Heading towards the nearby Marguerite’s Bakery—his last resort to boost up the mood—David thought about how philosophy classes had not been particularly engaging at the seminary. Instead, he attributed his love for rational arguments to the long conversations with Father Duane during his holidays in Newcastle West. Duane had indeed been his vocational counselor, and being exceptionally versed in Spinoza, David considered it a gift that the old priest’s favorite philosopher was a Jew excommunicated by his religion on the grounds of denying the existence of God.
“If God is infinite, it follows that there can be nothing but God; we are all part of Him, but so are animals, plants, and minerals—absolutely everything,” insisted Duane, quoting Spinoza.
The boy thought it was incredible that the God of Spinoza was impersonal—nothing like the white-bearded father figure from his childhood. But Spinoza also concluded that God being indifferent to our purposes meant that man should not expect to be loved or punished by Him. A few years later, this reasoning made David so uneasy and preoccupied during the many train journeys between the seminary and his hometown that he would miss his stops or forget to eat. Can a God who does not care about me still be my God? He repeatedly asked himself.
Even after his ordination, David took some time to digest the philosopher’s disconcerting ideas, coming close to abandoning them. He thought it unusual that the philosophical analysis was presented to him by a priest who, in his public image, did not seem to have abandoned orthodoxy. Even Father Duane’s sleek physique, elongated face, and grave eyes framed by thin, round spectacles resembled a stern, rigid figure. “They will repeat over and over that we are created in His likeness, but we must immediately accept that God is nature, stripped of any human characteristic,” the old priest explained to David during his first semester at the seminary.
Many years lay between David’s vocational announcement and his entry into the seminary. Duane thought the young man would reconsider his decision but was surprised to see David increasingly involved with the activities of the parish. Moreover, despite his mother’s misgivings and his many philosophical doubts, David was sure that his faith had only increased during the seven years of study for his ordination as a diocesan priest.
Caring directly for the daily spiritual needs of his community was such a privilege that it justified giving up the opportunities of worldly life. In fact, celibacy initially seemed to be the biggest challenge for the Callaghans. “Our backyard wasn’t meant to be changed, Mum,” he said, smiling at Lis. “And don’t think that living alone under a roof is the same as being lonely.”
It is difficult to know for sure whether Father Duane would have introduced Spinoza to David if it had not been for the young seminarian’s rebellious and inquisitive character. But the encounter with the seventeenth-century excommunicated philosopher forever changed David’s way of looking at things, thus reformulating his intellectual admiration for God. “One must love and respect Him but without desire for exact reciprocity. The way nature loves us back,” concluded Duane, “is by recognizing us as part of it.”
On David’s last visit to his good friend, before Duane succumbed to a brutal case of pneumonia, the old man revealed one last surprise. After emptying a few cups of tea—intermediated by a double dose of whiskey—Duane waited for David to be fully relaxed and sunk into his chair before slowly unfolding the original thoughts of Peter Singer. Pausing regularly, he tried to anticipate the reaction of his prey to the reflections of the contemporary Australian philosopher. Another double shot of whiskey helped to draw the horizons of pantheism into which David was to be initiated.
“Singer considers people who don’t attach importance to the interests and rights of animals as a speciesist. Similar to racism, speciesism consider the perspective of only their own species and bear strong prejudice against the other species,” said Duane amid intermittent bouts of coughing.
The old man had a golden retriever, which always lay by his chair. So immobile in her role of keeping the master company that she seemed to be part of the furniture, and only then did David remember her existence.
He examined the dog’s serenity in her frozen posture for a few seconds only. The coughing worsened, and David wished to interrupt the conversation and rush Duane to a nearby hospital. The old priest objected: “the last Duane lived longer than a hundred years, lad; you don’t know what we’re made of.”
Back at Marguerite’s Bakery, he used to enjoy sitting at an outdoor table and gaze at people. Those days, however, were gone and he picked a reserved corner inside the café. In fact, his discomfort was aggravated nowadays by having to greet almost everyone.
A middle-aged woman had approached him to ask whether she would attend the debate, to which he replied by nodding in silence, omitting the central role he would play. Meanwhile, a senior woman sat down at the next table utterly indifferent to his presence. Her eyes were glued to a book as if hypnotized by its contents. Curious, David craned his neck slowly, trying to catch a glimpse of the title. The position of his head was so unnatural that he had to scratch the base of his neck under his collar, but he was rewarded. The title was creative and somehow funny—“Plato, not Prozac”—and he immediately grasped it was a self-help book.
His espresso arrived, and it was intended to keep him good company until his quiche was served, but his mind had already capitulated. David could not stop thinking about the literary genre that inundated the publishing industry. He remembered that even his mother had made recurring use of such titles.
On one of the rare occasions when he paged through some from his mother’s collection, he was struck by how they packaged complex features of emotional and behavioral life in a seductive first-person narrative, both smooth and pleasurable to read.
“They desperately recruit philosophers, Christ, and mythological beings in an attempt to liberate us from our chemical dependence on anxiolytics, forbidden drugs, or simply from our existential emptiness,” Father Duane once punctuated.
Furthermore, David also remembered how his old friend saw the nowadays trend for the rescuing of individual souls as intrinsically delusional. “I humbly state that humans,” said Duane, “numbed by illusory accomplishments, have long ago diverted themselves from the whole they belong to, and thus fragmented their own kind, making their struggle to exist somewhat a pathetic adventure. Lone and melancholic, my son, ‘the individual,’ when well-off and healthy, may, however, have delusions of satisfaction—believing he is safe for being sheltered by fortune. Yet, regarding the enormous challenges we face, I prophesy that those people will soon be crying on their knees as they recognize themselves as inseparable from the whole.”
David assumed that Duane was not exactly a pessimist, but that his friend had prescribed to a sort of aged idealism. His harsh sentences had probably been sculpted by a lifetime of observation and records from the confessional, where his fatalistic view of human behavior was only reinforced.
On an unusually cold and rainy night, David poured alcohol over the wood in the fireplace to ignite the flames as quickly as possible, while Duane opened a bottle of Bushmills. Once the old priest was seated with his thin legs covered by a generous crocheted blanket, and as he balanced a double shot of the precious whiskey on his knee, his thoughts converged on an astonishing conclusion: “Accept the truth, Father Callaghan. The world and all who live in it would be better off if we were no longer here. Ah, what do you think? We went from despicable cave dwellers to global-scale predators in the blink of an eye. In the beginning, oh yes, in the beginning, we used to compose the great work of creation in the most prominent position, holding countless privileges in the animal kingdom. Today, like our giant friends of the Triassic Period, we are perfectly useless, utterly disposable.”
Honoring Ireland’s oldest whiskey, David savored the taste of the subtle malt while images of life on Earth without humans flooded his mind—a disconcerting though idyllic vision far removed from the sacred texts. Duane, who was more concerned with philosophical reasoning than science fiction, continued his preaching: “Our ego and its defense mechanisms… ambition, vanity, greed… are the source of our stupidity, David, the source of all incivility and human brutality. It operates in the unconscious and dulls our mental faculties…”
David already knew that, for Father Duane, the idea of homo sapiens as the “wise man” had always been an abstraction. “Conversely, what we have witnessed throughout history is the emergence of the homo stultus, or the ‘stupid man,’” affirmed Duane. To the old priest, stupidity has thus been the predominant element in people’s thoughts and actions, the driving force of consciousness itself.
The intense concentration of caffeine in his espresso did not help to bring David back to the present moment. Instead, this task fell to another lady’s hand delicately placed on his shoulder. David’s sense of touch, slowly followed by the other senses, was awakened.
“Father Callaghan, forgive me! My husband and I are very excited about the debate this afternoon, and I would like to ask you if it’s appropriate to bring our teenage daughter along.”
The sight was the last of his senses to awaken and was still unfocused when he lifted his right hand erratically. David was so immersed in his own reflections that he did not realize how ambiguous his gesture was. Yes, you must take your teenage daughter because she needs to know the world she lives in. Or perhaps yes, you are right not to take her, sparing the girl as long as you can from the general insanity. Confused, the lady thought it best not to clear up what Father Callaghan had actually meant and left as mysteriously as she had come. David did the same. He deposited money on the table without asking for the bill and put a partially eaten chocolate cookie in his pocket, as was his habit. With a bowed head, he made his way back to his house.
Helped by the proximity of his comfort zone, David’s short walk to the Callaghans’ property brought back a state of inner peace. Like the early dry leaves of midsummer that he stepped on, he saw the unwanted thoughts fall one after the other. Standing at his front gate and glancing at his garden lovingly tended by Elizabeth O’Brien, he was overcome by a new wave of gratitude. It was indeed a privilege to be a priest in his hometown, alongside those who watched him grow old and thus legitimized his life.
It had in fact been a concession of the Church in a doubly painful set of circumstances. The diocesan Curia of Limerick nominated David Callaghan to serve as the parish priest of Newcastle West just a few weeks after Father Duane had passed away so that he could personally take care of his gravely ill mother. “If fortune is born out of tragedy, how can it ever be celebrated?” he thought as he entered home.