Unto the Third and Fourth Generation
By Jaroslav Pelikan, Th.D. h.c. (1972), Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University
Saturday, May 25, 2003

Anyone who grew up on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism of 1529, as many of you did—and as I did, too, of course—will recognize in the title of this commencement address a passage from the twentieth chapter of the Book of Exodus, which Luther, with that sovereign freedom in relation to Holy Tradition and even to Holy Scripture that was at one and the same time his most endearing and his most exasperating quality, picked up and transposed from its original location because these words have an existential meaning for me on this day, when a third generation of Pelikans is receiving a St. Olaf degree (but, unlike my two sons and now my grandson, I didn’t have to work for mine, although I was the first to receive one, and I had the hood to prove it); and because the mystery of the continuity of the Church and of the faith unto the third and fourth generation, and far beyond the third and fourth generation, has come to bear a special theological and liturgical meaning for me that has now carried me far beyond Luther’s Small Catechism—or, more precisely, well behind it—I want to ponder the words “unto the third and fourth generation” as a pedagogical principle that describes a liberal education, and in a special way the liberal education you have received here at St. Olaf College, which identifies itself, as do I, both by the humanistic heritage and by the Christian heritage.

If this address has a text, then, in addition to the words of Exodus 20.5 that are the source for its title, it would have too a luminous affirmation by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. For as my academic Apostle’s Creed consists of the words that I cite at the slightest threat from Goethe’s Faust, “What you have as heritage, Now take as task, / For thus you will make it your own,” so also my academic Thirty-Nine Articles or Augsburg Confession comes from Edmund Burke:

One of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated [note Burke’s word “consecrated”], is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters…. Barbarism with regard to science and literature, unskilfulness with regard to arts and manufactures, would infallibly succeed to the want of a steady education and settled principle…. Society is indeed a contract…. It is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
Those words could be the constitution of the “Great Conversation” program of St. Olaf College, and of the College in its entirety, of its past and of its present—and, please God, of its future.

For, more’s the pity, it is probably not necessary any longer to prove that “barbarism with regard to science and literature, unskilfulness with regard to arts and manufactures, would infallibly succeed to the want of a steady education and settled principle”: they are already doing so, even as we speak. But you, as members of the St. Olaf Class of 2003, have been the beneficiaries of a “settled principle” that views human existence as a reflection of the image of God and human history as a staging area for the justice and the mercy of God. And therefore you know what Burke means by a “seady education,” with just the right mixture of structure and freedom. The curricular chaos of an unsteady education was graphically described by my lifelong mentor in such matters, Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, my Ph.D. Alma Mater from 1946, when he quipped that if we allowed patients to come to the pharmacy of Billings Hospital at the University and to select on their own which pills looked so interesting to them that they wanted to take them, we would—and we should—be sent to jail. Yet here are generations of undergraduates, presenting (as the medics say) with chronic ignorance, that most virulent of all intellectual diseases; and we say to them: “Far be it from me to tell you which courses you ought to take!” The imaginative design of the St. Olaf Interim mini-semester, with its dazzling array each January of all those intellectual and cultural goodies (and all that tourism), could by itself bring on serious indigestion. But set into the context of your “steady education,” it provides the variety that truly is the spice of life and that lends new meaning to the bread-and-butter components of the curriculum, which continue to define it.

But at the heart of that curriculum and of a truly liberal education is still the conviction, in Burke’s words, that we are only “ the temporary possessors and life-renters” of our tradition and therefore we must never become “unmindful of what [we] have received from [our] ancestors, or of what is due to [our] posterity, [nor] act as if [we] were the entire masters.” For as I have spent an entire scholarly and academic lifetime trying to remind all who were willing to listen (and even those who refused to listen), you do not have the freedom of choice to decide whether or not you have been shaped by your cultural, intellectual, and spiritual heritage: you have been, as you have been by your DNA, and that’s that. You do, however have two other choices: first, whether to know and understand this heritage in all its complexity and ambiguity or to be ignorant of it even as it continues to push you around; and second (but only second) whether to affirm it or to reject it. For knowing and understanding the heritage ought to be, it seems to me, the presupposition even for rejecting it. Therefore the College (or, at any rate, this College), respecting your freedom as it should and as it does, introduces you to the diversity of all the many different spiritual, cultural, and intellectual forces that have shaped us and that are shaping us now, from every century and, increasingly, from every continent and from every faith tradition.

Above all, as Burke argued in response to Jean Jacques Rousseau, the social contract is “a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Even as resolutely nonpolitical a person as I am, therefore, can resonate to G. K. Chesterton’s urging that we must “give votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors,” because, he insisted, tradition is “the democracy of the dead.” Not the latest hot trends from this or that school of ideologues or critics, but the consensus, and the dissensus, of “those who are living [and] those who are dead,” together with a profound sense of our responsibility to “those who are [yet] to be born: and who have a moral claim upon us, must inform our choices, which means that it is the business of the College—and of the Church—to provide us with the means from our heritage for such informed choices, as the one whom the St. Olaf Choir at last night’s concert called “John the Revelator” saw in his vision of the great host (Rv 7.9 AV), “from all nations, and kindreds and peoples, and tongues.” (At this point, as I myself have unforgettably heard them do, a previous generation of Norwegian Lutherans would surely break into a chorus of “den Store Hvide Flok! Behold the Host Arrayed in White!”) Only when we have listened to those voices can we be set free from what the great English Roman Catholic historian Lord Acton once described as “the tyranny of environment and the pressure of the air we breathe,” the captivity of the present, and then make our choices in that freedom.

St. Olaf College has given you such a freedom, for you to carry it unto the third and fourth generation—and then unto the thirtieth and fortieth generation. You have been blessed, so that now you in turn can become a blessing to what the charter of another great college has called “Church and Civil State.”

Works Cited
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, lines 682-83 (translation my own).

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 192-94.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Image Books, 1959), 48.

Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History, with an Introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper (New York: Meridiann Books, 1961), 44.