[Context: A few weeks ago I submitted an application to Ralston College’s one-year intensive Master’s degree in the Humanities (a program that takes place partially in Greece and involves studying the language). I’ve long sensed that studying Greek and/or Latin, and translating at least one of the great ancient texts, sits somewhere in my future. Augustine, Boethius, C.S. Lewis—all of them tried their hand at translating.
When I applied for the program, I couldn’t help but get prematurely excited. I was sure this was it—the thing I was supposed to do. Except I didn’t get in. So it was not, in fact, the thing I was supposed to do. A few weeks have passed since I received my rejection and, honestly, it sent me into a little bit of a funk—questioning myself and my capabilities: “Maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing.” “Maybe I’m no good at this after all and everyone who has ever complimented my writing did so out of pity.” “Maybe my whole endeavor is just one large arrogant effort and I’m nothing but the latest incarnation of Narcissus.” Maybe.
In any event, I thought I’d share my application essay publicly in its entirety. The essay highlights my current understanding of what I seem to be up to in my essays and books and serves as something like a manifesto. Ten years from now, nobody will be able to say that I hid my intentions.] :)
As Gandalf tries to rally the troops of Gondor in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, he meets a resistant King Denethor interested only in self-preservation. After a bit of back and forth, Gandalf offers a statement that describes his higher purpose—a purpose I have since adopted (with the appropriate contextual adjustments) as my own:
The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, these are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward…
Like Gandalf, I, too, feel called to care for all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands. Which is why I plan on devoting the rest of my waking days to sifting through the ruins of Athens and Jerusalem and shining as much light on the True, Good, and Beautiful as I can manage. Sure, it may have taken me the entire self-discovery journey of writing my first book, This Way to the Stars: An Introduction to Philosophy, to find my soul’s dream shared something with the good White Wizard. But once I saw it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had been blessed to find what Aristotle called a telos: the thing I was uniquely designed to do.
My first book started simply as an effort to trace the intellectual heritage of the modern Western mind. As somebody who has always been interested in the questions like, “why we’re all here?” and “what happens when we die?”, I wanted to get a better sense of where all these ideas that had been passed down to me had come from. If our origin stories have origins, where did these ideas begin? In an effort to understand it all, I sampled works of various philosophers that belong to the ages—Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine, Boethius, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche, to name a few.
But what I didn’t expect when I started the enterprise is that I would end up concluding the whole effort with a man not even mentioned in a typical university philosophy classroom: C.S. Lewis. Why? Because, in my humble opinion, Lewis had a better sense of our current state and struggles than anyone.
The insights I’m referring to come from Lewis’ Abolition of Man, which has become something of a handbook for me in the last few years (along with the Screwtape Letters, of course). In it, Lewis saw what he called Men Without Chests. The antithesis of the magnanimous (“whole”) man, these chestless men are best understood in the context of Plato’s tripartite theory of the soul (which saw the chest as the seat of spiritedness, thumos). For Lewis, much of the modern meaning crisis and existential angst could be sourced back to the societal shift that rose with science which placed increasing amounts of focus on the measurable and observable quantitative aspects of matter at the expense of a more qualitative view of being—which favored the use of more intangible things like Beauty and Goodness to guide our steps.
The problem, of course, with this shift, Lewis pointed out, was that in a world that has no room for the qualitative (e.g., Beauty and Goodness), all value becomes subjective and nobody has any moral basis on which to object to the dictates or preferences of the individual or the state. This, Lewis thought, was the spiritual cause of World War II’s atrocities. And why the task of the modern-day educator and philosopher is to restore the Chest and turn our attention back to the ancient trinity of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
As an institution and program seeking “students to do the hard thinking our time demands,” led by a President who holds a special place in his heart for my favorite philosopher (Boethius), I can scarcely imagine a better place to feed the flame of the Great Conversation.
I have no doubt that the program will be intense and demand a lot. And I also know that I would have it no other way. As a lawyer by training that finished 2nd in his class while surrounded by more intellectually gifted peers, I’m no stranger to the work required and remain confident that I am not only capable of withstanding the pressures of the program but that I will excel and emerge better because of them. In the words of Job 23:10: “When he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.”
[I hope this post does not come off as entitled. I have no doubt that the people who got into the program were not only far more qualified than myself but also incredibly kind folks. I hold no grudges with Ralston, just disappointed with myself for not being further along and more refined. But while I may not have gotten into the program, the mission remains the same. And I’m as dedicated to it as I ever have been. So it’s back to the anvil for me.
Godspeed to everyone out there in the fire, braving the flames in search of gold.]