Liberal Arts, Fr John Courtney Murray, & an Augustinian Prayer

The greatest shortcoming of most attempts at liberal education today, with their individualized, unfocused, and scattered curricula, is their failure to enhance the students’ understanding of their role as free citizens of a free society and the responsibilities it entails. Every successful civilization must possess a means for passing on its basic values to each generation. When it no longer does so, its days are numbered.

Whatever the formal religious attachments of our students may be, I find that a firm belief in the traditional values and the ability to understand and the willingness to defend them are rare. Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values.

I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness, as though not only the students but also the world was born yesterday, a feeling that they are attached to the society in which they live only incidentally and accidentally. Having little or no sense of the human experience through the ages, of what has been tried, of what has succeeded and what has failed, of what is the price of cherishing some values as opposed to others, or of how values relate to one another, they leap from acting as though anything is possible, without cost, to despairing that nothing is possible. They are inclined to see other people’s values as mere prejudices, one no better than another, while viewing their own as entirely valid, for they see themselves as autonomous entities entitled to be free from interference by society and from obligation to it.

Aristotle rightly observed that, in matters other than scientific, people learn best not by precept but by example. Let me conclude, therefore, by making it clear that the colleges who claim to offer a liberal education today and tomorrow must make their commitment to freedom clear by their actions. To a university, even more than to other institutions in a free society, the right of free speech, the free exchange of ideas, the presentation of a variety of opinions, especially of unpopular points of view, the freedom to move about and make use of public facilities without interference, are vital. Discussion, argument, and persuasion are the devices appropriate to the life of the mind, not selective exclusion, suppression, obstruction, and intimidation. Yet in my time our colleges and universities have often seen speakers shouted down or prevented from speaking, buildings forcibly occupied and access to them denied, different modes of intimidation employed with much success. Most of the time the perpetrators have gone unpunished in any significant way. These assaults typically have come from just one section of opinion, and they have been very successful. Over the years few advocates of views that challenge the campus consensus have been invited, and fewer still, sometimes victims of such behavior, have come. Colleges and universities that permit such attacks on freedom and take no firm and effective action to deter and punish those who carry them out sabotage the most basic educational freedoms. Yet to defend those freedoms is the first obligation of anyone who claims to engage in liberal education.

the Christian educational ideal and program is incarnate in the Christ of Chalcedon, who is both God and man and One.

And in the light of its inspiration the ideal itself emerges instantly; the Christian educator has to cooperate with the Spirit of Christ in fashioning a human personality whose life will be both divine and human and one. That is by definition the Christian humanist: the man who, in the image of Christ, respects and develops in himself the two natures, divine and human, and who makes of them a unity.

To the production of Christian humanists the whole of Christian education is directed. In initiating the process, the Christian educator takes into his hands a human personality that is baptized. He must visualize it as a unity; its two aspects, human and baptized, cannot be separated. And his aim is simple in itself, but enormously complex in its achievement. First, he has to assist the grace of baptism, the grace of likeness to Christ, to achieve its own intrinsic finality, the union of this whole personality with God, the transformation of its whole being into that of a child of God, the catching up of all its life in to the life-stream of the Son of God, Christ Jesus, that in Him it may set solely toward the Father.

Secondly, he has to assist this particular bit of humanity realize its uniquely human self in its full, divinely-planned beauty, that it may be a fit vessel of divinity. For it is not to offer to the divinizing action of the Holy Spirit a humanity that is empty, impoverished, discolored.

Finally, he has to assist this human personality in what is unquestionably its most difficult task, the joining of the two elements of its life into an organic unity, into one life, that is humanly divine and divinely human.

Thee do I invoke, God, Truth, in whom and by whom and through whom are all things true which are true; God, Wisdom, in whom and by whom and through whom are all wise who are wise; God, true and perfect Life, in whom and by whom and through whom those live who do truly and perfectly live; God, Blessedness, in whom and by whom and through whom are all blessed who are blessed; God, the Good and the Beautiful, in whom and by whom and through whom are all things good and beautiful, which are good and beautiful; God, Intelligible Light, in whom and by whom and through whom all shine intelligibly, who do intelligibly shine; God, whose kingdom is that whole realm unknown to sense; God, from whose kingdom law for even these lower realms is derived; God, from whom to turn is to fall; to whom to turn is to rise; in whom to abide is to stand; God, from whom to go out is to waste away; unto whom to return is to revive; in whom to dwell is to live; God, whom no one, unless deceived, loses; whom no one, unless admonished, seeks; whom no one, unless purified, finds; God, whom to abandon is to perish; whom to long for is to love; whom to see is to possess; God, to whom Faith excites, Hope uplifts, Love joins; God, through whom we overcome the enemy, Thee do I supplicate!