Browsing the bookshelves of our holiday cottage a couple of weeks ago I found a volume of book reviews written by the poet W.H. Auden. Called Forewords
and Afterwords, it’s described by Clive James as “free of bluff,
full of life” and full of “unintended hints at the vastness of his reading.”
Some little gems:
Speaking of Augustine’s insight into human nature:
“Man, that is to say, always acts either
self-lovingly, just for the hell of it, or God-loving, just for the heaven of
it; his reasons, his appetites are secondary motivations. Man chooses either
life or death, but he chooses; everything he does, from going to the toilet to
mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of
himself.”
On Jesus' death as something unexpected: “The idea of a sacrificial victim is not new; but
that it should be the victim who chooses to be sacrificed and the sacrificers
who deny that any sacrifice has been made, is very new.”
From the review of E.R. Dodds’ book Heresies:
“One may or may not hold the devil responsible,
but, when one considers the behaviour of large organised social groups
throughout human history, this much is certain: it has been characterised
neither by love nor by logic.”
Discussing Dodds’ work Pagan
and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, Auden relates what Dodds considers a major
cause of the church’s growth in the early centuries of its life:
“Epictetus has described for us the dreadful
loneliness that can beset a man in the midst of his fellows…Such loneliness
must have been felt by millions [in the centuries immediately following Jesus’
life]–the urbanised tribesman, the peasant come to town in search of work, the
demobilised soldier, the rentier ruined by inflation, and the manumitted
slave. For people in that situation membership of a Christian community
might be the only way of maintaining their self-respect and giving their life
some semblance of meaning. Within the community there was human warmth:
someone was interested in them, both here and hereafter.”
[Auden himself lived an unconventional life and had a curious relationship with Christianity, influenced first by Protestant Liberalism and then by Catholicism. A nice introduction can be found here: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/08/auden-and-the-limits-of-poetry-10]