The Last Renaissance Man
By DONALD DeMARCO
Some years ago I had the privilege of meeting the distinguished Thomistic philosopher Josef Pieper. I knew of his relationship with Karl Stern. When I informed him of Stern’s passing, he was saddened, but directly recalled how beautifully his dear friend played Schubert sonatas for him.
Karl Stern was, indeed, a skilled pianist and his repertoire went far beyond the works of Franz Schubert. When he needed psychiatric attention for himself, his mentor was happy to have Stern play Beethoven sonatas for him as a form of payment. He was also very knowledgeable about music in general and could hold his own in esoteric conversations about the finer points of music with world-class musicians such as Rudolf Serkin.
In his book, The Hand of God, Bernard Nathanson, who studied medicine under Stern, refers to him as the one professor who made the greatest impression on him. He identified his former teacher as “a profoundly erudite psychiatrist who was, in the McGill [Montreal] professional galaxy, a star among stars.” He admitted owing more to Stern than he first realized.
His biographer, Daniel Burston, interviewed people who remembered Karl Stern as a novelist. Others saw him as a psychoanalyst for priests. He was also a neurologist and a gifted writer. Who is Karl Stern (1906-1975)? Is he the same person who is a pianist, musicologist, psychiatrist, neurologist, novelist, teacher, and writer? He was all these in addition to being a husband and father. He was, perhaps, as some have said, the last Renaissance man.
Karl Stern was born in a small town in Bavaria to socially assimilated Jewish parents. When he was a teenager, he attended a Jewish synagogue, but soon became an atheist Zionist. He studied medicine at the Universities of Berlin, Munich, and Frankfort, before finding work in neurological research in England, and later as a lecturer in neuropathology at the Montreal Neurological Institute under Wilder Penfield.
Two of his books, The Third Revolution (1954) and The Flight From Woman (1965), are clearly masterpieces illustrating his keen insights into both culture and philosophy. They are even more relevant today than when they were written. The former centers on three great intellectual revolutions that have taken place in the modern world involving, respectively, Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Each represents the concomitant reduction of reality to matter and the dehumanization of man.
The first was Karl Marx’s economic revolution whose dialectical materialism led directly to atheistic Communism. Second, the biological revolution introduced by Charles Darwin led to the racist theory of Nazi Germany. Finally, Sigmund Freud inaugurated a psychological revolution that has threatened man’s spirituality.
Stern exposes the error of reducing various levels of reality to matter and how it has an adverse effect on man. At the same time, Stern explains, as St. Thomas did, how religion and science, faith and reason are harmonious with each other.
Stern is particularly adept in debunking the “nothing but” philosophies of Marx and Freud: “If Marx, instead of saying, ‘Religion is nothing but the opiate of the people’,” said, “Woe unto you who use religion as an opiate of the people,” he would have been on firm ground. Had Freud told his patients, “‘What you call religion is actually your neurosis,’ instead of claiming that religion is actually your neurosis, he would have stated a frequently observed truth.”
The Flight From Woman is a study of the polarity between the sexes. As a psychiatrist, Stern draws attention to the problem of activism, a lack of balance between action and contemplation. Underlying this problem, which is found more extensively in men, is a maternal conflict and a rejection of the feminine. Technological society is not congenial to tempering an excessively rational approach to life: “an undue emphasis on the technical and the rational, and a rejection of what for want of a better term we call ‘feeling,’ go with a neurotic dread of receiving, a fear of tenderness and of protection, and are invariably associated with an original maternal conflict.” Rationalism and positivism have influenced the modern world over the last three centuries to an extraordinary degree. The result has been a flight from the feminine, from feeling, from the tenderness of the human heart.
But The Pillar of Fire was, far and away, Karl Stern’s best-seller. It is regarded by many reviewers as the most outstanding account of a personal conversion from Judaism to Catholicism of the 20th century. Bernard Nathanson, who made the same conversion, tells us that “with each reading” of Stern’s extended letter to his brother, which constitutes the final chapter of the book, “I found myself fighting back the tears.”
Stern’s conversion story is by no means a solitary adventure. Along the way, Stern met or corresponded with C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Day, Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, Clare Boothe Luce, Graham Greene, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas Merton, Robert Lowell, and many others.
In a private conversation with Maritain, Stern, psychiatrist that he was, confessed a concern that his conversion might be nothing but a mirage rooted in an unconscious desire to escape the destiny of a Jew. Maritain’s response reads like a page from The Third Revolution. He warned Stern against allowing his spiritual experiences to be corroded by psychological analysis. The genuineness of Stern’s spiritual experiences, said Maritain, occurs “on a plane quite apart from that of primitive emotions.” Years later, Stern would write in The Third Revolution that “if someone comes to believe that the Freudian concepts are all there is to the nature of Man, he loses sight of the ultimate design.”
Stern remained true to that ultimate design. At the close of The Pillar of Fire, he states, like the narrator in Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven, that there was no doubt about the fact that with regard to the course of his life “towards Him we had been running, or from Him we had been running away, but all the time He had been in the center of things.”
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; How to Flourish in a Fallen World, and Footprints on the Sands of Time: Personal Reflections on Life and Death are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
