Tenebrae
Zebrun, Gary
His book is also a low-keyed attack on the New Right, but from a conservative, rather than a liberal or socialist perspec- tive. The book's thirteen chapters can be grouped into three clusters,...
...TENEBRAE Geoffrey Hill Houghton Mifflin, $4.50, 48 pp...
...The first view sanctions the contemporary status quo, and has little stake in significant future change, while the second view projects a vision of the future through subversion of the status quo...
...It is precisely the fusion of classical and Christian thought that is the basis of the idea of progress...
...an end and looked forward to salvation beyond history rather than within history...
...I • ~ms course turns your cassette p~ayer I into a "teaching machine "" With his unique Audio Forum ~ I I "programmed" learning method you set Debt F-52 I ~.1 I • • ' ~. • ., .s Ea,t.gth st I I'111 I . • I~l III~14II_~4IIII~I II~' New York, N.Y...
...Nonetheless, I am grateful he wrote it...
...umuuf exp rarzon daze and your • " • written instructions listemng and earn' . s gnature • ing By the end of the course you' I fond...
...And in "The Laurel Axe," referring to his own En~gland, he says., "It stands, as though at ease with its own world,/the mannerly extortions, languid praise,/all that devotion long since bought and sold...
...As a clas- sic conservative who treasures mediating institutions to guarantee the checks and balances required by a stable social or- der, he is disturbed by the New Right call for direct democracy through popdlar in- itiatives which by-pass normal institu- tions...
...The FSI s Programme(] German uour~e • I Now you can make a start on learning comes in two volumes: You may order one • to speak German with the same mate-or both courses" • i rials used by the U.S...
...ii -courle IS unconoltlOltaily guaranteed, try ., [] German A nat ve German speaker clear y - " "h _ .. i...
...Rosemary Radford Ruether N ISBET'S book aims at a major revision of the standard views of the sources of the idea of progress in Western culture...
...Classical thought was fled to a cyclical pattern and located the Golden Age in the past...
...115...
...In the first has fed such urgent comfort section of "Lacrimae," the speaker ad- through a dream, dresses the crucified Christ, and admits whispered 'your lord is coming, he to his own hypocrisy: is close' (In...
...And with this revelation, he is thrown into his crisis of faith, a time during which, This is the ash-pit of the lily-fire, this is the questioning at the long tables, thi's is true marriage of the self-in: self, this is a raging solitude o.f desire, this is the chorus of obscene consent, this is a single voice of purest praise...
...And later, evoking the Queen of Heaven, he tells her in his controlled but impassioned voice, "Our solitudes drift/by your sol- itudes, the seven/dead stars in your sky...
...Department of i. Volume I. Progremmed introduction to ~1 i State--the Foreign Servuce Instttute's German, 9 ca.ssettes, 12 hours and I • Programmed mtioduction' to German and 647-page text...
...over the ancients and the evident trans- formation of life made possible by the application of science to work through technology (something that never hap- pened in classical antiquity) allowed the idea of progress to take hold and become dominant up through the first World War...
...But it is invaluable...
...Today people ~n a~ ~r~n,,~to ,:=, o= t...
...For Craw- ford, the movement represents in the final analysis the drive of blind political technology, which could turn against its own constituency...
...J I 24 October 1980:603 that 1 have drowsed half-faithful for a time bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse: 'tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him...
...He does not state it so crassly, but he indicates the call for direct democ- racy will lead instead to dictatorship...
...Bonhoeffer, pacing in his skylit cell "restores the broken themes of praise,/encourages our bor- rowed days,/by logic of his sacrifice...
...i for use by members of Amer "ca 'ts (New York State residents add ap-I • dipomatie corps...
...Although these poems do contain spots of hope and belief, their organizing principle -is the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of transcendence in a world as violent and morally ramshackle as our own...
...More reflection on this priniciple, on the wider global experience, and on the structural cause of the rise of the New Right, would be a helpful supplement to Alan Crawford's important, but limited study...
...Hill knows that man himself is par- tially, if not solely, responsible for the darkness and lament that surrounds him...
...These lines represent no mere plunge into the self-pitying solipsism of so much poetry of de~;pair throughout the 60s and 70s...
...I I " " . . . . . In /llll roielgfl ~tlnc;:e iilSlllU|l~ = I ~lielrlll~ln I I yourselx learning anG speat~¢ng en[areIy...
...John of the Cross experienced...
...Basic Course, Continuld I m The FSI spent thousands of dollars and (More Advanced) 8 cassettes, 8'/z ii many years developing these materials hours and a 333-page text, $98...
...nr Tort ree weeks it you're not convinced [] • recorded on me cassettes prey ces an ex- . " . I...
...Tenebrae," 6) Hill is not neatly satisfied by his skepti- cism...
...I I Basic Course, Continued...
...Christianity provides a vi- sion of ongoing future perfection...
...He sees them feeding on confusion and re- sentment, but building nothing in their place except mindless power...
...This sense of abandonment recalls Blake in the "Songs of Experience...
...Only then did the shock of the World Wars and the decline of Western power lead to new movements of histori- cal pessimism...
...Gary Zebs'un G EOFFREY HILL is one of England's strongest poets, extending the intellectual/visionary tradition of Mil- ton, Donne, and Blake...
...In classical literature one finds 0aany versions of the idea of gradual evolution of the arts of civilization from primitive barbarism...
...z order_ ..q n~ fn vr~Hr t'~t~=tfit I yo.r own pace...
...In Catholic pastoral strategy, this principle is referred to as the "basic Christian community...
...so we bear witheSS, Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us, Each distant sphere of harmony forever Poised, unanswerable...
...Volume II...
...Like those songs, Hill's poem is a lament for loss of love once known so powerfully in child- hood and innocence: I went out early to the fare field ermine and lily and yet a child Love stood before me in that place prayers could not lure me to Christ's house Christ the deceiver took all I had his darkness ever my fair reward Having expressed his rancor by calling Christ the deceiver, the speaker feels grieved and drained of any will to live, asking himself "If the night is dark/and the way is short/why do you hold back/ dearest heart...
...In his fourth, characteristically slim~ collection, Tenebrae, Hill continues to present pow- erfuUy compressed poems, in which he considers the difficult but necessary task of seeking a moral ideal in the bankrupt culture of present-day Christianity...
...he quotes Yeats, the grim- mer Yeats who knew that "it is terrible to desire and not/possess, and terrible to possess/and not desire...
...But in Crawford's judgment, the New Right only preys on the constituencies behind these issues, and is not ultimately concerned with the issues themselves...
...Only toward the end, as he reviews the political significance, does he make his criticism strongly...
...But death as a kind of relief is'less Dante did before he entered the Purgatorio, perhaps as only modern man can important that death as an imagined state do down--"and wash this wound/that of pure desire...
...Christianity thought the world was al- most at...
...Hill's poetry, instead, reProgress as freedom, progress as power minds one of the dark night of the soul that St...
...She referred to this principle eventually as the "council system," and saw its roots in the work- ers' councils which rose and were repres- sed at various points in capitalist and communist political history...
...his uhbelief is a source of suffer- ing, an adversity that has brought forth remarkable religious poems by a man whose intensity and technical difficulty" remind one of the great English writer of sublime poems, William Blake...
...He fears, and rightfully so in my opinion, that the mobilization of the reck...
...lorei n langua e are turning to this Your cassettes are shipPed to you in hand- n I g g " "n -• outstanding audio cassette program, some Inbrary b~ ders...
...I enjoyed Crawford's book and learned a great deal from it...
...Nisbet sees this view lying under the surface in all I~inds of unsuspected places in patris- tic and medieval thought...
...Gnarled in both belief and unbelief, Hill expresses a range of complex emotions...
...It consists of a series of ~ur~ iAmprir:=n I:xnrPss VISA M:~st~,r m_ tape cassettes and accompanying text...
...Order today...
...He sees the leaders using the issues in- strumentally to build a power base...
...0017 I...
...and soul for soul discover This is your body twisted by our no strangeness to dissever skill and lover keep with lover into a patience proper for redress...
...A yearning for belief in will not heal...
...A return to old forms of checks and balances may prove insufficient to the challenge before us...
...In Christianity the vision of the future millennium on earth, deriyed from Jewish thought, ~s a con- tinual source of a hol~e for the future, based not on observation of facts, but on faith in the redeeming power of God~ For Nisbet, the normative idea of progress is a fusion of these two...
...I find it interesting that this is precisely the model taken for pastoral strategy by the Catholic church in many parts of the Third W~orld, where it lives under right- wing persecution...
...For in-stance, referring to his slain self in the third section of "The Pentecost Castle," the speaker, bewildered and angry, ad- dresses Christlike observers--perhaps Commonweal: 602 those once fiery, though now pale, signs (like Christianity itself) of Pentecost: You watchers on the wall grown old with care I too looked from the wall I shall look no more tell us what you saw the lord I sought to serve caught in the thorn grove his blood on his brow you keepers of the wall what friends or enemy sets free the cry of the bell At other times in the poem the speaker is more clearly skeptical about the power of Christianity to give one comfort when "ghosts for love/void a few tears/of wax upon/forlorn altars...
...Crawford does a masterful job of chronicling the genesis and structure of the New Right...
...In the terrible muddlement of our time in which the social and political orders commit .so much wild and unthinkable cruelty, the martyr's "words are quiet but not too quiet./We hear too late or not too late...
...Re- building community, then, as well as new forms of community institutions, may be a better long range strategy for resisting the American and indeed the global New Right...
...Nisbet says this isn't so...
...Having observed and shared in the hypocrisies of his fellow Christians, Hill has come to believe that "Theoiogy makes good bedside reading...
...She called not for a return to old forms, but for the development of a new political principle, one which would be an antidote to to- talitarianism and which would provide the seed for a new society...
...less resentments of mass society will lead not to populist empowerment, but to a strengthening of the "imperial presi- dency...
...If anything, the material is so thorough that it becomes a bit tedi- ous to read...
...In pre-modern and in modern thought one finds one of these patterns.or the other, but seldom the combination of the two that Nisbet proclaims...
...Many years ago, in her book' on The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt discussed the crisis of the modern Bankrupt faith & ramshackle culture party system, both in its class-based con- tinental form and in its interest group Anglo-American model...
...He complains that when he "cried out you/made no reply," leaving him next time to "pass by/without a sound...
...Nisbet fails, however, to distinguish between a classical view of progress in civilization that comes up to one's own time., but does not presuppose a strong vision of a better future, and a Judaeo- Christian apocalypticism which is pat- terned on a dialectic of judgment upon past and present historical evil that re- I'eases some new redeemed future through divine intervention and trans-formation...
...But I find his solution not adequate to the danger...
...Only when these twin heritages of Western culture lost their hold in the t 7th century through secular s~:ignce and philosophy was the way cleared for the idea of progress...
...I further believe he is correct in warning of the totalitarian danger from the New Right--a danger which is still weak, but growing...
...It is true that Augustine follows a Jewish apocalyptic pattern of seven millennia of HI~TORY OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS Robert Nisbet Basic Books, $16.95., 370 pp...
...But the heart does hold back in the dark night, and the darkness, the suffering itself, becomes a kind of brilliant transcendence: Splendidly-shining darkness proud citadel of meekness likening us our unlikeness majesty of our distress emptiness ever thronging You are the castaway of drowned untenable belonging re morse, how long until this longing You are the world's atonement on end in unending song the hill...
...The first cluster (chapters 1-4) describes the structure of the New Right--its or- ganizational, financial, and cultural structure...
...i ly as pos:sible "~ Foreign serv ce personnel, . _ • , I I that's who...
...r it's the most convement and most painless • --" i ceHent mode re nep you aevu;up yuu w to ea n . . . . . . . B • SKIllS" ay ~ r ~erman, return ixand we'll re- _ i ~. . . fund every penny you paid...
...The usual line is that neither classical culture nor Christian theology supported the idea of progress...
...I The Foreign Service Institute's German TO ORDER JUST CLIP THIS AD and mail = Course is oy var the most effective way to our na--e and address and a =beck • I t with y a,,, , ~; learn German at yOur convenience and a or monet_ .. _r~ _h_r=t...
...In the poem, "Two Chorale-Preludes" on melodies by Paul Celan, Hill says, "There is a land called Lost/at peace inside our heads...
...The book's thirteen chapters can be grouped into three clusters, although the author does not explicitly so group them...
...In the satiric poem, "'A Short History of British India (III),'" he points out that thanks to the England of his ancestors, "India's a peacock-shrine next to a shop/selling mangola, sitars, lucky charms,/heavenly Buddhas smiling in their sleep...
...The third and final cluster (chapters 9-13) addresses the political significance of the New Right--its im- plications for the Republican and Demo- cratic parties, its use of the politics of grievance or resentment, its roots in American populism rather than authentic conservativism, and its fundamental threat to democracy...
...a moment and for ever Dark passions-- images of death--attract The poem ends in this splendidly shining the desiring, though skeptical, speaker: darkness, in pure desire, a purity rein- "Ash-Wednesday feasts, ascetic forced by the strict repetitions of sound, opulence,/th'e wincing lute, so real in its as the speaker will go down--perhaps as pretence,/itself a passion amorous of love...
...In his early poem "Annunciations" he de- scribes this beautiful necessity, which continues to trouble and attract him in his new work: So it is required...
...God--an openness to any avenue of Hill is struggling with the aging Chris- belief--is at the heart of "Lacrimae": tian tradition, unwilling to let it go, or to So many nights the angel of my accept uncritically its cheapened con-house temporary forms of worship...
...InnIuuIInUIUUUlUnnnuuilmIIl) 5t cak ¢rmart i -[ikeaT)iplomat!i i I n a our own ace testin ourself correctin-I [] What sort of peop.le need to ear y P g Y , y • • foreign language as quickly and effective- errors, reinforcing accurate responses...
...3 • I . . . . . . . . barge O,,l~,~ ~,uul uT ~,,~,-o,,,~ ~..u • book YOu simply VOl;OW me spoken ano...
...And Tenebrae is recurrently elegaic, mourning the loss not only of human kindness and love', but of the power of light itself...
...m [] walks of life who need to learn to speak a ~,-vv...
...The poet describes the dark night of his religious desire in an epigraph to the opening poem ofTenebrae, "The Pente- cost Castle...
...He dis- closes the New Right strategy to build on fear and insecurity, especially among lower-middle-class Americans from the South, the West, and the Midwest, against trigger-issues like busing, abor- tion, gun control, homosexuals, wom-en's liberation, the Panama Canal, and so on...
...This is the real reason for Crawford's writing the book, although he carefully subordinates criticism to chronicle at most points...
...The second cluster (chapters 5-8) probes four key themes in New Right propaganda--defense of family, anti-elitism, the centrality of media, and anti-bigness...
...He brings key New Right leaders like Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, and Howard Philips, and key New Right or- ganizations like the Heritage Founda- tion, Moral Majority, Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and count- less others into public scrutiny...
...Hill addresses his poem, "Christmas Trees," to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who, before his martyrdom, cried out against the "'easy" faith of so many Europeans and Americans...
...Then both the progress in scientific thought Commotnve~: 604...
...The world, through the arts, sciences and technology, evolves in a continual step-by-step man- ner toward increasing prosperity and civilization...
...r.-k...
...The speaker feels painfully disconnected from God...
...Nisbet is on shaky ground in claiming Augustine for his theory of progress...
Vol. 107 • October 1980 • No. 19
