The aesthetics of Moloch.

My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, by Philip Rieff (Virginia, 288 pp., $34.95)

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THE supreme ironical aesthete James Joyce is reputed to have said--probably while sitting at a Left Bank cafe in Paris with his admirers and acolytes in late 1939--that "the Poles can perish as long as Finnegans Wake survives." Itself published in 1939, this witty monument of aesthetic nihilism contained ironic mockeries of Jewish monotheism--for "the Word of the Lord" we had "the Woid of the Loud." This was during the same time that the Nazis were preparing to shift their approach from systematic persecution of Jews to elimination and extermination: By 1941 the SS Einsatzgruppen would be murdering Polish and Russian Jews in mobile gas vans on the expanding Eastern Front.

Also in 1939, the Jewish atheist Sigmund Freud chose to publish Moses and Monotheism, a hateful anti-Semitic fantasy disguised as cultural history and anthropology--though Freud did so from the safe haven of London, to which British diplomatic intervention had brought him after the Nazi Anschluss in Austria in 1938. Most of his beleaguered Austrian, German, French, and eastern European fellow Jews were not to be so privileged and fortunate: They lacked the social and financial means to escape the clutches of their Social Darwinist German predator.

Here is a cultural history that is not much discussed. As a witty tempter says to Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, "This is a sentence not taught in schools."

Editor of The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, Philip Rieff is our finest living analyst of, and witness against, these tragic, apocalyptic dynamics. His great, ambivalent, and now classic 1959 book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, commenced from the view that was being influentially promoted in the 1940s and '50s by Lionel Trilling and, later, by his students and sympathizers: a conception of Freud as a heroic modern Stoic, advocating an inevitably painful instinctual repression and self-control as the price of both personal maturity and collective civilization. This Freud could be used both against the Marxists--with their brutal, simplistic fantasy of complete human malleability through utilitarian social engineering--and against the bohemians, who viewed Freud as the great libidinous emancipator. (Among the notable bohemians were the Bloomsbury aesthete-libertines of the 1920s; James Strachey, Lytton's brother, was Freud's English translator.)

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Yet what Philip Rieff came to see in Freud's work--and to make clear in later prefaces to the influential Mind of the Moralist and subsequent books--was that Freud was a grossly reductive thinker whose atheism was based on a deep hatred of the whole orthodox, Western moral tradition, as rooted in and formulated by Judaeo-Christian monotheistic revelation. Trilling's friend and Partisan Review colleague William Barrett saw Trilling's incapacity to recognize this fact as his fundamental limitation as a moralist. Nobler and wiser by far than the libidinous Freudians and the brutal Communists, Trilling could not leave the Freudian camp altogether and continued to invoke Freud as an exemplary Stoic moralist until his own death in 1975.

By contrast, Rieff left the Freudian camp altogether and became perhaps the most powerful ex-Freudian and anti-Freudian of all. In the process, like Daniel Bell and Gertrude Himmelfarb, he became a recognizably Judaeo-Christian moralist and cultural analyst. His internal critique of Freud has continued to develop with devastating and poignant force and his own philosophical-moral framework has been formulated and applied in works of great authority and influence, including The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) and Fellow Teachers (1973).

Central to Rieff's intellectual project--one of the most important

in contemporary high culture--is an analysis of the dynamics of that profound insight we all remember from Chesterton: "When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing--they believe in anything." The horrific 20th century saw the deification of the nation, the race, and the class. There was, as well, the perennially appealing deification of the self--which the conservative Freudian Quentin Anderson showed to be particularly virulent in the anarchically promiscuous "imperial self" deriving from those antinomian American emancipators Emerson and Whitman, and bearing poisonous fruit in Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and herds of their epigones. The result: "every man his own messiah" (as F. O. Matthiessen put it), giving us a world of "incessant autobiography" (C. S. Lewis) and a "culture of narcissism" (Christopher Lasch).

My Life among the Deathworks is Rieff's sustained attack on modern aestheticism. The first of three volumes that are clearly designed to be his final testimony, it is a bold, profound, disturbing book, highly offensive to contemporary pieties about the supreme value of self-expression, of the arts, artists, and aesthetic experience.

Rieff's rhetorical strategy is risky. He juxtaposes pictures and written fragments of tight analysis in the manner of a collage. He draws on a very wide range of intellectual and aesthetic phenomena, from music and visual art to theology and politics. His diction is dense, elliptical, and allusive: One hazards the estimate that he is using the Nietzschean aphoristic style to subvert, try, and convict its author through his own brilliant stylistic register.

For at the heart of Rieff's view of the culture war being waged inside our society (and in ourselves) is his indictment of the great nihilistic aesthetes who declared war simultaneously or sequentially on God, religion, and ethics, on what he calls "sacred order" as the root of both personal sanity and social order, the perennially necessary, imperfect, fragile civilized mean between anarchy and tyranny. For Rieff the greatest nihilistic heresiarchs are Nietzsche, Wilde, Freud, Joyce, and Wallace Stevens--great aesthetes who wrote powerful "deathworks" that do not so much reflect as shape politics, society, mores, and beliefs. Ideas and icons rule the world, and thus Rieff must be not only an intellectual "reader" and analyst of them but also an iconoclast--an anatomist of false, profane images and a valuer of true ones.

Rieff's essay "The Impossible Culture: Wilde as a Modern Prophet" is perhaps the best short introduction to his thought and chief themes. Like much of his writing since the 1970s, it is not only intellectually brilliant and morally ballasted, but very moving. In the essay, Rieff reprints part of the cross-examination of Wilde by Edward Carson, QC, in the famous and disastrous libel trial that Wilde himself brought, and lost, in 1895 against the father of his homosexual lover Lord Alfred Douglas. It is a document of extraordinary importance, showing that the ultimate philosophical stake in the trial--and in the cultural trials of our own time--is whether human reality is ultimately moral or aesthetic. (The brilliant Wilde saw prophetically that an apparently all-devouring "value-free" science was the ally and augmenter of aesthetic subjectivism.) If Carson was a "Philistine," it was because he was an ethical person, as Rieff shows him to be.

Come down 70 years to 1966: another trial, another courtroom, the same ultimate issues. But now the agile nihilist is not in the dock, like Wilde, but doing the interrogating. He is the witty John Mortimer, QC, whom the London Times described as having "a particular gift for amusing irrelevance"; he is defending the literary value of Hubert Selby Jr.'s pornographic novel Last Exit to Brooklyn and he is interrogating a critic of it, Sir Basil Blackwell, who has called it "a vile book, written, I think, with some relish." Like Edward Carson, Sir Basil is an ethical man; unlike Carson, he is no one's Philistine but a distinguished publisher--the first to print works of Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Sayers, and assorted Sitwells--and head of Oxford's greatest bookstore. Mortimer glibly asks him if anyone can ever really be "depraved or corrupted" by a book (or, by extension, by the arts). The noble old Christian gentleman, 79 years of age, a first-class graduate of Merton College, Oxford, an Anglican layman, and a magistrate himself, replies: "It depraved and corrupted me to some extent.... I define 'to deprave and corrupt' as 'to impair, spoil, debase, defile.' I am afraid my memory, in the few years that remain to me, will not be purged of it." Rieff would be on Basil Blackwell's side.

The ominous pertinence of Rieff's argument to our cultural condition is perhaps best briefly conveyed by his use of two photographs, one with commentary, one without. The one with commentary is of Abraham Lincoln, whom Rieff sees, as does Harry Jaffa, as a "sacred messenger" bearing tragic but ultimately hopeful witness to the American constitutional, democratic, republican cause, past, present, and future: a residual but renewable trajectory and momentum of civic decency in the light of Divine Goodness.

The other image is a photograph printed without comment. It is one of the antinomian aesthete Robert Mapplethorpe's highly praised sadomasochistic self-portraits. This image of transgression is both depraved in itself and viscerally depraving to the viewer. It precisely reveals the aesthetics of Moloch, the consequences of the aesthetic establishment of Sodom. Without explicit comment by Rieff, its transgressive, hateful obscenity shows what it is we must fight against, with all our civilized humanity--all our resources of intelligence and civic and moral will. As the century since the death of Wilde--"high modernity"--has shown, the stakes are very high.

Mr. Aeschliman is professor of education at Boston University, adjunct professor of English at the University of Italian Switzerland, and author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism.