I discovered Walker Percy at a time in my life when I was searching with immense urgency and anxiety for my place in a new, turbulent, adult world, which had assaulted me so abruptly after college. Call it what it was: a quarter-life crisis. I did not know who I was, what I stood for, or what I wanted to do with my life. I was a year into a journalism job but was starting to sour of it and didn’t know what else to do for a living. Moreover, I had just made up my mind (somewhat feebly) to become Catholic and was preparing to get married to my now wife in six months. So much change lay ahead of me. Most of it was positive change, but with it, there was also great uncertainty.
In The Moviegoer, Percy’s first published novel, which won him the National Book Award in 1962, I discovered a protagonist—Binx Bolling—fraught with the same “modern malaise” that afflicted me so deeply at the time. Stuck in an endless pattern of diversions from making money to pursuing women to, of course, watching movies, Binx lives in the sterile suburbs of 1950s New Orleans, though he remains haunted by the strict expectations of Stoic honor imposed on him by his old Southern genteel family—namely, his Aunt Emily. Yet neither the aesthetic mode of his suburban bachelor lifestyle nor the ethical mode of his Aunt Emily offers any feasible solution to his detachment and meaninglessness. Thus, Binx embarks on a “Search” for an alternative. What he arrives at is something in the trajectory of the religious mode: a firm commitment to everydayness. He seeks to uncover meaning in the ordinary and the familiar instead of chasing after it in perpetual newness or grandiose heroic gestures. He calls this solution “the Little Way,” which differs from the various versions of “The Big Search for the Big Happiness” propounded to him by the consumer culture and his aunt. Binx decides to leave the realm of pure possibility and get married, thereby embracing responsibility and commitment.
Though the book does not end with Binx explicitly converting to Christianity, Percy explained that he meant the book to be “a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual.” Rather, “he is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.”1
Percy’s other novels—which range from dystopian satires about insane psychiatrists engineering contraptions to mend the world’s spiritual qualms to existential romances about an amnesiac Mississippian’s odyssey around the United States with a terminally ill teen—often conclude on a similar note: a firm affirmation in favor of the everyday and the often overlooked commitments that accompany it.
Percy knew that Christianity was a “scandal” to the nonbeliever, but he nevertheless worked diligently to evangelize.
This message resonated with me. I was searching for greatness but meanwhile overlooked the extraordinary nature of the day-to-day obligations imposed on me by my relationships. This included not only my obligations to my soon-to-be wife and my family but also to God: regular prayer, going to Mass, and receiving the sacraments. Faith can bring about great things, but it first requires an “infinite resignation,” a willingness to give everything up and take gratefully what God gives you. To find yourself, you must lose yourself. To live, you must die (see John 12:24–25, Romans 8:13, Philippians 1:21, and Galatians 2:19–20).
Perhaps even more captivating than Percy’s fiction is his life story. He was the great-grandson of Henry F. DeBardeleben, a mining tycoon largely responsible for the development of Birmingham after the Civil War. Percy’s father and grandfather were both lawyers who suffered from extremely high expectations of accomplishment and severe bouts of depression. Within the first twelve years of Percy’s childhood, both of them committed suicide, which haunted Percy and informed his fiction for the rest of his life.
After the tragic death of his father, Percy and his brothers moved from their suburban home “over the mountain” from Birmingham briefly to Athens, Georgia, before moving again to the Mississippi Delta to live with their uncle, William Alexander Percy. Uncle Will was the son of a famous Mississippi senator and planter. He was also a bachelor and poet, whose foot in the literary world often brought accomplished writers to his home. At Uncle Will’s house, readings of romantic poetry and classical literature were commonplace. Percy and his brothers were thus well steeped in the arts. But, though Percy learned much from his uncle, Will’s commitments were, like the fictional Aunt Emily’s, to a fatalistic honor system Percy found unattractive.
Instead, what drew Percy as a teenager was not merely science but the scientism of writers like H. G. Wells and J. S. Huxley, who promised certainty while lauding skepticism and took the scientific method to be the sole arbiter of truth and measure of progress. According to his biographer, Jay Tolson,2 Percy “was attracted more to the idea of science than to its practice,” yet this ideological attraction led him later to pursue a career in pathology. However, this career was cut short when he caught tuberculosis from working with cadavers and relocated to a sanatorium, where he had plenty of time to rest. This shift was likewise prompted by works of Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky, which convinced him of the necessity of faith, the reality of sin, and the presence of flaws in the philosophical assumptions of scientific materialism.
After marrying his wife Bunt and relocating to southern Louisiana, Percy entered the Catholic Church. He went on to become one of the greatest critics of scientism in the latter half of the twentieth century. His critique can be summed up in just one line from his 1983 satire of a self-help book, Lost in the Cosmos:
You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
Though Percy often gets credit for being a disciple of Kierkegaard (and I have already used ample Kierkegaardian language to describe his work), Percy’s philosophical position was more attuned to St. Thomas Aquinas. As Tolson explains, “Aquinas’s work taught Percy how to be wary of the intellect, and mindful of its limitations without being anti-intellectual.”
Percy mourned the loss of the Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason, and with the advent of modern philosophy he saw a new, false anthropology arise: a “San Andreas Fault” separating mind and body, thereby reinterpreting man as a ghost in a machine. This philosophical disease, the almost-doctor believed, had several symptoms, among the greatest being extreme levels of abstraction coupled with a base obsession with self-gratification, often sexual. This, Percy called “angelism-beastialism” in his 1971 novel, Love in the Ruins. The concept is not distant from C. S. Lewis’s idea of “men without chests”: Man has forgotten his soul and therefore acts as if he is all head and belly, constantly inventing new theories and then indulging in easy pleasures to distract himself from the inevitable failure of his theories to explain himself, including those theories that purport to be scientific.
Percy was not merely a novelist but a philosopher who also wrote numerous essays in the field of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. Percy believed that man’s use of symbols—i.e., language—is what distinguishes humans from all other living things. Apart from language, all other phenomena in the cosmos are dyadic—that is, elements interacting with other elements. Language, on the other hand, is triadic.
“Triadic behavior is that event in which sign A is understood by organism B, not as a signal to flee or approach, but as ‘meaning’ or referring to another perceived segment of the environment,” Percy explained. “The triad is irreducible. That is to say, it cannot be understood as a sequence of dyads.”
A theory of evolution can explain how we started walking on two feet or developed opposable thumbs, but it cannot explain how a triadic event came about in a universe of dyadic events—how a world of stimuli and reaction could produce an entity with free will, an entity that names things. Science has not been able to produce a feasible explanation. The scientific method, though it can tell us much about atoms and energy and even the human body, stumbles when it attempts to tell us anything about the whole man, who has both material and immaterial components.
Percy the philosopher did much to “deconstruct” the faulty assumptions and false hopes of modernity. Yet he did not—like so many other philosophers lumped into the notoriously difficult-to-define camp of postmodernism—leave man to despair in his own meaninglessness or gravitate toward the will to power. Percy, instead, was caught in a battle against despair, which had tormented generations before him and resulted in the deaths of his grandfather and father.
A Catholic because he “believe[d] what the Catholic Church proposes is true,” Percy was convinced the only thing that would save mankind from this despair was the Good News relayed in the Gospel. His own journey of coming to believe in Christ (“a transcendent order and purpose”), according to Tolson, “was central to the conception not only of his first extended narrative but all his work.”
Percy saw his duty as both a philosopher and a novelist to “attack the fake in the name of the real”—the “real” being God, the source of all truth. While many, including his own lifelong friend and fellow writer Shelby Foote, believed art to be for its own sake and Catholicism to be an impediment to its successes, Percy sided with his mentor Caroline Gordon, who believed all great artists employed Catholic elements, whether or not they were aware of it. Art, in Percy’s view, is for something greater than itself. It is for God.
It is due to this commitment to the divine order that Percy positioned himself as a moralist “at odds with his time.” “A moralist,” Tolson says, “above all, is someone who takes himself as a living test of the principles by which he has chosen to live.”
At the beginning of his career, this drove Percy to become a staunch critic of Southern segregation. In his great 1956 essay “Stoicism in the South,” Percy defended Archbishop Joseph Rummel’s assertion that the way black people were being treated in the South was sinful. He also criticized Southern elites for acting with Stoic resignation in refusing to stand up for the blacks. In Percy’s view, upper-class white Southerners inherited a dual commitment to the virtues of both the Roman Stoic and Jesus Christ but over time placed a greater emphasis on the former. No doubt, Percy saw this in his Uncle Will, who lost the Catholic faith of his childhood in college and committed himself to an ethos of paternalistic duty, more philosophical than religious. Percy urged his fellow Southerners to finally “come to terms with [their] own Christian heritage,” for “the good pagan’s answer is no longer good enough for the South.”
Percy was convinced the only thing that would save mankind from this despair was the Good News relayed in the Gospel.
Later, Percy also became a fierce defender of the sanctity of human life. He saw abortion as a symptom of a death culture that was willing to kill for the sake of convenience and would not have a hard time exterminating the elderly and the terminally ill, provided they were impediments to the exercise of its autonomy.
After he published his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, in 1987 and traveled to Rome in 1988, where he met briefly with Pope St. John Paul II, Percy’s doctor diagnosed him with prostate cancer. A subsequent surgery revealed the cancer had spread. While receiving treatment, Percy continued to write and give talks, publishing his final essay, “Why Are You Catholic?,” in 1990. That same year, he ceased treatments and received last rites from a Benedictine monk of Saint Joseph Abbey in Saint Benedict, Louisiana. Percy passed away on May 10 and was buried in the abbey’s cemetery.
Today, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of his death, we may remember Percy not only as a novelist who wrote good stories—nor even as a Southern man, brilliant philosopher, or social critic—but as a knight of faith on crusade against despair, whose mission was to bring hope in the right things to a world that hoped in the wrong things and was increasingly losing hope altogether. Like Flannery O’Connor, Percy knew that Christianity was a “scandal” to the nonbeliever, but he nevertheless worked diligently to evangelize.
His life work can be a profound tool for us in the twenty-first century, especially for those of us who, like myself, are young men searching for our place in a perplexing postmodern world that so often obscures right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, truth and untruth. His fiction, philosophical writing, and essays are all reminders that our true place—our true home—is in heaven and that, for now, we are merely traveling back. We are pilgrims on a journey back to God, and no worldly circumstances can rob us of his love.
1 Quoted from Walker Percy’s acceptance speech for the 1962 National Book Award.
2 I am immensely indebted to Jay Tolson’s “Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy” (1992) for his detailed survey of Walker Percy’s life, work, and thought.