Christian Education and Personhood (John Paul II series)

This is the last entry culled from the encyclicals of John Paul II. The following is from Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the encyclical that attempted to give a more Christian course to Catholic university education. Much of what he has to say is true of Christian universities in general. Try replacing the word "Catholic" below with "Christian" and see how much you agree with and how much you can learn from:

4. It is the honour and responsibility of a Catholic University to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth. This is its way of serving at one and the same time both the dignity of man and the good of the Church, which has "an intimate conviction that truth is (its) real ally ... and that knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith." Without in any way neglecting the acquisition of useful knowledge, a Catholic University is distinguished by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man and God. The present age is in urgent need of this kind of disinterested service, namely of proclaiming the meaning of truth, that fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished. By means of a kind of universal humanism a Catholic University is completely dedicated to the research of all aspects of truth in their essential connection with the supreme Truth, who is God. It does this without fear but rather with enthusiasm, dedicating itself to every path of knowledge, aware of being preceded by him who is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life", the Logos, whose Spirit of intelligence and love enables the human person with his or her own intelligence to find the ultimate reality of which he is the source and end and who alone is capable of giving fully that Wisdom without which the future of the world would be in danger.

6. Through the encounter which it establishes between the unfathomable richness of the salvific message of the Gospel and the variety and immensity of the fields of knowledge in which that richness is incarnated by it, a Catholic University enables the Church to institute an incomparably fertile dialogue with people of every culture. Man's life is given dignity by culture, and, while he finds his fullness in Christ, there can be no doubt that the Gospel which reaches and renews him in every dimension is also fruitful for the culture in which he lives.

7. In the world today, characterized by such rapid developments in science and technology, the tasks of a Catholic University assume an ever greater importance and urgency. Scientific and technological discoveries create an enormous economic and industrial growth, but they also inescapably require the correspondingly necessary search for meaning in order to guarantee that the new discoveries be used for the authentic good of individuals and of human society as a whole. If it is the responsibility of every University to search for such meaning, a Catholic University is called in a particular way to respond to this need: its Christian inspiration enables it to include the moral, spiritual and religious dimension in its research, and to evaluate the attainments of science and technology in the perspective of the totality of the human person.

In this context, Catholic Universities are called to a continuous renewal, both as "Universities" and as "Catholic". For, "What is at stake is the very meaning of scientific and technological research, of social life and of culture, but, on an even more profound level, what is at stake is the very meaning of the human person"(10). . . .

21. A Catholic University pursues its objectives through its formation of an authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ. The source of its unity springs from a common dedication to the truth, a common vision of the dignity of the human person and, ultimately, the person and message of Christ which gives the Institution its distinctive character. As a result of this inspiration, the community is animated by a spirit of freedom and charity; it is characterized by mutual respect, sincere dialogue, and protection of the rights of individuals. It assists each of its members to achieve wholeness as human persons; in turn, everyone in the community helps in promoting unity, and each one, according to his or her role and capacity, contributes towards decisions which affect the community, and also towards maintaining and strengthening the distinctive Catholic character of the Institution. . . .

33. A specific priority is the need to examine and evaluate the predominant values and norms of modern society and culture in a Christian perspective, and the responsibility to try to communicate to society those ethical and religious principles which give full meaning to human life. In this way a University can contribute further to the development of a true Christian anthropology, founded on the person of Christ, which will bring the dynamism of the creation and redemption to bear on reality and on the correct solution to the problems of life.

By its very nature, a University develops culture through its research, helps to transmit the local culture to each succeeding generation through its teaching, and assists cultural activities through its educational services. It is open to all human experience and is ready to dialogue with and learn from any culture. A Catholic University shares in this, offering the rich experience of the Church's own culture. In addition, a Catholic University, aware that human culture is open to Revelation and transcendence, is also a primary and privileged place for a fruitful dialogue between the Gospel and culture.

44. Through this dialogue a Catholic University assists the Church, enabling it to come to a better knowledge of diverse cultures, discern their positive and negative aspects, to receive their authentically human contributions, and to develop means by which it can make the faith better understood by the men and women of a particular culture(36). While it is true that the Gospel cannot be identified with any particular culture and transcends all cultures, it is also true that "the Kingdom which the Gospel proclaims is lived by men and women who are profoundly linked to a culture, and the building up of the Kingdom cannot avoid borrowing the elements of human culture or cultures(37). "A faith that places itself on the margin of what is human, of what is therefore culture, would be a faith unfaithful to the fullness of what the Word of God manifests and reveals, a decapitated faith, worse still, a faith in the process of self-annihilation"(38).

45. A Catholic University must become more attentive to the cultures of the world of today, and to the various cultural traditions existing within the Church in a way that will promote a continuous and profitable dialogue between the Gospel and modern society. Among the criteria that characterize the values of a culture are above all, the meaning of the human person, his or her liberty, dignity, sense of responsibility, and openness to the transcendent. To a respect for persons is joined the preeminent value of the family, the primary unit of every human culture.

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 3

In the third part of Weil's The Need for Roots she reflects on how the French might be inspired to again love their homes and communities. I confess that I (often) find her overly idealistic, even contradictory, but she is worth listening to here. She is primarily concerned with the means that education possesses to cultivate the imaginative and moral sympathies of persons. She suggests that intimidation, false promises, simple suggestions or examples, or publicly sanctioned statements will not do the trick, that what is needed is the inspiration that comes through organized action. Yet having said this, she goes on to urge the use of inspiring words to reach the heart of the French people. She particularly recommends words that set forth the absolute good which pours from a sure faith in God.

The power of these words from God, she suggests, should be received in much the same way as a soldier receives a command--as an order of a superior. The other option is that of the technician, whom she believes to be subversive of true order and seeking false autonomy. A good command comes to both the mind and the feelings and has the shape of friendship, meaning there is a communique of trust to it. Thus, action "gives the fullness of reality to the incitations which have inspired it. The expression of such incitations, as heard on the outside, only gives them as yet a semi-reality. Action possesses a virtue of quite another order" (206).

Her vision for education, then, is one in which desire and example are married to living acts. We need faith more than realism, she says, and to see political action as spiritual rather than pragmatic. But, she observes, there are four chief obstacles in the way:

1. "our false conception of greatness;
2. "the degradation of the sentiment of justice;
3. "our idolization of money;
4. "and our lack of religious inspiration."

To begin to overcome these, Weil urges that the French revise and renew how they teach history, science, literature and philosophy, and religion. She insists that history should not be reduced to a Darwinian study of war, though war must be taught to do justice to the past. Instead, the gifts of the geniuses of art, activism, and sanctity must be taught, too. In literature, the "current of purity" must be studied, by which she means a healthy commitment to the integrity of the art on the part of writers. The modernist attitude of superiority in general must be jettisoned if the French are to recover true rootedness.

She places much more of the blame at the feet of modern science. Researchers are motivated by power and pragmatism rather than a love for the beauty and truth of the universe itself. As a result, they posit a world of complete determinism where force is the only political option, and in which technique is the overriding value: means without ends. "If justice is erasable from the heart of Man, it must have reality in this world. It is [modern] science, then, which is mistaken" (241). Pragmatism has polluted even the pure faith of Christians, who should know better, Weil believes. "A truth is always the truth with reference to something. Truth is the radiant manifestation of reality. Truth is not the object of love but reality. To desire truth is to desire direct contact with a piece of reality. . . . Pure and genuine love is in itself spirit of truth. It is the Holy Spirit" (250-1).

Weil, then, makes a move typical for her that I find problematic. She insists that Christians should understand God, not as someone who intervenes in response to particular circumstances, but as present in every event: "The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself" (280). The world is, from one view, a closed system of determined action, while from another view, it is completely open to God's comprehensive control. . She goes so far as to suggest that we see the universe as entirely one of "perfect obedience" always acting in love. What we experience as "the blind forces of matter" are really a creature obedient to eternal Wisdom and love. Thus, the pain and suffering we experience are motivated by love and act as the punishment we each deserve that will restore us to faith and holiness.

At first blush, Weil seems to be setting forth the classic Augustinian understanding of providence, but her view would also seem to undercut prayer and regulate God to a Platonic being who does not respond per se to our individual requests. She urges a re-visioning of the world:

"The order of the world is the same as the beauty of the world. All that differs is the type of concentration demanded, according to whether one tries to conceive the necessary relations which go to make it up or to contemplate its splendor. It is one and the same thing, which with respect to God is eternal Wisdom; wth respect to the universe, perfect obedience; with respect to our love, beauty; with respect to our intelligence, balance of necessary relations; with respect to our flesh, brute force" (291).

If this were all she had written, I would accuse of her of promoting fatalism, but obviously, she believes in political action and reform. Nonetheless, her position would seem to render any prayer for these things at best moot, at worst as pragmatism under the cover of middle-class piety. To reach this position, she must, like Marcion, that ancient heretic, deny much of the Old Testament, and thereby, as Eliot points out in his introduction to the English translation, the very basis for the Church.

Physical labor, then, she concludes, is the most holy work because its daily tedium and suffering bring us closer to our deaths and thus force us to a place where repentance is truly possible. Weil concludes that "physical labor should occupy in a well-ordered social life . . . its spiritual core" (298). By ending this way, she offers a vision of the physical world in which place, work, family, and making are at the center of a truly human existence--one marked by gratitude, reverence, and connection with God, the land, and others.

I just don't see that such a vision need exclude the practice of daily intercession. A God who acts in direct ways to special requests can be the same God who guides the every action of his universe of obedient love.

God and Majors

Interesting summary of a study on whether one's major in college impacts one's religiosity:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/28/majors

Interview with Francis Collins

To follow-up on Jekabs's last post, here's an interesting recent interview with Collins:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2009/julaug/evolutionthebibleandthebookofnature.html

Addendum to the Two Cultures

Cynthia Ozick in her essay "Crocodiled Moats in the Kingdom of Letters" argued that C.P. Snow and F. R. Leavis were in the long-run both wrong. Snow at the time was already wrong, and should have known(probably did know) better: "[W]e had already had well over a hundred years to get used to the idea of science as a multi-divergent venture--dozens and dozens of disciplines, each one nearly a separate nation with its own goverance, psychology, entelechy." Yet, Ozick, insisted that natural science nonetheless had a kind of polythiesm or animism that held its disparate parts together.

Leavis, on the other hand, at the time was right--there really was one culture of the humanities--the belles-lettres--that held it together. But this is now lost, she laments. Instead, "the culture of the humanities has split and split and split again, always for reasons of partisan ascendancy and scorn." Novelists, poets, journalists, and critics are divided from each other in their sour professionalism. Furthermore, there is no longer a unifying theory or philosophy that offers a center around which to gather even in good-hearted debate.

Is she right? Have we come to a vast broken mirror of a thousand cultures without a frame?

Three Cultures?

H. Newton Malony insists that there are three intellectual cultures in American society:

1. science, which strives "the general conditions that regulate the physical and social world through replicable experiments, sensate experience, and logical reasoning;"
2. the humanities, which strive to explicate cultural matters in history, philosophy, anthropology, and the arts;
3. religion, which "attempts to deal with ultimate struggles . . . in facing the enigmatic, the tragic, and the mysterious."

Malony's trifurcation shows not only the distinctions that C.P. Snow, like so many others came to assume, but also indulges in the problematic nature of "religion" as a general identifiable category of human experience, and one that is existentially removed form the other two. SHould we really see religion as a "culture"?

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow -- Part 3

The Humanities as Salvific Culture

From here on I would like to focus more on the literary side of this debate and the history that undergirds it.

Snow himself rightly understood that Trilling's "freedom from society" was at odds with his own social collective project (96). From whence comes this salvific mission for the teaching, indeed, the politics of the humanities? The mid-to-late 19th century was an important shift in pedagogy from the study of classics for language, logic, rhetoric, and general "mental toughness" to the study of the humanities as cultivating refinement and nobility of mind and eventually as new specialized academic disciplines. "One wonders how much Milton's prominence in literature classes after 1860 owes to his earlier ubiquity in rhetoric courses:" observe historians John Robert and James Turner, "if you could parse Paradise Lost, you could parse anything" (77).

This shift away from classical studies was due in part to the growing loss of a Protestant Christian cohesive vision of education before the Darwinian onslaught, but it was as much due to the in-flux of the German research model, The specialization that Snow would come to partially lament in the next century was required by the new sciences. The humanities ironically first arose in response to this division of knowledge. President Charles W. Eliot, for example, most noted for Harvard's move to the elective system, felt that the students needed some sort of civilizing influence to replace the old Protestant hegemony and looked to the humanities to provide it (81). Specialization at the time was an academic novelty because the classic, old-time college could not conceive equipping one student in a different fashion from another. Despite its adaptation at Harvard and the rise of Brown as the first American research university, the new practice was resisted at many colleges well until after 1900 precisely because it conceived of professorial loyalty as beholding to national and disciplinary organizations rather than to the local college and its surrounding community (Roberts and Turner chapter 5).

And it was precisely non-specialization that the humanities seemed to require. The realm of "culture" was handed the civilizing mission once accorded the senior capstone study of moral philosophy in the old colleges. In the place of its synthesis of Scottish Common Sense Realist philosophy, republican democratic political theory, and broadly evangelical piety, stood sympathy and feeling through an exposure to culture. Humanities instructors and scholars, like Charles Eliot Norton, held that cultural items--art, architecture, music, literature--revealed the spirit of a people; this had both objective and subjective qualities--it could be taught and it could be observed. Norton saw in the rise of the humanities three elements to replace the fading of Christian conviction:

1. the nurture aesthetic sensibilities through literary and artistic works;
2. the professorial linkages across cultural eras and times;
3. and the praise of European civilization as a kind of supercultural whole, though in all fairness Norton did not see Europe as the sole bearer of "civilization" (102-103).

Culture, however understood, became encoded with secular soteriological claims. Its purpose was to provide a comprehensive set of values, meanwhile leaving the physical condition of life to the natural (and eventually social) sciences.

As Turner points out, Norton substituted the vertical connection of humanity to God with a horizontal one of people to people (380). For Norton, the intuition of beauty was a product of human cultural progress. He understood beauty to be tied to moral desires, so that to cultivate one was to nurture the other. Imagination was at the heart of perceiving beauty; he saw this as an intellectual faculty obtained through "reflection, comparison, and remininscence" of images and other sense impressions (Liberal Education 382). In this sense, Norton's project represented the transition between other common sense realist claims for the moral sympathies and the eventually move to moral pragmatism. Turner claims that "Norton invented Western civilization" (384) in the sense that he put together a pedagogical and ideological program out of what others were suggesting piecemeal (384).

Yet at the project's heart were the conditions for its demise. Philology as the study, reconstruction, and interpretation of ancient texts formed the backbone of 18th and 19th century German university research and formed the basis for Norton's project. Philology was guided by cultural context and historicism (Roberts and Turner 97ff.); the first demanded a sense of the ancient culture's differences, while the second taught the constant change and evolution of cultures over time. In the end philological historicism within the humanities worked against anything like holism and eventually opened the way for a non-Christian soteriology to take its seat at the heart of university education, dismissing a unified or normative knowledge. It created a religion of cultivation, but one increasingly subject to emotivist ethics and relativistic truth claims.

By positioning ultimate meaning within the social and artistic milieu alone, it opened the door for William James' judgment of religion as capacity of supernatural feeling, but one without any final truth claims. For James, "Christianity makes sense only as disguised humanism" (Hauerwas 64). Prayer is only subjective authenticity and theological claims are only "over-beliefs" arising from religious feeling (66-68). There can be no final adjudication of what is true. Theologian Ernst Troeltsch would come to label this phenomena the "crisis of historicism" (119), one in which human culture could make only an agnostic gesture to the possibility of something beyond.

And this is what is at the heart of the Snow-Leavis debate. The two were, ironically, more in agreement than one might first think: both see the individual as primary and the conditions of life as finally oppressive and needing to be mitigated. Both also put something like an implicit trust in the humanities as offering the individual some surfeit from societal and biological meaninglessness. For Snow, however, only science can offer physical prosperity, which must be approached collectively while for Leavis and Trilling, the "criticism of life" offers a chance for freedom from the technopoly's oppression and operative conformity. Yet neither can reach a common basis for their pedagogical platforms. It is also highly questionable whether Trilling's attempt to adjudicate the two is any more successful.

Compare their assumptions with contemporary definitions of culture that Trilling recommended to his fellow Liberals in the 1940 Parisian Review, not for their "allegiance" but for their serious "consideration" (22). Historian Christopher Dawson and T.S. Eliot, whom Dawson influenced as part of The Moot and The Sword of the Spirit intellectual and ecumenical circles, held that culture and religion could not separated; indeed, a culture's without a religion was in the process of dying. Dawson held, "We cannot separate culture from religion any more than we can separate our life from our faith. As a living faith must change the life of the believer, so a living religion must influence and transform the social way of life" (Historic Reality 68). Religion, even if observed sociologically, is not one more sociological section of culture; it is not a sign system giving ritual meaning to otherwise material and psychological insufficiencies. Dawson charged that the material reading of history is not wrong to judge some "spiritual aspects of culture as conditioned by its material elements, but in the assertion of an absolute casual dependence of the former on the latter" (Enquiries vii). For Eliot, a people's religion and their culture are intertwined, perhaps really two aspects of the same thing, "culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people" (101). Culture is "a whole way of life" (103) and a "lived religion" (104). But no people ever have a perfectly pure religion. Europe, thinks Eliot, has always been more or less Christian but not totally so. By incarnation, the, he means neither a simple relation nor an absolute identification (105ff.). Instead, he sees the two as operating in something like a tandem:

An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian could have reproduced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. (200)

As we move into what many see as a post-Christian Europe, the jury remains out as to whether Eliot is correct.

What Trilling found attractive in Eliot's position was the promise of something beyond dialectical materialism of the Left: "What is meant negatively is that man cannot be comprehended in a formula; what is meant positively is the sense of complication and possibility, of surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth" (29-30). Trilling found in Eliot's politics the hope of a humanity not reducible to the Soviet overman nor the capitalist consumer. He approved in Eliot that "politics is to be judged by what it does for moral perfection, rather than the physical easement of man" (27). Trilling longed for something like a spiritual component to the human culture, even if was unable to conclude that "supernaturalism can aid us" (32).

Even if one finds aspects of Dawson and Eliot's historiography wanting, nonetheless, their insights leave those of us who teach literature in a confessional setting with a particular dilemma that I can only sketch in outline here: Can Trilling and Leavis' answer to Snow be our own? In light of the soteriological substitution each is making, should we be seeking to liberate our students from their cultural parameters? Likewise, what is the relationship between the cultures we study and the faith culture we consciously or unconsciously cultivate in our students' educations?

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow -- Part 2

Whose Culture? Which Collective?

Like many in his generation, Snow saw the condition of the individual and of the society as differing problems. He wrote, "Each of us is solitary: each of us dies alone: all right, that's a fate against which we can't struggle--but there is plenty in our condition which is not fate, and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle" (6-7). Human life is bounded by the tragedy of death, and thus, the best hope for humanity in the meanwhile is an end to physical want and suffering. The dilemma as Snow saw it is that the literati fall back in despair, idealizing a traditional aristocratic past, while the scientists seek to reverse suffering, functioning as optimistic stoics in the face of biological decay.

Leavis, as Roger Kimball notes, did understand what was at stake in Snow's distinction between a tragic existential solitaire and a supposed social deliverance. Leavis charged: "What is the 'social hope' that transcends, cancels or makes indifferent the inescapable tragic condition of each individual? Where, if not in individuals, is what is hoped for … to be located? Or are we to find the reality of life in hoping for other people a kind of felicity about which as proposed for ourselves . . . we have no illusions?" (53). Snow held scientists to be "a culture on the rise," while the literary culture he charged with fearing the future. Leavis, on the other hand, held out hope for what Matthew Arnold had called, "the criticism of life" as giving the individual some measure of success against a technologically oppressive society. Close to the heart of this debate was (and still is) the nature of human meaning and of human happiness and the location of both.

Part of this search for happiness had to do with the very nature of culture as a concept. Snow took a fair amount of criticism for his own use of the word "culture" in the Rede Lecture to describe his two sets of intellectuals. Some objectors insisted that he was really describing a struggle inside one culture, while others argued the term itself was ambiguous at best. Many thought the word was obscurely employed. Yet he defended the word as being clear for most of his audience, indicating "intellectual development, development of the mind." At the same time, he admitted the anthropological definition was also present in his argument since culture indicated a certain shared behavior (62-64).

For Snow, culture meant both a way of living and the educational development of students' native abilities. Leavis, sensing the battle lay in this direction, charged Snow with using "culture" as a mask for intellectual conformity and dull bias; Leavis labeled the Rede Lecture "a document for the study of cliché" (50). Snow's tomfoolery was in reducing intellectual culture to the anthropological--an "everyone knows" mentality. Snow, it seems, had four cultures on his hands, not just two, and quite possibly many more--not only the culture of science and the humanities, but culture as a thing to be cultivated and as a description of social existence, as well as culture as intellectual practice and as pedagogical methodology. His faith in his audience's understanding was in that sense misplaced. "Culture" by the 1950s and 60s, as I've noted in previous posts, was already a deeply contested term, one with a chameleon's ability to ever shift in the hands of its user. Indeed, the pedagogical and anthropological meanings were by no means in easy consensus, and Leavis' vehement response only shows this.

For some the jeremiads of Snow and Leavis amounted to what place the individual had in the collective. With his own 1962 Commentary essay, "The Leavis-Snow Controversy," literary humanist and cultural critic Lionel Trilling entered the debate, which he described as "a miasma of personality-mongering" (150). Trilling believed that Leavis, despite his personal vendetta and bile, held that "moral consciousness, which is also the source of all successful creation, [is] the very root of poetic genius" (151), a position to which Trilling was somewhat sympathetic. Leavis he felt saw literature in much the same way as Arnold saw the "criticism of life." Snow's lecture was, then, a counter-attack on literature seen as a threat to national and global prosperity. It insisted that the literary culture must follow the scientific lead and not act "the part of a loyal opposition" (161). But for Leavis and Trilling this could only deny literature's prime purpose, that is to offer its audience an escape from the confines of the techno-social bondage of modernity, to explore and be free. Trilling recognized in both Snow and Leavis a Christian rhetoric, though one long secularized. Trilling himself was suspicious of Leavis' talk of pedagogical deliverance through a class of aesthetes:

It assumes that all things are causative or indicative of the whole of the cultural life, it proposes to us those intensities of moralized feeling which seem appropriate to our sense that all that is good in life is at stake in every cultural action. An instance of mediocrity or failure in art or thought is not only what it is but also a sin, deserving to be treated as such. These passions are no doubt vivifying: they have the semblance of heroism. (174)

Trilling felt a more moderate approach was needed. Of course, Snow and Leavis were each in turn blind to this soteriological undercurrent. Snow would remark in passing that for certain scientists with religious faith "the sense of the tragic condition [might] not be so strong," but for "most people of deep feeling" this very secular tragedy of existence could not be evaded (6). In turn, Leavis could dismiss Snow's "social hope" as the typical religious "refus[al] to live on the spot where one is" (54). If international community of science seemed to offer one kind of cultural salvation, an end to the poor relations across the Iron Curtain, the "whole man" theory of education (as Trilling would later write) "now stands virtually in the place of religion and may even be thought of as itself a religion" and is "directed toward moral and spiritual renovation; its subject is damnation and salvation" (219, 231).

Trilling observes, "No, the world will not be saved by teaching English at universities, nor, indeed, by any other literary activity. It is very hard to say what will save the world. But we can be perfectly certain that denying the actualities of the world will not work its salvation" (163). Of what Leavis could accuse Snow, Trilling could in turn accuse Leavis and Snow. Each it seems was dealing in the evangelistic revival business. Both, he thought were suspiciously blind to "a politics of a quite ultimate kind . . . the disposition of the modern mind" (148). Trilling recommended a bridge between the two positions, a kind of clinging to the hope of the life of the mind: "The idea of mind which had taught the bookbinder's apprentice to embark on his heroic enterprise of self-instruction also taught the great scientist to place himself beyond specialness of interest which groups prescribe for their members" (176-177).

That we can no longer recommend this disinterestedness without a snort of incredulity is itself a cause for reflection.

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow-- Part 1

Over the next week or so, I want to indulge in a little intellectual history. I want to explore a debate from the 1950s and 60s about the nature of culture, science, and the humanities. What I want to show is how even "secular" debates often mask religious desires. I hope you'll find this interesting.
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"We accordingly rejoice in the fact of the increased popularity of the university in both of its functions--that of culture and that of specialization"
--William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education (1898)

In his 1959 Rede Lectures, the scientist-novelist C.P. Snow argued that the intellectual world of the West had become bifurcated between the culture of scientists and that of literary intellectuals. While Snow purported to seek a détente between the literary academy and the scientific one, his sympathies were clearly with the later. "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor," he charged,

It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation-- do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of you aesthetic revulsion. But I don't respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. (25-26)

In Snow's view, the literati who wanted to naysay a world of industrial progress are pampered and naïve at best. They exist in isolation from the world's need, living off the prosperity that science has brought their own nations. In his 1963, "A Second Look," Snow went further, painting the modernist school of Lawrence, Eliot and Pound as Luddite and Fascist all at once. He expressed incredulity and contempt, charging that those who dream of a pre-industrial world, really are ignorant as to what makes their own ease possible:

What is a machine-tool? I once asked a literary party; and they looked shifty. Unless one knows, industrial production is as mysterious as witch-doctoring. Or take buttons. Buttons aren't very complicated things: they are being made in millions every day: one has to be a reasonably ferocious Luddite not to think that that is, on the whole, an estimable activity. Yet I would bet that out of men getting first in arts subject at Cambridge this year, not one in ten could give the loosest analysis of the human organisation which it needs. (30)

Snow put much of the blame for this on an educational system arising out of Oxford and Cambridge that stressed over-specialization. The literary types simply never had enough mathematical training. Snow admitted that dangers could lie with natural science, as well, especially of the applied sort, but he felt the greater problem was with a culture of literature that denied applied science's promise for ending global poverty: "Literary intellectuals represent, vocalize, and to some extent shape and predict the mood of the non-scientific culture: they do not make the decisions, but their words seep into the minds of those who do" (61).

Thus, he envisioned a literary culture committed to the promise of applied science's technology, taking their lead from those who knew better how to mitigate the suffering of the physical world. "Changes in education are not going to produce miracles," he observed, but specialized education was a roadblock to a sympathetic public committed to such an expansive social hope.

Between the Rede Lectures and A Second Look, Snow had had cause to stop and consider the other side. His 1960 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, later published as Science and Government examined the inflated scientific council F.A. Lindemann had given the British government during World War II in regards to bombing in Germany. Snow wondered, "Will they say . . . we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity?" (Shusterman 27-28). He understood that especially in applied science, ethical reflection was a necessity, and he seemed to hope that the artistic culture might offer some help, but clearly he conceived this as one that takes its lead form the inevitable industrial, technological revolution.

While Snow himself was more interested in the larger social mileu within which higher education played a role, his claims about education nonetheless touched a real cord in the nerves of many academicians. His lectures set off an angry public contest, what one writer called, "the Great debate of our age" (Shusterman 25). Literary critic F. R. Leavis' 1960 Richmond Lecture “Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow,” being the most infamous moment, was more a diatribe and a rant than a reasoned answer, so much so that it outraged even the literary set. He accused Snow's culture of science being nothing but unthinking materialism, where "no one will long consent to be without abundant jam, salvation, and lasting felicity to mankind" (59). Leavis' attack was in fact a response to The Two Cultures being used as a secondary school text and was given before a private audience. He only released the text publicly once it had been leaked by one of the attendees and had made its way into the papers.

Unfortunately Leavis' most insightful questions were obscured by the bile and dismissal of Snow's own abilities as a novelist. Nor did it slow down the public's interest in the lectures. By 1961, Snow's original work had already gone through seven printings. Leavis followed in 1966 with "Luddites? Or There is Only One Culture," insisting that human understanding, language, and the university function "as a focus of consciousness and human responsibility" (96) in imparting Western civilization to the next generation, so the humanities should be at the core of a college education.

Part of what makes Snow's and Leavis' polemics still worth reading is that they exemplify fundamental disagreements as to the sciences and the humanities' educational roles within modern society, and yet I will charge when seen from the vantage point of theological conviction, they are curiously alike.

They are, as I will argue this week, two competing soteriologies, seeking to free the individual in some way from an oppressive world of biological or technological necessity. Both seek a reform in education as a way of creating a new class of persons able to work social and moral change, yet both are blind to the spiritual dimension of the polis they seek.