by Ella Johnson
Anytime I want a laugh, I pull up an email my sister Ari forwarded to me, written by one of her classmates… they both graduated a few years ago. The email is about the insane amount of readings an Mount Liberty College student is expected to absorb. It’s titled: “Welcome to the Trenches.” The email outlines how we students are expected to read more pages weekly than most graduate students, on top of full-time classes.
I find the phrase “welcome to the trenches” quite funny because all we really do is sit around and read. But in reality, my education is that serious to me. I believe that satan is real, that the Savior Jesus Christ will soon come again, and that there is a battle between good and evil going on right now. This war is more convoluted and intricate than it has ever been.
In High School, I was plagued by Pilot’s supposedly cynical question: “Oh say, what is truth?” As a child, the world was pretty simple. I didn’t have a smart phone, and my favorite pass-time was to make masterpieces from grass and twigs with my siblings. As I grew up, I was slowly exposed to contradictory ideas, and confusing people. With an extreme hatred for hypocrisy, and often for myself, I struggled to find a place somewhere between rigid religious world views and wacky postmodernism.
My education at Mount Liberty has gracefully guided me through the mighty and conflicting things I so desperately wanted to know. I now have the tools I need to face complexity with hope and humility. It’s truly impossible to tell you all in detail how this education gave me these tools, but I’ll attempt to give just a taste. The way each professor taught me, with their extreme care, interest, and desire for me to succeed — and my hilarious and insightful classmates — taught me almost as much as the books I read.
As I’ve looked back on the past four years, there have been key themes that have stuck out to me. A Portrait of Abbess Hildegard von Bingen, a document I read in my first year, deeply struck me with its themes of sexuality and femininity, astounding writings for what people consider to be the “dark ages.” Jacques Barzun’s writings about Martin Luther’s antisemitism and his influence of the Peasant’s war, as well as Erasmus’ even-keeled and wise contributions to the Reformation, taught me so much about myself. Carl Jung’s quote I found to be true over and over again: “Every good quality has its bad side, and nothing that is good can come into the world without directly producing a corresponding evil.” Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible solidified Jung’s observation in my mind forever. My classmates are probably tired of me talking about Thomas Sowell’s book A Conflict of Visions, because of how deeply it impacted my view of the world and how passionate I am about trade-offs vs perfect solutions, and that everyone is inevitably a hypocrite. I read every word of Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, and most of it out loud to one of my classmates, and Ridley’s pages and pages of research almost succeeded in making me a total optimist. There will always be people bemoaning about being “overworked, anxious, or isolated,” but Ridley refutes that economically, we truly live in the greatest time in the world. I reveled in the drama in Homer’s Odyssey, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Thomas Mann’s The Joker. At this point I should have the whole Constitution of the United States memorized (I don’t) but I learned invaluable things about the tyranny/anarchy cycle, Russell Kirk’s interpretation of a Revolution not made, but prevented, the lack of checks and balances on the judicial branch, and the ongoing debate today between the Federalists and the Anti-Feds. Ecclesiastes 1:9 “there is no new thing under sun” — The history of civilization taught me this from the women demanding The Oppian Law be repealed in 200 BC so they could wear jewelry in the streets all the way up to Mr. Jones stories at Columbia and students chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go.” The slippery nature of language and meaning has been bred into me from my study of latin, different translations of texts, philosophers like Derrida and Wittgenstein, and the Tower of Babel. I feel I finally have a grasp on the philosophy of science and mathematics from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to Euclid, Apollonius, Galileo, Newton, Francis Bacon, Popper, and Thomas Kuhn. Dr. Rogers taught me about historiography, and I learned so much about the nature of education from scholasticism in medieval times to the early years of Harvard to John Dewey to C.S. Lewis. I could go on for pages about all I’ve learned and the tools I now have.
But, what did I actually accomplish at Mount Liberty? Well, I didn’t fight in trenches, I didn’t get trained for a specific job, and I didn’t join a canoeing club…though maybe one day. But I felt that in some small way, I was able to revive the purpose of a true education. As it says on the walls of the Library of Congress: “The true University of these days is a collection of books.” What happened to “these days”? I’d like to go back to them, with less TikTok and more playing in the yard. At Mount Liberty, I got lost in some of the best and the worst books, and found myself reflected back in them. It was in the quiet corners of my study where I was able to unlock some of my greatest challenges and perplexities. So many of us are ever learning, yet never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. So many of us are starving for words of solace and understanding, but we get lost in the intricately placed weeds. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”
Mount Liberty revived my childlike wonder for the world, instilled deeper foundations of faith in my heart, and made me grateful for every interaction I’ve had with someone who thinks differently than me.
The things I’ve learned at Mount Liberty have allowed me to put on the armor of God, and be a true warrior against the evil that exists, not on a bloody battlefield like Joan of Arc, but in the trenches of mighty and conflicting philosophies, “for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”