“Tell your neighbor what teacher said last time in class...”
-Father Thomas M. King, SJ
To my great pleasure and greater surprise, a number of situations in which I happen to find myself through no fault of my own, have induced me to nostalgia about a dear old teacher, Father King, SJ of Georgetown University. (I am not alone). A great teacher and even greater man, Father King simply mesmerized me time and again during my first semester of freshman year at Georgetown. The experience was captivating, eye-opening, and, without any hyperbole, life-changing. I remember my term paper from his class. I remember the questions on the exams he gave (What a fool I was for not knowing the name of Augustine’s mother!), I remember his mannerisms; the way his right hand would write beautiful cursive, a la Fulton Sheen on the chalkboard with his left hand resting on the small metal lip of the board where the chalk itself is kept, leaving him with the appearance of alabaster fingers and leaving me constantly wondering how many semesters it took him to be able to give lectures, his hands full of chalk dust, and not allow an atom of it on his jet-black clerical attire.
For the record, it was something like sixty semesters that he taught this class. Sixty semesters. I always laughed when any foolish freshman mustered the hubris to debate with him. “Surrender the point,” I always thought. “He’s been teaching this class longer than we have been alive.” Those sixty semesters were plenty of time for him to perfect his dry-as-the-Sahara sense of humor (I certainly had no idea what to think when he joked about doing experiments on little children—all for the purpose of demonstrating that humans have an innate sense of what constitutes evil—or when he obliquely referenced the fact that he may or may not have performed exorcisms on the sixth floor of Healy.), his iconic “tell your neighbor” or “Teacher says…”, and his simply enrapturing delivery of “The Grand Inquisitor” story from Dostoeyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov. More on this later.
I have my concerns about future classes of students at Georgetown; asinine education requirements that amount to nothing by a group exercise in missing the point of the purpose of a university, diversity requirements that will quickly become a punchline among undergraduates, and the humiliation of our president continuing to drive around campus in a faded blue minivan—all of these will factor into the Georgetown experience of future generations of Hoyas. Yet I am even more saddened for them for this reason: they will never have the inestimable privilege to be taught by the great mind of Fr. King again. Had I known how influential the class was to be in my formation, I would have recorded every lecture. It is a continued source of bitter regret that I did not. Nevertheless, because his legacy is worth being remembered, oh patient reader, here is a synopsis of Fr. King’s Problem of God (for the record, it was, I believe, Fr. King himself who orchestrated the institution of this class at Georgetown. He was one of the few who taught it well, realizing that the class was, in fact, something higher than merely a forum for professors to air their Problems With God.)
We opened the class with, of course, the taking of attendance. Father King had seen far too many students in his day to remember all of them, and thus he read the attendance sheet word-for-word every class period without ever looking to see which face corresponded to which name. The real substance of the course began, of course, with the classical proofs for the existence of God and for the famed debate between Bertrand Russell and Fr. Copleston. The first third of the course was an introduction to a logically-rigorous and almost rationalistic approach to the divine. It was here that he lectured at length about the Allegory of the Caves, and his chalkboard drawings of the characters will never leave my memory whenever I open the well-worn pages of my Plato. Then a midterm. 28 points, each one correlating to a point on your final grade. There were only ever 100 points available in the class. Miss a single question on any assignment, and you had a point deducted from your final grade. Education is a serious business, you see.
The second third of the class was much different; it was a more emotional and relational approach to God focusing on his interaction with humanity and our desperate need for Him. It was in this section, if my memory serves me, that he devoted an entire class period to the reading of Dostoevsky. I had never heard the passage before, and I was captivated. I do not know what I would pay to have a recording of that lecture. Then another midterm. Finally, the third part of the class focused on, among others, Pierre De Chardin, King’s intellectual idol.
(Yes, perspicacious reader, the quote emblazoned above the stairway heading toward the ICC auditorium is from Chardin. Yes, perspicacious reader, it was Fr. King who is responsible for that quote being there. And yes, gentle reader, I abhor that quote with everything in me, and I still count it as the one thing about King that I could never understand or approve of. But we are, for sure, sinners all.)
In this third of the class, Fr. King performed his greatest feat: a freehand drawing of the map of the entire world, used to demonstrate the idea of panentheism, the idea that God is in everything, not to be confused with pantheism, the notion that everything is God. Then the last class came. A recap of the entire semester. And on the board he writes:
1. God is knowable rationally, logically-understandable, and fulfilling to the intellect.
2. God is relational, able to sympathize with our weaknesses, and emotionally close.
3. God infuses everything with life and beauty, and everything about the world displays some aspect of his goodness.
Then, as the long hand of the clock makes its last sprint around the clock, Fr. King scans the class gleefully, turns to face the board, and next to each of the three aspects of God, writes: “Father. Son. Holy Spirit.”
Class dismissed.
Now, is this a convincing understanding of the Trinity, that eternal, divine, and concrete Thing the understanding of which Augustine compared to the emptying of the ocean with a thimble? Perhaps not. It does perilously approach modalism. Nevertheless, I miss Fr. King. Dearly. And as his memorable sayings come into my head these recent days, so close to the second anniversary of his death, they do fill me with joy and a hopeful expectation of conversing with him once again.
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