Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[JHForest AT cs.com]

I just came upon this text, which connects Walker Percy, Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton and others in 
what the author sees as an "orthodox avant garde".

Jim Forest

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Christianity Today, Week of July 25, 2005

The following article is located at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/130/12.0.html

The Orthodox Avant-Garde

Armed with traditional faith, these Christians subverted the establishment,
putting secular ideas under the microscope of the eternal.

Interview by Rob Moll | posted 07/26/2005 09:00 a.m.

>> It's not easy to place thinkers as diverse as Walker Percy, Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton, and Northrop
Frye into the same category. But Robert Inchausti, English professor at
California State Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo, says they were all
avant-garde orthodox Christians. No matter their different political,
denominational, or literary positions, they all sought to be faithful to
Jesus while engaging the world. In Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws,
Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise, Inchausi discusses
Christian thinkers, writers, and activists who challenged secular
worldviews on their own turf, yet remained thoroughly Christian. <<

Q: Who are the avant-garde Orthodox?

These were orthodox Christian thinkers and artists who were not theologians
and made important and somewhat revolutionary contributions to various
secular disciplines. They're interesting people because they're both
subversive of the existing modern order, but they are not subversive of the
church or subversive of the faith.

They have a unique status as people who model for us how it is possible for
believing Christians to enter into dialogue with the secular culture in a
way that revolutionizes and transforms the secular culture and doesn't just
protest against it or isolate from it.

If you look at some of the major Christian artists and thinkers and social
critics over the last hundred years, you find a variety of political,
artistic, and intellectual schools within which they operate. Yet, they
still share Christ as their major inspiration. You have somebody like
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who from an American political perspective would be
very conservative. He single-handedly did away with Marxism as an attractive
philosophy for Paris intellectuals. And at the same time you have somebody
like Dorothy Day, whose entire witness to the poor in the United States was
to defend small families and small farms and collectives and indigenous poor
against a social Darwinism that she thought was running away with American
culture during the Cold War years.

Few people know these believers were Christians. E.F. Schumacher, the Small
Is Beautiful fellow, is often recognized as the guy who wrote about Buddhist
economics, because of a chapter in his book Small Is Beautiful. But he was a
Christian, and he said he put in Buddhism because he didn't want it to seem
like special pleading. He just wanted to make it clear that the economic
systems had religious under pinning. In order to demonstrate that in a way
that he could get a hearing, he used the example of Buddhism. But he himself
was a Christian thinker.

Q: Not only was their Christianity misunderstood, but often their message was
misunderstood. You include Jack Kerouac, who dismissed his hippie followers
who got into Buddhism, but Kerouac was a conservative and a Catholic.

Kerouac was really only a Buddhist for three years of his life. He was a
very traditional Catholic growing up, and then he toyed with Buddhism for
about three years. He came back to his faith and wrote a lot of stuff about
Jesus and refused to give up his love of Jesus for the Buddha. Later, when
he was having a hard time kicking his alcoholism, he started getting
attacked by the New York critics for a pretty accurate description of his
work, in which they said, This is a form of Christian primitivism.

Q: Kerouac captures a spiritual search in a way that many novelists don't.
You make the point that the novel has the ability to probe the soul in a way
that Enlightenment attempts to discover truth can't.

That's why Solzhenitsyn was so wise to novelize his history of the gulag.
When he transformed the sufferings of millions of people into stories we
could feel, it became real. Pasternack, in Doctor Zhivago, made the
spiritual sufferings of the lost intelligentsia of the revolution real in a
way that we could feel. Kerouac does the same thing with a spiritual longing
that was useful in the 50s and 60s to say there's more going on then just
the Cold War. We should be telling our stories to one another about our
inner lives.

Q: Thomas Merton was another Catholic writing spiritual literature during the
Cold War years.

The Seven Storey Mountain was a great conversion story. It provided a
criticism of materialism, modernism, the Bohemian art theme, and left-wing
politics, all these things that tempted him, that he turned away from 20
years before anybody else in the country had discovered them.

Then after he died, all his journals and letters came out, and it turns out
that all those years that he was in the monastery, he was having these deep
conversations with people from all different backgrounds and was thinking
through his faith and bringing it into dialogue with all kinds of things,
which made him a different writer. Now, we even read The Seven Storey
Mountain differently.

Q: It's ironic that while Merton had left the world for the monastery, through
his letters, he was active politically. Many of these Christians have a
different take on political action.

If you want to argue politics in the modern world you immediately find
yourself hamstrung by definitions imposed on you by politicians who have
laid out the rhetorical terrain. So the best way to deal with it is to
refuse to play the game by the rules. These Christians offer an alternative
vision that addresses political problems from a humble and inclusive
Christian perspective that doesn't argue about things so much as reveal
things.

Let me give you an example of this. At the end of my book, I say these
people don't want to change the world. Changing the world is not their
number one priority. Their number one priority is to love and serve the
world in the light of Christian revelation. Now if that means that you have
to stand up to an injustice, if that means you have to change the way the
mass media is run, or change curriculums or something, that will mean that
you will engage in dialogue with people, and you will witness, and you will
listen. You don't come in with this top down agenda and take everybody's
life apart so that you can put it back together again.

Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry's method is to ask how this
reform is going to affect my community and enter into dialogue with the
people for whom these political reforms are going to change. The guy I think
who was really on to this is Dostoyevsky. I guess you could call him a
sentimental naturalist in his first book, Poor Folk. And then he was sent to
the camps and he had his eye opened to the true nature of human beings. He
came back and said until we deal with the irrational in man and healing
one's suspicions of another, you could have the greatest political ideology
and people would subvert it out of sheer spite. Somehow, trust has to be
regained between people before you can talk about politics. And that's why
ideological posturing, even if you're right, is counterproductive.

Q: What kind of impact have these thinkers had, or should have?

In the 20th century, the contemplative side of Christianity was made much
more accessible by Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. Solzhenitsyn also had a
great world impact.

Some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s views have been misunderstood or co-opted.
We think of him more as a civil-rights icon than as an engaged prophetic
Christian trying to figure out non violence. I think he had a much more
troubled, interesting, complex message to America than what we have decided
it was in our history books and in our one-paragraph summaries of him. I
would say that his legacy probably has not been fully understood.

I don't think the full impact of what Schumacher has written about economics
has really hit yet, the defense of family business and local community
economies. That's starting to have resurgence in the third world with these
micro credit organizations. If you start taking Schumacher seriously, then
economics is due for a quantum leap, and that hasn't happened yet. We need
to rethink the way we do economics, to question the assumption that we're
all self-maximizing individuals.

I think Northrop Frye is another one who was understood too quickly, or
misunderstood. Literary studies over the past 20 years has been struggling
with a lot of competing materialisms. Frye had offered in the early 60s a
radical mystic contemplative vision of the literary studies, which doomed
him to obsolescence in 1963. But now that practices like lectio divina and
those contemplative ways of reading are being rediscovered, you look back at
Northrop Frye, and he's the guy who provides the most interesting ideas and
paradigms. But I think such a recovery is going to have to be done by
religious folk. Because if you try secularizing his categories, they just
don't work. It's only through religious eyes that Frye's literary cosmology
makes sense, in the same way that Lord of the Rings has a deeper meaning to
those who see its Christian themes.

In Frye's letters and journals and also his sermons, because he was a
pastor, you get to see the full Christian dimension of his thinking. He
discussed how to read prophetically, how to read contemplatively. These were
issues that Frye addressed that the last 20- 25-five years of literary
criticism just ignored. I think what's going to happen in about 10 years is
they're going to rediscover the language in which Frye was writing and learn
he was trying to teach us how to read in a way that deepened our inner
lives, not just increased our intellectual sophistication.

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