Love Quote by Robertson Davies

Oxford, in Robertson Davies's telling, doesn't hand its students knowledge so much as a posture: "a genial irreverence toward learning". The adjective does the real work. This isn't the sneer of the cynic or the anti-intellectual, but the cultivated grin of someone confident enough to poke at the idol without smashing it. Davies, a novelist steeped in institutions and their rituals, understands that the academy can turn learning into a piety: syllabi as scripture, credentials as sacraments. "Genial irreverence" is the antidote to that sanctimony.

The subtext is almost parental. Oxford "gives her sons" not mere instruction but a temperament, and the gendered phrasing nods to the old, clubby lineage of the place. Davies isn't only praising a pedagogical method; he's praising an atmosphere of educated play, where teasing the canon becomes a mode of intimacy with it. Irreverence here is a way of refusing to be intimidated by greatness. You can argue with Aristotle because you feel entitled to the conversation.

Then comes the turn: "and from that irreverence love may spring". Davies flips the expected moral order. Respect doesn't produce devotion; freedom does. When you allow yourself to laugh at learning's pretensions, you stop treating it as a church and start treating it as a companion. The context is a writer's defense of humane education against both reverence-by-rote and utilitarian careerism: love of learning isn't manufactured by pressure or awe, but by the permission to be bright, skeptical, and still warmly engaged.