A Kind of Perseverance: Two Essays (review)

The Pascal Lectures on Christianity and the University at the University of Waterloo is a series that was initiated in 1978 and presented Malcolm Muggeridge as the first lecturer. Its mandate is to challenge the university community to a search for truth through Christian faith, and there have now been nearly thirty speakers over the past nearly thirty-five years. Named after the seventeenth-century scientist and Christian Blaise Pascal (1632–62), the lectures regularly feature an individual distinguished both in scholarly endeavour and in some area of Christian life. The choice of Margaret Avison, widely known as a respected Canadian poet, as the twelfth lecturer for 1993 was undoubtedly based on the Christian commitment of her art as well as her long association with the University of Toronto.

Avison’s lectures, titled A Kind of Perseverance, were first published in 1994 by Lancelot Press in Nova Scotia, at that time the primary publisher of her poetry since sunblue (1978). The lectures have now been reissued by Porcupine’s Quill, the publisher of her posthumous autobiography, I Am Here and Not Not-There (2009), and Always Now (2002–2004), the three volumes of her collected poetry. As with these earlier volumes, Avison’s literary executor, Joan Eichner, has worked with Stan Dragland to edit the lectures. They have corrected errors in the first publication (largely quotations and bibliographical citations) and supplied some missing information about references. Eichner has also provided a short introduction and a biographical summary of Avison’s life, while the helpful preface to the first printing, by Waterloo English professor John North, has been retained.

Avison’s two lectures, ‘Misunderstanding Is Damaging’ and ‘Understanding Is Costly,’ are each preceded by ‘A Preamble to the Propositions’ and followed by some ‘Propositions.’ The preambles are characteristically self-deprecating (‘I am not qualified to pontificate . . .’), while the propositions describe the premises she begins with (for example, ‘Thinking we know, now, is the key danger to confront’ or ‘Conviction does not preclude listening’). Avison’s lectures are not expository or argumentative. As she notes, ‘The ideas are in cumulative clusters rather than in logical steps.’ She stresses the tentativeness of any assertion, whether secular or religious, and the twin challenges of understanding another person’s view, especially when separated by centuries of time, and of recognizing ‘our own shortcomings as much as we see others’.

The first lecture is full of personal references: reconciling her study and research with the imperatives of her conversion experience in 1963; her work on Byron as a graduate student; studying linguistics in Bloomington, Indiana; and reading E.M.W. Tillyard, Boethius, and Jacques Ellul. She confesses her own blind spots about Christian concepts during her earlier estrangement from the faith and acknowledges the continual need for historical perspective. Ultimately, we must listen to one another: ‘The more we listen to one another across the seeming barriers – different times, seemingly opposed positions like science and faith – the more our categories and distinctions dwindle, if a search for God’s truth is our concern.’

Her second lecture begins by admitting to the intellectual need for engagement: one is modified by ‘the experience of heartfelt sympathy.’ A reader of literature ‘learns to suspend judgment, in order to listen well.’ These reflections lead to the call for ‘[m]utual receptiveness’ as a step toward understanding. But just as Christians must stretch outside their comfort zone, so secularists should reciprocally grant the cultural importance of the Bible and respect Christian truths. The trouble is, ‘We all walk about in a cloud of our own comprehension, seeing what we already know everywhere we look.’ Avison never avoids human limitation: ‘Truth is final, but our mortal grasp of it can never be final.’ She winds down by characteristically exploring the roots of the words she has been discussing: understanding, damaging, damning, costly, pain. ‘What an awesome phenomenon language is, an echo chamber of ancestral insights and of our human psyches.’

Avison’s lectures are challenging, wise, idiosyncratic, indirect, enigmatic...