Feast of Sapience - Remembering Dr. McShane

Last year one of my favorite professors died.

To honor the life he lived and the lessons he taught, I wanted to write about him.

As with Dame Elizabeth Taylor (with whom he probably shared very little, other than perhaps a generous spirit and certainly my esteem), this is not a hymn to an idol: in this case, it is a reflection to honor a man who guided many with wisdom.

I chose a sequence that does not follow a strict chronology, for in life, one does not always remember lessons in a precise succession.

Phil The Fan

Picture this: Spring Semester, 1993. It is the early weeks of the semester and all still have their winter coats. The classroom in the English building is full of several dozen students, watching the professor at the front and center.

“Does anyone here know what a Thyestean feast is?” the professor asked the class. A solid man wearing a jacket and tie, his receding white hair hovers about his temple and ears, his Celtic blue eyes piercing with both curiosity and delight. His voice is eloquently grand with authority, as erudite as William F. Buckley Jr., but with only the faintest hint of the Mid-Atlantic in his vowels and his tone is gentle and soft spoken: he has a talent for the mimicry of accents, an asset that he uses for tales of instruction and humor. If he could exude kindness and warmth that the real C.S. Lewis had rather than the cold Oxford don that he played in Shadowlands, Sir Anthony Hopkins could ideally be cast to play this professor.

“A Thyestean feast comes from the tragedy of Thyestes, who was tricked by his enemy into eating his children,” I answered. I usually sat in front of the class, by choice, because grades were important and I loved the subject matter. The class was Children’s Literature and the semester started with reading fairy tales by the Grimm brothers, from English translations that were, well, grimmer than the most of the tales that Disney adapted. After the fairy tales came Homer’s Odyssey, followed by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; The Wind in the Willows; The Princess and the Goblin; The Hobbit; The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe; A Wrinkle in Time; and The Book of the Dun Cow.

With the reading of The Odyssey, I demonstrated an advantage I had over most of my classmates: not only had I read this epic in during the Fall Semester of my Freshman year, two and half years before, I had just taken (to meet my Minority studies requirement) Greek Literature in Translation, which meant that I read Homer’s Iliad, some lyric poetry, plus a comedy from Aristophanes, as well as tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: hence, my familiarity with the Thyestean feast.

While we were only a few weeks into the semester, Children’s Literature was my favorite class. This was not because the readings were “easy” (I mean, the original readership for most of the texts were children) but because they were all fantasy, which had long been my favorite genre. Decades before the Peter Jackson films, I had been a fan of Tolkien and had looked forward to joining a Tolkien club when I got to college. Sure enough, my first week at university, I joined the Tolkien club, where I heard about the Children’s Literature course. The Tolkien club’s sponsor, a bioethics professor, spoke with affection for the one of the professors who taught the course and reverence for the other professor, whom he said was one of the few people on campus that had wisdom. It was this latter professor who was the instructor of this Children’s Literature class that I attended: he was Dr. James McShane, who passed away on July 5, 2013.


Part of Dr. McShane’s style was that he’d read aloud passages from the text and then share observations on the content. For instance, one of the first stories we read was a translation of the original Grimms’ Cinderella, which had no fairy godmother or glass slipper (these, Dr. McShane explained, were found in the Charles Perrault version of the fairy tale, written for the French court and later used as a resource by Walt Disney), but had the evil stepsisters mutilate their feet to fit in the fabled shoe, only to be exposed by the birds which sang to the prince’s party: “Backwards peep! Backwards peep! There’s blood in the shoe!” The birds were symbolic agents of the girl’s dead mother, who on her deathbed reminded the child to be pious.

“What does it mean to be ‘pious’?” Dr. McShane asked the class. Many of us provided answers like “sanctimonious” and “holy” and to these answers Dr. McShane responded politely but then related an episode from Virgil’s Aenid, how during the fall of Troy, the heroic Prince Aeneas led to safety his young son Ascanius while he carried his decrepit father Anchises. “Aeneas represents the present, and he leads the future in the person of his son and carries the weight of history and tradition of the past in the person of his father. When scholars speak of ‘Pious Aeneas’, it is with this image that they have in mind. To be ‘pious’ is to carry tradition for the next generation.”

Again, after the fairy tales we read The Odyssey, one of the greatest stories in the Western canon. It begins with Odysseus stuck on the island with Calypso: many of us thought he was trapped and a prisoner. No, Dr. McShane explained: there is little in the text to indicate that Calypso has used all that much force to keep Odysseus her captive: on the contrary, he obviously enjoyed the nymph’s company…carnally. However, when pressed by the gods to leave, he finally begins his journey back to Ithaca.

While Odysseus is back on the sea, his son Telemachus goes on his own to seek information about his father. In Book IV, Telemachus comes to the halls of Menelaus and Helen, where they both relate to the prince stories about Odysseus. First, Helen relates how during the siege on Troy, she recognized a disguised Odysseus working as a spy and then explains how she helped him. Her story is followed by one by Menelaus, who relates that when the Greek warriors were inside the Trojan horse, they hear Helen suggest that the Trojans pierce the horse with spears to ensure that it was safe.

“What are we to make of these two?” Dr. McShane asked the class. He then shared a story of a sad young woman whose parents argued all the time: she thought that they hated each other, but he knew her parents and their relationship and explained to her “No child: they were two very passionate people whose relationship was quite physical. When you grew up, you only saw the dark side of their marriage.” He then brought attention back to Helen and Menelaus, noting that sometimes it is better for two unhappy people to have each other, lest there be four miserable people.

That lesson has stayed with me over the years. I would watch various relationships people have come and go, marriages begin with beautiful weddings and end in acrimonious divorce; I would also see couples stay together, complaining about each other one minute and then indulging in each other’s pet games. Years after college, I’d watch The Oprah Winfrey Show where she would have Dr. Phil McGraw as a guest delve into the lives of troubled couples, and then I would see McGraw do that on his own show. Through all that dysfunction, be it in gay bars or on daytime television or among friends, it was the wisdom in Dr. McShane’s insight on the not-pretty but well-suited pairing of Helen and Menelaus that would echo in my head.

These days, I rarely ever feel too sorry for people in “bad” relationships: I will feel sorry for their children, but beyond that, I am grateful that these people have each other and are thereby sparing the rest of us the hazards of dealing with such unhappy souls.

I will confess to having some difficulty in reading The Wind in the Willows: I found the idyllic pastoral setting in the English countryside to be…boring (in fact, I remember writing in my journal entry that I wanted the Queen of Hearts to appear and shake up the scene). I was annoyed by Toad’s antics and am convinced that today he would’ve been diagnosed with manic-depressive bipolar disorder. Fortunately, McShane’s lectures rescued the story from my criticism, as certain features of Victorian society were explained. For instance, when the rabbits would misbehave and annoy the other animals, the other animals would shout “Onion sauce!” at the lapines: onion sauce was a traditional condiment served with rabbit meat in England in the 1800's, so by shouting it at the reckless rabbits, the other animals were taunting them with death.

The following Fall Semester I had Dr. McShane for another class, this time for Irish Literature. Here I was no longer on that firm and familiar foundation of Greek Literature and fantasy: the works from the poets and storytellers of the Emerald Isle were a new menagerie. Gone were the glories of high fantasy, for now came the tales of suffering and sorrow.

Some of the bleakness was revealed when McShane relayed the time that he and his family stayed in Ireland, in a seaside town called Skerries. Apparently the people in Skerries were not especially friendly by American standards, so when the local priest asked McShane how he liked Ireland, the response was “It would be nice if people said ‘hello’ to my wife!” to which the priest replied (as relayed to us by McShane using his excellent talent for mimicry, realizing a lovely Irish brogue) “You best not be judging all of Ireland by Skerries: Skerries was settled by the Danes, and the Danes are a dour people.” As I had felt proud of my Danish heritage since I was a child, it was striking to hear the Danes dismissed as a dour people (I mean, really—Hans Christian Andersen and pornography—fairy tales and sex—what’s so dour about that?). Still, given that the Viking raids (which provided the Danes to settle Skerries, and in fact, many of the towns in Ireland, including Dublin, were established by Danes) ended many centuries ago, it is striking that these ancient memories lingered and haunted the Emerald Isle.

McShane also took time to explain more about the history of Ireland, the domination by the British, but noting the Irish successes along the way, and how during the 1700’s, Dublin became the second largest city in the British Empire; in fact, the former Parliament building in Dublin became the Bank of Ireland, a place that the professor recommended to see for its fantastic Georgian architecture. The professor also relayed an anecdote in the 1800’s about a Catholic politician from Ireland who won a seat in Parliament and would have taken the Oath of Supremacy (which affirmed allegiance to British monarch as the Head of the Church of England): when challenged that doing so would be a lie, the politician countered, “No, for it to be a lie, it must not only be an untruth, it must also have the intent to deceive: as I intend to deceive no one, I am not lying.” Over the years, I find myself correcting people when they misspeak and unintentionally give misinformation and say “I’m sorry, I lied,” to which I respond, “No, you only misspoke; for you to have lied, you must have also have had the intent to deceive.”

Of course, much of Irish history was not so cheery. Ireland lost home rule in 1801, when its parliament merged with Westminster, and several decades later, the Irish suffered the Potato Famine. Prior to McShane’s lecture, I did not understand the extent of the tragedy of the famine. The professor explained that potatoes were an easy crop for the Irish people, one that did not need much tending and one not likely to be taken from them by their British overlords. Also, despite the poverty, the Irish were very “pro-sex”, he explained, and being Catholics, they enjoyed big families: indeed, sex gave people something to do while the potatoes grew.

Then came the famine. Their major source of food, wiped out. (A cruel twist is that it only affected the potato: other crops did very well at the time, but those benefited the British which actually owned the land and could sell the crops, rather than the Irish who worked in the field). I remember how transfixed we were in class, hearing him relate the horror of people dying, and explaining how this event allowed for celibacy and late marriages to enter the Irish Catholic character. “When you see your children eat grass because they are starving,” he explained, “but then watch them die anyway, you change your mind about sex.”

It was at this point where McShane reflected on an exchange that he had with a church official regarding celibacy: the professor came to understand that this man’s religious views were steeped in the celibacy of Irish Catholicism, one that witnessed the horror of children starving after eating grass. In contrast, McShane’s own perspective was more pro-sex, in line with an Irish Catholicism before the famine. He had a big family and he and his wife were known to want some reform in the local diocese, in line with how they understood Vatican II. Contrary to how some factions presented them, the McShanes did not want to turn the Catholic Church into some New Age cult: they expressed their Catholic faith by opening their homes to unwed teenage mothers, thereby living a life of gracious Christian charity rather than of a scowling and shaming judgment. Over the years, I encountered even conservative Catholics who may have disagreed with the McShanes politically, but certainly respected how they lived their faith through grace and generosity.

A year after I took the Irish Literature course, Dr. McShane was gracious and generous enough to have me for an independent study, which enabled me to sit in another series of lectures for Children’s Literature. One lecture which I remember from the class for The Wizard of Oz: McShane only spent one lecture on that story, and in it, he related the 1939 film as well as the book (Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West would not be released for another year). When discussing the film, the professor mentioned that when he was in Atlanta, he saw Judy Garland in concert: she was more than an hour late for the show, and when she finally appeared, she looked like “the wrath of God”, but after a few minutes, she had the unruly and impatient crowd “eating from her hands.” It was very much like the closing scene from I Could Go On Singing.

Despite his piety and respect for the text, Dr. McShane was not above questioning certain received notions and conventional wisdom. I remember hearing how in school he challenged the teacher about the idea of the “topic sentence” in paragraphs: he directed the class’s attention to the fact that in the course book discussing paragraphs and topic sentences, the paragraphs themselves did not include topic sentences.

What especially stands out in my mind happened during that first semester for Children’s Literature, when we finished Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The story closes with Alice telling her sister about her adventures, and how they made Alice a better mother. “How could what she endured make Alice a better mother?” McShane asked the class. Another student, with whom I had taken a logic class the previous semester and with whom I would also take Irish Literature, commented on how demented the story was; and I added that it was also not a sentimental story. So, with the dementia but without sentiment, how could Alice’s adventures make her a better mother? I gained respect for Alice and her adventures, although perhaps I had lost some affection for them as well.

Another challenge to a text came when we read A Wrinkle in Time, where the character Calvin O’Keefe, who was of obvious Irish descent, related how he came from a large family and no one would miss him. Falling back on his own Irish Catholic family life, McShane countered this, noting that the book’s author Madeleine L’Engle was an only child and did not know much about what it would have meant to have siblings and growing up in a large family. “There isn’t less love,” he explained: “There is more love, and the older children help raising the younger ones.”

I remember that in one of his lectures, the professor reflected on the word “sap”, which is often used as an insult. “It is short of ‘sapience,’” he explained, “ which means ‘wisdom’, and has nothing to do with what happens in a maple tree.” For me, Dr. McShane had been a great resource of wisdom, of sapience, as well as generosity. He wrote a letter of recommendation for me to attend summer school in Oxford. When I graduated from University in 1995, I had the honor of Dr. McShane appearing at my reception. When I struggled with graduate school, I emailed him and listed him the options that I was considering, asking for his advice: his response was frank in that he could not recommend any of the options that I was considering. After that semester, I did not return to graduate school and while I sometimes miss the exchange of ideas in literature, history, philosophy, and religion, I am glad that I did not become a parasitical fixture of those ivory towers that the academic world all too often is.

I maintained contact with the professor, often sending him St. Patrick's Day cards in mid-March. Sometimes we would meet at his office, but we would also meet for lunch, most often at a Chinese restaurant close to campus. Sometimes we would reflect on current events: I remember he found the gross emotionalism over the death of Princess Diana to be “ghastly”. In 2003, after the Lawrence v. Texas decision from the Supreme Court, he reflected how the Court generally options to expand liberty to more people rather than restricting it from others. I recall in one conversation that he shuddered when I mentioned reading about Swedenborg, but gasped a sigh of relief when I said that I was also tackling Edmund Burke.

Sometimes gifts were exchanged at Christmas: I remember giving him a copy of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and explained to the professor that while I abhorred the Pullman’s philosophy (which could be understood to “anti-Narnian”: essentially, republican atheism in society and the universe), I liked his story-telling abilities and when I explained that Pullman described C.S. Lewis as a Protestant Ulsterman (which is technically correct, given that Lewis was born in Belfast and after a stint as an atheist returned to the Anglican church), McShane was intrigued but commented with a chuckle (no doubt thinking of someone like Ian Paisley), “Well, that’s hardly fair to Lewis.” He in turn gave me a copy of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a very thoughtful gift, for he knew that I wanted to be a fantasy novelist.

In one of our meetings at his office, I mentioned the Harry Potter books. Here he gave such a literary challenge: he was unhappy with them. “Harry Potter told a lie,” he said to me. I realized that this was true, that Harry Potter told many lies, and that rarely did Harry suffer much serious consequences for lying. McShane’s revelation to me was a slap in the face, as I did not recognize Potter’s dishonesty or appreciate it as much as the professor did. It underscored for me what a highly ethical and moral man that Dr. McShane was. To be a man of such strict principles meant that life for him was a challenge.

Of course, Dr. McShane did more than challenge texts and literary figures: he and his wife challenged the Church. Being a fairly liberal couple (in fact, McShane was the first avowed liberal that I actually respected and his wife remains the only Democrat candidate whose campaign I had ever helped), they found themselves at odds with the very traditionalist hierarchy of the local diocese. Indeed, so reform-minded were the McShanes that they were viewed as enemies of the bishop and were no doubt major targets of the mass excommunication that occurred in 1996. As I was not Catholic and didn’t even read the newspaper, I was only vaguely aware of what was happening. I had heard rumors that the local diocese was considered one of the most conservative in the United States, if not the world, and knowing that McShane was a liberal Democrat, I could imagine that there would be some friction.

Still, remembering that Dr. McShane believed that words mattered, it must be said that the Church is called “catholic”, that is to say “universal.” Before issues like abortion and homosexuality became such divisive subjects in society at large, thereby enabling Catholic officials to unite with their old rivals, evangelical Protestant ministers, many Catholics were Democrats, often blue-collar workers from several ethnicities. Decades before the prosperity gospel, many Catholics were very much engaged in social justice, and while some clergy and laity would gladly ally with Franco in Spain against the godless communists under Stalin, many nuns and priests would minister to the suffering and poor: as she is a Catholic or Universal Church, she provides a home for all.

Such concern for the poor and unfortunate did Dr. McShane reveal when in Children’s Literature he provided to the class a photocopy of the original introduction to George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, published in 1872. In this first introduction, the author stressed that while one of the main characters in the book was a princess, in a sense, all little girls were princesses and all little boys were princes.

“Who here knows about a cross of gold?” Dr. McShane asked the class, providing a question that stumped me. The answer came from the student who sat next to me, a gentleman of Irish and Italian descent (I would later discover that he had worked in Washington, D.C. on behalf of interests for the Democrats, as either a lobbyist or an activist) who said, “‘You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’” McShane nodded with affirmation and said “Yes!” and explained that the student was quoting a speech from William Jennings Bryan, which was memorialized at the Nebraska State Capitol. Bryan was a Nebraska Democrat made famous in part by his three failed attempts at the presidency as well as his fight against the teaching of evolution in the Scopes trial, the latter which was popularized by the historically inaccurate play Inherit the Wind. While Bryan’s “cross of gold” speech from 1896 was about the gold standard and in fact was two decades after The Princess and the Goblin was first published, McShane explained that the opposition of many religious people to the teaching of evolution was not simply because evolution came in conflict against a literalist interpretation of the Genesis creation account in the Bible (something not a problem for Catholics, who are not obligated to view Scripture with a literal interpretation), but because many took Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” notions and used their interpretations and applied them to the social sciences (i.e., Social Darwinism) to justify not only (at best) laissez-faire capitalism but also eugenics: in short, they used Darwin’s teachings to de-humanize their fellow man, whereas Christians like MacDonald and Bryan did not want society to forget that human beings were children of God, and that all God’s children are princes and princesses.

Dr. McShane once said that his hero was Saint Thomas More, “a man for all seasons” and a beacon of personal integrity. With that sort of example and application of Christian charity and Catholic belief, it is not quite so difficult to imagine that Dr. McShane maintained his Catholic faith as well as his left-of-center politics, or that he would come at odds with certain church authorities. Several months ago, I found at Barnes and Noble a book that detailed in part the struggles in which Dr. McShane and his wife fought. Reading this after the professor died, I was again reminded of his strength of character and eloquence of language: how he found goodness in opponents and even prayed with them, but would not permit them to lie.

For me, perhaps the most important but yet a quiet lesson that lingers deeply comes from another lecture in Children’s Literature. As I had previous mentioned, I had difficulty with The Wind in the Willows, and failed to appreciate the appearance of the god Pan in the chapter “Piper at the Gates of Dawn”. Fortunately, the Greek literature was still fresh in my mind during the lecture, so when Dr. McShane asked, “What is a goat song?” I could say “a tragedy”, and when he pointed out passages like “a capricious little breeze”, which would bring to mind “goat spirit,” I came to see the richness of the author’s vision: after all, “Pan” means “All” in Greek, but it also sounds like “pain”, which is French for “bread”, which in itself is a rich image, for not only is it a staple of the human diet, it evokes religious imagery, in not only the Lord’s Prayer (“give us this day our daily bread”) but also the Eucharist.

McShane found the closing of the chapter puzzling: why would this mystic experience be forgotten? Over the years, I can say that it makes a sort of sense to me. While I cannot say that I have ever witnessed a profound numinous moment, like Moses on Sinai or Saul en route to Damascus, I can say that I have had events, fleeting perhaps, times in which I sensed an expansion of life, of life that was beyond my scope and vision. Acts of kindness. Moments of beauty. Those experiences do not prove that God is real, but having had such experiences, I do not find God to be an idea expressed in words from an alphabet, but rather a lingering fascination that evokes hope and love, a resource for comfort (which, as Dr. McShane said more than once, means “with strength,” as in, you are being strong with someone). I can appreciate the fear that secular humanists feel when they hear a religious person (often an evangelical Protestant) speak as if on behalf of God Himself and I contrast that with the quiet gentleness of Pan in The Wind in the Willows. One cannot explain God any easier than one can explain falling in love, or the faith one has in a faithless lover, and sadly, not everyone experiences moments of God or committed love, but life continues regardless. I think of the wise insight from Confucius, when asked about ghosts and spirits: they might be real, but for now, we need to live a good life on earth. That would be something I think that even if Dr. McShane couldn’t fully accept, he would graciously let it be explained.

Dr. McShane has been gone for a year and I no longer send St. Patrick’s Day cards to his address. However, I cherish the memory of his kind voice, his expressive eyes, and the majesty and humanity of the thoughts that he shared: the wisdom, nay, the sapience of those lessons that I received from lectures in classrooms at the English building, the grandness of the gesture by which he accepted a plastic glass of Asti spumante from my father at my graduation reception, or over mu shu shrimp at a Chinese restaurant that no longer exists. Lessons about ugly relationships, the definition of a lie, and the challenge of integrity: these are only a part of his great legacy.

Auntie Mame declared that “Life is a banquet!” but Dr. McShane revealed that with a great teacher, one can find in life a feast of sapience.