"Proofs of God's Existence": Walker Percy, Jacques Maritain, and the Problem of the Symbol in The Moviegoer

69 Roberta Maguire "Proofs of God's Existence": Walker Percy, Jacques Maritain, and the Problem of the Symbol in The Moviegoer In this paper I intend to sketch OUT how Jacques Maritain's work led Walker Percy to some of the key arguments he makes regarding the symbol in his discursive writing ofthe 1950s and suggest how he further drew on it to explore those arguments in his first novel, The Moviegoer. Percy read Maritain, aThomist and convert to Catholicism, from his time at Trudeau Sanatorium onward, and as he moved closer to and beyond his own conversion, the philosopher's work became increasingly important. A challenge Maritain issued in Science and Wisdom, which Percy probably first read at Trudeau, played a crucial role in shaping the thrust of his work. "The peculiar problem of the age lying ahead of us," Maritain wrote, "will be to reconcile science and wisdom in a vital and spiritual harmony."1 Maritain made it clear why it was crucial to respond to the challenge. The Cartesian revolution, in causing the rupture between science and wisdom, had placed God—the most important object of wisdom—beyond rational investigation. Logos 1:3 1997 70 Logos Percy made Maritain's challenge his own, as he explains it in his 1958 essay "Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity," by seeking to "bridge the gap between the behaviouristics of Mead and the existentialia of Marcel."2 Maritain both issued a challenge that Percy took up and, through his work on the symbol, pointed the way for him to meet it. He developed his ideas about the symbol in several texts Percy read dating from the late 1940s, including an essay in Ransoming the Time entitled "Sign and Symbol." There Maritain named the symbol "the keystone of intellectual life,"3 and so offered a clue to bridging the gap between science and wisdom since both made use of symbols to generate and convey their different kinds of knowledge . Percy was impressed by this insight, which his reading of Susanne Langer, Ernst Cassirer, and Charles Peirce would also support. It appears in the first draft of his unpublished manuscript Symbol and Existence, probably completed in the mid-1950s, as follows: "it is the symbol and only the symbol which is equally accessible to the empirical and the existential disciplines: it is both a palpable something which lends itself to objective investigation , and a uniquely human creation susceptible of subjective phenomenological analysis."4 The essay "Sign and Symbol" supplied another clue to bridging the gap with a discussion ofin alio esse, a concept first articulated by die sixteenth-century Portuguese philosopher and Thomist John Poinsot. In alio esse describes how the symbol operates: it comes to contain within itselfin another mode ofexistence the very thing that it symbolizes. In other words, the symbol is botii what it appears to be and something else. If it could be understood how that cognitive function occurs—how the mind comes to perceive the symbol to be something that it isn't—Percy thought the gap between science and wisdom would be bridged. This idea arises repeatedly in the philosophical essays written during the 1950s. It dominates the first draft of Symbol and Existence, plays a significant Proofs of God's Existence role in the second draft probably completed in the late 1950s, and comes up in two essays published in 1957, "The Mystery of Language" and "Semiotic and aTheory of Knowledge." The latter essay argues that "a purely empirical inquiry" into in alio esse might "provide fresh access to a philosophy of being."5 According to Percy, such inquiry is needed because the modern mind requires it: In draft one of Symbol and Existence, he notes, "however true and telling the deliverances of the existentialists, whether modern or Kierkegaardian orThomist, in order that they become fully available to the Western mind, they must be approached from an empirical position and validated in an empirical framework."6 But if in alio esse were to be gotten hold of empirically, Percy realized empiricism needed redefinition. Again, Percy takes his lead from Maritain, who throughout his work made known his respect for science and disdain for "scientism ," which he said...