Relative Truths: The Damnation of Theron Ware, Father Forbes, and the “Church of America”

Nearly twenty years before he published The Damnation of Theron Ware, a young Harold Frederic published an essay called “Christianity and Civilization” in which he declared the idea of Christian Civilization to be an oxymoron. With “the triumphs of civilization in which we exult to-day,” he writes, “Christianity has nothing to do.” In fact, religion is the disease of the age: “No organized religion, be it never so pure and worthy . . . can escape degenerating into an Orthodoxy,” and it is Orthodoxy that conspires against the truth.¹ The conflict between orthodoxy and truth, and between dogma and the spirit of religious truth, is at the heart of The Damnation of Theron Ware, and nowhere does it exist in a more striking combination than in the figure of Father Forbes. As critics have long noted, Forbes is one of four “tempters” who represent the competing belief systems that Theron encounters in the novel and cause his damnation. He is less culpable perhaps than the “satanic” Sister Soulsby,² whom Stanton Garner identifies as “the true Mephistopheles,” but he often bedazzles the naïve Theron with what Bruce Michelson has called his “show-stopping generalizations” and “fast-and-loose lectures.”³ One key to Forbes’ character lies in his two mutually contradictory statements to Theron, that “truth remains always the truth” and that “[t]he truth is always relative.”⁴ In discussing Forbes’ early dismissal of relativism and later endorsement of it, Aaron Urbanczyk explains the inconsistency in definitions of “the truth” as Forbes’ attempt to be kind to a clearly distraught Theron after Celia has dismissed him from their circle.⁵ Yet taken together, these two statements suggest that Forbes deals in ambiguities proscribed by his religion, holding opposing ideas at the same time in a kind of doctrinal negative capability. For Father Forbes, truth must be simultaneously absolute and relational, subject to rigorous testing through the laws of science, yet delicately nuanced enough to admit ambiguities in interpretation.

This contradictory stance between relative truths and absolute truth has a much larger purpose, for it signals that Father Forbes exemplifies not one but several issues in late-nineteenth-century American culture. Forbes’ performance of his role as a priest not only follows contemporary Catholic advice on the subject but also demonstrates Theron’s deficiencies in a manner that echoes the novel’s evolutionary themes, much as his speeches about time and the nature of truth reinforce Theron’s inability to comprehend the relative nature of both. Moreover, inserted almost as an afterthought within Forbes’ speeches are important references to contemporary church and national controversies, including the question of priestly obedience to the Vatican, a subject in the news because of liberal priests like Father Edward McGlynn; the “racial” characteristics of the Irish; the issue of religion in the public schools; and the debate over whether Catholics divided their loyalties between obedience to the Pope and allegiance to the nation. Viewed within contemporary contexts for the novel, Forbes seems a touchstone, or perhaps a lightning rod, for these broader questions of Americanization and nationalism. To consider Father Forbes in multiple contexts reveals the novel’s engagement in debates over the Catholic Church’s place in building a new American social order.

Frederic’s perspective on the culture of priestly obedience appears to be drawn from the prototype for Forbes’ character, Father Edward Terry, a sophisticated priest and friend of Frederic’s from his days in Utica. Born in Ardmore, County Waterford, Ireland in 1842, Edward Aloysius Terry came to America in 1849 and graduated with distinction from Lazarist College of St. Mary’s in Barrens, Missouri, in 1861. He studied at the University of Louvaine in Belgium before being ordained in 1866.⁶ Two years later, and apparently a rising star, Terry “was called . . . to occupy the chairs of Dogmatic Theology and Sacred Scripture” at Mt. St. Mary’s College and Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the second oldest Catholic college in the U.S.⁷ By 1875, however, Terry had left Mt. St. Mary’s to become a parish priest in...