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

["Michael Larson" <Mlarson AT SOUTHEASTMN.EDU>]

CPL Eckert writes:
"As a military man, I hope peace comes before religious unification.

These eternal religious questions will not soon be resolved.

Human humility must bow down before such unknowns. 

Do not shoot at me because we do not agree who God is. 

Let us form some sort of human community even in our confusion.

Together we can struggle toward this unknown.

All things that rise must converge."

Yes, everything that rises must indeed converge. But the very word,
"convergence," denotes unity. And there is no lasting unity apart from
truth. So any who would rise must give way, in the rising, to whatever
is true. Therefore, they only are together who are abandoned to truth.
The rest must endlessly divide.


Jim Forest writes:
"Merton -- probably Walker Percy too -- wasn't drawn to the grouping
certain people into the category 'bad guys.'"

Nor did I mean to imply that either of them--Merton or Percy--were drawn
to such. I was only commenting on Merton's end-of-the-world scenario: in
it, he describes how it will be the "sanest" of men who will "sanely" go
about the business of annihilation. In that little picture that Merton
paints for us, it is ironically the so-called sane man who plays the
villain. As you have noted, we should not construe from this that Merton
was typecasting all sane men as "bad guys." Not at all. What he is
asserting, however, is that "bad guys" (as in men who do bad things) can
be, and often are, those whom we perceive to be sane.

Jim Forest goes on to write:
"As he died in 1968, he
didn't live long enough to read Percy's last novel, "The Thanatos
Syndrome," but he would have greatly appreciated Percy's approach
to the problem of evil, seen not on the level of good-guys-versus-bad-
guys of the classical Hollywood western, but rather the gradual
shifting of a border between good and evil within each human heart,
the greatest of all battlefields."

Yes, well put. Yet while it is true that both Merton and Percy
understood human nature (and therefore any individual human) to be
fallen, I don't think either of them assumed an egalitarian human
morality, wherein everyone behaves equally good and bad. That is to say,
they both understood there to be whole range of human responses to
Grace: some rejecting it entirely, others cooperating willingly and
wholeheartedly with it, and the vast multitude of others falling in
various places between the two extremes.


Robert Eckert, then Jim Forest:
>> "These eternal religious questions will not soon be resolved.

No, surely they won't."

We don't know when the religious questions will be resolved among the
human race as a whole. It could be a thousand years. Could be this
summer.


Robert Eckert, then Jim Forest:
>> "Human humility must bow down before such unknowns.

Yes."

No. It is not humility to insist that religious truths are unknown.
Perhaps they are unknown to a given individual, but that individual
cannot speak for the race on such matters.


Robert Eckert, then Jim Forest:
>> "Do not shoot at me because we do not agree who God is.

The problem is that very often we shoot each other precisely for that
reason, and not just across major religious borders but even minor
ones.

However it's astonishing that -- apart from the Balkans -- Europe, the
battleground of so many wars, many of which had a religious
component, hasn't been a place of war for 63 years. This surely is in
part thanks to the efforts made here to gradually create a European
Union. It is far from perfect, but we are not killing each other. (As an
American living in Europe, I am one of the immediate beneficiaries.)"

I am truly glad that you're not killing each other, but is a secular
Europe united allegedly by pluralism more palatable than the one that
was united by Christendom? And are there not worse things even than
war--such as, for instance, a pallid and faithless peace? Percy often
said as much, I think. 


Thanks much, Robert and Jim, for the ongoing discussion.

Best regards,
Michael Larson



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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: On the end of all things
      (Eckert, Robert G SPC MIL USA FORSCOM)
   2. Re: Can the sane be bad? (Nikkibar AT aol.com)
   3. Re: Can the sane be bad? (Jim Forest)
   4. Re On the end of all things (Jim Forest)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:57:16 -0600
From: "Eckert, Robert G SPC MIL USA FORSCOM"
        <robert.g.eckert AT us.army.mil>
Subject: Re: [percy-l] On the end of all things
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion"
        <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <e1648853330e.47c5ceac AT us.army.mil>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii



As a military man, I hope peace comes before religious unification.

These eternal religious questions will not soon be resolved.

Human humility must bow down before such unknowns. 

Do not shoot at me because we do not agree who God is. 

Let us form some sort of human community even in our confusion.

Together we can struggle toward this unknown.

All things that rise must converge.

- CPL Robert Eckert

----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Larson <Mlarson AT SOUTHEASTMN.EDU>
Date: Tuesday, February 26, 2008 20:05
Subject: [percy-l] On the end of all things
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org

> Robert Eckert's Percy-question regarding the future:
> >>In one interview, Percy, when asked a question concerning 
> something about living at another time, said he would like to sit 
> on a park bench in NYC in the year 2050 to see how we were doing. 
> To see if we made it.
> 
> Will we?<<
> 
> My guess is that Percy is not actually wondering here whether the 
> human race will avoid annihilation or even whether it will somehow 
> find its own way out of this modern malaise. I suspect rather that 
> he means, underneath the nonchalance of his answer, to remind the 
> interviewer (and of course the readers of the interview) that ours 
> is a tenuous existence, that our sustenance is well beyond our own 
> powers, and that the time is likely to be later than we think.
> 
> Regarding de Chardin:
> >>I wonder if Percy ever read DeChardin's "The Great Monad", 
> written in 1918 when he was with his regiment in Champagne. Even 
> during the horror of that war DeChardin found something positive 
> that I believe applies to this current clash:
> 
> "Mankind in armed conflict with itself is a Mankind in process of 
> solidification.... The whole of history teaches us this lesson, 
> that after every revolution and after every war Mankind has always 
> emerged a little more self-cohesive, a little more unified, 
> because the links that hold its organism together are more firmly 
> locked together and hope of a common emancipation has become 
> strengthened." (p.184, The Heart of Matter)<<
> 
> I would be surprised if Percy followed closely the ideas of de 
> Chardin, whose works were officially condemned by the Church in 
> 1962. The above quotation, for instance, is indicative of the 
> fundamental conflict between de Chardin's notion that the 
> perfection of mankind is an evolutionary process achievable at 
> some future point by the race itself as a whole, and the Church's 
> doctrine that perfection is attainable only through the conscious 
> cooperation of one's will with the salvific work of Christ, which 
> has already been completed in the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, 
> and the Resurrection.
> 
> Regarding peace:
> >>In a peculiar way, war is how we get to know other cultures. 
> Americans know much more about Islam now than they did in August 
> of 2001. We can hope that this struggle will settle, that Jewish, 
> Muslim and Christian people will learn to live together peacefully.
> 
> If we can survive the initial clash, we can converge.<<
> 
> Christ again is the stumbling block. If he is God, as the Church 
> claims (and as Percy affirms), then his kingship is universal. 
> Jews and Muslims cannot simultaneously accept this and remain Jews 
> and Muslims. Multiple religions may be able to coexist in some 
> circumstances, but they cannot converge. And the separate peace 
> they sometimes share is often merely pragmatic, always tenuous, 
> and inevitably temporary.
> 
> Regarding methods of killing:
> Robert Eckert:
> >>I would still argue that the sort of killer who would use an 
> agent like small pox in an attack is not the same type of killer 
> as a soldier who engages insurgents firing on a convoy just hit by 
> an i.e.d.. The insurgent or the soldier may be your hero. But, who 
> could have as their hero, who could conceive any possible good in 
> the use of a deadly contagious disease to indiscriminately inflict 
> harm?<<
> Jim Forest:
> >>Thanks, Robert. God knows you're right about the pure horror of 
> inflicting indiscriminate harm, whether by bio-weapons or any of 
> the numerous other methods that have been developed as a means of 
> mass murder. Developments in killing methods this half century or 
> so make Genghis Kahn look like Elmer Fudd.<<
> 
> Robert makes a poignant distinction. The soldier, especially if he 
> is fighting a just war, evokes our respect and admiration because 
> of his sacrifice. He puts himself in harm's way for the sake of 
> others. The designers of bio-weapons (as well as other weapons of 
> mass destruction) and the decision-makers who deploy them, 
> however, kill largely without personal risk or sacrifice, without 
> discrimination, and therefore without responsibility. 
> 
> True heroism, if not always a direct act of love, at least reminds 
> us of some higher realm, some sacred virtue. By contrast, workers 
> of iniquity--whether on the material or the immaterial plane--
> render the world desolate with love's privation.
> 
> Jim Forest: 
> >>... there are heroes who are beloved across borders. Saints. Now 
> there's an interesting word, one that meant a great deal to Walker 
> Percy.<<
> Yes. Heroes, every one.
> 
> Merton regarding Eichmann:
> >>"The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a 
> sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the 
> capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane 
> people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, 
> destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely 
> the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the 
> well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim 
> the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great 
> festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have 
> prepared.... No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have 
> perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing 
> the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely 
> down the chain of command." [Thomas Merton, Raids on the 
> Unspeakable (New York: New Directions, 1966), 45-53.]<<
> 
> Jim Forest:
> >>Of course we regard ourselves as sane, not to mention good and 
> decent and even God-fearing. In the Hollywood movie we make of 
> ourselves, we're never the bad guys.<<
> 
> But in Thomas Merton's Hollywood movie of how the world ends, the 
> sane ARE the bad guys. Percy did love to play with the malleable 
> idea of sanity. He often posed the question: Who is actually 
> crazy? The inmates or the attending psychiatrist? And it's true: 
> many of those we perceive, by all outward appearances, to be sane, 
> are not. Likewise many who, by societal standards, could be 
> labeled crazy are actually in touch with a precious piece of 
> reality. So the question is, What is sanity? And whose definition 
> of it is to be trusted?
> 
> Karl Terrell:
> >>Percy wrote about how the prospect of bad things happening -- 
> like an impending war, or perhaps an approaching category-5 
> hurricane -- do not cause dread or anxiety.  We are instead filled 
> with excitement.  We couldn't be happier.  
> 
> By contrast, WP saw a man who has everything going for him, 
> sitting in his fine home in, say, Short Hills, N.J. on an ordinary 
> Wednesday afternoon, with no identifiable problems on the horizon, 
> but who nonetheless finds himself ..... unsettled, anxious.
> 
> The subtitle of Dr. Strangelove was "How I Learned to Stopped 
> Worrying and Love the Bomb."  
> 
> The quote below [de Chardin] speaks of war in positive terms, as a 
> means of delivering 'solidification' and the 'hope of a common 
> emancipation.'  It seems to me that what's really going on is the 
> pull of the death wish that we all share.
> 
> Isn't that what Percy was talking about?<<
> 
> I think it's not a wish for death per se but for truth, for the 
> underlying heart of the matter. If death is necessary to see it, 
> well, then so be it. But when a storm whips up suddenly on the 
> horizon and we feel a surge of fear mixed oddly with hope, it is 
> not death that we long for first. Rather, we wish to see what lies 
> underneath, and we fancy that the storm might reveal it. We have 
> come to know, perhaps without even realizing it, that the ordinary 
> life we live Wednesday after Wednesday (and all the days in 
> between) is but an intimation of some greater reality. When the 
> storm arises, we are momentarily awakened from the malaise. There 
> appears across the valley a symbolic threat that today of all 
> days, the truth--and all its attendant beauty--might finally 
> prevail, might finally wreck what's left of our illusory 
> structures, lay waste to all that is false, and, last of all, 
> break our hearts for Good.
> 
> 
> Thanks to Robert Eckert for posing the great question, which has 
> sparked much discussion of interest.
> 
> Best regards to all,
> Michael Larson
> 


------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 01:32:44 EST
From: Nikkibar AT aol.com
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Can the sane be bad?
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <bfa.b4074ff.34f7af8c AT aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Mr. Larson is right about Walker's nervousness over Tielhard du
Chardin. I 
tried to get him to read the later works on a number of occasions and
he 
seemed uninterested although I secretly suspected that he might have
dipped  into 
the earlier works but didn't want to waste talking time on the matter. I
never 
discussed Monad with him as that was one I missed  myself.
 
Nikki Barranger



**************Ideas to please picky eaters. Watch video on AOL Living.

(http://living.aol.com/video/how-to-please-your-picky-eater/rachel-campo
s-duffy/
2050827?NCID=aolcmp00300000002598)
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Message: 3
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:22:37 +0100
From: "Jim Forest" <jhforest AT gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Can the sane be bad?
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion"
        <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID:
        <53c59b0c0802280522g6240874fr48590450f72dd652 AT mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Dear Michael,

I enjoy this exchange and am learning from it.

I had written:

>> Please re-read the passage Merton passage I quoted. He is not
saying the sane are the bad guys, only that people whom we regard as
perfectly sane are quite capable of initiating actions, or assisting in
them, which may take the lives of vast numbers of people.

Your replied:

>> In the passage you quoted, Merton implies that it is often sane men
who carry out evil actions. When they do so, when they "initiate the
great festival of destruction," is he not dubbing them "bad guys," in
the colloquial sense of that phrase?

Merton -- probably Walker Percy too -- wasn't drawn to the grouping
certain people into the category "bad guys." As he died in 1968, he
didn't live long enough to read Percy's last novel, "The Thanatos
Syndrome," but he would have greatly appreciated Percy's approach
to the problem of evil, seen not on the level of good-guys-versus-bad-
guys of the classical Hollywood western, but rather the gradual
shifting of a border between good and evil within each human heart,
the greatest of all battlefields.

Both Percy and Merton, while certainly not agreeing on everything,
had a great deal in common. Among other things, both were acutely aware
that evil actions are often performed by the most upstanding, respected,
normal and altogether "sane" people, whether it be the elimination of
"defectives" in the Germany in the 30s and early 40s, or the mass
killing of Jews, homosexuals and others in concentration camps, or
the fire bombing of whole cities during World War II, or the nuclear
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or any of the acts of mass
destruction that we more-or-less sane people may yet commit in the
future.

This is not to overlook the danger posed by the insane and
pathological, but on the whole their acts of destruction tend to occur
on a smaller scale. (My step-mother was shot and killed by such a person
as she waited for a bus in San Francisco on her way home from work one
day.)

Finally, in a more dangerous category, there are those people who are
so ideologically driven that, though they may be perceived as sane in
a society similarly deranged, are -- were it possible to evaluate them
by some objective measure -- truly mad as hatters. (It was an issue
Merton addressed in another of his essays, one of his finest, "Rain and
the Rhinoceros.")

friendly greetings,

Jim Forest

PS I should mention that, though I have been a Percy reader for many
years, I know a good deal more about Merton, having written a
biography of him ("Living With Wisdom"). I knew Percy only by
correspondence, and only during the last year or so of his life.

* * *

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Michael Larson
<Mlarson AT southeastmn.edu>
wrote:

> Jim Forest wrote:
> >>Please re-read the passage Merton passage I quoted. He is not saying
the
> sane are the bad guys, only that people whom we regard
> as perfectly sane are quite capable of initiating actions, or
assisting in
> them, which may take the lives of vast numbers of people.<<
>
> In the passage you quoted, Merton implies that it is often sane men
who
> carry out evil actions. When they do so, when they "initiate the great
> festival of destruction," is he not dubbing them "bad guys," in the
> colloquial sense of that phrase?
>
> >>Perhaps one might say Merton also raises a question -- I expect
Percy
> would as well -- whether our definition of what constitutes sanity is
> adequate.<<
>
> Yes! Exactly what I was trying to say, though perhaps not very
clearly.
>
> Best regards,
> Michael Larson
>

-- 
Jim & Nancy Forest
Kanisstraat 5
1811 GJ Alkmaar
The Netherlands

Forest-Flier web site: www.incommunion.org/forest-flier/
Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: www.incommunion.org
photos: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/
recently published: "Silent as a Stone," a children's book about a
community
of rescuers in Nazi-occupied Paris:
http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/books/silent-as-a-stone-mother-maria
-of-paris-and-the-trash-can-rescue/
another new book: "The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life":
http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/books/the-road-to-emmaus-pilgrimage-
as-a-way-of-life/

* * *
Nancy and I have been keeping a journal that follows our recent kidney
transplant. A blog has
been set up for this purpose -- A Tale of Two Kidneys. See:
http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/
* * *
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Message: 4
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:44:35 +0100
From: "Jim Forest" <jhforest AT gmail.com>
Subject: [percy-l] Re On the end of all things
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion"
        <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID:
        <53c59b0c0802280544k3badc6dax1e8cd81b2cc5d52a AT mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Dear Robert,

You wrote:

>> As a military man, I hope peace comes before religious unification.

As it says in an Old Book: "Without vision, the people perish."

>> These eternal religious questions will not soon be resolved.

No, surely they won't. But at least there is a significant process of
Christian-Muslim dialogue now occurring, while productive Jewish-
Christian dialogue has been going on since soon after the end of
World War II.

>> Human humility must bow down before such unknowns.

Yes.

>> Do not shoot at me because we do not agree who God is.

The problem is that very often we shoot each other precisely for that
reason, and not just across major religious borders but even minor
ones.

However it's astonishing that -- apart from the Balkans -- Europe, the
battleground of so many wars, many of which had a religious
component, hasn't been a place of war for 63 years. This surely is in
part thanks to the efforts made here to gradually create a European
Union. It is far from perfect, but we are not killing each other. (As an
American living in Europe, I am one of the immediate beneficiaries.)

>> Let us form some sort of human community even in our confusion.
>> Together we can struggle toward this unknown.
>> All things that rise must converge.

The last phrase reminds me of Christ's words, which I paraphrase:
"If I be lifted up, I shall draw things unto myself."

Jim Forest

-- 
Jim & Nancy Forest
Kanisstraat 5
1811 GJ Alkmaar
The Netherlands

Forest-Flier web site: www.incommunion.org/forest-flier/
Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: www.incommunion.org
photos: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/
recently published: "Silent as a Stone," a children's book about a
community
of rescuers in Nazi-occupied Paris:
http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/books/silent-as-a-stone-mother-maria
-of-paris-and-the-trash-can-rescue/
another new book: "The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life":
http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/books/the-road-to-emmaus-pilgrimage-
as-a-way-of-life/

* * *
Nancy and I have been keeping a journal that follows our recent kidney
transplant. A blog has
been set up for this purpose -- A Tale of Two Kidneys. See:
http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/
* * *
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