Preserving Goodness, Truth, and Beauty

In graduate school, I learned that universities teach critical thinking. This rationale motivated my coursework, teaching, and eventually the critique of secularism at the heart of my research. But a few years into the professoriate, I found the culture of critique insufficient for generating societal change or sustaining meaningful intellectual life.

Recently tenured, in the thick of parenting twin toddlers, chin-deep in a start-up Eastern Orthodox parish, and toiling at a second book, in 2010 I was invited to give a lecture that would bring me near the Orthodox women’s monastery that was my spiritual home. I rejoiced at my good fortune and accepted at once.

Holy Dormition Monastery was founded by Romanian nuns fleeing the Ceauseșcu regime. Its spiritual guide was Father Roman Braga, who had been a secondary literature teacher and a university student in Bucharest, where he belonged to The Burning Bush, a movement of students and faculty for the revival of Romania’s Orthodox Christian tradition of hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer. With many of the brightest of his generation, Braga endured years of torture in the infamous Pitești prison, the Soviet reeducation experiment Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called “the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world,” aimed at eradicating the “individual bourgeois personality” and creating the “new communist man.” Braga survived Pitești to embrace ordination. Like his contemporaries Nicolae Steinhardt and George Calciu, he became an Orthodox starets in the tradition of Dostoyevsky’s Elder Zossima. Many held him to be clairvoyant. People traveled across the globe to make confession to him.

Photograph by jerrywu12 / Adobe Stock.

In the “middle of life’s way,” I arrived at the monastery after my lecture suspecting Father Roman might offer guidance about the spiritual life – prayer, parish struggles, parenting. After confession, outside in slant late-winter light, what he brought up, seemingly non sequitur, was the university.

“The work of a literature professor is very important,” he told me with that serious, gentle smile. “You transmit – you preserve – for your students what is good and true and beautiful in their culture.” He paused. “And,” as he looked in my eyes then looked away, “you will find in time that you will come to love your students like your own children.”

A decade and a half later, I don’t disavow critical thinking, but I am convinced that if a university is to transmit anything worthwhile, it must teach more than this. Critical thinking has been the watchword of the American academy since the 1970s. The result has been increasingly cynical reason, the acceleration of societal polarization, and destructive critique on both left and right, bereft of resources for imagining a common good. Political camps dehumanize their enemies and legitimize depriving them of life or livelihood in terms reminiscent of the Pavlov-trained scientists who designed Pitești: the wrong are evilly stupid, brokering no conversation, and must simply be eradicated.

Father Roman’s sense of the significance of the university was forged in the very worst fires of the twentieth century. What he encountered in university was intense literary-linguistic study with professors and peers who longed for the truth and beauty that poetry described, who engaged in spiritual practice in its pursuit. What he took with him into Pitești – from his culture, his church, and the university – was neither capitalism, communism, nor critique, but an ineradicable conviction that there was more to being human than those ideologies implied: that goodness and truth and beauty exist, and that human beings have access to these divine realities, as he repeatedly taught us, “in the mystery of their human personality, where they meet God.”