Published in Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, 28 (Spring, 2005), 16-20.
James V. Schall, S. J.
Georgetown University
Commencement Address Delivered to the Graduating Class
Ave Maria College, Ypsilanti, Michigan, May 6, 2005
ON TESTING THE TEST
On the Kind of “Work” Metaphysicians and Doctors of
the Church Do
“The
apostle Paul states that God has placed apostles, prophets and doctors in the
Church.... He declares that there
are different kinds of ministry and work, and that the same Holy Spirit is
manifested in a variety of gifts for the good of all....”
–
John Baptist de la Salle (^1719).1
“Philosophy
is merely thought that has been thought out. It is often a great bore. But man has no alternative, except between being influenced
by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has
not been thought out. The latter
is what we commonly call culture and enlightenment today. But man is always influenced by thought
of some kind, his own or somebody else’s’ that of somebody he trusts or that of
somebody he never heard of, thought at first, second or third hand;’ thought
from exploded legends or unverified rumous; but always something within the
shadow of a system of values and a reason for preference. A man does test everything by
something. The question here is
whether he has ever tested the test.”
–
G. K. Chesterton, “The Revival of Philosophy – Why?” (1950).2
I.
A
recent study in USAToday (7 April
‘05) indicated that the percentage of CEO’s of Fortune 1000 companies who have
graduated from the Ivy League Schools is declining. Now, one can expect to find well-qualified candidates from
almost any college, small or large, famous or unheralded. Even a number of famous CEO’s,
including Bill Gates himself, are college drop-outs. So the first point that I wish to make to you 39 graduates
of this small college in Michigan is that, in a sense, it does not make much
difference any more, either career-wise or intellectual-wise, where you went to
college. It may be a huge place
like Michigan or NYU, a medium-sized place like Catholic University or Colgate,
or a rather small place like the hundreds of colleges scattered over the land,
especially in the Midwest.
Indeed,
being educated at famous colleges may be an impediment in many ways. Allan Bloom, in a famous remark twenty
years ago, said that the most unhappy people in our society today are those
students in the twenty or thirty so-called best and most expensive
colleges. He thought them to be
unhappy, because they were being educated, implicitly or explicitly, with a
philosophy that claimed it to be true that there is no truth, a formula for
despair if there ever was one. You
assume or are told that you are getting the best education in the world. Then you find that that education, in
turn, is based on nihilist premises.
You will naturally think there are no alternatives, since this education
is “the best.” You will, if you
are logical, be left with nothing, with emptiness as an explanation of all
reality. Meanwhile, you have a
mind that seeks to know all things, all that is.
However,
I am under no illusions about modern liberal education or modern philosophy,
for that matter. In this world, I
think, with Belloc in The Path to Rome, that, at best, we can only have a modest and relative happiness. That is worth having no doubt, but not
at any cost. A student can with
little difficulty acquire a terrible educated in any college, famous or
infamous. Moreover, even in the
best college, whatever that is and if such there be, a student still has to
allow himself to be educated. Not
all do. He needs the virtue called
docilitas, the capacity to be
taught, no easy virtue. He also
needs to learn what is really important, what is true, even if it is not being
presented in whatever college curriculum in which he chooses to engage
himself.
The
problem, mind you, is not so much
that no ultimate truth is presented in the school of our choice. Rather it is the pervading academic
thesis, implicitly or explicitly assumed, that all truth is presented, to
recall Plato, as mere opinion or shadow.
It is presented as if, following Descartes, doubt were the basis of
certitude. I came across the
following parody that catches some of this irony that truth as truth we cannot
hear in the schools we are likely to attend. It goes:
“Now I sit me down in school / Where praying is against the rule / For
this great nation under God / Finds mention of Him very odd. // If Scripture now
the class recites, / It violates the Bill of rights. / And anytime my head I
bow / Becomes a Federal matter now.”
Of
course, these amusing lines refer more to government control than to the school
itself. But it must be said that
the ideas that currently motivate the government with regard to what students
can hear were once but minority opinions someplace in academia. Ideas, even bad ones, perhaps
especially bad ones, do have consequences. This is why we must know the difference between an idea that
corresponds to reality and one that does not. That too is an essential part, if not the essential part, of
any education. We should, in the
end, be taught to be “judgmental,” to distinguish what is from what is not. As Chesterton once remarked, the very purpose of the mind is
to make judgments. To use your
mind to judge about nothing is implicitly not to use your mind at all. It is to try to give yourself comfort
by denying that you even have a mind
II.
Though
not ideal, I have long considered that a good education today must be more in
the nature of private enterprise.
Education is something every student has, to some extent, to pursue by
himself. I have little sympathy
with students who know that they are receiving an awful education, especially
in terms of truth, but do not do anything on their own to counter-act it. That is what my book, Another Sort
of Learning, was really about, to
give some guidance to those lost in the nihilist forests of modern
academia. If you can read, you can
be educated, even if education is more than reading. Indeed, the unlettered are not necessarily the unwise, as
Aristotle already indicated.
The
famous essay of Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” which anyone can
easily find and read on Google, was about this very point This short essay is not to be
missed even if you did miss it while in college or even in your middle or old
age. Indeed, one of the main
things that we gradually learn on leaving college at twenty one or twenty two,
as Plato intimated in book seven of The Republic, is not just that we missed much already. Rather we learn that much more we
probably we were not capable of learning until we were older, with more
experience.
Your
education, in this sense, is not ending today, but just beginning. In the end, it is possible to know
something of the truth of things.
It is important even if we have to find this truth outside the schools,
as we often do. I am not
particularly an advocate of what is sometimes called “lifetime education,” of
the notion that we are always learners or students. I do not mean that we cannot always learn something new, but
maturity means that we reach point where we know, as Aristotle said in his
famous discussion in the Parts of Animals, how to make our own judgments even about the wisdom of the wise.
I
am going to continue with two striking citations from students I know, the one
remark rather sharp, the other rather enthusiastic. Both are about the sort of education a student is
receiving. I will begin with the
one most critical. It comes from a
young man I do not know personally, but with whom I have often corresponded via
old-old fashioned letter or e-mail, that modern substitute for instant vision,
that perplexing tool that makes it almost possible for a professor to teach at
least something to anyone anyplace in the world.
The
only thing I will suppress from this comment is the student’s name and the
university that this blunt and energetic student attends: “I can’t resist commenting on your last
exhortation that I ‘keep the place alive.’ Ha! This place
will need more than me to keep itself on life-support,” the student
wrote..
The NIHILISM that saturates this
place, nay, I will use a qualifier:
the ‘debonair nihilism’ (Flannery O’Connor) that permeates this
place – that tender, warm emotion that says
‘there is no truth; yet, there is a revolutionary truth’ at the same time. Of course, that ‘revolutionary truth’
is always vague, always undefined, always confined to the realm of ideas, never
enfleshed. All I know is that it
involves accumulating a lot of community service hours, and repeating the
motto, ‘Men and Women for Others.’
Then, of course, we fill out the rubrics, carefully jotting down how
many hours of service we have done....
When will this revolution happen?
Perhaps at the same time when Sancho Panza finally gets his promised
island, and when Don Quijote brings back the Golden Age.
This young man hits pretty close, I think, to the
heart of the practical ideology that governs many universities. There is “no truth,” but we work hard
for the revolution to “improve” the man whose being is what we are free to
define, however we choose to define it.
Newman,
in his Sermon Seven on Subjects of the Day, to follow this young man’s
perceived logic to its consequences, briefly observes, “The one peculiar and
characteristic sin of the world is this, that whereas God would have us live
for the life to come, the world would make us live for this life. This, I say, is the world’s sin; it
lives for this life, not for the next.”
The problem is not that we cannot save our souls without also
effectively loving our neighbor in some concrete sense, which was the young
man’s Burkean point about “enfleshed,” not vague, ideas. The point is rather that, since we have
no souls and no truth to lodge in them, we have no grounded principle with which
to oppose those who would, in revolutionary fashion, reconstruct us, even
bodily, in the image of man no
longer fashioned in the likeness of God, the real norm and measure of what we
are.
A
student in one of my classes, to come to the second instance, told me that his
sister had enrolled in a master’s program at St. John’s College in
Annapolis. I do not know where she
went to undergraduate school or how she ever discovered the program at St.
John’s. But I asked my student how
his sister was doing there. He
replied: “My sister is doing very
well. She has started the language
component of her course work.
She tells me daily that she could not imagine the great feast of ideas
that was laid out, with table set, and her having never known it was there. She has made inroads on ideas and works
that make me – in a good
Augustinian sense – envious.”
I
am quite fond of this passage. It
does three very useful things.
First it reminds us that it is never too late. This young woman learned what ideas were after she finished
college. Yet, before this young
woman learned what she was missing,
she had to have some prior inkling or unsettlement that she was missing
something.
Secondly,
the passage reminds us that we often do not know what we are missing. If we did, we would already take steps
to find out. I have often had the
experience of having students in a class where we were reading together say,
Plato, or Aristotle, or Augustine, or Aquinas. As an aging clerical professor, I know what wonder can be
found in these sources. But I
easily recall that I was once in
the same situation as this young woman.
Not only had I never heard of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas,
but I had no idea what they were about or how to go about finding out about them. For this we do need teachers, or at
least, as Yves Simon says in a marvelous passage in A General Theory of
Authority, find them useful.
The
fact is, thirdly, that we cannot know what these ideas are about unless we have
the good fortune to be introduced to them, even if, unhappily, we have to do it
ourselves. Moreover, I think we
should be, as my student said of his sister’s studies, a bit “envious” of those
who receive a better education than we do. There is nothing wrong with that “unrest” in our souls that
arises from our being aware of how much we do not know. After all, this awareness is the
beginning of that Augustinian quest that we find when we begin to learn
anything, namely, that one truth leads to another, that we are never fully satisfied
with what is in fact true because we sense that more is true than we know. What is always points to its origin. And this is an
experience that is an intrinsic part of our very opening to the truth, any
truth.
III.
I
began this address with two citations, one from John Baptist de la Salle, the
sixteenth century founder of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. The great saint of practical education
pointed out that it is all right that there be a variety of talents and
accomplishments among us. We are
not all to do the same thing. To
recall Plato, we cannot have a city in which there are only philosophers, but
no farmers or craftsmen or, yea, politicians. We are to rejoice that others can know and do what we cannot
or do not. We all need a certain
humility before the man who can fix our car.
And
there must be a hierarchy of duties, some are more important than others, but
all, if they are real duties that must be done, are important. Without denying the existence of
frivolous things – and I am a
defender of a world in which frivolity can also exist – the least support the best and the best
the least, and we all need “middling” things. While there may be such a thing as a “vocation” to be a
teacher or a professor, there is, I think, no “vocation” to be a student. That is, a student is always someone in
preparation for something else, for the myriad of things to be done without
which the world cannot go on. Like
childhood which is supposed to end, so being a student is supposed to end. The day is to come when we are
“educated.” This day does not mean
that we now know everything, but rather that we know how to go about judging
and learning what we can know of what is.
The
purpose of education, then, is that we be educated. That is, we are finally to achieve those habits and
talents whereby we can judge and act on our own in this world in the light of
our awareness, as Newman said, that we are not only made for this world. The medieval guilds used to speak of
the “master-craftsman,” the man who had acquired the artistic and craft habits
and skills whereby he could now, on his own, produce fine works,
masterpieces. Analogously, this is
where we are to arrive, as Plato intimated in book seven of The Republic, at the point of being educated. In a kind of foreshadowing way, this is
in part what your graduation here today is designed to teach you.
My
second citation was from Chesterton.
This year, your graduation year, I might note, is the one hundredth
anniversary of the publication of Chesterton’s Heretics, a book that I dearly love, a book that, in its own
amusing way, foresaw most of the aberrations that would come about and are
still coming about in the century following its publication.
“Philosophy,”
he said, is merely thought “thought out.”
This is already Socrates’s “examined life,” isn’t it? One of the blessings of your years of
college life is that it provides us with the quiet opportunity to think things
out ahead of time, as it were.
Whether we like it or not, our lives will be confronted with the great
issues of truth, good, beauty, power, death, suffering, salvation,
eternity. Certain questions must
be faced whether we like it or not, whether we think about them ahead of time or
not. But it is one of the great
things about human life that we can face them, think about them.
Moreover,
as Chesterton again said, we do not have a choice of being only influenced by
good ideas. The world is full of
ideas that are not so good . We
ought to know what these are and how they got that way. This is why we study the “heretics,” as
Chesterton called them, why we study the history of philosophy and political
philosophy, as Leo Strauss remarked, as a series of “brilliant errors.” We cannot know “errors” unless we have
a philosophy based on what is, on
the truth of things. I hope it is
this latter that you have begun to learn here during your four years, at the
end of which, as those of us who are much older than you see, that you are
still young. But you are no longer
without, we hope, intellectual tools and the moral habits with which to use
them well.
We
must, as Chesterton said, test things with something. We need to know the criterion or “test” by which things are
rightly judged. Moreover, we are
given minds in order that we make our souls luminous to ourselves. As Thomas Aquinas said in his famous Commentary
on the Metaphysics of Aristotle,
(#15), “But above experience, which belongs to particular reason, men have as
their chief power a universal reason by means of which they live.” Notice that Aquinas said that it is by
reason that we “live.” What a
striking idea or phrase. That is
to say, unless we illuminate our lives with thought about what is going on so
that we are aware of what we are about, we will not be living a human
life. We are indeed the rational
animals, the beings who proceed by using our minds.
IV.
Let
me conclude. Little Sally is
standing behind Charlie Brown, who is comfortably slouched in the bean-bag seat
contentedly watching TV. She says
to him, “‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
That’s my new philosophy.”
In the next scene, while Charlie continues to watch TV, she continues
her explanation with some determination, “Whenever someone says something to
me, I just say, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’”
As
you can imagine, Charlie thinks he must make some response to this new
philosophy. With a kind of dull
look, still watching TV, he replies, “I’m glad you told me. Not I won’t say anything to you.” While Charlie sinks into the bean-bag in
despair at her logic, Sally responds, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
As
you leave here, I want to remind you that things do have meanings, that a
meaning is merely our way of saying what a thing is. Things have, in a way, two existences, the one their own esse or being and the other in our word that identifies
what they are. The two are
intended to go together.
We
read in the Prologue to John, that the Word was made flesh. During your years here, as the great
John Paul II remarked in his Fides et Ratio, you should have often asked yourselves what is the relation of word and flesh, not
only in your lives but in the divine Life. You are to study all that is, and wonder, following my young student friend, why
the nihilist explanation is not the right explanation.
But
unless you are aware that philosophy is thought “thought out,” you will not
have taken the trouble, though in truth it is more of a delight than a trouble,
to think things out for yourselves.
And it won’t be long before you become “envious” of those who have taken
this trouble. “What’s that
supposed to mean?” It is supposed
to mean that what is is what we
think about. You have been to
college in order to have begun to find out both what things mean and how to
judge whether what you know corresponds to that reality that is.
Let
me leave you with the following eleven observations that you might take with
you for the rest of your lives:
1)
“God has placed apostles, prophets, and doctors in the Church.”
2)
“A man does test everything by something.
The question here is whether he has questioned the test.”
3)
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
4)
“The unhappiest people in our society are those students in the twenty or
thirty best and most expensive universities.”
5)
“Now I sit me down to school / where praying is against the rule.”
6)
“Of course, that ‘revolutionary truth’ is always vague, always undefined,
always confined to the realm of ideas, never enfleshed.”
7)
“The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.”
8)
“Men have as their chief power a universal reason by which they live.”
9)
“My sister has made inroads on ideas and works that have made me – in the good Augustinian sense –
envious.”
10)
“This, I say, is the world’s sin; it lives for this life, not for the next.”
11) “Philosophy is merely thought that has been thought out.”