphold the status quo—namely “the most impersonal, the most mechanical and the most unequal civilisation the world has ever seen”107—by violence, despite offfĳicially benign intentions: “I’ve tried to be good…I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy.”108 The Incarnation thus introduces a wholly diffferent political vision:

As the new-born Word Declares that the old Authoritarian Constraint is replaced By His Covenant, And a city based On love and consent Suggested to men, All, all, all of them. Run to Bethlehem.109

103 Auden, Collected Poems, 391. 104 Auden, Collected Poems, 391, 392. 105 Auden, Collected Poems, 394. 106 Auden, Collected Poems, 394. 107 Auden, Prose: Volume II, 6. 108 Auden, Collected Poems, 394. 109 Auden, Collected Poems, 378. Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 257

Conclusion: Dogma and the Modernist Crisis

The modernist crisis was, as stressed in my introduction to this volume, a crisis of authority. For what is to count as an authentic source of authority in a world of radically clashing world-views? Who or what is heretical? What is to count as the moribund, the degenerate, the merely traditional, the passé? How, exactly, does one “make it new”; which fresh theory, or which updated model from the past, holds the key to the future? Can civilisation be renewed through human agency, and if so, what would count as cultural vitality and strength? What words, what literary forms, are trustworthy; and what, if anything, distinguishes poetry from propaganda? In the interwar period, that crisis of authority is considerably sharpened by the growth of totalitarianism, and by more general critiques of liberalism, democracy, and the capitalist economy. This provoked a widespread examination of what the fundamental values and character of “Western civilisation” had been and should be, at the apocalyptic-seeming turn of an era; indeed for many the political crisis could not easily be separated from a religious one. How was Europe’s Christian past to be understood, and was a post-Christian future unfolding? In this situation, the poets examined here became interested in how Christian dogma could connect them to that past in vital and indispensable ways, while at the same time responding to present-day tensions that they sought to resolve in their own work. Eliot presents the clearest case here, in his persistent exploration of the movement from modern ennui to faith in supernatural judgement. His embrace of the doctrine of Hell and the necessity for purgation as a literary, cultural and political tonic does not only look backwards, but also forwards to a fully revitalised Christendom. For Auden, liberal democracy itself needed to be re-connected with its Christian roots and given a transcendent purpose beyond maintenance of the status quo. To do so, Auden appropriated Charles Williams on Incarnation, and exercised his considerable theological imagination in order to construct a stance that could be both non-totalitarian and potentially salvifĳic. Both writers, then, reflected intensely in both prose and poetry upon what the very notion of holding a dogma has meant and might mean; and in each case, we fĳind evidence of considerable artistic reinvention and appropriation of ancient Christian dogmas to a new crisis. For these modernists, such reflection became a creative vehicle for confronting the pressing problem of authority anew, and never simply a retreat from complexity into pre-defĳined, unchal- lenging formulas. 258 Tonning

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Aligheri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Aligheri: Inferno. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. Asher, Kenneth. T.S. Eliot and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Auden, W.H. Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. ——. Prose: Volume II: 1939–1948. Edited by Edward Mendelson. Princeton, nj: Princeton, University Press, 2002. ——. Prose: Volume III: 1949–1955. Edited by Edward Mendelson. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2008. Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. London: Doubleday, 1967. Bush, Ronald. “‘An Easy Commerce of the Old and New?’: Recent Eliot Scholarship,” Modernism/Modernity 17, no. 3 (September 2010): 677–681. Eliot, T.S. “The Literature of Fascism,” Criterion 8 (December 1928): 280–290. ——. “Poetry and Propaganda,” The Bookman LXX (February 1930): 595–602. ——. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber and Faber, 1933. ——. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1973. ——. Selected Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. ——. Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Defĳinition of Culture. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, 1976. ——. Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. ——. The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 2: 1923–1925. Edited by Valerie Eliot and John Hafffenden. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. ——. The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 3: 1926–1927. Edited by Valerie Eliot and John Hafffenden. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. ——. The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 4: 1928–1929. Edited by Valerie Eliot and John Hafffenden. London: Faber and Faber, 2013. Gentile, Emilio. “The Sacralisation of Politics: Defĳinitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism.” Translated by Robert Mallett, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 18–55. Grifffĳin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Jain, Manju. T.S. Eliot and American Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kirsch, Arthur. Auden and Christianity. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005. Old Dogmas for a New Crisis 259

McDiarmid, Lucy. Auden’s Apologies for Poetry. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990. Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. ——. Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. North, Michael. The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Tonning, Erik. Modernism and Christianity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Williams, Charles. The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church. London: The Religious Book Club, 1939. chapter 14 Apocalypse Deferred W.H. Auden’s Anti-Totalitarian Vision

Hedda Lingaas Fossum1

As Edward Mendelson notes in Later Auden, Auden’s “studiedly casual” use of the phrase “original sin” in a 1939 review “marked a watershed in his prose.”2 It also came to form the crux of his political ideas. In this article I will investigate the function of Original Sin in Auden’s analysis of liberalism and fascism during the early 1940s, and the role it played in his vision of what it would ultimately take to resist totalitarianism. As Auden saw it, the failure of liberalism to prevent the rise of Hitler was due, in the last instance, to its fundamentally misconceived idea of human nature as inherently virtuous. Fascism, in his view, embodied a disillusioned reaction to the underlying premises of liberalism, but also against the experience of modern temporality. Drawing on Roger Grifffĳin’s theory of the palingenetic nature of fascism, I will present Auden’s alternative vision of society as an elaborately constructed response to, and rejection of, the time-defying and apocalyptic tendencies he saw as inherent in totalitarianism. The article examines Auden’s prose writing from the 1940s, as well as excerpts from the long poems New Year Letter (1941) and For the Time Being (1944). Justin Replogle has argued that “all of Auden’s major forties works are variations on the view of human existence introduced in New Year Letter.”3 For the Time Being has been described as “the fullest and most balanced expression of Auden’s religious attitudes” with earlier religious ideas and images placed in “an ordered whole.”4 In these works Auden draws up, against the apocalyptic backdrop of an escalating world war, the poetic framework of his religious convictions.

1 My thanks to Erik Tonning for his helpful suggestions and editorial assistance in preparing this essay. 2 Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 157. 3 Justin Replogle, “Auden’s Religious Leap,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 7, no. 1 (1996): 56. 4 Monroe K. Spears, The Poetry of W.H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 206.

Outlaws and Liberals

In a 1941 review titled “Where Are We Now?” W.H. Auden wrote: “The rise of Hitler, the outlaw, to power is a phenomenon that can never be sufffĳiciently studied.”5 In Auden’s writing, Hitler had become a central fĳigure, not just as a threat to liberal civilization, but as a troubling symptom of a modern, misdirected system of metaphysics unwilling to come to terms with the source of human evil. The logic exhibited by Hitler’s ideological stances, and the reception of Hitler as a sort of secular Saviour and prophet to the German nation both seemed representative of an underlying set of attitudes that, in Auden’s view, could be traced back to Romanticism.6 Romantic idealism had provoked a disillusioned pessimistic reaction, out of which emerged the “political romanticism” he saw as characteristic of National Socialism. This merits some explanation. Romanticism derived its power, according to Auden, from its “double faith, fĳirst in the possibility of realizing Unity and Equality on earth, and secondly in the intrinsic goodness of the physical world.”7 This idealism had, in the fĳield of politics, “stimulated demagogy and the woolliest kinds of humanitarianism from which the reaction into the worship of brutality and bureaucracy is now only too obvious.”8 Elsewhere, he is even more direct: “Like Rousseau, liberal capitalism began in the belief that all individuals are equally free to will, and just as Rousseau died a Catholic, so the masses, disillusioned, are beginning to welcome the barrack life of Fascism, which at least offfers security and certainty.”9 One thing “liberal capitalism” and fascism had in common, to Auden’s mind, was the abandonment of a notion of the unconditional: “[the view] that there is nothing which is unconditionally required, nothing for which one is in some sense or another eternally damned for doing or not doing.”10 Liberalism, with its commitment to the faculty of Reason, invested itself in the human capacity to arrive at truth by one’s own effforts. It had successfully wielded the weapons

5 W.H. Auden, Collected Prose II: 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 105. 6 For an in-depth discussion of Auden’s relationship to Romanticism, see Alan Jacob, “Beyond Romanticism: Auden’s Choice of Tradition,” Religion & Literature , 21, no. 2 (1989): 61–77. 7 W.H. Auden, Collected Prose II, 446. 8 Auden, Collected Prose II, 446. 9 Auden, Collected Prose II, 10. 10 Auden, Collected Prose II, 106. 262 Fossum of “skeptical rationalism, pragmatism [and] naturalism”11 against the “old orders” of tyranny and ignorance. However, a challenge arose once its “own” intellectual and scientifĳic disciplines started bringing the objectivity of reason itself into question (as in the theories of Freud and Bergson), or overturning the values of humanism (accused by Marx of concealing class interests, and further assaulted by Nietzsche). Unless the existence of unconditional truths and values are assumed, Auden writes, all truths must be viewed as relative. In that case, liberalism has few ideological defences against alternative political systems that claim a better ability to provide material security, or against the outlaw who claims that “social stability can only be secured by coercion.”12 Confronted with a movement that explicitly denied freedom and equality for all, how could liberalism defend the superiority of ideals that could neither be proven to be absolute, nor provide the results they promised? The historical importance of Hitler, Auden concludes, is to have “pushed liberalism to its logical conclusion.”13 Among the misconceptions that liberalism in Auden’s view had inherited from Romanticism, the most important was the notion of human innate goodness, i.e. that “man’s essential nature is uncorrupted.”14 The danger in this optimistic conception of human nature derived, among other things, from its denial or misinterpretation of “opposing evidence.” This in turn prepared the ground for a pessimistic counter-reaction which under the conditions of modernity could have catastrophic results. Under “liberal capitalism,” which in Auden’s view had produced “the most impersonal, the most mechanical and the most unequal civilisation the world has ever seen,”15 any claim that the “good life” was equally available to all was patently absurd. While technological progress had created an “economy of abundance” that in theory made an “open society” possible, diffferent social classes moved towards this open stage at dif- ferent speeds.16 This inequality would, as Auden saw it, reproduce the dangerous dualism of optimism and pessimism described above. The “Ins,” or the “proper and conventional / Of whom this world approves,”17 would tend to identify the ideals of Freedom, Truth and Justice with the current state of

11 Auden, Collected Prose II, 222. 12 Auden, Collected Prose II, 106. 13 Auden, Collected Prose II, 106. 14 Auden, Collected Prose II, 136. 15 Auden, Collected Prose II, 6. 16 Auden, Collected Prose II, 68. 17 From For The Time Being: W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 367. Apocalypse Deferred 263 afffairs. The “Outs,” perceiving this “ideological pretention,” would on the other hand be disposed towards denying or rejecting such ideals altogether,18 as when the token poor shepherds in For the Time Being sing: “feeling the great boots of the rich on our faces / We live in the hope of one day changing places.”19 The distinction between the ideal types of the “open” (modern) and “closed” (traditional)20 societies is important in Auden’s analysis of contemporary disillusionment with liberal optimism. Whereas the individual’s role in the static, traditional society had been a function of the external environment, the modern individual had to seek and recognize her own peculiar vocation, a predicament Auden refers to as “subjective requiredness.” As a consequence, the “external causal necessity of matter [had been transformed] into the internal logical necessity of moral decision.”21 In New Year Letter, Auden writes that:

[T]he machine has cried aloud And publicized among the crowd The secret that was always true But known only to the few, Compelling all to the admission Aloneness is man’s real condition.22

Open, diffferentiated, modern societies had, as Auden saw it, revealed to an unprecedentedly broad range of people a certain arbitrariness of traditional ways of life, and of traditional beliefs and values. Many of yesterday’s cognitive footholds had been eroded by the “sceptical rationalism…and naturalism” referred to above. In New Year Letter Auden refers to Darwin, for instance, as one of those “who brought an epoch to a close…brought / Man’s pride to heel at last and showed / His kinship with the worm and toad / And order as one consequence / Of the unfettered play of chance,”23 thereby exposing “Man” to a new sense of the chaos and contingency of existence. Marshall Berman later described this experience of contingency and indeterminacy as “the sense of being caught in a vortex where all facts and values are whirled, exploded,

18 Auden, Collected Prose II, 94. 19 Auden, Collected Poems, 384. 20 This distinction, as Edward Mendelson points out, Auden had borrowed from Henri Bergson, who had used it in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion in 1932: Mendelson, Later Auden, 142. 21 Auden, Collected Prose II, 92. 22 Lines 1537–42. All citations from New Year Letter are from W.H. Auden, The Double Man (New York: Random House, 1941). 23 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 738, 746–750. 264 Fossum decomposed, recombined; a basic uncertainty about what is basic, what is valuable, even what is real.”24 Modern society had, in a sense, democratized existential anxiety. Once an awareness of Auden’s “subjective requiredness” had been achieved, there could be no turning back. The individual was now aware that “his position in life is no longer a real necessity; he could be diffferent if he chose.”25 Any attempt to abolish such choice and recreate the conditions of “objective requiredness,” Auden concluded, would have to come about through artifĳicial stimulation orchestrated by the state, as when “a Pseudo-Nature of imaginary objective dangers, Jews, plutocrats, communists, foreigners, [is] consciously manufactured by the State which in the end, of course must provide real ones, the Police and fĳinally War.”26 In Auden’s analysis, the experience of modern vertigo and isolation had combined with the disillusionment with liberal politics and humanist ideals to create a twin impetus—widely shared among the modern masses—to get rid of the democracies of the 1920s and 30s. In the “political relationship of the impassioned leader and the impassioned masses” that had clearly contributed to the appeal of National Socialism, Auden saw a return “to a collective and political myth of Eros,”27 an attempt to escape or drown the insecurities of modern life through totalitarian politics: Since modern man and woman “cannot lose the sense that they are individuals[,] they can only try to drown that sense by merging themselves into an abstraction, the crowd.”28 In this context, Hitler’s appeal was practically messianic. Auden saw in Fascism a “Socialism that has lost its faith in the future.”29 Modern historians, on the other hand, have come to emphasize precisely the futural orientation of fascism; its revitalizing, palingenetic dimension. One such perspective has been offfered by the historian of fascism Roger Grifffĳin. As I will argue, the theory of the futural or millennial quality of fascism may in fact shed light on Auden’s analysis, not least on the alternative vision of society he eventually developed. According to Grifffĳin, Hitler can be understood as a kind of modern propheta, a term originally used to describe 15th century

24 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London & New York: Verso 2010), 121. 25 Auden, Collected Prose II, 93. 26 Auden, Collected Prose II, 178. 27 Auden, Collected Prose II, 138, 140. 28 Auden, Collected Prose III: 1949–1955, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 294. 29 Auden, The Double Man, 114. Apocalypse Deferred 265 radical, charismatic fĳigures on the fringes of crisis-ridden societies, who together with their followers were intent on turning instances of particular upheaval “into the apocalyptic battle, the fĳinal purifĳication of the world.”30 Nazism, defĳined by Anthony Stevens as a “new religion born out of social disintegration and the compensatory emergence of a charismatic leader,” presented itself as a radical break with the past, embodying a “revolutionary vision of history’s total regeneration.”31 Grifffĳin fĳinds considerable evidence for the signifĳicance of the regenerative and revitalizing aspects of National Socialism in his work.32 The unique blend of ideas represented by the nsdap was, he argues, “harnessed to the vision of a national palingenesis within a new order… [and] led by a man onto whom widespread popular longings for redemption and a new sacred canopy [replacing the pre-modern Christian horizon] could be projected, Adolf Hitler…”33

[National Socialism] functions as a vehicle for secular transcendence, for the re-embedding of society, for national regeneration, and for […] cultural and ethnic cleansing […] It was the projection onto Hitler of this temporalized utopia of a purifĳied society created within historical time that lay at the heart of the Hitler cult, and allowed him to embody the propheta leading his new community through its collective rite of passage into the new world beyond decadence and decay.34

As an antidote to modern despair and decadence, that is, Hitler promoted cleansing and national rebirth. This rebirth was to be achieved through an acceleration of social crisis into a cathartic “holy war” bringing the advent of the “new [order] of peace, harmony and justice.”35 In the Notes to New Year Letter, Auden calls Fascism’s slogan “Now or Never. In demanding a dictator it is really demanding the advent of the Good Life on earth through a supernatural miracle.”36 The “projection of a temporalized utopia” on to the fĳigure of

30 Roger Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 101. 31 Quoted in Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism, 274. 32 On the other temporal pole of Nazi ideology, the idealization of the racial and cultural past, see Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism, 141. He argues that this mythical past served to provide the values and ideals to shape precisely a new and splendid futural version of this “Edenic” state in the Third Reich. 33 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 275. 34 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 276. 35 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 101. 36 Auden, The Double Man, 114. 266 Fossum

Hitler could be seen as an attempt to evoke or activate such a “supernatural miracle.” One way to understand National Socialism, then, is as a revolutionary movement aiming to bring about the total regeneration of society by provoking a secular apocalypse. To elucidate this project Grifffĳin, drawing on the work of Frank Kermode, employs the notion of Cronus—“monstrous human time”— and the contrasting belief in Aevum—sacred, transcendental time.37 The fascist project of bringing about a secular Utopia through holy war can be seen as rooted in a fundamental human drive to “escape” secular (mortal, “monstrous”) time, not unlike Auden’s theory of despairing moderns trying to “lose themselves” in fascism. Grifffĳin’s interpretation of the millenarian promise of National Socialism in terms of human vs. sacred time—its “time-defying” dynamic or its will to “embody a new transcendent temporality”38—may serve to clarify and illuminate Auden’s envisioned alternative. To Auden, humans were fundamentally unable to achieve such transcendence by their own effforts. This view, as we shall see, was rooted in the conception of the inherently sinful nature of human beings.

Self-Love and Sin

The power by which, without blinding himself to his anxiety, [man] is nevertheless still able to choose, is religious faith.39

As has been discussed in depth by for example Replogle (1966) and Mendelson (1999), Auden’s writing in the early 40s is informed by the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. As Auden explained in a 1944 review, Kierkegaard approached the study of human nature and existence from the individual’s immediate experience as a subject, and as such, the “basic human problem is man’s anxiety in time.” A human being is defĳined as “a being who becomes[;] a conscious being who at every moment must choose of his own free will out of an infĳinite number of possibilities which he foresees.”40 Having an existential stake in the outcome of one’s actions, however, can make the self-aware individual’s existence an agony of choices—comparable to that threatening experience of time that

37 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 81. Grifffĳin refers to these categories as “ideal typical construct…not pseudo-scientifĳic or philosophical” ones. 38 Grifffĳin,Modernism and Fascism, 291. 39 Auden, Collected Prose II, 214. 40 Auden, Collected Prose II, 214. Apocalypse Deferred 267

Grifffĳin labels Cronus. Infĳinite choice entails an infĳinite possibility of failure: in a fĳinite existence, the incongruence between the irrevocability of action, the uncertainty of an action’s outcome, and the ever-present availability of alternative choices manifests itself in anxiety for the reflective individual. The onrush of modernity, as discussed in the previous section, had exacerbated this condition. In the work of the contemporary theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, however, Auden found an interpretation of human nature that moved beyond its agonizing paradoxes. To Niebuhr, anxiety is an inevitable side-efffect of “the paradox of freedom and fĳiniteness in which man is involved,”41 but from his point of view the real issue is not anxiety, but the sinfulness of human attempts to escape it. The problem of anxiety is thereby subordinated to the problem of sin.42 Niebuhr sees human evil as a consequence of man’s refusal “to acknowledge his dependence, to accept his fĳiniteness and to admit his insecurity, an unwillingness which involves him in the vicious circle of accentuat- ing the insecurity from which he seeks to escape.”43 The human ability to transcend one’s situation and regard it from a distance, while allowing him to envision other and more virtuous ways of life, also tempts man to megaloma- nia and persuades him “to regard himself as the god around and about whom the universe centres.”44 In practice, Niebuhr concludes, humans “always mix the fĳinite with the eternal and claim for themselves, their nation, their culture, or their class the center of existence. This is the root of all imperialism in man.”45 Crucially, this means that human evil is inextricably intertwined with the capacity for good. “The Christian view of evil is so serious…because it places evil at the very centre of the human personality: In the will.”46 In Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being, humans’ misuse of their will and their freedom is explicitly stated as the cause of the Fall of Adam and Eve. Describing the Fall during the Annunciation to Mary, the angel Gabriel delivers the following lines: “Eve, in love with her own will, / Denied the will of Love and fell…Adam, being free to choose, / chose to imagine he was free / To choose his own necessity.”47 The play on the words “will,” “love,” “choose,” and “free” here amounts to a Niebuhrian argument about mistaking the fĳinite for

41 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man. A Christian Interpretation. Volume I. Human Nature. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons [sic], 1964), 186. 42 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 178. 43 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 150. 44 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 124. 45 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 84. 46 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 16. 47 Auden, Collected Poems, 359–360. 268 Fossum the eternal and claiming one’s right to literal self-determination. The law of human nature, Niebuhr states, is “love.” When man tries to make himself the centre and source of life, this law is violated. “His sin is the wrong use of his freedom and its consequent destruction.”48 Spiritual imperialism and escapism are, in other words, considered the two vectors of human sinfulness in Niebuhr’s schema. Elsewhere he uses the expressions pride and sensuality: “Man falls into pride, when he seeks to raise his contingent existence to uncon- ditioned signifĳicance; he falls into sensuality, when he seeks to escape from his unlimited possibilities of freedom, from the perils and responsibilities of self- determination, by immersing himself into a ‘mutable good’, by losing himself in some natural vitality.”49 In New Year Letter, Auden portrays the modern, anxious subject as oscillat- ing between these two varieties of sinfulness. The fĳirst is embodied in the Ego, who “looks upon her liberty / Not as a gift from life with which / To serve enlighten and enrich,” but rather “as the right to lead alone / An attic-life all on her own, / Unhindered, unrebuked, unwatched, / Self-known, self-praising, self-attached.”50 Upon discovering the indeterminacy of this position—the infĳinity of choices and the impossibility of ascertaining the right ones—the subject plunges into the abyss of despair. Trying to destroy the self-consciousness that has brought on its miserable vertigo, the individual seeks escape in a suicidal nihilism, worshipping “the Not, the Never and the Night” and “The formless Mass without a Me.”51 Denying any possibility of a meaningful life in Time, the autonomy-seeking Ego falls back on its own bare power to end itself: the individual tries to be the hero whose “intellectual life [is] fulfĳilled / In knowing that his doom is willed.”52 Willing one’s doom becomes the fĳinal attempt at self-determination. These modes of flight from Cronus could, in “modern times,” only be combined “in a collective form, in warfare, where every individual is at one and the same time the masochistic murderee and the sadistic murderer, or in the political relationship of the impassioned leader and the impassioned masses.”53 The extraordinary temptation and danger of twentieth-century totalitarianism lay, according to Auden, in its ability to offfer both spiritual “triumph” and escapism. The fĳirst mechanism was demonstrated by the group-based

48 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 16. 49 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (Vol. I), 186. 50 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 1401–1403, 1408–1411. 51 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 1429–1430. 52 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 1436–1437. 53 Auden, Collected Prose, 138. Apocalypse Deferred 269 superiority constructed by totalitarian ideology. The spectacle of escape, on the other hand, consisted of “an ecstatic and morbid abdication of the free- willing and individual before the collective and the daemonic. We have become obscene night worshippers who, having discovered that we cannot live exactly as we will, deny the possibility of willing anything and are content masochisti- cally to be lived.”54 Auden’s linking of the dynamics of escape from sin to twentieth-century totalitarianism is entirely in tune with Niebuhr’s description of modern fascist nations as having achieved “a daemonic form of national self-assertion.”55 Collective egotism, in Niebuhr’s phrasing, offfered the individual “an opportunity to lose himself in a larger whole; but it also offfers him possibilities of self-aggrandizement beside which mere individual pretensions are implausible and incredible.”56 By contrast, the power of the Christian interpretation of existence, in order to withstand totalitarian ideologies, would need to be anchored in its acknowledgment of Original Sin.57 Both Auden and Niebuhr saw the Christian faith as unique in allowing humans to acknowledge both the paradox of their transcendence-desiring fĳinitude, and the real “bias towards evil” with which that condition is intertwined. Furthermore, it offfered human beings the possibility of dealing with rather than try to escape their condition, through the ability to repent and the related possibility of divine redemption. The odd moment when a glimpse of Paradise—the potential for harmony and Agape—reveals itself, catching us offf guard with an “accidental happiness,” plays an important role in New Year Letter. Auden recalls one such moment of private “vision” taking place in a “wedding feast” hosted by the Letter’s recipient, Elizabeth Mayer: “Warm in your house, Elizabeth, / A week ago at the same hour / I felt the unexpected power / That drove our ragged egos in / From the dead-ends of greed and sin.”58 Lucy McDiarmid has called weddings the “paradigmatic ritual[s]” in Auden’s poetry, rituals that symbolize the potential for the “[reconciliation of] a divided, unhappy community.”59 The kind of private communal activities described by Auden in the Letter

54 Auden, Collected Prose, 38. 55 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 219. 56 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 212. 57 Niebuhr’s defĳinition: “Original sin is not an inherited corruption, but it is an inevitable fact of human existence, the inevitability of which is given by the nature of man’s spirituality.” Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1935), 90. 58 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 843–846. 59 Lucy McDiarmid, Auden’s Apologies for Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 47. 270 Fossum form a counter-plot60 to the agonized frenzy brought on by solipsistic megalo- mania: In this scene, McDiarmid writes, “the centripetal power of love…[coun- teracts] the centrifugal selfĳish forces.”61 Without these instances of private happiness, Auden wrote in The Prolifĳic and the Devourer, we could not have faith.62 They remind us that we can, at least, serve other ends than the “ornate / Grandezza of the Sovereign State,” by learning to love “the polis of our friends.”63 As Edward Mendelson has shown, Auden’s pre-existing interest in the subject of the Absolute, once he immersed himself into the writing of Kierkegaard and modern theologians such as Niebuhr, lead him towards a distinctly exis- tentialist Christianity. Measured against an absolute value or unconditional standard, no subjective life could be adequate, or even claim full access to that value. Thus, as Mendelson writes, “the existential drama of absolute choices occurred in a human world with no comfort and no guidance, in a universe that accepted neither compromise nor half measures.”64 The bleakness of this scenario might seem purgatorial, and in New Year Letter time “the life in which we live / At least three quarters of our time” is indeed described as the “purgatorial hill we climb.”65 Any skyline we attain, Auden writes, “Reveals a higher ridge again.”66 However, as is suggested a few lines further down, this vertigi- nous mountaineering seems to be “the only game / At which we show a natural skill.”67 Our task, then, is to “Ascend the penitential way / That forces our wills to be free,” even while aware that “every step we make / Will certainly be a mistake.”68 Penitence is one way of responding to one’s self-aware existence in the “monstrous” Now that acknowledges an Absolute horizon while accepting that it is beyond human reach. “In Time we sin,” Auden says, “But Time is sin and can forgive.”69

60 Claude J. Summers has used this term in an analysis of “The Shield of Achilles,” referring to the “network of subtle echoes and analogies” which Auden creates in the poem to qualify “[its] pessimistic surface plot.” Claude J. Summers, “‘Or One Could Weep because Another Wept’: The Counterplot of Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 83:2 (1984), 215. 61 McDiarmid, Auden’s Apologies for Poetry, 83. 62 Auden, Collected Prose II, 428. 63 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 993–994, 998. 64 Mendelson, Later Auden, 133. 65 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 927–928, 924–925. 66 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 929–931. 67 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 935–936. 68 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 968–969, 963–964. 69 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 925–926. Apocalypse Deferred 271

Communal Counter-Vision

While the Nazi success in Germany undermined Auden’s faith in the self- evident values of liberal humanism, the existentialism of Kierkegaard… helped shape the concept of Agape into a political credo.70

In New Year Letter, modest visions of interpersonal community form an important contrast to the hellish struggle to escape rather than bear our existential burdens. Such private consolations would become the blueprint for Auden’s formulations of a “counter-vision” to totalitarianism on the social and political scale; a democracy grounded in a common recognition of our “equality in wretchedness” and the necessity of Agape. For Auden, the “pact of totalitarianism” represented a “manifest contract of souls in reflective self-love.”71 In New Year Letter, Hitler emerges, startlingly, as an inverted theologian:

We face our self-created choice As out of Europe comes a Voice A theologian who denies What more than twenty centuries Of Europe have assumed to be The basis of civility, Our evil Daimon to express In all its ugly nakedness What none before dared say aloud, The metaphysics of the Crowd.72

The “evil Daimon” answered the moan of apathy and despair emanating from a “corrupt Christendom,” whose members Auden drily imagined as saying to themselves: “Faith is too difffĳicult; nothing is despair, we must have no God but Caesar.”73 In Auden’s wartime Christmas oratorio, Caesar’s Empire is portrayed as a decaying liberal state that has lost faith in itself. Caesar is praised for having conquered the Seven Kingdoms of rational virtue—metaphysics, science,

70 Summers, “‘Or One Could Weep because Another Wept’,” 216. 71 Auden, Collected Prose II, 172. 72 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 1016–1025. Auden later revised the fĳirst two lines of this excerpt to: “…out of Europe comes a Voice / Compelling all to make their choice.” (Auden, Collected Poems, 225.). 73 Auden, Collected Prose II, 172. 272 Fossum mathematics, economics, technology, medicine and psychology.74 As the Chorus puts it: “Great is Caesar: God must be with Him.”75 The Narrator excitedly explains that this is “History…in the making…/ The longest aqueduct in the world is already / Under construction; the Committees on Fen-Drainage / And Soil-Conservation will issue very shortly / Their Joint Report…and the recent restrictions / Upon aliens and free-thinking Jews are beginning / To have a salutary efffect upon public morale.”76 But despite the effforts of the public relations team, no one is entirely convinced—”at least not all of the time.” In fact, the atmosphere haunting the Imperial Capital seems to be one of apathy and alienation. The opening chorus is permeated by forebodings of evil; anxiety is rising to the surface from under the layers of reassurance and propaganda, and the citizens of the would-be Liberal State77 fĳind themselves ill-prepared for the advent of a seemingly ominous moment in time: “Darkness and snow descend. / The clock on the mantelpiece / Has nothing to recommend, /…/ The eyes huddle like cattle, doubt / Seeps into the pores…/ The prophet’s lantern is out / And gone the boundary stone…// [As] The evil and armed draw near.”78 Some subconscious Horror is scratching at the door, and the Narrator tries to fĳind a plausible cause for “why we despair,” citing a sense of unreality and the sudden discovery that the “person we know all about / Still bearing our name and loving himself as before” has become a fĳiction, whilst “our true existence / Is decided by no one and has no importance to love.”79 “This,” he concludes, “is the wrath of God.” The Narrator seems to echo Niebuhr when he admits that “We know very well we are not unlucky but evil.” The influence of Niebuhr’s argument becomes even clearer in the following couple of lines, which state: “that the dream of a Perfect State or No State at all, / To which we fly for refuge, is a part of our punishment.”80 Here, then, is an explicit acknowledgment of that underlying sense of sin that Auden saw as a crucial part of the explanation for the modern appeal of totalitarian movements. Man is “tempted by guilt into a despair

74 As Miriam Starkman has pointed out, this list of “virtues” can be read as a parody of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. Miriam Starkman, “The ‘Grace of the Absurd’; Form and Concept in W.H. Auden’s ‘For the Time Being’,” The Harvard Theological Review, 67, no.3 (1974): 281. 75 Auden, Collected Poems, 371. 76 Auden, Collected Poems, 373. 77 Herod the Great appears in For the Time Being as a self-identifying liberal. His monologue is titled “The Massacre of the Innocents”: “Civilisation must be saved, even if it means sending for the military…” Auden, Collected Poems, 394. 78 Auden, Collected Poems, 350. 79 Auden, Collected Poems, 352. 80 Auden, Collected Poems, 374. Apocalypse Deferred 273 which tells him that his isolation and abandonment is irrevocable,” and tries to flee from that despair into the open arms of the totalitarian family. In a review of Niebuhr’s Christianity and Power Politics, Auden had written: “man cannot live without a sense of the Unconditional: if he does not consciously walk in fear of the Lord, then his unconscious sees to it that he has something else, airplanes or secret police, to walk in fear of.”81 The failure of liberalism to offfer a desirable alternative to totalitarian movements lay for Auden, as critic Bruce Cicero explains, in its refusal “to acknowledge the impossibility of successful social democracy without an unequivocal belief in man’s bias towards evil.”82 In the 1941 essay “Criticism in a Mass Society,” Auden makes explicit his belief that one’s attitude towards the concept of Original Sin is decisive for one’s political choices. Either, he says, you presuppose that “Man is a fallen creature with a natural bias to do evil,” or you presuppose that “Men are good by nature and made bad by society.”83 Fascist ideology, he asserts, is based on the combination of a lack of faith in absolute values and a hierarchical system of human value. Assuming that absolute values do not exist, and that some individuals, nations or races are better than others, the elite must “coerce the masses into accepting as absolute what in fact are myths” in order to achieve social and cultural unity; the system of government must be authoritarian and “the people must be protected from the consequences of their own mistakes by those who cannot err.”84 The presupposition for social democracy, on the other hand, is that absolute values do exist, though our knowledge of them is always imperfect: “Men are equal not in their capacities and virtues but in their natural bias towards evil. No individual or class, therefore, however superior in intellect or character to the rest, can claim an absolute right to impose its view of the good upon them.”85 Thus, democracy itself begins, in Auden’s framework, with an act of faith, namely that absolute values exist even though we must never claim to fully know or possess them. The sense of totalitarianism substituting a lost faith in an unconditional Divine applies not only to its institutions of oppression (the secret police as a substitute for Divine Law), but extends, in Auden’s view, to the very core of the totalitarian project. Let us recall his description of Fascism in the Note to New Year Letter: “[Its] slogan is Now or Never. In demanding a dictator it is really

81 Auden, Collected Prose II, 109. 82 Bruce Cicero, “Original Sin in the Later Auden,” Modern Age 44, no. 4 (2002): 344. Cicero’s article includes a more detailed discussion of “Criticism in a Mass Society.” 83 Auden, Collected Prose II, 94. 84 Auden, Collected Prose II, 97. 85 Auden, Collected Prose II, 98. 274 Fossum demanding the advent of the Good Life on earth through a supernatural miracle.”86 In Roger Grifffĳin’s defĳinition, National Socialism represented a longing for “secular transcendence,” a “temporalized utopia of purifĳied society created within historical time,” to be achieved through what could be thought of as a secular apocalypse. Auden, seeing in this apocalyptic logic the lie of individual sublimation to a mythical collective, sought to elaborate a metaphysical alternative capable of providing a sense of meaningful co-existence within secular time. Auden’s idea of the Time Being entails an abandonment of the hope for a human-made Parousia (or Apocalypse), and indeed the very idea that human beings are capable of achieving their own transcendence. The eschatological horizon, instead of looming over the present, is shifted into the beyond, to be realized only with the coming of a redeemer. In no way did such postpone- ment of the end times entail, as John Fuller has put it, any relaxation of “the continual demands of the Eternal upon an Individual living in Time.”87 However, this is precisely what should enable a common recognition of one another as fellow sinners, in need of mutual forgiveness. Auden thus calls on us to praise what Susannah Gottlieb has called “essential indeterminacy,” in other words, to “praise the condition of helplessness, for this condition alone makes possible fellowship…”88 This sentiment is summed up in the following prayer by the Narrator in For the Time Being:

Let us therefore be contrite without anxiety, For Powers and Times are not gods but mortal gifts from God; Let us acknowledge our defeats but without despair, For all societies and epochs are transient details, Transmitting an everlasting opportunity That the Kingdom of Heaven may come, not in our present And not in our future, but in the Fullness of Time. Let us pray.89

Thus Auden, for whom “democracy” means “the form of society through which…love for one’s neighbor can express itself most freely,”90 concludes in New Year Letter that

86 Auden, The Double Man, 114. 87 John Fuller, W.H. Auden: A Commentary (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 345. 88 Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 24. 89 Auden, Collected Poems, 374. 90 Auden, Collected Prose II, 230. Apocalypse Deferred 275

[T]rue democracy begins With free confession of our sins. In this alone are all the same, All are so weak that none dare claim ‘I have the right to govern,’ or Behold in me the Moral Law’91

Through the Christian Incarnation, as Auden has the Chorus in For the Time Being proclaiming, “a city based / On love and consent / [is] suggested to men.”92 Faith, in this sense, entails the opportunity to invest one’s existential energies in building this just city in the here and now. The choice to love, say the Wise Men in For the Time Being, is “open till we die.”93

Bibliography

Auden, W.H. The Double Man. New York: Random House, 1941. ——. Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. ——. Prose: Volume II: 1939–1948. Edited by Edward Mendelson. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2002. ——. Prose: Volume III: 1949–1955. Edited by Edward Mendelson. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2008. Berman, Marshall. All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London and New York: Verso, 2010. Cicero, Bruce. “Original Sin in the Later Auden,” Modern Age 44:4 (2002): 341–349. Fuller, John. W.H. Auden: A Commentary. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Gottlieb, Susannah Young-Ah. Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Grifffĳin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Jacobs, Alan. “Beyond Romanticism: Auden’s Choice of Tradition,” Religion and Literature 21:2 (1989): 61–77. McDiarmid, Lucy. Auden’s Apologies for Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Mendelson, Edward. Later Auden. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.

91 Auden, The Double Man, ll. 1633–1638. 92 Auden, Collected Poems, 378. 93 Auden, Collected Poems, 384. 276 Fossum

Niebuhr, Reinhold. An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1935. ——. The Nature and Destiny of Man. A Christian Interpretation. Volume I. Human Nature. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons [sic], 1964. Replogle, Justin. “Auden’s Religious Leap,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 7:1 (1966): 47–75. Spears, Monroe K. The Poetry of W.H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Starkman, Miriam. “The ‘Grace of the Absurd’: Form and Concept in W.H. Auden’s ‘For the Time Being’,” The Harvard Theological Review, 67/3 (1974): 275–288. Summers, Claude J. “‘Or One Could Weep because Another Wept’: The Counterplot of Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 83:2 (1984): 214–232. PART 3

Still Waiting for the End? Post-World War II Readings of Apocalypse

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chapter 15 Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation; or, “It is 1956 Fascism”

Matthew Feldman1

§1

In late November 2002, the National Archives in Kew, London released several MI-5 surveillance fĳiles, mostly covering leading British fascists interned under Defence Regulation 18b. Within this series are two surprising fĳiles from these “Right Wing Extremists” papers. Surprising, that is, not because the subject was considered a leading supplier of information to British fascism from abroad in autumn 1940; but rather, because he was not British, but American, and had not lived in the United Kingdom since 1920. In fact, just after the armistice concluding the Great War, the initial pages of this MI-5 fĳile reported on 12 December 1918 that “there is no ground to regard the above with suspicion, and his sentiments are pro-ally.”2 Yet on V-E day, 8 May 1945, this long-term Italian resident could hardly be considered “pro-Ally,” as this remarkable, disarming interrogation statement in Britain’s War Offfĳice fĳiles makes clear:

I am not anti-Semitic, and I distinguish between the Jewish usurer and the Jew who does an honest day’s work for a living.

Hitler and Mussolini were simple men from the country. I think that Hitler was a Saint, and wanted nothing for himself. I think that he was fooled into anti-Semitism and it ruined him. That was his mistake. When you see the “mess” that Italy gets into by “bumping offf” Mussolini, you will see why someone could believe in some of his effforts.3

1 I am particularly grateful to Dr. Marius Turda and the History Faculty’s Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford for a Senior Research Fellowship in 2012/2013; and for a research sabbatical granted by Dr. Erik Tonning’s “Modernism and Christianity” project at the University of Bergen, Norway, both of which directly facilitated the completion of this text. 2 See www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/nov2002.pdf for further details on these recently-released MI-5 fĳiles, tna kv2 series; KV/875 and KV/876, cited KV/875, 31a and 2a; all websites last accessed 12 December 2012. 3 Ezra Pound, War Offfĳice File 204/12602, 8th of May 1945, 13a and 13b. Pound’s statements here are very similar to a remarkable interview he made earlier that day; partially reprinted in

Thereafter, this radical right ideologue—clearly identifĳied as such by Britain’s secret services by the middle 1930s—became the chief protagonist in one of the century’s fĳirst “celebrity trials.” He ultimately avoided the noose through a deal; one whereby he pled insanity and was institutionalised in the u.s. for the next dozen years. That ideologue, of course, is given away in this chapter’s title: the leading modernist poet and patriarch Ezra Pound, pioneer of the avant-garde drive to, as he phrased it, “make it new.” As has been covered elsewhere by leading Pound scholars like Tim Redman, Miranda Hickman, and Leon Surette, Pound had embraced the revolutionary right in the 1930s, turning to Mussolini’s Italy and other permutations of fascist ideology as a “political religion” capable of regenerating a perceivably decadent civilisation through the trifecta of will, belief and charismatic leadership; or in Mussolini’s well-known slogan: “Believe, Obey, Fight.”4 As there is little space to traverse the well-charted waters of “political religion” theory here, a few defĳinitional approaches must sufffĳice. At the forefront of understanding this form of “secular faith” is Emilio Gentile, who detects this secular embrace of the sacred when

a political movement confers a sacred status on an earthly entity (the nation, the country, the state, humanity, society, race, proletariat, history, liberty, or revolution) and renders it an absolute principle of collective existence, considers it the main source of values for individual and mass

Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 407. These statements are substantially diffferent in tone and content from a longer, more formal statement, also contained in 204/12602 (13c–13h), versions of which are reproduced in: Noel Stock, “Ezra Pound in Melbourne,” Helix 13/14 (1983), 129–132; Richard Sieburth, “Ezra Pound: Confession,” The Paris Review 128 (1993), 194–206; and most recently, Omar S. Pound, Robert E. Spoo and Dorothy Pound, eds., Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 59–68. 4 For key works on Pound and fascism, see: Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999); “Pound and Fascism,” in Miranda Hickman (ed.), One Must not Go Altogether with the Tide: The letters of Ezra Pound and Stanley Nott (London: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2011), 278–299; and on the post-1945 period see, for example, “Ezra Pound: Anti-Semitism, Segregationism and the ‘Arsenal of Live Thought”’, in Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 143–191. On Mussolini’s well-known slogan, see Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, 1922–1945 (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); see also Figure 15.1, c. 1940, tna inf 2/1, Part 3, available online at: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/heroes villains/g3/cs1/g3cs1s2.htm. Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation 281

Figure 15.1 Mussolini’s “Believe, Obey, Fight”

behaviour, and exalts it as the supreme ethical precept of public life. It thus becomes an object for veneration and dedication, even to the point of self-sacrifĳice.5

5 Emilio Gentile, “The Sacralisation of Politics: Defĳinitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,” in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1.1 (2000), 18–19; see also Gentile, “Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics— A Critical Survey,” in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6.1 (2005); and more 282 Feldman

Correspondingly, in 1928—fĳive years before his only meeting with Mussolini and immediate “conversion” to the pnf’s operant “political religion”—Pound expressed his longing for no less than a “new civilisation” in his short-lived “little magazine” The Exile.6 That same year, coincidentally, one of the fĳirst Anglophone studies of Mussolini’s “New Italy” appeared, arguing that Italian Fascism represented a “religious revival”: “The cult of the New Rome is admittedly a ‘myth’ in the Sorelian sense, whose value lies not in its literal truth, but in its power to command obedience, devotion and sacrifĳice.” “Thus fascism represents a religious revival,” continued the American academic, Herbert Schneider, based upon spiritual devotion to the nation and “in conceiving politics as creative action and will.”7 And this view from a neutral observer! Characteristically, Mussolini was more direct and immodest on the Fascist revolution in his English autobiography, also published that year: “It was necessary to lay the foundation of a new civilisation.” This was no mere talk, but part of a socio-political attempt to overcome perceived national decadence via an “anthropological revolution”—one literally bent on creating “new men” of action and faith, warrior-priests with the will to turn myth into reality and to build a secular utopia. This “palingenetic” impulse, as Roger Grifffĳin has noted, demarcates Italian Fascism as “a modernist political movement for the age of the masses.” Still more concisely, Pound’s most recent biographer, Alec Marsh, has asserted: “Fascism is, in fact, a modernist politics.”8 In the fĳive years prior to commencing his wartime propaganda for Radio Rome, Pound’s chief journalistic outlet was provided by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and National Socialists (hereafter buf), which aired Pound’s ideas in no fewer than 39 texts written between 1936 and 1940; that is, just as western Europe was drifting to war against the Axis, with Pound becoming an increasingly inflexible ideologue for fascist ideology. Put another way, one of modernism’s leading fĳigures shared Oswald Mosley and the buf’s political faith in fascist ideology and contributed propaganda advice, in

expansively, Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). For the most defĳinitive Anglophone works on political religion, see Hans Maier (ed.), Totalitarianism and Political Religions: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, 3 vols., trans. Jodi Bruhn (London: Routledge, 2004–2007). 6 Ezra Pound, “The Exile III,” in Exile 3 (1928), reprinted in Pound, Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilisation, ed. Noel Stock (H. Regnery: Chicago, 1960), 222. 7 Herbert Schneider, Making the Fascist State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), 228–229, 241. 8 Mussolini’s Autobiography, cited in Roger Grifffĳin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 220, italics in original; and Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 105–106. Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation 283 addition to corresponding regularly; recommending potential authors; and subscribing to movement publications—in addition to acting as one of the leading contributors for both the weekly middlebrow journal Action (29 articles) and the more highbrow journal the British Union Quarterly (8 articles in 13 issues; a pamphlet and article in the buf’s short lived The Fascist Quarterly rounded out this publicism). Moreover, Pound went so far as to offfer his well- known Canto 45, “With Usura,” to Oswald Mosley for free inclusion in the buf press, surely bearing out Eric Bulson’s contention that “it may be customary to distinguish between the two Pounds, one a journalist, the other a poet, he never did so himself. For Pound, there was a time and a place in his life for both.” Such “a time and a place,” in turn, was nowhere more in evidence than in his activism for fascism in Britain. While the inclusion of one of Pound’s epic poetic sequences from The Cantos never came to pass in 1939, twenty years later things would be very diffferent, and Mosley would include Canto 101 in the fĳinal issue of his postwar review, The European, as described presently.9 Quite apart from his engagement with other far-right movements, marginal- izing Pound’s relationship with the buf in the second half of the 1930s, as his biographers have been wont to do, is far too hasty. Beyond close convergences on key policy issues, by contrast, Pound’s propaganda for the buf consistently mirrored the trajectory of interwar fascist ideology generally, as well as British permutations of fascism in particular. The latter, in fact, Pound dubbed the “local version” of totalitarianism in a 1939 buf article, while an earlier text for Action advocated no less than a “United States of Europe” under fascist hegemony.10 The latter point, as will become clear, was to be fervently taken up by “second wave” British fascism following the socio-political caesura of 1945. Yet there can be little doubt that, in these and other respects, Pound was far closer to interwar fascist theory and practice than has been previously maintained. In fact, as he wrote to Raven Thomson in 1939, “‘Action’ seems to be full of people saying what I would say, and having learned the main points I have been preaching (I mean me along with the others).”11 In this highly charged atmosphere—of apparently invariable drift toward another “total war” in Europe—the buf published its weekly “House Journal,” Action, extending to

9 Eric Bulson, “Journalism,” Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 94. For further discussion of Pound’s activism for the buf, see my “Make it Crude: Ezra Pound’s Antisemitic Propaganda for the pnf and buf,” in Fascism and the Jews: Britain and Italy, eds. Daniel Tilles and Salvatore Garau (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011). 10 Pound, “The Criterion Passes,” British Union Quarterly 3.2 (1939), 67; and Pound, “Britain, who are your Allies?” Action, 9th of April 1938. 11 Pound to Alexander Raven Thomson, intercepted letter of 5 July 1939, KV2/876 20a. 284 Feldman twenty pages and roughly 14,000 sales.12 And Pound was front and centre in many of the issues to which he contributed; yet just as importantly, he was both highly informed and reasonably influential in the dissemination of the buf’s fascist propaganda during the later 1930s. If the relationship between Pound and British fascism was both close and mutually benefĳicial before the war, that changed markedly during wwii with the start of his paid radio broadcasts for Fascist Italy, which continued until 1945 with some of the coarsest anti-Semitism yet heard in English. This is not the place to retrace the well-known “Pound Case”; but sufffĳice it to say that, fĳit- tingly for what was to ensue, no less a fĳigure than President Roosevelt pressed for the initiation of treason proceedings.13 After Pound’s arrest and detention, this led to the drafting of his award-winning poetic sequence, The Pisan Cantos, contemporaneous with a legal declaration of insanity and a transfer, in early 1946, to St Elizabeths asylum—where he would spend the next dozen years before the us government dismissed its indictment and released him into his wife’s guardianship. Throughout this period, and indeed beyond—as suggested by his high level contacts with Italian neo-Fascists like Ugo Dadone, Valerio Borghese and Amalia Bacelli, after his return to Italy in the late 1950s— Pound remained a committed “believer” in fascist ideology, as the excerpt from a February 1951 letter to fellow poet Louis Dudek spells out:

AS the fascists were partito unico, that is the WHOLE of the governing power in Italy, there were DIFFERENCES of view among them. Fascist militarists (very few) Cavourian fascists (i.e. liberals), royalists, republi- cans, left wingers, i.e. extreme socialists, and swine, namely capitalist cor- rupters, but also capitalist conservatives.

when I say “militarist” even that needs qualifĳication, there were men who reacted to communist violence, or to seeing their old fathers bashed on the head by roughs, or returned troops spat on (yes, physical sputum) by idem.

In working with the Pound archive, I have yet to come across any real critique of fascism by Pound during his years of institutionalisation. And that is “fascist” with a “Small F,” of course—referring to the generic ideology—not just

12 G.C. Webber, “Patterns of Membership and Support for the British Union of Fascists,” Journal of Contemporary History 19.4 (1984), 580. 13 This document is reproduced in my “The ‘Pound Case’ in Historical Perspective,” in Journal Modern Literature 35.2 (2012), 90. Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation 285

Mussolini’s pnf, as one of his earliest letters to Dudek, probably from early 1950, makes plain regarding Hitler’s 1925 autobiography:

HAS DUDEK ever read Mein Kampf? preferably in the original, or passably in Italian. (no knowledge of what it may hv/ been distorted to in frog or eng.) [….I] left it unread for years. slop journalism and the kind of smear that the british and murkn press can spread/14

Parenthetically, Pound’s encounter with Mein Kampf came in April 1942 through an Italian translation—titled Mia Battaglia by Valentino Bompiani, which ran to fully 20 editions from 1934 to 1943—and wrought important changes to his propaganda strategies thereafter. The wartime years, moreover, saw Pound write and broadcast literally thousands of wartime radio items—a long neglected issue of which the enormous dimensions are only now becoming known (for instance, he wrote radio scripts under no less than a dozen diffferent factiously-created names).15 Considering the level of venom directed at the Allies over the micro- phone, it should be obvious that Pound’s pro-Axis rhetoric does not make for comfortable post-war bedfellows—especially amongst ultra-nationalists! Two examples amongst literally scores presented in Leonard Doob’s edited collection, “Ezra Pound Speaking,” unmistakably mark out his position on Britain:

“England”, Broadcast 15th of March 1942 You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out- Jewed the Jew. […] YOU HAVE NO RACE left in your government. God knows if it can be found still scattered in England. It must be found scattered in England. The white remnants of England, the white remnant of the races of England must be FOUND and fĳind means to cohere; otherwise, you might as well lie down in your grave yards. Is there a RACE left in England? Has it ANY will left to survive? You can carry slaughter to Ireland. Will that save you? I doubt it. Nothing can save you, save a purge.

“Soberly”, Broadcast 23rd of May 1943: Usury has gnawed into England since the days of Elizabeth. First it was mortgages, mortgages on Earl’s estates; usury against the feudal nobility.

14 Pound, cited in Louis Dudek (ed.), dk: Some Letters of Ezra Pound (Montreal, ca: dc Books, 1974), 17, 56; all “Poundian” capitalization and grammar in original. 15 See my Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), Sections 5 and 6. 286 Feldman

Then there were attacks on the common land, fĳilchings of village common pasture. Then there developed a usury system, an international usury system, from Cromwell’s time, ever increasing. That system gave you your slums. It brought in that civic leprosy that has made England a byeword. It has taken the shock of this war, three years of war to jog your memory, to bring your slums up again into headlines. EVERY social reform that has gone into efffect in Germany and Italy should be defended. And the best men in England know that as well as I do.16

§2

Notwithstanding Pound’s excoriation of virtually everything British before 1945, he was one of the very few, as the remainder of this chapter will show, to advance both “fĳirst wave” fascism for Mosley’s buf—as above, during the “fascist epoch” in the 1930s and 1940s—as well as a post-war, “second wave” fascism via publicism for Mosley’s re-launched Union Movement in the 1950s, especially via its aforementioned “intellectual” house journal, The European. According to one of Mosley’s recent critics, this journal, edited by Oswald’s wife Diana, was a key vehicle for the advocacy of a Europe ruled by corporatist principles. This was undertaken via Mosley’s reheated attempt to place fascist thought on “a[n] intellectual plane,” thus revealing his “attempts at a more cerebral brand of fascism”:

Whilst The European served as a crucible for a number of young fascist ideologues, like Desmond Stewart and Alan Neame who had become sympathisers…it also attracted a group of writers fĳixated with the poetry of Ezra Pound, not to mention soliciting the occasional article from Pound himself; who had recently been released from a mental hospital in America, where he had been incarcerated following his arrest in 1945 for broadcasting for Mussolini. The European also served as a forum through which Continental fascists could appraise Mosley’s concept of “European Socialism”, which he wished to be accepted as a common programme for all European fascist movements, a drive that culminated in his participation in the Conference of Venice in 1962, and the foundation of the National Party of Europe (npe), a grandiose pan-European edifĳice “for

16 Pound, “England” and “Soberly,” reprinted in Leonard Doob (ed.), “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II (Greenwood Press: Westport, cn, 1978), speech numbers 16 and 90, respectively. Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation 287

which I have striven during the past fĳifteen years”, but which began to crumble almost immediately afterwards.17

Interestingly, this overview echoes Pound’s call for a “usa of Europe” fully a generation prior in Mosley’s earlier propaganda mouthpiece, Action. In an Orwellian inversion, as implied above, fascist ultra-nationalism was now to become “European socialism”—as Oswald Mosley was fond of declaring at the time. One readily available example derives from a May 1956 article of that name, published in both the neo-fascist Nation Europa and reprinted in his movement’s journal, The European:

the development by a fully united Europe of all the resources in our continent for the benefĳit of all the peoples of Europe, with every energy and incentive that the active leadership of European government can give to private enterprise, workers’ ownership or any other method of progress which science and a dynamic system of government fĳind most efffective for the enrichment of all our people and the lifting of European civilization to ever higher forms of life.18

Not least given his adjudged “insanity” at the time, Pound’s contributions to The European were remarkable—all the more so, indeed, as this relationship has been virtually ignored by scholars of either fascism or modernism. For the journal’s very fĳirst issue, Pound contributed a note entitled “Sovereignty”—for which, read anti-Semitic railing against perceived “usury.” At the same time, behind the scenes, Pound was trying to help as best he could from his position of confĳinement; for instance, in a letter written on 26 June 1953, Pound asked the aforementioned Louis Dudek for $50 to help reach the estimated $300 needed to continue publishing The European, a journal, as he put it, “standing for maximum awareness.”19 The admiration was mutual, of course, especially by some of the younger fascists braying within The European’s stable. One of these, Harvey Black, a member of the uk’s committee advocating Pound’s release, penned “The Story of Ezra Pound” for the November 1956 issue. This

17 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of Fascism after 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 135–136. 18 Mosley, “European Socialism,” reprinted in The European, 6.39 (1956), available online at www.feastofhateandfear.com/archives/oswald.html. 19 Pound, “Sovereignty,” The European 1.1 (Mar. 1953), 51; and Pound, cited in dk: Some letters of Ezra Pound, 102. 288 Feldman text offfered a useful barometer of the way in which fascists viewed his quite unique legal position, since Pound’s

only so-called “crime” was the expression of his personal opinions on the Italian Radio during the years when American was at war with Italy…a cursory glance at them brings home the absurdity of treating such material as “treason,” or even as propaganda. The ill-treatment meted out to him by the Americans in 1945 still reads as one of the more notorious scandals of recent history.20

Similarly, over the six years of The European’s short life-span, there were no less than 7 essays by Alan Neame on Pound’s Pisan Cantos sequence. Neame, another neo-fascist disciple of Pound’s based in Britain, had come to Pound’s attention in 1947 as a potential translator of Jean Cocteau’s 1945 Léone; their correspondence culminated in a May 1951 text for the Oxford-based Catholic journal, New Blackfriars (volume 32, number 371), entitled “Ezra Pound Reconsidered.” Following this neutral overview, Neame washed up in the fourth issue of The European two years later, offfering an annotated reading of Pound’s poetry in June 1953; in this case, of Canto 74, the fĳirst in The Pisan Cantos sequence. From a decidedly non-fascist viewpoint, Pound scholars like Ron Bush agree that The Pisan Cantos represent not so much a rejection of Pound’s fascist activism as a lament that his political faith had been sentenced with Mussolini, a laughing stock and warning to others. As John Whittier- Ferguson notes of Canto 74, that with “the death of Il Duce, or ‘The Boss’, as Pound often called him, this epic-in-progress lost its heart,” for the “vital centre of Pound’s poem, its chief ‘artifex’ who had literally been founding a new nation—who had, in other words, been planning and building in the present moment the ‘patterned streets’ Pound had been called for in poetry and prose at least since Canto V”—was unceremoniously strung up with his mistress, Clara Petacci, and a few regime sycophants (like the notorious Fascist anti- Semite, Roberto Farinacci) trying to flee the dying days of war in Italy:

The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders. Manes! Manes was tanned and stufffed, Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano by the heels at Milano That maggots shd/ eat the dead bullock digonos [twice-born; also written in Greek] but the twice crucifĳied

20 Harvey Black, “The Story of Ezra Pound,” The European, 4.45 (Nov. 1956), 163–164. Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation 289

The poem’s reference to the heretical founder of Manichaeism, allusions to the Dionysian, Christ-like “twice crucifĳied”—Mussolini was fĳirst deposed from power on 25 July 1943 and, after a stint as head of the Salò Republic, executed on 28 April 1945—and the “twice born,” or Digenes (for Neame, “a term common to mystery religions, denoting the initiate as against the uninitiated”) all point to the perseverance of Pound’s political faith after wwii. Indeed, the very fĳirst line, that tragic outcome of the fascist “dream” was one ofThe Pisan Cantos’ three major themes, as Neame rightly intuited: “the loss of a familiar world; the frustration of an ideal world; and the imperishability of once- apprehended beauty.”21 Neame was only getting started. His subsequent article on Pound, from the fĳinal issue of The European in 1953, annotated a further ten lines from Canto 75 before returning to the pivotal Canto 74 in September 1954 via a classic trope of wwii revisionism: the Allies were the true genocidal villains, not the Axis:

Hence, in Europe, we subject ourselves with beastly periodicity to the horrors of fraternal warfare, warfare in which some nameless agency decrees that in the same city of Frankfurt-am-Main the Goethehaus shall be razed but the Farbenfabrik shall be spared; that Monte Cassino and Dresden shall as non-military objectives be reduced to rubble; that three hundred years of cultural endeavour shall lie under permanent threat

“at the mercy of a tack hammer thrown through the roof”

Writing precisely on these last two lines in his 1995 study of The Pisan Cantos, Ron Bush righty asserts that the “Fascist orientation of this desire continues to pervade The Pisan Cantos and remains fĳirmly rooted in the ideological passions of the last year of the Second World War.”22 Thereafter, bookending the dozen issues of The European in 1955, Neame provided two additional articles on Pound’s Pisans. These annotated another 20 lines from Cantos 74 and 75 prior to ideologically “coming clean” in his sixth, penultimate essay of August 1956, “ A Musical Interlude”: “these poems are

21 Alan Neame, Canto LXXIV in “The Pisan Cantos: An Approach,” The European, 1.4 (Jun. 1953), 42, 38. 22 Neame, Canto LXXIV in “The Pisan Cantos III: Oxford Episode,” 2.19, The European (Sep. 1954), 25; and Ron Bush, “Art versus the Descent of the Iconoclasts: Cultural Memory in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” Modernism/Modernity 1.1 (1995), 92. 290 Feldman more than a record of the sufffering of one man crushed by the political machine. They record also something more catastrophic, the shattered life of a continent, of a culture and a myth that for many people came to a fĳiery end on May 1 [8th—sic], 1945.”23 The next year saw Neame publish his translation of Cocteau’s Léone with the Australian journal Edge; interestingly, in the previous issue of that journal Pound had published a translation of his own: Mussolini’s “Notes in Captivity” composed in the weeks after being deposed in July 1943.24 The former, Neame’s translation, was dedicated to Camille Chamoun, then- President of Lebanon, in the hopes she would assist in seeking Pound’s release from St Elizabeths sanatorium, as evinced by this striking letter from him to her on the 21st of May, 1957:

Those held responsible for the war of 1939–1945, even those whose hands had shed most blood, are for the most part either dead or pardoned. But alas, Madame, my master, who was neither a murderer nor was ever for- mally condemned, has not yet been set free, although now over seventy… I make bold to beg you, as you condescend to accept this poetic tribute, to pity the wretched lot of Ezra Pound and to ask at the hands of the President of the United States the release of the release of a poet whose greatness has only increased with his misfortunes…25

In his fĳinal missive from February 1958—only a year before the closure of The European—Neame demonstrated his own commitment to the continuing “political religion” of fascist ideology via The Pisan Cantos of “his master.” Returning to the hanging of war criminals at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946, when the “folk-mind was restocked with martyrs,” Neame avers: “By a curious coincidence the Nuremberg executions took place on the sixth day of the Feast of Tabernacles, when Jews celebrate the mystical victory of Messiah over Leviathan.” The tone of Neame’s article, like that in the many anti-Semitic passages in Pound’s post-1933 poetry, suggests that “coincidence” was the furthest thing from his mind:

23 Neame, “The Pisan Cantos, Canto LXXV: A Musical Interlude,” The European 11.66 (Aug. 1956), 371; italics added. 24 See Neame and Pound, in Edge, February and March 1957, respectively. I am grateful for Archie Henderson’s assistance with this journal; for further details, see his “I cease not to yowl” Reannotated: New Notes on the Pound/Agresti Correspondence (Houston, tx: Private publication, 2012), 920. 25 Neame, cited in Desmond Stewart, “Men and Books VI: Cocteau: The Last Imagist Poet,” The European 5.55 (Sept. 1957), 38–39. Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation 291

Saints, martyrs and divine kings are not the only people to rule from the tomb; and poets sometimes rule from the prison house…if we live in the Era of the Asylum, it is only so because it is at the same time the Era of the International Loan with Strings Attached.26

Beyond Neame’s hero-worship splashed across its pages, The European was itself Poundian in virtually every manner conceivable. Reviews of Pound’s favourite authors stufffed its pages—such as otherwise obscure economic conspiracists like the Americans Alexander del Mar and Brookes Adams27— in addition to frequent reviews of his 1950s publications of poetry and translations, including: The Classic Anthology defĳined by Confucius (June 1955); Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los Cantares (April 1956); alongside a review article by Denis Goacher entitled “The Critics and the Master,” reviewing The Translations of Ezra Pound; Literary Essays of Ezra Pound; and Sophokles’ Women of Trachis: A version by Ezra Pound in May 1954. Still other essays, like Denis Goacher’s “Dr. Leavis or Mr. Pound?”—which argued that “Mr. Pound is so far from being ‘purely literary in interests’ that it would take some pages to tabulate his activities”—including, putting it mildly, becoming “embroiled in world politics”—witnessed a lively correspondence over a number of ensuing issues.28 It is no overstatement to say that Pound’s literature and politics were an indispensible touchstone for this neo-fascist journal. Tellingly, two texts were contributed to The European’s fĳinal issue in 1959 by Pound’s authorised biographer, Noel Stock. While the latter’s 1970 The Life of Ezra Pound remains the gold standard of Pound biographies, there can be little doubt Stock had been drinking deeply from the radical right Kool-Aid but a decade earlier. As one of the disciples helping to disseminate Pound’s postwar “political religion” during the later 1950s—including his editorship of the aforementioned Melbourne journal, Edge, during 1956 and 1957—Stock was clearly taken with the phrase “blackout on history.” In actual fact, this was the title of his fĳirst of two articles for The European. For his part, Pound had been using the phrase in his correspondence several years earlier, as with the

26 Neame, “The Pisan Cantos VI [sic; should read VII]: Speech and Penalty,” in The European 6.60 (February 1958), 357, 360. 27 For example, in terms of the latter, Peter Wigham suggested that Brookes Adams’ The Law of Civilisation and Decay (1897) broaches the social role of art; and furthermore, “A book which serves to unravel much of this rather untidy aspect of Brookes Adams’ masterwork is the Guide to Kulchur by Ezra Pound,” The European 3.23 (Jan. 1955), cited 23. 28 Denis Goacher, “Dr. Leavis or Mr. Pound?,” The European 1.1 (Mar. 1953), 46. 292 Feldman neo-fascist Olivia Rosetti Agresti. The phrase, in turn, is almost certainly a reference to Harry Elmer Barnes’s introductory chapter, “Revisionism and the Historical Blackout,” from his 1953 Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. For his part, Barnes is recognisable as a pioneer of Holocaust Denial writings—or what he dubbed “wwii revisionism.” That this was simply an ideological repackaging of fascist anti-Semitism is made clear by the likely source for Barnes’s 1953 chapter; namely, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (which Pound had already read in April 1940). This notorious Tsarist forgery has been traced by Archie Henderson as Pound’s inspiration for his, and subsequently, Stock’s use of the phrase “blackout on history”:

On the historical blackout, see Protocol 16.4: “Classicism as also any form of study of ancient history, in which there are more bad than good examples, we shall replace with the study of the program of the future. We shall erase from the memory of men all facts of previous centuries which are undesirable to us, and leave only those which depict all the errors of the government of the goyim.”29

In his 1959 article by that name, Stock went so far as to praise Barnes as the “one professor who has made a fĳight for some sort of decency inside the historical profession.” Stock concludes, through veiled anti-Semitic reference preferred in The European to open Judeophobic references: “My purpose here has been to indicate that history is largely in the hands of men who in many cases seem to be hamstrung by attachment to ‘vested interests’.”30 That same year also witnessed Pound contributing a further three items to the fĳinal two issues of The European in 1959—with the journal in danger of collapse and Pound now out of the asylum—one short prose text; three poems; and most importantly, Canto 101 taken from the sequence Thrones de los Cantares (Cantos 96–101; reviewed in the May 1960 issue of Action) which, Pound elsewhere explained, referred to the “thrones in Dante’s Paradiso [which] are for the spirits of the people who have been responsible for good government… and to establish some defĳinition of an order possible or at any rate conceivable on earth.”31 Given his explanation, it is perhaps easier to understand Pound’s inclusion of two well-known Fascist apparatchiks, Edmondo Rossoni

29 Henderson, “I cease not to yowl” Reannotated, 509–510. For Pound’s reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in April 1940, see Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 202. 30 Noel Stock, “Blackout on History,” The European, 7.72 (Feb. 1959), 337, 343. 31 Pound, cited in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, 854. Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation 293 and Carlo Delcroix, appearing in Canto ci, itself featuring on The European’s fĳinal page in February 1959:

Rossoni “cosi lo stato…” etcetc [thus the state…] Delcroix: “che magnifĳica!” [how magnifĳicent!]32

§3

By way of a somewhat lengthy caveat, my conclusion will suggest that the convergence between Pound and Mosley’s “second wave” fascism in The European is striking for several reasons. One is that Pound, having been legally declared insane rather than face trial for treason, was not allowed to send out texts, letters or political statements whilst confĳined at St Elizabeths hospital—for it would both undermine his insanity claim and, as with the case of John Kasper, sketched below, keep him in a sanatorium as a kind of quid pro quo for his role in the conflicts over desegregation in the post-war American south. Yet a second, perhaps tactical reason also makes the Poundian nature of The European implausible; namely, Pound was becoming more extreme and unguarded in his endorsement of “fĳirst wave” biological racism precisely at the same time Mosley was repudiating many of earlier views in favour of a “second wave” fascism—one stressing a less seemingly dictatorial “Europe of nations” alternative. Mosley’s attempted “reframing” of some of the key points of fascist ideology in light of wartime experiences was in stark contrast to Pound’s anti- black racism and especially anti-Semitism; for example, his award winning The Pisan Cantos lifts phrases directly from the aforementioned forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion: “goyim are cattle” and “blackout on history.”33 Indeed, at the same time as Pound was contributing to The European, he lavishly praised Hitler’s Table Talk in his correspondence, or loaned out Mussolini’s 1943 diaries in captivity to his disciples. For Mosley’s part, in light of the Holocaust—for the radical right knows actual history as well as anyone—any recourse to anti-Semitism was likely to be wrapped in the dog-whis- tle phrase “international fĳinanciers” (much like “cultural Marxism” today).

32 Ezra Pound, “CI de los Cantares,” The European, Feb. 1959, 384. Translations are suggested by Carrol F. Terrell’s A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound: vol. 2, Cantos 74–117 (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1984), 658. 33 Pound, “Canto 74” in The Cantos, (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 459. I am grateful to Archie Henderson for his insights into the Pisan Cantos. 294 Feldman

Yet by this time, what must be frankly called Pound’s white supremacist variant of fascism was rather more unreconstructed than that of Mosley’s more sophisticated approach to the failings of the past. Nonetheless, Archie Henderson reports, this unlikely duo appeared together on 20 March 1961, when “Mosley held a press conference in Rome and Pound was among those in attendance. Afterwards, he said that he believed that the day would come for European unity, a concept wholly endorsed by Mosley.”34 To spell out this post-war divergence, a brief look of two radical right ideologues directly inspired by Ezra Pound—John Kasper and Eustace Mullins— points in an entirely diffferent direction from that of Mosley’s preferred “second wave,” post-war fascism; that of essentially “doubling down” on interwar fascism and biological racism. Eustace Mullins, who died in 2010, was to become one of the leading ideologues of the American radical right, with pamphlet titles such as The War on Christianity; Jewish tv: Sick, Sick Sick; Jewish War against the Western World.35 Another revealing text was written just before Mullins wrote the earliest biography of Pound in 1961. This was “Hitler: An Appreciation,” which was flagged up by none other than Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House on Un-American Activities Committee unauthorised survey, entitled “Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascist and Hate Groups.” Interestingly, Mullins claimed to have worked as a researcher for McCarthy until being dismissed in unclear circumstances in the early 1950s.36 Mullins’s later writings are still more extreme, and extend to enthusiastic Holocaust Denial, neo- Nazism and uncompromising racism—as indicated by his 1985 book, published by none other than the far-right Ezra Pound Institute, The World Order: A Study in the Hegemony of Parasitism. In addition to his unabashed neo- Nazism, Mullins was a roommate and close friend of Matt Koehl, soon to lead the American Nazi Party following the murder of George Lincoln Rockwell in 1967. Indeed, at the time when Koehl and Mullins were closest, in the mid- 1950s, Mullins also headed the Aryan League of America. Under its letterhead

34 Cited in Archie Henderson, “Pound, Sweden, and the Nobel Prize: An Introduction,” in Richard Taylor, and Claus Melchior, eds., Ezra Pound and Europe (Rodopi, Atlanta: 1993), 164. 35 These and other conspiratorial texts are available on Mullins’ website, maintained by a protégé and headed by four images at the top of the main site: two pictures of Mullins late in life, alongside two pictures of his mentor, Ezra Pound; available online at http://www .eustacemullins.us/. 36 See www.docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.archive.org/download/Preliminary ReportOnNeo-fascistAndHateGroups/u588n4_1954.pdf. I am grateful to Ernie Lazar for his assistance with this information. Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation 295 he corresponded frequently with Pound during his internment, this 1956 letter being one example:

I have the hard core of a group of determined fanatics who are willing to [go—sic] to the limit with me. I have done my country a great service by acting as a restraining influence and preventing them from assassinating some of our great public-spirited leaders, but perhaps I will not be able to hold them in check much longer. Quien sabe?37

Yet the more dangerous of Pound’s two protégés—who literally sat at his feet at St Elizabeths hospital—was the head of the Seaboard White Citizens’ Council in the 1950s, essentially the non-hooded face of the campaign against desegregating schools in the American South. He called Pound “Grandpa” and truly hung on his every word, including mimicking Pound’s style and ideas— right down to that of framing the issue of American “civil rights” as a states’ rights issue; in fact, he needed only ten days in Clinton, Tennessee to initiate race riots so severe the National Guard was called in and thereafter assumed law and order in the town.38 Kasper’s justifĳication for doing so was made plain in a letter to Pound of 30 June 1956:

It is 1956 Fascism. It is Jefff/ and Jacksonian and J. Adams. LONG LIVE THE ANGLO SAXON DEATH to his ENEMIES.

Two fĳinal letters further underscore this point: two months earlier, Kasper wrote to Pound, explicitly asking him to draft pro-segregation speeches:

Dear Gramp: COPY COPY. Can you write some short quotable slogans. Nothing highbrow. Stufff to stick in mass-mind. Repeated over and over so they don’t forget. And 5 minute speeches and 15 minute speeches. on Segregation/ States Rights. Mongrelization/ Separation of Races. NIGGERS

37 Eustace Mullins to Pound, undated letter from 1956, Yale University’s Beinecke Library Pound Collection, ycal mss Box 43, Folder 1500. 38 An excellent account of John Kasper’s actions in Clinton, tn is provided by Clive Webb’s Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens, ga: University of Georgia Press, 2010), Chapter 2. 296 Feldman

And JEWS: the Admiral [Crommelin] has taken up THE Question openly and it hasn’t hurt him. The kike behind the nigger. No war to save Israel. Awful busy here.

Alec Marsh has rightly suggested that Pound directly assisted in the construction of these violently racist slogans and speeches.39 Only a month later, furthermore, responding to a programme called “Virginians on Guard” written by Kasper—which his mentor clearly had a hand in editing40—Pound replied on 17 May 1956:

Figure 15.2 First page of Virginians on Guard seaboard white citizens’ council, 1956

39 John Kasper to Pound, letter of 10 April 1956, Yale University’s Beinecke Library Pound Collection, ycal mss Box 26, Folder 1127; and Alec Marsh, “Politics” in Ira B. Nadel (ed.), Ezra Pound in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 101–104. 40 I am especially grateful for Alec Marsh’s assistance with this 36-page document, the fĳirst page of which is reproduced here. Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation 297

Figure 15.3 “Ezra Pound returned to Italy today and hailed his adopted nation with a Fascist salute,” The New York Times, 9 July 1958

You can NOT say: Nationalist You can not put segregation as BASIC. You cannot say, Douglas (C.H.) or Social Credit or Gesell. You must use a formula which allows you to plug for what is correct in all three.

You can say local control of local afffairs. You can not SAY local control of local pur/pow which is the only way to GET loc. cont. loc. af. …Get the ku kluxers to keep their eye on main issue, not the immediate irritant…41

The historian Benjamin Muse remarks that Kasper “had a large hand in the violence” surrounding desegregation—for instance, the aforementioned “ku kluxers,” or kkk, were responsible for no fewer than 118 bombings between 1956 and 1963 in the American South—and was sentenced to federal prison in

41 Pound to Kasper, letter of 17 May 1956, Yale University’s Beinecke Library Pound Collection, YCAL MSS Box 26, Folder 1127. 298 Feldman

May 1958. Kasper apparently entered the penitentiary with Hitler’s Mein Kampf under his arm.42 His aims and targets were crystal clear by this time, as a contemporaneous pamphlet entitled “Segregation or Death” reveals, arguing that Jews were engaged “in a fanatical efffort to subvert existing Gentile order everywhere.” Kasper’s title page depicted a snake with a stereotypically Jewish head, winding around the White House, u.s. Capitol building, Supreme Court and, of course, the United Nations.43 Not to be outdone by Kasper, two months later Pound, following his release from St Elisabeths and return to Italy in July 1958—which was to be his home for the fĳinal 14 years of his life—greeted the waiting photographers not with a wave, but with a “fĳirst wave” fascist salute.

Bibliography

Black, Harvey. “The Story of Ezra Pound,” The European 4/45 (1956): 163–164. Bush, Ron. “Art versus the Descent of the Iconoclasts: Cultural Memory in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” Modernism/Modernity 14/1(1995): 71–95. Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 1988. Committee on Un-American Activities, u.s. House of Representatives. “Preliminary Report on neo-fascist and hate groups” (1954). Online at: . Doob, Leonard, ed. “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II. Westport, cn: Greenwood Press, 1978. Dudek, Louis, ed. dk: Some Letters of Ezra Pound. Montreal, ca: dc Books, 1974. Feldman, Matthew. “Make it Crude: Ezra Pound’s Antisemitic Propaganda for the pnf and buf,” in Daniel Tilles and Salvatore Garau (eds.), Fascism and the Jews: Britain and Italy, 66–87. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011. ——. “The ‘Pound Case’ in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Modern Literature, 35/2 (2012): 83–97.

42 William Randel, The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965), 36. 43 A major exception to the silence on these issues by Pound scholars is that of Fuller F. Torrey, who details some of the views of Mullins and Kasper; see The Roots of Treason (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984), 230; see also John Kasper, “Segregation or Death,” The Virginia Spectator 118.8 (May 1957), 21, 34–37. Roughly a year later, the Seaboard White Citizens’ Councils published a pamphlet with the same name in tribute to Kasper, by that time in prison. I am grateful to Archie Henderson and Alec Marsh for their assistance with these texts. Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation 299

——. Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Gentile, Emilio. “The Sacralisation of Politics: Defĳinitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1/1 (2000): 18–55. ——. “Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics—A Critical Survey,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6/1 (2005): 19–32. ——. Politics as Religion. Translated by George Staunton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Goacher, Denis. “Dr. Leavis or Mr. Pound?” The European 1/1 (1953): 41–51. Grifffĳin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Henderson, Archie. “I cease not to yowl” Reannotated: New Notes on the Pound/Agresti Correspondence. Houston, tx: Private publication, 2012. Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2002. Kasper, John. “Segregation or Death,” The Virginia Spectator 118/8 (1957): 21, 34–37, available online: . Koon, Tracy H. Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, 1922– 1945. London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Macklin, Graham. Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of Fascism after 1945. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Maier, Hans, ed. Totalitarianism and Political Religions: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships. 3 vols. Translated by Jodi Bruhn. London: Routledge, 2004–2007. Marsh, Alec. Ezra Pound: Critical Lives. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Miranda Hickman, ed. One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Stanley Nott. London: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2011. Mosley, Oswald. “European Socialism,” The European 6/39 (1956): 13–29, available online at: . Nadel, Ira B., ed. Ezra Pound in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Neame, Alan. “The Pisan Cantos: An Approach,” The European, 1/4 (1953): 37–46. ——. “The Pisan Cantos II: Considerations in Criticism,” The European 1/10 (1953): 13–26. ——. “Canto LXXIV” in “The Pisan Cantos III: Oxford Episode,” The European 2/19 (1954): 17–29. ——. “The Pisan Cantos IV: Constructions,” The European 2/23 (1955): 23–34. ——. “The Pisan Cantos V: Theory of Construction,” The European 3/34 (1955): 32–44. ——. “The Pisan Cantos, Canto LXXV: A Musical Interlude,” The European 4/41 (1956): 371–379. ——. “The Pisan Cantos VII: Speech and Penalty,” The European 5/60 (1958): 351–363. Pound, Ezra. “Britain, who are your Allies?” Action, 9 April 1938. 300 Feldman

——. “The Criterion Passes,” British Union Quarterly 3/2 (1939): 60–72. ——. “Sovereignty,” The European 1/1 (1953): 51. ——. “CI de los Cantares,” The European 6/72 (1959): 382–384. ——. Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilisation. Edited by Noel Stock. Chicago: H. Regnery, 1960. ——. The Cantos. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Pound, Omar S., Robert E. Spoo, and Dorothy Pound, eds. Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Randel, William. The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965. Redman, Tim. Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Schneider, Herbert. Making the Fascist State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928. Sieburth, Richard, ed. “Ezra Pound: Confession,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 193–206. Stewart, Desmond. “Men and Books VI: Cocteau: The Last Imagist Poet,” The European 5/55 (1957): 37–41. Stock, Noel. “Blackout on History,” The European, 6/72 (1959): 337–343. ——. The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. ——. “Ezra Pound in Melbourne,” Helix, Special Issue[s] 13 and 14 (1983). Surette, Leon. Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Taylor, Richard, and Claus Melchior, eds. Ezra Pound and Europe. Rodopi, Atlanta: 1993. Terrell, Carrol F. A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Volume 2: Cantos 74–117. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1984. Torrey, F. Fuller. The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St Elizabeths. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984. Webb, Clive. Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era. Athens, ga: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Webber, G.C. “Patterns of Membership and Support for the British Union of Fascists,” Journal of Contemporary History, 19/4 (1984): 575–606. Whittier-Ferguson, John. “Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the Modern Epic,” in Catherine Bates (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Epic, 211–233. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. chapter 16 “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” “The Auroras of Autumn” and the Christian Apocalypse

Benjamin Madden

Wallace Stevens’s late poems are remarkable both for their dense imagery and their seeming indiffference to the momentous world events with which they coincide. Critics who have sought to historicise the later Stevens have done so in two ways: fĳirstly by reading the opacity of the poems as itself a political stance irrespective of their content, and secondly by drawing heavily on correspondence and other biographical sources. This essay aims to take a diffferent approach to Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn” by aligning the poem with its historical context. The breadth and meaning of historical reference in poetry is clearly at issue here. While many of his modernist contemporaries were eager to signpost the relationship between their works and historical contexts both distant and contemporary through extensive quotation and related techniques, Stevens’s poems tend towards self-sufffĳiciency. This hermetic style poses fundamental questions about the nature of literary reference, and the risk of critical arbitrariness is always present. My argument is that Stevens’s poem engages directly with the discursive mobilisation of Christian apocalyptic surrounding the development of the atomic bomb. I will begin by describing how my own reading of the poem led me to this particular historical context, before arguing that the literature of nuclear war demands a critical frame that surpasses both language-centered and historicist criticism. Finally, I will argue that far from embracing opacity as an alternative to political commitment, Stevens’s late poetry opposes a set of values based on afffĳirmation of the “commonplace” to the apocalyptic threats of his time. Written during late 1947 and published in the Kenyon Review in 1948, “The Auroras of Autumn” begins with a series of dense fĳigurations of the aurora borealis, or the northern lights, as a serpent with a head of air.1 The second canto dismisses this fĳirst set of images brusquely (“Farewell to an idea…”) before replacing it with another:

1 J.M. Edelstein, Wallace Stevens: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 224; Wallace Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 355. All page references for Stevens’s poems are to this edition.

A cabin stands, Deserted, on a beach. It is white, As by custom or according to

An ancestral theme…

And later:

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach. The long lines of it grow longer, emptier, A darkness gathers though it does not fall…2

A sense of threat issues from both past and future; the abandoned cabin suggests that disaster may have struck already, and if it hasn’t, the gathering darkness implies that it might be about to. Is it necessary for our reading of the poem that this disaster should take on a specifĳic shape, or does the poem aim to impart only a generalised sense of menace and foreboding? Indeed, should readers transform that menace and foreboding into a form of existential angst, when the poem issues from an historical moment at which the fear of annihilation was insinuating itself into every moment of daily life? The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 revealed to people all over the world the existence of a vast and hitherto unknown source of destructive energy. As it became apparent that these weapons were likely to fĳigure in any future global conflict on a wide scale, the media and the public became obsessed with projecting just how such a conflict might unfold and what its implications would be for the ordinary men and women who would bear its brunt. By 1949, the issue would become urgent as the Soviet Union successfully tested its own atomic bomb and the possibility of a world-wide nuclear war became concrete.3 But in the meantime, the fear and uncertainty surrounding this new technology struggled to fĳind adequate expression. The atomic age might have represented a “new epoch” in humankind’s relationship with nature, but it did not immediately prompt a similar renewal of language. Instead, scientists and journalists alike drew on a series of stock responses and scenarios to explain the new technology to the public.4

2 Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 356. 3 David Holloway, “Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War, 1945–1962,” in Melvin P. Lefffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 1: Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 378. 4 Spencer Weart, in his Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), cites the humorist Frank Sullivan’s character Mr. Arbuthnot, an “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” 303

Part of the reason for this is surely that atomic power had entered the discursive fĳield well before development of the Bomb. Speculation about the utopian as well as the warlike potential of nuclear technology had swirled on both sides of the Atlantic since the discovery of nuclear fĳission in 1938. As a result, when the destructive power of the atom became widely known, there was already a reservoir of familiar tropes and expressions to draw on in describing it. As Spencer Weart argues in his exhaustive study, the history of nuclear technology is a “history of images,” of representations whose history begins well before the advent of nuclear weapons themselves, in every artistic and journalistic medium. “The Auroras of Autumn,” too, needs to be situated in that history of representations, as the major American poet of the mid-twentieth century’s reflection on that era’s decisive historical event. By the mid-1950s, the stock of images associated with nuclearism had grown exponentially.5 One of the most indelible is the one that Stevens’s “cabin on the beach” always calls to mind for me: that of a typical, two-story, weatherboard house destroyed in a nuclear explosion. Following the successful Soviet nuclear test, the possibility of a nuclear attack on the United States prompted the public to demand both information and concrete action from the government to defend them from the threat (Figure 16.1). The Truman administration’s response was to create the Federal Civil Defense Administration.6 Under the aegis of this organisation, civil defense planners paired a series experiments, called Operation Doorstep, with the ongoing nuclear tests in Nevada in order to determine the probable damage inflicted on American cities by a nuclear attack. In the fĳilms and photographs generated by these experiments, we can see a vivid realisation of the apocalyptic fears that had always crowded around “the Bomb,” redoubled for an American audience by their now being located, not across the ocean in Japan, but at home, in the most emphatically ordinary locales (Figure 16.2). It is the desolate landscapes and ruined, chaotic domestic locales produced in these experiments that cause me to intuit an afffĳinity between Stevens’s fĳigurations and nuclear war. The problem of situating Stevens’s poetry in history is well summarised in a line from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: “The poem is the cry of its

acknowledged cliché expert on the subject of the atom. Arbuthnot answered questions with the aid of a familiar series of stock words and phrases: “new era,” “harness,” “unleash,” “the philosophers’ stone,” “the alchemists’ dream,” and so on, 105. 5 I take the term “nuclearism” from Ken Ruthven’s Nuclear Criticism (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993), in order to denote the whole discursive fĳield of nuclear science and technology, as well as its social ramifĳications. 6 Weart, Nuclear Fear, 129. 304 Madden

Figure 16.1 Stills from footage of Operation Doorstep, showing one of the model houses demolished by a shock wave, 1953. Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada Field Offfĳice “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” 305

Figure 16.2 Scenes from inside one of the Operation Doorstep houses, before and after the nuclear detonation, 1953. Photos courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada Field Offfĳice occasion.”7 From “occasion” we can extrapolate that the poem can only issue from a specifĳic time and place; but a “cry,” defĳined by the oed as a “chiefly inar- ticulate utterance,” complicates the picture. The poem may issue from a spe- cifĳic time and place, but the relationship between that context and the content of the poem—if this view even admits of any content at all—must remain

7 Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 404. 306 Madden obscure. The problem is intensifĳied by the tendency of Stevens’s critics to assign to even his most grandiose and abstract passages a personal referent. This argument is not without merit; take the following passage from “The Auroras”:

…A capitol, It may be, is emerging or has just Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed…

This is nothing until in a single man contained, Nothing until this named thing nameless is And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees An Arctic efffulgence flaring on the frame Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.8

The spectacular telescoping of time, the godlike perspective, and the hint of great power politics contained in the reference to a capitol suggest events on a cosmic scale. However, “This is nothing until in a single man contained”: history can become meaningful only by being encapsulated in a single perceiving intellect. The poem, the cry of its occasion, bears an occult relationship to the external world legible only through the refracted preoccupations and anxieties of the mind that authored it. As such, critics like Harold Bloom have long held that “The Auroras of Autumn” depicts Stevens’s confrontation with a personal or poetic apocalypse.9 On this reading, the auroras themselves represent a kind of natural sublimity, which renders the poet awe-struck; this, and the persistent imagery of winter, reminds him of his declining poetic prowess. The only representation strategy available to him is the repeated askesis of the opening cantos, where a series of fĳigurations of the auroras are set out before being curtly dismissed in favor of the next one: “Farewell to an idea…” This, at least, allows the poet the mobility to assay the phenomenon from a variety of angles. But it may be precisely the shifting and amorphous nature of the threat and the poet’s inability to defĳinitively harness it in language that allows the poem to reflect its historical context. “Textualising” the Bomb became a pressing

8 Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 359. 9 Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), 256. “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” 307 problem in the immediate aftermath of the Trinity test, on 16 June 1945, when details of the new weapon and its destructive force had to be relayed to President Truman and other military decision-makers. One of those to whom this task fell, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, claimed that “words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and psychological efffects it produced.”10 Despite this invocation of the inexpressibility topos, Farrell nonetheless tried to encompass his experience with a barrage of adjectives: “unprecedented, magnifĳicent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying.” And, striking a familiar tone in the annals of nuclear discourse, Farrell invoked a series of religious topoi, describing “the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty.”11 As Ken Ruthvan notes, it is striking to witness an observer describe himself as “present at the birth of a new age—The Age of Atomic Energy”—while simultaneously “archaiz[ing] to reproduce the voice of that much older theological opposition to ‘forbidden’ knowledge.”12 Thus the topoi of Christian apocalyptic formed one of the main rhetorical means by which the development of the atomic bomb came to be textualised. But Farrell’s wrestle with the expressive limitations of language to capture “that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately” is only one facet of an effort to bring the mysteries of the atom into language that began much earlier. Farrell’s eyewitness account bears all the hallmarks of that effort, especially in its deployment of the religious discourse of apocalyptic in an effort to convey the magnitude of the Bomb’s power. As Ruthven has noted, the early atomic scientists and those who followed them were “obliged to mobilize themes and images from cultures so remote in time as to appear mythic and archetypal.”13 Literary and religious discourses, in other words, have been rede- ployed in order to textualise the nuclear from the outset. One of the most glaring instances of this must be the first atomic test itself, the codename of which, “Trinity,” was selected by J. Robert Oppenheimer in a direct allusion to John Donne’s thirteenth Holy Sonnet: “Batter my heart,

10 Robert C. Williams and Philip L. Cantelon, eds. The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present, 1939–1984 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 53. 11 Williams and Cantelon, The American Atom, 52–53. 12 Williams and Cantelon, The American Atom, 52; Ruthven, Nuclear Criticism, 33. 13 Ruthven, Nuclear Criticism, 19. 308 Madden three-person’d God.”14 Much can be inferred about the Los Alamos scientists’ attitude to the Bomb from this choice. Perhaps most importantly, the poem emphasises self-abnegation and the dislocation of received modes of perception in order to apprehend transcendent realities. In a similar vein, Oppenheimer famously expressed his reaction to the Trinity test by quoting the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”15 This invocation serves two aims at once: in content, it intimates the feeling of possessing near omnipotence. But as a quotation, it also assigns Oppenheimer’s pronouncement, and by extension the work to which it refers, to an agency other than himself and his fellow scientists.16 Canaday speculates that this rhetorical move, common enough amongst the Los Alamos scientists and other physicists, is the kind of fĳiction designed to mitigate the ethical strain caused by the scientists’ work. In the various pronouncements of the Los Alamos scientists, Canaday fĳinds references that go beyond the Bible, John Donne, and the Bhagavad Gita, including Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, H.G. Wells, the Faust myth, and the letters of Christopher Columbus.17 This cacophony of voices produces a screen of allusion behind which authorial identity and agency vanishes. In doing so, it recalls nothing so much as Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem whose title phrase takes on a new and prophetic poi- gnancy in the nuclear age. The Los Alamos scientists could be said to be engaged in a variant of modernist citational practice, a textual version of the self-abnegation celebrated in Donne’s poem. The scientists, then, found themselves in a situation analogous with that of the speaker of “The Auroras of Autumn”: in confrontation with forces whose magnitude seems to overwhelm their expressive capacities. One of the most troubling aspects of this early nuclear discourse is that, in its recourse to such a strange array of literary and religious topoi, it seems to undermine the special status sometimes attributed to scientifĳic language, whereby it is presumed to offfer unmediated access to the real. Instead, we fĳind only chains of allusion produced by authorial fĳigures in the act of constructing fĳictions. For Stevens, however, the efffort to create consoling fĳictions is a typical, indeed, a necessary, human activity. It is the construction of these fĳictions in the context of the pervasive and difffuse fears of the nuclear age that I take to be the subject of “The Auroras of Autumn.” In doing so, I am moving broadly within the

14 John Canaday, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics and the First Atomic Bombs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 201. 15 Cited in Canaday, The Nuclear Muse, 183. 16 Canaday, The Nuclear Muse, 188. 17 Canaday, The Nuclear Muse, 19. “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” 309 parameters of an approach to Stevens suggested by Frank Kermode in The Sense of and Ending. Accepting Stevens’s premise that we are story-telling creatures whose accounts of the world around us are ineluctably fĳictional, Kermode distinguishes between what he calls “fĳiction” and “myth.” Whereas fĳictions maintain their self-awareness, their provisionality, and a sense of their nature as heuristics (“Farewell to an idea…”), myths are dangerous because they are ossifĳied, and have lost the sense of their own limitations.18 This powerful distinction bears on nuclear discourse in important ways, most clearly in the case of its deployment of apocalyptic tropes. The science of nuclear apocalypse suggests that it ought to be conceived of as a world-ending catastrophe. But instead, nuclear scientists themselves have consistently deployed tropes that align nuclear technology with other types of apocalypse. One conception emphasises the revelation of hidden knowledge, as in Farrell’s alignment of the atomic age with “blasphemy” and the usurpation of God’s powers. Another is the almost Yeatsian rhetoric of the crisis that attends the transition from one era to the next, as in Farrell’s description of the Trinity test as the birth of the “Atomic Age.”19 Finally, there is the apocalypse rendered as a moment of personal crisis or revelation, as in Oppenheimer’s fĳiguration of the bomb as a route to self-transcendence. All are aspects of the Christian apocalyptic. In Oppenheimer’s fellow physicist Victor Weisskopf’s memoir, The Joy of Insight, he describes the test in the following terms: “When the brightness sub- sided, we saw a blue halo surrounding the yellow and orange sphere, an aure- ole of bluish light around the ball.”20 Weisskopf reports that the bluish light, caused by ionising radiation released by the explosion, reminded him of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, the right panel of which shows Christ rising up out of his tomb, surrounded by an enormous yellow aureola with a blue tinge on its outer edge (Figure 16.3).21 Weisskopf displays a higher

18 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 38. 19 The “birth of a new era” metaphor was also a feature of press reports surrounding the development of the atom bomb. The Manhattan Project and the Trinity test were revealed to the public the day after the bombing of Hiroshima, and the New York Times included on its front page an article headed “New Age Ushered,” already describing nuclear energy as “a tremendous force for the advancement of civilization as well as for destruction.” Sidney Shalett, “New Age Ushered,” New York Times, 7 August, 1945. 20 Cited in Canaday, The Nuclear Muse, 196. 21 The semantic slippage apparent here from Christ’s “aureola” to the bomb’s “auroras” is obvious. Even before outer atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs made artifĳicial auroras 310 Madden

Figure 16.3 Matthias Grünewald, Resurrection panel from the Isenheim Alterpiece, 1512–16, in the Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, Alsace “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” 311 degree of self-awareness than Oppenheimer, at least, by remarking: “The explosion of an atomic bomb and the resurrection of Christ—what a paradoxical and disturbing association!”22 But as we have seen, paradoxical and disturbing associations of this kind, whereby nuclear power becomes a portent of historical crises and transformations, runs throughout nuclear discourse. Indeed, it is implicit in the very application of the term “apocalypse” to the nuclear at all. Thus we have some sense of the discursive context in which “The Auroras of Autumn” was written, and some indication of how the poem might function as a critique of that emerging discourse. But there is another aspect of nuclear discourse that bears on my reading of the poem: its frequent use of prophetic rhetoric. All eschatological discourse is, of course, prophetic insofar as it looks towards an event or events that are yet to arrive. Nuclearism, too, is taken up with hypothetical scenarios, and one of its chief fascinations is the sheer variety of doomsday scenarios envisaged under its aegis. It is fĳitting, then, that the association that prompted my own apocalyptic reading is based on an anachronism: whereas “The Auroras of Autumn” was fĳirst published in Winter 1948, the civil defence experiments took place in March 1953. In other words, there is no way for the images in my head to correspond with the images in Steven’s head as he wrote those lines, nor with the images in the heads of the poem’s contemporary readers. But despite my pious aspiration to be a good historicist, I’ve never quite managed to break the connection. Is it necessary to do so? Can good literary interpretation risk appearing to impute prophetic qualities to the text under discussion? There is a certain historicist fundamentalism at work here, whereby setting limits to interpretive possibilities by emphasising the specifĳic conditions of textual production ceases to be merely a heuristic device, and instead becomes a hermeneutic absolute. Instead, I would urge that we remain open to diffferent modes of criticism, particularly those that emphasise thinking with a text, rather than treating it wholly as an object of critical dissection. The concept of prolepsis is useful here; while it usually refers to the foreshadowing of future events within the frame of a fĳictional narrative, we might also think of it as operating within the frame of history itself. This is particularly the case with representations of the nuclear, which form an almost inherently proleptic genre. Indeed, this was one of the central objects of study in the short-lived enterprise called “nuclear criticism.”

visible over the Pacifĳic in the 1960s, newspaper accounts of atomic explosions applied the term “aurora” to their fĳireballs. See “Pacifĳic Aurora Laid to u.s. Bomb Test,” New York Times, 16 November, 1958. 22 Cited in Canaday, The Nuclear Muse, 196. 312 Madden

In 1984, a special issue of Diacritics announced the project of “Nuclear Criticism” with the proceedings of a colloquium at which the keynote was delivered by Jacques Derrida. Nuclear criticism, presupposing as it does a detailed account of the development of nuclear technology and weaponry, might seem like an intrinsically historicist fĳield of enquiry. But in fact, it drew its inspiration largely from poststructuralism, and was displaced by the emergence of the new historicism in the mid 1980s. Derrida’s point is crucial to appreciating the special relevance of nuclearism to the deconstructive project, and vice versa: for most people living in the nuclear age, the bomb is only a notional entity, not something of which we are likely to have, or indeed to desire, any direct experience. The phenomenon of nuclear war, insofar as it exists, is “fabulously textual”; that is to say, “nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it.”23 One consequence of this textuality is that politics and policymaking of the most consequential kind must deploy textual models with origins and covert assumptions of which participants in these discourses may not be fully conscious.24 The disarmament campaigner and the war planner alike are motivated by visions of an imaginary future. As such, both are implicated in the “concept and a discursive practice” of eschatology, which “has a textual tradition, a social history, and a logic which deserve to be recalled.”25 In other words, nuclear criticism must approach “literary and nonliterary texts as constituents of historical discourses that are both inside and outside of texts”—precisely the words that Catherine Gallagher used to describe the new historicism.26 What, then, might explain nuclearism’s failure to attract serious new historicist enquiry? For one thing, the humanities have tended to resile from claims like Derrida’s, that “We [scholars of the humanities] can therefore consider ourselves competent because the sophistication of the nuclear strategy can never do without a sophistry of belief and the rhetorical simulation of a text.”27 For poststructuralism’s implicit claim of the primacy of texts, new historicism reasserts the primacy of historical conditions. But as we have seen from the example of the metaphors deployed by the

23 Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14.2 Nuclear Criticism (Summer 1984), 23. 24 This point is made with special force in Richard Klein’s “The Future of Nuclear Criticism,” Yale French Studies 77 Reading the Archive: On Texts and Institutions (1990), 76–100. 25 “Proposal for a Diacritics Colloquium on Nuclear Criticism,” Diacritics 14.2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer, 1984), 2. 26 Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and The New Historicism,” in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 37. 27 Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” 24. “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” 313

Los Alamos scientists, nuclearism highlights the possibility of chains of causa- tion that run through representations in determining ways. This outlook bears a strong afffĳinity with Stevens’s insistence on the inseparability of reality from human fĳictions, and adds context to the central question posed by “The Auroras of Autumn” about the adequacy of the poet’s fĳictions in the face of overwhelming natural forces. As I’ve pointed out, however, nuclear criticism is far from a going concern today. So why insist on this reading of the poem now, and in doing so disturb the dust on a bowl of Cold War anxieties? In part because the sense of narrative closure imparted by the collapse of the Soviet Union obscures the ongoing threat posed by nuclear weapons, in a world where the obsolescence of strategic stockpiles has paradoxically coincided with a slackening in the efffort to dismantle them. In the specifĳic context of literary criticism, the threat posed by nuclear weapons has been subsumed in the practice of literary criticism into the considerably more difffuse fĳield of ecocriticism, a move that obscures the extent to which the contemporary apocalypticism of eco- catastrophe inherits many of its own images from the nuclear forebodings that preceded it.28 As I mentioned earlier, one common interpretation of “The Auroras” sees them as an account of a personal apocalypse, the poet wrestling with his own waning imaginative powers. This is not to say that criticism has not recognised a broader sense of apocalyptic at work in the poem, but it has rarely ventured into specifĳics.29 Readers of Stevens tend to “resist any suggestion of topicality,” observes Charles Berger, “where only dark sublimity or generalized angst might reign.”30 Berger’s Forms of Farewell offfers the suggestion that the auroras in the poem might fĳigure in a variety of ways for nuclear weaponry quite directly: “‘Gusts of great enkindlings’,” he rightly points out, “is a phrase that had great resonance in 1947, capturing the aerial terrors of the recent past as well as pre- fĳiguring a greater fĳire next time.”31 Berger’s observation resonates with the poem’s fourth canto, which is redolent with Dante and particularly Milton’s “war in heaven” trope. In one striking, synecdochic invocation, the poem turns over the idea of a deity who

28 Ruthven, Nuclear Criticism, 91. 29 See James Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 289. 30 Charles Berger, Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 36. 31 Berger, Forms of Farewell, 47. 314 Madden

…measures the velocities of change. He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly Than bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flames.32

This brief allusion afffĳirms Suzanne Hobson’s important observation that the Second World War prompted a sea-change in the reception of Milton: “For some of their critics, the fĳirst-stage modernists had been wilfully blind to the approaching catastrophe and never more so than when they dismissed the Miltonic tradition in English poetry.”33 G. Wilson Knight, for instance, declared Paradise Lost a “prefĳiguration” of “our own gigantic, and itself archetypal, world-conflict.”34 Berger and Knight are also engaging in styles of criticism that acknowledge the proleptic qualities of the texts under discussion. But Berger’s suggestion about “The Auroras of Autumn” drew an outright dismissal from no less an authority on Stevens than Alan Filreis. Yet Filreis’s Wallace Stevens and the Actual World was highly influential in the 1990s reappraisal of Stevens, which reoriented criticism of Stevens’s poetry towards its embeddedness in real contexts; it is a little odd, then, to fĳind Filreis declaring that Berger’s reading of the poem fails.35 All of this prompts the question of Stevens’s directly expressed attitudes to the Bomb, or the lack thereof, and Filreis turns to an exchange between Stevens and his young Cuban correspondent José Rodríguez Feo. Despite Feo’s direct reference to the nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, in his response to Feo, not strictly a reply, Stevens pointedly refuses to engage with this subject. Instead, he presses on with his usual set of concerns: his routine, his book collecting, and so on.36 According to Filreis, “This image tells us a great deal about the poet of early modernism, who lived nine years into the nuclear age: a portly, well-dressed Wallace Stevens, striding obliviously above fall-out shelters, toting his precious copy of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives.”37 The implication is that by the latter phase of his life, Stevens was so withdrawn into his world of routine comforts and exotic luxuries that the advent of the atomic bomb could not have registered strongly enough to enter into his poetry.

32 Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 357. 33 Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 148. 34 Cited in Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism, 148. 35 Alan Filreis, “Review of Charles Berger, Forms of Farewell,” New England Quarterly 58.4 (1985), 631–633. 36 Wallace Stevens, Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens and José Rodriguez Feo, ed. Alan Filreis and Beverly Coyle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 191–192. 37 Filreis, “Review of Charles Berger,” 631. “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” 315

It is true that Stevens rarely mentions the atomic bomb directly, either in his prose or in his letters. But, pace Filreis, that reticence was hardly atypical; as most nuclear critics have noted, “Only in allusive and tentative ways does the atomic bomb begin to make its appearance in post-1945 American literature.”38 Hence the two-pronged approach of the Diacritics group: on the one hand “uncovering the unknown shapes of our unconscious nuclear fears,” and on the other investigating how “the terms of the current nuclear discussion are being shaped by literary or critical assumptions whose implications are often, perhaps systematically ignored.”39 Nuclearism thus takes shape as a covert discourse as well as an overt one, demanding subtler hermeneutic tools and a more capacious understanding of literary reference than those allowed by strict kinds of historicism. So the question to be put to “The Auroras of Autumn” is, I claim, not the one addressed by Berger and Filreis, “do they or do they not refer to the atom bomb,” but rather “how might the poem simultaneously draw on and contribute to a wider discourse of apocalypticism that continues to shape our understanding of midcentury American culture and much else besides?” Moreover, how can we think through and with “The Auroras” so as to better understand our own situation in the history of nuclearism? In an important contribution to discussion of Stevens’s politics, Paul Bauer describes Stevens’s stance during the Cold War as a “politics of reticence,” indeed, even a variant of Cold War liberalism.40 But whereas Bauer links Stevens’s political reticence, typical of his age and social class as well as expedient in the context of McCarthyism, with the “calculated obscurity of his later poetry,” I want to conclude with the contention that Steven’s late poetry offfers both a counter-apocalyptic politics and a counter-apocalyptic poetics. As Bauer recognises, the key to Stevens’s politics is his insistence on the persis- tence of the everyday even against the threat of catastrophe, and indeed of the everyday itself as the “vital center”: “specifĳic, contingent, local, individual, personal, and intimate.”41 “The Auroras of Autumn,” then, is engaged in measuring the adequacy of the various consoling fĳictions we have devised to cope with the nuclear threat. For instance, the fourth canto offfers a sustained meditation on the idea of a fatherly, creator deity:

38 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), xvii. 39 “Proposal for a Diacritics Colloquium,” 2. 40 Paul Bauer, “The Politics of Reticence: Wallace Stevens in the Cold War Era,” Twentieth Century Literature 39.1 (Spring 1993), 3, 28. 41 Bauer, “The Politics of Reticence,” 3, 29. 316 Madden

Master O master seated by the fĳire And yet in space and motionless and yet Of motion the ever-brightening origin,

Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown, Look at this present throne. What company, In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?42

A quotidian force like “the naked wind,” the poem seems to suggest, cannot or can no longer be made consonant—to “choir” with—the fĳiction of a creator deity. Humankind is responsible for the creation of its own fĳictions, a responsibility that rebukes the abnegations of the Los Alamos scientists with their religious rhetoric of transcendence and aesthetics of sublimity. The strongest challenge to Stevens’s cold war politics comes from James Longenbach, who argues that “Stevens dismantles the threat as if it were just one more of the mind’s illusions, easily replaced by another […] it depends on a faith in the power of ‘as if’, sustained only by willed ignorance of the threat.”43 But this outlook reverts to a pre-critical understanding of nuclearism, and dis- counts its discursive constructedness. Stevens memorably described simile as “the intricate evasions of as”; but the Los Alamos scientists are far more evasive on this score than is Stevens himself.44 “Soldier, there is a war between the mind/And sky,” reads the fĳinal stanza of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” and in lines redolent of the Los Alamos scientists’ awe at their own creation: “How simply the fĳictive hero becomes the real.”45 Stevens’s rigorous insistence on the imbrication of the imagination with reality makes him, in a sense, the ideal poetic interpreter of nuclearism. But his counter-apocalypticism is predicated upon its ability to assert the value of the everyday as a position apart from and counter to the master-narratives that threaten it from outside: “An ordinary day…does more for me than an extraordinary day,” he reports to Feo: “The bread of life is better than any souffflé.”46 When Filreis argues that “‘Auroras’ is a poem about [the] relative safety” of home (and by extension the ordinary), he neglects that the ordinary of the poem is rendered spectral and uncanny, brought to light only by the apocalyptic threat insinuating itself within.

42 Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 358. 43 Longenbach, Wallace Stevens, 289. 44 Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 415. 45 Stevens, “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 351–352. 46 Stevens, Secretaries of the Moon, 192. “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” 317

The counter-apocalyptic myth that Longenbach attributes to the poem, then, is in fact the one that the poem subjects to its most scabrous criticism in its concluding cantos, that of simply refusing the facts:

…in the idiom Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth, Not of the enigma of the guilty dream.

We were as Danes in Denmark all day long And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen, For whom the outlandish was another day

Of the week, queerer than Sunday.47

“Of what disaster is this the imminence,” asks the poem soon after, articulating the question I have pursued throughout this paper. The prelapsarian world, the “idiom of an innocent earth,” is now lost to us. The disaster, presumably the “it” of the following lines, is more likely to be engendered by “innocence” than averted by it:

It may come tomorrow in the simplest word, Almost as a part of innocence, almost, Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.48

These lines conjoin the threat of annihilation with Stevens’s characteristic scepticism towards the anti-modern modernism of the New Critics, the nostalgic agrarians whom Stevens satirises as “hale-hearted landsmen.”49 The challenge is to live without prelapsarian myths, and to cope with the changed realities of everyday life in new ways. This counter-apocalyptic politics of everyday life emerges as one of the major themes of Stevens’s late masterpiece, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” which declares that “The serious reflection is composed/Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace.”50 For a poet frequently given to puns formed by splitting multisyllabic words, the “commonplace” is also literally the

47 Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn,” 362. 48 Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn,” 362. 49 Bauer, “Politics of Reticence,” 20. 50 Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” 408. 318 Madden

“common place,” not the everyday as a philosophical abstraction, but the literal places in which our communal existence happens. In this sense, Filreis is right to note that when the scholar of one candle in “The Auroras of Autumn” “opens his door on flames,” he is doing so from within his home. The domestic plays host to all of the specifĳic, contingent, local, and individual attachments that constitute the everyday; as “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” puts it:

A thing fĳinal in itself and therefore, good: One of the vast repetitions fĳinal in Themselves and, therefore, good, in the going round

And round and round, the merely going round, Until merely going round is a fĳinal good, The way wine comes at a table in a wood.51

The sing-song rhyme at the end of these lines should not obscure the fact that Stevens is quite in earnest: the anti-utopianism that marks his later poetry is never more in evidence. The repetition that marks the everyday can be a fĳinal good to stand against the eschatological fantasies of politicians, technocrats, and ideologues. It is only by asserting the positive value of the everyday as the central level of experience against the techno-political edifice of nuclearism that we can achieve a discursive standpoint free from its eschatological biases. Visions of the “end” that symbolise it in terms of renewal or revelation are manifestly inadequate to the nature of this particular threat. This becomes especially clear in the ghoulish detail of Operation Doorstep. Many of the houses that made up the so-called “bombtown” contained within them mannequins arranged in typical domestic poses, so that the investigators could gain some idea of the effect of a shock wave on occupants (Fig. 16.2). These images epitomise the stark contrast between the commonplace and the apocalyptic, and we are reminded of what is at stake in the possibility of nuclear war: the very continuity of the everyday that Stevens cel- ebrates as “a final good.” Stevens’s poetry does not, as some critics have suggested, ignore the threat of catastrophe; rather, it models a form of quiet refusal to engage in an eschatological discourse already implicated in the nuclear threat.

51 Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 350. “Of What Disaster Is this the Imminence” 319

Bibliography

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Secondary Sources Anon. “Proposal for a Diacritics Colloquium on Nuclear Criticism,” Diacritics 14, No. 2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer, 1984): 2–3. Bauer, Paul. “The Politics of Reticence: Wallace Stevens in the Cold War Era,” Twentieth Century Literature 39, 1 (Spring 1993): 1–31. Berger, Charles. Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976. Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Canaday, John. The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14. 2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer 1984): 20–31. Edelstein, J.M. Wallace Stevens: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973. Filreis, Alan. “Review of Charles Berger, Forms of Farewell,” New England Quarterly 58, 4 (December 1985): 631–635. Gallagher, Catherine. “Marxism and The New Historicism,” in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism, 37–48. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. Hobson, Suzanne. Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Holloway, David. “Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War, 1945–1962,” in Melvin P. Lefffler and Odd Arne Westad (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 1: Origins, 376–397. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Klein, Richard. “The Future of Nuclear Criticism,” Yale French Studies 77 Reading the Archive: On Texts and Institutions (1990): 76–100. 320 Madden

Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. New York Times. “Pacifĳic Aurora Laid to u.s. Bomb Test,” 16 November 1958. Ruthven, Ken. Nuclear Criticism. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993. Shalett, Sidney. “New Age Ushered.” New York Times 7 August 1945. Weart, Spencer. Nuclear Fear: A History of Images. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988. Williams, Robert C. and Philip L. Cantelon, eds. The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present, 1939–1984. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. chapter 17 “History is Done” Thomas Merton’s Figures of Apocalypse

Mary Bryden

How are they down, how have they fallen down Those great strong towers of ice and steel, And melted by what terror and what miracle? What fĳires and lights tore down, With the white anger of their sudden accusation, Those towers of silver and of steel? thomas merton, “Figures for an Apocalypse” [1947]

As the centenary of the birth of Thomas Merton approaches, the impact of his prodigious output of poems, books, articles, journals, letters, and reviews seems to be showing no sign of waning, and indeed to be taking on fresh resonances in the post-9/11 landscape. A brief summary of his life may be helpful at the outset of this discussion. Merton was born in France in 1915 to artist par- ents, his father from New Zealand and his mother from the United States, and attended schools in both France and England. His fluent French would later be deployed in translations and in his many international friendships. After one year studying French and Italian at Clare College Cambridge, he transferred to Columbia University in New York, where he was awarded an ma in English in 1939. During these inter-war school and college years, Merton, a fast and avid reader, was absorbing a vast range of literary expression, from Milton, Shakespeare, Racine, Molière, Balzac and Blake to modernist writers such as Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Auden, D.H. Lawrence, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Even while convalescing from blood poisoning in the school sanatorium, he wrote a prize-winning essay on the modern novel, covering a spectrum of writers including Gide, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Romains, and Dreiser. At that stage steadfastly non-religious in his sensibility, Merton afterwards reflected in his autobiography: “And so I became the complete twentieth-century man. I now belonged to the world in which I lived. I became a true citizen of my own disgusting century: the century of poison gas and atomic bombs. A man living on the doorsill of the Apocalypse.”1

1 Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1998), 94. Merton’s best-selling autobiography was published in the United Kingdom under the title Elected

Yet a visit to Rome soon afterwards, and an absorption in its religious art and architecture, shifted Apocalypse towards a diffferent symbolic and ideological frame for Merton. Dissenting from what he suddenly perceived as the “false- ness and futility” of D.H. Lawrence’s four poems about the four Evangelists, “based upon the traditional symbols from Ezechiel and the Apocalypse of the four mystical creatures,” Merton started to read the New Testament, and formed a preliminary conception of what he later described as “the Christ of the Apocalypse, the Christ of the Martyrs, the Christ of the Fathers.”2 His path towards conversion to Christianity was to have many more twists and turns, but in 1938 he was received into the Catholic Church, and in 1941 astonished many of his friends by becoming a monk in one of the strictest of religious Orders: the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani, in Kentucky. In a life which divides almost exactly into two halves—pre- and post-monastic— the twenty-six-year-old novice would die twenty-seven years later, accidentally electrocuted whilst at a conference in Bangkok in 1968. During his life as a monk, thanks to the (sometimes conditional and always rather wary) tolerance of his superiors, Merton was allowed to continue to write in a range of genres, with the exception of novels. Although in his initial surge of enthusiasm and idealism Merton had been prepared to give up his writing, it is doubtful whether, in the long run, he could have sustained this renunciation. As early as 1949, he wrote in his journal: “I believe it has now become impossible for me to stop writing altogether. Perhaps I shall continue writing on my deathbed, and even take some asbestos paper with me in order to go on writing in purgatory.”3 Merton had started to write poems long before he entered the monastery, and he went on to produce hundreds more from the cloister. Together with drafts and fragments, and his translations into English of the work of other poets (from French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Portuguese, Persian, and Chinese), the volume of his collected poems4 amounts to over one thousand pages. No doubt the economy of poetry was on one level better suited than longer pieces to the brief intervals affforded by the monastic day, punctuated with frequent halting of activity for the

Silence (London: Hollis and Carter, 1949). In a Foreword, Evelyn Waugh describes this version as having been “renamed and very slightly abridged in order to adapt it to European tastes” (v). 2 Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 120. 3 Thomas Merton, Entering the Silence: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Montaldo (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 365. 4 Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1980). “History is Done” 323 liturgy, including the 2 am rise for Matins.5 On another level, however, poetry was for Merton the voie royale towards the meaningful communication of impulses and ideas. In his essay, “Poetry, Symbolism and Typology,” he writes: “The poet uses words not merely to make declarations, statements of fact. […] A good poem induces an experience that could not be produced by any other combination of words. It is therefore an entity that stands by itself, graced with an individuality that marks it offf from every other work of art.”6 More than simply an individual expression or an act of contemplation, poetry also became for Merton a vital site for political, social, and ideological challenge, for speaking truth to power. In a message to young Latin American poets gathered in Mexico City in February 1964, he suggested that “there are now in our world new people, new poets who are not in tutelage to established political systems or cultural structures—whether communist or capitalist— but who dare to hope in their own vision of reality and of the future.” On this footing, he felt able to afffĳiliate the vocation of a poet with that of a monk: “If we are to remain united […] against all power that poisons man and subjects him to the mystifĳications of bureaucracy, commerce, and the police state, we must refuse the price tag. […] Let us remain outside ‘their’ categories. It is in this sense that we are all monks: for we remain innocent and invisible to publicists and bureaucrats.”7 It is not necessary to look far in Merton’s oeuvre to fĳind examples of poems in which he explicitly confronts the murderous contradictions he discerns in state and society, especially in relation to planning for war. This essay began with an extract from Merton’s lengthy poem, “Figures for an Apocalypse.”8 Its imagery of tall towers falling in flames inevitably takes on an all-too-raw and vivid colouring in this post 9/11 era. I shall return to that poem later on—not to suggest any supernatural prescience on Merton’s part, but to link it to the ways in which Merton challenges his readers not only to inhabit their own history but also to discern the unsteady legs which propel that familiar history, and that familiar geography, towards a cloudy future.

5 One of Merton’s fellow monks later reflected that: “Even if Tom had been given all his work time for writing, it would have added up to only four hours a day, the time broken into two periods.” Basil M. Pennington, Thomas Merton, Brother Monk: The Quest for True Freedom (New York: Continuum, 1997), 9. 6 Thomas Merton, “Poetry, Symbolism and Typology,” in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New York: New Directions, 1985), 327–337 (327). 7 Thomas Merton, “Message to Poets,” in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, 371–374 (at 371, 372 and 373). 8 Thomas Merton, Figures for an Apocalypse (New York: New Directions, 1947), 12–28. 324 Bryden

“Figures for an Apocalypse” was in fact written in 1947, in the immediate aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, an event which later prompted Merton to write the extended meditation he called “Original Child Bomb.” Amid the devastating irony of that piece—fĳinally published in late 1961 after long delays caused by censors—Merton characterises the bomb not as a cold and metallic weapon, but as a tenderly nurtured infant, nick- named “The Little Boy” by its handlers, and then carried across the ocean in the womb of a B-29 bomber which its commander baptised “Enola Gay,” after his mother in Iowa. Merton also picks out the religious undercurrents which attended the event: “Many who saw the experiment expressed their satisfaction in religious terms. A semi-offfĳicial report even quoted a religious book— The New Testament, ‘Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief’. There was an atmosphere of devotion. It was a great act of faith.”9 It is no coincidence that “Original Child Bomb” was written during the increasing tensions of the Cold War, soon to intensify around the issues of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban mis- sile crisis. Born when World War I was at its height, Merton experienced his lifetime as being repeatedly stamped with the scars of conflict such as these. He wrote: “That I should have been born in 1915, that I should be the contemporary of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam and the Watts riots, are things about which I was not fĳirst consulted. Yet they are also events in which, whether I like it or not, I am deeply and personally involved.”10 On the evening of 6 April 1968, Merton was having supper in Lexington with a visitor. They saw on the television news a report about Martin Luther King speaking the previous evening in Memphis. After leaving, they heard on the car radio that he had been shot. Merton later wrote in his journal that the murder “lay on the top of the travelling car like an animal, a beast of the apocalypse.”11 At the time of the assassination, plans had already been provisionally made for Dr King to visit the Abbey of Gethsemani to make a private retreat alongside Merton. Writing to one of their mutual friends on the day of the funeral, Merton remarked: “These have been terrible days for everyone, and God alone knows what is to come. I feel that we have really crossed a defĳinitive line into a more apocalyptic kind of time.”12 These events, as Merton wrote in

9 Thomas Merton, “Original Child Bomb,” in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, 293–302 (297). 10 Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action (Garden City, ny: Doubleday and Company, 1971), 161. 11 Thomas Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 7, ed. Patrick Hart (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 78. 12 Thomas Merton, Letter of 9 April 1968 to June J. Yungblut, in Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love, ed. William H. Shannon (London: Collins, 1990), 645. “History is Done” 325 his journal, “confĳirmed […] the feeling that 1968 is a beast of a year, that things are fĳinally and inexorably spelling themselves out.”13 Indeed, just a few months later, in that same “beast of a year,” Merton was himself to die in an absurd and untimely accident. That idea of the beasts of apocalypse, pawing at the margins of life, or prancing across it, recurs on various levels in Merton’s writing. However, the implications of it within Merton’s aesthetic and within his notions of eschatology require careful examination. Apocalyptic expression tends to resurface in more urgent form at times of perceived crisis or disillusion. It offfers a method of reading disastrous events as foreshadowings of a much greater upheaval, a catastrophic eschatology in which a defĳinitive break in history occurs. Through the smoke of conflagration, some form of shining path can normally be glimpsed within the Judaeo-Christian traditions. Yet Apocalypse often poses more questions than it answers. Who or what precipi- tates it? Who negotiates the human/divine agency? Does God cause it, allow it, or grieve helplessly over it? Who survives it? Do they survive death, or survive after death? And how does the newly restored creation avoid the errors of the previous one? In the meantime, as Samuel Beckett’s narrator Moran humor- ously formulates it in the novel Molloy (a book well known to Merton):14 “How much longer are we to hang about waiting for the antechrist? [sic]”15 For Merton, the age is one of two superimposed eschatologies. The fĳirst is the Biblical one, the expected revelation of divine fulfĳilment. The second relates to what he calls “the vague and anxious eschatology of human foreboding.”16 Merton sees the two as superimposed because sometimes the secular anxiety is mistaken for the Biblical anticipation, and sometimes it results from denial or despair of it. Hence human beings may waver between fear of a violent end—the human cost of Armageddon—and hope for an ensuing

13 Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain, 78. 14 Merton had qualifĳied admiration for Beckett. Less keen on his “Trilogy” of novels—Mol- loy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—he nevertheless enthused about the short story collection More Pricks Than Kicks, and about later works such as Ping. In 1967 he experimented with reading some Beckett onto tape and playing it back, fĳinding “beautiful simplicity in drabness.” See Learning to Love: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 6, ed. Christine M. Bochen (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 224. See also Mary Bryden, “From Writing to Silence: Thomas Merton,” The Tablet, 13 December 2008, 8–9. 15 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in The Beckett Trilogy (London: Picador, 1979), 153. “Antichrist” is meant, being the correct translation of the word “l’antéchrist” used in the original French Molloy, the prefĳix here denoting opposition and not anteriority. 16 Thomas Merton, “The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room,” in Raids on the Unspeakable (Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates, 1977), 44–54 (44). 326 Bryden renewal of creation. However, the Biblical version is itself not static, and Merton was also working during the 1960s towards an adumbration of a dynamic eschatology with its roots in the here and now. In 1964, he writes in his journal: “I am coming to see clearly the great importance of the concept of ‘realized eschatology’—the transformation of life and of human relations by Christ now (rather than an eschatology focused on future cosmic events).”17 In this, he is undoubtedly indebted to the work of C.H. Dodd,18 in terms of the latter’s emphasis upon a present eschatological reality rather than upon an impending apocalypse. Imbuing the notion with the electricity of his own historical moment, Merton sees realised eschatology as being of “tremendous importance for the Christian peace efffort.” Yet he does not exclude some kind of cataclysmic convulsion: “The duty [that of the preaching of peace and unity], however, does not mean that there will not at the same time be great cosmic upheavals. The preaching of peace by a remnant in an age of war and violence is one of the eschatological characteristics of the life of the Church.”19 I want to suggest that this ideational testbed of Merton can be seen as a careful carving-out of a channel between two of the elements feeding into theological debate and dialogue in the 1960s: on the one hand, the Marxist faith in teleology, and, on the other, the cosmic evolutionary theory of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In one sense Merton could feel a kind of claustrophobia wafting from both sides: the inevitability of class struggle on the one hand, and the inevitability of cosmic Christ-infused evolutionary progress on the other. Yet both offfered an attractive future-oriented perspective. The influential theologian Bernard Häring (who had visited Merton in 1963) could write both that Marxist ideology “belongs to ‘prophecy’; it shows a way out of the unacceptable present”20 and that Teilhard de Chardin offfers “the vitality of a new humanism […] and a new freedom to participate consciously and creatively in the future shape of humanity.”21 Merton was all too well aware of the Marxist contention that preoccupations with Christian transcendence undermine humanitarian imperatives. He was also conscious that his own status as what we might call a “career contemplative” was potentially vulnerable to allegations of inertia from supporters of both the crusading atheist

17 Entry of 7 March 1964, in Dancing in the Water of Life: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 5, ed. Robert E. Daggy (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 87. 18 I am grateful to Rev. Prof. Paul S. Fiddes for this reminder. Merton was familiar with Dodd’s writing, and referred to his 1946 The Bible Today, for example, as “a remarkable book.” See Thomas Merton, Turning Toward the World: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 4, ed. Victor A. Kramer (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 65. 19 Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life, 87. 20 Bernard Häring, Free and Faithful in Christ, vol. 3 (Slough: St Paul Publications, 1981), 158. 21 Bernard Häring, Free and Faithful in Christ, vol. 2 (Slough: St Paul Publications, 1979), 348. “History is Done” 327

Marx and of the priest-scientist and World War I veteran Teilhard de Chardin. However austere the cloistered vocation, its wellsprings could be viewed as deriving from an eschatology of passivity and quietism. Merton makes explicit reference to this in a journal entry on the Feast of St Benedict, 1966: “On both sides, Marxist and Teilhardian, there is agreement in rejecting the contemplative life as ‘static’—because it accepts God simply as infĳinite, transcendent-immanent presence and truth in its wish for the dynamism of salvation history to work out.”22 It is this background which should illumine the signifĳicant moves towards a new self-defĳinition, driven by a redefĳined eschatological imperative, which Merton formulates in the last decade of his life. In the fĳirst place he distances himself from the notion of inhabiting a sequestered monastic space, legiti- mated by ancient wisdom, and begins to refer to himself as a “Christian exis- tentialist.” The character of his existentialism is diffferentiated from the fĳirmly atheist undertow associated with a fĳigure like Jean-Paul Sartre, and from the more ambiguous religious positioning of Albert Camus. Most importantly, Merton here declares his commitment to the immediacy of the unfolding moment, with its challenge to make a choice, not just in the domain of the spiritual, but also in the domains of the political and ethical. In doing so, he begins to evolve a radically active and process-based conception of soul. Soul is not simply an Aristotelian essential form, he declares, a static asset to be “entrust[ed] […] to some institutional bank for deposit until it is recovered with interest in heaven.”23 Rather, he says: “Speaking as a Christian existential- ist, I mean by ‘soul’ […] the mature personal identity, the creative fruit of an authentic and lucid search, the ‘self’ that is found after other partial and exterior selves have been discarded as masks.”24 Moreover, that self was to be not an individual work of art, but a self-in-community. As he wrote in his journal in late 1960: “Not concerned with mere perfecting of my own life. This, as Marxists see, is an indecent luxury (because there is so much illusion in it). My solitude belongs to society.”25 In this respect, Merton comes very close to the dialectic which so preoccupied Camus—the two almost identical words which designated two very diffferent modes of being: “solitaire” and “solidaire”26 (“solitary,” on the one hand; “in solidarity,” on the other).

22 Merton, Learning to Love, 32. 23 Thomas Merton, “Learning to Live,” in Love and Living, ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Patrick Hart (London: Sheldon Press, 1979), 3–24 (4). 24 Merton, “Learning to Live,” 4. 25 Merton, Turning Toward the World, 74. 26 See, for example, the story “Jonas ou l’artiste au travail,” in the collection L’Exil et le royaume (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). Camus’s daughter, Cathérine Camus, used the opposition 328 Bryden

This sense of not only having a stake in society but also having a lived commitment to it was all part of Merton’s embrace of that realised eschatology which is rooted in an ontological present. The intellectual and theological Zeitgeist, including the vivacious thinking which characterised much of the Second Vatican Council, is an important factor here. However, in his exposition of this realised eschatology, Merton notes, as indicated earlier, that embracing the duty to preach interpersonal reconciliation does not exclude the possibility of global devastation or catastrophe. Accordingly, it seems that the most signifĳicant driver of this imperative—the thing which gave it its apocalyptic orientation for Merton—was something quite independent of ecclesiastical structures: namely, the arms race. As nuclear stockpiling, nuclear testing, and nuclear stand-offfs proceeded during the 1960s, Merton discerned with increasing clarity and urgency that, institutional pressures notwithstanding, he could not remain silent. In 1958, he had written in his journal: “The more I read about Russia the more I think it is better to be silent about what goes on in the world and not mix oneself up in it. Except, too, that I think one ought to make some kind of a statement of one’s position—when one had an intelligent statement to make, which perhaps I do not yet have [my italics].”27 By an early point in the next decade, Merton was hesitating no longer. Moreover, his reflections on war and peace were leading him, as was also the case with Albert Camus, to point to the fĳirst half of the twentieth century as being the bloodiest in world history. Towards the end of his 1946 poem, “La Salette,” he had written that: “John, in the might of his Apocalypse, could not foretell//Half of the story of our monstrous century.”28 Now, in the early 1960s, in his prose-poem “Chant to be Used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces,” he chillingly ventriloquises a Nazi camp commandant, who concludes his address to the reader with the searing words: “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”29 The theologian Jim Douglass writes that the poem electrifĳied him as a graduate student: “What it meant was that a silent monk had shattered a larger silence […] the silence of the American Catholic Church on the threat of nuclear holocaust.”30 When the impact

in a biographical portrait of her father: Cathérine Camus and Marcelle Mahasela, Albert Camus, Solitaire et Solidaire (Paris: Michel Lafon, 2009). 27 Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol.3, ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 205. 28 Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, 131. 29 Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, 345–349 (349). 30 James W. Douglass, Foreword to Thomas Merton, Cold War Letters, ed. Christine M. Bochen and William H. Shannon (New York: Orbis Books, 2006), x. “History is Done” 329 created by this and by other writings, including “Original Child Bomb,” resulted in Merton temporarily being forbidden by the Cistercian order to publish anything further on war and peace, he simply continued to write and circulate a torrent of letters to an international circle of correspondents. In these remarkable letters, the apocalyptic tone is often very deliberately deployed. To one correspondent, in June 1962, he writes: “We live in prophetic and eschatological times, and by and large everyone is asleep.”31 In attempting to wake everyone up to the potential catastrophe of nuclear conflict, Merton had also introduced acute conflict into his own monastic environment. That environment was one sufffused with silence, imbued with the perception that, as Merton put it: “The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smokescreen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things. In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things.”32 Silence remained for him a productive resource, an accompaniment to some of his most intense thinking about world afffairs. Yet he also discerned that silence needed to be constantly reinvigorated, that a complacent or institutionalised silence held the threat that “the silence ceases to be vivid and becomes dead.”33 Moreover, in this later period of enforced restraint, silence also now took on a negative capability: that of complicity, and that of censor- ship. He recorded in his journal in 1964: “Certainly I refuse complicity. My silence itself is a protest, and those who know me are aware of this fact. I have at least been able to write enough to make that clear.”34 Merton had written in the last chapter of his collection No Man is an Island that: “In silence, we learn to make distinctions. Those who fly silence, fly also from distinctions.”35 The quiet operation of distinctions did enable Merton to clarify his thoughts on the way in which even well-intentioned grand-design templates for humanity’s historical development may usher murderous or genocidal events into a framework of theoretical neutrality or necessity. In the context of one of his late essays (1967), on Camus’s novel La Peste, Merton was able to reflect further on Teilhard de Chardin, and to conclude that, though Camus would have lauded Teilhard’s aspiration for human unity, “it is rather doubtful whether he would have been able to accept the evolutionary and historical scheme of Teilhardian soteriology.”36 Though highly sympathetic

31 Letter to William Robert Miller, Cold War Letters, 147. 32 Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1975), 83. 33 Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, 86. 34 Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life, 84. 35 Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island (London: Burns & Oates, 1955), 229. 36 Thomas Merton, “The Plague of Albert Camus: A Commentary and Introduction,” in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, 181–251 (216). 330 Bryden towards Teilhard for his courage to persevere in the face of influential voices in the Vatican hierarchy who thought him unorthodox—after all, Merton himself was no stranger to this phenomenon—he remarked that Teilhard was prone to, as he put it, “look at existential evil and sufffering through the small end of the telescope.” “It is unfortunately true,” he continued, “that Teilhard, like many other Christians, regarded the dead and wounded of Hiroshima with a certain equanimity as inevitable by-products of scientifĳic and evolutionary progress.”37 Merton himself could never inoculate himself against the lingering impact of these events. Moreover, their obscenity insisted itself all the more in the light of nuclear escalation. As he composes his responses to this, Merton increasingly uses language denoting an approaching cataclysm, an end to time and history. In one of his most powerful texts, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, he lays out a volcanic episode ahead for humanity: “We are living in the greatest revolution in history—a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race: not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race, or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody.”38 However, it is important here to recognise a vital element in Merton’s apocalyptic vision which diffferentiates it from the inevitable revolution envisaged by Marx or the inevitable evolutionary “Christifĳication” envisaged by Teilhard, and endows it with a distinctive dynamism. For Merton, the cataclysm on the horizon was not inevitable. It was not a pre-ordained visitation from on high. Rather, it derived from the operations of humanity, mired in a spiritual degeneration which, though desperately entrenched, was still recuperable. Hence the perceived urgency of Merton’s interventions. In his desperate letters of 1961/62, we see a litany of possible sources of averting strengths. He says in a letter to Bruno Schlesinger that women could provide the pathway of escape: “I think women are perhaps capable of salvaging something of humanity in our world today.”39 The contribution of Fidel Castro had in his view been closed down prematurely; so, too, had the possibilities of dialogue with representatives from the Soviet Union. As he writes in a letter to Ethel Kennedy: “Every form of healthy human contact with Russia and above all China is to be encouraged. We have got to see each other as people and not as demons.”40 This perception was applicable to every level in which Merton’s own effforts were operating, not least the monastery and the Cistercian Order, whose stance he

37 Merton, “The Plague of Albert Camus,” 216. 38 Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 66–67. 39 Merton, Cold War Letters, 23. 40 Merton, Cold War Letters, 27. “History is Done” 331 characterises with despairing satire: “Let us go up in radioactive dust still bliss- fully imagining it is the twelfth century and that St. Bernard is roving up and down the highways and byways of old France preaching the crusade […]. Monks must preach to the birds, for the birds, and only for the birds.”41 He even wrote to the Mayor of Hiroshima, three days after the seventeenth anniversary of the dropping of the H-bomb, stating that: “We are all walking backward towards a precipice. We know the precipice is there, but we assert that we are all the while going forward.”42 Of course, Apocalypse has always had two manifestations—one as a theological world-view, and the other as a literary genre. Merton puts both manifestations to work, but it is in his poetry that he is able to condense his thinking into the most compelling series of images. The latter part of this essay, then, will return to the poem with which it began: “Figures for an Apocalypse,” picking out some key elements from this complex and lengthy piece. The poem is divided into eight parts, many of them evocative of the literatures of the Bible. The fĳirst part, with its opening line “Come down, come down Beloved,” uses the sensual and luxuriant imagery of the Song of Songs, though this is quickly curtailed to connect the arrival of the Beloved with “the world’s last night” and “the wrath of Armageddon.” The sweeps and panoramas of the poem cover images of afffluent, bony women grieving for their lost jewels, a fĳigure like that in the Book of Apocalypse who advances, slicing through the “sleepy world” with a sickle, a prophet who had predicted wealth and plenty being pinned down and eaten by a wild dog, and a dragon emerging from a muddy river. What is Merton doing with this poem? Is he simply feeding offf the rich image-box already provided by the Book of Revelation and the Poetry and Wisdom Literature to create arresting word-pictures? As the poem progresses, it becomes clear that those biblical resonances are providing a framework for something much more complex. Merton begins to insert elements from the modernist cityscape of bars, bridges and subways. Alongside references to Juda and Babylon are names such as the “Hotel Wonderland” and the “Fauntleroy Bar.” Time and place become elastic, while what remains constant is the sense of hidden threat. The “Hotel Sherlock Holmes” appears to be a comfortable heritage venue, but is in fact a place under surveillance, where the walls are “full of ears.” The hour is said to be one in which “cities turn to butter//For fear of the secret bomb.” Also evident is an increasing alienation of the population from direct transactions and processes of the natural world. The inhabitants

41 Merton, Cold War Letters, 135. 42 Merton, Cold War Letters, 174. 332 Bryden rely on touts instead of producers, timetables instead of trains, and radios instead of conversation. It is in the sixth section of the poem that Merton’s imagery seems to leap most noticeably into the twenty-fĳirst century. This section is set explicitly in “the ruins of New York,” the city in which Merton felt his origins to be most deeply embedded.43 This is a New York in which the great towers have been brought down in the flames of a hostile attack:

What fĳires and lights tore down, With the white anger of their sudden accusation, Those towers of silver and of steel?

Tomorrow, the poem declares, “grasses and flowers will grow//Upon the bosom of Manhattan,” but, in the immediate aftermath, “the ashes of the levelled towers still curl with tufts of smoke.” This had been a fĳinancial centre, and the epitaph is written in the embers of the building:

This was a city That dressed herself in paper money. She lived four hundred years With nickles running in her veins.

Now, the banks and theatres have become caves, and the collapsed subways are about to fĳill up with streams and fĳish. The fĳinal vision, in the last part of the poem, is one of the end of time and the end of conflict:

Because the cruel algebra of war Is now no more. And the steel circle of time, inexorable, Bites like a padlock shut, forever, In the smoke of the last bomb: And in that trap the murderers and sorcerers and crooked leaders Go rolling home to hell. And history is done.

43 When on a visit to New York in June 1964, to meet Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the Japanese scholar of Buddhism, Zen, and Shin, Merton wrote in his journal: “Extraordinary—when the girl came to ask my destination, and when New York came out as the most obvious and natural thing in the world, I suddenly realized after all that I was a New Yorker—and when people had asked my destination in the past, it was New York, to which I was coming back.” Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life, 114. “History is Done” 333

While making the common alignment of apocalypse with an end to history, Merton is also in a sense stretching history into shapes that are uncomfortably recognisable. This is especially the case when we read this poem in association with what Merton wrote elsewhere about technology and the commodifĳication of values, and about febrile economic and defence systems controlled by people glued to computer screens.44 In October 1964, Merton received from a friend a copy of the brand-new translation into English of the French sociologist Jacques Ellul’s 1954 work, La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle. In this lengthy and influential work, Ellul sets out a thesis built around a concept of “technique.” Distinct from the domain of machines with which it is often enmeshed, technique is defĳined as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efffĳiciency (for a given stage of development) in every fĳield of human activity.”45 For Ellul, the internal logic of technique has imposed itself onto almost every sphere of organisation and exchange, with the result that the inhuman imperative towards maximal efffĳiciency is progressively eroding human society and elimi- nating the natural world. Ellul traces these tendencies at work in the state, in political and economic systems, education, work, leisure, and even sport. It would be impossible here satisfactorily to summarise the full range of Ellul’s arguments, but what remains constant is his conviction that this diminishment of what is properly human will culminate in a society in which “there will be whole categories of men who will have no place at all, because universal adaptation will be required. Those who are adaptable will be so rigorously adapted that no play in the complex will be possible.”46 Almost sixty years after Ellul’s work was fĳirst published, it is not difffĳicult to recognise some of his prognostications exemplifĳied in the virtual-reality screen, tablet, or phone applications which mean “no more face-to-face encounters, no more dialogue,”47 or in the fĳinancial and dealing systems which are several steps removed from the faceless humans whose insatiable needs have supposedly triggered them. Merton’s initial reaction to the book was that it was “great, full of fĳire- crackers. A fĳine provocative book and one that really makes sense.”48 He thought that it should be required reading for the clerics and theologians at that time engaged with the formulation of Vatican Council documents—in

44 See, for example, his letter (December/January 1961/62) to Clare Boothe Luce: “Hence, the weapons keep us in a state of fury and desperation, with our fĳingers poised over the but- ton and our eyes glued on the radar screen.” Merton, Cold War Letters, 43. 45 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), xxv. 46 Ellul, The Technological Society, 398. 47 Ellul, The Technological Society, 379. 48 Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life, 161. 334 Bryden particular, with the pastoral constitution on “The Church in the Modern World,” which would discuss questions of economics, social justice, culture, science, and technology: “One cannot see what is involved in the question of ‘The Church in the Modern World’ without reading a book like this. I wonder if the Fathers are aware of all the implications of a technological society?”49 No doubt he also responded strongly to Ellul’s repeated contention that a society driven increasingly by technology is one moving relentlessly towards warfare of the deadliest kind: “War is now beyond human endurance in noise, movement, enormity of means, and precision of machines; and man himself has become merely an object, an object to be killed, and prey to a permanent panic that he is unable to translate into personal action.”50 A few days later, Merton was still reading the tome, and bringing its contents into alignment with his sense of the apocalyptic: “I am going on with Ellul’s prophetic and I think very sound diagnosis of the Technological Society. How few people really face the problem! It is the most portentous and apocalyptical thing of all, that we are caught in an automatic self-determining system in which man’s choices have largely ceased to count.”51 Yet, at length, Merton’s refĳining intellect, his attachment to the careful operation of distinctions, led him to a certain ambivalence about Ellul’s impassioned thesis. Much as he was instinctively drawn to Ellul’s defence of the more ancient rhythms of human interaction with nature, he could not exclude the possibility of an optimistic path for human society; nor could he overlook the many benefĳits which technology could bring. After reflection, he eventually wrote: “I think Ellul is perhaps too pessimistic. Not unreasonably so—but one must still have hope. Perhaps the self-determining course of technology is not as inexorably headed for the end he imagines.” While recognising the impeccable logic of Ellul’s argumentation, he observed: “But more is involved, thank heaven, than logic.”52 Merton had just bought a new lamp and stove for his hermitage in the woods. Thanks to advances in the development of kero- sene pressure lamps, this twentieth-century monk was able to benefĳit from a lamp some twenty times brighter than a conventional oil lamp. He wrote: “Should I complain of technology with this hissing, bright green light with its comforts and dangers? Or with the powerful flashlight I got at Sears that sends a bright hard pole of light probing deep into the forest?” Though he was appreciative of the moonlight, he was also aware that it was unable, crucially,

49 Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life, 161–162. 50 Ellul, The Technological Society, 320. 51 Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life, 161. 52 Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life, 163. “History is Done” 335 to support his study and reading: “I got the stove fĳilled and working yesterday, and the lamp this evening. It gives a brighter and better light to read by for long[er] periods than the other one does.”53 Ellul would not, of course, have resisted the acquisition of modern conve- niences such as these. Merton’s Coleman lamp in any case required careful pressurising, lighting, and maintenance by a human being. Rather, Ellul’s concern was with the need to identify those underpinnings of the technological society which fostered dehumanisation, which trapped human beings within the machinist paradigms of computers, and which devalued the study of humanities in favour of those subjects deemed to have direct links with wealth creation or with information technology. Nevertheless, the example stimulated by Merton’s reading of Ellul—that of a “bright hard pole of light” being projected through the darkness—is an apt metaphor for the enlightenment he sought on so many levels. From it, he hoped to discern not only the immediate environs, but also the place to which they might lead in the future. Merton remained for the most part more optimistic about the onward course of human society than did Ellul; nevertheless, his poetry, essays and letters indicate the recurrent incursion of the apocalyptic into his reflections. Though a piece such as “Figures for an Apocalypse” resounds so strikingly in the aftermath of 9/11, Merton’s observations have nothing to do with predictive powers or clairvoyance, except insofar as “clairvoyance” denotes literally the act of “seeing clearly.” Merton tried constantly to examine ideas and situations in as transparent and undeceived a way as possible. In his message to the meeting of young Latin American poets in 1964, he declared: “To prophesy is not to predict, but to seize upon reality in its moment of highest expectation and tension toward the new. This tension is discovered not in hypnotic elation but in the light of everyday existence. Poetry is innocent of prediction because it is itself the fulfĳilment of all the momentous predictions hidden in everyday life.”54 Apocalypse for Merton was not something imposed from without, but could develop insidiously within, from a process of micro-transactions. Nevertheless, he saw his role as a poet as having nothing to do with the didactic. Neither did he feel the need to conform to the expectations of others. Merton’s genius for the communication of ideas was itself being exerted in the unlikeliest of settings. “For a man who was restricted [at least, within the monastery] to conversing only in sign language,” observes

53 Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life, 163. 54 Thomas Merton, “Message to Poets,” The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, 373. 336 Bryden

Monica Furlong, “it was an extraordinary irony.”55 Yet his public profile created unpredictable reactions among his readership. A few months before his death, Merton recorded in his diary: “Today a curious letter came from ‘The Woman of the Apocalypse’. Quite imaginative and colorful and ‘apocalyptic’: how not? It seems part of her mission includes ‘marriage’— and I am not sure how intimately this is supposed to concern me. She accuses me of being afraid. Yes, I am. How much of this wild stuff am I going to have to contend with? […] Being a writer has its hazards.”56 One of the hazards, for one who could relate his apocalyptic apprehension to the unfolding events of contemporary life, was indeed that other people would attempt to recruit Merton into their own apocalyptic scenarios. Yet, as Rowan Williams has put it, Merton “drew back from binding himself to words and actions that threatened to become the breeding ground for new clichés. He wrote fĳinely on war and peace and the nuclear menace; but he declined fĳinally to become a house guru for the peace movement.”57 This was not for lack of commitment. In his student years, Merton had found in the modernist works he devoured an aesthetic of fragmentation and uncertainty which in some way mirrored his own experience of a peripatetic and rootless upbringing. Yet that reading was also inextricably interlaced with an outwardly-turned desire to fĳind a political and ideological path away from the next precipice. As he later recalled of those interwar years: “I wanted to devote myself to the causes of peace and justice in the world. I wanted to do something positive to interrupt and divert the gathering momentum that was dragging the whole world into another war.”58 Now, in 1968, he explicitly accesses his earlier internal treasury of modernism, to write in a 1968 essay on Joyce’s Ulysses that: “We must clearly understand the function of nonviolence against the background of the collapse of language. […] Unfortunately, mere words about peace, love, and civilization have completely lost all power to change anything.”59 On one level, this is a plea for the sonorous, Gandhi-like action of nonviolence. In addition, however, if convictions had somehow to communicate themselves beyond the dilapidation of words, Merton intuited that his most

55 Monica Furlong, Merton: A Biography (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), xv–xvi. 56 Thomas Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain, 73. 57 Rowan Williams, A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2011), 66. 58 Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 151. 59 Thomas Merton, “A Footnote from Ulysses: Peace and Revolution,” The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, 23–28 (at 27 and 28). “History is Done” 337 persuasive voice would be that of a poet rather than that of a polemicist. As Williams, one of the most perceptive of commentators on Merton, remarks: “Merton is sure enough of his real place, his real roots, to let some very strange and very strong winds blow over him, to let his understanding grow by this constant re-creation in himself of other human possibilities. […] Merton will not let me look at him for long: he will, fĳinally, persuade me to look in the direction he is looking.”60 In which direction, then, was Merton looking and pointing? Fluent as he was, he would refrain from answering that question, since, as he told his Latin American audience of poets in 1964: “The reason for a living act is realized only in the act itself. […] Let us be proud of the words that are given to us for nothing, not to teach anyone, not to confute anyone, not to prove anyone absurd, but to point beyond all objects into the silence where nothing can be said.”61 For Merton, that desired silence would not be the lifeless silence of annihilation, but, rather, the productive and dynamic silence which offfered the possibility of averting apocalypse.

Bibliography

Beckett, Samuel. Molloy. The Beckett Trilogy. London: Picador, 1979. Bryden, Mary. “From Writing to Silence: Thomas Merton,” The Tablet, 13 December 2008. Camus, Albert. L’Exil et le royaume. Paris: Gallimard, 1957. Camus, Cathérine and Marcelle Mahasela. Albert Camus, Solitaire et Solidaire. Paris: Michel Lafon, 2009. Ellul, Jacques. La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle. Paris: Armand Colin, 1954. ——. The Technological Society. Translated by John Wilkinson. New York: Vintage Books, 1964. Furlong, Monica. Merton: A Biography. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985. Häring, Bernard. Free and Faithful in Christ, vol. 2. Slough: St Paul Publications, 1979. ——. Free and Faithful in Christ, vol. 3. Slough: St Paul Publications, 1981. Merton, Thomas. Figures for an Apocalypse. New York: New Directions, 1947. ——. Elected Silence. London: Hollis and Carter, 1949. ——. No Man is an Island. London: Burns and Oates, 1955. ——. Contemplation in a World of Action. Garden City, ny: Doubleday and Company, 1971. ——. Thoughts in Solitude. Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates, 1975.

60 Rowan Williams, A Silent Action, 19. 61 “Message to Poets,” 371, 374. 338 Bryden

——. Raids on the Unspeakable. Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1977. ——. Love and Living. Edited by Naomi Burton Stone and Patrick Hart. London: Sheldon Press, 1979. ——. The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1980. ——. The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton. Edited by Patrick Hart. New York: New Directions, 1985. ——. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. New York: Doubleday, 1989. ——. The Hidden Ground of Love. Edited by William H. Shannon. London: Collins, 1990. ——. A Search for Solitude: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol.3. Edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ——. Entering the Silence: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 2. Edited by Jonathan Montaldo. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. ——. Turning Toward the World: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 4. Edited by Victor A. Kramer. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. ——. Dancing in the Water of Life: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 5. Edited by Robert E. Daggy. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. ——. Learning to Love: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 6. Edited by Christine M. Bochen. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. ——. The Other Side of the Mountain: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 7. Edited by Patrick Hart. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. ——. The Seven Storey Mountain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1998. ——. Cold War Letters. Edited by Christine M. Bochen and William H. Shannon. New York: Orbis Books, 2006. Pennington, Basil M. Thomas Merton, Brother Monk: The Quest for True Freedom. New York: Continuum, 1997. Williams, Rowan. A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton. Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2011. chapter 18 Apocalypse in Early ufo and Alien-Based Religions Christian and Theosophical Themes

Carole M. Cusack

Introduction1 ufo and alien-based religions crystallised as contemporary Western spiritual phenomena in the post-World-War-II era, and reflected both historico-political and moral anxieties about the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the atmosphere of paranoia and expectation of the “end of the world” that emerged as a result of the arms race between the United States of America and the Soviet Union.2 The theology of such religions drew upon two principal sources, one physical and the other spiritual. First, the hardware- oriented, proto-conspiracist sightings of “flying saucers” by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 and the Roswell Incident the same year, in which an unidentifĳied object crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, and the United States Air Force cleared the site of debris, seemed to provide evidence that ufos and the extra-terrestrials who travelled in them were real.3 Second, the Theosophical idea of Ascended Masters who could transmit occult knowledge to humanity by means of clai- raudient mediums or “channelling” was extended to include aliens from distant planets (in addition to Tibetan lamas, denizens of lost worlds like Atlantis and Mu, the dead, and other putative sources of wisdom).4 This potent mixture was married to the popular cultural narratives of science fĳiction, such as the influential “alien messiah” fĳilmThe Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). The themes of apocalypse and conspiracy were particularly congruent with the Cold-War atmosphere of paranoia and scapegoating; thus the notion that the appearance of ufos and the visitations by extra-terrestrials

1 My thanks are due to my research assistant, Venetia Robertson, who helped me with the initial library searches and note-taking for this chapter, and to Don Barrett, whose tireless encouragement has contributed in no small way to my research over the years. 2 John A. Saliba, “Religious Dimensions of ufo Phenomena,” in James R. Lewis (ed.), The Gods Have Landed: New Religions From Other Worlds (Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 1995), 54. 3 Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Volume II (London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2005), 170–171. 4 J. Gordon Melton, “The Contactees: A Survey,” in Lewis, The Gods Have Landed, 5–6.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282285_020 340 Cusack were signs that—unless peace on earth be achieved—the end times were at hand gained currency. The enlightened ones would be taken into the ships before the destruction of the world.5 ufo and alien-based religions developed in divergent directions; while some advocated an eschaton of battle and destruction (e.g., the Church Universal and Triumphant), others envisaged a harmonious Intergalactic Parliament in which humans participated in peace (e.g., the Aetherius Society). This chapter examines the apocalyptic expectations of several ufo and alien-based religions, and identifĳies both their sources in the religious currents of the early twentieth century, and their imbrication with post-War political discourses.

Modernity, Science and Religion ufo and alien-based religions emerged in the wake of World War II and drew on alternative spiritual currents including Theosophy and esoteric Christianity and the anti-Communist and militaristic rhetoric of the democratic West, particularly America. These “spiritual” and “material” sources employed radically diffferent notions of modernity, particularly in terms of the relationship between science and religion. Theosophy, founded by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) and American Civil War veteran Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) in New York in 1875 manifested particular nineteenth- century interests, chief among which were the unifĳication of “Western” and “Eastern” religions and erasure of the divide between science and religion.6 These two aims were related, in that Blavatsky claimed that the traditional religion of the West, Christianity, was incompatible with the new science of evolution, whereas the religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, were not. Mark Bevir has stated that “Blavatsky…outlined an occult cosmology which embraced both a geological time scale and an evolutionary view of development” and that she “denied that occult science transgressed the law of nature.”7 Theosophy embraced the quest for a “key to all mythologies,” advocated gender and racial equality, explored esoteric themes including the paranormal and lost civilisations like Atlantis, and forecast the imminent arrival of the “World Teacher” (known variously as Maitreya—from the Buddhist tradition—or the

5 Ruth Montgomery, Aliens Among Us (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1985), 21. 6 Mark Bevir, “The West Turns Eastwards: Madame Blavatsky and the Transformation of the Occult Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63:3 (1994), 748. 7 Bevir, “The West Turns Eastwards,” 753. Apocalypse In Early Ufo And Alien-based Religions 341

Cosmic Christ), whose coming would inaugurate mass enlightenment in a benevolent eschatological scenario.8 In contrast, the Enlightenment philosophers in the eighteenth century and the scientists of the nineteenth century advocated a broadly anti-religious position. The power of reason was celebrated: this led to the denial of Christian doctrines including original sin and the assertion rather that humans were born free and good; vocal criticism of sources of authority like religious and governmental institutions; the promotion of science as a disinterested source of truth; an interest in the rights of those formerly excluded from power (e.g., slaves and women), and widespread agitation for democratic change.9 This view of modern culture shared an emphasis on science and progress with Blavatsky’s articulation of Theosophical modernity, but was opposed to both magic and religion whereas she argued for their continued relevance. In the twentieth century two world wars intensifĳied disafffection from institutional Christianity, and after World War II knowledge of Nazi death camps, in particular, caused disillusionment with science and progress as master narratives. From the 1950s spirituality and religion would return to challenge science’s claim to be the only authenticated source of knowledge, the scientifĳic understanding of reality as unchallengeable. The post-War period was fertile ground for conspiracy theories, with the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war fuelling citizens’ distrust of govern- ments, both democratically-elected and Communist. What is termed “UFOlogy” is dated from 1947, the year of the sighting of flying discs by Kenneth Arnold and the Roswell Incident, the “Ground Zero” event of UFOlogists. John A. Saliba has argued that the majority of people interested in UFOlogy are not religious, but are rather social scientists, natural scientists, government and the military, conspiracy theorists, adventurers, and hobbyists.10 However, UFOlogy has often re-worked narratives derived from religion, and UFOlogical organisations range from decidedly non-religious to decidedly religious groups, such as the Ashtar Command, the Nation of Islam, the Raelians, and Heaven’s Gate.11 There is as yet no scientifĳically valid evidence for the existence of alien life, and speculation about ufo visits to Earth is dependent on unscholarly

8 Al Boag, “From Blavatsky to Krishnamurti: Hindu Chronology, Biblical Eschatology, Physiology,” Literature & Aesthetics 21:1 (2011): 116–134. 9 Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Tolerance Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 291. 10 Saliba, “Religious Dimensions of ufo Phenomena,” 17–22. 11 Daniel Wojcik, “Apocalyptic and Millenarian Aspects of American Ufoism,” in Christopher Partridge (ed.), ufo Religions (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 280–281. 342 Cusack interpretations of archaeological sites, esoteric phenomena, religious texts, and a range of other “evidence.” It is thus necessary to analyse the appeal of UFOlogical narratives in the modern West. Three methodological concepts are employed in this chapter to identify the sources upon which ufo-based “alternative eschatologies” draw: rejected knowledge, the cultic milieu, and stigmatised knowledge claims. Rejected knowledge is a concept promoted by the Scottish chronicler of the occult, James Webb (1946–1980). He proposed that knowledge claims that emanated from “the Establishment” were regarded as suspect, and views that opposed the dominant worldview were understood to retreat into subcultural under- grounds.12 This retreat from mainstream perceptions can be observed in the espousal of “fringe” notions, by groups like Theosophy, sectarian Christianity, esoteric fraternities, and pseudo-scientifĳic advocates. The second concept, that of the “cultic milieu,” was developed by the English sociologist Colin Campbell.13 In his thought this is a genuine subculture with both ideological and social structures, rather than merely a floating reservoir of “spiritual beliefs.” The cultic milieu is by nature hostile to authority, but has unifying tendencies that involve the media, collective institutions, and social networks.14 The third concept is that of “stigmatized knowledge,” which Michael Barkun has divided into fĳive categories: (a) forgotten knowledge, which was once known but has been lost (e.g., the ancient wisdom once possessed by the inhabitants of Atlantis); (b) superseded knowledge, which was once authorita- tively recognised but has since lost status (e.g., astrology and alchemy); (c) ignored knowledge, including claims that have persisted in low-prestige social groups but are not taken seriously by the educated middle class (e.g., folk medicine); (d) rejected knowledge, meaning those claims which are explicitly rejected as false (e.g., ufo abductions); and (e) suppressed knowledge, which comprised those knowledge claims that are allegedly known by the authorities but are deliberately concealed due to selfĳish motives (e.g., alien visitations, secret cancer cures, and so on).15 These forms of rejected knowledge all rely on the existence of a conspiracy that inextricably links them to alternative spirituality, in which “(a) nothing happens by accident, (b) nothing is as it seems, (c) everything is

12 James Webb, The Occult Establishment (La Salle, il: Open Court, 1974), 10. 13 Colin Campbell, “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu, and Secularization,” A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5 (1972): 119–136. 14 Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (London: University of California Press, 2003), 25. 15 Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 27. Apocalypse In Early Ufo And Alien-based Religions 343 connected…principles [which] are fundamental to much New Age thought and alternative spirituality.”16 Conspiracy acts as both the explanation for why certain types of knowledge are rejected, and as a guarantee of their reliability. It has been noted that many new religious forms in late modernity exhibit what Barkun has termed “fact-fĳiction reversal,” in which notions of fĳictional and factual explanations are abandoned, or are actually exchanged. This rationale results in disbelief in the basic fabric of reality (i.e., life as it presents itself in “commonsense” terms).17 In contrast, novels and fĳilms are believed to contain foundational truths that are hidden in fĳictional forms because they are dangerous to “the establishment.” Recent examples of this phenomenon with a specifĳically apocalyptic tinge include the Y2K panic in late 1999, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Christian “end times” series of novels, Left Behind (1995– 2007), the X-Files (1993–2002) television series, fĳilms including Armageddon (1998), Avatar (2009), and The Book of Eli (2010), and the so-called “Mayan apocalypse,” predicted for 21 December 2012 by New Age fĳigure José Arguelles (who was also responsible for the Harmonic Convergence, a globally synchro- nised meditation which took place on 16 and 17 August 1987), and popularised by UFOlogical conspiracists such as David Icke.18

Apocalypse, End Times, and World Renewal

This chapter uses a number of interrelated terms to describe the “end times” speculations of ufo and alien-based religions. “Apocalyptic” is derived from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις (apocálypsis), which has the literal meaning of uncovering or revelation. In Judeo-Christian religion, this “revelation” is of the imminent “end times” and the transformational upheaval the world must undergo.19 Closely related terms include eschatology (the study of the end times), from the Greek eschaton meaning “last.” Richard Landes has argued that eschatology is both a secular and a religious discourse, concerned with what are believed to be the fĳinal events of history. He also linked millennialism, millenarianism, and chiliasm to this complex of ideas.20 The millennium has a

16 David Voas and Charlotte Ward, “The Emergence of Conspirituality,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 26:1 (2011), 104. 17 Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 29. 18 Voas and Ward, “The Emergence of Conspirituality,” 112. 19 Richard Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 18. 20 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 20–21. 344 Cusack specifĳic meaning in Christianity, which Stephen Hunt defĳined as “[a] period of a thousand years, especially that of Christ’s reign in person on earth.”21 These terms are used indiscriminately, and may serve to indicate the absolute end of time, the total destruction of the world, or merely to refer to the passing of an aspect of the current order that is deemed undesirable. The most notable aspect of millennial thought in the alternative milieu is, as Richard Landes has said, that “millennialism is a meme programmed to spread as rapidly and pervasively as possible. Under the right—apocalyptic—conditions, that meme can spread at epidemic speeds…with explosive force.”22 The positive outcome of such end-times scenarios is that the destruction of the present reality ushers in the new world. This can be seen in Christian- influenced New Age thinkers such as Ruth Montgomery and Edgar Cayce, whose visions posited that the return of Jesus to Earth “follows a period of […] catastrophes but inaugurates the New Age millennium.”23 Michael York argued that contemporary New Age millenarianism is often Gnostic, rather than orthodox Christian in tone. He noted that the New Age takes an “essentially Gnostic stance concerning the unreality or at least the devaluing of the material…[but] does not accept the Gnostic duality between cosmic good and cosmic evil.”24 Yet Christian-oriented ufo religions such as Heaven’s Gate, and the Christian and Hindu-influenced Church Universal and Triumphant (cut) both exhibited the duality between cosmic good and cosmic evil in their theology of the end times.

The Christian Apocalypse in ufo Religions

A potent mixture of apocalyptic expectation, conspiracy politics, and ideas about the “true nature” of humanity, reality, and the future was married to the popular cultural narratives of science fĳiction in the 1950s, including the influential “alien messiah” fĳilm The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Scripted by Edmund H. North (with a score by composer Bernard Herrmann, famous for

21 Stephen Hunt, “Introduction: The Christian Millennium—An Enduring Theme,” in Stephen Hunt (ed.), Christian Millenarianism: From the Early Church to Waco (London: Hurst & Company, 2001), 2. 22 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 9. 23 Michael York, “New Age Millenarianism and Its Christian Influences,” in Christian Millenarianism: From the Early Church to Waco, ed. Stephen Hunt (London: Hurst & Company, 2001), 225. 24 York, “New Age Millenarianism and Its Christian Influences,” 233. Apocalypse In Early Ufo And Alien-based Religions 345 his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock), the plot portrayed an alien messiah, Klaatu, accompanied by his robot bodyguard Gort, who landed in a spaceship in Washington in the United States.25 Klaatu’s mission is to inform humanity that violence, and the threat of nuclear war in particular, is alarming the peace- ful citizens of other planets. During his sojourn on Earth, Klaatu is given a tour of the city by Bobby, a small boy. He is grieved to learn that those in the Arlington National Cemetery have perished in wars, and he warns Professor Barnhart that Earth must embrace peace. Yet, rather than heed his message of peace, humans choose to kill Klaatu, who like Jesus is resurrected on the third day. He then departs Earth, with the dire warning that “humanity must submit to live peacefully, being watched over by the robots (like Gort) or be destroyed.”26 This model was explicitly Christian and posited that aliens were benevolent beings of superior wisdom, who desired only to assist humanity. A rather diffferent, though still Christian-themed, scenario emerged in the early 1970s, when Marshall Herfff Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie-Lu Nettles (1927–1985) who were also known as Bo and Peep, Guinea and Pig, and Ti and Do, taught that Jesus was a being from the next kingdom who had become incarnate in the womb of Mary. He awakened to this fact while on Earth and began teaching others the way to ascend to the next kingdom. Applewhite and Nettles believed they were “the Two,” that is the two witnesses spoken of in Revelation 11:3.27 The Two taught a complex dispensationalist view of world history, in which there were seven eras, fĳive of which were in the past (the biblical ages from Adam to Jesus), one of which was present, and one in the future. Although they were both Christians, Nettles had been a “member of the Houston Theosophical Society and a amateur astrolo- ger [and] inhabited a New Age subculture of disincarnate spirits, ascended masters, telepathic powers, and hidden and revealed gnosis.”28 This influenced their apocalyptic vision, which remained basically Biblical, but also incorporated elements of science fĳiction,ufo religion, and Theosophically-influenced notions such as Heaven’s Gate members being “walk-ins,” or supernatural

25 Wojcik, “Apocalyptic and Millenarian Aspects of American Ufoism,” 275. 26 Matthew Etherden, “The Day the Earth Stood Still: 1950s Sci-Fi, Religion and the Alien Messiah,” Journal of Religion and Film 9:2 (2005), www.unomaha.edu/jrf/Vol9No2/ EtherdenEarthStill.htm. Accessed December 10, 2009. 27 Robert Balch, “Waiting For the Ships: Disillusionment and the Revitalization of Faith in Bo and Peep’s ufo Cult,” in Lewis, The Gods Have Landed, 142. 28 Benjamin Ethan Zeller, “Scaling Heaven’s Gate: Individualism and Salvation in a New Religious Movement,” in George Chryssides (ed.), Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group (Farnham and Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2011), 157. 346 Cusack beings who had deliberately entered mortal bodies, in order to assist humans to enter “the Next Level” which was preferable to “spending your energy at the human level.”29 In 1988, three years after Nettles had died, Applewhite issued an important statement that explained that new members (or students) “were briefed as a crew aboard a spacecraft about how they would incarnate into human vehicles in order to do a task. They left their Kingdom ‘world’ and came into this ‘world’ beginning in the late 1940s…some left their Next Level bodies via so-called ufo ‘crashes’.”30 This in efffect argued that Heaven’s Gate members were essentially aliens on Earth, “stranger[s] in a strange land” like Moses, in Exodus 2:22. In March 1997 thirty-nine members committed suicide, believing that they would complete their Human Individual Metamorphosis and ascend to the Next Level, via a spacecraft concealed by the Hale-Bopp Comet. The Heaven’s Gate suicides generated widespread disbelief and discomfort, particularly when it was revealed that some of the men had undergone surgical castration, a profoundly Gnostic rejection of the flesh.31 Nevertheless, when framed in terms of what anthropologist Mary Douglas has termed “new taboos and rituals aimed at the redemption of the world” such dramatic physical manifestations of spiritual beliefs are understandable as measures of commitment and faith in the coming transformation.32

The Theosophical Apocalypse in ufo Religions

Madame Blavatsky, the fountainhead of Theosophically-influenced UFOlogy, was deeply interested in lost worlds such as Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria and others.33 Guy Ballard (1878–1939), an inheritor of the Theosophical tradition and the founder of the I AM movement in the United States, had a similar

29 Winston David, “Heaven’s Gate: A Study of Religious Obedience,” in Chryssides, Heaven’s Gate, 89. 30 Marshall Herfff Applewhite, “‘88 Update—The ufo Two and Their Crew,” in Chryssides, Heaven’s Gate, 27. 31 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 406. 32 Anthony B. van Fossen, “How Do Movements Survive Failures of Prophecy,” in Jon R. Stone (ed.), Expecting Armageddon: Essential Readings in Failed Prophecy (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 179. 33 Garry W. Trompf and Lauren Bernauer, “Producing Lost Civilisations: Theosophical Concerts in Literature, Visual Media and Popular Culture,” in Carole M. Cusack and Alex Norman (eds.), Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 101–131. Apocalypse In Early Ufo And Alien-based Religions 347 preoccupation with sacred geography, and he linked Mount Shasta in California (where he allegedly encountered and received knowledge from the Comte de Saint Germain, a member of the “Great White Brotherhood”), with the lost continent of Mu, and also with the Hindu sacred mountain, Mount Meru.34 I AM, which stood for the Theosophical concept of “Ascended Masters,” was essentially a Theosophical system, but space aliens—for example, twelve tall Venusians—were among the Masters who advised Ballard. The Masters were understood to be beings who had reached at least the fĳifth level of initiation, and who could be contacted via mediumistic activity. This is a basic distinction among ufo religions: so-called “contactee movements” channel the wisdom of extraterrestrials, who possess superior capabilities of the Atlantean type, and do not use physical spaceships; other movements (like the Raelians, founded by Claude Vorilhon [b. 1946] in 1973) argue that there are physical ships that visit earth and the aliens are possessed of superior technological and engineering skills.35 Guy Ballard blended the teachings of the Great White Brotherhood with patriotic fervour and belief in the cosmic destiny of America. Critics have argued that his wife Edna was a follower of William Dudley Pelley, the American anti-Semite, spiritualist, and founder of the fascist organisation the Silver Legion (or “Silver Shirts”). I AM had allegedly recruited members for the Silver Legion for political ends.36 Ballard and his wife Edna were politically conservative and a central I AM activity was an occult banishing ritual aimed at Franklin D. Roosevelt. Using such rituals, Ballard claimed to have annihi- lated nearly half a million people in Philadelphia, over three hundred thousand in New York, and about a million in the remainder of the United States within a period of twenty-four hours.37 I AM and its successors the Summit Lighthouse (founded by Mark Prophet in 1958) and the Church Universal and Triumphant (founded by Mark’s widow Elizabeth Clare Prophet, née Wulf, in 1974) were anti-New Deal, anti-Communist, pro-White, anti-civil rights; furthermore, survivalism and the acquisition of weapons were major foci. Mark Prophet preached against Communism, social degeneracy and left-wing ideals

34 Bradley C. Whitsel, The Church Universal and Triumphant: Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Apocalyptic Movement (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 23–26. 35 Rael, The Final Message: Humanity’s Origins and Our Future Explained (London: Tagman Press, 1998), 19–20. 36 Whitsel, The Church Universal and Triumphant, 24–25. 37 George Thayer, The Farther Shores of Politics: The American Political Fringe Today (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 266–267. 348 Cusack as forces bringing America into darkness, away from the light of the Ascended Masters.38 The Prophets’ apocalyptic vision intensifĳied in 1962, when they instituted an inner circle called the Keepers of the Flame Fraternity at the behest of El Morya (an Ascended Master). The Keepers’ spiritual work was directed to keep alive the divine flame in human hearts, and they claimed descent from the Venusian Master Sanat Kumara.39 The Keepers were archconservative, both socially and politically. In 1965 Mark Prophet published The Soulless Ones, a book that revealed a cosmic conspiracy in which aliens performed experiments on humans and implanted soulless automata among humankind to control it from high places.40 Mark Prophet died in 1973, and Elizabeth Clare announced “Operation Christ Command,” a strategy warning of imminent war with the Soviet Union. Elizabeth Clare Prophet identifĳied the enemy as a conspiracy of powerbrokers in league with the Nephilim (including the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission). She drew on UFOlogy and conspiracy theories promoted by writers like Zechariah Sitchin and the “reptilian” ideas popularised by authors including David Icke. The Soviet Union and Communism were understood as earthly representations of the Nephilim’s conspiracy in the 1980s.41 cut built vast underground nuclear shelters at its headquarters, Royal Teton Ranch, Montana, as Elizabeth Clare Prophet announced the coming nuclear holocaust for 23 April 1990. After the attack failed to happen, the movement sufffered mass defection and faded from view. Elizabeth Clare, affflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease, died in 2009. A more benevolent version of the Theosophical apocalypse was promul- gated by the Aetherius Society, which was founded in England in 1954 by George King (1919–1997). According to offfĳicial accounts, King was a master of yoga and possessed profound spiritual knowledge, and in 1954 was approached by the “Cosmic Masters of the Solar System [who] began using him as Primary Terrestrial Mental Channel.”42 King claimed to have communicated with the Venusian Master Aetherius, Mars Sector 6, and Master Jesus among others, and to have become aware that humanity was invited to participate in an Intergalactic Parliament with various alien species, a body dedicated to the

38 Whitsel, The Church Universal and Triumphant, 31, 105. 39 Whitsel, The Church Universal and Triumphant, 30. 40 Whitsel, The Church Universal and Triumphant, 32–33. 41 Whitsel, The Church Universal and Triumphant, 42–46. 42 Mikael Rothstein, “Hagiography and Text in the Aetherius Society: Aspects of the Social Construction of a Religious Leader,” in Mikael Rothstein and Reender Kranenborg (eds.), New Religions in a Postmodern World (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2003), 170. Apocalypse In Early Ufo And Alien-based Religions 349 pursuit of peace in order to save humanity and the earth from destruction. This Parliament also worked to facilitate the arrival of the “Next Master” (a messiah similar to the Theosophical World Teacher), who will descend to Earth in a spacecraft to destroy the world’s armies. Aetherius Society members meditate and pray in order to store energy (in devices called “spiritual energy batteries”), and are dedicated to pacifĳism, alternative medicine, channelling, and dowsing, and to drawing prana to the earth from Satellite Number 3, an orbiting spacecraft, through meditation.43 Aetherians believe in reincarnation, and argue that certain alien species are so developed compared to humans that they have been mistakenly referred to as gods throughout history. This view resembles the Raelian re-interpretation of the Bible as chronicling a series of visits to Earth by the Elohim, aliens who were accepted as gods, but were in fact scientists who had genetically engi- neered humans.44 The Aetherius Society also subscribes to certain conspiracist beliefs (chiefly that a sinister body, the “Silence Group,” has forced govern- ments to cover up evidence of ufo contact and alien communication). They also pilgrimage to the summits of sacred mountains, which has apocalyptic signifĳicance because if their mission to bring peace and enlightenment to the earth fails, they believe that they will be rescued from atop these sacred mountains.45 Theosophical ufo and alien-based religions developed in divergent ways: some, like cut, advocated an eschaton of battle and destruction; while others, like the Aetherians, envisaged an Intergalactic Parliament in which humans and alien species pursued the goal of universal peace. Themes of apocalypse and conspiracy were particularly congruent with the Cold-War mindset, and were thus more popular in the United States. The Aetherius Society reflected the “cosy” milieu of 1950s English alternative spirituality, and is now a world- wide body with a strong Internet presence, flourishing within the “New Age” scene. Christian ufo and alien-based groups generally exhibit less in the way of paranoia, conspiracism and violent apocalyptic ideas. Heaven’s Gate, signifĳi- cantly, re-defĳined suicide as staying with their earthly bodies; to live was to ascend to the “Next Level,” by means of what the unenlightened might have mistakenly believed to be suicide, the killing of their earthly bodies. Richard Landes commented on the Heaven’s Gate fondness for the television series, Star Trek, in particular the classic motto, “Beam me up, Scotty,” stating that

43 Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Volume II, 182–183. 44 Rael, The Final Message, 95–96. 45 Anon, “The Holy Mountains of the World,” The Aetherius Society, at http://www.aetherius .org/index.cfm?app=content&SectionID=79&PageID=35. Accessed 20 January, 2013. 350 Cusack

“[t]he Heaven’s Gate suicide on March 26, 1997 was a grotesquely literal application of this motto, and a parody of Christian Rapture apocalyptic, driven to wit’s end by the interminable delay of the great event.”46 It may be, however, that this assessment is unfair, in that noteworthy events in the heavens, such as the manifestation of comets, have been taken as signs of the activity of divine beings and more specifĳically the “end times” throughout history. The Raelians were mentioned in passing in this chapter, and interpret the narratives of the Bible in a secular and “pseudo-scientifĳic” manner to in support of what Rael has called “atheist religion.” In the Raelian end times, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad descend in a spacecraft to the Raelian Embassy in Israel and reveal that they are aliens made immortal through cloning, and not gods.47 Thus, is it impossible to simply equate Theosophically-influenced ufo apocalypses with peace and Christian-influenced ufo apocalypses with violence, or vice versa. What is important is that all ufo religions marry modern notions of science and progress to elements from traditional religions, and develop apocalyptic visions that draw upon, and are influenced by, popular culture and the conspiracist subculture.

Conclusion

I have elsewhere argued that invented religions, rather than being best classi- fĳied as “fakes,” are properly understood as the inevitable outcome of a society that values novelty, in which individuals build their identity through the consumption of products, experiences, and spiritualities.48 In the context of Western cultural trends, the history of ufo and alien-based religions can be placed in the category of “invented religions” in sundry ways. It can be argued that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky “invented” her Tibetan Ascended Masters, and that the Theosophical Society’s popularisation of mediumship as a means of receiving ancient wisdom created the possibility of revelations from aliens. The academic study of religion eschews theological concerns and views religion as a human cultural product like art or educational systems. Sociologist Peter Berger posited that humans construct their world through externalisation, objectivation, and internalisation. For Berger

46 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 407. 47 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 409–414. 48 Carole M. Cusack, Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Farnham and Burlington, vt: 2010). Apocalypse In Early Ufo And Alien-based Religions 351

[e]xternalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being [sic] into the world, both in the physical and the mental activity of men. Objectivation is the attainment of the products of this activity (again both physical and mental) of a reality that confronts its producers as a facticity external to and other than themselves. Internalisation is the reappropriation by men of this same reality, transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness. It is through externalisation that society is a human product. It is through objectivation that society becomes a reality sui generis. It is through internalization that man is a product of society.49 ufological religions claim to reveal the true nature of reality, and to explain humanity’s origins and future. These “ultimate questions” were formerly answered by traditional religion and religious institutions. In the twenty-fĳirst century they tend to be answered by individuals crafting their own bricolage of beliefs and practices from available sources (the Internet, fĳilm, television, science fĳiction and fantasy novels, and the “rejected knowledge” of conspiracy theories). ufo religions are numerically small, but reflect crucial modern spiritual trends, not least in the area of apocalyptic visions, and the reinterpretation of Christianity.

Bibliography

Anon. “The Holy Mountains of the World.” The Aetherius Society. At . Accessed 20 January, 2013. Applewhite, Marshall Herfff. “88 Update—Theufo Two and Their Crew,” in George Chryssides (ed.), Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group. Farnham and Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2011. Balch, Robert. “Waiting For the Ships: Disillusionment and the Revitalization of Faith in Bo and Peep’s ufo Cult,” in James R. Lewis (ed.), The Gods have Landed: New Religions from other Worlds. Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 1995. Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. London: University of California Press, 2003. Berger, Peter. The Social Reality of Religion. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.

49 Peter Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 4. 352 Cusack

Bevir, Mark. “The West Turns Eastwards: Madame Blavatsky and the Transformation of the Occult Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63/3 (1994): 747–767. Boag, Al. “From Blavatsky to Krishnamurti: Hindu Chronology, Biblical Eschatology, Physiology,” Literature & Aesthetics 21/1 (2011): 116–134. Campbell, Colin. “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu, and Secularization,” A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5 (1972): 119–136. Cusack, Carole M. Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith. Farnham and Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2010. David, Winston. “Heaven’s Gate: A Study of Religious Obedience,” in George Chryssides (ed.), Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group. Farnham and Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2011. Etherden, Matthew. “The Day the Earth Stood Still: 1950s Sci-Fi, Religion and the Alien Messiah,” Journal of Religion and Film 9/2 (2005). At . Accessed December 10, 2009. Exodus 2.22. King James Version. At . Accessed December 20, 2012. Fossen, Anthony B. van. “How Do Movements Survive Failures of Prophecy,” in Jon R. Stone (ed.), Expecting Armageddon: Essential Readings in Failed Prophecy. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Hunt, Stephen. “Introduction: The Christian Millennium—An Enduring Theme,” in Stephen Hunt (ed.), Christian Millenarianism: From the Early Church to Waco. London: Hurst & Company, 2001. Landes, Richard. Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Melton, J. Gordon. “The Contactees: A Survey,” in James R. Lewis (ed.), The Gods have Landed: New Religions from other Worlds. Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 1995. Montgomery, Ruth. Aliens Among Us. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1985. Partridge, Christopher. The Re-Enchantment of the West. Volume II. London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2005. Rothstein, Mikael. “Hagiography and Text in the Aetherius Society: Aspects of the Social Construction of a Religious Leader,” in Mikael Rothstein and Reender Kranenborg (eds.), New Religions in a Postmodern World. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2003. Saliba, John A. “Religious Dimensions of ufo Phenomena,” in James R. Lewis (eds.), The Gods have Landed: New Religions from other Worlds. Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 1995. Thayer, George. The Farther Shores of Politics: The American Political Fringe Today. London: Allen Lane, 1968. Apocalypse In Early Ufo And Alien-based Religions 353

Trompf, Garry W. and Lauren Bernauer. “Producing Lost Civilisations: Theosophical Concerts in Literature, Visual Media and Popular Culture,” in Carole M. Cusack and Alex Norman (eds.), Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Voas, David and Charlotte Ward. “The Emergence of Conspirituality,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 26/1 (2011): 103–121. Webb, James. The Occult Establishment. La Salle, il: Open Court, 1974. Whitsel, Bradley C. The Church Universal and Triumphant: Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Apocalyptic Movement. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Wojcik, Daniel. “Apocalyptic and Millenarian Aspects of American Ufoism,” in Christopher Partridge (ed.), ufo Religions. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. York, Michael. “New Age Millenarianism and Its Christian Influences,” in Stephen Hunt (ed.), Christian Millenarianism: From the Early Church to Waco. London: Hurst & Company, 2001. Zagorin, Perez. How the Idea of Religious Tolerance Came to the West. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Zeller, Benjamin Ethan. “Scaling Heaven’s Gate: Individualism and Salvation in a New Religious Movement,” in George Chryssides Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group. Farnham and Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2011. chapter 19 The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary

Malise Ruthven

Apocalypse has Many Faces

Christian origins are inseparable from the apocalyptic spirit that consumed the Judeo-Hellenistic world in late antiquity, a spirit that was also present in modern totalitarian movements. Muhammad’s early mission cannot be explained without reference to the apocalyptic admonitions, the foreseen calamities, and the terror of the Day of Judgement apparent in the early suras (chapters) of the Koran. Apocalyptic rumblings also surrounded Luther’s call for reforming the Catholic Church, Sabbatai Zevi’s claim to be the Jewish messiah, the French and American Revolutions, the Babist movement that evolved into the separate faith of Bahaism during the nineteenth century—to name but a few. The Mormon Church, the most successful of the new American religions, was born in millennial frenzy that swept through the “Burnt-Over District” of upstate New York in the 1830s. More recently David Koresh, the Waco Prophet, was engaged in “unfolding” the mystery of Revelation in preparation for Christ’s second coming when the us Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms (btf) foreclosed the Apocalypse by storming the Branch Davidian compound. Apocalyptic movements are Janus-faced. On the positive side the anticipation of imminent divine judgment can be translated into a message of social justice, with individual choice replacing dogmas handed down by ancestors, tribes or communities. They may appear socially inclusive, appealing especially to the deprived, marginalised and dispossessed. The negative side is the demonisation of perceived enemies, the binary world of good versus evil, where the People of God—the saved remnant of humanity—see themselves in absolutist terms as the sole bearers of divine wisdom or knowledge. The utopian project of realizing paradise—when the saviour or messiah’s followers choose to enact the millennial scenario in real historical time—may be freighted with consequences as devastating as the earthquakes, fĳires, plagues and wars of apocalyptic imaginings. The Bolshevik paradise, Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward and Pol Pot’s Cambodian geno- cide are all examples of apocalyptic visions brought into the dull sublu- nary world with devastating consequences. This essay will highlight a broad range of apocalyptic preoccupations across the centuries, not just within the

Abrahamic religions, nor simply by intellectuals, but as a crucial element within popular culture and mass movements in Western history.

Scriptural Origins

Apocalypses, redemption and end of the world scenarios are universal phenomena that occur in traditions as varied as African shamanism and New Age cults. They are a persistent thread in the religious matrices of Western Asia that gave rise to the scriptural traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Apocalyptic narratives long precede those now canonised in Abrahamic scriptures. The Prophet Zarathustra (generally considered to have flourished during the sixth century bc but possibly a thousand years earlier) reformed the ancient Persian religion and taught a system of universal ethics, with rewards for the good and punishment for the wicked, using language and imagery that fĳinds many echoes in the Bible and the Koran. Like subsequent millenarian prophets he taught a version of paradise, a world of perfect harmony. Here husbands, wives and children, including the resurrected dead, would be reunited within a single community “all united in adoration of Ahura Mazda and the Holy Immortals, all at one in thought, word and deed.”1 After Zoroastrianism became the state religion of the Persian Empire the coming millennium or “making wonderful” was deferred and the prophet came to be identifĳied with the Saoshyant, the “future benefactor” or messiah, who would resurrect the dead and restore the world to rights after an era of tribulation during which the forces of evil would temporarily prevail.2 In the Hebraic tradition these ideas surface in the prophetic writings of Isaiah (c 740–700 bc), who in the ominous times preceding the fall of Jerusalem speaks of an age of peace when men shall “beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks,” when “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”3 The same theme appears in a more desperate, urgent guise in the Books of Daniel and Ezekiel and other apocalyptic writings, where deliverance from foreign rule is linked to the eschatological “end of days” embracing resurrection, fĳinal judgement and immortality.

1 Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 99. Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernardsson (eds.), Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), passim. 2 Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, 100. 3 Isaiah 2:4. 356 Ruthven

In Daniel the messiah is identifĳied with the Son of Man who will be given “dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all the people, nations, should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.”4 Though the events in Daniel are set in the court of King Nebuchadnezzar during the Babylonian exile, scholars who are not fundamentalists date the book to early Hasmonean times (c 168–165 bc) when the Jews of Palestine saw their culture menaced by Helle- nism. The prophecies contained in Daniel and Ezekiel, along with the Revelation of St. John which rounds offf the New Testament, are central to the “end-time scenarios” adopted by many modern Christian fundamentalists (see below). The period following the conquests of the Persian empire by Alexander and his successors witnessed a remarkable burgeoning of Jewish apocalyptic literature, only some of which (notably Daniel and Ezekiel) made it into the Biblical canon. The word “apocalyptic” is derived from a Greek word meaning to “uncover” or “unveil,” a reference to the unveiling of divine mysteries through visions or revelations that represents an important theme in this literature. However, as indicated in the titles of fĳilms such as “Apocalypse Now” the fascination of the mysteries in question derives from their exotic and catastrophic character. As D.S. Russell points out, the pages of this literature are fĳilled with weird and wonderful fantasies

beast with sprouting horns, dragons spouting fĳire, falling stars, mysterious horsemen, mystical mountains, sacred rivers, devastating earthquakes, fearsome giants, demon progeny, monstrous births, portents in heaven and portents on earth. Its often frenzied and frenetic descriptions of coming woes sound like the product of over-heated minds.5

Most of this writing was produced in Jewish circles in the three-and-a-half centuries between 250 bc and 100 ce. The literature is mostly “esoteric in character, literary in form, symbolic in language and pseudonymous in authorship.”6 The themes with which the biblical genre is most closely associated tend to involve

the overthrow of all earthly conditions in a great cosmic catastrophe as the climax of the predetermined course of history in which “angels of the

4 Daniel 7:14. 5 D.S. Russell, Divine Disclosure: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 6, 9. 6 D.S. Russell, Apocalyptic Ancient and Modern (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1978), 1. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 357

nations” play an important part; beyond this catastrophe awaits a para- disical salvation for the righteous which issues from the throne of God and becomes visible as the “kingdom of god” on earth or as “the age to come” over against “the present age.”7

The fĳinal redemption is often associated with a messianic fĳigure or “mediator with royal functions” who institutes a reign of glory in which the resurrected dead will share, bridging the gap between them and the living.8 The historical basis for these highly charged imaginative writings was the cultural and religious conflicts of the Hellenistic era, when Jews experienced the temptations, and dangers, of assimilation into the cosmopolitan world brought into being by Alexander and his successors. In Russell’s words, “Jewish apocalyptic is, to a marked degree, a protest against many of the values which that culture represented,” especially the process of hellenisation facilitated by the rapid spread of koine or “common” Greek and the tendency towards religious syncretism it promoted.9 The threat of assimilation emerged from the climate of religious toleration fostered by Alexander’s successors, the Ptolemies and Seleucids, who allowed Judaism and Hellenism to co-exist. The assault on Jewish distinctiveness and communal identity culminated during the reign of the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes IV (175–163 bc) whose intervention in the appointment of a High Priest caused riots in Jerusalem. Enraged by this challenge to his authority, he desecrated the temple, plundered its treasures and issued a decree banning the Jews from living according to their ancestral laws. In a deliberate act of desecration and sacri- lege, offferings of pork were made to the Olympian Zeus whose altar was placed above the temple altar. The episode is alluded to in the Book of Daniel as the Abomination of Desolation. As Roman rule replaced that of the Greeks, apocalyptic writings contained in such books as I & II Enoch, II Esdras, II Baruch, The Book of Jubilees, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Treatise of Shem and the Testament of Abraham, continued to appear in various languages spoken by Jews, including Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered near Qumran in Jordan between 1951 and 1956, include no less than seven versions of the Book of Daniel. The Qumran community of Essenes, who may have influenced the teachings of Jesus, were fĳired with apocalyptic yearnings and expectations. The scrolls contain references to a messianic Teacher of Righteousness and include

7 Russell, Divine Disclosure, 10. 8 Russell, Divine Disclosure, 10. 9 Russell, Divine Disclosure, 15. 358 Ruthven a text known as the “War between the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness” which prefĳigures the Christian apocalyptic fantasies contained in the Book of Revelation. The document was “not just vaguely apocalyptic, but constituted a detailed training guide to a battle [the Essenes] believed imminent.”10 Johannes Weiss in Jesus’s Preaching of the God (1892) and Albert Schweitzer in his influential Quest for the Historical Jesus (1910) saw Jesus as the archetypical apocalyptic prophet who expected to see the establishment of God’s rule on earth through “a mighty act of divine intervention in history which would put an end to this evil age.”11 Psychologically, apocalyptic writing compensates for the actual loss of power, dignity and hope. The messianic fĳigure who will return at the end of time, to wreak vengeance on God’s enemies and compensate the faithful for the persecutions they have endured, satisfĳies what may be an inherent human instinct for order and justice. In the minds of the faithful—those who identify with a just cause that has been defeated, or a community that has been over- run, or subjected to dissolution—the hope of ultimate deliverance by the representative of a just god, makes the present experience of loss more bearable.

Jesus of Revelation

Christianity would construct an elaborate theological edifĳice on the basis of the supposed “return” of Jesus after his ignominious execution. In the Book of Revelation, which rounds offf the New Testament, the apocalyptic literary tradition was adapted to the redemptionist theology of St Paul, with Jesus appearing in the symbolic, but contradictory, roles of warrior and sacrifĳicial lamb. In striking contrast to the humble preacher of Nazareth in the gospel stories, who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey as deliberate “expression of royal humility in opposition to the military nationalism that confused the coming messiah with a military deliverer,”12 the warrior Christ of Revelation cuts a belligerent fĳigure: “And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of iron; and he treadeth the wine press of the fĳierceness and wrath of Almighty God.”13 Defeated in battle, Satan is contained in a bottomless pit for a thousand years during which time Christ

10 Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (London: Phoenix, 1993), 123. 11 John Riches, The Bible: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 82. 12 Don Wagner, Anxious for Armageddon (Scottdale pa: Herald Press, 1995), 79. 13 Rev 19: 13–15. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 359 reigns on earth with the martyrs killed by the Beast. Satan is released once more, before being fĳinally defeated forever. In the fĳinal judgement “the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars”14 are pitched into the lake of fĳire and brim- stone. In its fĳinal stages the vision of John contains a justly famous lyrical passage describing the “new heaven and new earth” and the New Jerusalem “that comes down from God out of Heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”15 After further descriptions of the New Jerusalem and a prayer for Christ’s return, the Book of Revelation—and, for Christians, the Bible—comes to an end. Despite its somewhat confusing structure, unwieldy repetitions and formu- laic images that hark back to the apocalyptic books of Daniel and Ezekiel, the Book of Revelation, with its descriptions of monsters and cataclysms building to a grand climax at the mighty battle of Armageddon, dominated by the all- powerful fĳigure of the warrior Christ, is a work of formidable literary power. It is not difffĳicult to see how, once included in the canon, it came to exercise a powerful influence over the Christian imagination. Still, for a long time, the apocalyptic tradition was read or contained in the context of a mainly oral culture under priestly or rabbinical control, where its potential—for being translated from the realm of the imagination onto the plane of actuality— remained limited.

Messianic Movements

After Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire the apocalyptic strain in Christianity was subsumed in the renovated imperial cult, common to both eastern Orthodoxy and western Catholicism, which conferred divine legitimacy on the Holy Roman and Byzantine emperors. In the master- ful hands of St. Augustine (354–430) the Kingdom of God was allegorised and spiritualised. Christian apocalyptic became “part of the everyday fabric of Christian life and belief, and to that extent reinforced eschatological awareness by embedding it in liturgy and preaching” while distancing Catholic thought from literalistic readings of prophesy and especially notions of an earthly millennium.16 The seal on Augustine’s teaching was set by the Council

14 Rev 21:8. 15 Rev 21:1–2. 16 Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophesy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge ma: Harvard Belknap Press, 1992), 42. 360 Ruthven of Ephesus in 431 which condemned millennialism and expurgated works of earlier church fathers thought to be tainted with the doctrine.17 Nevertheless literal beliefs in the apocalypse would become widespread in medieval Europe. Apocalyptic beliefs fuelled support for the Crusades, launched to restore the Holy Land from its Muslim conquerors, with both Muslims and Jews identifĳied in popular culture as agents of the Antichrist.18 Hence the Crusaders, before sailing to the Holy Land, and after their arrival, made a point of massacring and pillaging any of the Jewish communities they encountered. After the Reformation apocalyptic speculation gained new vitality among the various protestant sects. In The Pursuit of the Millennium, his classic study of millenarian movements in Europe, Norman Cohn demonstrated how groups such as the League of the Elect that appeared during the German peasant’s revolt of 1525, and the radical Anapabtists who aimed to establish a new Jerusalem in Münster, were fuelled by apocalyptic ideas.19 In most of these instances insurrections that began with limited and realistic aims also fostered a special kind of millenarian group. As social tensions mounted and the revolt spread, there would appear, somewhere on the radical fringe, a propheta or charismatic leader, with a following of poor or socially excluded people, intent on turning this particular upheaval into an apocalyptic battle for the fĳinal purifĳication of the world. Cohn concludes that what the propheta offfered his followers was not simply a chance to improve their worldly lot and escape from pressing economic anxieties:

It was also, and above all, the prospect of carrying out a divinely ordained mission of stupendous, unique importance. This phantasy [sic] performed a real function for them, both as an escape from their isolated and atomised condition and as an emotional compensation for their abject status.20

In due course a new type of leadership would emerge at the head of “a restlessly dynamic and utterly ruthless group which, obsessed by the apocalyptic phantasm and fĳilled with the conviction of its own infallibility, set itself infĳinitely above the rest of humanity and recognised no claims save that of its own supposed mission.” Sometimes this group might succeed in imposing its

17 Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 49. 18 Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 51. 19 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Paladin Books, 1969). 20 Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 284–285. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 361 leadership on the mass of “the disorientated, the perplexed and the frightened”; sometimes it encountered resistance.21 The English Revolution (1649–60) saw a proliferation of sects such as the Fifth Monarchy Men whose radicalism was fuelled by the belief that end-times were nigh. Chiliastic speculations prompted a re-valuation of Jewish-Christian relations. Though Judeophobia was rife in Eastern Europe (with massacres in the Ukraine taking place in the 1640s) many of the Protestant reformers, influenced by readings of the Old Testament began to look favourably on Jews as the chosen people of God. Interpretations of Deuteronomy and Daniel suggested that the expected millennium could be advanced if Jews were wel- comed in lands from which they had been excluded.22 In 1655 Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the English commonwealth, readmitted Jews to England following a gap of 350 years (they had been expelled in 1290, by Edward I). From the 1670s Jews began to be admitted into the British and Dutch colonies in North America, most of which were Protestant foundations. As in Christianity the apocalyptic strain in Judaism was subsumed in ritual, but also kept alive by it. The career of Shabbetai Zevi (1626–76) who proclaimed himself Messiah in 1648, at the dawn of the modern era is the best known example of how the eschatological forces that lie dormant in the tradition can suddenly erupt.23

Revolutionary Apocalyptic

Cohn established a clear connection between millennial fantasies and social unrest. Preachers—or eccentrics—who proclaim the end of the world can be found at all times, and in virtually all places. But it is usually only in periods of social anxiety or breakdown—in societies ravaged by war, famine, or epidemic—that apocalyptic scenarios gather sufffĳicient momentum to transform the societies which harbour them. Given the connection between apocalyptic movements and social forces, it would be mistaken to regard apocalyptic scenarios as being primarily religious phenomena. Having been canonised in religious texts it is obvious that they fĳind expression through religious discourse.

21 Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 285. 22 For a resumé of favourable attitudes towards Jews in the light of protestant biblical exegesis see Victoria Clark, Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 30–37. 23 Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah 1626–1676 (London: Routledge, 1973). 362 Ruthven

But they also exist outside religion. In Ernst Käseman’s words, “Apocalyptic is the mother of theology.”24 Apocalyptic millenarianism may be the matrix out of which religion is formed, as Käseman suggests, but in the absence of the Saviour its energies tend to dissipate. Although the prospective scenario may change, the paradigm retains its integrity: “disappointment” at the messiah’s failure to arrive becomes a powerful motor for action. Instead of waiting indefĳi- nitely, the believers are motivated to fĳill the vacuum created by his non-appearance. In response to indefĳinite deferment—to “the God who perpetually tarries”—believers in the apocalypse will frequently move along the activist scale, substituting “faith in deliberate human actions for hopes of a divine intervention. But even as that may have weaned millennial hopefuls away from a deus ex machina, it has not rid [humanity] of the passion for a just—a perfect—society.”25 An exemplar of positive activism rooted in Christian disappointment was the American pastor and theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, founder of the Social Gospel, who interpreted the idea of prophecy as a remit for action to improve society. Not only do apocalyptic scenarios cross the boundaries separating diffferent religious traditions, they transcend religion itself. In certain respects the Enlightenment secularised the apocalyptic scenario without changing the paradigm. Its foremost intellectual, Immanuel Kant, held that “philosophy can have her belief in a Chiliasm that is not wildly exuberant.”26 As John Mee has noted, despite the Augustinian spiritualisation of Christian millennial hope, “the possibility of a Millennium wherein the world would be reformed into the perfect society had permeated deep within the thought patterns of Christian Europe over many centuries; its presence persists even in the most secular of the utopian projections that were essential to the eighteenth century’s interest in progress.”27 Richard Landes argues that the revolutionary zeitgeist releases, but does not contain, apocalyptic energies that transcend ideological distinctions between reason and religiosity.28 At a profounder, psychic level, for example, Maxim Robespierre’s vision of a social nirvana, whereby Universal

24 Ernst Käseman, “Die Anfange christlicher Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 57 (1960), 162–185; cited in Richard Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (New York: Routledge, 2011), 84. 25 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 243. 26 Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784) from Immanuel Kant, On History, trans. Lewish White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963); cited in Landes, Heaven on Earth, 244. 27 John Mee, “Millennarian Visions and Utopian Speculations,” in Martin Fitzpatrick (ed.), The Enlightenment World (New York: Routledge, 2004), 536. 28 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 244. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 363

Reason overcame the constraints of inherited privilege and class, articulated aspirations arising from the collapse of the ancien régime. The French Revolution’s magnifĳicent slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” looks forward to a millennial realm, or state of social bliss where conflicts over property and status, territory and resources are subsumed within a “higher” order of existence. Hence millenarianism is the primal revolutionary ideology. “It is a collective salvation, a social mysticism […] It imagines a transformation of humanity, an evolutionary leap to a diffferent way of human interaction that can have enormous emotional appeal.”29

John Martin: Painter of the Apocalypse

If the French—and indeed the American—revolutions with their promises of universal freedom were bound up with millennial hopes, it is hardly surprising that biblical catastrophes should have fĳigured in the public consciousness during the early part of the nineteenth century. The career of English artist John Martin (1789–1854), painter of biblical catastrophes, pioneer of urban planning and architectural visionary, exemplifĳies the apocalyptic themes of destruction and millennial hope that surfaced in Europe during a time of great political turbulence, while Britain remained—internally—at peace. Martin was born in 1789, the year of the revolution and came to maturity during the Napoleonic wars, a time of massive upheavals in Europe. Having trained as a printmaker he oversaw the reproduction of his works, which achieved phenomenal commercial success. Though despised by the artistic establishment, his works were hugely popular, with one-offf displays in rented halls and other premises not normally frequented by art lovers. Within seven years of his death his last major work—the Last Judgement triptych (1849– 53)—had been shown in every signifĳicant urban centre in the British Isles. Its promoters claimed that it had been seen by a eight million people, a phenomenal fĳigure for Victorian times.30 [Figures 19.1 and 19.2.] Historians are divided about whether Martin actually subscribed to the biblical vision he describes so graphically in his paintings, but he certainly understood the millenarian mindset. He was born in Northumberland into a family of artisans, a milieu often associated with fundamentalist religious views. Two of his brothers, Jonathan and William, were fervent millenarians, and though

29 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 13. 30 Martin Myrone and Anna Austen, John Martin: Apocalypse, offfĳicial exhibition catalogue (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 2011), 182. 364 Ruthven

Figure 19.1 John Martin, The Last Judgement c. 1849–53 Oil on canvas 198.8 × 325.8 cm Tate. Bequeathed by Charlotte Frank in memory of her husband Robert Frank 1974.

Figure 19.2 John Martin, The Plains of Heaven 1851–3 Oil on canvas 198.8 × 306.7 cm Tate. Bequeathed by Charlotte Frank in memory of her husband Robert Frank 1974. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 365 it is not clear if John Martin shared his brothers’ views, it is more than probable that they informed his choice of subject. Ralph Thomas, a friend of Martin’s who kept detailed records of their meetings and conversations, stated that he was a “thorough Deist” who “believes that all that is good comes from God” and was shocked when Martin told him, on the basis of his geological knowledge, that be believed the world to be much older than described in the Bible. It seems possible, however, that Martin subscribed to a theory known as “Mosaic Geology” in which the Flood was seen as “the last great cataclysmic event that separated both the world of deep time from the biblical world, and the world of man from that of extinct creatures whose separate identities belonged to animals quite diffferent from any known, or at least not known in the location their bones were found.”31 Whatever the case, Martin was certainly a formidable exponent of the idea of global catastrophe. His phenomenal success demonstrates that his imagination resonated deeply with the zeitgeist of his time. One compelling aspect of his paintings is the almost uncanny futurism of some of the buildings he depicts in his apocalyptic canvases. The palace shown in the foreground of The Fall of Babylon (1819) [Figure 19.3] with neoclassical balustrades and tiers of terraces borne by Egyptian-style pillars are rooted in nineteenth-century forms, but a distant tower—inspired perhaps by a Mesopotamian ziggurat—has a strikingly modern appearance. Rather than echoing the past, it anticipates the brutal functionalism of a mid-twentieth- century structure, such as the art-deco London University Senate House, designed by Charles Holden (1932–37). George Orwell, for one, sensed Senate House’s rather menacing quality and is said to have made it the model for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). [Figure 19.4] Similarly, the towering palace with its tiers of colonnades surmounted by a circular pan- theon that dominates the background in the swirling Turneresque landscape of “Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon” (1816) [Figure 19.5] prefĳigures the formidable neoclassical designs that Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, made for Berlin in the 1940s. [Figure 19.6]

Messianic Failure and Cognitive Dissonance

The millennial vision embraces catastrophe and under certain conditions serves to bring it about. Since messianic movements inevitably fail to deliver

31 David Bindman, “Deep Time, Dragons and Dinosaurs,” in Myrone and Austen, John Martin: Apocalypse, 46. 366 Ruthven

Figure 19.3 John Martin, The Fall of Babylon 1831 Mezzotint with etching 46.4 × 71.9 cm British Museum Gift of the Artist 1833

Figure 19.4 The Senate House, University of London. Stock photograph, courtesy of the University of London. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 367

Figure 19.5 John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon, exhibited 1816 Oil on canvas 150 × 231 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington Paul Mellon Fund.

Figure 19.6 Albert Speer, “Volkshalle” [“People’s Hall”] seen through the triumphal arch. Model for the “Welthauptstadt Germania” [“World Captial, Germania”] project. Photograph: Bundesarchiv/Alamy. 368 Ruthven on their promises, all must end in redefĳinition, disillusionment or “cognitive dissonance.” Landes lists several responses to millennial disappointment. The most notable are withdrawal (whereby the remnant of disappointed believers maintains its solidarity in the face of the ridicule or hostility of the world, a response famously noted by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in their seminal study of a 1950s ufo cult);32 and spiritualization and/or indefĳinite deferment— whereby a hierarchy of religious specialists redefĳines or “theologises” a messiah’s non-appearance in spiritual (i.e. purely moral and non-terrestrial) terms, while appropriating and exercising the absent leader’s authority. Spiritualization has been the classic route of the Roman church since St Augustine, as well as that of the Shi’ite ayatollahs, who regard themselves a deputies of the “Hidden” or “Expected” Imam who “disappeared” in ad 873.33 Among the responses to cognitive dissonance Landes also lists coercive purity, and this is by far the most signifĳicant when it comes to violence. Coercive purity involves using the apocalyptic movement’s newly acquired strength “to carry out God’s unfulfĳilled punishment for the wicked”—or in the case of secular apocalyptic movements, to punish sceptics, nay-sayers and any kind of dissenter—in order to enforce the millennium or eschaton in the face of opposition and the failure of millennial promises. Arguably it is coercive purity— the attempt to bring about the Kingdom by force—that links medieval millenarian apocalyptic with modern totalitarian movements. Landes argues that the “logic” of coercive purity ultimately “attempt[s] to destroy every last crevice of human freedom.” Dictatorships want power and demand the people’s corporeal obedience; totalitarian societies want “salvation” and demand the people’s “soul.”34 Following Cohn’s pioneering study, Landes argues that medieval chiliasts such as Jan of Leyden—“true believers with a megalomaniac sense of cosmic purpose, driven to seize power with the intention of decisively reshaping history and humankind”35—should be seen as the precursors of modern totalitarianism. Cohn’s description of the totalitarian party might easily fĳit the agendas of Nazis and communists as well as those of medieval chiliasts:

32 Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956). 33 Landes Heaven on Earth, 57 For a detailed account of millenarian aspects of Iranian Shi’ism see Abbas Amanat, Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi’ism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009). 34 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 343. 35 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 342. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 369

a restlessly dynamic and utterly ruthless group which, obsessed by the apocalyptic phantasy and fĳilled with conviction of its own infallibility, set itself infĳinitely above the rest of humanity and recognized no claims save those of its own supposed mission36

However, for all their cruelty, medieval societies lacked the equipment with which to actualise their millennial fantasies with anything resembling the ruthlessness of mid-twentieth states with their disciplined bureaucracies, control over information, monopoly of armed forces and other concentrations of power. Landes sees the fĳirst modern manifestation of the totalitarian impulse— the Jacobin terror of the 1790s—as the outcome of millennial disappointment. The revolutionaries genuinely believed that the moment of collective unity or millennial salvation experienced after the collapse of the old order would last. The “millennial premise” underpinning their actions made “high-level assumptions about the ‘natural propensity’ of humanity…[I]t depended on an almost magical hope in the goodness of human nature and the reliability of reason.”37 Faced with such domestic woes as disruptions to the food supply as well as the hostility of foreign powers, they came to view any dissent not as consequences of their own actions, but as conspiracies to betray the Revolution. A similar response occurred in Russia when the workers’ paradise promised by the Bolsheviks in 1918 failed to deliver industrial targets of the fĳirst Five Year Plan in 1928–33. Rather than recalibrating their policies—as Lenin had done under the New Economic Policy (1921–25)—Stalin and his fellow millennialists responded to failure by the application of coercive purifĳication. In a series of show-trials culminating in the 1938 trial of Nikolai Bukharin, industrial failures were denounced as the deliberate acts of Trotskyists and saboteurs acting in concert with foreign powers aimed at destroying the Soviet Union.38 Landes is surely correct in linking the French terror of 1793 and the Soviet Gulags of 1933–40 with millennial disappointment.

The numerous diffferences between Bolsheviks and Jacobins should hardly blind us to the critical and disturbing similarities: for they both represent demotic secular millennial movements which, at the highest pitch of apocalyptic time, turned to state terror as a solution to the disap- pointments they faced.39

36 Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 285. 37 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 269. 38 Malise Ruthven, Torture: The Grand Conspiracy (London: Weidenfeld, 1978), 218–278. 39 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 284. 370 Ruthven

Hitler’s Jesus

In exploring the dynamics of Nazism, Landes reaches a similar conclusion: Hitler had a mystical sense of his own destiny. In a conversation with Nietzsche’s brother-in-law, reported by Hermann Rauschning, the Nazi leader is said to have confĳided that he

would not reveal his unique mission until later. He permitted glimpses of it only to a few. When the time came, however, Hitler would bring to the world a new religion…The blessed consciousness of eternal life in union with the great universal life, and in membership of an immortal people— that was the message he would impart to the world when the time came. Hitler would be the fĳirst to achieve what Christianity was meant to have been, a joyous message that liberated men from the things that burdened their life. We should no longer have any fear of death, and should lose the fear of the so-called bad conscience. Hitler would restore men to the self- confĳident divinity with which nature had endowed them. They would be able to trust their instincts, would not longer be citizens of two worlds, but would be rooted in the single, eternal life of this world.40

According to Landes, Hitler’s apocalyptic mysticism resonated with Gnostic undertones reflecting theosophical trends associated with Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant and Rudolf Steiner at the turn of the century.41 While suggesting that his messianic self-perception had a specifĳically “Christian” formulation, he points to evidence that Hitler’s Christianity was not that of the Gospels, but rather that of “Jesus Christ, the furious.” Hitler admired not the Jesus who sac- rifĳiced himself on the cross, but the triumphant Christ of the Book of Revelation who would slaughter the enemies of the Lord.42 Nonetheless, Hitler did not identify himself directly with the apocalyptic Jesus, but rather saw himself in the role of John the Baptist, preparing the millennial ground.

The peace on earth Christ wanted to bring is the very socialism of nations! It is the new great religion, and it will come because it is divine! It awaits the Messiah! But I am not the Messiah. He will come after me. I only have

40 Hermann Rauschning, Men of Chaos (New York: G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 1942), 97; cited in Landes, Heaven on Earth, 370. 41 Landes, Heaven on Earth, 367. 42 Rev 19: 11–15. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 371

the will to create for the German Volk the foundations of a true Volk community. And that is a political mission, though it encompasses the ideological as well as the economic. It cannot be otherwise, and everything in me points to the conviction that the German Volk has a divine mission. How many great prophets have foretold this.43

The enemies of Hitler’s Christ, one need hardly add, were the Jewish “deicides” who had failed to heed the messiah.

In boundless love I read as a Christian and a human being the place where it is proclaimed to us that the Lord fĳinally summoned up the energy, seized the whip and drove the money-lenders—that brood of vipers and adders—out of the Temple! His immense struggle for this world against the Jewish poison—which I still perceive today after 2,000 years with the deepest emotion as the most profound of matters— that he, because of it [the struggle] had to bleed to death on the cross.44

Contrary to historians who focus exclusively on the racial aspects of Nazi ideology, Landes suggests that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was rooted in a Christian theology that embraced racism while subsuming it within a broader apocalyptic frame. Seen in this light the Holocaust—the greatest crime committed in human history—was an exercise in coercive purifĳication driven by messianic goals.

Philosemitism and Christian Zionism

While coercive purifĳication—exemplifĳied by Auschwitz and Treblinka—are the extreme examples of apocalyptic fervour, the list of other reactions noted by Landes should be taken into account. Nazi-style anti-Semitism is only one hermeneutical outcome of apocalyptic Christianity: the reverse is, paradoxically, the philo-Semitic theology known technically as pre-millennial dispensationalism, which regards the Zionist movement and creation of Israel as theological prerequisites for the Second Coming of Christ. The roots of Christian philo-Semitism go back at least to 1585 when an Anglican cleric,

43 Otto von Wagener, Hitler: Memoirs of a Confĳidant, ed. Henry Ashby Turner Jr., trans. Ruth Hein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 170, 172; cited in Landes, Heaven on Earth, 370. 44 Cited in Landes, Heaven on Earth, 371. 372 Ruthven

Thomas Brightman, argued that Christians had a moral responsibility to support a state for the Jews in Palestine if England was to be blessed by God during the last days—which he believed to be imminent.45 The real founder and most influential advocate of Christian Zionism, however, was John Nelson Darby (1800–85) a scholar of Greek and Hebrew and former protestant Church of Ireland priest who broke with his church and joined the Brethren, a puritanical “house church” movement that focused on biblical prophecies, and saw in the growing corruption of “worldly” churches and nations signs of the impending Last Days. When the sect split in the 1840s he became leader of the most fundamentalist faction, the Plymouth Brethren or Darbyites. Darby is an exotically influential fĳigure, the architect of pre-millennial dispensationalism. Although he was not the fĳirst theologian to introduce the “dispensationalist” idea that salvation history is divided into diffferent divinely- ordained “dispensations” or epochs, he worked these ideas into a uniquely structured and highly-organised system that would prove attractive to protestants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the United States. According to Darby, the present age, or Church Age that followed the dispensations revealed in the Bible, the last of which ended with Jesus’s crucifĳixion, will begin with the Rapture, when all the believers will rise to meet Christ in the air. For those “left-behind”—i.e. people who have chosen not to become born- again Christians—the sequence of events outlined in the apocalyptic books of the Bible will unfold with disconcerting rapidity, starting with the seven-year rule of Antichrist and the Apostate church and the Tribulation, ending in the Battle of Armageddon and the return of Christ as the ruler of the Millennium.46 In a critical departure from centuries of mainstream Christian writings derived from Paul and Augustine which saw the Church as the New Israel (as well as from protestant variants that assigned this role to England or America) Darby assigned a special end-time role to the Jews, allowing for two distinctive tracks in the scheme of salvation, one for Jews, and one for Gentiles, before the two tracks merged in the ultimate eschaton. In the near future God’s chosen people would return to their ancient homeland and rebuild the Temple. Thereafter, after a period of terrible persecution during the reign of Antichrist, the surviv- ing remnant—the 144,000 righteous ones—would fĳinally embrace the Messiah. By the time of Darby’s death in 1885 there were more than 1500 Plymouth Brethren fellowships worldwide with branches in Germany, Switzerland, France, North America, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand. A tireless traveller, Darby made seven missionary journeys to the United States and

45 Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism (PhD dissertation, Middlesex University, 2002), 33. 46 Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 86. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 373

Canada where he came into direct contact with such leading evangelical lights as James Brooks of Philadelphia, Dwight Moody of Chicago and the man who would do most to carry forward the gospel of pre-millennialism, Cyrus Ignatius Scofĳield, founder of the influential Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas and originator of the Scofĳield Reference Bible, a standard fundamentalist text based on the King James version where special attention is given to the eschatological passages in Old and New Testaments. Though Darby’s theology would fĳind its most fertile soil in America, where pre-millennialist ideas have become part of the evangelical protestant mainstream, his ideas would prove highly influential in his homeland during a crucial period of world history—Britain’s “Moment in the Middle East.” Darby’s exact contemporary, the philanthropist and social reformer Lord Shaftesbury (1801–85), a leader of the influential Clapham Sect, became a passionate advocate of Christian Zionism. In 1839 he published an article in the Quarterly Review arguing that the

Jews must be encouraged to return [to Palestine] in yet greater numbers and become once more the husbandman of Judea and Galilee…though admittedly a stifff-necked, dark hearted people, and sunk in moral degradation, obduracy and ignorance of the Gospel…[they are]…not only worthy of salvation but also vital to Christianity’s hope of salvation.47

As the Ottoman Sultan’s ally and leading world power, Britain should play a critical role in restoring the Jews to their ancient homeland. The Church of England should establish a bishopric and Cathedral in Jerusalem to facilitate this process (a project which resulted in the construction of St. George’s Cathedral in Arab East Jerusalem). A key fĳigure in the translating pre-millennial Christian theology into practical Zionist policy was the influential Zionist writer Theodore Herzl’s friend William Hechler (1845–1931), one time Anglican Chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna. His booklet The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine (1894) predated Herzl’s highly influential Der Judenstaadt by two years. As Herzl’s leading Christian advocate, he was one of only three Christians invited to attend the World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. Herzl regarded Hechler as a somewhat “naïve visionary…He gives me excellent advice, full of unmistakable genuine good will. He is at once clever and mystical, cunning and naïve.”48 Hechler’s diplomatic contacts helped Herzl gain

47 Wagner, Anxious for Armageddon, 91. 48 Cited in P.C. Merkley, The Politics of Christian Zionism 1891–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 16–17. 374 Ruthven access to Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Grand Duke of Baden as well as members of the British political establishment.49 By the beginning of the twentieth century pre-millennial ideas concerning the desirability of the restoration of Jews to Palestine were widespread in evangelical circles in Britain. The two key fĳigures in persuading the British government to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine were liberal Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, who came to power in 1916, and his foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) who drafted the famous Balfour Declaration after discussions with Herzl’s successor as leader of the Zionist movement, the chemistry professor Chaim Weizmann. The Balfour Declaration, which took the form of a letter to Lord Rothschild made public on 2 November 1917, contained the well-known contradiction inherent in the Zionist-evangelical project for a “National Home” for the Jews:

His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.50

Pre-Millennialist Fantasy: The Ultimate Disaster Movie

Among those American protestants who tended towards literal interpretations of biblical prophecies (seeing them as divinely-inspired prognostications of the future, rather than symbolic interpretations of past events) theological opinion was divided between pre-millennialists, who believed, with Darby, that the period of tribulation would precede the second coming of Christ, and post-millennialists whose projection of the future required a millennium of peace in anticipation of Christ’s return. Crudely summarised, post-millennialism accords well with the optimistic spirit of the American frontier. Combined with the Arminian free-will theology that gradually replaced the Calvinist doctrine of election by grace in many denominations, it has influenced the spirit of enterprise and socially progressive evangelical action, from the abolitionist

49 Sizer, Christian Zionism, 11. 50 For the text of the Balfour Declaration see: unispal.un.org/…NSF/0/E210CA73E38D9E1D 052565FA00705C61. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 375 and temperance campaigns of the nineteenth century to the “social gospel” and tenement reforms of the 1930s. Pre-millennialism, by contrast, nurtures a pessimistic outlook. Before the return of Christ—which is usually deemed to be imminent—things must get worse. Environmental disasters such as earthquakes or forest fĳires, the loosening of sexual morality (likened to the pervasive fornicatory activities associated with the Whore of Babylon), unemployment, recession, alcoholism, accidents: every indication that “things are getting worse” is grist to the pre- millennialist mill. In the versions marketed by writers such as Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye, Darby’s system tapped into a rich vein of popular fantasy, allowing born-again Christians and Bible-believers to palliate anxieties about nuclear war and feelings of personal insecurity by the prospect of salvation, conceived of in literalistic, materialistic terms. Here the end-times depicted in the Books of Daniel and Revelation resemble nothing so much as the Ultimate Disaster-Movie. Christ hovers above the planet bathing it with His heavenly fluorescence (“God has His own lighting system. No sun, no moon, just an irri- descent glow from His glory”). All the born-again Christians will be “raptured”—that is to say, vacuumed bodily into the air. The rest of humanity will be left to cope with the ensuing chaos before eventually perishing. Despite the horrors they depict, the end-time events are described in the most pedestrian, matter-of-fact and concrete terms:

A chaotic rubble will result as many of the Christians “caught up” shall be taken from positions of trafffĳic control, industrial production control and from all walks of life: many of them taken while driving their cars, or even while piloting aircraft—and crashes of all sorts will occur. Communications will be disrupted […] police and fĳire control will also be very greatly afffected.51

Because of the large number of Born Again Christians (about 40 per cent of the population), the United States will be particularly badly hit.

When Jesus comes for his own, thousands of responsible leaders in government, industry, education, religion, the arts and the professions will be removed. With these leaders taken to meet the Lord in the air, the structure of government, industry, education, the arts and the

51 Charles R. Taylor, The Destiny of America (Van Nuys ca: Time-Light Books, 1972), 236; cited in Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 255. 376 Ruthven

professions will be so weakened that it will reduce the United States to an impotent and prostrated nation.52

Born-again Christians, however, need not worry, for all is foreordained in Scripture, especially in the books of Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation. After the Rapture and Tribulation will come the Millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth—with excellent job opportunities for the saved. Jesus will have “high management openings for can-do Christians […] He needs saints who develop success patterns in this present real-life testing ground […] Many leaders will be needed to reign over cities, nations, territories and millennium projects.”53 Moreover, in this glorious Thousand Year Christian Reich democracy can safely be abandoned. Economic and social conflicts will disappear, “strikes by workers and oppression by employers will be unknown.” Jesus, “an absolute dictator,” will be “committed to the instant destruction of the insubordinate or rebellious.” He will not permit the practice or propagation of “false religion in any form”;54 and just in case a core of resistance persists, He will flush it out far more efffectively than any Stalinist prosecutor: “At the Last Judgement no oral evidence will be required as in human courts; from the recesses of the individual’s own memory the whole story will be revealed and flashed instanta- neously before His mind.”55 In theory pre-millennialism leaves limited room for Christian love and compassion. Being exclusively geared towards the salvation of the individual, there is a theological selfĳishness about it, an indiffference towards the fate of the unsaved. Indeed many born-again believers, secure in the knowledge of their personal salvation, positively gloat in the contemplation of what will happen to the rest of humanity. “The darker the night gets, the lighter my heart gets” wrote the late Reuben Torrey, one of the founders of modern fundamentalism. In The Late Great Planet Earth, his phenomenally successful popularisation of the apocalyptic passages in Scofĳield’s Reference Bible, Hal Lindsey takes a cheerily brutal view of the coming destruction in the Battle of Armageddon:

52 Walter K. Price, The Coming Antichrist (Chicago: Moody Press, 1974), 48–49; cited in Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 242. 53 George Otis, Millennium Man (Van Nuys ca: Bible Voice, 1974); cited in Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 323. 54 Herbert Vander Lugt, There’s a New Day Coming (Eugene or: Harvest House Publishing, 1983), 119; cited in Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 322. 55 Frederick A. Tatford, God’s Program of the Ages (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1967), 139; cited in Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 323. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 377

The conflict will not be limited to the Middle East. The apostle John [the supposed author of Revelation] warns that when these two great forces meet in battle the greatest shock wave ever to hit the earth will occur. Whether by natural force of an earthquake or by some super weapon isn’t clear. John says that all the cities of the nations will be destroyed. (Rev 16:19). Imagine cities like London, Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago—obliterated! John says that the Eastern Force alone will wipe out a third of the earth’s population (Rev: 9:15–18).56

The upside of these catastrophic events will be the conversion of the 144,000 righteous Jews, following the defeat of the Antichrist. The latter’s rule of forty- two months “prior to Christ’s personal, visible return to this earth” will make “the regimes of Hitler, Mao, and Stalin look like the Girl Scouts weaving a daisy chain by comparison. The Antichrist is going to be given absolute authority to act with the power of Satan.”57 In the absence of the born-again Christians (who will already have been “raptured” before the coming of the Antichrist) “it is logical to ask” says Lindsey, how the Antichrist is going to “make war with the saints and to overcome them?”58 “The saints” he answers

are the people who are going to believe in Christ during this great period of conflict. After the Christians are gone God is going to reveal Himself in a special way to 144,000 physical, literal Jews who are going to believe with a vengeance that Jesus is the Messiah. There are going to be 144,000 Billy Grahams turned loose on this earth—the earth will never know a period of evangelism like this period. These Jewish people are going to make up for lost time.59

Though obsessed with the destiny of God’s Chosen People, pre-millennialists looked calmly on the Holocaust—a “sad but wholly foreseeable instance of God’s efffort to correct His recalcitrant people, and a foretaste of worse ahead,” as Paul Boyer puts it. “It took Hitler to turn the Jews towards Palestine,” says one of the numerous tracts on the subject. “It will take a greater Hitler to turn them towards God.”60

56 Hal Lindsey with C.C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1987), 166. 57 Lindsey and Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth, 110. 58 Rev: 13:7. 59 Lindsey and Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth, 111. 60 Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 216. 378 Ruthven

Meanwhile, the modern state of Israel, as the key element in God’s fĳinal plan for humanity, must be backed to the hilt—in territorial terms, from the Nile to the Euphrates. The founding of Israel in 1948, its survival and enlargement in the war of 1948 and its occupation and colonisation of the West Bank (the biblical Judea and Samaria) since 1967 are all seen as milestone in the eschatological programme masterminded by God. In sermon after sermon relished by the “born-agains” signs of the end-times are everywhere. The spread of aids and pornography, adultery and casual sexual activity, family break-up and teenage pregnancies fĳit the dispensationalist template but so too do current events, especially those involving Israel-Palestine and its neighbours in Western Asia and North Africa. As Susan Harding, an anthropologist specialising in American fundamentalism, suggests, dispensationalism is not so much a religious belief as a mode of knowing or understanding history:

Modern biblical critics submitted the Bible to history and found the Bible wanting. Dispensationalists submit history to the Bible and fĳind history wanting. Modern historians expelled deities from history. Dispensation- alists entrench God and Satan and the conflict between them as the very pattern of history.61

For readers already predisposed towards fĳinding divine portents in the newspapers, such twentieth-century events as the departure of the Turks from Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, the Nazi persecutions, the founding of Israel in 1948 and its capture of the Old City of Jerusalem including the Temple area in 1967, came strikingly near to the mark of pre-millennial predictions, generating a vast industry of books about Israel, the Middle East and the anticipated End-Times expected to occur in the region as the twentieth century drew to its close. By the millennial year 2000 The Late Great Planet Earth had sold more than 18 million copies in English. As Lindsey explained in his follow-up book The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (1981),

The center of the entire prophetic forecast is the State of Israel. Certain events in that nation’s recent history prove the accuracy of the prophets. They also force us to accept the fact that the “countdown” has begun.62

61 Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 237. 62 Hal Lindsey, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (New York: Bantam, 1981), 11; see also Sizer, Christian Zionism, 48. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 379

End Times and Left Behind

Recent end-time speculation has come to focus increasingly on contemporary anxieties. For example, skin cancers caused by holes in the ozone layer are equated with the “horrible sores” predicted in Revelation, while for some the Antichrist may already be manipulating our lives through his control of secret computerised banking codes based on permutations of the number 6-6-6.63 Although a majority of American fundamentalists lean strongly towards pre-millennialism, few are wholly consistent in pursuing its implications. Billy Graham, a convinced pre-millennialist, became a passionate advocate of disarmament during the 1980s—an activity that would logically lead to the postponing of Armageddon, interfering with God’s Plan for the world. In Countdown to Armageddon Lindsey, like Graham, made a subtle shift towards post-milleni- alism. If Christians would only get involved “in preserving this country” disaster might be mitigated, since it was possible that the us would remain a world power throughout the Last Days. While waiting in daily expectation of Jesus’s arrival, the faithful must take “active responsibility” as members of God’s family.64 Similarly, Tim LaHaye, a convinced pre-millennialist, joined Jerry Falwell in the national campaign to register “Christian” (i.e. fundamentalist) voters. He has now embarked on a career as a highly successful fĳiction writer. The Left Behind series of novels describing the aftermath of the Rapture co- authored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins now regularly tops the bestseller lists in America. By 2003 sales of these books in English are said to have reached more than 55 million copies.65 Like Martin’s pictures these novels describe a world of catastrophic destruction. Since all true Christians have vanished, having been raptured to heaven, those “left behind” have to contend with chaotic conditions: airports are littered with planes that crash when their pilots “disappear”; highways are similarly clogged with wrecked automobiles. Morgues and funeral homes report the disappearance of corpses. The AntiChrist appears in the person of Nicolae Carpathia, a previously obscure Romanian and advocate of global disarmament, with a striking resemblance to the young Robert Redford. Dismissing the biblical reasons for the disappearances, and supplying “scientifĳic” explanations instead, he rises to become un Secretary-General, and advocate for world peace. “We must disarm, we must empower the United

63 Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 254fff. 64 Lindsey, Countdown to Armageddon, xxx. 65 For insightful comments on the series, see Nancy Gibbs, “Apocalypse Now,” Time Magazine 1 July 2002, 45; Sizer, Christian Zionism, 76 n.77; Joan Didion “Mr. Bush & the Divine,” New York Review of Books Vol. 50, No.17 (November 6, 2003). 380 Ruthven

Nations, we must move to one currency, and we must become a global village.” The un headquarters is moved to New Babylon in Iraq from where Carpathia mounts his fĳinal attack on Israel. The series’s beleaguered Christian heroes try to save as many practising Jews as they can in preparation for their eventual conversion by the triumphant Messiah who will defeat Carpathia in the battle of Armageddon.66 Fundamentalist readers may understand the events depicted in the series, with all their violent ramifĳications, as literalistic enact- ments or visualisations of the End Time scenarios envisaged by John Nelson Darby and the Scofĳield reference Bible. As the novelist and critic Joan Didion observed in her essay on the genre,

What might seem to be the lesson of the Christian litany, that only through the acceptance of a profound mystery can one survive whatever spiritual tribulation these poetic fates are meant to signify, is not the lesson of the “Left Behind” books, in which the fates are literal rather than symbolic, and the action turns not on their mystery but on the inge- nuity required to neutralize them: a surprising number of the series’ beleaguered band of Christians turn out to have been trained, conveniently, as pilots, computer hackers, document forgers, disguise experts, black marketeers, interceptors of signal intelligence, and medical trauma specialists.67

The beleaguered Christian characters exhibit familiar anxieties and concerns associated with the Christian right: suspicion of authority, resistance to glo- balisation, hostility to religious ecumenism. In Didion’s view it is from an

assumption of competence, of the ability to manage a hostile environment, that the series derives both its potency and its interest: this is a story that feeds on wish fulfĳilment, a dream of the unempowered, the kind of dream that can be put to political use, and can also entrap those who would use it.68

66 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2004), 300 fff. Other titles in the series, published by the same company with sales claimed at more than 35 million (2004), include Left Behind, Tribulation Force, Nicolae, Soul Harvest, Apollyon, Assassins, The Indwelling, The Mark, Desecration, and The Remnant, in addition to Left Behind for Kids, abridged audio products, dramatic audio products, graphic novels, calendars and gift books. 67 Didion, “Mr Bush and the Divine.” 68 Didion, “Mr Bush and the Divine.” The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 381

A crucial factor, however, (upon which Didion omits to comment) is that the Left Behind series is being marketed as fĳiction. While Hal Lindsay’s books, and earlier productions of Tim LaHaye were presented as future history, with deliberate, if shifting, linkages to actual world events (a problem for the writers, as they had to keep changing the scenarios to keep up with changing headlines) the explicit marketing of End Times scenarios as works of fĳiction may represent a signifĳicant shift in the readership’s beliefs, away from literalism towards fĳictionalised representation. Like the John Martin canvases—whose menacing images are now relished by “Black Metal” artists such as Golgotha— the phenomenal success of these books show that people—especially those who feel themselves to be undervalued, underprivileged or marginalised— love to indulge in fantasies of chaos and violent endings, where the wealthy, powerful and privileged will get their just deserts. The very same vision underpins the apocalyptic denouements—the reign of the righteous and punishment of sinners—depicted in scripture. Under conditions of settled secular governance, great panoramic canvases such as Martin’s, modern disaster movies, Black Metal music and Left Behind thrillers may act as psychic opiates, offfering cathartic release for feelings of pity and fear, alleviating anger at the world’s injustices. But when traumas created by famine, war, disease or other social upheavals reach a critical point, fantasy and reality have a dangerous tendency to merge. Real time eschatologies are actualised. Violent endings happen.

Bibliography

Amanat, Abbas. Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi’ism. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. ——. and Magnus Bernardsson, eds. Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002. Bindman, David. “Deep Time, Dragons and Dinosaurs,” in Martin Myrone and Anna Austen (eds.), John Martin: Apocalypse. Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 2011. Boyer, Paul. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophesy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge ma: Harvard Belknap Press, 1992. Clark, Victoria. Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. London: Paladin Books, 1969. ——. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. 382 Ruthven

Court, John M. Approaching the Apocalypse: A Short History of Christian Millenarianism. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008. Didion, Joan. “Mr. Bush & the Divine,” New York Review of Books 50.17 (November 6, 2003). Festinger, Leon, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter. When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956. Friend Harding Susan. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Gibbs, Nancy. “Apocalypse Now,” Time Magazine, 1 July 2002. Johnson, Paul. A History of the Jews. London: Phoenix, 1993. Kant, Immanuel. On History. Translated by Lewish White Beck. New York: Bobbs- Merrill Co., 1963. Käseman, Ernst. “Die Anfange christlicher Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 57 (1960): 162–185. LaHaye, Tim and Jerry B. Jenkins. Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages. Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2004. Landes, Richard. Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Lindsey, Hal. The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon. New York: Bantam, 1981. ——. with C.C. Carlson. The Late Great Planet Earth. Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1987. Mee, John. “Millennarian Visions and Utopian Speculations,” in Martin Fitzpatrick (ed.), The Enlightenment World. New York: Routledge, 2004. Merkley, P.C. The Politics of Christian Zionism 1891–1948. London: Frank Cass, 1998. Myrone, Martin and Anna Austen, eds. John Martin: Apocalypse. Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 2011. Otis, George. Millennium Man. Van Nuys ca: Bible Voice, 1974. Price, Walter K. The Coming Antichrist. Chicago: Moody Press, 1974. Rauschning, Hermann. Men of Chaos. New York: G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 1942. Riches, John. The Bible: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Russell, D.S. Apocalyptic Ancient and Modern. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1978. ——. Divine Disclosure: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992. Ruthven, Malise. Torture: The Grand Conspiracy. London: Weidenfeld, 1978. Scholem, Gershom. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah 1626–1676. London: Routledge, 1973. Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Translated by W. Montgomery. Mineola ny: Dover, 2005. The Apocalyptic Social Imaginary 383

Sizer, Stephen. Christian Zionism. PhD diss., Middlesex University, 2002. Tatford, Frederick A. God’s Program of the Ages. Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1967. Taylor, Charles R. The Destiny of America. Van Nuys ca: Time-Light Books, 1972. Vander Lugt, Herbert. There’s a New Day Coming. Eugene or: Harvest House Publishing, 1983. Wagener, Otto von. Hitler: Memoirs of a Confĳidant. Translated by Ruth Hein and edited by Henry Ashby Turner Jr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Wagner, Don. Anxious for Armageddon. Scottdale pa: Herald Press, 1995.

Index

Action Française 88, 89n30, 90, 240, 242, Barnes, Harry Elmer 292 244, 253n85, 253n5 Barnes, James Strachey 20, 187, 187 n 1, Aetherius Society 340, 348–349 188, 190, 191, 191n11, 192, 192n 15, 193, 194, Africa 208 194n20–21, 195–201, 202, 202n40, 203, 204 agape 250, 252–253 Bärsch, Claus-Ekkehard 6 Agathon 83 Barth, Karl 17, 44–47, 53–65 Ahura Mazda 355 Bauckham, Richard 8–9 Alberti, Leon Battista 211 Baudelaire, Charles 36n37, 238, 238n9, 241 Albright, Daniel 100–101 Beasley, Rebecca 81n5 Alexander the Great 356–357 Becket, Thomas á 247 Alighieri, Dante 106n30 Bell, Ian F.A. 81n6 Althaus, Paul 45–47 Benjamin, Walter 49 amor 113–16, 121 Benn, Gottfried 56, 62–64, anarchism 68, 72 Benrubi, Isaac 85n17 anti-modernism (see modernism, Bergson, Henri 82–94 theological) Berning, Wilhelm 171 anti-Semitism (or anti-Jewish Bertram, Adolf 171 sentiment) 187, 194, 195, 198, 279–280, Besant, Annie 69n10, 370 284, 292–293, 371 Bible 118, 123, 308, 331, 349–350, 355, 365, Antiochus Epiphanes IV 357 372–373, 375–376, 378, 380 Antlifff, Mark 85 bildungsbürgertum 54, 56–57 apocalypse 1, 3, 7, 10–19, 21–23, 29–33, black metal 24, 381 35, 37, 40–41, 44, 47–50, 98–100, 102, 104, Blamires, David 30n5 123–125, 129, 137, 141, 233n53, 266, 274, 309, Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 75, 340–341, 311–313, 321–326, 328, 331, 333, 335–337, 346, 350, 370 343, 348, 350, 355–356, 360, 362–363 Bloch, Ernst 49 apocalyptic 224, 233 Blondel, Maurice 46n85, 82–83, 92 Applewhite, Marshall Herfff 345–346 Blossfeld, Karl 153, 156 Aquinas, Thomas 94, 226n16 bolshevism (or bolshevik) 198–199, Arnold, Kenneth 339, 341 354, 369 Aryan Leauge of America 294 Bonhoefffer, Dietrich 17, 54–65, 172 Ascended Masters 339, 345, 347–348, 350 Bormann, Martin 171, 173 Asher, Kenneth 240 n 16–18, 241n22–23, Brethren, Plymouth 71, 372 242n27, 243n 29 Brightman, Thomas 372 Astronomy 99, 101–102 Britain 187, 196, 198, 199 Auden, Wystan Hugh 21, 236–237, Brooks, James 215, 218, 373 249–257, 260–275 Broome, J.H. 93 Averroes 110, 114–115, 117, 122 Brunschvicg, Léon 92n43 Avicenna 110, 114–115, 117, 122 Bukharin, Nikolai 369 Bull, Malcolm 16 Baden (Grand Duke of) 374 Bultmann, Rudolf 46–47 Baillie, John 222 Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms 354 Balfour, Arthur James 89n30–31, 374, 378 Burwick, Frederick. 85n18 Ballard, Guy and Edna 346–347 Bush, Ronald 111n6, 114, 118n22, 212n17, Balthasar, Hans Urs von 56, 130, 134–135 241, 288–289 386 index

Caird, George B. 41 Coughlin, Father Charles 194, 194n22, 195 Cantos, The 109–122 crisis 29–31, 41, 44–48, 50, 123–126, canzone 111–114, 117 128–129, 236–237, 223, 226, 245, 257 Carsten, Johann Anton Wilhelm von 149 Cromwell, Oliver 286, 361 Caserio, Robert 68–69 Crowder, Colin 16 Catholicism (or Catholic) 18, 20, 30, 43, crusades 360 46, 68, 71–72, 74, 76–78, 80–85, 87–88, Csengeri, Karen 84n15 123–124, 126–128, 142, 146, 152, 171–173, 180, cultic milieu 342 182–183, 187–188, 192, 194–195, 197, 199, 200–204, 209, 211, 213–214, 222–223, Dallas Theological Seminary 373 240–242, 250, 253, 261, 288, 322, 328, damnation 133–134, 135, 237–238, 241, 252 354, 359 Daniel, Book of 31, 355- 357, 359, 361, Cavalcanti, Guido 109, 111–117, 120–22 375–376 Charles the Bald 109 Dante 18, 35, 36n37, 239, 243, 249, 292, 313 Chesterton, G.K. 68–78 Darby, John Nelson 372–375, 380 chiliasm 23, 343, 362 Darwin, Charles 151 Christ, Jesus 9, 22, 31, 33–34, 37, 41, 43–46, Daudin, Claire 144 54, 59–65, 125, 132, 134–136, 153, 168, 170, Dawson, Christopher 222, 224, 230 173–174, 180, 196, 211, 250–251, 253–254, 289, Day The Earth Stood Still (fĳilm), The 339, 309, 311, 322, 326, 341, 344–345, 348, 350, 344, 345n26 357–359, 370–372, 374–377, 379 Dead Sea Scrolls 357 Christendom 225–231 democracy 236, 240, 244–245, 250, 252, Christian Zionism 23, 361n22, 371–374, 253, 257 375n49, 378n62, 379n65 Denis, Maurice 85 Christianity 1–4, 6–7, 16–17, 19, 21, 23, 31, Derrida, Jacques 13–16, 166n1, 313, 312 40–41, 47, 56, 65, 67, 70, 72–73, 75, 125, 129, desegregation 293, 297 131n32, 133, 166, 168–173, 175, 177, 194n20, dialectical theology 59, 63 196, 200, 210, 222, 224–225, 228, 230, 233, Dilworth, Thomas 10–11 237, 237n7, 238, 239n15, 242, 243n31, dissolution 123–128 244–246, 248n55, 249–252, 270, 273, 279, Döblin, Alfred 58 294, 322, 340–342, 344, 351, 355, 358–359, Doering, Bernard 90 361, 370–371, 373 Domarus, Max 171n10–11, 207n4 Church Universal and Triumphant Douglass, Paul 85n18 (cut) 340, 345, 347–348 Dreyfus, Alfred 126–127 city 33–36 Dudek, Louis 284–285, 287 Clapham Sect 373 Clarke, Fred 222 Eastwood, Dorothy 92 Classicism 88, 90–91 Eber, Wilhelm Emil (Elk) 180 cognitive dissonance 5, 365, 368 Eckart, Dietrich 174 Cohn, Norman 3–4, 355n1, 360–361, 368 Eddington, Arthur 97, 99–101 Cold War 313, 315–316, 324, 341 Einstein, Albert 97–101, 104, 107 Collins, John J. 7n22 Einstein, Carl 58–59 commonplace 301, 317–318 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 17–18, 20–21, communism 224, 225 29–30, 32–37, 39–40, 42–44, 47–48, 67, Conrad, Joseph 102 69, 74, 78, 81–82, 93, 97–107, 111, 222, 225, conversion 239–244, 247, 250 230–231, 230n36, 236–250, 253, 257, Cookson, Willliam 111n5, 209 308, 321 Corinth, Lovis 183 Ellul, Jacques 333–335 Cosmology 98–101, 106–107 Emery, Clark 209 Index 387 entropy 99–100, 102–104, 107 Grifffĳin, Roger 2–6, 16, 20, 80n1, 187n2, Eriugena, John Scottus 109–122 188n3–4, 189–190, 201, 203, 209n9, 218n27, Ernest, Haeckel 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 222, 224, 226, 233, 233n53, 237, 237n5–7, 156, 158 242n25, 260, 264–267, 274, 282 eschatology 4, 9, 13, 18–19, 22, 29, 40–41, Gröber, Konrad 171 44–50, 110, 119, 121,132, 166–168, 312, Grogin, R.C. 83n12, 84n16, 85n18, 325–328, 343 89n33 Europe 206–209, 212–213, 215, 217 Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 173 European, The 15, 283, 286–293 Grosseteste, Robert 117, 120 everyday 316–318 evil 261, 267, 269, 271–273 Hall, Radclyfffe 69 expressionism 53–65, 183 Harnack, Adolf von 56–58 Ezekiel, the Prophet 33, 40, 355–356, Hayward, John 81 359, 376 heat death 103 heaven 130–132 Faguer, Nicolas 124, 130n29 Heaven’s Gate 341, 344–346, 349–350 fascism (or fascist regime, fascist ideology, Hechler, William 374 neo-fascism) 2, 17, 18, 20, 22, 118, Hegel, G. W. F. 44, 146 121, 126, 187–204, 206–208, 209n9, Heidegger, Martin 46, 166 212–218, 218n27, 224, 229, 236–237, 241, Heinz, Wilhelm 176 242n25, 244, 244n34, 245n35, 250, hell 130, 132–135, 137, 236–237, 239–240, 260–261, 264–266, 269, 273, 279–280, 242, 244, 247–248, 257 282–298, 347 Herder, Johann Gottfried 151 Festinger, Leon 368 Herzl, Theodor 373–374 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 170 Heydrich, Reinhard 171 Fiddes, Paul S. 13–15, 17 Heymann, Richard 180–182 Fifth Monarchy 361 Himmler, Heinrich 170–174 Foucault, Michel 167 historicism 312–313, 315 fragmentation 36, 43 Hitler, Adolf 5–6, 20–21, 62, 167–168, France 127, 129, 135 170–174, 176, 179–183, 197–198, 207, Frei, Hans 53, 59 209n9, 212, 246, 250, 260–266, 271, Frobenius, Leo 20, 208–209, 209n7, 279, 285, 293–294, 298, 354, 365, 214–216 370–371, 377 Frost, Robert 29 Hodges, H. A. 222, 226n16 Frost, Stanley 41 Hoess, Rudolf 171 Frye, Northrop 13–15 Holden, Charles 365 future 3, 9, 11–12, 15, 41, 44–45, 47–50 Höppener, Hugo 162 Hügel, Friedrich von 82 Gallé, Émile 158 Hulme, Thomas Ernest 18, 81–82, 84–87, Gentile, Emilio 188n4, 189, 195, 203, 224, 89–92, 240, 253 236n4, 280, 281n5 humanism 226–227, 233 George, Stefan 173, 178 Humboldt, Alexander von 151 Gerbod, Françoise 130, 135–136 Huxley, Aldous 258 Gnostic 113 Goebbels, Joseph 171 incarnation 237, 250, 252–257 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 151 intellect, active 115 Gogarten, Friedrich 63 intellect, possible 113, 115, 116 Gourmont, Remy de 85 Isaiah, the Prophet 33, 40 grain (or grano) 208–209, 212–214 Italy 206–207, 209, 211, 211–214, 216–219 388 index

Jackson, Kevin 44n74 Levenson, Michael 72, 75, 81 Jacobins 369 Lewis, Pericles 67–69 Jäger, Gustav 148 Leyden, Jan of 368 James, William 83–84 liberalism 187–204, 222–224, 240, Jasper, David 16 247, 249–250, 256–257, 260–262, Jaurès, Jean 131 273, 315 Jeans, James 97, 100–101, 107 Liebermann, Max 158 Jeremiah, the Prophet 40, 41n62 Liebregts, Peter 81n6 Jerusalem 355, 357–360, 373, 378 light philosophy 110, 114, 117, 120–121 Jodack, Darrell 82n9 Lindsay, Hal 23, 375, 381 John of Patmos 35 Lisle, Leconte de 86 John the Baptist 370 Lloyd George, David 374 John, the Evangelist 46 Loisy, Alfred 82–83 Johnston, John H. 30n6 Löwe, Adolf 222, 230 Jones, David 10, 17–18, 29–30, 36–40, Lubac, Henri de 47n85 43, 44, 48 Lucàcs, George 62–63 Joyce, James 241–242, 321, 336 Lucretius 152 judgment 124–125, 128–131, 134–137 Luke, the Evangelist 33n24, 34n25, 34n26, Julian of Norwich 248 37n45 Jünger, Ernst 176–178 Luther, Martin 58, 240, 354

Kandinsky, Wassily 180 Malatesta, Sigismondo 211 Kant, Immanuel 16, 362 Malory, Thomas 34, 36, 39 Käseman, Ernst 362 Manet, Édouard 141 Kasper, John 22, 293–298 Manhattan Project 310n19 Kayman, Martin 81n6 Mann, Heinrich 175, 178 Kenner, Hugh 42n68 Mann, Thomas 178 Kermode, Frank 3–4, 13–15, 29, 40, Mannheim, Karl 222, 224–225, 228, 48, 190, 203, 233n53, 237, 241n23, 266, 229n29 301n1, 309 Mao Tse-Tung 354, 377 Kierkegaard, Søren 21, 251, 266, 270–271 Maritain, Jacques 88–89, 90n34, 92, 223, King George 348 226–232, 229n29, 230n36 Klee, Paul 180 Maritain, Raissa 89n33 Klemperer, Otto 63 Mark, the Evangelist 33n24, 34n26 Koch, Robert 144 Marsh, Edward 90n36 Koresh, David 354 Martin-Amorbach, Oskar 180–181 kulturkreise 208 Martin, John 23–24, 363–65, 379, 381 Martin, Jonathan 363 Landes, Richard 4–5, 23, 343–344, 349, Martin, William 363 362, 368–371 Massis, Henri 83 Lasserre, Pierre 88–89 materialism 246 Laudet, Fernand 127–128, 130, 135 Matthew, the Evangelist 33n24, 34n26 Lawrence, David Herbert 1, 2n4, 68, 242, Maurras, Charles 82, 88, 90, 126, 240–244, 321–322 246, 253 le monde modern 126, 128–129 McCormack, Bruce L. 57 Le Roy, Edouard 83–84, 85n17 McGinn, Bernard 6, 7n22 Leavis, F.R. 58 medievalism 229 Lefèvre, Frédéric 83n13 Mee, John 362 Lenin (or leninist) 174n19, 218, 369 Mein Kampf 228 Index 389

Mendelson, Edward 236n3, 249n63–64, New World Order 294 251, 253, 253n85, 253n87, 254, 255, 260, Newman, Cardinal 92 261n5, 262n17, 263n20, 264n28, 266, 270 Niebuhr, Reinhold 21, 267, 269n57 Mendès, Catulle 86 Nietzsche, Friedrich 30, 94 Merton, Thomas 22–23, 321–337 Nolde, Emil 178 messianism (or messianic) 3n8, 23, nonconformism 72–73 49–50, 169, 264, 357–359, 365, 370–371 nuclear 301–318, 328–330, 336, 341, 345, Miller, Cristanne 67 348, 375 Milton, John 36n37, 74, 313–314, 321 Moberly, Walter 222 O’Leary, Stephen D. 11–12 Mobilisation 166, 169, 179–180 Oldham, Joseph Houldsworth 20, modernism 222–225, 227–228, 227n22, 228n23, 231–232, cultural 1–3, 5–8, 11, 16–17, 19–20, 29, 242n26, 244n33 43, 56, 65, 67–78, 80–82, 83, 87, 167, Operation Doorstep 303–305, 318 177–178, 188, 190, 203, 222, 226, 233, 237, Oppenheimer, J. Robert 307–311 241n20, 242n25, 282, 287, 314, 317, 336 ordinary 302–303, 316–317 theological 17–18, 30n4, 46, 73, 80, original sin 21, 90, 125, 240, 252–254, 260, 82–83, 85, 87, 92–94, 127–128, 135, 314 269, 273, 341 modernity 2–3, 7, 9–10, 18, 21, 23, 70, 80, Orwell, Charles 365 82, 126, 177, 179, 185 Owen, Alex 23 Moltmann, Jürgen 15, 47, 49–50 monasticism (or monastic, monas- paganism 20, 74, 169–170, 173–174, tery) 22, 322, 327, 329–330, 335 209–211, 224–225, 242, 246 Monet, Claude 141, 158 Paideuma 20, 208–209 Moody, Dwight 373 palingenesis (or palingenetic) 2, 20, 175, Moore, G.E. 92 200, 260, 264–265, 282 Mormon 354 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 49 Mosley, Oswald 22, 282–283, 286–287, Pascal, Blaise 92 293–294 Pasteur, Louis 144 Muhammad 350, 354 Péguy, Charles 84, 123–137 Mullins, Eustace 22, 294, 295n37, 298n43 Pellizzi, Camillo 209 Münster 360 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 151 Murry, John Middleton 222, 225, 229, 230, Petre, Maude 82 230n38–39 Pettenkofer, Max von 144 Mussolini, Benito (or duce) 18, 20, 112–113, Pisan Cantos 284, 288–290, 291n26, 293 118, 121, 190n8, 191, 193–194, 197–198n29, 201, Plethon, Gemistus 110, 120 201n38, 202, 206, 209n9, 212–213, 216, 238, Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, Laurent- 244, 279–282, 285–286, 288–290, 293 Marie 124, 126, 129 poetry 269, 270n61, 322–323, 331, 335 napoleonic 363 Pol Pot 354 nazism (or national socialism) 2, 5–6, 17, Polanyi, Michael 222 20, 23, 55, 62–63, 166–173, 175–177, 179–180, political religion 1–3, 16–17, 19–20, 236, 183, 191, 195–200, 202, 224–225, 249, 261, 236n4, 280, 281n5, 282, 290–291 264–266, 274 Pope Leo XIII 82 Neame, Alan 286, 288–291 Pope Pius X 80 Neo-Platonism 81, 109–122 popular culture 350 Neo-Scholasticism 226 popular science 101 Nettles, Bonnie-Lu 345–346 Pound, Ezra 1n2, 18–22, 71, 74, 78, 81, 93, New Age 344–346, 349 102n18, 109–122, 206–219, 279–298, 321 390 index pragmatism 81, 90, 93, 262 Schwartz, Sanford 85n18 propaganda 11, 71, 75, 169, 178–179, 182, Schweitzer, Albert 41 202, 206–208, 213, 217–218, 257, 272, secularisation 223, 233 282–285, 287–288 Shaftesbury (Lord) 373 Prophet, Elizabeth Clare 347–348 Shamanism 355 Prophet, Mark 347–348 Shaw, George Bernhard 148 Protestantism 74, 170, 252 sign 32, 43 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 21, 194, silence 328–329, 337 292–293 Spear of Destiny 170 Pseudo-Dionysius 110–111, 114, 119, 122 Speer, Albert 174, 365, 367 Spencer, Herbert 94 Quisling, Vidkun 169 Spengler, Oswald 47, 63, 168 Quran (or Koran) 212, 354–355 Spiegel, Ferdinand 183–184 St Augustine 36n37, 359, 368, 372 Rae, Patricia 81n7 St John of the Cross 239, 243n28 Raelians 341, 347, 350 St Paul 358 Rauschenbusch, Walter 362 Stalin (or stalinist) 369, 376–377 Rauschning, Hermann 370 stars 101, 103–107 Reformation, the 223 Staufffenberg, Claus Schenk von 173 rejected knowledge 342, 351 Stein, Stephen J. 7n22 relativity 100–101 Steiner, Rudolf 370 Remarque, Ernst Maria 176 Stevens, Wallace 2, 301–303, 306, Renior, Pierre-Auguste 141 308–309, 313–318 revelation 45, 47 stigmatised knowledge 342 Revelation, Book of 1, 7–11, 14–16, 31, 35, Stock, Noel 280–281 n 3, 282 n 6, 291–292 37–38, 41, 130, 132–133, 135–136, 331, 354, Strauss, David Friedrich 153 358–359, 369, 375–377, 379 Streicher, Julius 171 Ricciardi, Caterina 213, 219 Stuck, Franz von 180 Richards, I.A. 58 subjectivity 41 Ricoeur, Paul 13, 15 Sully-Prudhomme, René Armand Rikli, Arnold 147 François 86 Roberts, Michael 90n36 Surette, Leon 7, 23 Robespierre, Maxim 362 Suttner, Bertha von 156 Rolland, Romain 125 Symbolism 86n24 romanticism 87–88, 90–91, 93 Rosenzweig, Franz 49 Taine, Hippolyte 86, 94 Rothschild (Lord) 374 Tard, Alfred 83 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 88, 145 technology 333–335 Russell, David S. 41 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 326–327, 329 Temple, William 232 Sabbatai Zevi 354, 361 Terboven, Josef 169 sacred canopy 222, 228, 233 Tharaud, Jean 84n16 salvation 124, 134–137 Tharaud, Jérome 84n16 Satan (or Satanism) 241, 358–359, Theosophy 340, 342 377–378 Thomas, Ralph 365 Schiller, Friedrich 151 Thomism 84 Schirach, Baldur von 173 Thoreau, Henry David 161 Scholem, Gerschom 49n94 Thyssen, Fritz 171 Schuchard, Ronald 85n20 Tifffany, Loius Confort 158 Index 391

Tillich, Paul 17, 53–54, 56, 60–61, 64–65 Weisskopf, Viktor 309 Tonning, Erik 12n47, 20–21 Weizmann, Chaim 374 totalitarianism 20–21, 224, 236n4, 257, Weston, Jessie Laidley 34 260, 269, 271, 273, 283 Whitworth, Michael 100 tribulation 32 Wilhelm II 374 Trotter, W.F. 92n43 Wilhelmine Germany 54 Troubadour 109, 111, 114 Williams, Charles 253, 253n87–88, 257 Tyrell, George 86n22 Williams, Rowan 336–337 Woolf, Virginia 67–68 ufology 341, 346, 348 World War I (or Great War and Upward, Allen 68–78 synonyms) 2, 10, 29–30, 36, 44–45, 112, 124, 152, 156, 161, 168, 170, 175–178, Vidler, Alec 82 180, 182–183, 191, 203–204, 279, 324, Virgil 36n37, 243 327, 341 Visan, Tancrède de 85 World War II (and synonyms) 17, 20, 187, vitalism 82, 85 202, 204, 206–208, 210n12, 233, 260, 286n16, Von Balthasar, Hans Urs 130, 134–135 289, 292, 314, 340–341

Wagner, Richard 168 Yeats, W.B. 6–7, 17, 29–32, 40–42, 47–48 wasteland 29–30, 32–34, 36–37, 39, 42–43, Zarathustra 355 Weber, Eugen 88n29 Zielinski,Thaddeus 210, 210n12 Weisgerber, Albert 180 Zünd, Robert 143