What is the West? Stepping onto most college campuses today, it is something to be reviled rather than defined. The Italian scholastic Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) is often most credited with arguing for a harmony of human reason and divine revelation as leading to truth, and the use of reason in approaching divine texts. Revelation allows for the existence of an objective moral truth and the basis for why existence functions as it does. Aquinas was far from the only thinker to take this approach to theology and philosophy. Lesser-known to most in the West today, the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) and the rabbi-physician Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) approached the pursuit of truth much as Aquinas did. Now, a new master’s degree program at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is not only preserving the Western tradition but also bringing it back to life.
St. John’s is a Great Books college, and something all-too-rare in today’s higher education. Adopted in 1937, the college’s core curriculum includes reading “foundational texts of Western civilization.” Over the course of a four-year degree and “close reading of 200 great books across 3,000 years,” students read Greek tragedy from Aeschylus, the comedy of Aristophanes, the Hebrew Bible, Plato, and the works of Blaise Pascal. Last month, St. John’s College announced the launch of a new Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Classics program, offering students the opportunity to study classical medieval texts from Islamic and Jewish traditions alongside Arabic and Hebrew.
Attacked by both the left and the right, this approach to education is exceedingly rare today. The left has waged a war to eradicate the West as a defined civilization from college classrooms for years. Back in 1987, figures like Jesse Jackson led marchers at Stanford University to throw out its “Western culture” program. On too many campuses, the works of pop singers like Taylor Swift and racial theorists like Ta-Nehisi Coates are better known among students than those of Dante or Euclid. Disenchanted by intellectualism, the right is similarly dim. Conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk’s book The College Scam makes a popular case that higher education itself is empty and corrosive. Demonized and silenced by one side and ignored by the other, the soul of the Western tradition has few places left to breathe. But St. John’s College is building its lung capacity.
Medieval Jewish and Muslim classics are more “Western” than many realize. The 10th-century Persian philosopher Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi wrote extensively on the Aristotelian tradition and echoed Plato in his own work about an ideal political system. Students reading the poems of the Jewish poet Judah Ha-Levi (1075-1141) and the Persian mystic Rumi (1207-1273) will be exposed to Judaism and Islam beyond identity politics, but rather as spiritual paths and traditions that interacted with the medieval and Renaissance Western tradition. St. John’s associate dean, David Carl, stated that “these texts are not marginal or secondary writings and once stood at the center of the West’s intellectual life … alongside the classics of ancient Greece and modern Europe.”
Beyond reintegrating classics from medieval Judaism and Islam into the Western canon, St. John’s approach is arguably more transformative because of how it handles the process of teaching. St. John’s College President J. Walter Sterling stated that:
Students don’t just encounter two religious or intellectual traditions—they encounter one another…through slow reading, shared inquiry, and serious conversation, they begin to see the common questions at the heart of both traditions—and perhaps, the shared humanity at the heart of all education.
Whether St. John’s College is aware of it or not, they are reviving a philosophy of education that originates in the Renaissance, and involves a subtle re-sanctifying the curriculum in both material and delivery.
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The new works and thinkers that St. John is incorporating widely share the assumption of the existence of God and a divine presence in the universe. Such ideas are taboo across the vast majority of American college classrooms, but nonetheless have positive implications for how students approach other ideas about politics, science, and ethics when these grander ideas of transcendence are embedded at their core. Not only that, the slow reading of physical books, discussion, and argument in a face-to-face seminar setting re-humanizes. The educational experience. These elements of metaphysics and humanism are suddenly brought back to life in the New Mexican desert.
Something that is potentially amazing is happening at St. John’s College. Not only is the college maintaining its rare gem of a Western great books curriculum, but it is also deepening it in a way that is spiritually meaningful and socially empathetic. For far too long, conservative proponents have only been able to hold up Michigan’s Hillsdale College as an example of higher education done right. American universities do not need another “conservative” campus; rather, they need more of the right philosophy of education. St. John’s College is taking a step in the right direction with this new program. And to answer Charlie Kirk, it is not a scam. Instead, it is a search for truth that happens to be in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Image: St John’s College in Santa Fe by Capt Swing on Wikimedia Commons
About the author: Ian Oxnevad is senior fellow of foreign affairs and security studies at the National Association of Scholars.