By Pauper Peregrinus

What should Christians study? The question has exercised many great minds down the years. No one doubts, of course, that it is good to study sacred scripture, and what is called “divine science.” But how much time or energy should we give to human culture: for example, to philosophy, history, mathematics, and the various sciences of nature, to literature and the other fine arts? Can we justify giving them any of our precious time on earth?

The problem is a real one. St. Augustine expressed it with his usual acuity in his work On Christian Doctrine. “Suppose,” he wrote, “that we were wanderers in a strange country, and could not live happily away from our homeland, and so, wishing to put an end to our misery, we decided to return home. We find, though, that we must make use of some mode of conveyance, either by land or water, to reach that homeland where our happiness is to begin. But the beauty of the country through which we pass, and the very pleasure of the motion, delight our minds, and so, turning these things that we ought to use into objects of enjoyment, we grow unwilling to hasten onward to our journey’s end.” Such, he adds, is in fact the state of man on earth.

In other words, by studying earthly things, and discovering their beauties, we may find our desire for heavenly ones beginning to cool. “A man is never so well,” noted the bishop of Hippo, “as when his whole life is a journey toward the unchangeable life, and his affections are entirely fixed upon that.” His older contemporary St. Jerome experienced this problem as a young man, when he felt torn between his love for Cicero and Virgil, and his love for the psalms.

Accordingly, St. Augustine is cautious about studying created things, beyond the little science and history that will help us understand the bible, and enough logic so that we may think straight. True, he does not forbid us to go further: but he is afraid that even “studious and able young men, who fear God and are seeking for the blessed life” tend to throw themselves into their secular studies unduly. Some of the better pagan philosophers, he allows, said some noble things, which Christian converts have done well to bring into the Church, rather as the Israelites brought the gold and silver out of Egypt. Yet he adds that these same truths are found in a simpler and sublimer form in the Scriptures, and without admixture of error. We may wonder, then, why anyone should bother reading Plato and Aristotle, who already has the gospels and St. Paul.

Another 4th-century saint, Basil the Great, may be able to help us. This Cappadocian bishop once gave a talk to schoolboys on how and why to read books by pagans, and happily, his words have been preserved. The very fact that the Church’s scriptures are divine, he told them, means that we need to be in good spiritual shape to read them well. Just as gymnastics and even dancing forms the muscles that a soldier will later use in battle, and just as dyers must prepare the cloth before they add the dye, so boys should train their minds by reading poets, historians and orators. Of course, the Christian lad must steer clear of anything obscene, and “close his ears to songs that corrupt the mind.” But if they begin by studying whatever is best in human wisdom, “in which we perceive the truth as it were in shadows and in mirrors,” they will be more ready in due time to understand the word of God (Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature).

St. Basil is generous in speaking about the authors of the past who lacked the light of revelation. He knows people who hold that all the poetry of Homer tends to the praise of virtue, and he feels no need to contradict them: though he would add that it is natural and not Christian virtue that is in question. All the same, we should remember that it was youths and not grown men to whom the saint was speaking. We can hardly say that he was encouraging them to pursue what would today be called a literary or academic career.

A far more recent writer who grappled with similar questions was Clive Staples Lewis. In 1940, as the bombs were falling on England, he wrote a little-known but fascinating essay called “Christianity and Culture” (it can be found in a modern anthology of his writings entitled Faith, Christianity and the Church). His problem, he says, is this: to be cultured does not make us more pleasing to God. So how can he, Lewis, justify spending as much time and effort as he does on studying poetry, plays and novels? More generally, how can there be such a thing as a “liberal education”: how can any knowledge be worth pursuing for its own sake, if it is not such knowledge as we have been put on earth to acquire?

Lewis knows of no one who has faced the problem as squarely as John Henry Newman—now canonized—in his 19th-century lectures on The Idea of a University. “No one ever insisted so eloquently as Newman on the beauty of culture for its own sake, and no one ever so sternly resisted the temptation to confuse it with things spiritual.” Newman’s solution was to point out that every kind of thing has its proper perfection. The perfection of the intellect is not that of the will. The will is perfected by charity, the intellect by knowledge. While only the former kind of perfection prepares us for a happy eternity, the latter is a perfection nonetheless, and therefore worth pursuing. For “we attain to heaven by using this world well, though it is to pass away” (Discourse 5, “Knowledge its Own End”).

Lewis, however, professes himself dissatisfied with Newman’s answer. Granted, a liberal education may perfect my mind, as a course of weight-lifting may perfect my body, but does either of them perfect me? Having a well-stocked mind and a discriminating taste, and having a perfectly-honed physique, are both of them quite compatible with going to hell. So, can Lewis be serving God by dedicating himself to something, culture, that has no eternal value?

He considers the suggestion that there may be a moral duty to perfect even the non-moral parts of ourselves, such as the intellect and the body. He finds this implausible, given that Scripture and tradition do not seem to speak of one (those of us who are not given to frequenting gyms may find this reassuring.) He therefore suggests a humbler answer, in two parts. First of all, there is an existing demand for culture, and culture is not intrinsically bad, and it can afford innocent pleasures that divert men from sinful ones. Hence it seems that one may legitimately become a “culture-seller”—under which slightly ironical designation he includes teachers of English literature such as himself.

Secondly, while literature as a whole tends to promote not Christian but sub-Christian values, these values sometimes occupy the highest rank among merely natural ones: he mentions honor, romantic love, the contemplation of something divine in creation, and Sehnsucht, or the longing for some indefinable happiness. While it would be a mistake for the Christian to immerse himself in such sentiments, since he has got beyond them, they may aid the conversion of someone coming from a merely brutal or self-satisfied kind of life. It would make the “perfected Christian” worse, Lewis holds, to take any merely natural ideal as his inspiration, yet “to the man coming up from below, the ideal of knighthood may prove a schoolmaster to the ideal of martyrdom.” He sums up his thought in a fine aphorism: “Any road out of Jerusalem must also be a road into Jerusalem.”

Where does all this leave us? Lewis’s justification of his trade is convincing enough. Even were the arts no more than a form of play, human beings need some “deeds or words in which nothing is sought save mental delight,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, as providing a kind of rest for their mind. But in fact, as both Lewis and St. Basil suggest, culture is also a kind of milk, preparing weak souls for some more substantial food.

For Newman, too, there is much to be said. The intellect is man’s highest power, and it is perfected, says the angelic doctor, by every necessary truth. Therefore, provided we are always aiming above all at eternal life, we are pleasing God by cultivating it. Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, says St. Paul, whatsoever lovely, if there be any virtue, think on these things (Phil. 4:8).

Yet the doubts of St. Augustine abide. Fallen man will always be trying to turn the hierarchy of values upside-down. Studiousness is a virtue, but what the medievals called curiositas is a vice, and we had better learn to mortify our passion for learning as we do our other passions. And the closer we come to that eternal country of which the bishop of Hippo spoke, the less, I think, we shall want to spend our time on any human culture, however noble: for now we know in part … but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.

TITLE IMAGE: St. Jerome in His Study, by a follower of Joos van Cleve, 16th or 17th century.