August 4, 2023

Another newsletter about evil?  Shouldn’t I allow readers to enjoy what remains of their summer by writing about something lighter and more cheerful?  For an excuse, I offer the analogy of "Barbenheimer," the craze for going to see the season’s two hit movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer, as a double feature.  I have seen Oppenheimer, and it will figure in what follows.  I am guessing that those who see the films together use Barbie as chaser, a counterbalance to a movie that ends with the message, “We may have just ended all life on earth.”   I plan to see Barbie soon, so you may perhaps hold out for a more upbeat newsletter in the near future.  However, I feel I have unfinished business to take care of at present. 

I am writing on the day after Trump has been indicted for his role in the January 6 insurrection, and two days after the New York Times claims that, according to their survey, the 2024 presidential race between Trump and Biden is essentially tied.

I put very little stock in surveys, and certainly not in surveys conducted this far from the election.  But the poll serves as a reminder that tens of millions of people, well over a third of the country by most estimates, have thrown in their lot with evil, have pledged allegiance to arguably the most evil figure in American history.  Since Trump became president in 2016, good people, who can be defined as people who believe in democracy and who repudiate the hatred and fear through which would-be fascists manipulate their followers, have been frustrated and demoralized by the fact that the ranks of the evildoers include not just corrupt politicians and grifters but their friends, neighbors, co-workers, bosses, relatives, even sometimes their spouses.  Not just openly nasty people like Trump himself and Ron DeSantis, not just shamelessly corrupt politicians like (here in Ohio) Jim Jordan and J.D. Vance, but otherwise nice people—people who are not just respectable, not just superficially pleasant, but genuinely nice within certain limits.  Yet the minute certain topics are touched upon in conversation, their demeanor changes, and something looks out of their eyes that is not nice at all. 

We are urged not to demonize other people simply because we think their views are wrong but rather to engage in respectful dialogue with them.  That is civilized advice in a normally functioning society of normally functioning people.  But our society has not been normal or functional in quite some time.  At least a third of the American population is delusional, victims of an epidemic of mental illness for which we have no vaccine.  The rest of us are deeply, and rightly, uncomfortable with this conclusion.  To say, “I am sane but you are delusional” risks arrogance and the very elitism of which so many of the followers of Trump and the Republican party complain.  Of course, we are all a touch delusional in the sense that we are emotionally invested in our worldview and find an attempt to challenge or subvert it threatening.  But the mark of sanity is to be open to fact and argument and to the views of others; the mark of delusion is to live in a hermetically sealed bubble.  Any attempt at dialogue with a person in a delusional bubble is only going to end in frustration and demoralization.  I am no psychiatrist, but had unusual early exposure to this phenomenon because my mother was paranoid schizophrenic.  By great good fortune, anti-psychotic drugs were completely effective with her, and normally she was one of the kindest and best human beings I have known.  But off her medication, she was quite literally possessed, not by demons but by forces out of the unconscious.  Even her appearance and voice changed and became disturbing.  Her stories, as I have noted in a previous newsletter, were highly consistent and bore a marked resemblance to conspiracy theories like those of 4Chan.  My father was head of the Mafia, and he and his wife ran a prostitution ring, but my mother was working with the FBI to catch them, and when that happened she would come into an amount of money.  What you do not do with genuinely delusional people is argue with them.  Delusions are not beliefs:  they are a defense mechanism, a way of coping with fear and feelings of threat.  Trying to convince them there is nothing to fear is not going to work, and in fact will probably reinforce their feelings. 

Is it fair to compare the followers of Trump and the Republican Party to a person treated for mental illness?  Certainly we have to be careful not to stereotype and lump people together in one general description.  Some of the people preaching fear and hatred are not delusional, just manipulative.  They are not paranoid themselves but trying to instill paranoia in others, as Iago does with Othello, as Edmund does with his father Gloucester in King Lear, convincing him that the good brother, Edgar, is out to murder him.  This is not only true of Trump himself but of Fox News, for example, whose relentless message to its viewers of “Be very afraid” reliably generates profits.  At the other end of a spectrum are people like Robert Kennedy, Jr., Sidney Powell, and Kari Lake who are as removed from reality as my unmedicated mother but who have managed to avoid being institutionalized for it.  Powell’s 4Chan-style conspiracy theory that George Soros, Hugo Chavez, the CIA, the Clinton Foundation, and many officials belonging to a “deep state” contrived to rig voting machines in the 2020 election makes my mom look unimaginative.  In between, however, are grandma and Aunt Joanie, who are neither malicious power-mongers nor raving lunatics but who live in a state of fear and insecurity that the malicious ones make every attempt to intensify and exploit.  When people are afraid, they look for scapegoats:  all those immigrants and Black Lives Matter people (meaning most Black people) who are criminals and rapists, all those gay, lesbian, nonbinary, and trans people who are perverts and groomers, all those Jewish people who are manipulating the financial system, all those leftists who are pushing socialism and vaccines that have who-knows-what in them, who are spreading scary false stories about climate change, who want to take away our guns and legalize the murder of unborn children.  The attempt to argue with all that seems doomed to failure, amplified as it constantly is by the media. 

If argument fails, we may at least fall back on denouncing what is in fact, as the preceding description makes clear, not just a hodge podge of irrational notions but one vast conspiracy system, a devil’s house with many mansions.  We may choose to bite our tongue at the dinner table, but in the public arena, is there not in fact (to use the precise term) a duty to denounce all the lies and fictions?  If we do not call these things out, don’t we normalize them?  And yet fact checking is overwhelmed by the sheer number of falsehoods.  Moreover, as has often been observed, the journalists who remain well-intentioned have a tendency to fall into a “both sides do it” error.  They are trained to think that every argument has two sides, and that objectivity means detaching and seeing the weaknesses on both sides of the fence.  But in fact, while liberals, progressives, and the Democratic Party are by no means saintly, both sides don’t do it—“it” being the systematic undermining of factuality, the presumption that, if your cause is just, you have the right to make your own facts, your own reality. 

Basically, the problem is this:  those people who may not be perfect but who are on the side of the good are constantly in the position of being told, “You should curb your frustrated anger over the injustices being done, and try to engage the other side in dialogue, even though the other side is rarely interested in dialogue, only in ‘owning the libs.’ Your anger becomes self-righteous and only drives things around in a vicious circle, causing a backlash.”  The result is that the well-intentioned people feel constantly helpless and deflated, in a way that is not good for their own mental health.  Moreover, doesn’t charitable tolerance mean colluding with the forces of injustice?  Aunt Joanie is a sweet old lady who dotes on her cats and grandkids.  But her eyes are glassy from watching Fox News, and she genuinely believes the catalogue of threats already recited: that immigrants and Black people are dangerous criminals, that LBGTQ+ people are perverted “groomers,” that climate change is not real and that attempts to mitigate it are part of a “radical left” agenda, that Biden’s attempts to put back in place the social safety net are “socialism,” and so on.  We will give her credit—maybe she doesn’t go so far as Jewish space lasers and Satanic pedophiles.  But what do her attitudes, which translate into voting patterns, mean for my Black students, my gay and lesbian friends and colleagues? These attitudes, when held by tens of millions of people, encourage the persecution of people I care for, and even put them in danger. We are back to the fact that the Times says Trump has a shot at winning—thanks to Aunt Joanie. 

That is the problem we are wrestling with, the problem of judgment, not in the sense of pronouncing a legal sentence on people but of telling it like it is, of speaking out.   One might think the Bible could provide useful advice on such a subject, but when we turn to it, we get what seem to be contradictory messages.  On the one hand, we get “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” (Matt. 7:1-3, King James Version).  This passage gave Shakespeare the title for his play about forgiveness, Measure for Measure.  It is considered to be one of the “problem comedies,” however, because it advocates forgiveness, with no punishment, for a judge who tries to extort sex from a woman who is almost a nun by promising to spare her brother’s life, then double crossing her.  All nice and merciful, but where is justice for the woman, who admittedly is the one who counsels mercy?  But why should she have to?  Why would Donald Trump, convicted and unrepentant rapist, not love this play? We also hear the Jesus who says that those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword (Matt. 26:52), who says to love our enemies and turn the other cheek (Luke 6:27-29), who on the cross begs, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).  Yet this is the same Jesus who whipped the moneychangers in the Temple (recounted in all four gospels), who cursed the barren fig tree (Matt. 21:19, Mark 11:14).  The same Jesus who in multiple places threatens eternal damnation for the unrighteous, and who will come again to make a Last Judgment upon every member of the human race.  Is there any moral coherence in the Gospel account? 

Any interpretation of the Bible is a construct: even more than most texts, the Bible does not have a single, simple, clear message waiting inside it, available for everyone, not just the educated, as some people claim.  In this it is no different from Jesus himself, who taught in parables and metaphors that more often than not baffled his followers.  To the charge, “You’re making it up and inventing a meaning for Scripture,” the response is that any reading involves “making it up.”  Nothing else is possible.  Which is the right reading?  “By their fruits shall ye know them” (Matt. 7:16) is the answer that Scripture itself gives.  And that is a way of reading the cursing of the fig tree.  Jesus was not having a moment of impatient irritation because, damn it, he had really been in a mood for fruit.  He was making a point—through a metaphor—about the real categories of judgment, which are life and death. 

The last newsletter examined what is often called the mystery of evil.  Why has the human race most often chosen evil—even Adam and Eve, who had no real reason to, who had not been twisted by growing up in an abusive environment, who had all the autonomy necessary to proper self-esteem but wanted more, the power to be as gods.  Why this will to power, the same that motivated Satan to rebel, as Milton shows in Paradise Lost?   I suggested that the real reason is epistemological, a matter of false consciousness.  In this way, evil originates in an intellectual error, but results in a corruption of the human will, of human desire, thus combining the traditional Classical and Christian views.  By “epistemological” (pertaining to the theory of knowledge), I mean, as I explained in The Productions of Time—it is the foundation of the whole book—that ordinary consciousness, what we call the ego or “I,” is a product of a split between subject and object, between self and other, consciousness and its environment, which includes other people.  This subject-object split, which is often taken to be a “reality principle,” is in fact an illusion, though a stubborn and persistent one.  Blake called it the “cloven fiction,” cloven like the devil’s hoof.  It is an inherently alienated state:  I am “in here,” a ghostly, fearful self-awareness, and the whole world and other people are out there, apart from me, largely unknown, not subject to my will, possibly threatening.  Blake speaks of States, and urges us to distinguish individuals from the State they might be in.  The cloven fiction is a State, a State that is inherently paranoid—my very existence is defined by possible threat.  Not necessarily threat from any specific danger, but rather an anxiety or dread, as Kierkegaard called it, that is the default condition of the ego’s existence—it comes with the territory.  Bad conditions may catalyze or intensify it, but its alienated paranoia is always latent in the very nature of the State.  It is illusory because it represses or rejects the power of connection between subject and object that Blake calls the imagination. 

The point for the present discussion is that what is normally called good and evil, conventional morality or what Blake called “moral virtue,” operates within the subject-object paradigm—which means that it operates on the false premise that anything outside of ego consciousness, anything that is not-I, is a potential threat, to which the choice of response is fight or flight.  What is called neo-Darwinism sees all of nature in this way, as a fierce competition in which only the “fittest” survive, red in tooth and claw, ignoring and even scoffing at the other side of the Darwinian perspective that emphasizes the interdependence and necessary cooperation of all living things.  It did not take long for this distortion of biological theory to give rise to a distortion of social theory, Social Darwinism, which applied the notion of ruthless competition to capitalism.  Everything external to the self must be either mastered and possessed or else destroyed.  The term Social Darwinism is from the 19^th century, but the concept, as filtered through the novels of Ayn Rand, is still going strong.  As their actions show, it is the implicit life view of the robber baron capitalists of our time, as well as of imperialists like Putin whose obsession with building an empire is motivated by the notorious Russian paranoia about the security of its borders.  Ironically, the more secure the 1% become, the more fearful, because they make themselves secure by isolating themselves in special enclaves, apart from the outside world, from which they imagine all sorts of possible dangers and so isolate themselves all the more, in a vicious circle.  Evangelical Christians have become “Christian nationalists” swearing allegiance to Donald Trump, a man who is as close to the description of the Antichrist as makes no difference, because they feel so threatened that they have no choice:  our very survival, they say, is at stake, and so we are forced to accept Trump as the flawed instrument of the Lord.  

When Oppenheimer became one of the hits of the summer, I was mildly bemused.  Why should the present generation, which does not go back to that period in the way I do, be interested in the development of the atomic bomb?  On further thought, though, I gave the general public credit for its intuitive powers.  The book that the movie is based on is called American Prometheus.  In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity.  But what will humanity do with godlike power?  The film answers this question: it will use it against those whom, in its cloven-fiction paranoia, it identifies as its enemies.  Oppenheimer felt compelled to develop a bomb lest the Nazis develop one first.  But he believed that the power he bestowed would be put to good use.  It would end the war, and, in peacetime, the arsenal would be regulated by responsible institutions.  Instead, the thought of such terrible power falling into the hands of one’s enemies led to the paranoid arms race of the Cold War, and Oppenheimer himself would be persecuted by McCarthyite goons.   In 1959, Jung gave a talk titled “Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology” in which he directly referred to Oppenheimer, three years before the Cuban missile crisis:

All the divine powers in creation are gradually being placed in man’s hands.  Through nuclear fission something tremendous has happened, tremendous power has been given to man.  When Oppenheimer saw the first test of an atomic bomb the words of the Bhagavad Gita flashed into his mind: “Brighter than a thousand suns.”  The forces that hold the fabric of the world together have got into the hands of man, so that he even has the idea of making an artificial sun.  God’s powers have passed into our hands, our fallible human hands.  The consequences are inconceivable.  The powers themselves are not evil, but in the hands of man they are an appalling danger—in evil hands.  (465)

It is interesting, although I cannot account for it, that Jung’s version of the passage from the Bhagavad Gita differs from the film’s version: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”  But Jung’s intuition was also accurate:  his version captures the Promethean fire imagery.  Oppenheimer mastered the fires of death; Victor Frankenstein mastered the fire of life, the electricity that charged the batteries, so to speak, of his “monster.”  The result was the same.  The subtitle of Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus.  Oppenheimer worried about the enemies of the free world: the Nazis, the Russians, the Japanese.  But we never see those enemies.  What we see is an utterly repellent Harry Truman throwing Oppenheimer out of his office, calling him a “crybaby” after Oppenheimer says he has blood on his hands.  That is a typical Cold War attitude: this is a tough world, a dog eat dog world, and you have to be tough.  The weaklings, the bleeding heart liberals, cannot face what has to be done, and give aid and comfort to the enemy—they are, in fact, practically traitors. Truman not only dropped the bomb but dropped it on inhabited cities, which he did not need to do and was urged not to do.  If you can’t stand the heat, get out of Hiroshima. 

 No matter what the genre of Clint Eastwood’s films—the Western, the crime thriller, the war film proper in American Sniper, they portray a hard world that demands ruthless hardness of its “heroes,” who are really anti-heroes.  What makes Eastwood a fascinating filmmaker is that in his best films, such as Unforgiven, he calls the tough-guy attitude into question by showing that the price the hero pays for his hardness is not worth it, that the ideal of necessary heroic violence is really a form of nihilism.  In his later films, such as Gran Torino and Sully, he is searching for an alternative definition of the hero, defined by self-sacrifice rather than heroic violence.  But it is heroic violence, necessary in a corrupt and evil world, that inspires the villains of the present moment—the Putins, the Orbáns, the Steve Bannons, the Proud Boys and other January 6 insurrectionists.  Blake says, “Distinguish States from individuals in those States.”  The individuals just catalogued are evil insofar as they are trapped within the State of the cloven fiction.  It is the perspective they understand the world by, and, while they are trapped within it, it seems unquestionably real.  Those who do question it therefore must be either naïve fools or clever liars.  Yet Truman’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a hard necessity:  Kim Stanley Robinson’s classic science fiction alternate history story “The Lucky Strike” imagines a bomber pilot who refuses to buy the narrative of inevitability and who drops the bomb early, somewhere uninhabited, just the kind of thing a bleeding heart crybaby would do.  But the act of refusal, seemingly quixotic, helps to shift the perspective of the world towards cooperation rather than conflict, and history is altered for the better. 

Films like The Matrix and the science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick have helped familiarize a general audience with the idea that what is sometimes these days called “consensus reality” is a construct, a State in Blake’s sense of state of mind.  Unfortunately, in my lifetime the left has had its own paranoia, a mirror reversal of the right’s.  While the right clings to the false certainty of conspiracy theories, the left clings to an uncertainty principle other than the one accepted by theoretical physics.  The novels of Kafka and Thomas Pynchon, Joyce’s satire Finnegans Wake, Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel Solaris, and other modernist and postmodernist works seem to suggest the possibility of a radical skepticism little short of solipsism.  If the subject is sundered from the object, the object is unknown, perhaps unknowable.  That is true of people as well, who become Other.  Post-structuralist language theories such as deconstruction say that language never arrives at truth.  All statements are ultimately “undecidable.”  I find myself wondering how much radical skepticism informs Oppenheimer.  Robert Oppenheimer’s foil in the movie, perhaps in life, was Einstein, who famously rejected quantum mechanics with its uncertainties and paradoxes, saying that God does not play dice with the universe.  He is regarded, gently but firmly, as a has-been, suffering from a failure of nerve.  Oppenheimer dares to embrace quantum uncertainties, but finds himself lost in a labyrinth of moral and political uncertainties.  I wonder how far Nolan intends this parallel.  The fact that Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita has its own ironies.  The Gita is a section of the Indian epic The Mahabharata, an epic of heroic war with some resemblance to the Iliad.  The war is a civil war, so that warriors find themselves facing their own relatives in battle.  The protagonist, Arjuna, finds himself paralyzed by this realization, and the god Krishna has to reveal himself to tell him that, since it is all illusion, he can resolve his moral dilemma by not reasoning why, just plunging in to do or die.  Oppenheimer may think he can imitate Arjuna by dismissing moral questions in favor of obeying dharma, the law and its duties, but in fact he is led into the State of solipsistic ambiguity that Blake called Ulro. Thus, the subject-object illusion, the cloven fiction, leads on the one hand to paranoia and on the other hand to radical skepticism.  The result is described in a famous line from Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”  Blake’s response to such skepticism is a famous couplet:  “If the Sun & Moon should doubt, / They’d immediately Go out.” 

The only way out of this impasse is to change States, and the agent of such change is the imagination, as Northrop Frye explains in some of the most eloquent passages of Fearful Symmetry, his study of Blake.  Morality within the framework of the cloven fiction is simply the war of all against all.  Blake calls it “moral virtue” and denies that it is really moral.  Blake re-defines both religion and morality in epistemological terms.  The real contest is not between good and evil but between Truth and Error, and redemption consists not in being “nice” according to conventional social standards—Aunt Joanie is nice—but in casting off Error and awakening to true understanding.  There is some resemblance to the parable of Plato’s Cave.  We do not know reality, and therefore the Good, until we walk out of the shadows into the sunlight.  In a passage guaranteed to provoke kneejerk anti-intellectualism and cries of “elitism,” Blake says:

Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings.  The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory.  The Fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so Holy.  Holiness is not The Price of Entrance into Heaven.  Those who are cast out are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because no Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other People’s by the Various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds….     (83)

Frye comments dryly, “It is clear that when Blake defines his art as an allegory addressed to the intellectual powers, by intellectual powers he must have meant, strained as the interpretation may seem to some, intellectual powers” (84).  Let us not allow ourselves to be sidetracked at this point by the usual, well, errors.  First, Blake distinguishes between Intellect and abstract reason.  The two are opposites, and Blake satirizes abstract reason in the satirical figure of Urizen, the frozen figure of authoritarian restraint.  Also, he is not talking about something for which one needs an elite education.  Blake himself was Cockney working class, and his wife was illiterate when he married her.  No doubt a good number of the fools he is speaking of have degrees from elite universities, and some, I assure you, are academics themselves.  Their equivalent in Jesus’ day were the scribes and Pharisees whom he addresses with biting contempt.  By Intellect, Blake means what Jesus demanded.  Frye says:

Jesus’ teaching avoids generalizations of the sort that translate into platitudes in all languages.  Examples, images, parables, and the aphorisms which are concretions rather than abstractions of wisdom, were what he preferred.  These are the units of art, and are addressed only to those who are willing to understand them.  (82) 

A clearly exasperated Jesus says to his disciples in Mark 4, “Know ye not this parable? How then will ye know all parables?” In a poem called “The Everlasting Gospel,” Blake says,

The Vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy:…
Thine is the friend of All Mankind,
Mine speaks in parables to the Blind. 

Frye sums up: “Therefore the real war in society is the ‘Mental Fight’ between the visionaries and the champions of tyranny.  The latter are not the tyrants themselves but visionary renegades….As they are guardians of society and moral virtue, Blake calls them ‘Angels’” (68).  Blake uses the words “Intellect” and “Intellectual” when he refers to the imagination’s clarifying function of unmasking and thereby dispelling Error.  We are not speaking of detached argumentation here: “Blake is engaged in ‘intellectual War’” (68).  And judgment is a necessary weapon of the clarifying intellectual imagination: “Blake, in dealing with artists he considers Angels, lays about him with the destructive fury of a Friar John, without stopping to think whether he is being fair to them or not.  They can take care of themselves” (68).  In his fierce judgments, Blake follows the example of Jesus himself, who in turn follows the example of the prophets: “There is much haughtiness and arrogance in Jesus, much speaking with authority and blasting invective. This is the indignation of the prophet” (80).  But that is not the whole picture:

 “Severity of judgment is a great virtue,” said Blake: all sins (all manifestations of hindrance and restraint) should be violently resented and denounced by the visionary.  Weak and lazy people who are not actually being frightened at the moment tend to lose all interest in such matters under the guise of a good-humored tolerance, and in these moods of comparative courage they feel that the importance of sin is greatly exaggerated.  It is very different when they do become frightened, for then they at once begin to point to others and scream to have them destroyed.  But it is now the visionary’s turn to be tolerant.  As all vengeance is evil and as “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God,” resentment and retribution are irreconcilable.”  (69)

Thus, severity of judgment cannot be considered apart from Blake’s—and Christianity’s—central moral principle, the forgiveness of sins, “the antidote for the ‘accusation of sins’ which poisons the imagination” (69).  Thus,

The second step in forgiveness is the separation of the man from his sin, and the third the release of the imaginative power which makes this possible.  The prophet, who wants to be delivered from evil, denounces the condition the man is in; society, which only wants to be delivered from the inconveniences attached to evil, denounces the man only.  (69)

In his later work, “The visionary is characterized by two emotions of wrath and pity, called by Blake Rintrah and Palamabron….The prophet may flail his enemies with a haughty and arrogant contempt….But behind this is…the prophet’s infinite tenderness for the weak and foolish” (70).  So, Father, please forgive Aunt Joanie, for she knows not what she does.  But may Trump and DeSantis and most of the Republican party roast in the only kind of hell Blake believes in, the hell of being shut up in the iron furnace of one’s own tormented, hate-filled paranoia. “The only ‘church’ Jesus founded was a communion of visionaries, and Baptism and the Lord’s Supper symbolize, Blake says, ‘Throwing off Error & Knaves from our company & Receiving Truth or Wise Men into our Company continually” (83). 

Hell can be harrowed by the imagination in its two modes of decreation and recreation as discussed in The Productions of Time.  Decreation is, among other things, the prophetic, angry mode of the imagination, expelling Error as Jesus expelled the moneychangers.  Recreation reveals the realm of interconnection and mutual identification that we call love.  Considered as a State, it is both utopian and paradisal, but it is a realm not just of love but of imaginatively released power, a true Prometheanism contrasting with the false Prometheanism of an ego inflated to megalomania:

Even in those moments when most “we feel that we are greater than we know,” this feeling is not so much one of individuality as of integration into a higher unit or body of life.  This body, of course, is ultimately God, the totality of all imagination.  (43)

God, too, then, is a State, in which we live, and move, and have our being.  “We say that God and the imagination are one,” according to Wallace Stevens.  “How high that highest candle lights the dark.”  Prometheus in our dark time may be reduced to a single candle, but its flame dispels the shadowy Errors that surround us and reveals a reality to which the prisoners of the subject-object perspective are utterly blind. 

References

Frye, Northrop.  Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Black.  Princeton University Press, 1947.   Also volume 14 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Jung. C.G. “Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology.” Translated by R.F.C. Hull.  In Civilization in Transition, 2^nd Edition.  Volume 10 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung.  Princeton/Bollingen, 1978.  456-68.  Originally published 1959.