Proud and Unrepentant: Part 3

So, our discussions of the proud and unrepentant brings us to my personal favourite: the Lucifer of George Santayana.

Santayana‘s book-length poem/five-act play, Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy, was one of his early works, and I think it’s fair to say is it’s pretty obscure. Santayana is well-known for his contributions to philosophy, perhaps most notably in the field of aesthetics, and even more well-known for his quote about those who cannot remember the past. He is very much not well known for his poetry.

However, that’s a sad thing, because Lucifer is a wonderful work that presents a Lucifer that is even more impressive than Milton‘s: almost a hero, rather than an anti-hero. Additionally, it can be viewed as a project in highlighting the essential incompatibility between Christian theology and the Classical ideals–but you can read the story without worrying about that if it’s not your bag of tea.

I don’t know how I first got onto this work–I must have seen a reference somewhere, but for some reason I tracked down a copy while I was in university. The university library had a copy in their “rare book room”, which meant I could read it on site, but not check it out. I did read it, and knew I wanted to have a copy. This, however, was before the days of ABE, or used books on Amazon, so tracking down a copy would have been very difficult. (Incidentally, I ordered a copy via ABE a couple of weeks ago, no problem, for a reasonable amount of money–it’s a marvellous world we live in these days.)

I decided to take a different approach, and photocopied every page of the book. I had plans to scan in the pages, OCR them, and produce my own edition of the work. Those photocopies sat around for five years, until I finally scanned them all during a fit of procrastinating something else. Then the scanned images sat around for a few more years because I never had the time or inclination to OCR them.

Finally I recently decided to take the images and the OCR software with me on my flight to Australia, and pass some of the 30+ hours of travel by doing the OCR. I also did a quick Google search to pull up any scholarly articles I might find on the work, since I figured I could read them before going into the intense OCR proof-reading. And lo, and behold, my Googling turned up the fact that at some time in the past someone else had already done this project (yay LazyWeb!) and there are both text and PDF versions of the book available online. The text version is uncorrected OCR, and has some problems and the PDF version required me to upgrade to the latest FoxIt Reader to display, but still it beats doing it all myself. (I should also note that they have a bunch of other Santayana stuff, including another collection of Santayana poems, that I intend to read at some point soon–I’ll probably post about that later.)

So, I can recommend that you all check out this phenomenal work. It’s free!

And, as a teaser, I’m going to present two heavily-annotated samples, showing a couple of my favourite passages.

First, we have Lucifer explaining in his own words, to a visitor that finds him in his exile, why he rebelled:

Listen, if thou needs must know,
There is among the stars one greatest star
Which showeth dark, and none may see it shine.I know what Santaya was saying here, but everytime I still think about God hiding out in a black hole, like the Heechee.
Men know it by their hope; a hand divine
Must darkly lead them thither from afar.Come on, admit it, it sounds like Heaven is inside the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole.
But once within its bounds eternal lightCome to think of it, time passed a lot more slowly for the Heechee inside their black hole hideout. I wonder if they would have seemed like immortals to people on the outside.
Streams on their ampler souls, and there they are
What upon earth they would be. Of this realm
An ancient God is king, majestic, wise,
Of triple form and all-beholding eyes.Lucifer gives God credit for omniscience, anyway. And wisdom. That’s interesting given what comes along in a moment.
The terror of his glance can overwhelm
The sense, as lightning when it rends the skies.
The dread words of his mouth are gladly heard
But marvellous their meaning, not to prove
Except by faith and argument of love. Here’s where things start getting good–the notion that Gos is spouting words that are marvelous in meaning, but only if you take them on faith.
He saith he fashioned nature with a word,
And in him all things are and live and move. “He says that he made nature and provided the spark of life to everything.”
To that fair kingdom from primeval night
I passed, and clad in splendour and in might
I led the armies of my father, God.
My right hand urged them with a sword of light,
My left hand ruled them with a flowering rod.
Brave was my youth and pleasing in his sight,
Next him in honour;Lucifer paints himself here as having once been a true believer–isn’t that always the way; there’s no one harder on any belief system than an apostate. till one day discourse
Upon his greatness and our being’s source
Led me to question : ” Tell, O Lord, the cause
Why sluggish nature doth with thee contend.
And thy designs, observant of her laws,
By tortuous paths must struggle to their end.” Seems like a pretty sane question: If you’re God, why do all this “following the laws of Nature” stuff to get your plan to where you want it?
To this with many words of little pith
He answered.
And as when sailors crossing some broad frith
Spy in the lurid west a sudden gloom
And grasp the rudder taking double reef,
I nerved my heart for battleI love this passage–I’ve had that feeling before, when some starts talking and I can just see the argument coming in like a storm.; for my doom
I saw upon me, and that I was born
To suffer and to fill the world with grief.
But strong in reason, terrible in scorn, I could live with that on my tombstone, I think: “Chris McLaren, Strong in Reason, Terrible In Scorn”. Heh.
I rose. “Seek not, O Lord, my King,” I cried,
“With solemn phrases to deceive my doubt.Would that more people, especially talk show hosts, would throw this line into Cheney’s face.
Tell me thy thought, or I will pluck it out
With bitter question. Woe if thou hast lied,
Woe if thou hast not ! Make thy prudent choice !
Either confess that how thou cam’st to beSo, if God is the ultimate Creator, who made him?
Or why the winds are docile to thy voice,
And why the will to make us was in thee,Why does God need worshippers, anyway?
And why the partners of thy life are threeAnd what’s up with this Trinity thing, anyway?
Thou canst not know, but even as the rest
That wake to life behold the sun and moon
And feel their natural passions stir their breast
They know not why, so thou from some long swoon
Awaking once, didst with supreme surprise
Scan thy deep bosom and the vault of heaven,
For I did so when fate unsealed mine eyes.So basically, Lucifer is saying “Either explain all the things about how you were created, or else admit that you, like the rest of us, don’t know the answers, and that your experience of birth/awakening was of the same kind as mine”.
Thy small zeal for the truth may be forgiven
If thou confess it now, and I might still
Call thee my master, for thou rulest well
And in thy kingdom I have loved to dwell.Now it’s “I don’t mind that you lied, if you admit it right now, since you’re a good master and I like living here”. This is surprisingly similar to the Brust climax I quoted below, where Satan offers an end to the revolution if Yaweh will drop his (false) claim of being Supreme God.
Or else, if truth offend thy pampered will,
And with caressing words and priestly spell
Thou wouldst seduce me, henceforth I rebel.” These three lines are possibly my favourite in the whole work. If truth offends your spoiled whims, and you try to “spin” me, I’m going to straight-up rebel. You gotta like it.
I knew his answer, and I drew my sword, Interesting that he didn’t need to wait for an answer, no?
And many spirits gathered to my side.
But in high heaven he is still the Lord ;
I am an exile in these spaces wide
Where none is master.Santayana’s Lucifer trades freedom from mastery (and deception from above) for exile in a place where there is no master. Compare with Milton’s Lucifer, who rejects having a master, but not being one. It’s a nice distinction, and one that Santayana makes use of later in the story. The north wind and the west
Are my companions, and the void my rest. Note also, that the void is “his” rest, with no mention of the “many spirits” that gathered to his side.

The second passage come from much later in the book when Christ visits Mount Olympus and basically tells the Greek gods that they have to bend knee to his father, or else they will die. The gods refuse, and shortly thereafter the death sentence is carried out:

CHRIST
The hour is come. All is that was to be.
The gift I brought which ye would not receive
Was life, but death shall be the gift I leave.Ladies, and gentlemen, I give you: Christ the Hitman!
I am the Lord of Immortality,
The way, the truth, the life ; who lives by me
Shall live for ever.“…and that’s the only way you get to do it. Bow down before the one you serve.” You some inward voice
Persuaded once that you should ever live.
What privilege have you that you rejoice
While all things suffer? You shall also grieve.Yup, sounds like the Lord of Mercy to me, essentially saying “You think you’re so hot, but you’re really not.”
I have endowed you with exceeding strength
And beauty, bidding time to spare your pride
And leave you young. But you shall now at length
Grow old. Vain and unsanctified,
Weary of pleasures, you shall yield your breath
Like waves that sink again into the sea,
Not having any voice to cry to me.“You’re going to die because I said so”.
But painless be to you the hour of death
For you have sinned in all unwittingly
And full of stars the night on which you cease,
Passing forgetful to the realms of peace.“But hey, since presumably God made you this way, you can have a painless death.” Gee, thanks!

(Christ disappears)

HERA
He vanishes !

ATHENA
Tis well.

ZEUS
If I must die,
To-day at least I sit upon my throne ;
And not in fief I hold it. Tis mine own. Again, better to die the ruler of your own demesne, then live in fief. The people of New Hampshire would understand all these defiant gods.
The earth, my temple, stands. My native sky
Claps me about with homage of sweet air.
The kindly light of the unquenched sun
Gladdens mine eyes. To-day the world is fair.“We’re here for a good time… not a long time… So have a good time… The sun don’t shine every day.”
To-morrow, if dark clouds rebellious run
In flaming rack athwart the seas of heaven,
I shall not less have lived, I, mighty one.As much as I joke above, there’s kernel of real wisdom in here, both about how to live each day, and about how to look on misfortune.
And there where night, the mother of us all,
By the quick birth of light asunder riven,
Broods infinite and in her starless pall
Folds all the stars, there, children, is much room
For you and me and him, when he shall fall,
Who judging others speaks his proper doom. I like this as well–the whole “he might be on top today, but we all end up in the same embrace of Night” bit is an even more lovely formulation than the “Your worm is your only emperor of diet” one.
Some comfort it will be, when we abide
In that unbodied realm, to see this ghost,
Ill-boding spirit of impalpable pride,
Enter oblivion, and, hearing still his boast,
Feel o’er our face the shade of laughter glide. Now this is just funny: “Boy are we going to laugh at him when his turn comes”.
We also thought we should not taste of death,
But it is fated. Fleeting is the breath
That saith : I am eternal !These lines for me are the essence of youth, that we thought naively that we would not taste of death, but in a flash that moment passes, and it almost feels like we’re not even finished saying “I am eternal” before we get our first taste of death, and with it the end of innocent youth. We were born
And we must therefore die. Such is the wage
Of being.This line is the other contender for my favourite in the book. “We were born and we must therefore die. Such is the wage of being.” That’s genius, that is. Mourn, my stricken children, mourn.
Into the boundless ether breathe your rage. Do not go gentle into that good night…
You will be quiet soon. E’en now, meseems,
His peace is on us. Lethargy of age
Creeps over nature, chilling all her streams,
And heavy with the languor of dull dreams
Ye sit upon Olympus, and are dumb.Even divorced from context, that bit from “Lethargy” through to “dumb” is a powerful passage. It reflects the overall point of the piece–that age comes to all things, and even that which was divine can come to be stilled with age. There’s a sense in which it’s almost a respone to Ulysses–yes, those who strove with gods might not yield, but when age claims even gods… well, it’s like the man said: “Death closes all”.
No longer from his crag the eagle screams,
And in the wood the dryad’s limbs are numb.
The last sad summer of the world is come. There’s another lovely sentence. Someday I’m going to steal that. It hits the same notes inside me as “sic transit gloria mundi”, but since it’s in English it’s a little easier to spread around, you know?
The earth, that in her youth prodigious bore
Mammoth and Mastodon and Titan bold,
Scarce feeds the pigmies that she spawned of yore. And we’re back to science fiction imagery. This time post-apocalyptic, worn out Earth, dying from lack of resources.
Weary she bows her palsied head and hoar,
Likening her fate unto the fate untold
Of by-gone worlds, while man, her nursling, gathers
The utmost harvest from the laboured mould, Apparently Men keep striving even after the world itself has resigned from the struggle.
Envying the straitened fortunes of his fathers
In piety content, though poor in gold ; And this I liken to the old “no athiests in foxholes” thing–that with hope extinguishing the future men will wish they had religion to turn to. It’s probably true, but that doesn’t change my position on religion generally.
And on the barren peak he lived to climb
He stands aghast, and vainly waxen old
Prays the sweet heavens. But the stars are cold. Now that’s some damn imagery–Man, have reached the apex of all his aspirations, facing the end of all things, and crying out to an empty sky. Damn.
Fool, fool, to chide his soul with ancient crime,
Nor mark how earth and sky, together rolled,
His loves, his labours, and the gods sublime
He deemed immortal, slowly yield to time. And there it is, in beautiful words, the Big Secret. Our time will come. So it goes. Time will eat everything–all of us, everything we do and strive for, every dream we’ve ever had, and even every ideal we ever aspired to. Now, here’s the trick: to know that, and really know it, but not let it bow your head. Remember: “To-morrow, if dark clouds rebellious run / In flaming rack athwart the seas of heaven, / I shall not less have lived”.

Is that mighty, or what? (Did anyone make it down this far? Bueller? Anyone notice that I quoted shorter versions of both of these passages before?)

Coming next: We set aside Lucifers and move on to another proud and unrepentant fellow… a Scottish author.