Like the person who ascends out of Plato’s cave, you too are now obliged to go back down and help others to ascend, to draw others from shadows and images into the truth. Who raises the bar? The servant of others. Many have raised it for you, but you are challenged to go forth to serve, to will the good of the other, to love.

The following is adapted from the commencement address given at Naples Classical Academy on May 22, 2025.

Thank you for that warm welcome. Dr. Rochefort, Dr. LoTruglio, Board members, distinguished faculty and staff, parents, family and friends, class of 2025: Thank you for the invitation to speak with you this evening; it is a pleasure and an honor to be with you tonight.

Congratulations, Class of 2025. You’ve done it; you have completed high school. We are here today to celebrate what you—with the love and assistance of all those others just named—have accomplished and to invite you to commence something new, some next step in your life.

You deserve a particular recognition because you are the first to complete the full high-school curriculum at Naples Classical Academy. This is no small thing; you have engaged with deep fonts of the Western tradition and the American heritage, and have been encouraged to cultivate the moral, as well as intellectual, virtues as you have done so. What a beautiful thing to have pursued wisdom and virtue, and to have been shaped into better persons in the process. I suspect that in being the first class to complete the high school curriculum, one of the virtues that you have had to cultivate is a certain flexibility, a willingness to change and patiently to extend grace when some assignment or book or task does not go as some teacher or administrator thought it would go on paper.

I hope that you will extend this graciousness to me, for I—like you—am doing something a first time. I have never before addressed graduates. Mind you, I attend a graduation ceremony each year and often complain about the speaker and the inability of him or her to address and celebrate the graduates briefly, wisely, and from the heart, and so this is the task that I have set for myself. I will try to speak briefly and sapiently to you, class of 2025, while reflecting on the class motto that you selected for yourself, “Raising the Bar.”

This motto is to your credit. At first glance it suggests that you have had and continue to have a desire to pursue excellence, to seek wisdom and virtue. But both to look back at what you’ve accomplished and to look forward to the promise that the future holds, I want to pause and think on 3 things: 1. From what is this motto derived? 2. Why is a bar raised?  3.Who raises the bar?

So first, derivation. Perhaps “raise the bar” has become a mantra, an inside joke, a proverb, a shorthand, by which you—class of 2025—have challenged each other to excellence, have shared a laugh, have been able to stir yourself to reach deep within and to continue on when tired or discouraged. Yet, one of the peculiarities of language is that we sometimes create such a code-word without sufficient reflection on the context from which we’ve snatched it. As best as I can guess, your motto– “raising the bar”– is drawn from track and field wherein athletes competing in the high jump seek to clear the bar, to jump over it at a certain height, and after each competitor has attempted to clear a height, the bar is raised so that those athletes who were successful on the first jump may attempt to clear the bar at a greater height, and so on until there remains only a single athlete and champion who is able clear a height that none of the other competitors can clear.

It would seem, in describing the activity of the high jump, that I have already answered my question, which I now wish to treat: Why is the bar raised? It is raised recursively to challenge the athletes to greater heights and to determine a victor. But how does this goal carry across from the athlete to the Naples Classical Academy graduate? Note here that I assume that when you—class of 2025—chose your motto, you graduates identified with the athlete; the one who competes, who strains to achieve a certain excellence and victory. And this identification is fitting. You’ve undertaken a great deal of work to come to this day; you have been like the athlete in training, putting in all the time necessary before the competition so as to compete well. While it is charming, even inspiring, to watch, say, a Rocky-Balbo training montage of 4 minutes that moves forward with the energy of an inspiring soundtrack in a boxing movie, you have labored quietly in the silence of late nights and early mornings for four years (not four minutes) to come to today. When the training is over, and the meet begins, the high jumper takes bounding, almost exaggerated steps and curls as he approaches the bar, so that he might plant his feet and then with an ease jump and bend his body backward over the bar and land on the mat, meant to cushion one’s fall.

There is great grace and beauty in this sequence, as is acknowledged every four years when the world takes note and contemplates the beauty and perfection of those who clear the bar at the Olympic stadium. Today you are on the medal-podium, having completed something beautiful. It is good at such a moment to look back. Remember when you were a freshman, unsure how to train, that is, how to study, how to learn. You looked around the library or study hall or at a teacher and just imitated: You put the phone away, you took out the book and opened it. After five minutes, you quietly screamed inside your head, WHAT am I doing? HOW much longer must I continue? Yet, little by little, you came to grow you attention span, improve your ability to read, write, and figure, so that eventually with grace and beauty of mind you would think and choose with a greater ease and pleasure, with an elegance like the high jumper who skillfully bends her body backward over the bar.

Yet, for all the similarities between high jumping and school studies, I want to insist on an important difference. In the high jump, it is a zero-sum game, there is one victor and many losers. Not so for the wisdom pursuer and virtue seeker that you have become. Your education has cultivated in you, to borrow from Paul Griffiths’ account of the virtue of studiousness, the ability NOT to “seek to sequester, own, possess, or dominate what [you ] hope to know; [you] want, instead, to participate lovingly in [knowledge], to respond to it knowingly as a gift rather than as potential possession.” To know something—to accept the gift—is not to take it away from another so as to win. Rather, the good is diffusive of itself; it pours out and is not diminished in the process.

Consider the tried-and-true activity of schools, the debate. This activity stretches back through medieval universities (from where we’ve gained the funny costumes that we’re wearing) even unto the academy of Plato from which Naples Classical takes its name. The debate at first glance might appear to have a winner and a loser. Yet, in reality, when you ‘raise the bar’ by competing in a debate on an issue, you do not seek the defeat of an interlocutor or debating partner. Rather, as Aquinas’s Summa and Plato’s Meno model for us, in debate properly conceived, you seek fuller understanding and clearer expression of the truth. No matter the attitude of your “opponent,” you are thankful for the occasion to debate and thankful for the one with whom you “compete”, so-called, because both debaters can be lovers of truth and each debater can challenge the other to formulate ideas more clearly, so that the true debater loves not only the truth which he or she pursues but also loves the opponent-become-collaborator with whom he or she pursue it.

I hope that you can take this understanding of debate with you into a culture, society, and discourse that desperately need it. Too many of us think tribally in terms of an ‘us’ vs. a ‘them’, in terms of a zero-sum game, but we must NOT do so, we must cultivate friendships, especially with those with whom we disagree, we must be neighborly to all. We must make the words of Lincoln our own, so that we may say to those with whom we disagree about this or that matter, even grave matters: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” We are surrounded by tempting voices in echo chambers and foul examples that call for the destruction of those with whom one disagrees, but let us call on the better angels of our nature, let us love our neighbors, no matter their views, and nobly seek to persuade them in a way that respects each person’s dignity and judgment, and let us have the humility to really listen to the other, to learn from him or her, as well as teach, with—as Washington would have it—a sensibility to our own defects, an awareness that none of us are infallible.

Finally, by way of conclusion, let me turn my attention to a final aspect of the motto, “raising the bar:” Who is it that raises the bar? At the track meet, it is—in fact—NOT the competing athletes—with whom you, the class of 2025, have identified—who raise the bar. It is some attendant, one who would have no chance of clearing the bar himself, and at high-school meets, often a volunteer. As I sought to ground your motto in its original context, you—class of 2025—identified with the youthful, agile competitor because you have done the work, you have pursued wisdom and cultivated virtues and today—like the gold medalist—you are receiving a token of your achievement: a diploma. But see, on this happy day, that you could not be the first to complete the Naples Classical curriculum alone, that it would have been impossible to do so in isolation. So many have raised the bar to allow you to leap. You have been challenged, encouraged, comforted, and accompanied by your parents, grandparents, siblings, teachers, friends, pastors, rabbis, coaches, neighbors, administrators, by the founders of Naples Classical and so many other benefactors who have picked up the bar when you knocked it to the ground or raised it a tick when you became complacent with a certain level of accomplishment.

You have made a real beginning, through your education, to the life-long task of ascent, of going—in the words of Lewis’s Last Battle—further up and further in, to the heights of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, but you have done so with the love, support, friendship, and mentorship of so many. And like the person who ascends out of Plato’s cave in the Republic, as a friend of mine has observed, you too are now obliged to go back down and help others to ascend, to draw others—in the words of John Henry Newman’s tombstone—from shadows and images into the truth. Who raises the bar? The servant of others. Many have raised it for you, but by your own motto—whether you realized it when you chose it or not—you are challenged to go forth to serve, to be the humble attendant as well as the athlete, to will the good of the other, to love. You are the first to complete the Naples Classical Academy high-school curriculum, class of 2025. Go forth ever striving to be the first to stoop and lift the bar or burden of another, knowing that love—like knowledge—is never a zero-sum contest. Congratulations and Godspeed.

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The featured image is “St. Camillus de Lellis Carrying a Sick Man” (18th century), by the workshop of Pierre Subleyras (1699–1749), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.