Love (and Learning) in the Ruins

The news is chockful of campus protests, commencement walk-outs, devastated libraries, and shouting matches on the college lawns that traditionally represent solemn respites from exterior storms, where students read, ponder, and serenely stroll to their next classroom. I am a college professor in an era of change and upheaval. On placid days, I hear “Semper reformanda (always reforming)”; on less placid days, it is “Overthrow [insert whatever group is presently disdained].”

Amid the loudness, perhaps a whisper from the corner might be heard by those who still values the Liberal Arts, a paradigm invented by the Church and intended to prepare minds to assess and engage eras like our own. The Liberal Arts do not call for the educated to retreat from difficult issues, but to form minds for self-possessed and more effective modes of assessment and engagement. Here is my whisper from the corner.

I begin with a line from Walker Percy’s post-apocalyptic 1971 novel Love in the Ruins:

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ- haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

Percy, in both his fiction and non-fiction, wrote that the world—though not bad in itself—is corrupting and decaying. He was not a fatalist, but like his admired intellectual heroes—Guardini, Tolkien, Lewis, Solzhenitsyn—he concluded that Western culture has been corrupted by temptation and transgression. In the novel, Dr. Thomas More—a descendant of Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia—lives as a psychiatrist in a small Louisiana town incongruously called “Paradise.” The U.S. becomes progressively more fragmented, and society evolves into a maelstrom of extremes. Only Dr. More notices the breakdown, and even he, a lapsed Roman Catholic womanizer and alcoholic, falls into the collective collapse.

Pondering this eschatological scenario, which was presented in strong terms in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (City of God), I cannot help but think that Percy was either wrong in his assumptions and was delirious, or he was largely correct and the world is indeed dissolving under the weight of its corruption. Either way, as Percy suggests, the results are not pleasant, and the world he describes in Love in the Ruins–our world today, in so man ways–mostly continues to live as an unwittingly victim to its own decline. Percy writes of people abandoning their broken and dilapidated cars as if that was the normal state of automobiles. Like Aristotle, he insists that real knowledge and truth free us from both naïve optimism and benighted ignorance. So, what we teach our students in a collapsing world matters because knowledge, as classical learning has timelessly upheld, liberates through recourse to the truth. As Milton intoned: “The better fight, who singly has maintained against revolted multitudes the cause of truth, in word mightier than they in arms.”

Pedagogy is less effective and less intellectually nourishing than it was previously, when it was structured around the classics—called “classics” because they are timeless, and because they access the human spirit. We seek employment rather than betterment, and facts rather than wisdom. In his trenchant collection Come to Think of It, G. K. Chesterton stated that those who advocate only facts and only practical matters in education do not actually understand what a fact is: “Facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is spirit.” A classical education, if properly classical, is more concerned with the Permanent Things than those other things that pass away, such as jobs, salaries, entertainments, and even universities.

Percy once noted that many people “make straight As and still flunk ordinary living.” The general education curriculum at an authentic university must prepare students for the realities of living, as a refined and liberally educated person, in a world that is often inimical to the way educated persons are called to live. While many current curricula do make us nicer people, they do not usually make us more intelligent people. For that we must read the thinkers whose thoughts were directed toward making us better thinkers: Socrates, Sapho, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius, Augustine, Averroes, Nagarjuna, Aquinas, Teresa of Avilla, Hilegard of Bingen, Shakespeare, and others. (And we should remember that excerpts are not enough; anthologies give a false confidence in knowing what these persons teach but without taking the required time to properly digest their ideas.)

I imagine a more radical shift in university curricula than do many of my contemporaries. If I was Tsar of general education curricula, I would insist on a return to the classical education modern pedagogues have jettisoned in favor of the trendy activist pedagogy. Yes, let us retain new insights we have gained since the so-called “Enlightenment,” but let us also revisit what Socrates had to say about the life of the mind and soul before he was charged to drink hemlock and die for being too much of an irritant to those who fear the life of the mind. I have rarely read anything more summoning to the human condition than works published one, two, and three millennia ago.

So, we are perhaps in the ruins of Western society–and some prefer the ruins to the palaces that have been demolished–but the classical Liberal Arts are a paradigm of hope. In the Vulgate version of Paul’s letter to the Romans, we read: “Spe salvi facti sumus,” or “in hope we were liberated.” All this being said, some universities are doing quite well in promulgating a Liberal Arts education, though, a better understanding of what that is, precisely, is needed. Here in the United States, for example, glossy brochures often hawk the splendors of the Liberal Arts while failing to define exactly what they are.

This term is not just a loose idea that can be applied to any course of study. The Liberal Arts are a craft, which should be learned before, or in addition to non-Liberal Arts disciplines. The very concept of the Liberal Arts derives from the Medieval notion of artes liberalis; these include seven liberal arts appropriate for a free person. “Liber’ means “free,” or even to “make free.” The seven atres liberalis exist in vital contrast to the artes mechanicae, which are courses of study pursued for economic purposes. These non- Liberal Arts courses of study are the “vocational and practical arts,” as Professor Mark W. Roche, author of Why Choose the Liberal Arts?, describes them. Thus, the more a university dedicates itself to these “vocational and practical arts,” the further it moves away from the Liberal Arts. The Liberal Arts include the Trivium and Quadrivium: the first three subjects being language (grammar), oratory (rhetoric), and logic (dialectic); and the final four are geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. For the academic or ecclesiastic of the Medieval era, it was after learning the seven Liberal Arts that one undertook the “mother of all learning”–theology.

My radical recommendation, then, is that universities more accurately and truthfully identify what the Liberal Arts are, and also begin a process of teaching a general education curriculum that more accurately bears an organic connection to these seven areas of study. Now, it is fine to disagree with Walker Percy, or Aristotle, or me, but we can only intelligently disagree with what we thoroughly know. To restate the famous motto of the Enlightenment: “Sapare aude!” – “Dare to know!” What if our general education courses more closely followed the Liberal Arts ideal? What might a more classical education curriculum look like? And finally, does our current general curriculum already satisfy the requirements of an authentic Liberal Arts education?

I’ll answer the last question first. No, I do not think that the predominance of university curricula fulfills the conditions of a Liberal Arts education. Curricula are more often ways of indoctrination than open-minded learning that deeply challenges and liberates the mind. I suggest a more exhaustive investigation into the ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. By this I do not mean the small gulps of short readings that students sometimes receive in our general education curricula. I recommend actually imbibing these important thinkers in large glasses. Socrates, for example, provides a way to consider the seemingly haphazard movement of change in our current society, defining proper progress, as Samuel Stumpf puts it, as the product of “universal Reason (logos).” Haraclitus saw this Reason as “the unity and order of all things.” The key word here is “order”; the difference between chaotic change and reasoned progress is order.

In our list of works to slowly drink in and digest must be Aristotle, for he trains the mind to separate conclusions based on uninformed feelings from those based on verifiable evidence. When introducing his work on rhetoric, or oratory, Aristotle describes modes of persuasion: persuasion “based on the character of the speaker” and persuasion “by putting the audience into a certain frame of mind.” These two are trite and temporary, and appeal only to the passing fancies of human feeling. But the third form of persuasion Aristotle suggests is based “on proof.” General education courses will generate better and more persuasive writers if students read more Aristotle and excised the words “I feel” from their academic papers.

But in the end, the most salutary aspect of an education based on an authentic Liberal Arts model is that it centers on what Fr. James Schall, SJ, called “the ultimate meaning of existence.” The most penetrating question a person can ask of oneself, Schall suggests, is: “Why do I exist?”

Two assertions underscore the importance of an authentic Liberal Arts curriculum in a university. First, as philosopher Josef Pieper wrote:

It might well be that at the end of history the only people who will examine and ponder the root of all things and the meaning of existence – i.e., the specific object of philosophical speculation – will be those with the eyes of mystery.

In this declining culture, mystery is being replaced with a concern more for material pleasure than the lasting pleasure of the Permanent Things. I do not mean to be pugnacious here, but of my non-classicist colleagues, friends, and family members, few are comfortable discussing virtue and eternity without discomfort or annoyance. This dislike derives perhaps from the very fact that classicists seek the lasting pleasure of truth rather than the ephemeral pleasure of what is trendy, or short- lived. And on this subject, Walker Percy sees that the world would rather evade reality than face it.

Second, Chesterton was quite pessimistic about the direction of the intellectual community at the advent of the twentieth century:

The great march of mental destruction goes on. Everything will be denied. . . . We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be those who have seen and yet believed.

It is precisely the clarity of classical learning that will help us preserve our sanity and our sense of reality, especially as the intellectual community around us grows more distant from truth and certainty, which are not subject to the whims of human desire. Percy’s works describe how eye-opening a liberally educated life can be our modern world, and what we assign in our classrooms can, if we are purposeful, function to help us think more critically about the overwhelming pressures placed upon us by modernity.

We are called to become free from the captivity of witlessness, to attain the liberation of authentic learning. A curriculum firmly rooted in these disciplines does not merely expose us to ideas, but rather propels us toward examples of the persons who inspired and nourished the Liberal Arts. The classics, even the salutary disquisitions of mystery, are effective and essential means of knowing and practicing love in the ruins of our collapsing world.

Catholic World Report