By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
John Senior and the Restoration of Realism by Fr. Francis Bethel, OSB. Thomas More College Press: Merrimack, NH: 2016; 452 pp.; $34.99. Available through Thomas More College Press, www.thomasmorecollegepress.com.
An inspiring, moving account of the life and thought of a great Catholic teacher and professor of literature who left a profound legacy upon his students in the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) at the University of Kansas during the 1970s, this rich, complete study of Senior’s vision and philosophy of education illuminates the Catholic worldview and philosophical foundations that informed his greatness.
Fr. Bethel’s book is a masterpiece: an honest, balanced, sensitive, and penetrating examination of a deeply human story filled with excitement, adventure, conversion, surprises, controversy, and wisdom.
As a young intellectual seeking more from life than bourgeois materialism, hedonistic pleasure, and superficial popular entertainments, Senior pondered the promise of Marxism and the lure of Eastern mysticism, only to be disenchanted by theories that distorted or reduced the nature of reality.
Both the crass materialism of Communist ideology and the escapist bent in the thought of the Eastern masters violated the realism of common sense and the self-evident truths of man’s physical and spiritual nature — the givenness of “the nature of things.”
Having encountered in his search for meaning the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, Senior encountered the philosophy of being that recognized in existence not only the fact that things are, but also that all things that have being also possess goodness, truth, and beauty; everything that has being also possesses goodness because God who is Absolute Goodness created all that is.
The visible, tangible world known by the five senses and the physical life experienced in the human body — the natural order of God’s creation — provide true knowledge that leads man to the heart of reality — the invisible things of God known by the things that are visible, in St. Paul’s phrase from Romans 1:20.
This philosophical doctrine called Thomistic realism not only rescued Senior’s mind from the labyrinth of doctrines and theories that failed to conform to the mind’s innate love of truth and desire for meaning, but also transformed his intellectual and spiritual life from materialist and mystic to Thomist and Catholic. “There is nothing in the intellect that does not first come through the senses,” Senior gleaned from his study of St. Thomas and Aristotle.
Good thinking derives from seeing, hearing, feeling, remembering, and experiencing the real world in all its richness, mystery, abundance, variety, wonder, and delight. “Glory be to God for dappled things,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in Pied Beauty. Everything that is, is good, beautiful, and true. Man is neither a soul imprisoned in a body he struggles to escape nor a body functioning without a soul or a conscience. As a union of body and soul, man lives an integrated life in which he relies on the senses, the emotions, the memory, and the will to comprehend the nature of things and be in tune with the world.
Appreciating the intrinsic goodness of God’s created world in all its variegated multiplicity and in its mysterious depths, Senior saw the great error of modernity (“The Perennial Heresy”), the worldview that Fr. Bethel summarizes in one sentence: “The fundamental heresy of our day is the denial of the natural order, of the very foundations of culture.”
Discovering the intrinsic goodness and providential design of the natural order through the notion of being, Senior saw reality in a new light foreign to the modern sensibility — as rich, full, overflowing, and teeming with riches of goodness, beauty, and wonder — not as material to be subjected to the scientific method for analysis or merely understood empirically but as the handiwork of God the artist.
Thus in his teaching Senior identified the problem of modern education as man’s disconnectedness from the natural order. Without the clear perception of the real world through the senses, the life of the body, and the taste of life’s sweetest, simplest, and most wholesome pleasures, the young — jaded and bored — turn to alcohol, drugs, and “the superficial life of paltry pleasures” Fr. Bethel identifies as the opposite of what they learned in Senior’s classes: “looking at the stars, as if for the first time, learning poetry, singing Burns and Foster songs together and waltzing.”
With two other great teachers who shared Senior’s sacramental view of the world, Professors Dennis Quinn and Franklyn Nelick, the trio founded the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program designed to awaken and sensitize college students to the goodness of the natural order they never discovered or knew existed.
Just as it is possible to have eyes that do not see, it is possible to have minds that do not think. Teaching the great books of Western civilization in a two-year sequence of classes in a style known as “the poetic mode,” the teachers introduced young minds to the classics, “the best that has been known and thought,” in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase.
They presented literature as a body of traditional, timeless wisdom — a Perennial Philosophy — that illuminated for young minds the highest ideals of civilization they did not see in the popular culture that immersed them — noble, knightly, chivalric ideals like magnanimity, courtesy, and honor they discovered in figures like Don Quixote or Sir Roland.
In eighty-minute classes that met twice a week, the three professors engaged in a lively, spontaneous conversation about the work informed by their love and knowledge of the book and their life experience. The teachers did not purvey factual information, historical background, or critical scholarship about the work, but illuminated the heart of the story in all its quintessentially human elements, discussing such universal themes as the home and the banquet in the Odyssey, the nature of duty and “the tears of things” in the Aeneid, and “the good life” in the teachings of Socrates.
The poetic mode of teaching the professors practiced never resorted to formal lectures but incorporated the hearty, lighthearted, and serious exchange of intelligent minds that shared a common vision of the world rooted in tradition and reflected in the Perennial Philosophy and in Christian culture.
They practiced the art of conversation in the most gracious, civilized manner of naturally giving and receiving, listening and responding that amounted to a kind of “music” or “poetry” of its own — the spontaneous, energetic delight of the mind at play rejoicing in the truth as if it were a favorite pastime.
Needless to say, the combination of reading the classics, learning from master teachers, and enjoying the pursuit of learning for the sheer joy of it captured the minds and hearts of students whose jaded senses, lackluster imaginations, and dulled sensibilities responded with delight and wonder at the true, the good, and the beautiful.
They encountered the mystery of being and the philosophy of Thomistic realism in all its depths and riches. They tasted the sweetness of the Lord in the splendor of creation not only in the life of the mind but also in the civilized pleasures the program added to their lives: the memorization of poetry, the art of calligraphy, the beauty of the waltz, and the study of the stars and constellations.
In the most natural way, simply by exposure and introduction to the noblest ideals of Western civilization and its greatest writers and by the inspiration of great teachers who loved truth and illuminated the wisdom of the classics with a joie de vivre, students saw the world around them through a new lens and felt an attraction to the abiding ideals of an older world recklessly abandoned by modernity.
Without proselytizing or evangelizing in the least, the three teachers provided a formation of the mind, heart, senses, emotions, and imagination in such a wholesome, revitalized way that ten to twenty percent reverted or converted to the Catholic faith — a logical progression as the soil of Western civilization and its Perennial Philosophy flowered in Christendom that integrated human wisdom and divine truth. An appreciation of the natural order prepares the soil for the life of faith and lifts the mind to the supernatural order.
As Cardinal Newman wrote in his autobiographical novel Loss and Gain, “It is impossible to stop the growth of the mind.” These conversions provoked the criticism of the faculty at the University of Kansas who stigmatized the program as a school of indoctrination and brainwashing.
The great fruits of the program, ironically, earned it censure and condemnation and precipitated the eventual end of the program — a coup that professor identified as “death by administration.” The deadly sin of envy had shown its livid colors.
Fr. Bethel, a graduate of the IHP, tells this poignant story with comprehensive detail and meticulous documentation. He incorporates the testimonies and letters of former students, examines closely the founding documents, traces carefully the beginnings, development, and termination of the program, and presents a judicious examination of the two sides of the controversy that led to the demise of one of the most exciting chapters in the recent history of education in America, a chapter that might borrow its title from Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books or Ancients versus Moderns.
It is a battle that continues to rage in the cultural wars of the twenty-first century as The Perennial Heresy of the 1970s continues its warfare with the sword of political correctness and the dictatorship of relativism.
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