Culture of the Land

Heaven's Earthly Life

Joel James Shuman, L. Roger Owens, Joel James Shuman, L. Roger Owens

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780813139289
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Farmer, poet, essayist, and environmental writer Wendell Berry is acclaimed for his ideas regarding the values inherent in an agricultural society. Place, community, good work, and simple pleasures are but a few of the values that form the bedrock of Berry's thought. While the notion of reverence is central to Berry, he is not widely known as a religious writer. However, the moral underpinnings of his work are rooted in Christian tradition, articulating the tenet that faith and stewardship of the land are not mutually exclusive. In Wendell Berry and Religion, editors Joel J. Shuman and L. Roger Owens probe the moral and spiritual implications of Berry's work. Chief among them are the notions that the earth is God's provisional gift to mankind and that studying how we engage material creation reflects important truths. This collection reveals deep, thoughtful, and provocative conversations within Berry's writings, illuminating the theological inspirations inherent in his work.

Part 1

Good Work

Stanley Hauerwas

What Would a Christian University Look Like?

Some Tentative Answers Inspired by Wendell Berry

The Challenge Before Us

“There are also violent and nonviolent ways to milk cows,” I observed in a sermon on the occasion of the installation of Dr. Gerald Gerbrandt as president of the Canadian Mennonite University on September 28, 2003.¹ I made the comment to commend the parochial character of the Canadian Mennonite University. The Canadian Mennonite University, as its name suggests, is Mennonite and Canadian, and you cannot get more parochial than that. My comment about milking, therefore, was meant to praise why such a university would have no reason to distinguish between theoretical and practical forms of knowledge.

My sermon—and I think it important to observe that this is a university that assumes it is appropriate to have a sermon as part of its inaugural event for its first president—expressed my hope that the Canadian Mennonite University would not be just another “Christian liberal arts college.” I think it is now clear that Christian liberal arts colleges have turned out to be more liberal than Christian. It is not my particular interest in this essay to try to understand why the Christian liberal arts college has failed to sustain itself as Christian; rather, I begin to explore what a Christian university might look like.²

To “begin to explore what a Christian university might look like” is, of course, a far too grand project. What I am really interested in is to try to spell out what difference there may be between violent and nonviolent ways to milk cows. The focus on milking cows might suggest I assume that university curricula should not be determined by presumptions about the necessity to sustain “high culture.” I think it important, however, that universities teach Plato, Aquinas, Dante, and Darwin because I think one of the tasks of the university is to be a memory of a people. But too often Christian justifications of the university focused on the need to preserve the “classics” of Western civilization have created universities that serve class interests more than Christian purpose. Why and how Plato is read at the Canadian Mennonite University may be quite different than why and how Plato is read at Duke University.

I think, moreover, Wendell Berry's criticism of the university is very important to help us understand the difference between violent and nonviolent ways to milk cows. Berry is an unrelenting critic of the contemporary university. I am deeply sympathetic with his criticisms of the university as we know it, but his criticisms are so radical it is not unreasonable to conclude that he has no hope that the university can be reclaimed for humane—much less Christian—purposes. I hope to show that his work also suggests how we need to begin to live and, thus, think if we are to begin to imagine what a university shaped by Christian practices might look like.

I have, like Berry, often been a critic of the contemporary university. Of course, to be a critic of the university is to mark oneself as a university person. After all, universities are often associated with people who believe thinking means you are “critical.” So, critics of the university often discover that their criticisms of the university are criticisms that only people trained at universities could produce. Therefore, our very critiques reproduce the practices that we critique. The truth of the matter is that, in America, it is very hard to sustain a life of study without being parasitic on the university. I am more than willing, therefore, to acknowledge that my criticisms of the university, I hope, reveal my profound love of the university.

I hope I am a Christian, but the university has been more my home than the church. I went to Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, in September 1962. As they say, “the rest is history” because, from that time to the present, I have always lived in a university. The only way I know to make a living is to be at a university. I did not necessarily set out to be a university person. My life just worked out that way. I was brought up to be a bricklayer—honest work. I have tried not to forget what it means to be in the trades, but, for better or worse, I am an academic.

After Southwestern, I spent six years at Yale Divinity School and Yale Graduate School, where I received the bachelor of divinity degree and my Ph.D. I taught two years at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame, and I am now in my twenty second year of teaching in the Divinity School at Duke. My life has been made possible by people who care about sustaining the university. I no doubt owe the university more than I know.

Yet the history recounted in the last paragraphs is not one characteristic of those who have sought to have an academic career. I have always served the university. Because I am a Christian, I have worked to allow myself to be used by, as well as to use, the university. I am a theologian. Theology is not generally considered a legitimate field in the university. Of course, that was not the official position at Augustana or Notre Dame. Lutherans and Catholics still thought and think that theology should matter, though how it matters is in dispute. Theology is tolerated at Duke because we are a divinity school, but the Divinity School is regarded by many at Duke as a “cultural lag.” Theologians in the modern university bear the burden of proof, which turns out to be very good for theology because, if you are a theologian, you need to know what your colleagues in other disciplines know even though they do not have to know what you know.

Yet my identity as a theologian means I have always been in the university but not of it. Berry has been more out of the university than in the university. Berry, of course, would not be Berry without the university. He is a graduate of a university. He has a graduate degree. He has taught at the University of Kentucky and other universities from time to time. But he has clearly chosen to think and write outside the university. I may, therefore, have more of a stake in making the university work than Berry has. Nonetheless, I hope to show how he can help us begin to rethink what a university might look like in order to be of service to the church. Having said this, I should warn the reader that I may also be using Berry's work to sustain a project that Berry thinks hopeless.

Berry on the University

“Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found.”³ If any sentence could sum up Berry's work and, in particular, his criticism of the modern university, it is this one. In order to appropriately appreciate his criticism of abstraction, however, it is wise, I think, to attend to his early but very important essay “Standing by Words.” Berry is very careful not to reproduce dualisms that only create the problem he is trying to help us avoid. He is not, for example, advocating subjectivity as an alternative to objectivity, nor is he recommending the particular over the universal. Rather, he is trying to help us resist our tendency to speak nonsense.

Berry seldom betrays any knowledge of philosophy or philosophers. I suspect that, like many poets, he is suspicious of philosophers. But his understanding of language, the criticism of the abstractions that we are taught to speak at universities, cannot help but remind some of us of lessons we have learned from Wittgenstein. In “Standing by Words,” Berry argues that the disintegration of communities and persons in our time is a correlative of the loss of accountability in our use of language. According to Berry, for any statement to be complete or comprehensible, three conditions are required:

1. It must designate its object precisely.

2. Its speaker must stand by it: must believe it, be accountable for it, be willing to act on it.

3. This relation of speaker, word, and object must be conventional; the community must know what it is.⁴

Berry suggests that these common assumptions are becoming uncommon through the development of specialization. As a result, language is increasingly seen as a weapon to gain power over others or as a medium of play. Some—even poets such as Shelley—think our task is to heighten the subjectivity of language in order to resist objectification. Yet, when that unhappy choice is accepted, only pathos can result, making language nothing more than a medium of self-pity.

It is extremely important to note that Berry is not denying the need for generalization. There is truth in T. S. Eliot's claim that “the particular has no language”—but there are, nonetheless, two forms of precision that allow the particular to be communicated.

The first is the precision in speech of people who share the same knowledge of place and history: “The old hollow beech blew down last night.” Berry calls this community speech, which he praises because it is precise and open to ongoing testing against its objects. Such speech is the “very root and foundation of language.”⁵

The second form of precision is that which “comes of tension either between a statement and a prepared context or, within a single statement, between more or less conflicting feelings, or ideas.”⁶ To illustrate this form of precision, Berry contrasts Shelley's complaint against our mortality, “I could lie down like a tired child,” with Robert Herrick's, “Out of the world he must, who once comes in,” observing that the latter satisfies our need for complexity and, thus, does justice to our actual experience.⁷ Such precision is hard-won, requiring us to battle against our proclivities to engage in fantasies.

One form such fantasies take is the production of sentences that try to be objective by avoiding all personal biases and considerations. Berry thinks scientists often use such language. He gives the example of conversations transcribed during the Three Mile Island crisis as members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission worked to “engineer a press release” to avoid frightening the public that a meltdown might happen. Thus, one commissioner suggests they say “in the unlikely event that this occurred temperatures would result and possible further fuel damage.” Berry observes that what is remarkable and frightening about such language is the inability of those who so speak to acknowledge what it is they are talking about.⁸

The perversion of speech illustrated by attempts to be objective serves the political purpose of securing the power of those who use it without their being held accountable. They say such speech aims to bring people together for some common project. Accordingly, they try to create the illusion we all speak the same language: “[This means] either that they will agree with the government or be quiet, as in communist and fascist states, or that they will politely ignore their disagreements or disagree ‘provisionally,’ as in American universities. But the result—though power may survive for a while in spite of it—is confusion and dispersal. Real language, real discourse are destroyed. People lose understanding of each other, are divided and scattered. Speech of whatever kind begins to resemble the speech of drunkenness or madness.”⁹

Berry offers another example of this passion for objectivity that, interestingly enough, has to do with cows. In an article entitled “The Evolution and Future of American Animal Agriculture,” G. W. Salisbury and R. G. Hart argue for the importance of the transformation of American agriculture from an art to a science. Art, they suggest, is concerned only with the “hows,” science with the “whys.” Accordingly, they recommend that a cow be described as an “appropriate manufacturing unit of the twentieth century.”¹⁰ Berry notes that such language relieves those who use it of any accountability indicated by a farmer's statement: “Be good to the cow, for she is our companion.”¹¹

The latter sentence requires a world that is organized in the hierarchical sequence of nature, agriculture, community, family, person. Such a hierarchy is based on the assumption that these systems are interrelated and that whatever affects one will affect the other. The former sentence reverses this hierarchy so that it runs from industrial economy, to agriculture, to dairy, to dairyman. This latter hierarchy is meant to disintegrate the connecting disciplines, turning them into professions and professions into careers. Berry's subsequent criticism of the university can now be seen as the development of his concern that in the university we are taught to speak in a manner in which we are no longer able to “stand by our words.” Thus my claim that the two questions you cannot ask in the modern university are, “What is the university for?” and “Who does it serve?” That the university has no “learned public” to serve—and a learned public might be one that milks cows—is at the heart of our problem.

Berry thinks the modern university is at least one of the institutions that should be held responsible for the corruption of our language. The university at once legitimates and reproduces the disintegration of the life of the mind and of communities through increasing specialization. According to Berry:

The various specialties are moving ever outward from any center of interest or common ground, becoming ever farther apart, and ever more unintelligible to one another. Among the causes, I think, none is more prominent than the by now ubiquitous and nearly exclusive emphasis upon originality and innovation. The emphasis, operating within the “channels” of administration, affects in the most direct and practical ways all the lives within the university. It imposes the choice of work over life, exacting not only the personal costs spoken of in Yeats’ poem (“The Choice”), but very substantial costs to the community as well.¹²

Specialization of the disciplines, however, is crucial if the university is to receive the support it needs from a capitalist society. If universities are to grow—and the assumption is that they must always grow—they will need money. But it is equally important that they accept the fundamental economic principle of the opposition of money to goods. Berry, who otherwise betrays no Marxist sympathies, seems to know in his bones that there is no abstraction more abstract than money. Not only is labor appropriated from the worker in the name of money, but the worker is also expected to use that money to buy goods that cannot be represented by money.

The incoherence of university curricula reflects the university's commitment to legitimate the abstraction effected by money. For example, it is crucial that the university ensure that learning be organized not as a conversation between disciplines but rather as a place where disciplines are representatives of competing opposites. As a result, accountability is lost. The sciences are sectioned off from one another so th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Placing God in the Work of Wendell Berry
• Part 1: Good Work
• Part 2: Holy Living
• Part 3: Imagination
• Part 4: Moving Forward
• List of Contributors
• Index