Again, in connection with Seneca's Letter 88, this was a noble, but horribly failed, attempt at proposing a Mission Statement for a small Catholic college on the integration of Liberal Learning and Christian values.
This was written in late 2015, and later went through so many committees that what ended up being released by the administration was no longer recognizable.
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The Role of the Liberal Arts: A Brief Elaboration
Our University defines itself as a Catholic, Benedictine and Liberal Arts institution. As the term “liberal arts” is often vaguely defined, the following is an attempt to briefly but clearly articulate this critical aspect of our mission and identity. While many Catholic colleges struggle with this problem of identity, we have a special opportunity to articulate how we can both be firmly grounded in the Tradition, and engage with modern society, to be in the world but not of the world.
Far from being merely a sweeping survey of knowledge or a guided tour of the humanities, a liberal arts education is defined not merely by its breadth, but by its depth; it is not a set of subjects to be learned, but rather a method of learning itself. Drawing upon over two millennia of acquired wisdom, the liberal arts ask the student to take up the challenge of becoming a free person. Such a freedom is not just social, political, or economic, but fundamentally intellectual, moral, and spiritual. In the simplest of terms, the liberal arts demand that we learn to think for ourselves, to be the active agents of our understanding, not simply passive recipients. It is not a freedom from things, of the self-absorbed relativist variety, but a freedom in things, a willing openness to knowing ourselves, our world, and our Creator.
Only when we acquire the habit of reasoning with clarity, logical order, and rigor can we begin this task. As such, the liberal arts as a method offers the tools necessary for us to take responsibility for our own thoughts, words, and deeds, and by doing so brings us closer to a genuine apprehension of the true, the good, and the beautiful.
At the heart of such an endeavor lies a view of the human person sadly out of fashion in our secular, consumer society. Instead of labeling men and women only as producers, homo faber, the liberal arts also define men and women by their very nature as beings of intellect and will, homo sapiens. The servile arts, the artes mechanicae, are good and useful technical skills, but are on their own without meaning and purpose if not guided by the liberal arts, the artes liberales, which allow reason to rule, order, and direct our actions with meaning and purpose.
If the human person is indeed a rational animal, we must grasp that our end and purpose is to know the truth and love the good. This goal is not some means to greater efficiency, but is itself the highest and most dignified: as Socrates said, “wealth does not make virtue, but virtue makes wealth, and all other things good for man.” Far from being an exercise in abstract theory, the goal of the liberal model strikes to the very root of our nature; we are only happy when we live in the light of truth and love. All other things are secondary to and derived from this primary end.
While a liberal arts model can take on a variety of specific forms, depending upon time and circumstance, we are well advised to keep the basic framework of the trivium and quadrivium in mind. They are not “subjects” in the contemporary sense, or compartmentalized topics to be covered by predetermined outcomes, but rather integrated methods of learning, which proceed in an orderly manner. In the simplest of terms, the trivium teaches us how to speak, think, and write with truth and beauty, while the quadrivium inspires us to examine any and all subjects by describing and explaining their structure and harmony.
Education in the trivium, from the ancient world to the present day, asks the student to proceed to master letters, i.e. to become literate, by degrees: first by mastering grammar, then by applying one’s mind to the study of logic, then by combining these studies into the art of rhetoric. These “ways” of free-thinking into intellectual liberty progress from language itself to thought itself, and then (and only then) to argument, since argument combines structures of language with structures of thought in an unassuming, unaffected, and hence compelling manner.
Intersecting with the student’s immersion in the arts of the trivium should be the crossroads of the sciences. Viewed through the lens of liberal education, however, not just any sciences can take the place of the quadrivium, the mastery of which requires, once again by degrees, the study of number per se (arithmetic), number spatially conceived (geometry), number temporally grasped (music, with an emphasis on interval, balance, proportion, and harmony), and all of the above combined into a single, unified whole, traditionally represented in the subject of astronomy, in which number is instantiated in itself as well as in time and in space (thereby combining the “virtues” of arithmetic, music, and geometry, respectively).
These seven ways of learning, trivium and quadrivium, are not an education in different kinds of knowledge; rather, they are a course of study in ways of coming to know. The liberal arts are a holistic integration, suited to the object which they claim to scrutinize—reality itself. Our use of these arts should never be limited to one or another class or discipline, but must be employed across all fields, whether in the common core or in the major course of study.
We are also well advised to stick as closely as possible to a lively and direct dialogue with primary sources, the heart and soul of a “Great Books” content. By engaging with the authors themselves, students learn to think, not merely parrot the canned procedures of textbooks or rote assignments. The Canon of our culture’s literature, art, science, philosophy, or theology is not a closed system, but an openness to truth in all its forms, experienced within the social, cultural, and historical conditions of the original writers. The true, the good, and the beautiful are all the most vivid when seen in the breadth and depth of their origins.
If we are to avoid the pitfalls of a mechanistic and compartmentalized education, it is furthermore crucial that we rightly understand the relationship of teacher and student in such a model. The teacher does not merely provide students with data to be processed, but joins in a dialogue with each student ordered toward a contact with reality, and informed by trust and friendship. Students themselves become the primary source of their own understanding, while the teacher becomes the occasion or opportunity for such growth to take place. Such a relationship is sadly reversed in many contemporary curricula.
Such a task seems naïve at a time when the overwhelming trend in education is to create obedient and efficient workers, ordered toward worldly achievement and success. After all, we are asked to define ourselves by our careers, our social status, our productivity. Yet the weight of this assumption is itself the very reason the liberal arts are needed all the more in our times. The modern student, as Sayers observed, often “remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it.” It becomes even more critical that we reaffirm the dignity of the whole person, body and soul, as a thinking and free being. Nor can we settle for the lip service of acknowledging the liberal arts in word but not in deed. If our model of human nature is indeed correct, the liberal arts core cannot be a mere set of hoops to jump through in order to acquire a professional degree, but quite the reverse, our professional degrees must always be ordered toward the service of the human person.
Last but not least, our commitment to liberal learning at our college must be understood within the ultimate context of our Catholic and Benedictine identity. Though the liberal arts have their origins in the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans, their complementary relationship with the Catholic life of faith becomes readily apparent. Athens, it turns out, does indeed have much to do with Jerusalem. The tools of natural reason become both welcome and necessary companions in our encounter with supernatural faith. In this way, our love of learning joins with the desire for God, Who is Himself the fullness of all that is true, good, and beautiful. With St. Anselm, we therefore embrace the ideal of “faith seeking understanding.”
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