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that he found poignantly memorable the remark,
"If
God died in the
nineteenth century, man died in the twentieth," and he was as aware
of as he was opposed to this sense of "ontological insecurity,"
anomie,
and alienation, and did all he could to counteract it in his writing
and teaching.
In his analysis and attitude Van Doren prefigured more recent
and technical analyses of the crisis of modern character and culture
by thinkers such as Peter Berger, William Barrett, Daniel Bell, and
Leszek Kolakowski, not to speak of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom
Van Doren recognized and warmly praised early on. "The pervasive
sense of disorientation which has spread through" modern culture
and which is a prime "source of the crisis of modernity," Bell has
written, is caused by "the lack oflanguage that can adequately relate
one to transcendental conceptions."
Both Van Doren's poetry and his prose provide such a lan–
guage. "Poetry is something that reveals and glorifies existence," he
asserted, and in the fifth of the beautiful psalms published in
That
Shining Place
(1969) he wrote:
I will not cease to say your name
However many smile at me,
However many claim they know
You were not here before things were
Nor will be after. . . .
The achievement or restoration of such sanity is fraught with dan–
gers of fanaticism, wishful thinking, delusion, and ignorance, as
every kind of religious fundamentalism perennially shows. Like his
friends Mortimer Adler and Thomas Merton, there is an Aristo–
telian and Thomist cast to Van Doren's mind: he is the poet of
Natural Theology, of gratitude, praise, and creation, and of nar–
rative, but in no windy, vague Transcendentalist way, as his judi–
cious but withering essays on Emerson and Whitman show. "The
Transcendentalists did not write stories, they emitted sayings, and
'Orphic' at that," he /wrote, but Hawthorne "tested their truths in the
truth of narrative, and found them wanting.... " and:
In the charming sketch entitled "The Old Manse" [Hawthorne]
described his rummaging among old theological books he had
found in the attic. They were ancient and dead, yet still not dead
as the contemporary gospels were.
