I. Reclaim your Education

“We are concerned as anybody else at the headlong plunge into the abyss that Western civilization seems to be taking,” wrote Robert M. Hutchins, editor of the 1952 Great Books of the Western World.[1] In order to “recall the West to sanity,” Hutchins, and his associate editor Mortimer Adler, compiled the fifty-four volume Great Books of the Western World series representing the primary texts from the greatest intellects in Western history.[2] From Homer, to Dante, to Shakespeare, they saw these authors in a dialogue, a “Great Conversation,” that gave the West a distinctive character.[3] These authors, especially the ancient and medieval ones, had contributed to the rise of the liberal arts and to the belief that the liberally educated man was one who had disciplined his passions in pursuit of the good. As Hutchins observed, “the aim of liberal education is human excellence.”[4]

Yet, Hutchins saw the West as undergoing a practical book burning.[5] The great books were being removed from Western education and with them any semblance of a true liberal education. Today, the book burning continues. It is evident that modern education is more a training—it trains students for a societal function and delegates the holistic, human formation to a culture of relativism. A college graduate is no longer expected to be “acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition” nor the perennial questions into truth, beauty, or goodness.[6] We are deaf to the “Great Conversation.” We are cut off from the great treasury of our intellectual inheritance and only vaguely aware it even exists.

The great books are an invitation to reclaim your education. They are a remedy to the privations of modern education and a salvageable substitute for our lack of a robust liberal arts formation. As Hutchins advocated, in reading the authors of the great books “we are still in the ordinary world, but it is an ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius.”[7] We are invited to the Great Conversation, to listen, and to add our voice to the pursuit of truth.

There is a latent danger, however, in how one approaches the great books.

II. Avoid the Sins of your Age

In his 1647 masterpiece, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, the Spanish priest Baltasar Gracian, S.J., exhorted his audience to “avoid the faults of your nation.”[8] He explains: “Water shares the good or bad qualities of the strata through which it flows, and man those of the climate in which he is born.”[9] We live, as Cardinal Ratzinger observes, under a “dictatorship of relativism,”[10] and it contaminates every feature of our intellect. To have the requisite self-awareness and virtue to purge these impurities is a “triumph of cleverness.”[11] Whether we think of the ark of Noah, the compulsion out of Plato’s cave, or the angel that led Lot out of Sodom, the great books can help us escape the errors of our age. Writers like Aristotle or St. Boethius challenge our modern presumptions and stretch our imagination to encompass new perspectives on reality. We may better see our age for what it is and what led to our present culture (or anti-culture).

Relativism, however, is pernicious and infects even the remedies against it. We should observe that the authors of the great books disagree. In fact, many of the modern great books became “great” by being contrary to most all that had preceded them. The political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes is a rejection of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. The understanding of history by Karl Marx is a revolution against over two thousand years of human observation, and Friedrich Nietzsche rejects everyone to wage war against Socrates and Jesus Christ. In short, the “great books” were chosen for their impact and not principally for their truth.

The latent danger in the great books is that one simply becomes a well-read relativist. Before us are the greatest minds in the West, these minds disagree, therefore there is no reasonable expectation of truth. Even so-called conservative great books projects will refrain from saying one great book is better than another—they denounce any type of guidance to the great books, favoring a pseudo-neutrality that places dialogue over truth.[12] As Patrick Deneen observes in his 2013 essay, “Against Great Books,” “I have come to suspect that the very source of the decline of the study of the great books comes not in spite of the lessons of the great books, but is to be found in the very arguments within a number of the great books.”[13] Many of the “great books” listed in the Great Books of the Western World are the same books that led to the crisis of education in the West. As Deneen notes, “the broader assault on the liberal arts derives much of its intellectual fuel from a number of the great books themselves.”[14] If applied incorrectly, the remedy for our failing liberal education, the “great books,” becomes part of the disease.

The great books can help us avoid the errors of our age, but we cannot approach them through those same errors. Approaching the great books as some cosmopolitan relativist bears a contrary purpose than that of the traditional liberal arts. If the great books are our answer to the collapse of the liberal arts, then the great books must echo the true purpose of the liberal arts.

III.       Conform your Mind to Reality

In his 1946 classic, The Intellectual Life, the French Dominican A.G. Sertillanges lays out the simple purpose of study: “The order of the mind must correspond to the order of things.”[15] He is drawing from St. Thomas Aquinas, who teaches that truth is the conformity of the mind to reality.[16] This is the purpose of the liberal arts, of the great books, and of all study: the pursuit of truth. We must labor to conform our minds to the contours of reality. We aid one another in our pursuit of truth through our words, whether oral or written, for it is the purpose of our words to convey truth. How rich we are then to have the writings of such masters as St. Augustine to help guide us in this vocation of the intellect. As Sertillanges teaches, “books are signposts” on the movement of the mind toward truth.[17] We approach such authors as a student approaches a teacher—ready for a tutelage in what is real.

All things are judged good or bad according to their purpose (or telos, as the classical Greeks called it). I know a good knife must be sharp, because I understand its purpose is to cut. And because I know its purpose, I understand that the whetstone is good for the knife while its opposite would be bad. In sum, because I understand the purpose or telos of the thing, I can know whether the quality of that thing is good or bad—and also what is good or bad for that thing. So too is it for our intellect. If the purpose of our intellect is truth, then it is by that standard I judge what is good or bad for my intellect. Like a whetstone to the knife, a true great book will sharpen my mind’s understanding of reality. It is in obedience to this telos that we, like Sertillanges, judge our study and the study of the great books in particular. Not all great books meet this standard—as some are guides to the delineations of what is real, while others labor against it.

If we are to reclaim what was lost when the liberal arts fell, then the purpose of studying the great books must be the pursuit of truth. It was not relativistic dialogue that led Bl. Alcuin of York and Emperor Charlemagne to rebuild the West. Nor was it relativism that nurtured St. Thomas Aquinas or Dante. We are the inheritors of a robust pursuit of truth—a desire to satiate in the thickness of reality.

Yet, how does one judge what is true? In other words: how do we reconcile that we turn to the great books to teach us truth, yet we are to judge the great books by whether they teach truth? Are we the arbiter of what is real? What standards or principles should one bring to the study of the great books? What was the principle of truth amongst the liberal arts?

In his architectonic 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed, “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.”[18] His address—arguably one of the most important postconciliar papal teachings—submits that there is a profound harmony between Greek reason and Hebrew faith. The Greek philosophers, like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, sought the logos of reality. The Greek term logos means “the account of something” or the “ordering principle of a thing.” In Plato’s Republic, for example, Socrates is seeking the logos of justice—to know the reason and reality of what justice is. Aristotle speaks of logos as an argument that appeals to the intellect. The pursuit of the logos is part of our intellectual inheritance. It cultivated in the West the belief that nature, and all within it, bears a discoverable, rational order. It is at the heart of both our philosophy and our empirical sciences, as from logos we draw the word logic and the suffix –logy, as in biology (the account of life) or zoology (the account of animals). If truth, as aforementioned, is the conformity of the mind to reality, it was the concept of logos that taught the West that reality was an ordered, objective, and rational whole.

Greek reason and Hebrew faith began a dialogue hundreds of years prior to Christ. As Pope Benedict XVI observes, “despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature.” To the Holy Father’s point, one may compare the violent clash of Greeks and Hebrews in First and Second Maccabees with the notable influence of Greek thought upon the reflections on faith in the Book of Wisdom or Sirach. Moreover, it is notable that the first Old Testament canon, the Septuagint (c. 250 B.C.), was a Greek translation centered in Alexandria. In sum, Greek reason coupled with Hebrew faith under Roman order tilled the earth for the coming of Jesus Christ. As St. Paul teaches, our Lord came in the “fullness of time” (Gal 4:4).

The zenith of this harmony is provided by St. John, as he opens his Gospel with an allusion to Genesis: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” St. John notably gives the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity the name Logos. He further proclaims, “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14). Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, is the Logos of all creation—the ordering principle of reality itself. As Aristotle notes that logos can be a communication of reason, so too is the Logos the Word—the Word spoken by the Father in Genesis that structured the very order of being. The rational order of reality observed by the Greeks is the work of the Eternal Word, the Logos. As St. Paul teaches, in Jesus Christ “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… all things were created through him and for him” (Col 1:16). Note as well that the Logos not only created reality but continues to hold it in existence (Col 1:17). What the Greeks sought via reason and what the Hebrews sought via faith is revealed to be Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Eternal Logos.

Truth is the conformity of the mind to reality, because objects in reality have a logos—a rational order—to which the mind may adhere. Here, we may better understand why Christ proclaims He is the Truth (John 14:6). If Jesus is the Logosof all that is real, Reason-itself, the account of all creation, then to conform your mind to Him would be to contemplate the Truth of all things. He is not the logos of any particular thing, but the Logos of all—and in Him and through Him we may come to a better understanding of particulars. The liberal arts must be understood as a pursuit of the Logos. The student would undergo a disciplined order of knowledge that moved the intellect into conformity with reality. First, the student would learn grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the trivium), and then arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (the quadrivium). All of these, however, and such higher sciences as medicine or law, were subservient to and perfected by the queen of the sciences, theology. The liberal arts were a foundation to and an acknowledgment of the study of God by both reason and faith, as illuminated by the Logos. It is amongst the debris of what was such a time-tested tutelage in the real that we must return to the great books. Deprived of this education, we turn first to the teachers who may be called “the ancients,” the intellects from Homer to Dante, who built up such a rich treasury of education. It is by their observations on nature and revelation that we learn of the Logos.

We live in the age of the anti-logos. Modernity is a rejection. The second half of the great books, “the moderns,” from Machiavelli to present, largely represents a deconstruction of any belief in an ordered whole of creation. While there are certainly good modern thinkers, such as Cardinal Newman or Pope Benedict XVI, the main trait of our modern age is rejection. Man no longer turns to God, revelation, nature, or history for guidance, but rather these become malleable to man’s creative will. Each man becomes his own god, his own “Logos,” who believes reality should conform to the “truth” of his own imagination. We live in an anti-culture—our dominative tutelage in the unreal. We live in a post-Christian paganism that no longer even adheres to the natural  logos of Socrates or Aristotle. The sin of our age, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI noted, is the sin against the Creator.[19] Man now makes his own reality and demands others adhere to it—the dictatorship of relativism.

Let us reclaim our culture. Let us reclaim our education by turning to the teachers of what is real, those who may help us—in this age of the unreal—conform our minds to Reason-itself, the Eternal Logos, Jesus Christ.

The world is in chaos. Modern man now holds himself as an autonomous moral universe in which every conceivable reality is malleable to his subjective will. Man has been “emancipated,” in the spirit of non serviam, from God, the Church, nature, history, reason, and now even his own body. Even the most basic realities of what it means to be human are eroding and with it the foundations of our civilization.

If we asked whether there was cause to hope amongst the chaos, most Catholics would, if even out of piety, answer yes—our hope is in Jesus Christ. Yet, what did Jesus Christ teach us about the relationship between chaos and hope? What is the biblical understanding of chaos? And what is the relation of chaos to vocation of a disciple of Jesus Christ?

The answer to these questions is water and what lies beneath the concept of the waters in the biblical text. Let us look at the opening of Holy Scripture:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:1-2).

The primordial waters of Creation are formless, void, and dark. The Spirit of God flutters above the deep, and it is from these waters that God will draw Creation. The contrast in the opening of Holy Scripture grants us our template for understanding the biblical allegory of water: water represents chaos, disorder, darkness, and death; but, just as God drew Creation from the face of the deep, so too does God draw order, beauty, light, and life from that which is chaotic.

It is this interplay between the chaos of water and the order of God that we will use as our primary pattern, our thesis, to examine other examples in the biblical text.

A clear example resides in Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood (Gen 6-9). The primordial waters of Creation return to reclaim the earth for chaos. The Great Flood is another creation narrative, in which God must once again draw forth order and beauty from the chaotic deep.

The waters represent death and the Ark represents life. Many of our Early Church Fathers saw in this text an allegory of the Church and the world. The Church is the Ark, our salvation, and the world is the watery abyss, our death and damnation.

As an aside, there is an image here that has always caught my imagination. Note that the waters burst forth before the door to the Ark is closed. You can only image what realizations set in on the people around Noah when the waters started to come forth—when they realized that the Ark was indeed their hope for salvation. And note that in the midst of this realization—who closes the door to the Ark? The Lord does—not Noah but the Lord (Gen 7:16). It is ultimately God’s Ark, as it is God’s Church, and He decides who is worthy to enter and be spared the waters of chaos and who is not.

Let us leave Noah for the narrative of Moses. The life of Moses is deeply intertwined with the allegory of water. First, recall that in order to save her child’s life, his mother sets her infant son in a basket upon the waters of the Nile (Ex 2:3). Like Noah in the Ark, we see the child’s life preserved upon the waters that would have otherwise been his death. He is then pulled forth from the waters by Pharaoh’s daughter, who names him Moses, meaning “to be drawn out” (Ex 2:10). Like Creation itself, Moses is drawn from the waters and his very name exemplifies the relationship between chaos and order, death and life, water and God.

The narrative of Moses’ salvation as an infant serves as a foreshadowing to the salvation of Israel. Moses is called by God to draw out Israel from its bondage in Egypt and, as he was delivered from the waters of the Nile, he must now be the hand of God in delivering Israel from the waters of the Red Sea (Ex 14:10-22).

What should have been their death, the Red Sea, God turned into the vehicle of their salvation. A pattern emerges, as seen in the stories of Creation, Noah, and Moses, that those who have hope in God often find their salvation amongst and through chaos.

Take note of the fate of the Egyptians (Ex 14:22-31). They too attempted to cross the Red Sea but, like those who did not trust in God during the Great Flood, they are swallowed by the waters and it becomes their death. The Egyptians serve as a fateful reminder for those who attempt to traverse this life—with all its chaos and disorder—without placing their hope in God.

Another considerable example is the crossing of the Jordan River (Jos 3:17). Here, God commands Joshua to have the Ark of the Covenant lead the people across the Jordan. Once again, like the Red Sea, there is water between Israel and the Promised Land. The Ark is carried into the waters and the waters cease and those carrying the Ark stand upon dry ground. The Ark remains in the middle of the dry riverbed until the entire host of Israel has safely crossed.

Here, like the Red Sea, we observe a clear visual of the necessity for us to place our hope in God when attempting to cross the waters of this life into the eternal Promise Land.

Let us turn to a somewhat different and more nuanced example of water as an archetype of chaos. In the book of Job, when Job laments his losses, he cries out for thick darkness and blackness to swallow up the day of his birth (Job 3:4-5). Notably, amongst the chaos he is suffering, he invokes the Leviathan—the great beast of the waters (Job 3:8).

It more notable that when God decides to chastise Job, God too invokes the Leviathan (Job 41:25). God presents a clear juxtaposition: to God, the Leviathan is a plaything, like a maiden tying a bird to a string; but to man, the Leviathan, this great beast of the sea, means certain death. It is only with God, by placing our hope in him, that man can be delivered from this great beast of the waters, this beast of chaos.

Another example, and arguably one of the best examples of the allegory of water, is the narrative of Jonah. As you will recall, Jonah attempts to run from the Lord and, while he is on a ship at sea, the Lord sends a storm. Jonah is subsequently tossed out of the ship and into the sea. It is intriguing that with Noah and Moses, the vessel upon the water was the instrument of God’s salvation, and here we have Jonah, who is contrary to the will of God, being tossed out of the vessel and into the sea. He is tossed out of what represents salvation and into what represents death and chaos—only to be swallowed by a great beast of the sea. And while there is some debate whether Jonah died within the belly of that creature, it is clear that our Lord Jesus Christ uses the story as a foreshadowing of his own death and resurrection—drawing yet another parallel between water and death.

Does this pattern of God using water, representing death and chaos, as a vehicle of salvation extend to the New Testament? Yes. In fact, almost our entire study up to this point could be a reflection on the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. Let us recall that St. Ambrose, in commenting on Luke 3:21, tells us Christ was baptized not to become holy, but to make the waters holy for us.[1] God enters death and the instrument of death becomes the portal of our salvation.

As the Spirit of God fluttered above the primordial waters and then drew forth Creation, so too does the Holy Spirit draw us from our baptismal waters as a new creation in Christ. The Church, into which we are baptized, is our salvation, as was the Ark to Noah or the basket to Moses. Moreover, we hope never to be contrary to the will of God and be tossed from the ship like Jonah. It is through these waters—like with the Red Sea or the Jordan—that we must pass to enter our Promised Land, our eternal happiness with God.

Even a casual survey of the ministry of Jesus Christ exhibits a continuation of this catechesis on water.

At the wedding of Cana, our Lord performs His first miracle—the turning of water into wine (John 2:1-11). This is, in many ways, a summary of the entire salvific mission of Jesus Christ. What represents chaos and death, water, becomes by the hand of Christ wine—which in turn foreshadows our true salvific drink, the Precious Blood. Like the wedding at Cana, we too are called to wed ourselves to Christ and become one flesh with Him: we leave behind the water and we take of the wine.

Recall also Christ calming the storm (Matt 8:23-27). Jesus and His disciples are in a boat on the sea. “Suddenly a violent storm came up on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by waves” (Matt 8:24). Notably, however, Christ is asleep. His disciples wake our Lord and, as Matthew records, “he got up, rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was great calm” (Matt 8:26). The narrative of Christ calming the sea recalls His relationship to the primordial waters of Creation. For Christ is the Eternal Word, the Logos, the ordering principle and account of all reality (John 1:1-14). It is in Him, through Him, and for Him all things were made (Col 1:15-17). Thus, when God the Father spoke the words of creation over the primordial waters it was the Eternal Word, the Logos, that gave Creation its form and substance—and continues, at present, to hold all things in being (Col 1:17). Christ can be the God who sleeps amongst the waves, because the chaos they represent holds no danger to Him. The Logos brought order to the primordial waters, and the Incarnate-God, Jesus Christ, calms the waters of the sea.

St. Matthew then pivots into the story of Christ’s healing of the demoniacs (Matt 8:28-34). As you may recall, Christ drives the demons out of the two men and into the herd of swine. We should take careful observance of the fact that when the demons are sent into the pigs, the demons drive the pigs into the sea where they die amongst the waters. St. Matthew is showing us that the sea, the water, is the realm of the demonic—that which is lifeless, void, and dark; yet, he couples this narrative with the calming of the storm to show us that this chaotic realm is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ. Here, it is most important to recall from the narrative before that when Christ calmed the storm, He actually rebuked it—He used the language of an exorcism. The two narratives are meant to be read as one.

We could also contemplate Christ walking on the water and what it means for St. Peter, our first pope, to leave the boat and come to Christ standing atop the waves. Let us, however, turn to when Christ calls Peter to be a disciple and what water has to do with discipleship.

The Gospel records:

As [Jesus] walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him (Matt 4:18-22).

It is not by accident that Christ called fishermen to be his first disciples. It is an intentional act that illuminates a pattern throughout all of Salvation History. It is a decision built upon the narratives of Creation, Noah, Moses, Jonah, and more. Walking by the sea, He calls them to be “fishers of men.” If one is to be a fisher of men, where must one be? As a man draws a fish out of the sea from his boat, so too do the disciples of Christ draw souls out of the chaos and into the Church.

Therefore, chaos is not a reason to give up hope. We are called to chaos. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to be in the chaos but not of it—to draw souls out of the chaos and into the grace of God’s Church. We are called to be in disorder but not be disordered. We navigate the chaos for the salvation of our neighbor—fishing them out of darkness and death of the worldly waters and into the great Ark of our Salvation, the Catholic Church. We are agents of order to disorder, of light to darkness, of hope to despair, and of life to death.

Before we end, let us examine the end of Scripture. In the Book of Revelation, St. John writes:

And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name… The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?” (Rev 13:1-4)

Here, we see the return of the great sea beast, the Leviathan, who serves as a type of antichrist in the Apocalypse. He represents disorder, death, chaos, and is contrary to God in all ways. The people, echoing a corruption of St. Michael’s name, praise the sea beast saying, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?” The irony of their praise is found in recalling what God said about the Leviathan in Job–it can bring swift death to us, but to God it is nothing, a plaything to be led on a string. As demonstrated by Christ throughout the New Testament, God has absolute authority over the waters, the chaos, and all that dwell therein.

But we, placing our hope in Christ, know that the great sea beast is defeated and a new earth and a new heaven are created. Our biblical examination of water concludes as St. John writes toward the end of his Apocalypse:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more (Rev 21:1).

There is no sea in the new earth. Chaos has been brought to order, darkness to light, death to life, and the Leviathan, the sea beast, is defeated by the Lamb. The allegory of water provides an architectonic template to understanding the entire narrative of Salvation History, and it is a divine story given to us to provide hope amongst the death and darkness of daily life.

In the Gospel of Luke, Christ is with His disciples and tells them to “push out into the deep,” into the “deep water” (Lk 5:4). So too is Christ calling us to push out into the deep and draw out the souls who need Him the most. May we always be willing to take the hope of God into the depths of chaos.

This article is an adaptation of the talk entitled “On Water, Chaos & Catholic Leadership” given at the 2021 USCCB national Child & Youth Protection Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and similarly a talk entitled “On Hope & Chaos: A Biblical Study on Water” at the 2021 Idea of a Village Conference in Locust Grove, Oklahoma.