Humane Letters are about the study of the human spirit. It is a spirit, that searchingly, persistently, and relentlessly, seeks what is true, good and beautiful in the world, in others, and in the self, in which one is guided by love as a life principle upon which to build a life worthy of that spirit.
The term Humane Letters itself refers to a classical liberal arts education, that emphasizes history, literature, and other humanities fields. The term has its roots in the intellectual movement known as Renaissance Humanism, a Fourteenth Century Movement sparked by the rediscovery of Greco-Roman literary works by European scholars.
The study of Humane Letters is not, properly speaking, a discipline consisting of standardized methods of inquiry into canonical texts. So how may one benefit from its study? What credentials has one earned through the study of Humane Letters? Is there a “job” waiting to be filled for that ‘peculiar’ person who studied Humane Letters? The short answer is no, in that Humane Letters is not job training. However, mastery of Humane Letters endows the freshly-minted graduate with a fund of knowledge that does not have a short shelf-life, but lasts a lifetime. What can be better than acquiring an understanding of one’s own society derived from knowing the history, traditions, and values that have been passed down and “paid forward” to him and to her, to their cohorts and their compeers? They are well-equipped to address, envisage, and speak to the issues of their own time, which have been faced before in other times, in every age.
For the one interested in learning Humane Letters, you will not find a department or an entire school that goes by the name of Humane Letters. You may be familiar with that term from attending a degree-awarding ceremony in which distinguished alumni and alumnae, well-known personalities in the arts, and generous sponsors of philanthropy have received Honorary Doctorate degrees in Humane Letters for their contributions towards enriching society. It is in recognition of one who has made an indelible impression upon the society of the times.
Humane Letters’ realm is the written word – Letters – that nourish the mind in a way that the fine arts, performing arts and mechanical arts, fall short. This is not simply limited to literature, but can be found in old and new media – through weblogs, correspondence, diaries, letters, social media – any media that can capture thought in the snapshot of the written word. Of the foregoing media, correspondence by letters shows a side of life, deeply personal and emotionally compelling, that is not found in other genres of personal literature, such as autobiography, diaries, or personal journals.
Communication through personal letters holds a high position in the history of Humane Letters. There is something more substantial in receiving a personally-addressed letter than a quick email. While emails are efficient for delivering information virtually instantaneously, personal letters are just that – the personality and inner thoughts, emotions, and feelings, like an interlocutor in a conversation. A well-written letter can dispel loneliness in a way that social media cannot: hearing a person, versus receiving in cyberspace a bombardment of likes and shares.
AN “I” FOR AN EYE
Humane Letters is not art, photography or other graphic media. The visual arts, whether in motion or stillness, have a prominent, perched place in our collective lives. They can entertain – even educate and enrich our lives, but they can also limit, nay impair, our horizons. Will Rogers, noted humorist who perfected what would be called the “soundbite” by the end of the second millennium, commented on what passed for wisdom in his day and age: “It isn’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just isn’t so.” Contrary to popular belief, it is not true that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Nor is it true that “seeing is believing”. Television, motion pictures, theatre, and the glossy layouts of the magazine rack – all now “enhanced” by artificial intelligence – can masquerade as a zeal for knowing, in which a disciplined approach is missing. Undisciplined, untamed desire, scatters your force, in what St. Augustine of Hippo referred to as “concupiscence of the eye”. It manifests itself as a frivolous, avid curiosity that craves for experiences, in which a multitude of impressions fails to intensify your understanding of news events and your encounters with other cultures. The silvery glare of the tube lays traps for the unsuspecting viewer to be conditioned into a dreamy, unfocused haze, that produces inattentiveness and disinclination to be active. Such viewers would feel at home in Plato’s Parable of the Cave. As caves tend to be dark, so, too, are the movie houses and theaters. The cave is “home” to enchained prisoners, who take all the play of lights and shadow, as representing reality. So, while it is true that contemporary man and women are not held in chains, watercooler conversation about celebrity behavior mingled with chattering about the latest ads and scores, is not how we learn about our humanity, about human excellence, about the best in ourselves, as rational, knowing, and loving beings.
I AM
It is important to recognize that we are born with minds before we acquire speech, and language, and the symbols of language, namely letters. We are born ready to learn, well-equipped with functioning senses, that require no language. Before language acquisition, newborns find themselves in a family. Properly speaking, as the newest member in the family, a newborn is a family being, not yet a human being. Through family interactions, newborns learn to be human. They learn in a family, what is love. Without language, we learn love through hugs, caresses, smiles, spoon-feedings. Love is tangible, we learn love from touch. We love to be loved by the ever-encompassing gesture, the hug.
We learn by doing, by trying, by falling down and getting up again, we learn from mistakes, we learn by mimicking, by imitation, by pretending, by dress-up and acting as heroes or heroines – all these before language. Our humanity was already well-developed, before learning a single letter. So why need Humane Letters?
We are not limited to what we can only immediately experience. The first knowledge beyond immediate experience is from a children’s storybook. The child still knows no letters. But the child can follow the story by seeing pictures on every page. Every page, one succeeding the previous pages, follows a pattern. The book is read to him. He begins to sense that those black squiggles mean something. When mom or dad reads the story, on the pages with a lot of squiggles, mom or dad is doing a lot more talking. The more squiggles, the more talking. Meanwhile, the child is “processing” all that he sees and hears. He is starting to form his own thoughts: “Maybe those squiggles relate to the pictures? Maybe not? I don’t know. It’s very strange. Who can help me? My mom and dad love me. I trust them to make sense of everything. But I trust my mom and dad because they love me. They love me because I am, not the great I AM, but because of the great I AM, well, I am. And I cannot yet think, so I’ve been told, so therefore I am not. If I am not, then what to make of all these hugs and stories and mom and dad? I heard that Mr. I-am-not, (or is it Mr. I-think-not?) has lost his coordinates. I hope he finds them.”
In following a story, an infant is beginning to recognize patterns, and by the time of becoming a toddler, he is able to make mental maps of the world around him, beginning to develop the faculties of perception and memory. Later in preschool, and in the early grades of primary school, the growing child has already mastered the elements of spoken language, and can process the squiggles of alphanumeric symbols that mysteriously combine into sounds and words. By the time of preschool, a young child is already a thinking being. But it is not until later, when a child has reached the age of reason (thought to be about the age of seven when a child can begin to discern the meaning of right and wrong as more than obedience) that he can apply his thinking to make choices and decisions, although he cannot yet govern his life by reason. The child still needs guidance, primarily from the parents, with outside in loco parentis representatives, such as teachers, neighbors, and extended family, assisting the parents in their primary role as teachers of their children. Part of this process in guiding children to make choices and decisions for themselves is the development of a conscience – as moral compass and guide that will gradually mature into a sense of self.
THE CLASSICAL SENSE
The ancient Romans had their household gods, they believed, would help the parents in raising their children. The Romans had two gods that supplied the nourishment they needed to live. They petitioned a god when the crop was harvested and removed from the soil – the goddess Runcina. After giving Runcina her due, Romans appealed to and offered homage to the goddess Educa – for supplying the food separated from the soil. As the supplier of nourishment, the goddess Educa, with her watchful eye, fed Roman children, giving them what they needed to guide them to grow healthy and strong, and thereby providing them the education to lead them out of dark, unlettered childhood, into a world of Letters and learning. The ‘squiggles’ they had seen in early childhood now have meaning. This is the process of beginning to acquire a cultural heritage, a legacy of historical, moral and social knowledge and values – that will tool the young and prepare them to appreciate and participate in the Civis Romanus, in fidelity to a higher order of being, Romanitas – the Roman Way.
TO BE LETTERED
We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that we can know everything, by dabbling in this and that, never mastering anything. But to want to know everything worth knowing is something different. Truth is worth seeking and worth knowing. As long as you are searching for truth, you will not be deceived. It remains the goal of any education worthy of a lifetime’s dedication and devotion.
An education in Humane Letters necessarily entails mastering a canon of literary works that focus on the humanity of its human subjects in matters of the heart. Studying the motivations that move the human heart to joy, desire, fear, and sorrows – and their opposites – sadness, apathy, courage, and rejoicing – is foundational to Humane Letters, which instructs us on how we ought to live. A canon of excellent books opens up the world of things worth knowing, and to a connection with the experiences of men and women in other places and times. When done well, Humane Letters not only provides knowledge and mastery of literary texts that will be useful throughout life; it teaches us to love what is noble, beautiful, and good – what matters, in the main, to truly set us free: free from the narrow parochialisms and prejudices of old; free to grow into vast, infinite horizons of hope, and to live the heroic life, unafraid.
With classical, we invoke our origins, the deep sources that give education in Humane Letters its foundation. With the liberal arts, we invoke the classical purpose of education in Humane Letters: freedom – not freedom to do as one wills according to whims and passions of the moment, but in a freedom, where to be free is to know the truth, to live by noble purpose, and to give generously, even at great cost, out of love for others.
Thus, our origins and destiny, our beginnings and our “ends”, are closely related, since what we know of our humanity was initially revealed to us in the hunter-gathering societies in the predawn of history, and later cultivated in the stability of agricultural communities, where the invention of writing for the record launches us into the seas and storms of history. Our history, which is our origins and destiny, is preserved through Humane Letters, guided by love as our life principle. Our love searches past and future, and clings to those dimensions of time, finding meaning in a time no longer with us, and a time not yet, without acknowledging present. By acknowledging the present, incorporating past and future into present time, thereby reconciling memory and hope, shall set us free from guilt for the past, and anxiety about the future.
HUMANE LETTERS AS RESPONSIBILITY
Reflections on our beginnings and our destiny were subsequently preserved, defended, and developed, then bequeathed to us, largely in Humane Letters. Now it falls to us as keepers of culture to pass that knowledge on and maintain it by teaching others. A free, humane, and lettered culture is not frozen in books, maintained and catalogued as an inheritance of literary treasures. It also entails a great responsibility. Now, more than ever, there is an urgency to preserving, studying and promoting Humane Letters. Our culture, our freedom, and passing on the blessings of liberty to our children and our posterity, depend on that study.
The survival of Humane Letters has, at times, been a matter of greatest urgency. In Plato’s dialogues, we see the glory of Periclean Athens collapse in plagues and ignominious defeat by Sparta. Augustine wrote in defense of Christianity as the City of Man was collapsing around him. In recent times, T.S. Eliot developed the imagery of a wasteland of hollow men in the aftermath of World War I, and de Tocqueville’s analysis of the American experiment in democracy mingled hope with studied apprehension. They all wrote before, during, and in the aftermath of societal collapse, without vision for hope for a new order or restoration of the old.
Time and again, we return to classic works for the light they shed on our lives. Our need for that illumination may not always bear the urgency that social collapse or revolution bring. However, Humane Letters always impel us to consider what matters most. Great imaginative literature moves us the way we ought to be moved; hence, the enduring power of Dante’s journey to the underworld with Beatrice as his guide; and Shakespeare’s tragedies that cry havoc and treachery in the courts and councils of every age. They still resonate, despite a separation of centuries and millennia from the original record.
HUMANE LETTERS AS “US”
Due to an education steeped in history and a common tradition, the Humane Lettered person is able to structure phenomena into coherent narratives, finding meaningful patterns in the factoids and bricolage of seeming unimportance. To those who make decisions on human life and our collective destiny, Humane Letters equip men and women with a moral foundation to desire what is noble and to discern what is worthy of one’s best efforts; reading of history supplies the mind with a fund of exemplars to show us that in every age, perils and dangers were faced and overcome; and the exploration of literature awakens the imagination with compelling visions of justice and beauty, to bring to the public square.
To better apprehend the nature of order, justice and truth, Humane Letters have much to teach us.
Besides their insights into the human condition, ‘Letters’, in the widest sense, will teach us more about a people’s character, the rise and fall of nations and civilizations or the gradual undoing and social unraveling of society, than can any number of bluebooks, white papers, or doctoral dissertations full of Gradgrindian ‘hard facts’ and statistics.
IMAGINATION AS TRUTH
As our foundations are biblical and classical, with its emphasis on freedom and conscience, impose few constraints, requires little pretense, and allows style, whether in prayer, expression, or rhetorical flourishes, to become more personal and genuine. More importantly, the biblical and classical traditions foster genuine and authentic feeling, while avoiding the snares of ideology. As ideology has served as an almost ersatz religion, its ‘’scriptures, dogmas and doctrines” are written in the ‘mode of ambiguity’ to create an illusion of lively debate, replete with responses and counter-responses, never ending in any resolution, or as St. Paul had noted, “never getting any closer to the truth.” There are many more things, in heaven and on earth, than can be dreamt of in any ideology.
Humane Letters make connections between ideas and the deep places of the imagination. Lettered-educated men and women will continue to be moved by Eliot’s vision of the ten stairs and Yeats’ paeans to enchanted hearts rising up against foreign rule. It is the higher imagination that stirs the soul and move men and women to act.
They spoke to us – still do – in that their literary revolution was rooted in tradition; and resisted the calls to be ‘relevant’ – to use their art to satisfy worldly ambition. They recovered for us, in a century of gulags, holocausts, and ‘cleansings’, a new moral imagination. Eliot’s fresh approach to the moral imagination still move the mind and heart in a way that modern poetry, cut off from tradition, does not.
Awareness of our common humanity have been occluded by a fortress of layers of distractions after distraction upon distraction that are filled with fanciful spectacles empty of meaning. To recover Humane Letters as central to society, we do not have to demonstrate and fight pitched battles. All we have to do is not give undue attention to the unwanted detritus of meaningless content that is bombarded and blasted relentlessly at our senses.
Nor do the social sciences offer substantive answers to man and woman in their lonely isolation. The social sciences seek to explain and explore human associations, behavior, institutions, and social phenomena – but in a circumscribed way. Social scientists collect data to ‘measure’ humankind. The data, though, can only be of a certain kind, within circumscribed limits, in which only demographic, economic, geographic, ideological, or statistical ‘yardsticks’ may be research conclusions, but not ‘meaning’. Such yardsticks “underdetermine”, because these conclusions fail to account for the decisions made by a free people, to make prudent choices with that freedom, in their search for meaning in the race of life. Therefore, these yardsticks are inadequate – to account for real causes, having to do with conscience and the ethical decisions that flow from that conscience. The study of economics is fundamentally about choices and decisions made in a society of scarce resources. As to who gets what, and how much to have involves a system of tradeoffs, and as in the final analysis what determines who gets what, is a moral decision, not a scientific conclusion that can be drawn from elaborate econometric models. Humane Letters resists the ideological attempts to quantify the human person. Humane Letters rests on a more secure foundation, involving human conscience and the freedom to act in accordance with conscience, in which the human subject is the proper object for study, in a fully determined way, what it means to be a person.
