The Damnation of Theron Ware

[_CaliforniaKid]

A favorite book excerpt of mine, from a 19th-c novel. It's a favorite because, in a way, it's similar to my own experience. Theron Ware awakens to a world of knowledge beyond his narrowly Evangelical horizons.

"A penny for your thoughts!" she said, with cheerful briskness. This
ancient formula of the farm-land had always rather jarred on Theron. It
presented itself now to his mind as a peculiarly aggravating banality.

"I am going to begin my book this afternoon," he remarked impressively.
"There is a great deal to think about."

It turned out that there was even more to think about than he had
imagined. After hours of solitary musing at his desk, or of pacing up
and down before his open book-shelves, Theron found the first shadows of
a May-day twilight beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white
paper, still unstained by ink. He saw the book he wanted to write before
him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea
of beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by
week, had faded away like a dream.

This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own
brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really
a most fruitful time for the young clergyman. The lessons which cut
most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.
Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy,
found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that
he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose
pretensions to intellectual authority among any educated people would be
laughed at with deserved contempt.

Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery
did not dismay Theron Ware. The very completeness of the conviction it
carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had
really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little,
an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had
been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once
his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to
be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating
his mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron
mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues
in the Conference. They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant: the
difference was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go on all
their lives without ever finding it out. It was obvious to him that his
case was better. There was bright promise in the very fact that he had
discovered his shortcomings.

He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various
works in his meagre library which bore more or less relation to the task
in hand. The threescore books which constituted his printed possessions
were almost wholly from the press of the Book Concern; the few
exceptions were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to
him through that giant circulating agency of the General Conference,
and wore the stamp of its approval. Perhaps it was the sight of these
half-filled shelves which started this day's great revolution in
Theron's opinions of himself. He had never thought much before about
owning books. He had been too poor to buy many, and the conditions of
canvassing about among one's parishioners which the thrifty Book Concern
imposes upon those who would have without buying, had always repelled
him. Now, suddenly, as he moved along the two shelves, he felt ashamed
at their beggarly showing.

"The Land and the Book," in three portly volumes, was the most
pretentious of the aids which he finally culled from his collection.
Beside it he laid out "Bible Lands," "Rivers and Lakes of Scripture,"
"Bible Manners and Customs," the "Genesis and Exodus" volume of Whedon's
Commentary, some old numbers of the "Methodist Quarterly Review," and a
copy of "Josephus" which had belonged to his grandmother, and had
seen him through many a weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood. He glanced
casually through these, one by one, as he took them down, and began to
fear that they were not going to be of so much use as he had thought.
Then, seating himself, he read carefully through the thirteen chapters
of Genesis which chronicle the story of the founder of Israel.

Of course he had known this story from his earliest years. In almost
every chapter he came now upon a phrase or an incident which had served
him as the basis for a sermon. He had preached about Hagar in the
wilderness, about Lot's wife, about the visit of the angels, about the
intended sacrifice of Isaac, about a dozen other things suggested by the
ancient narrative. Somehow this time it all seemed different to him.
The people he read about were altered to his vision. Heretofore a poetic
light had shone about them, where indeed they had not glowed in a halo
of sanctification. Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw
them instead as untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal
lusts and ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to
secure a foothold in a country which did not belong to them--all rude
tramps and robbers of the uncivilized plain.

The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him with peculiar
force. How was it, he wondered, that this had never occurred to him
before? Examining himself, he found that he had supposed vaguely that
there had been Jews from the beginning, or at least, say, from the
flood. But, no, Abram was introduced simply as a citizen of the Chaldean
town of Ur, and there was no hint of any difference in race between him
and his neighbors. It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's
father, died in Ur, the city of his nativity. Evidently the family
belonged there, and were Chaldeans like the rest.

I do not cite this as at all a striking discovery, but it did have a
curious effect upon Theron Ware. Up to that very afternoon, his notion
of the kind of book he wanted to write had been founded upon a popular
book called "Ruth the Moabitess," written by a clergyman he knew very
well, the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin. This model performance troubled itself
not at all with difficult points, but went swimmingly along through
scented summer seas of pretty rhetoric, teaching nothing, it is true,
but pleasing a good deal and selling like hot cakes. Now, all at once
Theron felt that he hated that sort of book. HIS work should be of a
vastly different order. He might fairly assume, he thought, that if the
fact that Abram was a Chaldean was new to him, it would fall upon the
world in general as a novelty. Very well, then, there was his chance.
He would write a learned book, showing who the Chaldeans were, and how
their manners and beliefs differed from, and influenced--

It was at this psychological instant that the wave of self-condemnation
suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again,
leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from
the shelves, and gasping a little, as if for breath. Then the humorous
side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned
feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write
learnedly about the Chaldeans, or anything else. But, no, it shouldn't
remain a joke! His long mobile face grew serious under the new resolve.
He would learn what there was to be learned about the Chaldeans.

...

[Father Forbes introduces Theron to Dr. Ledsmar] "I daresay I can help you. You are
quite welcome to anything I have: my books cover the ground pretty well
up to last year. Delitzsch is very interesting; but Baudissin's 'Studien
zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte' would come closer to what you need.
There are several other important Germans--Schrader, Bunsen, Duncker,
Hommel, and so on."

"Unluckily I--I don't read German readily," Theron explained with
diffidence.

"That's a pity," said the doctor, "because they do the best work--not
only in this field, but in most others. And they do so much that the
mass defies translation. Well, the best thing outside of German of
course is Sayce. I daresay you know him, though."

The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully. "I don't seem to know any
one," he murmured.

The others exchanged glances.

"But if I may ask, Mr. Ware," pursued the doctor, regarding their guest
with interest through his spectacles, "why do you specially hit upon
Abraham? He is full of difficulties--enough, just now, at any rate, to
warn off the bravest scholar. Why not take something easier?"

Theron had recovered something of his confidence. "Oh, no," he said,
"that is just what attracts me to Abraham. I like the complexities and
contradictions in his character. Take for instance all that strange
and picturesque episode of Hagar: see the splendid contrast between the
craft and commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech,
and the simple, straightforward godliness of his later years. No, all
those difficulties only attract me. Do you happen to know--of course
you would know--do those German books, or the others, give anywhere any
additional details of the man himself and his sayings and doings--little
things which help, you know, to round out one's conception of the
individual?"

Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young
minister's head. It was Father Forbes who replied.

"I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,"
he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go
so well with his gown. "Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out
of existence as an individual. The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym--it
means 'exalted father.' Practically all the names in the Genesis
chronologies are what we call eponymous. Abram is not a person at all:
he is a tribe, a sect, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended for
a man; it is the name of a great division of the human race. Heber is
simply the throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the
Hebrews; Heth of the Hittites; Asshur of Assyria."

"But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it?" queried Theron.

The priest smiled and shook his head. "Bless you, no! My dear sir, there
is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian
theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why
Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In
his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names,
'GENTES NON HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' It was as obvious
to him--as much a commonplace of knowledge--as it was to Ezekiel eight
hundred years before him."

[_Blixa]

How did you come across this, Chris? I've never read this novel, though I've certainly read many references to it (in relation to the development of american realism--Dreiser, etc.--and literature of upstate New York). Thanks for reminding me about it.

[_CaliforniaKid]

I actually first encountered this excerpt in a textbook for an American religious history class. It struck me as not only charming and well-written, but also as somehow existentially true.