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3 Athens, Jerusalem, and . . . Overcoming the Exclusivist Paradigms of the Past   I have chosen this broader title to think about the split about reason and faith or the gap between secular rationality and religious sensibility, particularly in university life, not only because of Tertullian’s famous question, what has Jerusalem to do with Athens?1 but because for me it sums up a good deal of my upbringing and my later experience at universities in England and NorthAmerica.This will also give me a chance to introduce myself and my present understanding of things past, present, and future to you. I grew up, as it were, in Jerusalem, in the midst of a sea of individual faces in my hometown parish, just about all of whom evinced the same brand of basic North of England Christian piety: daily services, visit the sacrament, indulgences, and the convictions , at times overwhelming, that the faith is really all there is (except perhaps for education, but this meant top grades ultimately) and that to marry outside the fold, for example, was a terrible misfortune. No one in my world then could articulate that bridge between learning and reverence that Alfred North Whitehead had already seen as a major challenge to the British system of education. Instead, I was, of course, aware of other faces somewhere on the horizon of my pre-adolescent consciousness: through snatched glimpses 65 of a television program called The Brain’s Trust, which I was not allowed to watch, the unforgettable, but rather puzzling and utterly assured, faces of the philosopher Bertrand Russell and astronomer Fred Hoyle compelled me to realize that per impossibile some people—mostly the “university crowd”—did not believe in God. So, in the absence of voices already in the world but not near me—alas—I realized dimly that there were two certainties, each utterly opposed to the other, and while I loved one face and was puzzled by the other, I was afraid of the certainty of both, the tenacious vulnerability of Jerusalem and the aristocratic superiority of Athens. But if you had asked me when I was eleven,“Can there be a Jerusalem without an Athens?,”I should have answered haltingly , expecting to discover that it was a trick question whose answer was that while there probably must be both on earth, people might well do without smug, superior, arid intellectualism in heaven. And then, to cut a long story short, I discovered Athens myself, first at school in isolated moments—a sudden and real glimpse that Virgil was actually a human being (and not just lines), that Plato’s Greek could take your breath away (if you forgot to treat it as work), and above all, one morning when I was twelve, that Alphonse Daudet’s use of the word étincellant to describe wine in his “Letter,” Les trois messes basses,2 was perfect somehow under any conditions—and then even more so at university , where I became deeply committed to the love of learning for its own sake, its profound nobility; for what I took to be its deeply civilizing and humanizing power; and, probably too, for the inherently“universal ” nature of the university ideal, that is, its apparent commitment to the freedom of a universe, and more, and to the responsibilities of civilization which accompany such freedom. But I found no institutional context that could embrace and ground this vision. Instead, in my twenties, when I ran into the more homogenous faces of Christians, I tended to recognize different “types” and secretly breathed a sigh of relief that I could escape again into the fresh air of university life.When I say“types,”I mean this pejoratively, probably because I became incapable of really seeing individual faces, since an ideology or a group mentality seemed to obscure individual identity: I disliked traditional authoritarians (and their opposites) for their lack of generosity, social libertarians (and their opposites) for their ideologies, 66 Kevin Corrigan intellectualist Christians (and their opposites, like Bertrand Russell) for insisting that belief is a matter of quantity (e.g., “you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself ‘a religious being’”3 ), and martyr-complex believers for making reality the very difficult business it doesn’t always need to be. The problem of faith without doubt or reflection might have made me despair altogether but for Sophocles’ Antigone, which presented to my mind one of the major problems...

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