I Remember Nathan

90 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Dr. Scott sought to establish a scholarly reputation that could be described in the same way he described Melvin Tolson, as "a Negro writer who asks to be considered as something other than merely a special case of ethnic ferment:' These remembrances recognize the one who left us all with a belief he articulated in his essayon "BlackLiterature" for the Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing that "it is within the power of a disciplined language to alter consciousness and thus to redeem the human reality:' University ofSan Francisco I Remember Nathan Charles H. Long I liked Nathan immediately. I first saw him when he came to the University of Chicago in the spring of 1955, and I remember him on the second floor of SwiftHall. He wore dark grey trousers, a brown sports jacket and smoked his cigarette with confidence. My impression was that he was a person who knew who he was and what he was about. Over the years I have had no reason to change this impression. The Chair of my field, the History of Religions, Joachim Wach, who was also my dissertation advisor, died the summer of that year while visiting his sister in Switzerland. The next summer I was appointed Advisor to Students in the Divinity School and Instructor in the History of Religions. This was the beginning of my long collegial friendship with Nathan. Nathan had been hired as Assistant Professor in the Field of Religion and Art (later Religion and Literature.) Preston Roberts was the other member of this field, and it was Preston who had become aware of Nathan and his scholarly work. While they shared a common and serious intellectual compatibility, their styles were completely different. Preston was short, had been raised in the Quaker tradition, was endowed with a great head of very blond hair and wore large horn-rimmed glasses. He smoked incessantly, spoke softly and sometimes with diffidence. He reminded one of a stereotype of one of those Eastern "egg-head" intellectuals, say, from Yale, though he was in fact an authentic, genuine, dyed-in-the wool, Chicago man. Nathan, by contrast, was a large person or, as he might have put it, "endowed with a hefty avoirdupois:' Not only was he a large person, Nathan THE LEGACY OF REV. NATHAN A. SCOTT, JR. 91 did things in a grand manner. One might say that Nathan expressed a kind of "baroque" style. "Baroque" can be taken in a negative sense, and I wish to make it clear that I am not implying anything of the sort here. I speak of Nathan and the baroque because he was able to create a pleasing aesthetic unity by putting seemingly divergent elements and modes together. This was an expression of coincidentia oppositorium; thus, in terms of the baroque style, I would have more in mind Bach and Handel in music and Caravaggio and Rembrandt in painting. Nathan possessed an originary sense of homo hierarchicus. For him, hierarchy was not a political ideology but a sensory mode inherited in his formation and along with this penchant for hierarchy, he lived and expressed one of the keenest senses and sensibilities for fairness and egalitarianism one could imagine. He had a talent for friendship, an art he developed in every aspect of his life. Combined with his enormous talent for friendship was his sheer delight in kinship, not just in his own kin, but equally in the objective fact that it existed. He loved kinship relations, whether this involved parents, children, nieces, nephews, or uncles. I guess today in some sophisticated postmodern jargon, one might say that he enjoyed genealogy. That may be the case, but for Nathan such meanings were more than just book-learning. He was always quick to inquire about the origin of the names of the newborn, for here, in the naming of the next generation, he discerned that something important was taking place. At that great Memorial Banquet dinner celebrating and honoring his life,I was reminded of how much enjoyment he derived from eating with his friends-what he might have referred to as "commensality" That's another thing-Nathan did not like...