Our culture wars continue to rage. It is a state of extremes breeding a crisis of extremism. As often happens in crisis, we tend to recreate the past. Dionysian hedonism is alive and well in the ethos of pleasure-seeking progressivism; in response, post-Christian “neoreactionaries” are resurrecting the stern moralities of ancient Greece and Rome.
This is uncharted territory for the older generation of conservatives, who used to speak of classical thought and orthodox Christianity under the one heading of the “Western tradition” as the antidote to modernity’s ills. At that time, the common ground between the likes of Marcus Aurelius and Thomas Aquinas, namely a shared definition of virtue as self-mastery, seemed vastly superior to what passed for an ethical system in the cultural mainstream. But things are less clear today.
In fact, as writers like Tara Isabella Burton have documented, some of the right’s neoreactionary influencers are explicitly opposed to what they consider the emasculating effects of Christianity. Where the Gospel celebrates self-mastery as a means to Christ-like selflessness, post-Christian conservatives celebrate it as a means to worldly greatness.
The Church, of course, refuted these errors during its infancy, and those refutations have never gone out of date. Nonetheless, what is easy to accept in theory is sometimes difficult to embrace in practice. The continued attraction of many otherwise orthodox believers to the neoreactionary movement shows just how hard it can be to tell where the Christian and Greco-Roman definitions of virtue diverge.
Perhaps the solution is to be found not in further argument, but in poetry. In “Christianity and Poetry,” Dana Gioia reminds us that “some truths require the utmost power of language to carry the full weight of their meaning…. To stir faith in things unseen, poetry evokes a deeper response than do abstract ideas.” Here, Christians are blessed to inherit Richard Wilbur’s “A Baroque Wall-fountain in the Villa Sciarra,” a formal masterpiece that uses three images of water, in various stages of complexity, to explore three contending visions of virtue. Arguably Wilbur’s greatest work, it makes a powerful case for Christianity’s superiority to paganism.
The poem begins with a lush description of the titular structure, an Early Modern wall-fountain in a Roman municipal park. Well-placed caesuras and heavy enjambment mimic the “effortless descent” of the fountain’s “sweet” liquid over a family of stone fauns, who appear totally absorbed in the play of light and shadow around them. Almost twenty-four lines, exultant in form and content, are devoted to this portrait. They are a monument to sensual satisfaction, amounting even to “saecular ecstasy.”
But that ecstasy entails being “blinded.” One of the fauns, in particular, is so hypnotized by the “swift reticulum” of the water that her face has been “bent on the sand floor.” Literally “goatish,” drunk on “flash…and waterfall,” and rendered imperceptive of the outside world by an excess of pleasure, this is a bestial vision that most self-respecting readers would not consciously aspire to.
Wilbur then conjures an altogether different monument: the Maderno fountain in Saint Peter’s square. Where the Villa Sciarra work is baroque, warm, and teeming with life, its Vatican counterpart is spare, restrained, and impersonal. If the former is an image of Dionysian hedonism, the latter is the very picture of classical self-mastery.
“[A]re we not / More intricately expressed in the plain fountain…?” The reader encounters this question roughly halfway through the poem. Wisely reluctant to place himself in the company of the inhumanly sensuous fauns, he is tempted to answer in the affirmative. But in a series of subtle turns, Wilbur contests any easy assumptions or conclusions.
The characteristic feature of the Maderno fountain is its “main jet,” whose action is expressed as a continual struggle fulfilled only “in the act of rising, until / The very wish of water is reversed.” In this depiction, Wilbur appeals less to our imagination than to our reason. In fact, by rejecting natural imagery and the pull of gravity alike, he characterizes the Maderno fountain as consciously opposed to the physical world and its inherent inclinations. Parallel to the vision of the fauns’ “ecstasy,” then, the rising jet offers its own vision: an “illumined version of itself.”
Here, the poem turns again. For one, Wilbur’s choice of words connotes the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection: a subtle warning that something is amiss. Additionally, the main jet at its pinnacle is portrayed as a “gnatlike shimmering,” which may be eye-catching, but inspires more disgust than delight. Finally, despite its best efforts, that shimmering inevitably falls back to earth, where it is welcomed by a pathetic spattering: the sound of “its own applause.”
All this suggests that the self-mastery the Maderno fountain represents, though an aspiration to nobility, is ultimately hollowed out by its vanity. Moreover, the fountain’s self-congratulation at its moment of greatest abasement indicates that it is no less blinded than the fauns are. The fact that its blindness comes from pride instead of pleasure makes little difference; in the end, the “flatteries of spray” are the same.
Could not the same criticisms, with little alteration, be applied to the neoreactionary conception of virtue? It is well, good, and an affirmation of humanity’s distinctiveness to pursue something higher than the animalistic contentment of the hedonist. But if the goal of that pursuit is simply self-aggrandizement, it is bound to end in an arrogant and effectively empty austerity. Wilbur never says so outright, but he does not have to; his imagery has done the job already.
The poet then reconsiders the fauns. Less repulsive now that the shortcomings of their antithesis have been revealed, their ability to “rest in the fulness of desire / For what is given” is felt as a condemnation of “our disgust and our ennui” with the human condition’s limitations. Perhaps it would have been better, we are asked, if we had remained in the wall-fountain’s “bizarre, / Spangled, and plunging house,” content with created goods?
Thankfully, Wilbur does not leave the reader at such a disconcerting impasse. Rather, he introduces a new vision. Abruptly, we are made to see Francis of Assisi “lay[ing] in sister snow / Before the wealthy gate,” a turn of phrase that references the saint’s self-exposure to the cold for the purpose of union with Christ’s suffering.
This portrait seems out of place next to the descriptions of two stone fountains, but it paradoxically unites what appeared contradictory in those descriptions. For Francis’s loving embrace of the winter elements is a purification of desire without contempt for the created order. His “freezing and praising” is neither the “saecular ecstasy” of the fauns nor a vain striving after worldly greatness, but both a synthesis and a transcendence of the disparate paganisms that the Villa Sciarra and Maderno works represent.
The saint, of course, embodies Christian virtue. He distinguishes himself in that, even as he approaches spiritual perfection, his gaze is fixed not inward, but on God and God’s gifts. It is an abnegation of both self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement that empowers him to genuinely exceed his limitations and foretaste the “bliss” of the world to come.
Here is the promise of Christianity in full: that the lover who is freed from blindness (of pleasure and of pride alike) is freed to truly behold the Beloved; thereby, he is imbued with the Beloved’s own strengths. Born again in Christ, his “eyes become the sunlight.” No amount of humanly achievable self-mastery could compare with this beatific vision.
Wilbur concludes by forgoing the conceit of fountains for the image of pure water, which the “hand is [made] worthy of” by holiness. It is a fitting exchange, since water can symbolize the power of humility, itself the antidote to the self-centered gaze. In the ancient Chinese poetry of the Tao Te Ching, for example, “The highest form of goodness is like water” because it “knows how to benefit all things without striving with them” and shows that “the weak overcomes the strong.”
This natural wisdom is confirmed by the writings of Christian mystics like Saint John of the Cross. The Ascent of Mount Carmel explicitly urges believers to prioritize submission to God over the pursuit of moral virtue for its own sake. Together, these insights reinforce Christ’s own condemnation of the self-righteous Pharisees, and they constitute an urgently needed correction to the post-Christian right.
We are not wrong to seek a nobler alternative to Dionysian hedonism. But as “A Baroque Wall-fountain in the Villa Sciarra” teaches, it is only with obedience to God that the drive for self-mastery can transcend the self; it is only by holding greatness and humility in tandem that we can become worthy of the strengths we strive to possess; and it is only in “freezing and praising” that we will satisfy our society’s yearning for authentic morality.
