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MODERN AGE

that invite students into the Great Conversation, that foster the growth of virtue and
contemplation, and that help shape morally
self-regulating citizens who love God and
their neighbor would be considered unutterably naive by the social scientists who run
our nation's accreditation agencies. If the liberal arts cannot be justified along pragmatic
lines, if their impact cannot be measured
numerically, converted into flow charts, and
backed up by aggregate data, then they have
no place in the modern university.
In the end, when our once-fine institutions of higher learning have abdicated all
responsibility to protect and propagate the
best that has been known and thought in the
world (to use Matthew Arnold's trenchant
phrase), when they have, to borrow a line
from Yeats, dried the marrow from the bone,
then will they become what they are already
fast becoming: expensive vocational schools
draped in whatever politically correct garb is
fashionable at the moment.
Although my language may be stronger
than most, I am hardly the first professor to
warn against the slow decay of the liberal arts.
The problem that I diagnose above is wellknown to critics inside and outside academia
who care about the intellectual, moral, spiritual, and aesthetic formation of the young.
And many of those critics have mounted
vigorous defenses of the liberal arts. Unfortunately, in doing so, too many have relied on
the language and ethos of utilitarianism. We
need the liberal arts, we are told, because they
provide students with critical skills that will
help them to survive and thrive in their more
practical majors. Thus the study of Latin is
praised because it calls for intense, quantifiable rigor and yields pragmatic results, such
as the ability to recognize the roots of medical and legal terminology.
Whereas such arguments are helpful
and necessary, what the modern academy
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desperately needs are arguments that present the study of literature, history, and
philosophy-that is to say, the passionate
pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty as
it has manifested itself in the most lasting
works of the human imagination, in the rise
and fall of kingdoms, and in man's search for
meaning in the cosmos-as a good-in-itself,
not merely as a training ground for medicine,
law, and business. More than that, the "passive" life of imagination and contemplation
must be held up as having a value equal to
the active life of "hard work" that dominates
the marketplace.
Enter Josef Pieper (1904-1997), a German Catholic philosopher whose work has
received growing (and much deserved)
attention and praise over the last decade.
A Thomist who wrote often on the virtues,
Pieper was a great apologist for the life of
contemplation, a life that the master of
his master (Aristotle) considered to be the
highest and happiest. In Leisure, the Basis of
Culture (1948), Pieper makes great strides
toward defending the liberal arts by opening
his reader's eyes to a single, rather shocking
etymology. The word school comes from a
Greek word (schole) that means-believe it
or not-"leisure."
In book 10, chapter 7 of the Nicomachean
Ethics-the very chapter where Aristotle
argues that the contemplative life is the
happiest-the thinker whom Aquinas refers
to simply as the Philosopher makes a stunning statement: "we are busy (a-schole or
"not-at-leisure") that we may have leisure
(schole), and make war that we may live in
peace." In sharp contrast to the modern man,
who takes a vacation so he may work harder
when he gets back to the office, Aristotle,
one of the hardest-working philosophers the
world has ever known, says that it is for the
sake of the vacation that we work at all. Of
course, in making this distinction, Pieper
Modern Age - Summer 2014

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