Rescuing Socrates (So He Can Rescue Us)

A New Essay Reminds us of the Importance of the Classical Liberal Arts

Roosevelt Montas has written Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Saved my Life and Matter for a New Generation (Princeton UP, 2022), reviewed at Law & Liberty (go here: https://lawliberty.org/book-review/can-socrates-be-saved/), an autobiographical account, as the title reflects, of how his encounter with the Western classics of philosophy and literature transformed his view of the world, saved his life, and how they can do the same for a new generation. I have read the review at Law & Liberty, by Douglas Henry, but have yet to read the book. I will order it and may follow this entry at a later date with another more fulsome consideration. From Douglas’ description, the book seems to be written by a fellow traveler with whom I share homonoia— Greek, for “like minded (or hearted)-ness; being of one mind.” Although I am American by birth and Montas is an immigrant, the elements of his experience (in Douglas’ account) in having his mind opened by the classics resonates with my own.

It is true that I am a Ph.D. teaching as a tenured professor at a very small university in a big public university system (more “state recognized” at this point than “state funded”). But my road to my current circumstance is circuitous. I come from a large, loving lower middle class Roman Catholic family (nine children, one marriage of 50+ years) in which I was the first to go to “far-far away” college without having any idea how I was going to pay for it. I thought I wanted to be a journalist, so I applied to exactly one school my senior year in high school, the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, because my mother had told me it had the #1 journalism school in the country. By the end of my first semester there, I knew I needed to leave. Not because Mizzou wasn’t a heck of a lot of fun, but because it was. I didn’t crack a book and made the Dean’s list. Girls discovered me. My mother asked me when I came home for Christmas and I said, “I have got to transfer.” She asked me why. I said, “It’s too much fun and if I’m going to pay for school by myself (no resentment there, mind you), “I have got to go someplace else. I don’t want to do ‘journalism,’ I want to major in English—and there’s no reason to pay out-of-state tuition to do that.” She had always hoped I might have a vocation to the priesthood so she colluded with our parish priest to give me the General Bulletin for the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas. A “Catholic University for Independent Minds.” UD is a private Catholic institution, sanctioned by the Diocese of Dallas on a charter, I think, originated with the Cistercians or the Dominicans (I can never remember which). I read Dr. Donald Cowan’s introduction and I was hooked. His articulation of the rationale for a Classical Liberal Arts eduction was exactly what I had found lacking at Mizzou. I didn’t want a state funded “jobs training” program; I wanted an education. And that has as much to do with the soul as it does the mind.

I was an indifferent high school student but did quite well at Mizzou, so I visited UD and applied, and then stayed at Mizzou for my Spring semester—basically using my record as a freshman there to launder my lackadaisical performance in high school and my mediocre SAT scores (had I applied at UD out of high school, I would not have been accepted—average SAT scores at UD the year I entered were about 1300 (out of 1500, I think. My score was in the upper 900’s…). In any event, I think my just showing up on campus one day unannounced and asking for an application caught the attention of the registrar, the aptly named angel Sybil Novinski, and she not only took my application but invited me to write an essay in the Dean of Student’s office to see if I could score a scholarship. I did. Not much, but half-off UD’s private school tuition was a lot.

So, I transferred the following Fall semester, the beginning of my sophomore year. I got what I asked for and a heck of a lot more.

It was a jarring experience. Because UD has a Core Curriculum required of all undergraduates regardless of major, everyone takes basically the same classes for the first two years. Same English Lit, same philosophy, history, theology, basics in maths and sciences, politics, art history. We’re not talking about one class here or there; same 12 hours of English beginning with Homer’s Iliad and running all the way through the novel and American Literature. Same 9 or 12 hours of Philosophy, (beginning with Intro and then followed, I think, by Philosophy of Being, turning to the Philosophy of Man, and ending with the Philosophy of God). And so on. Most appealing to me about the culture at the school while I was there was that the Core Curriculum (jointly designed by founders Donald and Louise Cowan) was reflective of a truly Catholic and catholic sensibility about the contemplation of the truth in all its disciplinary manifestations and expressions, but on a campus that was preternaturally unevangelical in its reflection of a Catholic religious identity. Daily and Sunday Mass were always offered. The Cistercian and Dominican priests were professors of many of our classes. The Cistercian Abbey was on our campus; the Dominican one right across the road. But one never ever felt pressured to be or to act Catholic. This appealed to me (but I could not have known it until after I’d experienced it for a time after transferring), because I was struggling with my faith, as so many of us do at that time in our lives, and resented feeling pressured or duped into believing one way or another. UD’s professors were warriors for their individualized views who seemed to me immediately to do only one thing in common when they argued, either with us or with each other: they smiled.

But on my first day in Philosophy of Being (the second in core order, which UD permitted me to take first, as a transfer, since I’d had “Intro to Philosophy” accepted from Mizzou), our professor said “And you’ll remember that in Book X of The Republic, Socrates casts the poets out of the ideal state as the purveyors of copies of copies of the truth, or, worse, as liars.” I looked around the room to nodding heads. Everyone in the room knew what he was talking about except me. I may not have formulated in just these words at the moment, but I should have thought “I’m behind.” I did two things, one immediate and the other over the long run: I used my “refund” money to buy the complete works of Plato and the complete works of Aristotle. And I read them. And I shut my mouth. For about the next four years. My students find it hard to believe now, but I did not say a word in my classes—so fearful was I that I’d be discovered to be some kind of posing fraud who really had no right to be there.

I was thrilled and terrified at the same time.

At the end of the first two weeks of studying Homer’s Iliad, Professor John Alvis said “Your essay on The Iliad is due next Friday. Are there any questions?” There were no questions. This is the freshman level English course at UD. No “composition courses” offered when I was there. On Monday, when Dr. Alvis, who had begun lecturing on The Odyssey asked “Are there any questions,” someone got up the gumption to raise her hand and say, “Um, on Friday you said our essays on The Iliad are due this Friday.” “Yes,” Dr. Alvis said. “So, What are we supposed to write about?” “The Iliad, of course!” he said, and walked out of the room.

So, yes. No. I didn’t say a word. I made notes furiously. I turned in most of my papers a day late. I always wrote them the night before they were due—moving my books, typewriter (1980s), cassette player, and coffee maker down to the lounge in my dorm; turning on the television at 1 o’clock in the morning, muting it, and playing music as I tapped out my soul on the Smith-Corona my mother had given me as my going-away-to-college gift. God Bless her. It was the new-fangled one with the correction tape built right into the ribbon cartridge. I wouldn’t find out until I was in graduate school that my waiting until the last minute to write my essays was a cheap and cowardly dodge—I’d always get the B or B+ and I’d get to pretend that I could have gotten an A. But I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know.

The other reason I wanted to go to UD was because its Core Curriculum meant (by design) that its second campus, in ROME, ITALY, only offered courses to sophomores that were required of ALL majors for graduation with any degree. So, you kind of had to go to Rome for a semester. You were only, thereby, allowed to go once, and the sequence was designed so that you went either Fall or Spring of your Sophomore year. I was a transfer and paying for school myself, so UD let me finagle things until I could afford to go. Hence, I put it off until I was a senior and then graduated late (because, at that point, I never wanted to get out of college and was trying to figure out how to stay in for the rest of my life. Which, as it turns out, I figured out how to do).

It was not until I went to Rome that I finally dared to open my mouth in class. It was in our English course, the one that covered the Greek Tragedies, and drama. So, got to do some Shakespeare and modern drama as well. And I didn’t speak until well into the semester. I was something of a stranger to the other students during that semester, since I was a transfer, kind of someone with no “group,” and a loner. And, because I was two or three years older than everyone, well, they didn’t know me and I didn’t know them. My roommate, Paul, and I became fast friends because our third roommate was a drug addict and a weirdo.

In any event, Professor Fougerousse was lecturing on Shakespeare’s King Lear and discussing the dilemma faced by the King’s court and his daughters, given the defects of his character. As I remember, students were pretty tough on Cordelia for her answer to King Lear’s inquiry “How much do you love me?” Her sisters, to my classmates, had offered cagey and rather smartly Machiavellian answers—Regan says “more than all the riches in your treasury”; Goneril says, “More than all the lands you command”; Cordelia says, “I love you according to my bond, no more and no less.” Of course, Cordelia is banished and the general sentiment seemed to be that her answer was at best a miscalculation or stupidly honest. “Wow,” Professor Fougerousse said, “Does anyone want to defend Cordelia.”

I raised my hand.

Professor Fougerousse gave me the floor. I remember that everyone on the aula turned to look at me.

I said, “Well, she’s the only one who tells the truth. King Lear’s problem is with two things; love and truth. And Socrates and Plato argued that the task of education is to teach the child what he ought and ought not like before he is of the age of reason so that he is, by the time he can decide for himself, in the habit of the Good. Aristotle argued that philosophy itself is only concerned with (as Parmenides said) “what is.” Aquinas said the task of human being was to love each thing with the kind and degree of love it deserves, no more and no less. Dante, in the Inferno depicts a circle in Hell for those who love too little but also a circle for those who love too much. Obviously, Cordelia’s answer to her father and King is the only true answer and the one he cannot accept.”

When we got back to our room that evening, my roommate Paul said, “Well, Fuck you very much, Greg.” I looked at him in surprise. “Like, you don’t say a word all semester and then you come out with that?”

True story.

I offer the anecdote to illustrate how quickly an education in the Classical Liberal Arts effects the soul and mind (if not the habits) of the student exposed to and steeped in its riches by those who have been informed by it and have come to love it.

I was marked and forever changed by my experience at the University of Dallas. I am forever indebted as much to that institution as I am (almost) to my parents, to my Church, and to beautiful Bride and children for the formation of my soul. If I was a questioning soul when I came to UD, I was an answering soul by the time I left—and the answering has been a journey that has brought me right to this moment and will take me to my end.

The point of the anecdote is to note that Socrates, as Montas’ book, I’m sure, powerfully illustrates, urges us, as Christ more perfectly does—and to as devastating and humiliating ends—to pursue the truth but also to accept it once we either discover it or as it reveals itself (it happens both ways). Just as importantly, an education in the Classic Liberal Arts forms in the soul a habit of making essential connections that help us to understand the landscape we wend as those at-home aliens who are in a world but not of the world we would understand. An education in Classical Liberal Arts also strongly militates against the idea that we are alone in our journeys or that the “journey” itself is more important than its end. And please, the journey makes no sense if it doesn’t have a goal. So, quit the idea that a journey with no destination has any meaning. It doesn’t. We really are “fellow travelers” on a journey toward what Tolkien called the “Inn at the End of the World,” where we will hoist a hearty ale and laugh together at all our mistakes. And then know each other for the first time.

Socrates encourages us to accept the fact that we do not get to determine the truth for ourselves, but must humble ourselves to the idea that the Idea precedes us and makes us. His thinking is a precursor, in my view, to the real articulation of this truth that christens Christ’s true joining of Aristotle’s pointing out to Plato that his Idea of Ideas was a category error: that Plato was simply giving prevalence to Secondary Substances over Primary Substance and he had the entire picture of truth and reality upside down. And that is John’s “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” If Plato and Aristotle and half of the pre-Socratics are correct that Philosophy can only be about “What is” and “What is” can only be what is “True,” then the Medievals were on to something in arguing that thinking about truth can only be thinking about God (as impractical as that is). And there you see a real and vital connection between Western and Eastern contemplations, since Eastern philosophers seem to believe in the “is-ing” part of “being,” but get stuck on the objective/subjective thing and ascribe to all things God’s nature as that for which being and essence are NOT separate. Oh, and don’t get me started on the Incarnation. Because that’s what everyone has always really been arguing about.

Be that bit of knot tying, trying as it may be, is tied here and will have to be untied someplace else. I’m trying to illustrate that confronting such paradoxes is a matter of accepting a paradigm for questioning that is open to everything. Like Moby Dick it’s a White Whale whose mystery must be confronted and accepted, but never captured or solved, perhaps. At least not the way Ahab attempts and fails to do it.

And that is why a Classical Liberal Arts education is so important. Not because it might train you to do something useful for someone else or even for yourself. But because it teaches why it would be worthwhile (which is not the same thing as useful, which is the kind of thing a man or woman is paid for), to do anything at all.

More soon. I hope.