What is the intention of a Great Books education? Does it need to make the student feel at every moment as though there were a palpable design upon him? I ask because making things “intentional” seems to have become something of a buzzword, even in spiritual matters.
Guided tours can be a wonderful thing. I remember being taken into churches in Rome, for example, by those who had been there many times and who could, with a subtle gesture or two, reveal whole aspects of the architecture of the nave and the art in the side chapels that I would otherwise have missed entirely. But tour guides can also be bullies of observation, pointing out things as though these and only these constituted what was worth seeing. They rush everyone along—no loitering—more to satisfy a kind of “I saw that” checklist than to open anyone to discovery and wonder. It’s almost as though they owned what they deigned to show you, like the Duke in Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” who pulls the curtain from before the portrait of his lovely last wife only as a gesture of possession.
Teachers are guides, clearly, and the question is which kind of guide one will be. On Wednesday of this week, freshmen at Wyoming Catholic College began classes for the first time, and it is natural to consider what we hope for them to see in an education like ours—what we intend. How much intending should we do for them? I was struck a week or so ago by some lines in a poem by A.R. Ammons, whom Christian Wiman praises for a pervasive spiritual openness despite his apparent lack of religion. “I go to nature,” Ammons writes, “not because/its flowers and sunsets speak/to me (though they do) or/listen to me inquire but//because I have filled it with/unintentionality, so that I/can miss anything personal in/the roar of sunset, so that//I can in beds of flowers hold/ my head up too.”
These lines seem, on the face of them, to be a direct contradiction of what we praise when we send our students out into “God’s First Book,” by which we mean that the whole of creation is a kind of text speaking to them of the Creator and waiting to be heard and interpreted. But the question might be to ask what this book is really like. I find myself almost entirely in sympathy with Ammons in these lines. He does not go to nature to be preached at or taken personally by the flowers—Oh man, here’s that poet Ammons so look your best—but to experience freedom and wonder in the “unintentionality” of the natural world. For Ammons, the beauty of a mountain meadow crossed by the shadows of moving clouds is not “intended” in the same way a poem or the nave of a cathedral is intended. In effect, nature transcends intention and frees us from self-centeredness. I think that is what Ammons means when he says that “I can in beds of flowers/hold my head up too.” He can simply be.
The greatest texts share some of this “unintentionality.” The freshmen in my section of HMN 101 start the Iliad on Monday, and I wonder whether I should treat this great epic more as nature in Ammons’ sense than as artifact. John Keats in his early brilliance (he died at 25) wrote in one of his letters that “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.” There’s something essentially ungenerous about poetry that wants to tax us for reading it, like a salesman who offers a free trip (but only if you buy a timeshare in a condo, it turns out), or, yes, like a bad tour guide. Keats says it well: “Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, ‘admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!’
What is the intention of this education? Does it need to make the student feel at every moment as though there were a palpable design upon him or her? I ask because making things “intentional” seems to have become something of a buzzword, even in spiritual matters. “Let’s be very intentional about it,” someone will say, as though simply letting things take their natural course were no longer good enough, and we had to add this element of meaning to do it. The best kind of intending allows for serendipity, which is actually one of the questions on the course evaluations of professors here at WCC: did serendipitous insights happen? Perhaps we should speak of attention as much as intention. What we want is the unexpected gracious moment that is the seal of Presence, the evidence of that fullness that we cannot will into being.
It is pure gift that lets us hold our heads up.
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College’s weekly newsletter.
This essay was first published here in August 2022.
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