On Presence: Variations and Reflections by Ralph Harper

by Ralph Harper

The Reverend Ralph Harper, a philosopher and theologian, has been credited with introducing existentialism to North America in 1948 with his work A Theory of Man. Forty years later, Harper delved deeper into the interior life of the human imagination in On Variations and Reflections . Winner of the 1992 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, On Presence is an insightful articulation of mankind's experience of presence. Drawing from philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Marcel, theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Tillich, mystics like Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, and novelists like Dostoevsky and Proust, this compelling work considers the transcendent and religious dimensions of the ordinary mysteries in everyday life.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is more like wading in than reading. Stepping into a river, perhaps. Entering a room where a conversation is already in progress. Ralph Harper, it seems, felt alone or at least unappreciated in his witness to that human experience he calls "presence." He knows that most mystics and some philosophers have experienced it, or at least credited it, and written about it. He cites them, and many they are. But most of all, he cites Marcel Proust, who "usually insisted that presence is impossible," because "Proust's stories … have the same authority for many of us in this century that Holy Scripture had in earlier times." He says: "Today we all take for granted the separateness of knower and known, subject and object, and agonize over problems of our own making. We are still embarrassed by talk of Being and by the metaphysicians who use the word. … I find it as difficult to speak of Being and transcendence as the next person. The only oneness that is even casually acceptable today is the oneness of dubious experiences of chemically induced states of cosmic awareness. But that is all the more reason for asking whether there is not something here we may have missed…" It is like walking in on one man's lover's quarrel with his times.

Harper assembles his chief witnesses: Martin Heidegger, Louis Lavelle, Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, twentieth-century philosophers who were influenced by Meister Eckhart and revived his approach to the question of Being or oneness. For further philosophical and theological testimony, he calls Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Karl Barth, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, Charles Williams, Joseph Maréchal, C. S. Lewis, Gershom Scholem, Rudolf Otto and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For mystical testimony he calls Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, Rabia, Rumi, Heloise, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walter Hilton, William Blake, Blaise Pascal, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the anonymous author of "The Cloud of Unknowing." For artistic witness he calls, in addition to Proust, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emily Bronte, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Alain-Fournier. He cites the Bible, Catholic teaching and liturgy, Kabbalah, Buddhist and Hindu thought, and Tantra. The cumulative effect is to make Proust a witness for what he usually denied – and to challenge his supposed followers who imagine they live in "a Proustian world" to admit the possibility of "presence," to ask whether there is not something they have missed. Along the way, those of us who already admit the possibility of presence gain a list of whose work to read and why – in Harper's estimation – they are important witnesses.

I have found it invaluable to have this thorough and careful exposition of the core of mysticism in my library. Harper shows the link between the wisdom- and love-based modes of mysticism, between the philosophical and devotional approaches to presence, and between the quest of divine love and the practice of human love. "The metaphysician uses the same language, out of desperation, as the mystic; and the mystic uses the same language as the man or woman in love. They speak of intimacy and use its terms. There are different motives and different reaches of consciousness that propel people toward metaphysics and mysticism and sex, but the pattern of intimacy is much the same in all three, even though the intentions seem different. When the metaphysician and theologian speak of the closeness of Being or God to the human mind, they are thinking of the ease and grace of sharing, accepting, understanding. It is the same for each of us in the presence of someone who is willing to take us as we are and who offers himself or herself in return. This is an experience well-known within families, and in friendships, teaching, healing."