"The Sphere of the Sun," or, The University I Would Like to See

By Jane Barter Moulaison, Theology

In the past dozen years or so, I have grown accustomed to the patterns of life as scholar and mother. Days pass before me through the regular vistas of mini-van and computer screen.  Increasingly, however, I am compelled to turn my view to my mobile device, with its hazard lights ever flashing: “Be always on guard!” Life is full and life is good, but, lately, there is one ball that is dropped in this, my frenetic act.

In the eleventh Canto of the Paradiso, Dante and Beatrice travel to the fourth sphere of the heavens, the sphere of the Sun. The Sun, a little higher than Venus, the sphere of lovers, is where the scholars reside. Above the Sun is Mars, the sphere of the glorious martyrs.

Basking in the Sun’s illuminating light, Thomas Aquinas, the summa of philosophers, receives  Dante and Beatrice as “guests of heaven.”  Through his well-crafted speech, he turns intellects to contemplate the good life, a life personified by Thomas in that  good-for-nothing wolf whisperer, Francis of Assisi.

The university I would like to inhabit resembles the Sphere of the Sun.  It is a realm where pilgrim students are free to grow in wisdom and in virtue and so direct their gaze away from themselves and toward a life worth living.

Yet, increasingly, the modern university has come to resemble not this, but the fifth sphere, Mars—the place where the martyrs do not perceive the light, but are consumed by it.

The contemporary university demands that scholars become martyrs. It asks its inhabitants to sacrifice their time and their talents for the supposedly noble ends of sustainability and efficiency.  And it hands over our young and our eager scholars to the promise of a citizenship in heaven, a citizenship that is perennially withheld. Its slogan has become,  “It’s better to burn out than to gaze away,” to paraphrase that great medieval poet, Neil Young, only slightly.

To become a scholar, it seems to me, you need to avert your gaze from the urgent and the necessary.  At the very least, you need the kind of space to make intellectual and moral judgments about the ends for which you are prepared to lay down your life or your livelihood.  In order to discern this, you need to waste away your time in thought.  You must not ever, according to the counsel of Thomas to Dante, be “too swift to judge.”

Yet the university of today counts on its workers being so harried by the hazard lights of necessity that they will judge swiftly and nobly to sacrifice themselves for its sake. It counts on the endless armies of martyrs who willingly take on precarious and soul-destroying work in hope that they might gaze one day again upon something more stable and more worthy.

The university I long for is not like this—it is the sphere of the Sun. There, scholars are trained to desist from being too swift to judge. There, its pilgrims are treated like heavenly guests. There, personal sacrifice is not compelled from on high. And there, its citizens have taken the time to discern that sacrifice is only intelligible when it is free.