At left: Newspaper clipping announcing a 1962 lecture by Father Nogar at Purdue University. At right: Dominican friars at prayer in the priory at the Dominican House of Studies, River Forest, Illinois.
As a historian of American religion, I love introducing undergraduates to the denominational traditions that have made a mark on U.S. history. But many of my students are interested in more than history. They want to know: Which of the religions is right? For them, my class becomes an opportunity for spiritual exploration.
I don’t fight this. Though I teach at a state university, where the First Amendment obliges me to remain neutral on religious truth claims, I can’t control how the students use the background they learn in class.
I do, however, take a stand on at least one matter of theology. Religion, I insist, is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Many people wrongly assume that the “right” religion is just waiting to be found. You’ll know you’ve found it—they think—when, after careful study, you’re able to agree 100 percent with its claims. Short of that, you can’t commit.
The Catholic theologian Raymond Nogar, O.P., had a name for this fallacy. He called it the “the folly of the package deal.” A package deal, as he put it, is “the insistence that if you buy a part, you must buy the whole.” The world is far too complex, he maintained, for one system of thought or religious tradition to account for all the complexity. Even atheism may offer a useful corrective to certain inherited assumptions. “Neither Aquinas nor Sartre suffices,” he said, for explaining the world and the human predicament.
Father Nogar wasn’t arguing that we should assemble our own private religions from the cafeteria of beliefs and practices. He was, after all, a Dominican friar who spent his whole career teaching Catholic philosophy. His point was rather that religious commitment is rarely free of doubt. No religion can explain everything, and sometimes one’s own religion is wrong—even about big things.
I was an undergraduate once, so I remember the desire to find the perfect religious system. In the summer after my sophomore year, I had an internship in Chicago at The Lutheran magazine. I rented a room at Dominican University in River Forest, where I spent part of my “leisure” time reading Paul Tillich’s three-volume Systematic Theology. I never got through the whole thing, and it left me with more questions than answers.
I should have supplemented Tillich with Father Nogar, whose work I didn’t discover until many years later. Little did I know at the time, I was walking in Father Nogar’s old haunts in River Forest, where he taught for more than two decades at the Dominican House of Studies.
Father Nogar is not widely remembered today, though in 1998, the University of Notre Dame Press reissued his little gem of a book, The Lord of the Absurd (1966), which includes his lecture, “The Folly of the Package Deal,” originally delivered to students at Stanford.
On November 17, 1967, Father Nogar was found dead in a stairwell at the Dominican House of Studies. He had suffered a heart attack. He was 51 years old. We can only speculate about what additional contributions he would have made in his specialty, science and religion. But his essays in The Lord of the Absurd, all of them talks given on college campuses, still speak powerfully to the challenge of religious faith in the face of modern skepticism.
In the book’s title essay, “The Lord of the Absurd,” he drew on his knowledge of chaos theory and quantum mechanics to argue that the world is not a tidy system but is full of uncertainty and unpredictability. We are “whistling ourselves a tune,” he said, when we embrace the fiction that the universe is an orderly cosmos.
For Father Nogar, the absurd claim of Christ as crucified God best spoke to the chaos and suffering we encounter in the world. That Christ himself participates in the disorder of creation makes him the Lord of the Absurd, the God who takes on the “mysterious misery” of our existence.
In my secular classroom, I can’t prescribe Father Nogar’s defense of Christianity to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. Non-Christian traditions have their own ways of assimilating suffering that may, in their own cultural contexts, resonate just as deeply as the story of Christ.
But whatever one’s views, Father Nogar’s work teaches us that the point of religion is not to resolve all contradictions or provide an airtight system that can drive away all doubt.
© 2023 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Bibliographical Note
I thank John Wilson, former editor of Books and Culture, for introducing me to Father Nogar’s work. The quotations above appear in Raymond J. Nogar, O.P., The Lord of the Absurd (1966, reprint: Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 56, 60-61, 145. Also helpful is Father Nogar’s article, “The God of Disorder,” Continuum 4, no. 1 (1966): 102-113. For commentary on his work, see Patrick Marrin, “A Spirituality Rooted in Absurdity,” National Catholic Reporter, December 4, 1998; and John Wilson, “Lord of the Absurd: The Tangled Web of Science and Religion,” Christianity Today, April 26, 1999.
Illustration credits: Journal and Courier (Lafayette, Ind.), November 30, 1962, via Newspapers.com. Undated photograph of the Dominican Priory in River Forest, Illinois, Dominican Province of St. Joseph, via Flickr.com.