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Macbeth and Total Depravity

February 26, 2005

Have you ever worked on a post for an hour - AND THAN LOST IT!!! Now you know how I feel.
I had a grand post on MacBeth, Total Depravity, Harold Bloom, and Neibuhr. Than I hit close instead of post. So let me quickly summarize.

I started rereading Macbeth. Specifically Harold Bloom's guide to Shakespeare's Macbeth. Bloom describes himself as an "unbelieving Jew of strong Gnostic tendencies." Bloom sees Macbeth as us,

Macbeth is all too human. ...since we are Macbeth, though we are pragmatically neither murderers nor mediums, and he is. ...The proleptic element in Macbeth's imagination reaches out to our own apprehensiveness, our universal sense that the dreadful is about to happen, and that we have no choice but to participate in it.

Bloom shows Macbeth to be a passive pawn of his own imagination, and then, the violent acting upon those thoughts. Unknown forces contaminate Macbeth. "The nature that Macbeth most strenouously violates is his own, but though he learns this even as he begins the violation, he refuses to follow Lady Macbeth into madness and suicide." But his nature, is as he imagines it.
Rather than a gnostic view of Macbeth, I see the drama as an example of man's total depravity. Yes, we are Macbeth. No, we do not have to participate in a destiny that is forced upon us by external powers. We are born of sin, son's of Adam, a wrathful God has made judgement upon us, but has chosen to provide redemption through his son taking on sin and its judgement by paying the penalty for our sins on the cross.
When I first saw Macbeth - I saw evil, when I later read Macbeth I saw evil coupled with ambition and its violent results. Now I still see evil in Macbeth, but he is evil because he is a man born of sin. This makes Macbeth even more tragic and empty, because there is no redemption. Unlike Harold Bloom who says,

That pretty much makes Christianity as irrelevant to Macbeth as it is to King Lear, and indeed to all the Shakespearean tragedies.

On the contrary, Macbeth is the most Christian of the Shakespearean tragedies. A man born in sin, swallowed by sin, and responsible for his sin - sees no need for a Saviour. Now that is a TRAGEDY.

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