An Open Letter to Pope Benedict
by Anthony Esolen - April 14, 2008
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
Holy Father, welcome to my country. Your presence cheers thousands of us Catholic professors and students who love the Church and want her to be more of a presence in our lives at school. You will find more enthusiasm than suspicion among the young, who are coming to see that the secularism they have been taught deadens mind and heart.But many of their teachers will accuse you of coming to curtail the free play of reason in academic discourse, shutting it into the iron cages of dogma. So thieves are the first to appeal to the hallowed right to own property.
For American professors, like their European counterparts, have more or less abandoned not only faith, but reason too. They deny that reason can determine any truths beyond the quantitative and empirical. Such residual reason as they acknowledge can tell what tensile strength a buttress would require to hold up the wall of a cathedral, but it cannot tell why one should build that cathedral. It can tell how to feed a child; it cannot tell, without appealing to bald selfishness, why one should want a child to feed. At its most honest, it reduces human life to the satisfaction of appetite. "Nothing but food and sex," said a biology professor at my school, a college struggling, with some success, to remain Catholic and sane.
But man abhors an empty altar. Without faith, and with reason under house arrest, he turns to something else to serve. As you have written, the nearest and greatest idol is power. In my field of literary studies, "discourses of power" are de rigueur. Scholars of Shakespeare smile at the notion that the poet understood more about human nature than any artist who ever lived. Shakespeare thought he was writing about men and women, sin and redemption, justice and mercy, and, yes, legitimate political power and tyranny. But we see behind that screen to the Renaissance games of court power in which he was involved. Such studies, of some limited use, have conquered the rest and demand obeisance.
Our academy is its own caricature. In this regard, Catholic colleges are no different from any other. Rare are the professors of political science who doubt the competence of the state to cure the ills attendant upon man's avarice, pride, lust, and sloth. The god of power must be adored. Rare are the professors of sociology who will say that, without a common faith in things higher than gasoline, elections, and paychecks, no genuine community can exist, let alone stand against the ambitions of the state. Rare are the professors of Western literature, informed by the gospel of Christ, who dare to read A Christmas Carol and assert that a child, perhaps a child in a womb, is more important to the world than any king or queen – or a new car and a career.
But they who believe only in power are the last to be trusted with it. I will not delve into the shameful treatment of students and their parents as cash cows, or the passing of their instruction over to ill-paid assistants. The fascination with power has not just made our universities bad. It has perverted the very mission of a university, which is to engage the quest for truth.
When Diocletian sought to unify the fragmenting Roman Empire, he demanded that citizens submit to the cult of Rome and the emperor. They were to hail him as Dominus et Deus, Lord and God, prostrating themselves as they entered the royal presence. Now, Diocletian was a cultured and cynical man. He knew he was neither Lord nor God. But he also knew that apotheosized power can brook not the slightest breach. That is why, when the Christians refused to bow down before his idol, he persecuted them so mercilessly, and so publicly. The same dynamic, bloodless but culturally devastating, is at work now in the American university. If a college's mission is not determined by its reverence for objective truth, goodness, and beauty, the permitted speech of its professors will be uniform, cowed, and predictable. There is far more variety and boldness of thought in an American tavern than in an American classroom.
So you come, Holy Father, to bring not only the freedom of truth but the preparatory freedom of the quest for truth. Let the professoriate be honest here. Suppose an untenured professor were to say, boldly and publicly, "I believe that the so-called 'right to choose' is nothing but the expression of chaotic voluntarism, and even if it did not involve the murder of an unborn child I would oppose it." Or, "It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence." Or, "The 'society' of a man's house – a society limited indeed in numbers, but no less a true 'society' – is anterior to every kind of State or nation."
Depend upon it, it is not only those who publicly oppose abortion or same-sex marriage who could not be hired or would not be retained. Harvard would fire Edmund Burke. Georgetown would fire Leo XIII.
So do not be deceived, Holy Father. We have nothing like the University of Paris in the days of St. Thomas, when all questions might be put up for learned dispute. Stand up among ten or 20 professors for the competence of reason and the virtue of faith, and you will likely be the only one who actually believes in academic freedom.
Piety
But our loss of faith is the bad fruit of our loss of natural piety generally. It's not universal, but you will find that many professors undermine not only the Catholic faith, but the very possibility that a student might seek out the faith. They undermine piety.
The virtue I am speaking of is not the same as Christian faith. My finest teachers at college were taught by a man who had revolutionized the study of medieval English literature. He had paid close attention to the art of manuscript illuminations, stained-glass windows, and sculpture. He had read both the summae of the great theologians and such devotional manuals as The Cloud of Unknowing. He was steeped in the romances of France, England, Germany, and Italy. And he concluded that modern critics had misunderstood the rambunctious pilgrims on Chaucer's trip to Canterbury. He argued that you could not really read the Canterbury Tales without understanding the Christian symbolism and eschatology.
