By 1941, shortly after the death of his mother, W.H. Auden was drafting an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship in which he proposed to write "a long poem in several parts about Christmas, suitable for becoming the basis of a text for a large-scale musical oratorio."
Auden had come to believe that all the matters he was strenuously reassessing - art, community, erotic love, politics, psychology - had been fundamentally altered by a single event: the entry of God into human history, what Christians call the Incarnation. The Christ child, as every character agrees in the poem he would write, changes everything. And that radical disruption of the world, and therefore of all the things human beings typically think about the world, needed to be accounted for. The result was his great poem, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.
According to the Christian liturgical calendar each year begins with the season of Advent, which uniquely concerns itself with past and future events: it remembers the first coming of the Messiah and looks forward to the day when, as the Nicene Creed puts it, Christ "will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead." To be a Christian is to live between these two advents, to be thankful for the salvation brought by the first Advent and to be soberly penitent in light of Christ's inevitable return in judgment.
The believer therefore lives poised on a cusp, with Before and After falling off on either side of the moment. We have no power to alter or delay the moment's arrival; it comes to us as decision because we must respond in some way to it. This condition is largely what Auden means by "the time being": to be faced with the necessity of radical choice, but a choice that must be made as a kind of leap of faith, since the fateful moment does not impose an interpretation, but rather calls one forth from us.
It is not surprising, then, that the poem's mood at its outset is not festive but rather anxious, full of foreboding: dominated, then, by the prospect of the second rather than the first Advent. Thus the clear indications early in the poem of a contemporary setting: the second line of the opening section mentions "the clock on the mantelpiece," the fourth refers to a mirror (clocks and mirrors are, of course, central images for the whole poem).
In the second section of Part 1, the mirror appears again, this time set "over the fireplace" of a house with a living room and a wine cellar. Moreover, "The violent howling of winter and war has become / Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop." This section ends with a flat affirmation - "This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God" - and the remaining sections of "Advent" are therefore appropriately dotted with questions about this predicament: "Where is that Law for which we broke our own?" "O where is that immortal and nameless Centre from which our points of / Definition and death are all equi-distant?" "How can his knowledge protect his desire for truth from illusion?"
For Auden, a certain kind of temperament provides exceptionally fertile ground for the cultivation of illusion: the "Arcadian," he would come to call it, the celebrant of an ideally innocent past - or, in the terms of this poem, the one who longs to return to the Garden. What was once the Garden has become "our dreadful wood." Humanity must turn its back on that original Garden and look for the experience of wholeness elsewhere; "but you will not find it / Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert."
Because a straightforward return to the Garden is impossible, answers to the challenging questions pressed at the end of "Advent" must be sought elsewhere. Possibilities come into view in "The Annunciation," which somewhat surprisingly begins neither with Mary nor with the angel Gabriel, but with the "Four Faculties" as described by Carl Jung in his book Psychological Types: Thought, Intuition, Sensation and Feeling.
In the poem, these Faculties are made to serve a theological purpose: "We who are four were / Once but one, / Before his act of / Rebellion" - which is to say that before the Fall, Adam's intellectual, perceptual, emotional and sensory capabilities were unified and governed by a single unerring impulse. After Adam's "act of / Rebellion," our faculties split and now struggle with one another for dominance. A kind of psychomachia or internal warfare is the common lot of humanity, a point Auden would develop more completely in his later and longer poem, The Age of Anxiety.
The Faculties peer into the Garden from which Adam and Eve were exiled. That exile initiated time as we know it (thus the clocks) and anxious self-consciousness (thus the mirrors). Auden sets the Annunciation - the archangel Gabriel's telling young Mary that she will be impregnated by the Holy Spirit of God and will bear the world's Saviour - in the Garden of Eden to indicate that Mary's acceptance of her role is the key event in the renewal of the world that had been broken by our first parents. Auden here embraces the ancient theological commonplace that Mary's humble obedience in response to Gabriel's invitation - "And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38) - inverts and sets right Eve's prideful response to the serpent's invitation to eat the one fruit that God had forbidden.
But in characterizing the fundamental human need addressed by Mary's obedience as a psychic one, the anxiety produced by self-consciousness and inauthentic being, Auden is drawing not on ancient sources but on a theological movement generated primarily by Kierkegaard and developed by his twentieth century successors, especially Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and, in a sense, Jung himself. This dynamic union of contemporaneity and traditionalism characterizes Auden's Christian thought.
So the presence of the Four Faculties indicates a narrative of original psychic integration broken to pieces by the Fall, with the Incarnation marking the beginnings of reintegration. But then, in the latter sections of "The Annunciation," Auden begins to apply a similar analysis to the social world. Those who rejoice at Mary's acceptance of her task include "number and weight" (the inanimate world) and, among human beings, the great, the small, the young and the old.
The developing story of redemption is received by all, affects all, but in different ways according not only to psychological inclination but also to social emplacement. This emergence of a social taxonomy marks a key transition in the poem: persons shaped by various combinations of the Four Faculties enter the public realm, and that realm will be consistently present for the rest of the poem.
At the end of "The Temptation of St. Joseph," Joseph and Mary - neither of them exceptional in themselves, but only in the roles they have been chosen to play - become the proper patrons of "common ungifted / Natures," of the "romantics" and the "bourgeoisie," people who according to their varying natures follow the "Average Way" but who are nevertheless the objects of God's redemptive love.
The fourth part of the poem, "The Summons," concerns itself with the exceptional, to whom the arrival of this Child comes as worrisome news, or worse: says the Star of the Nativity, "I am that star most dreaded by the wise," who fear "the doom of orthodox sophrosyne." Sophrosyne means moderation or temperance ("nothing too much"), and the radical intrusion of God into history threatens to disrupt any and all attempts to employ disciplined, methodical thought to bring the human world under rational control. The natural scientist, the philosopher, and the social scientist alike must confront both their inevitable failure and the vices their attempts at control have led them to.
Something fundamental to Auden's reading of history appears when the purgative journey of these Wise Men is interrupted by a chorus praising Caesar. In this "fugal-chorus," Auden translates the Roman imperial project into contemporary terms. When the projects of modern natural science, philosophy and social science are absorbed by the State - an absorption dramatically accelerated by war - then twentieth-century Caesarism achieves social domination more comprehensive than anything the Romans could have dreamed of. The state that controls the economy ("the Kingdom of Credit Exchange") and an ever-expanding pharmaceutical industry ("the Kingdom of Organic Dwarfs") is well-placed to make the final conquest: "the Kingdom of Popular Soul."
Auden repeatedly insisted on the absolute necessity of defeating Hitler. But unable to join the war effort, due to his homosexuality, he devoted much of his writing during and immediately after the war to what sort of Western society would emerge from an Allied victory: he feared that "the danger is that, in order to win [the war], the democracies will construct an anti-fascist political religion, and so, by becoming like their enemies, lose the peace." This accounts for his decision to write, in wartime, a long poem that has relatively little to say about war but a great deal to say about the dangers of Caesarism, especially in the soft-totalitarian form in which he felt it was likely to emerge in the West.
The poem's social taxonomy returns with the introduction of the Shepherds. They are the poor and humble of this world who, unlike the Wise, do not seek control but who also refuse to be simplified and objectified, refuse "to behave like a cogwheel / When one knows one is no such thing." Their role is to watch and wait, striving to maintain hope. Thus to them the Chorus of Angels proclaims, though with altered pronouns, the declaration from Isaiah 9: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given."
And now, with the fifth part, "At the Manger," the Child is indeed born, and Mary, the Wise Men, and the Shepherds gather around him. Mary, who understands what her son is called to do and be, simply wants her "Little One" to sleep and dream while he may, but Auden uses the responses of the Wise Men and the Shepherds to illustrate what may well have been his favorite binary opposition, that between Arcadians and Utopians.
The Arcadian temperament I've already explored, and it is manifested here in the Shepherds, who "never left the place where [they] were born" and are afflicted by the "sullen wish to go back to the womb" and to have "no future." By contrast, the Utopian temperament looks with "arrogant longing" towards a perfected future and therefore wishes "To have no past"; it is embodied in the Wise Men and, by extension, in all who seek shaping power over their worlds.
Thus earlier in the poem the Shepherds hear voices tempting them to suicide; at first their only reply is, "No, I don't know why, / But I'm glad I'm here," but once they have seen the Child, they cry, "O here and now our endless journey starts." Only the Child has the power to sweep away "the filth of habit from [their] hearts." Conversely, the Wise Men, with their Utopian temperament, must arrest their determination to remake the world, and instead must find all meaning in the Child: so at the manger they cry, "O here and now our endless journey stops."
Each group must discover genuine hope by achieving release from its habitual "phantasy." Earlier in the poem a Chorus had asked, "How can [Man's] knowledge protect his desire for truth from illusion?" The answer is that knowledge cannot: such illusions are displaced only by "Living Love," a Love incarnate in this infant.
The next two parts of the poem develop these ideas in more detail: the challenge this Child poses to intellectuals in search of knowledge and to political leaders in search of power. The characters encountered are therefore a theologian and a king.
Auden's Wise Men are secular intellectuals whose encounter with the Star of the Nativity, and then with the Child himself, opens them for the first time to the transcendent. Simeon, though, is a serious believer, and the challenge the Child poses to his intellectual framework is of a wholly different order. In keeping with his commitment to contemporaneity, Auden strips the biblical Simeon of his Jewishness: readers will learn nothing from this poem about how the very idea of an Incarnate God might have struck a man in Jerusalem who "was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel" (Luke 2:25). Instead, 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, and the ways that a stenographer might or might not resemble Brunnhilde.
Moreover, his language is specifically Christian throughout, paraphrasing or commenting on the early creeds and Augustinian theology. The famous words of the biblical Simeon - "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation" - do find their echo here: "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." But otherwise his language is resolutely modern and enmeshed in the terminology of post-Kierkegaardian philosophical theology.
The burden of Simeon's discourse is essentially twofold: he sets out to explain how God could assume human form, and then how that Incarnation can repair the damage Adam and Eve inflicted on themselves and all their descendants. Simeon's initial task is to close off the Arcadian retreat, then to block the Utopian advance: the first six paragraphs outline what in another poem Auden would call "the alternative routes ... by which the human effort to make its own fortune arrives all eager at its abruptly dreadful end." Simeon conceives of intellectual history as a series of impasses. It was necessary that each of those impasses be explored, and then recognized as offering no outlet, before humanity could be ready to confront the truth of God's purpose:
"The Word could not be made Flesh until men had reached a state of absolute contradiction between clarity and despair in which they would have no choice but either to accept absolutely or to reject absolutely."
This absoluteness of response is required by the absolute absurdity of the Word's being made Flesh. Were the claim merely a symbolic one, some interpretative negotiation might be possible; "but of this Child it is the case that He is in no sense a symbol": he is, rather, as human and as historical as any of us. King Herod, in the following section, understands the choice he is offered in precisely the way that Simeon does:
"Why can't people be sensible? I don't want to be horrid. Why can't they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd? Because it is. And suppose, just for the sake of argument, that it isn't, that this story is true, that this child is in some inexplicable manner both God and Man, that he grows up, lives, and dies, without committing a single sin? Would that make life any better? On the contrary it would make it far, far worse. For it can only mean this: that once having shown them how, God would expect every man, whatever his fortune, to lead a sinless life in the flesh and on earth. Then indeed would the human race be plunged into madness and despair. And for me personally at this moment it would mean that God had given me the power to destroy Himself."
The difference between Simeon and Herod lies not in understanding but in response: where Simeon replies to the news by joyously affirming, "we are bold to say that we have seen our salvation," Herod replies with blunt opposition: "I refuse to be taken in." With a sigh of deep regret, he orders the slaughter of the Israelite children.
Simeon the theologian may have found it dif5cult to accept the idea of God Incarnate, but for Herod it is impossible, because acceptance would require him to relinquish his position as the chief local instrument, in Judaea, of Romanitas and the Caesarist project. And this he lacks the strength of will to do.
While the Christmas narrative, especially as seen by Simeon and Herod, presents us with an absolute contradiction that demands an absolute response: "Once again / As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed / To do more than entertain it as an agreeable / Possibility."
The poem's inconclusiveness mimics that of its audience. And therefore it must end not with resolution but with an invitation: to follow, seek, and love the one who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. It is almost the tone of a revival meeting. In the poetic presentation of spiritual things, Auden would never again be so explicit. In 1946 he told Alan Ansen, "It's the only direct treatment of sacred subjects I shall ever attempt."
Alan Jacobs is Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography. He has also edited and introduced critical editions of W.H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue and For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.
Excerpted from Alan Jacobs's introduction to For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio by W. H. Auden. Copyright 2013 by Alan Jacobs. Published by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.