Yale Acquires New Professor of Ethics

Harold Attridge just emailed the Divinity School today, informing us that Jennifer Herdt, Associate Professor of Theology in Notre Dame’s Theology Department, will be the new Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity Schoo, effective July 2010. 

Here is part of Attridge’s email:

Members of the YDS Community:

I am delighted to let you know that this afternoon Jennifer Herdt let us know formally that she has accepted our offer to join the faculty in July as Professor of Christian Ethics.  Jan Hagens, Jennifer’s husband will also join the Yale faculty as a lecturer in the College, teaching in Directed Studies and Comparative Literature.  He will be also serve YDS as Assistant to the Dean for Continuing Education.

It looks like a good acquisition for YDS, which has traditionally been strong in the area of ethics. Herdt is, among others thing, on the editorial board of The Journal of Religious Ethics, one of the leading journals in the field of ethics.

Now, if they’ll just make the theology hire . . .

Reading and Listening

I’m returning here to the original purpose of my blog to list some recent things I’ve been reading and listening to.

I just listened to a lecture by Peter Ewells on education and assessment, which was excellent. It was rich with content and provided an overview of major issues facing educators, especially issues of concern to policy makers. It may be an ominous sign that I am so interested in aspects of administration, pedagogy, etc., as such people seem to get roped into committees, etc. But, since I am a graduate student, no such risk yet obtains.

Also on a pedagogical and educational note, I’ve read some recent articles, one of which was in the Atlantic, on teaching, and it seems that certain false but enormously influential strains of thought about pedagogy are finally being overturned by evidence, especially from charter schools and programs like KIPP. All of that has been encouraging to my outlook on the future of K-12 and higher education.

Besides all my readings for class, which include lots of Kierkegaard, Tillich, Barth, Raher, McFague, Althaus-Reid, medieval theologians, I’ve been rereading Augustine’s Confessions  and also intend to read a couple of his other major works. I’m planning on writing my Medieval paper on Augustine, Scotus, Aquinas, or Ockham, in descending order of probability. I think I need to just stay with Augustine, as I don’t want to begin in depth study of Aquinas and other later Medieval thinkers until I have an very strong foundation in Augustine’s major texts (Confessions, Trinity, City of God, etc.). So, I’ve been poking around in a lot of stuff by Chenu, Richard Cross, Gorden Leff, Marilyn Adams, and other scholastic experts.

Turner gives recommended reading lists in his syllabus, and I’ve been reading a number of books on those lists. I read Louth’s work on Mysticism, which was good, and I’m reading both of Turner’s books on Medieval theology, although with less urgency than some of the other material I’ve been reading. I’m also reading Leclercq’s The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture as well as Smalley’s The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, both of which are recommended highly be Turner. Turner’s Eros and Allegory, as well as both of the preceding books, have caused me to reflect more than usual on questions of reading, in a deep, not modern, sense. In particular, I’ve been increasingly suspicious of standard criticisms of Patristic and Medieval hermeneutics due to historical, not primarily theological, considerations. We’ll see if of my suspicious work into my paper.

For Kierkegaard all the texts, save one, that Hare assigns I’ve read at least once, some multiple times, so I am really getting a lot out of the rereading process. I’m also using the course to read some classic secondary sources I had not gotten to, most of which are relatively old. There are a number of topics I could write on, but I am still leaning towards a paper on The Sickness Unto Death, this time moving past the first six paragraphs, which, in a sense, I have spent the last three years studying. But I am also strongly leaning towards a project that deals with Jacobi’s influence on SK, especially drawing on Paul Franks work on German Idealism and some of Bernard Williams’ work on ethics. If I start the Jacobi project, my goal will be to revise it and rewrite it over my year in Heidelberg, incorporating a lot more of Jacobi than is in English and drawing on more German scholarship. Since I’ll have German down before I turn to the relevant Scandinavian languages, I’m trying to structure my major projects so that they lean heavily towards work I can do responsibly in German, and thus work focusing either wholly on Idealism, Jacobi, Romanticism and Hamann or those topics and thinkers in relation to Kierkegaard.

I am more and more coming to grasp structural components of Kierkegaard’s thought that eluded me in my first trip through the major pseudonymous writings, and I think The Sickness Unto Death plays a more central role in understanding SK’s authorship than has been widely recognized. Indeed, I think one of the many fruits of the work I’m currently doing is that I’m going to be able to explain a pedagogical or interpretive point: why Kierkegaard is so badly understood. A lot of famous thinkers are badly understood, even by people who’ve bothered to read some of their major work, but SK is particularly badly understood, even by many Kierkegaard scholars, and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me, in some cases at least, why that is.

Naturally, besides all my class related material, I’ve been reading some things here and there on the side. Among my bedside books are Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, which strikes me as an important book for any Christian, but especially theologians and historians. I recently read Marsden’s Reforming Fundamentalism, which was a sobering and enlightening history of one part of my heritage as an American Fundamentalist/Evangelical. I also have some books by Scruton by my bed, which I read as time permits and inclination suggests. Some other books, not necessarily restricted to my bedside, are Robinson’s The Death of Adam, which is proving thoroughly enjoyable and rich with insight. I’m not sure I always trust Robinson’s historical sense, but that does  not detract from my admiration for her writing. I’ve also been reading some McCabe, in this case God Matters, which goes along nicely with Turner’s class.

One book that is leaving a major impression on me is David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, which so far is brilliant and powerfully reorienting. I first heard of it from a Tolkien scholar, Patrick Curry (he has a fantastic book on Tolkien and ecology), and, thanks to Tolkien, I am very open to the kind of work Abram is doing, work that I would have find bizarre four years ago. Ever since my Tolkien class as an undergraduate, I’ve considered myself a treehugger of sorts and have been receptive to ecological work, although some stuff I’ve read, like McFague in theology, is unappealing. Abram’s provides an remarkable analysis, based especially on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, of the Lebenswelt that we naturally inhabit, arguing that, in spite of what we consciously think, the Lebenswelt is actually well described by categories and frameworks we typically describe as animistic. I would have found this thesis highly suspicious 4 years ago, but after Tolkien and especially Barfield, I’m actually quite sympathetic to what Abram is doing. I will continue to reflect on his work as I’m reading.

There are other interesting things I’m reading, especially some material I’m getting into on resurrection (a topic on which I want to do some serious theological work) and atonement, but I can’t think of a lot of it and this post is already lengthy.

Important Research on Multitasking: Don’t Do It

http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education presents and discusses some recent research on multitasking that confirms earlier research: Multitasking is bad for you.

Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford, has shown multitaskers seem actually to be worse at multitasking than the old fashioned people who do one thing at a time:

Indeed, last summer Nass and two colleagues published a study that found that self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks. Nass says he was surprised at the result: He had expected the multitaskers to perform better on at least some elements of the test. But no. The study was yet another piece of evidence for the unwisdom of multitasking.

The recent research also confirms something I have noticed in my own experience, especially in the past few months. The internet is a major distraction for me, not in any straighforward sense, but in the sense that I noticed I had difficulty switching from online browsing to focused reading, or doing the latter while my computer was up, or I was entertaining the possibility of checking my email in ten minutes. Another psychologist, Meyer, has explained why this is: “In a series of papers a decade ago, he and his colleagues determined that even under optimal conditions, it takes a significant amount of time for the brain to switch from one goal to another, and from one set of rules to another.”

Indeed, I discovered this article on multitasking because I switched from finishing Andrew Louth’s The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition to checking Arts and Letters. Now I know scientifically that I had better mentally block off a large chunk of time within which I forbid other activities besides reading if I want to give Louth the attentions he deserves.

All of this research, for which I am grateful, confirms ancient wisdom. Indeed, I often think much sociology and pyschology involves establishing for our own satisfaction what our mothers told us, or, put another way, proving ancient wisdom. I do not demean this effect, for we no longer trust our mothers and the ancients as we did before, and if we thus need researchers to prove teachers are most important for students education, or that doing five things at once diminses our capacity to do anything well, thank heavens for curious, gifted, and diligent researchers.

One should notice especially how concerned these psychologists are about the implications of their research: they see that it suggests what critics of technology and advocates of traditional forms of learning have long said, namely, that technology (much of the time)  and multitasking are destroying, not aiding, our capacity to learn and to reason well. The capacity to sit on one’s rear end for a long time and do one task, suggested by the German word used to describe scholars and other focused workers, Sitzfleisch, is not replaceable, but it is destructible.

This Sitzfleisch is, not incidentally, one of the traits that should characterize all good scholars, but especially those in the humanities, for certain texts, like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, require nothing less than many tens of hours of focused, diligent attention in order to approach even a skeletal first-hand knowledge of them. The demand placed on the readers of such texts is one reason I am suspicious, as was my perhaps most learned professor, of people who claim wide-reading, particularly as scholars. A corollary of my skepticism is the deep respect I have for someone like Denys Turner, who you do not need to be around long to learn that he has spent many hundreds of hours carefully reading about a thousand years of Latin texts. He knows secondary scholarship, but he does not much like scholarship (so he says), and it’s quite clear, for example, that he knows Aquinas – and cares more about Aquinas - a great deal better than he knows, or cares, what other people have said about Aquinas, which is not to say he does not respect the opinions of other; indeed, he’s perhaps the most open academic I’ve yet met. But he knows what is intrinsically important and distinguishes it from what it is necessary qua academic in a university.

The research thus reminds me of the importance of attending to things, something Oliver O’Donovan speaks incisively of in a lecture (the title of which I’ve forgotten). We are to attend well to the world, and we thus must develop the capacities that enable attentiveness and fight against conditions that weaken it.

I gave up the television a good while ago (found it boring), although I still enjoy shows or movies now and then. Now I suppose I need to learn better how to control this thing enabling my current post. To that end . . .

Williams James’s The PhD Octopus

A friend pointed me to James’s outstanding essay, written in 1903, “The Ph.D. Octopus,” that dealt with graduate education and concerns James had about the direction it was taking.

http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/octopus.html

It’s nice to know one has the company of James in one’s concerns about graduate education. Unfortunately, James’s ideas for reform were not implemented, and things, a hundred years later, have gotten much worse, as he feared they would.

It’s worth noting a few things about James’s article. First, he clearly thought that qualifying for a PhD in no way ensures that one can teach, and that the assumption of such a connection was rubbish:

First of all, is not our growing tendency to appoint no instructors who are not also doctors an instance of pure sham? Will any one pretend for a moment that the doctor’s degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be successful as a teacher? Notoriously his moral, social, and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his doctor’s examination is unable to take any account whatever. Certain bare human beings will always be better candidates for a given place than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them, just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one’s own procedure.

He also makes a point about the effects of snobbery, which hits home for all those in higher education, I think, especially in prestigious institutions in which snobbery is the order of the day. He addresses the class of “failures” created by the education system, and how the creators of that system are responsible for those failures.

Finally, his last suggestion, which was also left untouched, was to let men of exceptional intellectual power forego the hindering tedium of higher degrees with the assurance from their professors that they have their support and recommendations. I am sure things like this happen, but I’m equally sure it almost entirely restricted to elite classes – as we all know, it’s still an “old boys club,” when it comes to getting certain jobs and positions, it’s just the club is a bit more diverse than it used to be.

This last suggestion of James struck me as particularly wonderful, as I know people for whom the PhD will be a waste of time, if not a dulling of their talent, and yet they “must” get it. More is the pity James’s advice was not followed.

Incidentally, a college professor in 2003 reflected on James’s essay, “The Ph.D. Octopus: One Hundred Years On.”

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/septemberweb-only/9-15-12.0.html

Christopher Hitchens and J. Gresham Machen

Here is a good interview with Hitchens: http://www.portlandmonthlymag.com/arts-and-entertainment/category/book-and-talks/articles/religion-god-0110/#

One of the many reasons I like Hitchens is because, in some ways,  he understands Christianity better than most Christians. The interviewer is a self-professed liberal (a sophisticated one who distinguishes Fundamentalists and Liberals by distinguishing “literal” and “metaphorical” readings of the Bible – very savvy indeed), and Hitchens provides an argument, not unlike Machen’s in Christianity and Liberalism, against her: her version of Christianity ”is not in any meaningful sense”  Christian. This is one of the interesting, and to serious Christians and serious atheists, obvious facts about liberalism: only liberals think their views are serious and plausible representations of the tradition they claim to be a part of. Everyone else knows better. Orthodox Christians know that if certain things are false, the game is up and one had better be honest, stop taking money from one’s parishioner’s and denomination, and give up the title “Christian.” Atheists who have no reason to not read the Scriptures honestly and are not invested, emotionally, sentimentally, or financially, in Christianity, see the absurd hermeneutical distortions of liberals as just that: absurd.

Only people who want to have a culturally palatable version of Christianity, for example, twist certain clear passages to mean the opposite of what they say. Those with no vested interest in being “Christian” see such readings as dishonest and attack the Bible for teaching x, while the crunchy conservatives who are willing to stick their fingers in the eye of culture admit that x is what the Scriptures say but that that means the culture, not Scripture, is wrong (usually an impossible scenario for liberals, unless the culture is politically conservative).

The Fundamentalist/Liberal dichotomy can drastically oversimplify, but if you have people, like this interviewer, labelling everyone orthodox as Fundamentalist (i.e., if you affirm the creeds, so believe Jesus rose from the dead, etc.), then one can see where one falls on that crude, but helpful, scale. That scale better represents the historical reality of “Fundamentalism,” too. As anyone who has read Machen knows, he was an excellent thinker who stated clearly what the dividing issues were between Liberalism and Christianity: basic commitments to those doctrines that make Christianity what it is. He wanted to cut through the beloved fog of mealy-mouthed preachers and theologians who intentionally used traditional language whose traditional meaning they denied.

Denys Turner recently said something in tune with Hitchens’ comments. Someone in Medieval Theology asked if any of “these people” questioned whether “God was omnipotent, you know, like Process theology did.” Turner said, “No, not really.” He then went on to say, “I don’t see the point of a limited God – why bother with that? We’ve got enough things in the world, why would we want to add one more great, big thing?” Why indeed. 

Still, it’s a delicious irony to hear a hardened atheist telling a professing Christian what Christianity means.

I endeavor to be honest enough with myself so that if I lose my faith I become a Nietzsche, not an Episcopalian (of course, I attend an Episcopal church, so I can’t resist taking shots at them). Radical Islam does everyone the courtesy of reminding them that beliefs matter and sincerity does not hack it. If you sincerely get your beliefs wrong, as most of the world thinks radical Islam does, all the theoretical schlock shoveled from humanities departments will not fill the holes left by the bombs of their false belief. Hitchens only takes seriously serious believers, hence his remark that if all Christians were like his interviewer, he would not have to bother writing against Christianity.

Honest Christian profession is going to make people angry and offended, no matter how politely expressed; it’s one of the most disgusting condescensions of modern theologians (like Bultmann) to act as if everyone “back then” thought Christianity was sensible, as if the early church did not have its own cultured despisers (a historical inaccuracy demolished by, among many, Robert Louis Wilken), and “now, as modern people, blah blah blah,” we have to make some alterations. History revenges itself, of course, so that while Bultmann or Tillich (or fill-in-the-blank) is going out of fashion more people are still being converted to the same Gospel, replete with “supernaturalism” and bodily resurrection (while using the wireless), and, wherever they are fallibly but faithfully living, they are still mocked by the intelligentsia, respected by the common man and beloved by the poor. Some things don’t change.

Marilynne Robinson: An Interview, Reviews, Etc.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2010/01/01/an-interview-with-marilynne-robinson/

Michael Horton, from Westminster Seminary California, has an interview with Marilynne Robinson that mostly focuses on her collection of essays, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.

Roger Kimball also reposted his review of that book, for those without access to the New York Times Review of Books, here:  http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/More-on-Marilynne-Robinson-5044

Paul over at Philosophy, Lit, Etc. has a link to a long excerpt from Robinson’s recent essays, “Onward Christian Liberals,” http://praymont.blogspot.com/2010/01/state-arts-gossip-accomplished-nephews.html 

I intend on reflecting further on this essay in a later post, but for now I’m just noting it.

Why Beauty Matters: A Documentary by Roger Scruton

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr6NlPDMSIM

The best televsion I have ever watched.

Profound, important, beautiful.

Teaching and the Intellectual Life: A Guest Post

Brad Holden is currently studying at the University of Heidelberg. He wrote the following in response to some comments on my post, The Intellectual Life; he graciously allowed me to publish it as a guest post, where it would get a wider audience.

I’m responding to Roger’s post because I’ve heard similar sentiments from many individuals intent on a career in higher education. These aspirants to the professoriate desire, above all, to teach – this is usually identified as a calling – and they are convinced for some reason that a university setting will provide the most hospitable environment in which to do so. Such a view seems to me, I don’t know how to put this any other way, a fundamental error arising from either a misunderstanding of what academia is or what one actually desires.

I generally think the mistake is the first one. Academia is idealized in a naïve, Dead-Poet-Society sort of way. But why would anyone think that professors are bent on instilling a love of learning? Or, for that matter, that they care about their students as human beings – as ends in themselves – at all? The summum bonum of academia is not to teach, but to research. That is, the majority of scholars connected with a university of any kind view the teaching of classes as a burden on their real work. After all, a simple consideration of the means by which professors receive either a job or tenure would lead one to recognize that the merit system is based not upon professors’ pedagogic commitments but their publications. In an environment in which many a soul has published and perished, it is sheer delusion to think that scholars are concerned – let alone encouraged – to instill a love of learning.

Thus, I think Roger sums up the reason for this misconception nicely in four simple words: “near as I can tell.” Without knowing much about the pitfalls or pressures of university teaching, countless graduate students expend a great deal of effort pursuing a career that will prove to have been a mirage. And I write as one who has taught for two years in a university. Like many others, I assumed that the university setting would provide an inherently superior environment to a high school classroom. It wasn’t long, however, before I came to think of myself as teaching the 13th grade. All of the vexations of teaching in high school are present. Attendance being required as a safeguard against loan fraud, disgruntled students now sit in class, as insensible to ideas as the eyes of the blind are to light. Moreover, my experience in faculty meetings would lead me to suggest that not all is concerned with learning for its own sake. Universities are preoccupied with basic economical concerns like funding and student enrollment: competition with the neighborhood community college leads to relaxations of standards, and complaints from parents create pressure to drop requirements or pass students – to do whatever it takes, in fact, to keep the consumer happy. That’s not to mention the many unseemly goings-on in academia—athletes, for example, who are somehow kept eligible.

Thus, Roger, I myself, and many others do something that is quintessentially human: we know that teaching high school is, in some ways, unappealing, and we think that the grass will be greener on the other side—or that the students will somehow change over the course of one summer. Yet while this may be a very human error, it is a serious one—one involving great personal cost and years of effort for what amounts to so much tilting at windmills. Someone called to teach (I don’t doubt the vocation), knowing little about the realities of academia, pursues a university position, undertaking thereby years of work and insecurity in this quest. Yet the goal, even if one can land a position, never materializes; as one professor told me: there will be no sharing of ideas over a pint in the pub.

Instead, the desire to teach will be twisted into something else: the desire for tenure and approbation. Potential professors – those whose heart lies with teaching – seek to change the academy in order to obtain a place within it. They are thus demanding jobs when no real need exists—how many scholars of literary theory can the taxpayers be expected to employ, after all? Moreover, they refuse to entertain the prospect of entering the secondary educational system in America, because it, like academia, is fraught with problems. Yet these problems are of a fundamentally different character. High schools and, more importantly, students need teachers. And these teachers shouldn’t have to be encouraged to provide quality instruction or instill a love of learning. While no one is interested in hiring more PhDs, everyone in this country would like to improve the quality of secondary education. Thus, despite the problems endemic to each position, thousands of students are hoping to reform the academy – in the sense of creating more jobs – even though this endeavor must ultimately prove futile. The work to be done in high schools, however, doesn’t have to be. If people called to teach entered the field and demanded to be able to do so, I don’t think either the parents or principals would prevent them.

Nevertheless, it is also possible that the desire to teach in the academy (which is not, I would claim, the same thing as an intellectual vocation, although certainly it benefits from and is intimately tied to one) arises not from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of academics, but from an obtuseness of one’s own motivations. When one desires not just to teach but to be called doctor as well, the prestige of the position has been intimately tied up in one’s calling, and the selfless wish to share ideas has been contaminated by the selfish desire for praise.

While I don’t claim to be able to diagnose the motivations of every potential university teacher I’ve met, I do think that quite often one or both of these factors is involved in such a desire. Teaching, as a vocation, is not the purpose of university positions, and if one is seeking such a career for this reason, it will like end in “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”

An Interview with Roger Scruton

http://www.clarionreview.org/2009/10/test-from-the-archives/

Some highlights:

You have described conservatism as ‘loving the world for what it is.’ What do you mean by that?

Conservatism involves, as you say, loving the world as it is – not all of it, but that which we can receive as a gift from the dead. It means recognizing that it is easier to destroy than create. It involves an attitude of friendship towards the community, rather than a desire to remake it in obedience to some all-encompassing goal. And so on.

…

Many people consider conservatism a form of romantic nostalgia, an irrational reverence of the past. How would you respond to that? Is conservatism a romantic movement?

Every form of social and political belief that lies before us today is related to the Romantic movement, for that is the archetype of our ongoing attempt to live by our own devices. This is more true of socialism than of conservatism, in fact – socialism being a kind of diseased nostalgia for the future, which is yet more damaging than nostalgia for the past. And this word “nostalgia” – what does it mean? The longing for the nostos, the “homecoming”, the Heimkehr, which is the heart of all serious thinking about our time on earth. You must simply distinguish the negative from the positive forms of it. The Renaissance was a great movement of nostalgia towards the classical world; and look how it shook things up!

…

You write that many educational institutions remain in the grip of a nihilistic “culture of repudiation”. What can modern students do to acquire a proper education and civilize themselves, given the distractions offered by modern life?

Self-help is a valid philosophy today as in the 19th century. I remember visiting students in the old communist countries who had been expelled from universities and who took the initiative to invite people from the West (and especially anti-socialists like me) to speak to them. Intelligent people can always rise above their environment, provided they equip themselves with the three great conservative weapons: humor, irony, and scorn.

The Intellectual Life

A.G. Sertillanges says that a man can devote himself to the intellectual life if he has two hours every day to practice his calling. Being paid for this vocation is a luxury of the few, just as being paid to work in a job that directly supports this vocation is also a rare luxury. “When we speak of vocation, we refer to those who intend to make intellectual work their life, whether they are entirely free to give themselves up to study, or whether, though engaged in some calling, they hold happily in reserve, as a supplement of their activity and as a reward, the development and deepening of their mind.”

We like to think we know exactly what our calling will entail, like working in a university, or being paid as a researcher. But these proper goals, towards which we order our lives to fulfil our calling, are not guaranteed us. I know I am called to pursue and share truth; I believe I am called to pursue and share truth in the university. Thus I order my life towards that latter, proximate end as a way of working towards the former, ultimate end. But many believe they are called to the university; some of us are necessarily wrong - we know this because there are not enough places for all of us. When we overly specify our calling, we open ourselves to a deep blindness, one that stops us from seeing other opportunities as anything but failures. Thus the  scorn we heap on other avenues, righteously sure that these will not, cannot, be our fate. This involves confusing our good desires with our calling. Some people happily get what they desire. They often have an academic variation on the theme philosophers call ’moral luck.’ Others work equally hard, lacking this luck, and through their frustrated desires God teaches them other ways in which they can fulfill their calling.

A Christian professor can know he is called, now, to be a professor; a Christian graduate student can know, now, he is called to graduate school. A graduate student can not know, now, he is called to be a professor. He believes. Tomorrow he may die. In six months his life may radically change. In a year his parents may require his personal care. The future is not given to us, except for to plan in prudence and wisdom. All else is presumption: “Age nunc, qui dicitis: ‘Hodie aut crastino ibimus in illam civitam et faciemus quidem ibi annum et mercabimur et lucrum faciemus,’ qui ignoratis, quae erit in crastinum vita vestra! Vapor enim estis ad modicum parens, deinceps exterminatur; pro eo ut dicatis: “Si Dominus voluerit, et vivemus et faciemus hoc aut illud.” (James 4: 13-15, Novum Testamentum Latine) If God wills. But even this does not ensure my desires will find their object. It is the necessary, not sufficient condition, for our most simple intentions.

The intellectual life is a high calling, but it brings no sure temporal reward. Calling to this life is not calling to recognition, status, or payment.

How much could be said of this fundamental disposition as it affects a career entirely devoted to the life of thought! I have spoken of the opposition and lack of understanding that the great are exposed to; but these things are the lot also of the little; how can they be resisted without single-minded attachment to the truth, and without complete self-forgetfulness? When the world does not like you it takes its revenge on you; if it happens to like you, it takes its revenge by corrupting you. Your only resource is to work far from the world, as indifferent to its judgments as you are ready to serve it. It is perhaps best if it rejects you and thus obliges you to fall back on yourself, to grow interiorly, to watch yourself, to deepen yourself. These benefits are in the measure in which we rise above self-interest, that is, in which interest centers on the one thing necessary.

The intellectual life is essentially about truth; the academic life is accidentally about truth. The intellectual will wrest his academic position towards the pursuit of truth. Thus he fulfills his calling in the academy.

Can we be called towards recognition, status, and payment for our intellectual work? No. These may be accidents of our essential task, gifts for which we are grateful. But they are not our calling. Tear away recognition, status, and payment from the academy, tear away, that is, self-interest, rise about it, and ask if the one thing necessary is really that to which one is called. If it is, you can and will pursue it without recognition, status, or payment.

At its best, higher education facilitates the intellectual life by richly enabling the pursuing and sharing of truth. At its worst (and I fear this is more common), it obstructs the pursuing and sharing of truth. If God blesses the intellectual with support from the academy, he must studiously ignore its obstructions and fulfil his calling, gratefully freed from other concerns.

But this is difficult. Higher education inculcates vices that strike into the roots of our being, corrupting all our fruit. It teaches us to study and write about things with no intrinsic value; it teaches us to subordinate the true and the permanent to the expedient and the transitory. It teaches us to publish for status, advancement, and recognition, not because our work is true, important, or valuable. It is simply publishable. We think, “I just need to get some things out there, but eventually I’ll turn to the important topics, those not subject to fashion, etc.” Here we make the naïve assumption that our habits can simply go away; that our being has not been reshaped through the ends towards which we have ordered our desires and the means we have used to achieve those ends.

This was profoundly illustrated by a student with whom I studied German. Intent on becoming a manager in professional Baseball, he subordinated all of his academic pursuits to that end. When discussing the importance of books, which he never read (too long, too much time – just articles for him), he said, “Once I’m successful, I’m going to get a huge library and read all the time.” I felt terrible, but knew I could not persuade him how distorted a view of habituation and personhood this reflected.

Every paper we write, every projects we pursue, is a soul-making act, reflecting and shaping our deepest commitments,  supporting virtue or nurturing vice. Every sacrifice of the best and the true for the expedient is an act against ourselves and our fellow-men, reflecting and nurturing disordered loves.

“Tell me what you love, I will tell you what you are.” Love is the beginning of everything in us; and that starting point which is common to knowledge and practice cannot fail to make the right paths of both in a certain measure interdependent.

Truth visits those who love her, who surrender to her, and this love cannot be without virtue. For this reason, in spite of his possible defects, the man of genius at work is already virtuous; it would suffice for his holiness if he were more completely his true self.

The true springs up in the same soil as the good: their roots communicate. Broken from the common root and therefore less in contact with the soil, one or other suffers; the soul grows anemic or the mind wilts. On the contrary, by feeding the mind on truth one enlightens the conscience, by fostering good one guides knowledge.

Sertillanges understood the premise that renders our arguments for the humanizing effects of the humanities sound, and without which they are so much self-important humbug. It is this: the humanities are about truth. When the custodians of culture stop believing  and practicing this truth, they have betrayed their trust, forfeited their authority, and sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. Their authority and dignity passes to those who profess truth, who insist that their work is about reality, and that reality is the standard against which it should be judged. If these then use their profession to get benefits and authority not rightly theirs, if they swindle the culture because its eyes are dim, we can complain only about that which we have given away, lament only the treachery we made possible.

The humanities are an abstraction; they are books and people, teachers and scholars, who make up the concrete world the abstraction signifies. The humanities are as healthy or as weak as its custodians. The custodians are what they love. Thus we need lovers of truth, those called to the intellectual life, working in the academy. But we need them in that order: lovers of truth, called to the intellectual life, and, if blessed and lucky, working in the academy.

Bypassing the love of truth and the demands of the intellectual life and pursuing the dangerous, abstract remainder, “working in the academy,” will not solve our problems, as teachers, scholars, students, or cultural custodians.  It will deepen them. If God calls us to the academy, if we find ourselves in it and we can thus say that we are so called, it should be because we arrived there on our journey towards truth, and we should remain there only as long as it supports and does not hinder that journey.

In the end, that journey is the only one that matters, for when our eyes are too dim to read, our limbs to weak to walk, and our lungs to tired to breathe, when recognition is a dim memory or a vain wish, we will rest blessed in the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that we have loved and for which we have lived, or we will complete our journey away from Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, receiving in full measure that which we loved and for which we lived.