HistoricalChristian.Faith

Is the end of learning to make us good? Knowledge for virtue and the knowledge of God

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — on its advocated core (the proper end of learning is the formation of virtue and, for the Christian, the knowledge and love of God) the reading is well grounded and broadly held across the tradition, and answers on its own ground the danger Scripture names, that knowledge alone “puffeth up”; the one caveat is a boundary, not a demotion — the reductive form, that learning has no good of its own except as it moralizes, over-reaches, and the intrinsic-good of knowing is weighed on its own page · advanced by Basil the Great (with Quintilian, Augustine, Milton, and the Reformers)

Related arguments: the end of learning — see also is knowledge its own end?

The claim

Since we must needs attain to the life to come through virtue, our attention is to be chiefly fastened upon those many passages from the poets, from the historians, and especially from the philosophers, in which virtue itself is praised. For it is of no small advantage that virtue become a habit with a youth…

— Basil the Great, Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature V.¹ The interpretation weighed here is the great Christian answer to what is learning for? — that the end of all study is the making of a good and God-loving person, so that learning is rightly ordered upward to wisdom, virtue, and the knowledge of God, and is misused when made a final end in itself. It is the rival, on the question of the telos of learning, to the thesis that knowledge is legitimately its own end; and it answers a second rival, that learning is for use, by setting a higher end than either private payoff or intellectual self-completion. It is distinct from the neighbouring claim that Christians may lawfully take up pagan learning at all (the handmaid-of-theology argument): that asks whether the material is permitted; this asks what the whole enterprise is for.

Who advances it

It is the mainstream of the Christian tradition, with a pagan forerunner. Quintilian already made the orator’s whole formation aim at a character, not a skill; the fathers Christianized the ordering. Basil, writing his nephews a manual for reading the classics, makes virtue the very criterion of what to read and why. Augustine fences the whole curriculum with charity and subordinates it to the Scripture it serves. The Reformers re-founded the schools on the same conviction — learning for godliness and for the good of Christ’s church and the commonwealth — and behind them all stands the biblical axiom that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.”²

The evidence for

The tradition sets virtue, not knowing, as the goal. Even in its pagan high form the ideal of the liberal education aimed past cleverness at character. Quintilian’s orator is, in Cato’s phrase, “a good man, skilled in speaking” — and he means it strictly: “I do not merely assert that the ideal orator should be a good man, but I affirm that no man can be an orator unless he is a good man.”³ A training that turned out a skilled scoundrel would, on this view, simply have failed. Basil takes the same ordering into Christian schooling: because “we must needs attain to the life to come through virtue,” the pagan authors are read precisely for what they teach about virtue — Hesiod on the steep road to excellence, Prodicus’ choice of Heracles, the philosophers who trace “the silhouette of virtue” that Scripture will fill in.⁴ The learning keeps its place exactly as it serves that end, and no further.

Scripture warns against knowledge severed from love. The reading’s sharpest proof-text is the one that names the danger of its rival: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.”⁵ Augustine builds the whole of Christian learning on that verse: he surveys the disciplines a student of Scripture needs, but fences the enterprise with charity and subordinates all of it to the knowledge of God, beside which even the best “plunder of Egypt” is poor.⁶ Learning that does not make its holder more loving and more like God has, on this account, missed the point of learning. The biblical frame is consistent: wisdom’s beginning is not information but the fear of the Lord, so that knowledge is ordered from the first to a right relation to God and neighbour.

The Reformers built institutions on it. The point is not merely homiletical; it founded schools. The Reformation re-established the languages and the arts for the Gospel and the good ordering of the commonwealth — learning as the church’s and the city’s nursery of godly and competent people, not as an end that answers to nothing beyond itself. On this reading a curriculum is judged by the kind of person and community it forms, which is why the tradition could pour centuries of labour into education without ever treating erudition as self-justifying. Milton gave the thesis its boldest Protestant form: the very end of learning, he wrote, is “to repair the ruines of our first Parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him” — study as the restoration of the divine image the Fall defaced.⁷

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The core is well grounded and broadly held: learning is rightly ordered to the formation of a good and God-loving person, and a body of knowledge that leaves its holder no wiser in living and no more loving has failed of its proper end. This is the near-unanimous voice of the Christian tradition and it answers the strongest worry about disinterested learning — that it “puffs up” — on that worry’s own ground, by giving learning a telos higher than either self-completion or gain. Scripture supplies not just a caution but a positive ordering: wisdom begins in the fear of the Lord, and knowledge is for love. On its advocated core the reading is sound.

Where it can over-reach. The reading fails only in its reductive form — that learning has no good of its own, and is worthless except insofar as it directly produces virtue. Two things weigh against that stronger claim, and the best proponents avoid it. (1) It would strip the intrinsic good of knowing. On the reductive form a piece of pure mathematics, or the patient understanding of a distant galaxy, would be valueless until it moralized someone — but understanding truth is itself a perfection of the mind, a good the tradition elsewhere prizes (the knowledge-as-its-own-end reading, whose modest core is sound). (2) The proponents themselves distinguish the ends rather than collapsing them. Basil calls pagan letters a real good — leaves that shelter the fruit — even while ordering them to virtue; Quintilian wants a good man and a skilled one; Newman, from the other side, keeps the intellectual good genuinely a good while denying it is virtue (“Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another”). The honest tradition holds two ends in order, not one end that swallows the other. So the claim to affirm is that learning is rightly ordered to virtue and the knowledge of God — not the reductive claim that knowing has no worth of its own.

Assessment

Sound. That the end of learning is the formation of virtue and the knowledge and love of God is the mainstream Christian answer, well grounded in Scripture (“knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth”; the fear of the Lord as wisdom’s beginning) and in the tradition’s lived practice of building its schools to that end, with a genuine pagan anticipation in Quintilian’s “good man, skilled in speaking.” The one qualification is a boundary rather than a demotion: the reading is sound as an account of learning’s highest and ordering end, not as a denial that knowing has any good of its own — the reductive form over-reaches, and the intrinsic-good thesis is weighed, and partly upheld, on its own page. Read together with that page, the two leave a hierarchy of ends in place: knowing is a real good, and it is rightly ordered upward to the good of the whole person and to God — which is where the tradition, at its best, has always put it.

Sources