"Made all we see and us in spite: how else?
But did in envy, listlessness, or sport
Make what himself would fain in a manner be--
Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while."
Made them to plague, as Caliban would have done. And caprice is
Setebos's method. He does things wantonly. No noble master passion
flames in him. No goodness blesses him. Such a god Caliban makes, so
that it is odds whether Caliban make God or God make Caliban. Be sure,
a man-made god is like the man who made him. The sole explanation of
God, "who dwelleth in light which no man can approach unto," and who is
whiter than the light in which he dwells, is, he is not myth, man-made.
God made man, and revealed to him the Maker. Thus only do we explain
the surpassing picture the prophets and the Christ and the evangelists
have left us of the mighty God. Caliban will persist in the belief
that the visible system was created in Setebos's moment of being ill at
ease and in cruel sportiveness. Nature is a freak of a foul mind. But
Caliban's god is not solitary. How hideous were the Aztec gods! They
were pictured horrors. Montezuma's gods were Caliban's. Caliban's
Setebos was another Moloch of the Canaanites, or a Hindoo Krishna. And
the Greek and Norse gods were the infirm shadows of the men who dreamed
them. Who says, after familiarizing himself with the religions of the
world, that Caliban or his theology is myth? Setebos has no morals.
He has might. But this was Jupiter. Read "Prometheus Bound," and know
a Greek conception of Greek Zeus:
"Such shows nor right nor wrong in him,
Nor kind nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so."
How hideous this god, decrepit in all save power! But for argument,
suppose
"He is good i' the main,
Placable if his mind and ways were guessed,
But rougher than his handiwork, be sure."
Caliban thinks Setebos is himself a creature, made by something he
calls "Quiet;" and what is this but the Gnostic notion of aeons and
their subordination to the great, hid God? No, this brief dramatic
lyric is far from being an imagination. Rather say it is a chapter
taken from the history of man's traffic in gods. Setebos is creative;
lacks moral qualities in that he may be evil or good; acts from spleen,
and by simple caprice; is loveless; to be feared, deceived, tricked, as
Caliban tricks Prospero,--so run the crude theological speculations of
this man. He gets no step nearer truth. He walks in circles. He is
shut in by common human limitations. Man can not dream about the sky
until he has seen a sky, nor can he dream out God till God has been
revealed. Caliban is no more helpless here than other men. His
failure in theology is a picture of the failure of all men. God must
show himself at Sinais and at Calvarys, at cross and grave and
resurrection and ascension; must pass from the disclosure of his being
the "I Am" to those climacteric moments of the world when he discovered
to us that he was the "I am Love" and the "I am the Resurrection and
the Life." God is
"Terrible: watch his feats in proof!
One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope,
He hath a spite against me, that I know,
Just as He favors Prospero; who knows why?
So it is all the same as well I find.
. . . So much for spite."
There is no after-life.
"He doth His worst in this our life,
Giving just respite lest we die through pain,
Saving last pain for worst--with which, an end.
Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire
Is, not to seem too happy."
Poor Caliban, not to have known that in the summer of man's joy our God
grows glad! All he hopes is,
"Since evils sometimes mend,
Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime,
That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
And conquer Setebos, or likelier he
Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die."
This is tragic as few tragedies know how to be. Setebos is mean,
revengeful, fitful, spiteful, everything but good and noble; and his
votary will live to hope that he will either be conquered by a mightier
or will slumber forever!
So Caliban creates a god, a cosmogony, a theology; gets no thought of
goodness from God or for himself; gets no sign of reformation in
character; rises not a cubit above the ground where he constructs his
monologue; puts into God only what is in Caliban; has no faint hint of
love toward him from God, or from him toward God, when suddenly
"A curtain o'er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird--or, yes,
There scuds His raven that has told Him all!
It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze--
A tree's head snaps--and there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!"
And there, like a groveling serpent in the ooze, there lies Caliban,
abject in fear, with not a ray of love. Hopeless, loveless, see him
lie--a spectacle so sad as to make the ragged crags of ocean weep!
So pitiful a theology, yet no more pitiful than theologies created in
our own epoch. Men, not brutal but opinionated, assume to comprehend
all things, God included. They destroy and create theologies with the
flippant egotism of a French chevalier of the days of the Grand
Monarch. They settle matters with a "Thus it is, and thus it is not."
Would not those men do well to read the parable, "Caliban upon
Setebos?" Grant Allen and Huxley would be generously helped; for the
more they would lose in dogmatism, so much the more would they gain in
wisdom. And what is true of them is true of others of their
fraternity. This irony of Browning's is caustic, but very wholesome.
Barren as Caliban's theology is, certain contemporary theologies are
not less so. A day to suffer and enjoy--and then the night, long,
dark, dreamless, eternal!
How sane Browning was! What breadth of meaning is here disclosed!
What preacher of this century has preached a more inspired sermon than
"Caliban upon Setebos?" He saw the irrationality of rationalism. He
knew that knowledge of God came, as the new earth, "down from God out
of heaven." Men will do better to receive theologies from God than to
create them. A life we may live, having the Pattern "showed us in the
mount." Christ gives the lie to Caliban's estimate of Deity. Not
spite, nor misused might, nor caprice, nor life surcharged with either
indifference or spleen; but love and ministry and fertile thought and
wide devotion to others' good, an oblation of Himself--this is God, of
whom Caliban had no dream, and of whom the Christ was exegete.