AUDEN'S IDEOLOGY
455
pushed Sexuality to the side as far as
it
can, and attempts rather
unsuccessfully to mitigate its confessed Guilt and Isolation by
re–
forming
the Authority it
pull~
down to it in Auden's traditional Jacob–
and-the-angel wrestling match. But in Stage III Anxiety, Guilt and ,
Isolation are themselves the
relations
of Authority to the core; they
are
Grace (its mirror-image, as Auden puts it), the means by which
Authority is manipulating the core into salvation. (Sexuality, mutated
into Agape, is itself floating somewhere up near God.) The reader
may complain about my last diagram: "But what is left to be the
core?" That is the point I was making: there is nothing left. Tl)e_one
thing the Chric;tian must realize is that he is_"les§_!!l<Hl._!l.IlY'OfGOd•s
~reatttres~_,~ -that
he is swallOwed
~
in Authority, the wholly e e-
- · minirrg-Autlfority_of_ God.
-----
- --
This was early piain to Auden: about New Year, 1940, he dis–
approvingly judged that the Calvinist tradition makes man "the
passive instrument of daemonic powers"; but by the anniversary of
this date, in the
Nation
of January 4, 1941, he is giving the theo–
logian Niebuhr (who in Cromwell's time would undoubtedly have
been named Death-on-Pride Niebuhr) a little neo-Calvinist lecture
a
la
Kierkegaard: he is "not sure" that Niebuhr "is sufficiently
ashamed
[my
italics]," mourns over Niebuhr's "orthodoxy," and ends by
threateningly demanding that Niebuhr decide once and for all "whe–
ther he believes that the contemplative life is the highest and most ex–
hausting of vocations, or not." Just so, in late 1939, months and
months before, he had complained that the doctrines of the theo–
logian MacMurray are distorted by his "determination to believe in
the existence of God," and had suggested that those doctrines would
lose little-and, obviously, gain a lot- if expressed as Auden ex–
pressed them: "Man is aware that his actions do not express his real
nature. God is a term for what he imagines that nature to be. Thus
man is always making God in his own image." (In a little over a year
he is sure that God is the Wholly Other.) Those years were fun for
Auden, but death for the theologians.
But I am being drawn into theology and the article which will
follow the present one: a discussion of the effect on Auden's ideology
of Freud, Marx, Paul, Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Barth
anc~
Niebuhr.
III.
After observing in Auden this permanent anxiety, guilt, and
isolation, adhered to with unchanging firmness in every stage of his
