McInerny Revisited

A couple weeks ago a giant went ungently into that good night.  I am sad to say that I gave him only a passing mention, because I was so busy, but I would like to revisit and mark again the importance of Professor Ralph McInerny of the University of Notre Dame.  He was a giant, a Catholic, a man of wit and humor, a fierce friend, and an intellectual powerhouse.  He was an unabashed lover of puns and witicisms (like Chesterton and Belloc); he authored books such as On This Rockne, Irish Gilt, Law and Ardor, Rest in Pieces, The Book of Kills, Aquinas and Analogy (no pun, but a very important Philosophical text), and (my favorite) A First Glance at Thomas Aquinas: A Handbook for Peeping Thomists.

Chris Wester wrote a superb obituary for McInerny in the University News this week.  Wester's review highlights McInerny's influence and dedication to Liberal Education and the restoration of Catholic Culture.  Wester's review was the best thing I've read in the University News since Josh Mahan's Sports section interviews where he interviewed himself pretending to be another Rugby player.


Western civilization has lost one of the most celebrated Thomists in recent memory. On the morning of January 29, Professor Ralph M. McInerny, surrounded by his friends, succumbed to esophageal cancer. Despite McInerny's longtime association with the University of Notre Dame, it bears reminding that his influence on academia was not limited to one university. Rather, McInerny dedicated his life to redeeming the soul of the culture in which he lived, one university at a time. Between 1978 and 2004, McInerny gave over 380 separate lectures at institutions ranging from large and famous universities to small liberal arts colleges. Indeed, it was not long before McInerny found his way to the University of Dallas, an institution that McInerny came to admire and support with efforts that cannot go unsung.

Many of you reading this article may be wondering to yourself, who was Ralph McInerny anyway? This reaction would certainly make sense as many of us were not conscious of a Western intellectual tradition, much less Thomism, before coming to college. And given that McInerny's primary academic work was completed by the time many of us entered high school, it may be difficult to discern this man's importance to the tradition of liberal learning that we find at UD. Therefore, it would behoove us all to examine briefly the life and influence of McInerny and, in doing so, come to a better understanding of what one faithful man can do with the gifts God has given him.

Ralph McInerny was born in Minnesota on Feb. 24, 1929. After attending high school in St. Paul, McInerny spent a year in the U.S. Marine Corps. Following his undergraduate education at St. Paul Seminary, McInerny completed, with incredible speed, an intense series of postgraduate degrees in philosophy: a master's from the University of Minnesota in 1952, and a Ph.L. and Ph.D. from Université Laval, Quebec, in 1953 and 1954 respectively. After teaching briefly at Creighton University, McInerny was hired at the institution that was to become his home for the remainder of his life, the University of Notre Dame. After rising through the professorial cursus honorum, McInerny was named, in 1978, the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at Notre Dame. One year later, McInerny was named the director of the Jacques Maritain Center.

McInerny's area of expertise was in the work of Thomas Aquinas, Soren Kierkegaard and Jacques Maritain. He authored no less than 46 books on philosophy, the Catholic Church and other academic topics. Some choice titles of his lectures and articles include "Maritain on Liberal Education," "Liberty in the Catholic Tradition" and "Memento Mortimer," this last one written just after the death of Mortimer J. Adler, McInerny's good friend and the architect of what is now considered to be the Western canon of literature. Through his Thomistic studies, McInerny came to be an ardent defender of liberal education in the Great Books. But, more importantly, McInerny saw the importance of Catholic identity to that liberal education. Never was this more clear than in 2009, the year he retired, when the ardently pro-choice Barack Obama was invited to be the commencement speaker at Notre Dame. McInery called the act "an unequivocal abandonment of any pretense at being a Catholic university" and added that the invitation was "in sad continuity with decades of waffling that have led with seeming inevitability to it."


Despite the sour note upon which McInerny ended his career at Notre Dame, he had plenty of reasons to be hopeful. His interest in promoting liberal learning in America had led him to a number of small liberal arts colleges around the nation, including a peculiar institution on a small hill in Irving, Texas. In 1990, McInerny came to UD as the keynote speaker at the celebrated Aquinas Lecture, put on annually by the philosophy department. His lecture at the event was titled "The Voice of Conscience." In 1991, McInerny was named to the steering committee for UD's Center for Christianity and the Common Good. McInerny returned again in 1997 as Notre Dame's official representative at the installment ceremonies of Rev. Milam Joseph. In 1999, McInerny delivered two more lectures at UD, the first titled "Fides et Ratio and Implicit Philosophy," the second "What is Literature?" McInerny's visits to Irving nurtured a growing friendship between faculty members at Notre Dame and UD. Indeed, many UD alumni have chosen Notre Dame as their first choice graduate school.

But other than lectures and visits, McInerny did not do anything to change our university. But this is precisely why he matters so much. McInerny's support of UD and other colleges was a simple confirmation that this school was worth supporting because it had the right mission. Like so many other intellectual giants of the late 20th century (Mortimer Alder, Jacques Barzun and Malcolm Muggeridge, to name a few), McInerny, in life, found UD to be a home base of like-minded friends and, in death, friends we indeed remain. 

Friendship is something that marked McInerny's life, particularly in the academic sphere. He sought to transform his culture, but not without allies. And this could ultimately be McInerny's greatest lesson for our generation: that the transformation of culture need not be a solitary enterprise. With the encouragement of certain gifted leaders, men like McInerny, a general mobilization of minds can take place, at which point only the grace of God is needed to achieve a sure and lasting victory. Ralph M. McInerny, "requiescat in pace."

Liberal Arts in Claremont, CA

Hey dudes,
Just wanted to show off this article I've written for the Claremont Independent, the Conservative student magazine on campus here. I showed up to one of their editorial meetings and they asked if I'd write an article on literature and the liberal arts; I said, "heck yes." It was interesting writing it because Claremont McKenna is a secular liberal arts college. I saw this as an opportunity to introduce these guys to some Catholic voices on the liberal arts. Hope you like it,
CWolfe

Some Authorities on Literature and the Liberal Arts

Earlier this semester, I had the pleasure of attending a debate at the Athenaeum titled “Is CMC a True Liberal Arts College?” This was an interesting topic for debate, because the wording of the title implies two questions. First, “what exactly is a ‘true’ liberal arts college?” Second “should CMC be a true liberal arts college?” The debaters primarily discussed the second question, with conversation focusing on practical issues, mainly on the possibility of getting a job after college. From my vantage point, I did not the debaters adequately answered the first question before they moved on to rejecting or accepting it as the purpose of CMC. This is completely understandable; the liberal arts is a difficult subject to give its full due. I myself cannot give a full account of the liberal arts, but I do know of some authorities within the tradition and within the Claremont community that are up to the challenge of answering some of the more pressing questions surrounding the liberal arts.

Q. 1: Cliff’s Notes, anyone? Well, Cliff’s Notes do work well as shortcuts. The benefit of shortcuts is that they make exchanges quick, efficient, and cost-effective. Unfortunately, the opposite characterizes the leisured discussion of the free people. Leisure, as philosopher Josef Peiper says, is “the basis of culture;” in order to be open to what the liberal arts offer, we must be in a passive state of mind. I refer the reader to a 1990 CSPAN interview with Mortimer J. Adler, co-founder of the Great Books Program. A caller from Canada phoned in and asked Adler what he thought of his idea for a speed-reading program of the classics. With a visceral reaction Adler replied:

"No! You can’t speed read them. I think you have to read them word by word. You have to ponder the sentences. When I’m reading a great book I never read faster than 20 pages an hour, sometimes slower, because it’s hard, hard work… I never read more than an hour or an hour and a half, because I get tired."

When asked if he had to choose between speed-reading the classics or not reading the classics, Adler said definitively, “No reading.”

Q. 2: What do liberal arts do for the human person? As a virtuous activity, studying the liberal arts has its benefits as well as its hard work. To those who support CMC’s focus on the liberal arts, the rewards are too important to be overlooked. Professor John Farrell spoke eloquently on the subject: “The liberal arts teach you how to approach the most important question concerning human beings, how to live. Before you can pursue that question, you need to have some sense of what the world is, what human beings are, and how they relate to each other.” Literature lays the foundation for answering this all-important question through the most natural of activities, which we have all engaged in since childhood- listening to stories. We need to listen to stories in order to understand man and his place before asking “what is the best way of life?” As Professor Farrell puts it, “the study of literature (including poetry) is the study of stories and story-making. All of our lives are guided by the stories we inhabit—stories about the world past and present, what it is and how it got here. We invest in stories about our nations, our institutions, the genesis and pursuit of our ideals, our own families, and our personal course of life.” Put in these terms, the liberal arts come to look less “useless” and in fact necessary for living.

Q. 3: What is the relationship of literature to the other sciences? The question of organization of the disciplines is a critical one. If Claremont McKenna is to be a true” liberal arts college, it must know which discipline is its queen. Without a hierarchy, there is no best way of life proposed, and academia reverts to its default relativistic mode. I would like to close this discussion on literature and the liberal arts with a reflection from John Henry Newman:

“The book of nature is called Science, the book of man is called Literature. Literature and Science, thus considered, nearly constitute the subject matter of Liberal Education… Science is grave, methodical, logical; with Science then she (theology) argues, and opposes reason to reason. Literature does not argue, but declaims and insinuates; it is multiform and versatile: it persuades instead of convincing, it seduces, it carries captive; it appeals to the sense of honour, or to the imagination, or to the stimulus of curiosity; it makes its way by means of gaiety, satire, romance, the beautiful, the pleasurable.” (from The Idea of the University)