Read Orrin's interview of Frederick Glaysher.
The Enlightenment writ large spelt the end
of all that was truly human and noble.
-Frederick Glaysher,
The Bower of Nil
This is a narrative poem that can, and should be, read in one sitting. It depicts one long, troubled night in the life of philosopher Peter Marsh, whose wife has recently been murdered. Early in the night, Marsh discusses his wife, Mary, with a friend, David Emerson. With Emerson and then continuing to think about Mary and their children even after Emerson leaves, Marsh reveals the distance he feels from his family. They are products of the Enlightenment, of the Age of Reason, of the Sexual Revolution, of the drug scene, of Modernity in all its terrible guises and have fallen prey to its various pathologies.
This leads Mr. Glaysher, in the second and I think strongest section of the poem, into a learned and devastating critique of modern culture. Here Marsh resembles a Biblical prophet or at least a T.S. Eliot or Geoffrey Hill, raging against the ruination of Western Civilization. Marsh begins, in a refutation of his wife's irreligion, with twin declarations that: "Whether one believes or not...the soul exists." And, "Reason and faith go hand in hand." He embarks on a sustained attack, reminiscent of Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics, on modern Man's fealty to Reason at the expense of religious belief and philosophical inquiry:
O Dame Philosophy, he mused, where is
your consolation? Where belief in wisdom,
let alone love of it? Providence is dead.
The perplexed no longer seek a guide.
Descartes finished off fifteen-hundred years
of philosophy and substituted himself,
retreated into the stove of consciousness,
into the crucible of doubt,
which has brought us where we are:
When the foundation is undermined
the superstructure will collapse of itself.
The disease has only worsened since then.
[...] Descartes was a dead fish,
he thought. Pascal saw it right off.
He never fell for all that sophistry.
He knew the cause of man's unhappiness
is that he doesn't know how to sit
still in his own room. Yes, that's it.
Sit quietly and wager, enwrapped
in fire, neither excluding reason nor
admitting only reason. [...]
Montaigne may have thought we have lost
the hierarchy of being and reason,
but what could he offer other than
his scathing skepticism? Pascal
knew the fallacy of Montaigne's dilemma.
The immortality of the soul is
an eternal, divine command.
Sitting on the fence is itself negation,
refusing to wager is to wager.
Both the heart and reason perceive God.
And reason's last step recognizes there is
an infinite number of stairs beyond it.
God of Abraham, God of Isaac,
God of Jacob, not of philosophers
and scholars....Certitude, certitude.
Here, in the existential realm, we live
and move and have our being. The stakes are
infinite. Negation molders in the grave.
By the end of this section Peter Marsh is near total despair, as his survey of philosophy has led him to point where we are today, a moment of utter nihilism, complete lack of faith, and surrender to the view that life has no purpose. He picks up a pair of scissors and lays down on the ground.
The third section opens and as he lies there, the new day begins to dawn, the first bird begins to sing, and hope begins to return to Peter Marsh. The first hope is that God will reveal his will to Man again. The second is that democracy will give rise to a better world:
For all its decadence democracy
has permitted freedom of worship,
freedom of individual conscience.
Groping, faltering, it moves toward
a wider definition of loyalty.
At the least it has formed a bridge between
the old world and the one still forming.
Uncouth, but not barbaric, democracy
stands for a universal vision
of mankind wrestling with destiny
laying the foundations of world peace,
blending the nations into harmony,
a discredited yet immortal System.
Out of each cataclysm, democracy
strains to raise the millions toward
greater affiliation, freedom, peace.
At this point, even a religious believer and a democratic optimist can't help feeling that Mr. Glaysher is getting ahead of himself--not to mention well ahead of most of the competing civilizations in the modern world--and by the time he gets to this--"Sooner or later the time will come, regalvanizing the United Nations..."--he begins to lose us a little. And this:
Slowly, gradually, a marvelous
world civilization will develop,
with a world Executive, supported by
an international force, guided by
the adjudications of a Supreme Tribunal,
serving the interests of all nations,
implementing the decisions
of a global Legislature, freely
elected by all the inhabitants
of the diverse but unified planet,
mirroring, however faintly, His Kingdom.
...is just too much. Surely God's purpose for us here on Earth can not be so mundane as to create a World Government? In fact, we have little reason to believe that God favors one kind of government over another. As Robert Kraynak has written in his excellent recent book,Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World:
The difficulty is that modern democracy's need for
a religious basis is no guarantee that one is readily available.
As disturbing
as it might be for modern believers to admit, the
critics of religion have a legitimate point: Christian faith is derived
from a
revealed book, the Bible, and from church traditions
that are not necessarily liberal or democratic in their teachings.
The
Christian notion of human dignity, for example,
is derived from the biblical idea that human beings are made in the image
and likeness of God. But it is not clear if
the Bible's idea of the divine image in man--the Imago Dei--entails
political notions
like democracy and human rights, in fact, many great
theologians of the past understood it to be compatible with kingship,
hierarchy, or authoritarian institutions.
The Christian view of human dignity is also qualified by a severe view
of human
sinfulness and by other difficult doctrines--such
as, divine election, the hierarchical authority of the church, and the
priority
of duties to God and neighbor over individual rights.
These doctrines are not always easy to square with democratic norms
of freedom and equality, nor are they easily discarded
without removing the core of Christian faith.
Thus, we must face the disturbing dilemma that
modern liberal democracy needs God, but God is not as liberal or as democratic
as we would like Him to be.
[Italics in original]
But from what I've read Mr. Glaysher is devoted to the cause of the United Nations--this seems a personal dream of his. And, since we can't know God's purposes, it's possible this could be one. At any rate, the poem closes well with an especially nice Baha'i prayer of self-abnegation:
"I bear witness, O my God, Thou hast
created me to know Thee and to worship Thee
I testify, at this moment, to my powerlessness
and to Thy might, to my poverty and to
Thy wealth. There is none other God but Thee,
the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting."
and with Peter Marsh's faith in God and in Man's future fully restored. He is once again reconciled to the "torment and struggle" of his life.
Mr. Glaysher writes with a genuine passion, with an obvious thrill at the play of ideas, and with an often compelling sense of purpose. Though I personally found the world government stuff to be dubious, the excesses seem excusable because I also happen to agree with nearly all of his analysis of how we got to where we are and to share his hope for a better tomorrow, one that remains within our grasp because of a combination of the universality of our God and of our political system. On balance the poem is very worthwhile reading and the middle section is just outstanding.
(Reviewed:24-Oct-02)
Grade: (B+)
