Of course I understand that there are ways of studying political philosophy that don't involve setting out fecklessly on epic intellectual and spiritual quests that lead you through dark woods and halls of mirrors, rambling old houses and brand new palazzos built on ancient plans, rooms alternately dim and brightly lit, to some of your life's most central projects.

But thanks to Hadley Arkes, now the Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions emeritus, I studied it the other way: the way that does, in fact, involve setting out fecklessly etc. Hadley taught us that political philosophy is everybody's business, and is an urgent adventure (and an awfully fun one).

The Arkesian Kool-Aid

Despite freshman-year rumors, the Arkesian Kool-aid turned out not to be the kind of drink that stops thought, but the kind of drink that starts it. For so many of his students, what we write, what we read, the terms in which we think—they’ve all got his fingerprints all over them—even where we depart from him.

I hope, somehow, that my approach to conversation, to encountering other humans, also has his fingerprints on it—because the one thing that he always conveyed was the importance, the utter worthwhileness of paying attention to people. Having good conversations is a thing that is as worthwhile as writing good books or building good buildings—possibly more so. And conversations always require attention not just to arguments but to the people making them.

He's the opposite of someone who is more interested in ideas than in people. He is interested in ideas because it matters what people think; because what they think, how they know truth, can hurt or help them, can destroy or create. He gets this across in every conversation he has, in every extensive commentary on every paper he grades, commentaries that were themselves like conversations.

We knew, of course, that he was not particularly a detached academic; he did his own legwork; he periodically disappeared to Do Things in Washington, or perhaps more precisely, to Get Up To Things there. But we also knew what his priorities were: he was a teacher. And if he was, as one of his other former students has described, something of a Nero Wolfe, sending all of us Archie Goodwins out into the world, he only ever sent us out for the City’s good, and ours.

What He Taught

And what was it that he taught? Above all, he taught us to read—slowly, closely—and to argue. Teaching us to write was there as well, but the writing came second to speaking, I think. Reading him, one hears his teaching-voice in one’s head.

And in general his approach was … well, somewhat different from others of those who have taught in this tradition. Of course we were assigned all the usual suspects first, but Hadley’s the only one I know of who encouraged a Garments of the Court and Palace approach to (for example) print-outs of certain dissenting Supreme Court opinions as well—and above all, to Lincoln.

We were expected to read especially the formal court opinions alert to the power of these words. Written by those in a particular office, in a particular circumstance, they had a power not completely divorced from the liturgical; but we also were aware of being invited into the company of teachers, of friends, of people who did us honor by welcoming us into their conversation, through the ceremonious activity of reading. And the ceremony was not decreased just because one was reading in a coffeehouse on North Pleasant Street, and not in exile outside Florence.

It’s easy to get this wrong: to misunderstand. There was no worship of the authority of our authors, here. Where a writer went wrong, though he might be a chief justice, he had to be challenged—and, in fact, especially then. The authority was not in the office, but in reason, in reality; any freshman might talk back to a judge on the bench, if he could substantiate his counterarguments.

But the power was in the office, and so when one read the bad opinions—even those that reached the right conclusions, but through the means of unjustified or vague premises and muddled reasoning—one had the sense of witnessing a slow disaster: Pompeii, but with ash and lava overtaking the city at a hundredth of the speed.

Arkes the Rationalist

I think I still would be pro-life even without having run into Hadley, but I might well be too stressed out and panicky and and incoherent to write about abortion (and about other things where the stakes are frighteningly high) if it hadn't been for him. He helped me find out how to write about the most important things in a way that's not just an expression of my own feelings, but that is public, accessible to public reason. And how to nevertheless not stop feeling about the topics of my reasoning.

What Hadley instilled in us was what might be described as a belief in the effectiveness of Reason. Learning from Hadley, one knew in one’s bones that if the argument worked—if the structure was right and the premises were accurate and the conclusions, therefore, followed—then the actual carrying out of any physical-world consequences was a sort of mopping-up operation. All the work of statecraft and law and politics is done in the classroom, in the courtroom, in conversation, in the pages of journal articles, or in the margins of returned papers.

Leaving the Octagon, walking down the hill back towards Frost Library, one might turn to him and say, “But that implies that...” and name a physical-world consequence. But a good deal of the work had already been done. (Burke would be appalled. To think there are people out there who believe Professor Arkes to be a conservative.)

He has been called, because of this general way of approaching the law, a rationalist. It’s meant to be a fear-word, a bad thing. But what it means is that he argues that positive laws, to be just, must flow from just premises in the natural law, or must not violate them; that law is, and should be, a matter of reason and right, not merely will and expediency. And he has a kind of faith that this will happen: that our legal system will hold together, will deliver on the implications of the premises it embraces, for better or worse, at one time or another.

A Different Kind of Christian

I won't say that I wouldn't be a Christian if it weren't for Hadley. I was some kind of Christian already at Amherst; I had already apostatized from being a good Upper West Sider. But if it hadn't been for Hadley I might well be a different kind of Christian. (It's a bit the way one friend introduces you to aspects of another friend you would not otherwise know, which is especially odd given how many more years it took for Hadley to stop dancing around the edges himself.)

I don't think I'd be a fideist, but I might have been in the camp of those who regard the Greek philosophical tradition as being a corruption of the essentially Jewish nature of the Church.

In other words, being taught by Hadley Arkes makes things slightly better for you when you read N. T. Wright (but you should still read N. T. Wright, for certain things.)

Dorothy Sayers wrote, in “A Vote of Thanks to Cyrus,” about the shock she'd had realizing that Esther's King Ahasuerus was, in fact, Xerxes. "Xerxes!—but one knew all about Xerxes. He was not just classics, but real history; it was against Xerxes that the Greeks had made their desperate and heroic stand at Thermopylae." There's no special otherworldly category into which one can safely stash the Bible. "Here was God," she writes "—not Zeus or Apollo or any of the Olympian crowd...bursting into Greek history in a most uncharacteristic way and taking an interest in events and people that seemed altogether outside His province. It was disconcerting."

Part of my version of this was, I think, to notice the fact that the words that the New Testament was written in were Greek words, and that these words had a history, and that, thanks to Hadley, that I knew some of that history.

One reads, and one begins to suspect that God was deliberately, almost cheekily, inspiring Jews to use Greek philosophical terms to describe what he was up to (Jn. 1:1. Also see Phil. 2:5-11.). At which point ... the scalp prickles. Something is about to happen: the world becomes charged, like the feeling of the air before a thunderstorm, both because of what is implied by this about what God was doing among the Gentiles in history, and by what is implied about the structure of reality itself: one realizes that this is going on, and one feels the whole of the Scholastic tradition looking over one’s shoulder.

If it weren't for Hadley I might not have been in a position to notice this spookiness, or to love it. Without him I might not have known how to want Athens and Jerusalem to be friends. I might not know, or might not know in the same way, that a good deal of the magic of the world lies in the word "ought," that the law is something to be rejoiced in as grace is.

Better Than We Are

Professor Arkes has, it seems to me, an unusually pronounced ability to create knock-on effects in the lives of his ex-students: knock-on effects that tend to generate anecdotes. There is one story, for example, about Geoff O’Connell, class of ‘70, who, dodging bullets as CIA Chief of Station in Beirut, found himself thinking “...and I got into this to test out the ideas in that Bureaucracy class of Hadley’s.”

For others of his students, one symptom of the Arkes knock-on effect has been a habit of participating in a particular sort of debate, and even participating with a particular style of argument: one that has followed us from the campus in Western Massachusetts through the rest of our lives. It is not a style of reflection one can shake. Making these arguments, pursuing them and deploying them, is not something that one stops doing after college: that was, many of his students have found, only the start.

Another of Hadley’s students, Jim Mastrangelo, illustrated an aspect of this style (and amused himself) in an online collaborative book that we recently put together for him with the following reflection:

One of Prof. Arkes's noted peers at Amherst College is known for asking of his classes: “Does law ask us to be better than we are?” As bold as the political ramifications of this inquiry might be...perhaps the important question, given our ability to think, is not, “Does law ask us to be better than we are?” or even, “What should we be?” but rather, “What should we have for lunch?” Which question, of course, in turn hinges upon what we can [surely Jim means “may”] have for lunch. And through reasoned consideration, we can perhaps determine the best possible lunch.

"Does the law ask us to be better than we are?" Well, if it doesn't, what right could it possibly have to ask us to do anything? What may one legislate if not morality? Either Option A: The law asks us precisely to behave better than we do; or Option B: it tells us what kind of ice cream to order. And option B is tyranny. Because we're persons who act, by asking us to behave better than we do, the law is asking us to become better than we are—right?

Professor Arkes always asked us to become better than we were, by asking us to think more clearly than we did, to read more carefully, to state our case more precisely. He asked us to love wisdom. And he asked us to love it on behalf of people who could not yet love it themselves. He taught us that is was possible to desire the Good and to delight in it, to hunt it down in its lair; and if some of us have found that It had been hunting for us all along, I don’t think that Hadley has been too taken aback.

Susannah Black received her BA from Amherst College and her MA from Boston University. She is associate editor at Providence Magazine, is a founding editor of Solidarity Hall (which now appears as The Dorothy Option on Patheos), and is on the Board of the Distributist Review. Her writing has appeared in First ThingsThe Distributist ReviewSolidarity Hall, Providence, Amherst Magazine, Front Porch Republic, Ethika Politika, The Human Life Review, and elsewhere. She blogs at Radio Free Thulcandra and tweets at @suzania. A native Manhattanite, she is now living in Queens.