Faith, Sex, Mystery
Baumann, Paul
BOOKS Leaving the Hound at bay When the twentyseven-year-old newly baptised Richard Joan (for Joan of Arc) Thomas ?for Saint Thomas More) Gilman arrived in New Orleans in 1954,...
...And in this light it is interesting to note that his hard-won faith, the product of much study and personal anguish, is nonetheless curiously heterodox...
...He just didn't buy it, or to borrow his phrase, he unwillingly "swallowed" his doubts about transubstantiation along with the wafer...
...Gilman's passionate infatuation with Catholicism began, appropriately enough, not in a church but a library — a branch of the New York Public Library to be exact...
...Gilman, it hardly needs saying, is a gifted writer and a masterly exegete...
...Gilman rejects sacrament, one fears, because it is not arcane enough...
...But finally there is too much talk — and a kind of fussily nuanced talk at that — and not enough action in Faith, Sex, Mystery...
...Earthly perdition has its consolations...
...a church from which an endless procession of coffins seemed to emerge...
...In closing he asks us to indulge his uncertainty and admire the fact the spiritually he is "still pedaling in midair.'' But such untethered longing is no great feat — it's what most people do...
...Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir is the story of Gilman's conversion, apostasy, and "present existence in a realm of abstract, remembered spirituality...
...The mannered air of the seminar room seeps in...
...Gilman's final allegiance, like most of ours, is to the skeptical rationalism and (Continued on page 88) 86: Commonweal individualism of this secular and socalled scientific age...
...Indeed, if Mr...
...That Gilman is convinced he was once the object of "His special concern" is perhaps the most puzzling aspect of this memoir...
...Illicit sexual "impulses," idosyncratic attitudes, would drive this convert out the church doors and into the open arms of the literati a scant six years hence...
...You can't nurture the spirit in a world that increasingly demands the walls of every sanctuary be torn down and replaced with the transparent advertisements of the self...
...And he knows it...
...The author's feelings for her are still strong and demand respect...
...And we mean Spirit...
...This "force" reappears on a number of occasions as Gilman, raised in an ethically homogeneous Jewish neighborhood, makes the culturally difficult move towards the Catholic church...
...Reading it he is struck quite blind by the magisterial assuredness of Gilson's presentation...
...This insensibility to sacrament leaves Gilman with a rather attenuated Catholicism, as though he might have insisted on reviewing plays only by reading them and never attending a performance...
...He "had regarded as terrifying apparitions the nuns he would occasionally see going in and out of — scuttling in and out of — the Catholic church a few blocks away from his home...
...He once was a Catholic...
...Ruth becomes Gilman's spiritual midwife, coaching him through an intense but finally successful labor...
...Yet he claims to have forfeited some ineffable fulfillment...
...For all my avowed respect for mystery it seems that I couldn't wait for its operations to take effect, didn't trust that it would happen...
...Not that he is happy about any of it...
...Worse, he misses it...
...In the beginning of Faith, Sex, Mystery, Gilman outlines the problems of autobiography, and speaks of the necessity of finding a "shape" for his story...
...I became largely secular...
...The fact is: he moved towards the church during a period of great personal frustration and insecurity...
...That may be true...
...In this retreat I had left God behind...
...As the symbol of the thing, as well as the thing itself, the Eucharist is not "confined" by the bread and wine...
...things are not that bad...
...But our ability to respond to such symbols, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, is largely determined by our social experience and the systems of accountability that govern our dealings with others...
...These strange solicitations culminate in the appearance of Ruth, a somewhat prescient figure whose haunting spirituality is enhanced by her faded beauty...
...SEX, MYSTERY Richard Gilman Simon and Schuster $16.95, 253 pp...
...But the ultimate shape of this memoir is not a very surprising one — it preserves the glossy edges of an age whose spiritual sterility the author professes to disdain...
...deprived of the promise of eternal salvation it lacks spiritual depth, even to a certain extent hope...
...Moreover, we must live in, not travel through the sacrament...
...The voice that emerges is at once self-assured and more FAITH...
...A romance any good Irish pastor would have warned him against...
...This is a teasingly self-effacing assessment, and typical of Faith, Sex, Mystery in its somewhat manipulative quality...
...88: Commonweal...
...it has already happened on the cross...
...That this fails to make any of us particularly happy is no surprise...
...The effect is at first striking, but soon the incongruity of the two ways of life becomes apparent...
...But it also encourages an oblique, lofty, and yet tentative style that is too often the way the author hedges his bets...
...BOOKS Leaving the Hound at bay When the twentyseven-year-old newly baptised Richard Joan (for Joan of Arc) Thomas ?for Saint Thomas More) Gilman arrived in New Orleans in 1954, the city, although not exactly a boiling cauldron of lusts, was steamy enough to scald his thin spiritual hide...
...Something, one suspects, he doesn't want to pay for...
...There isn't any other...
...But Gilman is unwilling to act on this regret...
...I wasn't to be solicited anymore...
...The risks he takes in pursuit of that goal are humbling...
...In any event, the Hound of heaven is evoked, and Gilman even professes to have learned the Hail Mary by a kind of osmosis...
...The book literally takes possession of our casual browser and he is drawn unwillingly to the tome by a mysterious force, an experience he later comes to accept as divine intervention — perhaps the only force powerful enough to get anyone to pick up a text on medieval philosophy...
...That is a rarefied realm, to be sure, and if these revelations don't make for inspirational reading, this work can still impress with its remarkable candor, sensitivity, and erudition...
...Efforts to physically discard the book are eerily frustrated...
...To some extent Gilman is frank about this, although he argues that his anomalous social situation and his precarious psychological condition were secondary to what he calls his spiritual experience...
...He never told his Jewish parents...
...I didn't go to the church, it came to me," he insists...
...A "secular nun" is how Gilman describes her...
...It is not a house you can live in...
...Its accessibility — you don't have to ingest Gilson to worship at this table — taints it...
...And I don't now," he finally admits...
...Amusingly, he goes to Commonweal...
...He wanted mystery, he says, "But in this case, as in some others, the mystery seemed too literal...
...As it is, Gilman offers us an oddly importuning piece of writing...
...Like the patron saint of all autobiographers (in a line he quotes more than once), he chose chastity, but later...
...Perhaps...
...It [Catholicism] all seemed irrelevant," he says of religion's role in his advancing career...
...Especially evocative is a lyrical passage on growing up in Brooklyn and his childhood impressions of Catholicism...
...In those terms, the individualistic meritocracy of the dominant culture Gilman embraces leaves little room for sacramentality...
...After four years as associate editor of Jubilee (1955-1959), his ambition is to move towards the nonsectarian press...
...Equally adept, and crucial to the book's ultimate purposes, is a sketch of a world-weary French priest who hears Gilman's confession, offers an acute diagnosis of his spiritual condition ("aridity"), and stuns our memoirist with some nearly heretical counsel...
...Paul Baumann than a little self-regarding...
...By the time he moves to Commonweal, a magazine he feels has prestige outside the limiting world of religious journalism, he is no longer a practicing Catholic...
...Rather, as Alexander Schmemann has written, those elements of the sacrament are the perfect expression of the '' reality of the symbol and the symbolism of reality...
...He has been richly blessed with talent, success, children, and the affection of students and friends...
...Gilman takes great pains to emphasize the complexity of life and the ambiguities of human motivation, and that is fair enough...
...He wants mystery to take him beyond, to the next realm — and immediately...
...Intellectually he falls head over heels in love with Rome...
...What — in this world — does he really expect from religion...
...He couldn't accept the idea that such mysteriousness was "confined to a physical fact...
...Real life, notes Schmemann, is eucharistic life...
...Understandably, he regrets that in leaving the church his life is now "set against nothing...
...There he encounters the Amity ville Horror edition of Etienne Gilson's Spirit of Medieval Philosophy...
...But is it just coincidence that those so-called manifestations of the spirit evaporate as his professional and personal confidence grows...
...Richard Gilman, child of Brooklyn's Flatbush, distinguished drama and literary critic, (drama critic first at Commonweal, then Newsweek, more recently The Nation), professor of drama at Yale University, former president of PEN, winner of awards and grants worth coveting, has a confession to make...
...So if there's nothing intellectually or morally dishonest — and Gilman maintains there isn't — in the loss of his faith, why is it the source of such extravagant melancholy...
...He was in his late twenties, unemployed, struggling in an unhappy marriage and unable for the most part to write...
...Gilman is just a little too fond of admitting to a shortcoming...
...He can't help but see the bread and wine as "a concession," a kind of visual and tactile aid to belief...
...His portraits of the Manhattan clergy he abashedly confronts in the 1950s while trying to sell subscriptions to the Catholic journal Jubilee are vivid and agreeably pointed...
...She is an apostate actress...
...His dissatisfaction with the lack of a "real" career and his determination to forge new professional relationships parallel the rapid dissipation of his faith...
...And I know that beneath those rationalizations I fell back into selfcommiseration because the battle against carnality and ambition — which had come more and more to look like aspects of the same primary force, alarming, guilt-ridden — had become too much for me...
...Beyond that, the mystery of the Eucharist is something that, as I understand it, we need not trust to happen...
...But she seems entirely too otherworldly for any serious religious work, and in this she is emblematic of much of the "religion" and even "mystery" in Gilman's book...
...In the concluding pages Gilman con13 February 1987: 85 fesses, "I know I've been a rationalizer, a subtle schemer after a 'truth' about my actions that would keep my conscience disarmed...
...Gilman were a less generous and tolerant man — with himself as well as with others — he might have written a better, more original, book...
...Still, Ruth's "I wanted to kiss a leper" ecstasies are a bit theatrical...
...Socially, professionally, and to some extent sexually (or at least he thought so at the time), his status was marginal, his sense of identity shaky...
...He confesses, for example, that he had "trouble from the beginning" with the sacramental nature of the Eucharist...
...And by "secular" we understand that his devotion was transferred from a religious community to a succession of writing jobs...
...This is hardly a unique evolution, and one can't help but wonder at Gilman's fretful reminiscence of it all...
...In this sense it is a discipline as much as a gift, or perhaps the essence of the gift is the discipline...
...He attempts to woo the reader with therapeutic frankness, addressing us directly, and often imploringly...
...It could be said that Gilman had built the most modern of glass houses and then furnished it with the finest ecclesiastical antiques good taste and brains could find...
...The Eucharist does not offer access to some other dimension of existence, but delivers us over truly to the existence we live now...
Vol. 114 • February 1987 • No. 3
