Remarks to new members of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Villanova Chapter, April 22, 2012
by
William Werpehowski
Department of Theology and Religious Studies
Villanova University
Congratulations to our new inductees. Well done.
First off, I want to thank Professor Christine Palus of our Political Science Department for inviting me to say a few words at this induction ceremony. You honor me with your kindness and confidence.
Next, I bring this message to you from John Churchill, National Secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society: “I wish to extend my warmest greetings to the Villanova chapter and congratulate its new inductees, both personally and on behalf of the national Society. Good for you, and good for the University to have done so well in educating you.”
Events like this one are occasions for celebration, of course; but they are also opportunities for gratitude — gratitude for students like yourselves, for teachers and colleagues such as those assembled here, and for the circumstances, encounters, and personal influences that have contributed to whatever accomplishments and successes we enjoy. For my part, there are two such influences I would like to share with you as they concern the educational vocation I have chosen and my reasons for choosing it. Memories can be unreliable; still, I have to say that these core encounters took place about fifty years ago.
After school, when I was eight or nine years old, my grandfather Stephen Margetich, my mother’s dad and my first son’s namesake, said something like this to me: “You be sure to go to college. It’s a great thing to get an education. It makes you better.” He himself left Croatia at the age of fourteen with grades one through seven under his belt, and eventually landed in America working, as did so many others, at the Bethlehem Steel plant in my home town just fifty or so miles down the road from here. My grandfather was a great musician and a voracious reader, and he alone among members of my family actively and unambiguously supported my wacky decision to study religion in school (the others, understandably, couldn’t help themselves asking me again and again, “Religion? What are you going to do with that?). What did he mean by the remark that education “makes you better?” It has always been clear to me that he meant “a better person,” “a person of character.” He meant something like what the initials Phi Beta Kappa signify, the Greek motto that “love of learning is the guide of life.” Specifically, I learned later, he was referring to a freedom that learning and the love of it brought along — freedom from bigotry and narrow loyalties, freedom for welcoming undefensively but also challenging fearlessly when need be social, cultural, and political arrangements, and finally, the freedom to pass on these other two freedoms in our families and other communities. Believe me, it wasn’t that the connection between college and material success escaped my grandather’s notice. Not at all. It just wasn’t what he most wanted to say to me about the matter. And throughout our time together until his death in December, 1979 (on the day after I learned that I had a job interview at Villanova), it never was.
Grandpop’s message was spoken to me at around the same time that my mother enrolled at Moravian College to complete her own studies and get her baccalaureate degree. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents between 1960 and 1962 when school let out. Mom would get back from classes by dinner. After preparing and sharing it with the family, she took to studying. Here is what I remember about that. She shared what she was studying with me — be that art history, biology, Spanish literature, philosophy, or stuff in her major, which was sociology. I did not understand a word she was saying most if not all of the time. But the words flowed about Leonardo da Vinci, the experimental method, Don Quixote, the pragmatists, and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd. And what carried the words to me, what made me want to listen to them even if I hadn’t a clue, was that they were almost always spoken with excitement and joy, with laughter and/or gravity and/or wonder about the world she was learning about and learning within.
Grandad got me thinking about learning, inquiry, and the freedom, above all, for virtue. Mom shared her love of learning, her joy, with me. I have always believed that what I do in my work and why I do it are traceable first of all to those two folks.
I invite you all to conduct some such similar exercise, some such tracing, and offer a word of thanks.
Now, however, I want to reflect briefly, in tribute to Stephen Margetich, on one more virtue or discipline or skill that the freedom of inquiry and the life of the mind may draw forth. And in tribute to Margaret Werpehowski, who also sends her greetings to you, I’d like to consider the relation between joy, beauty, and moral responsibility as it might emerge from the love of learning.
C. S. Lewis, a fine literary critic as well as a Christian theologian and author of The Chronicles of Narnia, had this to say about what is involved in reading well:
Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are. . . . In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of self. But that is an old paradox, “he that loseth his life shall save it.” [1]
Lewis is talking about a kind of self-forgetfulness, a release from self-preoccupation, in the service of getting the point, or getting nearer the truth of things, or testing a hypothesis, or reaching an insight. This self-emptying, what we theologians might call kenosis, is essential to genuine academic excellence. It includes both a passion for the truth and objectivity about it all, enough humility and self-criticism so not to cut what is the case to the shape of our desires, and enough patience to wait for the light to shine and illumine us. As Simone Weil has it, this way of “paying attention” is certainly not accomplished by gritting your teeth and furrowing your brow as beads of sweat stream down your face.[2] It is more a discipline of yielding, of respect or even reverence for the subject matter of the arts and the sciences.
Often self-forgetfulness may come as a relief, a glimpsing of peace that accompanies feeling unburdened by one’s own cares and anxieties. Certainly reading and intellectual activity are not the only avenues to it — witness Tolstoy’s marvelous description of how the character Levin experiences it through manual labor in community with others in Anna Karenina. But evidently your own gifts include having a route to self-forgetting in and through your will and desire to inquire and learn. And this virtue, as Lewis tells us, is the central ingredient in acts of love and justice. The “freedom” in study that “makes you better” is a freedom for humble, self-giving attention.
And the “joy” one takes in study and inquiry and learning may attune one really to see the world and the beauty within it. There is a lot of ugliness in the world, too, of course, including the ugliness of hatred, of willful, stubborn stupidity, of vulgar desire, of exploitation, degradation, and murder, of contempt for the truth and the relentless quest for dominant power. Your education, I am sure, has taught you a lot about all of that. But all of that, as all of us in this Augustinian university know, is, however viral, at root parasitic, an absence or diminishment of the good and the true and the beautiful. In your studies, you have also and especially encountered the glories and mysteries of natural, social, cultural, political, moral, and spiritual worlds.
How have you, how will you, respond to these glories, these mysteries?
In her magnificent novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, who I believe is the finest writer of English prose going today, puts the following in the voice of the book’s protagonist, the Reverend John Ames:
Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave — that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us . . . to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.[3]
The excitement you have known in your studies and conversations, your reading and writing, your explorations and discoveries, yes, even in reckoning with your struggles, losses, and self-doubt — this excitement, this joy in living the love of learning as a guide to life, should, God willing, bring you “to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear,” and that precious things have been put into your hands. To do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. So your response, your response-ability, is to be useful, to be generous in giving homage and devotion and faithful service to the world you inhabit, and to life and its dignity in its manifold environments.
Ladies and gentlemen, students and now fellow members with your teachers of this nation’s oldest academic honor society: Take pride, if that is the right word for it, in gaining in some grand measure the freedom for self-forgetfulness, for in it you certainly will flourish and be enlarged. Just so, be useful.
Congratulations again, and God bless you and yours.
[1] C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 138.
[2] See Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God (New York: Harper Collins, 1973), 57-65.
[3] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2004), 246.