The Samson Gesture

As the neoclassic period was a revolution into the past, so our present neo-romanticism is a persuasive echo of those subjective impulses that have characterized numerous previous epochs. Despite a relentless assertion by greeting card manufacturers, daytime television, and checkout-counter magazines, human beings are not naturally romantic. Romanticism is a stance, a bit of a pose that must be consciously—and often self-consciously—assumed. Conceived in idealism and dedicated to the proposition that all humans are superior, it seems to have an irresistible appeal in times when people’s minds fail them. Romanticism’s deliberately irrational base is shored up by emotionalism and buttressed by sentimentality. These materials, we should understand, are among the poorest one might choose for building a foundation, for a base anchored by such things is subject to all winds and responsive to every pressure.

Neither an era nor a person becomes romantic in one overmastering epiphany. Indeed, there are no romantic children: romanticism is strictly an adult or, more accurately, an adolescent affliction. As we grow out of childhood, we degenerate from childish realism to teenage skepticism, and skepticism makes us easy prey for romantic blandishment. No one remains skeptical for long. As Norman Forster pointed out years ago, skeptics by definition can affirm nothing—and that includes their own skepticism. Being skeptical about skepticism starts an inevitable pendulum swing toward simple belief. In its highest manifestation, this belief becomes faith; in its lowest, it is no more than credulity. Those who swing all the way back from credulity end in cynicism—that condition of intellectual and emotional exhaustion that is not merely a prelude to despair but is the hallmark of despair. For that reason, the true opposite of faith is not doubt but despair. Doubt can be the start of belief, while faith can only be totally countered by despair, just as love can only be truly thwarted by selfishness.

I would speak of love briefly because this is the attribute most lacking in romantic periods. Such a statement is not so much a paradox as it is unanalyzed fact. Focusing upon oneself is the antithesis of love, which can never be less than two. How clearly our popular songs give us away today—“My Way,” “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” Current slang is equally revealing: “Do you own thing.” Caressing one’s ego is no substitute for the empathy of shared respect and affection, and no protestation of sympathy or general concern for a “cause” is persuasive if our relationships are ambiguous. Some quick tests concerning the essential nature of our involvement should be whether we can serve by rather than above, regularly rather than occasionally, and, perhaps, most revealing, without recognition. Serving the attractive, the deserving, and the appreciative is easy; the tests of love involve the unlovely.

If romanticism is short on love, it is usually—and deliberately—long on ignorance. In fact, a return to the primitive response—instinctive rather than learned— rallies romantics of every age. Yet even simplicity is not sought; it is awaited. The discipline, the apprenticeship that earns access to basic truths requires an ordering of life that seems to be anathema to romantic yearners. Like Alexander of old, they would rather cut knots than untie them. The fact that cutting knots always ruins the rope and makes further use of it impractical has little appeal to those whose chronology is restricted to NOW and whose horizons are bounded by HERE. The obviously simplistic are easily recognized, however, and they rarely have much of an impact. The half-educated are another, and far more serious, matter. These are they who have learned to carp, but have not yet learned to criticize. These are they who know enough to spot the ore but cannot refine the gold. These are they who dream of unearned breakthroughs, who forget, if they were ever aware, that the Curies and Flemings were prepared to understand the significance of their seeming luck. A better world does not “come about.” It is made. A clever slogan may thrust through sham and hypocrisy, but superficiality is a widely circulated counterfeit of simplicity. The surface nature of a label cannot be forgotten with impunity. The label should alert us to what we may expect, but no description of contents substitutes for experiencing what is inside, multi-dimensional and many flavored. Perhaps T. S. Eliot stated the scholarly ideal effectively when he said that the “end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” We are not given knowledge; we earn it—and this principle applies as clearly in sacred matters as in secular ones. We can only learn by faith as we have prepared ourselves to receive.

Romantic ages abound in folk heroes. From Child Roland to Manfred, from Thoreau to Yoko and John, the aspirations of a period seem to focus in personal manifestations that catch, if only for a moment, the urges that lie behind the romantic image. For years I have wondered if there were not an archetype that would help us understand the continuity behind the difference. We hear the same tone in separate tongues and from distant lands; a sense of deja vu plucks at our consciousness.

I am now convinced that the pristine romantic lived not in Camelot but in ancient Israel. Appropriately, we know little of his background. All romantic heroes seem to spring into existence full blown. If we had time to reflect on this phenomenon we might be tempted to reiterate that children are not romantic—and neither are adults who have really grown up. We cannot, therefore, consider the childhood—or old age—of a folk hero. He must be forever young, physical, and mindless.

In the camp of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol, we meet such a man in Samson. Blessed of God from birth with the calling of a Nazarite (John the Baptist had a similar blessing), Samson grew up very much an individual. Rebelling early against the establishment, and clearly showing that he did not discriminate among peoples, he left his Israelitish home for the cities of the Philistines. Finding there a woman who pleased him, and using this as the only qualification needed, he demanded that his parents procure her for him. To all entreaties that he seek a wife among his own he defiantly asserted: “Get her for me, for she pleaseth me well.” Now, casually breaking his parent’s hearts did not mean that Samson was unsentimental about his father and mother: romantics never forget the sentimental token. The record duly acknowledges that Samson did bring his parents a handful of honey on one occasion. Unfortunately, this is the only incident in the entire story that shows Samson thinking of anyone except himself.

Just as parents (ancient or modern) so often do, Samson’s father, Manoah, tried to humor his romantic son. He arranged for a marriage with the Philistine woman, but Samson becomes involved in a guessing game that offended his ego and left the marriage feast in a petulant huff. Quite unconcerned about the hopelessness of his intended wife’s position, he did not return until she had been given to another.

Enraged upon learning that she has not waited, Samson begins the first of several cruel tricks on the Philistines that jeopardize all his people. To the Israelites’ pleading that he give himself up so that others will be spared, he replied with stunning irrationality: “As they did unto me, so have I done unto them.”

The story of Samson and Delilah is almost too embarrassing to relate. Milton could not bear to make Samson out to be a complete fool in Samson Agonistes, but the original story is one of hopelessly indulgent stupidity. Samson’s tale is not an account of a scheming, clever woman who deceives a lovesick suitor. In fact, Delilah wasted no time in subtlety, and Samson was quite aware of what he was doing. As an archetypal romantic, however, he could not believe he would have to accept the consequences of his folly. Even after he was shorn, blinded, and used as cheap machinery to run a Philistine mill, he still thought only of himself: he prayed not for power to redeem a misspent life, but strength to be avenged for the loss of his eyes.

If we shake our heads a bit incredulously at the spectacle of a man whose only hope is to destroy and whose only thought is of himself, we need to shake the cobwebs of centuries from our eyes and consider the Samson gestures that characterize our own time. To plead that some things must be destroyed in order that better things can prevail is to seek positive ends through negative means. One need look no further than personal experience—no matter how limited—to know that the explicitly negative cannot be successfully tied to the abstractly positive. True, Samson destroyed three-thousand Philistines in his cataclysmic suicide. This fact is explicit enough, but we are given no indication that this brought about any equally explicit, positive result. In our woolly yearning we assume it will. It must! History offers little evidence that romantic gestures are even significant, must less positive. The odor of ego that usually surrounds our aspirations for humankind should warn us about what we are allowing to happen. The bifocals of our own inadequacies make it possible for us to keep our eyes on the stars and our feet in the mire.

Those who cite Thoreau in support of their romantic fantasies should read him carefully. Commenting dryly on those who would reform the world, he suggests that the only reform that is meaningful takes place in the hearts of individual men before they get up each morning. This focus on personal responsibility rescues the individual from the eccentric. A viable society is only a collection of sensitive, cooperative individuals. Personal freedom is the first casualty of chaos.

Rationality is the sine qua non of education. Irrationality may be the disguise of the saint, but it is usually the refuge of the egocentric. Gestures dramatizing the supposedly intolerable have a tendency to rally and focus opposition as well as support. If good people who would repudiate romantic postures are to transmute rhetoric into results, what we need is not necessarily more understanding or even compassion. Indeed, we may never fully understand one another, and compassion shrinks under pressure. What we must have and use is more imagination. Imagination is the great resource of scholarship. Realism without imagination is static; realists have to make what they need. Imaginative people waste little time bemoaning what they lack. Instead, they adapt what they can find and constantly come up with fresh combinations. They move in the strength of successful achievement without smugness, bringing all resources to bear. Above all, they know that small changes, in the aggregate, constitute a continuing revolution that does not have to eat its children.

Romanticism’s flaws help us understand that we cannot be satisfied with what we have been, although what we will be must echo what we now are. We cannot be content with gestures: the pillars of society will come down if enough force is applied. Let imaginative scholarship be part of the personal arsenal we commit to improving the world.