by Elissa McCormack
Elissa McCormack gave the student speech at this year’s graduation on May 22, 2009. The following is the text of her speech.
As someone who went to a Jesuit university as an undergraduate and who will be returning to the Jesuits for doctoral work, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the qualities of a Dominican education.
First, there is the emphasis placed by Dominicans on foundational or first principles in philosophy or theology. This can best be illustrated with a comparison to my undergraduate experience. There was one old Jesuit professor who used the same method in all of his classes; he would draw a triangle on the board to represent the mystery of God and a stick figure to represent our human response to the mystery of God. While I was still an undergraduate, in fact, I met an alum who told me that those drawings were the only thing I needed to understand in order to understand this Jesuit’s classes. At DSPT the thing that gets drawn on the board over and over again is SF over PM, to represent the combination of substantial form and prime matter. One could almost say that this is the one key principle that you need to understand in order to understand all of the rest of your classes at the Dominican School. I’m pretty certain that this came up in just about every single class that I took here; the non-DSPT students in our classes had not taken the “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophical Anthropology” series of courses, so they had missed out on this key piece of knowledge about the world and needed to be taught. In order to explain to you the immense importance of substantial form and prime matter in less than a minute, I hear that some of the Dominican brothers have said that the closest thing in this world to prime matter is tofu. Before you give it form, tofu is just tofu, but once you cook it and give it form, you can have tofu burgers, tofu stir fry, tofu chili… I’ve even seen a recipe online for something called “Tofu Pumpkin Cheesecake.” By giving it a different form, your tofu can be anything; without form it’s not much… just tofu. Now, I’m sure that the faculty is worried that I’ve misunderstood everything they’d tried to teach because of my comparison between prime matter and tofu; but yes, I understand that tofu is not prime matter.
Another quality of a Dominican education is the emphasis on both philosophy and theology, which is one of the reasons why I chose to come to DSPT in the first place. Interestingly enough, this all came out in one of the very first classes I took at DSPT, “Revelation and Theology”. As background for this story, you need to understand that I walked into class the first day, my very first class as a DSPT student, to discover that I was the lone lay woman in a class full of men studying to be priests! That was quite the first impression!
As part of the class, we were to have two debates, the first of which was “whether philosophy is necessary for theology.” Immediately, the three Dominicans in class took the pro side and I was left to argue against the necessity for theology with a Jesuit and a Franciscan. I’ve always said that this sounds like the beginning of one of those “walk into a bar” jokes: “A Jesuit, Franciscan, and lay woman walk into a bar to debate with three Dominicans…” (If anyone can come up with a good punch line for that one, let me know.) In this debate, it turned out that I was lucky to be the only woman in the class. Although we didn’t win the debate, we came pretty close due to our brilliant idea to include the three female Doctors of the Church who most definitely did not have any formal education in philosophy. I started out my part of the debate by saying that I had recently read an article that talked about masculine versus feminine ways of doing theology—the former being based on philosophical rationality and the latter on experience. I then strategically focused on Thérèse of Lisieux, quoting, “Ah! si des savants ayant passé leur vie dans l’étude étaient venus m’interroger, sans doute auraient-ils été étonnés de voir une enfant de quatorze ans comprendre les secrets de la perfection, secrets que toute leur science ne leur peut découvrir, puisque pour les posséder il faut être pauvre d’esprit” (Thérèse de Lisieux, Histoire d’une âme (Paris: Sarment, 2001), 131). Not a direct translation, but she says that if great scholars who had spent their lives in study questioned her, they would be amazed at the knowledge she had that they could not discover, because in order to know these things you must be poor in spirit. This, as hoped, threw all of the Dominicans off… after all, who wants to argue against the Little Flower!
This story also illustrates another one of the qualities of a Dominican education, the disputatio, the method used in medieval universities where students and professors would debate the pros and cons of a specific topic. One of the things that DSPT has done so well is to recreate that type of discussion, not only in the classrooms, but also in student activities like the Owl of Minerva philosophy forum and the Dumb Ox theology forum, the latter so named because Saint Thomas Aquinas’s schoolmates called him a Dumb Ox. For those who don’t already know the story, Aquinas wouldn’t speak up in class so his schoolmates all doubted his intelligence, luckily Saint Albert the Great recognized that it was precisely due to his great intelligence that he wasn’t speaking up! Thomas Aquinas definitely still has a posse, and you can find it here at the Dominican School.
One of the things that DSPT values highly is using the traditions of philosophy and theology to speak to contemporary culture. This is something that happens regularly in the classrooms and in the student philosophy and theology forums. It’s amazing the kind of groups that you can bring together at DSPT in these types of discussions, after all, where else would I get a crowd to come and listen to my presentation about Christ-like figures in the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer? It is in this sense that DSPT is truly a community of scholars. Students can gather together in the classroom, or over lunch in the Galleria, and discuss what they are working on in their classes. Recently I overheard a discussion over Tuesday Lunch that involved a comparison between the medieval, Franciscan philosopher-theologian Duns Scotus and the Japanese horror movie The Ring.
Probably the most important quality of a Dominican education is the combination of contemplation and action, something that we, as graduates, should remember as we embark on our next journeys. We need to take what we’ve learned here—about substantial form and prime matter, about accidental and essential qualities—and apply them to our discussions with today’s world. We can take the methods that we’ve learned here, like the emphasis on discovering first principles, and use them to talk to the world, by going back to find what we hold in common with our debate partners. Of course, in my field of history, going back to the roots means tracing obscure seventeenth-century heresies back to Augustine and tends to take a while; there’s quite a lot of Church history to trace things back into!
We must always remember, as Fr. Michael says at almost every graduation, Commencement is not an end, but a beginning. Whether we are going on to further education, or starting new jobs with our new degrees in hand, we can take what we’ve studied at DSPT and act on it to make a difference in our communities, in the Church, in the Academy, and in the world.
