I was reading about the role of mercenaries in Haiti's ongoing gang war the other day, and A.E. Housman's "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" came to mind. One line specifically echoed through my brain: "What God abandoned, these defended."
I've always thought this one line, more than any other, is what elevates Housman's short poem from the realm of jingoistic special pleading to universal literature.
Housman's immediate object in writing the poem, after all, was to defend the British officer corps against German insults before a British newspaper-reading public. And that takes no special courage. He was preaching to the choir.
And so, MacDiarmid's merciless riposte to Housman's poem on this score in many ways carries the day, and will echo through the centuries: "It is a God-damned lie to say that these / Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride[.]"
But the jingoism isn't the only thing in the poem.
Housman, being Housman, also cannot resist the temptation to throw in a swipe at the Christian deity. He shakes a fist at Jehovah, as he so often does—saying, in effect: these men saved the day, no thanks to you! You didn't even lift a finger!
Thomas Hardy often does this as well. In his poem about the "Blinded Bird," he is most directly railing against the bird's human tormentors. But he also can't help but notice that the deity too has been missing in action here.
"All this indignity—with God's consent—on thee!" he cries.
It is the same note he strikes in a famous passage from Tess of the d'Urbervilles:
"[W]here was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked."
Max Scheler would say that these passages give the game away that the poets' real motive is mere ressentiment. Housman's patriotism and Hardy's compassion and humanity are mere pretexts in order to score a point against the ultimate heavenly father figure and put their creator in the wrong.
Indeed, Sheler interprets all Enlightenment humanism through this psychological lens. "'Mankind' is not the immediate object of love [...]— it is merely a trump card against a hated thing. Above all, this love of mankind is the expression of a repressed hatred of God."
He goes on: "Man is loved because his pain, his ills and sufferings in themselves form a gladly accepted objection against God's 'wise and benevolent rule.' Wherever I find historical evidence of this feeling, I also detect a secret satisfaction that the divine rule can be impugned." (Coser/Holdheim trans.)
I admit that I felt a bit called out by this passage. After all, I have long experienced an emotional thrill at reading passages like the ones from Housman and Hardy discussed above—or similar ones in Byron (see his "Prometheus" or his dramatic poem Cain: A Mystery).
I do indeed feel a certain "secret satisfaction"—exultation even—on reading Heinrich Heine's "Adam the First," with its ringing clarion call to human rebellion against divine authority: "I know how small and insignificant you are, no matter how big you make yourself, with all your death and thundering."
And the line from Orwell's essays that most hooked me as a young fan was undoubtedly his confession in "Such, Such Were the Joys" that the only characters from Christian mythology for whom he could feel any sympathy were Cain and Lucifer.
Or take Thomas Hardy's sarcastic aside in Tess, when he is commenting on the suffering and squalor entailed in the Durbyfields' teeming rural poverty. "Some people would like to know," he writes, "whence the poet [i.e., Wordsworth] whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of 'Nature’s holy plan.'"
It is indeed possible to detect in such a line a certain "satisfaction that the divine rule can be impugned" as perhaps not so "wise and benevolent" after all, as Scheler puts it. But in fairness, it is hardly a "secret" one—Hardy wears it on his sleeves.
And if this feeling of "satisfaction" is indeed there—it is one that I experience in reading it as well.
If Hardy and Housman suffer from a case of theological ressentiment, in short, let me just confess up front that I have always had the same bug.
In defense of us all from Scheler's diagnosis, though, I would say two things.
First of all, the "secret satisfaction" I feel is not really because I feel that I have managed to wrong-foot a God I don't believe in. I know that there is no actual being in the clouds for me to score points against.
The internal argument I always feel I am having—and that Housman, Hardy, Byron, etc. were having—is with other humans.
And if I feel in some way vindicated by a passage like Housman's "What God abandoned..." or Hardy's impugning of "Nature's holy plan," it is because I feel that they have had the courage to utter a taboo truth that so many of the humans around me have always tried to disguise:
Namely, that accepting this world as it is, would be a kind of betrayal of human solidarity. To worship a fictitious God that would make a universe like this one—and to call it wise and good merely because that God has power of us—is to opt for more human and animal suffering, and to defend its continuance.
This is why Camus is absolutely right, in his The Rebel (which was also written in dialogue with Sheler, though I can't remember if he cites the specific passage I'm discussing here) when he says that the first form of rebellion is metaphysical rebellion.
By the same token, the root conservatism is religious conservatism. Those who start by praising God end by accepting the human world as it is.
This is why Marx said that the critique of society begins with the critique of religion. In order to believe that human and animal suffering can and should be changed, you first have to conclude that they are fundamentally unacceptable and unjust.
And to do that—you first have to reject any human ideology that would preach submission to—still more, worship of—a hypothetical being that would make a universe with so much pointless suffering.
I don't doubt that Sheler is correct that Hardy, Housman, Byron and the rest all show a deep reservoir of internal anger, which erupts whenever they have an opportunity—however tangential—to swipe at the deity.
But it can hardly be called "repressed." All these writers made clear exactly what they were protesting against: the theology of cosmic submission.
If they were in some sense "settling scores" with anyone, or trying to invoke human suffering as a "trump card" in debate, it was not so much to mock a God they didn't believe in—as to refute the human worshipers of such a being, who would defend and therefore accept his unacceptable works.
Their "metaphysical rebellion" was indeed a first gesture toward human solidarity—and even if not all of them went on from this position to a broader social rebellion against injustice and privilege and inequality (of the three, Byron made the clearest connection between his theological and political rebellions), they nonetheless offer a theological starting point for such a work of social reconstruction.
Scheler could still come back with a sneer and say: "you don't really care about the 'blinded bird' or about Tess or about the British Expeditionary Force, you just want to win points in an argument. You just want to get your own back on some half-remembered priest or self-righteous vicar or father confessor who made you feel small and insignificant when you were a child."
He could, in short, argue that the psychological root of this impulse toward "rebellion" is still mere ressentiment—even if he were willing to grant that it is ressentiment directed against some human figure from the poets' past, rather than an actual deity.
And indeed, I know exactly the arguments from my childhood that I'm still replaying in my brain whenever I read passages like these from Hardy and Byron and Housman, and the resentment and anger I still feel about them.
I grew up in the Bible Belt, and many of the kids around me at school believed in a literal hell where God would banish unbelievers after death to an eternity of torture.
I have never to this day been able to get over the fact that this is both: 1) a fairly good literal reading of the New Testament—and therefore cannot be dismissed as a false interpretation of the Christian tradition; but also 2) a morally insane position. It is even more insane not only to believe in the existence of a God that would torture its own creatures—but to worship and praise such a being.
It was impressed upon me for all time as a child, therefore, that the default religious tradition in the civilization in which I was born teaches a morally insane view of the cosmos. And what's worse—if they are willing to tolerate such moral insanity as the basis of the universe—why would they not tolerate it in society?
If they are willing to tolerate the infinite and eternal torture of the vast majority of souls that have ever existed, why would they have any ground for social or political protest against the torture and suffering of human beings in this life?
This is why I say that the root of political conservatism is always theological conservatism. And the latter must be attacked before the former can be overthrown. (This is also why, conversely, there always seems to be something redeemable even in politically reactionary writers so long as they were theological rebels—H.L. Mencken and H.P. Lovecraft come to mind. The only writers whom I find totally unrelatable are the theologically conservative ones—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, etc.)
As a child, then, I very much felt myself stranded—"a stranger and afraid" (Housman)—in a morally insane society.
Is it any wonder, then, that I would experience an extraordinary sense of relief and vindication whenever I would find some other writer, from any period of the past, who had the courage to point this out?
Is it any wonder that Bertrand Russell would become a hero to me for all time, for daring to point out that he cannot acquiesce in the widespread view that Jesus was the most moral man who ever lived, given that he appears to have believed in hell?
Is it any wonder that Arthur Koestler would make it onto my short list of favorite authors, simply by pointing out (in one of his memoirs) that to believe literally in a theological hell is to worship a kind of cosmic concentration camp warden?
These were the only other voices I ever heard crying out in this moral wilderness. They were seemingly the only ones who could perceive moral insanity for what it was and had the courage to name it as such!
Scheler is absolutely correct that I experience a kind of "satisfaction" in reading passages from authors like this—but it is not just because I want to score points in an argument and feel that I am clever.
It is because I feel I have found in Byron, Hardy, Housman, Koestler, Orwell, or Russell that all too rare "kindred spirit" of which Thomas Gray wrote.
In a world of people who politely decline to notice or comment on the moral insanity at the heart of their largest and most popular religious tradition—one that has been with us for millennia and, alas, shows no signs of going anywhere today—these are some of the handful of writers who have had the courage to say that this religious tradition—if taken at all seriously—preaches a morally intolerable position.
Scheler may be perfectly right, then, that enlightenment humanism proceeds, from its origins, from some inner reservoir of anger. But I find it to be a fruitful source of anger. It is the anger of rebellion—the rebellion that must start, as Camus wrote, from a position of metaphysical rebellion before it can move on to rebellion against social injustice and the powers that be.
Is it true that if poets had never felt wronged or powerless as children—if they had no inner kernel of ressentiment against adults and society and the world—they would never have become rebels? Probably. They probably wouldn't have become poets either, for that matter.
But this doesn't mean they were wrong in their rebellion, or that their cries of protest against cosmos were in any way less sincere. As Koestler argues in his Arrival and Departure, finding a psychological origin for a moral impulse does not negate the validity of that impulse.
We are not entitled to say, then, that just because Enlightenment humanism may stem from some experience of childhood anger against powerlessness and injustice, that therefore its protests are merely disguised egotism.
Instead of reading Thomas Hardy as "really" just wanting to score points for himself instead of wanting to save the "blinded bird", then—it is more accurate to say that he was able to feel genuine indignation on the bird's behalf precisely because he had once felt helpless and wronged himself.
Instead of saying that Byron didn't really care about the animals whose sacrifice Jehovah demands, let us say that he cared about them precisely because he was able to relate to their plight, club-footed and sickly child that he once had been.
Scheler often writes as if, to trace an ethical motive to ressentiment is to prove it fundamentally false.
But could it not be, to the contrary, that the resentment we feel at our own experiences of being wronged, of helplessness, can form the basis for an ever-widening solidarity with the suffering of other living beings?
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