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Walker Percy's Guide for the Perplexed
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11864 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1994 |
6,713 Words |
| Author
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James Thompson
James Thompson, who lives in Nashville, is the author of
several books, the most recent of which is The Church, the
South and the Future. |
We know that the modern world is coming to an end . . . . At the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies . . . . Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another . . . . The world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.
-Romano Guardini
The End of the Modern World
(Epigraph to Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman)
Walker Percy agreed with his fellow Louisianan Jimmy Swaggart on at least this: Times were bad and folks were confused. Percy refrained from publicly criticizing the Reverend Swaggart, most likely figuring that it would be a waste of time, as everybody had long since made up his mind about the notorious preacher. He does take a swipe at a Swaggartlike evangelist in his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). Tom More's wife succumbs to the blandishments of a TV gospeler and embraces Pentecostalism. Afire with evangelical zeal, she drains her bank account to support the preacher's "Gospel Outreach" to Latin America. Tom quips: "He'd rather convert a Catholic Hispanic than a Bantu any day in the week."
Percy argued that Swaggart and his fellow exporters made a bad situation worse. With the times out of joint and people hungering for solace and security, the "new fundamentalists," as he called them in a 1983 address to Catholic seminarians, promised much but delivered little. They whipped up a reckless, world-blasting apocalypticism that provided thrills but scant guidance for daily life. With friends like this, Percy warned, Christianity need not worry about its enemies; these people, he said, "do a disservice by cheapening the vocabulary of Christianity and pandering to a crude emotionalism divorced from reason."
Famous novelists seldom visit obscure seminaries to alert priests-to-be about the dangers of resurgent fundamentalism and to share their thoughts on the future of the Catholic Church. To Percy, it made as much sense to meet with the young men of St. Joseph Seminary as to hobnob with students and professors of literature at nearby Louisiana State University. He was, after all, a Catholic all the time, but a novelist only during
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