Last week, teaching, for Thales College, one of the sequences of classes in Western Civilization, I and four students, by chance all of them young men, discussed Machiavelli’s The Prince. It is utterly refreshing when you know, from the start, that you need not censor yourself, not for crude or obscene language, but for ideas. That relaxed atmosphere lends itself to intellectual inquiry. When you have to walk a tightrope, you don’t walk at all.
READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: The Modern Phenomenon of Ignorance to the Third Degree
This coming week we’ll be reading Martin Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian, which postdates The Prince and, in one sense, is utterly foreign to Machiavelli’s patterns of thought — for Luther is Christian, and that means he must believe in a divine governance of human affairs, though neither he nor his Roman opponents would understand that governance in a simplistic way, as if every decision made by every earthly ruler were a matter of God’s enforcement, for reward or correction or self-punishment as the case might be. Yet the question I will ask — a question almost impossible to ask at any other college not affiliated with a religious body, as Thales College is not — has to do with what freedom is taken to mean, and what the students themselves assume that it means. I am guessing that they will tell me what they have been taught, though they may not put it in these words: that freedom is a negative, a license. You are free to the extent that you may do as you please without interference from the church or the state. And the next question will be whether, if freedom is so defined, there are suggestions of that definition in the works of both men, as there will be in the works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others we will be reading this term. Or, to put it another way, we will be talking about a continental divide in human thought, with the ancient world and the Middle Ages on one side, and modernity on the other.
I think that they will be up to this discussion. My impressions after this first week of class are wholly pleasant and optimistic: We can think; we can speak! Such thought and speech as we will engage in are predicated upon the ability to read. I don’t mean, by that, the ability to decipher the letters on a page and make words out of them. I mean the ability to grasp an author’s train of thought, his tone of voice, the logical connections he attempts to draw, what he soft-pedals and what he hits hard, what he brings to bear upon the matter at hand, and what he dismisses as impertinent or omits outright. To read a Machiavelli or a Luther, then, you require the long habit of interpretation, and, lest everything fall into a confusion of persons and events, objects and places, books and more books, you require also a fund of general knowledge. That doesn’t mean that you need to know who Hiero of Sicily was, though that does help. It does mean that you know roughly where Sicily is, and where Carthage was, and what Carthage had to do with the Romans. And when it came to that knowledge, my students — homeschooled or taught at classical Christian schools or both — were in the ballgame.
I believe, by the way, that this definition of freedom is wrong, partly because it takes one aspect of freedom and makes it out to be the whole, and partly because, in never attributing any end or purpose for freedom, it mistakes man; he is reduced to an instantiation of will or desire, colliding, as Lucretian atoms do, against other instantiations of will or desire, with the state left to adjudicate among them. There is then no inner dynamism to freedom: It is not a virtue but an extrinsic condition, secured by the mechanism of politics. Jesus — and again I say, at what other secular college could I bring him up in such a class, and with clear approval, without risking my job? — says that he who sins is a slave to sin. Paul continued along this path, to which the great wisdom-lovers of Greece and Rome would be amenable, and Luther certainly agrees. But if that is so, then license is a fine way to make slaves of everybody, with the state conniving at the enslavement, because genuinely free people are hard to control.
A churchman may well say that every heresy gets God wrong, usually by taking one strand of truth and detaching it from others, thus distorting it and making something silly or pathetic or grotesque or monstrous of it. But what if the assumptions underlying modernity get man wrong, via the same kind of oversimplification, by the same detachment of one truth from the rest, resulting in things similarly silly, pathetic, grotesque, or monstrous? Can you ask that question at a secular school? I don’t know. I’ll be asking it. Now, even if we were not a nation full of cowardly informants, eager to rat on their professors or their fellow students, so that — I am told — classrooms are eerily silent before the professor comes in, this question is not a comfortable one. It can’t be. It’s a question about the air we all breathe. It’s a question that turns a mirror upon us, and not a mirror of our own devising; or a laser that pierces beneath clothes and flesh to show things we might prefer not to see.
Now, I am certainly not one of those teachers animated by a desire to debunk and no more: the professorial equivalent of flippancy. I usually do the reverse. I debunk the debunkers. I say that they are foolish to ignore Aristotle, and here is why. I say that Kant ought to have read Thomas Aquinas a lot more carefully than he did, if he read him at all, and here is why. I say that to dismiss a hundred scenes from Shakespeare’s plays as if they were no more than “comic relief” for the groundlings is to be a blockhead yourself, and here is why, and here is how the glory of Shakespeare’s art of interwoven motifs comes forth in those comic scenes in the most unexpected and enlightening ways. I will not say that Hobbes and Locke were blockheads or villains. Why study what you simply despise or hate? In all but the rarest of subjects, studying the stupidity and villainy of Hitler, for example, nothing good or intelligent will come of that. The definition of freedom as license does reach a part of the truth: Even Pericles, in his famous funeral oration at the beginning of the great Peloponnesian War, says that in Athens every man lives as he pleases, and nobody pays him any mind. That, of course, was the kind of exaggeration you can engage in at a public event meant to rouse the courage and the patriotism of your fellow citizens. But it is not wholly wrong.
It does occur to me, with some pain, that we are at the onset of another quadrennial national election, and that you could hardly have this conversation at any political convention or caucus, not to mention with the candidates and their staffs, or with the political reporters for our major newspapers and television networks. Why not? I don’t put much stock in the machinery of elections, but if you are going to have a machine, why must it ferret out all depth of learning and subtlety of thought? Another question for another day.
