It is sometimes offered as a variant of the dunce’s defence: ‘I don’t know much about art but I know what I like’. On the contrary we are responsible for our preferences. Taste is a cultivated thing.

The Great Books study can only be a very limited selection of that canon because the average time allotted for a degree is not enough to cover them in any satisfactory way. I presume that the dismal compromise of a doorstop book of readings would be rejected by the votaries of the Grand Schema. What is left then is probably what most people get namely the attempt to develop the critical faculty which will serve to asses any book whatever. However lightly and provisionally held this presumes a point of view. Naturally this will be brought to the reading of whatever of the great books is appropriate to the chief area of study. A very close ‘ examination of this text applying the criteria that one has adopted will show whether these criteria are serviceable. As you mention the templates established by Aristotle and Aquinas are useful comprising as they do a demonstration of their power to elucidate and come to a conclusion.

OK… drop John Locke. That particular inclusion was a minor point. I appreciate much of what Patrick has written, but I still think there is great value in reading and thinking about these great works of literature, poetry, philosophy inspite of the relativism and multiculturalism that abound on most university campuses. Yes, even Nietzsche! After reading him, why would any college student want to invite him to a birthday or graduation party?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cutsinger

It is probably teachers that matter most. I was educated at St. John’s, and it was really about five of the teachers I had (one a Christian Brother, one a fierce anti-communist and critic of the neglect of history at the college) that mattered most.

And in my own case I can say that the cure for the soft-Nietzschean relativism Patrick complains of (aside from teachers who pointed other directions) was partly accomplished by falling under the influence of the real Nietzsche from my first year. This helped me become a good critic of much of what I read, and it also gave me time to discover the ways in which Nietzsche comes up short. My point is that if you want to order a curriculum to work toward liberation from relativism, you have to start by going explicitly into relativism and then examine critical responses. And you have to have teachers who are up to the task.

Students should learn the classics early and learn them well. They are in fact the basis for an educated mind. But the post-sixties fetish of great books a la Mortimer Adler and St. Johns cannot be the whole of education. As a corrective to American philistinism, it is a welcomed departure from a purely practical education. But the idea that reading great books – in translation! – can be a substitute for the older European, sentimental education is absurd. Better to learn French or Italian well, have a complicated affair with a girl from Bratislava who reads Milan Kundera while living in Rome, than to read bad translations of Aquinas in a sterile environment back in the States. I can vouch that on this Bloom would have agreed with me.

In some ways I’m talking more from an Orthodox mystical position than a more Scholastic Western Christian one. Certainly my view of mysticism is not something I particularly take from anything unique to the West, it is grounded in Christian Platonism. From my experience I think this is far closer to the Orthodox tradition of mysticism than the modernist and subjectivist ideas of the existentialists, as far as I know no genuine mysticism gives much credit any ideas like these.

“…But there is one objection which goes to the heart of the matter and which must be considered. To make a liberal education depend on the mastery of the liberal arts and on the reading of the great products of these intellectual arts, leads us to view the tradition of the West comprehensively. That tradition includes all the great works of religion, philosophy, science and belles-lettres and, since in the human order, imperfection is of the essence, even the greatest works will have errors and defects, and there will be many books of great importance intellectually because they are so largely and crucially wrong. At this point the objection has been made by some Catholic educators that the tradition of the West is divided into black and white, and that only the pure and true shall be admitted as the materials of Christian education. Not only is such a division impossible per se, because in all human work there are degrees of both truth and error; but more deeply the answer must be given that the truth shines forth most clearly in the widest context of errors it is able to rectify. It was this answer which Father Virgil, keenly appreciative of the catholicity of mediaeval learning, always gave to such an objection. Nothing can be alien to Christianity if it is catholic. Not only must it encompass the pagan tradition of the ancients, but it must similarly make modern culture its own — even the most deviating and antagonistic trends in modern thought — if Christendom is to be re-established in the modern world. But this cannot be done by putting up fences and staying within the tradition of books not on the Index. Father Virgil knew that the Index was not intended to restrict the field of education. He knew that the great flowering of Christian culture would not have happened in the thirteenth century if Christians had not read the books of infidels and pagans…”

The point being that some works are read because they are both influential and erroneous. Adler saw the entire tradition as useful in advancing a moral, catholic worldview.

An example from my own tradition: Ghazali mastered the works of the neoplatonists and published al-Maqasid al-Falasifah – the Goals of the Philosophers – which was praised by the falasifah of his day, before publishing al-Tuhafat al-Falasifah – the Incoherence of the Philosophers – the penultimate refutation of neoplatonism in orthodox Sunni Islam.

“I imagine the vast majority of our graduating students have not been adequately exposed to the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Milton, Locke or Thomas Reid, et al. seeing them as mere relics that have little applicability or practical import. Didn’t Wendell Berry write once upon a time, something to the effect, that these great books can be taught but they no longer teach?”

Hmm Locke’s work as great books, now you’ve opened up a can of worms there Mark. I’m sure we could discuss this for hours.

But are they doing this from modernist infected viewpoint? Existentialism is modernist through and through, it is based on infra-Intellectual(in the Platonic meaning.) subjectivism which is contrary to all proper mysticism I have come across. Mysticism whether is that of knowledge or love/passion but which ever one it is there is a great role for the Intellect, or bodhi in Vedanta spirituality, whereby one directly perceives truth and ones being and knowledge are united. This is the basis of all metaphysical and mystical knowledge and it is rejected by the existentialists in favour of infra-Intellectual subjectivism which cannot be a valid foundation for mysticism or religious truth of almost any kind.

““Taste and See” is an invitation to phenomenalism and existential derivative of meaning. No, I’m not suggesting that St Gregory Palamas would be a phenomenalist, but his argument against Barlaam and the formalization of the theology of divine Energia hangs on the notion that our experiences of God are not created things, but uncreated God Himself. For St Gregory, we participate in the actual life of Christ, not some neo-Platonic illusion or created shadow.”

I’m unsure how that is a criticism of the neo-platonists(who tend to be excellent thinkers.) rather than their actual beliefs(except that it is not Christ they talk about.). It is part of neo-Platonism and all genuine mysticism(from Taoism to the Plains Indians.) that one can escape the created and phenomenal world through religious and mystical experience. This is one of the major criticisms of the existentialists that they come pretty close to denying that one can escape “the created shadow” in any meaningful way; they art subjectivists.

“This leads many Orthodox (including myself) to think it would be easier for an existentialist to be Orthodox than a rationalist Calvinist. If I can get a mystic (in the corrupted modern sense) to accept the reality of my being, they are closer to Orthodoxy than any rationalist will ever be.”

Surely it would be greater still to be part of genuine, tradition with room for genuine, traditional mysticism which had no room for either modernist rationalism(which partly infects Calvinism.) nor existentialism.

I suggest you look into James Cutsinger, his work Not of this world, treasures of Christian mysticism is an excellent anthology.

http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/authors/James-Cutsinger.aspx
http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/products/0-941532-41-0_Not_of_This_World_Treasures_of_Christian_Mysticism.aspx?ID=94

In fact the Perennialists thinkers as a whole are well worth a read when it comes to metaphysics, cosmology and religion(particularly comparative religion.). Frithjof Schuon is above all a towering and amazing thinker.

http://worldwisdom.com/public/authors/Frithjof-Schuon.aspx

Anthony T. Kronman’s appraisal is blunt: liberal arts and humanities departments in our universities have collectively blown it, sucumbing to the research ideal rather than “cultivating minds.” Given Deneen’s valid complaint that a curriculum of great books cannot do anything but promote a more fundamental relativism unless it takes place within a distinctive set of control beliefs and presupositions, at least students are exposed to books that can still teach.

I imagine the vast majority of our graduating students have not been adequately exposed to the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Milton, Locke or Thomas Reid, et al. seeing them as mere relics that have little applicability or practical import. Didn’t Wendell Berry write once upon a time, something to the effect, that these great books can be taught but they no longer teach?