Dear Professor S-------,
I write to you from the midpoint of a deployment to Japan (my second in as many years) and, oddly enough, on the eve of my 10-year high school reunion. That, coupled with the recent Programa 2010 I received in the mail, has whirled my thoughts back to my own years studying the Great Books. That it took six months to arrive at my deployed location in rural Iwakuni is a testament to the vicissitudes of military life as well as a sort of metaphor for the long road I have taken from room 215 in O'Shaugnhessy Hall on Notre Dame's beautiful campus.
You must excuse me if I am a little nostalgic for those two old PLS classrooms on the second floor of that stuffy, grey-bricked and yellow-tiled building. It was always my favorite building on Notre Dame's campus, I confess—the discordant steps one had to take from the soaring, stained-glass-lit entryway into the crowded industrial hallways littered with flyers always seemed to me the soul of college. Whether students and professors entered the central-heating gratefully brushing snow or rain from coats or mildly regretting their exit from fall or spring splendor, the workmanlike intimacy of coffee shop and classrooms, small desks and big ideas never failed to inspire. And of course it was the big ideas that seduced me.
The interconnectedness of things and the efficacy of prayer are two concepts that have haunted me throughout my life, and I suffered just such a haunting upon opening the Programa. I re-read Moby Dick only weeks ago, wondering anew at Melville's fantastic story about seeking to appreciate, understand, and (in Ahab's case) arrogate the divine, only to find that the Cronin-award-winning essay was also about Moby Dick. I naturally read it through with pleasure, remembering quite well the quoted passages. A strange coincidence, no? I have marveled at similar coincidences since my memories began. And as before, this particular coincidence stirred in me memories and understandings long sifted to the bottom of my heart over the six intervening years that separated me from 215 O’Shaugnhessy.
I read with interested and excitement your Opening Charge. In my opinion the Program of Liberal Studies sets itself apart from any other university education not only by its strong and integrated academics (religiously integrated and substantively integrated, both of which you dwell on briefly in the Charge), but by its approach to the business of learning. There is an adage I learned from my parents that “anything worth doing is worth doing well,” which is a value often lost in an acquisitive and materialistic society. For legion students looking to be employable as they leave college, perhaps the nuance required in a genuine values-oriented struggle with their academics (whether the subject be an engineering problem, an accounting problem, or a literature problem) seems superfluous. If success in life is truly more “who you know” than “what you know,” the important thing is the actual degree and the contacts with which you graduate, not the transformation into an erect, thoughtful person offered by the university milieu (if I may borrow crudely the subject of Part I of your Charge). Anything worth doing is worth doing well, and to gather the community together for an "Opening Charge" to reinforce that not only are integrated academics worth doing on their own merits, but that they're worth doing well, is unusual and sustaining.
It surprised me to read that you began your advanced education in the fields of Evolution and Biology, since I made the mistake of many PLS students and assumed that all instructors were originally philosophy or literature professors. The passage from advanced knowledge to faith was well-charted in literature by C.S. Lewis, a favorite author of mine, and it seems to fit your own passage from ocean biology to philosophy and then to the Program in certain significant respects. I was lucky, however: I discovered that reason and faith were inseparable immediately after adolescence (or, in our world of lengthening youth, perhaps I mean “during late adolescence”) through the efforts of you and your fellow professors. The Thomistic concept of theology and natural science cordially and passionately exchanging knowledge each from within their own bounded spheres makes simple sense to me and seems to overlay neatly the entire discussion you bring up in the Charge of applying the principles of anatomical homology to behavior, intellect, and spirit. Casting the whole of human evolution as biomolecular processes, and applying that principle to human experiences, is certainly “a profound reductionism of the human to the animal.” The “striving upward” or “seeking upward” that is emphasized by your discussion of walking upright only confirms the conviction of our faith that we are ontologically different as human beings in our moral consciousness, our manipulation of environment to create symphonies and cathedrals, and our self-awareness to the point of death—we co-exist in a supernatural world wherein exist perfect values like Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Thanks to the Program and its professors that conviction was allowed to flower within me before it entirely withered before the hot air and cold reason of modern education.
Put simply, the Great Books education (and the points you draw in your Charge) introduced me formally to the concept of integrity, the idea that we are interconnected entities of soul and body, and that by extension our actions in all cases must reflect our values. We cannot, at our core, compartmentalize and yet still claim integrity. Integrity means whole-ness, or structural soundness. And if truth and righteousness are good things, as my convictions and reason tell me, then they must apply to my entire life; to except pieces here and there (like a literature class, or a military order, or a personal doubt) is to fail to be whole and complete. It was just such a clear and joint application of faith and reason that resulted in my discovery of my wife; the intellectual razor of integrity cut away all the festering crust of doubt and conventional wisdom to present for my wonderment the great love I conceived and yet hold for her. So also formed my certainty that the execution of my profession well was worth the long nights and great personal investment it requires. What the Program essentially taught me, and what your Opening Charge reinforces, has made it possible for me to become a person I value. I honestly don't think I would have had the spiritual wherewithal to become a Marine, an Aviator, a husband, or a man without being invited and encouraged to stand upright against the weight of the world, even if just for 20 hours a week during three years of my youth, by the Great Books. I said it before in an email to Professor F-------, and I don't think I could say it better to you: "I am lucky, really, to have discovered so early in my life that earnest truth-seeking and pursuing righteousness are more lasting values than success or pleasure."
You were my professor for more than a few classes, and you therein guided me through a good deal of the transformation wrought by PLS. You also occasionally appeared at the 5:15 daily Mass at the basilica, which impressed me nearly as much. Your Opening Charge brought me back with a wrench to that warm intellectual life of seminar and thought, which was well-exemplified by Mr. Benz' excellent essay on Moby Dick. The practical demands of today's military tasks, or today’s personal obligations, or the fact that today I am deployed away from wife and home can seem irresistibly heavy, but that I can bear them at all is due to the upright posture I learned through PLS—its integrated, rigorous academics and its cultivation of community alike. Thank you for your wonderful Opening Charge, and for everything else.
