Yet the desire for understanding is hard to eradicate, and many a young person is still interested in the big questions. At most colleges and universities there are still pockets of liberal learning, and great (or good enough) teachers who care about students and nurture their interest in living meaningful lives. It takes only one or two really good teachers to open a mind and turn around a soul. And for students of whatever age, it takes only an openness to learning and a desire not to be self-deceived to make for ourselves a life of thoughtfulness, and to become people who will not sleepwalk through life but will delight in learning whatever we can about the world’s limitless mysteries, beauties, and truths.
The first chapter in this section, “The Aims of Liberal Education,” is addressed especially to entering college students. It considers several competing goals of a college education, and rejects them in favor of a wisdom-seeking – a philo-sophical and liberating – habit of thoughtfulness, through which we seek deeply to understand ourselves in relation to the world around us. Making use of a distinction between two different types of thinking – asking questions (the way of Socrates) and solving problems (the way of modern science) – this chapter argues for the life-giving benefits of questing for what is true and good, of having and honing a mind that is open and hungry, yet also modest and self-critical.
Chapter Twelve, “Looking for an Honest Man,” offers as an example my own wisdom-seeking journey, from medicine and biochemical research to philosophy, literature, and Bible study, all in the service of understanding the meaning of our common humanity and of learning how to live a worthy life. Although autobiographical in character, the chapter is meant to convey what anyone can learn from a serious engagement with big questions and great authors. It points the way to a revival of humanistic learning, in which the books that we have inherited are treated neither as authoritative guides nor as relics of a no longer relevant age, but as friends who will walk with us through life, challenging our assumptions, elevating our sensibilities, and giving us new questions and insights into the things that matter, now and always.
Going beyond philosophy and literature, Chapter Thirteen considers the two great intellectual and cultural edifices that compete for our adherence and that seem to offer the most comprehensive truths: science and religion. The age-old tension between these two complementary but adversarial domains – often mistakenly called the domains of reason and of faith – has for centuries been an animating force of Western civilization. But recent partisan attempts to reduce the tension by eliminating the other side now threaten to mislead us about both. By a careful critique of “scientism” – a quasi-religious faith that natural science can answer all questions about the world and our place within it – I try to rescue the biblical teachings from the belief that science has rendered them unbelievable. Instead, I argue for the compatibility of the Bible, properly read as an account of what things mean and of how to live, with science, properly seen as an immensely powerful but ultimately more modest and partial effort to understand (only) how things work.
The final section of the book, “The Aspirations of Humankind: Athens, Jerusalem, Gettysburg,” comprises three essays, each one focused on a famous text that I love and have often taught, each text associated with a famous city, each city associated with a different strand of Western civilization and culture, each strand displaying and advancing one or another of the great aspirations of humankind.
First, Athens, the leading city of ancient Greece. According to Pericles, her leading statesman, Athens was the school of Hellas, later to become also a major source of Western civilization. Western civilization would hardly be what it is were it not for the Athenians, who at the battles of Salamis and Marathon repulsed the huge Persian invasion, thus saving the ground for Greece’s golden age – for democratic self-rule, individual freedom, and the enduring works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; Herodotus and Thucydides; Phidias and Polycleitus; Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle. It is from the Greeks that the West inherited the ideas and ideals of human virtue or excellence (aretê), as well as a devotion to the beautiful (to kalon), both in nature and in art. And it is from the Greeks that the West inherited also the liberal arts of arithmetic and geometry, music and astronomy, grammar, rhetoric, and logic, as well as the passion for truth and the love of wisdom known as philosophia. These humanistic teachings – especially about virtue and wisdom, and their relation to human flourishing – received their supreme expression in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the subject of Chapter Fourteen.
Next, Jerusalem, the holy city of ancient Israel – of God’s originally chosen people, the People of the Book, who under the leadership of Moses entered into a covenant with the Lord at Sinai in which they bound themselves to pursue righteousness and holiness under His commandments. Jerusalem, final home also of Jesus of Nazareth, the story of whose life and teachings, crucifixion and resurrection became the basis of a new and hugely successful universal religion that spread biblical teachings to all regions of the globe. It is from Jerusalem (that is, Judaism and Christianity) that the West inherited the ideas and ideals of man (and woman) made in the image of God, of loving your neighbor as yourself, and of loving the one God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might. It is from Jerusalem that the West inherited also a devotion to justice and mercy and a belief in the dignity of all human beings – the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God. The biblical teachings – especially about the relations among law, justice, and holiness, and between man and God, as presented in the Ten Commandments – are the subject of Chapter Fifteen.
And finally, Gettysburg. To the old trope of “Athens and Jerusalem,” long regarded as twin sources of the West, I add – in all seriousness – the site of a justly famous cemetery and an even more justly famous speech. The name of Gettysburg stands for the unique contribution to Western civilization made by the idea and practice of the United States of America. If Greece gave the West virtue, beauty, and philosophy, and if biblical religion gave the West reverence, righteousness, and love of neighbor, America gave the West – and the world – its first enduring political embodiment of the ideas and ideals of freedom and equality and the practice of constitutional self-government in the service of those ideals. Gettysburg is, perhaps, an odd choice to stand as the representative of the United States. Philadelphia, site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and home of the Constitutional Convention, has an older and more fundamental claim. And Washington, D.C., as the nation’s capital, would be a more obvious choice. But it was at Gettysburg that our greatest and wisest president gave the canonical speech that remains to this day the most powerful and most beautiful statement of the American creed and purpose. The concluding chapter offers a close analysis of the Gettysburg Address and reflections on Abraham Lincoln’s “refounding” of the American nation.
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Even this cursory summary of what lies in store should alert the reader to the fact that I offer no single account of what makes for a worthy life. The various chapters and sources I rely on point in different, often competing directions. Which is it: private intimacy, public action, or the search for wisdom? Which is the better life: questioning or reverence, giving the law to yourself or living under command, seeking truth or serving others? Whose call should we answer: Athens, Jerusalem, or Gettysburg? As we have many talents and diverging circumstances, the path to a worthy life taken by one of us will rarely match the path taken by another. But in one respect, the goal is, at least formally, the same for all: to have earned in word and deed our place at the banquet of human life to which we have been so graciously (and undeservedly) invited.
I have no idea whether I will someday have to answer for my life before the bar of judgment. I have never lived my life either in hope of heaven or fear of hell. But I have long liked the idea of having to give an account of my life when my time is up, not so much in terms of specific good deeds and bad, virtues and vices, kindnesses and sins, as to explain what I have done with the unmerited gift of a place on our planet, and, to boot, with all the advantages of living in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yes, our circumstances have changed greatly. Our streets are no longer paved with cobblestones, and we do not travel by horse and buggy. We no longer write letters or go on dates, and we spend much of our lives in mediated existence