Slouching Towards Bethlehem in W.B. Yeat...

0:08 Erin: You're listening to Subtext, and today we'll be continuing our discussion of W.B. yeats, the Second Coming. In part one of this discussion, we covered the first stanza of the poem. And now for the second coming of our discussion. We'll be covering the second stanza of the poem and try to explain Yeats's dark vision of a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext.

0:43 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. All right, so here we are on the second stanza. The poem takes a real. Doesn't quite take its final turn yet. Right. So it evokes the possibility of a Christian second coming and something hopeful, and then it will take its dark turn towards his strange vision of a sphinx. There's a kind of a quality of satire or parody here. It's a send up of the very idea of a second coming, which in some ways might not be surprising if we reflect on the poem. So we've seen hints. Even though he's talking about things falling apart and what's not going to be called for is a revolution. Right. In a way, the falling apart is what he's reacting to in the first stanza is all the revolutionary fervor and the chaos and disorder that it's created. So if we think of a second coming or the hope for a second coming as a variation on the revolutionary spirit, then we might not be so surprised that he's going to end up rejecting it. That's what he dangles before us as bait at the very beginning of the second stanza.

1:59 Erin: Yeah, and I like that idea of satire because as we said frequently in the previous episode, he's working a lot in Christian imagery. And the devil is often called the ape of Christ. It's a mimic of Christ, but it's sort of backwards turning things upside down. And so in this idea of the second coming, of course, we think of the book of Revelation, the second coming of Christ. The content here is actually going to be kind of an aping of that or a turning upside down or a satire, as you say. But before we get into it, I just want to talk a little bit about the form of the poem, since I don't think we talked about that very much last time. So in the previous episode, we covered the first eight lines which make up the first stanza. And now the second part is actually a sonnet. It's kind of a sonnet. It's 14 lines long. So the whole poem together is sort of a sonnet plus an addendum, in a way. And so this sonnet form, which, you know, traditionally a sonnet has eight lines of one idea, and then a volta, a turn, and six lines of a competing idea. And that's sort of what's going on here. So there's a bit of a sonnet feel to it, in addition to the fact that it's 14 lines long. And then also there is sort of an iambic pentameter going on here. It's so loose that it almost is an iambic pentameter. And there are some rhymes, some slant rhymes, but they almost seem to be accidental, and they don't really occur in any kind of pattern. So that we have hold and world, falconer and everywhere, or gyre and everywhere. So there's a suggestion of a line, a ghost of a rhyme, but doesn't seem to have any particular pattern, which I think sort of fits with the whole theme in which he's working, of this mere anarchy. Kind of has one foot in the world of form and one foot in free verse, and it's sort of spanning the breach between the two. Yeah. So he starts with, surely some revelation is at hand. He's seen all of this chaos and anarchy happening in the first stanza, and now he's saying, okay, there's going to be some revelation that's coming. Surely the second coming is at hand. So I think here he's referring to the ideas in the Book of Revelation, which is, of course, the final book of the New Testament, written by St. John of Patmos. And there's a struggle between good and evil that happens in Revelation, and it reaches a fever pitch. The evil is growing stronger and stronger, stronger. And there's this climax in which God finally comes down to earth to intervene. He destroys evil, performs the last judgment, and then basically establishes heaven on earth in which there is no more death and the world kind of returns to a prelapsarian state. So Yeats is assuming that with all of this anarchy, destruction and chaos, that there is going to be this restorative coming, this revelation, this second coming of Christ. And then there's kind of a turn that happens in line three.

4:46 Wes: I love this twist. You know, as I've said before, before I like a poem with a good twist, and I love the way it goes sideways here. Although, no, it's not such a nice vision that he's having. It's really powerful. So hardly are those words out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight. So we get this idea here that something out of the collective unconscious has actually inserted itself into his imagination. So what's going on is he's describing his own inspiration to us as a poet, but it's described as a kind of mystical vision that comes from this. Again, I think the best way to phrase it is collective unconscious. Although the use of the phrase spiritus mundi seems like an opposition to me to the idea of the Holy Spirit. And I think of the role of the Holy Spirit in Mary's conception of Christ. And here he is having his own conception.

5:47 Erin: As a side note, I just want to say that I love the fact that you have the proper classical pronunciation of spiritus mundi. And I'm saying spiritus mundi, which is bringing out my ecclesiastical Latin background. So we're kind of the personifications of the Greco Roman and the Judeo Christian traditions. Just in our pronunciation of that term.

6:05 Wes: I keep my pronunciation very Roman.

6:09 Erin: Yes, you're very good.

6:11 Wes: As Marcus Aurelius put it, one ought to strive to be a real Roman. So I do that every day, as with Yeats. I like those aristocratic Roman values, you

6:22 Erin: know, There you go.

6:23 Wes: You get to run around in togas and sandals, a very kind of leisurely outfit. And yet you're conquering the world at the same time. It's great.

6:31 Erin: I prefer, like, very heavy robes, ridiculous hats, sticks that you could beat people with if you want.

6:37 Wes: No, that's another form of power. So it just depends on which kind of power you want.

6:43 Erin: I'm into this whole sword and sandal thing, too. But so this image comes out of this collective unconscious, this world soul or whatever, from which we get all these archetypes and everything. And he has this vision of the sands of the desert in which this shape with a lion body and the head of a man is moving. And this is obviously supposed to be reminiscent of the Sphinx, and I think, in particular.

7:08 Wes: Right. Of the Great Sphinx of Giza, that actual monument that was discovered at the end of the 19th century.

7:16 Erin: Yeah, because there's an implication here that it's been awoken from a stony sleep. So we know that this is a stone sphinx, so we can assume that it's the Great Sphinx, perhaps. And this is a time in which

7:25 Wes: I Mean, maybe I'm wrong about that. That's just the way I've always thought of it.

7:28 Erin: Yeah, that kind of makes the most sense. Ignoring stony sleep, I was thinking that this was an animal that's sort of been Benjamin Buttoning or something like. It resurrects and then it's kind of living its life backwards because at the end of the poem, we have it slouching towards Bethlehem to be. But which makes one wonder what constitutes a birth. If by waking up and moving around for the first time in 20 centuries, it's not being born, it has to go elsewhere to do so.

7:53 Wes: So thinking of the Sphinx as a statue, essentially, that becomes animated and gets up, which is a great image, moving its slow thighs. Although I think because it's a cat, essentially, I think of it as maybe stretching before it starts moving on. That's, of course, not what really happens. But as many critics point out, there seems to be an evocation, Shelley's Ozymandias here. Right. So the idea of a great monument sitting in the sand and being a symbol of power but having been ruined and defeated by time. But here the twist is that instead of being a symbol of the way power is subjected to time, the power comes alive and reinserts itself into the. Into the world.

8:41 Erin: Yeah. And that's where we get this idea that perhaps this power. First of all, we know that the image is troubling his sight, which is an interesting term. So we know that this can't exactly be a benevolent force. Perhaps it's a malevolent one. And in the connection to Ozymandias, too, you know, Ozymandias has the pedestal beneath him on which is written, look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. So we get this idea that this guy is, you know, he has this wrinkled lip and a sneer of cold command. And so we have this idea that Ozymandias was kind of a dictator, you know, like, not a particular nice dude. So the same sort of idea is evoked when we have the Sphinx coming to life. That it has a gaze that is blank and pitiless as the sun. There's something of that coldness and perhaps that evil and malevolence that's being brought about here with this animal's resurrection.

9:30 Wes: And the other part of that, I think of that as a byproduct of something's being a statue. So I think of ancient Greek and Roman statuary where often there's a blankness to the eyes. And the same thing goes, I think, for this Giza statue. And the blankness just is a product of the fact that I think the eyes were often painted on. Right. There might have been good reasons for not trying to sculpt the eyes, I'm not sure. But I don't know if it was technically too difficult or what other reason. Maybe it would have looked creepy. That may have some influence over our relationship to the ancients. The way in which these statues seem ethereal or otherworldly, there's a kind of power to that. It enhances the timelessness. These sculptures have survived over time.

10:19 Erin: There's a strange sort of revival of Egyptian culture that's happening at this moment in time that Yeats is writing. I mean, it really starts in the earlier part of the 19th century, but Egyptian revival architecture continues to thrive up until the late 30s, maybe especially because of this renewed interest in Egypt with the search for King Tut's tomb. And I think it's actually found in 1922, maybe. A lot of Egyptian symbols I think are being evoked at this time. Like for instance, I looked up if there was a connection because I sensed that there was between Masonry and the Sphinx, because I know that with the societies in which, like specifically the golden dawn, that secret society that we talked about in the previous episode that Yeats was a member of, of the founders of that society were actually Masons and they used a lot of Masonic imagery and symbols. And one of them was the Sphinx. And the Sphinx was actually seen as a symbol of mystery and also a symbol of initiation. It was always placed at the entrance to various Masonic temples. So I think that's kind of important here. The idea too that this is an amalgam creature is really interesting. I think first of all, we get this creature in flashes. Basically we see that it's a shape with a lot body and the head of a man. It has this blank and pitiless gaze. It has these slow thighs. But we don't really get this long view. We get like flashes of individual cut up parts, which is kind of like nightmarish. You know, it's dreamlike in that sense. But because of that, there's this real emphasis on the idea that this is an amalgam animal. It's not a shape of the Sphinx. It's a shape with lion body and the head of the mountain man. And I was thinking about this in terms of. I looked up again the book of Revelation. There's of course the great beast in Revelation. Well, there are actually two beasts. So there's the sea beast, which has this amalgam quality. To it as well. So in chapter 13 of Revelation, the beast which rises up out of the sea has seven heads, ten horns, and on its horns ten crowns. The beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear and his mouth as the mouth of a leper lion. So he also has this like cut up kind of quality to it. There's a second beast as well, which we could talk about in a minute. But this is a sort of hint that we're getting that this is maybe supposed to be like the Antichrist. Not really sure, but it's something that is reminiscent of this evil creature that comes out of the book of Revelation. So it's not Christ which is coming, but it's this evil, malevolent force.

13:00 Wes: Yeah, I think we're meant to wonder that from the very beginning, the way the poem will end. It'll become a question, I think, of what we're supposed to think of it. Is it evil? Is it good? Does it transcend good and evil? Maybe, but yes, the first side of it that we get is really frightening. And I think you're right, it's sinister, malevolent.

13:20 Erin: And then we have the most interesting part to me, besides the slow thighs moving, which is just a great. I mean, I just love that line and that image. Then we have these shadows of the indignant desert birds that are reeling around it. This is one of the frustrations of the poem for me, actually, because just like we get these flashes of different body parts of the sphinx creature, but not the whole thing together, we also don't get the actual indignant desert birds, whatever those may be. We just get their shadows that are moving around it, which is really strange. And we can imagine that these desert birds are perhaps vultures or something that eats carrion ants. They are indignant. And maybe we could talk for a second about why that word is used. Indignant.

14:02 Wes: Yeah. It's really interesting that we get the reeling shadows. So we're put in the position of looking down towards the ground, right. Instead of up at the birds, we're looking down and maybe we're in the position of the birds at that point. Because, you know, if this were a movie, right, the camera shot would be looking down and we'd be seeing the shadows around the sphinx and not the birds themselves. And we might be as high up as the birds.

14:25 Erin: That's really good point.

14:26 Wes: When I read this poem, I wonder, well, what are they indignant about? My first association is to the possibility that they were actually sitting on the statue so that their perching place, they've lost it. So as soon as the Sphinx becomes animated and starts moving, they fly off, and now they're reeling above it. And then if they are vultures, if they are carrion birds, then you have something here that is going in the opposite direction. So that usually they're oriented towards things that are animated and alive dying, so that they become carrion for them, so that they can perform their function as vultures and go down and eat. And here's something that's doing the very opposite of that. And we can make a further association to that if we think of redemption or salvation as involving something like a metaphorical kind of eating. This is not like the body of Christ where one can partake of it. This is not a type of beast that's here to meet any kind of need.

15:35 Erin: I mean, the birds don't necessarily know that the statue is not a dead thing. They might actually have the impression that it is like a dead animal. So that could potentially allow for this parallel between these birds wanting to feed on the animal and Christians who partake of the body of Christ. So there's, I think, some kind of parallel there. But rather than Christ who dies and is resurrected and who allows himself to be the food of his followers, the Eucharist is initiated from him. So he allows people to eat of his body and blood. On the other hand, we have this inversion of that in which these desert birds are indignant because the thing that has come to life has not allowed, you know, the birds to feed on it. Or that desire has been something somehow like subverted or inverted, where they can't eat. I think there's also supposed to be a parallel here with. Or at least it brings to mind for me, a parallel here with the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, which is often seen as a dove. So you have the dove versus the vultures. And then the vultures create these shadows on the ground, like you say. And it actually makes me think of the wording of the Annunciation from the Bible. So when the angel Gabriel tells Mary that she's going to. To conceive Christ in her womb, she's going to conceive of the Holy Spirit. It's worded as the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee. So there's this idea that when she actually becomes pregnant with Christ, when the incarnation happens, it's when the Holy Ghost sort of like flies or hovers over her head and casts a shadow down upon her In a sense, you know, it's not quite literal. This is kind of making it more. But it's also then the fact that it's a vulture that's indignant and the shadows are reeling around this animal. Certainly that use of the word shadow is evocative of that portion of the Bible.

17:30 Wes: Interesting.

17:31 Erin: Yeah. So then the image is over, he says the darkness drops again. The vision that he had has ended. But now he knows something. And what he knows is really hard to say, but we'll try. But he says, now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cry cradle. So there's a lot to unpack here and a lot that's kind of confusing, but okay, so 20 centuries of stony sleep. So we know that this animal has been asleep for 2,000 years. And we know, because we talked about his gyres and everything in the previous episode, that he believes that this 2000 year cycle is about to come to an end and this sphinx creature is going to come and supplant this.

18:10 Wes: It's been asleep for longer, but it's been. Because this monument was built right. 2500 BC or something like that. But for 20 centuries of, of that Christ was born 20 centuries before. For 20 centuries of that it's had to worry about. I think we're meant to think that it's been vexed, a nightmare, the rocking cradle has something to do with Christ.

18:31 Erin: So the implication here is that this paganism, or whatever force that we want to associate with the Sphinx has not been put to death by Christianity, it was just sleeping, meaning that it could wake up and return at any time, time. So Christianity has not completely supplanted this. It's just been kind of filling the void while this sphinx was asleep. And it seems as though this rocking cradle of the baby Jesus, rather than keeping it to sleep the way that a rocking cradle normally would in this satisfied, happy, nightmareless sleep, instead it has angered this sphinx creature. It's caused this pagan force to maybe be angry or to cause it to have nightmares and to wake up in kind of a foul mountain mood.

19:19 Wes: Yeah, I love that reversal in this where you think of a rocking cradle. So the Sphinx is not in the cradle. Obviously, if it were in the cradle, maybe it would be soothed by that. Maybe it would have been a better sleep. But the rocking cradle is off somewhere else and the Sphinx is tormented by its very existence. And so then we have to think about what has it been vexed by? What is it about Judeo, Christian Values that's so vexing. We can think of a few different things. One of them is just that the war, the anarchy that Yeats talks about in the first part of the poem is not actually historically unusual. It's not historically unusual if we take it to mean war and disorder. And Christianity has been a significant source of war and destruction. So for a long time the Church, right, was also a powerful political entity and there were crusades and wars over religion and eventually Protestantism and disintegration into factions. So one might think on one level that this is part of what's vexing, but I'm not sure that would be entirely right, because I think it has something to do. We read the portions from a Vision where Yates is talking about a transition from an age of necessity and truth and goodness and mechanism and science and democracy, all these things that he associates to together to one of freedom and aristocracy and war. So I wouldn't take this just as a critique of the horrors of the last 2000 years and the extent to which they might have something to do with religion. I would take it as a critique of these sorts of values. So it really does parallel the Nietzsche critique of the ascetic and the ways in which, and I think here even of our Keats episode, the ways in which there's a lack of negative capability and the sort of irritable reaching after truth, the asceticism of science and the repression of instinct, the self denial involved in both a scientific frame of mind and in a Christian frame of mind. So maybe there's something sinister about these ceremonies of innocence. Maybe they're lies. Maybe they dampen down the imagination. These aristocratic values and virtues are compromised by them. Excellence, let's say an ancient Greek conception of excellence, or maybe some other conception of excellence as strength and domination and so on. So those could be some of the things which are vexing to the beast. The beast could be a representative of that sort of critique. And for Nietzsche, at the very bottom of this critique is the fact that he thinks they lead to Nietzsche. He thinks they lead to a sense of meaninglessness. It's not sustainable. First of all, they're actually Christianity and morality in general. It's actually motivated by nihilism. It's a nihilism predicated upon the inability on powerlessness, on being a slave, for instance. He calls it slave morality. And their logical endpoint is explicit nihilism, the death of God. And then the question is, what comes next? So that's the sort of critique I see at work here. Well, Not Nietzsche in particular, but just this general idea. My question really is, you know, how do we explain the being vexed? So I'm thinking out loud there. I'm just. I think there might be some other ways to think about this.

22:48 Erin: Not to completely undercut that and retreat immediately back into the religious. But as I promised earlier, there are two beasts in Revelation. The sea beast is the one with that amalgam quality. But then there's a dragon beast which actually gives the sea beast its authority. And this beast is the one who in Revelation is standing before the woman who it's pretty much agreed upon, represents Mary, who's the Queen of Heaven. She's pregnant and she's ready to be delivered of a baby. And this dragon beast is actually waiting before her, ready to, as it's put in the Bible, devour her child as soon as it's born. I think that we're actually kind of like with the shadows of the desert birds and the idea of revelation, the use of that word, revelation, as of course having for Christian society a particular kind of meaning, a reference to the book of Revelation. I think we're also maybe supposed to think of this nightmare of the rocking cradle as reminiscent of this Antichrist who wants to eat this child. And we have some hints of maybe the meaning of what eating this child is. The indignance of the desert birds because they can't feed upon this evil force or this sphinx spores. I don't want to say evil. So this anti force, I mean, even if we don't say ascribe value of good and evil, there is this anti Christian idea here which is best exemplified by images of the Antichrist, the thing that is annoyed by the rocking cradle, the force that wants to eat the baby so that it can't come into the world and bring Christian values and all of those implications, even if we don't think of it as a redeeming force, just whatever this gyre and its Christian society has produced in the world. And so this other force which is going to take its place, we are imagining that now at the end of this Christian life cycle, this gyre, it's now successfully going to, in a metaphorical sense, eat this baby and produce this new Christless anti Christian world, which is, you know, subjective rather than objective, which has that list of qualities that you read, rather than the collective, the individual, et cetera. And so by saying that that's, you know, I think for some people like the Antichri, you know, that's obviously a bad thing. But I think what he's doing is he's using these images to just describe whatever is not Christian as a way to just say that this is going to be whatever the opposite of that force is in terms of the values of this successive idea system. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. Another interesting and sort of complicating element of this is again, like said before, what does it mean to be born? What does it mean that this animal which has woken up or become resurrected in Egypt and is now walking toward Bethlehem, what does it mean for that thing to be born? Well, perhaps in a sense it's being born again. This is again reminiscent of the idea of baptism, but this baptism, rather than being the ceremony of innocence in the first stanza, it's that drowned, that upside down version of that. Maybe this is the ceremony of evil, or if not evil than this anti Christian ceremony which is creating chaos, anarchy, dispersion, or propagating that rather than creating this holistic collective body of Christ.

26:11 Wes: So this is part of the problem of what the ending means. Does the new age that's coming upon us, is that a continuation of anarchy and chaos or is this a restoration of order?

26:24 Erin: Right, that's one of the things I struggled with.

26:26 Wes: Here's another list of adjectives from a vision, he says, where the primary heir of Christ is dogmatic, leveling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace, its means and end. The antithetical era of the beast will be expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical. Is that a solution? Is he endorsing that? It's unconscious. I mean, another way of reading this is you could straightforwardly critique it without getting into his whole system of different ages as a critique of the revolutionary ethos or the progressive ethos. So you might say there's no way for us to fashion a conception of a better future if that involves some sort of rapid transition. Look what happens as soon as you start talking about second comings or revolutions. This is what happens. This is what is actually visited upon the world. This is the unconscious reaction that'll inevitably be. So I don't know that that's necessarily the right reading, but that's another angle to take with this. I think if the stuff we've read from Yeats, A Vision, gives us a more comprehensive way to look at this, but on first blush one might read that. And I think there are obviously anti revolutionary elements to this poem. So what is the Slav slouching about? I love this use of the slouching as a verb for movement here.

27:50 Erin: Yeah, that's great as an active verb. It makes me think that the animal is wounded. Is that the wrong association to make?

27:59 Wes: No, I hadn't thought of that. But that's really interesting.

28:01 Erin: I always thought of this wounded loping, you know, the cat in the desert or whatever. It's like I keep wanting to make Lion King associations, which is just like really, really stupid. Like. Oh yeah, it's like Scar and Lion King or something. It seems wounded to me. Or it seems like it's not happy to be traveling or it's not able to travel effectively.

28:21 Wes: It's definitely pissed off.

28:23 Erin: Yeah, it's not pissed off in a way that's kind of speeding it towards Bethlehem. It's pissed off like it doesn't even want to bother, but it's going anyway.

28:30 Wes: I don't know. And that's the interesting thing about the movement of cats, right? There's an ill defined line in cats between their indifference and their laziness. On the one hand, and they're stealth and prowling and subterfuge on the other. They move in this very expert way. But there's a kind of casualness to it as well. And the other contradiction here is between we think of slouching as involving poor posture and there's kind of a slouchy and sorry to keep reducing the sphinx to a cat, but this is the most important for the movement purposes part of it. We think of slouching as involving poor posture posture, but in a way a cat can move as it's crouched down. It's a kind of expertness to that sort of posture. And finally there's this association between the slouching posture in human beings and kind of lack of discipline or even poor moral character. I think these are natural associations. But we're not meant to think of the beast as undisciplined or unexpert in its movements. But we are supposed to wonder about the moral implications of this. So slouching is just such a perfectly ambiguous word for all of this. It's part of what makes it hard to tell what the beast actually is exactly. Is it a lowlife, is it criminal? Or is it more like a beast of prey, let's say, is it more human than suffer from the evaluation that attend upon the human, the kind of moral evaluations that we make? Or if it's more like an animal, does it transcend those evaluations? And so the sorts of things that we might blame a human being for, sociopathy, for instance, criminality in a cat, that natural Sociopathy is just impressive and powerful and even admirable.

30:24 Erin: Wow. All I can say is that you are no slouch in your analysis of that slouch.

30:29 Wes: Thank you very much.

30:31 Erin: Yeah, so maybe we should talk about just what it all adds up to. Or did we already?

30:36 Wes: So it certainly has conservative sympathies and in earlier drafts of it there's mentions of Burke and Pitt, so two denouncers of the French Revolution. But I think the very first draft celebrated the fact that the German Free Corps went to Russia in an attempt to end the revolution there. And that's a sort of proto fascist. And the Free Corps was itself proto fascist. So you could read this as Yates endorsing the reactionary and endorsing counter revolutionary violence, and to the extent that he does that, endorsing fascism. But Yates himself, maybe in a kind of self serving way, wanted to see this as a premonition of coming fascism and a rejection of it. So in a letter to Ethel Mannan, for instance, he said, as my sense of reality deepens, and I think it does with my age, my horror at the cruelty of governments grows greater. Communist, fascist, nationalist, clerical, anti clerical, all are responsible according to the number of their victims. I have not been silent. I have used the only vehicle I possess, verse. If you have any poems by you, look up a poem called the Second Coming. It was written some 16 or 17 years ago and foretold what is happening. So you could call that a revisionist and self serving reading by Yeats, but I don't think it's necessarily inconsistent. There's nothing in here that necessarily says he's prophesying a new age, but that doesn't mean he endorses it or every element of it. It just may be what he thinks is going to happen. As he got older, he was more willing to moralize. I think that's something he was against in a way when he was younger, but he became more political and more willing to moralize as he got older.

32:22 Erin: So, so what that adds up to basically is this idea that no matter what age it is, people have a propensity for violence. And I don't want to say anarchy, because now that's a loaded term. They have a propensity towards evil, whether that be in one system of beliefs or another. And yet Yeats is saying that there's a rejection of the Christian system which has this understanding of that evil nature inherent within all people, but also the potential good need for salvation. And Yeats himself seems to indicate that there is this need for salvation. But how do you become saved from Christianity, perhaps? Or, you know, how do you have the idea of salvation then, even outside of a Christian system? So there's something rather. I don't know if we put this in religious terms, which I don't really want to. It's almost as though Yeats has this deistic idea of how the world works, that whatever forces are in control are not necessarily good or bad. As I've said before, they are just operating on a cyclical system independent of the needs or the requirements of those people in any given circumstance. This is where, I mean, if I can just interject my opinion of this poem here, which is not any kind of indictment of its quality or its canonical status or the reasons why it is justly famous to me. It's just so convoluted and so contradictory and paradoxical. You know, this idea of, of this anti Christian society coming about which provides salvation from the Christian society, you know, the fact that he uses all these Christian images and ideas in order to describe the supplanting of Christian images and ideas. It's very difficult for me. It's hard to kind of get your hands around it. And I think that frustration that I feel when I read this is probably common. I don't know if it's common to you.

34:12 Wes: This gets us back to the Nietzsche critique of morality and Christianity and then also to the anti revolutionary conservative critique. So it's hard not to be ambivalent about such critiques, even if you're not a Christian, for instance, or not prone to progressivism or the revolutionary. So Nietzsche's critique is just that. Look, morality is actually the problem. Morality. There's something fundamentally hypocritical and inhumane about morality. It just suppresses and keeps hidden all of these darker impulses. And in many ways they come out in the system of morality. So they come out as sadistic punishment. Or even the conception of heaven and hell might be read as Nietzsche read it as kind of vengeful and sadistic. And for Nietzsche, the interest in morality is actually ultimately predicated in will to power. And there's a lot of psychological insight to this. It's not hard to find the very sinister elements of morality. Violence itself is highly moralized. Sociologists and psychologists know this. They know that when people engage in mass violence or even second degree murder, that they are thinking about these things in moral terms. The other person did something wrong, the other person is evil. The other person deserved to get what they got. The only way to rectify the moral order was to punish the other. And then with the revolutionary critique, look at all the horrors that revolutions lead to. Look at what it means to elevate certain ideals above the well being of actual physical human beings. So those critiques are well taken. But what does it leave you with? Nietzsche himself must be operating according to a system of values. And you could actually end up saying, actually Nietzsche is a great moralist. He just has a more refined sensibility. Or you could even say, despite the fact that he seemed there are anti democratic or anti liberal elements there, you could just say he's the ultimate classical liberal. He's defending a concept of justice which is prior to and higher than the good, although he would probably reject that characterization himself. But if that's not the case, then what are you left with? What direction are you left with? After such critiques? We can't go back to being what Nietzsche called blond beast, right? We can't go back to being sociopathic monsters who murder each other at will. We can't dismantle civilization. We're stuck with it. We can't deny that Christian values and the secular versions of those values that still predominate, you know, so whether you're Christian or not, those sorts of values actually predominate in society. You can't deny them in a way that they are necessary. So they have their downsides, but they can't be abandoned. That's the problem. That's why this is so unsatisfying. There's no answer to be given here. There's no better system to be proposed. Nietzsche talks in very vague terms about a gay science, a way of unifying and synthesizing the instinctual and the more ascetic trends in our nature. A way of elevating the aesthetic and the artistic and the imaginative, making that the basis of our ethics or even a return to ancient Greek virtue ethics. And there's tons of insight into that and tons of practical application, but it's not complete. And then the darker side of Nietzsche is an embrace of elitism, which is entirely unsatisfactory. It's entirely. It comes across as juvenile. Most people can't do that or live up to that. And even people who think of themselves as living up to it don't. We're all just human in the end. We're all vulnerable and flawed. So conceiving of ourselves as ubermenschen, I think it's. It's an unhelpful vision of the world and it arguably lends itself to fascism, even though Nietzsche was anti fascistic and anti Nationalist, and to the extent that he thought romanticism led to this sort of thing, anti romantic, despite an earlier flirtation with romanticism. So I'm sorry to talk so much about Nietzsche, but I do think it sheds a lot of light on this. These sorts of critiques are important, but they always leave you confused and not knowing where to go. Exactly. So what do we do at the end of this poem when the rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem? What are we supposed to think? He leaves it as a question, which is the only way you can leave that. I don't know if it's a critique of the poem to be dissatisfied with that or if it's just a critique of our human condition.

38:50 Erin: One of the tenets of incarnational theology, the idea that Christ actually takes human form, is that that is an ennobling philosophy, that Christ is human like us. And therefore if God can become man, then man, you know, made in the image and likeness of God can become sanctified, can become holy, so that God had to eat and even go to the bathroom. And all these things which are considered sort of like other necessities of being human, that these things are therefore sanctified in a sense, or made better, made holy, so that it's not such a terribly ugly thing all the time to be a human. And so that idea of what being a human means, I mean, I think that in Christianity anyway, though, there is all of this violence, religious wars, et cetera. There is something ultimately compelling and satisfactory about this. Reconciling the evil of humanity with the grace of God and the potential for growth, enlightenment, sanctification, change, redemption. I think Yeats can't help but operate under this idea, even as he's describing this anti Christian force. So certainly the condition of humanity, you know, remains the same. I don't just want to give a pro Christian polemic and say that the result of all this should be that Christianity should remain in place. And, you know, it's a bad thing when we lose Christianity. Of course I'm going to believe that to a certain extent because I am a Christian.

40:12 Wes: But you're describing a very live important possibility that we just can't reject out of hand, whether it's Christianity or some sort of religious orientation. That's the big question. And we can't simply, you know, even as someone who's as fond of Nietzsche as me, I can't be very presumptuous just to. Nietzsche was anti atheist as well, actually. So this is. Atheism would be a sort of presumptuousness and it's not itself a solution.

40:35 Erin: And I don't mean to say this just in terms of Christianity exclusively. Any kind of great world religion, religion, any of the great religious traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, whatever they may be, they all give us something outside of ourselves. They all try to ennoble humanity or lift up humanity or give humanity something greater than themselves to strive for and also to unite people. And whether that is for good or for ill. Yeah, I don't know. I'm losing it at this point because I just don't want to say that Yates is wrong.

41:10 Wes: Well, why not?

41:11 Erin: Because I don't necessarily think that he's wrong or that Nietzsche is wrong because I don't know enough about it to be able to dismiss Nietzsche out of hand or Yates out of hand or something. But yeah, I think the objective forces that Yates is saying are being supplanted by the subjective forces. I think those, objectively speaking, are better than the subjective in a sense, and better for humans, humanity.

41:34 Wes: I agree.

41:34 Erin: Okay, that's the most bland way I can put it without upsetting people or undermining myself.

41:41 Wes: Most people, I think, would obviously agree, whether they're more prone to the secular and the naturalistic or to the Christian, because those all get tied together, not just by Nietzsche, but by Yates in that first objective phase. So it's important to understand the critiques, but it's difficult to know what to do do once one has comprehended the critique. It's easy to criticize. But what's the solution other than to reform and improve and refine what we already have?

42:09 Erin: Right. And it seems as though we have no choice anyway. I mean, we're all going to be carried away in the blood dimmed tide and we just kind of have to lie back and let ourselves float. But. All right, is that a good place to end? Yep.

42:22 Wes: Thank you. That was a lot of fun.

42:24 Erin: Thank you.

42:27 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to remind you again that if you're listening to this on the feed for the Partially Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us, a rating or review would help us a lot. You'll also find us@subtextpodcast.com us@patreon.com on the website. You'll find ways to subscribe to email updates and to contact us directly by email or follow us on social media. We would love to get your feedback, including comments on episodes or episode requests or anything else. And once again, thank you for listening.