30th Anniversary Festivities
Address, Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J.
Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., is a lector in Biblical Hebrew
at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. He obtained
a B.A. from the University of Chicago, an M.A. in classics
and philosophy from Oxford, an M. Div. from Weston Jesuit
School of Theology, and a Ph.D. in Semitic philology from
Harvard. He was ordained in the Society of Jesus in 1987.
His articles have appeared in numerous academic journals and
popular publications.
Following is an abridged version of the after-dinner address
he gave during the on-campus celebration of the College's
30th Anniversary.
Let me put the issue I wish to address bluntly: Isn't it
obvious that, in a time of national crisis, pursuits such
as philosophy and theology and the other abstract disciplines
are a grotesquely irresponsible self-indulgence, that we should
put aside these mind-games and apply ourselves to the practical
tasks that face us? Or, even if we should decide to linger
in the academy, doesn't common sense tell us that it is metallurgy,
not metaphysics, by which we do our part?
C. S. Lewis targeted this problem in a lecture addressed
to Christian students at Oxford called "Learning in War-time."
It was given in 1939. He did not comfort his hearers with
any sententious remarks about the ennobling effects of learning
on the individual. He did not argue that good scholars make
good infantry leaders, good citizens, or even good men. Rather,
he asked how a Christian could be so cavalier towards his
duties as to engage in study at any time, under any circumstances:
How is it right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures
who are at every moment advancing either to Heaven or to Hell
to spend any fraction of little time allowed to them in this
world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art,
mathematics or biology?
Lewis saw that it is futile to ask whether a course of action
is good or bad unless you have a clear idea of the end which
it is meant to serve. In this case, the end is our salvation
and the salvation of our fellow men. He answers: "Human
culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something
infinitely more important than itself," and argues, "if
men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until
they were secure, the search would never have begun."
Men are different from other species, he said, in that "they
propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct
metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds,
discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of
Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae."
- Defiant Detachments
Not all of such activities are of equal dignity. Nor should
they be. The sublimity they share is not intrinsic nobility,
but a sublime disinterestedness. They have a tang of holy
disobedience about them; they are pursued in defiance of the
powers that would urge a man to look exclusively to his animal
needs, and to debase himself to any extent in order to fill
his stomach or preserve his life.
Such intimidation may be diffuse and unprompted; it may be
concrete and malicious - but the mathematical theorem and
the joke on the scaffold exhibit their kinship precisely in
their defiant detachment from the world of mammalian well-being,
a world in which all of us are drones and slaves.
When arts become truly liberal arts, they become liberating
as well; they are subversive because they have refused the
bribe offered to and accepted by the servile culture at large.
The despot may or may not despise propositional logic, or
astrophysics, or the music of Bach. He may be President for
life in Romania. But what infuriates him is radical spiritual
freedom, displayed by those who pursue logic or physics or
Bach - precisely in their unconcern for the opinions of others
and indeed for their own comfort or safety or success.
These activities of defiant detachment are not our ultimate
end or telos. They may serve our damnation as easily as our
deliverance. But they resemble our ultimate end in that they
are pursued for their own sake and not for the sake of some
ulterior good.
It's a risky business, of course. The man who gets a Ph.D.
in theology, and for whom God becomes not an end but a means
will go to hell; his brother, who gets a diploma in refrigerator
repair, if he instrumentalizes his learning, will go to Oxnard.
Still, most of us are willing to concede the principle that
curruptio optimi pessima and to admit that, even though the
search for knowledge often ends in failure, the fact that
it can be pursued at all is a great thing.
"Human culture," says Lewis, "has always had
to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important
than itself." This is true, but incomplete. For that
which is of supreme importance not only overshadows human
culture, but is a necessary condition of its existence.
Just as spirituality only bestows itself on those who are
interested in something other than spirituality (God), so,
in the long run, disinterested learning can only remain disinterested,
the liberal arts can only remain liberal to the extent that
the resemblance they have to the ultimate human end is not
taken for the real thing.
Reflect on what this passage says, taken from your College's
founding document:
Divine Revelation . . . frees the faithful Christian from
those specious and yet absurd notions of freedom which, because
they are false and subvert the life of reason, deceitfully
enslave all who believe in them. In particular, it teaches
that self-rule is not the same as independence, but rather,
that the assertion of complete independence destroys the capacity
for self-rule. For to say that a man governs himself is to
say that he has within him the principle that governs him.
Let me help underscore the point: freedom itself can only
survive - can only fail to corrupt - where truth is understood
to be superior to freedom. It is a question of putting first
things first.
It's very likely that most of us, at one point or another
in our lives, have had a teacher whose interest was not in
discovering or transmitting the truth, but in making disciples
and forming a little coterie of admirers. But, by the same
token, we can see that liberal education - more than any other
form of education - entails a progressive surrender of the
advantage that the teacher has over his student.
If I know Latin and you don't, I hold all the aces in my
hand. Your knowledge of what authors and works exist, the
translations by which you have access to them, the final word
on interpretation of difficult passages - all this is entirely
in my power. But if I teach you Latin, I dissolve my monopoly,
I give over my control. You become free to read the works
you choose to read, to translate them as you deem right, to
propound and defend your own interpretation: Latin letters
become a vast estate in which you and I walk as free and equal
citizens.
- Will They Edify or Corrupt Us?
And, of course, this is true not only of Latin but of the
liberal arts in general, whose aim is well expressed in the
words of the Renaissance aphorism, "The pupil who does
not surpass his master, fails his master." The teacher's
vocation is oriented, so to speak, at unemployment; his goal,
with respect to his pupil, is to render himself superfluous.
Once we are made heirs to the patrimony of human culture,
will it edify us or corrupt us? The answer is: both. Well,
liberal arts liberate; they are indifferent to whether the
freedom they provide will be used for good or ill. There is
even a sense in which they are impotent to decide between
truth and error, provided their own procedural canons are
followed.
"A clean heart create within me, O Lord, and a steadfast
spirit renew within me." Liberty, without self-rule,
is useless - worse than useless - and self-rule requires a
clean heart and a steadfast spirit: for us sinful men, constant
cleansing, continually-renewed resolve. And I'd propose two
indications by which you might gauge how your time here is
so profiting you.
First: that at the end of four years, you'd find adoration
of the Blessed Sacrament more fascinating - fascinating in
the pedantic sense in which it "binds" your imagination
and your intellect in mysterious ways that it didn't before.
Second: that each year you make a better confession than you
did previously - that you discover and repent of truths about
yourself to which you were blind before, that is, every time
you go to confession, increasing the moral real estate, working
toward the time in which the whole Mass is leavened. Self-knowledge,
though painful, is a necessary precondition of self-rule,
putting first things first.
There are many respects in which the anxieties that an incoming
class of students are facing are novel - at least in respect
to your previous thirty years. But in the ultimate terms,
the points and the compass have not changed. And thirty years
from now, the children of the class of 2005 will themselves
be of military age, facing God knows what adversity. Like
all men, they will be called to put first things first: in
the words of the Catechism, "To know, love, and serve
God in this world, so as to be infinitely happy with Him in
the next."
The responsibility is grave. But the execution of the task
need not be. Notice the asymmetry here. When first principles
are missing or askew, even a man's amusements carry with them
something of the odor of the tomb. But where first principles
are in order, they can assimilate to their sacred purposes
occasions of little consequence, or no consequence at all.
Because his holy defiance rests on a deeper obedience, because
he knows, as Socrates knew, that no ultimate harm can befall
him, the just man is made free of the world. Baseball has
its place. Banquets have their place. Jests can be made on
a scaffold. He can read Dante while under a bombardment and
Ezekiel in a Dodgers' bullpen. And even when the civilization
that nursed him seems to be dissolving before his eyes, he
can give himself cheerfully to Padre Pio and Weird Al Yankovic
and Semitic philology.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Winter 2002
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