Dear Editors:
Thank you for printing the piece by Alain de Botton Dec 18. He rightly sees the importance of the humanities to humanity, and we applaud him as he calls the modern university to task for its utilitarian approach to education. The great books, art, and music of our culture can indeed act as a “storehouse of useful ideas,” and those ideas more than justify four years' study at university.
However, when he encourages the thought that the culture might serve as a substitute for scripture, Mr. de Botton underestimates the foundational place of scripture in our art. The humanities can indeed speak to the needs of the human, but the majority of the cultural power that he rightly finds in the great books of the West is the result of centuries of reflection on and belief in the biblical narrative and its view of life. The great books carry the wisdom of the ages in the same way a river carries water. The river and the water are as one to us, so we might be excused for thinking that the book and its contained wisdom are also one, but we would never imagine for a moment that the river created the water. Mr. de Botton helps us see the benefit that comes from knowing the work of our best writers (not to mention our best composers, architects, and filmmakers), but they did not create the wisdom they espouse. Artists discern it then embody it in their artistic expressions. The help they may offer their readers about marriage, death, and work is founded on a picture of those subjects found in the Bible. So the view that scripture and culture might serve as two potential options for the foundation of a civilization misunderstands the relation of the two elements: scripture is the water, culture is the river. The Western dismissal of scripture as the source of wisdom is simply bad scholarship -- it ignores most of the very points of the books Mr. de Botton sites, and can only end up misinterpreting the work of Suger, Dante, Durer, Botticelli, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Bach, Mendelssohn, Eliot, Rouault, et c.
This misunderstanding may very well be the reason for the loss of purpose Mr. de Botton finds in many humanities departments. Perhaps we have substituted culture for scripture already -- in the 18th-19th century? We first lost the water, and as a result the river dried up. How can we claim the humanities can offer wisdom if we no longer believe in the Giver of wisdom? We are right to try to regain the humanities, but without their foundation in theology they dry up, and even their most ardent supporters find it hard to give reason why they should be studied, apart from a vague sense that they are more meaningful than the robotic pragmatism preached in every public square. It is no wonder we have become a culture of utilitarianism, we doubt everything else.
We applaud Mr. de Botton’s new work in London for calling us back to the humanities, but fear that without the underpinning of biblical virtues, it may lead only to a repeat of the errors of Modernism. In the end, there are only two ways to go: either to accept the cultural relativism presently taught in the trendier humanities departments, or do the hard scholarly work of rethinking the connections between faith and reason that were lost in the Enlightenment. We are humbly attempting the latter.
