A secular liberal arts education struggles against itself.
St. Mary’s Church near the campus of Yale University in New Haven. (Credit: Buckley Institute)
Corinne Cowan
Opinions Editor, The Buckley Beacon
I have a vivid memory of a moment on my Yale tour for prospective students several years ago, when my tour guide took us through Sterling Memorial Library. While my father and I gaped at the beauty of the Sterling’s towering windows and stained glass, the tour guide told us about the building’s history. Sterling Memorial Library was designed to look like a cathedral, she said, but now it’s our library. Instead of a confessional booth, we have a circulation desk. Instead of an icon of Jesus, a personification of Wisdom is depicted at the aft of the grand entrance nave.
When I caught my father’s eye, he remarked, “Sounds sacrilegious.” I didn’t think much of that moment at the time, but as I walk through Sterling several years later, I often reflect upon Yale’s once-religious character. After all, Yale was not always a secular institution. Our first charter was for the purpose of educating ministers and laymen, and until 1926, Yale students were required to attend daily chapel and prayer.
Nowadays, Christianity at Yale is confined to the Chaplain’s office, or maybe to a cross carved into a gothic wall here and there. But it would be a mistake to believe that our past religious nature was merely accessory to Yale’s identity as a liberal arts institution.
The liberal arts originated in classical antiquity, and have appeared in various forms throughout the medieval and modern eras. The basic idea, from which Yale draws its inspiration, is that a student of the liberal arts receives a general, well-rounded education, instead of specific skills or knowledge. A liberal arts education typically contained some sort of ethical or humanistic core, and was meant to lead pupils towards the good and true life, not merely a life of a specific career path.
What I want to focus on is the liberal arts’ former emphasis on ethics and on truth. Yale and other liberal arts schools mimic this sort of character formation, but it’s not quite the same as how the liberal arts have historically been taught. There’s a difference between teaching ideas as if they are an option out of a buffet of options to believe in, versus teaching ideas as if they are true. For example, it’s possible to teach a class on moral systems by merely presenting the facts, and it’s possible to teach virtually the same information in a way that communicates an additional judgment of value or of truth.
The latter method most likely seems problematic to us today. To make a positive claim about the value or truth of certain information introduces issues of subjectivity. Who decides what is moral or true? For most of the history of the liberal arts, this kind of subjectivism wasn’t contested. Our understanding of what was good and true was necessarily grounded in the Christian tradition. Put simply, a worldview that includes a transcendent, omnibenevolent, and infinite being is a worldview in which it is a lot easier to ground objective claims about the nature of the world, and the nature of humanity.
This principle extends far beyond claims about what is moral or good. The Western understanding of truth, which undergirds our entire academic framework, depends on the possibility of facts about the world existing regardless of human opinion. The goal of academic research and inquiry is to discover these truths about the world, which is a framework that is common to all academic disciplines. What is the point of scientific research if we’re not attempting to uncover the truth about the world? What reason have historians to investigate our past if they are merely grasping at shadows?
In the most traditional sense, the study of humans and of reality through the liberal arts needs a concept of ultimate reality and truth – a role filled until recently by God. But as Nietzsche declared towards the end of the nineteenth century, God is dead, and we have killed Him. Our spiritual disenchantment has led generations of students to believe that truth is ultimately relative, and that morality isn’t real. This is where the liberal arts are today. I’m not advocating for a full-throttled return to a religious Yale, but let’s consider what secularization has meant for the project of the liberal arts.
The relativism which proceeds from the secularization of the liberal arts degrades their study. As philosopher-academic Allan Bloom argued in his 1987 classic The Closing of the American Mind, relativism diminishes the role of the liberal arts in the pursuit of the good and true life.
Relativism in the liberal arts relegates moral judgements, judgements that are fundamental to humanistic studies, to mere matters of opinions. At Yale, I’ve been in seminars that are organized around a common notion of the truth that a text communicates, and I’ve been in classrooms in which the discussion dissolves into varying passes at interpretation. The former allows us to understand the normative claims that studying literature, philosophy, or history gives us. The latter insists that all interpretations are equal, which undermines the very point of showing up for a class at Yale. And the latter ultimately understands the liberal arts not as a humanizing discipline, but as the robotic collection of fallible belief.
Relativism also leads us to nihilistic tendencies, as Nietzsche described. The belief that everything is relative ultimately leads us to the belief that nothing matters and nothing is real. As a goal, the liberal arts champions the pursuit of truth and knowledge, and there are few beliefs that are as dangerous to that goal as nihilism.
As a form of response, many thinkers have grappled with the crisis of modernity by championing reason as the new god. This is the ethos of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, a cathedral dedicated to reason over “religious superstition.” The history of the West is scarred by attempts to uproot traditional religion and morality with rational foundations.
But epistemic foundations built on reason alone cannot save us from the grips of the abyss. Enlightenment figures who championed rational thinking eventually came to the realization that there are some problems which pure reason alone cannot solve. Kant and Locke, the figureheads of the rational age, all ceded ground in their philosophical debates to some level of uncertainty.
At Yale, a return to theism is practically impossible. Our pluralistic reality guarantees that Yale will remain a secular institution. What we can do, however, is advocate for a return to intellectual standards and to a greater understanding of the humanistic core of the liberal arts. It won’t be perfect, but we can at least attempt to gain some objectivity.