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Last fall, a friend and I taught a course called “Ideas and the Modern World” to 16 honors students at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The course is very similar to the “great books” courses common in the 1940s and 1950s, most of which were dropped—as William Bennett, Allan Bloom and others have pointed out^a—as a result of the 1960s student protests against authority in general, and specifically against what was perceived as a straitjacket curriculum based on a narrowly defined tradition. We structured our course around a series of questions about the human condition, including, for example: Do we have free will? How do we explain suffering? Are there limits to human knowledge? How do we decide the right thing to do? What role does a divine being play in our lives? How much are we capable of achieving? Are we basically good or evil? How do we determine, individually and collectively, our heroes? Do we perform good deeds to get rewards? What is the end or goal of our lives? In short, these and other questions focused on our image of God and of human nature and on the relationship between the two.

The Bible is a critical text in the course. The students read part of Genesis, all of Romans, the Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Job. These students, and I suspect they are not unlike their contemporaries across the country, are very much the products of 20th-century American culture. Even those raised in religious traditions look upon God and religion as fairly remote and distant aspects of life that take up part of Sundays and are useful only in times of need or grief.

By the end of the course, both God and religion mean something different to the students, and not because we focus on any particular religious belief, or indeed on religion as an academic subject at all. This happened when I taught the course before, and in thinking about this short piece, I asked myself why. At first, most students seem to find the questions fairly simple. Freedom is perceived by them as the ultimate objective, and any limitation—even on the expression of that freedom—detracts from human existence. For example, their overwhelming attitude toward the fall as described in Genesis 3 is positive; they regard the fall as a fortunate event, because Adam and Eve assert their independence from God. As they read more, however, their responses to the texts become less simple and certainly more ambiguous.

In most of the first half of the course, the image of God and religion encountered by the students is not very attractive to them. They see God as arbitrary, harsh, limiting. Death, as punishment for eating the fruit, seems excessive; God’s personal whims appear to cause all of Job’s torment; God’s choice as opposed to human choice flies in the face of their sense of human worth. Luther’s statement, “Thus the human will is like a beast of burden,” reiterates for them what they had felt as the debilitating message in Genesis, Job and Romans. Consequently, they read the Bible only as a collection of interesting stories that attempt to answer certain basic questions within carefully defined (they might even say “primitive”) limits. They agree that these old stories might be good to know, but they are not comfortable looking to them for relevant commentaries on modern issues. In fact, until the period of the Renaissance, the development of Western religious traditions seems inimical to their concept of what it means to be free.

Pope Innocent III (On the Misery of the Human Condition) certainly represents a low point in his criticism of human potential and his harsh denunciation of human capability and achievement. The students reach the midpoint of the course believing that the Bible and its followers had, on the whole, a negative influence on the development of humanity’s capability to govern itself, and they seem unsurprised by their conclusion. They anticipate, however, a radical rejection of this tradition in the Renaissance, perhaps foreshadowed by the assertion of the Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola: “O highest and most admirable felicity of man to whom it is granted to have whatever he chooses, 044to be whatever he wills!…Are there any who will not admire man?” They immediately accept Erasmus’s points in his 16th-century debate with Luther on free will; they dislike Luther’s perceived denigration of reason and logic; they applaud Erasmus’s distinction between faith and works.

But then we read Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. We ask them how many would agree to a bargain with Mephistopheles, should he appear in their room one night? No one would make any bargain. Why? we ask. The students are not sure.

They read from John Donne, who wrote in 1611:

“Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

All just supply, and all Relation,

Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,

For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a Phoenix….”

We explore Milton’s Paradise Lost. The students’ initial attraction to Milton’s Satan gives way to positive feelings toward his Adam, who is tempted by Satan. We open our discussion of Paradise Lost by asking with which of the two, Adam or Satan, would they rather spend a weekend. At first, the wit, the cunning, the assertion of liberty (“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”), the freedom of movement that Satan manifests are most attractive. At first reading, the ease with which Satan tempts Eve and, through her, Adam implies superiority, but a closer examination of Satan leads the students to rethink their judgment. Eventually, they conclude that Satan is more limited than Adam; having once decided to oppose God always, he is constrained to this position for all eternity; Satan no longer has a choice.

We read 17th-century philosophers, and the students become uncomfortable with the abstract portrayal of God and eventually grow as dissatisfied with the remote God of Descartes, Locke, Hobbes and others as they were with Luther’s “obstinate assertion” of scriptural authority. The same students who earlier confidently maintained that the Renaissance was a “good” thing, because it opened up the possibility of greater human achievements and made possible the exploration of both the inner and outer universe, now begin to grow uneasy with the excesses spawned by the Renaissance spirit, begin to understand that some contemporary problems have their roots in the competition between scientific and spiritual values in the 17th century, those then compounded by the additional conflict between spiritual and material values from the 18th century to the present.

The impulsive clarity expressed by the students at the beginning gives way to recognition and tolerance of ambiguity. For example, they become less critical of Robinson Crusoe’s inconsistent calls on both God and Scripture. They begin to see in Crusoe a vivid example of 20th-century isolation—personal, spiritual and economic—which has put us out of touch with one another and, in some instances, under the control of the very institutions that once existed to provide us with a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a shared set of human experiences. They see that Crusoe understands the Bible in a more personal light, as it relates to him. The students find some affinity with Crusoe as he searches for links, threads, connections, as he discovers in the Bible the potential for greater understanding of his personal history—who he once was, who he is in isolation—and of how he can develop a deeper relationship with his companion, Friday. There are no clear or certain answers for Crusoe; at this point in the course, there are none for the students either.

Students leave the course a little bewildered. God and the biblical traditions that seemed not very attractive early in the course—perhaps previously in their lives—now seem central to their own sense of themselves and the world in which they live. They feel they have a context: they see in the Book of Job, for example, not so much a harsh picture of God, but a human almost obsessed (rightly?) with meeting God, with presenting his case to Him. In fact, they find more affinity with Job’s quest for a face-to-face meeting than with Descartes’s obsession with a clean slate or with theoretical questioning of his own existence, What they thought was out-of-date, a relic, an icon, is connected to their thoughts about the environment, human potential, the notion of heroism, the possibility of human greatness, their image of God. What once seemed archaic, becomes contemporary.

It would be claiming too much to say that the students have undergone an important religious experience, but I do not think it is excessive to say that the experience has made religion, God and the Bible more meaningful to them. Perhaps this is what critics such as Bloom and Bennett, who argue for a return to the “great books” tradition, really mean (though I would take them to task for slighting American pluralism)—that too many in our society do not know what matters, do not understand where we have come from and how we think and act in the ways we do. Without such knowledge, such connections, it may be more difficult—perhaps even impossible—to determine the right directions, structure or priorities of America and much of the rest of the world in the 21st century.

Last fall, a friend and I taught a course called “Ideas and the Modern World” to 16 honors students at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The course is very similar to the “great books” courses common in the 1940s and 1950s, most of which were dropped—as William Bennett, Allan Bloom and others have pointed outa—as a result of the 1960s student protests against authority in general, and specifically against what was perceived as a straitjacket curriculum based on a narrowly defined tradition. We structured our course around a series of questions about the human condition, including, for example: Do […]