The Grandeur of God and the Love of Literature

Ralph C. Wood

14 years ago

The Grandeur of God and the Love of Literature
By Ralph Wood

Rather than offering a large set of theoretical claims that might prove soporific so early in the morning, I thought it might be instructive to praise the particular teacher who engendered in me a lifelong love of literature. His name is Paul Barrus, and he is still very much alive even if not very well, in this his 98`x` year toward Paradise-as Dante described the Christian life. I owe him a debt too great to be paid, but at least I can offer this small tribute of praise and thanksgiving, in the hope that we too might shape the lives of our students as deeply as he did mine.

Let me make clear that Paul Banus was above all an extraordinarily able scholar and teacher. Here my accolades are strictly secular: they could be made of any great academic. Excellence is excellence, wherever it is found, and there is no need to baptize it as covertly Christian. An atheist could possess these same traits of academic integrity and rigor. Barrus possessed them abundantly. Though he was a master of languages (speaking both French and German while reading Latin as well), his chief love was literature. One of its chief functions, he said, is "to lift life to the level of consciousness, to deliver us from our self-enchantment, to free us from our hallucinations of permanence."

Paul Barrus did not suggest that literature could proffer so great a gift as salvation. He was no aesthete of the imagination. Yet his teaching revealed that the great novelists and poets offer parables and metaphors of our redemption. They can liberate us from our bovine obliviousness, freeing us for a life of moral and spiritual discernment. Most of us remain mired, as Thoreau so memorably said, in "lives of quiet desperation." We academics must not think of the morally and spiritually unconscious primarily as those folks who do not read books or possess college degrees. Millions of Americans are spiritually inert because they have been educated in mere technical proficiency. A recent Baylor graduate illustrates my point. This alumna confessed to me that she had acquired huge amounts of data and many professional skills during her four years here, but that she had done no serious thinking at all. She was never made to encounter the large religious and philosophical questions about the meaning and purpose of life, about the reality of God in his own radical act of self-disclosure, about the problem of evil and suffering. Thus did she give her grim assent to Walker Percy`s claim that the wrong kind of learning can be a dangerous thing. "You can make all As," Percy said, "and still flunk life."

Paul Barrus helped me wrangle with the eternal queries because he was an excellent classroom teacher, not because he was a published scholar. He did not have "world enough and time" to do academic research and writing. During those days, a five-course teaching load (and at least one summer term) was the norm. Yet it must also be confessed that Barrus did not find this regimen a burden. He loved to teach, and he loved to teach literature more than to write essays about it. Given the choice between reading Anna Karenina and cranking out yet another article, he knew where the true priority lay. He also knew how often scholarship is made to serve ideological purposes that grind the professor`s own political axe. It is a noteworthy fact that Paul Barrus` students never had an inkling about his political propensities. This is all the more remarkable when we recall that the 1960s were a politically turbulent time. We lived near to the killing of John Kennedy in nearby Dallas, yet were not far from the war in faraway Vietnam, whose veterans were returning with reports of horror. The atmosphere was also charged with racial controversy. The federal courts had mandated the integration of public schools and universities, and yet our college president had vowed never to admit black students. That Paul Barrus never voiced his opinions about these matters is not to say that his teaching was non-political. It is rather to say that he taught a politics of a considerably higher order than the current crisis could touch. The high quality of his teaching made a far more powerful political commentary on controversial matters than any strident pontifications could have accomplished. His sterling integrity of mind and his deep generosity of heart made a devastating critique of an unjustifiable war, of political hatred, of racial bigotry.

Barrus was master teacher, not because he had learned clever techniques or effective methods of instruction, but because he had mastered his subject the chief imaginative writers of 19t` century America: Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville, Dickinson and Twain. Barrus taught them with energy and enthusiasm, and he expected his students to meet him on the same terms-to be prepared and attentive and involved. He despised pretense and puffery in all its forms. The single motto that he wished to affix to his doorposts, he wittily confessed, was this one: "Be specific." The pretentious and the concrete don`t easily mix. Literature draws its lifeblood from metaphors and analogies, from characters and plots, not from disembodied abstractions. Barrus approached literature in the same way that Dr. Johnson`s blind housekeeper poured tea: she kept her finger inside the cup. His teaching of the great texts of American and European literature was enlivened with soul-scalding illustrations and telling comparisons.

Barrus was so popular a teacher that his sections of American literature filled quickly every term. Yet he never cultivated a student audience. He did not "hang out" with us, nor did we drop by his office for idle chat. He maintained a healthy professorial distance that commanded our respect. Yet we knew unmistakably that he was our friend, and we went to him for counsel. When my college roommate committed suicide during his first year of medical studies, I went straight to Paul Barnes` office for consolation and instruction. Barrus also made periodic bookpurges to lighten his heavy-laden shelves, and he would invite his students to treat themselves to works he no longer needed. Many of these books were excellent works in Catholic culture that became mainstays in my own burgeoning library.

Paul Barrus was not only an excellent scholar and teacher of literature. He was also one of the deepest Christians on our campus. His life in the classroom was decisively shaped by his faith. His religion was not a dusty hobby that he pursued in his pastime: it was the core and center of his being, and thus of his teaching. What made Barrus` Christianity so singular is that he was the single practicing Catholic on an otherwise Protestant faculty and on an almost entirely Protestant campus. I had heard rumors of Barrus` Catholicism long before I took his classes. They had prompted in me the fear that, as an agent of the scarlet harlot of Rome, he could not be a serious Christian. My home county in eastern Texas contained not a single Catholic church. Having never met a Catholic prior to my arrival at college, I shared the conventional Protestant bigotry about Catholics. What a huge irony awaited me! In this Catholic I would find a lifelong friend and spiritual companion who would shape me more decisively than any of my other teachers.

Though I had wanted to study at Baylor, I can now see the providential mercy inherent in my attending East Texas State and thus of getting to study with a Catholic professor. I found that Paul Barrus` faith resonated deeply with my own. He was devoted to the same Lord, to the same salvation uniquely accomplished in him, to the same evangelical desire to declare this Good News to all people. Under Barrus` tutelage, I became deeply sympathetic to Catholic

Christianity. As I explained to President Sloan when I joined the Baylor faculty, my work is ecumenical to the core. It is premised on the conviction that we Baptists and other Protestants constitute a reform movement within the church catholic (note the lower case), and that we have our right to exist only as we make our unique contribution to the Faith universal.

I learned from Ban-us that ecumenical vision did not mean bland religious tolerance, much less apathetic indifference. Though a cradle Catholic by virtue of his Irish-American upbringing in Iowa, he was also a Catholic by conviction. What Flannery O`Connor confessed of herself was also true of him: "I am a Catholic not as someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist," she once said, "but as someone else would be an atheist." While we didn`t know Barrus` politics, we knew that he went to weekly Mass at the tiny Catholic church in Commerce, and that he appeared in class every spring with a strange cruciform smudge on his forehead. Most of us would soon learn that Lent did not refer, as we had thought, to the stuff that stuck to our socks.

Barrus` religion was not an individual and subjective business. To be a Christian, I learned from him, meant much more than "having a private relationship with Jesus"-walking and talking in the garden alone, being told that we are his own. Being Christian meant an open and unabashed identification with the Body of Christ, with his people called the Church. In Paul Barrus I encountered, for the first time, a Christianity that centered upon three inseparable things: liturgical worship, ethical practices, and doctrinal beliefs. It was no private affair of the lonely believer before a solitary. God: it was a drastic communal and public reality. I was later to learn that Paul Barrus had consecrated himself to a life of celibacy. You can imagine the shock that we hormonally-charged adolescents experienced upon learning that someone would give up sex for the Kingdom of God. As a young man, Barrus had been summoned to the priesthood. But as was the custom those far more demanding days, a needy grandparent had been assigned to his care. Having to earn a living not only for himself but also for her, he became a teacher. Yet Providence was still at work, as Barrus was finally able to follow his first calling half a century later. After retiring from college teaching as a man well into his 70s, he was at last priested.

Looking back upon these events with the hindsight of forty years, I can now see that Paul Barrus was helping me confront the fact that to be Christian is often to be counter-cultural. To make witness to the Gospel is, inevitably, to go against the grain of the world. This was a hard lesson for a boy who had been brought up in the South, where Protestant Christianity is the culture religion of the region and where, as it is sometimes said, there are almost more Baptists than people. Here I was confronting a teacher who revealed, ever so quietly, that being Christian requires us to be both radical and eccentric: it requires us to have roots as deep as the Cross and to have a Center other than the world`s other centripetal and centrifugal points.

Paul Barrus made it evident, in a state-college classroom where true pluralism could prevail in the early 60s, that Christian faith is not one human possibility among others. It is not merely our western way of being religious. It is, instead, the unique provision that God has made, in the Jews and Jesus Christ, for the whole world`s salvation. It is what eye has not seen, what ear has not heard, what mind has not thought, what heart has not felt, what spirit has not imagined. It was what St. Paul calls simply "the Gospel of God." Little did I know that Barrus was having an indelible effect on my vocabulary. Quite unwittingly, he was excising the word "moderate" from my speech. Though it remains a term of political praise, I discovered that "moderation" is usually a religious vice. That Christians would describe themselves as "moderates" rather than as radicals or eccentrics has remained a huge conundrum to me. It is exceeding strange that Baptists, or Christians of any other sort, could deliberately embrace the adjective that describes the church of Laodicea–the church whose lukewarm moderation makes God promise to vomit it out of his mouth. St. Thomas Aquinas, I would later learn, declared that sin is often the result of excess, of taking good things to extremes. In one matter alone, said Thomas, there can be no excess: there is no excess in the love of God. To love God moderately is indeed an obscenity.

II.

There were two kinds of truth that, as lovers of literature, Paul Barrus and my other English teachers made me confront. The negative lesson they taught me is that, for Christian faith to be worthy of the name, it has to confront the harsh truths that count against it. The skepticism that we encounter in great literary texts is ever so salubrious and chastening for the life of faith. Their doubts can serve to make our faith real. The great canonical texts, as Harold Bloom has argued, permanently re-arrange the furniture of our lives. They serve to remind us of all those tragic realities and harsh truths that an easy belief is prone to ignore. This explains why Barrus could teach non-Christian-even anti-Christian-texts sympathetically. He understood that the Gospel can stand its own ground and does not need our desperate defense. Once when I asked why he had written a doctoral dissertation on Ralph Waldo Emerson, that notorious denier of Trinitarian faith, he replied without hesitation, "To become a better Christian."

Emerson, Barrus taught us, challenges our conventional notions of God and man and the world. So does every eminent writer. We cannot read Sophocles or Shakespeare and still believe that we are self-made men and women who determine our own destiny by our own wisdom and effort. There are painful limits to human existence, the great writers teach us, things that we cannot know until it is too late, forces and circumstances that shape us quite apart from our own wills. And we are undone by our virtues, they remind us, even more than our vices. These are lessons worth learning in their own right and in any age, but especially important for our own time. Ours is an age when secularists and Christians alike are likely to forget that there are evils which cannot be fixed but only endured. Rather than making non-Christian writers into either anonymous believers or worthless heretics, Barnes taught me that we ought to revere them as the masters of suspicion who give the lie to all saccharine piety.

From Melville I learned something far darker than Darwin ever taught-namely, that nature is not only random and accidental, but perhaps also malevolent, bursting forth from its depths with leg-amputating and ship-scuttling fury. Never again, after reading Melville, could I view calamities such as cancer and hurricanes simply as the direct will of the good God. Melville gave me dark but healthy doubts, for faith without doubt is dead-to rephrase the Letter of James. Yet I suspect it was Thoreau and Emerson who offered the most serious corrective to my naïve Christianity. They both belonged to the tribe that William James called "the once born"-those who have no apparent need for the transcendent and redeeming God of the Gospel. Asked whether he had made his peace with God, the dying Thoreau replied that he was unaware of any quarrel. Emerson virtually canonized Thoreau for remaining the perfect "bachelor of Nature and thought," claiming that he "never had a vice in his life." My Catholic teacher didn`t offer a hostile reading of these great pagan writers as damnable apostates. Instead, he gave a deeply sympathetic account of their work, finding in them a chastening corrective to all Christian presumption. Yet I also notice this caveat written in the margin of my old textbook: "Thoreau and Emerson believe in the latent perfectibility of man." This was a humble rather than a preachy sort of Christian witness, a quiet reminder that Hawthorne and Melville were the better inheritors of the Puritan tradition and thus the better analysts of both natural and human evil.

Hence my enormous gratitude not only for Paul Barrus, but also for all of my other teachers of literature who made me consider the great counter-witnesses to Christian faith. I am a better . Christian for having been steeped deeply in Camus and Beckett and Sartre, in Frost and Hemingway and Stevens. As Karl Barth often observed, the so-called "God" whom our best skeptical writers deny is often the No-God whom we should never believe to begin with: an arbitrary deity who jumps in and out of his creation like a divine factotum, doing our will whenever we beseech him, a sacred Santa Claus who brings us whatever we want whenever we are not naughty but nice. "The cry of revolt against such a god," Barth declared, "is nearer the truth than is the sophistry with which men attempt to justify him."

Yet the literary texts I encountered during my years at East Texas State bore down upon me with positive no less than negative truths. They built up rather than tore down; they braced far more than they undermined. My chief literary awakening to moral and spiritual life had to do with race. To understand it, you must first permit me to set the southern racial scene wherein I was raised. I had grown up amidst rigid segregation and fully sanctioned discrimination. Blacks could not attend my schools and churches, it goes without saying, but neither could they use the public restrooms, drink from the public water fountains, eat in the public restaurants, nor sleep in, the public hotels and motels. Segregation and discrimination combined to constitute a Southern victory that virtually overcame the loss of the Civil War. Racial superiority was the background noise of our lives, the racket which we could not hear because we heard nothing else. To question the inherited racial order was akin to a fish questioning water or a bird doubting the air.

Yet Mark Twain had indeed questioned it, and through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn he made me question my own received assumptions about race. Yet Twain seared my conscience not by overt preaching, but rather by the subtlety and irony that only a great literary text can accomplish. A scene that struck me with special forc .occurs when Huck is returning from one of his escapades on the Mississippi and reports to Tom Sawyer`s aunt Sally that he had witnessed a boatwreck. "Anybody hurt?" she asks. "No`m," Huck replies. "Killed a nigger." Well it`s lucky," Aunt Sally continues, "because sometimes people do get hurt."

This small exchange served as a veritable bombshell in my own small soul. Though I had been taught to sing that "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight; Jesus loves the little children of the world," there was little in my own world to reinforce this profound biblical reality. On the contrary, nearly all of our social habits and practices counted against it. Now as then, the church`s message hardly registered in a society whose alien values virtually overwhelm it. Yet a literary text broke through this hard social crust and awakened me to moral consciousness, as Twain reveals how a black man killed in a river disaster mattered little more than a dog or a cat that had been run over by a wagon.

I was again morally jolted by the more celebrated scene wherein Huck ponders whether he should inform Miss Watson about Nigger Jim`s whereabouts. (I should add that Twain employs the slur word not to demean but to show Huck`s complete conformity to Southern racial practice, and thus to measure his eventual liberation from it.) In a long moral meditation, Huck grapples with his own conscience. He counts the many ways wherein Jim has become to him the very embodiment of fidelity and unselfishness, of gratitude and guilelessness. To violate him, Huck senses, would be a crime against the very nature of things, a horror of metaphysical proportions. Yet Twain refuses to lecture or hector. Instead, he depicts Huck`s moral moment of truth in entirely ironic terms. Huck`s church and society have taught him that to violate the slave system is to contravene the law of God. If Huck does not turn Jim in, it follows, he will surely be damned. In a splendidly naive scene, where Huck thinks he is doing evil rather than good, he rips up the revealing letter to Miss Watson, declaring "All right, then, I`ll go to hell."

Yet the scene that struck even deeper chords of resonance and reformation in my own racial consciousness occurs in William Faulkner`s story called "The Bear." There the 16-year Ike McCaslin finds himself examining early 196` century ledgers kept by two of his great-uncles, Buck and Buddy. The two brothers had made these half-literate ledger-entries as they bantered back and forth about the McCaslin family`s various dealings with their slaves. The crucial entry involves a certain black slave named Eunice: "Bought by Father in New Orleans 1807 ,$650. Dolars. Marid to Aucydus 1809 Drownd in Crick Christmas Day 1832." A second entry reads: "June 21 th 1833 Drownd herself." Writing two days later, the second brother adds: "Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding him self." What young Ike McCaslin has discovered to his staggering horror, though it had been caused only vague puzzlement in his uncles–is the reason why Eunice had killed herself on Christmas day.

The day of the world`s rebirth, we learn, had been the day of Eunice`s deliberate death. For it was then that Eunice had first found out the truth that was beyond her bearing. She had discovered that her daughter Tomasina was pregnant. This daughter, we also learn, had been fathered not by Eunice`s slave husband Thucydus but by Carothers McCaslin, the plantation owner himself. Twenty-two years later, this same "Tomy" had been impregnated by this same Carothers McCaslin-which is to say, by her own father. The next generation of McCaslin brothers finds it incomprehensible that a Negro slave like Eunice could be reflective enough to have cause for suicide. Yet their mention of it, six months later when Tomy herself died in childbirth, reveals that they were not totally opaque to the truth. Like Twain, Faulkner does not wag his finger in moralizing instruction. Instead, he uses indirection to reveal the horror that prompted Eunice`s despairing act. Her self-murder was an act of metaphysical protest against a system so evil that the father of a slave child could summon that very girl to his bed of carnal lust and father yet another child on her. Faulkner enables his readers to overhear Ike`s moral reveille as it is gradually but powerfully sounded, and thus to experience our own shock of recognition.

I do not mean to suggest that my own racial awakening was anything extraordinary. Many other youths of my generation underwent a similar jolting. I should also add that the work of Martin Luther King had a transformative effect on my consciousness, since he had so deeply rooted his racial protest in the Gospel: in the Christian summons to regard all men, no longer from a merely human point of view, but as people both created and re-created in God`s own image. Nor could Faulkner and Twain have prized open my closed racial mind had the church not already done its preparatory work. The ministry of the Texas Baptist Student Union during the early 1960s was devoted largely to racial reconciliation. The pastor of Commerce`s First Baptist Church, Julius Stagner, and the campus BSU director, Richard Norton, were unrelenting in their call for us to regard black people as our brothers and sisters in Christ. They stood courageously. with us when we invited William Lawson, the black campus minister at Texas Southern, to address our own BSU chapter-perhaps the first black man ever to address a white audience on our campus.

So it is, then, that my undergraduate life was shaped decisively through teachers who stirred in me a lifelong love of literature. They created in me a symbiosis of things moral and imaginative. Yet the amalgam, the substance that made the two worlds bond together and cohere, was Christian faith itself. Paul Banus taught me that, far from constricting human life, the tiny aperture that God opens at Bethlehem and Golgotha encompasses the widest of all worlds. There is nothing, in fact, larger than the Gospel. It is larger not only than everything in the world, as Chesterton so aptly said, it is larger than the world itself. Because everything finds its true size only in what Hopkins called the grandeur of God, there is no need to fear truths that come from non-Christian writers. They serve to challenge and stretch and deepen our faith in the God whose Gospel, even if they do not know it, is their beginning and middle and end.

Barrus was so popular a teacher that his sections of American literature filled quickly every term. Yet he never cultivated a student audience. He did not "hang out" with us, nor did we drop by his office for idle chat. He maintained a healthy professorial distance that commanded our respect. Yet we knew unmistakably that he was our friend, and we went to him for counsel. When my college roommate committed suicide during his first year of medical studies, I went straight to Paul Barnes` office for consolation and instruction. Barrus also made periodic book purges to lighten his heavy-laden shelves, and he would invite his students to treat themselves to works he no longer needed. Many of these books were excellent works in Catholic culture that became mainstays in my own burgeoning library.

II.

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