G. C. Jeffers

And behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him (Revelation 6:8).

Since the onslaught of COVID-19 began, and since dramatic actions unseen in living memory (the closure of schools and businesses as well as the edicts of local and regional governing authorities, backed by the power of the police, to remain home save for necessity), I have been beset by W.B. Yeats’s famous poem Second Coming. It reads:

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.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those 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 thighs, 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?

This poem, written on the background of the Irish War for Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War, succeeds in evoking the deep and dark foreboding in a number of ways, not least by appropriating biblical language for Christ’s parousia and synthesizing it with biblical language about the apocalyptic beast of Daniel and Revelation. What Yeats is reaching for is some way to talk about the cosmic significance of the horror that is ripping apart his homeland. Yeats was born just after the conclusion of the American Civil War and died while World War II was raging. In the interim, he witnessed the Franco-Prussian War, the Spanish-American War, the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and, of course, the wars in Ireland already mentioned. He had a front row seat to the horror of the technologizing of warfare and to the industrial efficiency with which men could now kill each other. And Yeats, searching for comfort, or at least meaning, is left insisting that “surely some revelation is at hand” and, because of the depth and gravity of the world in which he finds himself, such as he has experienced must be the harbinger of that greatest of prophecies, the second coming, the parousia. But, and this stops him cold, the second coming of what? Trembling with horror and foreboding, Yeats takes notice of the chthonic form of a lion with a man’s head emerging and “slouch[ing] toward Bethlehem to be born.” The word that Yeats uses, revelation, connotes that something that has been hidden will be showcased. The Greek term for this is apokalypsis, to reveal or unveil. An apocalypse, then, is not so much the end of a civilization or of the world, but it is (rather) the revelation about the meaning of society or the world; it is a way of telling the truth through the use of symbol. 

A kind of apokalypsis familiar to those in the church is the sacraments. As St. Augustine held, and virtually all Christians have held since, a sacrament is “an outward sign of an inward grace.” That is, the sacrament reveals something true and communicates that truth to the receiver of it. Semiotics as it developed in the Western tradition came to understand a sign as two sides of the same sheet of paper, the signifier and the signified. Thus the word “leaf” is the signifier and the green things that grow on trees are the signified. Or, in the case of baptism (for example), the outward sign (the descending into water and then coming back up in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) can be equated to the signifier and the inward grace (dying with Christ and being raised with him) can be equated to the signified. It is pretty important to note that the signifier and the signified are not the same thing. The signifier points to the signified. 

There are entire regions of the human experience and of truth that are inaccessible except via symbol. Dr. Louise Cowan makes the point beautifully in her book on myth. She writes:

“[The region of non-verbally accessible truth] . . . is the realm of archetypes, the ultrasensory patterns that are preconditions of life itself, that reach down into the secret regions of organic and inorganic matter. This primordial level is not concerned with a culture so much as with the profoundest processes of the psyche, ultimately with those experiences that are universally human, rather than societal–with physis rather than nomos, nature rather than culture. This realm precedes consciousness and is available only through archetypal images. The desert, the wilderness, the vast sky, the garden–these are images in the Texas experience that allow the emergence of the archetypal; the primordial. Though they are common to all humanity, they reveal themselves in the depth of each person rather than to entire communities and are thus not, in the strict sense, political or cultural, as is the mythic. When the myth has loosened its hold upon the individual’s conscience, when, in Yeats’s phrase, “things fall apart,”, the archetypal is unleashed, and without the restraint of myth, expresses its force in violence. Rape, murder, insanity, horror, the grotesque – these are the manifestations of the titanic, which governed more anciently than the mythic gods. Yet the archetypes animate the myth, provide its vitality, ground it in reality.”

Cowan’s argument is that the mythic provides a means by which individuals within a given cultural framework can “read” the archetypal world within themselves. The archetypal is often evoked by an encounter with a whole object, a cosmos within itself. As Dr. Donald Cowan has put it: 

“[an experience’s] reality [is] taken into the mind as a whole by a kind of grasping. It comes from a love-at-first-sight experience, a knowledge of something before rationality sets in, before analysis has torn it apart. Music comes to us in such a fashion and for most persons remains a non-verbal, nonrational experience of satisfaction.” 

The desert, the mountains, soaring cathedrals, Beetoven’s ninth, the roaring of niagara falls, the eclipse of the sun, the explosion of hydrogen bombs in the wilderness, the leap of a tiger onto its prey–all of these are cosmic wholes that, once grasped, must be translated (and to some extent tamed) by myth. Without myth, these archetypal experiences will overpower the individual psyche and will, as is the case with PTSD, fail to integrate with the individual. The fractured self that results is unmoored, disconnected, and adrift upon the primordial waters of chaos. Such a self is תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ (Tohu wa-bohu), “formless and void.” 

Rene Girard, the great anthropological philosopher, gives us a model of how Cowan’s ideas about myth mediating the archetypal actually work. For Girard, the two key aspects of religion–prohibition and sacrifice–are both driven by the sociological need to prevent an outbreak of communal violence caused by mimetic rivalry (which exists beyond conscious awareness somewhere in the archetypal). Religion, he argues, accomplishes this end via the scapegoat effect rooted in myth. The scapegoat effect is when two or more opposing forces–held in opposition by mimetic rivalry–are able to put aside their differences by transferring their violence to another, third party. By blaming a victim and killing or excluding it, the community is able to recapitulate order. Myths recount the cosmic nature of the scapegoat effect while the use of sacrifice enacts it, and the effectiveness of the scapegoat effect relies on people not realizing that the victim is actually innocent. 

Christianity is important because it unmasks the scapegoat mechanism, the secret that lay behind the effectiveness of human institutions. At first glance, according to Girard, the gospels seem to affirm ritual sacrifice, but in reality they turn it topsy turvy by loudly proclaiming the innocence of the victim. While it may be true, as Caiaphas (the high priest in the year that Jesus was executed) noted that “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed,” such a result requires a belief in the guilt of the victim (John 11:50). Such a belief is no longer possible in a world where the scape-goat mechanism has been exposed and where large numbers of people worship the most famous innocent victim of all time. And, as Caiaphas predicted, not being able to sacrifice one man has led to the downfall of whole societies because of the now much broader use of mimetic violence. If we can no longer blame a single victim, then the violence cannot be contained. In Cowan’s words, “manifestations of the titanic,” those gods which existed in capricious anarchy prior to the arrival of Order, are unleashed and the archetypal is unmitigated. 

Of course, the other (and far more common problem) is the failure to grasp the archetypal at all, to merely see the titanic effects without seeing the titans. This failure to grasp the whole is endemic in our world. And the current pandemic is, in my mind, making this clear by exposing the world to terrible effects (mass death, quarantine, lockdowns, mass fear, food scarcity, etc) without revealing the cause of those effects. Caught up in our default scientistic, materialist, marxist worldview (the only kind of knowledge is empirically verifiable through controlled study and observation, all that exists is physical, and all relationships, especially those involving business and the government, are about the pursuit of power), the loudest conversations about the pandemic center on the following topics: the effect on the upcoming election, the effect on the economy, the effect on preparation for next time, the best practices for dealing with pandemics from a public health perspective, and (most importantly) who is to blame for all of this? China? Trump? World Health Organization? CDC? The media? The ancient Greeks knew better. When Thebes was beset by a plague, Oedipus (the king) sent an entreaty to the oracle at Delphi and consulted the local seer; he awaited a word from the gods. We, of course, are not.

Now that we are all in lockdown, prevented from leaving our houses, stalked by a pestilence that is beyond our control or understanding, arising mysteriously from the miasma of a Chinese meat market, we find that though everything is now different, nothing really is. We have been told we cannot gather in large groups. That’s fine. We all have social anxiety now anyways and looked for ways to avoid others. We are told that school and work will henceforth be conducted via the ubiquitous screens. That’s great. We are really, really good at using screens as simulacras for real experiences. We are told that we should not get near each other in the grocery store and that we should be careful about touching anyone or anything. Of course. We are cynical and suspicious of others. This is not a stretch. We are told not to go out to eat but to have food delivered to us directly. Perfect! We have all fallen in love with DoorDash already. We have been told to disinfect and sanitize ad nauseum. Excellent. We’ve carried around hand sanitizer for years and have long made war against the unseen microbes. 

And so, while Yeats asks for a revelation, an apocalypse to give meaning to the titanic manifestations of his day, we have not sought even that. As world bending and grave and horrifying as the pandemic is, we are far less startled than we ought to be. Our convenience is only barely interrupted, and even that is being re-routed through other means. In being told to throw out our communal traditions of gathering together for work and play and fellowship and entertainment, we have found it all too easy to comply. Like a family heirloom inherited from a long dead great-grandmother, such traditions have been given place of honor. But when push comes to shove, when we have to move halfway across the country and we need to choose which items to keep and which to jettison, it is all too easy to toss out the heirloom. We no longer remember its real value or purpose, only that we are supposed to value it. The pandemic is thus an empty signifier, a kind of reverse sacrament, in which the outward sign points nowhere and to nothing. For the Greeks (or really, for any pre-modern people), the pandemic would be evidence of divine judgement or, failing that, collateral damage in a theomachy, a war between the gods. But we have lost our myth and we have no means by which to make sense of the titanic. Each individual is forced to reckon with the violence and horror and shock without recourse to a shared story, a shared tradition. There is no apokalypsis, no revelation, nothing but cold, terrifying microbes arising out of an empty universe and unleashed upon unsuspecting humanity. We have no recourse but our technocratic medicine. No hope but our bureaucratized governments. And no truth beyond what is recorded by our own senses. But, fortunately, the world does mean. The cosmos is intelligible. Atlas still holds the world and Apollo still speaks at Delphi, if only we listen. As C.S. Lewis has it:

“One who contended that a poem was nothing but black marks on white paper would be unanswerable if he addressed an audience who couldn’t read. Look at it through microscopes, analyze the printer’s ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say ‘This is the poem’. Those who can read, however, will continue to say the poem exists.”