Humanities and Divine Science

In the Article Reclaiming the Humanities: Education Beyond Career Training author Walker Larson notes that "the humanities are vanishing because we no longer understand what they’re for."  At Divine Science University (DSU) our mission is sharing wisdom & experience for those who seek illumination in life by providing opportunities to gain knowledge, acquire wisdom and live with integrity.  We are a source of education, so this claim prompted me to delve further. 

This article is primarily about the university education in the humanities, but the broader truth applies to DSU as well. First what are the humanities? The humanities are academic disciplines that study the aspects of human society and culture, including certain fundamental questions asked by humans. These are the “right brain” activities that lend themselves to creativity and inspiration.

DSU holds divine science to be learning to understand the fundamental nature, function, and being of the divine, and the energetic nature of the divine's action, i.e., light. It is safe to say that "certain fundamental questions asked by humans" are included in the exploration of Divine Science, so DSU can be a part in promoting humanities studies.

At academic universities the humanities are frequently defined as any fields of study outside of the sciences that use critical, speculative or interpretive and have a significant historical element as distinguished from the objective approaches of the sciences. They typically include courses of study such as philosophy, religion, history, language arts, performing arts, and visual arts.

Walker Larson opens his article noting that over the past decade the overall study of the humanities in the United States have declined by close to 20 percent. He cites that at some universities these studies have declined by 50 percent.

He cites two main misunderstands of what education is for. The first is that "most modern universities have adopted one or both of two insufficient understandings of education: that it is merely for career training or it is for political indoctrination."

Certainly education must take into account training for career. Humans have bodies to be clothed and fed that require maintainence and support, but we also have souls. A purely pragmatic approach to education tends to overlook the feeding of the soul, that divine sustenance that makes living joyful. 

A whole education takes into account the whole human being, not merely his material needs. Not merely feeding the body, but feeding the soul and enlightening the spirit. This is what DSU and its associated colleges and academies are about.

Larson notes that a prevailing mindset of many students, faculty and academic staff is that "the purpose of college is simply to get a good job. The university is a kind of complicated vending machine: put in the cash and the time, and it will eventually kick out a tasty, marketable degree with which you can provide for yourself comfortably. Get in, get out, get own with your life" so that you may then go about merely existing, and ultimately exiting this world.

The purpose of the humanities, however, is not merely knowledge for the purpose of existing; the purpose of the humanities is to humanize. Every student can benefit from a humanities education. While Larson notes "I have yet to encounter a nonhuman college student..." the reality of the current AI explosion is that AI IS a non-human student. The humanities would certainly be beneficial to AI's learning to interact with humanity. Mark Van Doren is quoted in this article as stating: 

"the {humanities] are [more] necessary rather than nice. Poetry, story, and speculation are more than pleasant to encounter; they are indispensable if we would know ourselves as men. To live with Herodotus, Euripides, Aristotle, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pascal, Swift, Balzac, Dickens, or Tolstoy—to take only a few names at random and to add no musicians, painters, or sculptors—is to be wiser than experience can make us in those deep matters that have most closely to do with family, friends, rulers, and whatever gods there be. To live with them is indeed experience of the essential kind, since it takes us beyond the local and the accidental, at the same moment that it lets us know how uniquely valuable a place and a time can be.”

I once had a mentor that put it even more succinctly: One may learn in one of two ways – through direct experience, e.g. a hot stove will burn; or though indirect experience e.g. the lessons taught through the experiences of the characters of literature. 

If such indirect experiences are not explored, then one's life experiences are limited to one's direct experiences or the input of the programmers in Hollywood and elsewhere who provide exciting versions of unreality. We are seeing, and reaping, the results of all of this indirect programming currently.

"Clearly, then," Larson share, "the humanities are to be studied for their own sake, for the way that they open our eyes to universal truths. These truths are, on the one hand, practical for the art of living well, and on the other, wonderfully impractical in the sense that they are worth knowing for their own sake, as an end in themselves, not as a means to some pragmatic goal ... To know something of the universe, of human nature, makes us more fully what we’re meant to be."

Such soul and spirit feeding studies shape primarily the human character itself. They lead us to consider what if there was something even more fundamental to us than learning how to make money, to merely survive, or just to exist. What if there was learning about how to be human?

Van Doren is also quoted:

“The aim of [humanities] education is one’s own excellence, the perfection of one’s own intellectual character. [This] education makes the person competent, not merely to know or do, but also, and indeed chiefly, to be.”

This is what DSU desires to assist in accomplishing.

A second reason that such soul and spirit studies are declining is politicization.  Politics is "the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources. Academia has even boiled this subjective set of activities down into studies that dictate what actions result in which responses in the hopes of being able to forecast or manipulate the group's political responses. This they term political science. 

Obviously if a central "approved" viewpoint were attainable then predictable outcomes would be easier to achieve. This is where academic politicization comes in. In some cases academia has even dictated what viewpoint about the subject matter was to be taught in order to make sure that all were operating on the same world view.

As the word science means pertaining to “cutting or splitting; dividing or separating” in order to know, such politicized programs focus more on critiquing, tearing down, or "seeing through" texts using political lenses. This modern critical method is based on a spirit of suspicion toward the texts at hand and have become preoccupied with political science agendas concerned more with desired outcome than with promoting individual exploration, experience and delight.

Currently, it seems, humanity is loosing interest in its humanities. With formal education declining in their teaching of humanities it will be up to resources like DSU and many other "universities" to share their wisdom of the past about things that matter most to a culture and a civilization: family, friendship, war, peace, justice, sacrifice, love, death and God. While it may seem that the humanities may be waning, but history, literature, art and other divine sciences reveal that the good in this world will endure.

We invite you to explore DSU. We invite you to contribute your wisdom. We invite you to develop your own college or academy for sharing your wisdom for humanity. It is one way we can "build up" humanity rather than see it merely exist.