Curbing the Aggressive, Capricious, Untrustworthy Intellect

It’s a heck of a phrase, isn’t it?

The adjectives strung together are strident and wholly negative modifiers of—the intellect.

Huh?

In our knowledge-obsessed twenty-first century, the statement, Curbing the Aggressive, Capricious, Untrustworthy Intellect sounds like heresy. Unless we stop, really HALT.

And think about the amount of words we read, hear, and maybe write. As a ‘wordsmith,’ I’ve had a love/hate relationship with words for most of my life. For example, my fulfillment of a promise to John that the move from Nevada wouldn’t include tons of books, hurt. Among the countless discarded books, articles, and the like were the textbook that took six years to write, the dissertation, and a beautifully framed image of the doctorate that together took close to ten years to complete. Once they were gone, I felt empty, hollowed out. It took a while to figure out that, just like my dog, Seymour, I don’t like change. So many words, gone into the ether.

Not that I have regrets. I have none. I’m merely reminded of the exquisite pain of spiritual growth. Growth demands that we excise parts of ourselves that once defined us. Those excised parts of ourselves leave bleeding tissue that takes time to heal.

That elegant critique of the untrammeled human intellect

isn’t mine. The phrase belongs to Cardinal John Henry Newman. It’s his description of our ostensibly “educated” human minds when untrained in the skill of learning how to think. And highlights the diabolical nonsense peddled as education in much of 21st-century academia.

Newman spent his life at Oxford and witnessed the decline into liberalism by faculty who considered themselves superior to the rest of the world. Beginning with honest zeal, these men ‘reformed” Oxford, while falling victim to the “pride of reason.”

It was at he height of his academic success at Anglican, Catholic intolerant, Oxford University England, when Newman became a “papist.” A primary spokesman for the Oxford Movement of the Anglican Church, Newman’s study of church history convinced him that the true home of Christianity was the Roman Catholic Church. Two weeks after he published a document that argued the main doctrinal bases of the Anglican Church, could be interpreted in a way that supported the Roman Catholic Church., it was censured.

John Henry Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism ignited a storm of controversy and derision among his former colleagues.

And cost him his entire career.

• “Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
• “Alas! It was my portion for whole years to remain without satisfactory basis for my religious profession, in a state of moral sickness, neither able to acquiese to Anglicanism nor go to Rome. But I bore it, till in course of time, my way was made clear to me.”
• “To be deep in history, is to cease to be Protestant.”
• “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”
• “It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.”
• “Knowledge, the discipline by which it is gained, and the tastes which it forms, have a natural tendency to refine the mind, and to give it an indisposition, simply natural, yet real, nay more than this, a disgust and abhorrence, towards excesses and enormities of evil, which are often or ordinarily reached at length by those who do not from the first set themselves against what is vicious and criminal.”

When he was offered an opportunity to found a Catholic university in Ireland.

Newman jumped at it because education had always been “his line.” His book, The Idea of a University remains a classic. In it he explains that the purpose of a university is liberal education. By that phrase, however, Newman means, the cultivation of mind, “which enables a person “to have a connected view or grasp of things.” And which manifests itself in “good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view.”  It is “the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us” that is the object of a liberal education…”

When John Henry Newman was elevated to Cardinal, he bypassed Bishop, he was filled with “profound wonder and gratitude” at the decision of Pope Leo Xlll. In the Biglietto Speech, Newman wrote that unlike the saints, his writings had been filled with error. And yet he had been wholly dedicated to opposition of the “one great mischief: liberalism in religion.”

“Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion.

Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith…it must be borne in mind, that there is much in the liberalistic theory which is good and true; for example, not to say more, the precepts of justice, truthfulness, sobriety, self-command, benevolence, which, as I have already noted, are among its avowed principles, and the natural laws of society.

It is not till we find that this array of principles is intended to supersede, to block out, religion, that we pronounce it to be evil. There never was a device of the Enemy so cleverly framed and with such promise of success.”

The Idea of the University

Doesn’t this matter only to the young?

More accurately, how is this relevant once we’re out of college?

Or, if we never went, to those of us who are working or are now retired?

Indeed.

Newman answers. “By that phrase, however, Newman means the cultivation of mind, “which enables a person “to have a connected view or grasp of things.” And which manifests itself in “good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view.”  It is “the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us” that is the object of a liberal education…”

Such training enables us to see that the great dangers to humanity reside not in the “other” but in our own hearts. Whether we’ve lived only three decades or eight, we end each day aware of the many times we’ve failed Jesus’s command to love everyone.

In an extremely sobering piece, The Imaginative Conservative recently republished an interview from the Iranian magazine, Qalamyaran. The interviewee, Joseph Pearce, eloquently expresses the serious business of education as a lifelong pursuit. A pursuit that is best achieved outside of the walls of a university.

The interviewer begins with this question of Pearce:

“What is a human being?”

A “human being” should be understood in the classical sense of being “homo viator”, man on a journey or “pilgrim man”. This means that man has a telos, a purpose. His life is meant to be a quest for the attainment of goodness, truth, and beauty, which is ultimately the quest for God, the quest for heaven.

In addition, however, a “human being” is also “homo superbus” (proud man), who chooses to refuse the purpose for which he is chosen, preferring to go his own way instead, or choosing to go nowhere in particular.

Also, and finally, a human being is “anthropos”, one who is not confined by instinct or emotion but is meant to look up in wonder at the cosmos and be moved to contemplation thereby.

A “human being” is, therefore, a being at war with himself. The “homo superbus” is at war with “homo viator” and “Anthropos”. This is why great writers, such as Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn, remind us that the battle between good and evil takes place in each individual human heart.

The Idea of the University and the Future of Civilization