That was on Saturday.

On the following Thursday, the largest room in Emerson Hall was nearly filled to capacity. There had been standing room only earlier in the year.

From high on his platform in front of us, the voice of the theologian rose and fell in a slow, hypnotic monotone.

"...Ze problem to vich all true philozophy must give an answer is ze question, 'Vat is ze meaning of Being as Zuch?' Or, in other vurds, 'Vy is there zomthing instead of nodthing?'"

In row upon row, people leaned forward to catch every word, feverishly scribbling in their notebooks. The mesmerizing drone of the theologian lifted them, trance-like, beyond the everyday world of corporeal men and concrete things. It carried them high, high into the tenuous stratosphere of abstraction, where the earth below could be glimpsed only briefly and dimly, as the ponderous metaphysical clouds parted for a moment, then coalesced in still thicker obscurity. Through the shadowy haze, however, they could sense the mammoth struggles that the voice affirmed were raging all around them. From far off they could sometimes catch the sound of the straining ontological tensions: the grunts and heaves of Destiny striving with Freedom, of Dynamics with Form, of Essence with Existence, and Boundlessness with Finitude.

For a chilling moment, they hovered over the black, terrifying abyss of Utter Non-Being; for a thrilling second, all were ultimately concerned.

The bewildered frowns dissolved into warm smiles, however, and the room burst into applause as the theologian uttered his last words. Chatting happily, the audience moved up the aisles and out the narrow doorway into the hall.

"I'm so glad you came," my friend of last Saturday said, pressing over to me through the crowd. "He really had them today, didn't he? That mystery of non-being always gets 'em. You see what I mean about God, now, don't you? No one thing, but the ground of it all. Sheer transcendence itself."

He pulled out his pipe and mentioned the theologian as he struck a match. "Fabulous, isn't he? Depth psychology, symbolic meaning, Hegelian dialectic, expressionist art, existentialism, and all twentieth-century: complex, bold, systematic...Everything."