By Jack Rich
Richard McKeon's unpublished novel Little Flowers offers a window into his lifelong preoccupation with the liberal arts. Written in the late 1920s and sent to a publisher in 1930, the manuscript now sits in the Special Collections Archive, presumably finished but never published. Yet within its pages lies the same question that drove much of McKeon's scholarly work: what makes the liberal arts worthwhile? Why study them?
The novel follows Bernard, a medieval learned man in the 1600s who struggles with religion, ambition, and interpersonal relationships. At the heart of the story is Bernard's attempt to write a philosophical and religious text called Theologia Diaphorica—a work designed to make theology accessible to the common medieval person. Like Thomas Aquinas, Bernard structures his text as a series of questions and answers. But crucially, he writes in the common vernacular rather than Latin, hoping to reach those he cannot access through preaching and to encourage critical thinking rather than blind faith.
Through Bernard's story, McKeon does exactly what his protagonist attempts. Little Flowers isn't as philosophically dense as the Theologia Diaphorica might be, but it engages deeply with the issues and methods of philosophy and religion. McKeon fills the novel with medieval history, references to important philosophers, and explorations of their ideas. Yet he makes all of this digestible by embedding it in a profoundly human story—a man trying to reconcile his humanity with his religious and scholarly life.
The novel becomes McKeon's own vernacular translation. Just as Bernard uses accessible language to democratize theology, McKeon uses narrative to make philosophy and the liberal arts approachable. This mirrors the teaching methods McKeon would later employ: telling stories about philosophers, drawing examples from his own life, and recalling the questions a "simple-minded student" of his might have asked, all to make complex ideas less intimidating. In Little Flowers, the story itself provides the foundation for understanding, offering stepping stones to ask the fundamental questions about why the humanities matter—even if McKeon, like Bernard, never provides a definitive answer.