In 9th grade, Trinity students begin their study of Humane Letters by reading the short story Revelation by Flannery O’Connor. The story is set in the mid-century American South, and the opening scene finds the protagonist, Ruby Turpin, in a doctor’s waiting room. As Mrs. Turpin waits for the doctor to see her husband, she makes pleasant conversation with the other occupants of the room. Inwardly, however, she is busy judging them, mentally dividing them into social classes, criticizing their clothing, speech, and demeanors. In her heart she repeatedly thanks Jesus that he has made her who she is, a clean, respectable, well-off but not too rich churchgoing woman with “a little of everything, and a good disposition besides.” Then, a college girl across the room throws a heavy book at her head and calls her a warthog from hell.
Ruby Turpin, is, understandably, shaken by this experience. As the story proceeds, she can’t get it out of her head. She insists, to anyone who will listen—her husband, her farm workers, herself—that she is not a warthog from hell. She protests all together too much. The fact of the matter is, the girl’s words have mysteriously begun to undermine her self-satisfied conception of herself. This grotesque encounter brings Ruby Turpin face-to-face with the ugliness in her own soul.
The 12th grade Humane Letters course also begins with an O’Connor story. On the first day of their senior year, Trinity students read Parker’s Back. Obadiah Elihue Parker is shiftless, self-absorbed, and, O’Connor writes, “ordinary as a loaf of bread.” His mouth habitually hangs open, and the fact that he exists has never struck him as extraordinary. But Parker, too, has an encounter that calls him out of himself. At the age of fourteen, he sees a tattooed man at a fair. To Parker, the pictures on the man’s body seem to form a “single intricate design of brilliant color.” As the man flexes his muscles, the “arabesque of men and beasts and flowers on his skin” appears to have “a subtle motion of its own.” This sideshow freak is the most beautiful sight Parker has ever beheld. The experience shapes the rest of his life.
These two somewhat bizarre short stories are certainly not the most important things the students read in the Humane Letters curriculum. But I do think they’re emblematic, in that they represent, albeit on a small scale, the whole gamut of human experience. Horror and glory. Ugliness and beauty. Chaos and order. Slavery and freedom. Encounters that are outside our day-to-day experience, whether they be brutal or transcendent, force us to stop and reconsider; to ask why; to wonder.
This is the project of the Humane Letters course. We want our students to develop rigorous habits of thinking: to be able to analyze texts insightfully and write about them coherently. We want them to be capable of sustained, civil discussion about important things. But we want them to do all of this for the sake of understanding and living their own humanity ever more deeply.
The philosopher Russell Kirk had a formative influence on the founders of the Trinity Schools. He puts it this way: “What then is the end, object, or purpose of humane letters? Why, the expression of the moral imagination; or, to put this truth in a more familiar phrase, the end of great books is ethical—to teach us what it means to be genuinely human.”
How does the Humane Letters course do this?
There are many true answers to this question. The most obvious one, perhaps, is that the texts that make up the course all have humanity as their subject. The truest way to learn about human nature is by experience, but the greatest works of literature and philosophy can serve as a sort of vicarious experience, a crash course in the best that has been thought and said by and about human beings. In addition, Humane Letters does not only offer us material that is humane. The very form that the class takes is a model for genuine human activity. The endeavor undertaken daily in the HL classrooms is discursive, communal, and free. These three qualities are essentially human and characterize everything that is best about us and what we do. Let’s consider each of these qualities, and how growing in each quality might make our students more human.
First, Humane Letters is discursive. This word has many definitions, but this is the closest to what I mean: “Passing from one thing to another; ranging over a wide field; roving; digressive.” Having a discussion in HL is more like looking at a painting or listening to a symphony than it is like solving an algebraic equation. It does not proceed linearly. It’s certainly not a free-for-all; participants are expected to read the text closely and use sound logic in interpreting it. However, the richness of the topics under discussion generally precludes the conversation proceeding with a syllogistic sort of rigor. Each new piece of evidence from the text, each connection made to a work of previous study, each sudden insight helps us to understand the matter at hand a bit more deeply.
Isn’t this just the way that human beings learn? An inspired sermon can make us understand an intimately familiar verse of Scripture in an entirely new way. An intense life experience can reveal hitherto undiscerned meaning in a poem or a movie or a prayer. We can never, in this life, quite get to the bottom of reality; there is always more to be discovered.
Second, Humane Letters is communal, as are all the best things in life. We are made in the image and likeness of God; God is in his essence a community of persons, and so we are made for communion and for love. We learn best in community with others. Having eighteen pairs of eyes on the text and eighteen perspectives in the room necessarily means that we learn things we wouldn’t have on our own.
Sharing conversation and life in common is one of life’s greatest joys, and yet it can be profoundly difficult. Our egos have a nasty but incorrigible habit of getting in the way. How many of us ever fully attain the maturity of being able to regard the experiences, desires, and thoughts of others as having just as much claim to reality as our own? Anyone seeking to understand himself and his nature as man must learn to do battle with his innate egocentricity, and seriously consider the possibility: “I might be wrong and they might be right.” The Humane Letters seminar is an excellent place to practice the virtues of humility and charity which are essential to a fully human life.
Finally, Humane Letters is free. This word has several shades of meaning. On one level, it simply means to be unbound by any constraint, and Humane Letters is free in this sense, within reason. Our students don’t need to fear saying the wrong thing in class, as long as they’re willing to be wrong, and to have their minds changed by the evidence. We have a profound confidence that human beings can discover truth if they have the humility and openness to let their minds be shaped by the world as it exists.
There is also a deeper meaning to the word “freedom.” Paul says that Christ has set us free for freedom, the freedom we participate in when we are pursuing the good, fulfilling our nature. Humane Letters is also free in this sense. Intellectual activity is a properly human pursuit. In the same way that a trained pianist is more free than a layman to make music, or an athlete is more free to run a marathon, a person who has trained his or her heart and mind to consider reality deeply is more free to be a human. By giving students the opportunity to discipline their souls in this way, the Humane Letters course invites them into a genuinely human life.
At Trinity, we put a lot of emphasis on being a community of learners. The Humane Letters course is the community of learners writ small. It consists of humans doing a supremely human thing together, for no other reason than that the thing is good to do: it is beautiful, it is pleasurable, it gives glory to God, it bears good fruit, and by doing it we participate as humans in the eternal order of things.