Death of My Teacher, Jaroslav Pelikan

My mentor and teacher from my undergrad days, Jaroslav Pelikan, died of lung cancer over the weekend. Obituaries will be legion, if a tad slow in coming. Here's one appreciation: http://www.svots.edu/Events/Summer-Institute/
2003/readings/Pelikan-Legend.html

In more than 30 years, I never forgot the experience of studying with him. The single most extraordinary teacher I ever knew.

If you're not a fan of church history, never mind; he'll make you one. I had intended to be a Russian Studies major but he 'converted' me to medieval intellectual history. I dropped Gogol and Tolstoy to grapple (in Latin) with the likes of Aquinas and Anselm, But somehow, Mr. Pelikan made this an intellectual adventure whose attraction lay in its very otherness, its distance from modern thought.

If you don't feel like reading his books (there are at least 40 of them), Google him and with a bit of patience you can find some recorded lectures and interviews. Here's a link to a few quick hors d'oeuvres:
http://www.counterbalance.net/transcript/jp-frame.html

Or, if creeds are your interest:
http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/speakingoffaith/20060518_pelikan.mp3

Listen and watch. The unfeigned joy, the humor that bubbles through his awe-inspiring erudition, are what set him apart from so many deeply learned scholars. His pleasure in sharing his knowledge was infectious.

I still love the quote from Augustine that he always used to cite, in a somewhat vain stab at humility: "What we have written we have written not in order to say something, but in order not to remain altogether silent."

Even though he was a name dropper who loved to brag about his accomplishments and tell anecdotes about how he learned to type before he was 3, and spoke 5 languages before he was 10, these foibles merely served to render him human where he might otherwise have appeared too godlike.

Despite his scholarly prominence, he was incredibly kind to me and to other students and took his time with us -- although if you wrote a paper for his class, you'd probably get a "Very good. B-". Here's what one of his colleagues had to say about his relationship with his disciples:

YDS Home>News for the YDS Community>Pelikan

James Dittes, the Roger J. Squire Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology, said, “Jary Pelikan liked to say that the best graduate education occurs when the student can look over the shoulder of the professor at work. But I am not entirely sure he followed that maxim in practice.

“Too often it seemed to me that the education was going on because he was looking carefully over the shoulder of the student. As mentor and as advocate he exercised a profound and vigorous respect for the accomplishment and talent of others, especially perhaps of those regarded conventionally as ‘junior' scholars, even the maverick.”

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He did, for a time, seriously entertain thoughts of becoming a concert pianist. I see both vocations - music and scholarship - as his way of spreading the knowledge and joy of our Creator, by whatever name we choose to call Him/Her.

Indeed, his respect for other faiths was genuine and heartfelt without in any way interfering with his own firm membership in the Christian faith. The fact of his progression from Lutheranism to Eastern Orthodoxy in no way lessens that firmness - he saw all denominations of the church as branches of a single tree.

I will miss knowing he is here on earth with us but feel sure he has gone to his rest having lived a full and fulfilling life. I hope he didn't suffer too much at the end. Ave atque vale.