The Liberal Arts and Sexual Morality by Peter Kreeft

The Liberal Arts and Sexual Morality by Peter Kreeft Featured Writing Featured Audio Books About FAQsThe Liberal Arts and Sexual Morality More Featured Writing Source: Crisis Magazine, April 2003Spectacular proof of the decline of the liberal arts is the simple fact that the only places in America where you can be sure you will get a liberal education, in the authentic sense of the term, are a few tiny little upstart crackpot islands of sanity like St. John's, St. Thomas More, Magdalene, Christendom, Corpus Christi, St. Thomas Aquinas, Ave Maria University, Kings College, and Campion College. Whenever major secular universities like Kansas or USF relax the vigilance of their animus against Great Books programs and tolerate the creation of a classical liberal arts program (like the St. Ignatius Institute), two things always happen: It is spectacularly successful, and the university demands to murder it. That is why I called these universities "secular," not "Catholic." Whereas liberal education has declined so much that the term has become nearly unintelligible, sexual morality has declined so much that it has become nearly extinct. We do not need to define it, only to find it. Like liberal education, it can be found mainly in enclaves of eccentricity: mainly families (often unfashionably large ones) that believe the orthodoxy and live the orthopraxy of six religious traditions: Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, Evangelical, Mormon, and Islamic. But its definition is not hard to find, unless you have a Ph.D. As a very simple, earthy neighbor of mine said when complaining about the elaborate "sex education" program in our local, very liberal high school, "They teach them everything except to keep their pants on." Though the graph of the decline of the two venerable traditions of liberal education and sexual morality is nearly identical, it would be the fallacy of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" to conclude that they are therefore casually connected. But we can see four clear connections, if we only look. First, liberal education seeks truth that is, it seeks to know the truth for its own sake rather than as a means for the sake of anything else as an end. Aristotle called this "theoretical science" distinct from "practical" or "productive" sciences, since its end is knowing for the sake of knowing rather than knowing for the sake of practice or production. He ranked it highest because it perfects the most important power of the most important part of the self: the reason, that faculty of the soul that is naturally fit to rule the passions. "Practical science" perfects not quite our very selves but something almost as close: our lives, our activities. "Productive science" perfects only things in the external world that touch our lives. The immense cultural, psychological, and scientific changes of the last 23 centuries have not diminished the validity of Aristotle's ranking of these three sciences; in fact, they have made his point prophetic. For at the very beginning of the modern era, some four centuries ago, we find a nearly universal revolt against this fundamental ideal of liberal education, knowing the truth as an end that is justifiable, even noble, for itself. Aristotle's hierarchy is turned exactly upside down. Francis Bacon most clearly trumpets the new educational philosophy: "Knowledge for power," for "man's conquest of nature," has replaced knowledge for truth. All the early classical modern philosophers agree with Bacon here, even Descartes (see chapter 6 of Discourse on Method). The goal of education suddenly becomes utilitarian,

The Liberal Arts and Sexual Morality by Peter Kreeft

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