My wife (Karin) and I took, for our 40thanniversary, to the Ucluelet/Tofino area on the West Coast of Canada. The waves from the ocean continually rose in thick white foams, crested, then crashed on the shoreline. Rocks and waves waged their ongoing, day by day, week by week, month and year by year contest, the craggy and rugged rocks momentarily protected we humans from being overwhelmed and swallowed up by the ocean, the tragic always nearby.
I was rereading the correspondence between Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz when on our 40th, the correspondence lasting from 1958 until Merton’s death in 1968 (2018 being the 50thyear since Merton’s death and 60thsince his probing and animated correspondence with Milosz began). I was taken by Milosz’s respect for Robinson Jeffers and the way Jeffers dared to gaze into the obstinate reality of the tragic and not flinch from going to such places---Jeffers and Milosz had suffered much in their lives and they had lived through a period of Western history in which much sadness and tragedy abounded. It was not that Merton did not want to face the tragic in the same way Milosz and Jeffers did (Merton followed Camus in such a trajectory), but in the inevitable tension between tragedy and hope, Merton leaned more to the hope side of the tension (while never negating the tragic) and Jeffers-Milosz tended to heed and hear the tragic and were slower in embracing hope. The perennial tension between the tragic and hope is foundational to minimal responsible thought in the area of spirituality, theology, philosophy, literature and political thought—the aberrations are naïve optimism and a form of realism that knows no hope.
It is 100 years this year since Robinson Jeffers The Alpine Christ was written (1918-2018). The date, of course, is significant. WWI had seen Western Civilization turn on itself, millions were killed or injured and, at a more personal level, Jeffers father (who he much admired) had died—in short, tragedy was in abundance. The waves of war had, like a Tsunami, overwhelmed the rocks and flooded the West in much pain and war. The Alpine Christ is not an easy poem to read but it does raise all the larger questions about the seeming absence, silence, eclipse of God in the midst of carnage and brutality. Such questions are asked often in more benign and secure historic moments and contexts but they become more pressing and intense when deaths mount and there seems no end to war (and the long-term implications of it). The Alpine Christ is set in Europe and the metaphor of the Alps (mountains) means the vision and view will be seen from a large and spacious one, a looking down into the valley of history, time and war (and the larger intellectual and practical implications of it). There are few who have dared to engage, in a significant way, Jeffers poetic power, but William Everson (a friend of Merton) did so more than most.
The sheer intellectual and poetic power of Jeffers, Everson, Merton and Milosz must be lived into if even a minimally mature notion of Christian faith is ever to be salvaged and lived from with some integrity and authenticity—tragedy and hopes—how are such tensions to be lived into and from?—naïve optimism is silly and a paralysing realism will not do. How can Everson, Merton, Jeffers, and Milosz point the way forward on this challenge to one and all on their all too human journey? The Alpine Christ is no Walt Disney ending but if Disney will not do, who can be trusted with such questions? What might be the limitations, even, of the cruciform, kenotic and suffering servant Christ as a way to answer such questions—Jeffers certainly pondered this in The Alpine Christ with his Christ-like figure of Manuel. It is these larger questions that we find attempts to answer in Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Hardy, Nietzsche, Camus and Jeffers that need deeper and further pondering.
Amor Vincit Omnia
Ron Dart
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