In memoriam: John B. Cobb, Jr., 1925-2024
We recently lost our great, dear John Cobb, right after Christmas and before the fires. He was only a few weeks away from his hundredth birthday, February 9.
John B. Cobb, Jr. was Founding Chair of Pando Populus. He was the world’s leading this, the first to write about that, the pioneering figure who… His firsts alone in small, single-spaced type are enough to overfill an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper, each first listed one after another. I talked with him about his long list of accomplishments once and he said, “Well, by the time you get to be my age, you’re going to be the leading something or other in some category simply because you will have outlived everybody else!” The humility was John, as was the humor. But if anyone deserves to be thought of in the category of the great and the good, it is he.
I first met him in 1981 when I enrolled in a Claremont Graduate School course on the Nicene Creed, which in the hands of John changed my life. John lectured in an old fashioned way, behind a lectern with an open lecture book in a style that’s forgotten by most professors today, but I never learned as much from a course before or since. He taught me that there’s nothing wrong with a lecture from the front so long as the lecturer is worth listening to. That’s the rub, having something truly important and interesting to say. And John always did.
When I asked him one time how he wanted me to introduce him professionally — as a professor, philosopher, or theologian; a leader in interfaith dialogue, especially Christian-Buddhist; an environmental activist, or peace activist; the author or co-author of 50-plus books, including seminal ones in fields outside of standard philosophy or theology such as economics and biology, or perhaps some other way still, he said to use, “philosophical theologian,” and it would take it all in. He was the leading figure internationally in the philosophical tradition of Alfred North Whitehead and for Whitehead, as for John, “religion” was best defined as “world loyalty.” He took an old-fashioned approach to philosophy, reflected in his broad commitment to thinking about and attempting to understand the world. For John, theology included the theology of agriculture, the theology of ecology, the theology of economics, and more. And in his theology, he showed his commitment to the whole of life — not just privileged parts of it, but extending even to the parts you cannot see. If we were all blind, John once said, he thought we’d have a far more accurate understanding of reality, what with the way eyesight can get in the way of our seeing what’s really there.
I loved talking with John about ideas, but in this I was always his student. Where our relationship was more like that of colleagues was in the matter of projects. I once heard John define himself as an entrepreneur and, while surprised, I knew why — because of the astounding number of projects and organizations he initiated and had gotten off the ground. So the language between the two of us was usually the language of getting this or that project launched as it was an intersecting interest we shared with great overlap. And so it was natural that we came to found Pando Populus together, and even more natural still why Pando’s own program suite has the project-based focus that it does — intellectually grounded, to be sure, but oriented to entrepreneurial endeavors for the common good, all part of an ambition to do something to save the world. And if that didn’t work, try something else.
In that 1981 class I took from John, he finished a particularly fascinating lecture on an important and controversial subject and said: “This is the best I can do with this material at this time. Ten years from now, I hope all of us will have progressed our thinking on this subject further than I have been able to do today. And even more, when you get to be my age, I trust you will have progressed your own thinking further still. But for now, this is the best I can do.” And he closed his lecture book. With John’s passing, the experiences he left etched into the years 1925-2024 are definitive as the best he could do — and what an extraordinary “best” that is. Now it’s up to all of us, as those who come next, to give to the world the best we can offer, in his tradition.
A few years ago, John traveled with us to the Pando grove and one-tree-forest in south-central Utah that has some 47,000 trunks but is all one tree. He loved the symbolism of Pando for what it can tell us about the nature of reality. Connected at the roots, it is the largest living thing on the planet — and one of the oldest. No single Pando tree trunk will ever live more than about 150 years, but the tree itself in all its many manifestations of trunks is thousands upon thousands of years old, older than anyone knows, and for that reason has an eternal quality to it. The issue is not how long any individual Pando trunk lives. The issue is the never-ending nature of the Pando one-tree forest and rootball underground from which all trunks emerge and to which they make an everlasting contribution.
The last time I saw John alive was a few weeks before Christmas. We had a wonderful dinner together in the Claremont Village with our mutual dear friend and Pandomaniac John Buchanan, after which I took John back to his apartment and stayed for a few minutes to talk. We chatted about what was next for Pando, challenges and opportunities. When I got ready to go I sensed that he still had something on his mind. “I just love you so much,” he said, “but I’m frustrated that I can’t physically express it any better than I can.” He then stood and held out his arms as I stood, too, and he gave me a big hug. I assured him that the love was mutual, not only from me but from the whole of the Pando family. And then I left. On my drive home, I kept replaying the tape and reminding myself of what a unique and absolute treasure in John we have had and how fortunate all of us have been who have found ourselves in his ever-expanding circle of influence and love.
May those of us in the Pando family find comfort in the interconnectivity of all that is in the moment we now share, which is eternity.