The Criterion/Volume 4/Number 2/Our Need for Religious Sincerity
OUR NEED
FOR RELIGIOUS
SINCERITY[1]
By W. B. YEATS
I
Some weeks ago, a Dublin friend of mine got through the post a circular from the Christian Brothers, headed 'A Blasphemous Publication', and describing how they found 'the Christian number of a London publication in the hands of a boy'—in the hands of innocence. It contained 'a horrible insult to God . . . a Christian Carol set to music and ridiculing in blasphemous language the Holy Family'. But the Editor of a Catholic boys' paper rose to the situation; he collected petrol, roused the neighbourhood, called the schoolboys about him, probably their parents, wired for a film photographer that all might be displayed in Dublin, and having 'bought up all unsold copies . . . burned them in the public thoroughfare'. However, he first extracted the insult—the burning was to be as it were in effigy—that he might send it here and there with the appeal: 'How long are the parents of Irish children to tolerate such devilish literature coming into the country?'
II
'The devilish literature' is an old Carol of which Dr. Hyde has given us an Irish version in his Religious Songs of Connacht. The version enclosed with the circular was taken down by Mr. Cecil Sharpe, and differs in a few unessential phrases from that in The Oxford Book of English Ballads.
So meek and so mild;
Oh, gather me cherries Joseph
For I am with child.
With his words so unkind;
Let them gather cherries
That brought thee with child.
In his Mother's womb;
Bow down you sweet cherry tree,
And give my Mother some.
Bowed down to her knee;
And now you see Joseph
There are cherries for me'.
The poem is a masterpiece, because something of great moment is there completely stated; and the poet who wrote the English words—it may exist in every European tongue for all I know—certainly wrote before the Reformation. It has been sung to our own day by English and Irish countrymen, but it shocks the Christian Brothers. Why?
III
The actual miracle is not in the Bible, but all follows as a matter of course the moment you admit the Incarnation. When Joseph has uttered the doubt which the Bible also has put into his mouth, the Creator of the world, having become flesh, commands from the Virgin's womb and his creation obeys. There is the whole mystery—God, in the indignity of human birth, all that seemed impossible, blasphemous even, to many early heretical sects and all set forth in an old 'sing-song' that has yet a mathematical logic. I have thought it out again and again and I can see no reason for the anger of the Christian Brothers, except that they do not believe in the Incarnation. They think they believe in it, but they do not, and its sudden presentation fills them with horror, and to hide that horror they turn upon the poem.
IV
The only thoughts that our age carries to their logical conclusion are deductions from the materialism of the seventeenth century; they fill the newspapers, books, speeches; they are implicit in all that we do and think. The English and Irish countrymen are devout because ignorant of these thoughts; but we, till we have passed our grain through the sieve, are atheists. I do not believe in the Incarnation in the Church's sense of that word, and I know that I do not, and yet, seeing that like most men of my kind these fifty years I desire belief, the old Carol and all similar Art delights me. But the Christian Brothers think that they believe, and suddenly confronted with the reality of their own thought cover up their eyes.
V
Some months ago Mr. Lennox Robinson gave to a paper edited by young poets a story written in his youth. A religious young girl in the West of Ireland, her meditations stirred perhaps by her own name of Mary, begins to wonder what would happen if Christ's Second Coming were in her own village. She thinks first that the people are so wicked they would reject him, and then that they might accept him and grow good. She is pursued by a tramp, becomes unconscious, is ravished and returns to consciousness in ignorance of what has happened. Presently she finds herself with child and believes and persuades her parents that a miracle has taken place, and gradually the neighbours believe also and turn good. At last she dies bringing forth a girl-child; and the tramp arrives in the village knowing nothing of what has happened, gets drunk and boasts of his crime.
This story roused as much horror as the Cherry Tree Carol. Yet countless obscure mothers have so dreamed, have been so deceived; some of them born in Protestant communities have become Johanna Southcotts and lost our sympathy; but if we imagine such a mother as a simple country girl living amongst settled opinions, the theme grows emotional and philosophical. I have myself a scenario upon that theme which I shall never turn into a play because I cannot write dialect well enough, and if I were to set it where my kind of speech is possible, it would become unreal or a mere conflict of opinion. Mr. Lennox Robinson and I want to understand the Incarnation, and we think that we cannot understand any historical event till we have set it amidst new circumstance. We grew up with the story of the Bible; the Mother of God is no Catholic possession; she is a part of our imagination.
VI
The Irish Religious Press attacked Mr. Lennox Robinson and a Catholic Ecclesiastic, and an Ecclesiastic of the Church of Ireland resigned from the Committee of the Carnegie Library, of which Mr. Lennox Robinson was secretary, because it would not censure him. I think that neither the Irish Religious Press nor those Ecclesiastics believe in the Second Coming. I do not believe in it—at least not in its Christian form—and I know that I do not believe, but they think that they do. No minds have belief who, confronted with its consequences—Johanna Southcotts, deluded peasant girls and all the rest—find those consequences unendurable. The minds that have it grow always more abundant, more imaginative, more full of fantasy even, as its object approaches, and to deny that play of mind is to make belief itself impossible.
VII
I have worked with Mr. Lennox Robinson for years, and there are times when I see him daily and I know that his mind plays constantly about the most profound problems; and that especially of late his Art, under the mask of our brisk Dublin comedy, has shown itself akin to that of writers who have created a vision of life Turtullian would have accepted. I think of Strindberg in his Spook Sonata, in his Father, in his books of autobiography, as mad and as profound as King Lear; of James Joyce in his Ulysses, lying 'upon his right and left side' like Ezekiel and eating 'dung' that he may raise 'other men to a perception to the infinite'; of John Synge, lost to the 'dazzling dark' of his Well of the Saints and of the last act of his Deirdre. I cannot deny my sympathy to these austere minds though I am of that school of lyric poets that has raised the cry of Ruysbroeck though in vain: 'I must rejoice, I must rejoice with ceasing, even if the world shudder at my joy'.
VIII
The intellect of Ireland is irreligious. I doubt if one could select from any Irish writer of the last hundred and fifty years until the present generation, a solitary sentence that might be included in a reputable anthology of religious thought. Ireland has produced but two men of religious genius: Johannes Scotus Erigena, who lived a long time ago, and Bishop Berkeley, who kept his Plato by his Bible, and Ireland has forgotten both; and its moral system being founded upon habit, not intellectual conviction, has shown of late that it cannot resist the onset of modern life. We are quick to hate and slow to love; and we have never lacked a Press to excite the most evil passions. To some extent Ireland but shows in an acute form the European problem, and must seek a remedy where the best minds of Europe seek it—in audacity of speculation and creation. We must consider anew the foundations of existence, bring to the discussion—diplomacies and prudences put away—all relevant thought. Christianity must meet to-day not the criticism as its ecclesiastics seem to imagine of the School of Voltaire, but of that out of which Christianity itself in part arose, the School of Plato, and there is less occasion for passion.
IX
I do not condemn those who were shocked by the naive faith of the old Carol or by Mr. Lennox Robinson's naturalism, but I have a right to condemn those who encourage a Religious Press so discourteous as to accuse a man of Mr. Lennox Robinson's eminence of a deliberate insult to the Christian religion, and so reckless as to make that charge without examination of his previous work; and a system which has left the education of Irish children in the hands of men so ignorant that they do not recognise the most famous Carol in the English language.
- ↑ The Irish periodical, which has hitherto published my occasional comments on Irish events, explained that this essay would endanger its existence. I have therefore sought publication elsewhere.—W.B.Y.