Anecdote of a Jar

“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