Nathan A. Scott, Jr.: Staying on Course

THE LEGACY OF REV. NATHAN A. SCOTT, JR. 111 dialogue: a form of conversation, or "at least the effort to initiate a fruitful conversation with those who represent the significant intellectual and cultural disciplines whereby man's self-interpretation is undertaken, in the deepest dimensions of his encounter with reality" (15). Nevertheless, if his annual Christmas letters faithfully indicate his preoccupations, then the health and well-being of his family-Charlotte, the children, their spouses, and grandchildren-were uppermost in his life. I don't recall anything in the letters about his own work. But then, there was no need for him to do so. His work speaks for itself. Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Emeritus WORK CITED Scott, Nathan A., Jr.Adversity and Grace. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968. Nathan A. Scott, [r.: Staying on Course Kevin Lewis I am honored to be included among this less-than-a-minyon for Nathan, which also recalls for me the sober sidewalk mourning-tents honoring the deceased that my wife and I would pass by, on foot, in Gaza when we were fortunate to live and teach there for a semester ten years ago. And it is All Souls' Day: think candle smoke hanging over Polish cemeteries. Are we sure it's too early in the day for martinis and cigars? Neither Jewish nor Muslim (nor Polish), Nathan was ebulliently, sacramentally Christian. He taught me to welcome the well-timed martini. Upon leaving the South Side of Chicago for the last time to take up my first real teaching appointment, I said goodbye on his doorstep with a tribute box of cigars. I confess I did not see Nathan again, so far as I can remember, after leaving Chicago in 1973 for my job in South Carolina. We exchanged Christmas cards annually, but we never crossed paths again. And I confess I have not read as much ofhis workas the rest ofyou. My working bibliography this morning is effectively limited to his "Ramble on a Road Taken" and Ralph Wood's interview with him in that same issue of Christianity and Literature. 112 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE When I first met Nathan in 1967 he was twenty years younger than I am now. He was intriguing. How I admired what I knew of his publications! He was easy in his skin. He twinkled. He could roll his eyes to heaven and thrust his chin like nobody I knew. I wasn't sure ifhe was naturally or intentionally playing a character. It was the apparent sense of self as theater that struck me at first and never quite wore off as our relationship evolved over those years. We immediately shared a common interest in Tillich. I had gone to lecture courses in college offered by Tillich and written a senior mini-thesis applying Tillichian notions to the fiction of William Faulkner. Tillich had impacted me profoundly. Nathan and I bonded (if that's the word) over the "depth dimension" as an instrumental concept for an appropriately flexible religious criticism of literature. That Nathan whom I encountered thenadd his sacramental spirituality and churchmanship-is what I mostly remember. (A little later he moved on to engagement with moral vision as such and with civic virtue.) It helped, also, when we first met, that I had come from two years of working through an Anglican theological curriculum in the U'K, familiarizing myself with canons, beadles, priests, choir-boy processions, and prayer books all in "good order:' I had grown up in a Presbyterian minister's manse, with the amused beliefthat John Knox had "done away with all that:' In the freedom to devise my own courses in my first job, I moved on to spiritual autobiography, existentialism, apocalyptic visions, and, with trepidation, religion in the South-away from Nathan's greater interests. And slowly I have grown more certain of my own long-evolved theology: hybridized, shaken, and stirred. Thanks, of course, in some part to those years-late sixties, early seventies-working for with Nathan, I advertise myself now, years later, as a Postmodern Calvinist Christian Humanist-put it on my grave markereternally grateful for the Calvin who gave us: "The mind...