The end of a liberal education should not be escape from the corrupt contemporary world or the achievement of a purity that increasingly excludes others, but rather the cultural incarnation of the Word in our own time and our own history.
Almost fifteen years ago, my wife and I took a trip to Ireland—part vacation, part pilgrimage, part occasion to see our oldest daughter in action while she was working with the Irish Studies program at Notre Dame. One day that May, I joined a group traveling out into the Atlantic to Skellig Michael seven or eight miles off the western coast of Ireland, the starkly beautiful site of monastic withdrawal—the stone beehive huts still stand—dating back to the Sixth Century. It was an unforgettable day that brought home an extraordinary version of the life inspired by St. Anthony of Egypt, whose Memorial the Church celebrated earlier this week. His example informed the Desert Fathers, who gave away their worldly possessions and removed themselves from social and political distractions in order to achieve as much as possible an unmediated encounter with God—a way always beset by demonic temptations. The Desert Fathers inspired the founders of monasteries and orders, including St. Benedict.
Their inspiration continues. On the Wyoming Catholic College campus, for example, our students live without cell phones—a modest imitation, to be sure. But the underlying intention of this famous policy is to make possible real, undistracted encounters with each other, with the great thought of the past, with God. Moreover, removal from the daily world characterizes our outdoor programs at Wyoming Catholic College, which take students out of the “front country” and into the wilderness, where they encounter conditions without the usual amenities of postmodern digital civilization. Our freshmen just spent a week in the Tetons. On the 21-day trip that began the school year, each of them spent a day entirely alone, and some of the best reflections that they wrote came out of this experience—their day on Skellig Michael, so to speak.
I wrote about Skellig years ago, and I was reminded of it when I came upon Emma Donoghue’s recent Haven, a new, lyrically beautiful (if ultimately troubling and agenda-tinctured) novel set on Skellig Michael. The central figure, Artt, is a learned monk from the east, a renowned copyist of the Scriptures who arrives at a lax and increasingly corrupt Irish monastery in about 600 A.D. One night, he dreams of an island where he will establish a new life of greater purity and harsher ascetic practice. In his dream are two other monks, the older Cormac (the monastery’s best storyteller) and young Trian, both of whom he soon convinces to join him. The two men make new vows to Artt as their prior, leave the monastery by boat with very few provisions, and journey down the Shannon River into the Atlantic Ocean, obedient to Artt’s strong conviction that God will guide them.
The three go where the winds and currents take them, and after several uneasy days at sea in their keel-less vessel, they discover two rocky islands (Skellig Michael and Little Skellig) jutting up from the ocean. On the heights of Skellig Michael, they find a small flat area in the shelter of the southern peak. Governed by Artt’s sense of what God wills for them, the three men fashion a life of prayer and work. Donoghue’s novel is rich with description of their ingenuity in using the island’s scant resources, such as the eggs from the nests of gannets and puffins that cover the sheer cliff-sides. Skellig Michael has no spring for water, but Artt says that God will provide. The observant Trian soon finds a natural cistern, and Cormac, full of practical resourcefulness, fashions a more capacious receptacle for the rain. When they run out of firewood, Trian discovers a sea cave full of driftwood.
At first, the island seems almost an enchanted place that answers their needs in beautifully unexpected ways. But as the novel progresses, Artt’s rigid adherence to the letter begins to ruin things. He insists that they must never leave the island for exchanges of any kind, and then he forces the reluctant Trian to spend his days painstakingly copying the Psalms by hand—an absurd task if no will ever see these copied Psalms (Trian’s work) or the Old Testament in Greek (Artt’s daily work). Fiercely legalistic, increasingly irrational in his disregard of the naturally given goodness of the island, harshly opposed to both creativity and ordinary prudence, Artt indulges notions that he claims are God’s will.
When they run out of driftwood, for example, they could trade for wood from the mainland or other islands, but instead, Artt grotesquely forces Trian to kill dozens of newly hatched puffin chicks every day to use as fuel for their fires, claiming that God created puffins for this very reason—a task and a justification that Trian finds abhorrent, though he tries to remain obedient. As Artt’s “revelations” become more and more monstrous, he gradually destroys both the haven he came to found and the community of complementary souls that had temporarily flickered into existence. He comes to think of other people as the evil to be shunned. His desire for isolation with God becomes a prideful madness, the victory of the demons he warns against but does not recognize.
For those engaged in a truly Catholic education, Christopher Dawson has a beautiful reminder in The Formation of Christendom. There are men “who seek to transcend human nature by the flight of the Alone to the Alone,” writes Dawson. “But this is not Christianity. Although Christianity does not deny the religious value of contemplation or mystical experience, its essential nature is different. It is a religion of Revelation, Incarnation, and Communion.” The end of education at Wyoming Catholic College is not escape from the corrupt contemporary world or the achievement of a purity that increasingly excludes others, but rather the cultural incarnation of the Word in our own time and our own history. In order to make it new, however, we need the wilderness, the desert places, the island, those places “back out of all this now too much for us,” as Robert Frost puts it. “Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.
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The featured image, uploaded by Stinglehammer, is a photograph of Skellig Michael taken in 2018. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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