DO STRANGE SEREDIPITOUS THINGS HAPPEN?

Yesterday afternoon I was home nursing laryngitis and sinus when I got a call from a College Dean, also a friend, asking me if I would please consider teaching a course starting in about 3 weeks on World Religions?

The book I had in my hands was a discussion of Joseph Campbell's views on World Religions. How could I refuse? So, March 9, at Midway College, I will begin teaching that course.

Fasinating book, which I here quote from and offer a summary recommendation.

On Kindness to Strangers.
Or What moves us to be generous with others?

"How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action? . . . This is something really mysterious, something for which Reason can provide no explanation, and for which no basis can be found in practical experience. It is not unknown even to the most hard-hearted and self-interested. Examples appear every day before our eyes of instant responses of the kind, without reflection, one person helping another, coming to his aid, even setting his own life in clear danger for someone whom he has seen for the first time, having nothing more in mind than that the other is in need and in peril of his life. . . . "

This is Schopenhauer's question found in his essay "On the Foundations of Morality." His response was that the immediate reaction and response represented the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization best rendered as "thou art that." (A modern translation might be: "There, but for the grace of God go I!")

This presupposes, as the German philosopher wrote, his identification with someone not himself, a penetration of the barrier between persons so that the other was no longer perceived as an indifferent stranger but as a person "in whom I suffer, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enfold my nerves."

This fundamental insight, as Schopenhauer continued, reveals that "my own true inner being actually exists in every living creature.. . [and] is the ground of that compassion (Mitleid) upon which all true, that is to say, unselfish, virtue rests and whose expression is in every good deed."

Joseph Campbell was fond of Schopenhauer's question. This is the quote with which Eugene Kennedy opens his book, Thou Are That, editing Campbell, in his life’s study of Tranforming Religious Metaphors. Chapters in this book are: Metaphor and Religious Mystery, The Experience of Religious Mystery, Our Notions of God, The Religious Imagination, Symbols of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, Understanding Symbols.

Highly Recommended. 4.5 stars out of five. This book will be kept for re-reading, as it contains wonderful insights that speak to the searching restless soul of modern life.
Paschal Baute. 2/25/05