Charlottesville

This essay appeared on September 3, 2017 on page I12 of the Springfield News-Leader under the News-leader’s title “A New Narrative is needed on Confederate Statues."

The recent racist demonstrations in Charlottesville and the ensuing riots are a graphic reminder that all Americans do not share the same values, or the same national story. There are many narratives that Americans have adopted to explain themselves—two conflicting views were in evidence at Charlottesville, revealed by the images streaming from our television sets. Elements of the Alt Right, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Neo-Nazis held a demonstration around Civil War Monuments in Charlottesville celebrating White Power and vilifying African Americans, Jews, and any others they held to be different from themselves. As a result there has been a backlash against civil war monuments. Some have been torn down and others removed. There have been cries to put them all in museums—"get rid of them" seems to be the sentiment of a vocal part of our countrymen.

 

            I am a son of the post-reconstruction South, born in Louisiana, reared and educated in the segregated public school system of Greenville, Mississippi (1940-52). I do not recall ever having seen a civil war monument during my early youth, although I must have seen a few. At least I can say for certain that in my education the War of Rebellion and its leaders were never extolled or held up for special honor. The "stars and bars" as the confederate battle flag is called was, and still is ubiquitous throughout the south, but in Greenville it was never displayed in public buildings or functions. Online I discovered that Greenville has one civil war monument at the Washington County Courthouse, erected in 1909 by the Private Taylor Rucks Chapter Daughters of the Confederacy "To Commemorate the Valor and Patriotism of the Confederate Soldiers of Washington County 1861-1865." The statue itself presents a single common soldier of the line. On the four faces at the base are statements by Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Randolph H. M'Kim, and Charles B. Galloway. Except for the statement by Jefferson Davis (who mentions "the sacred cause of states' rights"), the others do not specifically relate to the war, and in themselves might be judged inspiring.

 

A 2017 study reported that at least 1503 symbols of the confederacy can be found in public spaces across the United States. These memorials include monuments and statues; flags; holidays and other observances; and the names of schools, roads, parks, bridges, counties, cities, lakes, dams, military bases, and other public works.¹

 

We cannot ease or erase our national shame for having accepted and tolerated slavery as a convenient solution to economic problems (even as early as our colonial period) by eradicating vestiges of the War of Rebellion. Such symbols are part of our history as a people, whatever the reason they were erected. What is needed is a new narrative that puts these symbols into national, rather than regional perspective, so that there is a more compelling narrative that completely disallows racist rhetoric and ideology. These surviving vestiges of the civil war are like the "stones" the Israelites erected after crossing over the Jordan. The stones were to remain a memorial so that "when your children ask in time to come 'What do these stones mean to you?' You shall tell them…"  (Joshua 4:1-24). In my view, the monuments should remain in place and not be hidden away, but rather officially placed in perspective as symbols of a flawed cause, misplaced loyalties, and the enslavement of human beings. We must not be allowed to forget.

 

            Any cause that calls one to bigotry, racial hatred, the disparagement and inhumane treatment of others, and/or aims to romanticize or otherwise misstate the national significance of the War of Rebellion by appealing to these vestiges of the war deserves to be condemned.

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monuments_and_memorials_of_the_Confederate_States_of_America

The Making of Poems and Parables

The Poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) concludes his comments on analogy in poetry with this statement: "Thus poetry becomes and is a transcendent analogue composed of the particulars of reality, created by the poet's sense of the world, that is to say his attitude, as he intervenes and interposes the appearances of that sense."¹ Thus poetic truth (which the poem is) as seen by the poet is an agreement with a particular aspect of reality viewed through the poet's imagination.² In short the poem is a description of some aspect of reality as the poet himself/herself imagines it.

 

            Stevens draws on (but misquotes) an example from the Gospel of Matthew describing Matthew's imagination at work.³ Jesus went about cities and villages teaching and preaching, and "when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they…were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd" (Matt 9:36; Mark 6:34; and compare Matt 26:31 and Mark 14:26; Zech 13:7). Here is how Stevens describes Matthew's imagination working on particular aspects of reality:

 

There came into Matthew's mind in respect to Jesus going about, teaching and preaching, the thought that Jesus was a shepherd and immediately the multitudes scattered abroad and sheep having that particular in common became interchangeable. The image is an elaboration of the particular of the shepherd.⁴

 

Actually, in this case Matthew took the image from Mark 6:34 and Zech 13:7 (compare Matt 26:31) and applied it to Jesus. Still Stevens' description of the way image making is done is accurate, as his other examples in the chapter show.

 

            Jesus made his parables in much the same way as Stevens describes a poet making poems. The parables in the gospels, if they originated with Jesus, "are the creative inventions of the mind of Jesus…" and fragments of his fictional view of reality.⁵ His reality was first-century life in Judean villages, and he invented the plots for these brief narratives by applying his imagination to particular aspects of that reality.

 

As a whole, the stories suggest that Jesus was a shrewd observer of life about him, but the information for inventing realistic characters in his stories would not have come only from his imagination. His stories arose from a blending of creative imagination with shrewd observation of everyday [village] life in Roman Palestine.⁶

 

His stories are notable for their secularity and realism. In short Jesus saw and described things as they are. Few of the stories have what may be described as religious motifs,⁷ and they also sport a goodly number of flawed characters. Nevertheless, the narrative voice of the stories neither commends nor condemns the actions of Jesus' invented characters. The stories conclude but the complications that are raised for readers are not resolved, and that feature appears to be deliberately designed into Jesus' narratives.

 

            The stories reflect a kind of moral ambiguity. When read closely as creative fictions against their background in Palestinian village life, they raise perplexing moral/ethical questions but offer no solutions. They do not even hint at a preferred solution, but interpreters, beginning with the gospel writers themselves, have regularly turned them "into stories about Christian theology, social justice, religious morals, and metaphors for the reign of God."⁸

 

            One can never be certain about such things, but judging from the nature of his oral compositions, as they have come down to us, it appears that Jesus did not turn to God to inspire his imagination, but rather he turned to the reality of the Palestinian world.

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

¹"The Effects of Analogy" in The Necessary Angel. Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf and Random House, 1951), 130.

²Necessary Angel, 54.

³Necessary Angel, 113

⁴Necessary Angel, 128-29.

⁵Parabolic Figures or Narrative Fictions, xv.

⁶Hedrick, "Survivors of the Crucifixion" in Zimmermann, Hermeneutik der Gleichnisse Jesu, 176.

⁷Hedrick, Wisdom of Jesus, 128-29.

⁸"Survivors of the Crucifixion," 172-73.

On Giving up Traditional Religious Faith

Suppose you have given up traditional faith in God and have come to the conclusion that the Judean man Jesus was only a man, about whom little historical information is known for certain. You no longer believe in life after death, but think that everything ends in the grave, and the church is simply a social organization, rather than a spiritual organism. Would such a change in perspective really matter?

 

            The Bible has very little to say positively regarding such a turn of affairs. It does make a serious threat, however: If Christians commit apostasy, it is impossible to restore them again to faith (Heb 6:1-8), or so the author of Hebrews thought. Later church leaders had different views on that issue, however.

 

            The closest thing to a "positive" word for someone who has given up traditional faith is likely found in Ecclesiastes. The writer of Ecclesiastes (calling himself, "Koheleth"; perhaps, the "Gatherer") gathered his own random reflections on the utter weariness of life, which he found as bitterly disappointing at best, into the book Ecclesiastes (from its Greek title ekklesiastes, "one who calls an assembly"). "Everything," Koheleth declared at the beginning of his collection, "is an ephemeral vapor" (1:2).

 

            The central theme of the sage's reflections is that life is transitory—like a momentary breath (1:2-11). He finds that there is a weary sameness to life (3:15); it passes like a shadow (6:12). Being governed by chance, as it is (9:11-12), life is unfair: the righteous perish early and the wicked live out long lives (7:15).

 

            The author does believe in God (5:18; 3:13; 8:15), but thinks that the life the Creator has bestowed on his creatures is an "unhappy business" (1:13). Human beings are like the beasts of the field; both return to dust (3:18-20; see also 9:10), and there is no certainty about the fate of the human spirit (3:21-22). The writer is candid; his views reflect the honest ponderings of a man who sees life from a rational perspective rather than through the eyes of faith. He struggles with the question: what is the point of life—and finds no satisfactory answer. His quest for answers brings him to the edge of despair, and his solution was to take pleasure in the simple things of life, like eating, drinking, and work (2:24; see also similar statements at 2:10; 3:12-13; 3:22; 5:18-19; 8:15; 9:7, 9; 10:19).

 

            The precept of traditional religion with which the text ends (12:13-14) surely does not reflect Koheleth's views as such a sentiment violates the norm of the work as a whole. Koheleth ponders the dichotomy between the inequities of life, and the failure of traditional religion to cope successfully with that reality. In the final analysis, however, he gives up neither on God nor life, and continues pondering the human situation.¹

 

            Could you learn to live without God and the comforts of traditional religion, as Koheleth has apparently managed to do? He found that honest transparency as an observer of life was preferred to embracing the answers of an inadequate traditional religion—even though by so doing he marginalized himself from the "righteous" (5:1-2; 9:1-6).

 

            If your fateful change of mind happened in one moment of time, the day following would nevertheless find the sun shining just as bright, birdsong just as sweet, and the world still filled with all the vibrant wonders of life. At least that was the experience of the poet Wallace Stevens. He began in Pennsylvania apparently as a traditional Lutheran² but ended life as a poet who thought poetry, "an exceeding music" that "must take the place of empty heaven and its hymns."³ He was regarded as a "poet of reality," who through imagination peered into the figurations of what seemed to be, in order to see "things as they are." Here is a quote from one of his poems⁴ seemingly reflecting a positive response to a profound shift in thought:

 

It was when I said,

"There is no such thing as the truth,"

That the grapes seemed fatter.

The fox ran out of his hole.

You…You said

"There are many truths,

But they are not parts of a truth."

Then the tree at night began to change

*****

It was at that time, that the silence was largest

And longest, the night was roundest,

The fragrance of the autumn warmest,

Closest and strongest.

 

In Stevens' case giving up traditional faith brought a renewed sense of the wonder of the universe. A literary critic once wrote of Stevens: In the end Stevens' subject was "living without God and finding it good."⁵

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

¹In this description I have freely "borrowed" from my own description of Ecclesiastes found in The Wisdom of Jesus, 69-72.

 

²In 1953 he described himself as a "dried up Presbyterian," who was not an atheist, but he certainly no longer believed in the same God in whom he had believed as a boy: Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966), letter 808 and 875.

 

³From "The Man with the Blue Guitar," Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1961), 167.

 

⁴Stevens, "On the Road Home," Collected Poems, 203-204.

 

⁵Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens (1960), 127.