Now I stare at people's shoes

Hello,

As a note to the reader, I would like to point out that I have nothing to say about the reading for this week.  I personally believe that if I have nothing to say, I shouldn’t say anything.  It seems like such a waste of time and energy.   However, for the sake of my grade in this class, I will make something up.  Feel free to consider this an apology for what you’re about to read.  Enjoy.

            Education is easily considered to be one of the most valuable things one could possess.  Why do people hold it hold it in such high regard?  Is it because of the opportunities that it presents to the student?  While it does provide a plethora of opportunities, it does so much more.  In my first blog post, I wrote about how Arthur Holmes has explained the importance of a liberal arts education in shaping the mind of an individual.  He is more concerned about what the education will do to an individual instead of what it will do for them.  I believe that St. Basil would agree with this too.

            For those who are unaware, St. Basil wrote on the use of pagan literature as a means to educate Christian children who were not mature enough to understand the Bible.  On the topic of pagan literature, he writes that “we should not accept everything without discrimination, but only what is useful” (Basil VIII).  He obviously believes that the pagan literature (such as works by Plato and Aristotle) is not completely true, but had truth in it.  It is to be polarized into what is useful, and what is useless.  This is a process that I have repeatedly gone through for over twelve years in my schooling.  Every source of information that I had learned from (until this year) is considered pagan.  I had never opened a Bible in a school for academic purposes until I started to attend Olivet, and even then, most of what I currently learn from is pagan.  Is this wrong?  No, it is not, as there are still things to be learned from literature that is not strictly Christian.  St. Basil even lists several Biblical figures such as Moses and Daniel who had studied, learned, and grew from pagan literature.

           Having established that a Christian’s education is not to be restricted to the Bible, my sequential mind begins to wonder what the next step is.  Suppose a student studies the pagan literature described by St. Basil.  How is the student to distinguish what aligns with the Bible without being mature enough to comprehend the Bible?  This seems almost paradoxical to me.  Our other reading, Go With God by Stanley Hauerwas, seems to provide an answer to this.  The student needs a mentor.  The student is to seek “professors who have reputations as intellectual mentors of Christian students” (Hauerwas 4).  If the student is not mature enough to understand the Bible, then it is their responsibility to find someone who is.

            I find it appropriate to close with a quote by Aristotle (one of the pagan authors referenced by St. Basil).  He said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”.  It seems ironic how the pagan Aristotle perfectly explains St. Basil’s view of Christian interaction with the pagan literature of the world.

*Title Note:  Since I didn't like what I wrote I wanted to give you something worth considering.  You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their shoes.