One of the benefits of being a teacher for a few years or decades is that you develop a repertoire of responses to common student questions: metaphors, anecdotes, history lessons, readings of biblical or literary passages. Benjamin Myers’s slim new book, An Invitation to the Liberal Arts: The What and Why of Classical Christian Higher Education gathers the riffs he’s honed over years of directing Oklahoma Baptist University’s Honors Program into a wonderful celebration of liberal learning. Reading this book gives you a chance to sit in the corner of his office and listen to him articulate the joys and rigors of education to a prospective student or a questioning sophomore.
Myers opens with two metaphors that set the table for his discussion of a liberal arts education. Imagine that someone bakes a cake from scratch, slices a generous piece, and hands it to you on a plate: what should you do? Eat and savor it, of course, but you should also demonstrate gratitude, and one proper dimension of this gratitude would be expressing curiosity about how the cake was made. In asking what ingredients and techniques led to the delicious masterpiece, Myers writes, the recipient enjoys the cake more fully and practices proper gratitude: “curiosity about the creation is a kind of high praise for the creator,” so education should begin and end in such wonder.
Or imagine that you have inherited an old, rambling house, full of character and history. In Myers’s case, he doesn’t have to imagine; he and his family received such a house, long used as a bed and breakfast, from his in-laws. Such a gift is a great blessing, “but it is also a great responsibility.” To receive this gift well entails the ongoing work of repair to keep it in good condition and the work of hospitality to share its shelter with others. In the same way, Myers argues, “to become educated in the classical liberal arts tradition is to step into a rich inheritance of thought, beauty, and history.” Genuine gratitude for such an inheritance must entail action—acts of care, correction, and charity. In linking gratitude with education, Myers stands in the tradition that Heidegger voices when he insists that “thinking is thanking.”
Myers develops other metaphors to fill out his vision of education. At one point, for instance, he describes an education in the Western tradition as climbing a tall mountain peak: it entails a lot of work, but if you endure, you are granted a grand view, which includes both “foreboding and desolate scenes” but “also much that is beautiful.” Two implications of these various metaphors counter common confusions about the nature and purposes of education. First, Myers shows how wisdom is not “a mere tool to be used but [is] a dwelling in which to make a life.” Second, education is not a private commodity but a gift from a community that invites students to join “a great project of cultural renewal” and play their part in renovating it and handing it down to the next generation in a better condition than it was when we received it.
Over the course of eight brief chapters, Myers fills in the particulars of this grand educational vision. He begins with Paul’s injunction to the Philippians to “think about” that which is true and noble and right and pure and lovely and admirable and excellent and praiseworthy. In a distracted age that puts the superficial and titillating constantly before our eyes, reading great books from previous centuries is a particularly important way of obeying this command. Myers then considers the Christian and classical foundations that undergird the liberal arts tradition. On this account, such an education frees us from “the sinful impulses of our desires and immediate needs” and frees us for living in generous service to others. Part of this liberating formation entails developing the virtues needed to exercise our freedom well. In addition to the three theological and four cardinal virtues, Myers argues that liberal education also forms students in humility, patience, attentiveness, and selflessness.
In the second half of the book, Myers considers four particular questions or misconceptions that many prospective students have regarding the liberal arts. The first is that people can be “simple,” faithful Christians without going to college. Myers counters that this is uniquely difficult today given the shallow and narcissistic pressures promulgated through the mass media, so more people need a robust education than in previous generations. Second, despite the focus in business and politics on the value of leadership, Myers finds much leadership advice today quite vapid. Throughout history, great leaders have more often than not received a liberal arts education. Further—in a section that’s particularly near to my heart—Myers argues that “we need to produce not only the great and famous leaders who shape the world in big and obvious ways but also the local and personal leaders who shape the world in numerous smaller, more subtle ways.” A liberal education prepares people to serve their families and communities in particular places. Third, Myers clarifies that math and the hard sciences are an intrinsic part of liberal learning when these disciplines are oriented to the pursuit of truth and not merely the pursuit of a career. Finally, Myers describes how a liberal arts core should not compete with a student’s major but should ground and contextualize more focused study.
I offer this brief summary to whet readers’ appetites for Myers’s book. His conversational yet clear discussion of these issues is delightful. I do want to address one area where a qualification or two would benefit his argument. Myers claims that while a Christian liberal arts education has always been valuable, it is particularly necessary now because a “simple Christian” life has been endangered by our distracting and superficial media culture. In ways that Western Christians living “from the Protestant Reformation up to the First World War” were protected from, we now “live in an environment in which our love is always being pulled in multiple directions.” In this context, Myers writes, “we must give up the idea of being a ‘simple Christian.”
There’s something to this point, but well-educated Christians ought to be very careful not to imply that academic education is a preferred path to holiness or even a good life. In “Learning in War-Time,” C.S. Lewis handles this very well, insisting to his audience—students matriculating at Oxford on the cusp of World War II—that “scholars and poets [are not] intrinsically more pleasing to God than scavengers and bootblacks.” As he concludes, “The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us.” Myers would agree that not all people are suited to spend four years studying old books in a university context, and those who have different aptitudes and vocations are no less able to lead good, faithful lives. It’s important, I think, to head off this potential misconception explicitly, particularly given the reality that only a tiny minority of Christians throughout history have received the kind of liberal arts education Myers lauds.
That said, Myers is certainly right that most people today encounter far more words and images than those living in previous generations. In an essay first published in 1972, Wendell Berry made a similar point:
Ignorance of books and the lack of a critical consciousness of language were safe enough in primitive societies with coherent, oral traditions. In our society, which exists in an atmosphere of prepared, public language—language that is either written or being read—illiteracy is both a personal and a public danger. Think how constantly “the average American” is surrounded by premeditated language, in newspapers and magazines, on signs and billboards, on TV and radio. He is forever being asked to buy or believe somebody else’s line of goods.
Matters haven’t improved in the last fifty years. Berry’s antidote—much like Myers’s—is to read old books attentively:
What is our defense against this sort of language—this language-as-weapon? There is only one. We must know a better language. We must speak, and teach our children to speak, a language precise and articulate and lively enough to tell the truth about the world as we know it. And to do this we must know something of the roots and resources of our language; we must know its literature.
A four-year degree at a Christian liberal arts college isn’t the only way to learn something of the roots and resources of our language and culture, but it’s certainly one very good way. And now that AI-generated words are only further polluting our informational ecosystem, many young people are looking for structures to help them practice patient, communal attention to well-wrought human words. We should extend this invitation in new institutional forms to meet the new challenges of our present; a book I co-edited on the liberal arts explores some of these, such as the Catherine Project. Even with this caveat, Myers is absolutely right that we should not neglect the remarkable gift that previous generations of Americans have bequeathed us in the small, Christian liberal arts colleges dotted across the country.
It’s this contemporary reality that makes Myers’s book—and the vision of humans and human education it propounds—so necessary and valuable. Those of us alive in the twenty-first century are the inheritors of a fabulous and precious house of wisdom. It is in need of renovation and repair, but to neglect it would be gross ingratitude. And to believe that AI can erect an infinite array of new and better houses for us would be arrogant. This accessible book can help prospective college students and their families rightly value the inheritance being offered to them. May many take up the work of cultural renewal to which Myers invites us.
Image Credit: Johann Sperl, “Farmhouse” (1873) via Wikimedia.
