Martin Gardner, 1914-2010 R.I.P.
That represents one side of Gardner’s intellectual activity, the disabused, skeptical side. Another side is on view in many of his essays on philosophy and religion. In The Night is Large, a compendious collection of essays from 1938-1995, Gardner included sections on the physical and social sciences, pseudoscience, mathematics, the arts, philosophy and, finally, religion. In the last essay, “Surprise,” he describes his own position as “philosophical theist.” Commenting on the deep religious faith of the mathematician Georg Cantor, Gardner writes that
It is because I, too, believe in this “wholly other” realm, a realm in which our universe is an infinitesimal island, that I can call myself a mystic in the Platonic sense.
Gardner went on to acknowledge that he was not “arguing a case but only expressing an emotion.”
It has no agreed-upon name. There is no way you can talk someone into feeling it, any more than you can talk someone into falling in love or liking a piece of music or a type of cheese. Rudolf Otto, the German Protestant theologian, coined the word numinous (from the Latin numen, meaning divine power ) to express this emotion. . . . For Otto, the essence of the emotion is an awareness of what he called the mysterium tremendum, the tremendous mystery of the wholly other. . . .
If one is a theist, the emotion combines with strong feelings of humility, of the littleness of one’s self, of holiness, of gratitude for the privilege of existing.
My last correspondence with Gardner was just a month or so ago. I wrote to tell him about the coincidence that a good friend now occupies the house he lived in for decades on Euclid Avenue (how’s that for an appropriate name?) in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. I discovered this quite by accident. My wife and I were having dinner with a few other people at our friends’ house. I can’t remember Gardner’s name came up, but when it did I mentioned that he had lived for many years in Hastings-on-Hudson. “Yes,” said my friend, “and he lived in this very house.” One of the other couples present also knew Gardner. They recalled the time he invited them, shortly after they had moved to the neighborhood, to his house for drinks. Would it be alright if they brought their young children along, since no baby-sitter was available? Of course, nothing could be more agreeable! They arrived and Gardner proceeded to entertain the children with magic tricks for two hours.
It was some years ago now that I noticed on one of Gardner’s books that he was born in the fateful year 1914. “Gosh, that’s a long time ago!” I thought. It is even longer ago now, of course, but then it is an oft-noted fact that one’s sense of time compresses as one ages. At twenty, sixty years seems a very long time. At fifty, it no longer seems quite so extensive. And of course sub specie aeternitas, which view we can never inhabit but only allude to, such puny spans of time are as nothing. A thought which tends, I believe, to nurture that sense of “ontological wonder” Martin Gardner so eloquently evoked.
Requiescat in pace.
I’m sorry to hear of the passing of Gardner. I’m also curious to see what he has to say about “Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs & the Rise of Modern Mathematics” because the editorial reviews at Amazon are ludicrous, unbelievably so. Typo alert, it is “Dawn”, not “Down”.
He had enough material for a second annotation of “Alice” and it is well worth finding.For that matter, anything by Gardner is well worth finding. I wouldn’t attempt to add to Roger’s tribute.
Great tribute! Never read his work. Know I want to.
Thank You
Three points:
1). I dislike the euphemism “passed away” for “died”, but in Gardner’s case, having lived to 95 in a life full of achievement and fun, perhaps it’s appropriate, for once. He certainly had his time, and used it very well.
2). Plato said that one cannot be called happy until they die, otherwise some disaster can always strike. If that is so, now we can say Gardner was happy.
3). About Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”. Claiming Keats said that is my second-least-favorite literary blunder, right after #1, the claim that Juliet, saying “wherefore art thou Romeo”, is looking for him (“Wherefore” mean “why”, not “where” — she’s asking him, or fate, why he had to be a Montague while she’s a Capulet.)
As W. H. Auden pointed out, Keats never said anything of the kind. It’s the GRECIAN URN that says “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — and from the poem it is quite clear Keats strongly disagrees with that sentiment, seeing it a an unfeeling, cold response to life!
“Passed away” is appropriate in Gardner’s case, because, you might be surprised to learn, Gardner was a “philosophical theist”. Which is to say, he was not an atheist; he believed in God and an afterlife.
Perhaps, Skeptic, a suitable replacement euphemism, one Gardner would have surely approved of, is “handed in his dinner pail.”
That’s from a poem by Wodehouse, about a goat (“so fine and frail”) who took a slug betwixt the horns.
Thank you for writing that fine appreciation.
Having been brought up and lived as a young man as a mathematician and physicist, Martin Gardner’s almost universal influence on myself and my peers’ childhood was too obvious and trite to be even worth much mentioning amongst us. Only with the tributes pouring in now does one realize that he was–as he deserved–almost as appreciated by those in the other of the Two Cultures, as he was in ours.
I never met Martin Gardner,but I first learned of him when I read, at the age of about 14, his “Fads and Fallacies in the name of Science”, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
About 1980, I met James Randi, who told me that Martin Gardner drove the paranormalists crazy: he had no academic position for them to undermine.
Gardner was a man of expansive curiosity and equally as expansive intellectual and spiritual depth. Although you did not mention this particular work his “The Flight of Peter Fromm” is as poignant and “dead on” a rendering of an individual struggle with faith and reason as I’ve ever read. I was given the book to read before embarking upon a graduate degree in theology and it’s pages have periodically informed my intellectual, spiritual and theological journey ever since. I almost now reflexively recall some part of Martin’s own journey whenever I come upon a passage in Tillich or Barth that stirs the now long-slumbering fundamentalist in me.
The good he did lives beyond him. Thank God somebody debunked that pernicious “Secret” book. It’s a slap in the face to anyone who has been dragged all unwilling into the underworld of tragedy.
Whoever said “only the good die young” was not thinking of Martin Gardner. A good eulogy on a good life. I need to finish reading some of his books on my bookshelf.
All I can add are murmured ‘Hear, hear’ and ‘Amen’.