James Clement van Pelt ’03 M.A.R. is the former coordinator of YDS’s initiative in religion, science, and technology. He is a member of the Polanyi Society and co-coordinated the 2014 conference on William H. Poteat at Yale.
A conference in early June entitled “The Primacy of Persons: The Legacy of William H. Poteat” drew scholars to Yale from North America and Europe to celebrate the life and work of one YDS graduate who has contributed significantly to the developing understanding of personhood. During the conference the Poteat archive was inaugurated in the Special Collections of the YDS Library and several significant works of art were donated to the school in Poteat’s honor.
After graduating from YDS, William H. Poteat ’44 B.D. (1919-2000) became a professor of philosophy and religion first at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and later at Duke University, where he remained for most of his career. He was an early exponent of the thought of Michael Polanyi, the scientist-philosopher who introduced the dynamics of tacit knowing via the Terry Lectures at Yale in 1962. Poteat is known for his articulation of the post-critical mode of philosophy and for seminal ideas such as the pre-reflective “mindbody” from which personal experience and its encounter with the world proceed. His convivial approach to teaching, springing from his richly personal implementation of the Socratic method, led many of his students toward transformative personal discovery. He wrote or co-edited numerous books and articles; a collection of his essays, The Primacy of Persons and the Language of Culture: Essays by William H. Poteat, was published in 1993.
The conference was planned and led by Poteat scholar and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies Dale Cannon of Western Oregon University. Its initial purpose was to formally introduce the archive of Poteat’s unpublished papers collected in the YDS Library, arranged through Special Collections Librarian Martha Smalley. She prepared an exhibit in the Day Missions Library of items included in the archive for the introductory session of the conference, which was held there at Dean Gregory Sterling’s invitation.
Conference participants came from North America and Europe. Because so many had been students of Poteat, the event took on a reunion flavor reflecting Poteat’s deep commitment to academic conviviality. A show of hands revealed that about a third of those present have past or current affiliations with Yale, including conference co-organizer Walter B. Mead ’60 M.Div., Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy at Illinois State University, who had arranged with Smalley for Yale to accept Poteat’s papers.
The program featured presentations on the relation of Poteat to Polanyi and other thinkers, the specific philosophical and theological issues raised by Poteat’s work, and the implications of Poteat’s thinking as applied to various areas and methods of inquiry. Other sessions were devoted to sharing anecdotes about Poteat’s unique teaching strategies and to conversation about the implications of his approach to experiencing the authentic life.
At the introductory session a bronze sculpture and a watercolor painting were presented to the School in Poteat’s honor, each created by internationally renowned Greek sculptor Evangelos Moustákas, whose art inspired an epiphany for Poteat that transformed his vocation as interpreter and critic of modern Western culture.
“The intellectual categories upon which I had relied no longer fit,” Poteat reported after encountering Moustákas’ work in 1968. “My whole being—my mindbodily being—was riven” in what he later called it his “Orphic dismemberment.”
Along with those works, a framed collection of haiku poetry praising Poteat was donated by Zöe Savina, a poet of international stature in the world of haiku and also Moustákas’s wife. The gifts were accepted on the school’s behalf by Jennifer A. Herdt, associate dean for academic affairs and Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics, who offered an eloquent commentary on ways the themes of those particular works of art resonate with the values of the School.
Each work can be understood as a moving evocation of life’s struggle to triumph over death, perceived from a uniquely pre-Cartesian Greek perspective. The bronze depicts “From the Catastrophe to Rebirth,” symbolizing those victims of genocide in recent history who have survived to rise from devastation to resurrect their families and their culture. One side of the Janus-like sculpture presents the ravaged victims, and the other, their victorious restoration. At Dean Sterling’s suggestion, the sculpture is on permanent display in the Student Book Supply window fronting the hallway nearest the School’s formal gallery and reception area, so that each side can be viewed in its own setting: one from inside the store and one from the adjacent hallway.
The painting, bold and vivid in its red and golden paint, depicts the myth of Orpheus, when he emerges from beyond the mortal veil leading the shade of his dear departed Eurydice to return her to the world of the living—at the very moment when he turns to gaze upon her before she is fully resurrected and finds in doing so he has sent her spirit back to the underworld forever. That moment of heart-rending realization now overlooks Dean Sterling’s office—perhaps a reminder of the profound concerns at the boundaries of life and death that students are likely to encounter in their ministries after graduation.
Zöe Savina, a lifelong admirer of Poteat, contributed her framed depiction of a series of haikus praising Poteat just as they are transformed magically into butterflies soaring from the pages on which the poems are inscribed.
The gifts were funded by admirers of Poteat and Moustákas through a campaign conducted by Betty Eidenier, a fellow North Carolinian and longtime friend of Poteat. The donations were facilitated by YDS Director of Development Constance Royster, while Dean Sterling extended the School’s hospitality and arranged for the effective display of each work of art. He also translated the Greek title of the sculpture to be “From the Catastrophe to Rebirth”, more accurately reflecting its full import, observing that “The Catastrophe” in modern Greek can refer to the Holocaust.
Other enduring outcomes of the conference include over twenty original papers and two significant Wikipedia articles entitled “William H. Poteat” and “Post-Critical,” along with the new website whpoteat.org where video recordings of each conference session are soon to be available, along with biographical and academic information about Poteat and links to downloadable versions of all the papers presented.