The Sleep of Christ: Incarnation and the Queerness of Heresy in W. H. Auden’s “For the Time Being”

Abstract

This article explores the circuitry between queerness, heresy, and materialist theology in a major literary work by W. H. Auden from the 1940s. Rather than banking on flights of erotic or ecstatic transcendence, Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” (1944) intimates queer sexuality as a heretical form of immanence bound to theologies of the creaturely body. For Auden in the early 1940s, queerness is corporeal enough to organize a theological materialism—or, more spiritedly, a theo-corporeal-ism—whose roots lie in his considerable exposure to Søren Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism. This article reads Auden’s persistent elisions of Christ’s body in “For the Time Being” vis-à-vis the oratorio’s implicit investment in queer sexuality as theologically corporeal (i.e. theo-corporeal). Notwithstanding the paradox this implicitness poses for Auden’s queer exegetes, the article maintains that “For the Time Being” is hermeneutically compatible with Marcella Althaus-Reid’s key work on queer theology.