IN MEMORY OF KING HEROD
Steinfels, Peter
IN MEMORY OF KING HEROD PETER STEINFELS A MONG THAT select group of citizens who still remember, amidst all our current public troubles, a recent episode in the nation's history known as the war...
...Compared to these modern versions of Herod, cut to the pattern of contemporary types, what was the "real" Herod like, that is, the one constructed according to the canons of truth used by historians rather than those used by polemicists, playwrights, and poets...
...IN MEMORY OF KING HEROD PETER STEINFELS A MONG THAT select group of citizens who still remember, amidst all our current public troubles, a recent episode in the nation's history known as the war in Vietnam, 1965 will be recalled as the year of the Great Escalation...
...People want a God like themselves...
...Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices...
...Herod's conclusion that the alleged new king should be put to death "was not, we must suppose, an easy decision," the editorial pointed out...
...We have no reason to suppose that Herod was unsympathetic to the weeping of Rachel...
...Curious about that question, a few years ago I picked up Herod the Great, a handsomely illustrated volume published by American Heritage Press, a book suitable, perhaps, for small coffee tables...
...Fve hardly ever taken bribes...
...An admiring professor of education had even assigned the editorial to his classes and given them a reading comprehension on the multiple-choice test indicated that he, too, had completely missed the point...
...Matthew's account is interesting but hardly sufficient...
...It's not fair of God to put Herod in this pickle...
...Matthew does not bother mentioning the king's duty to preserve his people from the obvious dangers of upstart revolutionaries...
...By the end of 1965, however, besides expressing numerous doubts about the conduct of the war, the editors had grown more than a little weary with the this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you rationalizations regularly issued by Washington's apologists...
...he has no grasp of the demands of responsible political leadership...
...A good clue to this is that St...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien, for instance, has written a play, King Herod Explains, of which I have seen only a few passages...
...Besides the above, the editorial contained thinly cloaked references to the domino theory and the need for negotiations...
...The collapse of Rational Law will threaten the political regime as well...
...If the rumor is not stamped out, brought "by the trio who came to see me this morning with an ecstatic grin on their scholarly faces," every crook and cornerboy will imagine that God forgives their crimes...
...I object...
...Naturally," thinks Herod, "this must not be allowed to happen...
...Why can't people be sensible...
...Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment . . . the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the greatest masterpices...
...Herod has worked hard-"Ask anyone you like...
...Auden's Herod is an enlightened progressive, an apostle of rationality and economic development...
...it closed with the somewhat heavy barb, "If we try, we can all find a Herod to support...
...Life after death will be an eternal dinner party" and the energy of the masses diverted from "its normal and wholesome outlet in patriotism and civic or family pride...
...King Herod, the traditional villain of the Christmas story, is a good example...
...In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few inches...
...Much to their amazement, the editors received a number of letters from readers who seemed not merely to have drunk of the good wine of Niebuhrianism but to have fried their brains in it They congratulated the magazine for finally seeing the other side of the story, for recognizing the ambiguity, the complexity, the tragic irony of Herod's predicament...
...I want everyone to be happy...
...I haven't had sex for a month...
...How dreary...
...I read all official dispatches without skipping...
...in these the king defends his cruelties as relatively minor and no less justified politically than the millions of deaths ordered by twentieth-century statesmen...
...yet that would be uncharitable, at least until all the - facts are in...
...Knowledge will degenerate...
...And "even inside this little civilized patch itself," established "at the cost of heaven knows how much grief and bloodshed," the old passionate disorder always threatens to break out...
...and several months after, as though one war were not enough for a country of our size and vigor, we invaded the Dominican Republic under pretext of removing American citizens from the dangers of a revolution...
...Why couldn't this wretched infant be born somewhere else...
...For Herod, the entire Empire is only "a tiny patch of light," outside of which barbaric superstition ranges...
...I'm a liberal...
...Civilization must be saved even if this means sending for the military, as I suppose it does...
...That is not all, Herod realizes...
...The author is the distinguished classical scholar Michael Grant, and his account, to my surprise, turned out to be similar to Commonweals, O'Brien's, and Auden's- but without the irony...
...Continued on page 31) Steinfels (Cont...
...W. H. Auden, in his "Christmas Oratorio," For the Time Being, gives Herod a long and marvelous speech...
...Justice will be replaced by Pity...
...In the first months of that year, the United States began an exercise, picturesquely named Operation Rolling Thunder, intended to bomb the Vietnamese into the Free World...
...Even if the infant were God, be would have to be destroyed, but Au-den's Herod is not Dostoyevsky's stern Inquisitor...
...Herod's musings finish by covering his recourse to violence with the balm of self-pity...
...The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums, and permanent invalids...
...Accordingly the magazine's Christmas issue, a decade ago, carried a rather bitter editorial...
...I will write about it in my next column...
...History is often unfair to men who have to make hard decisions," it began...
...The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck-drivers no longer carry guns...
...I am put in mind of this episode, which was amusing and not so amusing, every time I encounter the uses, usually ironic, to which modern writers have put the figure of Herod...
...Reason is helpless, and now even the Poetic Compromise no longer works"-those charming tales about the Olympians...
...Of course, there still "isn't a single town where a good bookshop would pay," but "it is a beginning...
...It was entitled "Herod's Anguished Decision...
...and if we are tempted to say that his "was a rather excessive way of handling the matter" and may have "violated some traditional norms of morality...
...It would be another year before the editors of Commonweal would pen their radical condemnation of American policy in Vietnam, a condemnation which, though it may have run several years ahead of public opinion, was nevertheless, for better or worse, and in my recollection, reached gradually and reluctantly...
...Was it possible that the intent of such an editorial could be missed...
...war is hell, as the general once said, and no one knows this better than the man who has to make the decisions...
...I brush my teeth...
...Standing at night by the window of his citadel, he muses on the order and prosperity brought by his rule...
...Nor does he take the trouble to point out that the slaying of the innocents was not done with malice toward them personally, but for the sake of the common good of his people...
...Herod dreads the counter-culture which would flourish should the public get the human, sentimental God it yearns for: "Reason will be replaced by Revelation...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 1
