Subject: The Center: WP = SK vs. Aquinas
From: Gregory J Zuschlag (zoosh@JUNO.COM)
Date: Sat Jun 26 1999 - 14:15:14 EDT
Dear list folks,
(1) R. Eckert's Kierkegaardian homiletical/apostle-like exhortation about
The Center,
(2) the discussion of fideism, and
(3) the Fides et ratio interest
reminded me of the insight by Paul Giles into what he saw as *the* great
unresolved tension in WP's work: that between SK and Aquinas-- the
tension which makes WP's work uniquely American literature and
(religious) thought.
Allow me to quote from Giles' exceptional _American Catholic Arts and
Fiction: Culture, Ideology, and Aesthetics_ (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994)
:
<< "It is," noted Percy in 1981, "a classical dispute between Catholics
and Protestant whether faith is a form of knowledge"( Lawson and Kramer,
_Conversations with Walker Percy_, 204); and with Percy being a
late-flowering Catholic, his texts fluctuate equivocally between
Kiekegaardian uncertainty and Thomistic resolution.
Percy's essay "The Message in the Bottle" actually features two
contradictory epigraphs: one from Aquinas insisting "The act of Faith
consists essentially in knowledge," and the other from Kierkegaard
declaring "Faith is not a form of knowledge." SK's point here is that
"the eternal" and "the historical" are such mutually distinct categories
that it is absurd attempting conceptually to reconcile them; whereas for
Aquinas, of course, the historical is so analogically related to
historical being.>> (371)
A good quote on SK's Apostle and the Genius:
<<Percy exploits the genre of comedy as a radically anti idealist form
that skeptically defuses the pretensions of human institutions. As with
Flannery O'Connor, however, one of the unresolved contradictions in
Percy's art may arise from an uneasy conjunction between this skeptical,
comically concrete emphasis and the higher principles of Catholic faith.
Percy said he revered SK's essay _The Difference between a Genius and an
Apostle_, where SK stated that a "genius" is the person who sees or
embodies the world for other people, whereas an "apostle" is that
secondary figure who takes it upon himself to conceptualize his finding
and preach to others what he perceives as truth. A novelist "least of
all," said Percy, should be an apostle; he should embody concrete truths,
not seek "to edify anyone or tell them good news."
It is of course clear enough that Percy's novel avoid didacticism; still,
in these perpetual dialogues between "vertical" and "horizontal," between
Protestantism and Catholicism, between transcendence and immanence, there
occasionally lurks a suggestion that Percy does not altogether avoid in
the form of his own writing that "angelic" or apostolic tendency the
themes of his books so much deplore.>> (375)
I hope this sheds some light on things as well as encourages those
SK-philes and Aquinas-philes to see both the *complementary and
contradicatory* nature of their positions.
I am more optimistic than Giles is about old WP. I hypothesize that
WP's late-late-flowering great interest in CSP (as the Ketner-WP
correspondence and the Jefferson lecture from the 80's reveals) can be
viewed as an attempt to escape this either/or dillema to a place where
both vertical/trancendence and horizontal/ immanence are honored and
accounted for; where, in the words of Tillich, Catholic substance and
Protestant principle kiss.
Something to chew on,
Your working-boy theologian,
Greg
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