What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever—Westminster Shorter Catechism 1
I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly—John 10:10 (KJV)
Around the year 544, a Roman statesman named Cassiodorus founded a new monastery near the city of Squillace in southern Italy. He was determined to advance an ambitious new vision of Christian education. His curriculum consisted of two parts: biblical study and exploration of the liberal arts. After mastering both, his students would join “a new generation of Christian scholars” equipped for a life of excellence in this life and the life to come.1
Cassiodorus called the monastery The Vivarium. A vivarium is an enclosed space where creatures are given the resources for their own flourishing and observed so that we can learn more about what kind of thing they are and what they are meant to do.
The Vivarium was a profound statement by Cassiodorus about what he believed humans needed to thrive, what learning those things revealed about the human condition, and what man could accomplish when he was equipped with such knowledge. Scripture and the liberal arts. Not two isolated enterprises but distinct disciplines each mutually reinforcing the others. Knowing God and knowing man.
While the Bible certainly teaches us a lot about what it means to be human (See Genesis 1-3 for example), the liberal arts (or humanities as we often call them today) “grasp human things in human terms.”2
In other words, the humanities help explain humanity to itself. So, it is no surprise that the terribly anti-human culture we inhabit today coincides with a complete destruction of the humanities across the West.
Humanities departments are failing to attract students. Speaking about his own discipline, Wilfred McClay credits capitulation to political ideology for the decline. The study of history has been “weaponized” to placate the new progressivist gods and useful for the “mindless sloganeering of protestors who can only repeat a memorized chant.”3 Activists obsessed with intersectionality and critical theory actually tear down monuments and statues in the name of history. The discipline has cannibalized itself.
What is true of history is true of other fields. Just as history has become anti-history, so have the humanities become anti-human. In their delusion, they think human nature is infinitely malleable and demand utopia now. What is the result of their efforts? Moral relativism, an oppressive speech regime, and a debased culture of self-gratification mirroring the worst horrors of Orwell and Huxley.
We ignore the wisdom of our fathers at our own peril. We might think we are morally superior to those who have gone before us, but there are timeless truths to learn from the likes of Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and others—lessons about pride and power, virtue and love that do not change from one generation to the next.
This connection between education and culture that I am describing is not original to me. The idea is as old as Plato and runs through C. S. Lewis.
In Book II of The Republic, Socrates asks Glaucon, “How will the men of their ideal city be educated?” If he is serious about having a just city, Glaucon must commit himself to forming just men. According to Socrates, pedagogy determines your polis.4
Lewis agrees. In Abolition of Man, Lewis begins by noting a lesson in a particular grammar textbook for secondary school students. The authors of the textbook submit that a truth claim like “The waterfall is sublime” only conveys sentiments. We can’t actually speak objectively about the good, the true, or the beautiful because they are simply an expression of subjective feelings.5
Lewis, of course, saw through the authors’s scheme. While rejecting the traditional values under the guise of subjectivism, they were really asserting their own set of values as objective. For Lewis, it was an obvious form of tyranny that would tear apart the social order and eventually lead to the complete destruction of mankind.
Plato and Lewis help us understand the inherent connection between liberal education and culture. But grasping human things on human terms, as necessary as it is, is not enough. There is another, much more spiritual connection between the humanities and the good life. Plato and Lewis understood it. So did Cassiodorus. It is why he had his students as The Vivarium study special revelation as well. True knowledge of man leads us to the higher knowledge of God.
Calvin gets at something similar in the first chapter of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. “The whole sum of our wisdom,” Calvin says, “broadly consists of two parts, knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves.” The latter will inevitably lead to the former since its purpose “is to show us our weakness, misery, vanity and evilness, to fill us with despair, distrust and hatred of ourselves, and then to kindle in us the desire to seek God, for in him is found all that is good and of which we ourselves are empty and deprived.”6
Determining what is good starts in one of two places. Either we seek the answer within or find it outside ourselves. The former inevitably leads to subjectivism and the destruction of the very thing it seeks. Therefore, the good must be objective. And if it is objective, it must stand outside ourselves. We can’t manifest it. It must be received: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17).
So let’s connect the dots.
Culture mirrors education. If man grasps the immutable facets of human things on human terms, he will order society accordingly. But true knowledge of humanity culminates in the knowledge of God. The two are inseparable.
The breakdown of our social order parallels a similar interruption in the chain above. For too long, we have tricked ourselves into thinking we could have the benefits of a God-fearing culture without fearing God. We have partitioned off the knowledge of man from the knowledge of God and lost both in the process. The high wall of separation between the sacred and the secular has grown so tall that it has blocked out the light. We are restless, and so we will remain until we find rest in God.
Possible solutions abound. Let me propose one for the church: we need to facilitate new vivariums.
Such a task is not a repudiation of the sufficiency of Scripture. After all, human reflections on the reality of human nature should never contradict the Bible but complement and apply it. Still, we need to be the place where those who seek answers find them: answers about who man is and how he finds his ultimate end in the glory of God.
Writing at Mere Orthodoxy, Stiven Peter also encourages the church to embrace helping humans with human things:
Our Culture does not give guidance on how to interact with the opposite sex. The Church should aid in modeling romance, flourishing marriages, and fulfilling family life. Zero-child households are becoming the norm. The Church, in response, should be saying, “Here is how you date. Let us help you. Here is how we've married. Let us help you. Here is how we've parented, let us help you." Our Culture is marked by profound loneliness. The Church should model generous hospitality and deep commitment to the community. Our Culture does not know how to have hope in times of adversity. The Church should model suffering and perseverance. No one else is going to repair these institutions. Only the Church can.7
But helping humans with human things requires a shared language of human nature. We cannot administer CPR to a dying culture if we haven’t been taught the proper techniques. We need to build up those muscles that have atrophied under liberal secularism with a steady diet of nutrients (Scripture) and exercise (liberal arts). Perhaps then we will be ready to take on the anti-human culture with a better vision of the good life and point them to the source of every good gift.
Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023), 344.
Wilfred McClay, “The burden of humanities,” The New Criterion, November 2023, https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/11/the-burden-of-the-humanities.
McClay, “The burden of humanities.”
See Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2016), lines 376-383.
See C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2015), 4-12
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Robert White (Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth, 2014), 1.
Stiven Peter, “Christ Repairs Culture.” Mere Orthodoxy, November 13, 2023, https://mereorthodoxy.com/christ-repairs-culture.
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