AUDEN'S IDEOLOGY
451
being! What escape from responsibility or from guilt can equal this
responsibility, this guilt? And, after
all,
is not the death of these poor
guilty creatures (damned as they were by their lack of any connection
with God through that one Mediator, Christ) only one more relatively
unimportant effect of the germ-cell's division, that primary actual–
ization of the
fact
of the first Fall-the Fall which has transformed
every succeeding action of man into a guilty horror? How unimpor–
tant these inevitably trivial secular issues must seem to us to whom
God has brought it home that there is only
one
issue: the obedience
of the guilty soul to God, the soul's salvation by the grace of God.
Over and over Auden attacks ev.ery "good" act, every attem.rt
to "improve." He reiterates that "it is not enough to bear witness
[i.e.,
to be a martyr] for even protest is wrong." He writes, with that over–
weening humility which is the badge of all his saints, the humility
of Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard and Barth:
Convict our pride of its offense
In all things, even penitence.
So far as
his
penitence, so far as all (theological) things are concerned,
it is hard to put up more than a token resistance to his contention.
When we look at the world around us and within us, and then think
of a 3tatement like Niebuhr's, that only rebellion against God "is sin
in the strictest sense of the word," how bitter it is not to be allowed
to include that theology itself within the category of
sin, in the strictest
sense of the word.
But I am applying ethical concepts to a realm
in which, as the most casual witness must have observed, all ethics is
suspended.
Auden first slipped into this dark realm of Faerie (this "horrible
nightmare," as the goaded Froude confessed) on the furtive excur–
sions of the unbeliever who needs some faked photographs of the Little
People for use as illustration&. to a new edition of
Peter Pan,
but who
ends up as a cook's boy helping the glbomier dwarfs boil toads and
snails for the love-feast that celebrates the consummation of their
mysteries. Thus in
New Year Letter
many things are used as mere
mt;taphors or conceits which a few months later are accepted as dog–
matic and eternal truths. For instance, the status of the Devil (who
has "no positive existence," but who nonetheless perpetually pushes
us over into Good) is still exactly that of
A.
A. Milne's bears which
eat you if you step on the cracks in the pavement-lovable hypos–
tatized fictions of the pragmatic moralist. But I have no doubt that
Milne, after a few years of avoiding cracks, sometimes woke screaming
