The Spirituality of the Liberal Arts

I teach in a Doctor of Liberal Studies program. In it there are 6 core seminars designed to form the basis of a truly interdisciplinary study of what it means to be human. Because the questions, what does it mean to be human, is the core question of the liberal arts. Roughly put these are subjects of our core courses:

• The human as creator of and created by culture.
• The human as both knower of and part of the natural world.
• The human as the maker of history and made by history.
• The human understanding itself as transcending the body, as psyche, soul.
• The human as creative and creator.
• The human as a possessor of natural rights in relation to all other humans. 

The whole that transcends these parts is appropriately called the human spirit, although I won’t assert my colleagues would all agree. The term human spirit is justified because it is transcendent. It does not die when individual humans die, or individual societies die, or even whole civilizations are swept away. It is thus also, as we typically mean when we say spirit, invisible and not readily perceived by the physical senses. And yet, to turn to a third common meaning associated with the word spirit, it is essential. Without it the individual human becomes a mere biological assembly; life and death merely two different biological processes at work. 

In theory, and certainly we humans commonly imagine it so, the human spirit will transcend even the life and death of planet earth from which we come. A great deal of our literature and self representation, from that which is religious to that which is more modern, speculative, and even anti-religious, imagines a human spirit that transcends both space and time.

It is the study of the human spirit, coming to a full understanding of its nature, that comprises the liberal arts. Absent a human spirit we cannot make sense of the evidence that comes through our own self-representations or the subject matter we engage. And we cannot justify the study of human artifacts as anything other than evolutionary byproducts of human biology. Without a human spirit everything becomes paleontology, and anthropology has no justification as distinct science apart from zoology. Such reductionism is justifiable only if the advocates for it understand themselves as a mere biological machines evolved to make such judgments; an unprovable assumption without a reference to a human spirit that can stand outside the mere human body and brain and examine their function and derive from them its purpose. 

In short the objectification of the human by humans is itself evidence of the human spirit. (Or if you prefer, of human minds become Mind, human consciouses becoming Consciousness. The terms serve only to cast a glimmer of modern respectability over the more ancient word spirit.)

I offer these reflections primarily as a reminder, especially to religious people like myself, that the study of the liberal arts is a form of spirituality quite apart from any specific religious commitments. When we are reading great literature, examining human history, seeking to understand the functioning of human societies, delving into the life of the mind, or studying human religion and culture we are engaged with the human spirit. We are both affirming our own spirit and becoming more spiritual. 

Moreover, and this is characteristic of most practices of spirituality, we are forming a particular kind of human character, or if you like (following Calvin Schragg,) a particular narrative of self-understanding. It is an understanding of the self being open to and shaped by other ways of being human, other human stories, other human self-expressions and self-understandings. The spirituality of the liberal arts is, because its ultimate subject matter is the human spirit, a spirituality of openness to the diversity of ways in which we are and become human. 

Some of us, for many reasons, may choose to place our human spirituality in the context of an even more transcendent Spirit; to understand humanity in the contexts described by theology and metaphysics. That is also a realm in which I teach. But theology and metaphysics are not required for an authentic spirituality, and both religion and philosophy have historically offered many reasons to eschew placing the human spirit in those contexts. 

Finally, perhaps as a tease, let me suggest that there is also an authentic spirituality arising from the scientific study of the natural world, which itself (quite apart from all theories of Gaia and etc) has a spirit of its own.