September 1, 1939

Excerpt

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

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This is the ending of W. H. Auden’s long poem, “September 1, 1939” (which refers to the beginning of World War II, Germany’s invasion of Poland). The poem was first published in October of that year in The New Republic.
Copied here out of Immortal Poems of the English Language: An Anthology. Edited by Oscar Williams. 1952.  (I have taken the liberty of taking the second u out of stupor.)
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An interpretive comment is in order as concerns the definition of “Eros”.
Eros was originally the name of the ancient Greek god of “passionate” or romantic love; this meaning is expressed in our culture’s use of the term “erotic” as a synonym for “sexual”…and in this manifestation Eros is only too familiar as the cherub-archer visiting our planet in February, and the “have-sex-until-you-die” spin incessantly trumpeted into our brains.
I submit that this is a caricature of the Eros of which Auden speaks here.

Just below I’ve gathered some ideas from the 20th century with which Auden was no doubt very familiar, as they circulated freely in the atmosphere which he breathed. His Eros, as I understand it, is perhaps some synthesis of all these ideas (of course, it would not have precluded “sex”).  As I imagine it, the concept of “life force” describes Eros best, after all…. the instinct to survive, to relate, to create, and not to give up, destroy, die. Though Auden surely also understood that life finally requires death, that Eros and Thanatos are inextricably linked… the poet’s paradox is our paradox.  We dance in Time:  as Thanatos descends upon us, it is Eros whom we muster, which we are called to “affirm”; and in a time of much life, of much Eros, perhaps we are asked to “affirm” Thanatos…at any rate, this may explain the final line of the penultimate verse of the poem:  We must love one another or die.

It’s not easy to tease apart many theories, and maybe unnecessary, but an overview of just a few ideas can open up the mind and the heart.

20th century philosophers and psychologists revisited Plato‘s conception of Eros, what we know as “Platonic love” which, in this original sense can be attained by the intellectual purification of eros from carnal into ideal form … in Plato’s dialogue “The Symposium”, he argues that eros is initially felt for a person, but with contemplation it can become an appreciation for the beauty within that person, or even an appreciation for beauty itself in an ideal sense. As Plato expresses it, eros can help the soul to “remember” beauty in its pure form. It follows from this, for Plato, that eros can contribute to an understanding of truth…if the lover achieves possession of the beloved’s inner (i.e., ideal) beauty, his need for happiness will be fulfilled, because happiness is the experience of knowing that you are participating in the ideal.
(Quoted from Wikipedia, which has a good treatment of this topic.)

Sigmund Freud considered eros to be much wider concept than libido, or sex drive; he considered it to be our life force, our desire to create, to produce, our very will to live. Later psychoanalytic theory directly opposed eros to the destructive drive of thanatos, the death instinct.

In the 1930s, in his treatise “Agape and Eros”, Swedish Protestant theologian Anders Nygren examines the motif of love in Reformation theology. He reminds us (and Plato would not disagree) that even Plato’s conception of eros is an egocentric and acquisitive sort of love, needs-based and desires-based, whereas agape is self-giving and self-sacrificial kind of love wherein “we reject all self-gain and interest, and surrender ourselves to the other and love them purely for themselves”. He considers such agape to be the properly Christian understanding of love.

Carl Jung understood eros as the feminine principle informing a man’s anima, an irrational drive for connectedness and completeness. (“irrational” is not a pejorative term in Jungian psychology). It is the compensatory counterpart of logos, the masculine principle of rationality and objectivity, represented in the woman’s animus. “Taking back the projections” is a major task in the work of individuation, which involves owning and subjectivizing the psyche’s unconscious forces which are initially felt to be alien to oneself and so “projected” onto others.
In essence, Jung’s concept of eros resembles the Platonic one. Eros is ultimately the desire for wholeness, and although it may initially take the form of passionate love, it is more truly a desire for “psychic relatedness”, a desire for connection and interaction with other sentient beings. (Although Jung was inconsistent, and he did sometimes use the word “eros” as a shorthand to designate simple sexuality.)

(The material in this diversionary note has almost all been gleaned, and often quoted, from Wikipedia.  With much appreciation.)

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As far as I understand Auden’s beliefs, he inhabited a liminal realm between what we call “the secular” and “the sacred”, where heaven and earth meet and mingle … if a prayer can be uttered from that place, I imagine it might sound like this poem.

And make no doubt, “May I…”, indeed! To affirm can, at the best of times, be a challenge. Because it’s a tricky thing that we usually don’t stop to consider: to affirm, to love, to deny, to aspire, to disagree, to care, to agree, to thank, to believe, to hope, to imagine, to disbelieve, to have faith, to respond, to reject, to decide, to challenge, to acknowledge, these, and many others, are “transitive” verbs; to be meaningful, they need objects, whether direct or indirect. What do you agree to? believe? believe in? What is it that you affirm? . . . and having determined that, how do you then go about actually living this affirming? With how much intentionality do you bring your inner self into the world around you?
This constitutes human consciousness.  Could it be that it also goes a little way to elucidating what it means to be among “the Just”?  What does that even mean?  Have you ever considered:  To what extent am I “just”?