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Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

William Empson, The Complete Poems of William Empson; from notes on the poem 'Bacchus'

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william empson

—William Empson, Milton’s God (1961)

Here, from Empson’s great atheist tract in the guise of a Milton study, is a response avant la lettre to the devotees of René Girard. What the Girardians take to be the heart of Christianity—its final sacrifice designed to end the sacrificial cycle once and for all—Empson finds the essence of its unique barbarism, its inferiority not only to the secular tradition he hails, but even to the other religions of the Axial Age.

Milton’s God contains many passages of interest and can be not only read but re-read with pleasure (I’ve just read it for the second time; whereas, don’t ask me how many times I’ve read Seven Types of Ambiguity). Its justification of Milton’s Satan is wholly persuasive and makes sense of Paradise Lost in its totality. Like Harold Bloom, Empson was deeply dismayed by the Christian, conservative turn in Anglo literary criticism that came after modernism and before postmodernism, and his passages on how this distorted the reputations of major authors like Shelley and Joyce are telling. His reminder of why Christianity was under Enlightenment assault in the first place, when the modernist literati had returned to its assurances in a collapsing society, are timely, to say the least, given our own oncoming “New Conservatism.”

Yet I pause when he advocates Utilitarianism, for which poetry was famously no better than push-pin. Is there no human sacrifice in such a system? As with his New Atheist successors, I see something so Protestant in his atheism—he even concedes this at one point—an unspoken conviction that images, for all that he’s interested in their ambiguity, must be explained, cleared away, to make room for transparent truth. Maybe I’m in no mood for this style of argument since the world is about to enter its third year of being cruelly abused by a scientific clerisy as obscurantist and anti-human as any priest class ever was—just as that maven of atheist philosophy, Nietzsche, warned us, with English Utilitarians and Darwinians very much in mind.

In Catholic school when we’d harass the teachers with questions of theodicy, we would be told, “God works in mysterious ways.” A frustrating, evasive answer, no doubt. But do you even have to believe in God at all to judge it the last word in theology?

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