C.S. Lewis on Studying the Liberal Arts in Our Times

(This article appeared as a special to CatholicExchange.com on January 31st, 2003)

Just over sixty years ago, in the autumn of 1939, university students gathered to hear a sermon preached by C.S. Lewis at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, in Oxford, England. He began:

A University is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. And at first sight this seems an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service why should we - indeed how can we - continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?

So spoke Lewis as WWII sputtered to life. The German army had begun to roll west, and few could hazard how far it might go before stopping, if stop it did. Nevertheless, good, stout young men thought it worthwhile to go about the business of classical education. What drove them to university studies at a time like that? More pointedly, what drove men to study philosophy, mathematics, science, art, history and literature - how could they dare to receive a liberal education - when Europe looked like dissolving?

Lewis answered his own query: There had never been a time when men didn't have good reasons to put off "cultural studies." Whether for war, for technical advances in peacetime, or for work in the missions, opportunities to move immediately into necessary and noble practical enterprises had always presented themselves. Any good man with a heart for moving things ahead in the world had found them tempting.

Liberal education: a prudent path to understanding today's world better

Equally, though, there had never been a time when such cultural studies as those students were about to undertake were more valuable, more vitally necessary. Indeed, the next few years would amply demonstrate the need for taking stock of the direction the world was taking, of slowing down, so to speak, the hurry and impetus of the present and placing it into the perspective of the past:

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy must be answered…Most of all, perhaps, what we need is an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

But how, we might ask with Lewis, can we learn from the past to undeceive ourselves of our own blindnesses and discover the genuine truths and wisdom of our own age?

Sitting at the feet of Aquinas, Shakespeare, Plato and Einstein…

Upright in a historical landscape strewn with philosophies and ideas and opportunities too fashionable to endure stand a host of canonized saints and secular sages: St. Augustine, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, John Henry Newman, C. S. Lewis himself. These entreat us to step outside the narrow confines of the present, to enlarge our thoughts, to search elsewhere than in our own minds and current intellectual customs. Their writings are the invaluable lenses through which we may make our own the wisdom of the past and see the truths - and the follies - of the present. Lewis writes elsewhere:

Every Age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

Learning from the past has always been an essential aid to understanding and living with effect in the world we inherit from the past. Wise men and women have always applied themselves, heart and soul, to the demanding but rewarding work of discerning the insights into human nature, the natural world, and God made by those who came before us, even when it seemed least practical. What medieval Irish monk, for example, could have imagined how ultimately practical he was for studying and recording the learning of the ancients? Restoring civilization to Europe depended on him.

It exists: Catholic liberal education based on the "Great Books"

There is today, on a peaceful meadow in the mountains of southern California, a Catholic college whose students are responding to Lewis's wartime exhortation. Each autumn at Thomas Aquinas College, 102 new freshmen take their place in the academic community and begin their study by reading the very sermon Lewis preached at Oxford in autumn, 1939. Under its influence, they discuss the significance of the work to which they are about to devote themselves: a careful, critical examination of the texts of the greatest and most influential authors in the last 2500 year history of Western Civilization.

Abandoning lectures and textbooks for discussions of these great books, they are off on a quest to learn about and understand the principles of the natural world, society, government, revealed truth and God. For four years, they consider the world through the eyes of the wisest of our ancestors and under the guiding light of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Then, awarded a bachelors degree in liberal arts, they carry with them into their lives as teachers, lawyers, priests, religious, businessmen, and doctors an understanding of the principles - theologic, philosophic, moral, political, mathematical, and scientific - which have guided men and civilizations through the ages.

If you aspire to lead the life of one for whom the wisdom of the past is alive in the present and understood as the key to the future, or if you know someone who might like to learn about Thomas Aquinas College, you may contact the College at 800-634-9797, or request information online.

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