I was delighted to read the story about E. Harris Harbison 1928 in the Princeton Portrait section of PAW for June 2025. I was a student in Harbison’s “Ren and Ref” course in the fall 1962, and I was even in his precept. This may well have been the last time he taught us undergraduates. He was visibly ill and lectured sitting.
Harbison was also a playwright of sorts. At our last class he read us a short play he had written. Luther, Calvin, and Loyola were being tried in a heavenly court for the crime of shattering the “medieval synthesis of faith and reason.” The prosecuting attorney was Dante. I don’t remember the outcome, but I do remember this. At one point Loyola yells “ad majorem Dei gloriam,” and Calvin yells back, “That’s heresy. God is perfect, and perfection cannot be increased.” There was more in this vein. At the end of the class, we all were eating out of his hand, and we gave him a rousing hand of applause. It was richly deserved.
I was delighted to read the story about E. Harris Harbison 1928 in the Princeton Portrait section of PAW for June 2025. I was a student in Harbison’s “Ren and Ref” course in the fall 1962, and I was even in his precept. This may well have been the last time he taught us undergraduates. He was visibly ill and lectured sitting.
Harbison was also a playwright of sorts. At our last class he read us a short play he had written. Luther, Calvin, and Loyola were being tried in a heavenly court for the crime of shattering the “medieval synthesis of faith and reason.” The prosecuting attorney was Dante. I don’t remember the outcome, but I do remember this. At one point Loyola yells “ad majorem Dei gloriam,” and Calvin yells back, “That’s heresy. God is perfect, and perfection cannot be increased.” There was more in this vein. At the end of the class, we all were eating out of his hand, and we gave him a rousing hand of applause. It was richly deserved.