The Desire Beauty Awakens

If man's deepest and truest desire is for the transcendant (my soul is restless until it rests in thee), the devil's work is to blunt that desire with "worldly concerns" -- politics, faction, "the Cause." "Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provide that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours. . . " (Screwtape, Ch. 7).

The primary symbol of the desire for the transcendent is Eros, love. To the degree we love, to that degree are we able to soar above the clutching fingers of hell. W.B. Yeats depicted something like this in a 1938 poem called "Politics." It's epigraph is a statement made by Thomas Mann as he witnessed Hitler and Europe heading for war: "In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms." Yeat's reply is this:

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russion
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

Glenn Hughes, in Transcendence and History at p. 119 explained the poem this way: "The poet's being distracted by beauty symbolizes all human longing for a life made brilliant and immortal through love, a life fulfilled through the realization of that happiness of which eros is the universal promise. The momentary distraction of the poet symbolizes the impossibility of political concerns ever finally holding the attention of our most searching desires, and thus the impossibility of their constituting the meaning of the 'destiny of man.'"

In light of Screwtape's advice above, I take the poem to mean that unless we glimpse and soar in love to the beauty of the transcendent, the infernal realms will constrain and bind us.