The Unredeemed Liberal Arts: And How to Save Them (Part 1)

If you ask almost any student or professor what the purpose of the liberal arts is, they will likely not give you an explicitly theologically informed answer. Instead, they will likely discuss how “it fosters critical thinking,” or helps one “adopt different approaches to understanding,” or “trains one’s mind to be agile.”¹ Christians are usually no different.² Certainly, these answers could be linked to the general development of our human capacities but rarely are they as theologically attuned to our telos as Hugh of St. Victor’s answer, “This, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness, a likeness which to us is a form but to God is his nature.”³

There are numerous historical reasons for the failure to teach Christians how to think theologically about the purpose of the liberal arts as a whole or the particular arts themselves. The source of the problem reaches back to the curricular practices of the medieval universities. This blog post will outline how early American Christian liberal arts colleges amplified this problem.

In tomorrow’s post, however, I will then point out how American Christian liberal arts institutions in the late nineteenth century made important curriculum changes to partially correct this problem. Still, they only made changes in one area. We still have a long way to go before we save Christianity from being relegated to a curricular silo and allow Christ to animate what remains of a liberal arts curriculum within general education at Christian universities.

The Unredeemed Liberal Arts

Historically, universities have been incredibly conservative places when it comes to the undergraduate curriculum. Numerous courses required in the liberal arts colleges of the medieval universities formed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were still required by American liberal arts colleges up to the late nineteenth century. For example, Yale College’s 1880 curriculum was typical (pp. 54-55). Students largely took courses in liberal arts such as Greek, Latin, Mathematics, the Natural Sciences, Rhetoric, Philosophy, etc. (with the non-traditional liberal arts course, hygiene, being required for first-year students—probably for good reason).

Also, what most people do not realize is that both the medieval liberal arts curriculum and early American versions were more pagan than Christian. They certainly were not Christian in ways most faculty who read Christian Scholar’s Review would consider Christian. They even primarily taught Greek using pagan sources instead of the New Testament. The original reason for this arrangement is that medieval universities followed Basil’s instead of Augustine’s curricular ordering regarding the place of Scripture in education (placing it after instruction in pagan writings).

Moreover, they made theology an advanced degree only offered in graduate faculties for those who graduated from liberal arts colleges. The largely pagan liberal arts provided the prerequisite tools or capacities on the way to learning how to practice theology, law, or medicine. Unfortunately, that often meant that medieval liberal arts students were not necessarily educated to think theologically about both the purpose and content of the liberal arts unless they encountered astute commentaries or teachers.⁴

Unfortunately, during the formation of the early American liberal arts colleges, “the commentary as a genre disappeared for more than a century, between 1670 and 1790” ⁵ That meant the early offerings of pagan authors were not supplemented by Christian commentaries. The colleges also left out other important Christian sources. For example, in perusing most of the early course catalogs from American liberal arts colleges I have not yet found a pre-1900 curriculum that required students to read Augustine’s Confessions, which contains a helpful example of how to think Christianly and critically about the liberal arts, or his On Christian Doctrine that provides insight into how to understand the relationship between Christian and pagan learning. Nor did they read Hugh of St. Victor.

In addition, colleges did not require students to read old or newly created works that offered a Christian approach to a specific liberal art such as rhetoric or political science. Instead, they usually read a pagan author’s understanding of subjects such as rhetoric or politics. For example, 1880 Yale students read John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy instead of Augustine’s City of God in the recently created course addressing politics.

This problem was compounded in that American liberal arts colleges never added the graduate faculties of theology, law, or medicine until the late nineteenth century. This situation created a view of the liberal arts that had never been the view of Christians in earlier church history. The largely pagan-informed liberal arts began to be seen and still are seen as the core of the university and not tools for higher theologically-informed vocational ends. Whereas Hugh of St. Victor would write in the eleventh century that the liberal arts are means meant to help us restore the image of God, today one finds a contemporary Dean of Arts and Humanities at Harvard describing the liberal arts as “the soul of the university.”

Similarly, while Augustine would critique the unredeemed liberal arts in the Confessions as possible instruments for ungodly intellectual seduction (book V), North American liberal arts educators began to portray them as incorruptible goods in and of themselves instead of possibly corruptible tools. That is what happens when the liberal arts are separated from Christian theology, especially theological anthropology. Its advocates tend to idolize them.

Indeed, much of the panic about the demise of the liberal arts today is informed by this problematic view. Instead of seeing the liberal arts as helping humans further what Christ has already done for us—restoring the imago Dei and advancing God’s Kingdom, or at least serving humanity or other professional disciplines, they were seen and continue to be seen as the heart and soul of the university. It leads to contemporary defenders of the liberal arts, which are usually those teaching in the liberal arts, sounding at the same time, insecure, arrogant, and self-interested—exactly what one would expect of unredeemed approaches to the liberal arts.

The Missing Basics: Bible and Theology

One major source of this earlier problem was how both the Bible and theology were related to the liberal arts college in America. One will not find a Bible or theology course in the first three years of the liberal arts curriculum of almost every liberal arts college in America before the Civil War. Only as seniors might students take one or more of four courses that would touch on Christianity: moral philosophy, evidences of Christianity (usually based on William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity), natural theology, and/or Butler’s Analogy (based on Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion). For example, one can see in the1880 Yale College curriculum linked earlier that Yale required Natural Theology and Evidences of Christianity.

That’s why those praising either early American college curriculum as being thoroughly Christian or equating a liberal arts education with a Christian education are always mistaken. Yet, it is important to note that most pre-Civil War Protestant college students in America still received Bible teaching during their time in college, but it was often undertaken on Sundays in association with required church attendance. Bible teaching fit within what we would classify today as the co-curricular dimension of the college or university. For instance, the 1872 Methodist Boston University catalog indicated that the institution required students to attend chapel and then invited students to attend Sunday School for the study of the Bible on Sunday afternoon (p. 71).

These institutions practiced what I call a Christ-added approach to the liberal arts curriculum. This reality is also why it is understandable that so many of them secularized. In most cases, secularization simply involved abolishing co-curricular chapel or church requirements and altering some senior classes.

Truly Saving the Liberal Arts

The liberal arts and the liberal arts college will only be saved if we recognize that the liberal arts are not the soul of the university. They are merely instruments or tools that can help us advance our God-given vocation endowed in us by God, as image bearers of God. As image bearers, we are both to steward God’s creation and enjoy the wonderful opportunity to expand upon God’s creation by creating human culture. We are to do all of that in all our vocations while demonstrating God’s virtues. That purpose is a key element of the Christian university’s soul. Those teaching the liberal arts, and all faculty for that matter, must remember that the liberal arts are only humble tools that only fulfill their potential when they are used in service to that Christian vision. Christian educators must also justify them in this way.

Moreover, the tools themselves must be taught in ath theologically-informed manner. Simply teaching pagan or secular approaches to rhetoric, history, languages, politics, economics, health, etc., something that course descriptions give the impression that is what is happening at most Christian liberal arts institutions (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), is hardly how to advance restoring the image of God in our students.

Tomorrow, I will discuss one successful attempt in the late nineteenth century to try and reform the liberal arts to at least provide one important element to the liberal arts curriculum—the addition of classes studying the Bible.