In his 1954 inaugural lecture as the first chair and professor of “Medieval and Renaissance English” at Cambridge, C.S. Lewis says that, though it is not within his power to treat the whole field, “this appointed area must primarily appear as a specimen of something far larger, something which had already begun when the Iliad was composed and was still almost unimpaired when Waterloo was fought…I shall be unable to talk to you about my particular region without constantly treating things which neither began with the Middle Ages nor ended with the end of the Renaissance. In this way I shall be forced to present to you a great deal of what can only be described as Old European, or Old Western, culture” [1]. I think C.S. Lewis would lament the absence of this “Old Western culture” in many Holy Cross humanities classrooms. In many of our literature classes, students emerge uneducated on the culture and history out of which classic pieces of writing were produced. Instead, they emerge with knowledge of how to manipulate these works to fit their own purposes. I hope to offer my opinion as a student of English and Spanish literature, informed by the thoughts of C.S. Lewis, as to why it seems plausible that the humanities are declining and criticized for not being serious areas of study.
My first reason is that many teachers and students have lost the ability to relate to the past. As a result, we miss the invaluable opportunity that literature gives us to engross ourselves in a different world and a different mentality. One example of our disconnect is our failure to understand the religiosity of our predecessors. Lewis notes: “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not” [2]. The post-Christian character of many academics makes it difficult for them to pick up on religious references in classic pieces of literature which in turn diminishes their students’ understanding of the material. Jeffrey Knapp, author of Shakespeare’s Tribe, mentions: “On the level of practical criticism, secularist readings of Renaissance plays have failed to explain some of the most prominent recurring plots, themes, and character types in the plays, or even to notice the existence of such recurrences” [3]. We speak a different language now; we quickly pass over Shakespeare’s many references to Doomsday because we have lost the sense of its gravity and meaning, a meaning that Christians throughout the ages would have understood. Because of this lost sensibility, we begin to lose access to the mind of Shakespeare.
As a result of our ruptured relationship with the past, many classes attempt to discuss pieces of classic literature from a time period distinct from our own through the use of modern critical lenses without teaching much about the traditions and cultures from which these pieces emerged.
Some have preserved this lost art. To illustrate what I mean, I will cite an example from a class with a professor who has maintained this ability to have a healthy relationship with the past. In my class Shakespeare’s Contemporaries, the professor posed a question to the class: “Who has thought today: am I going to Heaven or Hell?” The class was silent. He responded, “The Elizabethans thought about that every day.” Through a jarring question, we were transported to a time distinct from our own. However, this class was an exception. In many other classes, we would have focused on class struggles, perception of women, questions of identity and sexuality, etc. Accordingly, we would likely have brought modern presumptions into our study of history’s best literature so that we were no longer studying history or literature at all but learning how to manipulate the material to fit our own agendas.
Learning about and immersing ourselves in the past does not enslave us to it. Lewis argues, “I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past” [4]. I think we as students are becoming bound to a fairly recent past by only learning to work with modern presumptions. I fear that our literary education is equipping us with the ability to perform one, low-level party trick: do shallow, unhistorical criticism of great literature. This subjectivity and infinite malleability diminishes the seriousness of the humanities: we become the stereotype of literature majors who do not have to do work (because reading our own opinions into literature does not often require reading the literature), who go to class and just talk about their feelings, and who write nonsense, and as long as the professor agrees with our nonsense, we get an A.
The seriousness of the humanities is regained when we remember that reading great pieces of literature and immersing ourselves in the ideas of great authors enrich our minds. By applying various modern critical lenses onto literature and reading our own ideas into it, “we are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves"[5]. I think we would do well to follow Lewis’s advice and, when studying literature from the Old Western tradition, to immerse ourselves in this tradition: “Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.” [6]. Then we can escape the danger of meeting only ourselves, and maybe then we can meet people like Cervantes and Shakespeare.
Endnotes
[1] C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 11-12.
[2] Ibid., p.5.
[3] Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe (University of Chicago Press, 2012), p.2.
[4] Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, p.4.
[5] Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 85.
[6] Ibid., p.19.