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become cluttered with a modish phraseology nearly as obnoxious
as the class-struggle phraseology of the thirties. There is the term
"original sin," for instance, which has lately taken on a flavor
definitely avantgardist, like the word "marvelous" in the lingo of the
surrealists. Altogether there is far too much manipulation of the
notions of guilt, evil, and sin, notions drawn from theological sources
at second or third hand and converted, under cover of the religious
revival, into a kind of aesthetic demonology which is really little
more than a mid-century version of the "Satanism" that prevailed
in
the advanced literary circles of Paris at the time of Baudelaire's
youth.
All that is but a symptom of the appalling disinclination on the
part of the new literary converts to make anything more of .
the Christian ethic of love and goodness than the world will allow.
What they make much more of is the orthodox doctrine of evil-a
doctrine the ambiguities of which have baffled many a theologian but
which for that very reason perhaps suits the literary faculty in its
present state of privation. It is a doctrine that can be worked with
facility both as a mystification of magical import and as a pre–
fabricated motive to be pressed into service wherever concrete and
specific insight into human nature and conduct is missing. To be
sure, there is no denying the reality of evil. But it is precisely its
reality which is obscured and dissipated when turned into an all–
sufficing explanation and then made the object of aesthetic play-act–
ing with modem ideas of the irrational and the demonic, ideas as
ubiquitous as they are indeterminate. One recalls that in
Faust
Mephistopheles observes with his characteristic shrewdness that
Auck die Kultur, die alle Welt beleckt,
Hat aUf den Teufel sick erstreckt.
Since that verse was written Faust has been virtually eclipsed by
Mephistopheles in the role of protagonist of the higher productions of
Kultur;
and being exceedingly practiced in beating the highminded at
their own game, Mephistopheles is no doubt far from displeased by
his
rise to a position of glamor in the cultural hierarchy.
Moreover, the free play now given to the doctrine of evil and
sin has more than an aesthetic resonance. The moral implications
are not to be overlooked.
If
the Utopians on the Left (the futurists, as
Toynbee calls them) disastrously assume the innate goodness of man
