October 11, 2024
What does it mean to say that JD Vance “won” last week’s vice-presidential debate with Tim Walz? Regrettably, it means that style matters more than substance. Most of what Vance said was a lie. But because he said it smoothly and suavely, and because his opponent was visibly nervous, a lot of people said he won, even though some of his lies were contorted to the verge of bizarre, even though Walz’s answers had plenty of substance most of the time, despite a delivery lacking Vance’s gracefulness. A disheartening number of people are persuaded by appearances, in a way that is far older than American politics. In fact, as Milton shows in Paradise Lost, falling for a glib, urbane con artist is the original human sin. Eve was led by a fast-talking snake to throw away paradise. Yet the story as Milton tells it also has darker implications. Milton shows clearly that the reason that Eve allowed herself to be persuaded was not just the serpent’s ingratiating and articulate manner but the promise of power, the promise that “Ye shall be as gods.” A part of herself of which she was barely conscious wanted to believe the serpent, despite the fact that eating the fruit would be disloyalty to a God who had always treated her well.
That is true of nearly half the electorate right now. They have a choice between the lies promulgated not just by Trump and Vance but by Fox News and Elon Musk’s X and the real news coming from reputable sources, but they choose to distrust the latter and swear allegiance to the former. Why that choice? Because their fear and hatred has led them to long for a man of power to institute authoritarian rule and run things the way they think they should be run. They are not innocent victims of clever deceivers. They have access to the same accurate sources as the rest of us, and they choose to reject them. They have been tempted and have made their choice, and they are responsible for it.
Not everyone chose to be fooled by Vance. In fact, by far the majority of responses on New York Times discussion boards were disgusted by Vance’s blatant dishonesty and by the evident phoniness of his manner. Those who did not want to believe in it saw through it easily. The smarminess that he exuded whenever he talked of his family was to me particularly annoying. But what is most interesting is how the debate showed that Vance is a chameleon. This polished, reasonable-sounding fellow is practically the opposite of the Vance of the MAGA rallies ranting about childless cat ladies and pet-eating immigrants. The most outrageous lies—that Trump peacefully ceded power, that Trump “saved” the Affordable Care Act that he actually tried to end from his first day in office—were smoothly coated with hypocrisy to make them easier to swallow. What was revealed was far more than a liar. This is someone without scruples, who will do anything, be anything, in order to win. It is, to be sure, a Republican type, other versions of which include Mitch McConnell, Lyndsey Graham, and Nikki Haley. This was “honest Iago,” although, mind you, Vance is not up to Iago’s level: everyone in Othello, not just its title character, is fooled by Iago’s pretense that he is just a rough, honest soldier.
Vance began his career by writing Hillbilly Elegy and acting the part of a social crusader with a cause. But whatever was true then, Vance now is not driven by ideology but by the desire to win. Whatever happens in a month, he will undoubtedly be the Republican candidate in 2028. The Renaissance knew all about Vance’s type. They learned about it from Machiavelli’s The Prince, which recommends such duplicitous, ruthless, unscrupulous tactics as the only way for rulers to survive. They also knew it from the negative portrayals of Ulysses in some Greek and Roman literature, the Realpolitik Henry-Kissinger-style cynic that Shakespeare portrays in Troilus and Cressida. The debonair Mark Antony of Julius Caesar who turns the crowd into a lynch mob against Brutus and Cassius is another example. Vance is one of the type for whom the end justifies any means whatsoever, and that end is always power.
One of the big, dumb questions that, as I tell students, we should always ask: why do people want power? Want it so much that they will do anything, step on anyone, betray anyone, to get it? To answer this, we have to set aside what Maslow called the basic need for “self-esteem” in his hierarchy of needs. The term is a bit misleading: as he explains in various places, the need for what he terms “love” and “self-esteem” in the hierarchy are his ideal versions of the pleasure principle of Freud and the power complex of Adler respectively. Negatively, “self-esteem” means autonomy and agency, freedom without coercion, affirmation of individuality. Positively, it means the power to work and create, and the self-respect that comes with being a worker and creator. Such power is indeed a basic human need. But we are not talking about that kind of power. The power that so many have obsessively sought throughout human history is not a real human need at all.
Behind Alfred Adler’s “power complex” is Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power, and, for all his neuroses, Nietzsche grasped that the key to understanding the power drive lies in the word will. The will acts to fulfill our desires: the sub-title of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is What You Will, a complex pun on “will” as desire yet simultaneously “will” as the power by which we attain our desires. One way to define evil is as the will become corrupt—indeed, that is how it is defined in the Catholic doctrine of “original sin” and the Calvinist doctrine of “innate depravity.” Since the Fall, the human will is corrupted in all human beings. What does that mean? It means the refusal of limits. I want it, and I want it now, and no one is going to stand in the way of my having it, whatever “it” happens to be. This kind of unlimited selfishness is not the result of a deprived or abusive upbringing, an attempt to compensate for early lack: it is how we come into the world. It is our “natural” tendency, and socialization consists of trying to unlearn and restrain it. Augustine had his issues, but he was shrewd about what we are really like. In his Confessions, he said, do not tell me about an innocent baby. Imagine that baby blissful and content at his mother’s breast, when along comes a sibling who tries to compete for the mother’s attention and care. The look of sheer hatred on the baby’s face, and the ensuing tantrum, should disabuse anyone of the idea that we are born innocent and corrupted by the world. If that child had power, what would it do? There is a classic science fiction story by Jerome Bixby, called “It’s a Good Life” (1953, later made into a Twilight Zone episode) based on exactly that premise: a community terrorized by the whims of an omnipotent baby who can even read people’s thoughts, so that they can’t even think anything negative and have to live in a constant state of self-hypnosis.
When older children throw temper tantrums after they do not get their way, especially if they have been spoiled and indulged, we see the unlimited aspect of the corrupted will in their over-the-top, screaming, red-faced fury. Someone like Donald Trump is stuck at exactly this stage, and he is one of a long line of tantrum-throwing grown-up babies, from Roman emperors to Hitler to Elon Musk. Trump’s rallies whip up the hardcore MAGA crowd into a communal temper tantrum of this sort, whose catharsis exhilarates them all. Vance is more controlled, but the tendency shows in him as a kind of whining petulance. Such regressive infantilism is contagious, and has spread since the Trump years so that there are now tantrum-throwing babies everywhere, such as those who act up on airplanes.
The tripartite scheme that Dante adopts to structure his version of hell in the Inferno maps human evil according to the particular manner of the will’s corruption. Upper hell, circles 1 through 5, punishes sins of “incontinence,” of a lack of control or will power. These are sins of the pleasure principle, such as lust, gluttony, sloth, and anger (the pleasure of giving in to one’s bad temper). Lower hell, circles 7 through 9, punishes the sins of active malice, which subdivide into two kinds, forza and froda, force and fraud.
The stereotypical form of forza is that of domination, of coercive power. The unit of domination, so to speak, may be as small as two, as in an abusive relationship. The will to dominate (and to be dominated) is found everywhere, from religious cults to organized crime. The larger the group, the more likely it will be riven with internecine struggles, as all the would-be bosses fight it out to the last man standing. Backstabbing and double crossing are to be expected, so that dictators live in a state of well-founded supicion and paranoia. Around the time that Putin first invaded Ukraine, I saw a photo of him meeting with various high-level officers: he was at one end of an enormously long table, and they were at the other. High-culture critics are frequently contemptuous of superhero comics and films, and yet, the older I get, the more respect I have for how the superhero genre intuitively understood from the beginning the nature of evil in our time. Two Jewish teenagers here in Cleveland, Ohio invented the first superhero, Superman, in 1938, the time of the rise of Hitler. Comic book supervillains seem so exaggerated, yet they are a stylized version of a recurrent psychological type. Everything about them depicts the psychological phenomenon that Jung calls “inflation,” even the bombastic rhetorical manner in which they speak. These are not just petty crooks, or even crimelords. They don’t just want to have all the good things in life. They seek total domination, and their horizon expands wider and wider. Everyone knows that Putin will not stop with Ukraine, but will go on to invade other countries. There is no point at which he would stop. Like Hitler, he would eventually reach for world domination, a Third Reich.
The world-conquering emperor is not a new type: in Shakespeare’s day, Marlowe laid it before us in Tamburlaine, whose conquests stopped short only at the border of the undiscovered country of death itself. What is perhaps new is, as Orwell tried to warn in 1984, that modern technology and methods of both warfare and surveillance might enable some enterprising Big Brother to impose the first permanent worldwide and permanent dictatorship, the boot that stamps upon the human face forever. Modern science has expanded the human horizon beyond the world itself, and science fiction followed suit, showing galactic empires ruled by tyrants such as Darth Vader. Stan Lee gave us Galactus, a titanic being who devours entire planets for their energy like breakfast bars, and who speaks with the usual pumped-up bluster: “Puny human, you dare think you can oppose the cosmic might of Galactus, eater of worlds?”
Why in the world does anyone want to conquer the world? And yet they do. Such people are not rare aberrations, especially if we include a variant of the type, the ultra-rich, the .1%, who want to conquer the world by capitalism rather than by armies. The same pattern of ever-expanding, never-satisfied ambition shows itself. Such people have more money than they can possibly spend, but it is never enough. They have to exploit the other 99.9% ever more ruthlessly, even though it undermines the social stability that makes their privilege possible. Increasingly, they develop the itch to get involved in politics, supporting anti-democratic causes and politicians who will further their agenda. The Koch brothers manipulate the system using the wealth of big oil, and recently the tech bros have been getting into the act: not only Elon Musk but Peter Thiel, who is the mentor of JD Vance. For that matter, there is Trump himself, who started as a crooked real estate developer, turned reality TV star, and finally expanded into political ambition.
What satisfaction is there in ruling the world? What do these people want? Because they pay a terrible price for their ambition. The great work of literature about that price is of course Shakespeare’s Macbeth. With absolute power comes madness, an increasingly delusional divorce from reality and increasing reliance on magical thinking. King Lear exemplifies this in a way that cannot help but remind us these days of Trump. Dictators surround themselves with yes-men who tell them what they want to hear. Another part of the price is the paranoia already spoken of, the tendency to see enemies everywhere—often accurately, since many people want to be king of the hill. The most terrifying price is a murderous impulse that grows increasingly genocidal. This begins as an outcome of the end- justifies-the-means mentality, but it grows beyond that into the command of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Exterminate the brutes.” Macbeth’s violence begins as part of a cover-up, the need to murder witnesses and those who have figured out the deception, but it spirals until by the end he has murdered half of Scotland. The killing becomes an end unto itself. Genocide regularly devolves into this exterminating impulse, and not just in “darkest Africa.” The final solution of extermination, of “ethnic cleansing,” shows itself in the historical treatment of Indigenous peoples in America, on a small scale in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the tales of American soldiers cutting fingers off dead bodies for trophies. At this point, the will to power is revealed as nihilism, as utter negation. Paradoxically, what began as a quest for “all”—all the toys, all mine—reveals itself as a deathwish, a drive towards “nothing,” the key word in King Lear. The final extermination is of the self: mass shooters invariably shoot themselves at the end, like Hitler in the bunker.
Forza and froda, force and fraud, are twin aspects of the corrupted will. In Paradise Lost, Satan first tries to take heaven by force. In the council of devils in Book 2, after the rebel angels have been decisively and humiliatingly defeated, Moloch is the voice of the kind of nihilistic violence we have spoken of. He wants to get right back in the ring and fight again even though it is clearly hopeless, and would rather be annihilated than give up. But Satan wins the day by proposing a switch of tactics from violence to fraud. And of course the devils triumph that way in the short term—the short term meaning all of human history. With froda, we are back to Vance again. Sometimes an individual liar can build up singlehandedly a structure of lies, an anti-reality within their victim’s mind. I have occasionally taught Othello and The Tempest side by side, suggesting that Iago acts as a kind of anti-Prospero, an evil magician. He does not just tell lies about Desdemona: he conjures an entire alternate reality within which Othello begins to live. This imagery is actually in the play: Othello protests that he has used no “magic” out of his heathen background to win Desdemona, but in swearing allegiance to Iago he goes over to the dark side, and in the end is babbling to Desdemona a conspiracy theory that the handkerchief she has supposedly lost has magical properties of enforcing women’s fidelity. But the world of lies is the opposite of what it seems: it is really chaos returned, symbolized by the storm at the beginning of Act 2. The contrast is with the good magician Prospero conjuring a new society out of the sea, curing those who are curable of the will to power and restraining those who are incurable. His magic consists of theatrical spectacle, the good lies of art.
Iago’s individual attempt to entrap his victim into a web of lies that becomes an alternate reality has a social counterpart in the use of propaganda to hypnotize large populations, to make them believe the exact opposite of the truth. In the mass, people are highly suggestible. There are plenty of comic strips and sitcoms whose plots turn on the way that gossip spreads like wildfire in a small town where communication is direct and immediate. The more false and vicious the gossip, the easier it spreads. The personified Rumor in Virgil’s Aeneid and the Blatant Beast in Spenser’s Faerie Queene represent the power of the false word, antithetical to the true, creative word. Kingdoms and empires have always depended on propaganda as well as coercion to pacify their peoples, but the invention of mass electronic communications has greatly increased the ability of would-be tyrants to construct a whole alternate reality for their victims. So long as there were only three networks, all of them regulated, the power of television to act as an indoctrinating tool was limited, so that job passed to talk radio, where people like Rush Limbaugh initiated a passive audience into a looking-glass world of paranoid fantasies. Then came Fox News and social media, the triumph of froda, enclosing millions of people in a bubble from which they may never emerge.
In Milton, the contest of froda is not resolved until Paradise Regained, which is really a necessary addendum to Paradise Lost. His success with Adam and Eve encourages Satan to try tempting this new character on the scene, Jesus, whom a voice has designated God’s “son.” Milton expands the story of the temptation in the desert from the three temptations in Matthew and Luke to the entire range of possible human temptations, all the things it would be possible to gain by selling one’s soul, finally ending with not one earthly kingdom but three: Parthia, Rome, and Athens. He is utterly baffled by someone who is indifferent to gain, recognizing, at least to himself, that Jesus has exceeded him, for Satan himself lost everything by “ambition.”
Yet the situation is complex. It is clear that if Jesus had capitulated at any point, even the highest point of world domination, Satan would have had contempt for him as someone who could be bought with the world’s toys. What does the corrupted will really want? Not more toys. It may begin that way, but in the end its ambition grows beyond the desire to win the Monopoly game, to own everything, or to win at Risk and conquer everything. Such ambitions are smallminded. When it comes fully into its own, the will wants total, unlimited power: it wants to be God. This is what the Bible speaks of on the human level as pride, the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins. Satan is the archetype of that pride, the pride of the unbounded will, the fully revealed form whose “type” is the figure in Isaiah 14, in which the prophet says,
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
Isaiah is referring to a personified Babylon, but the tradition grew up that Lucifer was Satan’s name before he fell.
But, again, what is the point of trying to become a god? It brings no pleasure or joy. This is perhaps the true “mystery of evil.” I cannot solve the mystery of evil, but I do think that sometimes one gets the sense of a spirit thrashing around inside a world that is too small for it. That is how I understand Rilke’s famous poem on the caged panther:
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. (Stephen Mitchell translation)
One thinks of the story of Alexander the Great weeping because there were no more worlds to conquer, figuratively circling the bars of his cage. Perhaps the ultimate ambition after conquering the world is to smash one’s way out of it. Maybe this is what Nietzsche sensed in the god Dionysus. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche contrasted Apollo, god of form and formal restraint, with Dionysus, spirit of ecstasy and the breaking of form. In The Birth of Tragedy, which was his first book, Nietzsche saw Apollo and Dionysus as what Blake would call Contraries, opposites in a creative tension. But Nietzsche increasingly saw himself as the iconoclast, the idol-breaker, determined to question absolutely every truth, to break through the mind’s own limits, the a priori categories by which the mind, according to Kant, structured human experience. However, to do so risks madness, and at the end of his life, Nietzsche identified himself with Dionysus and lapsed into complete and incurable psychosis. He defined his Superman as the one who overcomes himself, breaks through his own barriers and is self-reborn into an expanded identity—and who does so by force of will.
It is that last which is the fatal error. Jung was both deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and deeply wary of it, and devoted a long-running seminar, published in two enormous volumes, to figuring out the point at which it went wrong, which was when Nietzsche’s ego gave in to the temptation of power and identified with the numinosity of an archetype. Dionysus the god, Zarathustra the prophet, and the Superman or Overman—all these are basically the same figure, the one who breaks through the limitations of both the world and human identity. But when the ego identifies with that power of creation, decreation, and recreation, the result is Jungian inflation: the swollen ego feels it has become an absolute will. That is why, despite the efforts of Nietzsche critics like Walter Kaufmann to distance him, Nietzsche is a genuine forerunner of the Nazis, who, yes, twisted his theory—but who recognized that his exaltation of the will was fundamentally what they were all about. There was a good reason why Nazi filmmaker Lina Riefmanstahl titled her famous film The Triumph of the Will.
Nonetheless, the contradiction of the will to power bleeds through, like a stubborn stain through paint, the paradox of the will to impose order and yet at the same time the will to shatter it. A poem by Wallace Stevens significantly titled “Connoisseur of Chaos” begins:
A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations).
It would appear that Nietzsche’s binary opposition of Apollo and Dionysus has two potential forms, creative and ironic, what Blake called Contraries and what he called a Negation, opposites that are mutually negating rather than synergetic. As a Negation opposing false Dionysian chaos, a false Apollo is a divine control freak. In Blake’s self-invented mythology, this figure is Urizen, whose name puns on both “reason” and “horizon.” Urizen is determined to order and control everything in the universe, fearful of the slightest expression of energy or spontaneity. He is totalitarian in the sense of “totalizing,” reducing everything to “One Law.” Totalitarian regimes seek total control: the fall of a sparrow will be scheduled and carried out according to all the proper regulations. So far as possible, such regimes try to become thought police, regulating even the inner lives of the population. The ideal citizens of such a state would be automata, or the mindless collective or an ant colony. Urizenic dictators seek total power not for personal gratification but because they seek total order, so the attempt at total order invariably becomes violent, because the world cannot be ordered in that way. Hence, a violent order is disorder.
The historian Oswald Spengler, whose visionary book The Decline of the West influenced many Modernist writers and also the young Northrop Frye, though in a complicated, qualified way, said that the late stage of a civilization is characterized by the “megalopolis,” the super-sized city whose population is highly collectivized. Anything that large and sprawling is ungovernable by democratic means, so people begin longing for a savior, a charismatic figure of power. It is not surprising that Spengler became a Nazi sympathizer. Ayn Rand took Spengler’s and Nietzsche’s ideas and, in The Fountainhead (1943), embodied them in a charismatic order figure who is not a statesman but an architect and philosopher. In the theatres right now, playing to empty seats, is Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, whose visionary inventor figure, played by Adam Driver, is clearly intended to suggest Rand’s, but apparently without the fascistic moral. Somehow or other a miraculous invention, in this case a substance of virtually alchemical possibilities, is going to lead to a social renovation despite the efforts of a corrupt power structure and various recalcitrant factions to stop it. It does not make much logical sense, but the need driving it is understandable. As a Negation, the Apollonian impulse is to conquer the world “for its own good.”
The counterpart of such false order figures is a false disorder figure, Dionysus as an agent of chaos, the anti-establishment figure who wants to blow up the system. Trump won in 2015 because he sensed that many people were longing for someone to take a wrecking ball to the whole social order run by the “elites.” Most of Trump’s destructiveness is verbal. He quite deliberately says socially unacceptable things, “triggering the libs,” violating norms, and his followers love it every time. Whether his statements are true or not doesn’t matter. Whether he actually grabs women by the pussy or just talks about it, they are thrilled by his transgressiveness. Even his verbal style is transgressive: he has contempt for proper grammar and spelling, for coherent sentence structure. Such things are more “elite” rules, and he is not ignorant of them but rather deliberately flouts them. However, Trump is degenerating mentally, and as he does so he is losing what control he used to have over his transgressive nature. He rambles on bizarrely about sharks and Hannibal Lector, and he has become increasingly violent, making over-the-top threats about what he will do to his enemies. That means he is becoming less effective, because he more and more gives the impression of being in the grip of destructive energies rather than being their master.
The psychopathic type who terrifies us most is the one whose nihilism is under cold, icy control. The greatest such figure in literature is Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Brought into the Earnshaw household as a strange, savage little boy, he grows up to become at last absolute master of both the Earnshaw and Linton households. He demoralizes everyone by staging little scenes to show how he has no limits, will stop at nothing, such as hanging a pet puppy. Yet he differs from the crudely violent Earnshaws by his iron self-discipline. His brutality is always calculated, and every move he makes is part of a long-range strategy for gaining legal control over both houses. The union of forza and froda makes him undefeatable—and in fact he wins. In the end, he is absolute master. Nelly Dean refuses to be cowed by him, which he respects, but she can do nothing to stop him. Yet from the moment he triumphs, all Heathcliff can do is fade. He has become the omnipotent ruler of the pocket universe of the two houses, but once again we meet the figure thrashing against the boundaries of a reality too small for it. What Heathcliff really desires is union with a kindred spirit whose will is as uncontrolled as his—but Catherine Earnshaw has died. Heathcliff digs up her corpse, fighting against the limit of death, but it does no good. All he can do is escape this world to join her, which he does by starving himself to death. Legend has it that the two figures roam the moors as ghosts, free of limitations at last.
The decent people of the world are exhausted, tempted to despair. Dictatorships springing up around the world like toadstools, right-wing political parties swelling their ranks in Europe and of course the MAGA metastatis in the United States. Even if we manage to drive the current devils back into their holes, is human life nothing but an endless Manichaean struggle, the good barely counterbalancing the ever-recurrent evil? It is the theme of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, written while the Nazis were not yet defeated. In the time since my parents were born, two world wars, a Cold War, smaller wars everywhere, the advent of Reagan selfishness, the Tea Party, Trump. The oligarchy of the Gilded Age triumphantly returned, the virus of mental pathology sweeping social media, deadlier than Covid. The tragedies of Shakespeare’s middle period are all about the nature of human evil, and they are not comfortable reading. Is human history merely an ironic cycle, and is all we have to look forward to preparation for the next wave of power-addicted psychopaths? Is the doctrine of original sin correct that human nature is innately evil, that the human race is, as Northrop Frye put it, a psychotic ape looking in a mirror?
But despair is a temptation, a passive state of the imagination, a nothing-but reductionism posing as “realism.” Because there are good people: perhaps as many as half the human race. An important theme in Milton’s Paradise Lost is that of the saving remnant. Having witnessed what the human race is capable of during a lifetime of civil war, Milton became fond of the theme that God would redeem the handful of people who remained faithful to the good, starting with Noah and his family. He would have spared Sodom and Gommorah and the other “cities of the plain” if even one righteous person could have been found in them, and he did spare the little town of Zoar, whose name means “insignificant,” simply because Lot and his family rested there on their flight.
Not many miles from me is Zoar Village, settled by German separatists in 1817, a self-exiled group trying to live a spiritually anarchist life outside the tyrannical power-lust of both Church and state. I am moved by the significance of the name. If God himself was willing to spare us for the sake of a mere handful, what right do we have to give up on the human race that has, even while the bombs are raining fire from above, continued to create and love? The wartime poems of Dylan Thomas, such as “Ceremony after a Fire Raid,” and “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, are, paradoxically, celebrations and elegies at once.
We speak of the mystery of evil. But, as C.S. Lewis at times said, the deeper mystery is that of the good. After all, selfishness is not hard to understand. What’s hard to understand is goodness that stands to gain nothing. What is the essence of goodness, the opposite of the insatiable will to power? Love. Yeah, well, love will break your heart. Love will crucify you, as it crucified Jesus himself. Yet we love anyway. My beloved guinea pig, Penny, had to be put down last week at the incredible age of 8—pigs normally live to 5. Not for one minute would I have chosen not to love her, though her passing leaves a wound in the universe. She was a goodness beyond what human beings are capable of. What love does is open you, pries apart your defenses. C.S. Lewis’s mentor in both Christianity and fantasy was George MacDonald, in whose fantasy novel Lilith the title character keeps her hand tightly clenched in a fist to guard water of life needed by the Little Ones, children whose growth is arrested, as a consequence of which they may grow into “bad giants,” big and selfish adults. The hand actually has to be cut off and buried in order to perform its irrigation. That closed fist is a brilliant symbol for the will to power: we are reminded that the name “Faust” means “fist.”
But if we open ourselves, we are open to empathy, to agony, to being flooded with the whole world’s pain. We cling to a residual selfishness, knowing that only a god could take on such pain, knowing we could die of empathy. And yet sometimes, we unclench that muscular fist we call the heart. The will-to-power people always want to live forever. They lust for immortality. The opposite of the clenched fist is what T.S. Eliot called “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender,” the moment in which we stop willing. If we surrendered entirely, we would cease to be, for the ego is constituted by the will.
Yet it could prove true that “being” is overrated. Its opposite is said to be “nothing,” the abyss of annihilation. However, the imagination, both East and West, harbors images of a state beyond both being and not-being. Not a life after death, but a state beyond both life and death, beyond the walls that isolate all things one from the other. The godlike will is alone, proudly alone, insistently alone. Yet it is to be pitied. To be selfless is to be together, in the mutual state that Frye called “interpenetration” and regarded as the heart of the imaginative vision. Images of heaven provide some intimation of it, even if partly contaminated by the ego’s desire to live forever and have all sorts of rewards. In “Poem on His Birthday,” the last of his series of October poems, Dylan Thomas tries to suggest such a state beyond the isolated, alienated consciousness and the objective world it is driven to conquer or destroy:
Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true, And, in that brambled void, Plenty as blackberries in the woods The dead grow for his joy.
We cannot “believe in” such intimations, for they are not facts. We cannot even hope, for, as T.S. Eliot says in “East Coker,” “hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” Therefore, he says, “In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not.” As for love, he says in “Little Gidding,” “not less of love but expanding / Of love beyond desire, and so liberation / From the future as well as the past.” The final liberation is from the will itself, that glass in which we see darkly, and in that miraculous, liberating moment we will see “face to face.”