Published in A Student’s Guide to Liberal Arts, ed. William T, Stancil (Kansas City: Rockhurst
University Press, 2003), Chapter I, “What Are the Liberal Arts?” pp. 1-19.
James V. Schall, S. J.
Georgetown University, DC, 20057-1200
ARTES LIBERALES – THE
LIBERAL ARTS
“‘Because,’
I said, ‘the free man ought not to learn any study slavishly. Forced labors performed by the body
don’t make the body any worse, but no forced study abides in a soul.’”
–
Plato, The Republic, 536e.
“That
there is to be education in music in such a way that they will participate in
the works [of music], therefore, is evident.... What is appropriate and inappropriate for different ages is
not difficult to define and resolve, in response to those who assert that the
concern is a vulgar one. In the
first place, since one should share in the works for the sake of judging, on
this account they should practice the works when they are young, and when they
become older leave off the works, and be able to judge the noble things and to
enjoy [them] in correct fashion through the learning that occurred in their
youth.”
–
Aristotle, Politics, 1340b31-38.
“But
in an orator ... we demand the acuteness of a logician, the profundity of a
philosopher, the diction virtually of a poet, the memory of a lawyer, the voice
of a performer in tragic drama, the gestures, you might almost say, of an actor
at the very top of his profession.”
–
Cicero, On the Orator.1
I. THE
CLASSICAL TRADITIONS.
In
the Crito of Plato, during the
month in jail awaiting the return of the sacrificial ship that would occasion
Socrates’ execution, Crito indicated that, from his personal wealth, he could
easily provide a bribe to enable Socrates to escape. No one, even those who found him guilty as charged, really
wanted Socrates to die. Besides,
Crito, a rich friend of Socrates, would seem cheap in the eyes of the city if
he did not come forth with bribe money to free Socrates. A convenient place to which Socrates
might go in exile, Crito informs him, is Thessaly, famous for its barbarian
ways. Socrates had already
rejected the alternative of going to Thebes, a civilized city.
Nor
would Socrates, contrary to his vocation, cease to philosophize so that he
could remain in Athens, the cultured city that Pericles had called the
freest. Socrates rejected going to
Thessaly because, in such a society, he would have no one with whom to talk. The barbarian king would, of course,
know of the big-city fame of Socrates, the philosopher. He would have asked him to his court to
perform some amazing feat to impress his retainers. Kings often found hapless philosophers amusing, while
philosophers were known to have conversed with kings..
Yet,
for Socrates to be Socrates, the philosopher, he would need to engage in
conversation, in dialectic. Such
dialectic required someone genuinely interested in the higher things. Socrates preferred audiences that
contain souls with some deep desire to know. Socrates only undertakes to give monologues before some
corrupt, smooth politician like Callicles in the Gorgias. Callicles refused further to engage Socrates in
conversation lest he (Callicles) have to question his own political life and
its supposedly unlimited freedom to do whatever the politician wanted. Though, as he tells us, he had gone to
college in his youth, the young tyrant, by his own admission, rejected the
principles of liberal
educated. He ceased all that
academic nonsense when he went into the active life of politics. Nor was the barbarian king liberally
educated. The former lacked
virtue, the latter culture.
The
barbarians in Thessaly, then, though worthy enough in their own ways, were not
prepared systematically to examine their daily lives, the civic purpose that
Socrates appointed to himself in The Apology. The
barbarians would not have understood the point of such an “examined life.” They were not “free” to know that they
did not know. Socrates, who knew
that he did not know, had to remain a private citizen even in Athens, lest he
be eliminated sooner. Still his
whole life was engaged in conversations that could only take place in a city,
albeit a disordered city. In this
city, philosophers and fools were not easily separated because no principle of
distinction was allowed. But in
Athens, nevertheless, philosophic eros might have some chance of attracting the souls of the potential
philosophers, those who had not yet decided how they would live their
lives. Though philosophy was not
necessarily or fully at home in any existing city, including Athens, still
philosophers had to live in some place where they would not be killed, however
much their killing might confirm their philosophic vocations before the world. The cities in speech that they left us
were designed to free us from actual cities even while living in them. To have no articulated “city” in one’s
soul is the essence of an unfree man.
To have one, placed there by argument, is to be liberally educated.2
Likewise,
in the New Testament, we read that Pilate, Christ’s Roman judge, hears that
Christ is from Galilee, a place outside of Pilate’s immediate
jurisdiction. In Galilee, the
Romans had set up Herod, a puppet king.
Pilate, who knew this whole business of executing Christ was messy, was
delighted with the jurisdictional excuse to put Christ outside of his legal
authority. So he packs Him off to
Herod’s court for further judgment.
Herod was shrewd. He had,
of course, heard of this Jesus and was anxious to look him over. Like the barbarian king in Thessaly,
Herod too wanted Christ to be on stage.
We can imagine the scene when Christ is brought before Herod’s
court. Everyone is there,
expecting some feat, perhaps some miracle, about which many had heard Christ to
perform.
But,
before Herod, Christ remains in complete silence. He will not “perform.”
He found nothing genuine in Herod, no place to reach his soul. Herod evidently was sensitive enough to
get the point, so he returned Christ to Pilate. The Gospel notes that up till that time, Herod and Pilate,
neither of whom was the absolute worst of men, were not on intimate terms, but
now they became “friends.” They
both experienced this Christ, silent before them, refusing to respond to
unauthentic politicians. Theirs
was a friendship of complicity, of responsible men mutually rejecting their
responsibilities, to find pleasant consolation in their, to them, rather
amusing, if lethal, jurisdictional game.
If we be liberally educated, we cannot help but see this “friendship”
against the classical background of the friendship discussed by Plato,
Aristotle, and Cicero.
We
have here, to recall a phrase that Leo Strauss has made famous, from
Tertullian, both “Jerusalem and Athens.”3 That is, we have the two origins of our
culture, the Greek heritage and the revelational response to its brooding
questions to itself. And these
origins belong together, however different each is. What is known as patristic and medieval thought is designed
to explain how this relationship is possible, how the best in Athens can be
seen as related to revelation and its unique terms. This seeing of this relationship is what Chesterton once
called “the keenest of intellectual pleasures.”4 What is known as “modern” thought is
largely the attempt to solve the classical human questions without recourse to
either tradition.5 Any
adequate concept of “liberal arts” and “liberal education” would, at the risk
of intellectual incompleteness or honesty, require attention to the Greek and
Roman classical traditions, to the Hebrew and Christian revelation, to the
patristic and medieval experience, and finally to modern claims, especially
those arising from science and politics, even when they claim to be
“autonomous.” Students who read
Plato, Aristotle, St. Paul, and St. Augustine often are struck to find
themselves more up-to-date, more knowledgeable about what is going on about
them by reading these sources, than when they read The New York Times, or the latest textbook. The former possess a freedom and an intelligence that the
latter somehow lack.
II. THE
CONTRAST OF SLAVERY AND LEISURE.
We
are familiar with colleges that describe themselves as “liberal arts”
colleges. We are also familiar
with the distinction between things liberal and things servile. Work is sometimes designated, even in
the Church, as “servile,” something to avoid on Sundays. Certain disciplines, particularly what
is known from Aristotle as “metaphysics,” are called freeing subjects.
Such a “liberal” discipline is undertaken “for its own sake,” that is,
the purpose of the knowledge gained is not to “do” anything with it. Just to “know” something is itself a
pleasure, though often something we must learn to enjoy. The “useful” crafts and disciplines,
even medicine and in its way art and law, are designed to “produce” or “make”
something. The work, though worthy
in itself, is “for” something else.
The hammer, though it could be in itself an artifact with ornate
carvings, is first intended to pound nails.
The
notion of “slavery,” in which someone was designated to perform “servile” work
or labor, did not initially refer to something wrong with the slave, but
something wrong with the work he was forced to perform because it had to be
done. No one was willing
voluntarily to do it. In the Book
of Exodus, we read: (the Israelites) were made to work in
gangs with officers set over them, to break their spirit with heavy
labor.... So they (the Egyptians)
treated their Israelite slaves with ruthless severity...” (1:11-14). In short they made use of them as
slaves in every kind of hard labor.
Such slavery caused by conquest or other political means did not imply
anything about the slave himself.
Roman professors were sometimes Greek slaves.
The
so-called “natural” slave, strictly speaking, was, unlike the captive slave,
rather someone who was not causa sui. Such a person had some real and
objective defect in body or mind that could not be remedied. He could not rule himself; he had to be
ruled for his own good by another, be it family or state. Aristotle had already said, however,
that if we could invent certain moving statues, perhaps it would be possible
some day to make machines that would do much of this servile work that had to
be done, like weaving or pounding.
Such invention is indeed what eventually did happen in what came to be
called the industrial revolution.
Much
of the freedom from toil in the modern world is based on mechanical or
technological “slaves” who do the work that is degrading for human beings to
perform. Anyone who spends his
time engaged in deadening or purposeless work, whether by coercion or by
choice, would be considered, by the Greeks, to be a slave, however much we
dislike that word. Moreover, as
Yves Simon once remarked, if we contracted to pay a man a very high wage to dig
a ditch six-by-six-by-six then fill it up again only to begin again and again,
the man would soon go mad for being
purposeless.
The
main Christian commentary about this situation was first, not to deny that
there was back-breaking work, but, secondly, to affirm that the one who did it
could nevertheless save his soul, that is, reach the highest things. Likewise, if a work needed to be done,
even if it be drudgery, it usually had a worthy purpose, no matter how difficult
or boring. It had the connotation
of service to the poor, or to those who needed it, without which life could not
go on. Even with adequate
machinery, as modern totalitarian regimes have proved, without these two latter
notions of personal salvation and objective service, legal slavery might never
have been eliminated. Without
them, slavery will no doubt return in some form or other. The worker has his dignity; the work
has its purpose, but still there are things “for their own sake” that are not
drudgery nor directly the Beatific Vision. The order of things to be known and done in the world
remains a worthy project even if we may, on occasion, save our souls without
them. This too is part of
revelation..
What
is surprising about the sundry machines and devices from water wheels to
computers that have been invented to do so many of the tasks that were
otherwise considered inhuman and toilsome is that we end up, as even Hobbes
suspected, with what is called “free time” and the problem of what to do with
it. We have designed machines and
techniques so that we do not have to do many necessary things that keep us
alive and prosperous, things from sanitation systems to satellites . Is this time we now have left over
merely “pastime?” Or are there
things to be done that are not merely “useful?” This is the issue that Plato and Aristotle in ancient times
and Josef Pieper in modern times have made famous under the notion of skole, or leisure.6 Ancient cities were criticized because
they used slaves to do the servile work so at least a few could be free enough
to pursue other, more noble things.
Modern cities are often criticized because they are full of people with
free time that is frittered away on frivolous things.
In
a famous passage in The Republic,
in the city he is building in speech, Socrates first sketches a city with a
sufficiency of worldly goods and indeed with an abundance of luxurious goods,
all of which came forth because of a demand caused by unlimited desire. Glaucon bitingly called this abundant
economy “a city of pigs”; that is, it was a city with nothing higher in it than
keeping alive and content.
Glaucon’s famous phrase was not a compliment, however worthy an
accomplishment it might be to have both needed and luxurious things in existing
cities. He was aware that what was
most important about human life had not yet even been discussed in the city in
speech. In the classical sense of
the term, the “liberal arts” have to do with these things that exist in the
midst of or beyond abundance. This
does not deny that the intellectual and productive efforts to make this
abundance come to pass – the free
market, the rules of justice and law, the value of work – were also, in their own ways, freeing
and noble ones.
III. THE
LIBERAL ARTS TRADITION AS HANDED DOWN.
“Liberal
arts” have a history. The Greek
and Roman experiences are and remain in some sense normative. To be free, we must carefully continue
to study them. That is, the
attentive reading of the Greek and Roman philosophical, literary, historical,
and political traditions begins and continues a reflection into the heart of
things that cannot be duplicated as easily or as elegantly by any other
tradition. This is, in large part,
because this tradition did not think, however proud it was to be Greek or
Roman, that it was not addressing mankind as such. Metaphysics was not “Greek” metaphysics, but
“metaphysics.” The principles of
“oratory” were not Roman, but universal.
Moreover,
not only is this tradition worthy in itself; but it becomes doubly worthy
because of the subsequent traditions that themselves read this initial source
and commented on it, rewrote it, even objected to it. It was not an accident that Cicero, as he tells us in his De
Officiis. sent his son, however
unworthy, to Athens to study. Nor
was it an accident that Augustine, as he tells us in The Confessions, decided, as a brash young man, to become a
philosopher because of a now lost Ciceronian dialogue. Likewise it is not surprising that
Augustine’s major work is entitled The City of God, both because two Psalms speak of such a city (#46,
#87) and because Plato wrote The Republic. We cannot read Augustine
without, at the same time, reading the Greeks, the Romans, the Hebrews, and the
Christians. Augustine was a man of
“liberal learning,” who even wrote a dialogue featuring his own son entitled, De
Magistro, “On the Teacher.” Augustine still teaches us, if we but
let him.
One
of the men most responsible for what is known in the United States as “great
books programs,” themselves designed as efforts to “save” liberal education,
was Mortimer Adler.7 “Liberal
arts are traditionally intended to develop the faculties of the human mind,
those powers of intelligence and imagination without which no intellectual work
can be accomplished,” Adler has written..
Liberal education is not tied to
certain academic subjects, such as philosophy, history, literature, music, art
and other so-called “humanities.”
In the liberal-arts tradition, scientific disciplines, such as mathematics
and physics, are considered equally liberal, that is, equally able to develop
the powers of the mind. The
liberal-arts tradition goes back to the medieval curriculum. It consisted in two parts. The first part, trivium, comprised
grammar, rhetoric, and logic. It taught
the arts of reading and writing, of listening and speaking, and of sound
thinking. The other part, the
quadrivium, consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (not
audible music, but music conceived as a mathematical science). It taught the arts of observation,
calculation, and measurement, how to apprehend the quantitative aspect of
things. Nowadays, of course, we
would add many more sciences, natural and social. This is just what has been done in the various modern
attempts to renew liberal education.8
These medieval programs were called “trivium” and “quadrivium,” that is, they indicated the place where three (tres viae) ways or roads or four (quatro viae) roads of knowledge preparation crossed in the same
person. The quadrivium, in particular, had to do with numbers – arithmetic meant “number in itself,”
geometry met “number in space,” music meant “number in time,” and astronomy
meant “number in space and time.”9
Without preparation in such disciplines, we lack the intellectual tools
to understand the world. They were
each worthy of study in itself, but once acquired, the student was “free” to
stand before all things as a whole, both to know and to act. Hence the notion associated with
“liberal arts” was “universal” or “general.”
IV. THE
PLEASURE OF LEARNING. AND THE UNEDUCATED MAN.
In
order to be a complete human being, there were things worth doing and
knowing. Man was an animal who
freely needed to complete himself to be what he was intended to be. But this “self-completion” was not
considered to be, though it could be, an act of pride or autonomy, that is, an
act that made man the cause of the distinction in things. The fact that man had to “complete”
himself to be what he was intended to be was itself a challenge in one’s own
soul. It was a deference to one’s
own initiative and freedom.
Education,
moreover, was itself not a “thing.”
The word educere meant to
bring forth, or to complete something already begun by the very fact that one
is a human being. We do not “make
ourselves” to be human beings, as Aristotle constantly affirmed, though we do
make ourselves to be good or bad human beings, complete or incomplete human
beings. Yet, the freedom to become
bad or evil is itself a kind of slavery since it deflects us from our proper
end. This is why the path to
freedom has in this classical tradition always been pictured as one of
acquiring virtues and avoiding corresponding vices.
But
the human mind itself had its own proper functioning. It was something capax omnium, something capable of knowing all the things it did
not itself make or create.
Aristotle had remarked that there is a proper pleasure attached to every
human activity, including the activity of thinking, of knowing, as well as of
willing, doing, and making. It
would not be wrong, thus, to describe “liberal education” as the effort to
experience the proper pleasure due to knowing, according to what they are,
all the things that are – seeing, tasting, listening,
touching, smelling, remembering, imagining, knowing, thinking, believing. “To be learning something is the
greatest of pleasures,” Aristotle remarked in a surprisingly open phrase, “not
only to the philosopher but to the rest of mankind, however small their
capacity” (148b13-15). But since
we can choose disorder, since we can reject the kind of being we ought to be,
it is quite possible to be illiberally educated; indeed it is possible to
acquire vices instead of virtues while knowing what both are. What would someone who does not acquire
the proper formation of his soul look like?
We
are fortunate to have three classical descriptions, without citing, in
addiction, Horace’s famous description of the bore. Let me cite two portrayals – one from Plato, one from the English novelist Evelyn
Waugh. In each of these
description, we find pictured a man who can certainly read and write, who is
active in public, and who, no doubt, thinks he is properly educated. But in each description, it is clear
that the person so described lacks the very order of soul and mind that would
enable us to call him “free” and judicious in his relation to the highest
things.
In
the eighth book of The Republic,
Plato describes the soul of the democratic man, the man who is “free,” that is,
the man with no order of principle in his soul. What is his day like?
And why? How does he appear
before others? This is Plato’s
description.
“And he doesn’t admit any word of
truth into the guardhouse (of his soul), for if someone tells him that some
pleasures belong to the fine and good desires and others to evil ones and that
he must pursue and value the former and restrain and enslave the latter, he
denies all this and declares that all pleasures are equal and must be valued
equally.”
(Adeimantus) “That is just what
someone in that condition would say.”
“And so he lives on, yielding day
by day to the desire at hand.
Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other
times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical
training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he
even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy. He often engages in politics, leaping
up from his seat and saying and doing whatever comes into his mind. If he happens to admire soldiers, he’s
carried in that direction, if money-making, in that one. There’s neither order nor necessity in
his life, but he calls it pleasant, free, and blessedly happy, and he follows
it for as long as he lives” (561b-d).
It would be difficult to find a more blunt description
of what a liberal education is not.
Such is the man who thinks his life to be pleasant and free when it is,
by any objective evaluation, just the opposite.
Each
point of the young man’s disordered soul needs emphasizing: on occasion he jogs
to keep in shape. Next, however,
he is found with a beer lounging around mostly watching TV. One day, after seeing or hearing one,
he desires to be a banker, the following day a soldier, the day after even a
philosopher. He drinks heavily,
then goes on a diet and drinks only water. He denies himself no pleasure, considers all pleasures equal
whether they follow good or bad actions.
In short, the man has no principle of order in his soul, no way to
distinguish worthy and unworthy ways of life. Such a person is very dangerous both to himself and to his
polity precisely because his soul is disordered by a lack of discipline and
knowledge about what human life is about.
Plato never tired of reminding the potential philosopher that the
condition of his city ultimately depended on the condition of his soul. No political reform could ever be
successful without personal reform.
No one who did not understand this relationship could be “liberally”
educated.
Aristotle
has a similar description in the Politics (1323a26-34) of a man whom no one would want to be if he could help
it. One of the prime purposes of
good literature is to enable us to encounter vicariously what disordered souls
might look like before we ever decide to put them into our own lives, when it
is too late. Again, because of
lack of virtue, the man in Aristotle’s graphic description is unable to do what
he ought. And while Aristotle does
not think virtue is a question of knowledge alone, still there is a knowledge
component to virtue. That component is called prudence. Without this virtue, without the
examination of the possible ends to which it might possibly be employed to
examine the means to achieve it, the soul is continually engaged in pursuing
false definitions of its own happiness and taking the wrong means to achieve
it.
The
man with a faulty understanding of what a liberally educated man is, is not
free to do what he ought to do because, like Plato’s democratic youth, he does
what he wants, whatever it is. He
denies himself no pleasure and refuses to acknowledge any distinction between
good and bad not of his own making.
Thereby he is “free” even to do what is wrong and call it virtuous. This position already anticipates the
“freedom” of Machiavelli’s prince, the apparently exhilarating but corrupting
freedom to do wrong, when “necessary,” the freedom to reject Socrates’
principle that “it is never right to do wrong.”
The
second passage I should like to cite in this consideration of what no one would
want to be, of how one’s faulty education will not really free him or teach him
the truth of things, including human things, comes from Waugh’s novel Brideshead
Revisited. In the early part of World War II, Waugh had occasion to
comment on the type of modern young man who comes into the army. He is clearly a young man of modern
education and taste, a worthy successor to the men described by Plato and
Aristotle. This young man’s name
is Hooper.
Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with
Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my
eyes were dry to all save poetry –
that stoic, red-skin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast
flowing tears of the child and the man –
Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s
Day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae.
The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a
profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto,
Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon
– these, and the Battle of the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred
such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called
to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and
strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.10
Hooper evidently had a social science education, heavy
on statistics and “facts.” He did
not know of the great events of history that ought to have filled his boyhood
imagination. He was not liberally
educated. He was not free.
In
book four of Aristotle’s Ethics,
the word “liberal” initially had to do with material possessions. Aristotle saw that man, to be virtuous,
needed a certain amount of material goods. He also understood that we reveal our souls by how we deal
with the material goods, large or small, that we do have. The Greek word elutheria referred to that virtue by which we rule our material
goods so that we can achieve our higher purposes by their proper use. The word is sometimes translated as
“generosity” or “liberality.” It
has two aspects, the person with ordinary wealth and the person with immense
wealth. Aristotle was not
particularly worried that some people had more wealth than others. Rather he was concerned with how our
wealth, whether little or great, was used. Liberality or generosity is a virtue precisely because it is
designed to free us from ourselves to see that what we possess is also related
to others not just for their good but for their enjoyment.
“Freedom
to welcome truth, without hindrance on the part of our mind, certainly is a
rare privilege,” Yves Simon has written in a perceptive essay entitled,
“Freedom from the Self.”
That human freedom should be
restricted in this high order of the mind’s relation to truth is a moral and
metaphysical disaster of the first magnitude. Knowing is the creature’s best chance to overcome the law of
nonbeing, the wretchedness inflicted upon it by the real diversity of “that
which is” and “to be.” A thing
which is not God cannot be except
at the cost of not being what it is not. It cannot be except by
being deprived of indefinitely many forms and perfections. To this situation, knowledge, according
to St. Thomas’ words, is a remedy, inasmuch as every knowing subjected is able
to have, over and above its own form, the forms of other things. This remedy is, so to say, complete in
the case of intellectual knowledge, for intelligent beings can have the forms of
all things and be all things spiritually, intentionally, transsubjectively,
objectively,11
Freedom from the self is first required that we might
have a freedom for others, a freedom to know what is.
We
cannot be the kind of being we are unless we are not other things. Thus, it is all right to be what we
are. Yet, what we are contains
this mind with its capax omnium,
with its capacity to know all that is. It is this exciting freedom to take
into our souls what we are not, to take it in without changing or destroying
what we take in, that constitutes the purpose of liberal arts which are
designed to teach us how to be open to the various levels of being.12
V. THE
WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING LIBERAL ARTS.
Robert
Kagan has traced the various understandings given to the term liberal arts or a
liberal education. Generally, the
term included the ideas 1) that knowledge was its own purpose, an end in
itself, that it was good to know, 2) that liberty meant having the virtues
whereby we could rule ourselves, 3) that knowledge included something useful,
some worthy way of making one’s way in the world, and 4) that this liberal
learning had a political component, the ideal of living in a free society, of
participating in ruling and being ruled.13 The Roman notion of education was more practically oriented
than the Greek classical view. The
Romans stressed the capacity of speech, of eloquence. Aristotle had said in his Rhetoric that a man should be as able to defend himself with
his speech as with his arms.
The
medieval university, having newly discovered Aristotle and being familiar with
revelation and the classic heritage through the Fathers of the Church,
considered that a liberal education dealt with already discovered things. The source of truth was God, both as
known by reason and by revelation.
Logic and dialectic studies seemed the best way to prepare oneself for
grasping what is known. The
medieval summae and curricula,
while not neglecting practical things, attempted to organize all of what men
knew into one orderly, interrelated whole.14 The Renaissance notion of a liberal education was in part an
effort to return to the classics minus the addenda of revelation while
minimizing the Greek notion of the contemplative life. There was a revival of the notion of
the primacy of the city and its demands.
The focus again became “this worldly.” More particularly modern education was interested in what
was not yet known. The “scientific
methods” stressed not what was revealed or what was previously learned or even
what was useful for the city, but “new things.” With the spread of “scientific method” into all disciplines,
including the liberal ones, with its implication of “progress,” it was again
proposed that the secret to
general education was at hand.
The
modern university is “liberal” in the sense that it does not have any principle
of priority. No department or
branch of knowledge seems to have any priority over the other. Each discipline has in common only what
each discipline maintains about itself.
In this context, it becomes almost impossible to have a “liberal
education” in the classical sense.
Not merely do the great books seem to contradict each other, but so do
the “truths” that are found in the disciplines.15 The primacy of relativism as the ground
for democratic education seems to flow from the condition of modern knowledge,
as it flowed from Aristotle’s notion that “democracy” was based on that
understanding of liberty that had no order other than that of its own
choosing. Universities are perhaps
useful as a place for preparation especially of elite students who will, by a
kind of aristocratic heritage, gain control of certain professions and offices
in the economy and in politics.
But whether there is in fact a genuine place of “liberal education” can
be doubted in the present context.
Not merely are the classics and revelation considered to be inadmissable
as norms or canons for the education of all, but the sciences themselves never
know what they might be in the future.
The conclusion of this observation is not that there is no place for
liberal learning, but that its place may not always, or even usually, be found
in usual academic institutions.16
VI. THE
PLACE OF ERROR IN LIBERAL EDUCATION.
We
are, of course, reluctant to admit that the case for “liberal education,” for
“liberal arts,” for the things that free us from slavery to the self, from
contentment with merely the useful is hopeless. Liberal education is not a “speciality.” It is not what is called a
“major.” Rather it is rooted in
the kind of intellectual eros that
we find in Plato, in the “wonder” that begins all thought in Aristotle, in the
drive to know what reoriented the life of the young Augustine when he read
Cicero. This eros lies behind all we do, since all things are worth
knowing. “There is no such thing
as an uninteresting subject,” Chesterton once remarked, “but only uninterested
people.” Jacques Maritain put the issue bluntly: “Great poets and thinkers are
the foster-fathers of intelligence.
Cut off from them, we are simply barbarians.”17 That we be not barbarians, that we be
not cut off from great poets and thinkers is what we mean by being “free”
because we know the things that are. The liberal
arts have something to do both with solitude and with the city. Cicero began the third part of his
famous De Officiis (On Duties),
with these memorable words: “Publius Cornelius Scipio, the first of the family
to be called Africanus, used to remark that he was never less idle tan when he
had nothing to do, and never less lonely than when he was by himself.”18 We can likewise almost feel the
draw of the city in this passage from Boswell. He and Samuel Johnson had stayed overnight at St.
Albans. The following day, March
29, 1776, Boswell writes, “I enjoyed the luxury of our approach to London, that
metropolis which we both loved so much, for the high and varied intellectual
pleasure which it furnishes.”19 Again here we have that classic theme that there are genuine
intellectual pleasures, that they are to be found in cities, without forgetting
the fact that cities also kill philosophers and others of its own. One might almost say, in this context,
that the reading
and rereading of Cicero and of Boswell’s Life of
Johnson can by itself be considered a
liberal education. There is more,
but these are good beginnings, indeed good endings of such an enterprise. Great
thinkers, no doubt, can be and have been in error. Aristotle, who knew Plato’s worry that the poets could
corrupt us, understood that the knowledge of error, even great error, is not
something that we should reject knowing.
It is part of being free.
“We must, however, not only state the true view,” Aristotle observed,
“but also explain the false views, since an explanation of that promotes
confidence. For when we have an
apparently reasonable explanation of why a false view appears true, that makes
us more confident of the true view.” (Ethics, 1154a23-26).
The history of error, the history of heresy, (I think of Chesterton’s Heretics), is as much a part of liberal education as the
insight into truth. A considerable
part of being intelligent and being virtuous consists in knowing what it is to
be unintelligent and un-virtuous, especially knowing in the graphic terms we
see these in our literature.
Unless
we can understand the arguments against truth, we do not fully understand
it. And the arguments against
truth can be very persuasive. Part
of any liberal education is to know these arguments, and to know the truths to
which they point. Josef Cardinal
Ratzinger, himself a man of genteel and liberal leaning, gave a good example of
this awareness of how it is a part of being free to know where ideas lead. “The central problem of our time,” he
observed on October 6, 2001, at the Synod of Bishops in Rome, “is the
emptying-out of the historical figure of Jesus. It begins with denying the virgin birth, then the
resurrection becomes a spiritual event, then Christ’s awareness of being the
Son of God is denied, leaving Him only the words of a rabbi. Then the Eucharist falls, and becomes
just a farewell dinner.” We are
reassured to see the connection of
ideas and things, itself the result of our being free, being open to what
is..
John
Henry Newman, whose book The Idea of a University stands at the heart of any modern discussion of this
topic, made this point about the difference between liberal education and
salvation.20 Newman held
that no matter how valuable natural virtues are, they do not, significant in
themselves though they be, guarantee supernatural excellence. The gentleman, while perhaps being
exquisitely refined, can still lose is soul.21 This is just another way of saying that
man has a destiny higher than perfection in this world. Indeed, it implies that perfection even
in this world is not complete without attention to his ultimate purpose. Any education can stop short of this
higher purpose, but it does so at the cost of what is true at any level wherein
something, in being itself, always points us higher.
Aristotle
had indeed given many hints that something more was “due” to human nature than
seemed given to it, though he was not quite sure what it was. “Such a (contemplative) life would be
superior to the human level. For
someone will live it not in so far as he is a human being, but in so far as he
has some divine element in him.” (Ethics, 1177b27-28). This
passage suggests why it may be “illiberal” not to include all that we can know
of man in our “freeing” education of him.
The best “natural” explanations of our condition as human beings seems
to be aware that we are lacking something, not merely because of a certain
“wickedness” of which even Aristotle was aware, but because nothing we find in
our ordinary ways seems to satisfy us (Politics, 1267b1).
This again is Augustine’s realism.22
Education
that does not include explanations and understandings of what we are will rely
on an education that lacks the necessary intellectual tools and information
fully to explain man to himself. To explain man to himself is the
central purpose of any liberal understanding of man. It is also, as John Paul II often says, the purpose of
Christianity. Christian literature
presupposes certain unanswered, often brilliant questions that had already
occurred to the human mind before Christianity itself came into being. The liberally educated man knows these
classic questions as they arise in any soul, including his own. A liberally educated Christian cannot
understand his own revelation if he too does not know the force of these classic
questions.
In
conclusion, liberal arts include the intellectual eros that is unsettled by not knowing what is true. If we read descriptions of this
philosophic eros along side the
revelational proposition that homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est, we can at least suspect that this unsettlement that
we find in human history is itself something put there from the beginning.23 To be free, that is, to be “liberally
educated,” to practice the truly “liberal arts” is to be open to something that
is not ourselves, or not made by ourselves. Mankind is more a drama of receptivity than it is of its own
creativity in cities and in arts.
The final word, I think, should be that of Aristotle, the man who made us most aware that there is an order in things. “For self-sufficiency and action do not depend on excess,” he wrote in the Ethics, “and we can do fine actions even if we do not rule earth and sea; for even from moderate circumstances we can do the actions expressing virtue.” (Ethics, 1179a2-6). We do not have to rule the land and the sea to do fine actions. Ordinary people can do actions that express virtue, they can know what is. The revelational side of this same principle is simply that everyone, king or pauper, can, with grace, save his own soul. If we combine these two principles, we have the essence of what it is to be free, free both to know what the world is like and what is our destiny. We can, to be sure, choose to be “illiberal,” to be “slaves” to ourselves, mindlessly to say whatever it is that comes into our heads. What it is to be “illiberal,” in short, points us to “liberal arts,” to what it is to be free enough to know the truth of things and to find pleasure in this truth.
1Cicero, “On the Orator,” in On the Good
Life, edited by Michael Grant
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979),
280.
3Leo Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens: Some
Preliminary Reflections,” Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, edited by Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, l983), 147-73.
6Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of
Culture, trans. G. Malsbary (South
Bend, IN.: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998).
7But see, Frederick Wilhelmsen, “Great
Books: Enemies of Wisdom?” Modern Age,
31 (Summer/Fall, 1987), 323-31
11Yves Simon, “Freedom from the Self,” A
General Theory of Authority (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 151-52. The reference from St. Thomas is to De Veritate, 2.2.
12See on this point, E. F. Schumacher’s A
Guide for the Perplexed (New York:
Harper Colophon, 1977).
13Donald Kagan, “What Is A Liberal
Education?” The McDermott Papers (Irving, TX.: University of Dallas, 2001, 5
pp.
14See, for a still masterly treatment of
this topic, Joseph Lins, “The Seven Liberal Arts,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Appleton, 1912), I, 760-65.
15See Leo Strauss, “What Is Liberal
Education?” Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 3-8.
16See James V. Schall, Another Sort of
Learning (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1988); A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning (Wilmington, DE.: Intercollegiate Studies, 1997).
17Jacques Maritain, “Education and the
Humanities,” The Education of Man: The Educational Philosophy of Jacques
Maritain, Edited by Donald and Idella
Gallagher (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1962), 85.