IV
ESSAY IN APPLIED HISTORY

17
Models of the Educated Man

In the summer of 1974, I participated in an Aspen Institute conference that brought together a wide range of scholars and educational administrators from Europe and the United States to discuss the kind of education appropriate for the latter part of the twentieth century. I was asked to prepare for the conference this paper surveying various past models of education, drawing such conclusions from the exercise as seemed appropriate. The piece was published in The American Scholar 44 (1975), 195–212 .

Those of us who are troubled by the confusion in contemporary education, perhaps especially if we continue to believe in a liberal or general education, are sometimes tempted to look to the past for guidance. But the lessons of history are rarely unambiguous. For one thing, its messages are various. Like Scripture, it can generally be made to support what we want it to support; and in the case of education, the Western cultural tradition incorporates not just one but a whole series of educational ideals, which rest on quite different assumptions and point in different directions. Beyond this, however, it is not always clear just how the present learns from the past. If history can help us, it will not be because those apparently ideal moments in the past which appeal to our nostalgia can simply be recalled under our own very different circumstances. It is these difficulties surrounding the relevance of history to education that this essay seeks to examine.

At the outset, it may be observed that the conventional contrast between general and specialized education appears, in historical perspective, less than absolute; the earliest hints of a general education ideal were the products of professionalism. Particular occupational groups,

notably warriors and scribes, developed high standards of competence; and, in doing so, they exhibited a tendency to idealization that seems regularly to accompany the formation of a professional ethos. Indeed, only at the stage of idealization have these groups first come to our attention: warriors through the competitive heroism of the Homeric epics, scribes through the Old Testament book of Proverbs. This idealization may be partly understood as a response to social need. Warriors were more effective if their brutality was restrained and if they were not only good fighters but also loyal and congenial comrades; scribes, if they were honest, fair, and consistent in their administrative duties. But a more personal impulse was also at work, a profound aspiration to personal excellence and social respect, a desire for recognition as the most admirable warrior or scribe. In this way, professional roles were elevated into ideal human types, with implications extending far beyond the professional group.

We may first see this aristocratic ideal in the evolution of the ancient warrior from predator into hero and, when the fighter again became prominent in the Middle Ages, of freebooter into knight and eventually courtier and gentleman. Each may be seen as a variant of the same general model of the educated man, which may conveniently be described as aristocratic. Warrior, knight, courtier, and gentleman have in common a concern with conspicuous achievement, prestige, or leadership. Each, as an ideal type, implies that education should be directed to the formation of effective men who, through their independence, ambition, initiative, and personal strength can take a prominent role in the world. For such men, both self-respect and the ability to maintain the respect of others are essential; an important aim of their education must therefore be a sense of personal honor. But the ultimate test of their education is the ability to perform great deeds, a concern that led to an emphasis on the educational value of examples of glorious achievement in the past. This was why Greek aristocrats studied Homer, medieval knights listened to the chansons de geste , Rabelais included chronicles of chivalry in Gargantua's curriculum. But preparation for achievement also required practice, whether in the use of arms or, at a later stage in the development of this ideal, in more refined kinds of virtuosity. It is also obvious that the ideal was highly elitist; its essence lay in the ability to rise and to remain above other men.

But although such education was professional, the leadership for which it prepared was peculiar in that it demanded not specialized formation alone but the development of all dimensions of the personality. It called on a man to excel simultaneously in bodily strength, skill, and

stamina, in vigor of personality, social gifts, reliability, and good sense. It was concerned at once with physical, moral, and social development. Chaucer's knight had learned not only the use of arms but music, which he could compose as well as play, dancing, drawing, the arts of speech, even carving at the table. In addition, the aristocratic ideal has always been unique in its careful attention to shaping and refining the erotic impulse.

Yet in its earlier stages, this ideal did not quite provide for the development of the whole man because of its neglect of, even contempt for, learning and intellect. It required a wide variety of personal skills, but it was largely indifferent both to substantive knowledge and to the value of a disciplined mind. But by the sixteenth century, the aristocratic ideal proved flexible enough to make room for literary education, increasingly important for political leadership in a more complex world. Books were needed now, especially histories, because the variety in the modern world was exceeding what a man could learn from his own experience. Thus the aristocratic ideal of the educated man as one who has become something was at least partly transformed into one who has learned something. But learning, like personal skill, was still subordinated to great achievement and retained its elitism: even this enlarged general education was exclusively for rulers. As time went on, the aristocratic prejudice against learning did not disappear; rather, it survived in the aristocrats' attitude toward universities. From the beginning they had disdained the university because it was the domain of "clerks" and not primarily concerned with forming Gentlemen. And although aristocrats sometimes felt the need to attend universities, they retained a deep conviction of the difference between formal schooling and education for life in the world, an education that only the world itself could provide. Indeed, since the universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remained clerical institutions in an increasingly secular world, they were not attractive to men of talent. They could not fit any man for a life that put a premium on civilized manners, sociability, urbanity— in short, the worldly arts.

So in the eighteenth century the aristocratic ideal was transmuted once again into the conception of a person at case in the world, whose mind was polished rather than trained, who might know very little beyond the arts of getting along, and who learned them not in the universities (which could not teach them) but in public assemblies, private clubs, and drawing rooms. Thus the aristocratic ideal grew socially more comprehensive. It seems least admirable in the degree to which it remained narrowly tied to the old aristocracy, as witness that most cu-

rious of educational documents, Lord Chesterfield's Letters . It is most impressive in the extent to which it permeated the ambitious bourgeoisie; its breadth and flexibility are illustrated in the English novel of manners. In the end, the ideal of the gentleman as formed by the world did not stress the dissimulation and self-seeking urged on poor Philip Stanhope, but something more like the generous civility of Tom Jones—a quality not unrelated to civilization and capable of extension to new social groups.

A rather different emphasis came out of the educational ideal of ancient scribe culture—the scribe ideal. The distinction of the scribe was his literacy, which not only differentiated him from the warrior but also elevated him above peasants and manual workers. Literacy, therefore, meant social superiority, a circumstance not irrelevant to the perennial notion that things of the mind are higher than those of the body. The literacy of the scribe associated education with books and led eventually to the notion of education as familiarity with a standard literary corpus, the classics. Hence scribe education, in contrast to aristocratic education, pointed to the need for schools, and eventually universities, which could supply bookish learning. Books also made possible the accumulation of substantive knowledge; thus scribe culture suggested that education might consist in the acquisition of a body of knowledge and that the educated man is a learned man.

Scribe education aimed to produce a human type significantly different from the aristocratic ideal. It sought to form not heroes but practical men whose ability to manage their own affairs and those of a complex society would ensure for themselves good health and long life, material prosperity, and the respect of others. Its moral ideal included such useful but equivocal virtues as prudence, calculation, and foresight, economic enterprise and thrift, vigilance and reticence. While the aristocrat displayed himself to the world, the scribe gave it wary service. But the literacy of the scribe also imposed on him the higher responsibilities of the teacher, and the wisdom books of scribe culture often transcend mere worldly wisdom to teach a lofty ideal of honesty, justice, loyalty, temperance, charity, cheerfulness, and personal stability. The educational ideal of scribe culture had, therefore, a strong ethical component, not altogether different from, but more complex and less heroic than, that of the aristocrat.

It differed, however, on one crucial point. Scribe culture is important for introducing into educational thought a primary concern with intellectual formation. The education of the scribe advanced from proficiency

in the use of language to the higher arts of verbal and rational discourse, and its concentration here was in sharp contrast to aristocratic concern with the shaping of the total personality. There is, in the scribe ideal, no interest in the body or in the dramatic and aesthetic presentation of the self. For the scribe, the intellectual faculties are preeminent; all other dimensions of the personality must be subordinate to them. Only when the intellect is sovereign can man be freed from the limitations of a merely material existence or from enslavement to the bodily passions. Thus, in scribe education, concerned with the liberation of man by cultivating his "higher" mental faculties, lies the origin of the idea of the liberal arts that shape and free the mind, and hence of a liberal education. The scribe ideal is preoccupied with what can be planted in the mind, and even the scribe ethic is secondary to scribe intellectuality, in the sense that it is acquired by precept rather than by practice, from books rather than from direct experience. Thus the ideal scribe, whose duties required that he be a model of social responsibility, became an authority first on the virtues, then on virtue itself, and finally on the uses of the mind—which, as the highest faculty in man, might provide him access to the highest powers in the universe and the highest way of life. From the scribe ideal comes the attenuated idea of the educated man as philosopher and sage. The philosopher-king is thus a kind of hybridization of the aristocratic and scribe ideals.

The aristocratic and scribe ideals obviously touched each other, and the transformations of the aristocratic ideal can be understood partly as a result of their interaction. A courtier had to acquire some of the verbal skill of the scribe, and the worldly culture of the eighteenth-century gentleman exhibits some of the worldly wisdom of the more mundane kind of scribe culture. But the assimilation of the two types was never complete: central elements in the aristocratic ideal survived among the ruling groups of the West, notably its concern for great achievement and the persistent suspicion of bookishness reflected in the worry of eighteenth-century parents over sons who pursued their studies with excessive diligence and, within the memory of some of us, the idea of the gentleman C .

Both these early ideals entered into the formation of a third major conception of the educated man which has, nevertheless, some claim to discussion as a separate type—the civic ideal. The idea of the educated man as citizen appeared first in the Greek polis, reappeared in Rome and again during the Renaissance, and has remained a prominent strain in modern educational discourse. In this conception, education civilizes

men, in the root meaning of the word. It is based on a notion of man as a political animal whose potentialities are realized in the degree to which he is effectively socialized and a participant in the life of his community. This ideal immediately appears to subordinate individual talents to collective needs and sees the educated man as one who understands and performs his social duty; the state thus becomes the essential force in education.

Aristocratic elements may be discerned in the civic ideal. It was concerned to develop the whole man, not only intellectually but physically, emotionally, and morally, for honorable achievement on behalf of the community; hence its devotion to poetry, on the ground that poetry alone could reach the deeper levels of the personality. The exploitation of aristocratic competitiveness to identify excellence also kept this educational tradition solidly elitist. At the same time the civic ideal relied heavily on literacy—first because written laws replaced imitation as the primary vehicle of instruction in civic virtue, and then because civic education depended on literature to transmit collective ideals. Hence it relied on a standard body of written classics to provide a common culture that was eventually seen as the bond uniting all civilized men, a perennial justification for a classical education. So, in this conception, education is no longer the possession of a particular professional group; it becomes, for the first time, fully identified with general culture. Yet along with its balance, the civic tradition obviously stressed the moral ends of education, an emphasis expressed in the French ideal of the honnête homme and the Victorian concern with character. Its educated man is first of all a good man.

But this moral emphasis generally rested on the assumption, frequently unexamined, that virtue is a function of enlightenment; it assumed that virtue can be taught because it can be planted in the mind. Hence in practice the civic ideal, like that of the scribe, gave primary attention to the development of the intellect. It regularly emphasized the importance of disciplining the mental faculties, a conception already present in the sophistic idea of the arts as purely theoretical studies that exercise the intellect and give it ineradicable powers. Thus the idea of the educated man as the man of virtue pointed to the notion of the educated man as the intellectually disciplined man. But this tradition also found a place for emphasis on the values of substantive learning. Renaissance thinkers saw learning as vicarious experience that enabled the individual to transcend the limits of his own existence and thus prepare himself for all the contingencies of life. Bacon saw learning as a source of perspective. Newman appreciated the well-stocked mind

almost as much as the well-formed mind. Such a mind, he wrote, testifying to the comprehensiveness of this ideal, "is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres." But knowledge, Newman made clear, could assume such significance only to a disciplined mind.

The social emphasis in this view of education did not, however, always signify conformity to conventional ways of thought and behavior. This is apparent in Bacon's emphasis on the critical powers of the trained mind, one of whose responsibilities is to expose the fraudulent idols of the tribe. Bacon's educated man was not only the civilized and socialized, but also the independent man, whose mind is always "capable of growth and reformation." Thus this conception also contains the germ of the notion of the educated man as one who, though still working for the benefit of society, stands apart from it in order to expose and remedy its errors: the autonomous rational man of the Enlightenment, whose education has freed him from the superstitions of the past, who has indeed a duty—again we sense the moralism of the civic ideal—to oppose the collectivity when it is wrong.

The notion of such detachment of the educated man from society suggests the possibility of his alienation from society and thus another ideal, that of personal self-cultivation. This ideal, though it draws on some elements in the civic ideal, severs man's bond with the social world and makes the pursuit of individual perfection an end in itself. This ideal has tended to emerge when an effective role in the world's affairs is foreclosed to educated men by historical conditions, as in the hellenistic world with the decline of the polis, during the earlier Middle Ages, and in the later Renaissance with the loss of civic freedom. Under such conditions, general education lost its social value, and the ideal of the educated man was narrowed to include those human qualities, chiefly intellectual, most appropriate to the cultivation of private excellence. This could mean, in its more trivial modes, the formation of taste and refinement, aesthetic and intellectual snobbery.

It could also find loftier expression. Plato suggested this in his disillusioned advice to the wise man to renounce politics and turn instead "to the city he bears within himself" and there "to cultivate his own garden"—the conclusion also of Candide , the most readable educational

novel of the eighteenth century. Education in this sense sought to produce an isolated sage who devotes himself to higher things, perhaps, because he knows the world so well, even a misanthrope. Learning here is no longer seen as a resource with which to manage the world but as a private consolation for the sufferings inflicted by the world and a means to escape from it. Thus Seneca recommended the avoidance of public affairs in favor of "sacred and sublime studies which will teach you the substance, will, environment, and shape of god, what destiny awaits your soul, where Nature lays us to rest when we are released from our bodies." He prescribed such an education as an antidote to the urgency, complexity, and confusion of life: "Everyone accelerates life's pace, and is sick with anticipation of the future and loathing of the present."

Seneca still paid tribute to the disciplined mind and to the virtue stemming from it, but now as resources for transcending the ordinary human condition. His kind of education is no longer the development of powers for use in the world, but rather of the defensive strategies of the personality to avoid contamination by it. His ethic is all control; his educated man is the man who refuses full engagement with life through a perfect apatheia . Such self-discipline is still intended to serve human freedom, but freedom now in an entirely private definition. Its proper use is the contemplation of the eternal verities. Liberated from all earthly bonds, the soul of the educated man "makes its way to the heights," where its freedom is at last complete.

This conception of the educated man is, of course, quintessentially elitist; Stoics of every age have taken pride in their distance from "the crowd." Here, however, the elitism is that of the scribe rather than of the aristocrat. It is likely to recur with some regularity among scholars who, although they are generally regarded, and above all regard themselves, as the custodians of education, live sequestered from men in more active careers, by whom they vaguely feel despised. There is, at any rate, a slightly familiar note in a letter of an eminent Cambridge don written in 1871: "For me it is one of the great happinesses of the happy life here that one can live with such men, not with men who are starving their minds or making their moral natures hopelessly ugly in order to be millionaires or, as the crown of their career, expectant baronets. Here, at all events, there is a true and refined republicanism; for there is no rank except what culture gives; and the society is composed of people who have foregone the pursuit of wealth or rank because they preferred prizes of another kind . . . they are bound to each other by the ties of interests which can never become slack, and which no self interest can

dissolve." The author of this sentimental—and to one experienced in the ways of universities today somewhat implausible—tribute to Cambridge life was the distinguished classicist Sir Richard Jebb. If Jebb's vision of the educated man had been nourished by his knowledge of antiquity, he had evidently exploited it rather selectively.

The Christian-secular ideal, the traditional Christian conception of education, borrows from several of the ideals so far described but differs from them all in one crucial respect. This is, paradoxically, its secularity. Christian education is necessarily secular because, for the Christian, the most important capacity of man is his ability to respond to the love of God; and since this response depends on grace, it is beyond the power of education. This circumstance makes possible a way of approaching education radically different from those so far described. At the same time, the Christian view of education illuminates a dimension of the other conceptions to which we have not yet given sufficient attention. The pagan culture originally underlying these other ideals was not secular, in the sense that it sought to understand every dimension of human experience—physical nature, politics, and anthropology—within the context of a single holy and cosmic order governed throughout by a uniform set of rational principles. Thus the same patterns of order, the same subordination of low things to high things, supplied the model of perfection for the larger cosmos in which they were obviously realized, for society, and for man; and this meant that politics and human nature were seen as perfectible in the degree to which they were brought into conformity with the divine order of the cosmos. From this standpoint, education was the process of bringing man into harmony with nature by strengthening the sovereignty of his higher faculties and, ipso facto, making him harmonious within himself. In this sense, the educational ideals of antiquity were generally religious.

Christianity took issue with this notion of the sacred character of education. For the Christian, education could neither make man truly virtuous nor unite him to God, and any claims to the contrary were perilous to the soul. The heart of the Christian position was thus a distinction between the aims of education and the end of man. This explains the "almost" in Newman's celebration of knowledge and sets him somewhat apart from other champions of a liberal education. "Knowledge is one thing," Newman declared, "virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justice of view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no

vivifying principles." Here the intellectuality central to classical anthropology has given way to a different estimate of man.

Accordingly, Christian thinkers valued education, drew heavily on the resources of other patterns of education, but assigned it more limited goals. Though they denied that it could endow men with the holiness demanded by God, they recognized its capacity to civilize. They valued this lesser species of excellence, for it was both humanly convenient and pleasing to God that men who nevertheless remain sinful in the sense that they are full of potential sins should be restrained, through the internalized disciplines of a sound education, from the commission of overt sins. Christians also valued the knowledge conveyed by education, only stipulating that it must not be confused with sacred wisdom and that, in Augustine's pregnant phrase, it was used rather than enjoyed. Thus Christianity did not so much repudiate earlier ideals of education as reinterpret them along more utilitarian lines. This humility was also reflected in a more democratic understanding of education. Besides the standard subjects of a literary education, Augustine recognized the place of "teachings which concern the bodily senses, including the experience and theory of the useful mechanical arts."

In addition, the secularity of the Christian ideal was liberating. For it implied that man is not compelled to adopt an authoritative (and authoritarian) model of education imposed on him by the abstract order of things, that he is not a slave to forces outside himself but can freely choose the kind of education best suited to his needs, as he defines them for himself in the particular and concrete circumstances of his existence. Yet this existential dimension of the secular ideal has often so burdened man's resources for deciding how to use his freedom that he may be tempted to escape from it into new kinds of naturalistic determinism.

This dilemma may help to explain the emergence, since the end of the eighteenth century, of still another educational ideal: the romantic-naturalist ideal. Like the secular ideal, it differs radically from most of what has gone before, but now through the idea that the task of education is to protect and aid human nature to unfold according to its own innate principles of development. The models so far treated, however various in other respects, at least agree that the human personality is basically malleable and that the task of education is to shape it in accordance with predetermined ends. But the telos of man in the naturalistic model is no longer derived from social, ethical, or religious sources and imposed on human nature, so to speak, from the outside; it is immanent in man. Thus, while other conceptions find their justification

and explanation in history and anthropology, in ethical and social philosophy, or in cosmology and theology, this model looks to biology, developmental psychology, and learning theory. Its ruling principle is not some ideal of the mature person but the nature of the child.

A mark of this conception is that it seeks to restrain the teacher from interfering with the development of his pupils: he is not to beat them, an injunction with more than humanitarian significance, in order to shape them to his own preconceptions, but to encourage them by gentleness and understanding. They are to enjoy education because education, properly constructed, should be consistent with the obvious needs of their own natures. Nor, in this conception, does the teacher decide which human faculties to develop or in what order. Every capacity for personal development is seen as equally worthy of encouragement, since each is by definition natural. And each unfolds in a natural order in which—another significant feature of the conception—the rational powers are last to emerge; that is why Rousseau's Émile did not learn to read until early adolescence. In this ideal, intellectual development is secondary—not only in its order in the curriculum of nature but also in the values it represents—to the perfection of the body, the life of the senses, the feelings, the imagination, and adjustment to all the circumstances of daily life. At the same time, there is more room for individuality, since reason is a common possession of men while their other potentialities tend to differentiate men from one another. In important respects, therefore, this model suggests a less social idea of man, although, by its indiscriminateness and its lack of objective norms, it is also singularly democratic.

Meanwhile, the idea of an educated man has also been deeply affected by the "knowledge revolution," out of which has emerged the conception of education as preparation for research. As long as knowledge was limited, relatively simple, and not very technical, education could be fairly eclectic. Although it regularly emphasized the formation of character, it could attempt at the same time to discipline the mental faculties, provide a common culture, and supply a minimum of substantive knowledge. Yet obviously the sheer bulk of the knowledge now deemed necessary for an educated man has squeezed out of education—and for the most part even out of our understanding of it—everything but the acquisition of knowledge in some manageable form. One result has been a broad decline in the idea of a general education, which for all practical purposes has become little more than a nostalgic memory. Indeed the body of requisite knowledge has become so vast that no one can hope

to master more than a small segment of it. So, in the popular mind, an educated man is now some kind of specialist; and in a sense we no longer have a single conception of the educated man, but as many conceptions as there are learned specialties.

Yet even in this situation, which seems to preclude a common educational ideal for man, we may discern a development somewhat analogous to the evolution of the aristocratic and scribe models. The need for knowledge, and above all for new knowledge, seems to be pointing to the formation of still another ideal. For the proliferating new specialties have at least this in common: that all are supposed to expand indefinitely through research; and a new conception of the educated man seems to be emerging precisely from this circumstance. It is closely related to the changing conception of the university, whose primary task is certainly no longer the formation of virtuous men nor the study of inherited learning, but the discovery of new knowledge. In this context, an educated man is above all a man who is open to new knowledge and able to advance it.

Once again what immediately presents itself as only the narrowing of education into specialized training for the scholar, and more specifically the scientist (the scientific conception of scholarship having invaded, with mixed results, even the humanities), points to a modification in the idea of the man best suited to the broader service of a changing society. Training in research is thus perceived as a moral force, as forming men who are bold, critical, imaginative, industrious, innovative, independent, and active. Whether these qualities are all the world now requires is, of course, a question worth serious consideration; nor is it certain that the virtues of the laboratory are readily transferable to other aspects of life. And in any case, although the research ideal clearly fits some of our needs, it leaves unanswered the question what we are to do with all our new knowledge. In this respect the research ideal, like the Christian, is fully secular.

The foregoing analysis may be of some interest to the historian of Western culture; but it remains to ask what, practically, we are to do with it. In earlier periods, history was conceived as a body of examples to be imitated or abhorred in the critical decisions of life, and therefore essential to any educated man. But it is obvious that we cannot exploit history in this way. We cannot choose for ourselves the most attractive among past educational ideals, if only because each was firmly embedded in its own time. Yet the relativity of each ideal to its historical context may suggest at least one "lesson of history": that any fruitful reflection

about the purposes of education must now begin with a definition of our own social and cultural condition. We shall need to ask not only what our world is like and what it needs but such fundamental questions as whether it is sufficiently consolidated to permit the formulation of any single educational ideal, whether it is likely to be, or (perhaps the hardest of all) whether we really want it to be.

But the relativity of education to its time has a further implication. It suggests the impossibility of establishing any educational ideal on the cosmic principles that infused some of the most attractive among the ideals of the past. Whether we like it or not, we are, at least for the time being, restricted to a secular conception of education, with all the burdens of choice this implies. Even the naturalistic ideal cannot, I believe, relieve us of the burdens of freedom—partly because the supposed orthodoxies of science, especially when applied to man, have generally proved no more stable than other dimensions of thought and just as dependent on cultural change; partly because the very importance of education for the needs of society means that we cannot allow it simply to happen but must continue to define its aims in accordance with changing collective needs.

The rich accumulation of ideals I have here described may also help to illuminate our educational predicament in another way. I suspect that few of us can review these alternatives without the sense that each of them expresses some part of his own deepest assumptions on the matter. For, however little practical influence some of them now exert, all of them linger on in some part of our minds, obscurely clashing with one another and variously challenging, accusing, and confusing us. This suggests that we face a problem not altogether new but now aggravated beyond anything known before: that we have inherited too much and from too many directions to be able to manage our cultural resources. Thus we now have no classics because we have too many classics. To pose our problem in its starkest and most dismal terms, how can an educational ideal bring into focus a culture that Joyce compared to the scattered debris on the field of Waterloo and that only achieved coherence in his peculiar artistic vision? Unlike antiquity, which had the practical advantage of knowing culture but not cultures, in our age we have effectively lost the ability to recognize a barbarian when we meet him. Or if some apprehension of this kind crosses our minds, we may try, with a vague sense of guilt, to repress it. On the other hand, the cultural relativism that is now probably an ineradicable element in our world may itself, in ways I cannot altogether foresee, provide some positive foundation for an educational ideal. It has, at any rate, some ethical

content, as our guilt at being repelled by those unlike ourselves may imply. It suggests respect for variety and humility about ourselves, and it may lead us in the direction of an open and pluralistic ideal of education. Whether such an education is likely to meet other contemporary needs, such as the need for a minimal sense of community in a large and complex modern society, is of course another, and very large, question.

But perhaps the educational ideals of the past can also be instructive in less portentous ways. They can, in any event, tell us something about how conceptions of education come into existence, how they are related to social and political realities, what requirements a viable educational ideal must meet, and the kinds of assumptions on which it is based. It is evident that the needs of societies for particular kinds of trained persons have been decisive in the development of education and even of ideas about general education. Such needs obviously differ according to whether a society is primitive or advanced, warlike or peaceful, agrarian, commercial, or industrial. Moreover, the specialized training required by specific needs displays a regular tendency to assume a more general significance, and the idealization of a professional type has commonly evolved into an ideal for man in general. Past experience suggests, therefore, that the familiar antithesis between specialized and general education is somewhat misleading. The larger significance of social need for education is also evident if we look at the problem from the standpoint of the individual. The emphasis then shifts from the kind of man needed by society to the kind of education needed by man for survival in society, and this too is likely to suggest something more than a narrowly vocational training.

Along with social need, we may identify another set of variables that has proved crucial to defining the purposes of education. In that process, much has regularly depended on how the human personality is perceived, though this generally remains an unexamined assumption underlying educational discourse; the anthropological presuppositions of a culture are perhaps the least likely elements in it to receive critical scrutiny. Obviously, however, men's notions of what education can or should accomplish depend on the degree to which they consider human nature malleable and in which of its dimensions; on their analysis of the human organism and the value attributed to its various potentialities; and, again, on whether they perceive man as autonomous, unique, and free to determine his own ends or as part of a larger system of reality—metaphysical, cosmological, or biological—that determines objectively the proper shape and direction of human development. Some of the super-

ficiality in educational discussion stems from failure to recognize issues of this kind. And since we can generally identify the assumptions of another age more readily than those of our own, reflection on earlier conceptions of education may provide some training in the critical scrutiny of our own anthropological preconceptions.

But here a word of caution about the literature of education: it has been notoriously optimistic. Doubtless because most of it is composed by pedagogues, it has usually stressed the malleability of human nature. One suspects that much of its enthusiasm (especially when it comes from experienced teachers) is chiefly hortatory, or exaggerated for strategic reasons. Still, recent expressions of outrage over the views of Jensen, Herrnstein, et al. suggest (among other issues in this controversy) the degree to which confidence in the power of nurture over nature has become a piece of orthodoxy that cannot be challenged without considerable personal risk. But although writers on education often sound as if they consider each individual a tabula rasa on which the educator may imprint whatever messages he wishes, it is also worth observing that such enthusiasm has not, historically, been a necessary condition for taking education seriously.

Past experience appears to suggest, then, that any satisfactory educational ideal for our own time must be appropriate to our kind of society and government. If we are to reach agreement about education, we must first agree about the nature of our social and political arrangements, taking into account both their structure and their capacity for change. In addition, an appropriate educational ideal must have some correspondence to our understanding of human nature, its limitations and its possibilities: what it is, what it can be, what it ought to be. These are hard, perhaps impossible, questions. But until they are answered I cannot foresee any solution to our difficulties.

One further troubling question needs to be raised here: the value and practical significance of deliberate efforts to formulate an educational ideal. This is, finally, the knotty question of the relation between social theory and social reality, of the place of ideas in history and of the function of the intellectual. I am far more comfortable in raising this question than in trying in to answer it. Accordingly, I should like to state it more specifically as well as historically: what has been the relationship between those who have thought most constructively about education in the past and the time and place in which they existed? Are we to understand their reflections about education as descriptive, or prescriptive, or in some way both at once? It may be that no single answer will cover every case and that, like political theory, educational theory is

sometimes largely descriptive in a normative sense, sometimes largely prescriptive and idealistic. But it seems to me in general that the educational proposals in the past which have proved most influential have chiefly put into words the values and convictions already implicit, if not in educational practice, at least in the more vigorous cultural movements of their times. Thus the role of the educational theorist may be somewhat like that of a statesman: not so much to create a new ideal for education as to sense what is already present in a latent form. His greatest talent, aside from his articulateness, is his ability to perceive with skill and sensitivity the changing needs of his time; thus he expresses, clarifies, and consolidates perceptions that have remained, for others, still below the level of consciousness. But the ability to do this well, like the ability to manage the tangled affairs of states, requires talent of the highest order.

18
Socrates and the Confusion of the Humanities

This essay owes its existence to my membership, during the academic year 1976–1977, in the National Humanities Institute, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, in New Haven. Under the leadership of Robert E. Hiedemann, a number of us who had been fellows at the institute contributed essays on appropriate topics to a volume dedicated to Maynard Mack, its distinguished director. My essay, included here, was a slightly tongue-in-check reaction to a certain preciousness about the humanities that I sensed in some of my colleagues. The volume in which it appeared was entitled The American Future and the Humane Tradition: The Role of the Humanities in Higher Education, ed. Robert E. Hiedemann (New York: Associated Faculties Press, 1982), pp. 11–22. It is reprinted here with the permission of the publisher .

The impression that the humanities are now in special trouble—perhaps even, as we sometimes say, in a "crisis"—is widespread among teachers in the traditional humanistic disciplines, and it is doubtless true that we have immediate grounds for concern. After a period of remarkable expansion and exuberance in higher education, when there were students enough for us all, enrollments are declining; and students, worried about the future, seem to be drifting into programs better designed to prepare them for jobs than anything we have to offer. This essay is directed, however, not to this immediately distressing situation, but to more fundamental problems in the humanities that, indeed, our present difficulties may have inclined us to forget. For these difficulties have encouraged us to look without and to deplore the times, when our basic problems—as we knew better in the period of our prosperity—were in ourselves. The present situation may therefore be unfortunate for the

humanities above all because it has tended to diminish our perspective. It encourages us to imagine in the past some kind of Golden Age, or series of Golden Ages—fifth-century Athens, the Augustan age, the twelfth century, the age of the Renaissance, the nineteenth century, now perhaps even the happy decades after the war—when the humanities were properly appreciated.

Such nostalgia is hardly supported by what we know of the humanities in the past; as nearly as I have been able to determine, teachers and scholars in the humanities have always felt defensive and insufficiently valued. In the nineteenth century, when everybody who was anybody received a classical education—the touchstone of the humanities in the past—Matthew Arnold was apprehensive about the spread of Philistinism. Renaissance humanists felt much the same. So Petrarch exclaimed of his own time, "Oh inglorious age, that scorns antiquity its mother, to whom it owes every noble art—that dares to declare itself not only equal but superior to the glorious past!"; and his followers continued in this vein for the next two centuries, not realizing that they were living in the Renaissance. We hear the same sad complaint in the greatest humanist of the twelfth century, John of Salisbury, who imagined himself besieged by a new horde of barbarians. "What is the old fool after?" he imagined them asking of himself; "Why does he quote the sayings and doings of the ancients to us? We draw knowledge from ourselves; we, the young, do not recognize the ancients." It may even be possible to read a hint of the perennial unpopularity of the humanities into the tragic fate of Socrates, though his case. as I will try to show, is more problematic.

What this appears to suggest is that, in thinking about the plight of the humanities, we are confronted with some chronic disease that is far more important to diagnose than any acute illness that may have developed during the last decade. It is this deep-seated and perennially debilitating malaise that I will try to identify here. To do so, I will begin by setting side by side two important features of the long history of the humanities. One has to do with the origin of humanistic education among the Greeks, as historians now understand it. The other involves the veneration for Socrates, and for what he supposedly stood for, in a series of writers, most of them prominent in the long tradition of humanistic discourse. The juxtaposition of these matters is intended to throw into relief a deep and persistent ambiguity in the humanities that seems to me to have confused us about both our role and our public. We would like to believe that we have something of supreme value, perhaps even a kind of saving grace, to offer to a world in desperate

need of redemption. But the world has seemed oddly indifferent to this gracious offering, with the result that we who represent the humanities have for centuries felt unappreciated, frustrated, sometimes even aggrieved.

Underlying this unhappiness is a deep-seated ambivalence about the significance of the humanities. Here the early history of education in the humanities is instructive. It appears to have emerged out of the ancient rivalry between philosophy, with its rational pursuit of ultimate truth, and rhetoric, which assumed that this quest was hopeless and was prepared to make the best of the sensible, contingent, and shifting world of appearances. This opposition was the analogue, in antiquity, of the familiar tension between the two cultures of our own time, with philosophy then corresponding to natural science now. And the crucial point here is that education in the humanities stems not from the position represented by Socrates (unless Plato has quite misled us about this great figure), but from his antagonists, the Sophists, among whom Protagoras was probably the most influential, as he is for us the most vivid, individual personality.

An immediate implication of this glimpse at our origins might be that the inclusion of philosophy among the humanities today, insofar as philosophy is still conceived as the rational pursuit of final truth, itself reflects some confusion about the humanities. It also suggests that, if we are to understand the humanities as the expression of some coherent tradition, we ought to think very seriously about what Protagoras stood for. Basic to his position seems to have been a thorough skepticism about the possibility, for human beings, of what for Plato (and presumably for Socrates) constituted genuine knowledge. For Protagoras, the human mind is confined to the subjective and transitory realm of appearances; it cannot penetrate through or beyond them to a realm of objective and immutable (i.e., scientific) truth, notably to such truth about the human condition; the mind is confined to the human world of probability and convention. This is the significance of Protagoras's famous dictum, so unacceptable to Socrates and to all who have yearned for transcendence, that man is the measure of all things. Protagoras was agnostic. Diogenes Laertius attributed to him this saying: "About the gods I have no knowledge whether they exist or do not exist. There are many obstacles to such knowledge, for instance, the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life." This meant that, for Protagoras, education could not consist in the encouragement or transmission of what, for philosophers, was true wisdom, but only in the formation of useful or probable opinion; he had nothing to offer in the way of salvation. And although

his educational objectives were to be met by the effective use of language, he conceived of language not as an access to objective reality (as Socrates suggests that it ought to be in the Cratylus ) but simply as a conventional instrument for human communication, derived not from physis but from nomos . The Sophists were, in this tradition, rhetoricians, with close ties to those arts that rely on language to create a variety of human worlds: to legal and political discourse, but also to historical and dramatic composition, and notably to poetry, the art especially distrusted by Socrates.

And in the culture of antiquity it was not philosophy that triumphed, but rhetoric. For a thousand years rhetoric dominated education, sub-ordinating systematic rationality to the arts of language, and relying for this purpose on a corpus of received texts esteemed for what they could convey through language. Rhetoric, not philosophy, gave us the humanities. The position represented by Protagoras was further developed by Gorgias and other rhetoricians, converted into a more systematic pedagogy by Isocrates, transmitted to Rome by Greek teachers of rhetoric, and assimilated by the Latin orators. Only in the later hellenistic period, with the triumph of an increasingly authoritarian empire, did philosophy begin to develop any general prestige among educated men, for whom it represented solace in a situation in which public communication, and accordingly the rhetorical art, had reduced value; and the notion that philosophy was concerned with higher and better things than this world can afford also proved attractive to some Christians, who saw in it an opportunity to emerge from their long cultural isolation. But although a considerable revival of philosophy, and of dialectic as its primary instrument, took place in medieval Christendom, and rhetoric endured a corresponding decline, the ancient tradition of education in the humanities was periodically rediscovered. With the Renaissance it again became a dominant force in education, until it began to falter once more in the later nineteenth century. Or, more precisely, it dominated the education of the upper classes, a qualification that may have some bearing on the curious place of Socrates in the post-classical career of the humanities.

For meanwhile something quite odd had occurred. Protagoras, the figure with the best claim to be considered as the founding father of education in the humanities, has either been forgotten in this connection or transformed into some kind of enemy of true learning, even for those who owe him most: and "sophist" has become a term of opprobrium. On the other hand Socrates, the foe of Protagoras, has been metamorphosed into the model and patron saint—Sancte Socrate, ora pro nobis —of the whole humanistic enterprise. Given the circumstances I have

described, however, it is hardly surprising that he has been a singularly ambiguous model and that what he has chiefly sanctified has been a vast confusion about the significance of the humanities.

This has not been, on the whole, the fault of professional philosophers. Thus there is nothing ambiguous in the account of Socrates given by Aristotle, who perceived him strictly as a philosopher. "Socrates," Aristotle said, "concentrated on ethics and not on external nature, though in ethics he sought the universal and was the first to set his mind to definitions." This seems to mean that Socrates adopted—but also refined—the rational methods that philosophers had previously employed in speculating about external nature, and that he redirected them to the investigation of human nature. Thus his importance consists in the fact that he pursued the old philosophical quest, with its assumption of an ultimate truth awaiting discovery by human reason, in a new area of inquiry. It also seems clear that, by this interpretation, Socrates would be difficult to transform into a model for the humanities. He remains, in Aristotle's presentation, a philosopher and, in the context of ancient thought, a scientist, albeit an ethical scientist.

The improbable transformation of Socrates into a model for the humanities seems to have been a result of the observation, which was correct, that Socrates was concerned with ethics, while at the same time it was forgotten that he did so as a philosopher , in the ancient meaning of that term. The result was to assimilate into humanistic learning, inadvertently, the philosophical pursuit of final truth; and because ethics was thought vital to salvation, the humanities were transformed from a body of discourse concerned with the best possible adaptation to a merely human world, into a set of disciplines claiming access to some kind of ultimate wisdom, with a bearing on the final destiny of man.

The transformation began early; Socrates was celebrated in antiquity itself for having shifted the attention of philosophy from cosmology to ethics and, in this sense, from heaven to earth. In this way, it was supposed, he had made it relevant to the human situation. Thus for Diogenes Laertius, Socrates was "the first person who conversed about human life, [for], perceiving that natural philosophy had no immediate bearing on our interests, he began to enter upon moral speculations, both in his workshop and in the marketplace." Augustine transmitted this estimate, giving a Neoplatonic interpretation to Socrates' motives: he had recognized that ethical study purifies the mind and thus prepares it for the contemplation of eternal truth. Medieval thinkers, John of Salisbury included, venerated Socrates on this basis, and this estimate of Socrates became the orthodoxy of the Renaissance. Savonarola and

Erasmus shared it; and Vives notably pressed Socrates into the battle of the two cultures: "Since he was the wisest of all mortals, he did not hesitate to proclaim his ignorance of the things of nature; he preferred to encourage men to give up the study of those mysteries and apply the same energies to the reformation of their moral life." But the point here was always, not simply that Socrates had shifted philosophy from heaven to earth, a notion possibly consistent with the Sophistic origin of the humanities, but that the heavenly insights of philosophy had, through Socrates, been given a terrestrial application. Socrates brought philosophy down from heaven, but this meant that he had obtained it in heaven.

Furthermore it was generally believed that, from the profundity of Socrates' ethical thought, it necessarily followed that he had been the best of men; his life demonstrated that to know the good is to do the good, and more broadly the competence of philosophy—again in the ancient sense—to rule over human affairs. Epictetus made the connection between Socrates' thought and his life explicit: "Thus Socrates became perfect, improving himself by everything, following reason alone." Montaigne described the soul of Socrates as "the most perfect that has come to my knowledge." Rousseau praised him for his practical virtues; for Hegel he was the model as well as the founder of morality; Mill thought him "the man who probably of all then born had deserved best of all mankind." Even Nietzsche, whose understanding of the moral life was somewhat different, hoped that "if all goes well, the time will come when, to develop oneself morally-rationally, one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible." What Nietzsche most admired in Socrates was his capacity for "joy in life and in one's own self." His Socrates was distinguished by "the gay kind of seriousness and that wisdom full of pranks which constitutes the best state of the soul of man." All of this seems to imply, however goodness is defined, the ability of an education in the humanities to make men good.

But although Nietzsche contrasted Socrates with Jesus ("Moreover, he had the greater intelligence"), it has been more common to identify the two, especially by those who have wanted to claim for Christianity the status of a higher philosophical wisdom and to equate such wisdom with sanctity. Justin Martyr proclaimed that Christ had been "known in part even by Socrates." Aeneas Sylvius—later pope—believed that "the doctrine of the life of the world to come" had been taught by Socrates; Ficino thought that the self-renunciation of Socrates had fore-shadowed Christ; Zwingli included Socrates among the virtuous pagans in Paradise; Rousseau maintained that Socrates had worked for the glory of God and the Christian church. On the other hand still another view

associated Socrates with the civic tradition. Diogenes Laertius thought him "very much attached to democracy," and Vives represented him as "the first who applied philosophy to the service of people and cities." But the notion of a civic Socrates was vigorously rejected by Kierkegaard, for whom Socrates was wholly indifferent either to being, or to making anyone else, a good citizen; for Kierkegaard the Socratic ethic was strictly individual.

Interpretations of the Socratic method, and above all of the motives behind it, have been equally diverse. Socrates' protestations of his own ignorance were taken at face value by some of his earliest admirers, for whom he was simply a humble seeker after a truth he did not himself possess, but which he nevertheless hoped to attain. So, for Diogenes Laertius, "in an argumentative spirit [Socrates] used to dispute with all who would converse with him, not with the purpose of taking away their opinions from them, so much as of learning the truth, as far as he could do so, himself." It was in this spirit—the positive spirit of classical philosophy—that the Socratic dialogue, if it was noticed at all, tended to be understood. Aeneas Sylvius claimed to discern its influence in, of all places, the debates among the theologians at the Council of Basel, who "held a long discussion, some maintaining the negative, some the positive view, knowing that this was the old Socratic method of arguing against another's opinion. For Socrates thought that in this way what was closest to the truth could most easily be discovered." John Ponet represented his own Short Catechisme as an application of Socratic method, through which, "by certain questions, as it were by pointing, the ignorant might be instructed, and the skilful put in remembrance, that they forget not what they have learned." According to this common view, the Socratic method is a positive strategy for discovering an objective and impersonal truth.

Others, perhaps truer to the posture if not to the declamatory style of Protagoras, have been less sure of the innocence of Socrates. In early Christian thought he could also be seen as an aggressive agnostic, preparing for the Gospel by displaying the pretentious folly of paganism and, by implication, of classical philosophy. Augustine believed that he had "hunted out and pursued the foolishness of ignorant men who thought they knew this or that—sometimes confessing his own ignorance, and sometimes dissimulating his knowledge." For Augustine, Socrates had discovered and taught nothing positive, even in ethics; this explained, for him, the radical disagreements among those who claimed to be his disciples, and confirmed Augustine's mature view of philosophy as "the city of confusion." This vision of Socrates as a deliberately de-

structive critic of all facile belief was revived in the Enlightenment, in a rather different interest, by Diderot, who posed as a potential martyr in the cause of atheism and free expression and identified himself closely with Socrates, who "at the moment of his death was looked upon at Athens as we are now looked upon at Paris; . . . he was at the very least a turbulent and dangerous spirit who dared to speak freely of the gods." And Kierkegaard, contrasting Socrates sharply with Plato on the basis of a distinction between "questioning in order to discover content and questioning in order to disappoint and humiliate," compared him to Samson: he "seizes the columns bearing the edifice of knowledge and plunges everything down into the nothingness of ignorance." Nietzsche may have had something similar in mind in describing Socrates as "not only the wisest talker who ever lived" but also "just as great in his silence." There is strange company here; but whatever the historical accuracy of this vision of Socrates, it suggests something closer than anything else we have examined to the original inspiration of education in the humanities.

This rapid survey leads to various reflections, all somewhat disheartening. One is that the invocation of Socrates inevitably results either in the distortion of Socrates to bring him into conformity with our notion of the humanities, or in the distortion of the humanities to make them conform to our image of Socrates. The first would imply indifference to history, the second a betrayal of what gave the humanities, at the outset, their specific identity. The second would seem to be more serious, from the standpoint of the humanities, and raises a question of motive, or at least function, for it seems to me not enough to say that the ambiguous portrait of Socrates in Plato has misled us; consciously or unconsciously, we have made choices. I would suggest that, except for the last group noticed above, whose reading of history may not be altogether plausible, Socrates has been invoked by teachers in the humanities because of their discontent with the humble status assigned them by Protagoras, in a world in which "philosophy," because of the sublimity of its concerns and the certainties to which it laid claim, had become—as for some it remains—a word to conjure with. The patronage of Socrates has allowed them—and us—to cherish the humanities and at the same time to lay claim to a wisdom infinitely more prestigious than anything in the more mundane tradition of Protagoras.

For, underlying the remarkable diversity among our conceptions of Socrates, one common impulse can be discerned: the belief that, as the Delphic Oracle was reported to have said of Socrates, he was "of all mortals the wisest." Each vision of Socrates represents one interpretation

or another of what it means to be wise. The model of Socrates allows us, therefore, to avoid that radical choice between the authoritative wisdom claimed for classical philosophy and the humbler, more tentative, and practical insights, appropriate to the merely human condition, that gave birth to the humanities. Socrates enables us to have it both ways. And this seems to me unusually dangerous in the world we presently inhabit, a world that has either ceased to believe in wisdom—as a good deal in contemporary philosophy suggests—or has good reason to distrust any human claims to wisdom. The humanities, in the tradition of Protagoras, seem to me to have abiding value; but claims to the wisdom of Socrates, who "sought the universal," only reduce our credibility and justify the indifference of contemporaries. I do not mean to suggest that all teachers in the humanities are haunted in this way by the ghost of Socrates; and even for those who are, any claim to wisdom is likely to be subliminal and in any event now too embarrassing to be pressed. But there is abundant evidence of the importance of this claim among our predecessors; and, perhaps because I can still sense its numinous charm in myself, I am persuaded of its continuing and seductive power.

The basic problem here is that the admirable but ambiguous Socrates encourages us to cling obscurely to a conception of man, embedded in ancient philosophy, that few of us, on a conscious level, can now accept. In this view the various agencies of the human personality are distinguished as real entitles and regarded as higher or better and lower or worse, with the clear implication that the higher should rule the lower. This higher faculty is variously identified with reason or the soul, and contrasted with the body and the passions. It is also seen as the spark of divinity within, and therefore man's point of contact with a realm of higher and eternal truths and values. This conception was often associated with man's upright stature, which made him unique among animals. Cicero's Stoic gave this notion classic expression; providence, he explained, raised men "to stand tall and upright, so that they might be able to behold the sky and so gain a knowledge of the gods. For men are sprung from the earth not as its inhabitants and denizens, but to be as it were the spectators of things supernal and heavenly, in the contemplation whereof no other species of animals participates." With the intrusion of philosophy into the humanities, this conception became the essence of humanitas; the task of the humanities was henceforth to assist man in developing his potentialities for the contemplation of higher things, and the coordination of lower things, notably his own faculties, in accordance with his heavenly vision. And it seems to me that this notion of man, however detached from its pagan theological context,

persists among us, with its implication that, in their concern with higher things, the humanities can somehow finally save mankind from whatever dismal fate might otherwise await it.

Yet here we are also divided against ourselves. For in our world the human personality is understood as a mysterious psychosomatic unity in which the classical distinction between its higher and lower faculties—a distinction that Socrates presumably endorsed—has lost all meaning. That remarkable modern humanist Sigmund Freud, indeed, fixed on the erect posture of man as precisely the mark of his fall from primordial bliss; it signified the schism of the personality, the perverse separation of humanitas into an honorable portion above the waist and a shameful region below, which brought not salvation but neurosis and despair. Yet the claims of the humanities to a privileged position in education seem to me still to rest, for many of us, on this traditional understanding of man. The notion of man as divided into higher and lower elements is the basis of a persistent belief that the humanities are concerned with higher things, with perhaps a hint of contempt for the ordinary concerns of daily life; and in our world this is only too likely to reinforce the prejudice against the humanities as precious and impractical, at best concerned with the improvement of leisure and the provision of social distinction.

This anthropology is also, therefore, the vehicle of an implicit elitism that lingers on in the humanities and continues to make them seem of doubtful relevance to the tasks of mass education with which most of us are confronted. For just as the humanities, in their admixture with the attitudes of classical philosophy, have distinguished between the higher matters of their own concern and the lower preoccupations of ordinary life, so they have traditionally distinguished between the higher men for whom they are appropriate and those lower beings to whom they must remain inaccessible, however much we may aspire to "raise" the barbarians in our midst, through instruction in the humanities, to a higher and more human level of existence. This aspiration is itself, of course, unexceptionable; I only mean to suggest the possibility, by describing it in such language, that the social attitudes embedded in the philosophical tradition that Socrates represents among us (however democratic he may sometimes appear) may interfere with our task in a very different setting.

But there is a further problem for us in the latent influence of philosophy represented among us by Socrates: its authoritarianism. If human culture is a body of sublime insights derived by man's higher faculties from the heavens above, then its values must apply equally to

all men in all times. This conception of what we have to offer puts us in the position of a kind of (not altogether secular) priesthood, but in addition it implies that other men have an obligation to attend to our teaching. This is perhaps why we sometimes feel aggrieved that they remain so indifferent and refractory. And this is all the harder to bear since, because we too are inhabitants of the modern world, we can neither express nor defend this discontent. In another part of ourselves, we know that it is no longer possible, indeed that it would hardly be desirable, to promote the notion of a single high Culture; consciously we now recognize only cultures in the plural. We know only that the human world is fascinatingly diverse and that we can discern in it, or impose on it, many meanings, but no longer—at least as responsible teachers—a single Meaning. But Socrates, except perhaps in the ahistorical vision of an Augustine or a Kierkegaard, justifies our yearning for something more.

I do not mean to suggest that this yearning much affects what presently goes on in our programs in the humanities, though I suspect that it inhibits our respect for a good deal of what we feel compelled to do; and indeed Socrates may be so protean a figure that we could exploit him—though this is not commonly done—to sanction even our current activities. This is suggested by the hodgepodge of ancient reports about the philosopher thrown together by Diogenes Laertius. This writer, who happily did not himself claim to be very wise, noted among other matters the fame of Socrates as a usurer and bigamist, his mysterious immunity from the plague, his devotion to physical fitness, and his reputation for valor, most of which would appear to have only marginal significance for the humanities. But Diogenes also tells us that Socrates was devoted to the performing arts. He was a distinguished sculptor, and in addition he played the lyre and "used frequently to dance." A talented poet, he helped Euripides write plays. He was also a sharp literary critic; e "used to pull to pieces" the work of other poets, with such devastating effect that he drove Meletus, an aggrieved poet, to join the prosecution at his trial. And finally he was himself a clever rhetorician, "a man of great ability, both in exhorting men to, and dissuading them from, any course . . . very ingenious at deriving arguments from existing circumstances": in short, much like Protagoras. I realize that the suggestion that we might appeal to Socrates in support even of what we are now doing is likely to seem absurd, but this sense of its absurdity might also obliquely confirm the fact of our discontent with the humbler tasks that have now fallen to our lot.

For, as I have tried to suggest in this essay, the real significance of

our persistent devotion to the model of Socrates is that he helps us to evade the radical choice between the lofty responsibilities that classical philosophy aspired to fulfill and those more human tasks that the humanities can effectively perform. It is in this sense that I think it is appropriate to speak of a "crisis" in the humanities, for this word literally signifies a crossroads, where a decision must be made. This crisis is not a product of the recent past; we have been standing, immobile, at this crossroads for nearly two thousand years. But such a decision, as I have also tried to show, would not require the repudiation of the treasures of antiquity, though it might compel us to view some of them in a rather different light; for the culture of antiquity—and this is also at the heart of the problem—was far more diverse than many of us now commonly recognize. The decision would compel us, instead, to treat the resources of antiquity with greater discrimination. Indeed, it would require us to follow antiquity in a choice that, unlike us, it was prepared to make. Such a choice would enable us, I believe, to speak with greater inner confidence, and therefore greater effect, to our contemporaries.

19
Christian Adulthood

An issue of Daedalus is often preceded by intensive discussion in preliminary conferences, out of which specific assignments emerge for dealing with a proposed topic. In 1974 such a conference was held, presided over by Erik Erikson, to discuss comparative models of human adulthood. Because I took exception to remarks at this conference about the significance of Christianity in this context, I was assigned to prepare an essay on the subject. Reactions to my essay have sometimes been surprising. One commentator described it as "a classic of gerontology." Reprinted by permission of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, "Adulthood," 105, no. 2 (Spring 1976), 77–92 .

The elasticity of Christianity, as it has accommodated itself to two thousand years of cultural change, is well known; and it poses special problems for the identification of a peculiarly "Christian" conception of what it means to be an adult. It is also likely to make any attempt at such definition seem arbitrary. I shall nevertheless try to show in this essay that Christianity does contain a characteristic conception of healthy human maturity, but to do so it will be necessary to distinguish between what I shall call historical and normative Christianity. Historical Christianity reflects the composite of those cultural impulses that make up what is commonly thought of as Christian civilization; much of it is not specifically Christian, although it constitutes a large part of what has been believed by Christians. Its conception of "adulthood" is often an eclectic mixture of somewhat contrary impulses, and it is likely to be unstable. But normative Christianity is an ideal type. It is normative in the sense that it builds on and is consistent with those biblical norms

about human nature and human destiny that give to Christianity whatever precise identity it may possess. It is also, therefore, heavily indebted to Judaism. It is not ahistorical, but it can rarely be found in a pure form. Its conception of adulthood can be stated with some coherence.

The conception of maturity in historical Christianity can be further described as a mixture of two quite different notions, which I shall call the idea of manhood and the idea of adulthood . The significance of this second distinction may be suggested by the differing etymologies of the two terms. The Germanic man is considered by most linguists to be derived from an Indo-European verb meaning "to think" (cf. the Latin mens ); it thus refers to a supposedly qualitative difference between human beings and other animals, and "manhood" would thus imply entrance into a fully rational existence. But adult comes from the Latin adolescere , "to grow up." It is (or can be) neutral about the nature of growth; it implies a process rather than the possession of a particular status or specific faculty. The two terms, which are often confused in our culture, can also be taken to represent the two major but contrasting impulses in the Western tradition. Adulthood , as I will use it here, is related to the anthropology of the Bible; and its suggestion of process hints at the distinctively dynamic qualities of the Hebrew language.^[1] But manhood is a creation of classical antiquity, and it reflects the need of classical culture to organize all experience in terms of absolute, static, and qualitative categories.

The idea of manhood is elaborated in the classical formulations of paideia or humanitas , which pointed, for the Greek and Latin educational traditions, to the peculiar excellence of the human species. Unlike adulthood, manhood tends, with rare exceptions, to be sexually specific, and thus it is one source of the tendency to deny full maturity to women.^[2] It also differs from adulthood in its rejection of individuality, and it is oriented to the goal rather than the processes of human development. We can see this in the relative indifference of classical humanism to the psychology of the child and its significance for the formation of the man.^[3] Childhood, in this conception, was conceived not as the positive foundation of maturity but as formlessness or chaos, and manhood was the result of the imposition on this refractory matter, by education, of an ideal form. With the achievement of manhood, childhood was decisively and happily left behind.

Embedded in this conception were both the metaphysical distinction between form and substance, with its hints of anthropological dualism, and a characteristic distinction, within man, among the several elements of the human personality: soul and body, or reason, will, and passion.

These were seen not merely as analytical devices but as real, qualitative distinctions corresponding to distinctions in the structure of all reality. Similarly, childhood and manhood had to be qualitatively distinct; they could not coincide, for insofar as a human being was still a child he could not be a man. Here we may discern the characteristic resistance of ancient rationalism to ambiguity and paradox.

In this view, some of man's faculties were also ontologically superior and sovereign, others inferior, dangerous except in subordination, and thus demanding suppression. Manhood was specifically associated with the rule of reason, which was at once the spark of divinity in man, his access to the higher rationality of the divinely animated cosmos, and the controlling principle of human behavior; the function of reason was to order the personality into conformity with the larger order of the universe as it was apprehended by the mind. The principles of reason thus come from "above," and the ideal man is therefore a fully rational being who pits his reason against the chaotic forces both within himself and in the world.

The assimilation of this conception into historical Christianity has been responsible for its tendencies to an idealism in which the religious quest is understood as a commitment to higher things, with a corresponding contempt for lower. Anthropologically, this has often pitted the soul (more or less associated with reason) against the passions and the body; it has also been responsible for the doubtful association of Christianity with the notion of the immortality of a disembodied soul. And certain conclusions have followed for the ideal of human maturity often encountered in historical Christianity. This conception is the source of a Christian ethics of repression, directed (like the pagan ethics of the hellenistic world) chiefly against sexuality as the most imperious of the bodily passions; of Christian distrust of spontaneity, a quality especially associated with childhood; and of the notion of the mature Christian—this might be called the Christian ideal of manhood—as a person who has so successfully cultivated his own bad conscience, his guilt for his persistent attraction to lower things, that he can only come to terms with his existence by a deliberate and rigorous program of self-discipline and self-denial in the interest of saving his soul. The Christian man, in this conception, has consciously separated himself as far as possible from his childhood, in obedience to a higher wisdom that is readily distinguishable from folly.^[4]

We can encounter this conception of Christianity in many places, notably among its modern critics. Nietzsche's morbid caricature of Christianity owed a good deal to the conception,^[5] though Nietzsche also

understood the significance of biblical Christianity better than many of his Christian contemporaries.^[6] And of course this kind of Christianity is now peculiarly vulnerable to attack. A case in point is a recent work by a British psychologist, whose position will both help to bring out the human implications of the classical strand in historical Christianity and throw into relief what I will present as normative Christianity. This writer addressed herself especially to the historical impact of Christianity on human development. Noting Jesus' association of childhood with the kingdom of heaven, she remarked:

Socrates encouraged his young followers to develop towards maturity; Jesus tried to reduce his to the level of children. The Gospels contain numerous statements in which the attitudes of children are compared favorably with those of adults. . . . These statements are so often quoted with approval that probably few pause to consider whether it is really a good thing for adults to think and behave like children. What attracted Jesus towards "little children," obviously, was their unquestioning trust in adults, and his ideal was to be surrounded by adults who had a similar trust in him.

This writer's somewhat uncritical commitment to the classical ideal of a manhood that leaves childhood behind seems reasonably clear, though her sense of the implications of that ideal and of the historical roots of the kind of Christianity she indicts is somewhat confused. But her attitude is not uncommon, and her depiction of one prominent strand in historical Christianity is not unfounded. She discerns in Christianity an authoritarian impulse that, rejecting true adulthood, aims to reduce adults to a childish malleability, and so proves also destructive of the positive qualities of childhood. Christianity, in her view, is a "harsh, joyless, guilt-obsessed religion that makes happiness suspect and virtue unattractive." It is, in essence, an "ascetic, other-worldly religion which for centuries has served to stifle the free intelligence and to limit disastrously the range of human sympathies." It is dominated by "a self-centred preoccupation with one's own virtue and one's own salvation," and accordingly the Christian has a "negative, passive, masochistic character and [an] obsession with suffering and sacrifice."^[7]

But this indictment neglects to notice that similar charges against historical Christianity have been periodically made from within the Christian community, a fact which suggests that we may find in Christianity itself a very different understanding of the Christian position. Thus it has not escaped the attention of Christians that the authority

claimed for Christian belief has at times tended to degenerate into an authoritarianism that contradicts the central meaning of Christianity. It is undeniable, for example, and certainly by Christians, that the Christian clergy have in some periods claimed, as Christ's successors, to be "fathers" with a more than legitimate paternal authority over the laity, their "children." In 1301, for example, Boniface VIII brought a long tradition of such paternalism to a climax in a stern letter to the king of France. "Hearken, dearest son," he wrote, "to the precepts of thy father and bend the ear of thy heart to the teaching of the master who, here on earth, stands in place of Him who alone is master and lord."^[8] But the practical authoritarianism in Christian history is easily exaggerated; the claims of ecclesiastical authority have rarely gone unchallenged. Those of Pope Boniface, indeed, resulted in a major disaster for the papacy at the hands of men who also considered themselves Christians. Some Christians have also rejected in principle the attitudes he represented. Calvin, for example, placed a highly unfavorable construction on clerical paternalism. "Hence it appears," he declared, "what kind of Christianity there is under the Papacy, when the pastors labor to the utmost of their power to keep the people in absolute infancy."^[9] Indeed, the papacy itself has shown recent indications of sympathy for Calvin's position. The aggiornamento of John XXIII has been widely interpreted as an admission of the coming-of-age of the laity, and Pope John himself suggested a new understanding of adulthood in his transparent inability to take seriously his own status and dignity as an adult. Paradoxically, this was somehow interpreted by many of those who observed him as the most persuasive evidence of his maturity.

The paradox of Pope John takes us to the heart of the conception of adulthood in normative Christianity, which I shall now approach directly through a text in the Pauline letter to the Ephesians:^[10]

So shall we all at last attain to the unity inherent in our faith and our knowledge of the Son of God—to mature manhood, measured by nothing less than the full stature of Christ. We are no longer to be children, tossed by the waves and whirled about by every fresh gust of teaching. . . . No, let us speak the truth in love; so shall we fully grow up in Christ. He is the head, and on him the whole body depends. Bonded and knit together by every constituent joint, the whole frame grows through the due activity of each part, and builds itself up in love.

Here we are immediately introduced to several important themes. One is the strictly metaphorical meaning of "childhood," whose character-

istics may be encountered in men of all ages; another is the association of maturity with personal stability. Still another is the identification of full adulthood with the loving solidarity of mankind, and this will concern us later. But it is of particular importance for our immediate purposes that the measure of true adulthood is finally "the full stature of Christ," for this is an absolute standard, in relation to which no man, whatever his age, can claim to be fully an adult. This peculiarity of Christian adulthood especially struck Calvin, who emphasized it in commenting on the text:^[11]

As [the apostle] had spoken of that full-grown age toward which we proceed throughout the whole course of our life, so now he tells us that, during such a progress, we ought not to be like children. He thus sets an intervening period between childhood and maturity. Those are children who have not yet taken a step in the way of the Lord, but still hesitate, who have not yet determined what road they ought to choose, but move sometimes in one direction, and sometimes in another, always doubtful, always wavering. But those are thoroughly founded in the doctrine of Christ, who, although not yet perfect, have so much wisdom and vigor as to choose what is best, and proceed steadily in the right course. Thus the life of believers, longing constantly for their appointed status, is like adolescence. So when I said that in this life we are never men, this ought not to be pressed to the other extreme, as they say, as if there were no progress beyond childhood. After being born in Christ, we ought to grow, so as not to be children in understanding . . . although we have not arrived at man's estate, we are at any rate older boys.

Here the paradox is fully stated: that the Christian, however ripe in years, cannot think of himself as a completed man. Christianity has, then, a conception of full adulthood; the goal of human development is total conformity to the manhood of Christ. But since this is a transcendent goal, the practical emphasis in Christian adulthood is on the process rather than its end. Since it is impossible to achieve perfect maturity in this life, the duty of the Christian is simply to develop constantly toward it. The essential element in the Christian idea of adulthood is, accordingly, the capacity for growth, which is assumed to be a potentiality of any age of life. It is in this sense that the Christian life is like adolescence, that stage in which the adult seems, however ambiguously, trembling to be born.

But adolescence also suggests the coexistence, within the personality,

of the child and whatever it is that he promises to become, and this points to another peculiarity of the Christian view: its insistence on the continuity, rather than the absolute qualitative difference, between the child and the man. The developing adult is assumed to incorporate positively the individual and (in fact) irrepressible character of the child. Adulthood assumes that the child cannot be left behind, but is the basis of the more mature personality. Thus the child lives on in the man, so that child and man are somehow identical, a conclusion, from the standpoint of classical manhood, that is paradoxical and absurd. It is evident also that the idea of adulthood is related to various other Christian paradoxes: that the last shall be first, that foolishness is wisdom, and that God, who is himself "highest," should lower himself to become a corporeal man—and indeed, as though this metaphysical confusion were not sufficiently degrading, that he should come not as a hero or a king but as a humble figure who is put to death for others. The paradox of adulthood points to the folly of the cross.

Similarly adulthood does not recognize real qualitative and hierarchical distinctions within the personality; it sees man, whether child or adult, as a living whole. It may sometimes use such terms as "spirit," "soul," "mind," or "flesh"; but this vocabulary (which also reflects the difficulties of translating the thought of one culture into the language of another) is intended to describe various modes of activity of what is, in itself, an undifferentiated unity. The anthropology of normative Christianity can only be pictured, not as a hierarchy of discrete faculties, but as a circle organized around a vital center, the core of human being (cf. Latin cor , "heart"), whose qualities, for good or evil, permeate the whole.^[12] Thus, where classical anthropology sought to understand man by identifying the several faculties of the personality and ranking them according to their objective value, normative Christianity has been inclined to accept and even to celebrate the mysteries of the total personality.^[13]

This conception of Christian adulthood is, of course, not only normative; it has also found concrete historical expression, though I think it has rarely been dominant in the history of Christianity.^[14] Nevertheless, the availability to Christians in all subsequent ages of the canonical Scriptures and the constant effort to penetrate to their meaning have meant that, however obscured by misunderstandings arising out of the cultural limitations of their readers, a biblical conception of adulthood has always played at least a counterpoint to the classical conception of manhood. It has never altogether disappeared from later Western culture, however muted it may have become; it has regularly helped to block

radical intrusions of the classical idea of manhood into Christianity (I suspect that both Arianism and Pelagianism are linked to that conception); and occasionally, though usually only briefly, it has swelled out unmistakably as a major theme. It is prominent in the mature Augustine, in the more Pauline manifestations of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations, and in twentieth-century neo-orthodoxy and biblical theology, with their heightened cultural relativism and their enhanced sensitivity to history.

This conception of adulthood is in fact so inextricably linked to normative Christianity as a whole that we can trace it through a series of basic and specifically Jewish and Christian doctrines and, in this way, explore its implications more deeply. Its foundations can be discerned in the biblical account of the Creation, which incorporates a number of insights basic to Christian thought. This is not, as in the creation myths of surrounding peoples, the culmination of a primordial struggle between a creator and the forces of chaos, coeternal with, perhaps even anterior to, him; it is a true beginning. This has various implications. God created the universe; and, as this was eventually understood, He created it out of nothing,^[15] a doctrine that establishes both the absolute transcendence of God and His full sovereignty over every aspect of creation.^[16] And since the Creation specifically included the heavens as well as the earth, the story subverts the classical distinctions between high things and low.^[17] If hierarchies of any kind are admissible in the biblical universe, they cannot, at any rate, have any sacred basis. They possess only relative value; all created things are, in the only relationship of absolute significance, on the same level, as creatures.^[18] For man this means not only that he must recognize his creatureliness but that he must see it in every aspect of his being. No part of him is divine, and therefore none can claim to rule by divine right over the others.^[19] Among its other implications, this precludes the possibility of repression as a way of ordering the personality. Because man was created as a whole, indeed in God's own image, every aspect of man is good and worthy of development, for "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good" (Gen. 1:31).^[20]

In addition, this good creation is depicted as a work of time, and, as the sequel reveals, God has built into it the dimension of process and change. Time and change, so dimly regarded in the classical world of thought, are therefore also necessarily good; the biblical God underlined their positive significance by presenting Himself, after the Fall, as the Lord of history who encounters and reveals Himself to man in temporal experience.^[21] The Old Testament is fundamentally historical, and the

New is based on a further series of historical events in which God uniquely enters and sanctifies time.^[22] In this conception the past acquires peculiar significance. It is that aspect of time which man can know through memory, which indeed he must ponder deeply because it gives meaning to the present and promise to the future.^[23] The past demonstrates God's care and will for man and therefore it cannot be ignored or repudiated. This explains why the Scriptures so frequently summon man to remember the past, for in an important sense it is contemporaneous with all subsequent time.

The significance of the past also points to the indelible importance of all human experience. It gives meaning to the particular temporal experiences that have shaped each individual during the whole course of his life, so that the biblical idea of time is the foundation for the conception of the worth of the individual personality.^[24] But it also gives meaning to the collective experiences of mankind into which all individual experience is ultimately submerged, a conception basic to the discovery of the great historical forces that transcend individual experience.^[25] Fundamental to the Christian view of man is, therefore, an insistence on a process of growth in which the past is not left behind but survives, shapes, and is absorbed into the present.^[26] The unalterable past provides a stable base for the identity alike of each individual and of every society. St. Augustine's Confessions , with its vivid delineation of a personality changing yet continuous with its past, is a product of this conception.^[27] The absence of genuine biography in the classical world has often been remarked.^[28] By the same token, the great classical histories sought to reveal the changeless principles governing all change, while the biblical histories were concerned with change itself as God's work and with its shaping impact on men.

The Christian life, then, is conceived as indefinite growth, itself the product of a full engagement with temporal experience involving the whole personality. The Christian is not to evade the challenges, the struggles, the difficulties and dangers of life, but to accept, make his way through, and grow in them. He must be willing to disregard his vulnerability and to venture out, even at the risk of making mistakes, for the sake of growth.^[29] This understanding of life finds expression in the figure of the Christian as wayfarer (viator ) or pilgrim; Christian conversion is thus not, as in the mystery religions, an immediate entrance into a safe harbor but rather, though its direction has been established, the beginning of a voyage into the unknown.^[30] As movement in a direction, it also implies progress, but a progress that remains incomplete in this life.^[31] The "other-worldliness" of Christianity is significant, in

this context, as the basis of the open-endedness of both personal and social development.

From this standpoint, just as the essential condition of Christian adulthood is the capacity for growth, the worst state of man is not so much his sinfulness (for sins can be forgiven) as the cessation of growth, arrested development, remaining fixed at any point in life. In these terms, just as adulthood requires growth, its opposite—what might be called the Christian conception of immaturity—is the refusal to grow, the inability to cope with an open and indeterminate future (that is, the future itself), in effect the rejection of life as a process.

There is, however, a close connection between the rejection of growth and the problem of sin; the refusal to grow is, in an important sense, the source of all particular sins. The story of the Fall reveals the connection, and may also be taken as the biblical analysis of the causes and the consequence of human immaturity. It contrasts essential man, as God created him, with actual man, man as he appears in history, who is fearful of the future and afraid of growth. The story explains this as a result of man's faithlessness. For the fall is caused not by a breach of the moral law but by man's violation of the relationship fundamental to his existence; it belongs to religious rather than to ethical experience. Primordial man, whose goodness stems from his dependence on God, is depicted as rejecting the creatureliness basic to his perfection and claiming independent value and even divinity for himself. He seeks to become "like gods," and implicit in this pretension is the rejection of his own further development. By complacently making himself as he is the divine center of his universe, he rejects the possibility of change and learns to fear all experience. Thus he loses his openness to the future and his capacity for growth; in short he repudiates his capacity for adulthood.^[32] The claim to divinity, therefore, paradoxically results in a pervasive anxiety. And out of this anxiety man commits a whole range of particular ethical sins, the end products of his faithlessness. Thus, too, he begins to suffer particular sensations of guilt.^[33]

A further symptom of his immaturity may be seen in man's perennial tendency, implicit in his claim to divinity, to absolutize his understanding of the universe in a frantic effort to hold his anxiety in check. This, I take it, would be the Christian explanation for the relatively small influence of a biblical understanding of the human situation in Christendom itself. Man solemnly invests his culture, which is in fact always contingent on his own limited and self-centered vision and need, with ultimate meaning, thereby imprisoning himself within a man-made, rigidly bounded, and internally defined universe that further destroys

the possibility for growth. He philosophizes, claims access to the real truth of things, to being-in-itself. This is the significance normative Christianity would assign to the absolute qualitative distinctions of classical culture, a man-made substitute for biblical faith. Harvey Cox has described such constructions as a "play-pen," a nice image in its implications for human development.^[34] Their power to inhibit human sympathy, with its special value for personal growth, is suggested by the need of the Greek (in an impulse with which we are all quite familiar) to see the man who differed from himself as a barbarian. Without faith—what Tillich has called the courage to be, which is also the courage to become—the only escape from man's intolerable fear of chaos is the idolatry of cultural absolutism. So, without faith, man tends to bigotry, for any grasp of the universe other than his own is too dangerous for him to contemplate. It is in this light that we can understand the full implications of the pagan charge that the early Christians were enemies of culture. In a sense this was true then, and it remains true; for normative Christianity all culture is a human artifact, and no absolute validity can be attached to its insights. Such a position is always likely to be disturbing, as every social scientist has discovered.

Yet normative Christianity does not deny the practical values of culture. It simply insists that, just as man is a creature of God, so culture is a creature of man, not his master. Secularized in this way, culture can serve many useful human purposes, and it can even become a vehicle of Christian purposes when men fully recognize their dependence on God.^[35] But culture can never be ultimately serious. Indeed, there are tensions in the Scriptures that suggest that some dimensions of biblical religion itself may be understood as products of culture, or at any rate set in a larger context within which, like culture, they can be seen to possess only relative authority. Job discovered this in his confrontation with an inscrutable but infinitely holy God, and we can also sense something of this in the tension in the Old Testament between prophetic religion and the law. The law is like culture in the sense that it defines and particularizes sins, and the prophets do not deny the validity of such definition. But prophetic religion also insists, not simply that there is more to be said about man's situation before God than this, but, in addition, that definition is significant only in relation to the indefinite and open.^[36]

If the Christian analysis of the evils in historical existence can be understood as a diagnosis of immaturity, the Christian conception of salvation can be similarly construed as a description of the only way to recover that capacity for growth in which true adulthood consists. The

basic problem here is to replace anxiety with faith, so that man can enter an open future with confidence and grow through his experience. But here he encounters a problem he cannot solve. Faith is a function of man's dependence on God, but it is precisely this relationship that man in historical existence has repudiated. In effect he has destroyed the "true self" God made, and he must therefore be remade. And as Augustine asked, "If you could not make yourself, how could you remake yourself?"^[37] Described psychologically, the predicament in which man finds himself is one of entrapment and bondage—in short, of total helplessness.^[38] Furthermore, because man was created a living whole and repudiated his creatureliness as a whole, there is no area of his personality left untouched by his alienation from God and thus from his true self. This is the precise meaning of the often misunderstood doctrine of total depravity: it signifies that man has no resources by which he can save himself.

Yet exactly here, in the recognition that this is the case, lies the first step toward the resumption of growth. Once man sees himself as he is, acknowledges his limits, perceives the contingency of all his own constructions, and admits that they have their sources only in himself, he is well on the way to accepting his creaturehood and open to the possibility of faith. Faith begins, then, not in illusion but in an absolute and terrifying realism; its first impulse is paradoxically the perception that faith itself is beyond man's own control, that there is no help in him, that his only resource is the grace of a loving God. The Christian, as Barth remarked, is "moved by a grim horror of illusion." "What is pleasing to God comes into being when all human righteousness is gone, irretrievably gone, when men are uncertain and lost, when they have abandoned all ethical and religious illusions, and when they have renounced every hope in this world and in this heaven. . . . Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone. Piety is the possibility of the removal of the last traces of a firm foundation upon which we can erect a system of thought."^[39] Salvation thus begins with confession, the admission of sin and ultimately of faithlessness, which is therapeutic in the sense that it demands total honesty and is directed to the removal of every false basis for human development. Augustine's Confessions might be described as the Christian form of psychoanalysis, the retracing, in God's presence and with His help, of the whole course of a life, which aims to recover the health of faith.^[40]

By confession and repentance, themselves a response to faith, man recognizes his helplessness and thus becomes open to help. This help is

revealed and made available by God himself through the saving work of Christ, in which God again demonstrates his infinite concern with history. The response to Christ in faith expresses man's full acceptance of that creatureliness which is the essential condition of his authentic existence and growth; the answer to sin is not virtue but faith. By faith man is dramatically relieved of his false maturity, his claims to a self-defined "manhood," and enabled to begin again to grow. This is why conversion can be described as a "rebirth," which resembles birth also in that it is not subject to the control of him who is reborn; baptism, the ritual of rebirth, is an initiation into true existence. Freed from the anxieties of self-sufficiency by faith, man can grow, both individually and collectively. Indeed, only now has he the strength to face directly the contingency, the inadequacy, the slavery and sinfulness of all merely human culture. He can risk seeing it clearly because, with faith, he has also received the gift of hope. From this standpoint the Gospel is the good news because it frees man for adulthood.

But this is an adulthood that involves, always, the whole man; thus its goal is symbolized not by the immortality of the soul but by the resurrection of the body as representing the total self that must be made whole. As Augustine exclaimed in old age, "I want to be healed completely, for I am a complete whole."^[41] Christian maturity is manifested, therefore, not only in the understanding but more profoundly in the affective life and in the loving actions that are rooted in the feelings. Christ is above all the model of absolute love. Conformity to this loving Christ is the goal of human development; in Augustine's words, "he is our native country." But he is also the key to Christian adulthood, for "he made himself also the way to that country."^[42] The Christian grows both in Christ and to Christ.

Again we encounter a set of paradoxes, the first of which is that man's full acceptance of his creatureliness, the admission of his absolute dependence on God in Christ, proves to be the essential condition of human freedom. For the only alternative to the life of faith is bondage to the self, to the anxieties and the false absolutisms embedded in human culture, by which man is otherwise imprisoned. Faith, in these terms, is the necessary condition of true autonomy, of freedom not from the constraints of experience—the Stoic ideal—but freedom to grow in and through them that is essential to adulthood. The Pauline injunction to work out one's own salvation in fear and trembling suggests this freedom, and suggests also the strains attendant on growth, but it would be impossible to fulfill without the faith that "it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his pleasure" (Phil. 2:13). This kind

of freedom supplies the strength to challenge authority maturely, without the rebelliousness, arrogance, and destructiveness symptomatic of insecurity, or to criticize the definition of one's own life and to examine the dubious sources of one's own actions.^[43]

At the same time, obedience to God paradoxically proves a far lighter burden than obedience to human ordinances or the requirements of culture, even though—another paradox—it is, in any final sense, impossible. For Christian righteousness consists not in a moral quality that must be maintained at all costs but in a relationship of favor and peace with God that is the source (rather than the consequence) of moral effort. If the Christian is in some sense virtuous, his virtue arises from love rather than duty, and if he fails, he can count on forgiveness. Thus, though he must recognize and confess his guilt as part of his more general realism, he is not to nourish or cling to it, for this would amount to the rejection of God's love. Repentance means allowing our guilt to be God's concern, and all guilt, otherwise so paralyzing for the moral life, must be swallowed up in love and gratitude. Christian adulthood is a growth away from, not toward, guilt.

By the same token it cannot be repressive, not only because no power in the human personality is entitled to excise or even to control any other (this is the happy implication of total depravity), but above all because such an effort, since it cannot touch the quality of the heart, would be superficial and in the end futile. Christian thinkers have sometimes displayed great insight into the nature of self-imposed control. Calvin's description of the process implies some acquaintance with its physiological consequences, as well as realism about the social necessity for restraint in a world in which those, too, who are growing in Christ must recognize that they are not fully and dependably adult: "the more [men] restrain themselves, the more violently they are inflamed within; they ferment, they boil, ready to break out into external acts, if they were not prevented by this dread of the law. . . . But yet this constrained and extorted righteousness is necessary to the community."^[44] But the ideal of Christian adulthood is not control but spontaneity; it is, in Augustine's words, to "love and do what you will."^[45]

The spontaneity in the Christian ideal of adulthood points to still another paradox: its deliberate cultivation of, and delight in, the qualities of the child, now understood less metaphorically.^[46] Childhood, after all, assumes growth, and it is in this respect fundamentally different from childishness, which rejects it; in this sense childhood is a model for adulthood. Indeed, childhood welcomes the years, unaware that they bring decay and death, and the deep and fearless interest of the child

in his experience permits him to ask simple but profound questions that, later, may seem wearisome or too dangerous to be entertained. The child is not afraid to express wonder and astonishment.^[47] Thus the confident trust in life of a healthy child, so different from the wariness that develops with age, has often been taken in Christian thought as a natural prototype of faith; in this sense, the adult Christian life is something like a return to childhood. As Kierkegaard remarked, it seems to reverse the natural order: "Therefore one does not begin by being a child and then becoming progressively more intimate [with God] as he grows older; no, one becomes more and more a child."^[48] But there is, in this reversal, realism about the actual results of maturation, which ordinarily destroys the openness and wonder of childhood and replaces it with disguises and suspicion, with sophistication and a "knowingness" that chiefly serve to exclude a propounder knowledge. For the man, a return to the values of childhood is only possible when the inadequacies of his pretended manhood have been recognized in repentance and confession and he can take the way of faith. Then the growth of the man can again be like that of the child.^[49]

This suggests a further peculiarity in the Christian view of adulthood: its lack of interest in chronological disparity. All Christians, insofar as they are growing in Christ, are equally becoming adults—or equally children.^[50] Baptism is no respecter of age. An important consequence of this is to limit the authority and influence of parents, for where parent and child are both growing up in Christ,^[51] the parent cannot be the only, or even the primary, pattern of maturity.^[52] The Christian parent has failed unless his child achieves sufficient autonomy to establish his own direct relation to Christ. Nor is there sexual differentiation in the Christian conception: girls and boys, women and men are equally growing up in Christ.

But there is still another respect in which Christian adulthood merges with childhood: in its appreciation for play. This may be related to Paul's contrast between the wisdom of this world and the divine foolishness by which its hollowness is revealed.^[53] The recurrent figure of the Christian fool, both child and saint, has sought to embody this conception. But it also has lighter, if equally serious, implications. The security of dependence on a loving God makes it unnecessary to confront life with a Stoic solemnity; the Christian can relax, even (again paradoxically) when he is most profoundly and actively confronting the sinfulness of the world. He can enjoy playfully (which also means to delight in, for itself, not to exploit instrumentally, for himself) the goodness of the Creation. His culture can be an unbounded playground for free and

joyous activity. He can risk the little adventures on which play depends. The loving human relationships of the Christian life can find expression in mutual play, through which we give pleasure to one another. Play is a natural expression of the joy of faith, which makes it possible to engage in life, even the hard work of life, as a game that has its own seriousness (for without their special kind of seriousness games could scarcely interest us), and that yet can be enjoyed precisely because the ultimate seriousness of existence lies elsewhere, with God.^[54] But play is also related to that seriousness. Bushnell saw play as "the symbol and interpreter" of Christian liberty and pointed to its place in the eschatological vision of Zechariah 8:5: "And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls, playing in the streets."^[55]

I have treated these various elements in the Christian conception of adulthood as aspects of an ideal for individual development, but to leave the matter at this would be to neglect an essential dimension of the Christian position. Like Judaism, Christianity has usually seen the individual in close and organic community with others. The Pauline description of growing up in Christ, though it has obvious implications for the individual, is primarily concerned with the growth of the Christian community; it is finally the church as one body, and perhaps ultimately all mankind, that must reach "mature manhood." The primary experiences through which the Christian grows are social experiences. One encounters Christ and the opportunity to serve him in others; the maturity of the individual is realized only in loving unity with others.^[56] The power of growth is thus finally a function of community, and, at the same time, maturity finds expression in identification with other men; Christ, the model of human adulthood, was supremely "the man for others."^[57] Through this identification of the individual with the body of Christ, the Christian conception of adulthood merges finally into history and eschatology.