“The Old and the New Testaments are the Great Code of art.” William Blake
More than fifty years ago, colleges and universities—and all of them, not just private and/or parochial ones—taught a course that typically appeared in the course schedule as “The Bible as Literature.” Many of my contemporaries and I, especially those of us majoring in literature, took said course and enjoyed it thoroughly. I cannot say that it was universally taught without dogma, but in the places where I took it or saw it taught, it was not a doctrinal course as one would find in a seminary. Rather, the course followed the biblical stories and where those stories could be found or alluded to in literature, especially Western literature.
For some of my contemporaries, the course was easy. We had, after all, been raised on these biblical stories, so seeing them in extrabiblical literature was hardly a stretch. In fact, from the poetry of T.S. Eliot, to Dante, to Ludovic Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, it’s very difficult not to see them. Closer to our own modern time, the great essayist G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “It is only by a definite and even deliberate narrowing of the mind that we can keep religion out of education.”
Ah, but how times have changed, and how our minds have narrowed. Not many years after my college graduation, the same professor who taught the course I took found teaching it more and more difficult. “Students,” she said, “know immediately who Archie Bunker is but cannot begin to tell you anything about Moses.”
I was reminded of this strange state of affairs recently when reading an essay by Gregory Conti, a Princeton professor, in, of all places, The Washington Post. Conti’s article, “Ivy League Students Are Suffering from Religious Illiteracy,” covers the gamut of lost learning. Conti declares himself to be a “non-believer,” but he is alarmed at the ignorance. He begins by saying:
“Several years ago, one of my colleagues at Princeton University hosted a lecture on religion and free speech. The talk didn’t seem to be landing with the students. Finally, he realized why: The speaker had made repeated reference to the Ten Commandments, and several students didn’t know what they were.”
Seriously? The Ten Commandments!? If this were not enough, he goes on to point out the dégringolade:
It’s increasingly common on college campuses to encounter students who are unfamiliar with the most basic features of Christianity, such as the difference between the Old and New testaments or between Catholics and Protestants. They seldom recognize the allusions to the Bible that appear in Shakespeare’s work or in Lincoln’s second inaugural address (or in Obama’s first, for that matter). These students are bright, conscientious and curious. But they lack religious literacy — and their ignorance of religious ideas means they struggle to understand a wide array of Western art, literature and philosophy.
Conti goes on to point out that
“Even if one thinks this is an exaggeration, it points to the difficulty of attaining any real understanding of the tradition of Western political theory without religious literacy. The same goes for other subjects: neither Shakespeare nor Austen nor Mozart nor Rembrandt nor John Ford nor Oscar Wilde can be appreciated absent a grounding in Christianity.”
This is precisely what Blake was referring to in the quote above when he placed it by his print of the classical statue Lacoön, composed around 1815. (You can view his etching online and the quote in the upper right-hand corner, amid scores of other musings, as was his wont. See www.blakearchive.org.) The fact remains that this glaring blind spot in the education of young people has been going on for many decades. When I was in graduate school, we looked at Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Not one of the dozen or so students could grasp any biblical allusion. One of the students happily declared that she thought Dickinson was on LSD or something like it. When I pointed out the source of her allusions, my fellow students could not believe it.
Why is this important? For one reason, it’s most difficult to understand past works of art, literature, philosophy, or political theory. For another, we cannot understand our own history, or even criticisms of our government (Thomas Hobbes, hardly a believer, titled his most famous work Leviathan). The loss of this knowledge among what many consider the best and the brightest (Ivy League students learn at a cost of nearly $100,000 annually) should matter to all of us.
We often opine that children are our future. They can also be the downfall of our civilization if they are not taught well.
