On Teaching the Important Things

JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J.

If one of our main purposes in life is to become wise, to

understand the things that really matter, then we must
seek where these important things are taught.
http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/education/catholiccontributions/on-teaching-the-important-things.html

Not long ago, I was sent a review copy of the Bodley Head-Ignatius Press collection, A
Chesterton Anthology. [1] The first thing I read in the wonderful book was a 1910
Chesterton essay entitled What Is Right with the World? some of which I read aloud in a
medieval theory class I was teaching at the time. The passage I read began, It is at the
beginning that things are good, and not (as the more pallid progressives say) only at the
end.
But there was a passage in that same remarkable essay that I did not somehow read to
that class. Let me site it here:
Sincerely speaking, there are no uneducated men. They may escape the trivial
examinations, but not the tremendous examination of existence. The dependency of
infancy, the enjoyment of animals, the love of woman, and the fear of deaththese are more
frightful and more fixed than all conceivable forms of the cultivation of the mind. It is idle to
complain of schools and colleges being trivial. Schools and colleges must always be trivial.

In no case will a college ever teach the important things. For before a man is twenty, he has
always learned the important things. He has learned them right or wrong, and he has
learned them all alone. [2]
This is not, of course, common doctrine in our academia, where we like to think the highest
things are our private preserves.
And yet it is a sober testimony to the fact that what is of ultimate importance is often
disclosed to us through our parents, our localities, our churches, and our rooted openness
to the being, to the what is that stands before us wherever we are. Perhaps the most
satisfying doctrine in Aquinas, in this sense, is his bold affirmation that each of us has his
own intellect, complete in itself, looking out on a world none of us made, so that each of us
first begins to know what is not himself. Only having thus begun can we reflect on the
famous Socratic admonition to know thyself.
Leo Strauss often talked about the care with which we must talk earnestly about the highest
thingsbecause there are so few who seem willing to listen. Sooner or later we must come to
realize that most of the important things we do not in fact learn are not learned because we
choose not to learn them. At some point we must recognize that our own natural capacities
are not the real causes of our personal status before the highest things. And we cannot, at
times, but be conscious of the fact that we do not, often dare not, talk about the important
things.
In 1770, Boswell recorded this passage from Samuel Johnson on the occasion of the death
of Johnson's mother:
He [Johnson] lamented that all serious and religious conversation was banished from the
society of men, and yet great advantage might be derived from it. All acknowledged, he
said, what hardly anybody practiced, the obligation we were under of making the concerns
of eternity the governing principles of our lives. Every man, he observed, at least wishes for
retreat: he sees his expectations frustrated in the world, and begins to wean himself from it,
and to prepare for everlasting separation. [3]
Such are solemn words, fit for pubs and walks and other places where we engage in
serious conversation.
Universities, to be sure, are places where we can hear some questions formalized, refined
in a way we could never encounter otherwise. Yet modern universities seem more like
Socrates' democracy, where every possible opinion can be heard and no one, in principle,
is able to tell the outlandish from the commonplace, the odd from the sane. Such
universities where all opinion is created equal and departmentalized have gotten the think

tank, as it is called, a newer institution where more and more of real thought in our societies
seems to be taking place. When we are unable to take a stand because, in theory, no stand
can be taken, it is logical and inevitable that vital thought surfaces elsewhere. Some, like
Alasdair MacIntyre at the end of his famous After Virtue, even seem to hint that we need to
refound the monasteries. [4]
In a touching essay, Professor Ralph McInerny recalled listening as a young man to the last
lecture the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain gave one autumn night in 1958 at
the Moreau Seminary on the South Bend campus. Here is what McInernywhose book St.
Thomas Aquinas is a must (see Chapter 7), and whose novel The Noonday Devil a
delightsaid, reflecting on the event:
He [Maritain] was a saintly man. That is what I sensed as I scuffled through the leaves on
my way back from Maritain's last lecture at Moreau (later published as The Uses of
Philosophy). He loved the truth, but his purpose in life was not to win arguments. He
wanted to be wise. Such an odd ambition for a philosopher! He succeeded because he
prayed as well as he studied. [5]
This sort of experience is why we go to a university as young men and women; the chance
to find there, once or twice if we are lucky, a wise man to teach us, or at least to teach us
about the wise men and women who lived before our own lifetimes.
Many people no doubt, will talk to us, and the sum total of a year's worth of courses at the
average university campus may come closer to the Tower of Babel than to the Seat of
Wisdom. This is why we must somehow be rightly oriented to reality even before we arrive
at ivy-covered colleges and mega-universities, as Chesterton told us. Plato, in The
Republic, said much the same thing before him: ...when it comes to good things, no one is
satisfied with what is opined to be so but each seeks the things that are ...(505d).
In 1985, the philosopher Eric Voegelin died at Stanford University in California. Voegelin
was one of the most important thinkers of our time. In 1980, in Montreal, a book of his
conversations was published, as I have previously mentioned. In one of the lectures in this
book, he told his audience at the Thomas More Institute, speaking of his own students and
following Aristotle:
One should be aware that we always act as if we had an ultimate purpose in fact, as if our
life made some sort of sense. I find students frequently flabbergasted, especially those who
are agnostics, when I tell them that they all act, whether agnostics or not, as if they were
immortal! Only under the assumption of immortality, of fulfillment beyond life, is the
seriousness of action intelligible, which they actually put in their work and which has a
fulfillment nowhere in this life however long they may live. [6]

Rarely, I think, are we spoken to so seriously. Often we do not want to be addressed

because we sense where such conversation might lead us. And that brings us back to the
original discussion of beginnings found in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis.
As I shall mention often, I think that the most remarkable scenes in pure philosophy, those
in Plato, have to do with young students instinctively gathering around Socrates, the
philosopher, hardly knowing why, to listen to penetrating philosophical doctrines spoken
and lived. Most young philosophers began in the curiosity and delight caused by hearing
their old professors and parents made fun of, little suspecting that each himself must
confront the issue of which Socrates and Voegelin spoke.
And this brings me back to Chestertonto the idea that before we are twenty we have
learned the important things. We have learned them right or wrong, and we have learned
them alone. The tremendous examination of existence, as Chesterton called it, will not be
based on whether we have been to college, but on whether we seriously, yet in good
humor, confronted in our lives the highest things. St. Paul intimated, in a famous passage,
that learning could easily deflect us into foolishness, even if we be, perhaps especially if we
be, professional philosophers (I Cor I:18-24).
Our purpose in life is indeed not to win arguments, but to be wise. For this latter, we cannot
neglect study or prayer, or especially that openness to existence about which we must
learn even if we learn nothing else, or even if we learn all else. We must seek out where
the important things are taught if the seriousness of action is to be intelligible, however long
we may live.
My last words here are again those of Chesterton: The ordinary modern progressive
position is that this is a bad universe, but it will certainly get better. I say it is certainly a
good universe, even if it gets worse... We are to regard existence as a raid or great
adventure... The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive.
Living is dangerous, I might add, not because we have been given the chance to fail, but
because we have been given the chance to see that in the beginning, all things were good
and we did not notice.

Endnotes:
1.

G.K. Chesterton, A Chesterton Anthology, ed. P.J. Kavanaugh (San Francisco:

Ignatius Press 1985). Another new collection of Chesterton is As I Was Saying: A
Chesterton Anthology, ed. Robert Knille (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985). Another
useful collection of G.K.C. quotations is The Quotable Chesterton, ed. George Marlin,
Richard P. Rabatin, and John L. Swan (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986). Back to text.

2.

Chesterton, A Chesterton Anthology, p. 344. Back to text.

3.

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. I (London: Oxford, 1931), p.
418.Back to text.

4.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1981), p. 245. Back to text.

5.

Ralph McInerny, Notre Dame Magazine, summer 1985. Back to text.

6.

Voegelin, Conversations, p. 6. Back to text.

Three books on education

1. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University.
2. Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education.
3. Jacques Maritain, The Education of Man: The Educational Philosophy of Jacques
Maritain.

Four books on philosophy and literature by Marion Montgomery

1. Reflective Journey toward Order: Essays on Dante, Wordsworth, Eliot, and Others.
2. Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed Home.
3. Why Poe Drank Liquor.
4. Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy.

Eight books on Christianity and political thought I

1. Jacques Maritain, Man and the State.
2. Charles N.R. McCoy, The Structure of Political Thought.
3. Heinrich Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought.
4. Rodger Charles, The Social Teaching of Vatican II.
5. John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths.
6. Thomas Molnar, Politics and the State.
7. Yves Simon, The Philosophy of Democratic Government.
8. Glenn Tinder, Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions.