Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan
Читать онлайн книгу.
a question I asked myself. As I caught up with events and trends in the world, I did regret that I missed the early days of SDS, that I had not been marching for civil rights down south, that I was not further along toward a university degree. However, I knew things had to play out in the way they did, given who I was and the world into which I was born. Moreover, there was a sense in which I felt that I turned negative to positive. I had survived a years-long, near-total assault on my intellectual, emotional, moral, and bodily integrity, and was stronger for it. Not that I knew yet how to bring such strength to bear upon my life. All I knew was that I wanted to continue my education and be socially and politically involved.
The year 1965 was the most difficult year of my life. I turned twenty-one in turbulence. I struggled not to drown in the tides threatening to engulf me and to find a bridge across troubled water. On so many levels, I felt like a misfit in the world to which I returned. It was not just the Rip van Winkle effect of discovering how things had changed while I was gone. It was a feeling of being neither here nor there, of being thoroughly out of joint with my surroundings, of belonging to no clear place. Even on the most superficial level, life was strange. I struggled to adapt to wearing ordinary clothes again. I kept feeling the lack of the long flowing veil and the swish of the long heavy skirts. I was a frightful sight. I had less than a half an inch of hair on my head, having been shaved so recently. My mother bought me a wig just the right shade of red as to look like my own hair. When I went down the shore one weekend with some of my classmates from high school, I was miserable. I had found them irritating and frivolous in high school, but I had even less in common with them now. On a deeper level, I plunged into darkness. The questioning that had unsettled the foundations of convent life for me was now unleashed full force, tearing relentlessly through my whole Catholic worldview. I grew obsessed with the question of the existence of God. I went over and over all the answers in the apologetics textbooks. I struggled with logic. I prayed for faith. I managed to continue to believe, but only by a thread and through the new theology. I responded most fully to the work of Teilhard de Chardin. I loved his passionate affirmation of matter, his respect for science and reason, his world-historical and teleological grandeur.
I got a summer job in Operation Discovery, a project of the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty,” intended to offer enriching experiences for inner-city kids. I was teamed up with a handsome seminarian with whom I got on well, and we took the students, all of them black, on excursions all over the city and state. We went to concerts, museums, and art galleries. The banter with co-workers and kids was so freewheeling, so easy, without all the rules and regulations and stress that stifled my interactions with pupils, parishioners, and sisters at Corpus Christi. My new freedom was heady. I could decide how to spend my time, what to read, whom to see, what to wear. I delighted in things that others took for granted.
I started summer school. I had enough college credits from my three years at Chestnut Hill to count for one year at St. Joe’s. I was, unsurprisingly, exempt from all theology requirements. To qualify for any degree in a Jesuit university at that time, students were to take courses on theology and even more in philosophy. A total of twenty-four credits in philosophy was required, which suited me just fine. I started as required with logic and then proceeded to epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. I also registered for classes in biology, psychology, sociology, and literature.
My first philosophy teacher was the witty and clever David Marshall, who used the classroom as a platform to talk about whatever was on his mind. As well as entertaining us with his views on everything under the sun, he managed to make logic seem fun and fascinating, and I mastered the principles and procedures of both syllogistic and symbolic logic. I also had him for philosophy of science, ethics and aesthetics. In all these courses, he ranged through the whole history of philosophy in sweeping strokes. My next philosophy teacher was John Caputo, an ex–Christian Brother and still a postgraduate himself, who taught epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of man, and philosophy of religion with far more rigor, demanding tighter analysis of the arguments of each thinker and less of the broad sweep. With exacting clarity, he guided me through the prime texts of modern philosophy, a fateful experience for me. He later became an academic star and advocate of postmodernist theology, a position that held no appeal for me, but he was an excellent teacher for me at this stage of my development. My literature teacher was John Mullen, well-organized, sardonic, and demanding a high level of critical reasoning and clear writing. He believed that philosophical questions were often dealt with more meaningfully in literature. He also thought that some works of science or philosophy were themselves fine literature. He introduced me to the work of physical anthropologist Loren Eiseley, through his book The Immense Journey. It formed my sense that factual writing could and should be as creative and as literary as fiction. Outside class, I read Maslow, Frankl, and Fromm for an alternative view to that offered by Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner in my psychology classes. The former thinkers’ emphasis on the whole person, on the flow of lived experience and the search for meaning, were urgently important to me as my life world was undergoing a total transformation.
A battle of ideas was raging in most Catholic universities at this time, as the relativizing effect of Vatican II was unraveling so many accepted principles. The divide was especially sharp in philosophy, where the hegemony of scholastic philosophy was cracking. The old guard, mostly priests, considered the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas to be the last word in the discipline, and all subsequent philosophy merely a series of approximations and errors. They used textbooks written by some priest who taught modern philosophy according to the formula “Descartes was wrong because …,” “Kant was wrong because …,” and so on. The new breed—mostly laymen, but including priests and ex-priests—sought to incorporate alternative philosophies. Existentialism and phenomenology were particularly strong currents in the philosophy departments of Catholic universities. For a time, this made St. Joe’s a congenial environment for my studies, and existentialist voices at first spoke most directly to my condition.
I studied philosophy with extraordinary intensity, which was a source of affectionate amusement to my teachers. When one of them heard I was heading for the beach for the weekend, he speculated that my beach towel was emblazoned with “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Such moments brought light relief from my fierce existential angst, which nevertheless continued to weigh heavily. Another teacher predicted a prolonged virginity for me, because: “After all, who wants to talk about Hegel at the breakfast table?” He must have felt it was safe to assume nobody had yet been subjected to such discomfort, since I had only recently left the convent and as yet had only got as far as turning into a secular equivalent, a Heideggerian variant of “being-toward-death” after taking off the veil. I reeked of Sturm und Drang. I brooded with neantization. I ached for authenticity. One of my teachers did not see it that way, and we bonded, to the point where I was on the verge of losing my virginity, but he stopped and decided it was a line we should not cross. My virginity was one thing, but my integrity was another. Another teacher offered to pay me to write a postgraduate paper for him. Desperate as I was financially and flattered that he thought an undergraduate able to do his postgraduate work, my integrity was really all I had left, and I had given up much already to keep it. He was not happy at having exposed himself without getting what he wanted. Though he believed I could ace an A for him on his postgraduate course, he gave me a B in my undergraduate class.
Philosophy preoccupied nearly my every waking moment. I pondered the great questions of the ages: between idealism and materialism, monism and pluralism, realism and conventionalism, structure and process. Above all, I weighed the arguments for and against the existence of God, as if deciding were a matter of life or death. Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways didn’t really work for me anymore. There was also the problem of evil. Where was God during the Holocaust? Where was he now, as some lived in luxury while others lived in rat-infested ghettos in Philadelphia or bomb-devastated hamlets in Vietnam? I struggled to believe. Much of what I read spoke of the eclipse of God, the absence of God, the death of God. I felt the full force of these phrases. I prayed for faith. I prayed to this hidden God, while asking myself how a hidden God was different from no God at all.
I turned every assignment into something meaningful and important for me to explore. I read texts that had enormous impact on me, such as Dostoevsky’s The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Camus’s The Myth