AT FIRST GLANCE, ARIZONA State University hardly seems like fertile ground for a religious awakening.
A combination of 362 days of sunshine and an influx of wealthy California transplants, results in a campus flush with perfectly tanned, waxed, and (occasionally) plastic body parts displayed in all manner of highly fashionable undress. Not for nothing was my alma mater voted Playboy's number-one party school in 2002. And a couple of years ago, Maxim, that bible of upwardly mobile miscreants--or at least those miscreants who would like to deceive single women into believing they are upwardly mobile--voted Phoenix "Best City on Earth" based almost solely on the merits of the aforementioned body parts.
But for all its party-school reputation, Arizona State is still a university. And so, as much as the inhabitants of Tom Wolfe's fictitious Dupont, the majority of professors and students embrace a strange mix of liberal ethos and licentious abandon. That is, embrace the kind of environment that, at once, requires passing a feminist theory course to graduate, yet welcomes Baywatch to the campus mall to select, by measure of male applause, a coed for a bit part in an upcoming episode.
My degree program, English literature, was perhaps more exposed to this paradox than any other on campus. After all, engineering and physics students don't have to deconstruct the racist, misogynistic, homophobic subtext supposedly present in the work of their masters. A mathematical formula either works or it doesn't, and the prevailing beliefs held by its author at the time it was created hold no bearing over its worthiness. Not so with literature studies, in which appreciation for John Donne's subtle, metaphysical metaphors has been replaced by appreciation for Adrienne Rich's obvious, sexual ones.
On the downside, that left a lot of room for would-be intellectuals to take up class time debating homoerotic interpretations of As You Like It and Richard III. On the upside, it also left a lot of room for B.S. And since B.S. requires considerably less study time than more concrete disciplines, all but the most serious English undergrads spent the extra hours waiting in line at whatever nightclub was least likely to scrutinize IDs. Unfortunately, I could hardly count myself among "the most serious English undergrads," so to this day my understanding of Paradise Lost remains seriously lacking, while my grasp of how to approach a bouncer so as not to seem suspect is nearly expert.
Why "Survey of English Literature: 800 to 1750" should have been any different I can only chalk up to providence. Certainly, it wasn't the professor, Dr. Helms. Though he presented himself as the stereotypical cloistered academic, complete with wizened brow, liberal rhetoric, and mop of unkempt white hair. On closer inspection he resembled nothing if not a dirty old man. After offering his students a rote regret that most of the literature of the Middle Ages is characterized by repressive religious overtones, he would titter so continuously at the Wife of Bath's brazen innuendo (making sure no potential phallic symbol, no matter how dubious, was lost on us) that we couldn't help but wish a little of that medieval repression might find its way into ENG 221.
As far as devout texts went, his treatment of them was far less appreciative. While acknowledging their aesthetic excellence and cultural import, he usually analyzed them from the standpoint that unhealthy self-denial and recrimination are the products of any spiritual instruction of the Judeo-Christian variety. So pernicious is that legacy, he lectured, that an unnatural spirit of shame continues to plague Western civilization today.
Despite the fact that at least one-third of the class was brought up in that Judeo-Christian faith, for 98 percent of us, Helms's word was good enough. No point examining the actual texts when we could gather enough from our TA-authored review notes to satisfy any essay question. We got the gist of it--Wife of Bath: enlightened; Edmund Spenser: uptight, if brilliant, prude. And had I not uncharacteristically turned one night to an original Vulgate-cycle source for an already overdue paper on Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, I might have gone on taking academia's word for it, congratulating myself for shrugging off the yoke of Christian morality that was my sad, oppressive heritage.
My outline was simple enough: regurgitate back to Dr. Helms, in slightly longer form, his observation that Malory wisely edited out much of the religious training in The Quest of the Holy Grail. All I had to do was skim through the bits of holy lecture proffered by the hermits in The Quest and demonstrate why Malory's interpretation was far superior for having rejected them.
Only, in the end, I didn't think it was far superior. In particular, the Lancelot of The Quest was not the tragic, romantic figure depicted in later incarnations. Rather than Malory's notion that star-crossed love caused his (and, by extension, Arthur and Camelot's) downfall, The Quest suggested that common lust alone brought him low, and that nothing noble or romantic followed from it: "Growing conscious of Guinevere's glances [Lancelot] . . . set his feet in the path of lust, the path which degrades both body and soul to a degree that none can really know who has not tried it."
This Lancelot was a prideful man who dismissed his nagging conscience in favor of a chivalric sham that suited his desires better. This Lancelot--beautiful, gifted, favored with every material asset, and assured he could achieve every great thing--had been taught to honor the tenets of the Christian faith and was expected to offer God some return on his blessings. Instead, selfish pursuits dulled his interest in all but the lowest passions, causing hermit after hermit to rebuke him: "[Our Lord] gave you beauty in full measure; He gave you understanding, and wit enough to distinguish good from evil; courage He gave you . . . and over and above He gave you such good fortune that success has crowned your every undertaking . . . And you were so careless of your trust that you basely forsook Him."
As I read the hermit's condemnation of Lancelot du Lac, I felt the full weight of it on my own conscience. To be born whole-limbed and whole-minded to the American middle class could be considered an even greater cosmic jackpot. All this bounty I, and most of my classmates, used to slack through classes, waste our parents' financial investment, and generally give ourselves over to profligate behavior. The sickness of Lancelot's soul as described in the 13th century was the sickness of ours in the 21st. He had allowed the philosophy of his age to divert him from what he knew in his youth to be true: "Thus were you lost to Our Lord, who had nurtured and enhanced you and equipped you with every virtue. . . . Thus, when He thought that you would be His servant and use the riches He had loaned you in His employ, you quitted Him there and then."
In Lancelot's excoriation, I saw the excoriation of every golden child on every university campus across America who had been raised to exemplify the Christian ethics of hard work, restraint, and reverence, but educated to spit on them.
An encounter with Christ's sacred chalice changed Lancelot's heart. An encounter with Lancelot changed mine. And though I knew that Malory would bring Lancelot back to iniquity in a continuing relationship with Queen Guinevere, The Quest left me assured that the round table's greatest knight was, indeed, a changed man. With a child's lack of guile, Lancelot goes from hermit to hermit, seeking instruction and praising God when he receives correction: "Ah! Gracious Lord Jesus Christ, I thank Thee and adore Thee for deigning to rebuke me for my offenses. Now I see truly that Thou dost hold me for Thy servant."
Later, he echoes St. Paul, and welcomes even death if it be in the Lord's cause: "If it be His pleasure that I die, the body's death will be the soul's salvation." Though Malory would eventually dismiss Lancelot's earnestness, I knew he could achieve lifelong victory--if for no other reason than I measured Lancelot's Quest experience against my own life, and found it sound.
As the author reveals in the seventh chapter, Lancelot's ascent to holiness is slow. After conversion, he continues to misunderstand the nature of his quest and attempts to defeat difficulties through his own strength, drawing his sword and prompting Heaven to pronounce, "O man of little faith and most infirm belief, why placest thou greater trust in thine own arm than in thy Maker? Thou art but a sorry wretch to hold that He who thou didst choose to serve can stand thee in no better stead than shield and sword." And even when he is rewarded for his faith with a partial vision of his heart's highest desire, he misinterprets the Grail Mass and directly disobeys his Lord's command.
Rather than present some medieval religious superhero who soars to the heights of righteousness the minute he rededicates his life to God, Lancelot stumbles along in faith, just as I have. The theology of The Quest proves not some pious pie-in-the-sky, but a workable application of biblical principle: Fallible man will only partly triumph in this life, but consistency will win him a place at the king's table in the next.
Though he makes only gradual progress in spiritual understanding, Lancelot genuinely repents, and he receives grace to sustain his repentance. Once his eyes are opened to the things of Heaven, he finds that all around him are instructors more than willing to help him stay on the path of righteousness.
So, too, did I find that, despite my secular surroundings, heroes of faith were telling stories all around me. In a "Bible as Literature" course that sought out historical inaccuracy, I found astounding consistency that shored me up against doubt. Though instructed to sneer at Jonathan Edwards's hellfire and brimstone, I instead discovered a reasonable argument for holy fear. Rather than dreary, obsessive-compulsive confession, in Augustine I found camaraderie and reassurance that there truly is nothing new under the sun.
All said, were it not for my enlightened, liberal education, I might never have discovered a humble, childlike faith.
The towers of academia are filled with progressive ideas destined to become nothing more than feed for the next generation's educators to snuffle and shred through. But these ersatz scholars will find that time sifts all lessons, retaining only those that bear witness to truth. Regardless of the cynicism and deconstruction heaped on their wisdom, history's great teachers will continue to speak through the ages to students who have ears to hear--and, sometimes, even to those who don't.
Megan Basham is a Phillips Fellow and film critic for Townhall.com.