Houses of Prayer
by James L. Sauer
One of the more famous faculty at our institution is known for his remark that our college is not like a monastery, but rather like a boot camp for life. This is a good image in itself, calling forth associations of the Church Militant, the Pauline armor of Ephesians, and the battle each of us feels against the world, the flesh, and the devil. But considering this professor’s self-admitted liberal political views, it is strange that he should have chosen a military image in this age of mandatory pacifism and that the connotation of medievalism with all its rich images of piety and order should have been neglected.
Then again, perhaps it is not so strange. The professor in question is a sociologist. Poor fellow. Perhaps if his specialty were in the humanities he would have chosen the older paradigm of the abbey. Or perhaps it is just an indication that Social Scientists have always felt more comfortable in a society of Five Year Plans and millennial training camps. Social Scientists desire to manipulate the world, to get people marching, to assign them numbers, the plan away poverty, social injustice, and vestigial humanity. Classical Humanists merely want to remind men and women that they have souls. Christian Humanists might actually want to save some.
In point of fact, too much of modern life is like a boot camp, and not enough is like the old monastery. When we remember that the type of regimen for which monasteries were established, perhaps it is time we went back to their attitudes. What were those elements of life? Were they not the civilizing virtues of obedience, work, worship, study, chastity, contemplation, and prayer? That’s the type of thing the monks filled their days with—or at least should have been filling their days with. And although I am a good son of the Reformation and believe with the Puritans that our Christian vocation is to be lived in the mundane activities of our life, not in religious isolation, nevertheless, I think we might have lost some of the virtues this old order afforded. This is what our colleges should be about; these are the values our home life should be nurturing: attitudes of worship, vocation, and chastity.
A New Dark Age
Instead of the disciplined life, however, we are barraged with the New Social Order of American me-ism. The idiocy of our current collegiate monkery is documented in the writings of Bloom and Hirsh and thousands of others. As for spiritual things, the American college is known more for its partying than for its prayer. There is more chance of hearing the pagan screams of Billy Idol than Gregorian chant. Communism may have produced Animal Farm, but it is Western culture which has given us Animal House.
Mediocrity and lethargy infest the state schools. Some private schools will take any warm body that can still sign a check, while the horror stories one hears from the Ivy League give most of us pause to thank God we were born poor provincials. Among the privileged class one finds the usual litany of the Left: Marxism, relativistic Deconstruction, feminism, homosexuality, pacifism, promiscuity—and stupidity. Yes, historic and philosophic stupidity is now a requirement for admission into the New Class. It’s all there in the catalog. As Samuel Johnson once pointed out about some dullard: “Such stupidity is not found in nature.”
It takes years of training to believe in androgyny. A graduate degree is sometimes required to believe that taxing the productive will produce wealth. Stanford University has apparently abolished its Western Civilization Readings course because too many of the classics were written by white males. Poetry composed by patriarchal prigs! Just think of the damage to our gender consciousness that might come from reading Shakespeare and Milton.
Only a return to the old virtues can vivify the intellectual life. Moreover, these virtues can only be nurtured in the environment of the Christian community.
Begin With Alpha
Perhaps a prayer of a contemporary Christian scholar might be: “Save us, O Lord, from twentieth-century education.” It is not an easy time in which to seek learning. Rock music blasts through our ears and television bedazzles our thought life. We pop in and out with our cars and plunk away our excess cash on electronic games, status symbol fashions, junk food, the latest Bruce Springsteen CD, and any sado-sexy movie that’s currently playing. Meanwhile, our family lives are messes, our priorities are in shambles. We have sadly forgotten the Word of the King Among Us: “The Kingdom of God is not food or drink or what you wear . . . .”
James L. Sauer is the Director of Warner Memorial Library at Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Paula, live in Coatesville, Pennsylvania with their seven children.
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