The Second Coming by Walker Percy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Belief Isn't Faith

Walker Percy is often referred to as a 'Catholic writer'. Indeed, like G. K. Chesterton, he became a Catholic in adult life, but unlike Chesterton he didn't become a spokesman for the institutional church.

I suspect that the underlying reason for Percy's ecclesiological reticence was his fundamental scepticism about the category of 'belief’. Religious faith for Percy is not a solution to a problem of life. And he recognised that belief is not necessarily divinely sourced; it could equally be derived as a rationalisation for one's status in life, let's say as a white, middle-class, privileged player of golf in the pleasant greenery of the North Carolina mountains. It comes as revelatory to such a person that "There are only two classes of people, the believers and the unbelievers. The only difficulty is deciding which is the more feckless."

One is reminded of Hegel's nostrum: "You need not have advanced very far in your learning in order to find good reasons for the most evil of things. All the evil deeds in this world since Adam and Eve have been justified with good reasons." Walker's theology therefore is not ultimately grounded in beliefs because beliefs are always suspect.

Faith for Percy is inseparable from doubt about belief, in a commitment to a belief in questioning even itself. This is the real mystery of religion, at least of the Christian variety: "If the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it? And if the good news is true, why are its public proclaimers such assholes and the proclamation itself such a weary used up thing."

So also, in contrast to Chesterton, it is unlikely that there will ever be an institutional movement for Percy's canonisation. Thank God for that.

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