Abstract
Aristotle teaches us that all genuine philosophy begins in wonder. In my life I never knew anyone who more fully embodied that spirit of wonder than Fr Joseph Flanagan. From my first encounter with Joe Flanagan as an undergraduate student here at Boston College, that spirit of wonder radiated outward. Because of the rave reviews by students ahead of me, I took his course on human consciousness. In that class we read a variety of books and were challenged by new and strange ideas. But the overwhelming and lasting impression that I took from my first encounter with him was the question – ‘I wonder what it would be like to think like that man?’
My own experience of him as an inspiring teacher has resonated with thousands of other students over the past several decades. Many years later another of his students, David Manzo, affectionately nicknamed him ‘Fr Five Percent’, because his ideas so dazzled his students that initially they only understood 5 % of what he expounded. Even more than conveying specific ideas, it was his mission as a teacher to stretch the minds of his students, and to show them that they, too, had within them the desire to learn, to discover new ideas, to find unexpected connections among things they had assumed to be unrelated. He made intellectual ideas exciting and enticing by his own excitement about what he taught. But even more than his enthusiasm about the ideas, it was the unrestrained, direct and deeply personal interest he took in each of his students that awakened their own love of learning.
He first discovered that wonder within himself in his encounter with the thought of fellow Jesuit philosopher and theologian, Bernard Lonergan. At the heart of Lonergan’s philosophy was his conviction that deep within all human beings is a passionate, unrestricted desire for knowledge, goodness and love. Joe Flanagan became one of the world leaders in promoting scholarship and study of Lonergan’s important contributions to philosophy and religious thought. He founded the Lonergan Institute here at Boston College, with its collection of scholarly materials, journals, scholarships, fellowships and conferences. Hundreds of scholars from all the continents have come here to study at the Lonergan Institute and returned to their homelands with riches they gathered during their researches here.
Before joining the Jesuits, Joe Flanagan joined the Navy during the Second World War. The Navy eventually sent him on to earn a degree in dental surgery – so that he could help heal people who suffered serious facial disfigurements during the war. But it was in dental school that he received his calling to the Jesuit priesthood. The DDS degree stuck, however, as his fellow Jesuits continually called him ‘Doc Flanagan’.
Joe Flanagan liked to tell that at the end of his first year of teaching here at Boston College in the spring of 1964, the students staged a bonfire in which they burned their philosophy books because of their abstract and stale teachings. The following year they formed a procession to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and threw their books in. That got the attention of President Michael Walsh, SJ, who made Joe Flanagan chairman of the Philosophy Department and told him to fix what was wrong with the philosophy courses. Like Pope John XXIII’s Aggiornamento, Joe Flanagan opened wide the windows of philosophy at Boston College to the challenges and advances and the concerns of the great modern and 20th-century thinkers. He brought to our department over 20 new faculty members including internationally acclaimed philosophers educated in the greatest European universities and traditions.
His passion for teaching was not limited to the classroom. I recall one time a group of us took part in a rally in protest of the Vietnam War and he had just given a speech at the rally. A student from the crowd asked, ‘Fr Flanagan, can you relate the war to … ?’ But before the question was finished, we started to laugh when one of us said, ‘Of course, he can relate anything to anything else!’ And I don’t think he ever took a hike or car ride with anyone that did not turn into a seminar. ‘Do you know why that water is so blue? It’s because there is so much orange in the sand on this beach’ was typical of what passed for casual conversation.
But his love of and dedication to teaching extended beyond those with whom he had immediate contact, whether in the classroom or the automobile. In 1969 he was instrumental in the establishing of a new program that would combine volunteer work at agencies serving people in need, with philosophical and theological education. Initially it was not at all a very well thought-out idea. But he was convinced that it could work. The several early mistakes we made could easily have been regarded as justifiable reasons for ending the experiment. But instead Joe Flanagan provided the Pulse Program with a greenhouse haven in which we could grow and mature by learning from our mistakes. Today the Pulse Program has served thousands of people of Greater Boston communities, and has profoundly altered the lives of thousands of Boston College students who now see clearly how the riches of philosophy and theology can guide them in living their lives. The Philosophy Department has come a long way from bonfires and waterlogged books.
Not content to develop just one innovative educational program, Joe also secured two major NEH grants with which he founded the Perspectives Program. There our students – and our faculty – engage in a serious way the question, ‘What is the best way to live?’ Students’ complacent assumptions are challenged by their encounters with the great thinkers not only from philosophy and theology, but also from natural and social sciences, from literature, architecture and music. The real genius of this program was that Joe Flanagan did not create it himself. Instead, he created a community that would create it. His great discovery was how to make academic planning a work of creativity, providing an environment for faculty to come together and talk about books they treasured. The structures of the Perspectives Program at Boston College emerged only after long periods of respectful debate, conversation and mutual education among faculty that blossomed into deep friendships, and the Perspectives Program flowed out of those friendships.
He pushed many of us past what we thought were our limits, to collaborate with him in bringing about these great programs and projects. We used to call him Euclid, after the famous Greek geometer. The Greek Euclid would begin his theorems by saying, ‘Let there be a line or a triangle or a figure with such and such specifications’, and would then proceed to work out the proofs. Joe Flanagan, the Boston College Euclid, used to say ‘Let there be a program, a conference or a fellowship or a journal’, and then recruit us, his friends, to work out the details. And he always seemed innocently amazed at how many details there were for the rest of us to work out while he watched.
But I think people most remember Joe Flanagan for his prolific generosity. Without a second thought, he would drive visiting scholars to Star Market to buy food or personal items. He spent his so-called leisure time taking people to share the natural beauties he loved best – scenic tours of the Massachusetts seashores or on expeditions climbing his beloved New Hampshire mountains or trips to Brighams in order to enjoy the ecstasy of what he called the Prime Analogate of vanilla ice cream. Always he was there with that beaming leprechaun of a smile and that infectious cackle of a laugh, often directed at no one other than himself.
Joe Flanagan truly embodied the Jesuit motto of finding God in all things, whether in philosophy or scientific discoveries or artistic masterpieces or natural beauty or the amazed faces of his students or the presence of family and friends. He would exuberantly tell us about some new book he had just begun to read, and how it had given him an insight that ‘completely reorganized my whole horizon of thinking’. Of course he seemed to have one of these insights just about every week. I am sure that now he has found that ultimate reorganization of his horizon that his relentless mind and heart were always seeking. Upon hearing of his death, one of Fr Joseph Flanagan’s former students emailed to say that she remembered him teaching that there were only two kinds of stories in all of literature: up stories and down stories. Surely the life of Joe Flanagan was an up story. And the ‘up’ of his story was wonder and love.