Introduction

I began to research the meaning of the liberal arts in the early 2010’s when teaching a freshman course at Belmont Abbey College entitled “First Year Symposium.” This course introduces students to the idea of the liberal arts, among other topics. I had a good liberal arts education and provided a fair introduction to the liberal arts, but I realized that I could understand it more comprehensively. I also speculated that our students would perform better if they understood what kind of education that they were offered. For this reason, I began to read key texts explaining this tradition and the education it inspires.

This essay outlines an essential goal of the liberal arts tradition and education and illustrates one of its most attractive, though not often considered, features: its ability to cultivate a “long view” in those who participate in it. One of its essential goals is to help successive generations to develop realistically hopeful views of human life, society, and civilization and to cultivate the wisdom and virtue necessary for realizing those views. Let me illustrate the importance of the tradition and its ability to cultivate a long view with three stories. The first is the story of a young man, the second of an elderly gentlemen, and the third of my grandmother.

The story of a would-be spiritual counselor

In the first story, a young man seems interested in spirituality but mistakenly turns spirituality into a business and in doing so sounds perfectly ridiculous.

While on vacation with my family, I happened to meet this strange young fellow in the hotel lobby where breakfast was being served. He stood sipping coffee in the very center of the busy space and seemed to have no intention of sitting down at one of the tables. He looked at everyone preparing their food and especially at the woman responsible for setting out breakfast. I casually observed him but, frankly, paid more attention to my breakfast. After ten minutes or so, and during a moment when everyone else had left the breakfast area, he abruptly introduced himself to me by saying “You know, I’m training to be a spiritual advisor.” Curious about what spirituality he promotes, I asked for his approach.

He responded, “It’s mostly about money.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, hoping that somehow he did not mean what I thought he meant.

He said, “It’s about getting people to pay me,” … my worst fears realized. Perhaps the fellow needed some time to warm up, I thought, so I asked again for his idea of spirituality.

“Well that’s mostly about entertainment,” he responded. I truly could not believe what I was hearing. Couldn’t he even pretend not to turn spirituality into a business? I tried to inject some seriousness into the conversation and asked “How would you handle someone with a real spiritual problem?”

“Well I take care of that as quickly as possible so that we can get back to entertainment,” he responded.

We were clearly not going to discuss the spiritual life, so I asked about his business: “What kind of events and activities have you done to build your business?”

In a rather sheepish tone, he said, “Well, the business is still in the ‘entrepreneurial stage.’” I took this response to mean that he had carried out no real events and activities. I was relieved!

After this encounter, I wondered how this strange young fellow got into this state of mind. I speculated that deep down he yearns for wisdom and a sound spirituality for living it out. Yet as a young man he realizes the need to work and earn his livelihood. Perhaps, then, he is trying to make a business out of his spiritual search. In his better moments, he desires to think about the soul, but he must think primarily about work. That, at least, is the best possible interpretation that I can think of.

I saw this young man struggling to reconcile spirituality and practicality, but doing it foolishly. This struggle is found more deeply and thoughtfully considered in the liberal arts tradition. For example, the Renaissance humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio distinguished "two kinds of liberal ways of life: one which is totally composed of leisure and contemplation, and a second which consists of activity and [public] affairs." Despite the stark contrast expressed in this sentence, the “liberal way of life” for Vergerio consists in both kinds. For example, he writes that the person schooled in great literature, which Vergerio calls "letters," conducts affairs with greater prudence: "Those who apply their mind to the conduct of affairs (regardless of how important) can become more prudent by reading the precepts and examples found in letters." Even so, liberal arts education teaches us how to spend "the times and hours ... when we must leave such occupations alone ... [and when] we can accomplish nothing outside our walls." Those times, he says, are devoted to "books in which everything is either very pleasant to learn or very effective for a good and holy way of life ... [and] in which the deeds of men, unexpected turns of events, unusual natural occurrences, and reflections about all these things ... are contained." The liberally educated have learned how to spend both work and leisure time pursuing goals—contemplative, practical, or both—of real value.

How, then, does the liberal arts tradition approach this struggle to reconcile spirituality and practicality? The liberal arts tradition forms the person interiorly to perform well in important areas of human life. We sometimes classify these areas into “contemplative” and “active” categories, or speak of “work-life balance,” but in reality all the areas interpenetrate. The liberal arts tradition teaches wisdom, promotes spiritual growth and maturity, and exerts great practical influence upon a person’s life. This formation of soul may promote a person’s success in the different areas of human life, including business or the professions. However, participating in the liberal arts tradition because it brings success, especially material success, tempts us to ignore its most foundational questions and valuable lessons.

The story of a retired IMF economist at Starbucks

Let us now take the story of a mature gentleman, no longer concerned about his livelihood, but intensely interested in the spiritual questions that the liberal arts tradition raises. The second story presents an intelligent and successful retired economist who nonetheless preserves in his mind a mistake that bedevils his ability to think reasonably about God’s existence.

Again during the family vacation, I had parked myself at a café to read, and an elderly gentleman at the next table politely asked what I was studying. As our conversation unfolded, I learned that he had served on a team of economists at the World Bank in the 1970’s and had pioneered a microcredit program in Indonesia. His work had improved the lives of thousands of people. With sophisticated technical expertise, he and his colleagues spent years developing and refining a program of small loans to poor workers, helping them rise from poverty.

This gentleman displayed an insight into human behavior as well as economics. He explained that those workers succeeded because they knew better than anyone else what their community needed and how to provide it. They repaid their loans almost without fail not only because they understood the value of the money loaned to them and ran viable businesses but also because they formed a community of people who depended upon each other and who knew each other, and therefore who would know all the whys and wherefores if a business failed, or worse, if a business owner failed to repay the loan.

Then our conversation turned to my work as a professor of theology. Imagine my surprise when this highly intelligent person with a lifetime of experience explained to me that he believed in God—and that was true for him—while others do not believe—and that was true for them. I said, “With all due respect, sir, I do not see how that is possible.” I proposed to him that the answer to the question about God’s existence does not depend on anyone’s beliefs. The reality is either that God exists or not, and no one’s beliefs change that reality. Believers and unbelievers can at least agree on that much.

Reflecting on this conversation, I thought: This man received an undergraduate education. Had no one helped him think through this question in such a way that the contours of the question became understandable to him and a permanent fixture of this thinking?

Perhaps he was simply trying to speak to me in a non-confrontational way. Not a bad thing. The urge to get along and work together is a powerful one, and it allows neighbors to enjoy the good things of the world and their lives together. On a deeper level, perhaps he was uncomfortable with the idea that he must consider those who disagree with him to be mistaken. His well-founded desire to think well of others, however, seemed to conflict with his intense interest in our conversation and his ability to think well about this important question.

The liberal arts tradition raises and explores such fundamental human questions in meaningful ways so that conversations about them may be carried on across generations.

A Lesson from My Grandmother’s Life

The third story explains a lesson I learned from my grandmother. She taught me very little directly, but I learned much from understanding her education and from her contributions to my own education. The lesson is this: A liberal arts education equips the mind with knowledge that the person should still possess late in life and to good effect.

My grandmother was adept with languages and in 1929 spent one of her college years studying at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. There she developed fluency in French and read, among other subjects, philosophy and theology, including Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae. She then returned to Rosary College in Chicago and finally, some years after graduation, to her hometown of Jackson, Tennessee, where no one carried on conversations in French or discussed Thomistic theology. But that is not the point. This knowledge, which she acquired in her 20’s, remained with her into her 80’s, when she could still speak French and recognize virtue. Her education furnished her mind and heart with realities—knowledge, thinking skills, values and virtues—that remained in force and relevant across an adult life spanning from the 1920’s to 2008.

Later in life, she recognized the value of her education, and she attempted to pass on this “furniture of the mind and heart” to me. Then a college student, I did not recognize the value of her education, so she had to tempt me. If I continued to take French courses until I graduated—the deal was—then she would pay for a plane ticket, and I too could travel abroad. Her gambit worked as well as it could have, given the material available at the time.

The liberal arts tradition does not necessarily create a great orator or philosopher, neither of which describes my grandmother. liberal arts education develops habits of careful thought and fluent speech in the various domains of human life. It provides access to the liberal arts tradition, to which a person might return as years pass. Its vivid imagination and sound thinking might guide exceptional action in ordinary life as well as in unique and challenging circumstances.

The Liberal Arts Tradition and Liberal Arts Education

By liberal arts tradition, I mean a tradition of learning developed by the ancient Greeks and subsequently adopted and transformed by a variety of Western cultures, notably Jewish, Christian, Islamic and modern secular cultures. In his introduction to The liberal arts Tradition: A Documentary History, Bruce A. Kimball outlines the six prevailing opinions about the origins and nature of the liberal arts.  The first opinion, which is probably the most widely known, holds that ancient Greek culture developed the liberal arts during the fifth and fourth centuries BC.  A second opinion holds that the Greeks initially learned the liberal arts from the ancient Hebrews and that the ancient Hellenistic-Hebraic-Christian conversation engendered a refined liberal arts tradition. A third opinion holds that Greek civilization drew its learning from the ancient Middle Eastern cultures that colonized the Greeks around 1500 BC and that Western culture later denied these origins precisely in order to assert its superiority over those cultures in the forms of modern racism and colonization.  A fourth opinion holds that Greek culture and learning were refined by Islam, which not only transmitted ancient Greek texts to the West but also gave the West “the best of what [Islam] had learned from classical cultures and what it had added by its own creative genius.” The fifth opinion holds that ancient classical thought and culture was refined by Modernity, either by the 14th-15th century retrieval of classical literature or by the 17th century political philosophy of liberalism. The final view holds that the liberal arts originates in and reflects ancient hierarchical cultures and should be refined by the feminist critique of its hierarchical traces. This brief survey shows that the liberal arts are inseparable from Greek thought and culture, even if one thinks that this tradition originated in some Middle Eastern culture, has been refined afterward by Christianity, Islam, or modern philosophy, or should be refined by feminism.

What should we recognize as the goal of the liberal arts tradition? At its best, the goal of the liberal arts tradition is to help successive generations develop realistically hopeful views of human life, society, and civilization and to promote the wisdom and virtue that favor their achievement.  It develops such views by raising fundamental human questions, proposing a variety of responses, and tracing out the implications for the practicalities of human life. The best of these responses reflect a searching intellectual depth, an imaginative and critical engagement with prior thought, and an eloquent, persuasive expression. These responses are expressed in a variety of forms, notably music, art and especially in writings, known by many names, such as “classic texts” and “great books.” These great works are well-known, not only in the sense that every educated person has heard of them, but also in the sense of having been read, reread, pondered, and discussed across generations by those who choose to participate in this tradition.

One need not have a liberal arts education to participate in this tradition, but without this education and the institutions that provide it, participation would be difficult for many people and the tradition itself could hardly flourish. By liberal arts education, I mean an education that begins by teaching children how to read in their native tongue and to use mathematics. It continues by introducing them to great literature in their native tongue and to mathematical systems. It broadens the students’ knowledge by teaching them ancient and modern languages, especially Greek, Latin, and modern European tongues. More importantly, knowing these languages broadens their ability to explore the liberal arts tradition, whose writings reflect many languages, times, and places. In this way students begin to study history, music, science, art, philosophy and literature of the past. A liberal arts education makes a student literate in the liberal arts tradition. The liberal arts tradition provides a way of exploring the past within the present in order to develop a view of the future.

When people begin to explore the music, science, art, and writings of the liberal arts tradition, they will feel the need to make sense of what they discover and will find some satisfaction in the discipline of philosophical thinking. Plato and Aristotle provide the liberal arts tradition with two strong, perhaps even necessary, anchors for any tradition. First, each discusses an impressively wide range of human questions in equally impressive depth. Their works show us how themes of lasting importance may fit together and the consequences of relating them so. Famously, Aristotle outlines the human virtues and a compelling view of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics. Second, these two philosophers provide a kind of high-water mark for understanding preceding attempts at philosophy and a point of origin for ideas developed later. St. Paul, for example, uses the Greek virtue tradition to explain Christian holiness. We may trace the development of ideas as if in a genealogy and demonstrate how humanity has arrived at its current ways of thinking. When tracing this history we find false philosophical turns that have underwritten terrible evil as well as philosophical insights that offer hope for human flourishing. This exercise cultivates realistically hopeful views of the future.

For example, in an ingenious great books course philosopher Nancy Marcus traces ideas about justice back in time from Martin Luther King through the medieval philosopher Boethius to the ancient philosopher Socrates. With King’s help, she shows students that their views about justice conflict with their acceptance of moral relativism and that they are not really moral relativists after all. Against moral relativism, King shows that society and culture do not always have the last word. King proposes that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and forces students to consider that there must be something objective, such as human nature, rather than merely something subjective, such as individual or majority opinion, that explains why a practice such as racial discrimination is unjust. Marcus then turns to Boethius’ famous book, The Consolation of Philosophy, to ask whether human happiness as well as justice is based on something objective. Finally she and her class encounter Socrates’ argument that a just life is the truly happy life, even at the cost of one’s life. At the end this course of study, the students do not have a sure-fire moral code for resolving every problem, but they no longer think that all ethical judgments are merely subjective. They know to look for some objective principle or idea that makes a particular action good or evil.

The Long View

I have proposed that the liberal arts tradition and education help successive generations to develop realistically hopeful views of human life, society, and civilization and to cultivate the wisdom and virtue necessary for realizing those views. All mature views of these three realities—human life, society, and civilization—are necessarily long. A mature view of human life accounts for its requirements across decades. From the liberal arts tradition, for example, we have Shakespeare’s famous poem “All the World’s a Stage.” This poem summarizes human life as “seven ages” from infancy to death, each with its own aspirations and vulnerabilities. A mature view of a society takes stock of what is worth preserving in it, what is not, how to promote the first and not the latter. For example, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein wrestles with the value of science and its unintended consequences during the Industrial Revolution. A mature view of civilization seeks the principles and practices that preserve human societies in humane ways. In sixth century, for example, St. Benedict recognized and abandoned decadent currents within ancient Roman culture, strenuously pursued his own spiritual development, became recognized as a great spiritual master, and founded monastic communities to help others along the path of spiritual growth. His attempt to preserve what he learned, the Rule of St. Benedict, illustrates guiding principles of community life, for example, of leadership in the role of the abbot, of democratic governance in the practice of counsel, of the rule of law in the Rule itself, of civil corrections in the discipline of faults, and of property management in the role of the cellarer. With texts such as these, the liberal arts tradition promotes the long view necessary for developing a good life, society and civilization.

I mean “long view” in several senses: first, the “long view” in the usual sense of seeking future benefit through present action, even foregoing short term gain. In a wealthy capitalist culture, efforts to accumulate and maintain wealth can provide conspicuous examples of this sense of the long view. People generate wealth through the short-term activity of work but accumulate wealth by saving some revenue or income rather than spending all. They maintain wealth by spending investment income rather than capital. These efforts are conspicuous because so many in our society seek to accumulate and maintain wealth. But more importantly, they are conspicuous when pursued with a hopeful, realistic long term goal in view. In other words, virtuous management of property surely involves the view that the property of a family, a business or a religious or civic institution should still be present in decades, even centuries to sustain and promote the flourishing of that family, business, or institution.

Benedictine monasteries can provide a good example of “long view” institutions. Belmont Abbey, which sponsors my own institution, Belmont Abbey College, developed land and in 2005 leased, rather than sold it to Wal-Mart, which then built on the site. The lease agreement required that Wal-Mart’s architectural design include a few Gothic architectural features similar to those of the college and monastery. When I asked the Abbot why they insisted that Wal-Mart include these features, he responded “because we intend to be here longer than Wal-Mart.” Founded over a century ago, the monastery took the long view and acted on goals to be realized a century into the future.

Clearly the liberal arts tradition focuses on topics of greater spiritual importance than wealth and property. But the tradition considers them because they provide a necessary support for the pursuit of spiritual and social goods and because they sometimes provide clarifying analogies to the nature of spiritual and social goods. Consider the investment a person makes when allowing a few principles to guide important decisions through the decades of adolescent and adult life.

This idea brings us to a second sense of the long view. A view is “long” when it rests on abiding principles of a good life, society, and civilization. If there are such “abiding” principles—or fundamental ideas—they will influence future ages as they do one’s own. They enable us, in a limited way, to see into the future. Such principles are found in the Greek and Christian virtue traditions, the Ten Commandments, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the constitutions of states, great literature, and the natural moral law. Great texts of the Western Tradition raise and explore them in dialogues and stories so that we might work them over in our minds in the context of our own times. These principles appear to us because human matters demand them. People thrive by following them and return to them in times of crisis. They are principles that do not lose their force when a society neglects them and they disappear from view. We can read about the ideas, events, and figures of the past, discern the influence of these principles, feel their force today, know that they will exert influence in future generations and hope that future generations will recognize their force. Those principles provide starting points for considering solutions of long-term value as well as immediate practical effect.

The liberal arts tradition also cultivates the long view because it raises questions that come up in each generation and offers deeply considered responses. Take, for example, the poet William Blake’s beautiful query about the causes of suffering and death, about the origins and nature of things, and about how experience shapes our perception of them:

Blake presents us with the mind in a state of wonder about existence. Was it an immortal hand or eye who created? Was it distant deeps or skies that changed? Both? If by a Creator was it an act of honor or of hubris to create? If there is no Creator, only nature, then is nature a seeming beauty that stalks you to the death? Or is that beauty real despite, or even because of its link with suffering? How does an innocent mind perceive all these realities, and what should mature human experience say about them?

Within the liberal arts tradition we find a variety of responses to the kinds of questions this poem suggests. Psalm 8 finds the origin of things in God and wonders at the splendor yet insignificance of humanity before God:

Here is a different response from the naturalist poet Thomas Hardy. He hopes that, despite its ravages, nature itself holds some reason why humans might rejoice. He pictures a bird singing in the dead of winter:

These three poems attract attention because they guide our minds through a reflection on perennial questions in beautiful language. They are part of a conversation across generations, which promotes a long view. Moreover, the person develops views about the tradition’s responses to these questions over a long period of returning to them over and over again. The exercise is never purely theoretical, but exerts practical influence on one’s conduct of life, in private and in public. A person’s conduct of life tests and refines one’s “long view,” especially the principles by which one lives one’s life and the way in which one directs one’s time and property.

Conclusion

These few examples show that the liberal arts tradition promotes spiritual maturity by drawing our attention to the profound questions running through our ordinary activities. Engaging the tradition begins, however, in the most mundane of activities: learning reading and writing. Yet with these two abilities we may grasp ideas and principles adequate to guide decades of career and family life and to explore the tradition’s responses to ongoing human questions. It is an approach that favors worldly success, but does not guarantee it. Either way, it cultivates and preserves a long view of life, society, and civilization.

One characteristic of a liberal way of life is the presence of an ongoing life-long project. The person has spent considerable time understanding the needs and possibilities of their moment in history and conceiving the beginnings of a plan to address them. A life-long project brings about a new reality that would not and could not exist but for the long view of its protagonist. This long view would be informed by knowledge gained in adolescence and young adulthood and developed through old age. It would certainly include principles for living a good life, contributing to society, and recognizing the good qualities of a civilization. Building a life-long project requires time and long-standing relationships, parenthood being one of the most common and powerful examples. With the birth of their first child, spouses have the possibility of cultivating a character in a new person. Someone with a “long view” would establish the kind of relationships needed to share this life project, not only to hand it on but also because of a goodness about it that needs to be shared.

The long view necessary for a life-long project, however, is not long enough. The long view needs to look beyond any project and into the fundamental human questions and responses that the liberal arts tradition explores. These questions and possibilities outlast any particular project, regardless of its longevity.

A version of this essay is published in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly v 39 n 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2016)