When the Renaissance humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries pushed for a renewal of the classical studia humanitatis (i.e. grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy) in concert with Christian theology, they were met with significant opposition by educators long-steeped in the medieval scholastic pedagogy and Church theologians alike (e.g., Louvain divines).
Desiderius Erasmus set forth his manifesto for such a recovery in a work called, The Antibarbarians, a Platonic-styled dialogue in which a number of his friends gather in dutch garden at a country estate to discuss literature, theology, and the Republic of Letters.
By way of a monologue given by his chief interlocutor, Jacob Batt, Erasmus maps out the condition of the conflict and provides the world with a clear view of the battlefield they were facing. For Erasmus, the three enemies of Christian humanism were the destroyers, the reductionists, and the tyrants. I explore Batt’s monologue and give a brief overview of their enemies in this post.
If you’ve read my work for any length of time, then you’re likely aware that I too share a strong desire to once again recover such a Christian humanism for our day. And, it doesn’t take a whole lot of investigation to see we face enemies similar to those Erasmus and his contemporaries battled during the Renaissance. The recovery of a Christian humanism today will require the same faith, courage, and wisdom that was required of them.
In my last post, following Batt’s model, I addressed his first set of troublemakers, the destroyers. Masking their jealously and/or stupidity in some vague religious pretext, they attempt to eliminate the Republic of Letters root and branch.
In this post, I want to address the reductionists (Batt calls them limiters). These are the enemies who don’t feel the need to eliminate bonae litterae from our educational programs altogether. They just want to limit them significantly and subordinate what’s left to their own “superior,” skills-based curricula meant to prepare students for the job market.
The Reductionists (or Limiters)
This second enemy is much subtler, which makes them in some ways more troublesome. They are shifty and elusive—“more elusive than the Parthians, now saying yes and then no . . . like Proteus, / Into all kinds of wondrous shapes they change”—so that you can never pin them down on any thing. Batt calls them “the educated who are really uneducated, the people who somehow find other studies acceptable (that is, their own), but as for the humanities, without which all learning is blind, they hate them worse than a snake.”
Like Niethammer’s Philanthropinists, the limiters are arrogant. While advocating for sound “education,” they attempt to give students skills while downplaying and circumventing the humanities as an unnecessary waste of time. If they were truly educated, they would see there would be no literature without them.
When trying to imagine what this looks like, one might think of the disciples of John Dewey who misused his theory—that an emphasis on discussing careers with students would instigate a desire for learning—by truncating the discussion to mere utility (i.e., education is only about a career).
Enthralled with raw facts and hard information, like Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times, modern educators have mistaken a student’s ability to retrieve data for education’s real end of soul formation and wisdom cultivation. Their approach is, quite literally, human reductionism (i.e., the making of utilitarian consumer-cogs for the marketplace and state).
I also need to point out that the limiters are not only secular utilitarians. There is a Christian variety, which is more dangerous to our cause because these limiters speaks our language. The Christian reductionists confine the Christian mind, in Harry Blamires’s phrase, to “a very narrow field of thinking, chiefly touching questions of strictly personal conduct.”
One example comes from some anti-intellectual circles where there’s a tendency to absolutize the biblical vision for God’s glory. In this reductionist failure of thought, the redemption of man for the glory of God is often emphasized in such a way that man is portrayed as incidental to God’s plan. That is, salvation is only about God and his glory; thus, man remains, all his days on earth, a worthless worm with whom God merely tolerates. Learning is, therefore, vanity. Christian Humanists believe with Irenaeus, Gloria enim Dei vivens homo (“The glory of God is a living man”).
In other reductionist Christian thinking, man is an alien in this world who must separate from the culture, or stand over against it, while he waits for his ticket to heaven to be redeemed. Christian humanists believe Christ did not redeem humans so they could merely huddle and cuddle. We affirm that while redemption from our sins is more than we deserve, God also freely gives us with it abundant life (John 10:10). The humanities, after all, are known to cultivate human flourishing.
I would finally add that those of us in the classical renewal are not immune to reductionist thinking. Classical Christian Educators cannot simply aim at the low bar of “better democratic citizenship;” we must aim at the high bar of incarnational humanism. To put the matter in terms of C. S. Lewis’s acclaimed work, Mere Christianity: “Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.”
The Weapons of our Warfare
Our tools against the limiters are, most importantly, definitions. The word education is nearly as misunderstood as the word liberal because it is too often associated with job training, surprisingly even amongst many Christian parents and classical educators.
The English word education comes from the Latin, educere. Fr. James Schall points out that, “The word educere means to bring forth, or to complete something already begun by the very fact that one is a human being.” Cogs and consumers are only valuable until they are no longer useful, but human beings have intrinsic, sacred value.
Our strongest defense against the limiters is to make our definitions and meanings clear so liberal educators can’t help but recognize students have eternal souls.