The days at Tuolumne Meadows grew short. Dragonflies, tiny helicopters, flew up and down the stream cascading down the gently sloping but muscular mountainside. Come, Pilgrim, we will go and sit among the boulders and shrubs, above the Lodge where the ranger presents at the campfire weekly and they sing Amazing Grace and Let Me Call You Sweetheart. Let us sit and watch the inexhaustible energy of the water, listen to the scolding of the blue-jays, and brood upon the sermons of the season.
And I can take you, Pilgrim, further upstream to more pools of unruly waters with swirling twigs and petals and bark and wings and mottled leaves and vestiges of the same, transient beings making their way to the sea. They move and are free and we are glad for them. They have had their high mountain summer in the sun, in the rain, in the cold wind. They became bold in the presence of their enemies, steadfast against the gates of hell, intelligent in temptation. They were delicate in love, and they shone brightly in their day, staying the assault of the darkness. Where then is your sting, O death? Where your victory, O grave? Let them seek out their sea, or their new soil, in a softer place where the sun sets, far below Tioga Pass. We can go to the quiet waters too, the still waters, the softly flowing dreamy and bright waters further downstream, near where the meadows begin, across the winding blue highway.
7 | The Scream
Niebuhr cast his net far and wide over human experience
I first saw Ruth, as I recall, in the cafeteria line. She stood tall and was classically pretty. Her face was fair and soft and uncluttered, pale at times. She smiled, laughed, and giggled easily with her friends. I saw a man paying attention to her. They talked often, and I grew jealous. Much later there was another man. I do not remember actually talking to her in the first few weeks, but my infatuation already knew no bounds.
The old town atmosphere of Orange, Chapman College, and the orange groves next to the new dorms with no fence between them felt like I wouldn’t mind being here forever. It felt summery and settled compared to the jagged emotions of New Delhi and St. Stephens, the cool foggy green of Mt. Tamalpais, the blue winds and scary currents of the Bay Area waters, the saturated clouds of unknowing at Tioga Pass. The only problem was Ruth.
A relaxed down-home camaraderie and friendship prevailed among the students and professors. Carroll Cotton, the men’s dorm supervisor, beat me easily in ping-pong, but he let me watch The Streets of Laredo again in his suite. Mike, a classmate, liked to talk about politics, and he became a good friend. My vociferous suite mate kept me posted on what he knew about Ruth. He darted around in his green MG, in which I myself was an occasional passenger. What an uncaged sort of guy, I thought, nothing bothers him. He always has something to say and is never at a loss for words. He goes where he pleases, and the MG was made just for him. He is friends with everyone and mad about no one.
A congenial space seemed to open up in which I could wander and muse. There was less pressure in Orange than there had been at St. Stephens. I lived in the dorms, I did not have to be part of an elite, and I went to the movies with other foreign students. I started working as a part-time youth assistant under the Reverend Green, who was the associate pastor at the First Presbyterian Church close by.
Dr. Bert C. Williams was my venerable philosophy teacher at the college, a kind and gray Boston humanist with thick glasses and a mustache. He did not hesitate to admit that he embraced the humanist philosophy of Edgar Sheffield Brightman, whose coherence-based argument for the existence of God we had to read. A lean figure with pointed features, Dr. Williams would huddle over the text on the table to explicate the material quite literalistically, exactly the way he wanted us to reproduce it on a test.
Edward Munch’s The Scream was one of the works of art pictured in black and white on the frontispiece of our history of philosophy text by W. T. Jones. I looked at it and heard the scream every time I opened the big book. The existentialistic readings in San Anselmo and my exposure to No Exit had prepared me well for a philosophy major, though sitting in class I could sense that a marriage between theology and philosophy might quickly become problematic.
I grew to recognize The Scream as an iconic image of modernity. The dark secrets of existence, heretofore told only in whispers, could now be shouted on bridges, told in bazaars, wept out loudly in railway junctions. Clandestine shames will find ears, suppressed stories will find a voice. Such was the promise of the times. Existence before essence, asseverated Sartre as existentialism’s manifesto. For better or worse we are thrown into an alienated, ambiguous, and deracinated world to make our own way, secure our own life, create our own meaning, learn from our own mistakes, find our own love. There is no metaphysical template against which to measure, no a priori norm to be a lamp to our feet and a light for our path, no plan laid before the foundation of the world for the fullness of our days.
This attitude of mind, however, was already setting me on a collision course with the mainstream of Western philosophy. I admit I was impressed by existentialism’s unyielding gaze into the cavernous depths of absurdity, angst, authenticity, nothingness, and freedom. Furthermore, had not theology found in existentialism a new language fertile for its own explorations of the subterranean recesses of the human soul? Had it not found a perch from which to critique the spiritually bankrupt culture of Babylon? I still note with interest the frequency with which the word existential is used nowadays with a somewhat different, more literal and political meaning, even in broadcast journalism.
Day by day, week by week in Dr. Williams’ class, however, I was being drenched in philosophies of reason, from Plato to Wittgenstein, with their interest not in the I and Thou of critical presence or in the alienations and anxieties of human subjectivity at all, but in logic, clarity of thought, and the foundations of knowledge. The big question percolating now in my soul had to do with the dissonance between these two alien frames of reference. It was as if two different languages with two different universes, each with its own firmament of suns and moons and stars, were in combat. I am not describing again the tension between intellect and existence, alluded to in a previous chapter, but rather the potentially rocky intellectual relationship between philosophy and theology. But Pilgrim, we will voyage together in this book to both universes and learn both languages.
We start by going back to a point in time one hundred years or so before I arrived in Orange. We flash back for a quick moment to the old stand-off between Kierkegaard and Bishop Mynster in Denmark. Even though theirs was not a clash between philosophy as such and theology, it is a good example of how a theologian can question longstanding tradition and erudition, and how she or he may detect the will to power, self-contentment, and self-deception operative in them.
Kierkegaard was the father of existentialism and Bishop Mynster the cultivated, shrewd, refined establishment Brahmin of Christendom who believed that the church should be kept secure and content by the state. Kierkegaard denounced Bishop Mynster publicly in the press, saying, You are mad with all the worldly pleasures and advantages of your position. You accept not one iota of Christianity’s teachings about renunciation and dying to oneself and being unhappy in this life. You deem the king and the priests and the wellborn infinitely more important than the beggar and the commoner.
My sympathies were very much with Kierkegaard. I still find reading his writings to be like being baptized at 8000 feet in Tenaya Lake, joltingly alarming and refreshing. His vehement attack on Christian hypocrisy, his expressions of solidarity with the beggar and the commoner, and his bald and piercing portrayal of the sickness of human interiority represent to me the best of the existentialist theology I had learned in San Anselmo. But how was I when I was young to weigh Kierkegaard and his theology of existence against the bishops and archbishops of the rationalistic philosophical establishment of the West? Furthermore, was not Kierkegaard on the verge of madness? Was it not just his unbearable manic-depressive condition that catapulted him into his faith?
The vague sense of fragmentation growing within me was validated by a paperback I bought that first year in Orange. Morton White’s Social Thought in America