Sheldon Vanauken: Many others will share my belief that he was the best, the wisest, the most generous of teachers, writers, and friends.

Remembering Sheldon Vanauken

by David Hartman

The Little Lost Marion and Other Mercies, by Sheldon Vanauken

Full disclosure of the reviewer’s relation to the author is a requirement. In this case that duty becomes a pleasure—becomes, in fact, a profession of love and a modest attempt at eulogy—for the author is the late Sheldon Vanauken, and I count it among my singular blessings to have known Van not only as a writer but also as a friend, and first of all as a teacher.

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In the classroom Vanauken was magisterial. He spoke knowledgeably of “the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome.” While he lectured, he sat, and bivouacked in his chair he was as immobile as a stump. But the world he drew us into three times a week—a world far removed from my freshman fixation on cheerleaders, draft status, and getting hold of a six-pack for the weekend—was a transcendent and heroic place. To this day, I am liable to discourse at length on why Homer’s Iliad marks the dawn of Western literature, why Pericles was a statesman to be emulated, or why Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Euripides rank with Shakespeare as the greatest of playwrights. Van once gave a lecture on Socrates that—so help me—cured my hangover. He made the very idea of civilization seem winsome and fragile, and he dispelled whatever notions I might have entertained about the romance of barbarism. Van was besotted by history, art, literature, and the manifold glories of the mind, and he enabled any student with the attention span of a higher mammal to be besotted as well.

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In my second year at divinity school, I received from Lynchburg an alumni flyer announcing the publication of A Severe Mercy. I ordered it, read it, and was transfixed as mystery after mystery was unveiled. The Davy of the postcards had been Van’s wife. C.S. Lewis had been their friend and spiritual mentor at Oxford. Before Oxford, Van and Davy had reveled in their private and pagan love, building a “shining barrier” against the world. But there, amid Oxford’s dreaming spires (abetted by Lewis’s wide-awake intellect), the Hound of Heaven had caught them. They became followers of Christ. After Oxford came his professorship at Lynchburg College, where, Van observed, “the students…were not only not students, they were semi-literate.” (Ouch.) And there in Virginia, after 10 years of marriage, Davy died of an undiagnosable illness. Her death was “the severe mercy,” the final collapse of the shining barrier that Christ had breached at Oxford. “Perpetual springtime is not allowed,” Lewis wrote to a grieving Van.

Within a week of receiving A Severe Mercy, I had read through it twice, and wept both times. Others have written—more eloquently than I—of the impact that book has had on their lives. I consider it the most beautiful book on love, loss, and grace I have ever read.

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I brought the card along to the laundry room—grief is occasional, but dirty clothes are forever—and after loading the washer I looked at the card again. “Damn Van!” I yelled. “Damn him for dying! Damn him for dying just when I needed him most!” Can we forgive the anger of the bereaved at the deceased, and the utter self-absorption of the grieving?

That night, I stood outside and stared up at the stars, mourning the death of my friend. And then—an act of mercy on God’s part, no doubt—I remembered the destiny for which Van had lived: union with Christ, reunion with Davy, in God’s Kingdom forevermore. “He’s with Davy,” I thought. One trusts that God, through the grace revealed in Jesus Christ our Lord, does indeed have a home—and even a new role—for this faithful servant, this valiant knight-errant whose courage and charity illumined so many lives.

I miss him terribly. Many others will share my belief that he was the best, the wisest, the most generous of teachers, writers, and friends.

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