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Dr. James
Wetzel comments on his appointment
I am very grateful to be given the opportunity to
teach and study at a university whose mission is so close to my own heart. I
discovered Augustine when I was an undergraduate at Princeton, struggling to
maintain my balance in the uncertain gravity of two increasingly divergent
worlds: philosophy and religious studies. I was a philosopher who wanted to
take up God and the soul, not as specials on a philosophical menu, but as
the illuminating sources of a philosophical life. I owe Augustine a profound
debt, not because
 he
taught me how to live such a life (I am still learning, and it is, in any
case, not a lesson that one human being can finally teach another), but
because he lent me his confessional voice at a time when I could not find my
own. The importance of confession to philosophy has something to do with the
importance of not confusing the basis of love and knowledge with a secure
point of view. It is also has something to do with not making one’s sense of
one’s own insecurity an article of faith. If what I have just said about the
importance of confession has some truth to it, then the sanest way to
confess before God is in the company of fellow seekers after truth. I
suppose that to some I have just described a church, not a university, but
if I have described a church, it is one whose catholicity defies
institutional circumscription: this church takes up the university and
transcends it. A university that calls itself Augustinian and remembers
Augustine in love has a better chance than most of accepting its own
mortality—and it is by way of such acceptance that values more than mortal
pass through.
I hope to bring to Villanova a teaching presence.
Although I believe with Plato that virtue is not an expertise and with
Augustine that the information most wanted in an education is not
information, I also believe that a desire to learn (or least a desire to
desire) is what makes the humanly unmasterable sort of teaching possible. So
I will share with my students and my colleagues the desire to learn as it
has taken specific form in me—as a desire for friendship with Augustine and
as a desire to work out the strengths and limitations of that friendship in
a study of the history of philosophy. I am particularly glad to be a member
of a philosophy department that values the history of philosophy. Love of
the dead is a mark of soul, and without some sense of affiliation and
affection for those who came before us, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to
care for those who will come after. The unity of a university ought ideally
to be one of time as well as place; a sense of tradition is indispensable.
I am aware that my first public words to the Villanova
community are not terribly scholarly in tone. I do in fact value highly the
self-disregarding side of scholarly labor—the nitty-gritty of language
learning, analysis of arguments, compilation of evidence, proper
documentation. But I also believe that scholars are human beings and that
human beings seek the truth in order not to be alone. I didn’t want my
introductory attempt to make myself known to be neglectful of my desire to
know those who would know me. |
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