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PLS and the Great Books

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Life with the Great Books

By Art Petersen '54

A sunny Sunday sometime after Vatican II. Standing at the lecturn facing the priest who is cleaning up after Communion, I am suddenly jerked clean out of my commentator function and frozen by the question: Why are you doing this? Yes, you! Up here at the altar in front of all these people, leading them in word and song, why are you doing this?

T.S. Eliot: All will be well, and all manner of things will be well by the purity of the motive in the ground of our beseeching.

Motive. Yes, I liked being up there in front of everyone, I was good at it. The sound of my voice, yes! And I liked singing. I felt close to God up there on the altar. Having gone to public grammar school, I had never learned to serve Mass, never been on the altar except to be married.

This was the 1960s of Pope John and John Kennedy and the Peace Corps (which had rejected my application, presumably because I had a wife and four kids). For those few years life was like the sun breaking through after a summer storm. There was a feeling we could change the world, make everyone feel what we in our little group felt: See how these Christians love one another!

Martin Buber: the spirit's lapse into mere spirituality becomes truly abysmal when self-deception reaches the point where one thinks that one has God within, and speaks to him.

Only much later did I stop to wonder where the question had come from that morning on the altar. It had stunned me so that when I came to and realized the priest and the whole congregation were coughing and staring at me, all I could see was my wife in the first pew making desperate gestures.

My life was further interrupted by a week of jury duty, which was mostly sitting around waiting to be called. On a lunch break, on a whim, I bought a book of 20^th century American poetry. After 15 years, it was like re-entering college. To my surprise the book included three poems by Thomas Merton. After that I began reading Merton, particularly his journal of the later years. At once I was back in Frank O'Malley's Modern Catholic Writers course, jotting down names he would drop in his lecture, then running to the library to find out what the author had to say. Merton was a truth-seeker, and through his Journals I discovered another world: Meister Eckhardt, Simone Weil, the elder Suzuki, Buber, Barth and on and on. He was like the pitcher that never ran out of milk.

Discovering John Dunne was just as mysterious. His Search for God in Time and Memory was given to me by a Catholic book club member who wasn't interested in searching. Here was a priest, a Domer who hadn't "found it". It was OK to be searching. I plunged in after Dunne, it was something I had to do.

John Dunne: I held myself open toward mystery. It is ... not a matter of looking for one person who will be the way, the truth, and the life, and rejecting all others, one by one. It is rather a matter of delving ever more deeply into the mystery of oneself and of others.

I first encountered the world of truth-seekers in the early 1950s in ND's Great Books course. Great Books was vernacular for The General Program of Liberal Education that Notre Dame had initiated by hiring Otto Bird away from Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. At the end of the 20-page booklet, which described the course as one built around "reason and understanding in the pursuit of truth," was an index of authors that would be read, a "who's who" from Aristophanes and Aristotle to Thoreau and Tolstoy. And 12 works that were on the Catholic Church's Index, forbidden to be read under pain of mortal sin. Needless to say, Dr. Bird got the needed ecclesiastical permission, and we purchased Modern Library editions of: Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Hume, Mill, Hobbes, Berkeley, Rousseau, Machiavelli and Marx. Practically the whole of what is known as "The Age of Reason." Oh, and there was Martin Luther's pamphlet, "On Liberty" (along with, of course, the writings of Saints Anselm, Athanasius, Augustine, Benedict, Bernard, Bonaventura, Cyprian, Cyril, Francis de Sales, Ignatius, John of the Cross, Robert Bellarmine, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More. Even Thomas a Kempis, who never made it to sainthood.

Perhaps the voice I heard that morning in church was the siren call of Truth, of Philosophy trying to get my middle-aged attention? Truth, partly revealed, partly hidden, to borrow Michael Gelven's metaphor, "like a partly unbuttoned blouse." We are lured, seduced not away from ignorance, but from knowledge. Until confronted that morning on the altar, I had been comfortable in my knowledge of God.

Simone Weil thought there were only two ways God penetrates the soul. One is through "the beauty of the world" -- awe, at the rim of the Grand Canyon; wonder, at a baby blue jay struggling to keep its balance on the narrow rim of our birdbath -- and through "affliction." Which is not the same as suffering, she says, because it is not deserved. While the "beauty of the world" may penetrate us for a few moments, even hours, "affliction" can last for years.

Simone Weil: Affliction ... distress of soul, and social degradation ... a marvel of divine technique... The man to whom such a thing happens has no part in the operation. He struggles like a butterfly pinned alive to an album. But through all the horror he can continue to love.

One year our business was going down the tubes, and so was the second mortgage on my house. I prayed. And hoped until I could no longer distinguish between the two. One week I was certain we wouldn't make payroll, and I just gave up. No more hoping. Almost at once things got better. Before dawn one morning I awoke from a dream, a strong light, a figure, a voice telling me everything would be all right.

At some deep level I had thrown in the towel. I had learned to live "down at the bottom" to use James Hillman's phrase, what he calls "building soul ... It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness."

Dunne describes the process of "going over" by looking at that old adage about "praying as though everything depended upon God, but acting as though everything depended upon you." A man controls everything he can in his life until he gets to "death and circumstances," and then he prays. As Dunne says, if he stops praying altogether, it wouldn't change much.

John Dunne: going over to a trust relationship with God ... would mean relinquishing control of his life in the central area, where he cares and where he is able to exercise control.

It means "taking a chance on God, an awful chance." Martin Buber describes the, "moment of encounter ... something happens ... something has grown there of which he did not know before, and for whose origin he lacks any suitable words."

Simone Weil: True faith implies great discretion ... It is a secret between God and us in which we ourselves have scarcely any part.

I'm not sure what to call myself these days, not that it's important but when it does come up I find myself replying, "I was raised Catholic." I remember an episode of Homicide in which the character played by Andre Braugher is questioned by his partner and answers, with some frustration, "There are only two kinds of Catholics, devout, and fallen-away." On our parish marquee is the message, "Welcome Home!" To all of us prodigals?

Doubt may be more valuable than hope. When he was just 23, John Keats wrote that he had discovered the quality that Shakespeare must have possessed ... .

... so enormously -- I mean NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason ...

In the long and often brutal conversion of the world from earth religions and local cults to the revealed religions -- mainly to Christianity and to Islam, with their broader philosophical and social concerns -- what seems to have diminished is the sense of the spiritual in everyday life. Eastern disciplines like Yoga and Zen Buddhism, even native American spirituality, are finding a place in our seclarized lives. Buddhist meditation techniques are now being tried with hyperactive children. While Christianity does not have a corner on compassion, it does seem to be most responsible for the concept that "all men are created equal." That is more important to me than its promise of salvation.

I have my baby picture framed, hanging in the hall where I pass it daily, to remind me I have no more control over my departure from this life than I had over my arrival. It gives me pause. And pleasure, I was a cute kid. It also reminds me of Jesus' admonition about the children, not just their delight in the world about them but their "joyful interrogation" to borrow an Indian priest's thought about the meaning of life: Life is joyful interrogation, any answer is blasphemy.

I have learned to trust reason in the pursuit of truth, as the Great Books promised. But I am just learning that it is not truth that drives me, but meaning. And when it comes to the thrill of finding meaning, I have learned to trust poets ahead of theologians. Trust the poets, only never, ever give them more than one vote.