We are familiar enough with the major categories of the humanities as they are taught in secular universities — history and anthropology, literature and philosophy — as well as with the sorts of examination questions they produce: Who were the Carolingians? Where did phenomenology originate? What did Emerson want? We know too that this scheme leaves the emotional aspects of our characters to develop spontaneously, or at the very least in private, perhaps when we are with our families or out on solitary walks in the countryside.
In contrast, Christianity concerns itself from the outset with the inner confused side of us, declaring that we are none of us born knowing how to live; we are by nature fragile and capricious, unempathetic and beset by fantasies of omnipotence, worlds away from being able to command even a modicum of the good sense and calm that secular education takes as the starting point for its own pedagogy.
Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name, which is not precisely intelligence or emotion, not character or personality, but another, even more abstract entity loosely connected with all of those and yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension — and to which we may as well refer, following Christian terminology, as the soul. It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our souls.
Throughout its history, Christianity indulged in lengthy debates as to the nature of the soul, speculating on what it might look like, where it might be located and how it might best be educated. In its origins, the soul was thought by theologians to resemble a miniature baby inserted by God into an infant’s mouth at the moment of his or her birth.
The baby inside us that we must educate. Receiving one’s souclass="underline" illumination from an early fifteenth-century Bible. (illustration credit 4.5)
At the other end of the individual’s life, at the moment of death, the soul-baby would then be expelled again through his or her mouth. The trajectory it was to follow would be more ambiguous this time: it would be either taken up by God or snatched away by the Devil, depending on how well or badly its owner had tended to it over the years. A good soul was one that had managed to find appropriate answers to the great questions and tensions of existence, a soul marked by such godly virtues as faith, hope, charity and love.
Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one — that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
By its own standards, Christianity therefore has no choice but to tilt its educational emphasis towards explicit questions: How can we manage to live together? How do we tolerate others’ faults? How can we accept our own limitations and assuage our anger? A degree of urgent didacticism is a requirement rather than an insult. The difference between Christian and secular education reveals itself with particular clarity in their respective characteristic modes of instruction: secular education delivers lectures, Christianity sermons. Expressed in terms of intent, we might say that one is concerned with imparting information, the other with changing our lives. Sermons by their very nature assume that their audiences are in important ways lost. The titles alone of the sermons by one of the most famous preachers of eighteenth-century England, John Wesley, show Christianity seeking to dispense practical advice about a range of the soul’s ordinary challenges: ‘On Being Kind’, ‘On Staying Obedient to Parents’, ‘On Visiting the Sick’, ‘On Caution Against Bigotry’. Unlikely though it seems that Wesley’s sermons could ever seduce atheists through their content, they nevertheless succeed, like any number of Christian texts, in categorizing knowledge under useful headings.
An illumination from an early-fifteenth-century Book of Hours, showing a soul which has recently emerged from a deceased man and is being fought over by the Devil and St Michael. (illustration credit 4.6)
While it was at first hoped by Arnold, Mill and others that universities could deliver secular sermons that would tell us how to avoid bigotry and find helpful things to say when visiting ill people, these centres of learning have never offered the kind of guidance that churches have focused on, from a belief that academia should refrain from making any associations between cultural works and individual sorrows. It would be a shocking affront to university etiquette to ask what Tess of the d’Urbervilles might usefully teach us about love, or to suggest that the novels of Henry James might be read with an eye to discovering parables about staying honest in a slippery mercantile world.
Yet a search for parables is precisely what lies at the heart of the Christian approach to texts. Wesley himself was a profoundly scholarly man in ways that the modern university would honour. He had an intimate textual knowledge of Leviticus and Matthew, Corinthians and Luke, but he quoted verses from these only when they could be integrated into a parabolic structure and used to leaven the hardships of his listeners. Like all Christian sermonizers, he looked to culture principally as a tool, asking of any biblical passage what general rules of conduct it could exemplify and promote.
Teaching wisdom rather than knowledge: John Wesley, a sermon outdoors in York, 1746. (illustration credit 4.7)
In the secular sphere, we may well be reading the right books, but we too often fail to ask direct questions of them, declining to advance sufficiently vulgar, neo-religious enquiries because we are embarrassed to admit to the true nature of our inner needs. We are fatefully in love with ambiguity, uncritical of the Modernist doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to change its audience. Our resistance to a parabolic methodology stems from a confused distaste for utility, didacticism and simplicity, and from an unquestioned assumption that anything a child could understand must of necessity be infantile in nature.
Yet Christianity holds that, despite outward appearances, important parts of us retain the elemental structures of earliest childhood. Just like children, therefore, we need assistance. Knowledge must be fed to us slowly and carefully, like food cut into manageable bites. Any more than a few lessons in a day will exhaust us unduly. Twelve lines of Deuteronomy may be enough, for instance, along with a few explanatory notes which point out in plain language what there is for us to notice and to feel therein.
The techniques that the academy so fears — the emphasis on the connection between abstract ideas and our own lives, the lucid interpretation of texts, the preference for extracts over wholes — have always been the methods of religions, which had to wrestle, centuries before the invention of television, with the challenge of how to render ideas vivid and pertinent to impatient and distracted audiences. They have realized all along that the greatest danger they faced was not the oversimplification of concepts but the erosion of interest and support through incomprehension and apathy. They recognized that clarity preserves rather than undermines ideas, for it creates a base upon which the intellectual labour of an elite can subsequently rest. Christianity was confident that its precepts were robust enough to be understood at a variety of levels, that they could be presented in the form of crude woodcuts to the yeomen of the parish church or discussed in Latin by theologians at the University of Bologna, and that each iteration would endorse and reinforce the others.