The Making Of A Remarkable Mind

In Memoriam: John Edward Alvis

In Dec. 23, 2019, the university bid farewell to a beloved faculty member and alumnus. Professor of English John Alvis, BA ’66 MA ’69 PhD ’73, passed away at age 75, less than two weeks after the passing of his wife, Sara Kathleen, MA ’71, to whom he was married for more than 50 years.

John Alvis arrived at UD as a freshman in 1962 in the time of UD legends, studying under Professor of English Louise Cowan during the tenure of President Donald Cowan (1962-77). He then did his master’s and doctoral work under Professor of Politics Willmore Kendall and began teaching at UD in 1968. Though he taught English literature, he had an equal command of politics, philosophy, theology and classical languages, guiding and inspiring five decades’ worth of students and colleagues, some of whom, such as Associate Professor of English Greg Roper, Ph.D., BA ’84, became both.

“By the end of my freshman year, on my Lit Trad II research paper, he wrote one sentence: ‘You are ready to begin writing English prose,’” recalled Roper. “That response — encouraging but not flattering, acknowledging accomplishment while hinting strongly at how far I still had to go — probably was the single most influential sentence of my intellectual career. Someday I hope to write the English prose that John held out for me as a goal that day in April 1981.”

In his own English prose, Alvis published seven books on authors ranging from Homer and Vergil to Melville and Hawthorne. He additionally published articles on American political institutions, Christian theology, the films of John Ford and Lorenzo Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise” (the doors of the Baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence). A published poet, he also wrote more than 15 plays. A nationally renowned scholar of the works of William Shakespeare, his writings reawakened the study of Shakespeare’s political thought.

Alvis’ approach to great literature was to examine how authors use fiction and poetry to explore the eternal questions in regard to the best way of life and the best order of society. He believed that those who seriously study these monumental works witness the aspect of all times, thereby learning to imitate what is good while avoiding that which is otherwise. To Alvis, a liberal education was more than a four-year experience; it was the beginning of a lifelong journey.

“John Alvis spent over 50 years at UD making a remarkable mind,” said Professor of English Scott Crider, Ph.D. “He read and thought about the entirety of the Western tradition and trained — first under his teachers, then under his own tutelage and in dialogue with students and colleagues — to dedicate himself to the wisdom of that tradition of texts. He had the most comprehensive, detailed and intelligent grasp of that tradition of any of us, a grasp always alive and fresh with new insight during discussion and writing.” Alvis devoted his career, and largely his life, to his vocation of teaching at the University of Dallas and to promoting the pursuit of truth and virtue.

“We have lost the treasure of John’s mind,” said Crider. “Our disorientation at the loss is matched only by our gratitude at the gift of the mind he made, then gave us. If we now live in a less heroic age at UD than before, his example indicates that we will be responsible for that, for he showed us how to be intellectually courageous while morally upright.”

These are excerpts from the speech Alvis delivered at the King/Haggar Awards ceremony on Feb. 17, 1989, the year after he received the King Award, as was and remains the custom.

By John Alvis, Ph.D. Edited by Thomas S. Hibbs, Ph.D.

On the most essential issues, those of human and divine character and of human destiny, surely a Catholic school must hold that somehow one begins and ends with the authorized Catholic teaching. One begins with Catholicism and ends with Catholicism whatever the gradualism fairness requires during the interval between beginning and end. To speak practically, a Catholic profession decided in advance of the argument means that first, one does not take up Aristotle’s Ethics with the thought that he may speak the last, nor even the decisive, word on the subject, and that, second, one expects in due course, sooner or later, to adjust Aristotle’s teaching in the light of a fuller truth apprehended through Catholic doctrine. You may well ask, “Why then study Aristotle at all?” A good question that deserves honest confrontation, especially since the general form of the question might be to state thus: Isn’t a properly Catholic curriculum one in which non-Catholic pronouncements, if read at all, are ranged under the sole authoritative statement, which must be the Catholic statement? Perhaps you share my understanding that the Catholic intellectual tradition distinguishes itself from the thinking of most other Christian churches by its emphasis upon the continuity of the order of nature with the order of grace. Catholicism insists that grace perfects nature in accord with principles consistent with nature, in accord, that is, with principles that nature itself, if fully instructed, could herself well understand — as though nature could discern its incompleteness and the general direction in which completeness might be sought but not the plan nor the means which would bring that completion actually to be. Both the plan and the means are known as God’s grace and by God’s grace. But to grasp the extent of that graciousness, it may be one must come to understand what grace operates upon and what rudimentary goodness it brings to full fruition. So, in brief, one must thoroughly understand the natural to arrive at an understanding of the supernatural as distinct from merely faith in the supernatural. It may be that some thinkers whose horizons are wholly confined to the natural understanding of that realm are better than their Catholic counterparts, who know more in terms of ultimate finality but know less well what lies this side of the ultimate disposition. If that is so, then non-Catholics may have something important to teach Catholics. And we may even say they can teach Catholics something important about Catholicism. For if one seeks to understand what it means to say that grace perfects nature, one improves one’s understanding in the degree that one better understands nature, just as certainly as one improves one’s understanding in the degree that one better understands the agency of grace. For that reason, then, precisely as Catholics we may do better to maintain a faculty and a curriculum somewhat keyed to great authors pagan and secular, as well as to authors Catholic, than to prefer teachers and authors less than the best just because they are Catholic, or worse, pretend teachers of books of a second order are great when in fact they are only Catholic. For similar reasons we should not suppose that our teachers though they profess Catholicism are as custodians of Great Books wiser than the books in their custody. True, they know something beyond the non-Catholic, but they may also have forgotten or never have known what can be seen by nature’s light and in that degree of ignorance will fail to grasp truth essential to the faith.

Alexander R. Landi, PhD '73, William V. Myres, PhD '73, and Alvis after receiving their doctorates.

Read more at udallas.edu/essential-truth.