'A talk?'
'An address. I am giving an address tomorrow, to the graduands. You will have to sit through it, I am afraid.'
II
She is seated, along with other eminent guests, in the front row. Years since she was last at a graduation ceremony. The end of an academic year: the summer heat as bad here in Africa as back home.
There are, if she is to guess from the block of black-garbed young people behind her, some two hundred degrees in the humanities to be handed out. But first it is the turn of Blanche, the sole honorary graduand. She is introduced to the assembly. Clad in the scarlet gown of a doctor, a teacher, she stands before them, hands clasped, while the university orator reads out the record of a life's achievements. Then she is led to the Chancellor's seat. She bends a knee, and the deed is done. Long applause. Sister Bridget Costello, Bride of Christ and Doctor of Letters, who by her life and works has restored lustre, for a while, to the name of missionary.
She takes her place at the lectern. Time for her to say her piece, Bridget, Blanche.
'Chancellor,' she says, 'respected members of the University:
'You honour me here this morning, and I gratefully acknowledge the honour, which I accept on behalf not of myself but of those scores of people who for the past half-century have dedicated their labour and their love to the children of Marianhill and through those little ones to Our Lord.
'The form in which you have chosen to honour us is the form you are most easy with, the award of an academic degree, specifically what you call a doctorate in litterae humaniores, humane letters or, more loosely, the humanities. At the risk of telling you things you know better than I, I would like to use this opportunity to say something about the humanities, about their history and their present situation; also something about humanity. What I have to say may be relevant, I humbly hope, to the situation in which you as servants of the humanities find yourself, in Africa but in the wider world too, namely an embattled situation.
'We must sometimes be cruel to be kind, so let me begin by reminding you that it was not the university that gave birth to what we today call the humanities but what, to be more historically accurate, I will henceforth call the studia humanitatis or humane studies, studies in man and the nature of man, as distinct from studia divinitatis, studies pertaining to the divine. The university did not give birth to humane studies, nor, when the university eventually accepted humane studies in its scholarly ambit, did it provide a particularly nurturing home to them. On the contrary, the university embraced humane studies only in an arid, narrowed form. That narrowed form was textual scholarship; the history of humane studies in the university from the fifteenth century onwards is so tightly bound up with the history of textual scholarship that they may as well be called the same thing.
'Since I do not have all morning (your Dean asked me to limit myself to fifteen minutes at the utmost – "at the utmost" are his own words), I will say what I want to say without the step-by-step reasoning and the historical evidence to which you, as a gathering of students and scholars, are entitled.
'Textual scholarship, I would want to say if I had more time, was the living breath of humane studies while humane studies were what we can properly call a movement in history, namely the humanist movement. But it did not take long for the living breath in textual scholarship to be snuffed out. The story of textual scholarship since then has been the story of one effort after another to resuscitate that life, in vain.
'The text for the sake of which textual scholarship was invented was the Bible. Textual scholars saw themselves as servants in the recovery of the true message of the Bible, specifically the true teaching of Jesus. The figure they employed to describe their work was the figure of rebirth or resurrection. The reader of the New Testament was to encounter face to face for the first time the risen, reborn Christ, Christus renascens, obscured no longer by a veil of scholastic gloss and commentary. It was with this goal in mind that scholars taught themselves first Greek, then Hebrew, then (later) other languages of the Near East. Textual scholarship meant, first, the recovery of the true text, then the true translation of that text; and true translation turned out to be inseparable from true interpretation, just as true interpretation turned out to be inseparable from true understanding of the cultural and historical matrix from which the text had emerged. That is how linguistic studies, literary studies (as studies in interpretation), cultural studies and historical studies – the studies that form the core of the so-called humanities – came to be bound up together.
'Why, you may justly ask, call this constellation of studies devoted to the recovery of the true word of the Lord studia humcmitatis? Asking this question will, it turns out, be much the same as asking, Why did the studia humanitatis come into flower only in the fifteenth century of our dispensation and not hundreds of years earlier?
'The answer has much to do with historical accident: with the decline and eventual sack of Constantinople and the flight of Byzantine men of learning to Italy. (Observing your Dean's fifteen-minute rule, I will pass over the living presence of Aristotle, Galen and other Greek philosophers in medieval Western Christendom, and the role of Arab Spain in transmitting their teachings.)
'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The gifts brought by the men from the East were not only grammars of the Greek language but texts by authors from Greek antiquity. The linguistic command that was intended to be applied to the Greek New Testament could be perfected only by immersing oneself in these seductive pre-Christian texts. In no time, as one might expect, the study of these texts, later to be called the classics, had become an end in itself.
'More than that: the study of the texts of antiquity came to be justified not only on linguistic grounds but on philosophical grounds too. Jesus was sent to redeem mankind, the argument went. To redeem mankind from what? From an unredeemed state, of course. But what do we know of mankind in an unredeemed state? The only substantial record that covers all aspects of life is the record of antiquity. So to grasp the purpose behind the Incarnation – that is to say, to grasp the meaning of redemption – we must embark, through the classics, on studia humanitatis.
'Thus, in the brief and crude account I give, did it come about that biblical scholarship and studies in Greek and Roman antiquity came to be coupled in a relationship never without antagonism, and thus did it come about that textual scholarship and its attendant disciplines came to fall under the rubric "the humanities".
'So much for history. So much for why you, diverse and ill-assorted as you may privately feel yourselves to be, find yourselves assembled this morning under a single roof as graduates-to-be in the humanities. Now, in the few minutes left to me, I am going to tell you why I do not belong among you and have no message of comfort to bring to you, despite the generosity of the gesture you have extended to me.
'The message I bring is that you lost your way long ago, perhaps as long as five centuries ago. The handful of men among whom the movement originated of which you represent, I fear, the sad tail – those men were animated, at least at first, by the purpose of finding the True Word, by which they understood then, and I understand now, the redemptive word.
'That word cannot be found in the classics, whether you understand the classics to mean Homer and Sophocles or whether you understand them to mean Homer and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky In a happier age than our own it was possible for people to bluff themselves into believing that the classics of antiquity offered a teaching and a way of life. In our own times we have settled, rather desperately, for the claim that the study of the classics in itself might offer a way of life, or if not a way of life then at least a way of earning a living which, if it cannot be proved to do any positive good, at least is on no side claimed to do any harm.
'But the impulse behind the first generation of textual scholars cannot be diverted so easily from its proper goal. I am a daughter of the Catholic Church, not of the Reformed Church, but I applaud Martin Luther when he turns his back on Desiderius Erasmus, judging that his colleague, despite his immense gifts, has been seduced into branches of study that do not, by the standards of the ultimate, matter. The studia humanitatis have taken a long time to die, but now, at the end of the second millennium of our era, they are truly on their deathbed. All the more bitter should be that death, I would say, since it has been brought about by the monster enthroned by those very studies as first and animating principle of the universe: the monster of reason, mechanical reason. But that is another story for another day.'
III
That is the end of it, the end of Blanche's oration, which is received less with applause than with what sounds, from the front row of seats, like a murmur of general puzzlement. The business of the day is resumed: one by one the new graduates are called up to receive their scrolls; and the ceremony closes with a formal procession of which Blanche, in her red robes, is part. Then she, Elizabeth, is free for a while to wander among the milling guests, listening in on their chatter.