The Human Quest and Divine Disclosure according to Walker Percy: An Examination in Light of Lonergan

Abstract

Introduction THE LIFE OF THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC novelist and philosopher Walker Percy (1916-1990) dramatically illustrates tensions of faith, reason, and science. Percy was raised an affluent and prominent Southern family marked by history of melancholy, depression, and tragedy. (1) As Paul Elie explains, There was suicide nearly every generation. One Percy man dosed himself with laudanum; another leaped into creek with sugar kettle tied around his neck. John Walker Percy--Walker Percy's grandfather--went up to attic 1917 and shot himself head. (2) His father, Leroy Pratt Percy, committed suicide attic 1929. Percy remarked, central mystery of my life is to figure out why my father committed suicide. In fact, wondering if he were destined for same fate, he often referred to himself as an ex-suicide. As Grant Kaplan notes, the question was how to get on living after deciding to live. (3) This article explores several connections between work of American novelist and philosopher, Walker Percy, and Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian, Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984). As far as I can tell, neither thinker ever referred to other. (4) Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, there are many unexplored connections between two thinkers. (5) The particular focus of this article is human quest and divine disclosure according to Walker Percy with special attention given to work of Lonergan. After narrating Percy's shift from scientism to broader examination of human condition, I will show Percy's attempt to articulate kind of knowledge that might account for this widening of horizons. The analysis then treats Lonergan's understanding of reason, faith, and belief as heuristic for illuminating same themes explored two of Percy's novels--The Moviegoer and Lancelot--both of which are permeated with questions concerning human quest, belief, and faith modern world. Percy's Broadening of Horizons (6) Early his life Percy had an inclination toward science. As Jay Tolson observes, even his high school years Greeneville, Mississippi, wake of deep tragedy, Percy was looking for certainties, and though he attended Greenville's Presbyterian church along with his brothers, he found them, not religion or his Uncle Will's Stoicism, but in science--or, more accurately, that exaggerated faith science that is called scientism. (7) Attracted by its elegance, beauty, and simplicity, science exhibited for him constant movement direction of ordering endless variety and seeming haphazardness of ordinary life by discovering underlying principles, which become formulated more rigorously. (8) Trained at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, Percy contracted pulmonary tuberculosis while working as pathologist at Bellevue Hospital New York City. As result of this diagnosis, he was forced to spend significant amount of time sanatorium Adirondack Mountains. This forced exile deeply transformed his inner life, and indeed, shaped intellectual and existential trajectory of rest of his life. What were consequences of this illness and interruption? Although Percy never abandoned his allegiance to and love for rigor and discipline of scientific he experienced a shift of ground, broadening of perspective, change of focus. (9) On his sickbed, he began to read Dostoevsky, Camus, Jaspers, Marcel, and Heidegger, among others. Indicative of his expanding horizons, Percy became less interested physiological and pathological processes of human body and more fascinated by questions concerning nature and destiny of human person, and, more specifically, by peculiar predicament of human persons thrown (to use Heidegger's image) into modern technological society. Percy writes: If first great intellectual discovery of my life was beauty of scientific method, surely second was discovery of singular predicament of man very world which has been transformed by science. …