Cardinal DiNardo's Commencement Speech at St. Gregory's University

As I mentioned Sunday, Cardinal DiNardo's commencement speech at St. Gregory's University was a great exploration of the importance of a Catholic liberal arts education.  Toward the end of his speech he says:

The rise of Universities in the 11th and 12th Centuries A.D. is a Christian phenomenon and is not strange at all. What is strange is what the fundamental Christian belief in the Doctrine of Creation and the Doctrine of Redemption does when these teachings enter into dialogue with classical pagan thinking. The little engine chugging along and keeping the dialogue going has produced some real explosions, fireworks, useless combustion, and intense light! You are heirs of that dialogue in this Catholic Benedictine University.

To bring Christian Faith into the heart of the University is to say that it is of momentous importance, as momentous as many other necessary and significant aspects of the human condition. For pagan and even now for sympathetic secular thought, the religious dimension may have significance but it is part of the whole picture. For pagan thought the gods and religious necessities reflected necessities in the universe that human beings should appreciate. The gods can be demythologized, the sense of the sacred given its rank, and a sense of the divine can be appreciated. But the whole cosmos is greater than these; in fact, the divine principle is frequently seen as something aloof, uncontaminated by nearness to human things. This is what makes Christian Faith and the belief in Creation and providence, a providence that is not oppressive, so startling, even unsettling. In the obedience of Faith we come to an understanding of God who reveals, but who could have remained silent. We come to an understanding of Creation ex nihilo, from nothing. God could be all there is and there would not be any lessening of being and goodness, but de facto, the world is and is there as the result of limitless and unforced generosity. This is not just belief but a revelation, an illumination. God is infinitely transcendent but closer to every part of creation and closer to each one of us than we are to ourselves. For details, read the astounding CONFESSIONS of Saint Augustine, the masterpiece of wonder about the God of Christian Faith. This affects the way everything is viewed and understood, and yet each thing now regains a sense of its own beauty and excellence by itself. It is as though every creature could say, however tiny or insignificant, “LOOK AT ME!” The whole creation and everything in it becomes a “university.”

Those who come to study at a university that is founded on such principles are fortunate to have this bigger picture and can be even more dedicated to the particular part or region of creation to which their particular talents or interests lead them.

 

Beyond the teaching about Creation, the Catholic University is simultaneously centered upon Redemption, or, in shorthand, on Jesus Christ, the greatest figure who made his own the reality of abiding with God, of filial obedience, and of the meaning of the human person. His life and teaching call for understanding and interpretation; but more so, they call for discipleship. One is not left neutral when approaching him. As the Misfit says in one of Flannery O’Connor's stories: “You got two choices. Either follow him or do some meanness.” A Catholic University tries to unpack all this significance in light of the Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church. It is a daunting but exhilarating challenge. Those who come to study at a university founded on this principle, aligned with the principle noted above about the doctrine of Creation, are doubly fortunate to have this reality opened up to them. Jesus is the, masterpiece interpreter of the human person and of the human heart. To be astonished and drawn to him while at a university is a gift and a blessing, not an awkward and lukewarm concession to outdated pieties.

 

The complete speech, which is well worth the read can be found by clicking "Continue Reading DiNardo at St. Gregory's"

ST. GREGORY’S UNIVERSITY COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

May 8, 2010

St. Gregory’s University

Graduation exercises are also called commencements or beginnings. Some steps in education and formation have been completed and now new steps appear, the initiation of something and someone is at hand. But these exercises also make a declaration about human beings and the human condition itself. St. Augustine, one of the great philosophical and theological super minds of the western Tradition, and there are only a few, was also an astute observer of political life, of the city, of the meaning of the person as an agent in the world. He wrote: “Ut esset initio homo creatus est, priusquam erat nihil.” “That there be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nothing.” St. Augustine was intelligent enough to understand that many “things” existed, even the earth itself, before God created them male and female. But his point is exhilarating: only with the creation of man does the principle of “beginning” occur in creation. In effect he was saying that it is with the human person that genuine agency of initiating something arises. In this he was very “political” and “worldly,” though he was equally emphatic that the “telos” of human beings, their finality, is for the City of God. Each of the graduates is a new beginning and their education equips them with knowledge, insight and moral agency to be true and good actors in the world, to initiate new things and to be, each of them, irreplaceable centers of intelligence and action in the city and world they enter “officially” now, though we all must admit they have been agents for some time. Graduation places a kind of seal of readiness for reason and action on those who have reached the level of proficiency to be called “graduates.” I congratulate all of those here today receiving degrees. I also extend words of thanks to the faculty and administration of St. Gregory's University, to the Liberal Arts standards in which you have been nested these past years, and to your long suffering parents and families. Those who know you are proud in you and for you. As for your parents and families, they are also relieved and rejoice in their pocketbooks now depleted.

This is a university with a core of liberal arts and the classical tradition done in a Benedictine way. I perused your course catalogue and the content of the courses. It is refreshing. … This place takes seriously that there are ends to things beyond human purposes; to be able to distinguish the ends of things and persons is the major step towards the good and the excellence of those same things, even beyond their use or usefulness. There will always be human purposes and they affect our look at things and the ways things look: but the genuine look at something is the good looks it gives us without our overly intrusive purposes. It is what the Greeks meant by eidos that later became cheapened into the concept of “idea.” It takes good human formation and tutoring to get at that. It was what the term “objectivity” was targeting.

The “good looks” of things admired by the mind is what education tries to draw out of the human beings, the new ones, who come to learn. That is the issue of classical education: it draws out the respect for things, persons, states of affairs, writings and etc. for the good of the mind and body of the person being educated. I am unabashed delighter in classical education and am myself a victim of it, A Jesuit High School, Duquesne Univ. Classics, Catholic University of America Philosophy, under graduate and post graduate, and Theological Formation at Rome first with the Jesuits and then at the Patristics Institute. Some people even accuse me of living in the 4th Century A.D. What of it? Such education steels your soul for a more fluent and less effusive view of modernity, and now, the view of the post-modem. I hope your education here has flexed your mind to make distinctions, the very basis for concepts, judgments and propositional thinking. I hope a few have moved even a step further into some philosophical displays and the formal character of language and being in which philosophy revels. I also hope that your study of things at their best in any field, their excellence, has also reached you personally to learn what human excellence and moral agency is and how acquired and lived. That is not unimportant. It is the crown of a classical and liberal arts formation, even if you are spending the rest of your life crunching numbers and products in business or delighting in the focus that the intentionality of the scientific mind, so dominant since the 1600's, so rightly celebrated and yet so clearly not the whole picture, gives to the world and to knowledge. (The scientific mind works with a bang in labs, battlefields, boardrooms and production lines but is less capable of doing justice to its practitioners themselves as declaratives and agents. In other words, it is ill equipped to deal with the first person singular when that syntax moves beyond information to personal disclosure. Scientific mind needs both correction and set limits from other ways of knowing, thinking and acting.)

The great Aristotle, and he was very great, is Plato without the pictures; he didn't write dialogues; he wrote treatises. But his sobriety and dead right analysis of the logos, the rational in the human condition, is remarkable. He also had an uncanny ability to outline and describe human character, human ethos in which reason is embedded. Given his sobriety of expression it is amazing that he wrote that an incontinent or undisciplined man can do 10,000 times more damage than a savage beast; it seems an understatement nowadays. He lined up human character in four types of agents, the virtuous, the merely continent, the incontinent or undisciplined and the vicious. The types were meant to display aspects of human action. Though the virtuous may not be huge in number, they are essential for the life of the city; they become a standard and a mark. Reason and passion are at home in them and they become a rule for right acting and good decisions. Virtuous persons are always essential for the good life of a community. Though Aristotle always preferred philosophical contemplation, the gazing on necessities, over the life in common, he prized the importance of excellent mind joined to a virtuous life. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, Aristotle remarks that there are some people who are very smart and intelligent but also wicked. They are rational beings but not very reasonable since the logos has not reached their moral agency. He uses the word “villainy” or “knavery” to describe such agents. They are really up to no good and ready for anything however base. To be thoughtless in this way, to make everyone and everything subject to our own purposes and not respect what things are is a serious problem in the human condition. Not only do we need to be good at our syntax, our categorical judgments and our propositions; these very things need a vision of the good of things. Without such vision we are at the border of the war of all against all, a Quentin Tarantino movie without end! No wonder that Aristotle crowns his analysis of human action with a beautiful and clear description of human friendship. You may have noticed that my analysis of human beings and the life of the mind has spent as much time so far on agency in moral and practical life, on virtue, as much as it has spoken about theoretical or technical-scientific proficiency. That is on purpose.

Up till now, on purpose, I have refrained in bringing to light any statement on the meaning of faith within education and formation, the life of reason and the mind. But something very distinctive happens when Christian Faith is brought to bear on the issues and practice of education and formation. To be sure, the first and unbreakable access to Christianity is by Faith; one is a committed believer. The act of Faith is a gift given by God and a response with the whole being of the believer. But Christian Faith is also a content and requires intelligent assessments, verdicts, practices, in short Faith involves understanding and reason. It first and last asks for what the tradition has called “the obedience of Faith,” already proclaimed by St. Paul and first announced by Christ Himself. The obedience of faith is a response from what the biblical tradition calls the “heart.” And the heart involves intelligence as well as will and affections. Faith is thus set up from its very beginning in a dialogue with reason, culture and social life.

The rise of Universities in the 11th and 12th Centuries A.D. is a Christian phenomenon and is not strange at all. What is strange is what the fundamental Christian belief in the Doctrine of Creation and the Doctrine of Redemption does when these teachings enter into dialogue with classical pagan thinking. The little engine chugging along and keeping the dialogue going has produced some real explosions, fireworks, useless combustion, and intense light! You are heirs of that dialogue in this Catholic Benedictine University.

To bring Christian Faith into the heart of the University is to say that it is of momentous importance, as momentous as many other necessary and significant aspects of the human condition. For pagan and even now for sympathetic secular thought, the religious dimension may have significance but it is part of the whole picture. For pagan thought the gods and religious necessities reflected necessities in the universe that human beings should appreciate. The gods can be demythologized, the sense of the sacred given its rank, and a sense of the divine can be appreciated. But the whole cosmos is greater than these; in fact, the divine principle is frequently seen as something aloof, uncontaminated by nearness to human things. This is what makes Christian Faith and the belief in Creation and providence, a providence that is not oppressive, so startling, even unsettling. In the obedience of Faith we come to an understanding of God who reveals, but who could have remained silent. We come to an understanding of Creation ex nihilo, from nothing. God could be all there is and there would not be any lessening of being and goodness, but de facto, the world is and is there as the result of limitless and unforced generosity. This is not just belief but a revelation, an illumination. God is infinitely transcendent but closer to every part of creation and closer to each one of us than we are to ourselves. For details, read the astounding CONFESSIONS of Saint Augustine, the masterpiece of wonder about the God of Christian Faith. This affects the way everything is viewed and understood, and yet each thing now regains a sense of its own beauty and excellence by itself. It is as though every creature could say, however tiny or insignificant, “LOOK AT ME!” The whole creation and everything in it becomes a “university.”

Those who come to study at a university that is founded on such principles are fortunate to have this bigger picture and can be even more dedicated to the particular part or region of creation to which their particular talents or interests lead them.

Beyond the teaching about Creation, the Catholic University is simultaneously centered upon Redemption, or, in shorthand, on Jesus Christ, the greatest figure who made his own the reality of abiding with God, of filial obedience, and of the meaning of the human person. His life and teaching call for understanding and interpretation; but more so, they call for discipleship. One is not left neutral when approaching him. As the Misfit says in one of Flannery O’Connor's stories: “You got two choices. Either follow him or do some meanness.” A Catholic University tries to unpack all this significance in light of the Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church. It is a daunting but exhilarating challenge. Those who come to study at a university founded on this principle, aligned with the principle noted above about the doctrine of Creation, are doubly fortunate to have this reality opened up to them. Jesus is the, masterpiece interpreter of the human person and of the human heart. To be astonished and drawn to him while at a university is a gift and a blessing, not an awkward and lukewarm concession to outdated pieties.

Let me give a brief snippet of Christ's teaching that is momentous when it comes to understanding virtue, the human heart, and thereby, the human person. All three Synoptic Gospels, Sts. Matthew, Mark and Luke, record an incident in which a lawyer comes to Jesus and asks what a highly debated question was then. "What is the greatest commandment? Jesus responds in all three Gospels with a quotation from the Book of Deuteronomy, from the inspired Pentateuch. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul.” Jesus adds a codicil from the Book of Leviticus: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself. His enriched sense of poverty before the Word of his Father delivered to Moses and Israel lies at the base of the quotations. He does not grasp at his status but repeats what his Father had uttered through the inspired Old Testament. This itself is illuminating. But St. Luke rewards a further question from the arrogant lawyer. He asks “Who is my neighbor?” What follows is a superb parable of the Good Samaritan. At the end of the parable Jesus shifts the question. “Who was neighbor to the unfortunate victim who fell among robbers?” The lawyer wanted to know who was good enough to be his neighbor. Jesus turns the issue upside down and asks “To whom are you a neighbor?” The Samaritan shows that the neighbor is anyone who is vulnerable or in need. The whole ceiling of moral limits is removed. The substantive issue is addressed simply through a narrative and the meaning of the inspired Word of God is enlarged, deepened and made startling and new. Such is the power of the presence and words of Jesus. We know these words as also uttered by one who is the Beloved Only Son of the Eternal Father. Perhaps we might say such occasions are teachable moments!

Graduates and Friends! This day marks endings and beginnings, appreciation for education and achievements. Above all it marks a day of gratitude. I hope that all of the graduates, armed with Degrees, will begin anew and accomplish much in the world with their eyes also fixed on the One who loves them beyond any reputation, achievement or human limits. I also pray that the graduates will deepen their moral agency and their delight in the grace God is constantly giving for their growth in holiness and thanksgiving.

The classical Christian tradition has always named the excellence of things, the excellence of persons, the truth of creation and the goodness of virtue by a name that shows they are reflections and images of a God beyond them all. The name of the word is beauty. The One who most showed us the beauty of the Father is the face of Jesus. I hope he will travel with you in the days ahead even as he has been with you here on this beautiful campus these past years of education. God bless! Do something beautiful for God!