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Here and there. The music in the high mass, yes. But a long mass was boring to me. (A long mass is boring to me even now!)
Giberson: What was there about Hungary when you were growing up that was so congenial to the production of such a stellar array of intellectuals?
I am a generation beyond this. The golden age of Hungarian education was about 1890 to 1920. Still, I went to a school that produced Nobel Prize-winners. One contemporary of mine just won a Nobel Prize in biochemistry a couple of years ago. We had eight years of Latin and some of Greek. Looking back today, I would say that Latin was the most useful useless thing I ever learned.
Yerxa: Did you have an attraction to history growing up?
Yes, I had an attraction to history and to literature early in my life. I was a voracious reader. I read some great Hungarian writers, who are not very well known abroad.
Giberson: How did you come to America?
Well, it is there in my Confessions of an Original Sinner. Hungary was not communized right after the war, but I saw that it was coming. I did some work for the British and American missions in Budapest, so it was easier for me to leave Hungary than for most people.
Yerxa: How do you see yourself now in relation to Europe and the United States?
I was about fifty years old when I suddenly found the proper formula for this: Europe is my mother; America is my wife. I come, of course, from Hungary, but it had never occurred to me that I was a European. Let me illustrate with a story that has a social element to it. In 1950, about four years after my arrival in the United States, I was invited to a dinner party. I overheard my hostess talking on the telephone to a friend: "We are having a European for dinner." For Americans, I was not a Hungarian-American or an Italian-American, but something else. And I recognized for the first time, "Gee, I am a European."
Giberson: You give the Christian doctrine of Original Sin a central place in your work and world-view. How do you react to recent developments wherein evolutionary psychology has intruded into the theological space occupied by the doctrine of Original Sin? Theorists in this field are suggesting that our sinful nature is really our "selfish nature" as evolution preferentially preserved behaviors that tended to secure the passage of one's genes into the next generation.
I am an anti-Darwinian, and one of the reasons for this is that I believe that the only evolution is the evolution of consciousness. There is an increasing intrusion of mind into matter. I have been much influenced by the work of Owen Barfield. He was a friend of C. S. Lewis, and Barfield and I became good friends. Barfield reminded me that mind precedes matter. And I believe that mind actually creates matter.
Darwinism itself was part of the evolution of consciousness. It was part of the religion of progress. It didn't take a particularly great mind to see that there is more in common between men and apes than men and minnows. To make this into an entire system of progress was actually predictable. Darwin was very much a man of his time. Yet, even if you are not a Christian, you must believe that no matter how small, there is a fundamental difference between human beings and all other living beings. If you don't believe this, then out goes all morality. Why is incest wrong? Why is cannibalism wrong?
Let me make a daring claim. Our very view of reality, of the universe, is nothing else but a part of history. Our view of the universe is nothing more and nothing less than our view of the universe. We are not just part of the universe outside of us. We have invented the universe. We are in the center of it.
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