Deep Calls to Deep; Or, How Karl Jaspers Solved My Problems with Milton and Emerson

By Book IV of Paradise Lost, Satan has formulated and begun to enact his plan for revenge on the God who cast him from heaven, but he enters the Garden of Eden in a deep existential funk:

Be then his Love accurst, since love or hate,
To me alike, it deals eternal woe.
Nay curs’d be thou; since against his thy will
Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n. (IV.69-78)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing two centuries later and across the Atlantic, somehow manages to turn Satan on his head:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning;
that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. (“Circles”)

Emerson is not always the sunny optimist popular thought holds him to be—he can moan and groan with the best of poets—but “Circles” is not a particularly pessimistic essay. Just a paragraph later, he refers to God, who sees the world as “a transparent law, not a mass of facts.” So why on earth would Emerson take what may be the deepest despair in a book full of despair and turn it into a paean to openness and freedom? I spent much of last spring trying to answer this question to my satisfaction.

I’ve had Karl Jasper’s seminal Philosophy of Existence sitting on my shelf for months, waiting until I had time enough to start reading for my comprehensive exams. If only I’d looked at it earlier; Jaspers, it seems, could have solved my dilemma.

Human beings, he says, operate from a perspective that is always already limited, inside what Jaspers calls “a horizon of our knowledge.” There’s always something over and beyond that horizon, and we are always already called to cross the horizon into what he calls the “encompassing.” The encompassing is not the horizon, and in fact once we cross one horizon a new one opens up. I was instantly reminded of Satan’s telescoping deeps and Emerson’s ever-widening circles.

The encompassing is a realm of pure possibility, similar to what Heidegger takes fifteen pages of Being and Time to call Dasein’s living ahead of itself. It is something that by its very nature cannot be grasped. To grasp pure possibility, after all, would immediately make it no longer pure possibility. Instead, we live our lives in immanence, forever drawn toward the transcendence that would take us beyond the horizon—to, of course, another horizon. It’s in this constant transcending that we receive our freedom.

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t answer the question. Why is Satan dizzy over the gulfs while Emerson is exhilarated watching the circles to expand? Jaspers answers with one very unexpected word: authority:

At first, authority taken on faith is the only source of genuine education affecting man’s nature itself . . . As he grows up within authority, the arena in which he everywhere encounters being opens up to him. If he grows up without authority, he will indeed come to possess knowledge, he will master speaking and thinking, but he will remain at the mercy of the empty possibilities of the realm where Nothingness stares him in the face.

It’s a paradox, of course—in order to transcend the immanent and confining world, in order to receive freedom, one must first surrender one’s freedom to a higher authority. Satan’s sin, of course, is one of refusing to recognize his place in the universe; he rebels against God, attempts to throw off the chains of perceived oppression, and so he’s locked into his position in the universe. And yet he still transcends. He literally moves through spiritual realms, from heaven to hell to earth (and, if the Book of Job is to believed, back to heaven occasionally).

So his transcendence offers him freedom and possibilities. But the encompassing is a threat to Satan because all beneficent possibilities have been exhausted for him; all that’s left beyond that horizon is a new defeat, a new suffering, a new punishment. Existential possibility is horrific in his eyes. There’s been some hand-wringing in theological circles as to why human beings are offered forgiveness but Satan and the fallen angels are presumably not. Milton and Jaspers seem to offer an answer: Human beings have never truly thrown off God’s authority, or at least they haven’t rebelled in such a violent and obvious way. They’ve never literally tried to toss God off His throne.

It’s worth noting that this fact does not necessarily make our possible future any brighter. Emerson recognizes this when he says, in “Experience,” that

Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. “You will not remember,” he seems to say, “and you will not expect.”

We don’t get to know what’s over that horizon, and while the circle could expand and let us climb higher, the deep could also open up and suck us in Nothingness. Jaspers sounds almost like a Calvinist here: “I can force neither of these two.” Of course, to do so would be to fail to submit to authority.

One point worth noting here is that Jaspers does not use the term authority the way someone like Milton would. That is, authority and God are not coterminous. When the circles widen, the authority disappears, and “the destructive exception becomes source of new authority.” This puts Jaspers much more in Emerson’s camp than in Milton’s—but he’s nevertheless the best way I’ve found to bring the two together.

My Fist-Fight with Karl Barth

I generally follow Karl Barth on theological matters, but as I reread Helmet Gollwitzer's selections from Church Dogmatics, I find myself arguing with him on the subject of general revelation (which he calls "natural theology"). I'm not sure I'm exactly breaking from him yet--but I'm struggling.

Not only does Barth disbelieve in general revelation (as distinguished from the specific revelation of God we get through the life of Christ as attested to in the Bible), he views it as just another "Tower of Babel," a work by which man futilely attempts to commune with God:

Natural theology is the doctrine of a union of man with God existing outside God's revelation in Jesus Christ. It works out the knowledge of God that is possible and real on the basis of this independent union with God . . . But this means that in actual fact God becomes unknowable to him and he makes himself equal to God. (Church Dogmatics II.1)

All this fits in, of course, with Calvin's doctrine of total depravity--really extended in Barth's case to absolute depravity. If man is absolutely fallen, he cannot in the final analysis trust in his logic, his emotion, or his will. The only thing worth trusting is God's revelation, that is, the Word of God, that is, Jesus Christ.

But I've grown a little dissatisfied with Barth on this issue. Maybe that's a product of my reading Plato and admiring certain parts of him, or maybe its my attraction to the broader vision of mythology offered by Chesterton, Lewis, and Milton, but I am no longer content with Barth's pessimism toward anthropology, and I think this dissatisfaction stems from the sticky wicket of total depravity.

The doctrine is sometimes confused with absolute depravity (which again, I think Barth holds to)--in other words, all men are depraved, but each man is not completely depraved. But there's a different, as this passage from the Canons of Dordt, that famous argument against Arminianism, suggests:

The result of the fall is total depravity or corruption. By this is meant that every part of man is rendered corrupt . . . There was no part of his nature that was not affected by sin. (III, IV, Article 4)

The Canons make it clear, mind you, that this definition does not mean that man is entirely helpless; he still has "glimmers of truth." So the magnanimous view of world religions offered by Chesterton and Lewis is pretty much compatible with traditional Calvinism. But Barth extends Calvin's principle. In The Word of God and the Word of Man, he says that these glimmers of truth make man try to reach God; that is, they give him an inborn religious impulse like the one St. Augustine describes in the first paragraph of the Confessions. However, Barth cautions that this religious impulse is inextricably twinned by humanity's complete inability to follow it properly, to learn truths about God's nature. (This pair of doctrines, incidentally, was the "unsupportable" argument of the massive and excised John Updike chapter of my thesis.) Thus, mankind is impotent to save itself, and all its attempts to do so are bound to fail; only God's Word, Christ, revealed through the Bible, has the power to save or to reveal. Barth out-Calvins Calvin, or at least takes him to his logical conclusion.

Using my first post on Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" as a representative of the more charitable view that other religions prefigure Christianity, let's see if Barth is really saying something so different. He says that man has a religious impulse So far, so good. All societies have their theologies, even if those theologies are secular, like the National Socialism of 1930s Germany or the god-free ethics of most of modern-day Europe. In Milton's poem, the Greek pantheon exists to prefigure Christ's birth, but they mysteriously fall silent and die away once the Word actually becomes Flesh. That sounds like an expression of Barth's second principle, that religious impulses lead only to failure. The religious structure created by the Greeks falls to pieces in the face of God's true revelation, just as Barth says all Towers of Babel are doomed to do.

And yet I do not think Barth is really saying the same thing as Milton (and Lewis, and Chesterton)--I think the idea that the Greek pantheon got even part of the essence of God right would stick in his craw. After all, for Barth, manmade religious structures are not putts that are a few inches off; they swing straight into the water hazard. The magnanimous system depends on general revelation; Barth denies any revelation other than Christ. I wonder if Frederick Buechner, that student of both Barth and Lewis, finds some way to bridge that gap. I need to comb through his catalogue.

It's Karl Barth week here at Ladder on Wheels. Later this week, I'll post about exactly why Barth so distrusts general revelation and why he may well be right; then I'll defend him against the common Evangelical critique that he hates the Bible.

On 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity,' Pt. 2

Paradise Lost, like most epic poems, has a certain symphonic sweep and grandeur to it; but Milton’s greater, or at least more surprising, achievement, is the way he infuses his early poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” with the same sweep. Like much of the poet’s early work, “Nativity” owes a good deal to sound--both the overall symphonic structure and individual aural descriptions of the action of the poem.

“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” opens peacefully and serenely, underscored, perhaps, by soft strings and flute. The first stanza develops slowly in customary iambic pentameter--a meter so commonplace that it is almost beyond our noticing it--and features a good deal of soft sounds, s’s and m’s: “This is the month, and this the happy morn” (1). All is right in the first section of the poem, and Milton allows his vision of the redeemed world to expand until it envelops everything. The poet sounds relaxed here, even as he adds in references to the Greek pantheon and to Christ’s eventual death for mankind’s benefit.

All of this changes when Milton reaches the long “Hymn” portion of the ode; he restricts his iambic pentameter to two lines per seven-line stanza and fills much of the rest with iambic trimeter, a skipping, tripping rhythm that moves us along much faster than the poem’s introduction did. Milton still uses the softer orchestral instruments for the first part of the hymn; his message, after all, is one of eternal peace, and so he still uses soft sounds and quiet words like “speeches fair” (37), “fears to cease” (45), and the particularly smooth “the winds with wonder whist” (64). The sound of his words is, for the most part, calm early in the “Hymn,” but his rhythm is speedy--this combination produces an overall feel of excitement, as though his subject so moved the poet that he could not sit still.

But as the hymn speeds cheerily along, Milton slowly switches to a minor key, so subtly that we do not notice it the first time through. He supposedly discounts evil by bringing up harsh (both sonically and denotatively) words and phrases like “battle” (53), “hostile blood” (57), and “the trumpet spake not to the armed throng” (58) only to dismiss them; but these words are a minor-key bell he cannot un-ring, and he thus purposely subverts his own cheerful message.

And indeed, as we progress through the hymn, its music turns darker and darker--the tympani gets louder and the woodwinds peter out. Although Milton speaks of the north star rather than the devil in line 74, his use of the name “Lucifer” is unsettling, an unintentional prefiguring of the villain of Paradise Lost. We see this again and again: Milton will say something like “The shady gloom / Had given day her room” (77-78)--in theory these lines are bright but in practice they feel dark.

Milton himself uses symphonic imagery for the hymn, and as the imagery increases, so does the “volume” of the hymn. The angels play “music sweet” for the shepherds” (93); the angels sing loud and “unexpressive notes” to the Christ child (116); and Milton invokes the chimes and, tellingly, “heaven’s deep organ” (128, 130). The intensity rises and rises, and finally, in its description of hell, the hymn explodes. “With such a horrid clang,” Milton writes, as the drums boom, “As on Mount Sinai rang / While the red fire, and smould’ring clouds out brake” (157-159). For several sections, the hymn is huge, loud, clanging, filled with phrases like “hideous hum” (174), “hollow shriek” (178), and “lowings loud” (215). The pastoral dream with which Milton started has turned into a loud, horrible nightmare, as the poet realizes that heaven’s perfection has still, 1,600 years after the events he describes, arrived on earth.

And then it winds down, the volume and intensity decreasing as Milton switches back to calmer words and sounds. But the ending of the poem is not the bucolic paradise that was the beginning. Instead, we’re left with an uneasy calm. The Christ child sleeps—again, violins and flutes—but around him are “shadows pale” (232), demons quieted but not silenced for good.

On 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity,' Pt. 1

G.K. Chesteron says somewhere in Orthodoxy that Christianity fulfills all religions and not just the Judaism out of which it came into its own. I wouldn't have expected to find echoes of that idea in John Milton, so stereotyped as a dour, unbending, humorless Puritan. (Much of that stereotype, I suspect, stems from our cultural misreading of Puritans, who, whatever their conservatism, always had room for a pint of ale, among other things.) But anyway, I'm finding Milton far more charitable and broad-minded than I remembered and expected.

People's Exhibit A: the early poem "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." Milton's early work can be perfunctory and conventional, but there's been at least a line or two of great power in everything I've read from the period. "Nativity" is no exception; there's his description of Christ as "that light insufferable" (l. 8), his prophecy of universalism (ll. 139-140), and the stanza-length description of Armageddon (ll. 157-164, just for starters. But I, good Presbyterian that I am, am ashamed when I talk about aesthetic pleasures (which, due to a class assignment, I will discuss in part two of this analysis) and prefer to focus on philosophical issues in the text.

My interpretation, then, hinges on my earlier paraphrase of Chesterton; to wit, I think Milton uses the occasion of Christ's birth to praise other religions, even if he ultimately dismisses them as inadequate. For Milton, as for Chesterton, other religions have value in that they prefigure the Incarnation and Atonement. In "Nativity," other religions appear in the guise of classical Paganism, an important metaphor in nearly all of Milton's early work. He associates Christ with Pan, for example, this equivalency between the two Great Shepherds being earlier proposed by Edmund Spenser in The Shepheardes Calendar. Indeed, it's Pan, not Christ, for whom the shepherds wait in the fields. I'm not well-versed enough in mythology to say whether or not people waited for Pan to return, but that seems to be the effect Milton's aiming at: As the shepherds wait for Pan, their patron god, they receive Christ, Pan's true form, instead.

Elsewhere, Milton even suggests that Christ's birth somehow even fulfills naturalism and materialism:

Nature that heard such sound
Beneath the hollow round
Of Cynthia's seat, the airy region thrilling,
Now was almost won
To think her part was done,
And that her reign had here its last fulfilling. (ll. 101-106)

These lines remind me of the Eastern Orthodox view on the Incarnation. The Orthodox take Ephesians 1:23 (". . . the fulness of Him who fills all in all" [NAS]) seriously and literally; for them--and perhaps for Milton, too--Christ's becoming flesh makes all flesh, all of Nature, real in a way it wasn't before.

Milton could stop here, but he doesn't, and it's his refusal to accept simple answers that makes "Nativity" worth reading and rereading. For it's not enough to say that other religions prefigure Christianity; Milton must then make it clear that Christ's birth immediately makes them obsolete. The shepherds may wait around for Pan, but Pan ultimately has nothing to say. As in Paradise Lost, Milton invokes the muse, but here she's dumbfounded:

Say heavenly muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the infant God?
Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
To welcome him to this his new abode (ll. 15-18).

Of course she doesn't. She and the rest of the pantheon have been waiting subconsciously for this moment, but it's so beyond their understanding that they must remain mute. The heaven Christ descends from is "by the sun untrod" (l. 19)--Apollo, who's been everywhere else, can't get clearance into the Trinity's boardroom (ll. 10-11). Indeed, Apollo stands, motionless, in awe,

And hid his head for shame,
As his inferior flame,
The new enlightened world no more should need;
He saw a greater sun appear
Than his bright throne, or burning axle-tree could bear (ll. 80-84).

Apollo's "oracles are dumb" (l. 173) and he "Can no more divine" (l. 177); even Nature, recently filled, steps aside: "She knew such harmony alone / Could hold all heaven and earth in happier union" (ll. 107-108). These lines do not signify the destruction of the old order but rather its voluntary stepping aside; after all, even the seraphim and Cherubim are capable only of "unexpressive notes to heaven's newborn heir" (l. 116).

So again: More magnaminous but just as complex as I expected from Milton. Part two, my mandatory two-pager on "Sound in 'On the Nativity,' " will follow tomorrow.