On Teaching

From James Matthew Wilson's "On the Overweening Pride of the Professorial Class" in Crisis Magazine:

     The proper life of the scholar and the teacher is one of drawing together the wisdom of the past, of keeping it alive, of developing it where it can be developed, and of passing it on, from the hands of the old to those of the young, as a tradition and inheritance. It is fundamentally an activity of conservation and cultivation, edging forward while looking backward, so that the wisdom in one’s care will not be lost. Again, as a great inheritance, its content is like a precious treasure that we already love for its accumulated glory and which we wish to pass down intact in a decided act of piety, reverence, and love. 

         The research of the professor should therefore be dedicated primarily to keeping something alive rather than to adding something new. The new supervenes on its own, left to itself, simply because the loving contemplation of what is good will always be by its nature fruitful. That is just the way with goodness. For my part, I have found I am at my best as a scholar when I seek specifically not to claim anything new at all, but only to explain what is old, what I have received in the common tradition, in terms inevitably distinct, because spoken in a new moment, but always in continuity and indeed intimate contact with what has gone before.
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         The scholar of the Christian-Platonist tradition, whether in ancient Athens or medieval Paris understood himself not as in possession of knowledge but as standing before it in awe. Truth is one; reality constitutes a coherent whole; and all true education is a progress ever further into the depths of that whole. But, as we see in Plato and St. Augustine, for example, the philosopher is always the one who knows nothing. He knows he knows nothing, only because the truth is not his to possess, but rather is his to love. The true philosopher therefore looks on in perpetual wonder, staring into a truth that transcends us all, that is never to be comprehended, though our heart beats with intensity as we come within the corona of its beauty. The whole truth lies not in the mind, but rather the mind comes to rest in the truth.
          As the theologian John Cavadini argued in a lecture at my own university, some years ago, what is peculiar about modern inquiry is not that it is obsessed with a desire for new insight, but for the way it understands the nature of knowledge and the relation of the knower to the known. As my comments have already intimated, the ancient and medieval universities understood the cosmos, the whole of creation, as intrinsically wonderful. It was a cause of wonder, in itself, and also because of its origin as a gratuitous fruit of the generosity and love of God. To study nature was to sing the praises of the supernatural as one strolled down the road toward it. To study what was above nature—to contemplate God—was to enter in awe, wonder, and love, into perfectly intelligible mystery. Study was itself an act of devotion, a loving act where the mind comes to stand in intimate relation with that which is at one and the same time forever beyond it and always and already within it.