Another Underline Adventure in Books Will Grabs Off the Shelf.
Toward the end of Stanley Hauerwas’s With the Grain of the Universe, he says, “By directing attention to the university as a site where Christians might rediscover the difference that being Christian makes for claims about the world, I do not mean to overvalue the importance of universities for Christians. Given the character of the modern university, we should not be surprised that the most significant intellectual work in our time may well take place outside the university.” And here there is a footnote:
In particular, I am thinking about Wendell Berry, who quite self-consciously stands apart from the university. He does so because the modern university is organized to divide the disciplines in a manner that insures that the university need pay little or no attention to the “local and earthly effects” of the work that is done in them. According to Berry, if the university sponsored authentic conversation between disciplines, the college of agriculture would have been brought under questioning by the college of arts and sciences or medicine. Berry confesses that he has no wisdom about how the disciplines might be organized but observes only that at one time, a time when the idea of vocation was still viable, the disciplines were thought of as being useful to one another. However, once the notion of vocation is lost, the university has no other purpose than to insure that the rich or powerful are even more successful. Berry wryly notes he does not believe that a person was ever “called” to be rich or powerful. The hallmark of the contemporary university is, of course, the professionalism whose religion is progress, and “this means that, in spite of its vocal bias in favor of practicality and realism, professionalism forsakes both past and present in favor of the future, which is never present or practical or real.” Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 2000), 129-130. Berry’s criticism could fruitfully be compared to John Paul II’s understanding of the culture of death. For example, Berry observes that the story that dominates our age is the story of freedom from reverence, fidelity, neighborliness, and stewardship. Strikingly, he suggests that the “dominant story of our age, undoubtedly, is that of adultery and divorce. This is true both literally and figuratively: The dominant tendency of our age is the breaking of faith and the making of divisions among things that were once joined” (133).
I said something in a post a few weeks ago about “whatever the first word I read from Wendell Berry was.” And it occurred to me the other day while reading that marked up footnote that this could very well be the first thing I ever read about Berry. Possibly, at least. I don’t know exactly what year I read Hauerwas or when it was that I finally picked up Berry’s The Art of the Commonplace, but it was late for me, not early. It really cannot be overstated how much of a non-reader I was before the early to mid 2010s.
Also, that reference to John Paul II’s “culture of death” might not be what you think. Here’s Hauerwas a few pages earlier:
For John Paul II, the church is the alternative to violence just to the extent that the church is the agent of truth. […]
In Redemptor Hominis John Paul II not only holds Christ up as the source of hope, but also provides on the basis of that hope his extraordinary analysis of the pathology of modernity. He notes that fear characterizes modern life. As modern people, we are afraid of what we produce, particularly that part of our making that is the result of our genius and initiative. We fear that our creations will turn against us and become the means for our unimaginable self-destruction. In later encyclicals, he describes our condition as a “culture of death” that is nowhere more evident than in our unwillingness to receive into this world our own children, exactly because we fear our calling to be God’s good creatures.
Redemptor Hominis was issued in 1979.
I love discovering valuable things written before my time. I don’t mean, in this case, the C.S. Lewis “clean sea breeze of the centuries,” “two heads are better than one,” thou shouldst read old books sense. I mean things that were written and said well within earshot of my time and my bubble but which I and (usually) those around me were simply oblivious to. Those early 2010s were spent exactly zero inches outside of the David Platt, Francis Chan, John Piper orbit. But footnotes — praise be upon them, those exponential breadcrumbs of discovery — they took me places I’m still finding thanks for.