November 17, 2021
Providence College alumni share the impact of studying Civ
We asked alumni on Instagram to share what Civ meant to them. Here are some of their responses.
See our Instagram storyAlumni reflection: Reconciling faith and reason through Civ — and Benjamin Franklin
By Joe Creamer ’01
I’ve felt for some time that Civ had profound effects on my life, and although I couldn’t exactly say how, I knew it was something more than the half-joking boasts of fellow alumni who say they surprise their friends with how good they are at Jeopardy. As Civ turns 50 this year, I’ve been thinking that the most important gift that Civ gave to me was a personal sense that faith and reason are compatible.
I remember in the second year of Civ we read Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. I had loved American history in high school and admired the founding fathers. To high school students, Ben Franklin is mostly presented as a scientist and patriot. One might learn that he founded the first lending library in America or that he wrote a popular almanac with humorous moral sayings. Franklin’s religious beliefs are avoided. However, religion was actually extremely important to Franklin; he returns again and again to religious questions in his Autobiography.
In Civ, I was introduced to this side of Franklin that I never knew existed. In sharing his life story, Franklin spent considerable time outlining his 13 virtues and the famous little charts that he carried around to mark his progress in virtue. He tells us his aim was no less than “moral perfection.”And he intended to do it primarily through his own efforts. I was struck at how pompous Franklin suddenly seemed. And I wasn’t the only one. He admits he only added humility as the 13th virtue at the suggestion of a Quaker friend who told him he was “generally thought proud.” In fairness, as I look back over it now, Franklin does acknowledge that he never was able to perfect himself in virtue and he does record a prayer he wrote asking “powerful Goodness” for help in his pursuit of virtue. Yet, here he is, at 79, thinking it advisable to include this “scheme” in his memoir, and even recommending it because it made him a “better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been….” Clearly, looking back over his life, he found his system worth sharing. And many people still find it valuable today: anyone can purchase for a few dollars a little notebook with Franklin’s virtue chart pre-printed inside. There are many different editions to choose from online. For good reason, modern historians have called Franklin the grandfather of self-help in America.
But in addition to knocking Franklin off the pedestal I had put him on in high school, Civ showed me that Franklin devoted himself to understanding the relationship of faith and reason throughout his life. Franklin had embraced deism — the belief that God was a clockmaker who created the world and then didn’t interfere with its operation — as a teenager. But within a few years, he began to modify his beliefs based on certain experiences he had living in London, where he had spent money he didn’t have on plays and shows. According to his own account, he was living “without religious constraints” and had even tried to seduce his best friend’s lover. She rebuffed him, but it was one scrape among many from which Franklin believed divine Providence had delivered him. These experiences caused Franklin to reject a rigid deism. Franklin wrestled with the relationship of faith and reason and concluded that you couldn’t become a virtuous person without God’s help.
Reading the Autobiography, the faith and reason theme that my professors had discussed in the first year of Civ finally clicked. Franklin’s approach to faith and reason is representative of a strong historical tendency in Christianity to reconcile faith and reason, or to expect them to complement each other. Because of this recurring element, faith and reason is an excellent organizing theme for Civ. And, in my own life, as I received this theme as a 19-year-old, it gave me a sense that that my Catholic faith was not wishful thinking. The philosopher Charles Taylor writes that many people think that scientific materialism, though personally meaningless, is a more mature stance than one of faith, a decision to face the void, to be a man, as it were. Civ suggested to me another possibility. Smart people aren’t all atheists; they are believers too. I knew this because I thought my Civ professors were the smartest people ever and great teachers. And they had faith. I used to stop by Dr. Anthony Esolen’s office and he would talk openly of his faith. Occasionally, I saw Dr. Thomas Grzebien at daily Mass in Aquinas Chapel. Two of my Civ professors, Rev. David Lewis Stokes and Rev. Robert Randall, were even priests. Both my professors and the theme of faith and reason made visible a path that I could take too.
As my understanding that faith and reason could grow together developed in Civ, there were still many stumbling blocks. Christianity, and perhaps especially Catholicism, seemed to have a lot of rules. My attempts to follow the rules seemed to be the focus of my faith. I didn’t fully see this at the time, but Franklin had a lesson for me in this regard as well.
One passage from Franklin’s Autobiography really irked me when I read it in Civ. Franklin describes how he rented a room from some Catholics when he was living in London as a very young man. They introduce him to a 70-year-old single woman who had planned to enter a convent abroad, but it didn’t work out. Instead, she lived like a nun on her own. She gave almost all of her income to charity and lived on gruel. Despite this, Franklin noted that she was “never sick.” The woman showed him a picture of St. Veronica. In the image, Veronica holds the cloth with which she had wiped Jesus’s face. Franklin notes that the woman explained it “with all seriousness.” What did Franklin draw from this experience over 50 years later: “I give it as another instance on how small an income life and health may be supported.” Franklin missed the whole point of this woman’s life. I felt that Franklin was mistaken back in Civ, although I don’t think I knew why and I certainly didn’t explain it very well in my essay for Father Randall. (He wrote on my paper: “You need help with your writing.”) Rereading Franklin recently, I see that Franklin was so enamored of his own moral improvement schemes and the importance of temperance and thrift that he missed what was right before his eyes. This old woman was not running a scientific experiment to find out how little one could eat and remain healthy. She wasn’t trying to find out how little one could live on in a year. She was trying to devote her life to God. Perhaps she did this as a response to her experience of God. Prayer, image, song, fasting, nature — these and many others are ways of experiencing transcendence in most religions. It’s possible the picture of St. Veronica that was so important to this do-it-yourself nun was instrumental in her experience of God’s presence. Franklin kept all the rules and restrictions of his Puritan upbringing, but his application of Enlightenment rationality eliminated even the possibility of transcendence. But the point of all the rules is to guide us as we decide how to respond to our experience of God. Franklin — and I — had this all backwards. Whatever experiences of God I had had, I didn’t know what to make of them. But the rules of Christianity seemed important to me. Following the rules seemed to be what made you a part of the Church; experiencing God was optional.
With the Enlightenment and the development of science and technology, many American Christians gradually and sometimes subconsciously made the same decision as Franklin to keep the moral rules, but let go of the faith. Franklin believed that Christianity would make people virtuous — this much could be proved, or so it seemed to him. Over time, as Christians began to doubt the more supernatural aspects of their beliefs, they fell back on Christianity as guidance for a moral life. Of course, Christianity includes moral guidance, but an encounter with Jesus as transcendent God is the heart of Christianity.
Transcendence, of course, is beyond reason. It is mysterious. It is an experience of connection to others, to God, to the universe. It’s the touchstone that allows us to conquer fear, to heal, to forgive, or sometimes to just simply keep going. Franklin thought Christianity without transcendence could still develop virtue in his fellow humans. But I would argue that Franklin missed something essential. Transcendence was the touchstone for Franklin’s little old woman in London. Her experience of God helped her maintain such a frugal and strict life. Franklin may have missed this, but Civ helped me to see not only that faith and reason are compatible, but that at some point reason must yield at least a small space to the possibilities of encounter and transcendence. What I learned and what I saw in Civ, eventually and gradually unfolded so that I could recognize this reality in my own life, and for that, I am grateful.
Dr. Joseph Creamer ’01 lives near Albany, N.Y., with his wife and five children. He teaches first-year writing at SUNY Albany. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington in Seattle and also taught history at Fordham University.
