The Past: Student Address to the 2010 Gutenberg Graduates
As it is said in our age one has ‘the positive’ more or less in the way a polytheist would make light of monotheism’s negativity, because polytheism, of course, has many gods, the monotheist but one. The philosophers have many ideas—all valid up to a point. Socrates has but one, which is absolute.
—Søren Kierkegaard
My class has asked me to speak about the past—the past, of course, as distinguished from the present, as that which has come into existence. This topic is, I am sure, inexhaustible, and so for your sake as well as mine, I will not try to exhaust it. Rather, to reflect the character of our time here at Gutenberg, I will attempt to speak with both brevity and profundity—as well as a good deal of confusion.
“Can virtue be taught?” This was the question which occupied the Greeks, the question which Socrates found fit to devote his life to—not hurrying to arrive prematurely at an end, but keeping the question alive and resurrecting her to a life anew in everyone with whom he dialogued.
To the present age she is a ghost who haunts our hallways. A memory. A faded vestige of an age, long past. For the better part of the day, she sits quietly in the attic and watches from her window there the constant, busy flurry of the system builders—the ongoing expansion and remodeling of the critical-scholarly-scientific fortress of the modern times.
Yet in the evening, as we lay in bed and allow our thoughts to wander from our work, we sometimes see her standing in the corners of our rooms. And if we do not hide our face in fear but look, we see in her the vivid pallor of one not dead but just ignored.
“Can virtue be taught?” It is a question, I believe, which must haunt every scientific age, every age which bows its knee before the idols of fact and scholarship. For Socrates was right to say that virtue is, indeed, a knowledge—but a knowledge nonetheless which cannot be given in a textbook. Virtue is a knowledge which NO human teacher can give; it must arise from the learner himself—that is, from the learner’s own existence. Socrates understood this, and so he also understood his own role properly as a midwife. He spent his life in service of the god to aid people in their own personal task of becoming the truth. This task is the task of every individual, and this has been our task at Gutenberg.
In the last four years, we have accomplished something extraordinary—we have learned to live, to bare our faces before God with honesty and humility. Yes, we have learned to relate to each other, to relate to our tutors, to relate to the authors whose works we read. But in a purer sense, we have learned to relate ourselves as existing individuals to a world—and to God.
In this way, our past is distinct from the past of our contemporaries. Our four years at Gutenberg has meant an education toto genera different from an education as is now most commonly understood. We have, each and every one of us, learned a truth, one not given us but borne out of ourselves—forged within ourselves—a truth which is our own. Our history at Gutenberg has signified the coming-into-existence in all of us of the eternal, which, as the eternal, is not properly historical but transcends the historical and rises above it, for it is the Absolute. Our education at Gutenberg was and remains a constant upward striving toward the responsibility of our existence as individuals before God. And Gutenberg was not so poor a midwife along this path.
To a certain extent, each of us has had to walk alone. I have seen, over the past four years, each and every one of my classmates encounter trials and hardships unique to them, out of which I have seen them grow into mature human beings. But though we have, in a certain sense, each walked our own paths, in a much more profound sense, we were and remain deeply united in a common project—in a common destination. And I stand here now to express my gratitude to you all, to my class as well as to the tutors who have aided us and guided us and walked beside us. I am honored and privileged to have shared this project with such a group of honest, sincere, and diligent students of life. My admiration and respect for you cannot be measured.
Copyright August 2010 by McKenzie Study Center, an institute of Gutenberg College.
