The Damnation of Theron Ware
The Damnation of Theron Ware is a compelling take on American Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century. Theron is a rhetorically gifted young Methodist pastor who, to his horror, is assigned a parish in a small town in northern New York. (The opening scenes are a comedic portrait of Methodist politics at the turn of the century). Immediately disillusioned by his ‘backward’ congregation, Theron becomes fascinated by the local Irish Catholic community and their priest, Father Forbes. He is particularly taken in by the aesthetic sensibilities of these catholics, and is startled to discover the intellectual depth of their worldview, a discovery which sets him on a path of doubting his own Methodist faith and eventually, Christianity altogether.
The greatest thing about this book is how realistically it portrays the intellectual milieu of its time and the kinds of factors that so often converged to push religious believers toward naturalism and atheism. Theron’s naive assurance that Methodism is the only honest and thoughtful form of Christianity mirrors that of so many Christians, then and now, raised in tribalistic denominationalism. All it takes is a personal encounter with a compelling counter-example to crumble the foundations of such a faith, which is so often built on a sense of exceptionalism rather than a deep and long-standing shared history. (‘We are special because only we believe the truth,’ as opposed to, ‘That which we believe is true because it is what Christians have always believed to be true’).
Father Forbes is a complex character: a liberal catholic priest who is educated, worldly, and wise. Insistent on the value of ritual regardless of the veracity of its doctrinal underpinnings and committed to the Irish immigrants whom these religious rituals serve, he introduces Theron to the aesthetic mythical side of nineteenth-century religious thought. There are some authentically Catholic stances represented by Forbes, such as the belief that faith and salvation are communal realities, common goods that we receive in and through membership in the church, rather than through individual intellectual assent to doctrine. And yet, he denies the centrality of the church’s truth claims, which cannot, in reality, meaningfully be reduced to myth. (He made me think somewhat of Graham Green’s whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, at least in his resolute anti-Donatism. The people need the sacraments even if he is by no means a worthy vessel to deliver them, but he means this in a Feuerbachean sense, unlike the whiskey priest whose failings are rather moral than intellectual). Father Forbes stands as a foil to Theron, for the latter becomes disdainful of his congregation as a result of his ‘illumination’, while the former exhibits a deep care and commitment to his flock.
Dr. Ledsmar, an acquaintance of Father Forbes, is an idiosyncratic ‘intellectual’ with a variety of interests, both scientific and historical, and a bold assurance that these latter effectively disprove the faith. His intellectual superiority humiliates Theron’s academic aspirations, to whom he provides the leading atheist literature of the day. And we find Theron entirely convinced by these books before he even reads them. (I think this often happens—some people have spent so long straining against the particular form of faith that they have received, all they need is the suggestion of a different way of seeing things for them to leap to its conclusions. This seems to account for much of the impact of historical Jesus studies in the 18th and 19th centuries. What Reimarus, Paulus, and Strauss provided people with was an alternative explanation for the events reported in the gospels. People often cared little about the viability of these explanations, all they needed was an alternate story to tell). On top of this, Theron finds Dr. Ledsmar’s air of intellectual sophistication intoxicating. Not unlike the kind of rhetoric offered by the New Atheists, it is precisely the rhetoric (rather than the arguments) that convinces so many people who are desperate to be viewed as intelligent by others.
The final straw for Theron is his acquaintance with Celia Madden. The direct antithesis of Adolf von Harnack, she presents Theron with a philosophical Hellenism—a kind of rationalist revisionary Greek metaphysics that substitutes for religious faith, seeing the best parts of Christianity as those taken over from Greek antiquity and disdaining the countervailing Hebrew influences and historical particularities of Catholicism. (Celia represents the kind of reactionary Catholicism that convinced so many Protestants that Harnack et al. were right in their assessments of the Christian tradition). Nonetheless, what Theron finds most compelling is her beauty and sophistication, and like everything else in his life, he subsumes her and the wonders she has to offer under the umbrella of his ego and ambition.
Theron is a perennial picture of a person without the intellectual acuity or work ethic to truly understand the complex issues with which he is occupied, but who insists on constructing his identity around his supposed intellectual superiority. Reality is far too complex for Theron to grasp, so he simply jumps from one overly simplistic portrait to the next and feels pride at having the legs for the leap.
The novel isn’t perfect, but I think it is well worth reading for anyone interested in faith and religion in the U.S. and the ways that intellectual, emotional, political, and economic forces converge to affect people’s beliefs. We do well not to reduce people to the concepts to which they assent, and our understanding of salvation (and, for that matter, damnation) should do justice to the complexity of real human lives. More than ideas, practices, or beliefs, it is Theron’s incessant need to be important, and his lack of key virtues such as humility and temperance, which eventually lead him away from faith and toward a life that better fits his vices. It is not entirely clear to me whether Harold Frederic views Theron’s transformation as Illumination (as in the original British Title) or Damnation (as in the U.S. title). If the former, then he makes an amusing caricature of himself, if the latter, he is a perceptive chronicler of the upheavals in nineteenth-century American Christianity.