A&S Honors Convocation
18 May 2003
Speech by Professor John L. Heineman

Our school's motto is officially "ever to excel" That phrase is a translation from a passage in the Iliad. It is, I submit, a rather misleading translation. In the story, an old man is sending his young son off to the war, the Trojan War. Now what father would tell his son -- be the first over the top, kill as many as you can, place yourself in the extremity of danger in order to become great? Yet that is how we use the phrase "excel" today. I don't believe the father meant that. A far better translation , and one fully in keeping with the Greek philosophy, would be: "Always seek the excellent." That phrase accurately summarizes the purpose of your Boston College education.

For how do we know the excellent, how do we find out that which we must seek. Today, there is no longer an agreed-upon body of knowledge that is thought necessary for every educated man and woman There is a feeling that our civilization, in particular our country's history isn't worth very much. It's racist, some say, sexist, imperialist. This is the challenge our country faces, and this very formulation&emdash;repeated endlessly on talk shows and in the media&emdash;reflects a despair. In my opinion, the crisis facing us today has been accompanied by another phenomenon: respect for the past has somehow disappeared. There is no belief in a usable past, and many have tried to replace it with an exaggerated form of individualism.. Yet it is precisely that usable past, that common inheritance, which Boston College has offered you to explore in the form of the liberal arts. The ancient Greeks were the first to trace out the path: To find the meaning of one's own relationship -- to our fellow humans, to our God, to the universe we inhabit. And they identified the academic disciplines by which this seeking could take place -- literature, music, science, theology, philosophy, and history. For most important, it is primarily through history, from an awareness of the culture we have inherited , that we derive our ethical sense, the sense of what is excellent. 

As a historian, I may be biased, but the whole program of your four years with us in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been an exploration of our common history, an examination of the dreams, aspirations, and accomplishments of men and women over the centuries. And by so doing, these four years have become part of your history, as you integrate your and your classmates' experiences here, with those of your parents and relatives sitting out there. For this history, this liberal arts tradition, is not some collection of facts we simply learn and forget about, once the final exam is over. The issues raised by the liberal arts are a living, dynamic force which will continue to influence your lives in ways you can barely even imagine this afternoon.

Let me concentrate upon this theme by using a extended metaphor. Over the past four years you and your classmates have been on a great voyage, exposed to many new things, new people, new ideas, new cities, and in the process these new experiences should have become a means for you to make the most important discovery of all: to have discovered yourself. I know that individually you have learned a great deal, and succeeded in mastering a number of difficult tasks. Otherwise you'd not be up on this stage this afternoon. But I hope that during your years here at Boston College, you also found those principles upon which you can build your life. A life that will not only be yours, but a life that is morally integrated as well. For knowledge alone is an empty possession. Certainly you have learned a lot here, perhaps you have gained an appreciation of the unlimited richness of humanity, but you have also learned that humans have also produced monstrous acts of cruelty and barbarism. So it is not surprising that some of the most educated in our midst, come away from their university experiences with the conviction that our lives, our "real lives" are shapeless, sordid, capricious, meaningless. What difference can I or any other individual make in such a world. Hasn't history shown the baseness and horror of human bestiality? Such cynicism is all around us today, particularly after the horrendous events of recent days.

But, I submit it is not human to be contented with this useless, even if ultimately accurate truth. We humans ever try to understand, to cope, to respond, to make some sense of our lives. As a species, we humans are apparently driven to seek some way of giving the hurtful twists of life a shape and meaning which are persuasive, and which can be lived with. This is the function of a liberal education, Art is one way we have tried to make sense; music is one way; poetry and literature are ways. An understanding of the physical laws underlying material reality is a way. But consistently throughout the millennia of human existence on this third planet of the solar system, the common integrator is and has been religion.

For without religion -- without an awareness of the togetherness of the human family, of these "linkages" which is another name for religion -- we cannot help but see history as pure accident, pure chance, an unmitigated series of one evil after another. 

The Greeks -- and we are their heirs in rationality -- spoke of God as totally other and somewhere "out there." And they spoke of humans as searching for God, as searching for meaning. The Jewish tradition&emdash;which we Christians inherited and follow&emdash;came up with quite a different construction. God does the searching, not us. In that most beautiful of Hebrew Testament passages, God tells Moses: "I will pitch my tent among you, I shall be Your God, and you shall be my people." For Christians, this pitching of tents, this dwelling in our midst, became dramatically visible with the Incarnation.

And the point of this insight? Well, on your voyage of discovery, you must always remember that the story of your life, of my life, is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity, from those communities which constitute my inheritance.. As Alaistair MacIntyre wrote in his splendid book After Virtue:

I am never able to seek for the good or exercise the virtues only as an individual. ... We all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social and historical identity. I am someone's son or daughter, someone else's cousin or uncle. I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession. I belong to this class, that tribe, this nation. -- and I would add, that as of tomorrow you are graduates of this College. --- Hence what is good for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles. I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point.

On in my words, I am born with a past, with a history, and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relations. The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social and moral identity coincide.

Several years ago, Professor Hunt of Harvard taught a course on Nazi Germany -- the same one I have taught here twenty-eight times. At the end of the semester, he was quite disappointed in the results and wrote a piece for the New York Times which he called "No-fault history." Students, he found, came to the remarkable conclusion that the Nazis were probably as good as what could be expected: given the power of the economy, the environment, the past suffering of the German people! And some students even said that they too might have become Nazis! A form of no-fault history that is all around us today, justifying actions. Professor Hunt's anguish and mine cries out that this cannot be so. No, we are responsible, each and every one, to arrive at a morally defensible understanding of the meaning of my life but only in the contest of response to social and communal obligations.

In one of the most important books I have ever read, Habits of the Heart, a group of sociologists analyze these problems in a way that is particularly helpful. Their conclusion reads in part:

We Americans have assumed that as long as economic growth continued we could leave all else to the private sphere. Now that economic growth is faltering and the moral ecology on which we have tacitly depended is in disarray, we are beginning to understand that our common life requires more than an exclusive concern for material accumulation., Perhaps life is not a race whose only goal is being foremost. Perhaps true felicity does not lie in continually outgoing the next before. Perhaps truth lies in [the fact] that there are practices of life, good in themselves, that are inherently fulfilling. Perhaps work that is intrinsically rewarding is better for human beings than work that is only extrinsically rewarded. 

Perhaps enduring commitments to those we love and civic friendship toward our fellow citizens are preferable to restless competition and anxious self-defense,. Perhaps common worship, in which we express our gratitude and wonder in the face of being itself, is the most important thing of all. 

If so we will have to change our lives and begin to remember what we have been happier to forget. We will need to remember that we did not create ourselves, that we owe what we are to the communities that formed us. ... We will need to see the story of our life on this earth not as an unbroken success but as a history of suffering as well as joy.

One of the most decisive challenges awaiting you on the voyage ahead is to come to terms with the fact that you and you alone are responsible for what you do. The good news is that in the process you will have the support of your classmates and friends, your families, those grandparents, and uncles, and aunts, brothers and sisters, cousins no matter how removed, who surround you today and will continue to be a part of you on this voyage. 

Thus, live up to that inheritance. Make Boston College proud. Seek the excellent, by knowing yourself, by honoring your past, by holding true to the faith, to the democratic institutions created by generations long dead, by acknowledging that necessity of personal responsibility is the inherited legacy of your culture. Whether or not that legacy will survive depends to no small degree upon each of you. For that drama of our history, of our liberal arts, is ours to act out in the present and carry into the future

My favorite Gospel passage is read every year on the first Sunday after Easter, but I have always felt it ought to be mandatory at all graduations. It is the familiar passage where two disciples meet the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus: Now theologians will insist that the point of that event is that the Disciples came to recognize Jesus in the "breaking of the Bread." But St. Luke does not stop at that point; he goes on to record the disciples saying to each other that they should have recognized Jesus before. The text reads:"Were not our hearts burning inside as he talked to us on the road and explained the Scriptures to us?" 

For forty years, my heart too has soared every time I walked into a classroom to talk to you , not about scriptures, but about our history. I leave Boston College with the fervent prayer that you too will look back at your history here, and repeat those same words: "Were not our hearts burning inside" as we studied at the Heights. Thank you and my heartiest congratulations