Putting Western Civilization Back into Education

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Opinion
Putting Western Civilization Back into Education
By Richard J. Bishirjian, Ph.D.
Aug 17, 2004, 19:24

Yorktown University’s motto, “Putting Western Civilization Back into Education,” says a lot about what this University is, what we do at Yorktown University, and why we exist as an Internet-based University.

If you’ve chosen to read this commentary, you are aware that American higher education is in a tail-spin.

We at Yorktown University date the beginning of that decline to the civil unrest of the anti-War movement that was fueled by enthusiastic civil disobedience of college students of the mid-1960s. I was a part of that process, too. I received my first draft notice at the conclusion of my sophomore year (I forgot to take a college deferment), and by 1965 when I was drafted again, those being drafted would be in Vietnam within a few months. Many would not return.

The confusion of those times was fueled by the dominance of the World War II generation that kept a universal draft fifteen years after the conclusion of World War II. In doing so, they made the youth of America captives to the deceit of the president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, who chose to lie to the American people about what was needed to win a war in Southeast Asia, and was too fearful to do what was necessary to win.

Guided by educated “whiz kids” recruited by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, trained in the latest behavioral methodologies of post-World War II America’s higher education establishment, my generation was sacrificed to the “test” of their theories.

College campuses erupted in demonstrations, of course, and, beginning at Columbia University, then Berkeley, progressed like a wave through American higher education.

The foundations of higher education were challenged and were found wanting.

Those foundations included required courses that no one had thought through in decades, and which gave no freedom of choice to students who wanted to study what they wanted, not what they were told to study.

There was also a cry for the democratization of the fundamental institutions of American society, and, so, participatory democratic mechanisms were installed, mainly at colleges and universities. These fundamental changes laid the groundwork for the politicization of Academe.

Given the vote, students elected to jettison the core general education curriculum, and at some institutions took a role in deciding who would be hired to teach them, and evaluate their Professors.

These were radical decisions that have had a destructive effect on higher education, but, what is more important, they empowered administrators, and campus radicals, causing many good Faculty to leave teaching, and others to retreat, rather than wage daily battle in an increasingly politicized academic environment.

When an organized feminist movement engaged these environments in the 1970s, the outcome was the alteration of higher education to include women’s studies, and the introduction of gender as a standard of judgment in the most important matters of college governance. Another layer of politicization was added to the educational mix.

Freshmen students today will be told about “diversity,” “multiculturalism” and the politically correct concept of “hate speech.”

What Freshmen don’t hear is anything about Western civilization, and, of course, the Judaeo-Christian tradition is nowhere to be found except in a very few religious colleges and universities.

In Western Europe, the Pope has tried to get the European Union to cite the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its role in the formation of the West in its basic statements. No deal.

Today, whatever may have been taught as the Judaeo-Christian tradition resides in very few places in Academe, and even in those places it struggles for talented minds to articulate its truths.

What is the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that is, what unifies Catholic, Protestant and Jew in the education of our young, the edification of adults, our understanding of our mortality and the limits of state power? I was privileged to have studied under Eric Voegelin whose first volume of Order and History (cited below) guides this exposition of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

That which binds us all is our experience of God’s intervention in history.

Western civilization is coterminous with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and includes a commonly shared morality based in God’s commandments—again His intervention in history.

Christians may not understand the wonderful sophistication of Jewish tradition as it searches for moral truth, but we may share in that exploration, amazement and wonder that the truths we discover are not our creations but God’s.

May I dwell on this one moment?

It is important because Yorktown University’s claim to putting Western Civilization back into education does not exclusively involve teaching the history of the West, though certainly an historical understanding of our civilization is vitally important.

Putting Tradition Back into Education is a process of recovery of our shared experience of God’s intervention in history.

That intervention, accepted by the Judaeo Christian tradition, is part of our understanding of ourselves as participants in a defining historical moment of the Hebrew clans when, as reported in Exodus (19:1), Moses ascended the holy mountain of Sinai and experienced the presence of God.

This experience parallels an earlier theophany that occurred many hundreds of years previously when Abram had been victorious in battle with Chedorlaomer.

The king of Sodom whose kingdom had been saved by Abram offered to reward him for his victory. Abram replied that he had sworn to Yahweh that he would not take even the smallest token of reward for the victory. If he did, the king of Sodom would take credit for the good fortune of Abram when in truth Yahweh was responsible.

Genesis 15 reports (1) as follows: "Some time after these events, this word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: ' Fear not, Abram! I am your shield; I will make your reward very great!' (15:1).

A theophany of Yahweh, which comforted Abram in a moment of great political danger, also shaped the political existence of the Hebrew clans after their escape from Egypt.

On a holy mountain, Moses experienced the voice of Yahweh which told him: "If you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine. You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation" (Exodus 19:5-6).

The conflicts of Abram and Moses with the dominant political units of the ancient Near East were caused by theophanies which were interpreted as promises: to Abram, that his "reward" will be "great" and to Moses, the conditional promise that "If you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession ...."

The promise to Moses is a covenant with a community which is a "possession" of God by virtue of its possession of a new truth about God.

To be sure, others in the ancient Near East claimed to be the recipient of favors of a god.

The Babylonian Nabonidus, for example, had a stela inscribed commemorating his ascendance to power as the reward of the moon-god, Sin. "At midnight he (Sin) made me have a dream and said (in the dream) as follows: `Rebuild speedily Ehulhul, the temple of Sin in Harran, and I will hand over to you all the countries.' (2)

But the theophany of Sin with Nabonidus is distinguishable from the covenant of Yahweh with Abram and Moses because Nabonidus' god, Sin, was a cosmological divinity, and the mode of cosmological kingship characteristic of the ancient Near East, remained intact.

The Israelite theophany, however, created a new political consciousness. Through their response to the revelation of Yahweh, the Hebrew clans became a new people in history, a theopolity ordered under fundamental rules emanating from a transcendent, not cosmological, Yahweh.

In Exodus 3, Moses encounters the presence of Yahweh, not as an intracosmic divinity, but as transcendent divine reality.

From the burning bush Yahweh reveals his name, "I am who I am," a concept which breaks the cosmological association of the gods with the cosmos.

In Judges 5, also, Yahweh is described not in the mode of an intracosmic divinity, but as divine reality whose presence is manifest in natural

phenomena:

"O Lord, when you went out from Seir, when you marched from

the land of Edom, the earth quaked and the heavens were shaken,

while the clouds sent down showers. Mountains trembled in

the presence of the Lord, the One of Sinai, in the presence of the

Lord, the God of Israel." (Judges 5:4-5).

Through their response to this revelation, the Hebrew clans who concluded the covenant with Yahweh became a new people in history. The people of Israel were conscious of their "history" as the record of those moments in which the God of Israel revealed Himself to them by his creative acts.

Ask now of the days of old, before your time, ever since God created man upon the earth; ask from one end of the sky to the other: Did anything so great ever happen before? Was it ever heard of? Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of a fire, as you did and live? Or did any god venture to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by testing, by signs and wonders, by war, with his strong hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors, all of which the Lord, your God, did for Egypt before your very eyes? (Deut. 4:32-34).

Can divine reality be manifest fully in one historical culture?

Is there not a tension in the covenant formula between pragmatic political existence and political existence transformed by right relationship to God?

Throughout the early history of Israel, its consciousness of itself as the people of God, as long as they hearken to God, runs counter to the necessities of pragmatic political existence.

The need to go to war in order to free themselves from servitude to the Canaanites, reported in Judges 5, for example, becomes, later in the imperial history of Israel, the need to go to war, not for the compelling reasons of a holy war, but because in spring all kings commence their campaigns (2 Sam. 11:1).

How can the theopolity of God, the substance of a city of God, be confined within the pragmatic history of the Hebrew clans, or any other worldly community?

Clearly it cannot for Israel, nor the United States.

The fact that Israel defected from the covenant time and again, either in pursuit of worldly power or by return to the compact symbols of the intracosmic divinities of surrounding cosmological cultures, answers the question.

But on the level of symbols, the historical consciousness of Israel, expanded by the Christian experience, was preserved by the Christian theologian, St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo.

The movement of the soul from out of the city of man is a concept which saturates St. Augustine's The City of God. Life, St. Augustine thought, was a pilgrimage, a trial we endure in the hope of attaining the ultimate goal beyond life. The soul moves along an ascending line, upward to a point beyond history, thus his linear conception of history.

History is linear, not cyclical because the Incarnation for St. Augustine was the greatest of all historical events, so great that it gave meaning to all previous and subsequent events. For Augustine, then, history is not to be measured by victories or military battles or the conquests of great empire. The criterion by which history is made meaningful is the history of faith in Christ.

Faith manifests itself in community, a city of God, which has a history. On one level, that history can be seen in Scripture. Cain, the first-born of Adam and Eve, was of the earthly city; and Abel, his brother, belonged to the city of God. And when Cain built a city, Able, "being a sojourner, built none."(3)

Abraham and Sarah in old age "symbolized the nature of the human race vitiated by sin and by just consequence condemned." (4)

Their nature denied them children. But Sarah conceived, and her son Isaac, "the child of promise," typifies the "children of grace, the citizens of the free city."(5)

Jerusalem, writes Augustine, prefigured the celestial city; (6) and David, its king, parallels Christ, the king of the city of God.

On another level, however, the history of the city of God is visible on the level of the souls of the faithful, the peregrination of the soul of the individual towards God. By living in constant attunement to God through faith, the Christian progresses towards Him and gives meaning to history, "by going forward in the living God, by the steps of faith, which worketh by love."(7)

The drama of faith struck Augustine strongly. "How shall we dare to say that we are safe?" he asks. The soul is less subjected to God as it is less occupied with the thought of God. And the flesh less subjected to the spirit as it lusts against the spirit. Life for the godly, therefore, is a pilgrimage, a living in tension between "the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God.(8)

The citizen of the city of God, though he cannot banish vice which lusts against the spirit, can, with God's help, preserve the soul from succumbing and yielding to the flesh. All people of Christ, therefore, whatever their station in life, are enjoined to endure this earthly republic, wicked and dissolute as it is, that so they may by this endurance win for themselves an eminent place in that most holy and august assembly of angels and republic of heaven, in which the will of God is the law." (9)

The peregrinatio of the soul as it lives in time gives meaning to history. The standard is not the rise or fall of nations, the vagaries of power, but our progress towards God.

Eric Voegelin explored the concept of the "historical present" in order to interpret St. Augustine's view of history more fully:

When the order of the soul and society is oriented toward the will of God and consequently the actions of the society and its members are experienced as fulfillment or defection, a historical present is created, radiating its form over a past that was not consciously historical in its own present. (10)

The pneumatic events which shaped the political consciousness of Israel, the promise to Abraham, the Exodus, the Covenant and Decalogue, constituted an "historical present" from which the life of Israel was seen to extend into a past that included the creation of the world and the lives of the patriarchs, a present under God and a future governed by the promise of Yahweh.

For St. Augustine, history consisted of the "historical present" of life in Christ; a past extending over the long history of the city of God seen as a narrative of the fulfillment of God's promise and, on the individual level, the memory in time of the individual; and a future which holds the hope of eternal life.

With an eye upon the Revelation of St. John, Chapter 19, St. Augustine formulated a periodization of history which avoided the politicization of the history of salvation.

John sees heaven open and a white horse ridden by one who is called Faithful and True. The armies in heaven follow him, and the nations of the earth are destroyed. The Devil is sealed in hell for a thousand years, during which time the righteous reign with Christ. At the end of this period there follows the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment.

Augustine suggests that the reign of one thousand years may be interpreted to mean "an equivalent for the whole duration of this world." (11) and rebukes the Millenarians who maintain that the thousand years of the prophecy must be interpreted as meaning a worldly enjoyment of luxury on earth enduring for a thousand years.

To Augustine the ages of history extend from Adam to the deluge, from the deluge to Abraham, from Abraham to David, from David to the captivity, from the captivity to the birth of Christ. "The sixth is now passing," he writes, "and cannot be measured by any number of generations . . . ."(12) The millennium began with Christ's birth and will continue in time until God in his wisdom calls a close to the trials of this world.

St. Augustine's view of history is at odds not only with the Millenarian tendency to find salvation through political action in this world but also with the Stoic concept of eternal cycles. The cyclical concept of history is incorrect because Christ died once, for a specific reason, to redeem man of his sins; and He will come again, not to die once more, but to judge.

The philosophy of history of St. Augustine remains in Western culture today, perhaps not in its full integrity, but in bits and pieces unconsciously present in the historical consciousness of Western man. A view of history, seeing reality from the perspective of time, is a distinguishing mark of Western culture.

After two millennia, even though Western historical consciousness has been stripped of its Christian nature, contemporary Western historical consciousness inhabits the outline of what is fundamentally a Christian phenomenon.

The linear design remains, with no conclusive reasoning to verify it, as does the conception of history's progressive movement towards an end of time; but modern eschatology sees that end in this world, not in the next. This latter phenomenon is a principal aspect of modern political religions.

Henri Bergson argues in his Two Sources of Morality and Religion that, there are two communities consubstantial with man: the open society and the closed.

All classical society was closed to consciousness of the universality of mankind, except for those few moments when great thinkers pointed the way to the open society.

Before mankind could be conscious of itself as a part of a community made up of all people-an open society which included both the prophets of Israel and the philosophers of Hellas -- the perspective of men who remained in the closed society had to be restructured. Only in the Christian experience, however, was a complete break made.

St. Augustine's The City of God is based on the perspective of this universal community.

The symbol of the city of God represented St. Augustine's own experience of the reality of a community inclusive of all mankind. At its center, both in the political sense and in the lives of its citizens, was the "unchangeable God," the highest good, summum bonum. (13)

Towards God, all Christians direct their actions and their wills, and by their love for Him they are known as citizens of His city. Likewise they love their fellow men because their consciousness of Him is what constitutes the common element in their humanity. St. Augustine's alternative symbol, that of the city of man, is symbolic of both pragmatic existence and the paradigmatic community of men who give themselves over only to love of themselves.

St. Augustine is saying that the inclinations of our souls identify us as types of men. The city of closed souls is a community of people whose souls incline toward love of themselves (amor sui). But the community of God consists of souls open to God, of men who love God (amor Dei). In history the two cities are intermingled, each pursuing its separate course. By their very nature we cannot expect them to become actual in political reality. St. Augustine does not suggest that the Church is the city of God. There are many reprobates in the Church, he remarks.

Plato and Aristotle formulated a view of politics which sought to give direction to political community by delineating its proper ends, identifying the forms of right government, and the moral limits upon government. These limits were found in a critical definition of human action which saw the nature of man in its openness to transcendent divine reality.

These insights were absorbed by Christianity, and through the Christian synthesis of noetic and pneumatic theophany, became principal aspects in the Western concept of order. To this tradition, St. Augustine added something not present in Plato and Aristotle, a total critique of worldly existence.

Plato and Aristotle essentially found the world comfortable. St. Augustine did not. Through his critique of the city of man, therefore, he limited our perspective of what could and could not be accomplished in political existence. In the Christian era, largely through the influence of St. Augustine, the soul of man remained the locus of right order, but its guardian became the Church, not the state. To the state was consigned an important, but limited role. This view of an essentially limited state, the product of his critique of the city of man, became a defining insight of Western civilization.