Tonsor: Catholicism: Confrontation with Modernity

I. 

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

"You speak about the confrontation with modernity," I observed in our next office-hour conversation. "More than that, you have dedicated your life to it -- it is your mantra. But what specifically does the Catholic confrontation with modernity look like?"

Tonsor answered: "It looks like Chesterton ... Belloc ... Dawson ... Maritain ... Gilson ... Guardini ... Sheed ... Ward ... Waugh ... and a host of others who led the Roman Catholic intellectual renaissance. It looks like Eliot ... Lewis ... Auden ... and many more who led the Anglo Catholic intellectual renaissance. 

"You no doubt want to know: What do these Roman- and Anglo-Catholics share in common? One element they share is humility. These Catholics -- integral humanists all, since they recognize that man is both matter and spirit -- these Catholics know that the underlying order which is perceived in the course of human experience and history never reveals itself in its completeness and perfection. Human limitations, passions, and sinfulness always stand in the way of a complete vision and harmonious accommodation.[1] 

"People are sorely mistaken if they believe God revealed what a specifically 'Catholic' social arrangement, political regime, or economic system should look like. The proclamations of today's televangelists notwithstanding, Jesus is not a registered Republican. He is not a Yankee-doodle patriot. He did not ordain our federated polity or free-market economics. These systems are of human devising. They are more or less satisfactory, and they are always conditioned by man's inadequacy and sinfulness. To elevate a human invention is to worship man rather than God, and Karl Barth was correct to call such excesses of enthusiasm by their right name: idolatry.[2] 

"Nevertheless, to be a Catholic in any meaningful sense is to confront the modern age, to critique modernity. The task of the Church in every age is to be like the parent who pesters teenagers with relentless questioning before they go out on a date. Since the modern age is a particularly petulant teenager, the Church must challenge the culture, standing up to any individual or authority who would harm life, violate religious freedom, or diminish the dignity of the human person. The Church -- along with her integral humanists -- should thus be a gadfly, a sign of contradiction to our base drives and animal motives. Note that I said 'should be.'

"In practice, the body of believers has hardly presented a unified front. That's because there are two kinds of Catholics -- positivists and realists. There are many nominal Catholics in the academy and they tend to be positivists. You will know they are positivists by their governing assumptions. Positivists believe that religion is a purely human phenomenon that reflects the evolution of human consciousness. Thus ethics are merely social conventions. Positivists would say that a controversial issue like abortion, if it is considered 'wrong,' is only 'wrong' because the hierarchy says so, or because the catechism and canon law say it is. In other words, it is only 'wrong' because human beings with authority claim it is wrong. Such positivism is similar to what one hears about rights: Human beings have rights because the state or society says so.

"There is another position, that of the official church and her integral humanists. They are realists. The realists think that morals are grounded not in social convention but in objective reality, a reality that is inseparable from the order of creation. For the realist, abortion is wrong because it offends God and disorders man.

"The gap between positivists and realists cannot be papered over. There is a perennial battle between them. Take, for instance, the issue of premarital sex since it is linked to other nettlesome issues like birth control, abortion, children out of wedlock, and intractable poverty. To think like a modernist is to be a positivist and say, Premarital sex is only 'wrong' because social convention makes it so, but that does not make premarital sex intrinsically wrong at all times in all places. To think like a traditionalist is to be a realist and say, Premarital sex is intrinsically wrong because it violates the order of nature, of reality, and it offends God. 

"The positivist-realist divide is one of the fundamental chasms in the modern mind. It is a fierce battle line in the present culture wars. When I say that to be Catholic is to confront modernity, what I mean is that the traditionalist Catholic will weigh the so-called truth-claims of the positivist against his own beliefs as a realist. Every ethical proposition, every action, will be sifted and tested -- not necessarily rejected outright, but sifted and tested: To what extent is it true, good, and in adherence to the natural law? To what extent can error teach us something of value? This has been the Catholic way from St. Augustine to the Dominicans to Lord Acton. It is the way of charity, and we are called to be charitable in our disagreements -- though I find it exceedingly difficult to be charitable toward silly people!" 

Tonsor was in a rare revelatory mood. To get him to admit a weakness was like trying to get a bone from a bulldog. But since it was best not to point that out, I simply said: "To disagree without being disagreeable, as Gerald Ford likes to put it."

"Yes," he nodded.

II.

I wanted to stretch our discussion from the conversational to the civilizational. What elements in the critique of modernity united the Roman- and Anglo-Catholic realists? "From your teaching it is clear that the Catholic confrontation with modernity will also venture onto a larger stage, that which shines a light on the course of a country or a civilization. Won't Catholic cultural critics judge a country or civilization against its best moments. For the U.S. a benchmark might be what the founding fathers achieved to expand the empire of liberty. Another might be what the civil rights movement did to expand the empire of equality. For Western civilization a benchmark might be the advance of peace and prosperity in the nineteenth century; or the will of the allies to fight to the death to secure victory in World War II."

"Yes," said Tonsor. "And determining those benchmarks would be a good debate to have. 

"The important thing to realize is that becoming a Catholic, like being a conservative, is to embark on a quest for order. Ultimately this quest is not for a humanly created order invented as a form of political wish-fulfillment, but a discovery, though history and experience, that such is the way things are. The notion that the ideologue can create his own order out of whole cloth, fashion his own paradise out of nature, build his own utopia out of ideology, has been the human calamity of the past two centuries."[3]

Prometheus, by Otto Greiner (1909)

"It's a thin line between prudent progress and Promethean overreach." I offered.

"Yes," he said simply. "If the first requirement of the integral humanist in our day is to confront modernity with humility, then the second is to name things rightly; to say, after careful consideration, This pattern of thinking or that pattern of behavior is disordered. It is imprudent. Tragedy will follow in its wake." 

III.

"Still one more thing is needed," concluded Tonsor, sitting squarely like a block of granite.

"What is that?" 

"The temptation for Catholics and conservatives to be as Faustian as the modernists. But we must be watchful lest we become what we disavow. In the end, perhaps the confrontation with modernity comes down to the simplest thing -- being an example, ourselves, of how best to live. That loving dedication to family, community, and all those who lent their lives in the past to the fashioning of a living tradition that can only be religious. Service in the cause of the good, the true, and the beautiful is always an act of compelling love."[4]
_________

Notes

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Mistaken Assumptions," Modern Age (winter 2002): 59.

[2] Ibid.: 58.

[3] Ibid.: 59.

[4] Ibid.

Tonsor: Catholicism: Integrated Humanities Program

I.

Between the decision to become Catholic and my formal reception into the Church, the ardor that propelled my conversion stalled and my spirits took a nosedive. Insecurity about my career resurfaced. For the previous several years, when I thought about what I ought to do with my life, I visualized myself teaching at a college where I could do some good for the students, the college, and the culture. I thought the best means to that end was graduate study in a good history program since that would maximize my development and opportunities. That's why I ended up at Michigan studying under Stephen Tonsor.

Although I am not the type to wear my religion on my sleeve, I still needed to process how the conversion might alter my work: Should I aim to teach in a secular or Catholic college? What if my only job offer were from an ideologically grounded college? Would my faith become an issue in graduate research and teaching? Would my conversion put off professors in a position to help my career along?

A voice in me asked: What would you do if you were not afraid?

To allay my concerns, I sought out my Doktorvater and soon-to-be-godfather, Stephen Tonsor. He did not pull punches, and the following dialogue would turn out to be important to my career.

II.

"Okay," I said, finding Tonsor in his office at the appointed hour, "here I am at Michigan, trying to figure out the extent to which my conversion might inform my work, particularly my approach to history."

Tonsor nodded but, uncharacteristically, did not respond right away. 

I then introduced an idea that I thought would give Tonsor and me grist for conversation: "I am looking for models of what I should or should not do next. When I lived in Colorado, a professor told me about the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. I wondered how three professors -- Dennis Quinn, John Senior, and Frank Nelick -- got away with creating a Catholic 'Great Books' program at a public R1 university. They believed that there was such a thing as truth and that the academy should offer students an integrated approach to the search for the truth.[1] But the dean and most of the faculty were skeptical. They accused the program's founders of being part of an 'international conspiracy' that required narrow sectarian teaching, religious indoctrination, brainwashing, and proselytizing.[2] Even Catholics were charging the IHP with providing a safe-house for potentially schismatic Catholics who followed Archbishop Lefebvre who by then was in open defiance of the Pope.[3] All this happened little more than a decade ago and it makes me ask: How self-consciously 'Catholic' can or should a Catholic scholar be?"

Tonsor answered: "You are asking the necessary questions -- I'd worry about you if you didn't -- and regarding the IHP I can certainly argue for the defense. 

"It's true: The Integrated Humanities Program was a political failure. Yet its founders were courageous visionaries willing to stick their necks out[4] at a time when the centrifugal forces in our society were tearing all semblance of coherence in higher education to shreds. Those were years of campus unrest, the Kent State shootings, and radical curricular experimentation.

"So Quinn, Senior, and Nelick came along and had a vision of restoring the humanities on campus. They wrote beautifully of recovering the liberal arts, of inspiring wonder, of pursuing knowledge for its own sake.[5] They were antimodernists and Thomists who challenged the modernists and pluralists at KU. Predictably, the antimodernists and Thomists could not gain the support of the modernists and pluralists.[6] Within ten years, KU's faculty killed the IHP in a democratic vote. That should surprise no one: A democracy killed Socrates, and a majority vote condemned Jesus to death.

John Senior, a Catholic convert and one of the three founders of the Integrated Humanities Program at Kansas.
Image at URL https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2557-recalling-why-they-resisted-dr-john-senior-s-classic-the-glass-confessional

"It became a national story. Some would charge that KU's dean, a jesting Pilate, was determined to kill the program from the start. Not only did he ask the Thomists, 'What is truth?' He handled the death sentence quite clumsily. A committee scotched the program by bureaucratic maneuvering that would strip IHP faculty of their power of initiative. Asked whether they could accommodate such an arrangement, I recall Dennis Quinn saying, 'I refuse to kiss the hangman'; and John Senior saying, 'I won't participate in my own execution.' Basically KU mandated that the integrated search for truth be disintegrated.[7]

"So, yes, by one measure the program was a political failure; it could not survive in a public R1 university. But by another measure it enjoyed some academic success. During the few years of its existence, students voted with their feet; they flocked to the program by the hundreds.[8] The classical readings, learned discourse, stargazing, and integral view of reality made them alive to a much richer intellectual life than the ordinary fare. It inspired them to wonder about the truth, goodness, and beauty that are revealed in creation. These were Olympian achievements on Mount Oread.[9]

KU is built atop a considerable hill called Mount Oread. Image at URL
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/No._10._State_University_of_Kansas%2C_on_Mount_Oread%2C_Lawrence%2C_Kansas.
_%285569456560%29.jpg

"Perhaps an even greater success occurred in the realm of the spiritual, as evidenced by the number of Catholic conversions and vocations the IHP inspired. The spate of spiritual conversions was a notable outcome[10] -- and it doomed the program. Quinn, Senior, and Nelick were reviled, envied, and feared; victims of their own success. Or should I say martyrs?"

I was eager to jump in: "What does it say about the intellectual ecology of the academy these days that Catholic scholars cannot thrive if they take religion seriously?"

"It's a fallen world filled with struggle," Tonsor said forcefully. "Are you surprised?"

I did not want to come across as naive since Tonsor felt disdain for the Pollyanna type.[11] I decided it was prudent not to continue that line of thought but just to let him keep talking.

"In the modern age," observed Tonsor, "there is a running battle over our most fundamental beliefs. Ours is a society where few men live in the house in which they were born; few live in the landscape which was their homeland. Science has transformed the values and technology has transformed the conditions of life. Religion, the essence of changelessness, remains the last redoubt against modernity. Not surprisingly, faith has become a battleground between those who would surrender to transience and those who would defend the permanent things. For the latter, it's a fierce and rearguard battle. As Henry Adams remarked, we have long since entered the era when 'whirl is king.'"[12]

III.

Suddenly Tonsor switched gears: "The IHP appeared at the wrong time and in the wrong place."

I looked at him quizzically. "What do you mean?" After his capable defense of the program, I was now unsure what he actually thought.

"Despite my high regard for Quinn, Senior, and Nelick; despite all their program's attractive strengths; there were legitimate reservations. I'm not talking about the jaundiced critics who accused the IHP of being part of an international conspiracy. That's an old anti-Catholic canard and it is shameful that Ph.D.s trained in the most sophisticated research methods would, without evidence, say such an absurd thing.

"A moment ago I argued for the defense. Now I shall argue for the prosecution." In using this method, Tonsor was tipping his hat to the primary method of the liberal arts -- from Socrates to the medieval scholastics to Lord Acton -- to examine all sides of an question. It was high irony on Tonsor's part -- to critique a traditional liberal program by applying the traditional method of the liberal arts -- but it effectively set up the point he was about to make. 

"We must ask: Were the three professors advocating too strongly for Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas?[13] Did they exclude competing views to the detriment of the students' education? I heard that the professors frowned on students asking questions,[14] which is inexplicable because teaching students to ask questions in the dialectical pursuit of truth is the sine qua non of a liberal education. To stifle questions in the humanities is problematic. Students do need to learn the range of debate when it comes to the perennial questions. They do need to know how to engage in rigorous dialectic with their professors and with each other. It's what puts the liberty in a liberal education. The freedom to shape one's informed worldview: that freedom is what keeps one's mind from being servile. 

"Add to these concerns additional ones -- for instance, that the students had 24 semester hours of freshman and sophomore humanities courses with just those three professors who all had the same Thomistic worldview. It's understandable that people of good will had questions. It was not only the pluralists who questioned whether the program served the best interests of the students.

"You see, the syllabus came out of the pressed-flower school of liberal education --" (He paused at my laughter.) "It relied too heavily on a set of premodern 'Great Books' which is not always the best way to initiate students into the modern intellectual problems they will face. Maybe the radio addresses of C. S. Lewis capture the students' imagination more than, say, the summas of Thomas Aquinas.[15] The teacher must be flexible. 

"In addition, the program's ahistorical approach to those 'Great Books,' its failure to give students adequate context, seriously hinders the enjoyment of reading them for the first time. I mean, how can you tackle Virgil's Aeneid or Dante's Inferno without a map, without knowing where to place the historically conditioned worldview of the people threaded through the story? This was also the design flaw in Mortimer Adler's set of 'Great Books of the Western World.'[16] It was ahistorical to a crippling degree, which is why no one reads them; in most houses the volumes just sit on bookshelves like knick-knacks. 

"Also, there was the program's attitude to modernity -- how it taught or, rather, did not teach students to engage modernity. The modern project is exceedingly problematic, but not everything about modernity is morally evil, intellectually misguided, and psychologically alienating. We are called to confront -- not just to reject outright, but to confront -- modernity: to test it and sift it and prove it. It's sometimes the most modern of authors who help us do that. While Goethe did not believe in transcendence the way a thirteenth-century Thomist did, I would defy anyone to do better than Faust for exploring and understanding the tragedy of the modern spirit.

"Now, I do not know John Senior personally, but after he converted to Catholicism in the early 1960s[17] he adopted an extreme position in his rejection of modernity -- rather too extreme, in my view. He apparently has a low opinion of Vatican II and attends Mass at Society of Pius X chapels.[18] His antimodern theology spilled over into the IHP whose assigned readings pretty much stopped at the year 1300 AD.[19] Well, time did not stop in 1300 AD. 

"And that leads to my final point: Not one of the teachers who founded the IHP was professionally trained in history. Their approach was largely literary and philosophical; by their own admission they "taught in the poetical mode";[20] Now, after I returned from the war I was a serious student of poetry and in fact considered becoming a poet.[21] At Illinois I took many philosophy courses and came close to pursing a philosophy Ph.D. I have great respect for my colleagues who are "lovers of wisdom." But poets and philosophers are sometimes tempted to take historical shortcuts. They do not work hard enough to understand the philosopher's cultural context and the development of ideas over time. I look skeptically on the work of people who inadvertently create wrinkles in time because doing so distorts the narrative of what really happened, wie es eigentlich gewesen. Then the danger is that the poet and philosopher are presenting something that looks more like propaganda than history. 

"Being antimodern is romantic and quixotic but it can be misguided if it's the sole exposure college students will have to the humanities. If you do not adequately prepare your students to confront the modern age -- if their minds are not truly engaged when they approach Goethe, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud because the well has already been poisoned -- then you are doing your students a great injustice. It takes courage to confront modernity, but students in the liberal arts have to get a sense of its complexity. They must be taught to test and sift the modernist authors in order to discern the truth, goodness, and beauty in their writing -- or in the debates provoked by their writing. 

"So, as much as I admire the integrity of Quinn, Senior, and Nelick; as much I as prefer to root for Catholics on the home team; I did find problems with the Integrated Humanities Program, serious problems that would have made me reluctant to lend it my unqualified support had I been at Kansas in the 1970s."[22]

As I listened to this pro et contra, I was surprised by how thoroughgoing Tonsor's criticism of the Integrated Humanities Program was. Although a devout Catholic who attended Mass faithfully, he could not support fellow Catholics when he thought their love for the thirteenth century shortchanged students who had to learn to confront modernity. In the years to come, I would learn other surprising things about his view of the Church. He was certainly Catholic -- but not the Catholic of my projections.

IV.

Tonsor wanted to be done with discussing the IHP and go directly to the point I was raising. "You will have to find your own way to come to terms with your conversion and your career. I cannot tell you how to do it.

"But I say this: If you believe that God is ultimately the author of all truth, then you will not be afraid of searching for truth wherever it might be found. Diamonds have been discovered in dunghills. The Catholic humanist knows this to be so and is not afraid to explore places outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom. Keep this assurance in mind -- it will always be the bridge between your faith as a Catholic and your work as an historian."

A eureka moment, this. Tonsor's words, which threaded through my mind like lightning in the night sky, supplied a therapeutic shock. His thought reminded me of something he had written in another context, a beautiful passage I had read in Lincoln, Nebraska, back in 1987 when on the journey to Ann Arbor. There he had written that it was important to "conceive of truth as God's own to be cherished and loved for His sake."[23] If I remained focused on pursuing truth, I should never again feel agitated about the relationship between my religion and my work. They would forever be organically connected.

It was a lovely thought -- meditation on which was cut short by a practical consideration: "What about the methodological gatekeepers who guard the ramparts to the profession? They do not speak of God as the ultimate author of truth, and they would roll their eyes if they heard me do so."

"Again, I cannot tell you how to negotiate history's gatekeepers. I could have done a better job myself. You must find your own way.

"But I have never counseled Catholics to retreat into the comforts and isolation of the Catholic ghetto. No, we Catholics should take our distinctive Catholicism into the WASP world, into the humdrum of the secular world, and engage. We should engage not just for our own sake -- since one cannot be a good Catholic without doing so -- but also for the sake of the world.[24] 

"In coming years you will find yourself trying to integrate two things: becoming a true humanist and a well-formed Catholic. The two are closely related. Our priests, poets, artists, and scholars in the humanities are entrusted in a special way with our patrimony. The humanists are the great conservators in every age. They live from the tradition even when they live against the tradition. They are the historical memory of mankind and because they are, they guarantee to us our humanity. Without the humanists, our culture would shuffle about, aimlessly, like an Alzheimer's patient without memory.[25]

"Unfortunately a disheartening trend has been under way for several years now. Too many humanists are committing treason. Recall the term made famous by the French novelist and philosopher, Julien Benda, who wrote of the 'treason of the intellectual.' The treason of the intellectual, the treason of the humanist, occurs when he refuses to fulfill the role to which he has been called: he trades the contemplative life for the active life.[26] It's a bad deal -- bad for himself and bad for his culture. 

"What's behind this treason, you might ask? It is politics. The intellectual has abandoned his calling because he has been beguiled by politics. In our day some trace the beguilement to the Reagan presidency. After Nixon and the Watergate scandal, good people turned away from politics. But Reagan came onto the scene. He was a charismatic figure and successful leader -- so successful he put the romance back into politics and seduced conservative intellectuals away from their calling. Now the humanist is making political activism and the manipulation of power his calling."[27]

I was taken aback by this charge against the Reagan revolution. I had assumed that Tonsor, a thoroughgoing conservative and stalwart Republican, was a big fan of Reagan's. 

"It is simple arithmetic," he said. "The more humanists abandon the academy, the fewer there remain to teach. It's not just the conservative movement that is damaged when our humanists put on a blue suit and red power tie and go to Washington; it's the culture, the humanities, our universities. But there are other and more important things for the humanists to do. In times like these, perhaps the ivory tower is the best defense against barbarism."[28] 

"But," I countered, "if the academy is becoming hostile to humanists, doesn't it make sense that a lot of them would want to work in a sympathetic administration?" 

"So then what? Do we abandon the field? If there is to be a Catholic intellectual life, then Catholic humanists will have to stand up in the academy; humanists who have the courage to join battle; humanists who are unabashedly, unselfconsciously, unapologetically Catholic.[29]

"The situation is not hopeless. The intellectually formed Catholic already has the makings of the good humanist. That's because Catholicism has a vision of the wholeness of man which is essential to the humanities. If we ought, as Lord Acton cautioned the historian, always to look for the cloven hoof, then we also ought to look in every man for the divine image: a comprehension of body and soul, of the real and the ideal, of nature and grace, of necessity and freedom, of sorrow and joy, of creatureliness and divinity, of all the contradictory and complementary elements which we as men find in our natures. There is no better antidote to ideology than the Catholic vision of the wholeness of man."[30] 

"There's your hermeneutic of dynamic tension again," I said with satisfaction. 

He growled and waved the thought off with irritation. 

"I must also say this: Professors Quinn, Senior, and Nelick got at least one of the fundamentals right: Education must be integral if it is to be successful. Our partial truths cry out for completeness, while our experiences need the confirmation and affirmation which derive from the experiences of others. Truth is always catholic, error always sectarian and subjective. Consequently community is always essential to the discovery and communication of truth. Because this is the case, we must, if we take the question of liberal education seriously, see that our colleges and universities are genuine communities and not simply a congeries of buildings housing atomistic students and alienated professors, each in his own bubble doing his own thing.[31]

"You are a Catholic humanist in formation. You seek what Jacques Maritain called 'integral humanism.' Leave off taking cues from the despairing and decadent culture of our times and with the aid of the Holy Spirit proceed to make all things new -- whatever you encounter -- be it in scholarship, imaginative literature, music, art, architecture. In all such endeavors you have a charge to keep. Doing nothing is not an option. For we will never recover harmony, dignity, clarity, and beauty until we discern once more the wholeness of man.[32]

"So be that person at the seminar table and speaker's podium who resists the ideologues who would reduce man to pure matter like the Marxists or pure spirit like the Gnostics. Be the integral humanist who sees man in all his marvelous and vexing complexity. Ecce homo! Or with Shakespeare say, 'What a piece of work is man!' This is why we study the humanities, to know thyself and our kind. Therein lies the path to becoming more fully human, because when we look into the depths of the human person, we also discover intimations of our God."

V.

It did not seem that Stephen Tonsor was going to show me how to handle the methodological gatekeepers of our profession. It was disappointing, but I did have the other members of my committee to consult.

Perhaps Tonsor was teaching me something more valuable than how to dodge the methodological gatekeepers. On the bus ride back to North Campus, I reflected on his intellectual style. He delighted in keeping his interlocutors off-balance. Whether our conversation was about politics or religion, poetry or intellectual history, I found him sometimes delightfully, sometimes maddeningly, sometimes inscrutably unpredictable. Here I had thought he would endorse the IHP because it was one of the boldest experiments yet in integral humanism in a public university. Yet he had thought through his reservations. He could not be shoehorned into the little box a lot of people tried to put him in (an antimodernist, Catholic, conservative box). I accounted his unpredictability a good thing. It did not arise from the lack of first principles -- au contraire. Tonsor's surprising answers to my questions arose out of his fierce intellectual integrity, his utter resistance to the groupthink of the herd, and his wonderful way of testing and sifting modernity in order to detect truth, goodness, and beauty wherever they could be found, even in modernity.

I realized that, even after almost three years of study with him, I still did not know this man, Stephen Tonsor. But what a guide for the perplexed he was!

What would I do if I were not afraid?
______________

Notes

[1] Deb Reichmann and Daniel L. Reeder, "In Search of the Good Guys," Kansas Alumni, vol. 77 (April 1979), p. 1; Robert K. Carlson, "What Price Truth? Death by Administration," Crisis Magazine, January 1, 1995; at URL http://www.crisismagazine.com/1995/what-price-truth-death-by-administration

[2] "College Assembly Votes to Do Away with IHP," Kansas Alumni, vol. 77, no. 8 (June 1979): 2-3; Carlson, "What Price Truth?" Crisis; at URL http://www.crisismagazine.com/1995/what-price-truth-death-by-administration. See also the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1973, document titled "Petition Concerning Re-evaluation of PIHP," March 26, 1973; also box 1, folder 1977, document by Dennis B. Quinn, "Education by the Muses," September 13, 1977, p. 1.

[3] Sharon Mielke, "College Program Suspect," United Methodist Reporter, no date found, p. 3. See also John Senior's own writing about "the threat of excommunication hanging over us who attend Mass at Society of Pius X chapels," in John Senior, "Recalling Why They Resisted: Dr. John Senior's Classic 'The Glass Confessional," in The Remnant, June 1, 2016; at URL https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2557-recalling-why-they-resisted-dr-john-senior-s-classic-the-glass-confessional. 

[4] There have been numerous tributes to the founders of the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, especially to John Senior. See, e.g., Philippe Maxence, "John Senior: In Piam Memoriam," Crisis Magazine (April 5, 2012), at URL http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/john-senior-in-piam-memoriam; Dwight Longenecker, "John Senior and the Restoration of Realism," The Imaginative Conservative (April 26, 2017), at URL http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/04/john-senior-restoration-realism-dwight-longenecker.html; and Patrick Martin, "A Tribute to John Senior," originally posted in The Catholic Thing (April 9, 2009), reposted by the Catholic Education Resource Center, at URL http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/education/catholic-contributions/a-tribute-to-john-senior.html. 

[5] See, e.g., University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1977, Dennis B. Quinn, "Education by the Muses," September 13, 1977, pp. 1-6.

[6] Reichmann and Reeder, "Good Guys," Kansas Alumni: 2.

[7] "College Assembly Votes," Kansas Alumni: 3. 

[8] "Old IHP Courses Thrive," Kansas Alumni, vol. 79 (November 1981); Longenecker, "John Senior," at URL http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/04/john-senior-restoration-realism-dwight-longenecker.html. In addition, there are abundant student testimonials in the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folders 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981.

[9] Again, see the abundant student testimonials in the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folders 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981; also see Carlson, "What Price Truth?" Crisis; at URL http://www.crisismagazine.com/1995/what-price-truth-death-by-administration.

[10] See the short biography of one of the program's most accomplished converts, Bishop James Conley, whose academic mentor and Catholic godfather was John Senior, at URL http://www.lincolndiocese.org/bishops/bishop-james-conley/biography. Again, see Longenecker, "John Senior," at URL http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/04/john-senior-restoration-realism-dwight-longenecker.html.

[11] Ann Tonsor Zeddies conversations with GW, East Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 18, 2017, and June 17, 2017; also Caroline Tonsor conversation with GW, Chelsea, Michigan, June 28, 2017.

[12] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Haunted House of the Human Spirit -- an Editorial," Modern Age (fall 1985): 291.

[13] For KU faculty who were already hostile to the IHS, the final straw would have been John Senior's book, The Death of Christian Culture (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1978). Published when the IHS was on its last legs, the book was an unsparing attack on modernism and a vigorous defense of a medieval scholastic school of philosophy known as Aristotelian-Thomistic Realism.

[14] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Liberal Education: Courses or Questions?" in Tradition and Reform in Education (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974), pp. 94-96.

[15] Tonsor, "Liberal Education," in Tradition and Reform in Education, pp. 94-99.

[16] For the ahistorical approach of the program see p. 2 of "IHP: An Outline," in University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integral Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1980s. The unnamed author -- likely IHP founder Dennis Quinn -- states in the document: "The lectures do not deal with what is commonly called 'background,' historical, anthropological, archaeological, economic, or social. Little attention is given to dating, authorship, or problems of text or translation."

[17] Andrew Senior quotation in the sidebar, in John Senior, "Recalling Why They Resisted: Dr. John Senior's Classic 'The Glass Confessional," in The Remnant, June 1, 2016; at URL https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2557-recalling-why-they-resisted-dr-john-senior-s-classic-the-glass-confessional.

[18] To see why it is regarded as both extreme and controversial to attend Mass at Society of St. Pius X chapels, see URL http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/cedsspx.htm.

[19] Tonsor was exaggerating to make a point, for he was not a big fan of the "Great Books" approach to a college education, most of whose volumes were written in premodern times. Recall that Tonsor's field of expertise was not classical, not medieval, but Modern European Intellectual history. He always wanted his students to grapple with important modern books. In my research on the IHP in the University of Kansas Archives, I found the original syllabus and saw that most of the books assigned were indeed "Great Books" written prior to about 1700 but, in fairness to the founders, there were still numerous selections from the modern age that the students were required to read when the IHP was designed to be a four-year program. See Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder ND, "A College of Integrated Studies" (1970), pp. 4-5.

[20] Again, for the ahistorical approach of the program see in the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integral Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1980s, "IHP: An Outline," p. 2. The unnamed author -- likely IHP founder Dennis Quinn -- states in the document: "The lectures do not deal with what is commonly called 'background,' historical, anthropological, archaeological, economic, or social. Little attention is given to dating, authorship, or problems of text or translation." For the passage in which one of the program's founders says they "taught in the poetical mode," see Dennis B. Quinn, "Education by the Muses," September 13, 1977, p. 1, in the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1977.

[21] Caroline Tonsor conversations with GW, Chelsea, MI, June 28, June 30, and July 7, 2017; also Caroline Tonsor email to GW, July 5, 2017. Tonsor's statement was not idle reminiscing. He and his future wife Caroline (nee Maddox) met at the University of Illinois Poetry Club, where the young combat veteran produced a number of fine poems that Caroline later assembled in a chapbook. Much of their courtship revolved around their close reading of modern poets -- Goethe, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman, and T. S. Eliot. Moreover, after Tonsor finished his undergraduate degree at Illinois, one of his best friends, fellow war veteran Jackson Cope, offered to set Tonsor up in his house in Columbus, Ohio, so that Tonsor could write poetry without worrying about paying the rent. Ann Tonsor Zeddies conversation with GW, East Grand Rapids, MI, April 18, 2017; and phone conversation with GW, July 7, 2017.

[22] For a critique of the IHP by a historian at KU who was in direct confrontation with the IHP founders, see James E. Seaver, "Remarks to the College Assembly," February 20, 1973, in the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1973.

[23] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Tradition: Use and Misuse," Modern Age (fall 1964): 415.

[24] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Idea of a Catholic University," in Tradition and Reform in Education (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974), p. 210.

[25] Tonsor, "Haunted House": 292.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Tonsor, "Idea of a Catholic University," p. 210.

[30] Tonsor, "Idea of a Catholic University," p. 212.

[31] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Redefining Liberal Education, Modern Age (summer 1972): 273.

[32] Tonsor, "Idea of a Catholic University," p. 212.

Tonsor: Introduction: Move to Ann Arbor II

I.

Nothing against Nebraska -- in fact, I really like the state -- but I was eager to get back on the road. After adjusting to the U-Haul's ugly engine roar, I turned my attention to Stephen Tonsor's 1964 review of two books, one by a Marxist, the other by a Jesuit. The review turned on the use and misuse of tradition,[1] and if that sounds boring it was not. The essay put the professor's mordant sense of humor on full display.

With lacerating wit Tonsor laid into one Barrows Dunham, a Marxist philosopher who had gained notoriety in 1953, during the McCarthy era. When called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Dunham refused to name names. As a reward for this act of civil disobedience he was fired by his employer, Temple University, later that year.

What with that kind of experience Dunham presumably had something interesting to say. But trying to read him, according to Tonsor, was "equivalent to taking a transcontinental auto trip with a talkative but senile Marxist." Why? Because "Marxism has had its great scholars and at its best has created a viable intellectual tradition." Alas, "Mr. Barrows Dunham does not belong to this tradition. His work falls into the pressed-flower school of Marxian hagiography." The line made me laugh. And in case the reader had missed how Tonsor really felt, he pressed the case further: Dunham's work is "stupidly presented." His "research is slight and largely at the level of third-rate Marxians and second-rate popularizers. His 'Bibliographical Essay' presents the image of an unscientific, ancient, and fuddled mind."[2] Well.

II.

Problematic as the pressed-flower method was, to Tonsor an even more serious problem was Dunham's willful distortion of what Marx called "the opium of the people": religion. Everything had to fit into the Procrustean bed of dialectical materialism, which warped the historic reality of Christianity:

"The account Dunham gives of Jesus will serve to illustrate the point [that Dunham's social history is only vulgar Marxism]. Jesus is presented to us as a 'social revolutionary,' 'the leader of an armed movement of national liberation.' His message was not eschatological, his mission not redemptive. He was simply anti-imperialist, a sort of proto-Castro. St. Paul is the counter-revolutionary theologian and the real founder of modern Christianity. Pauline theology ... describes, not realistically but imaginatively, the state men must inevitably be in so long as the wealth and power of a few derive from poverty and impotence among many.' Even for one who purports to have read the New Testament, these conclusions are astonishing. More conclusively, they demonstrate an ignorance of biblical scholarship.... No well-read student of Christianity, Marxian or otherwise, would today come to such absurd conclusions."[3]

III.

Tonsor also had a real problem with Dunham's abuse of the past. As he explained, a writer appropriates tradition for one of two purposes. Either he is a political hack, a propagandist who weaponizes the past in order to manipulate the present to his purposes. Or he is a historian who seeks to understand continuity, development, process, and the present configuration of ideas and events. Dunham's propaganda was an object lesson in weaponizing the past -- at least it could teach students what not to do.

Tonsor then contrasted Dunham's propagandistic treatment of social dissent with Vernon Bourke's historical study of free will. Tonsor praised the Jesuit's careful exploration of the idea of free will in Western thought down through the centuries. It was a methodological masterpiece that teased out eight different views of will and traced their development into the modern age, and it clearly gave Tonsor much pleasure to read. 

Significantly, Tonsor's concluding paragraph addressed a question that had long nettled me. Conservatives complained of ideologies, but could Christianity be considered just another ideology? Was the Catholic humanist just fooling himself? Here is what Tonsor said:

"It is interesting to explore the Western intellectual tradition with a Marxist and a Jesuit respectively. For those who argue that dogmas are all alike in their antipathy for rational inquiry, the experience will be an enlightening one. Certainly there is a great and apparent difference between those who conceive of disciplined inquiry as little more than a weapon in the arsenal of the social revolutionary and those who conceive of truth as God's own to be cherished and loved for His sake. Of the two positions it would be difficult to say which is the more revolutionary. It is easier to point out which is the more barbarous."[4]

IV.

I wanted to meditate further on Tonsor's work, but my attention was drawn to a terrific thunderhead whose cauliflower top spread over half the state of Iowa east of Des Moines. For more than two hours the open landscape offered a stunning panorama of the storm's development. When I finally caught up with the lightning-laced cumulonimbus, somewhere in the prairie parkland east of the Quad Cities, I gripped the steering wheel tight. Underneath the storm's fury, torrential rain reduced movement on Interstate-80 from a canter to a trot. I was relieved when later that dark afternoon I could check into a motel in Lansing, Illinois, near the Indiana border. I hardly noticed how seedy it was.

Image at URL
http://www.theimagestory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ethereal-sky-lightning-and-green-stormclouds.jpg

___________________

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Tradition: Use and Misuse," Modern Age (fall 1964): 413-15.

[2] Tonsor, "Tradition," p. 413.

[3] Tonsor, "Tradition," p. 414.

[4] Tonsor, "Tradition," p. 415.

Tonsor: Introduction: Prologue and first encounter

At the start of a new academic year, I am inaugurating this series on the most critical phase of my education as a historian. Three decades ago I began graduate school in the history department at the University of Michigan. It turned out to be intellectual boot camp. This and subsequent posts are creative reconstructions of the many fascinating conversations I had with my graduate advisor. They are reimagined from my notes, his public essays and private letters, the articles and books that we read together, and interviews with people who knew him. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to learn a lot from Stephen Tonsor. He had a fierce intellect. Under his influence I learned not only about history, not only about his civilizational mission to confront modernity, but also about myself.

I.

Long's Peak from a meadow below Twin Sisters.

The old family cabin where I was spending the weekend was at an elevation of 10,000 feet. It stood astride a spur of the Storm Pass Trail that led hikers into Rocky Mountain National Park. I timed my stay to occur in late September because, at that time of year, Colorado delivers spectacular autumn days. Over the Continental Divide the sky was the fathomless blue of gothic stained glass. The aspen trees had turned into a shimmering luminescence, as though each were made of cascading yellow diamonds. In my 360-degree view from the long slab of granite in front of the cabin, I had a panoramic view of Long's Peak, Twin Sisters, and Estes Cone -- all cloudless and serene. Surely this day, September 27, 1986, I was witness to earth's greatest crescendo of yellow and blue.

That morning I set out on a short hike to a meadow frequented by elk. After taking some photographs of a fine bull, I returned to the cabin and split lodgepole pine logs into firewood to help my relatives prepare for the coming winter. The languid afternoon hours were cut short when the sun dropped behind the granite wall of Long's Peak, and the rapid cooling hastened my retreat inside to build up the fire I had banked that morning. My back muscles ached from swinging the axe, but my mind felt invigorated by the physical work.

II.

Aspen trees in late September

This particular Saturday evening was dedicated to something I had planned all week. Sitting by the fire, I took out the journals I'd thrown into my backpack -- old copies of Modern Age and Intercollegiate Review that a former English professor, Loy O. Banks, had given me. In 1984-1985, I had completed my Fulbright year in West Germany and had spent a summer in Oxford. Now it was time to consider graduate school in earnest. Was a historian out there who would be a good fit?

As the evening closed in, I felt the disconnect between the mountains and the monographs -- a gap between the enchantment of the setting and the chore of the articles. Was I really in the mood to focus on the task at hand? But as I slowly turned the pages and scanned for "great ideas," I was not disappointed. A number of writers seemed to embrace not just a scholarly but a civilizational mission. One passage in particular resonated. It was from 1958: 

The historian must look beyond facts to meaning, purpose, and direction. Meaning, purpose, and direction -- they are not apt to emerge in the parochial study of one culture, one civilization, or one religious tradition. It is only when the historian makes the comparative method the tool of his studies that he can move beyond the provinciality of national, class, and religious prejudice. The meaning of Western civilization emerges only when it is confronted by another civilization. It is in these dramatic historical confrontations that the meaning of culture, civilization, and religion emerges. It is in these confrontations, too, that cultures and civilizations are enriched and expanded. It is through this process that every period of crisis is a period of hope, that the periods of cultural dissolution can be, and frequently are, periods of great innovation and harbingers of a new cultural era. We have been grievously and justly broken, but if such eyes as mine are worthy to foresee the divine meaning, the divine purpose, then we have been broken only to be made one.

I read the passage a second time. My thought became suspended in the rarified atmosphere of a civilizational as well as a continental divide. The author was comfortable with contrast, paradox, and tension. Turning back to the top of the essay, I was keen to know who wrote this historical manifesto. His name was Stephen Tonsor.[1] When the piece was published, almost three decades earlier, Tonsor was a 34-year-old instructor at the University of Michigan. He described the transcendent purpose of civilization as ultimately a quest for truth, goodness, beauty, even love -- the qualities that most dignified and humanized Homo viator, man the pilgrim. Here was a historian who wrote with the conviction that a civilization, although existing in time, was actually the vestibule of eternity.

With Tonsor's essay in my hands, my mind strained to recall what I had written about truth, goodness, beauty, and love on a sheet of paper that I kept folded in my collection of Great Books back in Fort Collins. It had been prompted by a class in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks that I had taken with Dr. Jan Benson:

Truth is about being. It is knowing what really is.

Goodness is about doing. It is acting in a way that helps others and yourself thrive.

Beauty is about attracting. It is moving irresistibly toward good things. Think of how we gaze at a sunrise. Beauty thus serves to feed the soul as hunger serves to feed the body.

Love is about connecting. It is uniting our soul with what is true, good, and beautiful.

As the fire burned down and my energy waned, I picked up the journals at my feet. The photocopy of a manuscript had slipped out of one of them. Curious, I picked it up and saw that there was no author's name on the front page. But the title, "Conservative Pluralism," led me to a surprising and serendipitous find: 

"The summer of 1953 was an exciting summer. My wife and I and our two small children spent that summer, as we had spent the previous two summers, atop a 10,000 foot peak in the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho as employees of the Forest Service watching for forest fires. One cannot imagine isolation much more complete. And yet, in that isolation, we heard the echoes of the great events transpiring in the world below the serene altitude we inhabited....

"One day that summer I hiked four miles and four thousand feet down to the road to meet the ranger and pick up a month's accumulation of mail. My mentor, Joseph Ward Swain, a distinguished historian of antiquity, had clipped various articles and reviews which he thought might be of interest to me and had sent them on. Among those clippings and articles was a review which had appeared in the Sunday New York Times Book Review of May 17, 1953, of a book by a young historian at Michigan State University, Russell Kirk."[2] 

This manuscript, whose opening scene was a fire lookout on Ruffneck Peak, was written by Stephen Tonsor. Not just any manuscript but this manuscript fell to the floor at my feet. Was it coincidence? Fate? Providence? I could not know what it meant at the time. Yet September 27, 1986, would be my first encounter with the mind of Stephen Tonsor. And these two men, Stephen Tonsor and Russell Kirk, would soon cross my path and I would walk with them for a crowded hour. Indeed, they and the tension between them would be decisive in my intellectual formation over the next several years.

Stephen Tonsor on how he discovered Russell Kirk --
in the Rocky Mountains

_____________________

[1] Paraphrase of a passage from Stephen Tonsor's review of Christopher Dawson's book, The Dynamics of World History, in "History and the God of the Second Chance," Modern Age (spring 1958): 200-01.
[2] "Conservative Pluralism -- The Foundation and the Academy," typed manuscript. The manuscript itself is not dated, but Tonsor's letters to Henry Regnery on September 8, 1981 (p. 4) and September 25, 1981 (p. 1), referred to the lecture by title and event organizer, the "Presidents' Club," and indicated that the lecture would be delivered on September 25, 1981. Letters are courtesy of Alfred Regnery.