A Desperate Surrender: The Crisis of Manliness in Education
In Hemingway’s “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” a sixteen-year old boy comes to the hospital on Christmas Eve asking to be castrated in order to cure his lust. The doctor refuses him, calling what he feels “a natural thing” and even “the means of consummating a sacrament.” However, the boy insists, condemning his sexual attractions as “a sin against purity.” He’s ultimately sent home, where he attempts to amputate his penis with a razor (“He didn’t know what castrate meant”), and we’re left with the suggestion he’s going to die from blood loss as a result of an incompetent on-call surgeon.
Unlike the wise doctor, both the boy and the incompetent surgeon are manualists—they only operate “by the book” and cannot think for themselves. Their education (one religious, the other scientific) has effected in them a neurotic obsession with rigidly following instructions and doing no harm. They’re left with their masculinity in crisis, paralyzed by the awareness of their own inadequacies.
Having studied in seminary and taught in an all-boys school, I find this type of desperate surrender epidemic among academically accomplished young men. Filled with anxiety, constantly under scrutiny, seeking the security of affirmation, they too resign to their manuals (whatever they be) and become politely impotent. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that education causes castration.
This same conclusion found expression in St. John Henry Newman. He makes the assertion—albeit in kinder terms—in sermon 30 (“The Danger of Accomplishments”) while considering the liberal arts education of St. Luke. Such education can make men accomplished thinkers; however, Newman says, “the accomplishments I speak of have a tendency to make us trifling and unmanly.”
For Newman, manliness is the ability “to do with ourselves what we wish.” Education hampers this ability to act because it is artificial—a retreat from the world of action into the mind in an effort to shore it up by reciting rehearsed responses. We become thinkers, not doers. It’s a necessary function, but not without peril. It’s all too easy to become satisfied with merely reciting the right answer, forgetting that we know in order that we might act. It amounts to sophistry if you know everything about hitting a baseball in theory but never swing a bat.
This, of course, is not an argument against all education. Newman understood the need for it better than anyone. In “Christianity and Letters” (part of the Idea of a University discourses), he considers liberal education necessary for the Christian man. The mental liberation effected by Western education frees man to follow Christ. In fact, Newman even calls Western culture “the soil out of which Christianity sprung,” invoking images of the Parable of the Sower. But the human soil is only properly cultivated if it can bear fruit—the fruit of virtuous, manly action. After all, “Faith without works is dead.”
Proper education cultivates manliness. It does not obviate our desires but trains them. Through it we learn to desire what is good in order that we may do what is good. This liberation is not accomplished by breaking a young man’s will, making him a performer, and rewarding him for parroting sterile, abstract theories. It’s accomplished by freeing him to discover himself by revealing his inner life and challenging him to answer for it. Education humanizes us by teaching us how to think (liberalism), not what to think (manualism).
Famed educator St. Don Bosco believed teachers should give young men ample liberties for play and expression, invoking a line from St. Philip Neri: “Do whatever you wish; for me it is enough you do not sin.” You will sin, of course, but in such cases the teacher takes on the fatherly role of coaching desire to its proper act. While sin is certainly not something to encourage, it is something to expect. The risk of temptation is not an argument for castration; a real man is aware of temptation and faces it boldly even though he might fail.
Education, manliness, and faith are ultimately bound up in each other. In his Itinerarium, St. Bonaventure claimed that nobody can attain a deep relationship with God unless he is “a man of desires.” It is the strength and freedom of our will that determines our ability to receive both intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. But a manualist education breaks the will and enslaves it rather than freeing it. If we want to solve the “crisis of masculinity” lamented by so many, then we ought to be untrusting of sophistry and unshaken by the inevitable sins that a boy will commit on the journey to manhood. Otherwise we will continue to produce castrati.