Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Some vintage Walker Percy

By Rick Garnett

A friend sent me this, from Percy's The Second Coming:

As unacceptable as believers are, unbelievers are even worse, not because of the unacceptability of unbelief but because of the nature of unbelievers themselves who in the profession and practice of their unbelief are even greater a**holes than the Christians. 

The present-day unbeliever is a greater a**hole than the present-day Christian because of the fatuity, blandness, incoherence, fakery, and fat-headedness of his unbelief.  He is in fact an insane person.  If God does in fact exist, the present-day unbeliever will no doubt be forgiven because of his manifest madness.

 

The present-day Christian is either half-assed, nominal, lukewarm, hypocritical, sinful, or, if fervent, generally offensive and fanatical.  But he is not crazy.

 

The present-day unbeliever is crazy as well as being an a**hole--which is why I say he is a bigger a**hole than the Christian because a crazy a**hole is worse than a sane a**hole.

 

C'mon Dr. Percy . . . tell us how you really feel!

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A bit more from the letter makes Percy's thinking clearer: "It has taken me all these years to make the simplest discovery: that I am surrounded by two classes of maniacs. The first are the believers, who think they know the reason why we find ourselves in this ludicrous predicament yet act for all the world as if they don't. The second are the unbelievers, who don't know the reason and don't care if they don't."

My eighth-grade teacher, Sister Marion, used to say that the beginning of learning was to "know that you don't know." (To learn, she also said, was "to make it your own" -- something I don't believe any other teacher ever said to me.) I guess if she were alive today she might have say it is important both to know that you don't know and to *care* that you don't know.

She would have fainted if she had read Walker Percy.