Stones in the road: M. Scott Peck's travels

Christian Century, Nov 22, 1995 by Wayne G. Boulton

By M. Scott Peck. Hyperion, 442 pp., $22.95.

SCOTT PECK loves storms. While on the Isle of Skye off the west coast of Scotland, he wanders along a pier at a ferry landing site and watches a gale approach, hoping that the winds will get even stronger and that his two-hour crossing to the Outer Hebrides will be dramatically stormy. In the midst of high winds, he feels part of something larger than himself. "Frankly, I feel in touch with God."

Some readers are drawn to Peck by his obvious gifts as a writer and as a storyteller, but many more feel the force of his intellectual courage and honesty. He has become one of the best-known authors in America, largely on the strength of a single book. The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (1978) is in its 11th year on the New York Times best-seller list. In Search of Stones is the most recent of ten books, all of which traverse the boundary between religion and psychology.

At age 15 Peck defied his parents' fondest expectations and quit Exeter, a prestigious prep school, because he was bored by the inanities of WASP prep school conversation and culture. He suspected that he was suffocating in the ethos and that he would die in the culture for which it was preparing him. So he dropped out.

Peck became a trained psychiatrist, but never re-entered the world of conventional academic thinking and scholarship. Instead, he sees himself as an "evangelist of integration," particularly with respect to the merging of religion and psychology. He has never been comfortable within the confines of a single academic discipline, and compares himself with Buckminster Fuller, who ascribed his intellectual success as a generalist to a childhood handicap. Being nearsighted, Fuller became accustomed to understanding the world through its large patterns; he couldn't see the details. "My deficiencies as a scholar," Peck writes, prevent me from becoming lost in the details."

In Search of Stones is based on the diary of Peck's 21-day excursion with his wife, Lily, through Britain and their search for ancient stone monoliths. In it he reveals much about himself. His candid revelations give a new, unsettling perspective to his basic message--that "growing out of narcissism is what life is all about." They also tell us much about the culture that celebrates him--revelations and all--and renew our appreciation for the Christian theological base that is missing from Peck's work.

In the brilliant finale to The Road Less Traveled, Peck subjected the often Pelagian enclave of psychotherapy to a theocentric critique in the name of "grace," then constructed a synthesis between theology and psychotherapy. Seventeen years later, with the publication of Stones, the synthesis is unraveling.

In Road, Peck dismantled one of the most powerful of contemporary gods: romantic love. He announced that it is a temporary phenomenon and that its demise within the context of any marriage of significant length is universal. He called it a surrogate for the love of God. Though the most powerful and commonly sought-after of such substitutes, it is of this world. It feels like a bit of heaven, but it never lasts. It can't live up to its promises. It always fails.

Now, in a Stones chapter titled "Romance," Peck tells us more about his view of love. During a dry period in his marriage with Lily, he responded to the limits of romantic love with sexual infidelities. "I believe I owe my readers at least a minimum modicum of honesty and realism," he writes. He regrets some of his affairs deeply, and apologizes for some of them, though not all. In romance, Peck believes, there is an element of adventure that always involves a degree of danger. He claims that "it is only from adventures and their newness that we can learn." From some of the affairs, he adds, "I have learned much and hope I gave as much as I got." Thus he refuses to condemn "utterly" his own infidelities.

At this point we get more bravery than candor from Peck. He struggles to get his mind around a slippery issue, without much help from Christian theology or from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Suddenly the "evangelist of integration" appears to be like the rest of us: more perceptive about others' fantasies than about his own. What is love exactly? What is its relation to sin? As Kierkegaard once said of our efforts to grasp evil apart from revelation, Peck is trying to see his own eyeball without a mirror.

What might be a Christian reaction to these revelations? Should we not become suspicious when the language of heroism, adventure and learning is applied to extramarital affairs, particularly to one's own? (Lilys "adventures" were limited to forays into science and fantasy fiction.) Are we perhaps reading a commentary on his claim in Road that all psychotherapy should be "genuinely loving"? (To be fair, Peck has said that he would now delete the section in Road on having sex with patients.) Only time will tell whether Peck's readers will grant his wish that he "graciously" be allowed to stand "unmolested."