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PARTISAN REVIEW
a representative neurotic theologian, does not thankfully push over
on to God is the responsibility for his own guilty depravity;
that
he is
responsible for, he confesses-with the abject, appealing leer of Peter
Lorre in M- but everything else in the universe God is responsible
for. This satisfies at one stroke Auden's anxiety-he is assured that he
can and should do nothing himself; his need for guilt and his need to
be reconciled to that guilt; and his need of an inexorable and uncon–
ditioned Authority.
When we have constructed God as the Wholly Other than our–
selves, the wholly evil; when we have decreed that the image of God
has been "wholly blotted out" in man by the Fall, we naturally find
the problem of mediation between the Wholly Other and what it is
wholly other than, a logically insoluble problem. We
require-that
is,
we have made ourselves require- a self-contradictory, paradoxical,
absurd mediator. Authority is now considered to
be
absolutely uncon–
ditioned, at once the Everything and the Not-Everything: shall
we
attempt to depose or limit God by demanding that he accord with
our morality, our reason, our anything? The demands of Authority
are equally unconditioned: but our own troubling actual existence
wholly disappears in our believing, vicarious identification with
Authority. Fortunate circumstances! since that existence is wholly evil:
"In every good work the just man sins." In every act we "do/Evil as
each creature does/In every definite decision/To improve; for even
in/The germ-cell's primary division/Innocence is lost and Sin,/Already
given as a fact,/ Once more issues as an act."
If
Luther had only
known about that germ-cell's primary division! The advances of
Science almost have enabled Auden to beat Luther and Calvin at
their own game. But then they were handicapped by taking it so
much more
seriously.
The later Auden is rarely serious: he
is
either
solemn or ingeniously frivolous, like some massive and labyrinthine
town-clock from which a corked Topsy and a gilt Eva somersault to
mark the hours of Time, but from which Uncle Tom himself, rattling
the keys and surrounded by the flames of Judgment, emerges to herald
the advent of Eternity.
The Buddha said that he taught nothing but suffering and the
escape from suffering; Auden today could say that he teaches nothing
but guilt,
which is
the escape from guilt. To be able to spend his time
feeling guilty over the primary fission of the germ-cell instead of
over that primary fission of the atom which produced in a few minutes
half a million casualties-what a God-sent mercy this ability is to
Auden, what a final expression of the depths and necessities of his
