Endkampf

W.B. Yeats - The Second Coming

The first stanza of W.B. Yeats’s The Second Coming (1919) is both a portrayal and a prophecy of where we are now as a civilisation. it feels so current that we might be forgiven for assuming that it was written this morning:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra announced the ‘death of God’ in 1883, this was the kind of future he foresaw as a consequence of a collective loss of faith. How do we find congruence and order in a world shorn of the commanding, central narrative that gave us pattern and coherence for so long? How do we connect and communicate when the glue that held us together no longer works? Where is our common ground? Where are our shared values? Where is our jointly-held sense of reality? We need these things. ‘Things fall apart’ without them. ‘The centre cannot hold’ because there is no centre any more, no universally (or even generally) agreed point of reference. We enter a ‘post-truth world’, where truth with a capital ‘T’ is a whimsical fiction at best and a tool of oppression at worst. There is ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’ but no higher authority to put them in context - no final arbiter, no grand tradition, no ‘meta-narrative.’ Polarisation, atomisation, disconnection - these are the inevitable long-term results. ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer.’

What happens next? Chaos and bloodshed regrettably. ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ What else could we realistically expect? There is no God - no overarching structure beyond ourselves; no stable human nature within. Everything is malleable and up for grabs. Egos clash in the night. ‘My truth’ and ‘your truth’ morph into ‘my will versus your will’. Power, and who wields it, becomes the only reality.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Out of this dissolution a new type of order appears. In the second stanza, Yeats depicts the approaching iron fist that will ‘discipline the world-floor’ in David Jones’s phrase¹ and inaugurate an authentically post-Christian and indeed anti-Christian age:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are the words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow things, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Who or what might this ‘rough beast’ be? Interpreting this poem is not an exact science. Yeats was an imaginative writer, a shaman even, not a political pundit or an economic forecaster or a social scientist. There are no exact predictions here, only images in words of concentrated power. It is our role to sit with the discomfort the poem stirs up and wrestle with the rough beast until we start to sense something of the power and intensity of the vision Yeats is trying to convey.

A great change is coming upon the world. That much is plain. The Second Coming is a poetic, imagistic evocation of what this transformation might be like. The rough beast is a symbolic representation of what could happen afterwards. So, again, who or what is he? What are his defining features? What is his standpoint and philosophy?

I foresee five possible outcomes. The first, largely self-explanatory, is a future imposed upon the West from outside, namely conquest by a rival power or civilisation (e.g. Russia, China or Islam). The next three can be viewed as potential results of changes in the fabric of society. beginning with the kind of pagan, anti-monotheistic resurgence advocated by D.H. Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent (1926). As Don Ramón Carrasco, the book’s visionary intellectual, puts it:

‘If I want Mexico to learn the name of Quetzalcoatl, it is because I wish the Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan and the tree Igdrasil. And I wish the Druidic world would see, honestly, that in the mistletoe is their mystery and that they themselves are the Tuatha De Danaan, alive, but submerged. And a new Hermes should come back to the Mediterranean, and a new Ashtaroth to Tunis; and Mithras again to Persia, and Brhama unbroken to India, and the oldest of dragons to China.’²

This is important vis-á-vis The Second Coming because Yeats believed that each succeeding age (or ‘gyre’) - lasting about two thousand years - was ‘antithetical’ to the one that preceded it, animated by the opposite impulse to that which had propelled the previous era. Two millennia ago, the Christ child was born in a Bethlehem manger. Now we have a rough beast slouching towards that city to be born. But rough in what way and rough to whom? Yeats’s imagery is rich and multi-layered. It cannot be reduced to a simplistic schema of ‘good Paganism’ versus ‘bad Christianity.’ The same is true of Lawrence’s writing. There are very clear synergies, for instance, between the passage above and Dr. Dimble’s exhortation at the end of That Hideous Strength (previously quoted in September’s essay):

‘The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China - why, then it will be spring.’³

This brings us to the third possibility - the end of globalisation and a localist renaissance. As Paul KIngsnorth asks in this 2017 essay:

What if we are at the end of an age of monotheisms and monocultures; an age which could only ever be supported by expansion and colonisation? What if our challenge now is to build a series of smaller visions, focused less on the future and more on the present; less on the sky and more on the ground?

This scenario is not undesirable and by no means impossible, though it could only come into being, one assumes, in the aftermath of a global collapse. In any case, Yeats seems to have had something more emphatic in mind in his prophecy of the rough beast - something more brutal and insistent. Looking at things this way leads us to the fourth possibility - the technocratic, bio-political nexus of surveillance and control which Kingsnorth is currently warning us against in his Subsatck site, The Abbey of Misrule. The ‘rulers of this age’ can sense the ground shifting beneath them and they will do everything they can to shore up their imperium, using cutting-edge technology to give their project a turbo-boost and render opposition obsolete. This is the whole premise of the ‘Great Reset’, where a disruptive event, such as Covid, serves as a catalyst for a suite of long-desired but previously hard to engineer changes - vaccine passports, maybe, or the abolition of cash, or the embryonic outlines of a Social Credit system.

All this is brilliantly flagged up in N.S. Lyons’s essential recent essay, A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism. Lyons lasers in on how both the NICE in That Hideous Strength and Sauron in Tolkien’s legendarily become fixated on planning and managing every aspect of life - human and non-human. This obsessive desire for 100% control leads to hubris and delusions of grandeur, cutting us off from the Divine and opening the doors for Satan to run rampant in the world. As Ransom realises in That Hideous Strength:

Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God … There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, hell would be at last incarnate.⁴

The fifth possibility, which could equally spring up from inside or outside the West, is the opposite of this - that Christ Himself will return but that we have become too spiritually obtuse to recognise Him. Even if we do, we will in no way make Him welcome. Our spiritually has become so lukewarm and conformist that we will inevitably see Him as a threat - something wild, strange and violent - a rough beast, in brief. We will reject Him in the same way that Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor rejected Him in The Brothers Karamazov:

‘What I say to you will come to pass, and our kingdom shall be accomplished. I tell you again: tomorrow you will see that obedient flock, which at the first nod of my head will rush to rake up the hot embers to the bonfire on which I am going to burn you for having come to get in our way.’⁵

Playing the prophet for a moment, I would suggest that the return of Christ or (perhaps more likely for now) the rise to eminence of one acting in His name, is our most probable long-term prognosis. This has been the thrust and aim of these Secret Fire essays all along - to raise awareness of the Golden Age to come that will succeed the Dark Age as inevitably as day follows night. Becoming attentive to its light, looking out for its signs, tuning into its presence - these are the meditative and imaginative tasks that help us usher in its advent. Not enough, in my view, has been written about the transformative potential of our times. The accent - among conservative, traditionally-minded Christians, at least - has more usually been placed on the all too obvious negative aspects. We have lost a great deal, for sure, and we will lose a lot more, but the point of this project has been to encourage us not to dwell overmuch on this. What we focus on grows, and when we’re climbing a mountain and approaching the top the last thing we want to do is look down! There is always a ‘top’, there is always a tomorrow, and there is always a future, but we need to work with it, not against it. The Devil wants to keep us angry, raging and rudderless, but we cannot afford to play his game. The stakes are too high. We are engaged in an Endkampf - nothing less than that - a battle at the end of the world for the soul and the future of the world. The lords and masters of this age will not, unfortunately, go gently into that good night. They will not align themselves with goodness, truth and beauty; with ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars.’ No. They will double-down on their failed strategy and fight, kick and bite to preserve and enhance the illusion of control that drives their evil words and deeds.

We need to brace ourselves, therefore, for a full-on assertion of authority from the global élites, á la the Covid restrictions but more hard-hitting and comprehensive. This, I suspect, is our short-term future, and this is what I will meditate on in January’s essay, through the prism of two prophetic and deeply eschatological early-twentieth-century texts - R.H. Benson’s novel Lord of the World and Vladimir Solovyev’s A Short Story of the Anti-Christ. In February we will reflect on a luminous figure who stands at the antipodes of all this - the Grand Monarch of Catholic prophecy. Then in March and April we will look at how the Grand Monarch motif plays out in two seminal Inklings works - Tolkien’s The Return of the King and Lewis’s The Last Battle. The series will conclude in May with an essay on Letter IV of Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot - The Emperor - which will tie the sequence together and serve as a springboard for future explorations.

Originally I had intended to write twelve essays (plus an introduction) and now there are thirteen. There may yet be more. This is because what we are dealing with in Secret Fire is a a living fire which changes, moves and grows. The Tradition we are fighting for is dynamic and explosive. It is not a museum piece, a dead and static thing, as our opponents believe. The high ritual and elevated language, for instance, which Christian modernists see as outworn and off-putting, invokes a sense of mystery and awe, pointing us towards the sacred flame - the secret fire, you might say - at the heart of reality. This is where we need to be. This is where we need to focus our attention. This is the level from which our next steps will become clear. It’s no good getting caught up in the outrage industry or becoming mirror images of those who wish to strip us of our patrimony. We have to go deeper than that - much deeper - as deep as Bism, perhaps, in Lewis’s The Silver Chair, the land of living jewels and salamanders ‘too white-hot to look at’, that ‘speak to us out of the fire’ …

‘Down there,’ said Gold, ‘I could show you real gold, real silver, real diamonds.’

‘Bosh!’ said Jill rudely. ‘As if we didn’t know that we’re below the deepest mines been here.’

‘Yes,’ said Golg. ‘I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Topdwellers call mines. But that’s where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing. There I’ll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze you a cup full of diamond-juice. You won’t care much about fingering the cold, dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the live ones of Bism.’⁶

There, in six words, is our definition of the sacred - ‘real gold, real silver, real diamonds.’ This is the holy blaze of the future which we are kindling in the world right now. This is the true Second Coming - the transfiguration of matter and minds and the revelation of Christ. That is what this Endkampf is all about.

1. David Jones, The Tribunes Visitation, in The Sleeping Lord (Faber and Faber, 1974), p.50.

2. The Plumed Serpent: D.H. Lawrence on Radical Traditionalism by Manon Welles

3. C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (Pan Books, 1955), p.242.

4. That Hideous Strength, p.121.

5. F.M. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Penguin, 1993), p.339.

6. C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (Penguin, 1975), p.177.