Puddles & the Head of a Pin

My old partner in crime and co-founder of the Institute, Fr. Michael Sweeney gave a very typical commencement address at the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology in Berkley(of which he is President)last month.

It's vintage Fr. Michael, witty and thought-provoking and a fun read:

May 17, 2007

We are all of us well aware that our age presents certain challenges, especially, perhaps, to our graduates. There is what our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI has called the “tyranny of relativism”, according to which any claim to truth is held suspect. So, for example, you, our graduates, will receive degrees in philosophy and theology. Undoubtedly you have friends and family who have called into question the value of your studies. These are, after all, disciplines in which everyone considers him or herself expert, without ever having considered the necessity for recourse to study. Even in our universities there has developed a sort of amnesia concerning the founding ideas and convictions that produced our civilization –which are the very things that you have made your study.

To remark upon such troubles is by no means new. Writing almost a century ago, G. K. Chesterton expressed his frustration over the state of higher education in England. "A puddle,” he wrote, “reflects infinity and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud. The two great historic universities of England have all this large and reflective brilliance. They repeat infinity. They are full of light. Nevertheless, or rather on the other hand, they are puddles. The academic mind reflects infinity and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still."

Happily, you are not graduating one century ago from either of the two great historic universities of England. Rather, you are graduating on the afternoon of May 18, 2007 from an institution that is rooted in the scholastic tradition of the Middle Ages, the tradition of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, a tradition that reveres and preserves the authority of the past, but revels in engagement with the present, and lays claim in hope to a future yet seen. It is a tradition that has never suggested a puddle to anyone. There was, of course the caricature of scholasticism concerning angels on the head of a pin. But we might well point out that even the caricature contains a veiled respect for the schoolmen: a pin, we should note, is sharp, pointed and, without expending much effort, penetrating. A pin is very un-puddle-like.

A civilization that has forgotten its past, such as ours is fast becoming, is a civilization that may reflect infinity, but can only reflect it: it cannot defend its founding ideas or the institutions that express them. Civilizations are not now, nor have they ever been, founded upon mere economic surplus; they are not the product of biological or social determinisms; they are the intentional achievements of personal love, personal labor and personal loyalties. You have studied the founding ideas of our civilization, and the faith that produced them. The degree that you receive today is, for this reason, unusual, even exclusive. It is not the case that the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology intends to exclude anyone from the tradition that we together reverence and preserve. We have not parted from our civilization; rather, contemporary society, by forgetting its roots, has departed from us.

This is the first contribution that you, our graduates, have to offer our world: a sense of its own past, made present. In this you are not historians; the tradition of the West is not a mere historical artifact, a venerable curiosity or a relic of the way people once thought. We do not treat of the great philosophers or theologians as voices from the past; rather, we invoke their presence, sit at their feet, and seek to be taught. The tradition of the West is a living thing; you have studied, not merely the history of the West, but the lore of the West, for “lore” is the other word for tradition: you have contemplated the ideas and the relationships that still haunt us and that, alone, can come to our help. As graduates of this school you preserve a living tradition; you are lore-masters. Your office is to summon for others their own past, and the past of their fathers, and their fathers before them, to make present the past that is theirs, that they may claim it, and therefore make sense of their present life.

You are to assist others to make sense of their present life –but to do so in order that they may claim a future, which is to hope. Our civilization has not been founded upon surplus or evolution, or any other determinism, and neither is our hope. All hope is founded upon a promise. Our Lord promises us eternal life, and we have built a civilization that is founded upon that hope. But, having forgotten our past, our contemporaries find it difficult to hope any longer in the great institutions that our civilization has produced. There can be no common hope if there is no common destiny, common allegiance or common good –the elements that constitute a people. No longer hoping in the things that are common, our hopes have become isolated and isolating: hopes in one’s individual possibilities; the hope –or is it not, rather, merely a wish?—that there will be someone or something holds promise for us.

In a very real way, the hope of our civilization rests with you. Only those who can invoke a living past, who can summon the fidelities and the promise that gave birth to our culture, can possibly offer a reason for hope.

These responsibilities are ours –and, now, yours. They are responsibilities that will command our whole intelligence, and require of us the cultivation of every virtue. Above all, however, they are responsibilities that confer rights upon us: the right to the solicitude and prayer of the Church, and the right to take our place among God’s people. The degree that you receive also confers rights and privileges: the right to the assistance and counsel of this School community, and the privilege of collaborating with us as we seek together to form and educate the people whom Our Lord has entrusted to us. And so we ask you, indeed, exhort and even command you, to take your place, and to enter fully into the work that you have begun here, with us.