Author Archives: Andrew Beer

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Several months ago I was contacted by a writer working on a piece about Catholic Great Books schools. My answers didn’t make the cut for the piece—possibly because I sent them too late. Not having anywhere else to send them, I post them here:

Why study the Great Books? Don’t more modern books have more to say to contemporary readers?

I like the answer Prof. Alan Jacobs gives in his recent book, Breaking Bread with the Dead. Studying great works of art is “our chief means of breaking bread with the dead”. That’s a quote from the poet W. H. Auden. The full quote, from a lecture Auden gave in 1967, goes: “Let us remember that though the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.” Studying great books is valuable because it makes us companions to the dead. It introduces us to their company. And sharing company with the dead enlarges us as human beings. It enables us to live a more complete, more generous, more humane kind of life. It also makes us more resistant to the blooming and buzzing confusion of present ephemera. We find a secure standpoint. We can take a broader view. We can stop, and think.

What is it about Christendom College’s Great Books program that speaks to this?

I can see why you might call our college a great books program—we certainly have a lot in common with such programs—but I like to say that we’re a Catholic—Liberal Arts—College—and that each of those three elements is important.

First, being Catholic means enjoying a special kind of membership—in the sense of being a member of a body. Being a Catholic, or simply a Christian, is to be a member of the Mystical Body of Christ—a communion that transcends the bounds of time and space and so already realizes the kind of communion with the dead that makes a fully human life possible.

But we are a special kind of Christian community. We’re different in important ways from a parish church or religious community. St. Paul writes to the Philippians: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Think about these things. Thinking about what is true, honorable, just, etc. is the special vocation of a Christian liberal arts college. But to carry out that vocation, we need help—not just from teachers and colleagues, but from the dead who lived this same kind of life before us. The life of liberal learning is deeply traditional. But we should remember that tradition means “to hand on”. We first receive ways of thinking about what it means to be a human being—these are the different liberal arts—and by pursuing those ways of thought with others, we hand on what we have received. And so, St. Paul continues to the Philippians: “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.”

Finally, we are a college. Our entire focus is upon the education of young men and women seeking a bachelor’s degree in a particular liberal art, while completing a core curriculum that introduces them to the diversity and unity of the various forms of liberal learning—the various ways of breaking bread with the dead. Every member of our body is engaged in this common pursuit. We are a company of fellow learners engaged in a distinctive kind of communion with the dead—and moved by the good hope that someday others will likewise seek our company.

Josef Pieper:

What matters to us, beyond mere existence, is the explicit confirmation: It is good that you exist; how wonderful that you are! In other words, what we need over and above sheer existence is: to be loved by another person. That is an astonishing fact when we consider it closely. Being created by God actually does not suffice, it would seem; the fact of creation needs continuation and perfection by the creative power of human love.

On Love (in Faith, Hope, Love, Ignatius, p. 174)

Plato’s Theaetetus 167d:

καὶ γὰρ πολλὴ ἀλογία ἀρετῆς φάσκοντα ἐπιμελεῖσθαι μηδὲν ἀλλ᾽ ἢ ἀδικοῦντα ἐν λόγοις διατελεῖν.

“It is the height of unreasonableness that a person who professes to care for moral goodness should be consistently unjust in discussion.”

Translation by M. J. Levett

Jacques Maritain:

I am speaking here of Wisdom by mode of knowledge, Metaphysics and Theology. The Schoolmen distinguish a higher wisdom, wisdom by mode of inclination or of connaturality with divine things. This wisdom, which is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, does not stop with knowledge, but it knows in loving and in order to love. “The contemplation of the philosophers is for the perfection of the one who contemplates and consequently comes to a halt in the intellect: so that their end in this is the intellect’s knowledge. But the contemplation of the saints is for the love of the one who is contemplated, namely, God: wherefore it does not stop in the intellect’s knowledge as an ultimate end, but passes into the heart by love.” Albert the Great (Jean de Castel), De adhaerendo Deo, cap. IX (Lugdunensi, 1651, T. XXI).

Here is the statement which my wonderful wife read at Tuesday night’s meeting of the Warren County Board of Supervisors. I am posting it here for convenience of sharing and to acknowledge that I was one of the 42 signatories.

Dear Board of Supervisors,

We, as Catholic parents concerned for the good of the entire Warren County community, urge you to release all the funding designated in this year’s budget for Samuels Public Library.

We believe that the closure of the library, even if only temporary, would deprive the citizens of Warren County of a resource that is essential for our flourishing as a community.

While we can understand many of the concerns voiced by some of our fellow Warren County Catholics regarding the curation of the library collection, we believe that the library is taking appropriate actions to address these concerns.

We wish to express our esteem and gratitude for all the librarians, staff, and volunteers of Samuels Public Library. We value their work to make this vital service available to all the people of Warren County.

We urge you all to allow the library to continue serving our community without interruption.

Here is a link to the video of the statement.

Alan Jacobs on Albert Murray:

Long before Murray started writing for publication, he believed that the good times roll in response to suffering—that the suffering in a sense generates the good times. “What the customary blues-idiom dance movement reflects is a disposition to encounter obstacle after obstacle as a matter of course”—and something more than a matter of course. In “the blues tradition” we see “the candid acknowledgment and sober acceptance of adversity as an inescapable condition of human existence—and perhaps in consequence an affirmative disposition towards all obstacles, whether urban or rural, whether political or metaphysical.”

An affirmative disposition toward all obstacles—this is the blues idiom in a phrase. Resistance and affliction as the necessary engines of creativity

Sharon Rose Christner via Alan Jacobs:

This place, when the sun goes down, becomes the ancient version of its names. Clinico was once clinicus, sometimes meaning the bedridden one, sometimes the one tending the bed, derived from words for bed and stretching out. In English, too, clinic follows this path back to lying down. Ospedale was once hospitālis, “hospice, shelter, guesthouse,” from hospes (host, guest, stranger). English’s own hospital, from those same roots, first arrived in the 1300s as “a house or hostel for the reception and entertainment of pilgrims, travellers, and strangers” (Oxford English Dictionary). In the 1400s it grew to mean “a charitable institution for the housing and maintenance of the needy,” and only after this did it take on its medical connotation.

Always, these places have first meant a bed, a place to lie down at night. Long before fluorescent wards with tile floors, before anesthetic and billing and patient privacy and disinfectant, long before the concept of a germ, these places have meant refuge from the elements, and the uneasy navigations of host and guest and stranger. …

No, it is not ideal. Surely the best place for people to sleep is not the hospital floor, and surely their presence is not the best imaginable thing for the hospital. But mercy has never arisen from an ideal situation – it grows as a garden at the end of this long maze of non-ideals.

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