One Man’s Unlikely Journey
Those who studied the era of Hitler’s rise to power and WWII, may know the name W. H. Auden. He was one of the most influential English poets of his day. He was considered a kind of secular prophet. He was no Christian. Rather, he was an atheist, a left-wing socialist, a practicing homosexual, and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War.
Raised at Gresham’s school in England, both his grandfathers had been clergymen. Still he, at the age of 13, abandoned the faith he had been taught since childhood. He considered faith ‘a vague uplift,’ about as appetizing and “as flat as an old bottle of soda water.” He simply lost interest, he would say later.
In 1939, he came to the United States. On September 1, he casually popped into a cinema on the East Side of Manhattan, a dominantly German area, though he did not realize it. It might have made no difference except for what happened that day. The film was entitled Sieg in Poland, a documentary on the Nazi invasion and conquest of Poland. On the screen, he watched Hitler’s S. S. Storm Troopers bayonetting innocent women and children heartlessly. The cold brutality released on civilians was senseless, morally repulsive. What shocked him, however, was the vocal and harrowing response of the audience. Like a crazed mob, all around him, voices cried out, “Kill them! Kill them!” as if the soldiers on the screen could hear them calling for more blood, for the escalation of the violence. Auden realized it was not only Nazi soldiers who were capable of such viciousness. It was supposedly ordinary folks on the East Side of Manhattan who were sitting all around him in the theater.
Auden was shaken, horrified. He was, himself, a liberal-socialist-democratic, a left-of-center thinker. He embraced Sigmund Freud’s ideas, the repression of super-ego, the inner voice of restraint and moral reason. He had championed the liberty of id – impulse and gratification, few boundaries and an amoral orientation. He liked Karl Marx’s godless political philosophy. He was not a conservative by any stretch of imagination. The humanism that he had embraced from his early teen years had always remained in place. At its core was a belief in the essential goodness of humanity. A sin nature? A dark center in the soul of man that only God could tame? “Nonsense,” he believed. On the contrary, like other humanists, he believed that once humanity worked out global problems, all would be well. Utopia would be possible, because humans were good.
Leaving the cinema that day with the savage scenes of the S. S. Soldiers playing in his head and the echo of the bloodthirsty audience hungry for violence ringing in his ears, he knew he had been wrong. He had encountered absolute evil, not merely on the screen, but sitting in seats all around him. Such evil he knew, had to be judged and condemned – absolutely and definitively. Why was Hitler so utterly wrong, and how could he seduce a nation with profound Christian roots to embrace his rage and savagery? Something evil was afoot, more sinister than the evil that could be attributed to mortal men. Hitler was not evil; he was absolutely evil. Yet, he was not, Auden knew, the source of evil, only the channel. Hitler was inspired by a force more fundamentally evil than that of any mortal man. Auden was shocked by evil – by a spirit that had gripped the soul of a people, and that frightened him into spiritual sobriety – he began a journey to rediscover the faith of his grandfathers.
In the 19th century, Dostoevsky also maintained a belief in the goodness of mankind. He held that belief until he came face to face with cruel depraved behavior in Siberia. There, he concluded, he had been wrong. Auden’s confidence in humankind’s goodness was shattered in one jarring afternoon. Like a vapor, it was gone. His balloon of idealism burst.
Auden was hemmed in by his relativism. How does one account for undeniable evil, absolute lunacy; and justify condemning it with absolute and unconditional judgement? Suddenly in his relativistic world, he was bumping up against absolutes. He had championed nonjudgemental tolerance and acceptance. There was no need, he believed, for absolute judgement of anything or anyone – until that day in the theater. There could be no acceptance of Hitler, or the actions of the S. S. Storm Troopers, or yet, the attitude encountered in the theater.
He told one of his friends, “The English intellectuals who now cry to Heaven against the evil incarnated by Hitler have no Heaven to cry to.” Dismissive of God, in the face of hellish evil, to whom do men turn? He suddenly knew, the whole premise of his liberal life had no foundation, no fixed walls – everything moved, all was relative. The real-world facing Nazism demanded an end to the make-believe world in which he had lived.
“The whole trend of liberal thought,” he wrote, “has been to undermine faith in the absolute… It has tried to make reason the judge… but since life is a changing process… the attempt to find a humanistic basis of keeping a promise works logically with the conclusion, ‘I can break it whenever I feel convenient.’”
In another interview, he would comment, “Unless one is prepared to take a relativistic view that all morals are a matter of person taste, one could hardly avoid asking the question: ‘If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?’”
Auden became an advocate for the renewal of ‘faith in the absolute.’ We must, he argued, “serve the unconditional,” or another monster like Hitler will arise and create a set a skewed values by which evil is justified. Auden’s cinematic experience did not move him from sinner to saint, but it unsettled him and his relativistic, Marxist ideas. It is such an unsettling, orchestrated only by God, which provides the opportunity for witness.
Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss sculptor, a close friend of Picasso, lost a close friend when he was only 19. He called the experience one in which a “hole was torn in his life.” What Auden experienced is what Os Guinness calls “a signal of transcendence,” a clue as from heaven that there is more. That something is missing, and that we are settled on the wrong limb and in danger of losing our souls.
Some transcendent experiences are abrupt and disconcerting. Others are gentle nudges by God. Some are triggered by the loss of a friend or companion, or by a simple, haunting memory. Others, by encountering some wall in life that leaves us at a dead-end and disoriented. Guiness speaks of ‘homing signals, clues, hints, jolts, triggers, epiphanies, transcendent impulses,’ all road signs that prompt a radical turn or even a U-turn.84
Humanity, all Adam’s children, are living, as it were, somewhere ‘east of Eden.’ We know, intuitively, that there was once a homeplace, and we have a longing to return there. This is a “homesickness that no other home can satisfy, a desire that no other satisfaction can fulfil, a yearning that can be assuaged nowhere else, and a restlessness that finds no rest in any other stopping place.” Augustine declared, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
Sin cut us off, and exiled us from Eden, from paradise and from the presence of God. It left us with a hole in our heart, a longing satisfied only by coming home to the Creator-Redeemer, Father and Son. We attempt to stuff the hole with pleasures, power and conquests, or to medicate it, or to ignore it with addictive behaviors and substitutes. But the inner pain never stops. It begs for more – and the ‘more’ that we feed it cannot satisfy it. The pain only grows until the fix no longer works. God is the ‘something that is missing.’