are his fundamental lack of cultural self-confidence, his willingness to open his ears to the siren song of nihilism, a juvenile eagerness to believe the worst about himself and his society and to relish, on some level, his own prospective destruction.
Whether one views the combatants in the struggle between God and Satan ontologically, mythically, or literarily, God created man in his own image and likeness but chose to give him free will—a force so powerful that not even God’s infinite love can always overcome it. Thus given a sporting chance to ruin God’s favorites, the fallen Light-Bringer, Lucifer, picked himself and his fellows off the floor of the fiery lake into which they were plunged by the sword of St. Michael, and endeavors each day not to conquer Man but to seduce and destroy him. As Satan observes in Book One of Milton’s Paradise Lost:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same . . .
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n.
Satan himself, however, has no need for servants in Hell, as God does in Heaven; he is instead satisfied with corpses on earth. As modern history shows, the Devil has had great success and ample reward in that department. But he cannot be satisfied with his infernal kingdom. As in a Hollywood sequel, the body count must be ever higher, just to keep the antagonist interested. Damnation consists not in consignment to the netherworld, but in the rejection of the ur-Narrative—a willful separation of oneself from the heroic path for which history and literature provide a clear signpost.
As Milton writes in the Areopagitica, the poet’s seminal essay on freedom of speech and, more important, freedom of thought: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” For Milton, the very absence of conflict was in itself contemptible, unmanly—inhuman.
This eternal conflict, then, is the essence of my religio-cultural argument, which I will view through the triple prisms of 1) atheist cultural Marxism that sprang up amid the physical and intellectual detritus of Europe after the calamity of World War I, and its practical, battering-ram application, Critical Theory; and 2) the Book of Genesis, from which our cultural self-understanding flows, and Milton’s great explicative epic poem, in which a God who reigns supreme is also a strangely absent and largely offstage Prime Mover; and 3) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s emblematic reworking of the man caught in the middle between Heaven and Hell, between God and Mephistopheles: Faust.
It is the story of humanity’s journey, of roads taken and not taken, and about the choices we must make. Let us begin, then, in Hell.
OF THE DEVIL’S PLEASURE PALACE
In 1813, the sixteen-year-old Viennese composer Franz Peter Schubert began work on his first opera, Des Teufels Lustschloss (The Devil’s Pleasure Palace), with a libretto by August von Kotzebue. The work remained unperformed until 1978, when it finally was staged in Potsdam, outside of Berlin. To say that Schubert was young when he composed this youthful but culturally seminal work partially obscures that he also proved middle-aged, dying at thirty-one in 1828. People got older younger then, grew up faster, and perhaps lived life more fully. In any case, the creative force embodied by Schubert was in a hurry to meet its negation, which is to say, its completion.
In Des Teufels Lustschloss, Oswald, a poor knight, marries Luitgarde, an aristocrat’s niece who is promptly disinherited. Heading for a new life, they are caught in a raging storm and take refuge in a nearby inn. When superstitious villagers tell of a strange, haunted castle in the vicinity, Oswald and his faithful squire, Robert, set off to investigate the manor house, which indeed turns out to be bristling with terrors and temptations. One of the latter takes the form of a shapely Amazon who tries to seduce Oswald, warning him of dire consequences should he not succumb. (He does not.) The more adamantly faithful Oswald is, though, the more terrors rise up to threaten him. He is finally saved by the timely arrival of Luitgarde, who, when threatened with death herself, stands fast—and suddenly the castle crumbles.
In the end, it all turns out to have been an illusion. The spirits were the villagers in disguise, hired by Luitgarde’s uncle to test Oswald’s courage under fire and prove him worthy of Luitgarde.
Conventional musical wisdom has long held that Kotzebue’s libretto is the principal reason for the opera’s neglect—an explanation applied to all Schubert operas, as it happens. More likely, the cause is Schubert’s inexpert handling of the dramatic necessities inherent in operatic composition; what works so brilliantly for him in songs and song cycles failed him as a composer in the larger forms of vocal compositions (although, curiously, not in his symphonies, each of which grew in sophistication and scope).
But, seen in another light, Kotzebue’s work is entirely in line with European philosophical thought of the time as expressed through art. Recall that this is the early nineteenth century, not the twentieth; the horrors of 1914 and 1939 are still far in the future. The happy ending (a victory of love over death) is not a cop-out but the proof of the promise of redemption—that we must suffer the temptations and travails of Christ and face our worst fears in order to win in the end. That its conclusion (“And then I woke up . . . and it was all a dream!”) has since become a groan-worthy cliché is not Kotzebue’s fault, given that he wrote in a less cynical age, but anyone ever tempted to throw a shoe at the end of Fritz Lang’s 1944 film noir, The Woman in the Window, knows what I mean. Not to mention Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
And who represents the saving power of divine grace? Almost invariably, the woman, whose own self-sacrifice rescues and transfigures the flawed male hero. In Goethe’s famous words from the second part of Faust: “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan,” or, “the Eternal Feminine draws us onward.” The Eternal Feminine, a sexually anti-egalitarian concept that feminists of both sexes today would regard as laughable, is one of the organizing principles of the cosmos, and a crucial factor in the hero’s journey. Even the pansexuality of today, try though it might, cannot replace this naturally primal force: the union of opposites into a harmonious, generative whole.
Crucially, then, Oswald is saved by the love of a good woman; so is the Flying Dutchman in Wagner’s opera; so is Robert le diable in Meyerbeer’s opera of the same name; so is Max the Freischütz in Weber’s masterpiece. And so, in another Wagner work, is Parsifal, whose sexual rejection of Kundry (the Magdalene figure) and her alluring Flower Maidens ultimately releases Kundry from Klingsor’s curse; without her compelled attempt at seduction, Parsifal could never have found strength through sexual sublimation, a potency that allows him to conquer the evil magician and regain the Spear, thus causing Klingsor’s own infernal pleasure palace to crumble into dust.
In short, in these tales, the twentieth-century cynicism of the interwar generation does not yet hold sway in the larger culture. The age of anxiety, alienation, nihilism, and anomie still lies in the future. But it will come, creating along the way its own secular Xanadu, another poetic Lustschloss, to tempt and seduce Western civilization into self-destruction, with shame and self-doubt its principal snares.
Two years after this ambitious but abortive effort, Schubert wrote the song that made his reputation, “Erlkönig,” based on a text by Goethe. The hammering octaves and rolling bass line in the piano would later inspire silent-movie
