Walker Percy

“Q: What kind of Catholic are you?
A: Bad.
Q: No. I mean are you liberal or conservative?
A: I no longer know what those words mean.
Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?
A: I don’t know what that means, either. Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?
Q: Yes.
A: Yes.
Q: How is such a belief possible in this day and age?
A: What else is there?
Q: What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
A: That’s what I mean.
Q: To say nothing of Judaism and Protestantism.
A: Well, I would include them along with the Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.
Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: It’s not good enough.
Q: Why not?
A: This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.
Q: Grabbed aholt?
A: A Louisiana expression.
Q: But isn’t the Catholic Church in a mess these days, badly split, its liturgy barbarized, vocations declining?
A: Sure. That’s a sign of its divine origins, that it survives these periodic disasters.
Q: You don’t act or talk like a Christian. Aren’t they supposed to love one another and do good works?
A: Yes.
Q: You don’t seem to have much use for your fellowman or do many good works.
A: That’s true. I haven’t done a good work in years.
Q: In fact, if I may be frank, you strike me as being rather negative in your attitude, cold-blooded, aloof, derisive, self-indulgent, more fond of the beautiful things of this world than of God.
A: That’s true.
Q: You even seem to take certain satisfaction in the disasters of the twentieth-century and to savor the imminence of world catastrophe rather than world peace, which all religions seek.
A: That’s true.
Q: You don’t seem to have much use for your fellow Christians, to say nothing of Ku Kluxers, ACLU’ers, northerners, southerners, fem-libbers, anti-fem-libbers, homosexuals, anti-homosexuals, Republicans, Democrats, hippies, anti-hippies, senior citizens.
A: That’s true – though taken as individuals they turn out to be more or less like oneself, i.e., sinners, and we get along fine.
Q: Even Ku Kluxers?
A: Sure.
Q: How do you account for your belief?
A: I can only account for it as a gift from God.
Q: Why would God make you such a gift when there are others who seem more deserving, that is, serve their fellowman?
A: I don’t know. God does strange things. For example, he picked as one of his saints a fellow in northern Syria, a local nut, who stood on top of a pole for thirty-seven years.
Q: We are not talking about saints.
A: That’s true.
Q: We are talking about what you call a gift.
A: You want me to explain it? How would I know? The only answer I can give is that I asked for it, in fact demanded it. I took it as an intolerable state of affairs to have found myself in this life and in this age, which is a disaster by any calculation, without demanding a gift commensurate with the offense. So I demanded it. No doubt other people feel differently.
Q: But shouldn’t faith bear some relation to the truth, facts?
A: Yes. That’s what attracted me, Christianity’s rather insolent claim to be true, with the implication that other religions are more or less false.
Q: You believe that?
A: Of course.
Q: I see. Moving right along now –”

- Walker Percy (1916-90), excerpt from “Questions They Never Asked Me So He Asked Them Himself” (Self-Interview, 1977)"

- via Stephen's Tumblr

I have a lot of respect for Walker Percy, in whom I recognize a kindred¹, if much brighter, mind. Unfortunately, I can't help but take issue with this self conducted interview, in particular this part: "This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer 'Scientific humanism.' That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him."

What I object to is the idea that "Scientific Humanism" precludes, somehow, both mystery and delight. It is a position which I hear often and am, frankly, tired of addressing. The style I have used in these blog postings is in part meant to emphasize that I find life to be profoundly beautiful, even in the most tedious of moments. A fly lights for a moment on the rim of my screen, the blackness of its hard shell glinting crimson for a dilated moment before taking flight again. To stub my toe is to feel blossom within me a bright red throbbing, mysterious and wonderful, even as I know it is pain. Every moment of life can be glutted with beauty if a person chooses to cultivate it.

This does not seem to require God. There are reasonable explanations for how the perception of beauty may occur in the context of materialism. Some people, I guess, will say that such explanations render all things inert but these people have fallen for the fallacy that to describe a thing is to capture it somehow. If I were to describe, for instance, Venus, as "a large rock with some gas around it" I might be technically correct and yet, this description is both flaccid and utterly irrelevant to the fact that Venus can also be a pinprick of violent light near a tarnished silver moon on a clear fall night. Only the most tedious kind of person believes that things can only bear a single kind of description or that, in any case, to apply a description to a thing fixes, in any way, its nature.

Percy justifies his position by calling up the specter of death, pointing out the distinct and correct grotesqueness of death from the human perspective. But death has nothing to do with it, and it betrays what all of this is really about. Religion is about making the universe human, not beautiful. If Percy believed as I do that Christian thought represented a profound overreaching of the human desire to know, a patchwork and tattered blanket of inconsistent cosmology and philosophy, and a collection of highly unlikely statements about the world, he would find his capacity for the perception of beauty, and the capacity for the creation of beauty on the part of the universe, undiminished. What he would find is that the story of the universe had ceased to be about him and/or us. That there was no story at all except the story he told to himself and others and the stories others told him.

People will say at this point something like "How can our stories mean anything in the abscence of God?" To which I pose the counter question, "How does postulating an ultra-consciousness resolve any of the existential questions about the nature of 'meaning'?" There are many reasons not to postulate such a consciousness, but among the reasons to do so is not "It answers the question of meaning." God does not answer this question, He merely delays the question, perhaps sometimes with a fog of words about mystery. The theist is no more in possession of a justification for meaning than the atheist.

I do not feel stripped of meaning because of lack of belief in a person-God. I feel, on the contrary, profoundly grateful that such a song of stories could have blossomed in a universe so alien to it. To look out at the sky, the vast tracks of void utterly hateful towards thought, that make up the lion's share of the universe, is to be filled with love, a profound love, for the simplest moment of perception. No "person" is responsible for my being, for the architecture of the universe, for the suffering (however mild) I might endure, for the sadness, in any grand sense. It all might never have happened, never did happen on Mars or Venus, and so even at the worst moment, to be is a wonderful accident. In abandoning Christianity I have found for the first time the ability to love being in an utterly unadulterated way.

Mystery would, of course, be undiminished as well. Arguably the mysteries of my universe are larger than those in the Christian world view. In any case the notion that science has slain mystery, is slaying it, or will slay it, has probably more to do with scientists with poor imaginations than any apologetical attacks from the spiritually minded.

Why do I object to religion then? Because I believe it is a disservice to being. Sometimes, as in Catholicism in some individuals, such as Percy, it nearly reaches or exceeds the level of art, adulterated only by the fact that it is not True. In other cases it is corrosive to the human spirit, bending us towards an incuriosity that is criminal, a fear of being profound enough to twist a man into a glassy eyed knot.

When one of us dies, a light goes out. A light which, when cast upon the tedious mechanical universe, reflects back a place of subtle and outrageous beauty. The light is out forever. I can't countenance, then, systematic dimming of these lights while they still burn.

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¹: Kindred, by which I obviously mean this.