Brothers of Perpetual Responsibility: Monasticism, Memory, And Penance in Cassutt, Donaldson, And Straczynski (1) (Michael Cassutt, Stephen R. Donaldson, J. Michael Straczynski) (Critical Essay‪)‬

MANY readers will remember Garrison Keillor's fictional parish in Lake Wobegon, "Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility." Parody though this name is, it aptly captures a moral stance shared by ascetics in Michael Cassutt's "Perpetual Light," Stephen R. Donaldson's First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and J. Michael Straczynski's "Passing Through Gethsemane." Cassutt's Brothers of Perpetual Light and Donaldson's Bloodguard, made semi-immortal by their vows, experience immortality as a bondage of perpetual responsibility; Straczynski's Brother Edward finds that his responsibility for his past sins outlives his personal memory of those sins. Here I will explore the responses of these characters to what Mircea Eliade calls "the terror of history" (139). In his seminal work Cosmos and History (also published as The Myth of the Eternal Return) Eliade argues that only in secularized societies is history--a sequence of human acts played out in irreversible, linear time--regarded as more real than the timeless events of myth. In contrast, in societies where religious ritual cyclically reenacts the actions of gods or culture founders, a human act gains validity by imitating a mythic exemplar. Acts that do not imitate mythic originals cannot share in the power of those originals, and thus are seen as meaningless and unreal. According to Eliade, linear memory, with its succession of unrepeatable, ontologically void acts, is felt as an intolerable burden in such societies, and can be endured only by being periodically abolished. Ceremonies of the New Year, of confession and forgiveness, of mythical death and rebirth redissolve the world into chaos and recreate it pristinely in a time ritually assimilated to the original creation. By such means the chain of cause and effect in profane time is broken and the burden of history lifted. When linear time is regarded as profane, history and fallenness are coextensive.