action would prove, as it turned out, vivid enough to shift my perspective from simply using to more total responding: if you find something important, be open to transformation by it. Martin Buber’s penetrating distinction between I-it and I-thou relationships in every area of life had not yet hit me with the revealing force it later brought—though my Chicago classmate and friend, Maurice Friedman, was beginning a lifetime of setting forth Buber’s ideas.3
But on some of the June nights when I walked across the ample Midway to my post, gazing at the stars, I wondered whether we might be seeing in Cayce much more than better methods of social engineering. He might be part of a noiseless flame of unguessed goodness, shooting out from the center of war-tortured humanity to answer the thudding bombs, the goose-stepping troops, the wailing of swiftly orphaned children. Under the eternal night skies patiently bearing their witness to order, it seemed possible that the collapse of my world into hate and conquest, concentration camps and strident slogans, might awaken some awesome answering current deep within us all. Cayce might belong to the future, when procedures as dazzlingly simple as his might free a great campus such as ours to give full attention to hunger, illness, bigotry, illiteracy, and urban blight. With such aid, even the lowliest among us might help to create music, inventions, or imaginative schools.
Chicago’s Doubts, Yet Discipline
How could he be real?
Nobody on Chicago’s faculty had knowledge or even interest to contribute about him, though a university was by definition committed to study of the universe. I went one day to the bachelor quarters of a professor who had just taught a brilliant course in the Gospel of Mark, gleaming with all the unsolved riddles about Jesus that modern scholarship had posed. What if, I asked him cautiously, we could directly inspect New Testament events of the far past through a trance state such as Cayce’s? His response was withering, made more icy by his personal courtliness.
His colleague in the psychology department, for whom I had just written a research paper on creativity in music, had a comparably disparaging response. Cayce was doubtless a medium, and researchers had exploded that fraud. I knew the category he was using, having read some years before the proceedings of a symposium held at Clark University in Massachusetts (the same campus which first brought Freud and Jung to this country), entitled The Case for and Against Psychical Belief. At that meeting had been a young researcher named Gardner Murphy, destined years later to become the dean of American psychologists and the most respected spokesperson for psychical research.4 Also with him were two biologists, Joseph and Louisa Rhine, who had graduated from our own Chicago campus. They were building a reputation for their research at Duke University in the field they renamed as parapsychology.5 (Not until much later did I discover that by 1943 they had already sought experimental aid from Cayce for their daughter, and had been interested enough to send a psychologist, Lucien Warner, from their staff to interview and observe Cayce in action. Dr. Warner would report to me years afterward how he had been so impressed that he stayed not the day he planned but a week, getting Cayce’s trance counsel for every member of his family.)
Cayce’s biographer reported that he vigorously denied being a medium, refusing to entertain messages from the dead and insisting on following a procedure that essentially let him go out to inspect for himself what he needed to know, by a combination of clairvoyance and what seemed to him religious guidance or inspiration. There were in fact solid psychologists who had already investigated him, from Harvard and elsewhere, though none had written him up. If the biographer were correct, no qualified professional scientist had ever investigated Cayce and charged him with error, delusion, or fraud.
How could the proper authorities have missed studying him in depth? Part of modernity was the conviction that science would sooner or later explore every worthwhile lead in the major disciplines. Of course, science was a social institution, subject to pressures of career, money, and respectability. But Cayce represented something, in biblical language, “not done in a corner,” for over four decades. Only my years of banging away at social change helped me to look a little further. It was not difficult to picture responsible social leaders being wrong about political and economic issues. Why should not those of comparable stature in psychology or religion also make mistakes in judgment?
Where should one begin? What would provide entry to Cayce’s world?
One possible avenue was the history of religions, the comparative study of traditions and practices of East and West, ancient and modern. There the rich array of oracles, sibyls, seers, healers, prophets, wonder-workers, and primitive shaman figures might well have types that resembled Cayce enough to help separate usable facts from hasty guesses about him. But my professor of World Religions dismissed them all as victims of “overbeliefs.”
Cayce saw his gifts in the framework of those promised in the Bible, which he had read through once for every year of his life. By now he had almost entirely memorized it (an unheard-of accomplishment in my world of university biblical scholars), in part through his peculiar gift, and in part through teaching it in church school ever since his youth. For him it was the best ultimate background for grasping what was happening in his unusual state. Trying to imagine his viewpoint, I went more than once to the Oriental Institute, just a block from my graduate house, to stand surrounded by artifacts from the Near East. As I wandered through the cool halls with their mute but eloquent displays, ancient Israel, Assyria, Egypt, and Persia stood before me in full dignity, summoned by the stone carvings, the jewelry, the pots and amulets, the mummies, and the figures of the gods. Models of temples and dwellings were arrayed with figurines of horses and chariots. There were javelins like those I had thrown so long in track and field events. On each visit I asked myself whether the people of those times and places had known something which Cayce had discovered again but the rest of us had lost.
There was no reason to think so in my courses on the Bible, where unusual gifts of prophecy or healing were uniformly explained away as mistaken perceptions from a superstitious age when “the sky hung low.”6 There were no miracles or useful trances in the world of the University of Chicago Divinity School; the biblical legacy came without a parted Red, or Reed, Sea or fallen Jericho walls, and certainly without a virgin birth or an empty tomb. The only unusual perception was essentially moral and theological insight. Not arrogance but honest conviction and disciplined scholarship lay behind this position, seen in the writings of gifted theologians such as the existentialist Rudolf Bultmann (whom I came to know well in later years when I brought him to teach in the religion department at Syracuse University, where I held a chair).7 But as though to make up for affronting tradition by discarding so much of scriptural content, the Chicago Divinity School turned intently to facts and empirical inquiry. Its building was next to that of the department of sociology on campus, and more than a few mused that the methods of the two were interchangeable. The model was to inquire, inspect, and analyze—not just to speculate. Surely, this was what the Cayce phenomenon required.
Chicago was the university which took on the discipline in every department of humbling itself before any reality to learn its secrets—even before the unseen atom. What it offered to study Cayce was most of all the attentive empiricism which made the university stand tall on the Midwestern prairies. The school had as yet no history of great formative minds such as had graced European and New England campuses for centuries. John Dewey was no Kant, and Thorstein Veblen no Max Weber. Nor was Chicago rich in literature and the arts, except in criticism. But it was carefully, even ruthlessly determined to be taught by the data at hand, in every field of academic life. That was the reason for the parade of Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry, as well as in economics, that had made (and would continue to make) the university great.
Yet when I stood in the quiet halls of the Oriental Institute, it was not at all clear how to reduce Cayce’s service to inspectable, manipulable circuits of his psyche. In those corridors it seemed that Cayce might lead to encounters with an active, loving Agent that could use ordinary shepherds or
