By Dr. Amy Fahey, Teaching Fellow
“The liberal arts college,” John Senior once wrote, “begins with wonder and ends in wisdom.”[i] In our current higher education system, as in much of American private and political life, we see precious little of either. But at Thomas More College, students and faculty spend four years peering closely at the great works of Western civilization, both on our New England campus and in the Eternal City, in the expectation of discovering and recovering truth, beauty, and goodness.
But the value and purpose of what we do is increasingly being questioned, even by those once thought to be staunch supporters of Catholic liberal education. Why study the Great Books? Why attend a liberal arts college? Does it really matter if the college is serious about its Catholic identity? The reasons such questions are being asked are too numerous and complex to be treated fully here, but I will briefly suggest a couple.
Legitimate economic pressures, combined with the lure of “free” or budget education—either online or at community colleges—have led many to question the value of the liberal arts. Must one pay for wonder? Must one put a price tag on wisdom? If you were to combine the current average car and rental payments, it would still be less than what most students pay for tuition plus room and board annually at Thomas More College. As the late Fr. James Schall reminds us, “The word ‘liberal’ in ‘liberal education’ refers to the habits and self-discipline necessary to control our passions and prejudices in such a way that we can see the truth of something when we examine it. . . . But if we can do whatever we want, we do not need much of an education except a Machiavellian one that teaches us how to live among scoundrels.”[ii] When faced between the choice of making short-term financial sacrifices in order to develop a life-long disposition toward truth or selling our educational birthright for a short-sighted mess of pottage, the answer is perhaps clearer.
Another reason is, ironically, the renascence of a type of classical education in Catholic secondary schools and homeschooling programs. When poorly pursued, such programs can foster a false sense of premature intellectual sophistication, leading some young people (and their parents) to adopt a “been there, done that” mentality toward the Great Books, as if a one-time read of Dante or Jane Austen is little more than a check-off on one’s bucket list. When faced with the choice between pursuing a lucrative career path or four more years of studying the liberal arts, Johnny is understandably tempted to believe that he doesn’t need additional Catholic intellectual formation, because he read Homer and St. Thomas when he was fourteen. So off he goes to study engineering at Behemoth U, while the hook-up culture rages all around him, and his radical professors seek to further undermine the Faith and the culture. But he can find Mass and a few good friends at the Newman Center, so he’ll do just fine.
And so, we find ourselves needing to define and defend what we do with greater clarity, precision, and force to those who, until quite recently, needed little persuading. This is a good thing, I think, for we should never take for granted those goods which we have been given. In what follows, then, I hope to provide one professor’s admittedly limited apologia for a Thomas More College education.
“Every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth.”
Benedict XVI
The mission of Thomas More College, as we articulate it for ourselves and for the public, is “to provide a solid education in the liberal arts, a Catholic education for students of all faiths, united in the quest for what is true, good, and beautiful. It pursues this mission by seeking wisdom and sharing it joyfully with the world.” This brief statement of purpose is helpful in expressing, with an economy of language Strunk and White would admire, what it is we do and why. In reflecting on this mission statement—and in observing our students, the curriculum, my fellow faculty, and our self-articulation of what it is we intend for our students—I have come to recognize three distinct but inseparable qualities of a Thomas More education: namely, that it is intelligible, integrated, and Incarnational.
First, what does it mean to say that our program of studies is intelligible? Quite simply, it means that the Truth exists and can be known. In this sense, intelligibility is a quality not only of the works we teach, but of the way in which these works are read, taught, and discussed. We presuppose that the great works have something to teach us, and that the role of the teacher is to educate—literally, to lead forth (ex- ducere-)—in two senses: to draw the students toward the truth, and to elicit the truth from the poem, novel, play, philosophical or political treatise, or theological work itself.
Far too many Great Books programs adopt an exclusively seminar-style methodology, in which the teacher is simply a fellow questioner of the “Big Ideas” the texts may or may not elicit. In such a setting, the conversation can devolve quickly into an open-ended exploration, where all ideas are entertained and all opinions and interpretations legitimized. Many liberal arts programs tout the good of these seminar discussions as the exercising and honing of “critical thinking” skills in their students. While such skills require the students to entertain various notions about man, they do not, as Newman notes in his “Grammar of Assent,”[iii] necessarily lead to an apprehension of or an assent to truths about man.
Likewise, a strict lecture format, in which students are largely given the answers to questions through recycled lecture notes, prevents the students from exercising their wills and intellects, from peering closely at the works studied in order to apprehend the truth. In other words, it simply dispenses information. But as Benedict XVI reminds us in his critique of both of these pitfalls, “education would be most impoverished if it were limited to providing notions and information and neglected the important question about the truth, especially that truth which can be a guide in life.”[iv] Because we presuppose the intelligibility of Truth, our students and faculty do not limit their scope to the apprehension of notions or the acquisition of information. Similarly, the College prescribes no single method of teaching, believing that teaching is an art.
Second, our program of studies is integrated, a word derived from the Latin integrare, “to make whole, renew, . . . begin again.”[v] Again, this integration has multiple implications: the texts we read in the humanities sequence speak to the works we are reading in philosophy and theology, so that students are taking part in one ongoing conversation. It is a conversation that happens not only on the campus of Thomas More College, but one which links us to those giants who came before us, whom Chesterton likened to “the democracy of the dead.”[vi] This integration prevents a kind of intellectual pride all too common among modern progressive man, who is apt to consider himself so much wiser than his forebears. When such men hubristically ask, “Why are you reading Aristotle and Plato? We know so much more than they do,” we respond as T. S. Eliot once did: “Precisely. And they are that which we know.”[vii]
This integration, this renewing and making whole, also informs all that we do both within and without the classroom; it means that the liberal arts are not wholly separate from the fine arts, from manual labor, from worship and communal life. When our Freshmen take Natural History, they develop wonder at the splendor and intelligibility of Creation, whether they’re dissecting a beaver with a seasoned trapper, drawing in a field journal, or studying the phases of the moon. When our students learn a folk song, write an icon, or make their first dovetail joint, they are participating in a broader Christian tradition stretching back to the Benedictines, St. Paul, and Our Lord Himself. In other words, this integration does not divide what is contemplative from what is practical, or what is beautiful from what is useful. Rather, whether they’re studying the form of a sonnet or mastering a Euclidian proposition, our students are seeking to integrate the order and pattern present in both Creation and the human mind.
Finally, and most importantly, the Catholic Great Books program at Thomas More College is Incarnational, literally “in the flesh.” Many Great Books programs fall into the trap of leaping over the concrete, sensible world in their desire for abstract or theoretical knowledge, or even for transcendent truth. Yet in this desire for intellectual knowledge, we neglect that direct contact with a reality that Christ, the Word made Flesh, came to redeem. “Christ plays in ten thousand places,”[viii] the great Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins tells us; and “Consider the lilies,” Christ Himself reminds us in Luke 12:27.
Possessing all of the right ideas about reality will avail us nothing if we do not exercise these truths in all spheres of our daily lives. If we only form minds, then are we capable of truly encountering Christ? I am reminded of an exchange between the superficially educated Julian and his wise mother in Flannery O’Connor’s masterful story, Everything that Rises Must Converge:
“True culture is in the mind, the mind,” he said, and tapped his head, “the mind.” “It’s in the heart,” she said, “and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are.”[ix]
As Benedict XVI has wondered, “While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will.”[x]
This is why students at Thomas More College not only study the Good Life—they attempt to live it, by finding Christ in those “ten thousand places.” For “first and foremost,” Benedict XVI reminds us, “every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth.”[xi] And as the great St. Ambrose says, “When we speak about wisdom, we are speaking about Christ. When we speak about virtue, we are speaking about Christ. When we speak about justice, we are speaking about Christ. When we speak about peace, we are speaking about Christ. When we speak about truth and life and redemption, we are speaking about Christ.”[xii]
“He who reads much and understands much, receives his fill. He who is full refreshes others.”
St. Ambrose
Smallness is essential to achieving all of these ends of intelligibility, integration, and Incarnation. What Russell Kirk warned of a couple of generations ago when he spoke of “the inhumane scale of Behemoth University” has only accelerated and worsened in the ensuing decades. Kirk speaks of the modern university as a place where students encounter “collectivism rather than community,” and where they are “lodged in barren dormitories . . . teen-aged ghettos, in which a great many students never become acquainted with a genuine professor, and utilitarian ‘output’ of graduates is the boast of educational administrators.”
Because of the small size of our College, I witness this intelligible, integrated, and Incarnational pursuit of wisdom daily in the thoughts, words, and actions of our students—in the sourdough bread they bake for our patron’s birthday celebration, in the poise and eloquence they demonstrate when they defend their Junior Project, in the zeal with which they belt out folk songs at social gatherings. I see the fruits of it in the influence our graduates are having at the parish and secondary school levels, in legislative chambers and halls of commerce. But most importantly, I see it in the beautiful marriages, families, and religious vocations that are the gifts of a Thomas More education to the rising generation. And if it hasn’t quite made me perfectly wise, it at least has made me hopeful. And so, I echo to my students and to all young people the promise St. Thomas More once placed in his children, when he wrote to them in 1517 to say, “I harbor the hope (knowing that you are persistent) that shortly you will surpass even your teacher, if not in discourse at least in not abandoning the suit.”[xiii]
In the middle of the Thomas More campus stands an ancient apple tree, which an arborist once told President Fahey is likely the oldest apple tree in New Hampshire, if not in New England. Somewhere in the hoary mists of time, students christened this venerable tree “Ambrose.” Faculty children and student siblings have long played in the shade of Ambrose; students have long studied and prayed beneath his crabbed limbs; once, during a reenactment of the York Mystery Plays, Zacchaeus (played memorably by alumnus Vince Deardurff ’15) even fell from Ambrose in his zeal to take Our Lord home with him.
It pleases me that this tree—which to my mind figures forth everything that is good and praiseworthy about our College—is named for the saint who said: “He who reads much and understands much, receives his fill. He who is full refreshes others.”[xiv] And I, like so many others, remain grateful that Thomas More College exists for a generation of young people eager to slake the thirst of a parched and pining world.
[i] John Senior. John Senior and the Restoration of Realism. Merrimack: Thomas More College Press, 2016. Here at 295.
[ii] James V. Schall, SJ. “An Illiberal Education.” The Catholic Thing. April 25, 2019. https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2019/04/25/an-illiberal-education-2/
[iii] John Henry Newman, “An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.” https://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/index.html
[iv] Benedict XVI. “Letter to The Faithful.” https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/letters/2008/documents/hf_ben-xvi_let_20080121_educazione.html
[v] “Definition of integro.” LatinLexicon.org. https://latinlexicon.org/definition.php?p1=2029708&p2=i
[vi] G.K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1927. Here at 85.
[vii] T.S. Eliot. “Tradition and Individual Talent.” In Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode, 37–44. San Diego: Harcourt, 1975.
[viii] Gerard Manley Hopkins. “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” https://hopkinspoetry.com/poem/as-kingfishers-catch-fire/
[ix] Flannery O’Connor. Everything that Rises Must Converge. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. Here at 9.
[x] Benedict XVI. “Meeting with Catholic Educators.” https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2008/april/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080417_cath-univ-washington.html
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ambrose, quoted in Jill Haak Adels. The Wisdom of the Saints: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Here at 14.
[xiii] Thomas More. The Essential Works of Thomas More. Edited by Ferard B. Wegemer and Stephen W. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Here at 284.
[xiv] From a letter by Saint Ambrose, bishop.
For further reading:
“Read Chesterton” & Other Wisdom:A Conversation with Dale Ahlquist
