The Scholar as Heretic

Geniuses who seem out of step to us because they walk with God appeal to us in vain from the flames in which we burn them. We do not choose to hear people who give us inconvenient truths that shake the elaborate simplicity of our minds and make us examine anew the foundation of our beliefs. With what relief do we see such people safely dead—so they can be interpreted into the grubby conformity we demand. Most of our prophets have been heretics to their times, and the roster of those who must find their life by losing it in defense of unpopular truth is, I suspect, growing at the same ratio now that it always has. We need not commend these heretics; they have seldom had and never needed our approbation.

But there are many ways to lose one’s life—and most of us do not die nobly, nor for important heresies. The martyred scholar is rare. There are ten Joans for one Tyndale. The training of scholars makes them too tentative, too conscious of relativity. They tell themselves they are seeking knowledge instead of conviction, and wait for those who do not know that their position is untenable to transmute heresy into truth. The scholar’s eyes do not burn with inner fire; they burn with poring over the ashes of others’ fires, straining to get warmth from the cold print of books. Who ever heard of a library bursting into flames from spontaneous combustion? You don’t feel Jeremiah’s burning within the bone vicariously. No, scholars usually prefer to have their fires banked and keep their heresies trivial.

Perhaps this is the greatest danger that faces scholarship today. The minor heresy does not seem to be important—and may not even be recognized. Yet it seems to me that the scholars are deviating from their potentially high calling in at least five ways:

Possibly not first in importance, but easily first in extent, is the heresy of the technician. Here are the traditional scholars—they of the ponderous tome and bubbling beaker. Here are the movie scientist and the ivory tower poet, whose favorite adjective is “pure.” They are engaged in “pure” research or are writing “pure” poetry. Their dim awareness of the abundant life promised by Christ is as cog to machine. The heresy here has little in it of hypocrisy, despite some popular feeling to the contrary. Specialists are not usually bluffing, but they are often focusing so narrowly that they find it hard to communicate in the imprecise, lay world. The real trouble here is that such specialists are idiots—idiots in the original meaning of the term, which suggests a partial, deliberately narrow point of view. These people have found their own strait and narrow way, but the sad fact is that their path gets so narrow that only one can walk along it. Technicians are necessary, but as something less than a human being. They become absorbed in things. As Emerson puts it so graphically, “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” The scholar as technician is, finally, the ultimate materialist. The technician’s “pure” has become dross.

Next we meet the scholar as gadfly. It’s so nice to have antiquity on our side—to rest in the lap of Plato, to become, in his famous line, “a gadfly to the state.” There’s something so ego-inflating here. Gadflies do not care whom they sting or where. Nothing is sacred to them, and they love to describe over and over the illusory balloons they have pricked. In fact, gadflies get so busy looking for balloons that they haven’t time for anything else. They become crusaders, self-decorated for valor in rooting out pretense and hypocrisy. They call themselves critics, but too often have mistaken faultfinding and carping for criticism. Their one-syllable comment, “NO,” becomes reflex action rather than real cerebral activity. They discover how easily a contemptuous laugh may cover up for the effort of achieving insight. The real danger here is not that the scholar as gadfly becomes too critical, but that the gadfly finally becomes incapable of discriminating at all. Such a scholar simply “kicks against the pricks” with vigor, usually compensating for lack of mental action with physical vehemence.

The archetype of this gadfly scholar is Jonah, who preached condemnation with fervor but could not conceive of bandaging the wound. There is something subhuman about Jonah, the man planted stubbornly under his withered gourd, bitterly unhappy with God and humanity, himself most completely lost in illusion. Jonah’s role of critic is only the means to an end, but since that role is all he has, for him it becomes the end. What an instructive contrast between the repentant, rebuilding Nineveh and Jonah, the perspiring gadfly!

The third heresy of modern scholarship has many points in common with the second but a different primary emphasis. Particularly among teachers we see the rise of the scholar as prophet. If this temptation is not the most pervasive for the educated pedant, it is surely the most dangerous. Here we find self-appointed seers who predict, forecast, and explain on the basis of their position as an “authority.” Who dares question the publishing Ph.D.? Who dares react until hearing how the “right people” are reacting?

We tend to develop Jehovah complexes. No political dictator is more ruthless than the tyrant who, standing in front of a class, has just had a shabby generalization questioned. How easy it is to manipulate terminology that students do not understand, to shift up into the cloudy abstract and float above the heads of the ignorant and awkward. We seem to feel a mother’s love for some of our ideas whether they die aborning or not, and often we defend them with maternal savagery.

Yet how relative is the term “authority.” We would like to possess the thing symbolized as well as the symbol, but if we can have the only one, we will settle for the symbol alone. We would often rather assume this title than earn it—better yet we would like to have it given to us by students and colleagues. To Mormons, the word “authority” connotes a religious sanction that should make us doubly cautious in accepting such a label, no matter how we come by it, for we are dealing here not with material counters that may be shifted without serious consequence but with impressionable lives. Perhaps only the truly great scholar can feel the security from which significant humility is born. The rest of us simply need to be warned that while many are called few are chosen.

As we pursue the heretical scholar, we find the temptations becoming more subtly deceptive. The scholar as catalyst is a frightening example of this. Here are the objective scholars. Such scholars are necessary for the reaction, but they really do not want to get their chemicals dirty. Here are those who talk of principles and consider themselves as exemplifying the very essence of scholarship. If asked to define their position they would probably call themselves skeptics—people who call everything into question, whose brains are a combination scale and computer, enclosed in an almost impervious smugness.

It is often difficult to make such people see that the position of the skeptic is self-destroying. Skeptics, by definition, cannot affirm anything—even their own skepticism. They must be skeptical of their skepticism, and that way madness lies! As Oscar Wilde has put it, “We can only be objective in those areas which concern us not at all.” To investigate is to become subjective. To suggest that we cannot be totally objective, however, is not to deny the possibility and desirability of being as objective as we can in many fields. But careful analysis of our present condition will reveal how few basic things we even want to be objective about. Who can be objective when spouse and family, church and state are concerned? Objectivity can become the fetish of scholarship. Since we seldom, if ever, find in our investigations alone the complete criteria we need to use, we must bring some fundamental critical apparatus from outside the work itself; and in so doing, we must make subjective assumptions. The scholar as catalyst does not really exist. The self-deception that permeates our attempts to bring the catalyst into being inevitably invalidates our efforts.

Finally, as the “last infirmity of the scholarly mind,” we find eclecticism. If technicians are narrow, broaden their outlook. If gadflies are too negative, “accentuate the positive.” If prophets are dogmatic, check their excesses through practical application. If complete objectivity is impossible, at least be aware of prejudices. We can fall back on Emerson’s famous definition of the American Scholar: “Man Thinking”—not the thinker, not the chemist or the poet, but the complete man in the laboratory, the whole man writing poetry. This ideal is exhilarating and in theory seems to be without flaw. In practice the student who wants to become the scholar so often becomes the dilettante. A blotter may faithfully pick up a surface impression of many things, but Rorschach himself might be hard put to see anything significant in such random acquisitions. Pope’s insistence that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is never seriously questioned, yet how much more dangerous are bits of knowledge mistaken in the aggregate for learning! Sadly, the picture of the schoolmaster in Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” is still the scholarly ideal of too many people:

The village all declared how much he knew;
’Twas certain he could write, and cipher too;
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And even, the story ran, that he could gauge:
In arguing, too, the parson owned his skill,
For even though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew.

Let us hope that the scholars gathered here tonight (and by definition and initiation you are scholars) will refute this concept. In matters of memory and surface manipulation you will always be a poor second to an IBM machine. Authentic scholarship (and I must have a definition of this if I list deviations as heresies) is concerned with knowledge as a tool. Indeed, the scholarly function is analogous to what Coleridge called the esemplastic process. Stated as simply as possible, an esemplastic process would be as follows: Two things are brought together by a third, and the result is a positive change in all three. In a teaching situation, if student and material are two components of our equation, the third would be the teacher or scholar (note how this function differs from a simple catalyst). Teachers themselves are an integral part of the reaction and are changed each time they succeed in making the fusion.

No matter how great the reputation of the scholar, no matter how keen the student, no matter how interesting the material, the complete function of scholarship does not exist if one element is missing. Occasionally, writers may so infuse their work that they will perform their scholarly office through books, but always, reduced to its lowest terms, the triangle exists. Scholarly work is therefore a unifying, inspiring one. Scholars are blessed with the opportunity of growing constantly as they participate in this creative process. The extent of their scholarship may be gauged by the ontological density of their perception—for they operate dynamically at many levels. They become a vehicle through which the organizing, integrating power of God may work. Scholars, of all people, must not dissipate their force through minor heresies, for in so doing they deny the power that gives their work significance.