By DONALD DeMARCO
MWhen he was lecturing at the University of Chicago, Mortimer Adler identified himself as a Jew teaching Catholic philosophy at a Protestant school to a class of atheists.
The image of not quite fitting in was characteristic of Adler’s life, though he was never one to complain about it. The absence of any rough edges has never been a formula for the development of personal authenticity. The unobstructed life, a modern Socrates might say, is not worth living perhaps even less than the unexamined life.
Mortimer Jerome Adler was born in New York City in the year 1902 to Jewish immigrants. His early ambition was to become a journalist which led him to drop out of school at the tender age of 14 to serve as a copy boy for the New York Sun.
His hiatus from formal education, however, was short-lived. Reading the great thinkers at night inspired him to enroll at Columbia University where he excelled but did not graduate. He refused to take the required swimming test in order to earn his bachelor’s degree. The school later apologized for this peculiarity and awarded him an honorary degree in 1983.
Robert Hutchins, who had befriended Adler, appointed him professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago in 1930. The appointment was met with opposition from several faculty members who entertained grave doubts about his competence as a non-lawyer teaching in a law school.
Adler and Hutchins went on to found the Great Books of the Western world program and the Great Books Foundation. This, too, was greeted with strong criticism. One fellow academic claimed that the Great Books showed a “profound disrespect for the intellectual capacities of color — red, brown or yellow.”
Adler, however, was more interested in great ideas than in politics. He insisted that ethnic quotas were irrelevant to his project. He placed no limitations on his readers, however. “Philosophy is everybody’s business,” he maintained.
Another critic remarked that it seemed to him that the Great Books “were an excellent instrument for perpetuating errors.” Adler was well aware of the philosophical errors of the great writers, but he wanted people to familiarize themselves with the great ideas, such as love, justice, beauty, goodness, truth, and God, and discuss them thoroughly. The Great Books was merely a launching pad.
Criticisms of Dr. Adler’s popularizing efforts invited scorn that bordered on the humorous. One critic called him “the Charles Atlas of Western intellection,” and another dismissed him as “the Lawrence Welk of the philosophy trade.”
Some denigrated him as a lightweight, while others regarded him as something of a crank. Adler always held his ground. It was not that he was stubborn. He was thoughtful, and had the courage to remain firm in his convictions.
Moreover, his scholarship could not be questioned. He and his colleagues at The Institute for Philosophical Research spent ten years studying the notion of freedom prior to Adler’s publication of The Idea Of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom (1958; 689 pages).
In his early 20s, Adler discovered St. Thomas Aquinas. What he admired about Thomas was the “intellectual austerity, integrity, precision, and brilliance” he found in the Angelic Doctor’s writings. As a result, he put the study of theology highest among all of his philosophical interests.
Though not a Christian, Adler spoke frequently at Catholic institutions and was a regular contributor to Catholic journals. Nonetheless, his adoption of St. Thomas placed him outside of the mainstream of professional philosophers.
An additional beef that his colleagues raised against him was that he wrote for the masses.
“Unlike many of my contemporaries,” he once stated, “I never write books for my fellow professors to read. I have no interest in the academic audience at all. I’m interested in Joe Doakes. A general audience can read any book I write — and they do.” He regarded academic jargon, esoteric language, and footnotes to be obstacles for his readers.
His critics may have been more motivated by envy than argumentation since many of Adler’s books, including How to Read a Book, were best-sellers. Concerning that work, one acid-penned critic urged Adler to read How to Write a Book.
Adler authored 50 or so books and established himself as America’s premier educator and philosopher. He was a man of outstanding intellectual gifts. At the same time, he understood the value of not thinking. “In idling,” he once remarked, “the motor’s running, but your mind takes in anything. Things pop into it. Those are the gifts of subterranean conscious.”
Often resisted in his life and yet always yearning to fit in, Adler, who was eminently Catholic in mind, delayed entering the Church until his wife, an Episcopalian, passed away in 1998.
According to one of his colleagues, Adler “had been attracted to Catholicism for many years” and “wanted to be a Roman Catholic, but issues like abortion and the resistance of his family and friends” kept him away.
In December 1999, Mortimer Adler was formally received into the Catholic Church. His longtime friend Bishop Pierre DuMaine officiated. “Finally,” wrote another friend, Professor Ralph McInerny, “he became the Roman Catholic he had been training to be all his life.” Finally, we might add, he fit in without either resistance or rough edges.
At the time of his passing, he was survived by four sons, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
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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.)
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