As a student I thought that the couplet quoted in my Title line, taken from W. H. Auden, was a really cool condemnation of the hypocrisy of religion. Today, in light of Edward Mendelson's review of Arthur Kirsch's Auden and Christianity in The New York Review, I have an alternative reading that may be singularly appropriate for our faith-based society. The reading is a reminder that loving your neighbor amounts to an acknowledgement that you and your neighbor are equally flawed. This elevates the moral language of religion beyond Carl Gustav Jung's "relation of the individual to his fantasy" by grounding a biblical commandment in a simple reality of everyday life, which is that every individual has a relation to a fantasy world but that those worlds are both flawed and incompatible. The problem with our President's faith-based policy resides less in his simplistic division of the world into good and evil on the basis of the wisdom of his heart and more in his faith blinding him to the fundamental proposition that the wisdom of his heart is flawed, just as it is in his neighbor's heart, whoever his neighbor may be. Auden's ballad is more about love than about the moral imperative of dealing with good and evil, but the lover in his text is thinking just as simplistically as George W. Bush. Both of them need to be cautioned; but in Auden's text the final stanza indicates that the lovers did not really "get the message" of that couple, which had been delivered by the chiming of the clocks:
It was late, late in the evening
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
So, if our President cannot get this message either, we just have to remember that he is no better than the protagonist of Auden's ballad, which is to say that he is just as human as the rest of us.
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