Author: Kleiner

An article here reprises some of G.K. Chesterton’s thoughts on America.  Chesterton called America a “nation with the soul of a Church”.  It is, Chesterton remarked, the only nation “founded on a Creed” (“a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.”).

An excerpt from the article:

“Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world,” Chesterton continues.  America’s creed is universal in its implications, recognizing knowable truths applicable to all men at all times. And in that sense, the country’s essence, he concludes, is “religious because it is not racial” in the way that “England is English as France is French or Ireland is Irish; the great mass of men taking certain national traditions for granted.”

At the same time, America’s creed is limiting because the creed itself defines what it is to be an American; it is the truths we hold. As Chesterton puts it, even when American pluralism is compared to a melting pot, “that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt.” That solid substance – that creed – he writes, is “traced on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy.”

This article reviews three recent books on the value of a classical education, a dying cause that a few of us still fight with great fervor.

So I just got back from a Fides et Ratio Seminar.  A big theme all week, as we read the “Fathers, Doctors, and Popes” (that was the title of the Seminar) was the meeting of the Christian Biblical tradition with Greek philosophy.  How is this to be thought of and worked out?  Here is a relevant and frankly amusing passage from St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, with a few notes in brackets from me:  (St. Gregory of Nyssa, c335-394)
”
The foreign wife will follow him, for there are certain things derived from profane education which should not be rejected when we propose to give birth to virtue. Indeed, moral and natural philosophy may become at certain times a comrade, friend, and companion of life to the higher way, provided that the offspring of this union introduce nothing of a foreign defilement.

[Gregory of Nyssa comes down clearly on the side of appropriating what we can from the Greek.  Just as the Jews took the Egyptians gold and refashioned it into the tabernacle, so too should we take truth wherever we find it – though we should appropriate it to new and proper ends and should leave behind anything “foreign”.]

Since his son had not been circumcised, so as to cut off completely everything hurtful and impure, the angel who met them brought the fear of death.  His wife appeased the angle when she presented her offspring as pure by completely removing that mark by which the foreigner was known.

I think that if someone who has been initiated under the guidance of the history follows closely the order of the historical figures, the sequence of the development in virtue marked out in our account will be clear.  There is something fleshy and uncircumcised in what is taught by philosophy’s generative faculty; when that has been completely removed, there remains the pure Israelite race.

For example, pagan philosophy says that the soul is immortal.  That is a pious offspring.  But is also says that souls pass from bodies to bodies and are changed from a rational to an irrational nature [Plato’s transmigration of souls].  This is a fleshy and alien foreskin.  … …
”

So am I the only one that giggles at this?  Philosophy’s “generative faculty”?  And the “fleshy foreskin” of erroneous Platonic teachings?  That is some image to use!  Some may prefer the so-called “baptized Aristotle”, but what about the circumcised Plato?!

I’ve been reading some old and great books in preparation for a week-long Fides et Ratio seminar at Thomas More College next week.  It has been great.  Augustine, Albert the Great, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Francis de Sales, St. Teresa of Avila, etc.  The seminar is great, and I wish more academic conferences were run this way.   15 people sit around a table.  No prepared presentations, just open discussion.  We spend a week together, and it is pretty intense (all day and into the early night each day).

Anyway, one of the readings is ‘On the Incarnation’ by St. Athanasius.  The short introduction by C.S. Lewis is worth the price of admission.  He presents a wonderful little argument for reading old and great books, and how reading them can help us avoid error.  I thought two passages were worth quoting at length, but you can read the whole introduction (and the book by Athanasius, if you want!) here.

“THERE is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

…

“None of us can fully escape this blindness [of our own contemporary assumptions], but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

So you just graduated from college with a philosophy degree.  Now what?  You’ve been living in an educational bubble that has allowed you to live the life of the mind, but now practical concerns are pulling you away from the cherished task of contemplation.

The relationship between the contemplative life and the practical life has always been vexed.  Aristotle describes the difficulty in Book X of his Nicomachean Ethics:

“But [a contemplative] life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of virtue. If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.”

The difficult that Aristotle finds is that our most natural desire (men by nature desire to understand) is strangely something of an unnatural desire, for fulfilling this desire seems to require that we be something that we are not – divine.  In other words, to satisfy this natural desire we must needs go beyond our composite nature.  This introduces a problem – how do I live a life that is both practical and contemplative?  At the end of the day, I think Aristotle aims at some kind of a balance here, but it is not at all clear how to work that out.  He goes on to contrast the “perfect happiness” of contemplation with the kind of practical happiness that “befits out human estate”, and seems to try to strike a balance but I don’t think ever quite manages to clearly negotiate the tension.  Instead, Aristotle leaves us at the end of his great work on the practical life with a great argument for why contemplation is the best possible (or is it impossible?) life for man.

It is tempting to believe that one can live the “life of the mind” only in the academe.  And so many liberal arts students graduate from college and think graduate school.  You can’t imagine setting aside the life of the mind for the all-too-practical life of a business person or some such thing.  But yet the prospects for a career after graduate school are exceptionally grim.  So what should you do?

Well, this article suggests that it is just wrong-headed to think that a life of the mind cannot exist outside the academe.  Is there a proper balance available out there?  For those of you out there working in the “real world”, share your experiences.  This is an issue that will face nearly all of our graduates.