on the culture

7/27/2019 On the Culture

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On the cultureThe Greeks, as I once learned through Leo Strauss, had awonderful word for vulgarity. They called it apeirokalia that is, a lack of experience in beautiful things. At the heartof liberal education (liberal in the pre-modern sense), is aproject to rescue men from this condition. It gives them theexperience they need, among beautiful things. It puts themin contact with the finest minds, the finest works, this worldhas to offer. As Strauss said, this is to make them humble, &to make them bold. Humble: to discover their place in anintellectual order, among minds more learned & wiser thantheir own. Bold: to break with the noise, the rush, thethoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair.

What we have today, in the governing heights of Westernsociety, is not liberal education. Rather it is the Vanity Fair ofthe intellectuals the class, the herd, the swine in manyways, who have come to dominate the intellectual trades. Inacademia, in media, in law, in bureaucracy, in religion(broadly considered to include secular humanism), wehave people who are credentialled, to be sure, but who havenot been educated. In particular, the education they have

not received is liberal education, which requires nearly thepolar opposite of the kind of training they have successfullyendured.

Liberal education is not specialized. The word universityonce conveyed this. It had many faculties, but was in thatsense alone multifarious. It was an aggregation of teachers& scholars gathered in one place, to consider matters in thewhole. It offered training in many disciplines, but to a

common end.

Well, who am I to judge? I have a Grade X education, as Iwas explaining to a gentleman the other day, by way ofexcusing myself from an opinion on some monsterpiece ofadvanced textual criticism by an academic star, which he
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proposed to study as a project in self-improvement. I canhardly read & write. You have a Doctorate in Philosophy, Imsure it will make sense to you.

He could not imagine I had read the book. He was, I assume,assuming I had seen the reviews. That is how most of usform our opinions, having delegated the homework to thespecialists.

Pressed on the matter, I recalled the moment of vivid clarityI had experienced at the age of sixteen, when I suddenlydecided to leave High School. It was like an impulse to leapoff a train, upon realizing where it was going. Somehow I

grasped, perhaps through older friends, that it was takingme to a University, to a modern one to a kind of cemeteryfor the philosophical mind; to a place where the love ofwisdom had been replaced with the demands of industry; toan institution in which everything I myself loved wouldbecome desiccated & tedious. Somehow I saw that thehumanities had been professionalized, that the adepts ofthe ancillary disciplines had taken over. The brain hadrebelled & deposed the heart; mind had itself been displaced

by a revolutionary committee of sparky little neurons.

This wasnt a Left/Right thing, incidentally. I was anywaymuch more liberal in those days (in the modern sense).Rather, the technocrats had removed the thinkers. This musthave moral & political consequences; shallowness alwaysdoes. No doubt it all began with a suggestion from the Devil;but Im sure the pioneers of modern higher education werewell-meaning people, who considered themselves perfectly

humane. (They were, as I understand, the people whopioneered modern textual criticism of the Bible, in ProtestantEngland then Protestant Germany, from the later 17thcentury forward; their sceptical techniques spreadingincrementally through other fields, making each in turn evermore specialized & self-referential.)


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In the olden time to which I was already semi-consciouslyadhering the introduction to a classical work might tellyou what it was about, who wrote it, when & why; things ofthis nature. That the book was written at some time, by

someone, & had been preserved in some apparent even iffragmentary order, might go without saying. After all, menhad loved it, & gone to the trouble of copying & re-copying,time out of mind. This in itself showed it must be worthvisiting. The teachers job was to focus the excitement; toshow a way in.

In the modern time, the introduction begins with the textualhistory. What the book is & why one should read it is the

afterthought. It is the part that is taken for granted, for thescholars are working assiduously on the text. This is anenterprise like coal mining, in diminishing seams.Advancement comes of scraping lignite off the walls, in eversmaller chips with ever greater precision. Then, as we arriveat literary theory, polishing the nothing that remains.

This, anyway, was my juvenile rebellion: You are not goingto send me down that mine! My general idea was to read

instead, from love of learning; to travel & find whatprofessors I could on the open road. Yes, there were someleft, & they always took me in. I had only to write to animpressive teacher, & he would immediately agree to seeme. I never suffered from lack of teachers; though I couldhave done better on the point of discipline & self-organization, for I have always been a reckless lover.

Here is the motto I discovered near the front of a book that

my high-school Latin teacher lent to me, it seems yesterday,but now long ago. It is by Emil Staiger:

The organs of recognition, without which no true reading ispossible, are reverence & love. Knowledge cannot dispensewith them, for it can grasp & analyse only what love takespossession of, & without love it is empty.


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before that. For sure it does, if it did, & let me not say thetextual history of a book is uninteresting. Nor would Isuggest that the acquisition of basic reading skills in Latin orGreek the sort of thing redbrick universities dont

encourage is unimportant. They are not important inthemselves, but for the larger purpose of assimilating aclassical heritage, or as much as one can within the limits ofa human life. For either we do that, in each generation, orthe heritage is lost.

As Jacob Burkhardt was quoted, in the same long-agoborrowed book: We can never be free of the ancient world,unless we become barbarians again.

Grammar & vocabulary are where we begin where thechild begins with a capacity for rote that will leave him as hegrows. Our ancestors understood, that we must catch themyoung, before that native ability is transformed, duringadolescence, into a new power to reason on things, & the olddelight in rhythmic recitation becomes dreary & a trial. It isnot a priority, to start with the declensions & conjugations,it is carpe diem, as Horace used to say.

Ancillary disciplines are not lower in priority. That is howthe liberals (in their modern version) think. Reality does notwork that way. One must become a crack Latinist (& I to myshame never became one) to capture nuance in thatlanguage; one must be able to dream in Greek to fullyappreciate the use of the old Attic or even the later New

Testament rhetorical figures to actually understand whatone is reading. Though let me add that a mind attuned by

poetry in any language will be open to the possibilities ofnuance in another, so that with a certain genius (in theancient Greek sense) insufficient training in the ancillarydiscipline can be overcome. Great scholars of classicalChinese, for instance, have admitted that the irresponsibleEzra Pound did better translations of Li Po; great Thomistshave admitted that the hack journalist, G.K. Chesterton,


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wrote arguably the best book on Thomas Aquinas. Life isunfair.

The ancillary disciplines are specialized, but strictly crucial,

means to a general understanding. They can never bediscounted, yet they cannot be the end to which we strive.So it is within e.g. Christianity, where moral perfection is notan end in itself, but the means of advance towards thebeatific vision. This does not mean it has some lower priority,that it can be safely ignored or bypassed. Only liberals thinklike that. For the sincere Christian, good behaviour is notoptional. It is the only possible path to the destination.

All this I have mentioned in order to make clear what I mean& what I do not mean. To this day, I have nothing againsttextual scholarship, & have benefited immensely from thecoal miners work: especially that which was done centuriesago, in the monasteries by men no longer named, when theveins were much richer. Yet those were not specialists. Theycompared manuscripts, they sought out the best, in thespirit of Saint Jerome: out of hunger for the truth, for thewhole of the truth, or for as much as they could get their

eyes on. They sought books because they wanted to readthem, & their commentaries engaged with the authors ofthose books. They were men, not apes.

The apes are specialized, each species for its niche; men, tothe contrary, were designed to be generalists, in the imageof our Maker. That is how we went forth & multiplied &subdued the earth: as masters upon entering the homeprepared for us. We were not, Darwinists & Marxians

notwithstanding, just a new design of monkey. It is thereforeto be regretted that the modern university is, for the mostpart, graduating apes, not men. Except, those which do noteven try to train their innocent charges to the survivalistlevel, & graduate not independent apes, but interchangeablecyphers for the machinery of perdition, to be ruled by apes.


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*

The demand for relevance in education has been throbbingsince at least the 1960s. Among the vulgar, it was in demand

long before. Expressions such as, merely academic, have along & curious history. So far as I can make out they were aproduct of reductionism from the era of Reformationpropaganda; but a book could be written on this.Relevance is for the apes, who delete from observationanything that does not serve the proximate utilitarian end.Human beings were distinguished by idle & irrelevantbehaviour from strange ritual acts of worship, to paintingon cave walls, to the very mysterious burial of their dead.

Tools could be fashioned by many animals, & apes wereespecially clever with them. It was the use to which the toolswere put that revealed our unique elevation, above nature.

I am making this short observation today, by way of lamentfor our Church. A commentator on my last post, theCanadian poet, Robert Eady, made what I considered anastute remark. He said, I think what has been missed forthe past fifty years or so is that Christianity is a revealed

religion. This was, in its subtle simplicity, the sort of remarkthat requires a liberal education. It may be too simple for anilliberal mind to grasp it could be dismissed as somethingobvious, & irrelevant. It could be taken glibly, when it is notglib. The entire orientation of our Church is to Christ, alive &available in the Eucharist. This is the unifying centre of ourChristian life; not one thing among many in any sort of list.Everything we must do follows from that singular act ofCommunion, in which the mystery of the Creation is takenwhole.

We had bishops, once, of liberal education; men who werenot narrow, & reductionist; who had cultivated the habit ofseeing things whole. Beyond them we had throughout theChurch teachers & scholars of real breadth, whoseinterpretation of our revealed religion was not constrained


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by the power-point mindset we are now getting, fromRome down. We had clergy & laity alike, broadened daily bythe experience of the beautiful old Mass, before it wasremodelled by the apes of the ICEL to make it relevant to

the times. We had a Church that consciously made its appealto all manner of men & women, & which was in that sensecatholic, universal; which was not tempted to pitch awaywhatever might seem irrelevant in the moment. ThatChurch had found her way into the hearts of men of goodwillin every known human culture.

A hideous, ape-like, destructive force has been at large inour world for generations, & through the hierarchy of our

Church for at least the last two. It is in its animal naturealways lurking; it had emerged within the Church before; butin the time since Vatican II it has often seemed to havebroken its chains. It cannot be defeated, within this world;therefore must ever be contained.

The Catholic Church teaches a revealed religion, not areligion limited by specialized human inquiry. It is, further, amystical religion, & irreducibly so for men do not live by

bread alone, but by every word from the mouth of God. TheChurch reaches out not to the poor, but to the poor inspirit, a much different, & not narrowly material idea. She isthere to accommodate sinners & saints, not those of anypreferred rank or class. Her works of mercy & charity followfrom the Revelation, & out of the mystery of divine Love.

They are not a political programme; Christ kept himself alooffrom Caesar.

Literalism, reductionism, point-scoring, prioritizing, aremarks of the poorly educated mind. The consequences aretoo easily foreseeable. But the cure is also foreseeable.Prudence itself, queen of the cardinal virtues, requiressomething in the nature of a liberal education, & we mustlearn to value that again. It can begin with the restoration ofreverence in the Mass, & with the re-apprehension of living


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beauty; with the re-acquisition of our enchantment with aCreation that is not reducible to parts in a machine. Thewhole is more than its parts. It is animated by the breath ofthe Spirit, & it is innate with poetry.

Or as Pope Francis put it yesterday, we must bear witnessto, & disseminate, this culture of life, against that cultureof death everywhere encroaching.

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