Escape from Scepticism: Liberal Education as If Truth Mattered

By Christopher Derrick

The brilliant English writer Christopher Derrick presents a disturbing indictment of today's colleges and universities and the troubled condition of liberal education. The occasion for his writing this book was a visit to Thomas Aquinas College in California which deeply impressed Derrick with its true liberal and Catholic education. This small independent college convinced him of the need for reform in Catholic higher education today, and he uses the example of this college as the way this reform should be carried out.

"This book is comparable to Newman's Idea of a University. Derrick has wit and a brilliant aphoristic style. This book could well serve as a manual for the reform of Catholic higher education today."
-Paul Hallet, The National Catholic Register

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781681491547

Book preview

Foreword

An imp keeps making my pen want to write Dawson when I mean Derrick. He must be wise as well as whimsical because both Christophers have written with profound sensibility and both have much to teach a generation which has not been taught the criteria for profundity.

It would be trite to call Christopher Derrick’s little book a classic. Any author these days can find some sympathetic and unmeasured mind willing to call his book a modern classic. I do think that Mr. Derrick has written a classical work, and I shall not demean him by calling it modern, for he has outlived the twilight of the modern age in which he wrote it. Escape from Scepticism is a literary exercise in pinning the tail on the donkey, the donkey being the spirit of the age, although the author was anything but blindfolded. He cheated by having the help of classical minds of the ages.

Mr. Derrick wrote this ten years after a gathering of presidents of Catholic colleges and universities published an embarrassingly illiterate rejection of Catholic scholarship. Gathered at a place called Land O’ Lakes, they invoked Christ the Teacher and then said in mottled words and clotted logic that they had never known the Man. There is no indication that the English author of the following pages knew about that ill-conceived event in consequence of which Catholic education in the United States has been in meltdown, but he certainly knew the philosophical virus of scepticism that led to it. Mr. Derrick will not be offended if I say that it did not take much wisdom to produce his chapters. The reader will know that he obviously is very wise, although the quality of his education makes him an exotic relic in academic halls today. Wisdom nurtures the author’s muse, but his book is just plain logic. I cannot very well call it common sense, because such sense has simply not been common for quite a while. The force of logic is precisely what must scandalize the pharisees of academe. Mr. Derrick dares to say that truth should matter in institutions consecrated to truth.

Thomas Aquinas College was little more than a glimmer in the eye of St. Thomas Aquinas when Christopher Derrick sat studying ducks on its fledgling campus in Calabasas, California. It has become a heartening success, as the author thought it should and would, and now in Santa Paula it covers grander acres with stately halls. The progress of the college was not the gossamer success of those colleges in the Catholic tradition which have prospered in the way of Isaac after he sold his birthright. This college’s success was born of a deliberate refusal to be successful that way. Martin Buber reminded a smug world that success is not one of the names of God. Only a Jew could say it with his moral decibels. Only a Jew who was God himself could prove it by getting crucified. Resurrection is not the world’s kind of success.

Thomas Aquinas College is positioned to be an especially convincing model by its commitment to the integrity of philosophical principles and the discipline of the mind. There have been some earnest Catholics who sought refuge from the crisis in Catholic education by wanting schools to be morally congruent refuges, chaste and drug-free but with no more than a vestigial regard for the demands of the intellect. This is not Roman Catholicism, although it is a dispirited kind of Amish Catholicism. To be historically more precise, this is a neo-Jansenism, and it is as futile in redressing the decadence of modern culture as the older Jansenism was in correcting the excesses of the baroque. Nor does the foundational vision of Thomas Aquinas College lapse into the other mistake subterranean throughout the Christian drama: I mean the Manicheanism which supposes the life of the mind can be divorced from the life of the virtues. The moral good has a home and nursery in Santa Paula, but for a high and apostolic purpose.

Christopher Derrick’s analysis of the degeneration of the economy of teaching and learning into a non-critical business does not waste time with the jargon which is the new Latin of the modern educational establishment. He is as impatient with cant as he is with Kant. Through the inescapable influence of his ethnic genes, he is cautious about enthusiasm, but he does admit that he has a rejuvenating enthusiasm for this collegiate revival of confidence in truth. If he is anything like me, he may have imagined a time when he had overcome the influence of the Holy Spirit and had become Pope. In my case, I know I would have been a kind and cheerful Pope, having first fired a lot of people either by script or by some more immediately combustible means. That is one of the perks of being an absolute monarch. At the moment, however, we have a Pope who has done other. Under the impression that the pen is mightier than the sword, he has written an encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, on why truth matters. In his own book, Mr. Derrick anticipated the very marrow of the encyclical in a way more entertaining than the diction of curial documents allows. At the very least, he was the vox clamantis in deserto before the appearance on our horizon of the Church’s instruction on norms for Catholic academies, Ex Corde Ecclesiae. One of the bleak ironies of our time is the coexistence of many, if not too many, documents for reform and agents reluctant to implement them. The tension is an inevitable product of the scepticism which Derrick skewered.

The majority of our institutions of higher learning are stuck in the tar pit of modern subjectivism such as Nietzsche heralded. Only because of modern political calamities is he an officially unwelcome uncle on most campuses, but his refrain is almost a universal academic mantra: Nothing is true; everything is permitted. It has replaced the shimmering mottoes of institutions in the authentic liberal tradition: Dominus Illuminatio Mea, Veritas Vos Liberabit, Lux et Veritas, and just Veritas. The honest course for many American universities in our philosophically deconstructed climate would be to place the grand-sounding latinity on their shields with the amount of their endowment funds.

Mr. Derrick is too courteous to make much of the fact that in the instance of Catholic colleges, this rot was allowed to happen by prelates and others consecrated to preach the truth. Bureaucracy is not the most solid safeguard against mediocrity, and, next to the neglect and decline of religious communities, this has been most glaringly so in the schools. Not every clerical official has found the life of the mind agreeable. This may have something to do with the politics of the Church Militant, which I am not qualified to address. It has an iconic example in Newman’s experience in Dublin as he tried to realize his idea of a university. The bishops thwarted him, as they wanted not really a university at all, but rather something more of a training school in the modern model of a supermarket of courses measured by hours of credit, which Newman derisively called a Pantechnicon. In our generation it has become a form of what we now call Cafeteria Catholicism. The bishops in Ireland would have been appalled at any imputation of utilitarianism, but their discomfort with Newman’s vision was agitated by a scepticism about the human potential which the Benthamites dressed in different secular clothes, while sharing the same shortsightedness. Shane Leslie wrote that the archbishop who most frustrated Newman’s efforts, Dr. Cullen, wanted Newman as a kind of window dressing for his university and was like a greengrocer using Newman as a decorative orchid among his vegetables. Lytton Strachey was more acid in comparing Newman and the local hierarchs to a thoroughbred trying to pull a hay wagon. He adds, and ever so poignantly, that Newman knew it.

Modern dissenters should not be allowed to match themselves with Newman in his struggle. Their liberalism is a secular and political hybrid which has made the twentieth century morally malignant and not at all what Newman and the Doctors of the Church have known as the liberal arts. I hope it is not unfeeling to say that the nature of ecclesiastical politics in the face of such dissent is to let the sceptical utilitarian surmount all reforms and thwart all acts of providence, like the roach which survives every test of evolution to crawl among us as an ungainly yet imperishable remnant of the age of times not apostolic but paleolithic.

Utilitarianism is the dismal brainchild of the servile mentality which is everything the liberally educated mind cannot be. To the endless lament of the muses and in spiteful contradiction of the virtues, this servility mimics service to truth. Too often, those entrusted with the care of souls have not detected the masquerade. They may even substitute servility to systems for obedience to truth, and they will think that an honest education in the liberal arts is a suspect form of elitism and that those who take seriously the classical regard for beauty and truth and goodness are like the hopeless philosophers on Jonathan Swift’s floating island of Laputa. For example, I have account of a rector who disdainfully announced that his dwindling seminary had no room for Ivy League types. The gratuitousness of his rhetoric only highlighted the lack of such types trying to enter his institution. Given the philosophical impoverishment of that League in recent years, his words bear a favorable interpretation, apart from what he meant. Our ancient and richly established universities cavalierly have given up the classical tradition which birthed them. The seminary rector’s point, however, was not that these institutions are other than what they are cracked up to be. He seemed to betray an insecurity which no amount of clerical preferment could erase. A more civilized version of this was Cardinal Manning’s private criticism of Newman’s impracticability, a sentiment which more than anything else may have been rooted in the cancer in the Church known as clerical envy. More ominously, the rector distrusted the liberal learning which was born of the Catholic imagination and which widely has been crushed by the very lack of that same Catholic imagination. Badly educated educators are a menace to education.

Such insecurity has given rise to a reflexive contempt on the part of some academics for legitimate authority altogether. There has been a long precedent for this, since not all academics have been innocent of vanity. But their self-consciousness attained new heights in the twentieth century: I think it is correct to say that the term intellectual became part of vernacular conversation only during the Dreyfus Affair. Characteristic of the modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century was a ready assumption that their ecclesiastical superiors could not be intelligent. Raw material in support of this theory gave them excuse for generalizing. In recent times, their frustration has sought release in a notion of a second magisterium paralleling the teaching office of the bishops. It is no more legitimate than the heretical notion of a second personality for Christ.

Thomas Aquinas College was the initiative of lay people secure in their faith and confident in the tradition of classical culture. It has enjoyed the encouragement of prudent bishops, and it has produced a remarkable number of clerics, but it expresses the grace common to all the baptized. My natural repose would not have inclined me to enlist for Columbus’s first voyage, nor would I have been the first man to try an oyster, and so I have profound regard for those souls who embark upon starting a college of liberal arts in our complicated years. But, like the canons of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, I am grateful for the glint of Columbus’s gold on their ceiling. I am even willing, in controlled circumstances, to eat an oyster hors d’oeuvre. Now that Thomas Aquinas College flourishes, I am happy to advise it on how to be what it is. Christopher Derrick saw it unfolding a generation ago. What he wrote about the start of so fine an adventure will be read generations from now. It would court presumption to trust in a widespread recovery of Catholic education in the near future. The future may have happy surprises, but widespread neglect of discipline in the United States has dismantled a great educational system