Dwelling on Delphi: Thinking Christianly About the Liberal Arts

By Robert M. Woods Ph.D.

Why the liberal arts are in decline and why you should care.

What are the intellectual and spiritual roots of liberal arts learning in the West?

Why a liberal arts education rooted in the Great Books is the best education and where you can find it today.

Where despite the truth that we are on the edge of the abyss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512749106

Robert M. Woods Ph.D.

Dr. Robert M. Woods is a respected figure and popular speaker in traditional liberal arts education. Having earned a Ph.D. in Humanities from Florida State University, he created and chaired a Great Books Honors College for over fifteen years. He currently serves as Headmaster of The Covenant School in Dallas, Texas, where he resides with his wife, Tina, and two youngest daughters. Dr. Woods is also a recognized scholar on the writings of Ray Bradbury, specifically Fahrenheit 451. He is honored to be a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center of Ray Bradbury Studies.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 Robert M. Woods.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

1 [phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-4909-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-4911-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-4910-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911196

WestBow Press rev. date: 07/19/2016

CONTENTS

Appreciation

Forward

The Lost Pearl of Great Wisdom

A Great Cloud of Witnesses Among the Christian Humanists and Select Liberal Artists of the Mere Humanism Nature

To Be Like Apollos

Saint Erasmus, Guardian of Good Letters, Pray for Us

Reading Cicero’s On Old Age at Any and Every Age

Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life: Required Reading Before the Final Exam

Clement of Alexandria: The Virtues of Liberal Learning

My Brother Jerome: Struggles of a Ciceronian Christian

Cassiodorus: The Liberal Arts and Praising the Lord

Basil the Great: On How to Learn from the Virtuous Pagans

John Chrysostom: Wisdom on the Soul as City

Bonaventure: The Eternal Implications of a Liberal Education

Thomas Aquinas on Wisdom

A Christian Humanistic Reading of Ovid, or Why Dante Is Our Virgil for The Metamorphoses

Rhabanus Maurus: Helping Religious Leaders Think

Standard-Setting Essay, Poetry, and Devotional Writings of Francesco Petrarca, The Father of Christian Humanism

Poor Pico Della Mirandola: A Misunderstood Christian Humanist?

Battista Guarino: The Best Old-School Program of Teaching and Learning Old-School

The Ratio Studiorum As Blueprint for Righteous Liberal Learning

Juan Luis Vives: The Aim of Study and the World of the Scholar

John of Salisbury: Wisdom and Eloquence in The Metalogicon

Giambattista Vico: Humanistic Liberal Arts Before Corruption

Alcuin: The Wisdom in Learning

Hugh of St. Victor: A Seminal Work in the History of Liberal Arts

Taking Note of T.S. Eliot’s Notes Toward Culture

Michael Oakeshott: On Really Teaching and Really Learning

C.S. Lewis Was Right About Old Books

Simone Weil’s Enchanting Reflections on Place of Deep Attention

Christopher Dawson’s Religion and Culture: The Expansive Lens of Cultural History

Eric Voegelin: Prophet to the Modern Academy

Liberal Arts as a Way of Knowing

Life of the Mind as Vocation

Our Christian Obligation to Be Intelligent

The Fragmented Wisdom of Heraclitus

How Reading Thucydides During Government Shutdown Tends Toward Wisdom

Before You Vote, Read Orwell’s Animal Farm and Politics and the English Language

Russell Kirk Engaged in the Great Conversation

Reading The Great Books in the Midst of the Media Ruins

Humanities as a Way of Knowing

The End of the Academy?

Pride, Envy, Avarice, are the Sparks…Indeed!

On Avoiding the T Word

Out of the Nursery to College, Back to the Nursery: Anti-Intellectualism and Authentic Learning in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

Christopher Dawson: Describing the Decline of Western Liberal Learning and Its Recovery

Why Mortimer Adler Would Have Been the Best Academic Dean Ever

Russell Kirk: Our Headmaster

Mortimer Adler On Phony Teaching and Phony Learning

The Education You Never Received, Always Wanted, and Can Still Have

A Few Modest Observations for One Against the Great Books

Enemies or Allies: Responding to Frederick D. Wilhelmsen’s Charges

On the Proper Order of Wondering and Wandering Minds

True Humanism

Recovering the Lost Pearl of Great Wisdom

On Why the Bible is NOT a Great Book

The Humane and The Inhumane

Walking to See: Ray Bradbury’s The Pedestrian

The Most Humane Ray Bradbury

Concerned with Everything in the Universe: Jacques Barzun’s Dawn to Decadence

The Christian Humanistic View of Being Human During the Renaissance

Mortimer Adler on the Meaning of Liberal Education

Receiving the Best Liberal Arts Education Through the Great Books

Hearing the Invitation to the Great Conversation

My Favorite Liberal Arts Professor I Never Had

A Case for the Quaint: Mortimer Adler and The Great Ideas Program

The Liberal Arts Can Save Our Civilization

The Liberal Arts and Living the Good Life

The Liberal Arts and The Truth of Things

Odds and Ends

Thinking Logically: Some Resources

Ten Books That Changed the Way I Think

Select Bibliography:

The Foundation of a Bookishly Shaped Liberal Arts Mind

As Beatrice is to Dante,

and Laura is to Petrarca,

so Tina is to Robert.

APPRECIATION

First and foremost, I thank God for my wife Tina, who assisted at every step, from readings to out-loud musings, to typing, to editing, to gentle touches of encouragement. I also thank Dr. Andrew Jacobs, a former student and current colleague, for carefully going over this book for errors and stylistic matters. Any and all errors are entirely my responsibility despite my wife’s heightened skill and Andrew’s extraordinary abilities. And I express my deepest gratitude to the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by Him all things were created, fashioned in heaven and on earth, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—these were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him, all things hold together. And He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything He might be preeminent. In Him, all the fullness of God pleased to dwell, and through Him He reconciled all things, those fashioned on earth or in heaven, proclaiming peace by the blood of His cross. I hope this work pleases Him.

FORWARD

It is an odd book, and I readily admit it. Being a combination of general musings in the form of reviews, blogs, articles, essays, outlines, and random notes; I trust it reflects the nature of liberal learning. Sometimes an artifact, at others times a conversation, an occasional lecture, but most often, I find readings shape the liberally educated soul. A liberally educated mind has become such a rarity that many fail to recognize one when they are in the presence of one who has such an education. So what is this little book’s intention? Simply this: consider that Great Tradition of the Liberal Arts and those whose shoulders we stand upon gazing toward wisdom. If this book prompts one person to search, listen, read, think, converse, and learn, we may consider the difference made, and the book’s purpose met.

THE LOST PEARL OF GREAT WISDOM

The Incarnation calls us to the things of this world, so when we consider the following quotes from the following great minds, we must begin and end with the Incarnation.

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

Tertullian

What has Ingeld to do with Christ?

Alcuin (when catching some monks reading Beowulf)

What has Horace to do with the Psalter? Or Virgil with the Gospel? Or Cicero the Apostle?

Jerome

Let us word the matter in an even weightier manner than Tertullian, Alcuin, and Jerome—what does Delphi have to do with Golgotha? Just as the Logos (God enfleshed) entered the world at a particular time and place, and human hands penned God’s words and wisdom in particular times and places (a different kind of enfleshment), God calls Christians to be in the world, as embodied beings. He calls us to be in the world, but not worldly. God calls us to a healthy, robust terrestriality, without compromising our calling. Engagement with the world in all of its God-imbued glory and (fallen) human wretchedness requires wisdom from God. This navigation needs wisdom that assists us to be faithful, spiritually minded as embodied beings about the most worldly things.

Just as the Incarnation of God ultimately concerned redemption, and just as God’s written word describes this redemption, God tasks the Christian with redeeming all that can be redeemed. Paul tells the worldly Corinthians to bring into captivity every thought for Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). We enact this by imitating the Word of God and by dwelling in God’s Word while we live in God’s world.

We are not alone. Many have endeavored faithfully to embody the Word for thousands of years. We can follow their lead, their model. The Christian worldview has thoroughly developed the shape, tone, contour, and content of the Liberal Arts in the West. The Bible, more than any other writing, informs the great intellectual Liberal Arts tradition to such a degree that ignorance of the Bible makes the apprehension of our past nearly impossible. The Bible was institutionalized in the Western intellectual tradition until the modern world. Even more, much of the modern world’s reaction to this tradition and the Bible represent a persistent mass rebellion of that tradition.

The Liberal Arts have declined for some decades, with the attacks on this tradition launched from various fronts. Some have called for all education to be immediately practical and eminently usable. Some have called for the end of these irrelevant studies that waste our time on fruitless intellectual endeavors. Such utilitarians represent the modern-day equivalent of ancient slave owners. One defines human primarily in terms of man as worker, who is best educated when pragmatism governs and consumption remains the end good.

Not all the enemies of liberal learning are managers of middle-class America. Many in the Academy have been educated into modern-day wisdom to adopt a posture of disdain toward the Great Tradition. In fact, the attack begins there. We should recognize these enemies of permanent things as anti-traditionalists. I once had an exchange with an individual who claimed no Great Tradition or Western intellectual heritage existed. I assured him otherwise. It was as real as Narnia and my birth city of Rochester, NY, real in different ways, yes, but real nonetheless. Personally, I believe the Great Tradition is real in both manners, Narnian and Rochesterian, and this should be more than evident by the end of the book.

Much like Christianity in twenty-first-century America, liberal learning stumbled to the wayside from sheer apathy and many and violent hostilities from others. The culture war raging for the past thirty years boasts many casualties. Many care nothing about anything that happened fifteen minutes ago, let alone fifteen-hundred years. This apathetic, lethargic posture in its passivity has wrought tremendous damage. The Academy cares now for other things. Instead of the good, the true, and the beautiful, one can major in the relative, the mundane, and the insipid.

Possibly the worst enemy, both omnipresent in the Academy and pervasive throughout society, is an extraordinary level of ignorance about the Liberal Arts. Shortly after I received my Ph.D. in Humanities, a well-intentioned, but astonishingly ignorant fellow asked me in the most sincere tone, Why would a Christian get a Ph.D. in Humanism since Humanism was opposed to God? After several minutes of trying, but ultimately failing to explain to him that I did not spend years pursuing a degree in Humanism, I yielded to him and said, I’m not sure. Willful, stubborn ignorance trumps learning and persuasion almost every time. I gave up years ago trying to explain to my colleagues in the hard and social sciences the value of a study in Humanities. As they have boldly declared in various ways, We know how things really are in our disciplines. I have decided that certain treasures ought not to be cast before certain critters where mud, like ignorance, represents the soil of preference.

Some things we desire to know toward a different end than merely knowing those things. Most college students now attend college not to learn for the sake of learning but to acquire the skills necessary to obtain gainful employment. Times have indeed changed. Not many decades ago, the primary motivation for attaining a college education shifted, from lifelong learning to the immediate end of earning wages, from receiving an education to making a living. Oddly enough, we arrive at a moment when many if not most students graduate without an education or the means to make a living. What does it profit a person to go to college for four years? The answer: to establish the beginning of twenty-five years of student loans and a certificate of achievement, what is still called a diploma. In fact, the college degree has become synonymous with the elementary school award, Everyone’s a Winner.

In the best and highest sense, a Liberal Arts education means a liberation from something and toward something. It is liberation or freedom from the kind of training that restricts one to being bound to a narrow trade or skill and a limited reference of all that is good, true, and beautiful beyond a small moment. Humane learning moves us toward a life of happiness beyond labor, feed, and rest. When liberal education expands and ennobles a human soul, a person gains the ability to recognize and desires to embrace what makes us distinctly human.

A person who has reaped the full benefits of a Liberal Arts education knows the true even when swimming in a sea of media and political propaganda. He knows the good even in an age that humorously declares no good exists, or everyone determines one’s own good, or all goods are equally good except for the goods more equal than others (think the tolerance mantra). The privileged human who has received that rarest of education firmly steeped in the liberating disciplines will know and treasure the beautiful in an age of crass consumption of the ugly that perishes as soon as it is mass produced.

Ideally, an additional function of a Liberal Arts education fully informed by Christian conviction suggests students will be made unfit for the modern world. We find ourselves in a world shaped by the odd marriage of Enlightenment and Romantic consciousness and the additional social soil of the fruit of consumerism planted in the Industrial revolution, but we cannot thrive with the right way of thinking and living if we use our world’s ways of thinking and living. While tensions and some inconsistencies appear within the Great Tradition, ones Mortimer Adler argued should be forced to speak with one another so the truth can be heard, much more compliance, agreement, borrowing, influence, and derivation may be found there.

Thinking Christianly about the Liberal Arts demands not merely giving attention to the content, but the very means of thinking about that content. That is to say, in addition to what one analyzes, it is the process of analysis that the Christian faith thoroughly informs. All truth is God’s truth was the consensus among early Christian thinkers, and that statement remains true to this day. However, the actual practice has been mixed through the ages. When one faithfully adheres to this conviction, it provides both freedom and enabling of the most meaningful engagement of this rich tradition. Within the history of the Christian intellectual tradition, the Liberal Arts have been appreciated first and foremost as pillars of wisdom and also as intrinsic goods, gifts from God.

A major contention of this book, implicit throughout, is that if the Liberal Arts are to survive in a meaningful manner, or even thrive with new and significant scholarship, it will be among Christians, unique communities, and institutions shaped by Christian conviction. While I know and trust in the presence of those old-school humanists still fighting the good fight, their days are numbered. I desire to be counted among people who recognize the temporal and eternal value of education. The true humanists see how Delphi and Golgotha are much closer in proximity than many understand. It is for those people I assemble this writing.

A GREAT CLOUD OF WITNESSES AMONG THE CHRISTIAN HUMANISTS AND SELECT LIBERAL ARTISTS OF THE MERE HUMANISM NATURE

Before we respectfully listen and join the great conversation of Christian intellectuals who were committed to the Liberal Arts, we need to exercise the much lacking human virtue of gratitude and the greater Christian obligation of gracious thanksgiving. Though only a select few will be discussed, let us think about our predecessors and show appreciation for their contribution. Reminiscent of canto four in Dante’s Inferno, let us recognize that great company of fallen humans who, made in the image of God, Romans 1:20 declares honored their perception of God and in some way bore witness to common grace and laid the foundation upon which later believers built. Socrates and Plato, whose dialogues represent a Liberal Arts education in their right. Aristotle, the professor to all disciplines within the university, yet, lamentably, neglected by most because of ignorance in the Academy. Numerous others who were participants in what Tolkien called splintered light. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil … all of them.

To Be Like Apollos

In consideration for a biblical patron Saint of the Liberal Arts, I suggest Apollos. Of course, some might protest. Why not Moses, Joseph, Solomon or even Paul? We might easily