Richard Curry Marius (July 29, 1933 – November 5, 1999) was an American academic and writer.
He was a scholar of the Reformation, novelist of the American South, speechwriter, and teacher of writing and English literature at Harvard University. He was widely published, leaving behind major biographies of Thomas More and Martin Luther, four novels set in his native Tennessee, several books on writing, and a host of scholarly articles for academic journals and mainstream book reviews.
Life
Marius began life on a farm in East Tennessee, evolved into a figure of 1960s campus political activism, and became a respected Reformation historian on the Harvard faculty. Through it all, he had a complicated and lifelong engagement with Christianity, wrestling with matters of faith—and its loss—both in his scholarship and his novels.
Childhood
Marius was born in Dixie Lee Junction, Tennessee, on July 29, 1933, and grew up on a farm in Loudon County, Tennessee, along with a sister and two brothers. His father was an immigrant from Greece who earned a chemical engineering degree in Belgium before settling in the United States, where he managed the foundry at the Lenoir Car Works of the Southern Railway. His mother was a former reporter for The Knoxville News-Sentinel in the 1920s and 1930s.
Religion
Marius' mother, Eunice, was a devout Southern Baptist and fundamentalist Christian whose religious faith had a particularly strong influence over him. His love of literature and poetic imagery may have been formed by her habit of reading to her children every day from the King James Version of the Bible. After Marius' older brother was born with Down syndrome, his mother told Marius how she had prayed that if her next son were born healthy, he would devote himself to Jesus. Richard Marius was born healthy.
As a young man, Marius shared his mother's fundamentalism, attending daily Christian services and carrying a Bible with him in college. He even felt a calling to be a minister, earning a divinity degree. But he grew increasingly skeptical of religion and lost his faith in his twenties, even though he devoted much of the rest of his life to studying Reformation-era Christianity. Marius later attributed his loss of faith in part to his intellectual engagement with W.T. Stace, an English-born philosopher. He was particularly affected by Stace's essay Man Against Darkness, which includes the statement that:
The problem of evil assumes the existence of a world-purpose. What, we are really asking, is the purpose of suffering? It seems purposeless. Our question of the why of evil assumes the view that the world has a purpose, and what we want to know is how suffering fits into and advances this purpose. The modern view is that suffering has no purpose because nothing that happens has any purpose: the world is run by causes, not by purposes.
His novel An Affair of Honor (2001) features a protagonist, Charles Alexander, who like Marius becomes caught between the traditional morality of his upbringing and the freethinking he encounters at the University of Tennessee and in W.T. Stace. As Marius evolved toward atheism, he developed what became a lifelong distaste for the religious right. But toward the end of his life, he began attending services again, first at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard and later at a Unitarian church.
Education
Marius earned a B.S. in journalism in 1954 from the University of Tennessee, where he first gained recognition for his writing skills. Attending college classes in the morning, he worked in the afternoons as a reporter for the Lenoir City News, writing a column called "Rambling with Richard". In 1955, he married Gail Smith. They had two children, Richard and Fred, before divorcing. Marius then enrolled in a divinity program at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary despite an increasing crisis of faith. He took a year off, spending 1956–57 in Europe as a Rotary Fellow in history at the University of Strasbourg, then returned to another Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, from which he graduated with a B.D. in 1958. Immediately afterward, he moved to New Haven, Connecticut, to begin graduate work in Reformation history at Yale University. Marius earned a M.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1962, after writing a dissertation entitled "Thomas More and the Heretics".