It is 1276.

John of Salisbury, Bishop of Chartres, writes,

“Above all careful attention should be given to those matters … which have in view the health of body and soul.”

Who has time, he asks, for any studies that “do not conduce to the betterment of man” in making his ascent to God? “Who can imagine that time should be devoted” to learning anything before we have learned how to look at life, how to discover our true path?

Fast forward to the present year.

Off you go to university to spend years studying the varieties of human thought – or maybe you are training for a job.

Did you have no need to “cultivate your soul,” asks John of Salisbury?

Study is actually “very harmful” to a person, he says, if this “occupies his attention to the exclusion of” the most essential things.

If, instead, “every man were to labour in the cultivation of himself … straightaway the condition of each and all would become the best possible, virtue would flourish and reason prevail.”

Without that fruit of reason and virtue how, he wonders, can we “serve God with full devotion.”

WHY GIVE UP THE OLD PLAN OF LEARNING?

The university – an institution that was invented by Christians – was once a place where,

• a ‘professor’ professes the faith,
• a teacher teaches the way things are,
• and this is done to help us bear the fruit that we were designed to bear.

This professor is not teaching information. Not even just knowledge. (Why is mere ‘knowledge’ even important?)

In a sense, he or she is teaching a job, since it is our primary job to be what God made us to be, and there is not a job anywhere that can be done without knowledge. We are called in the Bible to understanding: this is a part of it.

How but by understanding the truth about man and God will we serve anyone?

WHY DO WE THINK WE CAN SEE EVERYTHING FOR OURSELVES?

It is not necessary — indeed, it is impossible — for each person to understand his own life alone, as if he or she (a single person) were a unique species. The Church is the body of Christ and it is composed of many people who have studied deeper than we will.

John of Salisbury, citing another Christian thinker, wrote:

“Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants, and thus we are able to see more and farther than the latter. And this is not at all because of the acuteness of our sight or the stature of our body, but because we arecarried aloft and elevated by the magnitude of the giants.”

What makes us think we no longer need this help? What do you lose, and what do you gain, when you say, with the modern world, that,

“Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold.” — R.E.M., “King of Birds”