The Humanities and the Birds of Appetite

The Liberal Arts and/as Augury

There is a pair of red-tailed hawks who have taken up residence in the wooded area by my house, and I have become singularly attached, maybe even something more akin to devoted to them. I watch for them circling languidly in the sky when I walk the dog, root for them against the nettlesome machinations of the crows, triumph when they fly low enough for me to see their wings’ variegations of brown and cream, feel an uncanny punch of adrenaline when they screech or chirk in the otherworldly way that they do. Even as my rational mind chastens me, I anthropomorphize them, ascribing intention and meaning to the movements of their animal instincts. What primeval human compulsion is this, to scan the horizon and to impute significance and meaning either to their absence or to the particulars of these aviary visitations?

Nor can I fully shake the sense that certain of these encounters with birds are trying to communicate something to me from beyond the veil. Once, when my three children were much smaller, I had ushered them to the backyard for a lunchtime picnic, which, as anyone with small children can tell you, was no small feat. They had all that morning been weepy and bored and underfoot, and I thought a change of scenery might help us all to feel better. But the literal instant I spread everything out and laid out the food, a warm, bloody, headless bird fell dramatically out of the sky and onto the picnic blanket, dropped, presumably, by a hawk or falcon who was out hunting for his own lunch. Tell me, reader: how could I not take this personally, not ascribe some meaning to it? With apologies to Casablanca and to Humphrey Bogart, on all the picnic blankets in all the backyards in all the towns in all the world, the decapitated bird gets dropped onto mine.

Another time I was looking outside in the grey light of dawn and saw an enormous coyote—standing perfectly still with its haunches raised, about ten or fifteen feet from the sliding glass door where we were eating breakfast. As we watched, a massive hawk, my hawk, swooped down from out of nowhere with a guttural sort of scream and attacked it, chasing it away from the property. Tell me, reader: what kind of Homeric omen was this—either of my looming victory or of my eventual defeat? I have other stories, too: on the anniversary of a dear friend’s sudden and traumatic death, I was standing quietly in the backyard and a little songbird, presumably just learning to fly, landed on my shoulder and stayed there for at least a full minute, chirping confidingly in my ear like a voice from the far country.

Of course, I know that birds just do these sorts of things sometimes. I know from reading and reading Homer’s epics that “bird life aplenty is found in the sunny air, not all of it significant” (Odyssey II. 177). But I also know that the character who uttered this dismissive line was Eurymachus, one of the Penelope’s conniving and disenchanted suitors who chose to ignore divine disclosures and warnings of Odysseus’s impending return and who subsequently paid the price of his own life, so I will prudently try to keep at least the possibility of disclosive meaning open in these aviary encounters!

What I do know for sure, though, is that there is meaning aplenty to be found not just in the sky but also in the pages, patterns, images, and metaphors of the books in and beyond the Western canon. Though these pages are indeed bursting with flocks of birds—crews, murders, quarrels, flutters, knots, bands, murmurations, and swarms of them—I will prescind from all warblers, plovers, sparrows, starlings, robins, and storks in decided preference to the raptors: birds of prey and punishment and appetite, birds like sparrowhawks, eagles, merlins, kestrels, owls, and peregrine falcons. Truly, the power and fury and gravitas of these tremendous creatures stimulate the imagination no less in our books than in our backyards. Raptors are invoked not merely as occasions for auspicious or inauspicious bird-signs in the antique epics but also throughout the canon, up to and including what is now almost a cottage industry of raptor books within the genre of modern nature writing: think of T.H. White’s The Goshawk (1951), J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), or, more recently, Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014) and Vespers Flights (2020).

While I will mention some of the more powerful literary examples of raptors across the Western canon, most of the work of this essay involves a more detailed presentation of Baker’s masterpiece The Peregrine, an utterly harrowing, heartbreakingly gorgeous example of this sort of literature. The invocation of The Peregrine will serve as an occasion to reflect more constructively upon what these raptors might have to say about what might seem to be quixotic undertakings of programs of study in the humanities, that is, the liberal arts.

A Litany of Hawks

Though we could multiply examples nigh unto eternity, just a few samples of the bird-omens as messages from the gods in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey will suffice. There is the famously gruesome bird-sign in Book XII of the Iliad, which Hektor soundly rejects both to his and the Trojans’ mortal detriment:

Just then
as they desired to cross, a bird flew by them,
heading to the left across the army,
an eagle beating upward, in its claws
a huge snake, red as blood, live and jerking,
full of fight; it doubled on itself
and struck the captor’s chest and throat. At this
the eagle in its agony let go
and veered away screaming downwind. The snake
fell in the mass of troops, and Trojans shuddered
to see the rippling thing lie in their midst (Iliad, XII. 220-229).

The Odyssey likewise employs several bird-omens—which were likewise fatally rejected by Eurymachus and the other suitors—to foreshadow the return of Odysseus:

Now Zeus who views the wide world sent a sign to him,
launching a pair of eagles from a mountain crest
in guiding flight down the soft blowing wind,
wing-tip to wing-tip quivering taut, companions,
till high above the assembly of many voices
they wheeled, their dense wings beating, and in havoc
dropped on the heads of the crowd—a deathly omen—
wielding their talons, tearing cheeks and throats;
then veered away on the right hand through the city (Odyssey, II. 156-164).

Intense raptor imagery gets used elsewhere in the Iliad to describe the gods, invoked in these cases for their speed and power (XXI. 567-577). We see Homer likening Poseidon to a hawk (XIII. 73-78) and Apollo to a peregrine falcon (XV. 276-277). The human characters likewise get the raptor treatment, not just to evoke their animal speed and power but also the perhaps more anthropomorphic senses of intelligent sight, in the case of Meneláos, or the dark fury of grief in the case of Patróklos, when a fellow-soldier loses his life in the fierce battle over Sarpêdôn’s body (XVI. 669-675).

Finally, in Homer’s Odyssey, powerful raptor imagery is evoked in that first, deeply emotional reunion between Odysseus and Telémakhos in Book XVI:

Then, throwing
his arms around this marvel of a father
Telémakhos began to weep. Salt tears
rose from the wells of longing in both men,
and cries burst from both as keen and fluttering
as those of the great taloned hawk,
whose nestlings farmers take before they fly (Odyssey XVI. 256-259).

Had we “but world enough and time” we might think of the raptor imagery in the Scriptures: on passages in the book of Job, for instance, which in its own way displays the ferocity of the best nature poetry as it interrogates God:

Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars,
and spreads its wings toward the south?
Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high?
It lives on the rock and makes its home
in the fastness of the rocky crag.
From there it spies the prey; its eyes see it from far away.
Its young ones suck up blood; and where the slain are, there it is (Job 39:26-30).

Or the apocalyptic bird sign of Revelation 8 wherein an eagle cries “out in a loud voice, ‘Woe! Woe! Woe!’ to the inhabitants of the earth” (Revelation 8:13). We might also have speculated about why Lucifer is portrayed in Dante’s Inferno as a great, frozen bird, really more a bat than anything else, or else considered the rich eagle imagery on the sphere of Jupiter in Dante’s Paradiso, or perhaps done a deep dive into Robert Penn Warren’s poem “Evening Hawk,” whose title character climbs “the last light / Who knows neither Time nor error, and under / Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings / Into shadow . . . .”

But what I really want to do is confess an obsession. And—I must be quite forthright—it is a contagious one, borne of a man’s intense obsession and one which tends to breed other forms of obsessiveness. It is my obsession with a book certain passages of which might well—something like Blaise Pascal’s fiery Memoria—be sewn permanently into the lining of jackets everywhere: J.A. Baker’s 1967 environmental classic The Peregrine. It is a book in certain respects about the human transparency (or lack thereof) to the animal and natural world. And though it is a book about anger, loss, and grief, it has been somehow also a book of unusual consolation. People have been known to carry this unlikely book with them everywhere in life and even to be buried with it in death.

Perceval and The Peregrine: Birdwatching and the Quest for the Holy Grail

On the face of it, Baker’s The Peregrine is just another nature book about watching birds. A closer look, however, reveals an epiphanic, even apocalyptic study in the art of the slow burn: in descriptive and metaphorical language, in cinematics, in optics, in landscape, in setting, and the boundaries and possibilities of narrative voice and of human relationships with the animal world. In certain respects, it is not an easy book to read: it is sometimes tedious, often bloody, occasionally voyeuristic, and a bit despairing about the capacity of most human beings to relate to nature in anything other than an exploitative way. As Helen MacDonald (of H Is for Hawk fame) suggests, “Baker writes like an angel, but always the angel of death. No community and little human warmth exist in its pages. Baker wrote it as if he were the last man on Earth and the peregrines he watched airborne revenants, lost and losing souls.”

But even though the price of admission is high, on my estimation it is worth every single penny. The Paris Review acclaims The Peregrine as deploying such a “technique of description, a technique of ecstasy, really, that has the ability to transform the way you see, to cleanse the window’s perception as it were, and reveal the world in all its pure and infinite primal glory.” The Guardian praises its “dark fury” and its “ecstatic, violent, enraptored prose”; to The New Yorker, the book represents “a record of desire.” It is also one of the few mandatory texts—cinematic to its core—that Werner Herzog assigns in his filmmaking courses.

The book tells the story—if you can even call it that—of one man’s obsessive hunt not only to observe raptors in the wild but also to ritualize his own behavior to adapt to their habits and perspectives. He writes:

To be recognized and accepted by a peregrine you must wear the same clothes, travel by the same way, perform actions in the same order. Like all birds, it fears the unpredictable. Enter and leave the same fields at the same time each day, soothe the hawk from its wildness by a ritual of behavior as invariable as its own . . . Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must become the thing he hunts” (13).

And later:

Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified (41).

As Landmarks author Robert Macfarlane put it, “The Peregrine is not a book about watching a bird, it is a book about becoming a bird” (xiv).

It is also nearly impossible to tell whether the book is fiction or non-fiction, art or science, poetry or prose. There is also a deliberate collapsing of phenomena observed, observer, landscape, author, and narrator such that the reader gains a new kind of sight: we become katascopoi, “looker-downers,” like birds or the gods of antiquity. Near the beginning of the text, Baker writes, “In my diary of a single winter I have tried to preserve a unity, binding together the bird, the watcher, and the place that holds them both. Everything I describe took place while I was watching it, but I do not believe that honest observation is enough. The emotions and behavior of the watcher are also facts, and they must be truthfully recorded” (14). This is not, however, entirely true. Though in form it purports to be a brief personal diary of the narrator’s recorded observations of the activity of raptors in Great Britain in over just a few months (October 1 to April 4), in fact into these seven symbolic months Baker distills in heavily concentrated doses the data of over ten years and 1,600 pages of field notes and maps heavily annotated with hundreds of markings which recorded the particularities of his raptor sightings.

Every page is crammed with hundreds of metaphors and similes with varying degrees of plausibility. And though it could be said (and indeed has been said) that nothing really happens in this book—Robert MacFarlane quipped in Landmarks that “Waiting for Godot was once described as a play in which nothing happens, twice. The Peregrine is a book in which little happens, hundreds of times” (151)—its drama and its so-called “hyperkinetic” energy comes from its remarkably inventive deployment of figurative language and the utter sensuousness of his descriptions. The setting is strange, crepuscular, wrenched out of time. For instance, in the book’s cinematic opening, Baker writes that “a fragrance of neglect still lingers, like a ghost of fallen grass. There is always a sense of loss, a feeling of being forgotten. There is nothing else here; no castles, no ancient monuments, no hills like green clouds. It is just a curve of the earth, a rawness of winter fields. Dim, flat, desolate lands that cauterize all sorrow” (10).

Similarly, his figuration of the song of the night-jar flirts with synesthesia:

Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk mellows it and gives it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood. The sound spills out, and none of it is lost. The whole wood brims with it (11).

There are, as Robert MacFarlane elaborates in Landmarks, adjectives “torqued” into verbs; verbs “incite[d] to misbehavior”; “audacious comparisons,” and the contrivance of plentiful “neologisms and coinages” (152). Moreover, the manuscript pages were quite heavily revised at least five times; many of the pages were marked with stress-marks over certain syllables to indicate something like poetic meter, even if the pages themselves might look ostensibly like prose. Some of the sentences had been rendered into verse in the marginalia, and there were running tallies of how many hundreds of metaphors, similes, adjectives, and verbs had been used on each page. He could be (and will be) compared to another of England’s poets—Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins—in another voice and in another time.

In Part 1, called “Beginnings,” Baker’s narrator retrospectively considers what prompted the text, saying, “For ten years I followed the peregrine. I was possessed by it. It was a grail to me” (14). If it is true that The Peregrine is a book about descriptive language and prose style just as much if not more so as it is about birds, and if we continue to take into account the scrupulosity with which Baker revised his manuscripts for final publication, it will be clear indeed that the likening of his decade-long hunt in The Peregrine to the quest for the holy grail is not a throw-away line. Other images and diction choices throughout the book corroborate this evocation not only of a natural landscape saturated with religious imagery, but also the medieval Arthurian legends and their immediate predecessors.[1]

Here it is worth noting as an aside that T.H. White, the author of the classic falconry book The Goshawk, is also the author of The Once and Future King, another 1950s classic based loosely upon Le Morte d’Arthur (1485). In Baker’s world—which seems at the same time to be both medieval and modern—birds are “sepulchred in twilight” (11); glimpsing a hawk after hours of searching means that “all is transfigured, as though the broken columns of a ruined temple had suddenly resumed their ancient splendor” (14); a wren is a “priest”; another bird occupies a “hermitage” (81); a falcon startled from the marsh arises “like a departing god” (149). A frigid wind blowing in from the east he calls “a blaze of lances” (138); the wings of the peregrine shine in the sunlight “like red and gold chain-mail” (123).

There is also a haunting encounter with an owl in the woods whose

helmeted face was pale white, ascetic, half-human, bitter and withdrawn. The eyes were dark, intense, baleful. This helmet effect was grotesque, as though some lost and shrunken knight had withered to an owl . . . Neither of us could bear to look away. Its face was like a mask, macabre, ravaged, sorrowing, like the face of a drowned man (78-9).

On my reading, however, it seems that there is evidence that it is not just Arthurian-style legends and medieval landscapes in general to which Baker meant to allude, but perhaps even one in particular: namely French poet Chretien de Troyes’ (c.1130-1190) Perceval: The Story of the Grail which predates Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1469) by about 300 years.

One of the reasons that I think this is the case are the conspicuous similarities in each text in scenes which describe the strangely aesthetic experience of seeing blood on snow after raptors have wounded or killed, and then subsequently abandoned, their prey. Both protagonists are utterly enraptured by the contrast. First is the passage from Perceval:

He came to the king’s camp / But saw, before he reached / The tents, a flock of wild / Geese, dazzled by the heavy / Snow, fleeing as fast / As birds can fly from a diving / Falcon dropping out of the sky. It struck at a single / Goose, lagging behind / The others, and hit it so hard / That it fell to the earth. But the hawk / Didn’t follow it down, not hungry / Enough to take the trouble, / Too lazy to chase it. So the falcon / Flew off. But Perceval rode / To where the goose had fallen. / The bird’s neck had been wounded, / And three drops of blood / Had come rolling out on the snow, / Dying it vivid red. / The bird had not been badly / Hurt, just knocked to the earth, / And before the knight could reach it / It had flown away in the sky. / But its body’s oval shape / Was printed in the snow, the blood- / Dyed color suffused inside it, / And Perceval, leaning on his lance, / Sat staring at the sight. Blood / And snow so mixed together / Created a fresh color, / Just like his beloved’s face, / And as he stared he forgot / What he was doing and where / He was. The red stain / Against the white snow / Seemed just like her complexion (132-133).

Baker similarly describes two dead herons “shredded by many shapes of tooth and beak and claw . . . A day of blood; of sun, snow, and blood. Blood-red! What a useless adjective that is. Nothing is as beautifully, richly red as flowing blood on snow. It is strange that the eye can love what mind and body hate” (132). Here both Perceval and Baker’s narrator could be said to be acting somewhat like modern haruspex, observing the entrails and blood of fallen animals and finding not only meaning therein, but also the occasion for their own enchantment and for the re-enchantment of all of nature.

What is perhaps more apropos in Perceval for my purposes, however, is the symbolic value of the grail in tandem with the theme of the unasked question. The particular combination of elements in Perceval’s story, some of which reflect earlier iterations of the tale (a 1056 text called The Prophetic Ecstasy of the Phantom), are quite striking: there is a magical castle, a mysterious vessel, an enigmatic procession surrounding the grail, a bleeding lance, the mortally wounded fisher-king, and the visitation of a guest-hero who is expected to—but does not—ask a fundamental question which would have healed all wounds and restored the king and his imperiled land to health. As Perceval witnessed the marvelous procession of the grail and the maimed fisher-king, he wanted more than once to ask whom the grail served and what it all meant, but again and again he chided himself and kept his silence, again and again he deferred his asking of the fundamental question of the meaning of it all.

And the boy watched them, not daring / To ask why or to whom / This grail was meant to be served, / For his heart was always aware / Of his wise old master’s warnings. / But I fear his silence may hurt him, / For I’ve often heard it said / That talking too little can do / As much damage as talking too much. / Yet, for better or worse, / He never said a word (103).

Meanwhile, the wonderful grail / Was carried back and forth, / But again the boy was silent, / Not asking to whom it was served. And again it was thoughts of his master / Which kept him from speaking, for he never / Forgot how clearly he’d been warned / To beware of too much talking. / And so he stayed silent too long. / With every course, the grail / Was borne back and forth, / Uncovered, plainly visible, / And still he did not know why. / Although he wished to know / He told himself he’d surely / Make some safe inquiry / Before he left; someone / Would tell him. He’d wait until morning . . . And so he postponed his questions . . . (105).

When he awoke, however, he discovered that it was too late to ask the question of what it all meant, to ask “why the lance / Dripped blood (was some sorrow involved?) / And why they’d borne the grail.” For the castle had been abandoned during the night. “He called, but no one answered” (108). Perceval meets a mysterious lady, the sort of which abound in Arthurian legend, who chided him, saying, “Ah, how unlucky you are. / For had you asked those questions / You could have completely cured / The good king of all his wounds: / He would have become entirely / Whole, and ruled as he should. / How much good you’d have done!” (114).

Simone Weil’s much later, deeply personalist gloss on this story in her “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” puts the refusal to ask the question in the register of compassionate attention to the suffering other and, even more fundamentally, to prayer. On her reading, the question that the wandering hero should have asked the Fisher-King, who was “three-quarters paralysed by the most painful wound,” was simply this: “What are you going through?”[2]

The Quest and the Question, or, How Not to Be a Scavenger

So what exactly can this deep dive into raptors and medieval quests say about the nature and the value of a liberal arts education in the humanities? A liberal arts education provides an integrated vision of a kind of pedagogical formation that is multi-disciplinary, inquiry-based, contemplative, communal, and which aims at the total development of the human person in her intellectual, affective, aesthetic, and social dimensions. The liberal arts are called “liberal” in part because this course of study allows for and encourages a spirit of free inquiry. We are a questing and a questioning people. To call the liberal arts “liberal” is to celebrate the liberty to seek the truth wherever it may be found, uninhibited by the external forces of coercion, authority, power, utility, pragmatism, social norms, premature specialization and professionalization, or private interests which could constrain the integrity of such a search. As John Henry Newman famously argued in The Idea of a University, there is a sense in which knowledge is “capable of being its own end.”

First, we might notice that in The Peregrine, Baker’s narrator comes to inhabit the perspective of the avian other with such a fierce and radical kind of sympathy that by the end of the book it is difficult to tell if he still considers himself to be of the species of those called human. Certainly, he does not shy away from asking the question of the ultimate meaning of these natural phenomena. He adopts a doubled perspective, to see at once as the hunter and the hunted, the bird and the man, and even to come to a sort of transformative communion with it. “I found myself,” he writes, “crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts” (95).

Analogously, to read attentively through classic works in and beyond the Western canon—if and only if we, unlike the unlucky Perceval, ask the fundamental question when our hearts and minds prompt us to do so—to come to see a wide range of the patterns of human behavior, to expose and evaluate a full slate of possibilities of forms of human life: heroes, villains, statesmen, matricides, patricides, philosophers, lovers, wanderers, saints, sinners, pilgrims, mothers, fathers, poets, the bereaved, kings, travelers, contemplatives, prisoners, theologians, politicians, knights, actors, mystics, idealists, pragmatists, monsters, friends, scientists, revolutionaries, the visible, the invisible, the powerful, and the weak. As Pope Francis suggested in his 2024 letter on the role of reading literature on priestly and lay formation, reading widely inculcates “imaginative empathy” wherein readers can come to know that “our feelings are not simply our own, they are universal, and so even the most destitute person does not feel alone” (§34).

What has the power to heal our wounds and the wounds of those around us, however, is not simply proximity to the grail; that is somehow not enough. Rather, it is the presence of the grail together with the willingness to ask the question. Not a question, but the question, the one needful thing, the question prompted by our most intimate desires toward ultimate meaning. As human beings, we are, as Michael Gelven has described it, asking mysteries. In Leon Kass’s chapter “The Aims of Liberal Education,” in The Aims of Education (1997), he draws some helpful etymological connections between the words “question, query, [and] inquire” with the Latin quaero, meaning “to hunt out.” “To question,” he says, “is to quest, to search out and to seek after, to be engaged in a passionate pursuit. Like the hunting dogs’ search for game—the original meaning of our word quest—questioning is an earnest activity. This insight is preserved in the Latin root: quaeso means to seek and search, but also to beg, pray, beseech, entreat. In true questioning, we seek for an answer and by our questions entreat being itself to reveal, to uncover, to make unhidden, the object of our search (92). And in the liberal arts, the object of our search is not an empirically demonstrable fact but rather is the “search for what we are and what we can and should become” (92).

If The Peregrine is indeed a “record of desire”—and here we might remember that those who embark upon religious pilgrimages are called the peregrino in Italian or Portuguese or Spanish—what is it precisely that he (and we, and they) are seeking? What adventure, quest, or journey of transformation awaits our students, like Camino de Santiago pilgrims always “on the way,” who are called to liberal arts education? The narrator of Baker’s book wants not only to observe the raptors as empirical realities, but to gain a “sharpen[ed] vision” (13) to see, as he puts it, “the hardest thing of all . . . what is really there” (19).

But even when the narrator seems to get exactly what it is that he is after, it turns out that the sort of desire that motivates his search is exactly the sort of desire that can never be satiated this side of heaven. Even as he marvels at the falcon’s tremendous power of flight, for him to see it is to want to continue to see:

Now, I thought, I have seen the best of the peregrine; there will be no need to pursue it farther; I shall never want to search for it again. I was wrong of course. One can never have enough (149).

This feeling may rhyme well with some of our own experiences in education, whether as educators, those being educated, or both. Whereas early on in their study students might be frustrated at the lack of definitive answers at the mysteries opened by common texts, later they come to see the wisdom in asking more and more incisive, provocative questions which come up productively against some aporia. As Kass reflects in “The Aims of Liberal Education,” “Unlike the solution to a problem, the gaining of an answer to our questions does not dissolve the quest, or at least, does not abolish the desire. Like other forms of genuine love, love does not vanish but even grows when the object is present. As the lover loves to gaze on the beloved, so the questing mind delights in beholding the insights it receives” (92-3).

To undertake a course of study in the liberal arts is also to appreciate alongside Newman that some enterprises simply are their own reward, not for anything, not economized into profit or the crassness of gain, which chides in a small but significant way the calculus that human persons can be measured in terms of use, commodity, economy, or exchange value. Liberal arts education is not really for vocational training or to produce scholarship, or for becoming more cultured, even if it does happen along the way. The singular aim of liberal education, rather, is “the cultivation in each of us of the disposition actively to seek the truth and to make the truth our own,” as Kass put it (86), or likewise, the cultivation of Newman’s “philosophical habit of mind.”

The Windhover: To Christ our Lord

Readers of Thomas Merton will have already guessed that the title of this article, “The Humanities and the Birds of Appetite,” is a riff on the title of Merton’s 1968 book Zen and the Birds of Appetite. I wonder if there is a certain wisdom to be found in his prefatory author’s note:

Where there is carrion lying, meat-eating birds circle and descend. Life and death are two. The living attack the dead, to their own profit. The dead lose nothing by it. They gain too, by being disposed of. Or they seem to, if you must think in terms of gain and loss . . . Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the ‘nothing,’ the ‘no-body’ that was there, suddenly appears . . . It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.

In the study of the liberal arts, we are best served, I think, to envision our task not like vultures who pick over the bones of carrion long dead, but more like these raptors, like predators who seek a living prey, who revel in the dynamic, dramatic thrill of the hunt and not just the impoverished categories of gain and loss. Scavengers are content with nourishing themselves on dead things that have been left behind and that are relatively easy to obtain. The aim of liberal arts education, however, is—through often agonistic grappling with our texts and with each other—to cultivate a disposition of thoughtful inquiry, to seek as if we desire whole mysterious worlds beyond bare facticity, conceptual formulations, and merely pragmatic solutions to problems and nothing beyond the sake of knowledge itself, to go out hunting for the truth in whatever dells or valleys or forests or castles or rivers in which it may be found without foreclosing any possibility of free inquiry. May we desire and question and quest in such a way that the scavengers will miss it.

The “questing” impulse of desire at the heart of all human experience, however, and that which animates the program of liberal education in its most ideal forms, cannot and will not be sated by books alone, no matter how profound the texts or compelling the teachers. A liberal education, after all, “makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman,” as Newman warned. Knowledge is not virtue, is not redemption, is not sanctification, is not divinization. The act of reading the written word is thus only propaedeutic to the wild, glorious participation in the eternal Word, Christ the Windhover, who calls us all unto himself. He is no aporia, but the Truth. He is as Hopkins knew him to be: our “morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,” a raptor come down improbably from heaven. Christ is the “bird” who sacralizes the “sheer plod” of everything with his hidden presence in all things, his own holy wounds testament to those who “fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion,” inviting all who seek him an entryway into that which is indeed the hardest thing to see, that which is really there.

EDITORIAL NOTE: A different version of this article was delivered as the annual “Opening Charge” to faculty and students in the University of Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies, Fall 2021. 

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