Wisdom Before Information - 1941

September 17, 1941 - Robert Gannon, President of Fordham University

In his speech "Wisdom Before Information," delivered at Fordham University's Centenary in September 1941, The Very Reverend Robert I. Gannon, S.J., laments the decline of educational ideals in American universities, advocating for the motto "Wisdom Before Information" (Sapientia et Doctrina). Gannon critiques the shift from a pre-Civil War curriculum, which emphasized classical languages, logic, and a pursuit of deep understanding, to a modern system influenced by secular thought and German pedagogy that prioritizes accumulating credits and "undigested information". He defines wisdom as "knowledge of conclusions through first causes," acquired through tradition and "wisdom studies" like theology, philosophy, history, and literature, which foster maturity and understanding. Gannon argues that modern education's "exaggerated experimentalism" and "insidious kind of pragmatism" have marginalized wisdom subjects in favor of immediate utility and "the very latest" information, leading to "unprofitable speed," "dangerous and recurrent adolescence," and over-specialization, where graduates have narrow expertise rather than a "great, mellow mind". He contends that this overemphasis on Doctrina has recklessly undermined Christianity and Hellenism, contributing to an "annihilating war of ideas" and "intellectual slavery". Gannon concludes by urging universities to restore wisdom to the world by embracing "the enlightened bravery of Christian Humanism" and recognizing the enduring necessity of the Liberal Arts.

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The original speech text is provided below:

Wisdom Before Information

NO AGE IS ENTITLED TO MORE FACTS THAN IT CAN ASSIMILATE

By THE VERY REVEREND ROBERT I. GANNON, S.J., President of Fordham University

Delivered at the final ceremony of the three-day celebration of Fordham's Centenary, September 17, 1941

We take for granted, after all these years, the growing

spirit of fellowship and understanding amongst

educators that has brought felicitations from so many

and such great institutions of learning. We take for granted

too, the fact that you have come in your wedding garments

"In vestitu deaurato circumdati varietate" and rejoice espe-

cially in this latter fact because it is your splendor rather

than your graciousness that opens up the following train of

thought.

Here in the U. S., side by side with the youthful, bound-

ing spirit of research, we are all aware of a certain nostalgic

hoarding of older glories. Prior to the Civil War, this

hoarding was rather of substantial things, of educational ideas

and traditional curricula. All our American institutions of

learning were still within striking distance of the trivium and

the quadrivium, so that every college student in the city of

New York knew silver from golden Latin and could recog-

nize the Attic spirit in literature. He was even held respon-

sible for the elements of logic and was never allowed, even

in debate, to derive conclusions through an illicit process of

the major. On the other hand, academic robes had not

appeared as yet on this side of the Atlantic. Old Sir J. J.

Thompson, the physicist and Master of Trinity, frequently

enjoyed telling us that he had himself witnessed the American

premiere of caps and gowns at the opening of the Johns

Hopkins University, and used to add good natured but typical

British comment at our expense.

With the rise, however, of a secular and scientific spirit,

with the growing predominance of German influence on our

leading institutions, extraordinary changes of opinion oc-

curred with regard to the essential subject matter of an

education. So that now if one of our first graduates, Bishop

Rosecrans, for example, were to examine the mental content

of a modern college student who had majored, let us say,

`in traffic problems or in hotel management, he might in his

simplicity, mistake an arts man for an apprentice. But as

though in compensation for the change of what our forebears

would have called essentials, there has been a decided growth

of interest in mediaeval pageantry. Bachelor's gowns are now

being worn in Freshman, high school, grammar school. Spe-

cially tinted hoods have been devised for the most unexpected

- branches of learning. Long processions, led by a mace, wind

their way across campuses where not a word of Latin is

spoken, to amphitheatres where not a word of Greek is under-

stood. Schools of Methodology where credits are amassed

by future creditors are being housed in arched and groined

Gothic dreams that would have inspired a Jowett or a

Newman. Cynics may derive what conclusion they will. To

us simpler folk, this wistful glancing backward is a hearten-

ing sign. It means that more people than we realize are

still aware that education, especially higher education, has a

two-fold function; that its aim is not only to increase

knowledge, but to preserve it; that it must, therefore, always

be not only progressive but conservative, in the original

meaning of the words progredi and conservare; that where

in isolated cases, familiar to us all, it is merely forging

ahead and has lost all contact with the precious past, it must

risk a Liberal damnation and become (some courage is

required to use the awful word) reactionary. It must, that is,

double back on its tracks until it can pick up the golden

thread once more.

As if to echo this two-fold function of increase and pres-

ervation, someone endowed this University many years ago

with our only endowment, an excellent motto for the official

seal: "Sapientia et Doctrina", wisdom and information. The

"Veritas" on Harvard's seal is simpler and embraces just as

much. The "Yahveh" of Yale is simpler still and all-embrac-

ing. But "Sapientia et Doctrina" carries with it a suggestion

of analysis and emphasis that makes it a specific thing, a

definite educational ideal. For it stresses Wisdom before

Information and helps to answer the ageless question: "How

much information is it wise for one generation to have?"

Now everyone knows, in a general way, what is meant by

Wisdom, even though he may not be able to give the Scholas-

tic definition straight from the treatise on the speculative

intellectual virtues. He may never have thought of it as a

"knowledge of conclusions through first causes", involving as

that does, the First Cause of first causes, but he does know

that there are thoughtful people here and there who have

lived long and unselfishly, who have been through danger

and suffering, who have had their little moments of triumph,

their hours of disillusionment, their days and nights of silence

and spiritual growth. He knows of harassed men who can

pause in their incredibly busy lives to say, with the simplicity

of children, "I believe that character, not wealth or power

or position, is of supreme worth. I believe that love is the

greatest thing in the world". He knows that such people

have a quality that enables them to realize values, to weigh

motives and to understand how God works through His

creatures. Although this quality in greater or less degree

may sometimes glow in the mind of a self-taught man, or

even in the mind of a man who cannot read or write, he

knows that there are shortcuts in its acquisition. There is

much that a wise and loving father can give to an admiring

son. There is much that one generation can hand down to

another through that great, deep, wide channel of tradition,

the Liberal Arts, especially through the wisdom studies:

theology, philosophy, history and literature. For these are

the studies that bring us closest to the ideal of knowing

conclusions through first causes, of understanding how God

works through His creatures.

As with individual man, so with groups of men, whole

generations of men. Some we find who lay more store on

Sapientia, some who find Doctrina more important. In the

past millenium, for instance, we can discern a kind of water-

shed somewhere in the middle of the 15th and 16th centuries.

On one side the stream of inspiration seems to be flowing

from the past. On the other, strangely enough, from the

unseen future. The latter of course, appeals to us as obviously

preferable, because we are of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

We have been brought up in an evolutionary atmosphere

that leads us to expect, contrary to human experience, always

better and better things. We are still hypnotized by the

charm of the very latest, the most advanced, convinced as

we are that to march forward is always to improve our con-

dition, even though we march from a fertile field into a tract-

less waste, even though we march straight over a cliff. This

modern tendency has of course produced great changes in the

lives of men. We are fond of boasting that there has been

more progress in the fifty years just passed than in the

previous five hundred. But progress toward what? We have

undoubtedly been rocketing toward some part of space

with terrific and accelerated speed, but when we get there,

are we sure that we shall find it worth the journey? We

are progressing undeniably, but with every step we grow

more conscious of increasing instability.

Even those very ends for which we have sacrificed so

much health, culture and comfort, are being blown from

the face of the earth. It is true that killing people off is a

more complicated business than it used to be, but are we not

cleverly solving all the complications?

When we come, at length, to examine the cause of our

unprofitable speed, it seems to lie partly at least in our

graceless and unseasonable youthfulness. It may be embar-

rassing to admit that 2400 years after the age of Pericles we

are suffering from a dangerous and recurrent adolescence, but

the sad truth is that when the intellectuals of the last few

centuries successfully cut off our past, they cut off, to a

great extent, our only source of maturity, wisdom, and con-

demned us to play the role of brash and ignorant children

who despise the yesterdays of which they know so little.

For seeking inspiration from the past is not peculiar to a

primitive people, nor does it normally mean that a generation

lacks confidence in itself because of small achievement.

Rather, it indicates a degree of disillusionment which be-

longs to years of discretion. Like older men, maturer civiliza-

tions have a haunting suspicion that there were heroes before

Agamemnon. Rome was in her prime, already showing her

wrinkles in fact, when the poet wrote of her the line once

at the top of every schoolboy's copybook: "Veribus antiquis

res stat Romana virisque". And Troy was all but finished

when the warning came from Apollo: "Antiquas expuirite

matres." Greek philosophers and scientists built upon the

wisdom of the East. The Romans built upon the Greeks. In

the high noon of the Middle Ages, Sentences and Summas

organized, enriched and modernized Plato and Aristotle and

the early Fathers of the Church. And even in the proud,

self-conscious Renaissance, when Doctrina began to surge

ahead exuberantly, Wisdom studies and veneration for tra-

dition were long in dying.

In fact they are not quite dead even now, though informa-

tion at the expense of Wisdom has become the earmark of

our modern schooling. We realize with concern that too

many of our Principals and Supervisors and University

Faculties have been false to their high trust. They have

become infected with a dangerous-because exaggerated-ex-

permentalism that seeks, like communism, its real parent, to

begin a new world, not by building on, but by obliterating

the old. Worse still, the people as a whole, educators, par-

ents and students, have yielded little by little to the insidious

kind of pragmatism which applies the yardstick of immediate

utility to every subject in the curriculum. As a result, the

wisdom subjects are giving way all along the line to the

merely informational. Theology went overboard many years

ago. Philosophy flourishes in outline form as a species of

cultural history. Metaphysics has become a Roman Catholic

aberration. Literature, while still conspicuous in the catalogs,

has become in practice more and more the science, or the

bones of literature. Of all the Wisdom subjects which

linger today, waging a losing fight with practicality, History

alone seems to hold its ancient place. But even here, it is

not the more important philosophy of history that is regarded

with such favor but the enormous mass of information which

constitutes its material cause.

Largely as a by-product of this worship of utility, we are

faced by the problem of over-specialization. The same proc-

esses which have met with such success in modern American

industry have now been applied of late with strange results

to the intellectual world. A kind of assembly line has been

introduced into our universities, where each of our busy edu-

cators, like a factory hand, knows only one operation. One

cuts, one fits, one pads, one makes the buttonholes. A Dean,

a Registrar, a Department Head, a struggling Instructor. A

strange life that, making intellectual buttonholes for the

clothing of the mind! Of course in education as in industry,

the result of our efficiency is a very much cheaper suit. But

the method has distinct advantages. It certainly increases

the sum total of information in the world and simplifies

considerably the staffing of an intellectual factory. It is so

much easier to find a thousand brand new, shiny minds that

know all about some particular fragment of knowledge than

to find one great, mellow mind, broad and deep, the kind of

mind that was once regarded as the normal goal of a liberal

education, the kind of mind still sought by Christian Human-

ism as it strives, in the felicitous phrase of the distinguished

Editor of THOUGHT, "to develop the intellect, the con-

science and the taste in the light of both reason and revela-

tion; with the force of both passion and grace". There is

consequently every sign that Doctrina is on the increase. Soon

we shall have the universe completely tabulated, and no one

will know what it means.

In the midst of our Celebration today, therefore, sur-

rounded by distinguished representatives of all that is best in

modern thought, we cannot banish the formless fear that this

glory of ours is a touch of autumn coloring, reminding us

that another winter is at hand. Some pessimistic observers

look rather for another ice age that will end our particular

cycle of civilization. Would that we could blame some indi-

vidual tyrant for its approach. Would that we could say

"There is only one enemy to destroy, one 'Rattlesnake' to

scotch. If Democracy but attacks him now, with so many

super-tanks and flying fortresses, vigor will return to our

Christian principles. Our Churches will be holy and our

homes will be chaste again. There will be respect for mar-

riage vows and love for children. Prosperity, hand in hand

with social justice, will enter on the scene and educational

institutions will return to educational pursuits". But no one

so deludes himself except for political purposes. We all

know that the present crop of dictators in the world is a

symptom, not a cause. We all know that poor old Europe

was already sick unto death long before she decided to end it

all with an overdose of modernity. Sometimes we read in

Sunday supplements that we are sinking back again into the

Middle Ages. Shades of Canterbury and of Chartres! For

years past we have been sinking forward into a thoroughly

modern chaos, a scholarly and documented chaos, worthy of

our most Liberal and Progressive thinkers. For years past

our universities of Europe and America have been hacking

away at the twin foundation of their own house. Like men

gone mad with pride they have recklessly attacked Christian-

ity and Hellenism as though they could by some legerdemain

preserve Western Civilization and still destroy the two great

traditions on which it rests. For years past wise men have

been warning them that if they did not desist from their

crazy undermining operations they would bring the roof

down on all our heads. Now they have done it. Let us then

put the blame exactly where it belongs. This annihilating

war of ideas which is closing our hectic chapter of history

comes to us straight from the lecture halls of Europe and

America. It would have come sooner or later in any event.

Our brilliant professors who are long on Doctrina and short

on Sapientia would surely have found some method of de-

stroying us, even though the rulers of the modern world had

happily died in their baptismal innocence. As it is, our

educators prepared the way for intellectual slavery by giving

us, in place of education-bewilderment. In place of Wis-

dom, and at the expense of the sources of Wisdom, they spread

before their students more undigested information than the

human race has ever had before; much more than the human

race knows how to use at the present time. They produced

a glut of facts to which we are not at this time entitled, for

no age is entitled to more facts than it has wisdom to assimi-

late.

Now that the harm is done, however, no one would have

us declare a moratorium on information. But as Universities

our role must be the gradual restoration of Wisdom to the

world. We must push forward in every line of modern

research with continued and breathless devotion, but like

the athletes in the old Athenian torch race of Pan, let us not

run so fast that we put out the light. For the new world

that will be born of all this pain must be "a brave new world",

but not brave with the bravery of a dehumanized machine.

We want no heroes of the Soviet type to shape our futures

for us; reckless heroes who are ready to throw away their

lives in defense of indefensible principles which they never

understood in the first place. We want the enlightened

bravery of Christian Humanism. Our children's children,

in this brave new world which we may never see, must

realize that they are men, angels, as well as animals; men

with powers of imagination, reason, will and capacities for

unselfishness that verge on the sublime; men whose fathers

often reached the heights before them and left inspiring

records for them to read, in Philosophy, in History and in

Literature; men who are above all, God's own children, to

whom theology should be an alphabet. Far from despairing

then, in the growing darkness, the universities of the world

should be inspired by the glorious realization that they were

never more needed than today because the Liberal Arts were

never more necessary, Wisdom never more precious.