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Edward Upton, AM'01, PhD'10

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, in writing to his students in his Sermons on the Song of Songs, urged them not to strive for the “knowledge which puffed them up” but for the love “which builds up.”[1]  Bernard taught that knowledge, without love, was vanity; it was a knowledge that glorified the self, and not a knowledge that took its place in loving relationship with others.  The “kiss” of the Spirit, that which draws human beings on towards union with God, according to Bernard, united knowledge and love.  He writes, “Neither he who understands the truth without love, nor he who loves without understanding, then, can think himself to have received this kiss.”[2]  Bernard refused to divorce the life of the mind from the ethical regard of others. We should likewise refuse that separation.  I’m grateful that my institution of Christ College at Valparaiso University provides a space for scholars and young learners to understand the truth in love, and to love with understanding.  It provides a possibility for my students and me to see our professional development and our learning as always already part of a larger world of ethical practice and responsibility, and to respond to that world in loving service.

I’ve increasingly come to see this this love-knowledge of Bernard as a result of the contemplative attention we give to others, to the world, and to our subjects of inquiry. Simone Weil has famously argued that the purpose of school studies is to train the attention of students to prepare them for prayer. In fact, for Weil, love itself begins with a special mode of perception; she contends that “love is the soul’s looking. It means we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen.”[3] To love in this way is first and foremost to wait upon something other, to accord it dignity and importance, to listen and attend to it, and then to act for the sake of it. The good Samaritan of the gospels acts because he has suddenly become attentive to a human being, worthy of dignity, lying beyond common notice in a ditch.[4] In this sense, attention is “creative”[5] and active; it stimulates the mind and responds with concern for the other. Ultimately, for Weil, the only being that warrants our full attention is God. Nevertheless, she writes passionately about the related attention given to other human beings, to the beauty of the world and of art, to religious ceremonies, and to intellectual studies. For her, all of these signify an “implicit love” of God, a love that can grow and develop beyond its immediate object.

The kind of attention that Weil is describing is an attention that waits for an answering response, a logos or meaningfulness that responds to that loving gaze. It is, in a sense, very similar to the contemplative, aesthetic perception described by both St. Augustine in Book X of Confessions and Flannery O’Connor in Mystery and Manners, texts I regularly lecture about in the Christ College First Year Program. Both insist that a keen, sustained attention to the world and to those in it will reveal depths to which the mundane, commercial gaze has no access. For Weil, the truth that students are gifted in their studies, through their attentive work, is “like a sacrament.”[6] She writes, “Being a little fragment of truth, it is a pure image of the unique, eternal, and living Truth, the very Truth that once declared: ‘I am the Truth.’”[7] The process of learning, then, is also one of gathering up the fragments of truth that appear in the free and common pursuit of it. This also implies that in order to pursue the understanding and love that Bernard extols, we must train our eyes in a sustained and patient way, attentive for those events of truth that are gifted to us as we question, wait, and long together.

In my classrooms, I strive to enable my students to put aside the instant gratification of the twitter feed in favor of a prolonged attention: to the material at hand, to the concerns it embodies, and to their colleagues with whom they are in dialogue. True discussion occurs only when those involved, regardless of their backgrounds, pay a contemplative attention to those others with whom they are conversing. This means that they hold those others as potential icons of truth, and respect the dignity of the other as a fellow seeker of truth. I fear that all of us, students and teachers, caught up in technology that shortens our attention span and offers instant stimulation, or habituated by the administrative asceticism of the market, increasingly lack the ability to give texts, problems, and most importantly, other human beings, the time and attention they deserve. 

Literature, and especially poetry, rewards this kind of contemplation by inviting the class to linger, slow down, and wait. Though our students must emerge from our classrooms with a facility for engaging with the most sophisticated and rigorous criticism, they must also, in Paul Ricoeur’s terms, be persistently attentive to the “reference” of a literary text, the world that the text opens up in front of them. To approach a text with this expectation is to expect the text to address and challenge the reader’s assumptions. It is to pay a complex form of attention to the text, actively and creatively waiting for a response to the questioning gaze the reader brings to it. This is Weil’s idea of attention, now formulated as a hermeneutical principal. Such an attention prompts the reader to a deeper and deeper imaginative engagement with the text. Literature provokes the “creative attention” that Weil claims for the artistic genius and the person who truly loves the neighbor. I would therefore extend Weil’s claims for attention to the role of the careful reader who enters into the back and forth of play with a text, creatively attentive to the claim the text will make upon her. At the same time, the reader is preparing for similar creative attention to those outside of the text who claim a more immediate moral response.

I see the vocation of the teacher as fundamentally a vocation of service. As a teacher, I see my chief goal as enabling my students to pursue their own vocations through a rigorous, critical questioning and pursuit of human flourishing.  However, it is also my conviction that this pursuit depends now more than ever not only on a close engagement with the texts and practices of a familiar culture, but also in an attentiveness and response to that which lies beyond immediate physical and discursive cultural boundaries.  Students seek broad comprehension as they are cultivated through the whole range of humanistic disciplines.  Understanding does not seek to segregate moments of experience as much as it attempts to discover the myriad interrelationships between diverse discursive contexts.  Discernment therefore calls for close, careful attention to the push and pull of various discourses as they attempt to signify a single world.  The scholar cannot resolve these tensions for his or her students, but can assist the student in entering the debate in an informed and critical way. In this sense, a syllabus can be likened to a modernist composition of fragments in which students potentially find a new set of images that redescribe a world within which they can begin to think and act.

I believe that Christ College specifically and Valparaiso University generally views undergraduate education in this holistic sense, and it is this vision that drives it inexorably to interdisciplinary work in the institution as a whole and in the classroom.  This approach acknowledges that the boundaries we draw around our subjects are not absolute, and that the pursuit of truth often prompts us to pursue it into challenging territory.  Disciplinary boundaries are useful and necessary; they provide us with our critical lenses and specializations.  They provide the discipline and rigor necessary to investigate our fields in depth. Nevertheless, the subject matter we pursue often exceeds the grasp of our categories and intentions, and we must pursue the truth of our subject into whatever field it happens to draw us.  We must be willing to risk our interpretations outside of our expertise with persistence and humility. 

At the same time, interdisciplinary teaching and learning must be collaborative; the extent to which it is done in solitude is the extent to which it fails. Indeed, the discussion format embraced at Christ College implicitly acknowledges this reality.  Thus interdisciplinary work requires humility in the face of the truth and a dedication to collaboration and community, both on the part of students and faculty. On the face of it, this implies that no one scholar can fully embrace the magnitude of a question that crosses disciplines: we all stand somewhere, and that somewhere reveals some things easily, and conceals other things. But I also believe that the interdisciplinary openness of a classroom helps to make the professor responsible to the students, and all of us responsible to the material. We as instructors need to be open to the views of the emerging generations. We need to help them to find their critical voices, now more than ever. Their questions will drive tomorrow’s scholarship and politics, and we need to help them both to articulate their thinking in a rigorous, critical, and attentive way, but also to engage with difference in a collegial, ethical, and constructive way. And we all need to be open to the possibility that the traditions within which and about which we write might be disrupted by the texts that we study and the manner in which we study them. Our students, with their emerging perspectives, help to reveal those unexpected corners of those texts—however you might define that term—that will reshape what we think about our studies.

And so this common pursuit of truth takes place for our students through productive and respectful interpersonal relationships, close engagement with provocative texts, and the effort to express and argue through writing. Indeed, I try to show my students that reading and writing are two sides of the same coin, and that comprehension emerges in the dialectic between them. For this reason, I find that the most effective way to teach, either in lecture format or in seminar, is first and foremost to lavish as much attention as possible on the texts at hand.  Close reading, in the context of class discussion, lies at the center of my thoughts on pedagogy, and I find it critically important to model such close reading either in my own lectures or together with the class in seminar discussion.  Too often class discussion jumps to criticism of texts before the students truly understand the issues with which the text wrestles.  In Weil’s terms, to ground pedagogy in close reading is to ensure that students pay contemplative attention to the text on its own terms first, before applying a critical methodology.  Only then can one properly inform one’s critique, and usefully challenge the bases of one’s methodologies.  A focus on close reading provides an opportunity for the class to see where the ambiguities of a text are, where the invitations to exegesis lie, and how a single text generates a diversity of interpretations.