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  "description": "The following is the second installment of a three-part series. The first one can be found here. Used by Auden in concert with “limitation” to qualify",
  "path": "/religioustheory/posts/traversing-w-h-audens-religious-and-aesthetic-states-part-2-raji-singh-soni/",
  "publishedAt": "2017-08-04T15:44:59.000Z",
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  "tags": [
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    "aesthetic",
    "religious",
    "kant",
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    "secular",
    "Religion and Literature"
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  "textContent": "The following is the second installment of a three-part series.  The first one can be found here.\n\nUsed by Auden in concert with “limitation” to qualify boundaries proper to secular aesthetics in modernity, the term “absurd” in its Kierkegaardian sense implies another precinct against which art and the artist will necessarily chafe in nonreligious domains of the understanding. Ultimately, as a lay, non-liturgical, and thus secular work of art that surreptitiously advances a “Christian conception” of aesthetics, “The Sea and the Mirror” delineates the zone of the absurd as wrought by a religious “paradox of faith”; bordering on the secularist understanding’s “finite world” of aesthetic play, this domain of religious paradox and absurdity harbors “an interiority \\[or level of ineffable secrecy in the singular individual\\] that is incommensurable with \\[the\\] exteriority” that governs the worldly, secular, empirical understanding.\n\nAmid the friction of these incommensurable realms, Christ’s passage from the oratorio’s Egyptian desert, through the titular mirror, and thence to the tain of the aesthetic commentary reinforces Auden’s “absurd” effort to intertwine religion and secularity in For the Time Being as a book of two poems. Qua his turn to Kierkegaardian existentialism, which imbricates while also differentiating between aesthetic, ethical, and religious “spheres,” Auden in “The Sea and the Mirror” does not conflate religious interiority and secular exteriority.\n\nTrue to their Kierkegaardian form, these domains persist as incommensurable, even as Auden draws the Holy Family into the commentary through an implicitly Christian conception of art. The flight of the Incarnation’s key players, as each is redrawn in “For the Time Being,” into Auden’s Shakespearean “work of art” on “the limitation of art” thus interposes the two States in For the Time Being as a singular book: the imperfect “religious state” of the oratorio and the imperfect “aesthetic state” of the commentary. As Auden implies in conversation with Alan Ansen, the stakes of traversing such states are intriguingly novel:\n\nThe Catholics haven’t really evolved a Christian aesthetic. They didn’t take over Aristotle’s metaphysics, so why persist in a pagan aesthetic? After all, they didn’t condemn works of art as being unchristian. Even St. Thomas relies on Aristotle’s aesthetic. In fact, one wonders just how Christian he was…And the unsureness of the Catholic Church in dealing with the movies is another example. They have a good answer for almost everything – contraception, for example.\n\nBut their attitude towards manifestly heretical movies, which they let by, is thoroughly inconsistent. You know, I am beginning to feel that even Dante isn’t really a Christian writer. He’s really the greatest poet. It’s amazing how much harder it gets when one has come to take things seriously. Before I became a believer it was easy to accept Dante’s theology and suspend disbelief. But now I’m coming to doubt whether he really was a Christian. He doesn’t realize that God suffers.\n\nAuden’s views here revolve around his Kierkegaardian distinction between an unelaborated “Christian aesthetic” and an established secular or “pagan aesthetic.” For him, Christianity has not developed a coherent philosophy of art by which to mark its own aesthetic stances from those enshrined in Antiquity’s pagan conventions and in the nascent secular worldview of Renaissance Europe. Corollaries of this argument include not only Auden’s sense of the inconsistencies that mar Catholicism’s aesthetic judgment of films that are “manifestly heretical,” but also his provocative doubts as to the very Christianity of Aquinas and Dante; for, in the aesthetic sphere,\n\nAquinas’s Aristotelian baggage may inadvertently derail an ethical passage to the domain of religious faith and thus absurdity. Consonantly, following upon his own Patripassian conviction as to the Trinity’s quasi-creaturely suffering, Auden conjectures that Dante’s theology is less Christian than we imagine; for, in the mediating ethical sphere, “Dante’s Hell consists of punishments imposed from without, not of sinners who deliberately stay there, which is the Christian belief.” If Dante’s ethical sphere is compromised, then so is his religious sphere: “He doesn’t realize that God suffers.”\n\nBy the mid-twentieth century Auden was not alone in his view that “\\[t\\]he Catholics haven’t really evolved a Christian aesthetic.” Between 1961 and 1985, Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar completed a daunting sixteen-part study of Christianity, the first seven volumes of which he called The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. In Volume I: Seeing the Form, von Balthasar first traces “The Elimination of Aesthetics from Theology.” He then advances “From an Aesthetic Theology to a Theological Aesthetics” that will shape The Glory of the Lord’s remaining volumes. Auden’s theological and aesthetic aims in For the Time Being, as I gauge its interfacing structure, dovetail with von Balthasar’s intentions in The Glory of the Lord. Indeed, notwithstanding their differences in genre, both works ultimately grapple with secular modernity’s core “aesthetic contract”:\n\n> The conventions or terms of the \\[aesthetic\\] contract are precisely those problems an artistic or intellectual community is willing to undertake for the duration of the contract. Examples of particular aesthetic contracts include “German tragic drama,”  “the Elizabethan sonnet,” décadence, modernism, and postmodernism…The aesthetic contract is in effect so long as its always provisional and tentative solutions are to problems whose relevance is agreed upon by some consensus…A new order of government or a new system of production or technology may so alter living and thinking conditions as to invalidate a particular aesthetic contract…Artworks that become the basis for aesthetic contracts hover between an exciting hypothesis regarding possibility and a plausible analysis of existing conditions…“Creative freedom” is itself a clause deriving from one particular aesthetic contract, a late-Enlightenment-Romantic one, whose terms are elaborated, among others, by Kant, Schlegel, and Kierkegaard.\n\nFor von Balthasar and Auden, the epicenter of modernity’s aesthetic contract is “the secular nature of the theological void,” which “the artist was constructed to fill”; for both authors, moreover, the artist—a “human-born deity of creative and intellectual endeavor”—is “encrusted with metaphysical values so persistent that we are laboring at their productive illumination even today.” However, relying “for its format on stipulations made by Rousseau in The Social Contract,” the aesthetic contract in Henry Sussman’s account curiously elides a major “late-Enlightenment-Romantic” exemplar of “creative freedom” to whom The Glory of the Lord responds explicitly and to whom For the Time Being, I submit, implicitly responds.\n\nIn von Balthasar’s Seeing the Form, Friedrich Schiller is among the first historical proper names we encounter. “When\n\nHans Urs von Balthasar\n\nbeauty becomes a form which is no longer understood as being identical with Being, spirit, and freedom,” he writes, “we have entered an age of aestheticism.” “Borrowing from Kant,” von Balthasar continues, Schiller ventures boldly into this age of aestheticism by elaborating “spirit’s splendour in the beauty of form” and by arguing for “spirit’s sovereign freedom” in “an existence fully governed by the aesthetic principle.”\n\nAs von Balthasar explains in Volume V: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, Schiller’s thought-experiment culminates in a forceful secularization of “the Christian eschatology of the resurrection”: “Schiller’s aesthetic prosthesis replaces “the miracle of the grace of the personal God” with “the miracle of the divine charis of man (who had always been divine).”\n\nVon Balthasar thus echoes Auden’s perspective on the magnetic force of aesthetics in Greek Antiquity when he pinpoints Schiller’s\n\n> reduction of the infinite process of the becoming of the world towards God to the progress of mankind towards its highest (perhaps unattainable, only approachable) idea, and finally the provenance of the ideal from the Greeks. …Thus the inquiry into Being and God is lost to sight, and the spotlight falls on man actively involved in the agôn and in tragedy: on a being who possesses ideals but not gods, on a being who possesses its majesty and its glory within itself. Man has no need of myth; he is his own myth.\n\nCoupled with Paul de Man’s theoretical critique of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man for its misreading of Kant, von Balthasar’s theological intervention ups the ante for “The Sea and the Mirror,” whose clandestine aim—as a secular because non-liturgical work of art—is to delineate “a Christian aesthetic.” More precisely, because Schiller develops “the earliest formal theory of an aesthetic state,” Auden’s absurd endeavor “to show, in a work of art, the limitation of art” inevitably collides with Schiller’s aesthetic state.\n\nAt closer range, this collision transpires through the poem Auden crafts for Gonzalo in “Chapter II: The Supporting Cast (Sotto Voce).” Described in The Tempest as “an honest old councillor” and by Auden as a “good but stupid character” “who fails to acknowledge the existence of evil,” Gonzalo in “The Sea and the Mirror” admits to not having “trusted the Absurd.” As the stanza’s sole capitalized abstraction, “the Absurd” is bound to evoke Auden’s debts to Kierkegaard, whose epistemology of faith lends “the Absurd” its own interiorized domain of religious passion. “Had \\[Gonzalo\\] trusted the Absurd,” we read, all of his fellow characters on the island “would have begun to dance / Jigs of self-deliverance.” Locked, however, in the island’s verdant aesthetic field, where myriad surfaces obscure the all-important tain of human experience, Gonzalo encounters the world largely through the fancy of “speculation”; in turn, he merely freezes “Vision into an idea, / Irony into a joke.”\n\nDespite his newfound awareness of religious absurdity’s more solemn vistas, Auden’s Gonzalo basically resumes the mode of glassy speculation that originally lured him toward “Doubt and insufficient love”:\n\n> Farewell, dear island of our wreck.\n> \n> All have been restored to health,\n> \n> All have seen the Commonwealth,\n> \n> There is nothing to forgive.\n\nBy freezing Gonzalo’s aesthetic “Vision into an idea” of “the Commonwealth,” these lines at once introduce the specter of Schiller’s “aesthetic state,” allude deftly to Gonzalo’s famous lines in the play’s second act, and afford a dubious reading of The Tempest’s conclusion. Consider how in The Tempest Sebastian and Antonio mock Gonzalo’s vision of his aesthetic state:\n\n> GONZALO\n> \n> I’th’ commonwealth I would by contraries\n> \n> Execute all things, for no kind of traffic\n> \n> Would I admit; no name of magistrate;\n> \n> Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,\n> \n> And use of service, none; contract, succession,\n> \n> Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;\n> \n> No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;\n> \n> No occupation, all men idle, all,\n> \n> And women too, but innocent and pure;\n> \n> No sovereignty—\n> \n> SEBASTIAN              Yet he would be king on’t.\n> \n> ANTONIO The latter end of this commonwealth forgets the beginning.\n\nAs Stephen Orgel observes, Gonzalo’s aestheticized depiction of his very own colonial “plantation of this isle” “is closely related to a section of Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Cannibals’.” Carrying this vision to “prelapsarian” extremes with a twofold stipulation that “All things in common nature should produce / Without sweat or endeavour” and that “nature should bring forth / Of its own kind all foison, all abundance / To feed my innocent people,” Gonzalo does not heed his jeering interlocutors: Sebastian signals the contradiction in Gonzalo’s kingdom without sovereignty and Antonio dashes the vision’s wider illogicality.\n\nConsequently, even after suggesting he winnowed a moment of “Irony into a joke” played at his own expense, Auden’s Gonzalo nevertheless considers his “Commonwealth” as veritably “seen” rather than mocked as illusory. Captivated by this aesthetic state, Auden’s Gonzalo persists in his skepticism of the religious absurd, in turn misjudging the degree to which The Tempest resolves its moral conflict: “All have been restored to health,” he says, for “There is nothing to forgive.”\n\nReminiscent of de Man’s critique of Schiller in “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater,” Auden shapes Gonzalo’s poem as a subtle parody of free-wheeling aestheticism. In his meta-performance monologue, Gonzalo admits to the laughably un-ironic presentation of his ideal “Commonwealth” in The Tempest. Nevertheless, upon bidding farewell to the “dear island of our wreck,” he suddenly undercuts his own self-reflexive criticism and lapses without irony into the outlandish pastures of his singular “Commonwealth,” which in his estimation “All have seen.” The allure of perfection in the aesthetic state, Auden seems to indicate in Gonzalo’s poem, is potent enough to undo even one’s own discernment of irony’s critical, self-reflexive merits. In this context, an implicit target of “The Sea and the Mirror” is the political and ethical legacy of Schiller’s aestheticism in On the Aesthetic Education of Man:\n\nIn the midst of the awful realm of powers, and of the sacred realm of laws, the aesthetic creative impulse is building unawares a third joyous realm of play and of appearance, in which it releases mankind from all the shackles of circumstance and frees him from everything that may be called constraint, whether physical or moral. If in the dynamic state of rights man encounters man as force and restricts his activity, if in the ethical state of duties he opposes him with the majesty of law and fetters his will, in the sphere of cultivated society, in the aesthetic state, he need appear to him only as shape, confront him only as an object of free play. To grant freedom by means of freedom is the fundamental law of this kingdom\n\nThis passage resonates strongly with the architecture of Gonzalo’s Commonwealth in The Tempest 2.1.145-56. Just as Sebastian simpers at the contradiction in Gonzalo’s kingdom without sovereignty, so might we question how the abstract “free play” in Schiller’s aesthetic state could possibly unshackle us “from everything that may be called constraint, whether physical or moral”; similarly, just as Antonio punctures the logic of Gonzalo’s idyllic plantation, whose “latter end…forgets the beginning” (2.1.156), so might we perforate the teleological reasoning that spirits us, sans irony, from “the dynamic state of rights” to “the ethical state of duties” to Schiller’s “aesthetic state,” with its lithe tautology of “freedom by means of freedom” and its slippery viewpoint on the human as a “shape.”\n\nWithin this political legacy and its ambiguous geometry, Auden’s most explicit response to the secularizing “aesthetic contract” that descends from Schiller appears in the aptly-titled essay, “Squares and Oblongs”:\n\nA society which really was like a poem and embodied all the esthetic values of beauty, order, economy, subordination of detail to the whole effect, would be a nightmare of horror, based on selective breeding, extermination of the physically or mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Dictator, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.\n\nWritten in 1947, this passage countermands the aesthetic ideals of fascism while also glancing back to the Enlightenment’s radicalization of the aesthetic: “Everything in the aesthetic State, even the subservient tool, is a free citizen having equal rights with the noblest”; “and the intellect,” Schiller maintains in his deviation from Kant, “which forcibly moulds the passive multitude to its designs, must here ask for assent.” Notably, Auden neither disarticulates nor bypasses this democratic kernel in aesthetic theory, even though he sees aestheticism as too-readily collaborative with ideological propaganda. In fact, in “The Sea and the Mirror,” or rather in For the Time Being as a book of two interfacing poems, Auden consistently grapples with this democratic kernel. In my view, that is, he subtly regulates the emancipatory claims of secular aestheticism by way of a “Christian conception of art.”\n\nSmuggled across the Egyptian desert of “For the Time Being” and then through the mirror of Auden’s Shakespearean commentary, at whose labyrinthine center we find not the fabled Minotaur but a monstrous figure named Caliban, the creaturely body of Christ facilitates this regulation:\n\nAs a biological organism Man is a natural creature subject to the necessities of nature; as a being with consciousness and will, he is at the same time a historical person with the freedom of the spirit. The Tempest seems to me a manichean work, not because it shows the relation of Nature \\[Caliban\\] to Spirit \\[Ariel\\] as one of conflict and hostility, which in fallen man it is, but because it puts the blame for this upon Nature and makes the Spirit innocent…The natural, conforming to necessity, cannot imagine possibility. The closest it can come to a relation with the possible is as a vague dream; without Prospero, Ariel can only be known to Caliban as “sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”\n\nAuden’s Pauline allegory of The Tempest, which he reinforces by alluding to Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body,” distinguishes “Caliban, the embodiment of the natural” from “Ariel, the invisible spirit of imagination.” For Auden, this allegory is intrinsic enough to Shakespeare’s aesthetics for the polarity at hand to be standardized in performance:\n\nIn a stage production, Caliban should be as monstrously conspicuous as possible, and, indeed, suggest, as far as decency permits, the phallic. Ariel, on the other hand, except when he assumes a specific disguise at Prospero’s order, e.g., when he appears as a harpy, should, ideally, be invisible, a disembodied voice, an ideal which, in these days of microphones and loud-speakers, should be realizable.\n\nBy attributing Manichaeism and thus radical dualism to The Tempest’s worldview, Auden in his critical prose establishes a hermeneutic that he will unravel in his poetic commentary. Through the meta-theatrical designs of “The Sea and the Mirror,” Auden develops an Ars Poetica that questions the aesthetic and religious positions of what he takes to be Shakespeare’s “Ars Poetica.” Consonant with his Patripassian and thus anti-Manichean stance on the dialectics of Christian heresy, Auden radicalizes Caliban’s creaturely account of himself as monstrous, as “phallic,” and as Prospero’s “impervious disgrace” that “sprawls in the weeds and will not be repaired.” If indeed The Tempest and “The Sea and the Mirror” are extended cases of the body-soul dialogue, then Auden levels their aesthetic fields by having the body “present its own case objectively.”\n\nRaji Singh Soni holds a PhD in English from Queen’s University and teaches courses on contemporary world literature, literature of the South Asian diaspora, and violence in society at universities in Toronto. He is also Theory Colloquium Editor of Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory. Based in Princeton University’s archive of Derrida’s personal library, Soni’s current research project is supported by grants from Friends of Princeton University Library and NeMLA. He has published articles on “A Political Economy of the Humanities: Turning Tables with Marx and Kant” in Australian Humanities Review 59 (2016); “The Sleep of Christ: Incarnation and the Queerness of Heresy in W.H. Auden’s ‘For the Time Being” in Religion and the Arts 18.4 (2014); “Rethinking the Universal Secular Intellectual with Kant, Derrida, and Spivak” in Culture and Religion 14.2 (2013); and “Framing the Transnational Violence of Air India Flight 182” in TOPIA 27 (2012). \n\n**\nFootnotes",
  "title": "traversing-w-h-audens-religious-and-aesthetic-states-part-2-raji-singh-soni"
}