Section Seven of WH Auden’s “For The Time Being.” (FTTB)
(For the previous section: Click Here)
I should say from the outset that in my many readings of FTTB, I often skip over this entire section. It’s always felt like a weird little interruption to the narrative, and a section of incredibly deep philosophy/theology that even I —with my own theological education— could not make heads of tails of.
But I am again indebted to Alan Jacob’s incredible “Introduction” to the relatively new edition of FTTB that he edited a decade ago. Jacobs has made this section make sense to me at last. (Or at least helped me make sense of why Auden thought it was a good idea…)
In the Bible, Simeon is a minor character who comes to us in the Gospel of Luke, just after Jesus birth. He’s a very old man who encounters Jesus on the eighth day after his birth, when Mary and Joseph present him at the Temple. This might well have been a time of his circumcision. According to Luke, Simeon has been gifted with a vision of the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. Somehow, when he sees Jesus, he believes that vision is fulfilled.
Luke’s Simeon says:
“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation…”
You get the clear sense that Simeon will indeed die soon after this, and that he’ll die contented he’s gotten the hoped for vision.
But Simeon also blesses Mary and Joseph, and has special words for them. He says:
“This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed…” But then, it’s as if he looks straight at Mary, the Mother of this newborn baby, and he says “and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
Yikes.
Remembering that these Gospels are written decades after Jesus’ earthly life, we are being invited to see this as Shakespearean-like foreshadowing. Like those witches that appear in Macbeth, and give away the end of the story before it’s even begun, Simeon is telling us the whole story-arc, right here.
— Jesus’ is born, Incarnate God, as a baby.
— Jesus teaches a Gospel of love and radical inclusion of everyone, gathering Disciples and followers, and proclaiming that God’s kingdom is here NOW.
— Jesus runs afoul of the Powers That Be…who see him as a threat…and have him killed.
— God has some incredible “Last Word” in the matter, and raises him from the dead…rejecting humanity’s rejection of God.
That’s the broad literary outline of the Gospels. Luke’s Simeon foreshadows it all with this ominous sounding verse.
“…a sign that will be opposed…”
“…a sword that will pierce your own soul too…”
Simeon to Mary: “Congratulations, new Mom…you’re in for quite a ride…”
That the Biblical Simeon.
WH Auden’s Simeon is NONE of this.
And I suppose this is what always confused me.
Auden’s Simeon is a philosophical theologian, who speaks in $64,000 theological words. As Alan Jacobs describes him: “we hear from one who can discourse learnedly about Time and the Infinite, the Unconditional and the historically conditioned, the relations between Virtue and Necessity…”
Ok…but again…why?
Why stick in this section of verbose intellectual ramblings?
As Jacobs also notes “How Auden thought this meditation could be accompanied by music is not immediately
obvious…”
Indeed. If you’ve ever wondered why Ben Britten couldn’t set this poem to music, just flip ahead to Simeon and it becomes blindly obvious.
Jacobs suggest this section is almost like a palate cleanser for the narrative. It’s Auden’s attempt to poetically express what I would call “Incarnational Theology.”
It feels like a break with the narrative…because it is. It’s not a story. It’s philosophical/theology, expressed in poetry. Once we see it this way, this break in the story can make more sense.
So, having been given a new way to see this entire section, I have a growing appreciation for it. My sense is that it’s not only a character of SIMEON speaking…but Auden himself is breaking open a view into his own theology.
Let’s just cite a few passages that also mirror my own views of Incarnational Theology…
Simeon sees the meaning of Jesus’ birth in the following ways…
“But here and now the Word which is implicit in the Beginning and in the End is become immediately explicit, and that which hitherto could only passively fear as the incomprehensible I AM, henceforth we may actively love with comprehension that THOU ART. Wherefore, having seen Him, not in some prophetic vision of what might be, but with the eyes of our own weakness as to what actually is, we are bold to say that we have seen our salvation.”
Auden here is mirror John Chapter 1, and Simeon’s own words in Luke. He’s also clearly cribbing Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosophical/theologian. Incarnation brings the Hebrew Scriptures’ “I AM”…God far off in the clouds…and helps us see God as “THOU ART.”
And through Incarnational Theology, we see God present in all human beings.
Simeon continues:
“…in Him we become fully conscious of Necessity as our freedom to be tempted, and of Freedom as our necessity to have faith, And by Him is illuminated the time in which we execute those choices through which our freedom is realized or prevented, for the course of History is predictable in the degree to which all men love themselves, and spontaneous in the degree to which each man loves God and through Him his neighbour.”
I really love this section in a new way. My own sense of Incarnational Theology is that if we truly embrace it…if we deeply truly see all human beings as incarnated with little bits of God…then we can no longer see them as “The Other.”
Therefore, as Auden says here, each moment of life is a moment of CHOICE. (We covered this in the Annunciation section…) Auden/Simeon is connecting Incarntional Theology with the Great Commandment in this section. Which is wonderful, because of course, they ARE connected. Incarnation is shot-through the entire Great Commandment:
To love God IS to love neighbor and self…
To love neighbor…IS to love God and self…
To love self is to love God and neighbor…
There is no disconnection between any of it, because it’s all one unity of God and World….of heaven and earth.
We see it again in Matthew 25, the famous parable of the Last Judgment. When we love and serve the least, the lost, the left out…when love ANY human being, we are in fact also loving God.
It’s all one unity together.
This is the heart of Incarnational Theology.
The way I like to express it is:
God’s Incarnation means there is no meaning to the words “God forsaken.”
We can SAY those words. But they have no meaning…they have no reference in reality as reality can be known.
The set of “God forsaken” people, places, and things, is ZERO.
In God’s truth, there is no place, no time, no person…beyond or outside the presence of God.
This is the heart of Incarnational Theology. This is its power, its breadth, its depth. This is the deep way of seeing and understanding the world that we all too quickly skip over.
Auden clearly embraces the full depth of this. He has Simeon offer some ridiculous examples of the implications of all of this, just to help make the point (a few examples, edited for space…):
“Every invalid is Roland defending the narrow pass against hopeless odds, every stenographer Brunnhilde refusing to renounce her lover’s ring which came into existence through the renunciation of love.”
“Every Cabinet Minister is the woodcutter’s simple-minded son to whom the fishes and the crows are always whispering the whereabouts of the Dancing Water or the Singing Branch, every heiress the washerwoman’s butterfingered daughter on whose pillow the fairy keeps laying the herb that could cure the Prince’s mysterious illness.”
“Nor is there any situation which is essentially more or less interesting than another. Every tea-table is a battlefield littered with old catastrophies and haunted by the vague ghost of vast issues, every martyrdom an occasion for flip cracks and sententious oratory.”
Again, as I just said: In God’s truth, there is no place, no time, no person…beyond or outside the presence of God.
And in the final analysis, an incarnational view of God helps us with the anxiety of modern life.
And I’ll let Auden/Simeon again have the final word:
“And because of His visitation, we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present. Therefore at every moment we pray that, following Him, we may depart from our anxiety into His peace.”’
And all I can say is: Amen.
And yet…
We humans always have a choice before us…
To see God in and through all people, places, and things…or to see people, places, and things as “The Other” “The Threat,” “The Profane.”
We can respond in love for all God’s creation….or with anxiety and fear…
And, anxiety and fear are about to raise their heads again, as we run headlong into King Herod, in our next section…