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

Light, Darkness, and Idolatry in The Damnation of Theron WareIn the first 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 exalted or Tenth Heaven (Cantos XXX-XXXIII of Paradiso), Frederic remarks upon the hierarchical alignment of the clergy in wariness as well as the tendency of every eye lay at the conference to be fixed upon a common intent point. Here Dantes and Frederics versions of the saved diverge. Frederics Methodists gaze not at an all-encompassing, all-penetrating light, but at a Bishop whose vision fails him as he reads through a tend of ministers assignments for the coming year. The difference here, as distinct as the light Dante sees, begins Frederics hypothesis on a major and seemingly unanswerable question in the novel. With Theron as his guinea pig, Frederic systematically poses the q uestion of where verity originates. The locus of attention of the entire assembly at Tecumseh proclaims nothing of overwhelming truth or even 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 iodine particular point but from several, some of which we dexterity not be able to see.Dante, remarking on his final vision of the eonian Light, says, In its profundity I saw--ingathered / and bound by love into one single volume-- / what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered... (Paradiso XXXIII, 85-87). Setting aside obvious colloquial, linguistic, and stylistic differences which key for the six- light speed years which separate these two authors, the above quotation bears striking proportion to the words of another seemingly enlightened character, Father Forbes. He states, in his first conversation of length with TheronSo the truth remains constantly the truth, even though you give a charter to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to examine it by the light of their private judgment, and composing that it is as many different varieties of something else (Frederic 70).This assertion that the truth exists beyond the commonwealth of earthly understanding is echoed in Father Forbes final words to Theron, which ricochet like the sound of the door slammed in the ministers face The truth is incessantly relative, Mr. Ware... (Frederic 326).