novak, posts by tag: del colle - LiveJournal

Ralph Del Colle, my professor of Trinitarian systematic theology at Marquette and one of the members of my Doctoral Qualifying Exams board, died on Sunday. I didn't know him as well as I would have liked (I always got the impression that our senses of humor somehow just missed one another, but that he too found this amusing in itself), but every moment spent in his company was a pleasure. His seminar on the Trinity my second year is something I still come back to in my thinking and reading; his influence on the Trinitarian content in the classes I instruct is obvious to me; and stopping for conversation with him in the hallway or in his office was always refreshing and clarifying. He prepared me for my dissertation subject in ways I hadn't foreseen (he really ought to have been on my dissertation committee, but the text morphed in his theological direction only after I had already arranged my board). It was spontaneously comparing notes with him in the hallway one afternoon that began to hint to me just how influential the Catholic Charismatic Renewal had been, even if only episodically, in the formation of my teachers' generation of Catholic theologians. As that was confirmed for me in the stories I later heard from other faculty members, some of the potential for my dissertation to move in that way became clear to me.

Death always seems unfair in its timing, and I hate that he died so young when I think of his wife and children, or for the students he could have guided in the future. But from everything that I've heard from friends still in Milwaukee, he had a death that exemplified or revealed the heart of everything he believed: a holy death, with a kind of peace that the rest of the world would be stunned by, had they witnessed it.

As I've been keeping vigil from a distance electronically, and thinking about and praying for him and those he loved, I wanted to copy down here a few of the tributes that have been appearing in the last day.

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An old friend came through town yesterday and today: Brian E. Daley, S.J., one of today's great theological historians. I got to know him when he was a visiting professor at Notre Dame, taking a semester off from his position teaching Patristics at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Boston and considering a move to Notre Dame, seeing how he enjoyed teaching undergraduates as well as graduate students. Even though I wasn't taking a course with him, we got to be friends just meeting and talking in the halls and one night, out to dinner at Macri's Deli before heading over to see a showing of The River Wild, we were telling one another our stories, particularly our spiritual/theological stories, and I was telling him how it was that I had come back to Catholicism after abdicating for some years for an exploration of Evangelicalism. I mentioned that two books in particular had given me a historical context for that American Evangelical experience and for its theology, and which had let me see it in context – a context I was ready to leave behind. These two books were George Marsden, the great historian of American Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism's masterpiece Fundamentalism and American Culture (Marsden, who we wooed to Notre Dame from Duke and who let me sit in on a few of his doctoral seminars, was taken aback when I later told him that) and a book called The Hope of the Early Church, a survey of Christian eschatologies – theologies of death, judgment, end times, afterlife – in the first eight centuries of the Church. That book was by some Jesuit whose name I didn't remember. Seated across from me at the Deli, Brian looked at me, somewhere between awkward and bashful, and said, "I ... I wrote that book." "Get out of town!" I blurted. I mean, what are the odds?

Yesterday, Brian gave Marquette's first annual Theotokos Lecture, a new lecture series recently endowed at the University, entitled 'Woman of Many Names': Mary in Eastern and Western Theology. I asked Dan to pick me up a copy of the printed version, since I couldn't make the lecture as I was finishing up with my babysitting gig with the nieces. But I was able to make it to a session this morning where he was free to meet with graduate students for an hour. I was disappointed that it wasn't better attended, especially given how lively our Patristics/Early Church graduate student and faculty community is here, but apparently it was a nightmare moment of schedule conflicts, with Professors Barnes and Golitzin both out of town. It ended up being a lively conversation with me, Ellen Concannon, who had also known Brian during her Master's at Notre Dame, Professor Del Colle and Brian, and wandered around topics of Marian piety, its development, its interaction with notions of original sin and with the theology of immaculate conception, the papal definitions, ecumenical implications and conflicts in Marian understandings, theologies of the saints and of grace and freedom. We even tied a few things into my dissertation, which I had filled him in on. Tying Marian piety and theology more firmly into theologies of the saints seems obvious, but it was one of the bigger ideas to rattle around in my head from the discussion. I'm more comfortable with the saints and their various histories and spiritualities than I am with some of the excesses of Marian devotion, and to not let the Marian stuff become something separate, but couched within the wider context of our reaction to people of great spiritual gifts made it less an aberration to me. Del Colle said something really interesting about people receiving exceptional callings or graces to particular missions, and that resonated with me, too, because a lot of the excessive Marian language sounds more like a calling to simply a higher status, and that can't be right. So. Good stuff.

Brian's visiting this semester at Fordham University, and had seen Cardinal Dulles a few weeks ago, who is now so fading that he is mostly paralyzed and speechless, the poor man. His longtime secretary knows him so well that, in setting questions up entirely as "yes" and "no" questions, he can still communicate by moving his head, and he seems perfectly lucid. But it's a tragedy for such a great theologian to be so stricken at the end, as it is for anyone, of course. All told, it was good to be able to talk with Brian again, to hear a bit of how he was doing and such. We haven't stayed in touch over the years, but for a time, when I was in my Master's, he was both a good friend and spiritual advisor, with one letter of his in particular, back when he had returned to Boston before moving to South Bend, being a major moment of wisdom for me at a confusing point in my life.

AT LAST!!! After painful amounts of emails where I delicately tried not to irritate people through constant badgering, I have finally succeeded in setting up the date for my Doctoral Qualifying Exam oral-exam session. Trying to co-ordinated six schedules is absolutely no fun. But I'll be going before my committee on Thursday November 10th from 3:30 to 5:00. Presumably, then, my written exams will be over the two days before that: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Now I have to decide which exam I will take as my oral. My committee and topics are as follows, with the first three being in my "major" area--Systematics/Ethics--and the other two being in the "minor" areas--Biblical and Historical. Marquette is unique in lumping Ethics in with Systematics, and I have to do one of my three "major area" questions in it, even though I've no professional interest in Ethics to speak of.

Thomas Hughson, SJ, chair -- Church and State: Religious Discourse in the Public Sphere
Michael Fahey, SJ -- Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Church Universal and in the Catholic Church in Particular
Ralph Del Colle -- Trinitarian Theology, Classical and Contemporary: Historical and Contemporary Understandings of God the Father
Andrei Orlov -- Johannine Literature: The Jewish Mystical and Apocalyptic Background to the Prologue of the Gospel of John
Michel René Barnes -- Early Christian Theology to 324: Pre-Nicene Theologies of the Holy Spirit

So that gives me two more months of preparation time, which I'll need between being a slow reader when it comes to chewy theology, and between being a victim of my generation in having the proverbial attention span of a gnat. Still, I'm that much more excited today just for nailing this down!

Finally done with the writing. Think some of it is pretty good, but I'm at a loss for how to relate it here. I'll let it pass for the moment. Today was taken up with trying to redo art formats for Artist Development. Took 3 hours at $85 an hour for them to realize the problem. Ouch. Spent the evening at Professor Del Colle's with the rest of the Trinity seminar, celebrating the end of the semester with wine, food, books, song, and lots of conversation. Quality.

Tonight marks the 35th anniversary of the death of one of my most important teachers, Thomas Merton, before I was born. The eerie words at the end of his talk at the conference, right before he returned to his room to be accidentally electrocuted are almost like some strange Zen poem--a mystery, a koan of life:

"So I will disappear from view and we can all have a Coke or something. Thank you very much."

Spent some time reading in his private journals tonight to remember him and to pray.



December 13, 1958

Going in to town yesterday was a kind of "retreat" for my seventeenth anniversary in the monastery: impossible to think, without immense qualifications, the things I wrote the other day about being here for nothing. Really I am here for everything. Being out "in the world" would really be nothing and an awful waste of time. The "waste" of one's life in a monastery is the fruitful thing; or at least it is for me.

The overwhelming welter of meaningless objects, goods, activities -- The indiscriminate chaotic nest of "things" good, bad and indifferent, that pour over you at every moment -- books, magazines, food, drink, women, cigarettes, clothes, toys, cars, drugs. Add to this the anonymous, characterless "decoration" of the town for Christmas and the people running around buying things for no reason except that now is a time which everybody buys things.

And I myself bought things -- a pile of paper-backed books, the New Republic, Dissent and even, with shame, Time (because of a long cover article on Pasternak).

Met Clifford Shaw, a musician, who for some reason admires me and we had lunch in the Brown Hotel.

The rest of the time I was milling around in the library -- read part of a good article on Mount Athos in the Yale Review, listened to some piano music of A. Berg and Bartok. Looked up some books to take home. Then while waiting for George and the station wagon -- looked at marvelous bird-books (photos of Arctic loons, quails, bobwhites [my totem bird], warblers, woodpeckers, all kinds of ducks and grebes). (We saw a great blue heron on the way to work the other day, I looked it up to make sure and that is what it was) --at an old fashioned tree book and I was sinking to such depths that I had begun to look at jet planes when George arrived at 3:30.

The reason for going in was to see Terrell Dickey and get all the pictures for Art and Worship off to N.Y., for Farrar, Straus & Cudahy must do it. Too bag a job for us. I like the people in the library, smart and friendly and patient with my requests. Gave them a fruitcake which George had left over. One of them dragged out some drawings by Pasternak's father, which were in Life. Clever and lively fin de siecle stuff.

George had a load of cheese and fruitcake and said he got rid of $700 worth. That is a lot. We were stopping all the way in and all the way out and got home so late that I had supper at Bill Jones' place in Bardstown with a lot of kidding because the girl tried to give me pork instead of fish in a sandwich and it was Friday. (Delighted laughter of the Colored guys and girls back in the kitchen looking through the serving window.)

Walking up and down in Bardstown outside Krogers, in the cold, saluted by man, woman and child. I thought that never, never could I make sense of life outside the monastery. I am a solitary and that is that. I love people o.k., but I belong in solitude.

It was so good to get back and smell the sweet air of the woods and listen to the silence.



March 18, 1959

The old and the new.

For the "old man" -- everything is old -- he has seen everything or thinks he has. He has lost hope in anything new. What pleases him in the "old" he clings to, fearing to lose it, but certainly not happy with it. And so he keeps himself "old" and cannot change; he is not open to any newness. His life is stagnant and futile. And yet there may be much movement -- but change that leads to no change. "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose." ["The more things change, the more they remain the same."]

For the "new man" -- everything is new. Even the old is transfigured in the Holy Spirit and is always new. There is nothing to cling to, there is nothing to be hoped for in what is already past -- it is nothing.

The new man is he who can find reality where it cannot be seen by the eyes of the flesh -- where it is not yet -- where it comes into being the moment he sees it. And would not be (at least for him) if he did not see it.

The new man lives in a world that is always being created, and renewed. He lives in this realm of renewal and of creation. He lives in life.

The old man lives without life. He lives in Death, and clings to what has died precisely because he clings to it. And yet he is crazy for change, as if struggling with the bonds of death. His struggle is miserable, and cannot be a substitute for life.

Thought of these things after communion today, where I suddenly realized that I had, and for how long, deeply lost hope of "anything new." How foolish when in fact the newness is there all the time.

It is a year since I first found out about Pasternak in a chance reading of Encounter which I picked up in Louisville: the Gerd Ruge (?) interview. (The first thing P. taunted him with was being "so young and yet so decrepit.")