During the time set aside to compose this essay, I confirmed Allan Bloom’s suspicions about my intellect by following the crowd and reading his book. Especially in the middle section it is a much better book than I expected.
The Closing of the American Mind is a meditation on the state of American intellect, over against two landmark and remarkably paired diagnoses of Western history. The one is Nietzsche’s: that the outcome of philosophy, of the West’s multimillennial effort to be reasonable—and indeed that there is no reason to be anything else that we are not already. If history is not to halt in bourgeois self-satisfaction, we will therefore have to tap irrational passion and arbitrary decision precisely to move us to reason. The other is de Tocqueville’s suspicion that the regime founded on reason, the democratic republic, must prove inhospitable to the actual exercise of the reason on which it is founded.
Professor Bloom judges that de Tocqueville’s fears have been fulfilled. The nation built on Enlightenment has not merely become ignorant and unthinking, or even anti-intellectual in Richard Hofstadter’s sense, but is becoming incapable of thought. I have to say I agree, and that such diagnoses do not seem to me prejudiced by sentiiment for good old days. Bloom argues also that Nietzschian profundity, imported into the Lockean nation, has with appalling irony come to provide the justifying ideology of our superficiality. The derivations he traces in this connection have been much controverted among the symposiasts and reviewers, but I cannot turn aside to that discussion.
Now—if de Tocqueville is as right as Bloom thinks, that would seem to be a historical confirmation of Nietzsche's position. Vice versa, if Nietzsche is right, then de Tocqueville's prediction was not a warning but a prophecy. And both of these are, I think, what Bloom in fact believes—which would seem to leave Nietzsche as the only true guide. Yet what may come of acting on Nietzsche's kerygma has already been tested in Europe, and none of us will favor further experiments on those lines. In this interesting situation, Bloom can suggest only a last-ditch defense of the liberal regime, for however long this proves possible. Huddling around the embers is his image.
The place of defense or huddling is to be, despite everything, the "university," a term that he so uses as to encompass many institutions not officially so denominated; indeed it is first of all the colleges of liberal arts, in or out of "universities," that he has in mind. The university must again become the place where reason can be advocated against the hostility of reason's regime. It must be the haven, for the sake of democracy, of dissatisfaction with democracy, the place where all those questions are asked that democratic folk need to hear but that are natural only to aristocratic and monarchic regimes. It must administer Nietzsche straight, to awake us from the sleep induced by Nietzsche diluted.
It may reasonably (!) be doubted that academia can perform the Münchhausen trick that Bloom proposes for it. How exactly are we to persuade a society as hostile to reason as Bloom says ours is to license a privileged class whose sole function is to be rational? And how are the deep thinkers to be studied seriously when it is known that they are being used as calculated medicines for the health of the regime they abominate?
It is the insight of the whole line from Rousseau to Nietzsche that reason undoes itself because it undoes God, without whom reason—as every other interesting virtue—is groundless. And Bloom hammers this point home. But with respect to it he has no proposal. The university is to be democracy's temple, but it is to house no God.
The Closing of the American Mind ends very much as did another recently influential book, Alasdair MacIntyre's
After Virtue. MacIntyre ended by saying that what our civilization must have to survive is something like the Benedictine order. Many who read this wondered how there could be Benedictines without St. Benedict, or a saint without God. MacIntyre appears to have read his own book and wondered the same things, whereupon he reconverted to the faith.
II
In one part of Bloom's book the scholarship is demonstrably slipshod: his account of the university's origin. Most certainly, even the "modern" university was not created from nothing by the decision of Enlighteners to extend Aristotle's educational program to the many, in the unlikely case that there ever was such a decision. Bloom seems to have stopped reading with Aristotle, not to have started again until Machiavelli, and to have hypothesized what happened between from thin air.
The Enlightenment may have conceived the university as the place of "reason." But in its medieval origins and in some strands of its self-understanding to this day, the university is not a
universitas rationis, a world of
reason, but a world of
letters, a
universitas litterarum, the gathering into one place and one discourse of all those arts whose substance is
books and
argument. In the university's founding period, instruction was thus accomplished by the minute examination of texts and by the institution of debates; and anyone who has examined the record of one of those debates or read a medieval commentary on Aristotle will not suppose that this method was in any way inferior to the methods inaugurated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as to openness, dedication to logic, or pedagogical impact. The university may properly and faithfully be conceived, alternatively to liberalism's conception, as the place of discourse, of the
word.
Reason as the Enlightenment understood it is a sheer capacity and as such an individual endowment. The Enlightenment proposed to establish a regime by harnessing the elemental passions to reason, by turning them into
rights; also passions and rights are private possessions. Thus if reason and rights are our foundation, we are bound to individualism; then our choice is indeed between clinging to Locke and capitulating to Nietzsche.
And in that case, bowdlerized Nietzsche will surely win in the end, nor is it easy to see how a university founded on reason and rights can do anything but exacerbate the problem. Foundationally, however, the university was not the place of reason but the place of discourse; and the
word is no one's private endowment. It is the ontological status of community and of the word in which community is constituted that was forgotten by the Enlightenment—and has not been remembered by Professor Bloom.
For some generations, topics such as this have been discussed on the assumption that we know what an "intellectual" is—or "the liberal arts" or "the university" or whatever—and have only to consider how Christians can be called to this field. I have begun with Bloom in order to summon witness for the bankruptcy of this assumption. I doubt that the traditional way of putting the question was ever appropriate; it is anyway now antique. If there ever was a separately definable "intellectual" office or community or fate out there, to which believers might be called, there is none now. If we have a calling, it is not to join a predefined intellectual enterprise but to reinvent one. And there is nothing preposterous about the notion, since we invented the West's intellectual enterprise in the first place. For of course, that the
word has ontological status—so that the arts of the word might together make a universe—is an insight from the Bible.
III
Mediterranean antiquity's specific ideal of knowledge would never by itself have made the university. The organ of truth, in the classic tradition, is the "mind's eye"; knowledge is
theoria,
seeing. Every self-interpretation of the knowing subject takes one of the senses as its metaphor; Western antiquity's metaphor was sight. And the thing about sight is, it objectifies the other.
It is a point I have found illuminating in many contexts: we have flaps on our eyes and none on our ears, and we can easily aim our eyes and only with great difficulty aim our ears. Which is to say: I control what I see but can always be surprised by what I hear. It is with the eye that I fix the other in space and time, that I nail down what you/it are/is, so as to be able to get back to you/it. It is, oppositely, by the ear that you grab me, also when I'm trying to overlook (!) you. An ideal of knowledge that takes sight for its metaphor makes the other the object of knowledge but does not solicit reciprocity, does not offer the knowing subject to be the object of the other.
That is, to knowledge for which sight is the metaphor, the response or solicitation of the other is not
constitutive. In the final versions of Greek reflection, which became the theology of all late antiquity's cults, this ideal of knowledge is paradigmatically and foundationally instantiated in Aristotle's Unmoved Mover under various aliases. This God is a sheer act of vision, wholly agent and not at all sufferer, receiving and expecting nothing from what is seen—if, indeed, it is acknowledged that anything other than itself comes within its purview. The philosopher king, reentering the cave for the good of its inhabitants, asks them no question.
There was originally a countervailing factor: the actual
practice of philosophy. Whether Parmenides or Heraclitus indulged in other discourse than description of what they had seen we do not know, but for the sophists and Socrates and Plato, who were not coming
from vision but trying to be on their [way]
to it, conversation was the daily work. It was the Socratic conviction that the way to vision is by question and answer, and that real questions have to be actually asked, which rescued Greek
theoria from the inhumanity that was always its temptation.
Thus it was philosophy as
practice in which the gospel, when it appeared on the scene of antiquity, found both a rival and an ally. The gospel is a message, and its reflection therefore an argument; the first Christian theologians were simply journeymen philosophers who had found new matter. The difference between Christian theology and pagan antiquity's theology is that the latter, for all that it consists in talk,
leads to silence, is the handmaiden of cognition as pure seeing, while Christianity's talk leads precisely to more talk, to the purification and enlivening of a message. And also the gospel's ideal of knowledge is instantiated, in the God who
is His own word.
Pagan antiquity had many and very talkative circles of seekers. But what they sought was silence. A "university," per contra, is a
universitas litterarum, an independent world founded on and for discourse, a world in which discourse is its own justification, which some enter never to leave, and which initiates also those who are to leave into precisely the talkative callings. The university was founded by believers, to have a place in which to exegete their Book and argue interpretations of their message. Just so, no book and no argument could be foreign to it. In particular, the practice of ancient philosophy and the books that documented it were simply adopted, now in service of speech rather than of silence.
When the Enlightenment revolted against theology in the name of reason, it thus revolted also against philosophy as anciently practiced, since it was theology by which that practice was now carried on. Thus in the Enlightenment's understanding and practice of "reason," the countervailing factor is gone. Reason becomes what even Aristotle did not make it: sheerly the individual's ability to see truth. And for that, the university is, when push comes to shove, not really needed at all. It is that last point that Professor Bloom's book—to make one last reference to it—finally lays before us, willy-nilly.
IV
Christians' calling to intellect is the calling to nurture the word, to tend books and foster argument. This was always the case, but in our present circumstances we must be unwontedly clear about it. We serve a talkative God, who does not even seem to be able to do without a library. In His service, we will be concerned for talk and libraries. And some of us will have the privilege of spending a lot of time at that concern; if anyone wishes to call these "Christian intellectuals," there is no great reason to inderdict [sic] the label.
The model and origin of our care of books is the church's care of that library called the Bible. I understand that this is backward to the usual conceptions, but the usual conceptions, if they were ever appropriate, are anyhow now mere anachronisms. So I will reverse the usual conception, and inquire first what the church does with the Bible and second what the university might therefore do with its books.
The church, first, reads the Bible
liturgically. The writings that are canon for the church and that together we call the Bible are recited in the gathered community, to shape its imagination, suggest its argumentative warrants, cast its moral vision. The university, the community of Western intellect, also has a canon of writings. It is not quite so clearly marked as the canon of Scripture—though the contrast must not be overplayed, since also the canon of Scripture is intrinsically open—but it will serve; at least its center is indicable. In a living university, the sheer shared
experience—never mind
interpretation or
understanding!—of such as Plato and Augustine and Newton would be the foundation of everything else. That experience is now indeed embers, but the embers need blowers, not huddlers. Christians are the only ones around who have clear and arguable and imperative reason to blow on them.
Second, the church
researches the Bible, it labors on its book with the kind of reading that is misleadingly called "historical-critical method" as if with old texts there were some other. We persistently ask, What did the author
say? What really
happened? These are life-and-death questions for the believer. The first need not commit the famous "intentional fallacy"; we cannot ask what the author intended to say, but we must ask what she/he in fact got—past tense!—said. Neither is the second question hopeless of answer, nor does it lead us necessarily into historical relativism, though there is no opportunity here to retrace theology's long and in my judgement hopeful struggle with "hermeneutics."
Christianity did not invent such reading, but only for Christianity does salvation ride on it. Thus the techniques that we all assume and that created the nineteenth-century German university, still more or less our model, were all invented to deal with the Bible—if in many cases only to get clear of it. In a living university, a certain historicism would always infuse the various undertakings; not even natural science would regard its own history and great texts as beside its enterprise. A world that forgot historical-critical reading would be one in which the church could not live; our calling here is imperative.
Finally, the church looks to the Bible for
paradigms of its reflection, of "theology." The church is to preach the gospel and all its thinking is about what to say to be doing that. But "the gospel" is simply a label for what the apostles said. So while the apostles' theology, that is, the thinking they did to form their message, may not have been and for the most part was not very
good theology, we can at least be sure it
was theology. The theological authority of Scripture is fundamentally methodological: we look to it to see what the reflective labor was like that we are now to undertake.
When the university has been healthy, it has looked to its books in much the same way. In the high medieval period, reverence for Aristotle did
not mean unwillingness to disagree with him; it meant that he was the master of analysis, to whom those who sought to analyze should be apprenticed. In the eighteenth century, the authority of Newton and Locke did not mean there was no more to be discovered; it meant precisely that if one did as they did one might discover as much as or more than they did. The fundamental collapse of the university in our time is that it does not know what specifically it is to do, and it does not know what it is to do because the triumph of Enlightenment reason deprives the university of its drillmasters, including the Enlighteners. Here, too, Christianity may have a word of quite specific comfort: do not be afraid to look to Western intellect's masters and see what they did.
So much—in this essay—for the Book and books. Discourse does not consist in books, it consists in argument using books. Christians' calling to nurture argument can be very bluntly and so quickly stated. Since the message we have for the world contradicts everything the world could possibly suppose, argument is guaranteed whenever we show up—unless we have forgotten ourselves. It is not Nietzsche who will effectively challenge our current discoursive sloth, or rather, it is Nietzsche precisely in that the challenge he made was a version—an unbelieving and despairing, but nonetheless faithful version—of the Christian challenge. Proclamation of the meaninglessness of the world will not now startle anyone—if it really ever did; the claim that a first-century Palestinian is the meaning of things is another matter.
I do not mean that direct proclamation of the gospel is our calling to the intellect—though a bit more of that could hardly hurt. But those involved in the gospel's general argument with the world will necessarily fall afoul also of whatever are the self-evidences of their special "disciplines." I have arrived at my next and last main matter.
V
The title of this essay is "The Renewing of the Mind." The title is intended in a double sense. In the one sense, it refers to our calling to re-establish the intellectual enterprise, as I have just been discussing that calling. The other sense depends more directly on the passage from Paul's letter to Rome from which my title is a citation. "Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your minds" (Rom. 12:2). The passage's location is significant: Romans 12:1-3 is Paul's capsule description of Christian existence, a thesis set at the beginning of the whole parenetic section of his most reflective writing.
The word translated "mind" is that same big word of antique reflection, "nous." A survey of its appearances in Paul's writings quickly makes his use apparent. Paul's "nous" is not
theoria; rather, it is much the same as Kant's "judgment" or Jonathan Edwards' "sense of the heart." "Nous" is moral choice that is not mere—that is, arbitrary—choice but is precisely as moral choice the discernment of what is really out there. To use Edwards' favorite example, borrowed by him from a long tradition: if I "like" honey, that is my choice, and yet my taste for honey registers reality, for honey does in fact taste good.
It is characteristic of the modern West to suppose that knowledge of facts and choice of goods are two separate acts, so that knowledge is morally irrelevant and choice of the good arbitrary; when I first began to teach philosophy, I regarded this as a dogma beyond challenge. But of course the whole previous tradition supposed that the two must be somehow united, that somewhere in the structure of personhood there must be a grasp on reality that is inseparably knowledge of fact and choice of good, that is precisely taste for what is good. Such was Paul's "nous."
But if there is such a thing as judgment, it must guide all intellectual activity, since it is their unity. Vice versa, the dogma that there cannot be any such thing as judgment is the foundation of dogma of the intellectual tradition that is dying around us. Christians' calling to renew argument is guaranteed success if only we are faithful. For we must invariably dissent from the founding dogma of the—barely—existing intellectual world.
Paul's summary of the Christian life is that it consists in the "renewing" (anakainosis) of judgment. Paul does not ask how judgment is possible in the first place, not being much of a philosopher. But what he thinks does appear. The transformed judgment has as its object "to agathon kai euareston kai teleion" [the good, the well-pleasing, and the perfect] which are epexegetical upon "the will of God." And indeed and of course the reality of God is the necessary condition of an act of. mind that as choice of the good is also knowledge of the fact. That I choose "such-and-such is good" is in itself a fact only about me; that the Creator chooses so is a fact about the facts. Within an intellectual enterprise that either denies God or relegates Him to the fringes, judgment is indeed not possible.
Christians' calling to renew judgment—and just so, under the circumstances, to renew argument—will require us to speak of God, right out loud. In our time we are called to renew the "apologetic" enterprise, not so much to enable converts as to tell why judgment is after all possible, since there is God.
Continuing with exegesis of Paul: renewal of mind takes place as a transformation, of which only the
terminus a quo [end from which] is explicitly named in our text. We are to wean our judgment, our taste, from conformity to "this world" (tw aioni toutw). Paul does not need to name the
terminus ad quem [end to which]; it is the Kingdom of God, the "world to come." A "world," an
aion, is a temporal whole, not so much one big thing as one big history—one narrative, to use the currently fashionable word. Each temporal whole has a
schema, a pattern of how things go in it, the lines of which our judgment can bend to, or not. Since an
aion is a
temporal whole, its schema is determined by what it seeks. In Paul's understanding, what this
aion seeks is hate, the perfected encapsulation of each thing in what it already is. But there is to be a miracle; what will in fact come of this age is a new one. And what that age will seek is love, the perfected opening of each thing to the future the other is for it.
We do not live in the coming age. But we can already bend our judgment to its temporal contours, since in the resurrection we see what the scheme of that age will be. At least Paul says we can, and that this bending is the whole substance of Christian life. Besides supposing that judgment is possible and that it is the mind's controlling unity, Christians suppose that we rightly judge when we judge each item and sector of reality by how it opens to the love that is to come of it.
Only when—believers will say—we consider how, for example, the polity will finally undergo revolution into mutuality can we claim to know it. Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out the peculiarity that the social sciences have found no "laws" in the proper sense at all, yet are not discredited thereby. He suggests there can be only one explanation: the predictions made by these disciplines are not of that sort at all, they are not of the sort that can be falsified by one contrary event. Of what sort are they then? Readers of the Bible can hardly refrain from suggesting: perhaps they are prophecies, to be verified or falsified conclusively only by the character of the Kingdom when it comes. A renewal of argument where such opinions turn up would seem assured.
For another and historical example, Jonathan Edwards, a far more careful reader of Newton than all his contemporary vulgar Enlighteners put together, proposed that the physical world is the intersubjectivity of universal personal communion between God and created persons and between the latter, that the physical world is what God thinks in order to think a community that can include others than himself. Edwards argued that such an interpretation sticks closer to the actual features of Newtonian science than does interpretation by the metaphor of the machine, which was dominant around him. Moreover, if that is so, then what it is to be physical is malleable to transformations of relations in the universal community. The saints, Edwards once speculated, "will be able to see from one side of the universe to the other" since they will not see "by such slow rays of light that are several years travelling..." (Miscellanies, 926).
Perhaps such thoughts may not seem quite so ridiculous as they once did; the boundary between science and its philosophical self-interpretation is not nearly so plainly marked as formerly. Why
should such speculation be barred from physics classrooms? And how do we know that the movement of science itself must be immune to them?
Or again, whatever
are the "humanities?" Somehow, they are the disciplines that study humanity, yet are not social sciences. But what can that distinction mean? In practice, the humanities seem to comprise the several activities of interpretation of the arts, plus about half of what historians do. Perhaps this is not so unsensible a grouping, and perhaps those made contrary by the gospel may have something to say to it.
Western reflection has traditionally—prior to romanticism, which opens other questions—traced the fissure in human life as running between the true and the good, what is and what ought to be, and has looked to the beautiful as the possible reconciliation. The arts are thus interpreted as judgment in action—we may think of Kant's interpretation of the beautiful as serendipitous good or of Aquinas' interpretation of it as truth's attraction. If now the good is eschatological, if the good is the
aion to come, the arts are the presence of the future, the enacted "groaning" and "longing" of creation for what it is not but will be. Christian interpreters might tell of the arts in such terms; and such telling and the telling of history would not go ill together. On such a basis, there might even be reason to practice and teach the humanities.
VI
I could continue with examples—or anyway, someone could. But instead one final point must be made. Christians' calling to the intellect, whether because of its nature or because of our present situation, is not an individual calling. It is
communities that can be dedicated to discourse and to the renovation of judgment. And a dedicated community is an institutionalized one: it is institutions like universities and colleges that might undertake to reinvent the West's intellectual enterprise.
It is the enterprise as such that needs to be reinvented, the total discourse of the university that we are called to renew. Readers will divine that I conclude with the traditional insistence on what is usually and disastrously named "interdisciplinary" discourse, and with the not quite so traditional insistence on its institutionalization. But perhaps there is one difference between my insistence and that which we have so often heard, which may even make mine a bit more plausible.
The failure of good resolutions to get the disciplines together is easily explained: for the most part, they are given nothing to do together except to be together, or they are given some momentous "topic" artificially invented for the purpose. But Christians are now called to nothing less than the reinstitution of that common discourse within which and only within which our several "disciplines" can exist at all—at least, as human undertakings. We have decidedly urgent "interdisciplinary topics": restoration of the liturgical, scholarly, and paradigmatic experience of the books by which the university lives, and the institution of a university-saving argument between the prejudices of modernity and the truth of the gospel.
*Originally published in The Cresset VI, no. 4 (February 1988): 10-16. Reprinted in Jenson, Essays in Theology of Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1995), 163-174. Available for purchase from Eighth Day Books.
