Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University

3: The Odyssey as Eucharist

79 c h a p t e r 3 The Odyssey as Eucharist I began my discussion of “The Way of the University,” in chapter 1, with a quotation from Newman’s The Idea of the University, but, as I admitted then, I took it out of context. As soon as Newman considers the idea that “a university has a line of its own,” that it has its own “sphere” of knowledge , he denies it: It will be said [. . .] that a University has a line of its own. It contemplates , it occupies, a certain order, a certain platform of Knowledge. I understand the remark; but I own to you, I do not understand how it can be made to apply to the matter at hand. I cannot construct my definition of the subject-matter of University Knowledge, and so draw my boundary lines around it, as to include therein the other sciences commonly studied at the university and to exclude the science of religion . (29; 1.2.3) My task, too, is to draw a “boundary” line between “science” and the “science of religion,” and like Newman I find this difficult to do in practice . Ricouer’s theory gives me a way to imagine the line as existing somewhere between the concreteness of story itself and the thoughts we draw from it, but right away this linear sequence bends into a cycle, the energy starts flowing back and forth, and faith pours into the classroom after all. What I described in the last two chapters is the pattern and routine of my teaching, when I’m teaching the Bible or the other classic Christian texts in the Western tradition: my own faith identified as example of point of view. But my first year on campus as both a professor and a deacon, two moments in the classroom complicate and violate this Anderson.Teaching 9/30/04 4:21 PM Page 79 Teaching as Believing 80 pattern. I’m standing by the board, coffee cup in hand, lecturing in the way that professors lecture and leading discussions as we all try to do, when all at once my faith comes welling up, right there, in front of the students, not an example but a fact. This happens the first time during a discussion of Homer’s Odyssey, and it has to do with the very nature of literature . If mystery gives rise to story, story is inevitably related to mystery . There’s a conduit, and through it a connection is always getting made. If mystery gives rise to story, then literature is intrinsically related to religious experience, it can’t help but be, and even if that experience is as yet amorphous and generic and unnamed, it’s there, powerful and unsettling and entirely joyous. Even at a state university. Sometimes the horizontal beam of the university is intersected by the intensity and power of the shaft of faith, a beam of hope and joy that starts deeper than the classroom and extends far beyond it, but that for a moment cuts right through it, at its heart. The vertical beam keeps going, becoming more particular and exclusive, as I will argue in the end. But for now there is a glow around the juncture where the beams come together, a wideness, and it’s not two dimensional , as my image may imply. It’s broad and deep. “Admit a God,” Newman says to complete this passage above, “and you introduce among the subjects of your knowledge, a fact encompassing , closing in upon, absorbing, every other fact conceivable” (29; 1.2.3). We can’t keep God out of the classroom. We can’t keep God out of anywhere . My Odyssey October in the Literature of Western Civilization. We are deep into a discussion of the fifth book of the Odyssey—the sun streaming through the windows, the students alert, intent—when all at once the divisions and the tensions seem to fall away. My detachment dissolves. We are plunged into the story, plunged into the sea with Odysseus, as he struggles to stay alive in the wide, green, open water, in the great storm-tossed waves, as he is flung ashore, naked and spent, discovered in the morning by the beautiful young princess, a beautiful young woman in a flowing gown welcoming him, honoring him, redeeming him. And the joy that seems to flow out then, the joy and the release in that instant, as we discuss this story, as...