Contemplation of the Eternal

Robert Royal reflects here on the limited importance of book-learning:

[We should get rid of the idea that] a superficial understanding of sacred things is an advance over longstanding practices that directly confront the evils we find in ourselves and in a fallen world. On the very first page of The Imitation of Christ , Thomas à Kempis writes: “I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it. For what would it profit us to know the whole Bible by heart and the principles of all the philosophers if we live without grace and the love of God?” That’s the old Catholic wisdom, and it would be good if we listened to—and figured out how to follow it—again.

This harmonizes nicely with the point Gilbert Meilaender makes in the current November issue of First Things in his essay, ” Education and Soulcraft .” He writes:

[T]he desire to know ends where no classroom can take us: in contemplation of the Eternal. No one can require that. No one can program it. No credit hours can be given for it.

If a liberal education frees us in this way, we should remember that it is not the only way to such freedom. Were we to remember this, in fact, we might be less inclined to suppose that a college education is for everyone. For there is another path to such freedom in contemplation of the Eternal—we call it worship, and it is open to all.

This insistence on humility, coming as it does from such learned and thoughtful men, is clearly far from some vulgar religious “anti-intellectualism.”

But failing to subscribe to First Things , now that would be vulgar anti-intellectualism.