seeds of the Word (or, my working defense of the humanities)

I'll be teaching two humanities courses this upcoming semester, one on the Greeks and Romans and one on the medievals. Preparing for these classes has been an exciting and maybe too-consuming adventure, but it's been forcing me to look squarely at a question I usually shrugged off at Hillsdale: why prioritize studying the humanities?

I loved the classes I took for my history major, and I went that direction in the first place because I'd been enchanted by courses taught by the most wise and loving Great Books teacher a high-schooler could ask for. At Hillsdale, I took classes in philosophy of education and the liberal arts tradition, and I read A.G. Sertillanges' The Intellectual Life for devotional reading (ha! the Dominican spirit strikes again!) because it set my heart on fire. I thought then, and do now, that reading history, literature, political theory, philosophy, and theology impelled me to examine my life more intentionally and opened me to dimensions of human experience with which I had been unacquainted.

As I began to put together syllabi for my courses, though, I began to realize that my own experience did not constitute a sufficient apology for others to pursue a similar course of study. When one of the other missionary teachers asked me to describe in one word what I was hoping to find in Belize, I said, "integration." Integration of all this abstract thinking I've been doing for years with the practical realities of human life. Taking what I have discovered to be true and letting its implications permeate what I do and how I do it.

Well, here we are. The intellectual rubber meets the road to Benque Viejo.

The act of standing in front of a classroom and asking students to read Homer, Aristotle, Boethius, Aquinas, and Shakespeare stakes my integrity as a teacher and a human being on the assertion that these authors are worth reading and thinking about, not just for economically-privileged American students but also for economically-challenged Central American students. I will be cheating my students if I offer them anything less than a completely worthy use of their limited time and money.

The value of the liberal arts education that John Paul Junior College offers holds true only if liberal arts education is what it purports to be--an education based not on the particular race, nationality, sex, religious background, or economic situation of the person receiving it, but on the fact that he is a human being. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to understand and responsibly exercise freedom. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to wonder about and reflect on the conflicts and questions raised by his own experience. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to discuss these questions with other human beings and alongside them to seek the truth about the human condition. An education which helps him to do these things is an education in realizing the potential inherent in his humanity.

One could reasonably object that exercising freedom, reflecting on one's experience and seeking truth can be done without reading ancient texts. True enough. It seems to me, however, that one can think about reading these tests in (at least) two ways:

(a) "I will read Homer and try to figure out what he thought about x (hospitality, fame, immortality, family) so then I will know what an influential ancient bard thought about these things, and if I ever write a textbook on ancient Greece, then I can write about what Homer thought," or,
(b) "I will read Homer and try to figure out what he thought about x (hospitality, fame, immortality, family) and what the implications would be of thinking that way. I will think about why he thinks those things, and about whether or not I agree with him, and I will allow his perspective to bring nuance and depth to the way I think about these things."

No contest, folks.

The perspective of any given person is pretty limited, such that we learn best in the company of others. Reading ancient authors enables part of that company to be formed of those who have lived in times and places quite different from our own, who may think in categories utterly foreign to us, and who have foreseen difficulties (or solutions) in various paths of thinking not immediately evident to us.

SO. Super cool example I ran into the other day:

While putting together the ancient humanities course, I'd been pulling some sections from Justin Martyr's 1st Apology where he discusses pagan philosophy. He says, for example, pretty shockingly: "we have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them." Justin attributes the possibility of the rational pagan to the fact that "there seem to be seeds of truth among all men."

Ok, yes, he did just say that those who lived reasonably before Christ are Christians which is W I L D. Stick that on your back burner to consider, though, because it's not my point at present. 

Know where that same phrase popped up the other day, only a few weeks after I'd read it in Justin? The Instrumentum Laboris for the 2019 Synod on the Amazonian Region, the very same document which has created a tizzy in much of the English-speaking Catholic world, despite the general difficulty of source-checking any of the claims made by various Catholic news agencies as it is not yet available in English. One of the questions addressed in the document is the complicated question of what it means for Catholicism to engage with a non-Catholic culture. Where does the Church learn, and where does it teach?

Section 108 of the document reads "inculturation and interculturality complement rather than oppose each other. Just as Jesus was incarnate in a particular, determined culture (inculturation), his missionary disciples followed his paths. For their part, the Christians of a culture leave so as to encounter persons of other cultures (interculturality). This occurred from the beginnings of the Church when the Jewish apostles brought the Good News to different cultures, such as that of the Greeks, discovering there “seeds of the Word.” From that encounter and dialogue between cultures emerge new paths of the Spirit. Today, in this encounter and dialogue with the Amazonian cultures, the Church examines these new paths."

Yep, the Instrumentum Laboris explicitly invokes Justin's phrase. This suggests that the Synodal bishops think that understanding how Catholicism engaged with pagan Greek philosophy in the first centuries A.D. can help us understand how the Church today can engage with the cultures of the Amazon region. Not understanding the first will hinder our efforts to sort out the second--we'd have to re-do a lot of legwork that was already done, so to speak. (At least, the authors think that they think this; I'll have to read more of the document to get a better idea of how far the historical parallel can be drawn and how far the authors would want it to be.) This is a huge question being worked out by the Church right now, but it can be at least partially elucidated by our understanding of the past.

It's easy to treat great texts as desiccated museum specimens, but how much richer for us to know they contain dormant seeds of the Word to be watered by our encounter with them.