The Boundary Walker: In Thanksgiving for the Life of Nathan A. Scott, Jr.

Figure 1.

Nathan A. Scott, Jr.

It must have been the fall of 1973 that I found myself wandering the shelves of a bookstore just off Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. It was an enormous shop for those days, less elegant and more stuffed with old volumes and academic books than the glitzy mega-stores today. I was a young graduate student in literature, still trying to imagine what my life's work might be. I had developed quite a passion for literature, especially modern literature with its quest to make meaning in a seemingly godless world. But I also felt pulled toward religion and the whole question of faith, toward trying to understand what Christianity could mean in the secularized, radical late sixties and seventies.

There in the back shelves of that bookshop I pulled down a book called The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature by someone named Nathan A. Scott, Jr. The back cover quoted this man Scott saying, "Underlying much of the representative poetry, drama, and fiction of our period is a sense that the anchoring center of life is broken and that the world is therefore abandoned and adrift." That fit my sense of the world exactly, and what thrilled me was the promise that Scott would undertake a theological assessment of what all this meant. Here was religion engaging the deepest questions and denials of our time. I leafed through chapters inside with titles like "The Bias of Comedy and the Narrow Escape into Faith" and "The Tragic Vision and the Christian Faith" and "Faith and Art in a World Awry," and I was hooked.

I took the book home, and as I read it I found a new world opening to me in which the great works of literature, and of art, music, and film, were engaged in a lively conversation with ancient and contemporary Christian faith. I read paragraphs that I came to realize were quintessentially Nathan Scott—with sweeping lists of poets, novelists, and theologians. In a typical paragraph I landed on, Baudelaire and Kafka were rubbing shoulders with James Joyce, early Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, and then in a dazzling leap Professor Scott declared that the true spiritual home of all these writers was not with St. Athanasius, the fourth century Christian theologian, but with Dionysius the Areopagite writing in the fifth century. "Where did he come up with that?" I wondered. And then he capped off this small tour de force with a simple, humane summary. These modern writers, he said, "have not known the kind of confidence in the world and in temporal reality that was managed in happier moments in the literary tradition."

There it was—God's plenty—all wrapped up in a paragraph: the spiritual quest of the modern era, finding echoes in early Christian writings, leading to a summary that clarifies the spiritual dilemmas of our time.

I had discovered in Nathan Scott a mind that encompassed the entire Western humanist tradition. He had taken from his great mentor, the theologian Paul Tillich, the conviction that all works of art and literature are fundamentally theological, because they express the ultimate convictions of their creators and so deserve to be probed from a religious point of view. And this new field of Religion and Literature took as its focus secular literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in order to place the great poems and novels of modernity in dialogue with the religious vision embodied in the tradition of Western Christianity.

Paul Tillich once wrote a memoir entitled On the Boundary, describing his sense of having carried out his theological work in a dialogue between Christian faith and the intellectual and spiritual currents of the twentieth century. The more I worked with and studied under Nathan Scott, I came to see him as one of the signal boundary walkers of our time.

He lived and wrote on the boundary between religion and literature, between...