by Anthony Esolen
I am delighted to say that I will be joining the new Thales College, as a professor of humanities. What that means, I shall try to describe by way of contrast.
Let us suppose I am at almost any other American or Canadian college. I am considering Caravaggio’s painting of Mary Magdalen. Right there, I’m skating on thin ice. That isn’t just because the painting has a religious theme. It’s because I can depend upon almost nothing, among even the brightest college students, when it comes to knowledge of the history of art, or of the Renaissance in particular; no understanding of why such a painting was impossible to be executed two centuries before, or of why no one would have conceived the desire to paint such a figure, alone as she is, in a moment of intense introspection, careless of the baubles of her trade that lie scattered about her on the floor — baubles that yet have considerable dramatic power, because Caravaggio supposes that we know, as she does not, what they signify, and what momentous events are in store for her.
No, the students look at the painting with puzzlement and unease, as if it had come from an alien world. That unease is a short step away from a sort of willful boredom. And most other people, including their own professors, would be in a similar condition.
We have, I fear, fallen into a non-system of education that is analogous to dementia, and it is a dementia that reflects the disintegration of our current way of life and our scattershot patterns of thought. You cannot really appreciate the Caravaggio painting if you do not, so to speak, approach it from several angles at once, integrating into one ordered experience the knowledge you have gained from history, religious study, the arts, the momentous movement of the human mind that was in progress when Caravaggio painted, and the common and universal experience of man — his shame and his glory, his wandering and his return. The thing is, if you attempt to teach the Caravaggio painting as if it were only a matter of technical skill in oils, or only something he worked up to please his ecclesiastical patrons, you are treating of something that does not really exist. If you are teaching Homer’s Iliad as if it were a poem that fell from the sky, not an embodiment of the way of life that the Greeks were in the process of inventing even as the poet composed his song, you have but a piece of the thing, and you are likely to mistake what the thing is that you have got a piece of — in which case you may as well be said not to have the piece, either.
Not that you would stand out, among your fellows. What is most notable in political controversy in our time is a kind of pointillism, a failure not only to consider the many mutual relationships of one question or one arena of human life with another, but even to be aware that those relationships exist. A man in the fog of dementia may remember what a car is, and where Texas is, and that he once lived in Austin, but he cannot put the things together, and that means that he cannot really be said to have a grasp even of the things he does remember. We are, likewise, at best technicians with a single focus, and because truly human matters do not admit of such narrow treatment, we soon lapse into technical incompetence even so. We ask about debt as if it were a mathematical thing alone, and not related to culturally nourished virtues of frugality and thrift. We ask about marriage as if it had to do with the feelings of the couple alone, unrelated to those little creatures for whom man established marriage in the first place. We win battles and lose wars; and we proceed from there to organizing militarily correct battle plans but losing the battles we have planned. Imagine someone purporting to be a chess master, focusing only on the pawns. He is not good even at what he claims to be an expert in, as the pawns are pawns only in context of the whole.
The people at Thales College, though, have set themselves the task of reintegration. The head and the hand, so to speak, are to work together. Learning from the Iliad is not cordoned off from learning how to get on in the world of business, nor is the Iliad itself, if I may presume to speak as the new man on the team, to be cordoned off from learning about Greek art, politics, and philosophy. It is not a piece of a thing here, and another piece there; a department here, and a department there, and never the twain shall meet; political theory without the art that reveals man’s highest corporate aims; sociology without the biology that is every human society’s foundation; economics without the household for which economic activity exists. I am honored to be asked to contribute my experience to the enterprise, and I hope that some among my readers here will join us. It is more than desirable. It is absolutely necessary.
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Anthony Esolen is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College (Wake Forest, North Carolina). He is the author or translator of more than 30 books on literature, culture, education, and the Christian faith, including a three-volume translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House), Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Press), and, most recently, No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends Upon the Strength of Men (Regnery). He and his wife Debra produce the web magazine Word and Song, on language, poetry, classic films, hymns, and great popular music.
Photo “Thales College” by Thales College.
