Introduction:
An Ideal University?
by Dr. Robert Alexander
I hope
you'll pardon me if I seem ungracious. I find myself
a little gun-shy of academics holding ideals. I've
been around them, counted myself one of them, too long.
Instead of approaching your topic in terms of an ideal,
I've decided instead to approach it in terms of what I believe
to be real. And so I've chosen to substitute the
word real in my title because I'd like it to be
understood that if a school is to be as good as it can be,
I believe that it has to be rooted in a number of intersecting
realities: it has to emerge from our own
experiences; it has to see its being as ultimately rooted
in the reality of the Trinity; and, finally, it
has to discover whether its identity is in answer to a call.
Two questions have to be asked up front: the first
is, has there been a call, and if so, what is it? And the
second, is the school prepared to accept the reality
of a mystery--the unfolding of that call over time? I believe
there has been a call. That call is Fides Et Ratio,
and for those of us in education, it is to take up the task
of reconciling faith and reason. This is our challenge,
and I take it that it is all the more urgent because it
has been given explicit form. We have all heard it.
The
difficulty of reconciling faith and reason is in some ways
the struggle of our time. Failure to take
it up, I believe, is the root cause of the secularization
of our schools--it's simply easier to begin with reason,
to make it and the power or control it gives us over things
the center of our lives. Scientific and technological
advances have so established themselves in the popular mind,
the material benefits are so obvious, the promises of reason
so great, why should anyone turn to faith? Generations
have been raised on the belief that universal education
and the cultivation of reason are natural rights and the
sure means of happiness. And the fruits of that philosophy
are understandable. Reason has given us the power
to make ourselves comfortable: it has put security
within reach (seat belts, contraception, cell-phones); it
has given us a sense of mastery over our immediate world.
Even our inner, spiritual world seems to have been brought
under control with our theories of psychology, the unconscious,
dreams. The possibilities for control seem endless.
On the
other side, faith presents religious communities with some
of their more serious problems: people are drawn to
"causes," see themselves as making great sacrifices for
the group or the common-good, "serving the community," when
in fact what they're doing is too often only serving their
own self-interest. Their faith puts their reason out
of reach of discipline. Their work suffers as a result,
and when it does, its most conspicuous characteristic is
its lack of good sense; it simply doesn't stand up under
the light of day. And the consequence of this sad
fact is that non-Christians who already begin with some
resistance to Christianity are simply given more reason
for doubting it. We've been called to sanctify the
secular order, to work for a "reconciliation between the
secularity of the world and the radicality of the Gospel,
thus avoiding the unnatural tendency to negate the world
and its values while at the same time keeping faith with
the supreme and inexorable demands of the supernatural order"
(Fides, 43). We can't do this without submitting
our faith to the discipline of reason.
The
opposition between faith and reason, then, isn't simply
a tension between two terms of a proposition. It is
the struggle of our time. It’s always struck
me as somewhat of an irony that Christians find in the excesses
of reason (the tendency of modern man to exult in his technological
powers, his apparent mastery over nature) a cause for despair.
It seems to me a little like a man despairing of hunger
while sitting under a fruit tree. If anything, the
greater the dependency of our culture on reason, the more
a Christian has to work with. If we despair, it’s
only a symptom of the divorce between faith and reason and
ourselves, of some assumption that reason is merely technical
or, worse, corrupt by nature. If reason and faith
have the same source in God, then the possibilities for
inspiration and conversion should be unlimited. Either
we assume that our faith isn't reconcilable with reason
or we haven't learned to properly submit our faith to the
disciplines of reason, to penetrate reason with our faith
in order to use it well. And if we fail to do this,
it only makes clear our capitulation: we have handed
reason over to the world and admitted its corruption. The
primary purpose of education is the pursuit of truth.
As Catholics facing a widening breach between faith and
reason, it's important that we not be cavalier or too literal
in our understanding of the meaning of that pursuit. Whatever
form the program takes, it has to reflect a vision in which
faith and reason are integral to each other. Anything
less and the college will surely take its place adding to
the list of casualties. The great Christians of the
last century were known not only for their piety but for
their extraordinary uses of reason. Newman
,
MacDonald, Chesterton, Williams, Lewis, all led an educated,
unbelieving world to faith and taught Christians how to
think. The goal of education is not the pursuit
of faith--at least not directly--and our susceptibility
to despair of the world and its uses of reason can't allow
us to change that fact. The challenge facing us is
do we have a faith strong enough to hold us to the discipline
of reason while we learn to use it well?
Pope
John Paul II 
entitles
one of the sections of a chapter in his encyclical, "The
drama of the separation of faith and reason." I'm
assuming most of us understand the implications of that
drama, have experienced its casualties, seen the cost of
living in a world in which reason tries to operate without
faith or faith struggles to inspire without reason.
These two powers are inextricably bound and wherever we
find casualties, it's often because they are being acted
upon in division. At the outset of Fides Et Ratio,
when John Paul says that the truths of Catholic doctrine
are at risk of "being distorted or denied," I hear him asking
us to recover them and to find their sure "foundations in
relation to faith" (6). He says at the end of the
first chapter, "the truth made known to us by revelation
is neither the product nor the consummation of an argument
devised by human reason. It appears instead as something
gratuitous, which itself stirs thought and seeks acceptance
as an _expression of love" (15). I take it that the reason
for our conference--if I can use that word here--is that
an act of love has already taken place--struck deep and
inward; otherwise, we wouldn't be here. Now, the question
is, can it be incarnated in the world? Can it be submitted
to the practical and speculative workings of reason and
so given real--not ideal--form?
Several
purposes directed me in this paper, although none of them
will be immediately obvious. Two of them were purely
practical. The first was the curriculum, both in its
overall character and its inner, concrete workings; the
second was literature. I had to make a place for literature
because of defects in contemporary approaches. Artists
are especially close to the gifts of the Spirit; they have
a special power for moving the affections and cultivating
the kind of sympathetic knowledge that literature and poetry
can give us through the affections, the seedbed of love.
It was important to make a defense for this kind of knowledge
because in the hands of too many teachers, its power for
awakening healthy emotions has been lost. Literature
is simply made to serve ideological ends. So this
was not a small task. It meant clearing the way by
being as careful of philosophic principles as I could.
The two great battles in academia today are being waged
over philosophy and literature. And this is no accident.
The one has to do with wisdom, the other with our affections
and our capacity to love. The primary purpose
of a college is the pursuit of truth; but our call is to
love. We do this by forming ordinant emotions; but
we create the conditions for this work by first awakening
the natural affections, by helping students become capable
of large, generous feelings--not just magnanimity, a great
pagan virtue--but depths of empathy and compassion.
Young people are coming out of schools today in a condition
of intellectual hypertrophy--they have enlarged heads but
shrunken capacities to love. And one of our urgent
tasks is to address this problem.
The
final purpose guiding me wasn't just the truth of Fides
Et Ratio; it was what I take to be its underlying spirit,
something we can detect in its tone. One of
St.
Thomas' 
greatest
achievements, as John Paul puts it, was the reconciliation
between the radical character of the gospel and the secularity
of the world, and I don't believe it's possible to reconcile
faith and reason unless our work is carried on in the context
of this larger struggle. That requires real gifts
of intellect. We simply can't engage in this struggle
today without better developed minds. We are asked
to reclaim God's creation, not by force but as He does it,
freely, by invitation and through the gifts of the Spirit.
For us, in a large way, that means through our use of what
the secular culture most prizes, our reason and imagination.
But, clearly, the spirit in which we use these
is, in a sense, everything. And I find that part of
the wonder of Fides Et Ratio is the example it
gives of this spirit. What John Paul is asking of
us he himself does, and the form of Fides Et
Ratio, its tone, makes that abundantly clear.
It begins with a call to self-knowledge and closes with
a prayer to Mary, the Seat of Wisdom. What ties the
beginning and end together and unites the whole of the encyclical
is a spirit of humility and surrender. It was Mary's
humility that allowed Christ to come into the world; and
it's only in humility that we have any promise, any hope
of discovering who we are, of completing our quest for self-knowledge.
I take
it that the movement of that document from self-knowledge
to the self-forgetfulness that brings Christ to us provides
the terms of our endeavor: to be open to discussion
and inquiry, to struggle to find our identity in Christ,
and to know that if we enter into this struggle in a spirit
of humility and surrender, we will find our identity in
Christ in bringing faith and reason together because He
is the source of both of them.
A Real University
or College
Catholic
higher education is in a mess. I don't think it an
overstatement to say that in some ways it's in a state of
war. Schools everywhere are experiencing serious problems;
faculties are breaking up; good people are being chased
off, let go, and fired; loyalties are dividing around unresolved
tensions between faith and reason, between some who lean
more towards charismatic approaches or a sense of "mission,"
and others wanting greater intellectual integrity, higher
standards--so many of the problems are traceable back to
some failure of reason to draw on faith, of faith to stoop
to reason, some failure of assimilation between the two.
And, meanwhile, the body count is mounting. Nearly
a whole generation has passed since Vatican II. It
is a propitious time.
If one
thing is necessary at this moment it is that we get clear
on first principles. The school will take its identity
from them; it is the one thing on which there has to be
complete agreement. And since it is first principles
that will animate the school, give it its mission and identity
for action in the world, there is almost no greater task
than articulating them; it will be the hardest thing to
do. They will express the school's vision, declare
to the public--profess, really--the seriousness with which
it answers its call, the spirit in which it takes it up--finally,
how deeply it has plumbed the resources contained in them,
how open it's been to them, individually and collectively.
But,
of course, principles don't exist in a vacuum. They
represent seminal truths about the structure or nature of
reality itself. Our ability to penetrate them, to
live by them, depends in large measure on our openness to
learn from reality and our own self-knowledge. Their
meaning and vitality depends upon constant reflection on
our own experiences--not simply our experiences with formal
education but with life in general, with the multitude of
ways we informally learn or ways others--including God--have
taught us. A long view, which a course of studies
will give us, is a pre-requisite. But what about our
own experiences? What are we learning from the problems
immediately in front of us? One of our first concerns should
be to learn from the experiences of this passing generation,
this extraordinary grassroots reform we are still a part
of, from its hidden graces, its serious mistakes, the courage
and faith of the people willing to step out the way they
did, and to discover what these years have to offer if we
see them in light of faith and reason. Have we seen
their achievements and failures in the context of our political/social
institutions and also in the light of personal struggles
to reconcile faith and reason? Have we adequately reflected
on our own failings? The Manicheism, elements of Jansenism,
even the bigotry that infects us, the tendency to think
that because of our faith, we can't be wrong? A new school
can't be a refuge or sanctuary; it has to rest on sound
affirmations, and we have them in abundance. One of
the blessings of our faith is that we know by it that its
principles are superior to the whole order of social life;
they are the reference points that give it meaning.
But it is our task to bring all that the world has offered
to teach us and all that our experiences have given us,
to the incarnating work of reconciling faith and reason
in a college.
One
of our assumptions today, perhaps because we begin with
doubt and want everything to be proven to us, is that argument
or dialogue ends when agreement is reached, when doubt is
answered. But in fact, the reverse is true.
There can be no real conversation or argument unless people
begin with some ground on which there is agreement.
This is true of scientific, philosophical, and theological
discussions, how can it be less true for a founding? A people
can't really be said to come together, they don't become
a people, without agreement on principles.
What
is the content of our two founding principles of faith and
reason in this hour? I'd like to offer reflections on this
question, but before I do, I have to back up still further
to two preliminary principles that establish conditions
and parameters for discussing the primary ones. The
first is that there can be no conversation if there is no
agreement on what the conversation is about. How do
we reach agreement if we can't come together in dialogue?
The most immediate question, then, isn't the content of
faith and reason; it's whether we can talk. John Courtney
Murray 
says
that the first question, the one we have to take up before
any discussion of those principles or truths we hold, is
are we civil?
Therefore
I suggest that the immediate question is whether American
society is properly civil. This question is intelligible
and answerable, because the basic standard of civility is
not in doubt: "Civilization is formed by men locked together
in argument. From this dialogue the community becomes
a political community." ...The specifying note of political
association is its rational deliberative quality, its dependence
for its permanent cohesiveness on argument among men.
In this it differs from all other forms of association found
on earth.... This form of friendship is a special kind of
moral virtue, a thing of reason and intelligence, laboriously
cultivated by the discipline of passion, prejudice, and
narrow self-interest (We Hold These Truths,
pp.6-7).
I quote
these lines partly for the example of their tone but mostly
because they establish the preliminary conditions for our
endeavor--reasoned conversation and deliberation
that have the function of disciplining "passion, prejudice,
and narrow self-interest" and of cultivating friendship.
And
the second preliminary principle is that a Catholic school
is an institution which stands both as a mediary
and in time. That is to say, it looks back
to the family--the kids are coming directly from home--while
at the same time looking ahead to the universe we are preparing
our students to enter. It is the staging ground where
we begin the work of helping them to take on the conquest
of their own freedom. And because its identity as
a mediary is lived in time, it must return to its
first principles again and again over time. These
principles don't exist in a vacuum; they are lived experiences
submitted to reflection and embodied in traditions,
the living embodiments of a people's memory. They
are, in Murray's words, "experience illumined by principle,
given a construction by a process of philosophical reflection.
In the public argument, there must consequently be a continued
recurrence to first principles" (Truths, p.11).
So my
first question is: do we agree on the importance of
discussion, civil argument, the fundamental value of disagreement?
If the answer is yes, then having reached agreement, we
can begin the conversation. What are those first principles,
those truths we hold about which there is no disagreement
and upon which everything else depends? These truths will
provide the living standards by which everything in the
future will be measured, decisions, adjustments, even significant
changes. What is our understanding of faith and reason,
because it is this understanding that will give shape to
the program. We are not angels whose pure intelligence
perceives and comprehends immediately (Sum. theo. I,58,3).
We cannot get to the depths or range of first principles
except by patient, careful, painstaking efforts. To
begin those efforts is our most important task right now.
In the on-going effort of carrying them into the future,
the school will realize its identity.
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
* * * * *
The Call: to join Faith and Reason
The
most important task for any of us involved in this founding,
what has to command everyone's attention and energy, is
to conceive of the program as a whole, and to see that what
animates the center of this whole, giving form and substance
to all its parts, is the call to reconcile faith and reason.
This is the sum, the total, of what I have to say.
Whatever form the college takes, however it articulates
its mission, its governance policies, its public and administrative
guidelines, its common-life rules and customs, its constituting
principles, it should not underestimate the importance of
this animating dynamism between faith and reason, of the
shared commitment to resolve them into a whole. The
commitment to realize this call, like a marriage, will give
the college its identity. What will this mean for
the future? Who knows. But the principles making up
that tension will establish the guidelines, the parameters,
the foundations on which all work, all discussions, all
planning will take place. This shared understanding
of these principles is something we come to; we become who
we are by coming to them. They aren't simply working hypotheses;
they are the truths by which we live.
The
implications of this are, obviously, profound. As
corporeal creatures, we live in two interpenetrating orders,
moving about in what seems to be a bounded physical
universe while constantly breathing above time.
We are called to reconcile two orders, the natural and supernatural,
the finite and infinite, the immanent and transcendent.
And the cost of doing so is a constant tension--is it too
much to say, it is one aspect of the cross? How do those
of us involved in education resolve these two orders and
the rich, hierarchical whole they comprise into a curriculum?
How do we--I don't want to say implement; it's too mechanical--how
do we incarnate, give a living form not
just to our understanding but to those loves informed by
it? I would make a preliminary stab: readings.
Readings that give _expression to these two orders.
Philosophy, science, and catechism or theology, yes, for
sure, because ideas and statements of doctrine are essential.
The mind requires their clarity. But statements of
principles are not the same thing as those principles presented
as immediate, lived experience: we need poetry and
literature, works that make the spiritual world felt.
It is not enough to simply read "the best that's been thought
and written"; it's essential to feel it.
And for that reason, I would recommend Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Chesterton, MacDonald, Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, Faulkner,
Joyce, Eliot, and O'Connor
.
They help make us aware of multiple levels of reality in
ways others have not. But even more importantly, by
not confining their stories, their settings or images to
those of an ecclesial world, they help us find our ground
with all of humanity, to see the grace that is working there,
what the Spirit is doing in an unbelieving world.
But this is to get ahead of myself. What is the content
of the first principles of faith and reason? Let me take
faith first.
Because
of the mysteries involved, I'd like to be brief here, but
basically, our first beliefs are:
Faith: First Principles
1.
Our Triune God; we believe in three Persons, God the Father,
God, the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit: because we
are made in their image, both our individuality and our
social nature have their ontological roots in them:
three Gods, each distinct and individual and yet absolutely
social in nature, all of one being; so our humanity: each
of us distinct while still having the same nature,
2.
The Incarnation: we believe that out of a boundless
love, Christ took on our human nature in order to redeem
our sins. The measure of our sin, however much it
was hidden from us before His crucifixion, was made clear
afterwards: we killed Him--our revolt against God
is that great. But His death and resurrection made
clear that however great our sin against Him, His love was,
is, greater. The full extent of the magnitude of His
love and its radical nature was shown not only in His last
commandment, that we love one another as He did us, but
in His return to Heaven. He returned still in our
nature and by inviting us to join Him there, he offered
us a share in His divine nature with the Father. Can
any of the fantastic mysteries or fairy stories that leave
us breathless in wonder get even close to that? As the divine
founder of our Church, He gives it its infallibility, and
not all of men's sins, however great they are, will prevail
against it;
3.
The Traditions and Magisterium: these are not abstractions
or institutions inspired by men; they are the presence of
the Holy Spirit working out God's providential plan in time.
The doctrines, dogmas, encyclicals are all expressions--the
steady out-pourings of words over time--of the single, silent,
undivided, uncreated Word of God;
4.
The Cross: the invitation out of our fallen love into the
divine love of Christ with its promises of joy. Our
way: folly to the Greeks (those most knowing)
and a scandal to the Jews (those most righteous).
Herein is the freedom from all the fears that are the result
of our attachments to the world. The cross is the
thing most impossible for us, except in Christ.
5.
Mary: the human image of the absolute trust and faith
in God: the Seat of
Wisdom.
John Paul begins Fides Et Ratio with the Socratic
maxim, to know ourselves, to grow in self-understanding.
He ends with Mary because she is the image of the perfect
humility which is the condition for self-knowledge.
Clearly, self-knowledge here isn't what it means to the
psychologist or anthropologist: to know ourselves
is to come to discover the Creator Who made us--and so enter
into His boundless love.
These
are our beliefs. I take it for granted they will be
acknowledged everywhere, in chapel, in devotions, in shared
prayer; in our openly professed attachment to the Magisterium,
to Sacred Scripture, to the traditions of the Church; and
in the program in theology, in catechism if it is given
a place in the program. One of the more difficult
questions is how do we make these beliefs living in the
community, directly or indirectly? My own thought is that
they should be lived indirectly or freely, because where
they are forced or become one with the political structure
and its rules and policies, they can introduce into the
community a pharisaic, legalistic quality, forcing kids--and
even faculty--to rebel or conform for the wrong reasons.
Like the angel on the cornice of envy in Dante's
Purgatory whose good deeds are hidden by his own
light, faith should animate everything in the program, be
the beginning of the entire enterprise, the source
from which the "whole" will come, and except in the liturgical,
devotional life where it is given explicit form, it should
do all this invisibly. Like God, it has to solicit
or invite; it cannot force. But this approach means
that exceptional burdens will fall to the founders, requiring
of them real powers of abnegation, humility, surrender--these
will give faith its life and also keep the externals from
being merely externals. As academics, we're
not free of pride, and because it becomes easy to focus
on curriculum and classes, those things we most immediately
love, it will be easy to let matters of faith slip away,
to allow work to overwhelm them. It would be good
to recall the parable of the seeds blown away or plucked
up by birds. To keep us mindful, fervent, I believe
it's essential we make room for retreats, exercises, for
talks and papers. These should find an unassuming
place along side of talks and papers on academic matters.
Reason: First principles of reason
According
to St. Thomas, we exist as a part of a universe which we
can know. Its very nature, the fact that it is comprised
of various degrees and orders of immateriality, requires
that we approach it using different manners or methods.
Each science, according to Thomas, has its own virtue, its
own perfecting habits, because each science not only has
a different object to be known but ways of approach that
are limited or determined by that object. Evidence
of this fact is presented to us every day. Different
minds approach the world in different ways. The philosopher
doesn't think like the scientist--he's simply not trying
to understand the same thing the scientist is--and the poet
certainly doesn't engage the world the same way the philosopher
or scientist does. Each of these learners has a different
way of knowing--a habit perfected by the way in which he
approaches the world, and one of the values of their differences,
is that when they bring them together, they can compliment
and correct each other, give the benefit of their lights
to others who would never have come to them because of the
limits of their own disciplines. Our work is finally
communal.
But
I would like to consider this description of a universe
of learning a little more closely, especially since what's
at stake is the ultimate outcome or shape of a curriculum.
What are the first principles of our knowledge? First that
all knowledge, at least all knowledge grounded in reason
and in nature, however diversified or obscure its forms,
is finally coherent because being itself is ultimately one
and intelligible. And second, that reason is meant
for being; it's meant to see and to penetrate the depths
of what it sees. Its immaterial character guarantees
this if only we're patient enough working with the diversified
forms of matter in which being is presented to us.
These are the first principles of reason and it's imperative
we give them working room in the program.
Three
passages from St. Thomas make clear what's at stake here.
In the first (Sum. theol. I,85,1) Thomas establishes
the place and mode of human reason in the scheme of creation.
Because man occupies a middle ground between animals, who
can know only particulars through their senses, and angels,
who having no bodies, can know essences directly, he can
know both--particulars and universals, but only by patient,
hard work. In the second (Commentary on The Trinity
of Boethius
,
V,1), he makes clear the two conditions essential for real
learning: for man to have real knowledge, he must
have an intellectual habit of science--that is, he must
be capable of coming to certain knowledge of things.
There must also exist an object whereby the intellect can
be perfected. This object has to be immaterial (because
the mind is immaterial) and necessary--that is, it can't
be other than it is. And to arrive at knowledge of
this object, the intellect has to develop habits of abstraction,
powers of separating matter from motion and change--that
is, getting beyond the simple grasp of particulars that
animals have--or it won't be able to arrive at those underlying
forms contained in matter that are immaterial and unchanging,
the essences or universals that angels can grasp.
Finally, based on the principles of these two positions,
Thomas lays out the foundations for the ordering of the
sciences, distinguishing between objects of knowledge (those
of physics, math, and metaphysics) by their relative freedom
from or their dependence on matter to exist or to be known
(Commentary on The Trinity, V,1).
Now
these passages are probably commonplace to most of you.
But I confess I only came on them in recent years, and when
I did, I experienced them almost like a broken bone being
reset. A thousand confusions, a host of wracked and
misdirected efforts, suddenly were put to rest. Let
me explain why. I've spent my life teaching literature,
and I think I have a fairly good grasp of it. I graduated
from what I believe is an excellent graduate program, one
that required work in a field outside of literature--we
all knew the queen of knowledge was philosophy and didn’t
take it at our peril. But it wasn't till I was teaching
and came up against the confused interpretations of my colleagues,
each making literature into something different according
to his or her own starting points--Freudian, Feminist, Marxist,
De-constructionist--that I became aware that I really could
not defend my own field against those who would make of
it anything they chose. And I came to realize, early
on, that what I discovered about myself was not only true
of the other teachers in my department, it was true of most
of my colleagues. Colleagues from all departments
were clamoring for interdisciplinary courses--they all suffered
from the isolation of their disciplines--but none of them
could give an account of the principles of division or unity
of fields. And worse, because none of them could do
this, none of them could see that by simply combining courses,
they would only be adding to the confusion, contributing
to the incoherence and fragmentation they were trying to
escape. We were all under the shadow of Babel.
Thomas
freed me from this. The value of his principles is
that if he is right, we can't simply arbitrarily construct
a curriculum along any lines we want. If a curriculum
has any pretence of objectively presenting a universe, the
organization of courses and pedagogies has to do justice
to the real nature of that universe and our ways of knowing
it--our ways of engaging and becoming one with it.
This principle of correspondence is absolutely vital to
the life of a curriculum. The mind has as its object
an immaterial thing because its own nature is immaterial.
If a habitus is to be developed or perfected, its
object has to be constant or "necessary"; otherwise, how
could the intellect know? Each science has its own perfecting
habit because each is concerned with a different aspect
of reality, each limited by the depths of the reality of
its own specific object. What the physicist is studying
isn't the same as the mathematician, and what the mathematician
knows in his head isn't the same as what the metaphysician
knows. Each knows some-thing different because
each one is encountering the world at a different level
of immateriality. Whatever universal laws the physicist
discovers, he still has to verify them against the concrete
world of things; the mathematician has to validate his conclusions
according to strict laws of logic as they apply to the definitions
or postulates he begins with. And the metaphysician,
if he begins with an intuition of being (each seeker or
learner begins with some intuition of being), still has
to proceed with concepts that can unfold the nature of being
in its relation to matter. To take "disciplines" away
from a curriculum and turn students into generalists is
to undermine the very condition, the very nature of learning.
If the object of knowledge is constantly shifting for a
student, and if there is substantial depth to what he is
seeking to learn, how can he develop a habitus,
the power for grasping that is the fruit of a perfecting
work in a discipline? Wouldn't he simply be perfecting a
rationalist habit of mind of grasping ideas--not penetrating
being? Without a discipline or a way, he’s as liable
to become a rationalist, someone living in his head or a
sentimentalist, someone who can inspire others but who leaves
them finally outside the way.
Thomas'
distinction takes us to an especially high level of abstraction,
but it provides a sound working principle by which to deal
with questions of learning and by extension, texts, organization
of courses, means and ends. The principle firmly establishes
a correspondence between the subject to be learned and those
perfecting habits the learner will have to develop if he's
to learn his subject and not simply know ideas.
More importantly, it establishes beyond any doubt the relationship
of the student to the curriculum and the whole world of
being it attempts to help him enter. If a habitus
is to be formed in him, he will have to come to know the
interconnectedness of knowledge, its underlying coherence
and unity, but he will also have to face the resistance
that some specific field presents to his mind. All
fields lead to the same place, to being itself, because
each field participates in being in some way, but we can't
get to being without submitting ourselves to the limits
inherent in each field, to the peculiar kind of obscurity
that the matter of each field presents to us.
How,
then, do we do justice to both the unity and diversity of
our created universe in a curriculum? How is the unity underlying
creation reflected in a program while still making its first
principle philosophic inquiry? If being is manifold, rich
in the diversified forms it takes in matter and hierarchical
as well by the degrees of immateriality penetrating this
matter, and reason is meant to penetrate this being, how
do we adequately represent it in such a way as to be faithful
to both its complexity and to the pedagogies necessary to
approach it? Can a program be faithful to this teeming display
of being so that what students are introduced to actually
prepares them to properly engage it when they leave, both
with the wonder that it invites and with the work necessary
to penetrate the hidden intelligibility that is behind its
mysteries? For this to happen, it's important not to allow
the Great Books to overly intellectualize learning at the
expense of the affections, at the expense of the extraordinary
richness of being or the diversity of ways approaching it--through
the affections, through inclination, through what Thomas
called connaturality or sympathy. And it's important
if the group recognizes this--and it's clear it does--it
not allow poetry or literature, those disciplines in which
the affections have a greater home, to become merely means.
If we want our students to penetrate being, to stand before
its mysteries in wonder, with open hearts and rolled up
sleeves, we have to prepare them for that work at the outset.
The place the Great Books give philosophy and literature,
then, will be important from the start.
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
* * * *
Great Books
Few
people that I know of have any serious reservations about
the Great Books, and few would argue with their value as
the core of a program. The value of the texts is that
they offer "the very best that's been thought and written."
When
we read the Iliad by itself, its meaning remains
confined to the book. When we follow that reading
up with the Odyssey, the Aeneid and then
Chaucer and Shakespeare, we don't come away saying simply
that these are "great books"; we come away feeling we've
begun to appropriate a tradition, even without knowing it.
And the same can be said of philosophers and scientists.
No doubt there's a benefit to reading Thomas alone, but
anyone studying him in a line of sustained readings from
Plato and Aristotle up through Augustine, Boethius, Avicenna,
and Averroes, and then following him up with readings in
Gilson and Maritain, will realize a depth of intuitions
Thomas gave _expression to that he could never have arrived
at if he confined his reading simply to Thomas. Read
one way, the "tradition" stops with Thomas. Read the
other way, Thomas becomes alive today, part of a dynamic,
living tradition that expands and deepens the more and the
longer we are immersed in it.
The
Great Books are the legacy of Western thought and should
be the core of a liberal arts education. They should
be given their place, and one properly recognizing the importance
of forming the emotions, the capacity of young people to
love.
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
* * *
Disciplines
This
brings me to disciplines. Of course, academics are
going nuts with them; they proliferate everywhere.
But this fact isn't a reason for discarding them any more
than bad marriages are an argument against marriage.
We have to learn to use them well; fortunately, we have
principles to guide us.
The
first is that the correspondence between the thing known
and the knowing subject should firmly establish its place
in the curriculum. The ideas in our minds don't separate
us from the world, and the world doesn't stand off as alien
to us. We are a part of the world as knowing creatures,
and disciplines only validate this capacity in us to know.
They reflect our awareness of the difference between what
it is we know and how we know it, the mode or manner
by which we know and the fact that these change with the
object known. It's commonly accepted that we can't expect
from philosophy the same kind of precision we do from geometry
or math. I myself am amazed at the precision of both
Aristotle and Thomas in their treatises on the principles
of nature; but still, the manner of these treatises is different
from any concerned with physics, and so the precision is
as well. In physics, the manner is largely metric--most
questions are resolved in terms of measurements, in steps
whose logical progression is conceived in terms of formulas
or numbers--and since numbers are infinitely divisible,
infinitely precise. Philosophy, however, is conceptual
and verbal. The philosophy of nature deals with becoming
and motion and demands that anyone treating these deal more
directly with problems of language and give a conceptual
precision to his thinking. The manner of each is radically
different, involving different languages, different acts
of abstraction; anybody hoping to master philosophy or math
won't be able to do so without painstaking work in their
respective languages, in the different conditions of those
disciplines.
The
same is true of poetry and physics. Even though both
deal with the concrete physical world, their modes are radically
different. One gives us knowledge through concepts
(always referring back to the concrete as object),
the other a kind of sympathetic knowledge, or knowledge
by inclination or connaturality (this is Maritain's term,
following Thomas). Poetry offers us the immediate
experience of a sympathetic apprehension, the becoming one
with another through emotion. The self becomes one
with the other not strictly as object (as the intellect
knows it) but as subject. We begin to penetrate
the inner self of things and of others through inclination,
by a power of emotion or empathy. That's one reason
literature and poetry are approached in terms of point of
view; they deal more directly with the hidden interior of
things, with subjectivity, dream, imagination. These
two, physics and poetry, apprehend reality through very
different modes. And reading them as if they were
the same or subjecting them to the same pedagogy simply
violates this difference. It's important to not neglect
these differences because they remind us that the more we
work in a field, the more we work with the modes and manners
peculiar to that field, the more likely we are to come to
perfecting a habitus and penetrate its object.
I would suggest that one reason students don't do well in
school today is that they don't get enough work in a field;
they're often asked to work at a level of abstraction that
runs contrary to the mind's natural inclinations.
The mind is meant to penetrate being, but it can only do
this by submitting itself to the inherent limitations in
nature. The constant submission to particulars is
not a waste of time. I am reminded of Allen Tate's
remark on Edgar Allen Poe, who in his efforts to arrive
at pure essences, like an angel, tried to circumvent the
natural order. In the end, his intellectual force
was exhausted because it had no real object. Having
turned away from the sensible world, in his efforts to reach
God, he had nothing left to work with but his own ideas.
Tate says,
The
human intellect cannot reach God as essence; only God as
analogy. Analogy to what? Plainly, analogy to
the natural world; for there is nothing in the intellect
that has not previously reached it through the senses.
Had Dante arrived at the vision of God by way of sense?
We must answer yes, because Dante's Triune Circle is light,
which the finite intelligence can see only by means of what
has already been seen by means of it. But Poe's
center is that place--to use Dante's great figure--"where
the sun is silent." Since he refuses to see nature,
he is doomed to see nothing. He has overleaped and
cheated the condition of man. The reach of our imaginative
enlargement is perhaps no longer than the ladder of analogy,
at the top of which we may see all, if we still wish to
see anything, that we have brought up with us from
the bottom, where lies the sensible world. If we take
nothing with us to the top but our emptied, angelic intellects,
we shall see nothing when we get there. Poe as God
sits silent in darkness. Here the movement of tragedy
is reversed: there is no action. Man as angel becomes
a demon who cannot initiate the first motion of love, and
we can feel only compassion with his suffering, for it is
potentially ours.
(Tate, "The Angelic Imagination")
We undercut
the work of our students if we don't give their intellects
enough work with the physical body, with the world's body
and all that it offers us by way of analogy.
This
brings me to my second and the more important reason for
advocating disciplines: the importance of surrender.
Disciplines are just that, a discipline. The word
has become so much a part of common parlance, it has lost
its meaning. Disciplines discipline us in
a medium and a way of approach to reality. I am reminded
of a conversation I once had with a friend. We were
struggling to find a way into our talk and he said, "Jump
off anywhere. They all lead to the same place." If
being is our end, it doesn't matter where we enter it, what
path or medium we choose. They all point to the same
place. The question is: can we make the surrender
necessary to the work of penetrating being through our chosen
method? We want things easy or, even worse, grand and not
to be bothered with doing small things.
Dr.
Donald Cowan, Physicist and former President of the University
of Dallas, has spoken of the importance of surrender this
way:
What
T. S. Eliot said about the necessary loss of personality
on the part of the poet applies as well to a genuine learner.
The Christian paradoxes operate in education: attainment
through abnegation, wisdom through ignorance, triumph through
submission. Deliberately to choose abnegation, submission,
and ignorance, however--to strive toward them--is to fall
into their opposites, as the attempt to be humble tends
to be an act of pride. Something of interest must
be set up outside students, something that causes them to
forget themselves and exist in that outside phenomenon.
But here again the paradox is at work. If the professor
designs the object for the purpose of making students forget
themselves [as in a too structured program], at a certain
point, they will realize the trickery of the situation and
join in or else reject the programmed response. Either
way, the result is a trivialization of education.
The learning process demands like the Greek goddesses a
constant renewal of virginity. A good teacher will
forget himself in the object; will pursue it with delight
and surprise in the ever-recurring freshness, the eternal
springtime of learning.
(Donald
Cowan, Unbinding Prometheus).
All
learning requires an act of surrender: to the work
in front of us, to the limitations of our nature, to the
discipline of a field, and first and finally to
the truth that is our end. This act of surrender is
not a passive giving up but an active setting aside of the
self. Without such an act, it is unfortunately too
true that we read for ourselves, for the ideas in our heads,
for whatever goal drives us, success, money, prestige.
We may find what we are looking for, but it won't be the
whole, the truth of being that was there to be grasped.
We comprehend a poem or a work of art through this act of
submission, through taking in and being taken in by the
thing in its wholeness. And this is no less true,
though it may be less obvious, for the work of philosophy
or mathematics. If we read for our own ideas, that's
exactly what we'll get back, some form of ourselves.
The admonition at the beginning of Fides Et Ratio
was to know ourselves. If the soul is all things,
we can only do that by learning more about the world.
To become
a genuine learner, then, a student has to not only come
to some realization of himself as an individual, to some
discovery of his own ego, he must also experience a submergence
of the self, a loss of ego. This stage is more difficult;
fewer people accomplish it. But it is essential.
Something in the program or the curriculum should make a
place for this work. The first two years, I believe,
should be a general introduction to the world at large,
its underlying unity and principles. But a time should
come in a person's education when he has to face himself.
His readings will bring him to this, clearly, but too much
in terms of ideas and understanding: he has to confront
himself in his will where the question of surrender becomes
real. I don't believe he can come to this except through
a discipline. The last two years of college should be the
years of submission to a discipline, the transition from
an ambition for mastery over a subject to a willingness,
even a desire, to serve it--to fall in love. Donald
Cowan calls this a movement "from lust to love," and certainly
it is in the guise of love that a discipline comes to a
person. A student enters college full of ambition
and desire; he chooses a major in an act of service:
something touches him and he wants to discover what that
touch means. Some people never make the submission.
They go on thinking of a major as an accomplishment,
the beginnings of a career that will bring them money or
success. Others hear the call. Their willingness
to submit themselves to the discipline of that field, to
read not just for their own ideas or even, as in the case
of poetry or literature, to satisfy their own emotions,
but to find the thing itself that invites this act of submission,
is the first movement of the will towards truth. This
act is the first descent into the world's body and the beginning
of the ascent to its higher analogies.
This
concern for disciplines may seem exaggerated. It is
a result of reflections on my own teaching and my talks
with teachers whose preoccupation with their own subject
is sometimes so great that they've lost sense of the student
altogether or at any rate lost some sense of the importance
of pedagogies, ways of learning that correspond to what,
in fact, the mind is doing. My concern, ultimately,
is for the effect that pedagogies have on students.
Those pedagogies that deny the differences in the ways we
learn, that don't ask of us a personal surrender, some descent
into the body, can encourage subtle forms of rationalism,
the mind asking the world to conform to itself,
not the other way round. The reference
points for the rationalist aren't nature and whatever lines
of contact or resources of reason lie hidden there; it's
the light of his own mind. Cut off from his senses and hence
his imagination, he loses his power for using analogy, the
analogic imagination or what Allen Tate calls the "symbolic
imagination." Standing outside the long tradition of natural
law and natural feeling, he suffers from a diminished capacity
to penetrate principles in concrete reality and from a diminished
capacity to feel. This is Tate:
Despite
the timeless orders of both rational discourse and intuitive
contemplation, it is the business of the symbolic poet to
return to the order of temporal sequence--to action.
His purpose is to show men experiencing whatever they may
be capable of, with as much meaning as he may be able to
see in it; but the action comes first. Shall we call this
the Poetic Way? It is at any rate the way of the poet, who
has got to do his work with the body of this world, whatever
that body may look like to him, in his time and place--the
whirling atoms, the body of a beautiful woman, or a deformed
body, the body of Christ, or even the body of this death.
If the poet is able to put into this moving body, or to
find in it, a coherent chain of analogies, he will inform
an intuitive act with symbolism; his will be in one degree
or another the symbolic imagination.
Before
I try to illustrate these general reflections, I must make
a digression, for my own guidance, which I am not competent
to develop as searchingly as my subject demands. The symbolic
imagination takes its rise from a definite limitation of
human rationality which was recognized in the West until
the seventeenth century; in this view the intellect cannot
have direct knowledge of essences. The only mind that
has this knowledge is the angelic mind...This mind has intellect
and will without feeling; and it is through feeling alone
that we witness the glory of our servitude to the natural
world, to St. Thomas' accidents, or, if you will, to Locke's
secondary qualities; it is our tie with the world of sense.
The angelic mind suffers none of the limitations of sense;
it has immediate knowledge of essences; and this knowledge
moves through the perfect will to divine love, with which
it is at one. Imagination in an angel is thus inconceivable,
for the angelic mind transcends the mediation of both image
and discourse. I call that human imagination angelic
which tries to disintegrate or to circumvent the image in
the illusory pursuit of essence. When human beings undertake
this ambitious program, divine love becomes so rarefied
that it loses its human paradigm, and is dissolved in the
worship of intellectual power, the surrogate of divinity
that worships itself. It professes to know nature
as essence at the same time that it has become alienated
from nature in the rejection of its material forms.
To make
clear the importance of the symbolic imagination in a way
that's faithful to the principle he is at pains to explain,
Tate renders an actual historical event. The final
resolution isn't arrived at by a conversion of one thing
to its opposite or by a synthesis of two things in opposition:
the two actions are conducted simultaneously, as they would
be for Dante. This is a perfect example of the way
the symbolic imagination differs from a dialectic: in submitting
to the common thing, the concrete singular, it finds deep
within that thing not only the ultimate source of its existence
but whatever transformations it's capable of by being a
part of their shared act. For, whatever else the symbolic
imagination does, by conducting an analogy--exactly as St.
Thomas describes the act of judgment--it becomes one with
the act it is a part of. The end result of the work
of the symbolic imagination is not simply a conversion of
multiple levels into a "whole," a higher synthesis of knowledge.
It is empathy. Here is Tate's example:
That
the gift of analogy was not Dante's alone every medievalist
knows. The most striking proof of its diffusion and
the most useful example for my purpose that I know is the
letter of St. Catherine of Siena to Brother Raimond of Capua.
A young Sienese, Niccolo Tuldo, had been unjustly convicted
of treason and condemned to death. Catherine became his
angel of mercy, giving him daily solace--the meaning of
the Cross-, the healing powers of the Blood; and so reconciled
him to the faith that he accepted his last end. Now
I have difficulty believing people who say that they live
in the Blood of Christ, for I take them to mean that they
have the faith and hope some day to live in it. The evidence
of the Blood is one's power to produce it, the power to
show it as a "common thing" and to make it real, literally,
in action. For the report of the Blood is very different
from its reality. St. Catherine does not report it;
she recreates it, so that its analogical meaning is confirmed
again in blood that she has seen. This is how she
does it:
Then
[the condemned man] came, like a gentle Lamb; and seeing
me he began to smile, and wanted me to make the sign of
the cross. When he had received the sign, I said,
"Down! To the bridal, my sweetest brother. For soon
shalt thou be in the enduring life." He prostrated himself
with great gentleness, and I stretched out his neck; and
bowed me down, and recalled to him the blood of the Lamb.
His lips said naught save Jesus! and Catherine! And so saying,
I received his head in my hands, closing my eyes in the
divine goodness and saying, "I will." When he was
at rest my soul rested in peace and quiet, and in so great
fragrance of blood that I could not bear to remove the blood
which had fallen on me from him.
It is
deeply shocking, as all proximate incarnations of the Word
are shocking, whether in Christ and the Saints, or in Dostoevsky,
James Joyce, or Henry James. I believe it was T.S.
Eliot who made accessible again to an ignorant generation
a common Christian insight when he said that people cannot
bear very much reality. I take this to mean that only
extraordinary courage, and perhaps even genius, can face
the spiritual truth in its physical body. Flaubert
said that the artist, the soldier, and the priest face death
every day; so do we all; yet it is perhaps nearer to them
than to other men; it is their particular responsibility.
When St. Catherine "rests in so great fragrance of blood,"
it is no doubt the Blood of the Offertory which the celebrant
offers to God cum adore suavitatis, but with the
literal odor of the species of wine, not of blood.
St. Catherine had the courage of genius which permitted
her to smell the Blood of Christ in Niccolo Tuldo's
blood clotted on her dress: she smelled the two bloods not
alternately but at one instant, in a single act compounded
of spiritual insight and physical perception (Tate, "The
Symbolic Imagination")
I apologize
for these lengthy quotes. I've quoted them because
I'm convinced that one of the great problems facing modern
Catholics today, as it is for all people in Western countries,
is that they live too much in their heads, making the world
conform to ideas they begin with instead of standing open
to the world. That pose, whatever name we give it--rationalism,
Gnosticism, Manicheism--entails a refusal to accept the
body. We are being educated too much on Great
Books and great ideas at the expense of the
common thing, the ordinary thing right before our senses.
Miracles present themselves to our senses; it is a serious
question whether in fact we can experience those miracles
that make up our daily lives if we are living in our heads.
I take it that one of our most important tasks today is
a recovery of the place of our bodies. The question
I'd like to pose is: without struggling to penetrate the
concrete image as it's rendered by great artists, can we
really "face the spiritual truth in the physical body"?
I don't believe we can. The injunction facing us as
Catholics is, "taste and see." Too many Catholics
today are losing the gift for concrete experience,
turning away from the created world with their Protestant
brothers with too great a sense of nature's depravity and
so wanting to tidy it up geometrically, mathematically.
Without a submission to the natural order, it becomes nearly
impossible "to start with the common thing."
Curriculum
The
faculty is the heart and soul of a program. The curriculum
in a sense represents them, the way they stand towards the
world and the mystery of being. On one level, it reflects
their intellectual knowledge, their grasp of being, even
their secret aspirations and hopes. But on another,
it represents so much more because it will also embody as
much of the disciplines or traditions they have drawn into
themselves and that are alive in them now. One of
the great challenges to putting a curriculum together comes
down to a question of how much of the past is actually living
in them. The more they have given themselves to their
disciplines, their traditions, the more one they are with
them, their vital impulses, their secret creative energies,
the more vital and living the curriculum will be.
A daunting task, for sure. We can take comfort from
the number of philosophers in the group; we also have John
Paul's encourage- ment: "I cannot but encourage philosophers...to
trust in the power of reason and not to set themselves goals
that are too modest...." (Fides, 56) What
the collective outcome will be is hard to foresee; to help
us along, let me offer a few reflections.
As I
see it, there are two basic requirements for a curriculum,
one having to do with its shape and content, the other with
language. The first requirement is that it should
reflect reality, a universe of learning. A curriculum
is an _expression of the depth of the vision of those shaping
it. It is a construct, a man-made thing, and as such
it will reveal, willy-nilly, the degree to which those who
have shaped it have been open to the intelligible structures
of nature and the mysteries of being and also docile to
the task of trying to give these coherent form. The
second requirement has to do with language: it has
to be taken seriously. The fact that we take language
for granted because we use it all the time only makes it
imperative we give it its proper place in the curriculum.
Language is the medium in which we do all our work, and
its importance can't be overestimated. The curriculum
stands mirroring being, but its structure and content are
mediated largely through language, through words.
Allen Tate has said that one of the burdens education places
on each person is the task of attending "to the health of
society, not at large but through literature--that
is, he must be constantly aware of the condition of language
in his age." As poetry goes, so goes culture.
As language loses its capacity for rendering experience
meaningful, humans suffer. Where our uses of language
decline, our capacity for rich cognitive experiences declines
as well, and when that happens, when our powers of apprehension
go, so do our capacities for feeling, for forming ordinant
emotions. Serious thought has to be given to the role
of language for both students and faculty because it is
the primary way of approach to being.
The
requirements of the curriculum, then, are both simple and
complex. The curriculum has to reflect the infinite
variety and diversity of God's creation without losing touch
with those principles that give that variety and diversity
order and coherence. It must take its cue from a philosophy
that can inform all parts, show both their interconnecting
relationships and also their place in the hierarchy of ways
of knowing. And at the same time, it has to allow
for pedagogies that rest on a sound epistemology--one that
is inherent in the philosophy of the curriculum and that
makes a place for the variety of gifts and talents of the
teachers. Our curriculum should attempt to do justice
to God's creation both in the way it is represented and
in approaches. We don't want to limit ourselves; and
we don't want to limit God. It's also crucial to remember
that students are being invited into all of this,
that the curriculum itself give some hint of welcome or
hospitality, suggest not something mechanical or overly
systematic but a rich store of references or spots of light
that reinforce and amplify each other, all suggesting the
subtlety and complexity of the hidden splendors of being.
God solicits and invites. So should we in the curriculum.
A philosophy
is sound insofar as it does justice to the unity and coherence
of being. For students to take away a sound philosophy
from the program, it is essential that they experience their
universe as a core and one which their own mixed responses,
in the discussions they have with each other and with teachers,
will continue to deepen and amplify over time. They
should experience a shared heritage but one also diversified
enough to help individual students each discover his own
way. To provide a common experience with connecting
strands, then, is not a small need of the moment.
One of the central tasks we face is to provide a forum or
venue in which faculty and students can discuss and explore
the principles of this core openly. For this to happen,
people have to talk, and they can't talk without a common
language. This fact makes obvious another one.
The cultivation of language, the taking pains to protect
the condition of language in the curriculum, its place in
learning and discussions, isn't simply a luxury or even
an option. It is essential. There are at least
two things literature can give us in this regard: figurative
or symbolic language and the power of rhetoric. The
first one isn't small because it makes possible the mind's
movement through analogies, from common ordinary things
to the higher reaches of being. And the second isn't
small either because it gives power to this movement.
The
more we support the role of language in the curriculum,
the more we support our efforts to learn together.
I want to take a moment with this, particularly as it applies
to students. Students learn in a variety of
ways. The most instinctive is imitative. We
plagiarize a lot. But this isn't the only way we learn
or even necessarily the most definitive. Some of our
most memorable experiences are those taking the form of
epiphanies or revelations. We work hard, exhaust ourselves
in our work and, suddenly, when we least expect it, when
our wills are spent and in a state of receptivity, some
aspect of being that was hidden to us springs to life.
The learning that takes place in these instances isn't simply
a matter of midwifery, as Socrates would have it.
A word spoken--"a cry from the street" (this, from Joyce)--the
eloquence or even the love of a teacher in a lecture, a
chance comment in a discussion, something from the outside
is received as a flash and we see. Whatever form
it takes, it goes to the depths, engendering in our souls
some new action, bringing new relationships out of everything
already stored there, reconstellating our skies. Donald
Cowan says of this moment:
A voice
must be heard in the viscera. An inner tutor must
be stirred by an external message. The medium of instruction
is language--the written or spoken word. And it is
the common tongue that the inbuilt tutor understands.
However elegant, however satisfying, mathematics might be,
it must be translated into the common tongue in order for
the self to know it. And the situation is similar
for any specialized idiom.
We want
to increase the occasions for these epiphanies, these moments
for words to do their work, but for this to happen, we have
to take greater care with language, especially rhetoric.
At the same time, this vital importance of language for
a curriculum carries with it a drawback. One of the
inherent problems in education is that each discipline requires
a different language. The language of physics is radically
different from that of philosophy or metaphysics, and the
language of literature or poetry different from either of
these. The differences between these languages can
isolate faculty, making the one thing they have in common
an obstacle to their unity and to the possibilities of learning
from each other. To get around this, it's crucial
that faculty be willing to bring their work to first principles
and submit it to discussion with those from other fields.
The first reason for being of a college is truth
and the work of the practical intellect, and if friend-ship
and shared goals are to be more than nominal--or even more
than just social--colleagues have to take their work to
a ground of principles with each other. A common language
as well as a common core is required for that. What
we do with disciplines, then, is crucial. I venture
to say that the success or failure of the school may rest
on how these are approached, on the question of whether
each field is seen as integral, a part of a whole, while
still having its own autonomy.
For
the most part, the Great Books divide down into three different
fields, philosophy, science, and literature. This
division isn't arbitrary; it represents three entirely different
ways of knowing, three entirely different objects of knowledge.
The object or end of philosophy is being but being as it's
mediated through matter, motion, change. Philosophy
attempts to know this being in its diversified forms, but
it is forced to use concepts because to know being, it has
to abstract, to draw forth, the inner forms of things.
Its manner is conceptual because what it knows, the first
causes of things, can only be grasped through concepts--not
as in math through line, number, or formulae. Since
philosophy is concerned with what can't be other than it
is--that is, with what is, with first causes--it
proceeds by way of demonstrations, reasoning from causes
to effects and effects to causes and this by means of a
conceptual framework. So the mode of knowledge that
philosophy forms in us is conceptual and abstract, its manner
varying according to its object, changing as it is concerned
with logic, speculative or practical matters, or ethics.
Science, similarly, is concerned with the physical world
of things. Like philosophy, it abstracts from things
and has to return to them for verification. And insofar
as science rests on math, its conceptual framework tends
to be even more abstract. The reason for this is straightforward.
Math has as its object those things that depend on matter
to exist but not to be known. So the object of math
is those beings of the mind which refer to the physical
world (line, number, motion) but at a level of abstract
quantity. It considers line in itself, curve in itself,
etc. The fact that math and geometry have number and
line as their objects, and these are infinitely divisible
or multipliable, gives them an extraordinarily high degree
of precision. Hence, their attraction for science.
Philosophy and science are two different fields with distinct
ends or objects. They approach these ends in different
ways, through different acts of the mind. But in both
cases the mode of knowing is a form of abstraction, the
one taking its bearings from ontology--the being of things--the
other from habits tending to resolve problems in terms of
quantity or measurements.
Literature
is also a mode of knowing. But unlike philosophy and
science, literature doesn't abstract from the concrete,
material world, it enters into it, becoming one with it
by a kind of sympathy or identity. Its object is the
world of things and of human actions, but it doesn't know
these by way of abstraction, through concepts; it knows
them interiorly, through emotion, by means of what St. Thomas
calls connaturality, a know-ledge by inclination.
Emotions by their nature are obscure and seemingly unintelligible;
we can't see into them very well. Literature takes
us into this interior world and, by giving it form, makes
it intelligible. All three fields, philosophy, science,
and literature should have a secure place in a curriculum.
Philosophy and science, as such, don't face dangers.
Few people--and nobody sane--question whether they are genuine
disciplines. This isn't the case with literature.
Literature faces a danger the others don't because it lends
itself to so many other, adulterate purposes.
My own
recommendation, then, is to present the program or curriculum
in three disciplines or tracks, philosophy, science, and
literature. These three disciplines are, in a sense,
generic; they set the terms and fundamentals for all the
others branching off from them. They cover the whole
range of concrete and abstracted experience. They
would give a wholeness and coherence to the program while
providing sufficient depth and breadth to learning so that
anyone taking the core would have no difficulties with a
specialization in graduate school. Anyone grounded
in the fundamental principles and experiences of philosophy,
science, and literature (poetry) would find it relatively
easy to take up more specialized studies in physics, ethics,
anthropology, psychology, journalism, etc. And he
would certainly be prepared to teach in these fields, if
he chose or felt himself called.
But
there are also other reasons for limiting the disciplines
to these three: it's crucial that faculty come together
on first principles, and it's simply a question of practical
limits how well they can do that if disciplines are multiplied.
Anyone who's undertaken a discipline knows that penetrating
principles truly is a life-long work. But the issue
is more than just practical limits. I believe that
to the degree that we can penetrate the first principles
of our separate fields, to that degree we have the most
to offer each other as teachers and colleagues.
Exactly where it is hardest to understand each other, there
may be the most important place or source for discovery
and growth--Christ and His creation lurking just around
the corner. Too often differences between disciplines
become sources of friction--"they're different"; "they don't
understand us"; "math is indifferent to the world, so is
he; he's too detached"; "he's too sentimental, too poetic";
these become occasions for alliances, rivalries, even, finally,
factions and firings. One of the most fruitful periods
in my life was one in which I shared work with a physicist.
I'd spent most of my life surrounded by people in the humanities
and arts. But it wasn't till I began working with
this physicist that I became aware of my own deficiencies
in going to principles, in trying to relate poetry to physics.
I had made efforts along those lines on my own--trying to
stay close to philosophy to check myself--but without a
sustained engagement with another mind and one disposed
to see differently, to turn perspectives in ways different
from my own, I simply didn't do very well. There was
simply no reason to push my discoveries in literature to
principles that would situate my learning in the larger
universe of knowledge. My own learning in poetry suffered
as a result.
One
of the inherent "gifts" of a small college, then, is the
close, integral character of the curriculum and the opportunity
it provides faculty to learn from each other. But
for that to happen, faculty have to be willing to take
their work to principles. Taking on too many
fields can cultivate superficial habits of mind, can produce
"generalists"; too few can produce a narrowness or rigidity,
an inability to go to principles or to see the underlying
inter-connectedness of knowledge. We want a curriculum
in which, following Newman,
the
sciences, into which our knowledge may be said to be cast,
have multiplied bearings one on another, and an internal
sympathy, and admit, or rather demand, comparison and adjustment.
They complete, correct, balance each other. This consideration...must
be taken into account, not only as regards the attainment
of truth, which is their common end, but as regards the
influence which they exercise upon those whose education
consists in the study of them. I have said already
that to give undue prominence to one is to be unjust to
another.... (Idea, V,1)
The
curriculum can't give a balance or sense of integration
to the minds of its students that it does not have itself.
I take it that the philosophic spirit informing this curriculum
is Thomistic and as such would follow the guidelines of
Thomas. Philosophy would be the backbone of the program,
providing it with the principles and objective reference
points for adjustments that changes and time will bring
to the program. The critical communities surrounding
the Great Books are crucial; we have been formed by them.
But Great Book approaches typically ignore them. We
want to be open to changes that are faithful to the great
works--most of them coming from these critical communities--but
we also have to be guided by a sound grasp of principles
to do this. It isn't clear to me exactly how courses
should be organized--my background in philosophy is too
limited--but to be true to Thomas' principles, at least
as I understand them, my own suggestion would be to organize
the three fields, philosophy, science, and literature in
the following way because it is faithful to the different
modes and manners (ways, conditions) of knowing involved
in these fields:
1. Philosophy (The Philosophic Traditions)
Ethics
Political Philosophy
*Philosophy
of Nature (principles of nature and of division of sciences;
epistemology)
Metaphysics
Theology
2. Science (The Tradition of the Sciences)
Euclid
Astronomy and the Rise of Modern Science
Physics
Biology
3. Literature (The Literary
Traditions)
Lyric
Narrative (epic, romance, and novel)
Drama
Presenting
these three fields in this fashion doesn't necessitate doing
away with historical developments. Teachers can still
approach texts in ways that do justice to the historical
conditions and traditions out of which they came.
But the advantage to this approach is that it gives whole
traditions and their power for informing individual texts
their rightful place. Works are not treated in isolation
or taken out of context. Read in the light of their
traditions, they naturally speak to and build upon each
other. All together, they form an integrated core,
but within their own disciplines or traditions, they allow
for repetition and reinforcement and for gradually increasing
degrees of sophistication, giving support to the struggles
of students to move in a direction requiring greater and
greater powers of abstraction. And the reinforcement
and building as well as the gradual movement forward all
support perfecting habits. Students working through
these three disciplines would not only grasp important concepts
and principles--see their universal application by the integral
character of the program--they would be equipped to take
up the more concentrated work of a discipline in their upper
division years--and what's equally important, give a defense
of it. Their learning would be sufficiently historical to
locate texts in the unfolding of their traditions, to see
old problems from new perspectives, in new lights, but students
would also be able to recognize variations of old problems
and answer them intelligently because their education would
ground them firmly in first principles. And their
concentrated, more painstaking work in a discipline in their
upper division work would make it possible for them to keep
the discipline alive in themselves. They could become
philosophers, physicists, poets.
According
to this scheme, philosophy of nature would be the centerpiece
of the program, and coming as it does in the middle (end
of sophomore year or beginning of junior year), it would
affirm the program's commitment to ground reason in
nature. All the other courses would take their
bearings from this one--each of the science courses and
