Light, Darkness, and Idolatry in The Damnation of Theron Ware :: Essays Papers

Light, Darkness, and Idolatry in The Damnation of Theron WareIn the setoff chapter of The Damnation of Theron Ware, Harold Frederic describes in tedious detail every sight, sound, and structure comprising the annual Nedahma Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Using images that evoke Dantes Empyrean or Tenth Heaven (Cantos XXX-XXXIII of Paradiso), Frederic remarks upon the hierarchical alignment of the clergy in attendance as well as the tendency of every eye present at the conference to be fixed upon a common objective point. present Dantes and Frederics versions of the saved diverge. Frederics Methodists gaze non at an all-encompassing, all-penetrating dismount, but at a Bishop whose vision fails him as he reads through a list of ministers assignments for the advance year. The difference here, as distinct as the light Dante sees, begins Frederics meditation on a major and seemingly unanswerable question in the novel. With Theron as his guinea pig, Frederic systematic ally poses the question of where truth originates. The locus of attention of the good assembly at Tecumseh proclaims nothing of overwhelming truth or however permanence. The light, on the other hand, originates ...from numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets arranged on the ceiling... (Frederic 1). This light transcends and shines down upon the entire group. Here Frederic sets up the notion that truth comes not from one particular point but from several, some of which we might not be able to see.Dante, remarking on his final vision of the Eternal Light, says, In its profundity I saw--ingathered / and bound by love into one sensation volume-- / what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered... (Paradiso XXXIII, 85-87). Setting aside obvious colloquial, linguistic, and stylistic differences which account for the six-hundred geezerhood which separate these two authors, the above quotation bears striking resemblance to the wrangle of another seemingly enlightened character, Father Forbes. He states, in his start-off conversation of length with TheronSo the truth remains always the truth, plain though you give a charter to ten hundred k separate numskulls to examine it by the light of their private judgment, and report that it is as many different varieties of something else (Frederic 70).This assertion that the truth exists beyond the realm of terrene understanding is echoed in Father Forbes final words to Theron, which reverberate interchangeable the sound of the door slammed in the ministers face The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware... (Frederic 326).