The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (44 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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The Romantics’ new religion: Nature
 
There’s an excellent scene in Samuel Johnson’s
Rasselas
(1759), wherein the prince, on a quest to find the best mode of life, listens enthralled to a philosopher discoursing on living according to nature. It’s the only avenue to happiness, said he, the only way to free oneself “from the delusions of hope, or importunities of desire.” Throw away laws, throw away “the encumbrance of precepts, which they who utter them with so much pride and pomp do not understand.” “Deviation from nature,” he intones, “is deviation from happiness.”
 
There’s a lot to be asked of such a philosopher. The most obvious question is: “All right then, what should I do now? How do I live according to nature?” Rasselas asks it. The philosopher replies with breathless enthusiasm:
 
To live according to nature, is to act always with due regard to the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes and effects; to concur with the great and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; to cooperate with the general disposition and tendency of the present system of things. (ch. 22)
 
 
Rasselas’ reaction is our own—and should be man’s, too, after the heady promises of Romanticism:
 
The prince soon found that this was one of the sages whom he should understand less as he heard him longer. He therefore bowed and was silent, and the philosopher, supposing him satisfied, and the rest vanquished, rose up and departed with the air of a man that had co-operated with the present system.
 
 
Medieval man had a home: the cosmos, circumscribed by the heaven of heavens, the realm whose only location was the mind of God. By the nineteenth century, man no longer knows that home. In a sense his world is more vast, even threatening. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” said Pascal (
Pensees,
206), for now, when man looked to the sky, he saw the same world of whirling change and decay and death, writ as large as the universe, impossibly far and cold. In another sense the modern world is more cramped than the medieval world. Medieval man lived by the rhythms of salvation; his prayer on a Christmas morn made him one with Christians through all time, and with the Savior who dwelt with the Father before and beyond all time. Now nature is bigger than we had supposed, and (for a while it seemed) far more mysterious. But there is no getting
beyond
her.
 
The Romantic answer is to turn to Nature as a deity. Let man follow and adore her, and he will recover his place. Goethe’s Faust is not a man hankering for secret methods to summon demons. Instead he longs to escape the dust-ridden study and breathe free again, to immerse his mind and heart in the beauty of earth and heaven:
 
Where shall I clasp you, infinity of Nature?
 
You breasts, where? You wellsprings of all life?
 
 
 
 
Darwin Lays the Groundwork for Hitler
 
“There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. . . . It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race....”
 
 
Charles Darwin
,
The Descent of Man
 
Friedrich Nietzsche sounded the same tone in
Beyond Good and Evil
, lamenting how Christian charity had worked, “to preserve all that was sick and that suffered—which means, in fact and in truth, to worsen the European race.” In the twentieth century, some in Europe and America would take “corrective” action on this front.
 
 
Heaven and earth depend on you—toward you my parched soul is straining. You flow, you nourish, yet I crave in vain. (1.455–59)
 
 
On Easter morning, as the distant strains of a hymn turn him from taking deadly poison, he confesses that he cannot scale the heights of heaven, nor can he accept the simple faith of the common people, but something in the joy of the day reminds him of nature, and his childhood:
Once the embrace of heaven’s love rushed down to me in solemn Sabbath stillness; the churchbell tones were auguries and prayer was a lustful pleasure.
 
Ineffable sweet yearning prompted me to roam through woods and fields, and through a thousand burning tears
 
I felt my world come into being.
 
This song proclaimed the happy games of children, unbounded rapture of a festival of Spring. (1.771–80)
 
 
 
It’s impossible not to be drawn toward this nostalgia. It is ours still, without the joy and hope. But, historically, it is not common in literature or art, this longing for the simplicity of childhood. We see it only when people can no longer depend that the world they once knew will be anything like the world that is coming. We see it in our day, when some people do not even bother to be memorialized by a headstone.
 
In any case, what’s born here is the
cult of the child:
not of the Christ child, or of the soul reborn as a child, but of the ordinary child as blessed because, supposedly, he comes fresh from the hand of Nature, unspoiled by the sin of his society, till the years steal upon him and take the glory away. The poetry of the early century is filled with such celebration, concealing a despair:
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
 
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
 
And by the vision splendid
 
Is on his way attended;
 
At length the Man perceives it die away,
 
And fade into the light of common day. (Wordsworth,
Ode:
 
Intimations of Immortality,
71–76)
 
 
 
Christians who lived on the land, for whom the rhythms of the seasons were tolled by the church bell, do not speak this way. We only begin to talk about our health when we are ill. So in the Romantic longing for Nature there is a wistfulness, a sense that she recedes beyond our reach. The poet Wordsworth, recalling a swath of daffodils on a hillside, claims that the memory of that beautiful sight will be a comfort to him, and a force for good, in the gloaming days to come:
 
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
 
And dances with the daffodils. (“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” 23–24)
 
 
But in other moments he suspects differently. So in the poem
Michael
the old farmer reminds his son, before he leaves to make his way in the world, of the days they enjoyed together in the peace of a simple and natural life:
 
But we were playmates, Luke: among these hills,
 
As well thou knowest, in us the old and young
 
Have played together, nor with me didst thou
 
Lack any pleasure which a boy can know. (353–56)
 
 
The boy sobs; he bids his father farewell. And goes to the city, and—it is told in five short lines—falls to dissolution and shame, never to return to his father or his youth.
 
 
 
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
 
Rerum Novarum
by Pope Leo XIII; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1939.
 
Written near the end of the nineteenth century, this encyclical promotes justice among the classes, private property, and non-State-mandated charity. A critique of both capitalism and communism, it can serve as a good anecdote to the excesses of the twentieth century. So, the next time some Catholic politician tries to dodge a tough abortion question by talking about welfare in terms of “Catholic Social Teaching,” hand him this encyclical to show him it’s not “Catholic Socialist Teaching,” at all.
 
 
The city, then, stands in this age as the locus of bustle, change, dynamism, greed, power, law, and lawlessness. And it’s not the Rome that Juvenal satirized so savagely, or the Babylon that Augustine said was consumed with the lust for domination. It’s
any city,
the hulking and inhuman organism that swallows human beings alive. Against the grime of London or Paris, then, “Nature” stands for a whole set of political and “theological” positions, sometimes loosely adorned with the trappings of Christianity: free love, or at least a more equal relationship between man and woman; a “genuine” life, that is, a life in touch with one’s feelings; a preference for spontaneity over law, and intuition over precept; a reduction of Christ the Savior to Jesus the preacher for the poor, or Jesus the good and gentle sufferer.
 
Under the influence of this new “religion,” primarily indulged by people who never turned a hoe or broke a horse, some great art will be produced, reminding man—who now seems to have forgotten it—that the world is full of great and beautiful things, that rocks and hills and trees can be close to the heart, and that a day in the complex peace of a lakeside can soothe the wounds of a month of the false and noisy thing we take for life. We hear the longing in Keats’ finest ode:
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft,
 
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft,
 
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
 
(
To Autumn,
31–33)
 
 
 
Or, eighty years later, in the weary strains of the Irish poet Yeats, day-dreaming of giving up the mire of society and politics—to return like a prodigal son not to his Father, but to a small muddy island in a lake:
I shall arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
 
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made. (“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” 1–2)
 
 
 
So Henry David Thoreau goes out to live in the woods near Walden Pond, and has his laundry done for him by friends in town. So Walt Whitman meditates on the grass we feed with our bodies, jauntily dismissing the dread of death:
And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere,
 
The smallest sprout shows there really is no death. (
Song of Myself,
124–126)
 
 

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