Reverand Brian McGreevy continues his series, Not as Unwise but as Wise: Reflections from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength on Living Christianly in a Post-Christian World. This is available as a podcast on iTunes.
Not as Unwise but as Wise: Reflections from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength on Living Christianly in a Post-Christian World
Week 2: Education and its fundamental importance for how we view the world
–Liberal Arts: Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy), seeking to inculcate Virtue. In the Middle Ages, with the advent of universities, Theology (queen of sciences) was the framework for the liberal arts, while philosophy, history, and classical languages and literature (known as the humanities) were added to the traditional liberal arts
–St. Augustine: wrote that part of the answer to the despair of skepticism is found in the Christian conviction that Truth is attainable and that knowledge and wisdom are possible, because all Truth derives from God in His creation and His Law, perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. In City of God,Augustine defined virtue as “rightly ordered love” (City of God, XV.23), stating in one work:
“But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.” (On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28
“The foundational distinction between traditional education and modern education is that the ancients believed that education was fundamentally about shaping loves. The liberal arts [are] a central part of a larger and more robust paradigm of classical education that …holistically cultivated the mind, body, will, and affections.” (Jain and Clark)
–Universities and the Liberal Arts Education, and particularly higher education, was part and parcel of the mission of the Church from its earliest days. Universities were unknown in the ancient world and only came into being because the Church started them. What we think of as the great universities like Oxford and Harvard were robustly Christian in their original mission statements.
–Pragmatism was a philosophical movement in the 19th century which hugely impacted the philosophy of education and its purpose, pushing a utilitarian and economic view of education as about jobs and social reform. “The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.”—Benno Schmidt, President of Yale University, 1991
Whatever Happened to Philosophy? Philosophy was considered THE most important part of education, and was invariably a required part of university studies—answering these questions was the real WHY people went to college. However, over the past 50 years the study of philosophy has shrunk, first being subsumed into a required Western Civilization course, then made optional, and then disdained as IMPRACTICAL (won’t help you get a job), politically incorrect, and harmful (Patriarchy of Dead White Men). Up until the early 20th century, if you were a university-educated person, you more than likely would have studied philosophy and would have read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s Republic, and Augustine’s City of God.
Who’s Afraid of Epistemology? (and Metaphysics)—and why you need to know these words: Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which studies the nature and scope of knowledge and justified belief. It considers the relationship between knowledge, truth, belief, reason, evidence, and reliability. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy which studies being, the nature of existence and reality.
So he sent the word to slay/And slew the little childer “Surely it must have been a kind of macabre joke on Lewis’s part to preface a critique of textbooks with these lines? But no: Herod could but kill the body; our teachers (Lewis thinks) are killing our children’s souls, and this is the more grievous sin.”—Lewis scholar Alan Jacobs
