“How cleansed and purified I feel.”
I had gone through the first mystical stage
of purgation and now I was ready for illumination.
One night I awakened from a dream about sex
and I just thought of my dear Janie
and the temptation fled away.
I knew that I would love her forever
and that I could be pure forever just like
Dante and the courtly lovers of the Middle Ages.
Ironically now that I could be pure
my confessor asked me to leave the seminary
because a priest should not be falling in love.
Jane was going to Northwestern University
in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago
so I applied to the philosophy graduate program
at Loyola of Chicago and was accepted.
By the time I got to Loyola in January
Jane already had a real and normal boyfriend.
So we had some lovely meetings but I was free
to study philosophy which all seemed so real.
It seemed that at the heart of each philosophy
was a philosophy of love and I just loved
studying Plato especially his Symposium
and his Phaedrus which explained sublimation.
Aristotle, the Stoics, the Medievals and
the Postmodernists each had a new philosophy of love.
From Loyola to the College of St. Francis
Father Hecht SJ, the chair of the philosophy department at Loyola,
took excellent care of me by giving me a scholarship that took care
of everything from tuition, to room and board, to all of my books.
He introduced me to Mr. Kelling who took me to live with him
in a wonderful hotel right next to the downtown Loyola Tower.
Then he told me that they needed a philosophy teacher at St. Francis
College in Juliet, Illinois about fifty miles south of Chicago.
The wonderful sisters of St. Francis took me as their colleague
and after having lived in a community of men for nine years
I was now in a community of most beautiful ladies who had
the highest ideas of holy love and wisdom as they were educated
and then taught others in grade school, high school and college.
I could teach whatever I wanted to learn and we always thought
together about the Augustinian, Thomistic and Franciscan philosophies.
I took a course on Plotinus at Loyola from Fr. Nurnberger SJ
and I thought deeply about Augustine’s reflections on him.
Augustine’s motto came to be “credo ut intellegam,”
“I believe that I might understand,”
and that took him beyond mystical monism
to the gift of faith in the dignity of all persons as children of God.
The Franciscan nuns loved making clear how the Franciscans
built upon this and how Scotus showed the uniqueness of each person
and how Ockham showed how we can never know the complex person
but how our faith can let us love all as did St. Francis.
As a youth in the seminary I read the works of St. John of the Cross.
The active meditative night of the soul and the passive contemplative
night of the soul fit right in with Augustine fulfilling Plotinus
and with the Franciscan extension of love to all of God’s creatures.
I was so fortunate to be able to learn with the beautiful Sisters
and the beautiful students and for nine years absence made
my heart grow fonder then all of a sudden presence gifted me
with the heavenly delight of the other half of my soul for ever and ever.
From Loyola and St. Francis to the Phenomenology Workshop
In 1964, Herbert Spiegelberg got a grant and was able to invite
ten philosophers for a two-week seminar on phenomenology.
I was one of seven Americans and John Mayer, who founded the
philosophy department at Brock, was one of the three Canadians.
We all came to see that phenomenology is a theory of intentional
consciousness, an attitude of respect for the concrete and a
method of description begun by Husserl and continued by many.
At Loyola I was introduced to phenomenology by studying
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and we read Heidegger’s
Being and Time as soon as it was translated into English.
I continued to work on it with Barbara Henning at St. Francis.
I memorized the eighty-four headings in the table of contents and gave
a talk on it at the second workshop in 1965 and John Mayer
asked me if I would like to come to Brock University to teach.
That was fortunate for me because at St. Francis a beautiful
young nun, Sister Carolyn, became ill with tuberculosis
and when I visited her in the infirmary I told her that I would
pray for her twice each day and I believed that she would recover.
I told her that I loved her as if she were my sister, or my
mother or my wife and that I would always love her forever.
She told this to Sister Anita Marie, the president of the college.
Sister called me to her office and told me I should not
speak like that and that I should get a job teaching elsewhere.
So when Dr. Mayer asked me to come to Brock it was a relief.
Studying phenomenology prepared me well for what I would
encounter at Brock and especially the idea of intentional
consciousness helped me to think about agape and bhakti.
The monistic mysticism which sees Atman as Brahman
sees Brahman as pure being, pure bliss and pure consciousness.
A personal God always has an intentional consciousness
as distinct from the pure consciousness of monistic mysticism.
From the Catholic World to a Secular University
Mervyn Sprung grew up a Protestant and received his PhD
in Philosophy from the University of Berlin and deep in his mind
and heart he was a Buddhist for he loved a philosophy of peace.
As a Corporal in the army he thought about the war-like ways
of