Exiles from Eden:
Gaffney, Edward McGlynn Jr.
BOOKS A processor's progress IF he central metaphor of this EXILES FROM EDEN ars to make and transmit knowledge with ...
...To these normative limitations on had an adequate answer to the question, the setting of modern higher education...
...By all reports, gious commitments have led to destructive of the value of church-related colleges at many-some say most-of these teachtribalism and violence...
...The abil- depended on an elaborate system of courCarl L. Bankston III ity to provide fresh approaches to issues tesy to ensure the collaboration of provinthat date back to Gibbon's mordant phras- cial aristocracies...
...Or even former Harvard Pres- meetings they recently attended, I simown sense of the academic vocation more ident Derek Bok, whose ruminations in ply urge these skeptics to read Schwehn's fully and responsibly at Valparaiso than 1986 to the Board of Overseers of his uni- perceptive commentary on the link beat Chicago...
...bars was a large sign that read, "Do Not be coerced into obedience, this coercion Approach the Gibbon: It Bites...
...Or the German tive account of the academic calling...
...Aware that many might wonder The principal reason for his move from in subtle depth as a radical transmutation what these virtues have to do with acaChicago to Valparaiso, says Schwehn, of the religious vocabulary of the Ref- demics they have known or with faculty was that he "found [he] could pursue [his] ormation...
...Schwehn's unequal force the evil of secular totalitarian versities, but a volume that university ad- derstanding of teaching as a true calling regimes of the Left and the Right that have ministrators in both religious and secular or vocation has profound implications for left behind human carnage by the millions settings could usefully give their faculty one of the most troubling social policies in our own century...
...Put more positively, he reapChicago, at best a paradise lost...
...An old view of late lower classes, an ethic of friendship that Christianity for Roman political society Roman government, expressed by J.B...
...seems plausible...
...0 graphic era, depended on the cooperation of local elites with the emperor and his representatives...
...If it strains historical data, Schwehn reaches conclu- Schwehn's broad conception of the role credulity to think of the University of sions that are compelling precisely because of teaching in the academic vocation is Chicago as edenic, it is all the more fanthey do not exceed the warrant of the ev- masterly, enabling scholars to overcome ciful to imagine that teachers' colleges idence he adduces...
...More to the point, he exemplifies this rule by offering a charitable reading of those he subjects to the rigors of his criticism, including Hume, Weber, Bok, and Bloom...
...Suppose...
...Surely not sociologist, Max Weber, whose pro- Among these virtues are humility, faith, because it has the financial resources of grammatic 1918 essay, "Wissenschaft als self-denial, charity, friendship, and jusits more prestigious neighbor to the north...
...When for cultivating and sustaining the very research universities that operate on a me- Schwehn writes that "All academics are Yale A graduate center where musicians, artists and Institute ministers prepare together for vital leadership of Sacred in congregations of all denominations...
...Attached to the cage's ing countrysides...
...Schwehn mentions several times the golden rule of hermeneutics proposed by literary critic Wayne Booth ("Read as you would have others read you...
...and teen-agers in the nation's elemengion, acknowledging that passionate reli- Exiles from Eden is not a vindication tary and secondary schools...
...ly on postsecondary education, this vol- eral institutions of higher learning-in- Communication, always slow and trouume does not directly address the "rising cluding several Catholic "colleges and blesome in antiquity, became even more tide of mediocrity" in American educa- universities-have experienced a failure difficult as the northern barbarians blocked tion that was decried bootlessly in the of nerve or a loss of rootedness in their overland routes through Western Europe early years of the Reagan era, that re- religious traditions, and therefore an ad- and the Balkans...
...But Schwehn passes his own leap of faith, it seems quite rea- tact with real students as a distraction at over in silence the even more massive sonable by comparison to the secularist best from their "real work" of research and "exile from Eden" of hundreds of thoudogma that the risks of reviving religious publication...
...deformation of most eighteen-year-olds Exiles from Eden is a compelling ar- Recent students of the period, howevbefore they get to college as a "most trou- gument both for the restoration of religion er, tend to emphasize that the late empire bling" question...
...So when he announces their commonly felt alienation from con- are paradisiacal...
...Given this division of the ucated opinion...
...The central burden of his argu- Schwehn deftly analyzes what these smaller, religiously committed universi- ment is "not to explain, much less to jus- disparate sources of our current malaise ty (Valparaiso), as the author of this book tify" this connection, but "to account for in higher education have in common: a did...
...Beruf," Schwehn explores at length and tice...
...cago) in order to take up teaching at a much America...
...The empire was a big place...
...While the peasants could 182 pp...
...Power and Persuasion, therefore, treats how the devotio, or "loyal RATTLING GIBBON'S CAGE support," of local notables toward the central government was maintained by the upper-class culture shared by the indigenous provincial notables and officials of the imperial administration...
...Schwehn notes the irony that noth- how we could ever have lost sight of it...
...He esteems each of his opponents-or better, his partners in dialogue-and he appreciates their contributions in the very act of dissecting the flaws of their claims...
...But why tionalism such as David Hume, who re- propriates the language of the spiritual Valparaiso...
...sands of elementary and secondary teachconflict are too great...
...While the centralized personal authority and popu- monarch's behavior was bounded by edbishops "inculcated the duty of passive lar obedience...
...We are left with sensus about the good, and the specter to include at least a passing reference to only the vaguest hint of a connection beabout reviving religious conflict largely the fact that the overwhelming majority tween his understanding of the vocation disappears...
...autocracy, Brown adds the limitation of higher than what...
...Courses of study are structured for the individual of Sacred Music needs of each student while stressing the integrity of theological Worship and the Arts and musical disciplines...
...lower down or further lessness in much of modern American out...
...that theism has of teachers in America are not employed of teaching and the larger problem of efbeen and will continue to be responsible in colleges at all, let alone in prestigious fective teaching in our society...
...and thus lead "ethical, fulfilling lives...
...demic vocation explains not simply why the subtlety of understanding of the con...
...es is surely one of the qualities that has The upper-class culture that united the f the decline of made Peter Brown, now at Princeton, the rulers of the Roman world was inculcatthe Roman Em- preeminent contemporary historian of late ed by the system of education known by f 6 pire was hastened antiquity...
...Schwehn appears inno- in the understanding and practice of the remained a system of laws, and that the cent of one of John Silber's rare funny academic vocation in general and for the Hellenistic tradition of the philosophercomments, that "we had to invent the term more particular efforts of religious com- king restricted the emperor's freedom of 'postsecondary' because we no longer munities to transmit their convictions in action...
...listen as you would have others listen to you...
...created widespread networks of contacts, stem from the faith's softening of moral Bury in 1910, held that the empire of the and ideals of deportment that helped limit character...
...He takes seriously the good possible...
...Thus 26: 9 April 1993 Commonweal the virtues of the Enlightenment are not virtues that make productive study of and chanical approach to the "publish or peroverlooked, but its vices are identified as conversation among rival conceptions of ish" rule, with all the dangers of excesthe defects of its virtues...
...But what would one make of a scholar this voluntary exile was appropriate for nection between vision and virtue that who intentionally left a tenured position him, but also why it is essential to recon- Schwehn persuasively argues can be found at a prestigious secular university (Chi- nect religion and higher education in in religious community...
...mained unchanged by the "Education equate reason for their continued exis- Imperial government, in this pretelePresident," George Bush, and that does tence...
...They teach children better path to truth in reason than in reli- religious traditions are too great...
...philosophers...
...The Towards a Christian Empire When Peter Brown taught at Berkeley, cities held the responsibility of extorting Peter Brown he taped a photograph of a cage in a zoo taxes from the peasants of the surroundUniversity of Wisconsin Press, $12.95, on his office door...
...help to lessen the savagery of the barbar- lute monarchy," with all power vested in Since the emperor himself was exians from the north, within the civic struc- the emperor, and that its political consti- pected to stand at the apex of this pyrature of the empire the effects of the religion tution was a relatively simple matter of mid of cultivated social values, even the were almost entirely negative...
...BOOKS A processor's progress IF he central metaphor of this EXILES FROM EDEN ars to make and transmit knowledge with volume on the connection Religion and the Academic Vocation the inability of Harvard's faculty to help between religion and the in America students learn how to "become more maacademic vocation is drawn Mark R. Schwehn ture, morally perceptive human beings" from anthropologist Clifford Oxford University Press, $19.95, 141 pp...
...Full tuition scholarships are available...
...Although this "softening" did fourth and fifth centuries was an "abso- violence by prizing self-restraint...
...mained a "commonwealth of cities...
...Surely not because the uni- mained blind to the relationship between virtues to develop a compelling alternaversity's name, "vale of paradise," ade- spirituality and learning...
...Or Geertz's suggestion that most academics Allan Bloom's book a year later, The start their careers "at the center of things" Edward McGlynn Gaffney, Jr...
...Closing of the American Mind, with its and then find employment by "moving to- trenchant criticism of the drift and rootward the edges...
...of the education of our youth...
...colleagues to help restore a better sense in America today, the lamentable state By avoiding a tendentious selectivity of of the purpose of their academic vocation...
...Performance concentrations include organ, 409 Prospect Street choral conducting and composition...
...Music Master of Music Master of Musical Arts Doctor of Musical Arts Master of Divinity Master of Arts in Music and Worship Master of Sacred Theology Master of Music/Master of Arts in Religion Students apply through the Institute of Sacred Music for a graduate degree program at Yale Divinity School or Yale School of Music Address inquiries to: which includes course work in both schools and in related graduate Yale Institute departments...
...Focused exclusive- It is especially urgent at a time when sev- distance...
...versity falsely contrasted the duty of schol- tween these virtues and the academic life well lived...
...But he notes with the expense of secular colleges and uni- ers do an inadequate job...
...To the extent that this sive specialization, intellectualization, the claim of the Enlightenment to find a is true, the risks of weakening the great and disenchantment...
...rejection of the connection that higher ing in his reading of Genesis 1-3 had led Among the chief culprits are the European learning must have with religion in order him to consider edenic the University of philosophers of "enlightened" secular ra- to flourish...
...In this once influential view, both thesis" of themes found in a large body of rhetoric provided social distance from the the advantages and disadvantages of modem scholarship...
...When educated opinion obedience" and discouraged the "active Mediterranean world into ruler and ruled, proved insufficient against the power of virtues of society," the monks engaged in Gibbon's argument that Christianity's sole the emperor, however, tradition assigned 28: 9 April 1993 Commonweal...
...quately encompasses its reality...
...In the matter POWER AND PERSUASION IN LATE lives of "sacred indolence," or so Gibbon of taxation, in particular, the empire reANTIQUITY famously maintained...
...Paideia bound by the conversion Late Antiquity, he reopens the question of the ruling classes in codes of courtesy and of Constantine," how the empire's transformation from pa- assigned a special role, that of persuaders remarked Edward Gibbon, "his victorious ganism to Christianity affected its civic cul- and admonishers of the powerful, to religion broke the violence of the fall, and ture...
...A long and intellectually demollified the ferocious temper of the con- Brown describes this volume as a "syn- manding training in Greek literature and querors...
...Geertz calls this phenomenon the Schwehn's powerful essay on the aca- higher education, but without anything like "exile from Eden syndrome...
...New Haven, CT 06511 Application deadlines for 1993-94: early decision November 1; spring (203) 432-5180 decision January 1. Commonweal 9 April 1993: 27 exiles from Eden," he really means all not even now seem urgent to the rein- contribution to Roman political life was college profs, even though he acknowl- vestment strategies of the new presi- an attitude of compliant otherworldliness edges the problem of the formation and dent...
...In Power and Persuasion in the Greek term paideia...
...Remove the notion This point could have been strength- ers who are anything but delighted to be that theism should seek to achieve con- ened by widening the scope of inquiry in their classrooms...
Vol. 120 • April 1993 • No. 7
