Welcoming in a Lovely World

When Arne Kaijser emailed to tell me of the da Vinci Committee’s generosity, and Bernie Carlson reminded me that the lecture “can be a mix of major ideas as well as autobiographical reflections,” I took some time to sort my options. Eventually, for reasons that I will try to make clear, I decided to talk about two particular deep loves in my life: what I usually call my prayer life, and my commitment to the secular academy that draws us together in SHOT, and how these live in a single self-awareness.

Almost immediately after I received Arne’s email, I went to a file cabinet and found a handwritten note from Leo Marx dated 28 December 1991. Some weeks before he wrote the note Leo had asked me if I could put together a talk on short notice for a conference at MIT on the idea of progress, because one of the invited speakers had fallen ill. I had happily agreed. My talk, on religion and the idea of progress, considered a synchronicity between the Scientific Revolution and the delegitimation of Western mystical traditions among European theologians. I had chosen a single example, the peculiar history within the Jesuit order—my order—of its Ur-text, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. The Exercises, as scholarship and practice during the last half-century have rediscovered, is a hand-book of teachings about discerning one’s affections when praying and making decisions. Full disclosure: for much of that period I have been one of those vigorously pursuing—in scholarly writings as well as in practice, as a retreat director for people engaged in the Exercises—that rediscovery. The loves of my life that I named at the outset of this talk are rooted in this specific discipline of prayer.

In my brief talk that day I summarized how, for several centuries until the mid-1950s, Jesuits ignored the affective subtleties of the Exercises and treated them instead as a set of prescriptive moral exhortations. And I not only summarized my view that the Jesuits ought to recover our earlier wisdom, but also argued that Western science and precision technology should be complemented by practices of contemplation grounded in attention to affectivity. It did not go well. Some of the more senior scholars at the conference got upset. A few got angry. I was accused of advocating Nazism and of urging that irrationality replace rationality. A few days later, after the fireworks died down, I asked Leo what he thought had happened. A few weeks later he wrote in answer—that late-December note I had saved.

He began by reminding me that I was invoking “mysticism, the holy dark, and even the Jesuits and Ignatius himself” not just anywhere, but at MIT, where these were linked with “a dire view of an inquisitional, dogmatic, repressive absolutist church which we children of the Enlightenment grew up with and which I for one cannot wholly repudiate.” Fair enough. Hindsight says that I needed more than twenty minutes to articulate such a thesis in such a place. More important, though, was Leo’s next paragraph, which stayed with me all these years: “Sooner or later you owe it to your secular friends & colleagues to say where and how faith makes a real difference in how we and you think. Surely it must, or you would in effect be encouraging a trivialization of faith. Isn’t there just a faint conspiracy (between you and your secular friends—I take the liberty of including myself) to glide over that rock bottom distinction?”¹

Perhaps these three sentences have stayed in my mind because Leo was, simply, right when he said that “you owe it to your secular friends & colleagues to say where and how faith makes a real difference in how we and you think.” Good questions often lead to a sifting of memories, until some of those memories call attention to themselves as being part of an answer.² I have done a lot of sifting these past two months, stimulated by Leo’s old question and by the invitation...