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Antigonish Review # 149
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As Teacher and Mentor
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Cover
Family Photo by Brendan Sanderson
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The Debt We Owe Our Teachers
and Mentors
Michael W. Higgins |
Anyone who has ever studied
in the academy, at whatever level, knows the significant, indeed
determinative, role that can be played by a good teacher.
This is a point sanely argued by the firmly conservative
American Jesuit political scientist James Schall in his irritating
but wonderfully readable On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs
(2001) when he notes that the greatest shapers of civilization
have been teachers: Socrates and Jesus.
Few of us can claim tutors of such magnitude,
but we all know teachers, mentors, role models who have had a
critical influence on the making of our character, career choice,
or life?long intellectual and spiritual passions.
We treasure them because they are so few and their
impact so great. And enduring.
For me, the recent death of George Sanderson,
a professor emeritus in the department of philosophy at St. Francis
Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., brought home in a poignant
way the debt we owe our teachers.
Sanderson was more than a mentor; he was a friend
of many decades. He taught me a senior course in philosophy that
dealt with contemporary issues, that was Socratic rather than
magisterial in its style and approach, and that eschewed the timidity
characteristic of most Thomistic methodologies employed by philosophy
departments in Catholic universities in the 1960s by welcoming
far?ranging discussions around epistemological and metaphysical
matters that weren't safely sifted through the sieve of scholasticism.
Because of George, we read Henri Bergson and Marshall
McLuhan; we talked about Freud and Husserl; and we wrestled with
"being" and shifting human paradigms. In other words, he taught
us to think. But running through all his intellectual questing
- he began as a geology student at McGill moved on to philosophy
at StFX courtesy of fellow Montrealer Warren Allmand and ended
up with a doctorate from Louvain in Belgium - George nurtured,
as we would now say, his spiritual side.
He was an intellectual who took faith seriously,
in his research interests, in his writing and editing (he was
for many years editor of the award?winning literary and cultural
periodical The Antigonish Review), in his life as a faculty
member and professor, and in his family life.
He refused to be bifurcated: scholar versus man
of faith; each supported and defined the other. He was of a piece.
I last saw him in March of last year when I was
giving an invited lecture to the StFX community titled "Five Quirky
Things: An Enchirdion (handbook) for the Wise."
Afterwards, he pointedly reminded me that although
he enjoyed the lecture it was a bit longer than those he experienced
when he was my teacher. I got the point. He always made sure I
got the point.
He suggested we co?edit a work that would compile
a selection of religious poetry of the highest order including
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, John Berryman
and Thomas Merton, a work he dubbed "a portable, puissant potpourri
of pensées," a secular breviary that would "appeal to believers
who want to reflect and deepen their religious sensibility and
to secular seekers who are open to the religious dimension."
I thought the project a splendid one and I welcomed
the opportunity to work with an esteemed teacher. Death, however,
intervened.
But the proposal was vintage Sanderson: open to
the world, non judgmental, Catholic at its best. R.B. MacDonald,
a former dean of arts at StFX, and a priest?academic of impressive
integrity, captured something of the essential Sanderson in his
funeral homily when he showcased not only George's holy sagacity
and communitarian instincts but his self?deprecating sense of
humour:
"George was, as would be said in ages past, a
'character.' Indeed, the occasional iconoclast is always welcomed.
When the Congregation in the Vatican curia in charge of liturgy
removed St. George from the official martyrology, George said
that it didn't really matter that the church no longer believed
in St. George, but it was important that dragons do."
The perfect quip and so like George.
Michael Higgins (St. Francis Xavier University,
1970) is president of St. Jerome's University in Waterloo.
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