The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (24 page)

“We sing amid our uncertainty,” Yeats had written in
Per Amica Silentia Lunae
, but Ellmann indicts him for at times in his poetry
pretending
to belief, for using artifice to evade direct questions, suggesting that Yeats was locked in “an anxious struggle to escape from skepticism to direct belief.”
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Yeats was, in other words, caught—as many were caught: he hated materialism but couldn’t totally convince himself that there was another realm.

This attitude was reinforced by the behavior and understanding of his father, who corresponded with the poet on many aesthetic issues, and at the same time made it clear, through his use of
psychological
terms, where he thought the future lay. J. B. Yeats was in some ways the antithesis of his son and, moreover, he seemed to be doing a better job of it—he was certainly more at peace with himself. Yeats wrote to his father at this time (1914–15) that he was trying to arrange his thought “into a religious system,” and in his diary noted that “in the new Ireland a counter-religion would carry more weight than mere anti-clericalism.” At this time, too, he discovered (through Ezra Pound, who was the literary executor of Ernest Fenollosa, a scholar who had spent many years in Japan studying the Noh drama) that Japanese plays were full of spirits and masks and that their core drama was usually about the difference between mortality and the spirit.

Yeats thus threw himself into the development of a new form of drama, adapting Japanese ideas to the European context. The first play in this new
form was
At the Hawk’s Well
, terse, vivid, about the search for wisdom (the water in the well confers wisdom, but when the hero finally reaches it, the well has dried up). The play seemed to embody Yeats’s deepest fears for himself.

EXALTED YEATSISM

By this time he had met Georgie Hyde-Lees, a friend of Ezra Pound. She was interested in psychical research and in the Rudolf Steiner Theosophists, and Yeats sponsored her for membership of the Golden Dawn. Then, after a short engagement, they were married in October 1917. And it was Georgie who amazed her husband by her abilities with “automatic writing.” He gave up his obsession with séances, and he even gave up poetry for a time, until a message came from the automatic writing (a little too practical, perhaps): “We have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”
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Mrs. Yeats was blessed with a strong constitution and would work for hours to satisfy her husband’s demands, all her effort contributing to Yeats’s strange book
A Vision
, in which he classified human personality into twenty-eight types, or phases, each phase being linked to one of twenty-eight phases of the moon, and each constituting one of the spokes of a Great Wheel. According to this system, any human “soul” (he didn’t really like that word, but found no alternative) passes through all twenty-eight phases. Later he paid more attention to the Four Faculties, which the “soul” contains in varying proportions. These faculties were Will, Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate, the first two and the last two seen as pairs of contraries. Yeats had all sorts of geometric ideas about the shape of history and of character, and these, together with the twenty-eight phases and the Four Faculties—much of this based on research carried out through his wife’s automatic writing—composed what Ellmann calls “esoteric Yeatsism,” the development of which, he says, exalted the poet as never before.
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Yeats realized that his system brought with it problems. “[H]e saw clearly that by removing God from the universe and turning all life into cycles, he had deprived his system of any teleological basis for conduct
except that, if one lived a harmonious life, one might expect more harmonious future lives. . . . He could not define good and evil except in terms of complete or incomplete self-expression.” “During the period said to commence in 1927 [as he had established in
A Vision
] . . . must arise a form of philosophy, which . . . will be concrete in expression, establish itself by immediate experience, seek no general agreement, make little of God or any exterior unity, and it will call that good which a man can contemplate himself as doing always [echoes of Nietzsche’s ‘external recurrence’]. . . . Men will no longer separate the idea of God from that of human genius, human productivity in all its forms.”
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Later, Yeats emerged into what Ellmann calls a “cantankerous acceptance of life” as a framework by which to live. This was the moment when in his poetry he acknowledged that life varied from “The unfinished man and his pain” to “The finished man among his enemies.”

He had not given up his nationalism. He now wanted to fuse life, work and country “into one indissoluble whole.”
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Later still, he discovered various Indian gurus (a final aspect of his occult search), but in his poem of this time, “Byzantium,” he extols the human imagination in a mighty imaginative work that doesn’t evade the difficulties:

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins.

Yeats’s significance, for us, is well put by Ellmann: “The war on God is the ultimate heroism, and like all heroism in Yeats ends in defeat.” But, in addition, in Yeats’s case there was also the war with his father, as a result of which “He went into manhood without religion, ethics or politics, but held together by a feeling of revolt against his father and his times.” That revolt meant that it was some time before he could take on board his father’s almost throwaway remark that “the poet’s form of knowledge was different from that of a priest or scientist.”
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Yeats’s finest achievement might be said to be in his nationalism. Passionate nationalism was good, he felt, maybe even necessary, but not if it
degenerated into mere impotent Anglophobia. Yeats lived, as Dean Inge said in another context, “between skepticism and superstition.” He never gave up hope of bringing together myth and fact into a new religion, or as he called it, “a sacred drama”; but it is no more than the truth to say that, in old age, “the answers came no more easily to him than when young.” The mood of his last poem, “The Black Tower,” is one of heroic despair.
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And as he wrote in a letter two years before his death, “There was no dominant opinion I could accept.”
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And so this is Yeats’s significance for us. He hated the nineteenth-century material world, the world of particle physics, evolution and the deconstruction of the Bible; but try as he might, he could find no other realm, nowhere else to go; the supernatural world refused steadfastly to reveal itself to him, whatever occult practice he turned to. And W. H. Auden was harsh on him. “How on earth, we may wonder, could a man of Yeats’s gifts take such nonsense seriously?” T. S. Eliot was hardly kinder when he complained that Yeats’s supernatural world was “the wrong supernatural world. . . . It was not a world of spiritual significance . . . but a highly sophisticated lower mythology summoned, like a physician, to supply a fading pulse of poetry with some transient stimulant so that the dying patient may utter his last words.”

Because his father had steered him toward psychology, he looked elsewhere for insight. He tried magnificently, heroically, to create another world with his poetry, and at times, as with his nationalist poems, he succeeded gloriously. But in Yeats’s main aim—to explore, describe and communicate that other, non-materialistic realm—he failed, and his attempts to do so read, as Auden said, absurdly to us.
A Vision
spends a significant proportion of its pages “preparing readers to encounter its strange explanation of the universe through geometric symbolism.”
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Unlike, say, Wallace Stevens, Yeats’s own imagination was never enough; the real action was always going on somewhere else, somewhere he never found. He never escaped “the fury and the mire of [mere] human veins.”

AMERICA’S SHADOW CULTURE

While none of the above is unfair to Yeats, he was far from being the only individual to adopt these beliefs that seemed so absurd to Auden. In fact, and so far as the United States is concerned, the Harvard historian of psychiatry Eugene Taylor has identified an entire culture, what he terms a “shadow culture,” of more than two hundred years of alternative religions and “pop-psych” movements. Standing outside mainstream psychiatry and the mainstream churches, these movements comprised a variety of attempts to live in the post-Christian world, both before and after Nietzsche. Taylor calls it both a “visionary” tradition and a “crank literature,” a “folk psychology” and a “psychospiritual tradition,” focusing as it does on an “experiential interpretation of higher consciousness.”
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His survey is a clear account of an otherwise woolly world.

This shadow culture, Taylor said, comprised a vast unorganized array of discrete individuals “who live and think differently from the mainstream but who participate in its daily activities.”
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He traced this tradition back to the First Great Awakening in America in the first half of the eighteenth century, when an evangelical wave swept through the northeast and 250 new, emotionalist churches were established outside the Calvinist faith. Such groups as that of Conrad Beissel and the Ephrata Mystics, the Shakers and other visionary communities, the Swedenborgians, with their concept of “correspondence,” that God speaks to man through Nature; and the Transcendentalists, who also believed that understanding could come through the contemplation of Nature—all of these shared the view that intuition was a higher faculty than reason.

The fashions and fads for homeopathy, phrenology, mesmerism, hydrotherapy, shamanism and Orientalism all came and went in the nineteenth century, some making bigger waves than others, but all leaving their mark. Figures like Emerson, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller were all regarded as inspirational leaders with spiritual qualities, together with John Muir, an immigrant from Scotland who arrived in the United States in 1849 and who, among his other achievements, deserves credit for preserving the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest in Arizona as national parks.

Despite the rise and fall of many of these fads, Taylor argues, the last three decades of the nineteenth century “produced full-fledged organi
zations devoted to spiritual therapeutics that were national, even international, in scope.”
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One of the reasons for this, he says, was that the visionary tradition had been gradually suppressed within American high culture “because of the rising tide of positivistic science.”

Utopian socialism was another part of the visionary tradition, Taylor says, and here he includes the Mormons, the Seventh-Day Adventists, charismatic religions aiming to change the experience of intimacy, and alternative forms of consciousness. Spiritualism, Theosophy, New Thought and Christian Science drew their strengths from an interest in life after death, producing a parallel interest in “automatic speech,” table tipping, slate writing and “rapping and knocking,” as he puts it. Books with titles such as
The Divine Law of Cure
,
Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography
and
Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics
proliferated. In 1881, the Massachusetts Metaphysical College was formed by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, which taught pathology, “therapeutics,” moral science and metaphysics. The American Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1885. Despite many experiments, Taylor reports drily, “the psychical researchers were unable to discover any evidence for the reality of life after death.” But they did “establish the reality of the unconscious.”

The impressive-sounding Boston School of Psychopathology comprised an informal knot of investigators including William James, the neurologist James Jackson Putnam, Richard Clarke Cabot and the neuropsychologist Morton Prince. Many of its members “had direct ties either by birth or upbringing with the intuitive psychology of character formation bequeathed to them by Emerson and the Concord transcendentalists.” The Boston School was much more scientific than any of its predecessors, being much influenced by Darwin. Even so, James maintained, it was psychic phenomena that “were destined to change the very shape of science in the future.”

There was, Taylor goes on, a dramatic expansion of psychotherapy in America after 1900, as people began to acknowledge that “spirituality played a key role in a person’s mental health.” Mystic states were key here, he said, but they were so different from “the normal everyday waking state” that “we don’t know how to deal with them.” The Emmanuel
movement was launched in 1906 at Emmanuel Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, “to fuse modern scientific psychotherapy with the Christian teachings of moral character development.”
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These meetings, which drew upward of five hundred people twice a week, came to be called “moral clinics.”

In addition, from 1893 when the World’s Parliament of Religions met in America as part of the Columbian Exposition, marking the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the New World, a number of Indian swamis and Japanese Zen spiritual elders, plus the White Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, toured the United States to great acclaim, speaking at universities. These events resulted in the establishment, among other things, of Vedanta societies.

Taylor, alumnus of the fiercely positivist Harvard, nonetheless gave a sympathetic account of the visionary tradition, arguing that it was more open-minded than the more mainstream traditions, that it discovered the unconscious independently of, and maybe before, Freud; and that, at root, it conceded that mysticism is a genuine aspect of experience, not a pathology, and one that we need to take seriously and try to understand if we are ever to have a full life. The main thrust of his study, from our point of view, confirms that though Yeats embraced “the wrong supernatural world,” he was by no means alone in this. For twenty or thirty years either side of 1900, vast numbers on both sides of the Atlantic thought as Yeats did.