I was reminded this week of a little known poem by W.H. Auden:
Hell is neither here nor there
Hell is not anywhere
Hell is hard to bear.
It is so hard to dream posterity
Or haunt a ruined century
And so much easier to be.
Only the challenge to our will,
Our pride in learning any skill,
Sustains our effort to be ill.
To talk the dictionary through
Without a chance word coming true
Is more than Darwin’s apes could do.
Yet pride alone could not insist
Did we not hope, if we persist,
That one day Hell might actually exist.
In time, pretending to be blind
And universally unkind
Might really send us out of our mind.
If we were really wretched and asleep
It would be easy then to weep,
It would be natural to lie,
There’d be no living left to die.
Auden here is meditating on something which is counter-intuitive to many of us: being evil is hard.
This strikes the Christian mind oddly. We know that sin is the default position of the human heart. The Christian doctrine of original sin means that we cannot help but sin. And the particularly Protestant doctrine of total depravity, whilst not meaning (despite often being mischaracterised as such) that human beings are as bad as they can possibly be, does mean that there is no area of human life that is untainted by sin. Augustine famously made sense of Adam’s first sin by characterising it as a “falling away from the work of God to its own works” rather than a substantive act in itself (City of God, XIV.11), and the image of simply “falling” into sin, like fruit ripe from the tree, conjures a sense of ease.
Zooming in on our individual lives, we know that we usually choose the sinful routes in life because they are easier. It is hard to take “the high road”—that's surely why the New Testament is full of exhortations to “make every effort” in the faith (2 Peter 1:5), to “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles” (Hebrews 12:1). We admire the great men of history who did the right thing in the face of immense opposition, because it was difficult to do so. They displayed the cardinal virtues—prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. Those words even sound hard. Much easier to be imprudent, intemperate, cowardly, and unjust.
I think in our current moment we are (rightly) particularly attuned to the effort required to live a good life. We are living in the chaos of decades of modern expressive individualism, which defines itself by its opposition to any unchosen restriction, and a strong backlash has arisen at even the most popular level—that’s why Jordan Peterson has become one of the most famous people in the world by making self-discipline great again. It’s a message which has not only brought order to the lives of many (young men in particular), but also joy. An easy life, we are realising, is rarely a fulfilled one.
Yet Auden tells us it takes an “effort to be ill”, that we are merely “pretending to be blind/And universally unkind”, that we are not “really wretched or asleep”. All of these are biblical images of fallen humanity. Auden, then, can seem very wide of the mark—reheated tabula rasa-ism, assuming we’re all basically good but are hindered from living it out by nefarious external forces.
Yet I think Auden deserves a hearing here.
Born in York in 1907, Auden drifted away from Christianity in his youth. In the 1930s, however, after a trip to see the Sino-Japanese War and as he observed the rise of the Nazis, he began searching for a secure moral foundation which allowed him to articulate why the Nazis were wrong and he was right. As much to his own surprise as anyone else’s, he found this via a return to Christianity in the early part of WW2. Precisely how “Christian” Auden was is debatable—his doctrinal beliefs remained ambiguous, and he continued with gay relationships after his reconversion despite his acknowledgement of their sinfulness (interestingly, he once characterised homosexuality as being a bad habit he picked up in boarding school and never shook off, which is strangely similar to Aristotle’s characterisation of it as a vice akin to biting one’s nails). For a lucid, orthodox treatment of the question of Auden’s faith, you can do no better than this piece from Auden scholar Stephen Schuler, which I commissioned for Ad Fontes.
“Hell is neither here nor there” was published in Auden’s 1940 collection Another Time, which consisted mainly of poems written between 1936 and 1939. This, then, predates Auden’s full reconversion, but the wheels were in motion. He was, in this period, very happy to speak of “divine laws” and the merits of Christianity, even if in his book of prose reflections written around this time, The Prolific and the Devourer (which wasn’t actually published until the 1990s), he somewhat reluctantly denies any belief in God.
How, then, can we make Christian sense of Auden’s poem?
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