Karen Blixen and the Apocalypse of Man: a Voegelinian meditation.

"The Age of Reason has received its name, not because it was particularly reasonable, but because the thinkers of the eighteenth century believed to have found in Reason, capitalized, the substitute for divine order."

--Eric Voegelin, "Necessary Moral Bases for Communication in a Democratic Society" (1)

I

By the phrase "the Apocalypse of Man" the political philosopher Eric Voegelin meant to indicate the spiritual decadence--of egophany, gnostic superbia, and libido dominandi--that characterizes modernity in its secular and materialist moods, and that has contributed directly to the pathos, bloody and nightmarish, of the twentieth century. In Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man, Voegelin notes how, in the "positive" philosophies that eventuate in the convulsion of the French Revolution, one encounters a "perversion of the idea of order" that stems, in its turn, from "the instrumentalization of man." (2) In this negative apocalypse, the germs of which first appear in a distinctively modern form. in the anthropological reductions of Locke and Descartes, as Voegelin says, "The ground of existence in the Pascalian sense is denied to man." (3) The idea of a chain of being, with man in his proper niche and God both presiding over and communicating with the whole, is lost; and so too is the understanding of man as a creature of limitation and fallibility. In Voegelin's vocabulary, the subject who submits to an ideology, invariably "anti-Christian," of man-and-nothing-but-man closes himself off from participation in the "transcendental realissimum" (4) of God and in so doing reduces himself to the servant of a purely and savagely immanent agenda. Thus, "the growth of the soul through an internal process, which is nourished through communication with transcendental reality, is replaced by a formation of conduct through external management" and "disorder of the soul is established as the nature of man." (5) Voegelin has traced this perverse impulse in modernity to the gnostic heresies of the late medieval period--for example, to the work of Joachim di Fiore (1145-1202)--and therefore to the dissolution of faith that accompanied the fragmentation of Christendom and the rise of material science and of the national states. (6)

In his discussion of Bolshevism and National Socialism as classic rebellions against reality, Voegelin often draws on literary sources to supplement his own analysis. In Hitler and the Germans (1961), for example, he makes masterly use of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities, and Heimito von Doderer's Demons for illustrative purposes; elsewhere he draws on Dostoyevsky. In Voegelin's massive work there nowhere appears a reference to Karen Blixen (1885-1962)--the Danish author better known under her pen name of Isak Dinesen--but Blixen, like Musil or Doderer, also saw into modernity's heart of darkness with searchlight penetration. In many ways herself a specimen of the modern consciousness--a Nietzschean and an acolyte of that Good European, Georg Brandes--she nevertheless reacted strongly against the prevailing secular dispensation and argued for the validity of a medieval code; a nonbeliever among too-unctuous believers, she became an apologist for the old ways in confrontation with the deniers of God.

Blixen's references and allusions are her own, of course, but they correspond uncannily with Voegelin's: so much so as to suggest a strong parallelism in their thinking. Blixen alludes to Plato and the Stoics, Gothic Catholicism, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, all positively; and by way of chastening criticism, to the gnostics, even to Joachim di Fiore by name, to the positivists and materialists who set the scene for and who then followed in the wake of 1789, and finally to the Russian revolutionaries for their nihilism and to the Wagner of Tristan und Isolde, with its cult of love-in-death. The link between Plato as positively evaluated and Wagner as negatively evaluated lies in the concept of eros. In the two items from Blixen's oeuvre that I propose to bring under consideration in what follows, one can also observe the aristocratic radical (a Brandesian term) in the Baroness of Rungstedlund, who often sets aside her antinomian persona in order to emphasize the valuable order implicit in normative concepts such as la grace de Dieu and I'ancien regime. Blixen understood from direct and painful experience the need for a spiritual regimen, and a truly antitraditional program could properly horrify her when it raised its repellent head.

II

One thing in particular could abruptly short-circuit the Nietzschean in Blixen: modern secular arrogance in its wicked spate. In 1939, Blixen received a traveling fellowship to report from Germany for the Copenhagen newspaper Politiken. Her visit began on 1 March and ended on 2 April 1940. She then set her notes aside for the duration of the conflict. The long essay Letters from a Land at War, appearing belatedly in Heretica in 1948, records Blixen's experiences and sets forth her analysis of the totalitarian state. She sees National Socialism, quite without any fanciness of political or philosophical vocabulary, as a manifestation of pernicious ideas not accidentally associated with but intrinsic to the Enlightenment. She sees the Nazi state, that is, as the ferocious abolition of an immemorially improvised and fundamentally decent civic order unthinkable except in the framework of Christendom. The essence of the Enlightenment manifests itself, in Blixen's harsh judgment, as the elevation of reason, so-called, above tradition, identified with a putatively intolerant and therefore intolerable old order that must be swept away. A refrain of the essay is the depressing formula, to paraphrase it, a young Ph.D. told me. The Nazis indeed found early and widespread support among the professors and their students, precisely those who thought of themselves as the most enlightened.

From the moment Blixen arrived in Das Reich, various "well-informed" (7) academic experts in the state's employ oversaw her itinerary and made sure to interpret correctly for her the sights and people that she encountered. These guides could call on a mass of "facts and figures" (8) for the visitor's education. They had ready rejoinders to all critical questions. "One could almost believe," she confides, "that in this people there is a peculiar sense of life as a mathematical problem which is known to have a solution." (9) The totalitarian state thus represented itself to Blixen through its collegial functionaries--"doctores," she calls them, using the Latin--of the arts and sciences. So: "The Ministry [of Propaganda] attached to me a young Ph.D." (10) Again: "There was a young Ph.D. from the Arbeitsfront." (11) And again: "I ... met a Ph.D. who had a position in the organization 'Kraft durch Freude,' which was under the Arbeitsfront." (12) Nazidom wanted also to appear as a high cultural renaissance struggling to redeem the decadence of a fallen civilization and therefore as the vanguard of a happy future: "One hears much talk about popular art. Not a small cultural elite, but the great German people itself will, they say, now create the art of the Third Reich." (13) The "they," of course, designates the cadre, the enthusiastic illuminati endowed with what they regard, in every sense, as a higher education. But the doctrine, since it runs counterintuitively and cuts itself off from reality, requires aggressive interpreters, who require in their turn a police force licensed to coerce in the name of doctrine.

The very fluency of the discourse, its blithe postponement of tough questions by means of slogans and doxologies, all by itself aroused Blixen's suspicion and inclined her against the suave attempt at persuasion. Never mentioned but always present in the record of doings is the fact that the Wehrmacht has just now swallowed up half of Poland, a nation that Blixen admired, while throwing the other half to Stalin's Soviet Empire.

Blixen immediately thwarted her overseers by making an unauthorized excursion to Bremen to renew her acquaintance with a man last present in her sight "in Mombasa in December 1913" and who "belonged to the good old times." (14) Blixen's account of her 1940 reunion with General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who had commanded the German Imperial force in East Africa that fought against the combined British and South African forces latterly under Jan Smuts, is the positive reference for everything else in the essay. (15) Her memories are important. Blixen, who involved herself peripherally in the fighting and knew the officers on the Allied side, "heard [Lettow] mentioned every day by the English [who] spoke of him with great respect, not only as a skillful commander and a brave soldier, but as a chivalrous enemy." (16) His foes, Blixen says, "developed a sort of love for him" until in this manner "Let-tow became a myth." (17) Finally, with the Armistice, "his enemies mourned his disappearance from their lives; there was 'nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.'" (18) Yet nothing about Lettow ever suggested the self-advertising hero; Lettow was not an incipient Duce or Fuhrer. Blixen remarks that he was "a very unobtrusive man." (19) She compares him, of all people, with the soft-spoken Albert Schweitzer: "they have in common in their deportment an unusual modesty and thoughtfulness towards their fellow human beings." (20)

When, over dinner, Blixen asked the general what it had been like to fight with no hope of prevailing, as he had done in East Africa, he answered, "Perhaps one should say that in such a certainty there may lie as great an inspiration as in any faith in victory." (21) After his defeat, Let-tow traveled to England, where his former adversaries feted him, "They sang For He's a Jolly Good Fellow ... and that is the equivalent of a Victoria Cross." (22) The old warrior is appropriately ensconced in Bremen, where "the seafaring people ... have brought home to their city very beautiful things from the other side of the globe ... These commercially adept people had their hearts in ships." (23) Blixen ended her Bremen excursion by going on Sunday to the Liebe-Frau Kirche, where an usher showed her "a collection of weapons from the time of the Crusades. ... which got all of Christianity to take arms ... and brought a new culture to the lands of the West." (24)

Blixen spent the remainder of her sojourn in and around Berlin, escorted by the "political clergy." (25) Blixen means the Bremen section of Letters to stand in contrast with the rest. She means Lettow himself to stand in contrast with those inevitable "doctores." British officers follow the old custom of singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." The enthusiasts of the Hitler regime, "untiring, zealous unto death, without any doubt or hesitation in their souls," (26) are full of talk, invariably prescriptive, about what will now supersede long-established--hence, time-vetted--custom. Blixen meets the leader of the Reichsfrauenbund and hears how she systematically orders the lives of German women "by Gau, Kreis, Ort, Zelle, and Block, down to the very basis of the population, the individual family." (27) One of the ubiquitous degree holders is a high official of the labor organization Kraft durch Freude. Blixen tells him that he must have gotten it backwards, as "joy" seems to her rightfully the goal and "power" merely the means. Putting the latter before the former would be an ethical absurdity and an operational impossibility. The doctor responds with a discourse about the Will in its struggle against a recalcitrant reality: "We of the Third Reich ... don't like to say that something cannot be done." (28) When Blixen responds, "some things ... resist any design," especially art, her interlocutor insists that nothing comes about that is "not created ... by the force of human will." (29) When she argues again, "some things are created by the grace of God," he condescends a smile and asks her, "do you really belong to l'Ancien Regime to such a degree ... that you believe in la grace de Dieu?" (30)

The old regime was once a "new culture," the one that had its birth in the Crusades and took the name of Christendom; it was a culture of commerce, exploration, and art. It might boast of grace at the same time that it believed in God. But the past exerts no grip on the zealots. Nazidom is the new "new culture" that conjures itself into existence through prescription, as a feat of the will, night unto a thousand years. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony becomes, in a betrayal of its real meaning, the heralding anthem of the novus ordo seclorum, as does Shakespeare's Lear, also grossly misunderstood. So too does the model of the future Berlin, "showing what the city will become once the work of demolition and construction ... has been completed." (31) Demolition goes before the always-postponed reconstruction; the cynical promise of material improvement becomes the excuse for wanton havoc. "The German will--that is God's grace towards Germany," says the doctor. (32) Despite all this Teutonic voluntas programmatically at work on human and plastic material, "the vista of Nazism ... has a limited perspective." (33)

Her colloquies and experiences eventually bring to Blixen's mind the bloody year 1789 and the French revolutionaries: "About Robespierre one may believe he was a god or a superman; he was certainly not a human being, for everything human was alien to him." (34) Marat "has no presence except an incredible loud mouth," and like Robespierre "he did not indulge himself in humaneness." (35) Danton she associates with nihilism and with "political ideas ... proclaimed like religion." (36) Inimical to this ersatz religion is anything human--anything modest enough to grasp that the present might suffer in a just comparison with the past or that the apotheosis of Reason and the Will can only occur through the sacrifice of spontaneity and grace.

III

The first paragraph of "The Deluge at Norderney" assimilates the post-Enlightenment social phenomenon of embourgeoisiement, in the year 1835, with the image of a reversion from order to disorder in the formless medium of the sea. It is perhaps a coincidence that the motto of the Social Democrats and their Radical allies in the Danish national electoral campaigns of 1934-35 was "Stauning or Chaos," Carl Stauning being the SD candidate for prime minister. The economy was in trouble and new social and political developments were in the offing, as they had been a century earlier when Denmark experienced a near civil war. Denmark's next-door neighbor, Germany, had grown bellicose, another parallel with the situation a century earlier. Blixen's fluvial metaphor conveys what one might call, using a Voegelinian term, the dissolution of the ground. The flooded coast becomes "an immense gray plane, alarmingly alive" in which "nothing seemed to be firm." (37) The same beginning, along with the title, also invokes the tale of Noah from the Old Testament and registers the idea that God might, should He so deign, arrange the proper chastisement of a megalomaniacal mankind. At the same time, everywhere in the tale, Blixen makes reference to the French Revolution, as if the turbulence of 1789--of the Directorate and the Terror--had never really ceased but instead had metastasized en camouflage to the corners of Europe.

Norderney, a hitherto little-frequented island of dunes and heaths on the Atlantic shore of Northern Saxony, has become a fashionable resort where the gentry consent to mix with the nouveaux riches of the middle classes. They follow the allure, as Blixen says, of "the romantic spirit of the age, which delighted in ruins, ghosts, and lunatics, and counted a stormy night on the heath and a deep conflict of the passions a finer treat for the connoisseur than the ease of the salon and the harmony of a philosophic system." (38) Before the advent of fashion, the peasant folk of the area regarded the seaside, so vulnerable to inundation, as the preserve of "the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity." (39)

To the romantic charm of the salty atmosphere Blixen attaches "the new political stir" (40) that has given a dose of frisson to the local Junkers. Some habitues of the hotel and its casino find in the "rank briny smell" of the tidelands the same excitation that they derive from "the smell of gunpowder over the battlefield." (41) The ideas of decay and violence thus mix with one another intoxicatingly. Midway through the tale, one of the four main characters speculates of another that he espouses "the revolutionary ideas of [the young] generation." (42)

Other themes connected with civic malady touch Blixen's main theme. A passion for divertissement--betokened by the popularity of the Norderney resort and by the imperiousness of fashion--always signifies the deracination of a people from its ethical soil. A stroll among the dunes is not differentiated, under the idea of divertissement, from the excitement of " the new political stir." In her reference to the "romantic spirit" that attracted the leisured classes to the North Atlantic littoral, Blixen reminds us that Romanticism, whatever else it may be in a positive way, also incorporates a morbid pleasure in ruins. When she describes the effect on onlookers of the collapse of a granary in the floodwaters, Blixen makes clear that such pleasure can only be indulged by the subject's bracketing of both the cause of ruin and its human consequences. One of the witnesses, himself lately rescued from the disaster, rises involuntarily from his place in the lifeboat only to seat himself again, "very pale." (43) The origin of ruin might lie in abandonment for better quarters or in benign neglect, but it is more likely to lie in deliberate destruction by an agent. Here the flood serves as agent, but the flood, as we have seen, is a metaphor for libidinous action sans restraint. Suddenly, for the onlooker, a ruin is no longer an aesthetic phenomenon; it speaks of displaced people and of the wreckage of lives.

Displacement and destruction along with the propaganda of Blut, Boden, und Germanentum had accompanied Prussia's martial annexation of Danish Slesvik and Holsten as German Schleswig and Holstein in 1864. Considering Blixen's assessment of Nazism in Letters from a Land at War, biological topics such as blood purity and race pride, which she ascribes to the interest of two of the four major characters, acquire the status of a prognosis; indeed, Blixen characterizes the pair in question as "devils in racial pride." (44) The reduction of the full humanity to the merely biological category implied by the term relates, in this sense, to the flood itself and to its destructive progress, which has reduced the differentiations of the countryside to gray homogeneity. The ground of human being is not blood, but spirit. He who discounts spirit inclines to treat man as so much matter. Elsewhere Blixen endows her dramatic personages with wildness, fanaticism, and megalomania. (45) Finally--like the National Socialists and Marxists and other modern ideologues--these same personae espouse "doctrines," at least one of which, the theory of the Third and Last Age of Mankind, of the Realm that shall last a thousand years, derives from "ancient and medieval sources," (46) especially "Joachim de Flora." (47)

Students of Voegelin will recognize in Joachim the aboriginal precursor of Hegel and Marx and the source, through his Tractatus super quatuor evangelica, of the specifically modern strain of world-immanent ("God is dead") ideology. When Blixen mentions doctrines, one should think ahead to those official state-employed doctores who blithely apologize for the Third Reich in Letters from a Land at War. Blixen could understand Nazism as a derailment of religion when she visited Germany in 1940 because she had imagined totalitarian politics under the same category six years earlier while writing "The Deluge."

Although as is typical for Blixen the frame contains many intricately nestled stories, the plot of "The Deluge" is simple: the rising waters, an anomalous tide whose cause remains unexplained, overwhelm the resort and its environs including extensive hectares of adjacent farmland. Boats from the parts that have escaped drowning set out to rescue, first, the guests of the resort and then the peasant families abruptly stranded on their rooftops and in their barn lofts by the incursion of the waters. Late in the evening, an already overloaded boat finds a peasant family of four stranded in the hayloft of their barn and in order that they be brought aboard four occupants of the boat agree to exchange places with them. The verbal supposition is that the rescuers will return at first light, although tacitly the complete submergence of the barn before morning is understood. A dog leaps from the boat at the last second to join the sojourners. To pass the night, awaiting their fate, the four engage in a round of soliloquies and colloquies, while sipping from a jug of distilled spirits and munching on a loaf of grainy peasant bread. (48) The situation resembles that set forth in the frame of Boccaccio's Decameron, but, as the monologues and exchanges have to do with love, identity, and transcendence, features of Plato's Symposium also hauntingly imbue the scene. Blixen's flood is like Boccaccio's plague--a symbol of spiritual turmoil. None of her characters is a Socrates; each gives evidence of a deformed eros, rather like the other speakers in Plato's dialogue.

Blixen's attribution of the flood to no known cause is thus a deliberate element in the construction: as the waters represent spiritual havoc, so the real origin lies in the specimen characters that the author has put on display against the scene of watery chaos. They are, as one might say, in order of perversity: Cardinal Hamilcar von Sehestedt, or rather a man named Kasparson claiming to be the Cardinal; Mademoiselle Malin Nat-og-Dag, an aged spinster, quite mad, who stems from an old family of the Danish Junkers; the same lady's ward, a young woman who takes the name of Calypso; and finally Johann Maersk, an unhappy young man from Copenhagen.

Sehestedt-Kasparson is the most demonic and perverse of the tetrad. Readers will best see him as a single character, despite the fact that Kasparson admits that he has first murdered the Cardinal and then impersonated him during the deluge. Early in the tale, Blixen divulges a few details of the Cardinal's ilk and type. Out of a kind of inertia the Sehestedts remained steadfastly Catholic during the religious wars, which in Denmark were especially horrific; yet they never showed any noticeable spirituality until a son of the family late in the eighteenth century revealed to his tutor extraordinary intellectual talents. Hamilcar became a priest whose "light of genius ... was impossible to ignore." (49) Indeed, "there existed a tale of how the Pope himself, after the young priest had been presented to him, had seen in a dream how this youth had been set apart by providence to bring back the great Protestant countries under the Holy See." (50) The Pope says of Sehestedt on the occasion of dispatching him to the North: "If, after the destruction of our present world, I were to charge one human being with the construction of a new world, the only person whom I would trust with this work would be my young Hamilcar." (51) After assigning the commission the Holy Father, as Blixen tells, "quickly crossed himself two or three times." (52)

It is as if he were warding off the intuition of evil. Suspicion exists, then, over Sehestedt's "ideas and powers" and "his visionary gift." (53) Blixen's little details suggest that the Cardinal suffers from the flaw of superbia, as "to him everything seemed possible." (54) He tells the Lady Nat-og-Dag, that, "every human being has, I believe, at times given room to the idea of creating a world himself." (55) He adds that he has been granted "omnipotence" and that he does not "shrink from the fantastic." (56) In 1940, six years after the writing of "The Deluge," one of Blixen's Nazi guides would remark that Germans under Hitler "do not like to hear that a thing cannot be done." Everything must be possible, whether it really is or not. In the mind of the super-bus, known in the twentieth century as the Ubermensch or Superman, the claim of a thing's possibility magically precedes and assures the same thing's ultimate actuality. Another mark of the superbus is his absolute certainty of knowledge; this is a quality that the man assumes belongs to himself uniquely.

Readers learn that in Norderney, as elsewhere, people "believed of [Sehestedt] that he could work miracles" and that "people took to thinking strange things of him," but no word in the passage says that the Cardinal discouraged these rumors. Sehestedt's reason for being at the resort fits into Blixen's subtle assemblage.

  [He] had, during the summer, been living in a small fisherman's house
  at some distance from the bath, to collect his writings of many years
  in a book upon the Holy Ghost. With Joachim of Flora, who was born
  in 1202, the Cardinal held that while the book of the Father is given
  in the Old Testament, and that of the Son, in the New, the Testament
  of the Third Person of the Trinity still remained to be written. This
  he had made the task of his life. (57)

Not only has the Cardinal flirted his lifelong with heresy, but in undertaking the Pope's ambition to undo the Reformation and in allowing the aura of a miracle worker to hover about him he has slowly mantled himself in the role of man-redeemer, the Dux e Babylone, worked out by Joachim himself in the Tractatus. That his valet, Kasparson, has murdered Sehestedt and taken on his identity only shows the danger in the Cardinal's arrogant self-election, for superbia is contagious, inspiring envy and imitation, and corrupts any established order. Voegelin's category is egoph-any, the revelation of the self as that which subsumes all else, including God. Kasparson already thinks of himself, by way of his bastard derivation, as the true Dux, being a son, if illegitimately, of that aristocrat, the Duc d'Orleans, who turned Jacobin and endorsed the regicide. Two leader-redeemers are noncompossible, so Kasparson repeats the crime of Cain against his brother Abel to acquire, for himself, Sehestedt's carefully cultivated and unique charisma. "If only [the Cardinal's followers] would have made me their master," Kasparson says, "I would have served them all my life." (58) Only this night, however, have the members of the laity "seen the face of God in my face." (59)

Malin Nat-og-Dag is another case of egomania and spiritual degeneration. Her peculiar surname means "Night-and-Day" in Danish. Blixen so denominates her because between the bouts of her deeply sunk madness, she has flashes of candor and lucidity. Of both the lady and her ward, Calypso von Platen-Hallermund, Blixen writes that "although they behaved in the midst of danger with great self-control," they nevertheless gave an "impression of wildness which, within a peaceful age and society, only the vanishing and decaying aristocracy can afford to maintain." (60) Blixen also refers to Nat-og-Dag's "derangement of ... mind." (61) Nat-og-Dag, like Sehestedt-Kasparson, has heretical leanings. Her background is the Herrnhuten, a Moravian sect common to Northern Germany and Denmark. (62) As Blixen puts it, "Miss Malin ... ran amuck a little in her relation to doctrine." (63) If the Cardinal's deformation of spirit were that of megalomania in the direction of libido dominandi, the lady's is one of a savagely blighted eros. Nat-og-Dag has rejected men to remain a virgin. In her dotage, however, she has reconceived herself fantastically as a whoring sinner who has fornicated with lovers the world over and whom God has therefore certainly damned. "She believed herself to have been the grand courtesan of her time, if not the true great whore of Revelation." (64) The Whore of Revelation is, symbolically, the perfect mate for the Joachitic Dux e Babylone. Blixen compares Miss Malin's character to that of the legendary Queen Sigrid of Norway who invited her suitors to the hof, locked them in, and burned them alive, to show her spite. Blixen calls Nat-og-Dag's mad laughter "the laughter of liberation," (65) thus linking her deformed eros to the Cardinal's soterio-logical fantasy.

Both Calypso and Johann Maersk are likewise erotically deformed, but not through willed perversion, rather through the demiurgic machinations of others. Calypso, once orphaned, found herself in girlhood under the guardianship of Count August von Platen-Hallermund, a pederast who, in his manor at Angelshorn, maintained a harem of boys under the guise of initiating them into philosophy and mysticism. Calypso only discovers her femininity by accident, after having been sealed away in the chambers and treated like a sexless being for fourteen years. During her captivity--for that is what it amounts to--Calypso thought of the Count as a "minister of truth." (66) Miss Malin, in one of her lucid flashes, refers to Count August and his boys as "those falsifiers of truth." (67) The truth that they falsify is the truth of the sexual division, so that their heresy is a classic rebellion against the structure of creation. The case of Johann Maersk furnishes a second example of the same rebellion.Another aristocrat-homosexual tried once upon a time to make him over into his own image. The decadent Count Joachim Gersdorff (whose pregnant given name one should remark) manipulated and humiliated Maersk, who says in recollection of his melancholy that "I was made a true Joachim Gersdorff." (68) Maersk has been seeking to reestablish his own identity ever since.

IV

But the girl and the lad remain minor characters. Blixen puts the greater substance of her narrative into the dialogue of Sehestedt-Kasparson with Nat-og-Dag. When the latter asks the former whether he believes in the Fall of Man, he answers: "There has been a fall, but I do not hold that it is man who has fallen." (69) He believes, true to the gnostic pattern, "that there has been a fall in divinity," or, in heaven, "a tremendous overturning, equal to the French Revolution on earth, and its after-effects," and that "we are serving an inferior dynasty of heaven." (70) When Miss Malin inquires why Kasparson (he has now admitted his identity and his crime) killed Sehestedt, he says, "That moment, when I killed the Cardinal, that was the mating of my soul with destiny, with eternity, with the soul of God." (71) Sehestedt-Kasparson's contribution to the round of tales that each of the four tells during their common terminal confinement must be understood in light (so to speak) of his auto-apotheotic claim. Characteristically, it is a piece of apocrypha, a story of Simon Peter and the thief named Barabbas, to which the teller gives the name "The Wine of the Tetrarch." (72) Before he narrates his tale, in the longish build-up to it, Kasparson says to the Lady in passing, as though it were not significant, "I think I hear the cock's crow." (73)

It is a tale told by a betrayer: Kasparson's rhetorical aim is to throw the veracity of the Gospels in doubt by presenting a mockery of the Passion as more noble than the Passion itself. On the Wednesday after the Resurrection, Peter meets a Mephistophelean criminal in a tavern. He has been a man of appetites, the stranger says to Peter, whom a terrible affliction now visits. Wine, which he has always loved, has lost its taste for him and he thinks that this "may be due to the earthquake which we had on Friday; it has turned it all bad." (74) He recently and brutally waylaid a shipment of rare wine destined for the tetrarch but is reluctant to retrieve it lest it too should have gone sour to his tongue. The stranger expatiates on his dejection. Peter explains that Christ means for every man to take up the Cross--that the way of humility is the way of salvation. The glowering criminal now shows his many scars and proudly disdains the counsel. "He looked a magnificent figure," Kasparson says. (75) "I have been a great chief," Kasparson has Barabbas say, "my name shall be remembered." (76) The term chief corresponds to the concept of the due, in light of which, as we have seen, Kasparson conceives himself. In Barabbas, whose cognomen means "Son of the Father," Blixen's gnostic-nihilist finds the prototype of the superman according to whose homicidal model he himself acts. Barabbas's superbia is Kasparson's.

By this time in Blixen's extended parody of the Decameron and the Symposium, the dawn has appeared, and with it the final, fatal rising of the tide. Calypso and Johann lie asleep. The worst--Kasparson and Natog-Dag--are full of passionate intensity, while the best slumber through catastrophe unaware that the climax approaches. In a recasting of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, Nat-og-Dag and Sehestedt-Kasparson clasp one another in a morbid kiss as their demise becomes patent. But the nothingness of the bare gray expanse of flood as it now covers the world is not the defeat; it is rather the perverse triumph of the two pneumo-pathological rebels. It is in nihilism and destruction that all rebellions against creation must end.

Voegelin wrote on occasion of people whom he called "noetically sensitive types." Plato is the greatest exemplar of the species in Voegelin's analyses of history, but Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, even Robert Musil, also illustrate the phenomenon. In his noetic sensitivity, the subject witnesses the deformations of the day; he plays a prophetic role, often paying the prophet's hefty tariff in the prophet's sorrowful coin He finds himself rejected and scorned by those to whom he speaks. W.B. Yeats was such a type, and his lines on "The Second Coming" have entered folklore as foreseeing the blood and horror of the modern period in the twentieth century; T.S. Eliot is another, whose poems are a kind of Old Testament for the age of mass communications, atomic weaponry, and the catastrophic trans-valuation of all values. Karen Blixen should be added to the roster. "The Deluge at Norderney" shows her to have understood the totalitarian disaster with prescient clarity at a time when appeasement was the standing rule. Readings of other portions of the Blixen oeuvre would show how comprehensive her vision was in this regard. In another of the Seven Gothic Tales, "The Poet," one encounters a repetition of the critique of progressive ideology and of reason, culminating in a murder whose victim, Councilor Mathiesen, comes close to passing beyond the reader's sympathy on account of his manipulative and arrogant treatment of others. In The Young Man with a Carnation, the first item in the cycle called Winter's Tales (1942), one encounters by contrast a fully erotically integrated poetartist who finds nondenominational but genuine reconciliation with God.

(1.) Eric Voegelin, Published Essays 1953-1965, edited and with an introduction by Ellis Sandoz (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000), p. 56. (2.) Eric Voegelin, Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man (History of Political Ideas, Volume VIII), edited with an introduction by David Walsh (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999), p. 83. (3.) Ibid. (4.) Ibid. (5.) Ibid. (but I have quoted the lines in the reverse of their original order). (6.) In Ersatz Religion (1960), Voegelin remarks as follows: "On the historical continuity of gnosticism from antiquity to modern times, let it be said ... that the connections in the development of gnostic sects from those of the eastern Mediterranean in antiquity through movements of the high Middle Ages up to those of the Renaissance have been sufficiently clarified to permit us to speak of a continuity." (See Science, Politics, and Gnosticism and Ersatz Religion, [Washington D.C.: Gateway Editions, 1997], p. 59.) The gnostic, writes Voegelin, is "dissatisfied with his situation" (59) and attributes his dissatisfaction to the world's being "intrinsically poorly organized" (60), or in other words to a failure of the original Creator. The gnostic responds to his perception with the conceit that "the order of being will have to be changed in an historical process" (60) and that this entails "man's own effort" (60.) Gnosticism typically entails, then, "the construction of a formula for self and world salvation" (60.) 7. Isak Dinesen, Daguerreotypes and Other Essays, with a foreword by Hannah Arendt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 90. (8) Ibid. (9) Ibid., p. 106. (10) Ibid., p. 102. (11) Ibid., p. 106. (12) Ibid., p. 117. (13) Ibid., p. 124. (14) Ibid. p. 92. (15) At the time, Lettow had only risen to the rank of colonel. (16) Daguerrotypes, p. 93. (17) Ibid. (18) Ibid. (19) Ibid., p. 95. (20) Ibid., p. 95-6. (21) Ibid., p. 97. (22) Ibid., p. 96. (23) Ibid., p. 101. (24) Ibid., p. 102. (25) Ibid., p. 103. (26) Ibid. (27) Ibid., p. 104.(28) Ibid., p. 118. (29) Ibid. (30) Ibid. (31) Ibid., p. 105. (32) Ibid., p. 119. (33) Ibid., p. 111. (34) Ibid., p. 132. (35) Ibid. (36) Ibid., p. 131. (37) Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 9. (38) Ibid., p. 1. (39) Ibid. (40) Ibid. (41) Ibid., p. 2. (42) Ibid., p. 27. (43) Ibid., p. 11. (44) Ibid., p. 16. (45) Ibid., pp. 16, 18, 17. (46) Ibid., p. 45. (47) Ibid., p. 5. (48) Clearly the symbolism of the Eucharist, perverted as is all else in "The Deluge," is in play here. (49) Seven Gothic Tales, p. 6. (50) Ibid. (51) Ibid. (52) Ibid. (53) Ibid. (54) Ibid. (55) Ibid., p. 52. (56) Ibid., p. 55. (57) Ibid., p. 5. (58) Ibid., p. 76. (59) Ibid. (60) Ibid., p. 9. (61) Ibid. (62) Blixen writes of a similar sect in one of her best-known tales, "Babette's Feast," where the sin of the pietists is that they have cut themselves off from life under the heretical notion that all pleasure is evil. (63) Seven Gothic Tales, p. 17. (64) Ibid., p. 21, (65) Ibid. (66) Ibid., p. 49. (67) Ibid., p. 46 (68) Ibid., p. 34. Blixen makes Gersdorff a "High Steward of Denmark" who "came of a Russian family" (39). Here one finds what is perhaps one more reference to revolutionary politics, this time of the Bolshevik variety; Gersdorff is a "man of fashion" (39) who corrupts Copenhagen high-society by encouraging cynicism, hypocrisy, and a general distancing of the aristocracy from reality into the fugue of detachment and pessimism. (69) Seven Gothic Tales, pp. 55-6. (70) Ibid., p. 56. (71) Ibid., p. 74. (72) Ibid., p. 61. (73) Ibid., p. 57. (74) Ibid., p. 63. (75) Ibid., p. 69. (76) Ibid.

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU is a visiting assistant professor of English at SUNY-Oswego and writes often for Modern Age and the Intercollegiate Review.