What Rough Beast

Posted by Sappho on January 31st, 2021 filed in News and Commentary, Quotes

The birth of Christianity is a versatile metaphor, one that can be drawn on to tell divergent stories.

There’s Cavafy, in Julian and the Antiochans, giving us the point of view of Christians reluctant to accept Emperor Julian’s return to paganism, for reasons that flip our expectations of Christians and pagans:

How could they ever give up
their beautiful way of life, the range
of their daily pleasures, their brilliant theatre
which consummated a union between Art
and the erotic proclivities of the flesh?

There’s Yeats, in The Second Coming, a poem whose mood is rooted not only in the Irish War of Independence, but also in the aftermath of World War I and of the 1918-1919 flu pandemic:

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?

And, just this week, there’s Kerry Howley, reflecting on the “bright rise of belief” in QAnon and the “unrestrained joy” of the assault on the Capitol:

By springtime, half a million Americans will be dead. It doesn’t matter whether the prophecy is right or the prophecy is wrong. In the negative space around the bright rise of belief, the rest of us argue using words that no longer work. Do you even know how to frame the question? Surrounding the birth of every new theology, forgotten or ridiculed, are the people who watched their neighbors come apart from the world. Dark to Light. We are the dark. It’s stifling in here, and full of fear.