The Great Books Calling, Part 3

 

The third installment of a mini-series on my path towards a Great Books education and Wyoming Catholic College. Click the links to read Part 1 and Part 2.

Thus far in my ramble I've shown what I felt was missing in the mainstream college experience, and explained why the Great Books approach, in contrast, drew me so deeply. Typical colleges today (and I'm lumping the Ivy Leaguers into this definition) hone their students into a particular career path, with relatively little concern over the actual formation of the students' minds and souls. The Great Books method, on the other hand, challenges its pupils to understand the fundamental truths of their existence. A human being is defined by more than what he or she does for a living.

So I desired this deeper kind of education. But which school to choose? Fortunately I did not have an overwhelming number of options--true Great Books colleges are a novelty nowadays. (I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain to people what they are!) The first school to draw my attention was St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.

Of all the college brochures in that oft-mentioned heap in the corner of my room, St. John's was the only one that spoke meaningfully to me. Among the oldest schools in the country (found in 1696), it has retained the classical liberal arts curriculum which most colleges have dropped. Although not religiously affiliated, they respect the integral place of Christianity in Western tradition, studying the Bible and many great Christian works of thought and literature. In class they use the time-honored (and stimulating) method of Socratic discussion. They care about intellectual life--and how it forms you for real life. They are emphatic on the integration of the different disciplines, on the harmony of the whole. I sensed wholeness from St. John's as I had from no other school.

So how did I end up heading west, not east? Why did I forgo the historic school in Annapolis for a tiny, 8-year-old college dropped into the vastness of Wyoming?

Three words: Mountains, horses, and the Catholic Faith.

(To be continued)

The Great Books Calling, Part 2

 

The second installment of a multiple-part series about my journey towards a true liberal arts education--particularly towards my dream school, Wyoming Catholic College. Part 1 can be read here.

After reading Anthony Esolen's book, it seemed I had never had another option. Going to a Great Books college was the next logical step from the quasi-classical education I'd received so far in homeschooling. I realized at last the source of my vague disappointment. I didn't just want to study English, or literature, or creative writing. Those, on their own, could never be enough. I wanted to learn about truth--in everything. And the Great Books method was the only one which addressed education as something more than a means to intellectual or material success. Its aim was to form the person. The whole person, body-mind-soul, for his ultimate destiny: knowledge and love of God.

That was what had been silently missing from my horde of college brochures. They talked an awful lot about the "what"--the number of majors, the small class sizes, the statistics of successful alumni, etc., etc., ad nauseum. So much "what" and so little "why". The purpose of higher education was presented as essentially utilitarian--fun on the side, perhaps, but really a tool for clambering higher up that ladder of highly-praised, poorly-defined, and sickeningly earthly success. So that the pamphlet I got from Harvard read just as hollow to me as the one from Joliet Junior College.

But the Great Books approach was different. While its method does prepare a person well for a career--perhaps better, even, than the so-called vocational or trade school approach--that is not the primary point. The point is not material welfare. It is not even intellectual satisfaction. The point of education is the right ordering of the soul. Not that every class must be a theology class, but every subject ought to be taught integrated with eternal truth. To me this meant something. It meant everything. The more I read about it, the more it filled me with a longing, desperate joy. I would have nothing else.

This resolve fell upon me so deeply that for several days I was afraid to tell my parents about it--for fear they'd caution me against making a college decision so quickly. My fear was groundless, but quite seriously nothing else appealed to me. Only a few schools in the country still based their curriculum entirely on the Great Books. Among those, only a few stood out to me: St. John's College in Maryland, St. Thomas Aquinas in California, and Wyoming Catholic College in...well, in Wyoming.

At last I knew what I wanted. I was going to school, not to learn more about literature, but to learn how to be a human being. Sounds a bit silly. We all know how to be human, don't we? Well--that's the question, isn't it? (I sense a Socratic discussion coming on...)

(To be continued)

The Great Books Calling, Part 1

Wind River Peak. I lift up mine eyes to the mountains, from whence shall come my help...

 

In beginning my application to Wyoming Catholic College, I've had the chance to revisit my truly God-guided journey to this school and this community. Here, then, is the first installment of a ramble on the Great Books.

 

The call I've felt towards WCC, ever since I really started exploring it, has been very strong and certain. I began having my first thoughts of college during my junior year of high school. I was pretty sure I wanted to go into higher education, with a vague intention of becoming an English major. I'd been given a gift for creative writing and discovered a love of classic literature. I was already fairly certain of my calling to become a Catholic author. Among the streams of college pamphlets pouring into my mailbox, I was definitely attracted to the liberal arts rather than the trade schools. But amidst it all I experienced a foggy anxiety, a deep disappointment. This is it? I thought. Going to college was supposed to be the first step into my new, independent, fulfilling adult life. Why did I feel, even before I'd touched any application forms, that it wasn't enough?

 

To be sure, I enjoyed learning. I loved coming to new insights in literature and history and theology, felt satisfaction when mastering a new mathematics concept. I knew I could get a good intellectual education just about anywhere, if I applied myself. And wasn't that what college was about--to train your brain in a certain area well enough to earn a degree to secure a successful career? So screamed all the shiny brochures mounding on my bedroom floor. But my soul, and the faith my parents and God had instilled in my heart, ached and cried out. Something was still missing.

 

But even in the darkness of my uncertainty, God drew my steps. In my reading, for school and for enjoyment, and in my personal journaling and insights, I felt Him calling me again and again to understand Him and His Church through beauty. Absolute beauty. Not something static, sickeningly romantic, or overblown, but real, the living ideal, the light and desire of every human heart. Beauty, not off in its own little creative box, enjoyable but unnecessary to our other human occupations, but essential--as in twined in our essence. Harmoniously and gloriously weaving itself into our reason, and spirit, and body. If, as the adage said, beauty was in the eye of the beholder--in other words, if it contained no reigning truth--I thought I may as well go out and blind myself.  

 

Finally, in the spring of 2013, I received a clear answer to my wondering. I discovered at a friend's house, on Easter Sunday, a book by Catholic professor and author Anthony Esolen. His book, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, described in detail how our secular Western culture has exchanged its classical and Christian heritage for moral relativism and chaos. To combat this, he advocated--he championed--a classical liberal arts education.

 

And all at once, the missing something inside me solidified and snapped softly into place. A certainty. I had to go to a Great Books school.

 

(To be continued)

The Mystery of Martyrdom: Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral"

They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.

They know and do not know, that action is suffering

And suffering is action.

~T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, Pt 1

 

The Wyoming summer wind ripped across the church steps, flapping books and tearing the words out of our literature professor's mouth, making both lecture and discussion impossible. But it was useless to hold class inside--although it was only ten in the morning, the warmth and stuffiness of the classrooms had made all our heads buzz with sleep. At last in desperation we tramped over to a protected nook of the building. Here we circled up on the concrete in the lee of the wind, and proceeded to dive into passages such as these, from T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral:

 

Neither does the agent suffer

Nor the patient act. But both are fixed

In an eternal action, an eternal patience

To which all must consent that it may be willed

And which all must suffer that they may will it,

That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action

And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still

Be forever still.

 

I had read the play once, before I knew it was on the reading list for Wyoming Catholic College's summer program. Back then the height of language and plot, dramatizing the final weeks of the life of St. Thomas Becket, had affected me deeply. But even on multiple readings, I couldn't get my head around obscure passages like the one above. I grasped the outline of the play but seemed to be missing its essence.

 

To do all what we did in class at WCC--to dive into historical context, draw out major themes, make comparisons between Becket and Christ's Passion, and dwell on the meaning of martyrdom--is impossible in one blog post. Suffice to say I came away with a much fuller understanding of Eliot's purpose in writing the play. The conflict centers, not so much on the fatal disagreement between Thomas Becket and his king, but on Thomas's own inner struggle. As he proclaim in the first act: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

 

For Thomas knows he is going to be killed, to be "martyred". He has defied King Henry's claims of power over the Church. But is he really dying for God's kingdom, or for his own spiritual pride? This is the terrible question: Can a man never escape pride, even when he is trying to serve God? But Thomas sees the way out. As he explains in the middle section of the play, in his Christmas day sermon:

 

A Christian martyr is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of a man's will to become a Saint, as a man by willing and contriving may become a ruler of men. A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.

 

If Thomas submits himself totally to God's plan, he cannot be acting out of pride. That is his salvation and ours. Before Becket's martyrdom, the tone of the play is one of terror and foreboding, mounting to ultimate despair--the despair of the soul trapped in pride. But afterwards, the world of the play, so to speak, is cleansed and re-ordered. For by accepting God's will, Becket became a channel of grace to Canterbury, drawing down God's eternal plan into time. This is the eternal action and pattern so obscurely spoken of--perhaps because it is indeed a mystery. God's love, being this mystery, but also being real, bewilders and even frightens us. As the Chorus pleads near the very end of the play:

 

Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,

Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire;

Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted;

Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God;

Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal,

Less than we fear the love of God.

 

God's love is fearsome. But He requires us to embrace it, as Becket did, because He is our purpose and fulfillment. That is the wonderful mystery of the martyrs.

 

St. Thomas Becket, pray for us!