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Liberal Education Imperiled3 3 9begins his Summa Theologica with the question whether anything besidesphilosophy is needed. Neither did the Reformation solve any of these problems.Luther criticized pagans such as Aristotle from inside the academy,contending his works should be discarded; Calvin believed that reason on itsown was of no value, but considered it competent of things in this world. Heat least believed that the life of the mind could be used in glorifying God. 85The Dialogue between Reason and RevelationWe could say that the problem we have been examining in liberal educationis similar to the crisis afflicting Western civilization. The decline of liberaleducation is a part of a broader symptom: the dismissal of both biblicalrevelation and ancient political philosophy. To put it another way, Westernman has profited from reason and revelation. The West is in crisis in partbecause of the attempted rejection of that which is inherent in man: the abilityto reason. Biblical faith also seems under attack in the modern world, andcertainly in most universities. If the West is to survive, or be revived, thedialogue between reason and revelation should be exhumed. If it is to comeback to life in the West, it needs to be resurrected in higher education, forboth provide fertile ground for moral education. 86The tension between reason and revelation is intelligible enough:85Marsden, Soul of the American University, 35–37. We should note that Catholics also had a boutwith the importance of philosophy and reason. Pope Leo XII criticized America for being too materialand did not like the Americanism of the Founding. Catholics were suspicious of the opennessof America and wondered whether freedom could produce a moral people. Long into the twentiethcentury, Catholic universities went through many of the problems that Protestant colleges did some250–300 years earlier. Part of the reason for this, it seems, was that Catholic colleges generally got alate start developing institutions of learning. See ibid., 271–73. On some of the early debates, whichfor example saw Origen condemned by an ecumenical council for blending the Greeks too much withChristianity, see James R. Payton Jr., Light from the Christian East (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,2007), 52–54.86Harry V. Jaffa, “Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts: A Critique of The Closing ofthe American Mind,” in Essays on “The Closing of the American Mind,” ed. Robert Stone (Chicago:Chicago Review Press, 1989), 133; Leo Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” in Studies in Platonic PoliticalPhilosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 147; Strauss, An Introduction to PoliticalPhilosophy, 125; Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism,238. On the primacy of reason as being necessary to save reason from its self-destruction, see Harry V.Jaffa, “Leo Strauss, the Bible, and Political Philosophy,” in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and JewishThinker, ed. Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Nicgorski (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994),195–96. Strauss speaks of the “crisis of the West” in The City and Man (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1964), 1. Susan Orr makes a more explicit link between this crisis and education in Jerusalemand Athens: Reason and Revelation in the Works of Leo Strauss (Lanham, MD: Rownman & Littlefield,1995), 5–6.