Lighting a Fire: Education and Human Longing (Summer 2004)

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Fr. Dennis Gallagher, A.A. '69, Vice President for Mission

Lighting a Fire: Education and Human Longing (Summer 2004)

"The monk was not aware his cell was ‘uncomfortable.’ He might die of cold without letting that interrupt his prayer. There is no chance this will happen to modern man, whose first thought is to light a fire. Such is the modest exchange of priorities and the liberating deed of the modern experience, which, as it becomes widespread and sharper, makes all the elements of traditional life appear all the more subjected to a law contrary to nature.” (Pierre Manent, on Montesquieu, in The City of Man.)

Does Catholic liberal education belong among the elements of traditional life mentioned in this quotation from the contemporary political thinker Pierre Manent? If so, and if Manent is right, it may deserve a place on the endangered species list. If this sounds unduly alarmist, perhaps we could pose the question another way: Do we still have hope that liberal education has the capacity to raise students above the calculating and pedestrian tone of modern life?

The larger context for Manent’s observation is a new kind of social arrangement envisaged by the early modern political thinkers. This was a society aimed at securing one’s place in the world by gaining increasing control over nature and removing, as much as possible, the traditional sources of conflict within the social and political order. To those thinkers, we owe much of what we credit as the goods of the modern liberal regime: its peaceableness, its spirit of toleration, its respect for individual rights. But in order for the so-called modern project to succeed by maximizing the comforts of this life, it was thought necessary to seduce folks away from their eternal longings and to attenuate their attachment to any life beyond the present one. For all its benefits, such a regime tends to flatten human aspiration; in Nietzsche’s fine phrase; the tension in the bow has been relaxed, it has forgotten how to “whir.”

Catholic colleges such as Assumption stand at an important crossroads. If we are to fulfill our mission of keeping alive those longings for completion, which are never entirely expunged from the human heart, we cannot simply do the bidding of a political regime aimed at comfortable self-preservation. Our Augustinian and Assumptionist tradition gives us substantial resources to resist the flattening out of modern secular life. Should these be forgotten or neglected, we run the risk of becoming more a mirror of the Zeitgeist than a spirited alternative to it.