Liberal Education Imperiled: Toward a Resurrection of Reason and Revelation in Higher Education

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Volume 41 Issue 2Volume 41 Issue 3

Fall 2014

Double Issue

Spring 2015

Sophie Bourgault The Unbridled Tongue: Plato, Parrhesia, and Philosophy

Richard Burrow Fulfillment in As You Like It

Alexandru Racu Strauss’s Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor

Book Reviews:Steven H. Frankel Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Rationalism: Another Reason,

Another Enlightenment by Corine Pelluchon

Michael Harding Political Philosophy Cross-Examined: Perennial Challenges to the Philosophic Life by Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax

Will Morrisey Locke, Science, and Politics by Steven Forde

Jonathan Culp Happy City, Happy Citizens? The Common Good and the Private Good in Plato’s Republic

Aryeh Tepper The Problematic Power of Musical Instruments in the Bible

Julien Carriere & Ancients and Moderns under the Empire of Circe: Steven Berg Machiavelli’s The Ass, Translation and Commentary

Erik S. Root Liberal Education Imperiled: Toward a Resurrection of Reason and Revelation in Higher Education

Book Reviews:Fred Baumann Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn, translated and edited by Martin D. Yaffe

Gregory A. McBrayer On the God of the Christians (and on one or two others) by Rémi Brague

Rafael Major Shakespeare’s Political Wisdom by Timothy W. Burns

Note to Readers

Editor-in-Chief Hilail Gildin, Dept. of Philosophy, Queens College

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Liberal Education Imperiled: Toward a Resurrection of Reason and Revelation in Higher Education

E r i k S . Ro o t

West Liberty University

[email protected]

No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy, and art

have been the main guiding lights of modern faith and culture.

—Winston Churchill

Liberal education is an ideal imperiled. Some say that it is past decline and in ruins.1 That may or may not be true. But what seems certain is that our modern colleges and universities suffer because they lack an understanding of their purpose. If it is true that higher education is beyond repair, we as aca-demics, who still believe in liberal education, are thus left to wander among the ruins. There has been an overabundance of articles and books recogniz-ing the inadequacy of higher education. Anthony T. Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life is another in a long list reflecting on the demise of liberal education.

As Kronman, a professor at Yale, tells his story, he left college at an early age expecting to find the meaning of life in political activism. That experi-ment failed and forced him to reconsider the role of higher education. Higher education should address the most important questions about life, such as how it should be lived and the all-important question of what life is for. Each individual must answer these questions for himself. But we are living in a

1 A recent article along these lines appeared on the website Inside Higher Ed: Victor E. Ferrall, “Can the Liberal Arts Be Saved?,” http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/11/ferrall (accessed Feb-ruary 13, 2008).

3 1 4 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3

time when the question of life’s meaning is most neglected, even though the purpose of college is to help students reflect on living in terms of the Good. This means that a liberal education is not one that is narrow in purpose—that is, for the training of students in order that they might obtain gainful employment—but one that forces students to look beyond mere monetary gain. To put it differently, there is more to life than simply getting a job, win-ning an election, or being practically deft at living in the immediacy that accompanies this life. Higher education, while it may acknowledge and pro-vide vocational training, is much more than that; it is designed for students to consider a “life worth living.”2

In order for this kind of education to flourish, Kronman asserts, col-lege should be intellectually open, thus allowing the exploration of different “horizons.”3 This is essentially the argument Allan Bloom made over twenty years ago in his Closing of the American Mind. This approach admittedly tends to emphasize the mysteriousness of life, but it also will yield much fruit for the individual. The purpose of liberal education must be kept in mind: “all liberal arts education is defined in consciously non-vocational terms. It is not a preparation for this job or that, for one career rather than another. It is a preparation for the ‘job’ of living, which of course is not a job at all.”4 Persuading students of the value of liberal education may be a difficult and serious task, but they are in the perfect setting to consider the good life; they are at leisure and have more nerve to challenge themselves and to question commonly accepted truths.

Students are more likely to challenge themselves by reading great books. These books are great because they facilitate that conversation about what our human existence means. However, Kronman laments that this has all been lost:

Even a half-century ago, the question of life’s meaning had a more central and respected place in higher education than it does today. But the questions of how to spend one’s life, of what to care about and why, the question of which commitments, relations, projects, and pleasures are capable of giving a life purpose and value: regardless of the name it was given, and even if, as was often the case, it was given no name at all, this question was taken more seriously by more of our colleges

2 Anthony T. Kronman, Education’s End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 2–3, 9, 10–11, 35, and 39. Many of Kronman’s criticisms were laid out more extensively in Eva T. H. Brann, Para-doxes of Education in a Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 23–30.3 Kronman, Education’s End, 40.4 Ibid., 41.


and universities in the middle years of the twentieth century than it is today.5

The aim of the great-books program, and the directed-studies program at Yale, is no “anything goes” education. Kronman believes that education should prepare students to be good citizens in a democratic republic. When it comes to the consideration of the best life and how we ought to live it, the author asserts approvingly that students should be exposed to a myriad of texts and immersed in a debate over that question which has gone unsolved for thousands of years: what is the good life? It may seem like this would lead to radical skepticism; if students are offered only possibilities, then they will not have any certainty. What if, in their pursuit of the meaning of life, they discover life has no meaning? Kronman’s answer to this is a revival of secu-lar humanism because, perhaps surprisingly, he contends we are a society plagued with certainty. He fears there is a “rising tide” of religious funda-mentalism in the country: “the revival of secular humanism is needed to help us be doubtful again.”6 We need more uncertainty in our lives because of the institutional success of political correctness. Sowing doubt for doubt’s sake is not his aim. Rather, Kronman wants to sow a disbelief in certainties that are bad. He does not appear to want to cause disbelief in good things, or good ideas. But what exactly does he deem good?

There is much that is profitable in Kronman’s book, but I will limit my discussion to his ideas about religion and higher education. In a chapter dedicated to political correctness, Kronman appears to conclude that the dialogue between reason and revelation is important to Western civilization. He asserts that one of the two has been completely defeated in higher educa-tion and no longer exists, much less is able to be addressed in the classroom. Higher education used to claim the authority to investigate life’s meaning, but that has since been abandoned. The only source that professes the ability to do so in the modern world is the church. While our author claims that church and college were once synonymous—a claim that may be disputed somewhat—higher education is now unwilling to pursue the question of life’s

5 Ibid., 44. This is a disputed question. Some have argued that the twentieth century saw a decline in proper education. This includes Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss, along with traditionalists such as Richard Weaver.6 Ibid., 255; see also 251–54; Ben Wildavsky, “Death of the Humanities,” Commentary, April 2008, 68. Kronman is not speaking of conservatives simply, but all religious fundamentalism, on the left and the right of the political spectrum. His critique is directed against religion per se since all are, he argues, intolerant in some way. It seems that, for Kronman, religious answers should be set aside, or devalued, in the academy so that humanism may operate in freedom.


meaning. However, Kronman asserts that churches are woefully lacking in their ability to address the question of the meaning of life, especially as it applies to higher education. The reason for this is provocative.

Religion cannot, by its very nature, be pluralistic. Secular humanism accepts pluralism and different interpretations of the meaning of life. Religion may be tolerant, but in the end, it must answer any question decisively. The manner in which it arrives at such decisive answers sacrifices the intellect. Kronman contends that the mind must be left behind because the religious believe in the finitude of human thought. While even secular humanists conclude that human reason is finite in its abilities, they do not assert, as the religious do, that there is something beyond reason able to carry us to the truth. Religion is ultimately fundamentalist and intolerant. In the final analysis, it asserts that there is only one answer to the question of life’s mean-ing. Therefore, the most fundamentalist religion, and even the most tolerant, are, in the end, intolerant. In that religious sects reject pluralism and dismiss at some point reason’s ability to know, it follows that religion is incapable of serving the aim of higher education in any open way.7 Is this true? Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical “On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy” is for the most part a positive appraisal of the role of the mind in discovering truth and the meaning of life absent of the authority of the church.8

Kronman laments that religious institutions are now practicing that which higher education has abandoned, arguing that it impedes the quest for life’s meaning when churches are in charge of the investigation. In other words, our existence is left in the hands of clerics who ultimately will not tol-erate differing answers to the question. One inconsistency about Kronman’s position is that he wants it both ways—he wants students not to be relativists, yet his position seems in the end to foster precisely the type of relativism that he finds disturbing in the modern university. He places his hopes in a revival of secular humanism because it is more open to differing views about life’s meaning, but American universities have had a history of religious plural-ism without fundamentalism. Further, he bemoans the fundamentalism of religious denominations in society, yet as such fundamentalism pertains to

7 Kronman, Education’s End, 162, 198–201.8 Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris (1879), http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/docu-ments/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris_en.html (accessed March 14, 2008). Pope Leo not only praises the early church fathers for their acceptance of Greek philosophy, but also lauds Thomas Aqui-nas and his ability to make Aristotle coherent in the church. Still, perhaps it is problematic that he also seems to consider theology the queen, the nondespotic ruler, of philosophy. The Catholic Church has made theology friendly to philosophy, but at what cost to philosophy?


higher education, those influences do not affect most colleges. They are few indeed, and we could conclude they are ineffectual and not much of a threat to the purpose of higher education. By the author’s admission, religion does not have a role inside academe so it is hard to understand how there may be that particular threat emanating from within. We ought not to dismiss the function of religion in higher education, however. It has had an important, and positive, impact in the past.

Kronman notes that there were three stages of higher education: the age of piety, the age of secular humanism, and the modern age, the latter of which begins in the 1960s and consists of the rejection of the importance of the meaning of life as a basis of study. The age of piety was one of dogmatism; the age of secular humanism is one in which dogmas were not taken for granted and there was a more serious study of the great works of Western civilization.9 The age of secular humanism, in which there was a separation of church and education, is clearly the era the author prefers. Before considering the merits of his argument, we should reflect on our past, our ancient faith.

A Brief History of Higher Education

No discussion of higher education would be complete without a look at its history, especially in the context of the United States. Our project here is to outline the development of higher education and determine the proper role, if any, of religion in higher education. Many religious conservatives yearn for a return of the Harvard of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was supposedly a golden age of education.10 The American college was shaped by a Protestant heritage and the university system was built on the founda-tion of Protestant sects. However, Christianity was displaced effortlessly. Institutions like Yale, Princeton, and Harvard abandoned their commitment to Christ to pursue academic excellence.11

9 Kronman, Education’s End, 46–47.10 By conservatives, I am speaking more specifically about evangelical Protestants. These conserva-tives look back on the glory days of higher education in the seventeenth century when colleges such as Harvard adhered to their religious foundations. In reality, these were not the glory years at Harvard. It had horrible beginnings. Its first master acted in ways that can only be called tyrannical, and that included the beating of one of his students. The conditions were so unbearable that many students in 1638–39 deserted the college. The experience actually delayed the development of higher education in America. See Joe W. Kraus, “The Development of a Curriculum in the Early American Colleges,” History of Education Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1961): 64.11 Nathan O. Hatch and Michael S. Hamilton, “Can Evangelicalism Survive Its Success?,” Christian-ity Today, October 5, 1992, 30; George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University (New York:


Most date the beginning of American higher education to 1636, when Harvard opened its doors. At this time the aim of the college was not to help students discover the meaning of life as much as it was to shape, or save, the students’ souls. Piety was most important, as it trained students in the right character, or intellectual and moral habits. Still, the American colleges were somewhat more tolerant than their older and more impressive counterparts in England. If there was instruction in the pagan authors, they were placed in the “proper Christian perspective.”12 At a time when Oxford and Cam-bridge were requiring belief in (or adherence to) the thirty-nine articles of the Book of Common Prayer, Harvard did not apply any religious tests for entrance into the school. It did not even require a promise from its students to enter the ministry. Students knew, however, that they would be instructed in the biblical knowledge of God and Jesus Christ. It was in that sense that the colonial colleges rested on a religious foundation and operated as Christian institutions.13 But Harvard had its share of troubles. The school did not toler-ate dissent from its faculty or administrators. When the president of Harvard questioned whether infant baptism was required, he was forced to resign. Yet Harvard still had its critics.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Harvard was embroiled in a great debate when fundamentalist Puritans, who believed that schooling should not con-tain anything absent from the Bible, attacked the school’s method of teaching, and that meant no teaching about, or from, the pagan philosophers. Salvation was from faith alone, and instruction should be from scripture alone. Charles Chauncy, Harvard’s president, answered this criticism in a commencement address in 1655. He stated that the Bible cited human authors to emphasize certain points because certain truths were accessible to all. The president then asked: “Who can deny that there are found many excellent and divine moral truths in Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Seneca, etc.?”14 Chauncy was not elevating the pagan authors above scripture. He was simply stating that their works contained some truth. Pagan philosophy was not coequal with the revealed

Oxford University Press, 1994), 4 and 31. This argument was made famous by Marsden. 12 Kronman, Education’s End, 48. 13 Bernard J. Kohlbrenner, “Religion and Higher Education: An Historical Perspective,” History of Education Quarterly 1 (1961): 45–46; William C. Ringenberg , The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 25. Of course, colleges were formed out of a strict denominationalism and there was usually clerical control of the boards that conducted oversight of the colleges. The schools required chapel services and teaching from the Bible. Most of these colleges were Protestant in nature. No Catholic school had any success until after the Revolution. See Kohlbrenner, “Religion and Higher Education,” 47–48.14 Quoted in Marsden, Soul of the American University, 43. Italics as in Marsden.


Word. Chauncy’s position was similar to the Calvinist doctrine of common grace, according to which nature, or the natural law if you will, reveals itself to the saved and unsaved equally. It was even similar to the Catholic teaching that God spelled his logos in the world. Yet even that was controversial.

The religious instruction of students who may or may not have been believers was nevertheless important to the identity of early colonial colleges. The original aspiration of Harvard was “to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life (John 17:3), and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.”15 In a 1754 advertisement, Columbia president Samuel Johnson asserted that education was

to teach and engage the children to know God in Jesus Christ and to love and serve him in all sobriety, godliness, and righteousness of life with a perfect heart and willing mind; and to train them up in all virtues, habits, and useful knowledge as may render them credible to their families and friends, ornaments to their country, and useful to the public Weal in their generations.16

Similarly, the primary goal at Yale in the 1700s was described as follows: “every student shall consider the main end of his study, to wit, to know God in Jesus Christ and answerably to lead a Godly, sober life.”17 Colleges required students to attend chapel in order to inculcate them with the divine Word. Though the colleges were tolerant by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century standards, there were serious conflicts when dissent arose.

Calvinists at Yale in 1722 engaged in an investigation of rector Timothy Cutler and tutor Daniel Brown because they were suspected of accepting Anglicanism. After they were dismissed for their denominational heresy, the board of the college instituted a rule that students could be taught only Cal-vinist theology. Yale was founded in 1701 because it was thought, remarkably, that Harvard was too theologically unorthodox, and too tolerant of dissent. Yale thus made all appointees sign the Westminster Confession and placed other requirements on employees, including forbidding them to attend Episcopal services. Yale administrators believed that subscribing to a confes-sion would guarantee institutional adherence to sectarian principles. While they had heard the names Locke and Newton, they were “warned against thinking anything of them” because it might corrupt the “pure religion

15 Ringenberg, Christian College, 38. For more on this, see Marsden, Soul of the American University, 40.16 Ringenberg, Christian College, 38.17 Ibid.


of the country.”18 The growing sectarianism in the Union caused religious and political rivalries, and even feuds in colleges both within and between denominations.19 While there was much competition in the free market of higher education between rival colleges, there was rarely toleration for views that even appeared to run counter to an understood theological position within an institution. Employees and professors who expressed “unorthodox views” were threatened with termination or fired.20 The history of Christian education is one in which the learning environment was rigidly closed. Toler-ance was not a virtue.

Some contend that denominationalism increased in the late 1800s, even as early as 1850.21 This development caused some college presidents to lament the rise of sectarian colleges as a “grievous and growing evil” and thus disas-trous for liberal education.22 The developments led to a curriculum that made learning useless to the needs of the young republican government. According to historian David B. Potts, it was rare that narrow denominational inter-ests drove college presidents or their boards. Institutions before 1850 were more involved in their community and less denominational. Colleges drew their students, and their funding, from the surrounding community. Col-leges were essentially local. Because they were community oriented, they reflected the diversity of the local populace. However, after 1850, with the rise

18 Thomas G. West, “The Transformation of Protestant Theology as a Condition of the American Revolution,” in Protestantism and the American Founding, ed. Thomas S. Engeman and Michael P. Zuckert (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 204. As West notes, this began to change in 1715 when Yale received a gift of modern philosophy books from Jeremiah Drummer. The gift had the effect of converting some to “new learning.”19 Beverly McAnear, “College Founding in the American Colonies, 1745–1775,” Mississippi Historical Review 42 (1955): 27; Ringenberg, Christian College, 39. Yale was not a tolerant school. In addition to firing “heretical” faculty and administration, it expelled two students in 1744 for attending the wrong (in this case a “new light”) religious service when they were in town. And they were expelled despite being on vacation. The president of Yale sent them packing because even their action allowed too much of the pluralism of the age to seep into the institution. “New lights” accepted and even liked revivalism, while “old lights” found revivalism a threat to the authority of the church. The president of the college (Clapp) was a heresy hunter. He fired many tutors and forbade books to be taught in the classroom that he deemed “heretical.” Though the college lost money and was on the brink of financial ruin, it was kept afloat by the charismatic Clapp until the 1760s. Clapp was such an authoritarian that the townspeople and students of the college finally had enough, rioted, and damaged his home in 1765, forcing his resignation in 1766. See Marsden, Soul of the American University, 52–53, 55–56. 20 Ringenberg, Christian College, 83. Sometimes these theological positions were understood only by the administration. In other words, they tended to be arbitrary. 21 David B. Potts, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominational-ism,” History of Education Quarterly 11 (Winter 1971): 363.22 Quoted in ibid., 364. The quote is from Presbyterian theologian Philip Lindsley, president of the University of Nashville. Julian Sturtevant, president of Illinois College, also found liberal education to be under threat from the growing sectarianism of many colleges.


of sectarianism—especially among the Baptists—these schools became not only more ideologically rigid on the administrative side, but also less attached to their community. Administration came increasingly under the control of individuals from outside the community and even outside the states in which the institutions were located. They also drew more denominationally friendly students from outside the local community. This led to increased monitoring of what constituted orthodox faith on campus. The faculty, college presidents, and other employees were closely monitored for “doctrinal impurity.”23

The decline of liberal education before the Civil War does not explain what colleges looked like at the time of the Revolution, or more precisely, how they were influenced by the Revolutionary spirit. The rationalist Revo-lution influenced the Protestant religions in the newly constituted states. Two developments are especially worth noting. First, reason was accepted as a legitimate “supplement to the authority of scripture.”24 Second, because reason was a complement to faith, institutions and their pious administrators accepted reason as an authority. They even adopted as a part of their faith the Lockean standard of a social compact and limited government. The American Founding, then, enlisted a variety of sectarians not to advance a country for Christ, but to secure the inalienable rights of all. This was not the approach of early Christians in the colonies, where reason was replaced by the doctrines of grace and the gospel: “the consequence of this [earlier] view was an early tendency…to disparage reason and learning and to elevate the dangerous passions connected with fanaticism and persecution.”25 Seventeenth-century Puritan theology represented a rejection of learning rather than its propa-gation. The dedication to a “by faith alone” theology fostered an “irrational spirituality.”26 This hostility to reason did not continue indefinitely, nor, as we have already noted, was it evident in all places.

The acceptance of human reason began to emerge in places such as Harvard, and the pagan philosophers were not found wanting. Harvard took Aristotle’s Ethics seriously, and his works were admired. Reason became respected “as a legitimate path to God’s order and law.”27 Respect for the Catholic tradition of

23 Ibid., 371. The narrowing of the mind to make room for a more sectarian education was the “origi-nal stumbling block” to the liberal arts and intellectual inquiry. See Linda Eisenmann, “Reclaiming Religion: New Historiographic Challenges in the Relationship of Religion and American Higher Education,” History of Education Quarterly 39 (Autumn 1999): 297.24 West, “Transformation of Protestant Theology,” 187. West is here referring to Protestant approaches to Christianity in particular.25 Ibid., 195.26 Ibid., 196.27 Ibid.


learning in philosophy and science created an openness to the basic authors of public right, such as John Locke. The lesson of this period is that as the Ameri-can Revolution approached, higher education was increasingly grounded in both reason and revelation. There was little pride in the mere irrationality of faith that we find in many Protestant denominations today.

Interest in the importance of colleges and of higher education increased during the Revolutionary period. The founding of colleges coincided with the advance of the Revolutionary spirit, which was not strictly theological. The colleges, though certainly religious in focus and instruction, were not austerely religious. As mentioned above, they accepted students regardless of faith. Dartmouth’s graduating class of 1799 had only one person publicly profess to be a Christian. At Yale in 1796, only one member of the senior class claimed to be a believer, and at Williams College of Massachusetts, five of ninety-three graduates identified themselves as Christians. Indeed, fewer than half of all antebellum students were professing Christians. In 1790, approximately ten percent of all Americans professed membership in a Chris-tian church.28 We may say that American colleges in the era of the Revolution were religious and evangelical, in the sense that they instructed students in matters of reason and revelation, but did not limit the class to believers or believers of a certain denominational stripe. They were godly institutions in the most general sense. Parents usually sent their children to colleges with the expectation that the experience would make them more open to God’s Word. What is perhaps remarkable about this is that the colleges formed in the time of the Revolution were open to Enlightenment rationalism and found reason supportive of the Christian faith.29

Liberal Education at the American Founding

Protestant theology came to support the principles of the American Revolu-tion, and eventually adopted as a portion of its theology the social-compact

28 Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 63; Ringenberg, Christian College, 58, 62; McAnear, “College Founding in the American Colonies,” 24. The toleration of student beliefs in those days is much different from today’s version, where the funda-mentalist schools are far more aggressive and boastful in their demands on the students. For example, the catalog at Bob Jones University currently asserts that any student who “in the opinion of the University does not fit into the spirit of the institution, regardless of whether or not he conforms to the specific rules and regulations of the University,” may be expelled. See Ringenberg, Christian College, 178. 29 Ringenberg, Christian College, 61–62, 68.


theory of Locke, which became a serious ground of the principles of the Rev-olution. Religion and philosophy at the Founding found a way to be generally supportive of one another. The Founding was broadly religious, but was also grounded in self-evident truths. It was a political order that had its roots in both reason and revelation. The Founding was not exclusively Christian, nor was it exclusively rationalist. As Thomas West notes:

For the idea of self-evident truth, and of the laws of nature’s God, implied that any reasonable human being, whether Christian or not, can discover principles of moral and political truth. The founding was not intended, as were the Puritan settlements of the early 1600s, “to advance the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.” …It was intended to secure the inalienable rights of all mankind.30

This theological transformation was not a secularization of the faith; quite the opposite. It was a sacralization of the faith by reasonable means. The rea-sonable arguments appeared to encourage Puritans to take a more realistic view of the world, and hence become more attuned to their own theology—for example, to recognize that divine grace would not cleanse this world. This development encouraged them to support limited government and the rule of law. Ultimately, Protestants recognized the instances where scripture supported the conclusions of reason.

Along those lines, Reverend Jonathan Mayhew preached one of the most famous pro-Revolutionary sermons in 1750:

Tyranny brings ignorance and brutality along with it. It degrades men from their just rank into the class of brutes. It damps their spirits. It suppresses arts. It extinguishes every spark of noble ardor and gener-osity in the breasts of those who are enslaved by it. It makes naturally strong and great minds feeble and little, and triumphs over the ruins of virtue and humanity. This is true of tyranny in every shape. There can be nothing great or good where its influence reaches. For which reason it becomes every friend to truth and humankind, every lover of God and the Christian religion, to bear a part in opposing this hateful monster.31

30 West, “Transformation of Protestant Theology,” 188–89, italics in the original. Much of the mate-rial in this paragraph is taken from the same source. In one of the most astounding developments, some theologians developed a state-of-nature view of scripture, arguing that the law of nature taught man to preserve himself. In this way, West argues, some theologians adopted (via Luke 22:36) the concept that “God helps those who help themselves.” See “Transformation of Protestant Theology,” 199–200. On the Founding being rooted in both reason and revelation, see Harry V. Jaffa, American Conservatism and the American Founding (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1982), 38.31 West, “Transformation of Protestant Theology,” 208–9.


Mayhew’s position found scripture reasonable on the determination of the conduct of men in politics. Those who are would-be tyrants in all forms are hostile to reason and the development of the mind. Worse, tyrants diminish the best and brightest. Samuel West’s 1780 sermon demonstrates the impor-tance of reason’s ability to know in a way that complemented faith:

We want not, indeed, a special revelation from heaven to teach us that men are born equal and free; that no man has a natural claim of dominion over his neighbors, nor one nation any such claim upon another; and that as government is only the administration of the affairs of a number of men combined for their own security and hap-piness, such a society have a right freely to determine by whom and in what manner their own affairs shall be administered. These are the plain dictates of that reason and common sense with which the com-mon parent of men has informed the human bosom. It is, however, a satisfaction to observe such everlasting maxims of equity confirmed, and impressed on the consciousness of men, by the instructions, pre-cepts, and examples given us in the sacred oracles; one internal mark of their divine original, and that they come from him “who hath made of one blood all nations to dwell upon the face of the earth,” whose authority sanctifies only those governments that instead of oppressing any part of his family, vindicate the oppressed, and restrain and pun-ish the oppressor.32

Reason might be seen here as being in the service of God and Christianity. In accord with the self-evident truth of the Declaration, Mayhew and West understand that the principles of freedom are capable of being understood by all men. Put simply, the Revolutionary spirit found reason and revelation as indispensible supports.

Before the mid 1800s, few colleges survived. Eighty percent of the col-leges founded prior to 1850 did not endure.33 Yet by 1840, there were many institutions of higher learning. Colleges of the nineteenth century looked remarkably, and uniformly, liberal for the time. The classics loomed large in the classroom. Freshmen at Yale, for example, read Livy and Herodotus, sophomores read Cicero and Xenophon, juniors read Plato, Thucydides, and Euripides, and seniors read logic and Enlightenment authors, just to name a few. Students did not pick and choose their curriculum à la carte as they do

32 Samuel Cooper, A Sermon on the Day of the Commencement of the Constitution, in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998), 1:637. 33 Kohlbrenner, “Religion and Higher Education,” 49.


today.34 The spirit of the Revolution led to the founding of many colleges and universities that were influenced by the principles of the American Found-ing. The goal of many of the colleges in the Revolutionary era was to produce morally upright citizens, and moral philosophy became the common ground on the basis of which to build republics of virtue. Aristotle was found useful because he taught that anyone could be virtuous by forming good habits.35 Theology increasingly was relegated to chapel services and one’s local church, but it was not discarded from intelligent life.

While there were sectarian conflicts through the eighteenth century, new schools, such as the College of New Jersey, made efforts in the direction of toleration and rights of dissent. Much of this toleration developed out of persecutions at places like Harvard and Yale. John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, symbolizes the Revolu-tionary spirit that moderated the sectarian conflict. According to George M. Marsden, Revolutionary statesmen believed that “service to the Republic had emerged as the preeminent good. For this there was hardly any distinction between the benefits of religion and the benefits of the science of morality.”36 This was not a rejection of religion, for the belief still prevailed that religion assisted in the development of public morals. However, the sectarian edge of the destructive conflicts throughout history subsided in the Revolutionary period. In post-Revolutionary America, there was general agreement that revelation could be seen in nature, and that it confirmed his divine work. While there was some disagreement over the proper relationship between reason and revelation, even the most ardent supporters of scripture—from Alexander Campbell’s restorationists to the evangelical Presbyterians—were “all…convinced that in fair controversy universal truth would eventually

34 Kronman, Education’s End, 54, 58. At the College of New Jersey in 1751, students read Xenophon in Greek and Cicero’s De oratore in Latin and took courses in Hebrew grammar. Under John Wither-spoon’s tenure (in 1772) students took Greek and Latin and studied Roman antiquities and rhetoric. They also had to study mathematics, history, philosophy, natural and moral philosophy, and geogra-phy. Harvard and Yale required conversation to be conducted in Latin in the early 1700s. See Kraus, “Development of a Curriculum,” 67, 71. Many colleges required Greek or Latin the first two years; see McAnear, “College Founding in the American Colonies,” 34, and Ringenberg, Christian College, 37. Making admission still more demanding, colleges required applicants to translate an elementary Latin or Greek text. For example, at Rutgers in the late colonial period, prospective students had to translate into English Caesar’s Commentaries, the Eclogues of Virgil, and one of the four Gospels. See Ringenberg, Christian College, 50.35 Marsden, Soul of the American University, 51–52. By the mid-1800s even those denominations that were founding their own colleges could not attract students on a narrow or sectarian basis. They appealed to religion, but in a more socially acceptable way that emphasized the general moral aspects of religion and its moral benefits, rather than on theological peculiarities. See ibid., 80.36 Ibid., 63.


flourish.”37 While there was tension between reason and scripture, it was a healthy tension. This may be considered the era of good academic feeling. At no other time did the two poles exist in such harmony.

Thomas Jefferson’s idea of education will shed some light on the under-standing of the relationship between religion and philosophy that obtained at the time. In his 1779 “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson contended that liberal education was an important part of equip-ping free citizens to rule and be ruled in turn:

Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exer-cise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.38

While Jefferson believed in the practical side of education, the deeper and more serious moral elements were most important and those elements could be imparted without a strict adherence to religious instruction. This is the reason the student needed illumination: so that the use of his natural powers of reasoning could know and defend the ends of man. Liberal education also had the added benefit of revealing those worthy to serve the public in the defense of public morals and natural rights:

And whereas it is generally true that that people will be happiest whose laws are best, and are best administered, and that laws will be wisely formed, and honestly administered, in proportion as those who form and administer them are wise and honest; whence it becomes excellent for promoting the publick happiness that those persons, whom nature

37 Ibid., 91. This is a remarkable occurrence in the early republic. While there were certainly funda-mentalists, most religious Protestants were of one mind on this matter. They were not afraid of debate and seemed to believe that scripture, or the Holy Spirit, had nothing to fear from an honest and free debate about the ideas. I would contend that Marsden makes too much of scientific discovery of the Enlightenment as it pertained to Jefferson. Jefferson was concerned, as we shall see, with philosophy as well and the ability of reason to know moral truths that could not be determined via empirical research. 38 Thomas Jefferson, “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 2:414–15.


hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other acciden-tal condition or circumstance.39

In his proposal for a University of Virginia, Jefferson laid out the aims of his college. Among those things he believed should be taught included a curious reference to the “Law of Nature” as a teaching that should arise under the general rubric of “government” courses.40 According to Jefferson, one of the aims of college education at the university would be

to expound the principles and structures of government, the laws which regulate the intercourse of nations, those formed municipally for our own government, and a sound spirit of legislation, which, banishing all arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on individual action, shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of another.41

A liberal education, according to Jefferson, should instruct students in the knowledge of their rights and how they should exercise those rights “with order and justice.” He asserts that education should develop the students’ “reasoning faculties” and “enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order.”42 Understanding our natu-ral rights and the law of nature not only leads to the improvement of morals and sharpens our reason; it has the added benefit of helping citizens under-stand their duties to other human beings. Liberal education contemplates the laws of nature, and hence the structure and order of our world. It is, then, a form of education in which the ends of life and of government become intel-ligible.43 It is the study of nature, of which man is a part. It is indisputable that Jefferson’s understanding of a liberal education carved out a spot for reason to flourish. In his initial document to the Virginia legislature on the creation of the college, Jefferson asserted that in conformity with the Virginia Con-stitution, no religious seat would be established at the university. Indeed, the

39 Ibid., 415.40 Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia, 4 August 1818, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 338. In his 1779 report on amend-ing the charter of William and Mary College, Jefferson asserted that philosophy and the principles of the Christian religion should be taught, but his proposal specifically mentioned philosophy and instruction in the law of nature in a variety of forms and classes. See Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 432, 434.41 Report of the Commissioners, 334.42 Ibid.43 Harry V. Jaffa, American Conservatism and the American Founding, 41–42.


college was not specifically sectarian at all, but allowed the presence of many religious faiths without establishing one as predominant. However, his relega-tion of the religious community to a competitive position within the academic community is not evidence of his hostility to religion; quite the opposite.

Jefferson believed that even in the absence of a professor of divinity, God, the creator, preserver, and supreme ruler of the universe, would have a place on campus in a general sense. Liberal education, then, included a space for God. It is striking that Jefferson speaks of God nonspecifically. This is not a God of a specific sect. The Sage from Monticello perhaps reveals a more philosophical reason for the exclusion of a particular religious denomi-national control from higher education. Though he found room for many denominations, he did so to preserve a place for reason: “By bringing the rival sects together and mixing them with the mass of other students we shall soften their asperities, liberalize and neutralize their prejudices, and make the general religion the religion of peace, reason, and morality.”44 It should not go without mention that religion was both beneficial and viewed with caution—as something potentially destructive—in the young republic. The effect of bringing together several faiths and sects not only moderated them, and moderated their appeals, but it allowed reason an exalted place on the campus. Taken together, reason and revelation had the effect of fostering a general morality in the community, which in turn would be beneficial to the young republic. Part of the problem, according to Jefferson, was that religious sects could become fanatical and hence hostile to reason or the mind. If they were allowed unchecked power in education, they would be so ambitious as to tyrannize over others.45 It is in the context of education that he explains,

44 Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Thomas Cooper, 2 November 1822, in Writings, ed. Peterson, 1465. See also Ringenberg, Christian College, 80.45 Jefferson to Cooper, 2 November 1822, in Writings, 1464. We should note that Jefferson certainly had a bias against certain sects, but his position was consistent with respect to liberal education and sectarianism. See Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monicello (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), 378. Some have noted that the word “fundamentalist” has been dropped for “evangeli-cal” because of its negative connotation. Not all evangelical schools are fundamentalist, however. The reaction to the secularization of many colleges led to the creation of fundamentalist schools. These religious schools have such a passionate attachment to their theological position that they have ended up denouncing those who one would think would be their allies. For example, Bob Jones Jr. con-demned Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority as “one of Satan’s devices to build the world church of the Antichrist.” The stifling intellectual atmosphere of these schools led none other than Billy Graham to leave Bob Jones after only one semester. The danger of these fundamentalist schools is that they claim to have speculative surety in all things, and that leads them to express surety in nonspeculative things. Therefore, these schools are authoritarian in institutional organization and campus politics. See Ringenberg, Christian College, 83, 172, 179, and 180. A more recent and popular treatment of this phenomenon is Hanna Rosin, God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (New York: Harcourt, 2007).


in a letter to Thomas Cooper, that the proposal for a University of Virginia does not offer a permanent seat to any denomination, but instead supports religious pluralism.46 The competition not only preserves the independence of each sect, but also the independence of human beings in the community who may not, out of personal conviction, subscribe to a particular sect. Reli-gion should become a field of study and inquiry like any other subject.47 This does not mean that Jefferson was indifferent to religion, or believed it was of no value.

In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Jefferson held (in article 3) that “religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools, and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Religion might be included in education, but as we noted in his development of the University of Virginia, religious freedom is necessary for the discovery of a rational truth. A unifying truth must be sought freely in the “anvil of debate.”48 This would allow the truth to flourish. We might say that religion and philosophy (knowledge) are the North and South Poles of morality. The separation of church and state in politics corresponds to the separation of religion and education at college. The separation would encour-age a “rational religious commitment” and make for a more “enlightened foundation for morality.”49

Several colleges noted the potential problems associated with religious control of colleges in terms of the potential effects it would have on the citizens. One aim was to offer an education that bolstered republican gov-ernment. Therefore, most colleges founded between 1776 and 1800 were republican in nature. The characteristics of such republicanism were a love of “liberty, industry, orderliness…piety, sobriety, and temperance.”50 James Bowdoin noted of his college that instruction in religion generally, morality,

46 It should be noted that Jefferson personally believed that the overall trend would be toward a univeralist religion. See Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, 26 June 1822, in Writings, 1458–59; and Jefferson to Cooper, 2 November 1822, in Writings, 1464.47 Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 393. See also Marsden, Soul of the American University, 74. 48 See Benjamin R. Barber, “The Compromised Republic,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, ed. Robert H. Horowitz (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 50–51. In Query 14 on Religion in the Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson details a law put forth by revisors in the state, and he explains that at least initially, the teachings of Bible and Testament should not be immediately proffered. Especially where the young teen is concerned, Jefferson would rather students spend time in history and ancient languages: see The Portable Thomas Jefferson, 197–98.49 Jaffa, American Conservatism and the American Founding, 54. 50 Hyman Kuritz, “Benjamin Rush: His Theory of Republican Education,” History of Education Quar-terly 7 (Winter 1967): 437.


and the laws would “determine the fate of the country.”51 At the University of North Carolina, the liberal nature of the college was noted in this state-ment: “nothing can be more conducive to the existence of liberty, than such a system of education as gives every citizen the opportunity of gaining knowl-edge and fitting him for places of trust.”52 The moderating effect of a college education was one of the reasons none other than Benjamin Rush rejected denominational or doctrinal control of education, believing instead in the unity of religious diversity.53

A country founded on the concepts of equality and liberty should have an education system dedicated to that end. Such a republic would respect the freedom of others to choose their own path to heaven. A man’s conduct matters more than his speculative opinions. In the Notes on the State of Vir-ginia, Jefferson noted that the early history of the colonists was one in which religious freedom was not realized. Indeed, the freedom of the “reigning sect” was the norm. This was antithetical to the principles of the Declaration of Independence:

The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submit-ted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injuri-ous to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.54

Jefferson concluded that reason and inquiry were the only means with which to contend against a supposed error, religious or otherwise. A free people is duty bound to respect the rights of others. Its members must have a respect for the mind, or reason’s ability to know, to be convinced of that duty. Indeed, it was by the freedom of inquiry that Christianity got its rise, according to Jefferson. Reason is the instrument of persuasion and political argumenta-

51 David W. Robson, “College Founding in the New Republic, 1776–1800,” History of Education Quar-terly 23 (Autumn 1983): 324.52 Ibid.53 Kuritz, “Benjamin Rush,” 436. Rush was active in the founding of Dickson College and believed students should have a heavy dose of republican classics, philosophy, and history in the curriculum. In order to make a people amenable to republican government, they needed to be exposed to republican arguments. See Robson, “College Founding in the New Republic,” 327. In that spirit, some colleges exposed their students to the full range of religious arguments, from pietists to skeptics. See ibid., 331.54 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, 210; see also 208, and Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 378–79.


tion. It is the most important thing common to all men. Religious force and coercion have failed and ever will. In order for a citizenry to respect the laws of nature, and reason’s ability to know, Jefferson wrote, the university needed to be “broad and liberal.”55 In his efforts to establish the University of Vir-ginia, Jefferson noted to Thomas Cooper that he hoped sectarian criticisms would subside, and thought that college education should be the “bulwark of the human mind.”56 Jefferson’s aim in the creation of the University of Virginia was to give fair play to the cultivation of reason through a non-sectarian education, albeit one in which religion was not excluded from the marketplace of ideas.

American colleges were to cultivate a natural aristocracy in political rule, as well as lead the citizens to virtue and enlightenment. James Madison con-curred with Jefferson, believing that higher education should partake of

the true doctrines of liberty, as exemplified in our Political System, [and] should be inculcated on those who are to sustain and may administer it. …Sidney & Locke are admirably calculated to impress on young minds the right of Nations to establish their own Govern-ments, and to inspire a love of free ones.57

Madison would go further, writing that the university was the “Temple” through which the liberty of the Union would be secured.58 The sacred texts of the republic were not the works of theology, but works of philosophy. It is evident that, for Madison and Jefferson at least, a liberal education included philosophy, or the love of wisdom. Still, Madison would write to Jefferson that “after all, the most effectual safeguard against heretical intrusions into the school of politics, will be an able and orthodox professor, whose course of instruction will be an example to his successors, and may carry with it a sanction from the visitors.”59 So that it might appear that even Madison’s opposition to educational indoctrination had its limits. However, nothing

55 Jefferson to Dr. Joseph Priestly, 18 January 1800, in Writings, 1070.56 Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 14 August 1820, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), 15:269. We should note that Jefferson believed the university would be a bulwark for the mind, as opposed to the soul, in the sense of salvation. See also Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 380; Marsden, Soul of the American University, 68.57 Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 8 February 1825, in The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, ed. Marvin Meyers (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1981), 349.58 Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 24 February 1825, in James Madison, Writings, ed. Jack N. Rakove (New York: Library of America, 1999), 810.59 Madison to Jefferson, 8 February 1825, in Mind of the Founder, 350.


could be further from the truth. Madison is not saying that a liberal educa-tion should be an indoctrination of a different kind. Madison and Jefferson did not dilute the religious influence only to institute their own brand of reli-gious truth; rather, they were seeking to broaden the learning of the citizen by including a philosophical teaching:

They were talking about a “nature” and “laws of nature,” that are acces-sible to reason, and better known if the reason is trained to see them. Jefferson and Madison thought that an educated man would have investigated these matters, indeed, that he would have come to some conclusions about them that would decisively shape his life. Students, when they are young, must have a reason to begin the journey of learn-ing, or they will not begin it at all.60

In Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance,” he urged caution against the public ascendancy of religious institutions because if any one sect were to receive favor, it would banish all other, opposing sects. Madison was not hostile to religion per se, or against Christianity, but dedicated to preserving liberty for all men, which he found more amenable to the appeal to a person’s reason and conviction.61 James Kent, the lawyer and legal scholar educated at Yale, thought that an education should be conducted on reasonable prin-ciples. He reasoned that the principles of government were accessible to all men and hence the principles of unalienable rights were discernible. Samuel Williams concluded that the best remedy to religious superstition and igno-rance, not to mention infidelity to the faith, was an “increase of knowledge and education.”62

60 Larry P. Arnn, “Why the GOP is Flunking Higher Education,” Claremont Review of Books 6, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 21.61 James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance,” in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805, ed. Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), 1:632–33. Somewhat more favorable is Benjamin Rush, who believed the Christian religion should be central to an education, even while he found religion of any sort—say, Islam or Confucianism—ben-eficial. However, Rush was not speaking about a college education, but the education of children. One thing that Rush believed religion should inculcate in all school-age children was republican principles. See Benjamin Rush, “A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania,” in ibid., 1:675–92. Likewise, John Adams thought that a liberal education was neces-sary for youth: John Adams, Thoughts on Government, in ibid., 1:407. Zabdiel Adams believed that the government should only generally encourage education in God, all other matters related to him being individual and left to our conscience. See “An Election Sermon,” in ibid., 1:556. In Charleston, an anonymous author deduced from the law of nature that a college education was valuable and that students should be taught their duty to God generally and to their countrymen. See Rudiments of Law and Government Deduced from the Law of Nature, in ibid., 1:582. 62 Samuel Williams, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont, in American Political Writing, 2:962; James Kent, “An Introductory Lecture to a Course of Law Lectures,” in ibid., 2:938–39.


◆ ◆ ◆

Returning to the where we began this inquiry, Kronman rejects the idea that there are no truths, or that there are no right answers, only opinions. A stu-dent who allows himself to be indoctrinated in that will not believe learning is valuable to his soul. However, if someone assents to the view that truth is found only in the revealed Word of God, he will also not begin a philo-sophical journey. He will resist, nay reject, philosophy and reason, which are essential to the quest for wisdom. The opposite of belief in the benefits of religious indoctrination is the belief that college should not impart any truth. The concern is that students ought not to be “browbeaten” by their professors or the administrators of a college. The college experience is nothing if not a consideration of all serious arguments. Evidence, from any source, should not be suppressed. In that sense, both the faculty and the student should be allowed to pursue their work. Finding a place for reason and philosophy is not the rejection of truth. Rather, it ensures that both reason and revelation may have the freedom to engage each other over the meaning of life. There should be an academic debate over the one thing most needful.63 Students, then, are not to be instructed in nothing, nor are they to be taught radical skepticism, but they are to be invited to look beyond their own opinions to something above them. They are to be, in a sense, skeptics of a certain type and yet reject relativism.64

What is Liberal Education?

Abraham Lincoln’s view of liberal education was one of moderation: “every man [should] receive at least, a moderate education, and thereby [be] enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries, by which he may duly appreciate the value of free institutions.”65 Liberal education is an education in culture, or toward a certain culture.66 It is not an education that guarantees

63 Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 72. 64 Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College asserts that “apart from the fact that the progressive idea of aca-demic freedom undercuts the principles of college, and apart from the fact that it robs the student of his reason to study anything outside himself, it has the disadvantage that it will not work. Well-inten-tioned advocates like [David] Horowitz apply this principle to open campuses up so that conservatives will not be hazed from the student body and faculty” (“Why the GOP is Flunking Higher Education,” 22).65 Quoted in ibid.66 Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 3.


a payoff at the conclusion of study; it is an education specifically fitted for a free people. The cause of freedom would be advanced through the proper use of liberty; a liberal regime requires a liberal education.67 It has meant an education in certain great books, that is, works written by the greatest minds of the Western canon. Since America is a Western nation, and since the colo-nists’ heritage was derived from Western nations, schooling in the works of that tradition was encouraged. Liberal education, then, has always been an education of a certain kind and toward a certain end, and as Cardinal Henry Newman wrote in his Idea of a University, it is for the cultivation of the intel-lect, teaching universal knowledge. The Eastern Orthodox Jaroslav Pelikan stated in a review of Newman’s seminal work that knowledge has its own end, and that is in its deciphering of some chief good.68

Ancient liberal education made citizens fit for liberty; it inculcated civic virtue, courage, justice, self-control, and patriotism.69 It was not to make citi-zens open-minded, and it was not a practical education. The business art was considered vulgar. However, the rooting of education in nature—the discov-ery and thinking of it—made the ancient city less stable because it detached the educated from the polis. It undermined the pious fidelity to the city and had the effect of undermining the authority of politics and jeopardizing lib-erty. Ancient philosophical education seemed to liberated the citizen from the polis in some way.70 The American Founding resolved this problem by making nature the authority of the Union. Therefore, it was able to ground liberty in nature.

Allan Bloom contended that a simple attachment to a great-books cur-riculum was not enough to foster a liberally educated person. What is most important is the way those books are studied, as politicized instruction can make learning abhorrent; students should first and foremost endeavor to understand authors as they understood themselves. Liberal education is dedicated to human completeness and is the “home of reason.”71 Our modern

67 Mark Blitz, “To See Ourselves,” Weekly Standard, 16 June 2008, 34.68 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 43; John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), xxi, xxxvii. 69 See in particular Lorraine Smith Pangle, “Liberal Education and Politics: Lessons from the Ameri-can Founding,” Academic Questions 8, no. 1 (March 1995): 34. 70 Ibid. Pangle makes the interesting argument that philosophy became more intertwined with liberal education, thus making the relation to “civic education…far more ambiguous.”71 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 22; Wil-davsky, “Death of the Humanities,” 69.


education ignores the self-evident truth of natural rights as an origin of the American republic. Bloom could easily be speaking of the Union when he writes that a “in a nation founded on reason, the university was the temple of the regime.”72 It orders the types of questions that are worth asking and answering. The question “what is man?” for example, is one of those ques-tions: “the liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows oth-ers worthy of consideration.”73 We have already discovered, at least for the Founders, something of what that looks like. In a statement similar to that of Madison and Jefferson, Strauss wrote that

we understand most easily what liberal education means here and now. Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corrod-ing effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.” Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.74

A liberal education was supposed to teach a new kind of statesmen. The truly great are the philosophic minds, and for Strauss, one of those was Plato. Edu-cation in the highest sense of the word was an education in philosophy. The quest for wisdom is the highest pursuit for man; attaining knowledge that leads to virtue and happiness is his end. Though we cannot acquire perfect wisdom, we can try to philosophize by spending time with those greater than we, those philosophers who because of circumstance and abilities are the greatest minds of the West. Liberal education means, then, we must listen to the conversation between great minds of the past. Thus, we ought to have a sense of humility. The problem is that we often think we are superior to these men. To overcome this sense of superiority is perhaps a highly difficult task. We are incompetent to be judges of the arguments made, yet we must judge. We are faced with our desire to know, yet do not, initially perhaps, know where to begin.

72 Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 244–45. Bloom also notes that in a regime dedicated to “free and equal human beings,” such “reverence” is “appropriate.”73 Ibid., 19, 21, and 344. 74 Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 314–15. Strauss makes a pointed argument concerning how difficult philosophy/philosophizing is. Not only is it elusive to attain wisdom, a philosopher must constantly begin from the beginning for knowledge must be acquired, and reacquired. See ibid., 328–29.


Liberal education is the “constant intercourse” with the great minds. The interaction requires a sort of skepticism of common opinion. To question the given opinions of the day—to question custom—requires a certain courage:

It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinion, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity.75

The philosophic concern, or interest, with common, or vulgar, opinion is to lift us higher to the most important things, and, as Strauss wrote, the most beauti-ful things. We might conclude that to be concerned with something above our mere opinions means to be interested in the “isness” of things. To have that occupy us means that we think there is a truth, a wisdom, worth pursuing.

Liberal education is the concern with the finest or highest things. Lib-erally educated human beings pursue politics and philosophy: “they are in earnest because they are concerned with the most weighty matters, with the only things which deserve to be taken seriously for their own sake, with the good order of the soul and of the city.”76 The liberally educated man, Strauss contends, is the gentleman. He is concerned with the health of the body poli-tic, and therefore, about justice. The gentleman is concerned with ruling in the interest of the entire society.

Generally speaking, “liberal education in the original sense not only fosters civic responsibility: it is even required for the exercise of civic respon-sibility. By being what they are, the gentlemen are meant to set the tone of society in the most direct, the least ambiguous, and the most unquestionable way: by ruling it in broad daylight.”77 Just rule, a just politics, is not conducted by force or in secret in a free society. The just city is framed by men over men, and the men who make the laws, if liberally educated, will also obey those laws. Yet a liberal education is not merely concerned with the here and now or with various policy preferences in themselves. As mentioned above, liberal education understands philosophy as a higher pursuit than mere poli-tics. Certainly, as Strauss writes in “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” politics ought to be about a pursuit of certain ends, but there should be some knowledge of the ends themselves: “For everything which comes into being

75 Ibid., 319. 76 Ibid., 324.77 Ibid., 327.


through human action and is therefore perishable or corruptible presupposes incorruptible and unchangeable things—for instance, the natural order of the human soul—with a view to which we can distinguish between right and wrong actions.”78 Liberal education, then, is a preparation for philosophy, and philosophy is, in the rank order of things, more weighty than gentlemanship.

Why is Kronman, not to say Strauss himself, concerned about liberal education and its demise? Strauss offers a seemingly innocuous statement after claiming that the status of the liberal arts is waning: “Permit me to summarize the preceding argument. In the light of the original conception of modern republicanism, our present predicament appears to be caused by the decay of religious education of the people and by the decay of liberal education.”79 At first glance, we might conclude that Strauss believes religious education and liberal education are synonymous, or tied together in some way that has since been lost. However, Strauss does not claim that religious education is liberal education. Indeed, he seems to separate them. The decline of religious education, or catechism, is not necessarily the fault of colleges. This becomes evident later in the same paragraph:

Still, I cannot help stating to you these questions: Is our present con-cern with liberal education of adults, our present expectation from such liberal education, not due to the void created by the decay of religious education? Is such liberal education meant to perform the function formerly performed by religious education? Can liberal edu-cation perform that function?80

Religious education and liberal education are two different things with two different ends. Yet Strauss seems to suggest that they may both work in the pursuit of justice. Liberal education was originally supported by classi-cal political philosophy, not theology, generally speaking. The oldest of the sciences is what Aristotle called political science.81 It is synonymous with political philosophy and the academy that he helped found. The problem with modern education—Kronman in many ways rightly recognizes this—is

78 Ibid. Strauss makes the argument at this point that there is a tension between the philosopher and the city. The reason for that is that the philosopher is necessarily skeptical of common opinion, which finds its full force in the city. Who is the constituent part of the city? The priest. The ends of philosophy, then, are not the same as the ends of the city. Philosophers find it very difficult to have noncommon conversations with members of the city, and that makes them suspect. Of course, the city needs philosophy in some way, but in a diluted form. See ibid., 328–31.79 Ibid., 336.80 Ibid.81 Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, editors’ introduction to History of Political Philosophy, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1.


that modern philosophy has taken over the education, thus making philoso-phy subservient to practical ends. In other words, classical philosophy is overtaken by modern philosophy, which makes philosophizing in a classical sense more difficult.

This development has generally taken over not only the modern secular university, but also religious institutions. Strauss seems to underscore this point when he writes that “philosophy thus understood [i.e., understood in the modern sense] could be presented with some plausibility as inspired by biblical charity, and accordingly philosophy in the classic sense could be dis-paraged as pagan and as sustained by sinful pride.”82 The problem here is twofold. Not only is religion, or theology, different from philosophy, but it may have also been co-opted by modern philosophy to serve ends that are hostile to both orthodox theology and classical philosophy. Therefore, liberal education today is something that exists in name only at most institutions of higher learning. Though it may be found in some places and at some institu-tions, it is not meant to be a political power. With classical philosophy as its guide, it is more concerned with the Good, or the eternal: it “seeks the light and therefore shuns the limelight.”83

The divide or tension between reason and revelation is evident in Strauss’s thought and it is a venerable problem since Tertullian asked the question, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?”84 If Tertullian had his way, religious education would have nothing to do with pagan philosophy, or indeed any philosophy, because everything contained in scripture is neces-sary and sufficient for living. Most early church fathers were more moderate. St. Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Gregory the Theologian were cautious and critical of philosophy, but even these fathers used Hellenic thought in the ser-vice of Christianity. So too in the academy there has been a struggle between philosophy and theology, reason and revelation. Christian scholars of all stripes have grappled with the issue. What is undisputed is that this conflict goes back to the foundations not only of Christianity, but of all three mono-theistic revealed religions. Maimonides contended that the pagans could be reconciled in many ways with Judaism. Thomas Aquinas extraordinarily

82 Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, 337. Strauss goes on to question whether the bibli-cal claims of inspiration for these matters are raised in sincerity, especially since theology is used to serve the ends of human power, which in the Straussian context are the ends of science—making human life longer, easier to live, but not happier. 83 Ibid., 345, 337.84 David Novak, “Body and Soul,” First Things, April 2006, 50.


begins his Summa Theologica with the question whether anything besides philosophy is needed. Neither did the Reformation solve any of these prob-lems. Luther criticized pagans such as Aristotle from inside the academy, contending his works should be discarded; Calvin believed that reason on its own was of no value, but considered it competent of things in this world. He at least believed that the life of the mind could be used in glorifying God.85

The Dialogue between Reason and Revelation

We could say that the problem we have been examining in liberal education is similar to the crisis afflicting Western civilization. The decline of liberal education is a part of a broader symptom: the dismissal of both biblical revelation and ancient political philosophy. To put it another way, Western man has profited from reason and revelation. The West is in crisis in part because of the attempted rejection of that which is inherent in man: the abil-ity to reason. Biblical faith also seems under attack in the modern world, and certainly in most universities. If the West is to survive, or be revived, the dialogue between reason and revelation should be exhumed. If it is to come back to life in the West, it needs to be resurrected in higher education, for both provide fertile ground for moral education.86

The tension between reason and revelation is intelligible enough:

85 Marsden, Soul of the American University, 35–37. We should note that Catholics also had a bout with the importance of philosophy and reason. Pope Leo XII criticized America for being too mate-rial and did not like the Americanism of the Founding. Catholics were suspicious of the openness of America and wondered whether freedom could produce a moral people. Long into the twentieth century, Catholic universities went through many of the problems that Protestant colleges did some 250–300 years earlier. Part of the reason for this, it seems, was that Catholic colleges generally got a late start developing institutions of learning. See ibid., 271–73. On some of the early debates, which for example saw Origen condemned by an ecumenical council for blending the Greeks too much with Christianity, see James R. Payton Jr., Light from the Christian East (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007), 52–54.86 Harry V. Jaffa, “Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts: A Critique of The Closing of the American Mind,” in Essays on “The Closing of the American Mind,” ed. Robert Stone (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1989), 133; Leo Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 147; Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, 125; Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 238. On the primacy of reason as being necessary to save reason from its self-destruction, see Harry V. Jaffa, “Leo Strauss, the Bible, and Political Philosophy,” in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, ed. Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Nicgorski (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 195–96. Strauss speaks of the “crisis of the West” in The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 1. Susan Orr makes a more explicit link between this crisis and education in Jerusalem and Athens: Reason and Revelation in the Works of Leo Strauss (Lanham, MD: Rownman & Littlefield, 1995), 5–6.


We must then try to understand the difference between biblical wis-dom and Greek wisdom. We see at once that each of the two claims to be the true wisdom, thus denying to the other its claim to be wisdom in the strict and highest sense. According to the Bible, the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord; according to the Greek philosophers, the beginning of wisdom is wonder. We are thus compelled from the very beginning to make a choice, to take a stand. Where then do we stand? We are confronted with the incompatible claims of Jerusalem and Athens to our allegiance.87

The divide is further described as being two different approaches of the “one thing needful”: for the Bible it is the obedient love of God; for Greek philosophy, it is the life of autonomous understanding, which is the belief in autonomous reason.88 Despite this tension, reason and revelation are in agreement with one another over what the moral law should be. They concur on its importance, most of the content, and on how insufficient it is in poli-tics. They agree even in the fact that reason tends toward monotheism by the contemplation of a single and eternal Good. The problem that exists between the two different ways of life—the one of the philosopher and the other of the theologian—is in the interpretation of the divine law. How they arrive at the law is from two completely different paths. It probably would not be as much of a problem if philosophy did not make claims on the divine as it inherently does. In other words, philosophy is somewhat theological and that makes it a direct competitor of theology, properly understood as the biblical theology of the personally revealed God. Western civilization has rejected both of the poles of Western thought, being seduced by the promise of infinite progress, which has nefarious designs on nature. It is debatable whether man has pro-gressed, or is happier, than premodern man.89

From the philosophic perspective the rational contemplation of the Good is an end in itself, but for the faithful, the believer, it issues in repen-tance, guilt resulting from wrongdoing, and divine grace and mercy from an omnipotent God. For the religious, at the heart of morality is action, whereas for the philosopher it is contemplation. The discovery of nature is a philo-sophical pursuit. This is not the case for the believer, or theologian. Generally, there are all sorts of divine texts that disagree on the laws that mortals should

87 Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” 149.88 Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 246; Harry V. Jaffa, “The Legacy of Leo Strauss,” Claremont Review of Books 3, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 14. 89 Much of this is drawn from Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 245–46.


follow. The Bible claims, however, that all other divine laws are frauds, and that the law it proclaims is the one true divine law.

This law comes from the one true God who is also a personal God. He is also omnipotent, unknowable, and not controlled by anything outside Him-self. God is mysterious, something He acknowledges when He says in Exodus “I shall be what I shall be.”90 God is free to do what He wants, when He wants. We know God only because He has imparted to us His promises. This pres-ents a problem for philosophy because the philosopher cannot contemplate this kind of God because God is “the only possible one.”91 Philosophy con-templates the whole and understands ideas—class characteristics—that are universal. Common nouns are an example of this phenomenon and assist us in making ideas intelligible.92 Once someone understands the idea of a tree, he can imagine particular trees and distinguish the particular from the universal. The God of the Bible cannot be imagined. The fact that He cannot be imagined, or contemplated in reason, requires believers to accept God on faith. Therefore, in any attempt to reconcile reason and revelation, even by the Christian theologians of whom St. Augustine is the most important, faith takes the primary position: “If God is one, and if there can be no other God, there can be no idea of God.”93 Philosophic reasoning about the Whole, the Good, or Nature will never lead men to the idea of God that we read about in the Bible. For the theologian, who is a partisan of the unknowable God, philosophy becomes a challenge to the way of life of the faithful.

Despite these tensions, the American experience made reason and revela-tion allies for the first time. Nature’s God and the Creator were inspirations of the Founding. They became friendly to one another in the service of freedom. As opposed to the ancient city where the foundation of the polis was obedi-ence to the gods, the American Founding formed a détente between reason

90 Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” 162.91 Jaffa, “Leo Strauss, the Bible, and Political Philosophy,” 197; Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 253–57.92 Jaffa, American Conservatism and the American Founding, 71. Scot Zentner has a nice discussion of this idea as well in “The Philosopher and the City: Harry Jaffa and the Straussians,” Interpretation 30, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 290–91.93 Jaffa, “Leo Strauss, the Bible, and Political Philosophy,” 197; Ernest L. Fortin, “St. Augustine,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Strauss and Cropsey, 177. Payton, Light from the Christian East, 55, writes that Augustine more than any other paved the way for Western Christianity’s acceptance of philosophy. However, while that may be true, he was preceded by many who also tried to make philosophy and Christianity friendly. They include Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. See ibid., 52.


and revelation.94 The summum bonum has had a salutary effect: philosophy has the capability of teaching political moderation. Expelling philosophy from the city, from humanity, would mean to exorcise moderation itself.95 Though the tension between reason and revelation cannot be resolved, classi-cal philosophy always had a dose of skepticism associated with it. The classical philosopher knows that he does not know. This skepticism not only provides a motive to pursue things the mind wonders about, but it also allows rev-elation to challenge philosophy.96 The converse is also true: since revelation may be misunderstood and turned into a convention-based extremism, the mind’s ability to know tempers the irrational expressions of the theologian.

The modern rejection of reason by the partisans of revelation was noted by Mark Noll in his work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Though he did not try to flesh out the reason for rejection of philosophy in many modern religious colleges, he understood the consequence: “the scandal of the evan-gelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”97 Evangelicals in particular played down the role of the intellect in favor of a narrow theology and fideism. As a result, they became at worst hostile to reason and the mind, at best suspicious of them. This led to a crisis in Christian formation of the person because the mind of the person was excluded. Ambassador Charles Habib Malik said at Wheaton College that “the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism.”98 Piety alone (reason alone) is insufficient and denies human beings a pivotal tool to order the soul. His remedy was for Christians to spend years poring over Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. According to Malik, the recovery of the Christian mind was the province of the American university.

His call was not heeded. Many evangelical colleges remained suspicious of philosophy and mistrusted reason’s ability to know. The rejection of philos-ophy, and hence man’s ability to reason, is, in essence, a misunderstanding of

94 Harry V. Jaffa, The American Founding as the Best Regime: The Bonding of Civil and Religious Liberty (Claremont, CA: Claremont Institute, 1990), 15–16, 20. For the importance of the gods to the ancient city, see Charles Kesler, Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 277, and of course, Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges, The Ancient City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 5. 95 There is a nice discussion of this in Ivan Kenneally, “The Use and Abuse of Utopianism: On Leo Strauss’s Philosophic Politics,” Perspectives on Political Science 36, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 146.96 Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 270. A nice summary is in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Nicgor-ski, editors’ introduction to Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, 11–12.97 Noll, Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 3.98 Charles Malik, “The Other Side of Evangelism,” Christianity Today, November 1980, 40.


reason’s ability to know. This development has led to anti-intellectualism. Phi-losophy has been replaced by activism, populism, and political pragmatism:

Evangelicals perceive moral vitality in terms of loyalty to various ideological positions and behavioral standards rather than as an imaginative endeavor to resolve social dilemmas or to discern ethical duties. Among modern evangelicals aesthetics run toward the com-mercial and pragmatic, as modern technology and media are embraced widely as tools of utility for worship and witness; they are far less con-cerned about philosophical and belletristic assessment. …Although evangelical churches have shed much of the separatist language of the fundamentalist past, sermons still routinely remind students of the dangerous lure of culture, encouraging avoidance rather than engage-ment, and offering occasional jeremiads on the debilitating state of postmodernity. Quite often, discussions of morality in public life among evangelicals have been captive to partisan politics, which often discourage students from thinking beyond conventional rhetoric about social problems and possible remedies.99

Those who fall short of God and seem threatening to the Christian commu-nity are labeled un-Godly. This development is partly the result of pietism, which has the tendency to move arguments from the complex to the simple. Thus, the spiritual and individual relationship with God is demoted to mere personal association. Evangelical colleges emphasize simplicity and inspi-ration. Scripture alone is the goal of learning, and that makes them more seminaries, or theology schools, than colleges. Because they teach that scrip-ture is inerrant, nothing but the consistent proof-texting will suffice. Yet they cannot hope to influence the culture when they despise the very culture they escaped from when entering the school. Malik asserted that the mind is the tool of evangelization. In order to evangelize, a person must make arguments and persuade, which is a province of the mind.

The perplexing problem with this brand of religious education is that human beings have a mind. It must be used properly if we are to find the truth of things. We are living according to nature if we are using our mind. First principles may be lost if we are not reasoning rightly, or not reasoning at all:

Each man can judge competently the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge. Accordingly, a good judge in each particular field is one who has been trained in it, and a good judge in general, a man who has received an all-around schooling. For that reason, a young man is

99 Douglas V. Henry and Michael D. Beaty, eds., Christianity and the Soul of the University (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 146. See also ibid., 40, 46, 47; Henry Lee Poe, Christianity in the Academy (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 7; Newman, Idea of a University, xxii.


not equipped to be a student of politics; for he has no experience in the actions which life demands of him, and these actions form the basis and subject matter of the discussion. Moreover since he follows his emotions, his study will be pointless and unprofitable. Whether he is young in years or immature in character makes no difference; for his deficiency is not a matter of time but of living and pursuing all his inter-ests under the influence of his emotions. Knowledge brings no benefit to this kind of person, just as it brings none to the morally weak.100

These principles apply to all men, believer and unbeliever. What is, and what is not, is something accessible to us all:

Socrates: Since knowledge depended on what is and ignorance neces-sarily on what is not, mustn’t we also seek something between ignorance and knowledge that depends on that which is in between, if there is in fact any such thing?

Glaucon: Most certainly.Socrates: Do we say opinion is something?Glaucon: Of course.Socrates: A power different from knowledge or the same?Glaucon: Different.Socrates: Then opinion is dependent on one thing and knowledge on

another, each according to its own power.Glaucon: That’s so.Socrates: Doesn’t knowledge naturally depend on what is, to know of

what is that it is and how it is?101

Man’s reasoning capabilities make him able to come together, to congregate, and to pursue noble ends. According to Cicero, the “learning of truth most closely relates to human nature. For all of us feel the pull that leads us to desire to learn and to know; we think it a fine thing to excel in this, while considering it bad and dishonorable to stumble, to wander, to be ignorant, to be deceived.”102

Part of the reason early Christian colleges collapsed was that they refused to tolerate philosophy. This conflict led to ecclesiastical conflict and division. Marsden describes this conflict aptly:

100 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New York: MacMillan, 1986), 5–6. See also James V. Schall, A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000), 2, 11.101 Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 157 (names of interlocutors added). 102 Cicero, On Duties, ed M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 8; Newman, Idea of a University, 78–79.


In each case there was an assumption that classical learning could be made subservient to the cause of Christ. The resulting tension was, in other words, inherent even in the most successful efforts at maintaining fully Christian learning while still doing justice to pagan science. …Even though pagan shortcomings on matters pertaining to salvation were often cited, much of pagan thought that implicitly challenged Christian first principles was nonetheless revered. Thus a balancing act was maintained between a strict biblicism and openness to recognizing that mundane aspects of God’s truth were revealed in nature or the created order, and therefore could be learned from non-biblical sources.103

The Puritan, or religious, answer to this was to approach higher education more or less as a theological school. Kronman rightly notes the decline of higher education in this regard. Religious schools declined, paving the way for the rise of secular humanism. He believes that it is not enough for a stu-dent to know about Plato, but that a student must choose between Plato and anyone else. In a debate between Plato and Nietzsche, students must endorse a position and take a side, and if neither position, the student must articulate which position is most persuasive. Secular humanism makes it possible to explore the meaning of life in a deliberate fashion, and this may be done without a religious foundation. The decline of religious foundations of the university allowed secular humanism room to flourish, but Kronman asserts that the antebellum college never had to address the problems associated with a declining religious faith. Religion in that era answered unequivocally the question of the ends of life:

Secular humanism neither reaffirmed the religious dogmas of the old order nor embraced the most radical doubts of the new one. It refused to endorse the idea that human life has meaning only in a world cre-ated by God and directed toward His ends. But it also rejected the notion that we are able to create for ourselves, as individuals, whatever structures of meaning our lives require in order to have purpose and value. Instead, it emphasized our dependence on structures of value larger and more lasting than those that any individual can create. It stressed the need for individuals to locate themselves within these structures as a condition of their leading purposeful lives. This much secular humanism shared with the religious outlook of the old-time college. But it did not insist that these structures be eternal, like the ideas in God’s mind. It accepted their mortality, and ability to decay, requiring only that they have a longer life than the lives of the indi-viduals who are born into them and die out of them, one by one.104

103 Marsden, Soul of the American University, 43.104 Kronman, Education’s End, 81; see also 69, 74–76.


According to the author, from 1869 to 1968 secular humanism was able to do just that. It reinforced the idea that the meaning of life could be taught. One problem with Kronman’s thesis is that, as noted above, the colleges at the time of the American Revolution allowed a space for philosophy beside theology. Kronman seems to miss the moderating effects of the American Revolu-tion on colleges. He also shares a thesis with Bloom. Kronman believes that we need more doubt in society because people have a certainty stemming from political correctness. On the surface, Bloom disagrees: he asserts that all modern students are relativists. However, Bloom disdains their certainty because students are certain in their relativism. The relativism that Bloom rejects has been transformed into political correctness—certainty in the political correctness of one’s own faction.

When people meet as representatives of a certain group, they are not interested in dialogue. Truth is lost in the dogma of the group. For college to be productive students must be free to participate as individual human beings. If they are going to be personally engaged in the material, they must be free to enter the conversation. College is a quest for truth, not a crusade.105 According to Kronman, students must be open to the idea that their opinions could be wrong, and that other students may change their mind. Kronman asserts that the “restoration of the humanities to a position of authority in our colleges and universities is a matter of signal importance. …The tradition of secular humanism must be reclaimed.”106 He prefers secular humanism because it is pluralistic and more open than the antebellum college. He likes the skepticism that undermines theological certitude even as he appreciates the theological contributions of Augustine to the discussion on the mean-ing of life.107 Yet in this sense, Kronman is no different from Bloom: “liberal education flourished when it prepared the way for the discussion of a uni-fied view of nature and man’s place in it, which the best minds debated on the highest level. It decayed when what lay beyond it were only specialties, the premises of which do not lead to any such vision.”108 Both Bloom and Kronman want to decrease the importance of theology in the academy and, further, political life.

105 Harry Neumann, “Teachers or Propagandists? A Note on the Decline of Academic Freedom,” Religious Humanism 4 (1970): 125.106 Kronman, Education’s End, 203. See also Neumann, “Teachers or Propagandists?,” 125. 107 Kronman, Education’s End, 121–22.108 Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 346–47.


Encouraging this debate within the halls of academia should be a desired goal—providing a space for each to exist:

No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian, nor, for that matter, some possibility which transcends the conflict between philosophy and theology, or pretends to be a synthesis of both. But every one of us can be and ought to be either one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy.109

Kronman’s remedy is incomplete even though he is correct that the reason parents sent their children to college was that these august institutions claimed to be an authority on life’s meaning. There were moral and spiritual benefits to higher education. Certainly, the intellectual life can be a comple-ment to the moral and religious life. When St. Paul addressed the Stoics and Epicureans in the Areopagus, he dealt with philosophical and religious issues that Athenians understood. The apostle spoke in a way and in terms that the pagans understood.110 Kronman’s position is therefore limited. The way to revive liberal education is to revive the dialogue between Jerusalem and Athens.

109 Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 270.110 Kronman, Education’s End, 196–97; Newman, Idea of a University, xxiii; Poe, Christianity in the Academy, 22. Poe goes on to lament that Christians are called to the marketplace of ideas to propagate the Truth of salvation, but that pastors have been wont to say that St. Paul was wrong (sinned?) to converse with philosophers on their own turf. See ibid., 25–26.

Liberal Education Imperiled: Toward a Resurrection of Reason and Revelation in Higher Education

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