Otto A. Bird - Seeking a Center: My Life As a Great Bookie

Seeking a Center

A portrait of Otto A. Bird, painted by Robert A. Leader, Notre Dame, 1964-65.

OTTO A. BIRD

My Life as a Great Bookie

A WETHERSFIELD BOOK
IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Cover design by Marcia Ryan

1991 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-89870-370-0 Library of Congress catalogue number 91-71555
Printed in the United States of America

To Mortimer J. Adler,
teacher, friend,
and benefactor

Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.W. B. YeatsNo me poseo sino aqui, en tu abismo, que envolvidendome todo, eres mi centro, pues eres T ms yo que soy yo mismo.Jos de Sigenza

W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, in The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 215.

Jos de Sigenza, Historia de la Orden de San Jernimo , quoted by Miguel de Unumono in Andanzas y visiones espaoles (Madrid: 1959), 14, which translated reads:

I cannot hold except here in your abyss,

since encircling me entirely You are my center,

since You are more I than I am myself.

Contents

On Becoming a Catholic

A Mediaevalist

The Theory of Love

Great Books

Ann Arbor

The Hutchins-Adler Reform

Studying Philosophy

Catholic Excitement

A Contemporary Assessment

The Institute of Mediaeval Studies

Graduate Study

A Dissertation on Cavalcanti

The Aeterni Patris

Saint Thomas Aquinas

Founding a Great Books Program

Notre Dames General Program

The Program , 1952-63

Gilsons Way

Adlers Way

The Idea of Justice: An Example

A Dialectical Solution

Two Ways: Gilsons and Adlers

A Work of Recovery

Finding a Center

Preface

In Robert Bolts play A Man for All Seasons , when Richard Rich recoils from the suggestion that he become a schoolteacher because whatever he did in that role would be unknown to men, Thomas More replies, But you would know, your students would know, and God would know. Otto Bird has devoted his life to teaching and, though he would doubtless have been more than content with the obscurity feared by Rich, word of this has gotten out. Not only do his students and colleagues know of it, the wider world has benefited from his choice of vocation. (It goes without saying that God has been privy to Ottos doings.)

It has been said of Gilbert Keith Chestertons Autobiography that it is about everyone except Chesterton. No more does Otto Birds book fall into the confessional genre of autobiography. He calls it an intellectual autobiography; it narrates the journey of an intellect, of a soul, and puts before the reader a vision of the intellectual life one wishes were more palpably present in Catholic colleges and universities than it nowadays is. In the title of a talk by his mentor Etienne Gilson, Ottos life has been a story of The Intellect in the Service of Christ the King.

There is at present much talk of the nature of the Catholic university. It is asked whether a university can be at once great and Catholic, an astonishing question given the provenance of the modern university. Often it is suggested that if the Mass is said on campus and students are sensitive to the material needs of the less fortunate, a university deserves to be called Catholic. Otto Bird reminds us of a better time, when it was understood that the faith should animate imagination and mind as well as the corporal works of mercy. Indeed, what is peculiar to the Catholic university is precisely that in its halls intellectual and imaginative pursuits are seen in terms of the great journey mankind is on toward salvation. It is curiously true that the fact that this life is a mere prelude to the true life men are meant for hereafter, far from devaluing the things of this world, enhances them and casts over them a light they could not have otherwise. Love calls us to the things of this world, Richard Wilbur wrote, and the line stands even when the love involved is the theological virtue. Faith and Hope and Love do not make one disdainful of this world but rather, by seeing it as the stage on which ones eternal condition will be settled, give it far pro-founder significance than it could have if our little lives were rounded in a sleep. The evanescent things about us, the fleeting things whose season swiftly comes and goes, nonetheless are messages from One who never changes, a scattering of Sybils leaves from which we can read, however obscurely, intimations of God. The reader will find in the pages that follow an exuberant romance with the world on the part of one whose destination is heaven.

It has been my privilege to know Otto Bird as a colleague for some thirty-six years. Slowly and over time one comes to see that some of ones colleagues, seemingly ordinary folk encountered day by day, engaged in the common task, are extraordinary persons, truly great. It is clear to me as it is to many others that Otto Bird is one of the great professors of the University of Notre Dame. His influence on students and colleagues is at once incalculable and inescapable. His work beyond the campus with Mortimer Adler has extended his reach to thousands upon thousands of others. I am delighted that his book is published under the aegis of the Wethersfield Institute, as the first in a series to be published with Ignatius Press. May this little book touch the minds and hearts of many and stand as a reminder of a magnificent man who understood his vocation clearly and lived it to the full.

Ralph Mclnerny

Chapter One

Beginning in Ann Arbor

Life in this world began for me in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on July 3, 1914, or so I have been told. For most of my childhood I lived in Ann Arbor in the vicinity of the old central campus of the University of Michigan. The Ann Arbor Press, which my uncle owned and operated, did much work for the university, since in those days it had no press of its own. Thus I grew up equating Ann Arbor with its university. However, this beginning of mine is not the one that I am here and now concerned with, except incidentally.

The beginning that I would recapture now through memory and recollection is the one that made me into a Roman Catholic in religion, a mediaevalist in scholarship, and a reader, teacher, and advocate of great books by profession. The development that had these three results had its beginning in Ann Arbora beginning that led me from there to Chicago, then on to Toronto, and eventually to Notre Dame.

I can see now many years later to what extent those beginnings have reached or are approaching an end. I became a Catholic, and, in continuing to believe and practice that religion, I am still at a beginning and will not know until death whether I have reached the hoped-for end that it promises.

I did become a mediaevalist and made a few contributions to the study and understanding of mediaeval thought, but it is unlikely that I will make any more, although my interest in the Middle Ages still remains.

Great books I still read; I established a college program based upon reading them, which still exists at Notre Dame, and, although I seldom engage in teaching them any longer, I do continue to write occasionally about them.

On Becoming a Catholic

The first of the beginnings that I have mentioned is also the most difficult one to write about. Unless one is a Saint Augustine, to provide an account of a religious conversion is especially difficult, since at root it is based on the mystery of the workings of divine grace.

Yet the circumstances surrounding that move for me were clear and definite. I was admitted into the Catholic Church in September 1932, at the start of my second year at the University of Michigan. Until that time in my eighteenth year I had not known well any Catholics with the single exception of an American-Irish woman thirty years of age, whom I had met the previous year at the house of a friend. During my high school years on the Mexican border in Nogales, Arizona, I had known many Catholics, since they composed a majority of my fellow students, but I knew none of them well and never discussed matters of religion with any of them. With my Grandmother Bird I regularly attended the Episcopalian church of Saint Andrews and became well acquainted with its young rector, and my grandmother may have held some hope that I would become a priest. I still wear the silver cross that she gave me when I entered the university. Following my fathers example, I had become an avid reader of the works of G. K. Chesterton, including even the more apologetic writings.

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