“Genuine poetry can communicate
before it is understood.”
T. S. Eliot
It was not until college that I discovered the poetry of Wallace
Steven and afterward I wondered why it took me so long to find him. Regardless,
I learned of him and was hooked. Why? Because the ‘innerland’ he projects was
mine, and, in his poems I saw reflections of my pre-salvation moral relativism.
And I, like Stevens, had actually convinced myself that the chaos of relativism
was preferable to order.
Recently I was talking with a young man who was struggling with an
epistemological crisis. He had encountered the “evil scientist” argument or
some version thereof, and he was deeply troubled. (You know the thinking. It
goes something like this: Q: How do you know you weren’t created a few moments
ago by an evil scientist who implanted memories in your head of a past? A: You
can’t. Therefore, in a similar way, it is impossible for you to “know”
anything.) The logical problem in this argument, of course, is that the implied
requirement of ‘knowing’ is beyond the attainment of any mortal and ignores the
realities of discerning between reasonable and unreasonable ‘knowings’.
Regardless, the young man was struggling, and as I listened, I realized that he
was afloat in a sea of moral relativism. Without belief in an absolute truth,
he was being flung from ethical stance to ethical stance, teetering between
hedonistic pragmatism and the despair of nihilism.
As I thought about our conversation, I was reminded of Stevens’ Anecdote
of a Jar. It’s a short poem:
I
placed a jar in Tennessee
And round
it was, upon a hill.
It made
the slovenly wilderness
Surround
that hill.
The
wilderness rose up to it,
And
sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar
was round upon the ground
And tall
and of a port in air.
It took
dominion everywhere.
The jar
was gray and bare.
It did
not give of bird or bush,
Like
nothing else in Tennessee
Steven’s jar represents order brought into chaos from outside a
present system. But ‘system’, in this case, is probably not the best word to
use. For Stevens, nature is a wilderness, untamed and surprising. It is a not a
system, but a non-system. And Stevens, using words such as ‘gray’ and ‘bare’,
makes clear his disdain for the jar. The jar takes ‘dominion’ and crushes the
life of the wilderness, ‘not giving’ either flora or fauna.
As a believer, I agree with Stevens and also, in some ways,
disagree. I agree that the placement of an absolute from without can bring
order. In that I agree. But I disagree with him if he is positing that an
absolute placed must always crush life. I also disagree with him that an
untamed wilderness is necessarily better than a tamed one.
For me, it boils down to the first word of the poem – “I”. Stevens
said he is the one who placed the jar. Thus it does not surprise me that the
order it brings is ultimately crushing and deadly. Man-made, man-placed
absolutes are crushing. If Stevens places a man-made jar, and if he is the one
who placed, I am not surprised it robbed the wilderness of spontaneity and
life.
But, imagine, for a moment, that God was the One who placed the
jar, not Stevens. Imagine that God Himself placed a Vessel in the midst of
man’s spiritual wilderness, a Vessel that established an Absolute immoveable
and sublime, One that gave Life as it gave Order. Would such a Vessel be
detestable? No. It would be laudable, desirable – indeed, it would prove to be
the Desire of all.
God the Father, of course, has done precisely this in the giving
of His Son, Jesus, the Christ. And in that pivotal historic event – the
Crucifixion, Burial, and Resurrection – He placed eternal order in humanity’s
wilderness of relativism. He placed the Cross on Calvary
and established order and life.
I know this has taken a philosophical turn today, but I believe it
is important. The great apologetic reality, the one which defeats all moral
relativism and epistemological uncertainty, is the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ. That He lives, and that there is evidence sufficient to convince any
sincere investigator beyond a reasonable doubt of that life, is the great
historic reality that witnesses eternally to Him Who is the Great
Epistemological Reality, the One upon whom we can build our lives. And He is a
good and life-giving foundation that will never be shaken.
What do you think?
“and the
rain descended, the floods came,
and
the winds blew and beat on that house;
and it did
not fall, for it was founded on the rock”
Matthew
7:25
-- Christian Pilet
