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Education and the Spiritual Tradition: An Essay on 'The Issue of Religion'
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10453 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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2 / 1993 |
4,646 Words |
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Anne Carson Daly
Anne Carson Daly, former professor of English at the
University of Notre Dame, is currently writing a book entitled
Alice and the Existential Questions. |
In 1819, the Romantic poet John Keats, already riddled with the tuberculosis that would kill him two years later, wrote a moving letter to his hard-pressed brother far away in America. The world, the young poet explained, is a school for souls, a "vale of soul-making." So, saying, Keats aligned himself with two millennia a of the West's greatest intellects. Although he would have disagreed with most of them as to what a soul was and as to how it should best be taught, he, like them, recognized that man is infinitely more than a "talking beast" and his education much more than a utilitarian endeavor.
In 1950, more than one hundred years later, T.S. Eliot, one of the twentieth century's preeminent poets, made much the same kind of comment to an august audience at the University of Chicago. In his fourth lecture on "The Aims of Education" subtitled "The Issue of Religion," the Nobel Prize-winning author emphasized that education is fundamentally and unavoidably connected to religion. He explained that this is so because one cannot carry out an educational program unless one knows whom one is educating and one can only know this by answering the question "What is Man?"
The Religious Answer
Eliot maintains that the answer to this question is religious because it requires that one define man existentially. To do this, one must grapple with the question of man's origin: Who made him? And with that of his ends: For what was he made? These questions, in turn, generate two others: Is a there a God? and if there is, what kind of God is He? Even if one answers that there is no deity, one must still locate man in the context of being: How did he come to be? How has he developed? What is his purpose and function? And where does he fit in the family of creatures? Clearly, as Eliot realized, one cannot come to grips with these questions without invoking some kind of framework of belief. And such a framework whether--secular, humanist, materialist, utilitarian or Christocentric--is implicitly religious because it provides its adherents with a supranational system of belief according to which to interpret reality. As Eliot was quick to point out, any such interpretation conditions how one defines man and dictates the role one assigns him, which, in turn, determines the kind of education that one thinks he needs.
In other words, the worldview to which one subscribes makes a world of difference in the kind of education one advocates. For the materialist, man is a wondrous concoction of chemicals, a "talking beast" who should be schooled
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