IT'S A JOY
to welcome you all here tonight. If you’ll permit me, I’d like to share a
few thoughts before we begin our literary readings
. So, here we are on the eve
of Veterans Day. The English word veteran comes from the Latin, vetus,
for “old,” and suggests the
accrued years of experience in a particular occupation, soldier or otherwise.
But the special meaning of Veterans Day in the US has always been with an eye
to honoring military veterans. As many of you know, Veterans Day was known as
Armistice Day until 1954, and was inaugurated on Nov 10-11, 1919, to
commemorate the cessation of hostilities between France and Germany in “the
Great War” on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month (11 November
1918). That was 101 years ago, exactly.
World War I and its aftermath impacted western
civilization in unprecedented ways, arguably ushering in the modern era, which
in its early decades (and arguably still) is characterized by cultural
disillusionment and hastened forces of secularization and despair. What we now
know as PTSD was rampant, and effected an entire generation. After a
catastrophe of such magnitude, some concluded that existence was meaningless,
and found fleeting solace in the pursuits of hedonism. Yet some who lived
through the Great War, and other wars since, responded differently: through a
recuperation of traditional faith, historical consciousness, artistic endeavor,
and honest work. Exactly 101 years later, how can we honor and remember the
personal sacrifice, the loss of life, and the social aftermath of WWI and other
wars, which are all a part of our inheritance? Especially pertinent for an event
hosted by Eighth Day Institute is the question: how can reckoning with the
significance of war help renew the cultural legacy of Christian civilization?
Ultimately, the impact of WWI cannot be fathomed. It was
a war in which machinery utterly outpaced and outflanked strategy, leading to
the tactically futile loss of millions of lives – an entire generation of
European men. The cultural aftermath of WWI, or any war, cannot also be
fathomed, insofar as each soldier’s experience of battle brings forward the
most fundamental questions about life and death, truth and power, faith and
doubt, beauty and suffering, and all these rippling through each veteran into
the lives of those around them.
One paradox of war is that its purpose, end, and goal –
its telos
– is peace; or perhaps it’s
more accurate to say that disagreements about what peace should look like –
what partitions and rearrangements constitute an imagined state of peace
– are what, in the most general of
terms, motivate war. Another paradox of war is that it brings out both the best and
the worst of people, facilitating
in the most common of breasts either base depravity or selfless nobility – or a
mixture of both. The words of war-time correspondent Chris Hedges are perhaps apropos
here:
I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The
rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I
ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers – historians, war
correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state – all of whom endow it
with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to
rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe
that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory,
corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes
preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions
about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare
when we watch those around us sink into the lowest depths. War exposes the
capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. And
this is why for many war is so hard to discuss once it is over.
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its
destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us
purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of
conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become
apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And
war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be
noble.
(Chris Hedges, War is a Force That
Gives Us Meaning,
3)
Surviving the battlefield, and finding purpose there, is
one thing; picking up the pieces of society afterward are another. And there
are those who did their best after WWI; among them, some of the authors whose
works you’ll hear read from tonight. But there are many who fought in WWI and
later wars whose thoughts or writings we’ll never know. Or maybe just barely. Only
last night, I discovered brief anecdotal accounts of WWI from my wife’s
great-grandfather, Donald Riggs, who was in the 40th US infantry
division supporting the French army in the trenches in mid-to-late 1918. After
the war, Riggs and others like him went back to their lives, forever changed,
to a world that admittedly had difficulty knowing what to do with them. And
there are many who never came home. And “they shall not grow old,” as tonight’s
film title puts it.
But some did come home. Lately I’ve been steeping myself
in the writings of the painter and poet, David Jones, who was a WWI veteran
from the UK. Unlike many of his comrades, Jones did grow old – one year shy of
four score years, dying in 1974. Other than
– or perhaps even alongside
– T. S.
Eliot (if Eliot’s own thoughts on Jones’s work are taken into account), Jones
may be the preeminent Christian modernist. His debut literary epic, In Parenthesis
, has been called “The Iliad
of WWI.” The excerpts from Jones
on the handout are from his preface to In
Parenthesis
, which convey one artist’s perspective about war and its
impact. His essay “Art in relation to War,” in posthumously published The Dying Gaul
, is also to be
recommended. Jones’ other long poetic work, The
Anathemata
, was described by W. H.
Auden as “likely the best long poem in English of this century.”
In his poetic and artistic oeuvre,
Jones mines the depths of Celtic, Roman, and Arthurian
mythology to allusively recuperate a vision of history in which human beings,
following the incarnational logic of creation, are most basically artists, that
is, makers of signa.
All made things
can be, and historically have been, artifacts that exceed mere functionality
and thus convey something of the gratuitious ( gratia
= grace, thanksgiving) of the divinely created order.
Moreover, from a traditional Christian perspective, all cultural production
non-identically resonates with the Eucharistic sacrament, mysteriously re-presenting
of the Logos in the midst and messes of finite existence, like war. The
frontispiece and end-piece of In
Parenthesis,
both engravings by Jones, are moving examples of this attempted
re-presentation. These allusive images convey the kenotic
presence of Christ in instances of concrete, ineluctable
suffering, and thus artistically “redeem the time” by recasting our vision of
immense cultural-historical sacrifices like WWI.
Jones is not alone in making a profound contribution to
renewing culture after the Great War: other giants include T. S. Eliot, J. R. R.
Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and many, many, others. Yet it is through reading Jones’
writings that such an evening as this occurred to me. A related abiding irony
is that, for many and perhaps most of us in this room tonight, war has only
“occurred” to any of us in a mediated fashion, through the artifacts produced
by those who lived it first-hand. Yet the circle goes both ways; soldiers on
the battlefield have always also been influenced in their sense of what they
were living through by engagement with things they have read or listened to or
watched. Human experience is not a closed feedback loop, even if it seems nearly
one at times. For the pen and the brush – the tools of art – are always
sparring with the sword and the gun – the tools of war, even as the latter
cleaves and redistributes the former’s fruits. War itself is an art, too. It
requires the realization of an ideal for a specific telos.
But the stakes of that
art are high, for human blood is the ink and the paint on the page and canvas
of its history.
Yet mankind is resilient. Looking both at the devastation
of war and at the subsequent responses to it from poets and artists and
thinkers suggests that the renewal of the Christian legacy of our civilization occurs
in part through reflective engagement with the historical fact of warfare,
spiritual and physical. While our Lord’s cryptic saying, “the Kingdom of heaven
suffers violence; and the violent take it by force,” is likely meant to refer
to the ascetic efforts of regular prayer and fasting, the history of the West,
most of all in the modern era, is a history of physical as well as spiritual
war. And in light of ongoing US engagement in armed conflicts across the globe,
the question of the cultural and even spiritual significance of war is exigent
for both the past and
present.
I don’t have answers to these huge issues – but gathering
together in order to be effected by them in some capacity seems an appropriate
mode of commemoration. And that is one thing this evening is meant to be: an
active instance of commemoration. The classical taxonomies of mental faculties
are clear on this point: that the imagination depends on – and is sourced from
– the memory. There is no thought that does not begin with remembrance.
Feast of St Menas of Egypt
Anno Domini 2017, November 11
Gaelan Gilbert
is the Headmaster of Christ the Savior Academy in Wichita, KS. He is also the author of a collection of poems titled
One Is Found First .
*This piece was presented at The Ladder, in Wichita, KS on the eve of Armistice / Veterans Day, Anno Domini 2019.
