Another Sort of Learning

296 Pages·1988·5.75 MB·English

by  James V. Schall

V SCHALL
JA M E S
Selected Contrary Essays
on
How Finally to Acquire an Education
While Still in College or Anywhere Else;
Containing Some Belated Advice about
How to employ Your Leisure Time
When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing
Spite of Your H ighest Earned Academic Degree,
Together with Sundry Book Lists
Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found
IGNATIUS
Another Sort of Learning
JAMES V. SCHALL
Another Sort of Learning
Selected Contrary Essays on the Completion of Our Knowing
or How Finally to Acquire an Education While Still in
College, or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated
Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure Time
When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in
Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree,
Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere
Else in captivity to Be Found
IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCIS CO
© 1988 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-89870-183-x
Library of Congress catalogue number 87-82977
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Page
Preface 7
Part I
So You’re Still Perplexed Even in College?
Introduction 17
1. Another Sort of Learning 19
2. Why Read? 25
3. What a Student Owes His Teacher 30
4. Grades 38
5. On Teaching the Important Things 45
6. On Teaching the Political Thought of Plato 52
Part II
Books You Will Never Be Assigned
Introduction 65
7. Straining for the Highest Things 69
8. The Supernatural Destiny of Man 82
9. On Doctrine and Dignity: From “Heretics” to
“Orthodoxy” 92
10. On Evil and the Responsibility for Suffering 112
11. The Obscure Heart of Ideology 126
12. The Mortality of Immortal Men 135
13. Oddness and Sanity 153
Part III
Have You Thought about It This Way?
Schall’s Unlikely List of Books to Keep Sane By 163
Introduction 165
14. The Recovery of Permanent Things 169
15. What Is a Lecture? 187
16. On Devotion 197
17. On Prayer and Fasting for Bureaucrats 206
18. On the Seriousness of Sports 218
19. On the Difficulty of Believing and Not Believing 230
20. The Humanities and the “Basis of Excellence” 241
21. On Spiritual and Intellectual Life 258
Conclusion 271
Bibliography 275
Acknowledgments 300
Preface
Several years ago, almost thirty now, I ran across the following
passage in a book called Self-Made Mad, which, of course, is
nothing less than the famous Mad Magazine. Let me cite it
here:
Did you ever stop to wonder about how recent historical
events will be reported in elementary school history books IOO
years from now? We hate to think so, but in the year 2060, say,
elementary school history books will probably be exactly the
way they are now. Which means they will be simply written so
that children who study them can find easy answers to every­
thing, even things that college professors and historians won’t
fully understand. For instance, every historical figure will be
either good or bad, with nobody a little good and a little bad,
the way most people really are.1
I have always loved this particular citation because it warns us
that real education and formal education may not be at all the
same things. There are, moreover, many things college profes­
sors and historians indeed do not understand. Do not be sur­
prised at this. I am a college professor, and I know.
Eric Voegelin, in his wonderful book of Conversations, was
not at all hesitant to remind us that it is rather common to go
through our higher education without ever having been
confronted with the questions that are basic to mankind wher­
ever and whenever man has appeared on this earth. And what
are these questions? Voegelin remarked: 1
1 Self-Made Mad, ed. William Gaines (New York: New American
Library, i960), p. 65.
7
8 Preface
The quest for the ground ... is a constant in all civilizations-----
The quest for the ground has been formulated in two principal
questions of metaphysics. The first question is, “Why is there
something; why not nothing?” and the second is, “Why is that
something as it is, and not different?”2
Such are questions behind which we cannot go, of course.
That is to say, they constitute the ultimate questions concern­
ing what is, about which we must ask. Yet, we are not regu­
larly allowed to ask ourselves such questions. And often, as
E. F. Schumacher, in a book I shall recommend again and
again, remarked, even when we are allowed to ask such
questions, we do not know how to pose them properly, freely.3
So there is room for some kind of guidebook, as it were, some
help to find our way out of a system that is designed, consciously
or unconsciously, to prevent us from confronting in our own
lives the ultimate questions of existence and essence, the two
questions that Voegelin posed as fundamental.
As the passage from Self-Made Mad implied, we are fallible
beings, a combination of a little bad and a little good. Our age,
in a strange way, is an age of perfectionism. We are no longer
aware of the classical and Christian tradition that would free us
from the utopian premises by the reminder of “the way most
people really are”. The classics were often nothing more than
books on education. They sought to teach us how pass from
esse to bene esse, from “being” to “being well”, to use Aristotle’s
famous phrase for the task of politics. But politics, as Aristotle
knew, led us to contemplation, to the consideration of the
right order of things.
The premises of “modernity”, a phrase I take from Leo
2 Eric Voegelin, Conversations with Eric Voegelin, ed. R. Eric O’Connor
(Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1980), p. 2.
3E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper
Colophon, 1977).
Preface 9
Strauss and Eric Voegelin, however, do not allow us to think
there is such a thing as a right order in anything, particularly
in ourselves. Philosophic “pluralism” or skepticism typical of
modernity constantly reminds us that nothing is true, that it is
in fact dangerous even to propose that there might be truth,
for this would imply that some kind of decisions about reality
can be made. And for many, this would jeopardize the founda­
tions of the modem republic, which is said to be based, at best, on
the pursuit of truth, never on the possibility of its being found.4
The signs of human fallibility, it seems to me, are at least
four. The first is the passing of time as fixed in our minds by
recurring days that serve to define where we are in our past
and our present, days like Thanksgiving and birthdays and
New Year’s. Second, there is a certain humor that forbids us
from claiming personal perfection. Then come our travels,
which reveal to us how different the ways of other men are,
yet how we are all precisely men, human beings, in all time
and in all places. Finally, we have our broodings, which cause
us to realize somewhere within ourselves how different we
ourselves might be, how different perhaps we really ought to
be, how stubborn in fact we actually are.
And so this is what we actually are—brooding creatures
who while away the hours and the days reflecting and laughing.
This will be a book then about time and learning, about
humor and wonder. And we shall soon discover, I think, that
such things are not so separate, nor even are they always
different things. We can brood or chuckle in our voyages as in
our readings. And the great feasts that mark our passing—the
New Year, Ash Wednesday, Christmas, our birthdays—these
are at once delightful, prayerful, and poignant.
4 See James V. Schall, “Truth and the Open Society”, in Order, Freedom,
and the Open Society: Critical Essays on the Open Society, ed. George Carey
(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986), pp. 71-9°-
IO Preface
We are thus fallible creatures, and we should recognize it.
And yet, and this is what I want to pursue in these various
wonderments and ponderings of mine, we do search, we do
seek. I believe that we are in a world today where most of this
searching must take place outside the normal educational process
and outside the myriads of media images and opinions with
which we are constantly confronted.
Thus, this will be a kind of reflective effort to tell us what
ought to attract us. Plato was eternally right when he realized
that we are attracted in fact by the Good, however it might
appear. We are constantly being drawn from outside of ourselves
by what we had not accounted for. We are not already com­
plete beings, but beings seeking completion. And Christianity
was right to suspect that not only are we attracted by the
Good, which brings us outside of ourselves, but that God also
comes in search of us.
In his marvelous book the Intellectual Life, the French
Dominican, A. G. Sertillanges, wrote:
“Why hast thou come?” St. Bernard asked himself about the
cloister: Ad quid venisti? And you, thinker, why have you come
to this life outside the ordinary life, to this life of consecration,
concentration, and therefore of solitude? Was it not because of
a choice? Did you not prefer truth to the daily lie of a scattered
life, or even to the noble but secondary preoccupations of
action?5
The “scattered life”—this is either a description of a life that is
founded on the premise of no theoretic order in the soul or the
description of a life based on no disciplined virtue that would
enable us to follow the important things, even if we should
want to do so.
5 A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, trans. Mary Ryan (Westminster,
Md.: Christian Classics, 1980), p. 49.