The Eagerness of Age
THE EAGERNESS OF AGE THE University of Louvain is soon to be 500 years old. An announcement of the ceremonies of observance has been sent around the world, so that scholars and lovers of...
...Yes, Louvain is old...
...But on the other hand, it has driven those who retain something of a metaphysical mind to reestablish their foundations...
...Finally, it appears—and to excellent advantage—in sympathy with the social purposes and standards of mediaeval Christian Europe...
...It has brought a great deal of intellectual scepticism into American life...
...In our own time, Louvain has been the memorable proof that the life of reason can go hand in hand with mystical earnestness—that a Catholic need not be deaf and dumb to the affairs of modernity, but can add them joyfully to his traditional, eternal treasure...
...No phase of secular academic life is more interesting, for instance, than the wide-spread vigorous reaction against chaotic group morality...
...As a result, the clash between pragmatic modernism and traditional doctrine has been so intense nowhere as inside the universities...
...But no brief summary can designate the meaning which Louvain has for so many who have reverenced it as a symbol of that advancement of science which civilization has always needed, and of that adherence to the Christian faith which guarantees genuine contact with eternity...
...During 500 years Louvain knew Erasmus as well as Cardinal Mercier...
...A nation which is forever concentrated upon the fact that it isn't intellectual, artistic, philosophical and what not, is in considerable danger of growing up to be priggish...
...Frontiers were altered round about it, and empires fell while it stood...
...If this formula had been an original invention, instead of—as it was—a thing waiting for somebody to express, it could hardly have been so satisfactory...
...It would be far better to accept Whitman's brave hypothesis of barbarism and set out to make bows and arrows with some abandon...
...But we need to capture its sturdy restlessness, its undimming spiritual vitality...
...Therefore, if the customs were to abide, if the individ478 ual was not to run completely amuck in favorite anarchies, it was necessary to consider these customs a sufficient philosophy in themselves...
...It has shown (as almost no other place in the world has) how easily Christendom can absorb the sound fruitage of the nineteenth century, just as it once assimilated the wisdom of antiquity...
...The combination of these two impulses—the conservative and the conquering—in the sphere of the intellect ought to give us, if not Louvain, then at least a widely distributed effort to do some of the things for which Louvain has stood...
...Accordingly he phrased his doctrine as follows: "The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities...
...It has been the spur for a hundred gospels purely negative in character...
...On the other hand, it has always been pioneer in spirit, facing the wilderness and the people who roamed there, then the vast accretion of industrial towns, tilled fields, sleepy suburbs...
...Even the speed with which its structures were rebuilt after wartime bombardment is almost a symbol oi how this centre of learning remained youthful after every shock, eager to advance and wrestle with the new...
...Even the most abstracted mediaevalist is interested in his subject primarily because it is not innocuous...
...This bewildering array of inquests, conducted with all the solemnity of a physician and all the purposiveness of a revivalist, may in the end magnify a self-consciousness which is already big enough...
...As a consequence, the position occupied—or at least occupiable—by the Catholic mind in the United States is quite unparalleled...
...Perhaps there was only one way in which the individual could wholly escape the pressure of that atmosphere...
...James simply noted the universal prevalence of a mental disease...
...He also saw that, in the face of several cultural complexities, nobody had time to get at the principles again...
...Perhaps America may never be able to duplicate the original in detail or even in some fundamentals...
...Sometimes their commentaries may have deplored, in passing, the absence of Racine and Watteau from naked American villages, but the tenor of their narrative was with the here and now—with the task to be done, with the dream to be made come true, in ways sanctioned as right by Christian centuries...
...and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts...
...It is now fashionable to believe that one has outgrown William James—perhaps to the extent of attaining the staggering intellectual stature of Will Durant...
...Louvain is a great model, to some extent an enduring recipe...
...But James's diagnosis of the modern American mind was certainly the soundest ever made...
...It lived through the heaviest storms which European civilization was buffeted by—the tumult of religious and social revolution, the catastrophic impact of the great war...
...Best of all, however, will be (we feel) a frank acceptance of the Catholic attitude toward America...
...The voyageurs who first came here may have hungered for an environment in which Malebranche and Descartes were gravely discoursing upon ideas, but they met the red man on his own terms none the less...
...Certainly Emerson, were he living today, would be mightily taken aback at the fervor with which the doctorate is thumbing old books and crumbling statues, not merely for the sake of antiquarian and aesthetic pleasure, but indeed in the hope of finding out "how to live...
...If any institution has lacked fear of America, it is Catholicism...
...But of necessity no university could be such a town...
...Like so many American institutions of today, it may now and then have been "swamped with mediocrity," but it was never itself mediocre...
...Very probably their fire was kindled by contagious flames: they discerned that literature was a great and going business in which they might well invest every penny they owned...
...Cram has termed "walled towns...
...Moments in its history when it was content to be complacent are rare...
...If the pressure of exterior opinion upon the presiding scholars could have been counteracted, the youthful student-body would still have been a stream carrying in the debris of the great world...
...He saw that his fellow-citizens had, in one manner or another, lost the connection between the customs they were observing and the principles behind those customs...
...Most people are so thoroughly dissatisfied with what is new about it now that they seem to be in almost too great a hurry to come back to something refreshingly old, permanent, and dependable...
...For the conquest of the mind of man is something that has to be reachieved constantly...
...The whole American spirit of his era was really in favor of "the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretense of finality in truth...
...An announcement of the ceremonies of observance has been sent around the world, so that scholars and lovers of education may be led to take their part in the homage due to a cultural ideal and a great intellectual achievement...
...America which gazes at its wrinkles and fumbles about for some helpful cosmetic or "facial lift," may succeed in changing its appearance but it will never become naturally beautiful by such tactics...
...and on the other hand, a brave trust that humanity can master new conditions and even a new self...
...He could dwell apart, in the equivalent of what Mr...
...It has absorbed the mediaeval tradition, not from books or parchment, but as a tree absorbs nutritive elements in the soil...
...This is, on the one hand, a profound conviction that basic truths are young after 500 or 5,000 years...
...And yet the creative, constructive urge abides...
...Within their pleasant boundaries, one might cultivate meditation of eternal truths more constant and fortifying than open air or molecular mystery...
...Nurses wisely keep their charts in places where the patient cannot stare at them too insistently...
...Again it is visible as a plea for a sounder grip on international obligations and diplomatic honesty...
...Sometimes this takes the form of opposition to democratic sovereignty, as in the critique of Professor Babbitt...
...The game of creating a completely new America seems to have been pretty well given up...
...and because it was normal he called it health...
...We fancy that neither Dickens, Shakespeare nor Chaucer set to work with rare enthusiasm because they saw the appalling dearth of intellectual enterprise in England...
...It ought to be observed meanwhile that the anxious are probably taking the temperature of American civilization a little too frequently...
...We are all deeply interested in making a satisfactory product out of American materials, in doing something with today for the sake of tomorrow...
...but if it could be transplanted it would be one of the most youthful things in young America...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 18
