Intellectual Infatuation

In the fall of 2001, I was assigned to teach Comparative Religious Ethics for the first time. I had no textbook as yet and so I started looking for one by conducting Google and Amazon searches. I typed “comparative religious ethics” and the same book appeared as the first hit for both searches because the book’s title is Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach, by Darrell J. Fasching and Dell DeChant. I had been intrigued by “narrative theology” and was equally intrigued by the prospect of “doing ethics” from a narrative approach. I ordered the book and liked it so much; I ordered it for the class. I dove in and took my class with me. We were in school just a few short weeks when September 11th arrived and the collective consciousness of a nation was forever changed. Teaching comparative religious ethics during that semester became more challenging than I could ever have expected.

 

The book and its ideas gave me the ability to lead my students through their confusion and their questions and offered analyses for the dynamics that are entailed in violence that claims a religious root. My students loved the book and since 2001 I have been using it every time I teach the ethics course. It is the book that students will not sell back to the bookstore when the course is finished.

 

In December of 2001, I did something I had never done before; I wrote to the author of a book to express to him my deepest gratitude and admiration. I told him that in addition to the intellectual challenge and critique the book offered, it gave my students and me something one rarely finds in a textbook. It gave us hope. He sent me another one of his books and since then I have bought two more.

 

Several weeks ago, at my invitation, Darrell Fasching came to Charleston. He offered a public lecture on campus and made classroom visits to my two ethics classes. For me, it was like geek prom night. After one of the classroom visits, I was speaking to a student who said that he was “infatuated with the book and its ideas.” I said, "What a great word!" and thought about that all weekend.

 

There have been times in my life when a teacher or thinker has had that affect on me. Like falling in love; when it happens, there’s no mistaking it. One listens to a lecture or reads a book and there occurs a “stirring of the mind,” likened to Socrates’ description of Eros as a “stirring of the loins.” The mind wakes up. It is excited and stimulated. But the odd dynamic is that rather than experiencing the imposition of ideas from outside oneself, it is experienced as an affirmation, an awakening to what seems to be already a part of one’s knowledge and self. It is as if the truth or wisdom of the words already existed in the core of one’s being and rather than a welcoming of something from without, it is a recognition of something within. The words resonate with a deep truth already known but never articulated, and like a lover to the beloved the response is a wondrous, “yes.” One desires to make the thought one’s own; to incorporate it into one’s very being so that as through the lens of one’s own experience, the thought itself becomes transformed and re-interpreted. And like an object of desire it becomes a part of oneself.

 

It has been pointed out to me that by its very description “infatuation” is transitory and destined to fade. I would argue that sometimes infatuation is the way love begins. There are those writers and thinkers whose immediate attraction does not sustain. It indeed, is a momentary fascination. But there are those others whose immediate resonance grows into a lifelong love affair of the mind. And like greeting and embracing a loved one who has been away, when one returns  to the book or hears the speech, it is understood in an even more profound way; and one is smitten all over again. And the love deepens.

 

As I shared these thoughts with my class last week, a young vibrant female student piped up from the back of the room, “Well, I gotta admit, I got a girl crush on you!” Another student added, “We all do.” Well, I doubt that, but it was a moment of openness and spontaneity and generosity of spirit that I will never forget. To be that for someone is to be a beloved of the mind and for a teacher there is no greater affirmation or heartfelt embrace.

 

I spoke too, of those in my life with whom I have been intellectually infatuated but with whom the fascination has grown into love; Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Abraham Heschel, Dorothee Soelle, Richard Niebuhr, Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza and a few others, but most recently  Darrell J. Fasching. The intellectual attraction began in 2001 but it has grown; it has grown into a love of the mind sustained by an intellectual “yes” and affirmed again and again by a recognition of speech and thought characterized by truth, wisdom and beauty. He is my teacher and I gotta admit, I have a crush.