Theology Today - Vol 45, No. 2 - July 1988 - CRITIC'S CORNER

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A Literature of Soul-Searching
By Robert Coles

For a number of years I have been teaching a course at Harvard College entitled "A Literature of Christian Reflection." I do so with Robert Kiely, a wonderfully sensitive and thoughtful professor of English. Our purposes are described this way in the university's catalogue:

An examination of certain classic and modern texts dealing with the Christian search for an experience of personal religious faith. Lectures will emphasize style, form, and the implications of the works for their authors. The approach will be primarily literary, interior, and biographical rather than theological or historical. The lives and works of modern authors will be compared with those of earlier periods. Authors to be studied will include Augustine, Juliana of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Luther, Calvin, Donne, Hopkins, Kierkegaard, Weil, O'Connor, and Bonhoeffer.

Terse statements meant to inform, and one hopes, invite.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a course called "Classics of the Christian Tradition." It was taught by Perry Miller, who was also my tutor-a demanding, scrutinizing one, but also spirited, kindly, generous. We read many of the authors mentioned above. Miller paid particular attention to Pascal and Kierkegaard. He was impressed, I think, with the willingness of those two iconoclastic thinkers to engage in a religious inquiry both skeptical and passionate. Each was no stranger to irony, or to the modern sensibility that gave us Galileo, Newton, and, in our time, Einstein. In his lectures, Perry Miller was at pains to emphasize doubt as an important aspect of faith, and not only for us who live in the twentieth century. He also emphasized the literary side of the texts we read: Pascal's capacity for exposition, his arresting, winning manner of approaching readers, which makes his pensees seem like our very own, stated at last as we would have them be; and Kierkegaard's shrewdly incisive, penetrating narratives whose dramatic pronouncements, biblically informed, have a way of putting thunder in the head,

Robert Coles is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard University. A prolific author, Dr. Coles has written on the lives of children (Children in Crisis, 5 vols., 1964-77; The Moral Life of Children, 1986; The Political Life of Children, 1986), on compelling fiction writers and poets (William Carlos Williams: The Knack of Survival in America, 1975; Walker Percy: An American Search, 1978; Flannery O'Connor's South, 1980), and contemporary spiritual figures (Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, 1987; Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage, 1987), among other subjects.

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shooting bolts of lightning across the intellect's often purposely dry terrain, hence an outbreak of fire now and then.

I well remember, as a matter of fact, a remark Miller once made as we struggled hard and long with Fear and Trembling: "If Kierkegaard doesn't light you up, send you pacing, then maybe this [Christian] tradition isn't meant for you." At the time, as I wrote down those words, I became irritated. Who was he, attractive and authoritative though he was, to insist upon such an exclusionary criterion for an entire body of thought and speculation? Where were all those other roads to Rome, or Geneva, or Jerusalem, or wherever? But a professor was entranced with a writer's dramatic performance, his brilliant hectoring, his lessons strenuously self-addressed-to the point that Kierkegaard's impatience with all of nineteenth century Christendom, himself included, was being directed through a Harvard professor at a bunch of mid-twentieth century boys. (Radcliffe women in the early 1950s were not yet permitted in most of our classes.)

Actually, I had experienced an earlier literature of religious contemplation, handed me by my mother, who was very much drawn to novelists and certain moral figures: Gandhi, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day. I remember as a child my mother reading her copy of a monthly newspaper sent from New York City, The Catholic Worker. I remember her reading Dr. Schweitzer's books and telling us children about his hospital in Lambarene. I remember her discussions of Gandhi with my English-born, scientist father, who was skeptical, indeed, of religion in general and of those who chose to write about it in any way. As for Gandhi, dad attributed his success in India to the British government, no less: its willingness to tolerate a non-violent uprising, and, eventually, yield to it-a contrast, we kept on hearing at the supper table, to what would have happened had Hitler been the one so confronted, tested.

My mother particularly loved Tolstoy's novels and stories. In that preference, she was joined by my father. I have memories of them reading passages from Anna Karenina to one another, or War and Peace, or "The Death of Ivan Ilych," or "Master and Man," or Resurrection. My father liked Tolstoy's luminous prose, his fine sense of detail, his extraordinary capacity to evoke character. My mother loved his strong moral voice, ever ready to call the reader to account philosophically or spiritually. About a year ago, when my mother lay dying in a Boston hospital, she had taken her great and long-time friend Leo Tolstoy with her. He was everywhere in her room, I noticed: by her bed on a table, at her feet on the bed, and on a window. She also brought with her old copies of The Catholic Worker, some of them going back to the 1930s and 1940s, yellowed yet obviously kept in neat piles, and so unwrinkled-and marked with that wonderful green ink she used to fill

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an old Parker fountain pen. (She resisted ball-point pens to the end, even as I still don't really know what a "word-processor" is or does.)

When my father went to the same hospital to die they'd been married over sixty years, were both in their eighties, and died within weeks of one another-he took with him back issues of The New Yorker and of his beloved Scientific American. He was also, as he put it, "thumbing through" a few of Robert Frost's poems. I recall looking at the book, The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, and wondering which ones had attracted my dad's notice. They turned out to be the very ones I teach in my undergraduate course on "Christian reflection," ones he long ago introduced to me when I was a high school student. They were, I think, a way of making an agnostic's point to an adolescent son asking a lot of questions and reading (so he must have thought) just a bit too much Tolstoy at the hands of a lovely mother who, however, "has a mystical bent" (a phrase I heard many times spoken by him about her). For dad, Frost's " 'Out, Out-'," or "Desert Places," or "Bereft" were important: the agnostic stoic's willingness to stay a lonely course, until the end comes, with no expectation of any revelations or miracles.

Such a tough, unyielding, even defiant posture-so powerfully rendered by a shrewd and deep-thinking poet--deserves, for my money, to keep company with Pascal and Kierkegaard, with Bonhoeffer and John of the Cross, with Thomas á Kempis and Flannery O'Connor, with Silone and Emily Dickinson, with Thomas Merton and Georges Bernanos and Simone Weil-the others whose work it is my job to address. Professor Kiely's list includes Augustine, Teresa of Avila, the poets Herbert and Donne and Hopkins, St. Benedict, St. Francis, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Bunyan, Julian of Norwich, and T. S. Eliot.

III

In planning our course (an element of Harvard's "core curriculum"), we have had in mind our own personal enjoyment as well as the instruction of others. And we have had in mind, I think it fair to say, our own continuing acquaintance with texts that had come to mean rather a lot to us, two middle-aged teachers with an increasing sense of life's constraints and tragedies as well as its wonderful opportunities (especially so if one is an American bourgeois). Our choices, then, are not meant to be regarded as "comprehensive" or "representative" in the ways those words get used in these days of social science survey research. Yes, we extend ourselves toward the past as well as the present, or the near-present; toward Protestantism and Roman Catholicism both (though a colleague, looking at the final list, teased us in a friendly fashion with the adjectival designation "Papist"); toward essayists, novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians; toward those who wrote primarily from the vantage point of convinced faith and those who were inveterate or reluctant skeptics. But we want to be intermediaries between certain writers, whose meditative life we find intriguing

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compelling, and our students, who are, we hope, beginning a journey with some of the writers we summon in our lectures.

Put differently, we hope to teach out of kinship or out of respectful disagreement, rather than in response to the imperatives of chronology or genre. Our purpose has been not so much analytic or "objective" as decidedly appreciative and responsive. I make no effort in my lectures to respect history's scheme of things, nor do I (nor am I able, I fear) to convey any doctrinal sophistication in my reading of the texts for which I have chosen to be responsible. Of course, we have wanted to examine both language and ideas, yet we are interested, above all, not only in what a particular writer is trying to say, but what human predicament he or she has chosen to address through the frailty (and sometimes, loveliness or power) of words.

I start with Pascal. He is a link for me with my own religious past, and his sense of unashamed awe before the enormous mystery of infinity (both with respect to time and space) has been for me a touchstone: so it went for him, so it goes for so many of us.

I read from the pensees I like the best (the first three hundred), and do so from a book I purchased at the age of nineteen. My old student markings are interspersed with my more recent college professor ones. And in the book are a couple of notes (mostly religious in nature) my mother sent me when I was a junior at Harvard, along with an interesting cry of unbelief from my father, who had seen in the Boston Public Library the first photographs of the Holocaust and was not about to settle for a prayer on behalf of the victims, or, as my mother would generously put it, "all of us." His vigorously rational and incisive mind, shrewdly materialist in its fundamental operations, though not in the pecuniary sense of that word "materialist," had no intention of surrendering before what he would often call "pietistic mumbo-jumbo." Hitler's deeds, and the complicity in them of so many educated, literate people, even the clergy, as well as the silence of so much of Christendom, warranted a look at what "religion" has become, so dad believed-a matter not to be confused with the persons of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, not to mention Jesus of Nazareth and his loyal, loving desciples, for all of whom he always offered unstinting admiration. His letter, still in that Pascal book, addressed such matters at some length in his own inimitable, Yorkshire-learned script, and, as I lecture, I think of him and of Pascal, two scientists who knew well enough the endless complexities of this universe, the mystery, the utter absurdity, as well as the utter rhythm and order of things; and who knew, each of them, the posture of humility-Pascal before the Jesus upon whom he wagered, and my dad before, as he put it, "the damnable enormity of evil," he who had once worked as an MIT graduate for the DuPont company, with its quaintly American slogan of "better living through chemistry."

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I leave Pascal for Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, which I read while in medical school, and have read twice since. Each reading has prompted different responses in me, even as Merton had so many sides of himself at work as allies or antagonists. At first, I was all too affected-to the point that, while on vacation during my year of hospital internship, I trekked to the abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, yet another stranger knocking on a door. In the early 1960s, when Merton was exerting a strong and important influence on many people I knew in the civil rights movement down South, I read a number of his essays and poems, and returned to the autobiography, which I then found, in places, rather too insistently triumphal: the conversion as a fortunate event, if not an aspect of one's good judgment, finally given the incarnation of a conclusive choice. Now, as I teach the book and lecture on the author's life, his various pieces of writing, and his struggles with himself as well as on behalf of various others, I feel yet again the tug of that extraordinary life, as it was chronicled in The Seven Storey Mountain and, thereafter, lived in such private and public ways, both. Pascal's writing reminds us of a particular kind of felt awe that is part of religious reflection; Merton's famous boot: helps us glimpse the turmoil and melancholy, the enthusiasm and joyfulness that can assert themselves in their own confluent and dialectic manner-the perplexity that can yield, of a sudden, to a conviction that holds firm. Merton's lyrical sadness, his buoyant hopefulness, his sheer will to persist and to touch his readers to the quick turn out to be extraordinary gifts for many students-even as for their teacher he has been, for over three decades, a reminder that the Christian sequence of hurt and pain and doubt and despair and redemption through grace is no mere remnant of earlier times, but a significant part of the modernity we know in this late twentieth century.

From America's contemporary Cistercian life, I cross the Atlantic to France, where a singularly chaste and holy secular woman, Simone Weil, lived a brief thirty-four years earlier in this century; and thence to the Spain of the sixteenth century, to the small villa of Fontiveros, where Juan de Yepes Y Alvarez was born. The students are asked to read Weil's essays that make up Waiting for God, the very three words of the title from Pascal's 282nd pensee; and afterwards, The Dark Night of the Soul, by the one who became, eventually, John of the Cross.

I discuss at some length Weil's lonely, brilliant, challenging pilgrimage, and share with the students my long effort to comprehend her complex and at times contradictory message. I tell them that it was in Perry Miller's course that she, too, was brought to the attention of us naifs; and I warn those students that she has a way of insinuating herself into a reader's mind, and even heart, notwithstanding some of her crankiness and, alas, upon occasion, her foolishness. Her love of Jesus is astonishing to contemplate-and her resemblance, in certain respects, to

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Pascal (the tough, scientifically erudite mind, the brilliant lucidity of pen) is remarkable. She loved to read Dark Night of the Soul, and no wonder: the uncompromising arraignment of self-importance and smugness, of egoistic maneuvers in all their cleverness, of "secret pride," as in this moment, which serves to remind the reader (a merely incidental benefit) how old-fashioned Freud's ideas were, really, even when they first made their appearance:

And hence there comes to them likewise a certain desire, which is somewhat vain, and at times very vain, to speak of spiritual things in the presence of others, and sometimes even to teach such things rather than to learn them. They condemn others in their heart when they see that they have not the kind of devotion which they themselves desire.

Weil and her beloved John of the Cross are both masters of spiritual psychology; as is Thomas 'a Kempis, whose Imitation of Christ needs no introduction to millions the world over, but to many students of Harvard College, yes, indeed. It does no harm for those young men and women, not to mention their teacher, that these words be read aloud in class: "Deeply inquisitive reasoning does not make a man holy or righteous, but a good life makes him beloved by God. I would rather feel compunction of heart for my sins than merely know the definition of compunction."

After making the acquaintance of those three saintly Europeans, I am ready to return to America, to visit with Frost, with Emily Dickinson, and with Flannery O'Connor, two of whom had their own lyrical ways of looking inward and trying to understand the world's surprises, provocations, riddles, and one of whom gave stunning fictional incarnations to Christian, or more precisely, Catholic doctrine. O'Connor's stories are sui generis, each an effort to take biblical dogma into the realm of Southern story-telling. Her tales are filled with comic irony and a shrewdly sardonic view of secular values and assumptions that all too many of us simply take for granted as acceptable if not desirable. Her letters (The Habit of Being) are also eminently worth reading; they offer a treasure of spiritual rumination, as does her non-fiction, collected as Mystery and Manners. Few students can read "Everything That Rises Must Converge" or "The Lame Shall Enter First" or "The Artificial Nigger" without feeling a tenacious hand collaring them, asking them to stop in their tracks and look at that "secret pride" St. John long ago noticed-in himself, of course. O'Connor is bracing as she calls from one direction, but the poetic initiatives which pull in quite another are also persuasive: Frost's ornery, probing agnosticism; Dickinson's piety, grounded in a naturalistic attentiveness to her immediate world, and fueled by a mind's deep desire to fathom and give expression to any and all symmetries or convergences.

We are ready, thereupon, to return to Europe for a last spell of encounters-with Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine, with Soren Kierke-

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gaard's The Present Age, with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, with Georges Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest. The Silone novel, not to mention a presentation of his life's struggles the "pilgrim's progress" from Marxist idealism, through disenchantment, to an outlook that draws with care and judiciousness upon both socialist and Christian outlooks-offers students all sorts of chances to connect religious matters with political ones. I love Bread and Wine with all my heart, as I do, too, The Diary of a Country Priest. Here were two religious wayfarers of our time, a French sometime royalist and an Italian one-time Communist-and yet how they come together in this pair of touching, unnerving fictions! Both novelists are trying to put themselves, never mind their readers, at a remove from the secular bourgeois world of the twentieth century. This, indeed, was also the purpose of Bonhoeffer, under the awful circumstances that obtained in Nazi Germany with its utter perversion of those values, as well as of Soren Kierkegaard, arguably as wonderfully truculent a social observer, as penetrating a psychologist, as daring a theologian as we have ever had in one person.

These four offer not only strong additions to a "literature of religious reflection," but an interesting range of literary expression: the Silone political novel, with its strong autobiographical strain; the Bernanos experiment, the story a cure's journal, affording the author exceptional access to the unselfconscious sanctity of an obvious homo-religiosus who, naturally, is full of self-doubt-a genuine, modest uncertainty about his own priestly usefulness; Kierkegaard's polemical essay, full of social satire and sharp philosophical asides; Bonhoeffer's heart-breaking prison letters, a reminder that suffering and injustice and moral loneliness will be ours throughout history, no matter our scientific achievements, our depth and breadth of knowledge.

VII

I want, always, to add more-Dorothy Day's Long Loneliness, Tolstoy's Confession, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer-but I use those three, very important to me personally over the years, in a fall-term course, "A Literature of Social Reflection," that precedes this one, and I don't want too much repetition in texts. Nonetheless, I do refer, inevitably, to Dorothy Day and Walker Percy, both of whom fate has enabled me to know-about as good a double stroke of luck as I can imagine. Nor can I go very long without thinking of Tolstoy, referring to his fiction or his essays. He was such a dear spiritual friend to my mother, and through her, to all of us in the home where I grew and first learned to think about life's meaning; and so he comes to mind during lectures, and informs whatever comments I make about other writers.

Tolstoy was constantly "soul-searching," my mother used to tell us, and, sadly, that expression, so natural to her, has no great currency these days among American intellectuals. (Should I make a brief point about "them" by spelling that last word as Flannery O'Connor did: "interleck-

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chuls"?) Yet, when I think of what I'm trying to do as I lecture about particular writers or discuss particular novels or poems or essays or letters or diaries, I remember that expression. "Soul-searching": the quiet, unostentatious look inward, managed in the nooks and crannies of an everyday, unexceptional family life. In that regard, William Carlos Williams, who hardly thought of himself as in the least religious, and whom I got to know in the 1950s because I wrote my undergraduate thesis on his lyrical examination of America, Paterson, was right to the point, memorably so: "People ask me what I'm doing a lot of the time, and I answer them with 'soul-searching,' and they shut up fast. I'm even surprised to hear the words come out of my own mouth but they tell the story."

The "story" he had in mind was everyone's story, if we would only know it and have the courage to seek it out, find our own particular way of rendering it: the thoughts we have about this life's purpose, if any; the questions we ask about our fate, such as our origins, our nature, our destiny, if any; the answers we have found to such questions-again, if any. Stories and poems are a great help in this kind of search. They grip the moral imagination, prompt us to wonder and speculate. Instead of holding us to theories, principles, ideas, ideologies, they let us each be ourselves, creatures using language to ask about reasons, to look with some intensity (and occasional fear or alarm) at what is happening, and to wonder why. I hope that in those texts the students and I will, yet once more, meet those great souls of other times, near and far, whose searching can help us along during our short stay here, a second or two in eternity's scheme of things.