In Part 1, we saw that “tradition” is a keyword among proponents of educational renewal. But what does “tradition” actually mean? I turned to Russell Kirk as prominent expert on “tradition” within the broader renewal movement, but found that his view, lacking a clear reference to truth, distorted his ideas about tradition and freedom.

Now, in Part 2, I plan to propose an alternative to Kirk’s view of tradition by revisiting the thought of another, but very different, midcentury conservative from Europe: Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI.

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Ratzinger on Tradition

Ratzinger thought deeply about tradition explicitly in connection to truth. Immersed in midcentury European academic life, he was sensitive to its frustration with the merely traditional, since some form of traditionalism had fueled the rise of Hitler. But he also recognized that simply rejecting tradition, and with it the traditional respect for truth, was no less destructive. Faced with those extremes, the problem was how to work within a tradition while keeping it, and oneself, open to the corrective influence of truth.

Ratzinger targeted other academic centrists who tried to erase the problem by modeling the humanist disciplines on the paradigm of natural science. In this paradigm, he writes,

the sum total of reliable data is continually on the increase, from Pythagoras to Einstein, and scientific research draws upon it as a self-contained intellectual treasury. The history within which a given idea is formed does not belong to its internal structure. For that idea it is not so much its own living history as a prehistory which is over and done with. The natural scientist has no need of it. (Eschatology, p. 23)

But this’s only possible for science because science deals with quantifiable matter and forces. Literature, history, philosophy, and theology, by contrast, deal with ideas, which only have one foot in the world of measurable “data.”

The “results” of the history of philosophy do not consist in a catalogue of formulae which can be totted up into a final sum. Instead, they are a series of raids on the deep places of being, carried out according to the possibilities of their own time. The history in which these explorations were made remains a living history, not a dead prehistory. (ibid, pp. 23-24)

Each historically conditioned raid “on the deep places of being,” or rather the specific conditions under which this or that raid was conducted, constitute a distinct tradition, in the sense that Alasdair MacIntyre means in After Virtue and which, I think, Kirk has in mind when he invokes tradition. Traditions overlap, compete, contradict, and so on, in part because each is incomplete — we’re dealing with raids, after all, not wars of conquest. And traditions die or adapt as they come into contact with each other, which is as it must be. For, says Ratzinger, “it is in the multivalent message of the entire history, and its overall critical evaluation, that truth is disclosed and with it the possibility of fresh knowledge.” (ibid, p. 24)

In other words, we can’t seek truth by rejecting tradition, but we can’t find it by resting in tradition, either. If we understand tradition like this, education certainly involves immersion in tradition, but for the sake of seeking truth: mere cultural conservatism isn’t enough. For the more deeply we are immersed in a cultural tradition, the more we understand that the great figures in every tradition tried to transcend their specific time and place and reach out for the absolute.

The fundamental openness of all men to others, and the agreement in essentials to be found even between those cultures farthest removed from each other, can only be explained by the hidden way our souls have been touched by truth. But the variety, which can even lead to a closed attitude, comes in the first instance from the limitation of the human mind: no one can grasp the whole of anything, but many and varied perceptions and forms come together in a sort of mosaic, suggested by the way that each is complementary with regard to the others: in order to form the whole, each needs all the others. (Truth and Tolerance, p. 65)

Perhaps a concrete illustration of what Ratzinger has in mind would help. We’re accustomed to thinking of the Bible as the Bible, a single volume we can browse and pray with. But that obscures the fact that the Bible is the product of a long and complex tradition of thought and ritual. The Bible came into being book by book and edit by edit; it didn’t drop finished from the sky. That piecemeal emergence, though, doesn’t compromise its unity, says Ratzinger:

the [Biblical] author does not speak as a private, self-contained subject. He speaks in a living community, that is to say, in a living historical movement not created by him, nor even by the collective, but which is led forward by a greater power that is at work. (Jesus of Nazareth, Foreword, p. xx)

That “living community” was a concrete group of people who lived, worked, worshiped, and died in the Promised Land over the course of centuries. For Ratzinger, the semi-permanent cultural structures prescribed by the Law — the liturgical cycle of feasts, the habits of prayer, moral conduct — were all concrete modes by which the authors of the Bible encountered God and His Word, an encounter they described, interpreted, and answered through their writings.

The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of every other tradition: shared literary, ritual, and aesthetic customs, along with canonical interpretations of what those customs mean, seems to constitute the essence of a tradition. A key aspect of Ratzinger’s view, though, is that customs have priority over interpretation, because interpretation is necessarily limited by time and perspective: “no one can grasp the whole of anything, but many and varied perceptions and forms come together in a sort of mosaic.” In other words, a culture is more than its intellectual tradition: the latter is composed of that mosaic of complementary, sometimes contradictory, interpretations, all of which serve to reveal the meaning of a shared life in the world.

But the priority of custom over interpretation isn’t absolute: if it were, then Ratzinger would be no different than Kirk. As it is, Ratzinger recognizes that as events and critical interpretations accumulate, and especially when interpretations are conducted as a search for truth, they redefine and purify inherited customs. For example, Ratzinger notes that while the ancient Israelites enacted the rituals of the Torah, they were uneasy about the sufficiency of animal sacrifice. Their unease came into its own after the Babylonian Exile:

There was no Temple any more, no public and communal form of divine worship as decreed in the law. Deprived as she was of worship, Israel was bound to feel immeasurably poor and pathetic. There was no expiation any more, no “holocausts” ascending to God. In this crisis the conviction became ever clearer that Israel’s sufferings, through God and for God, the cry of her broken heart, her persistent pleading before the silent God, had to count in his sight as “fatted sacrifices” and whole burnt offerings. It was the very emptiness of Israel’s hands, the heaviness of her heart, that was now to be worship, to serve as a spiritual equivalent of the missing Temple oblations. (The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 45)

This refined concept of worship laid the foundation on which Jesus built His teaching of the supersession of the Temple by the sacrifice of Calvary. Interpretation and event conspired, as it were, to refine profoundly the cultural tradition that God almost literally handed down on Sinai.

Lest Ratzinger seem to endorse rationalism over piety for tradition, though, it’s worth pointing out that the purification can work both ways. Interpretation must be nourished by the very culture it may have to criticize in the spirit of truth: only when it begins in a spirit of piety can intelligence criticize without merely destroying.

Reverence for the truth is inseparable from that disposition of veneration which we call adoration. Truth and worship stand in an indissoluble relationship to each other; one cannot really flourish without the other, however often they have gone their separate ways in the course of history. (The Nature and Mission of Theology, p. 40)

This leads naturally to the question of freedom.

Ratzinger on Freedom

Steeped in mid-century Europe’s post-totalitarian obsession with autonomy, Ratzinger at first wondered why more of his contemporaries weren’t led back to the Gospel, or at least to belief in objective moral truth, after 1945. The subordination of truth to power, after all, was the defining feature of totalitarianism.

He eventually realized that the preconciliar Church had done much to make returning to belief in truth unattractive. Much of the Church’s rhetoric between 1848 and 1950 had focused on condemning errors, doubling down on moral prescriptions, and endorsing reactionary regimes — sometimes, at least rhetorically, in exchange for proclaiming that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). That proved fatal. For

where this center of the Christian message is not sufficiently expressed and appreciated, truth becomes a yoke that is too heavy for our shoulders, from which we must seek to free ourselves. But the freedom gained thereby is empty. It leads into the desolate land of nothingness and disintegrates of itself. (On Conscience, p. 41)

I would argue that Kirk’s exaltation of order, though arising from motives vastly different from those of the liberal intelligentsia in Ratzinger’s crosshairs, leads to a similarly empty idea of freedom. Why? Both overlook truth.

The question of freedom is inseparably linked to the question of truth. When truth is not a value in itself which merits both active interest and the expenditure of time independently of its results, profit can be the only criterion with which to evaluate knowledge. If this is the case, knowledge has its raison d’être no longer in itself, but in the objectives which it serves. It then belongs to the domain of ends and means. (The Nature and Mission of Theology, p.35)

Ratzinger’s fear that without truth, “profit can be the only criterion with which to evaluate knowledge” is clearly directed at libertarians, but it applies far beyond them to neoliberal opportunists, benevolent technocrats, and cultural conservatives.

Let’s focus on that last one. Says Russell Kirk, “studies in seventeenth-century literature and ancient history and quantum mechanics all are paths to order. And also they are paths to freedom: for the unexamined life is a servile existence, not worth living.” (Redeeming the Time, pp. 39-40) Only by ordering ourselves according to past cultural and scientific achievements can we hope to be free: no doubt. Yet why do those achievements order us? Kirk attributes their efficacy not to their truth, but to their origin… in faith? “Out of faith arises order; and once order prevails, freedom becomes possible.” (ibid, p. 40)

But what kind of freedom? What does freedom actually mean in a society where not only the end, but the whole network of means — the customs and use of language, clothing, manners, lifestyle as a whole — is determined by an order dictated by a faith you can’t question, can’t, ahem, examine, without threatening the whole edifice? Kirk wants to preserve the tension between order and freedom, but tension implies risk to both terms and he won’t expose order to the risk of scrutiny. For anyone unwilling to enact Kirk’s preferred expressions of piety for his preferred order of things, he has harsh words:

today a great many people within the Academy will submit to no authority, temporal or spiritual. They desire to be different, in morals as in politics. In our highly tolerant society, such extreme individualism seems an amusing pose. Its consequences may become unamusing. (ibid, p. 38)

Where does piety end and ipsedixitism begin? Kirk’s principles allow him to insist that there is a distinction, but say nothing about where the line should be drawn in practice. In Kirk’s commonwealth, you may be about as free as the People’s Republic of China is a republic.

And that, I think, is because Kirk’s idea of faith excludes freedom: he has quite insistently made freedom wholly dependent on faith. This is taking credo ut intelligam a bit too far — into the realm, indeed, of fideism. For if Ratzinger is correct, then for Christianity and Western anthropology, freedom is integral to belief itself.

St. Augustine defines the act of faith as “thinking with assent.” St. Thomas Aquinas echoes him, adding that when we believe, it is the will, assisted but not dominated by grace, that moves the intellect to assent. In a certain sense, therefore, no one is born or even technically “raised” Christian: upbringing and culture are crucial, but in the last analysis, they’re crucial because they entice mind and will, preparing both for the moment of mature assent.1

If the educational renewal which is blossoming in this country is to survive the frosts ahead and yield a full harvest, we’ll need to debate these and similar questions about tradition and freedom. But if we do so without recurring, at all times, to the primacy of truth, then we are nothing but noisy gongs and clanging cymbals — and we’ll certainly bear no fruit.

Educational renewal is gaining traction, as the recent Front Royal Statement attests. More thinkers are waking up to the fact that societies need humane, not merely STEM, education to survive — and that humane education means returning, in some way, to tradition. Indeed, “tradition” features prominently in the Front Royal Statement, Hillsdale College’s K12 initiative, the mission of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, The Heart of Culture published by The Habiger Institute for Catholic Leadership, and our very own Boethius Institute.

But what is tradition?

It’s intangible and vague; “it cannot be reduced to a finite list of texts,” notes Dr. Erik Ellis. At the same time, though, this vague and intangible something has anything but abstract influence: it’s “more fundamental and constitutive of the practices that animate our day-to-day experience” than any one book we read, no matter how ‘great,’ because it governs how we read, think, and feel anything.

Granted, valuing tradition doesn’t require exact agreement on what, precisely, you value. We at the Boethius Institute are teachers “of traditional liberal education devoted to continuing and deepening that tradition”, while the ICLE aims at “recovering and adapting the classical tradition of liberal education” and Hillsdale at “reviving the American tradition” of “classical education rooted in the liberal arts and sciences.” Everyone emphasizes different aspects of this broader tradition…

…but at some point, differences become disagreements. After all, this broader tradition includes Christian and pre-Christian ideals and disciplines which have taken sometimes contradictory forms in Europe and America over the centuries. We need to “rectify the names,” as Confucius believed, and settle what “tradition” means, lest our renewal devolve into partisan conflict.

In Part 1, I’ll critique a common conservative notion of tradition expounded by Russell Kirk and sustained by his followers in the renewal movement. In Part 2, I’ll argue in favor of what I think is a superior concept of tradition, developed from the writings of Joseph Ratzinger.

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Kirk on Tradition

You may be wondering, “Why Russell Kirk?”

In 1950, Lionel Trilling observed that “in the United States at this time … there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” (The Liberal Imagination, p. xv) Trilling wasn’t gloating: he was lamenting. He and his ilk were liberal, but he knew they needed critics “who will do us the service of forcing us to become more intelligent, who will require us to keep our ideas from becoming stale, habitual, and inert.” (ibid, xvi)

Russell Kirk was one of the first to answer Trilling’s challenge. After serving in the Second World War, he completed doctoral studies in Scotland in 1953 and accepted a teaching position at the University of Michigan — which he resigned that same year, citing the school’s proliferating electives and undue focus on athletics. But it was an eventful year for Kirk in positive ways, too: he published his lightly edited dissertation as The Conservative Mind to great acclaim. The book became a rallying point for the nascent conservative movement and Kirk its intellectual godfather.

Tradition occupies pride of place in Kirk’s thought. He popularized Edmund Burke’s distinction of civil from political society, his ambivalence toward innovation, and the underlying attitude toward heritage which animates both aspects of Burke’s thought, and which can be epitomized as piety for tradition. Such piety was needed now more than ever, Kirk thought: contempt for Western ideals, propounded by higher education and mass culture alike, inject a toxin into the body politic and corrode its civic vigor. The only cure is renewed piety, embodied in an imagination formed by loving exposure to the Western classics. For obvious reasons, therefore, Kirk devoted considerable attention to the question of education.

But as I discovered on revisiting his writings, Kirk also embodies the problem with a reactive theory of tradition. Rightly disgusted by the effects of rejecting tradition, his spirited embrace is insufficiently critical — and examining why is instructive.

In “The Conservative Purpose of Liberal Education”, he espouses a vision of education that reflects his usual idées fixes — order, tradition, and so on — but omits what I take to be the lynchpin of the whole affair: truth. That omission warps not just his view of education’s political significance, but of freedom itself.

“The primary purpose of liberal education,” says Kirk, “is the cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination, for the person’s own sake.” (Redeeming the Time, p. 43) He’s emphatic about that last qualification: such an education “is meant to develop the individual human being, the person, rather than serve the state.” (ibid, p. 43; emphasis mine) Given mid-century conservative fear of secular collectivism, that provision makes sense.

Yet Kirk can’t resist endorsing the trope that “[liberal education] helps to provide a society with a body of people who become leaders in many walks of life, on a large scale or a small” (ibid, p. 43); they “leaven the lump of modern civilization” (ibid, p. 46); and so on. But doing so undermines his anticollectivist convictions.

For is producing leaders and leavening the lump of civilization the purpose, or a side effect, of liberal education? Kirk caveats his way around that distinction. He initially treats education’s leavening as an unintended consequence: “in its practical effects, liberal education works for order in the soul, and order in the republic.” (p. 43) But then he undermines his caveat: “the function of liberal education is to conserve a body of received knowledge and to impart an apprehension of order to the rising generation.” (p. 44; emphases mine) Two pages later: “I am saying that the higher learning is meant to develop order in the soul, for the human person’s sake. I am saying that the higher learning is meant to develop order in the commonwealth, for the republic’s sake.” (p. 46; emphases mine)

First it’s just a matter of “practical effects,” then a matter of “function,” and finally the explicit teleology of “meant to develop,” with “order in the commonwealth” presumably corresponding to what he means by “order in the soul.” For Kirk, it would seem, education orders citizens so as to order the republic at large. His anticollectivist sympathies would rankle at putting it that way, but it’s hard to resist the impression that the order he treats as a side effect turns out to be the goal.

Contrast this with George Will’s discussion of education in The Conservative Sensibility, where his Burkean credentials are unquestionable but his view quite different.

If freedom is, among other things, freedom from the bondage of appetites and passions — from what Yuval Levin calls ‘inner anarchy’ — then the American project depends on pre- or extra-political arrangements for disciplined living. Therefore, although the right to freedom exists prior to government, it depends for its enjoyment on institutions of civil society and government. Hence statecraft is, inescapably, soulcraft, because education is, too. (The Conservative Sensibility, pp. 357-358; emphasis mine)1

In this context, Will defines the function of education as “the transmission of the basic truths of the arts and sciences in order to enable students to become critical and independent thinkers.” (ibid, p. 358) When you see past that anodyne phrase “critical thinking,” you realize that Will is more or less echoing Aristotle in De Partibus Animalium, and hence is closer to the extant tradition.2 Humane education can have a positive social effect, but only if and when it transmits truth, at least in the form of first principles.

Now, there’s something limited, no doubt, about restricting education simply to knowing first principles. It seems a bit too… rationalistic. Certainly, it doesn’t measure up to the ideal of paideia, which H.I. Marrou describes as “a mind fully developed, the mind of a man who has become truly man”. (A History of Education in Antiquity, p. 99)

Yet any concept of paideia which forgets that truth perfects “the mind of a man” also fails to measure up. And that, it seems to me, is the position in which Kirk finds himself. He is so committed to maintaining order that he lets the need for order eclipse the primacy of truth, without which order is merely prejudice backed by coercion.

Kirk on Freedom

This problem becomes clearer in Kirk’s view of freedom, showcased in “The Tension of Order and Freedom in the University”. He proposes to address “the relationship between order and freedom, and the part of a university in maintaining the tension between the two.” (Redeeming the Time, p. 29) By the time he’s done, that tension is gone:

Personal freedom must be found within a moral order. And public freedom must be found within a well-maintained social order; it must be the product of a common historical experience, of custom, of convention. (p. 38; emphasis mine)

In a word, “out of faith arises order; and once order prevails, freedom becomes possible.” (p. 40)

Now, in one sense, that’s obvious and unimpeachable. But as with tradition, Kirk’s view of freedom suffers from his failing to make any clear or direct reference to truth.

In this respect, Kirk sounds like Christopher Dawson on civil society. “Culture is inseparable from education,” says Dawson, “since education in the widest sense of the word is what the anthropologists term ‘enculturation,’ i.e. the process by which culture is handed on by the society and acquired by the individual.” (The Crisis of Western Education, p. 3) Accordingly, civil society — the realm of lived culture — can only flourish when “social authority and the world of culture take hold of [man] from the cradle and thrust back the frontier of transcendence behind the authority of parents and schoolmasters.” (Religion and Culture, p. 29) For Kirk, analogously, freedom is always and everywhere an effect of education, the result of adhering to the rhythm of a preexisting tradition. Like civil institutions for Dawson, freedom does not and cannot exist apart from inherited faith in a certain cosmic order.

Dawson’s language of thrusting back “the frontier of transcendence” is illuminating. Here lies the flaw of Kirk’s omitting truth. When tradition or enculturation are taken as the yardsticks of education instead of truth, strange fruits blossom. For an education that immerses students in an inherited but false perspective would still transmit culture and promote order: the Confucian system in China, for instance, or education in the classics that distinguished court life in Heian Japan. How could either Kirk or Dawson say that such educations are defective?3

Now, Kirk could argue that since interior freedom is a desired effect of education, he retains some basis besides mere transmission for distinguishing good from bad education. But that would expose him to the accusation of utilitarianism, since interior freedom needn’t result from true belief. Only a partisan ideologue would deny that Xiaolin monks or Sufi mystics achieve some measure of interior freedom, despite profound conflicts with Christendom’s men of letters. If an education results in interior freedom, therefore, who is Kirk to find fault with its content?

In a word, Dawson and Kirk define education by its incidentals rather than by its end, which is fatal. The end of education, as understood in the West, is truth: interior order, and the social order that redounds to “the commonwealth,” are both effects of accomplishing this principal end. Forming good habits, etc., is likewise essential, and must, in children, precede the open and conscious pursuit of truth. But as every parent and teacher knows, children grow up and will demand justification for the habits their education imparted, especially when those habits maladapt them to thriving in modern society. Unless we can show the relation between those habits and what we think is true, we will seem to have done nothing but pass on our prejudices.

What’s needed is a definition of tradition which is sensitive to those aspects of tradition which Kirk rightly treasures, but accommodates the primacy of truth.

But that’s a job for Part 2.

Read Lucas’s previous post, “The Teacher Must Be A Good Observer”.

Studying Euclid is, without a doubt, one of the most pleasurable intellectual experiences I’ve ever had. As a teacher, I want my students to leave Geometry classes not only knowing a specific subject, but also to be able to share in the joy I find in these studies.

In classes of teenagers, the teacher is almost like a chemist conducting experiments: which elements should I add to cause a certain reaction — or to make a certain reaction easier to occur? To do this, you must know your students, so that you know which question or activity might be most effective in prompting the appropriate reaction to knowledge. When teaching Geometry, starting from the book The Elements, we can use various exercises; however, it is not enough to know which exercises exist, but why we use each exercise, and what our objective is in using them.

To help math teachers, I’ve compiled some practices that are present in my Euclidean Geometry classes.

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Memorization and oral presentation of the propositions.

When we learn, we become capable of expressing what we have learned. Our inability to explain something we have learned can mean many things: (a) difficulties with the subject matter’s vocabulary; (b) difficulty in constructing sentences; (c) difficulties with the subject matter studied; (d) lack of clarity about the form of the argument.

So that you can help your student, you must know in what aspects he needs your help, you need a diagnosis: the oral presentation of a proposition and the student’s bewilderment when “freezing” during the explanation will be analytical tools for you, and your student’s mistakes will help you apply the appropriate remedy.

We require a presentation to be clear: the student must be able to distinguish the datum and the dico of the proposition, discern whether the proposition is a theorem or a problem, and also follow Euclid’s steps during the exposition—the initial work is memorization. Why memorize? Wouldn’t it be better to learn? I am not among the teachers who undervalue memorization, and I think that memorizing Euclid’s argument gradually shapes our minds to Euclid’s way of thinking, and this presentation will be a solid basis for discussions that transcend the author himself, as well as for disagreements or doubts; furthermore, if the student deviates from Euclid’s method, they must be able to justify where and why they are deviating.

During the presentation, the student is also evaluated on their eloquence: the effort to make themselves understood often leads us to a better understanding of the topic being presented. Some students understand easily, but don’t know how to explain calmly, because they assume that what is obvious to them is also obvious to others—you should invite them to a slower, more precise, and didactic explanation. Good geometry teaching will ensure that your students achieve excellent results in other subjects, as well as in their ability to speak.

Expanding on the themes, exploring other possibilities or problems not contained in the Elements.

One of the best ways to help students grasp a topic is to propose extensions that require them to use what they have already studied. In Euclid’s work, this can be done in many ways, but it seems clear to me that this extension should only occur when the proposition is memorized exactly as the author presents it, so that, at a later stage, we can take new steps.

A clear example of this is proposition 1 from book I: the student must construct an equilateral triangle from a given straight line.

First, the student will present the proposition following Euclid’s steps: with center A and distance AB, they will draw a circle (post. 3). With center B and distance BA, they will draw a second circle (post. 3). They will find point C and draw lines AC and BC (post. 1). Finally, the proof: since lines AC and BC are equal to the same line AB—we know they are equal because they are radii of the circles, according to definition 15—they will also be equal to each other (Common Notion 1), and triangle ABC will be equilateral.

“What did we learn from this proposition?” the teacher asks.

“We learned how to construct equilateral triangles from a given straight line,” the students replied.

“I propose a challenge for the next class: you must find, based on this proposition, a way to construct: (a) a rhombus, (b) an isosceles triangle, and (c) a scalene triangle.”

Here’s the challenge: to construct each of these figures, students will need to revisit the definitions of a circle and distinguish between the types of triangles and quadrilaterals that exist. We will also be showing that mathematics is an exploratory and creative endeavor, and that there are certain figures waiting for our discovery.

There are countless exercises of this type, and they are present in older editions of The Elements. The most interesting exercises have been collected by me and compiled into a Study Guide that will be published on the Arts of Liberty page.

Analysis of Euclid’s Method — by questioning or by oral narration.

After the presentation and discussion by the students—who should question the presenter if they find any errors or do not fully understand the explanation—when the students are more advanced, I ask them to comment on the method of resolution used by Euclid: what did he do first? What did he do next? Could he have done it in a different order than he did? Was the order necessary or merely convenient? Which method of resolution did he use (superposition, reductio ad absurdum, etc.)?

I ask these questions separately at first, giving several students the opportunity to answer; when they are more mature in these studies, I suggest an oral narration analyzing Euclid’s method.

These questions are also useful when we have already completed a specific study cycle within Book I, for example. We can ask them to briefly revisit the first 26 propositions of Book I—in which triangles and angles are studied—analyzing which of them follow similar methods.

Reconstruct the steps of each proposition using the images.

This exercise can be very useful for reviewing propositions, as well as for students to discuss the necessity of each step Euclid takes in his argument, and the need for a specific order in those steps. We present students with an image of a proposition—let’s take proposition 2 as an example:

The student will immediately remember that line BC was the given line, and that A is the given point. Questions began to arise: where did the equilateral triangle come from? What is its importance to the present problem? Why do I need to construct two circles? Do the centers and distances chosen for constructing the circles need to be exactly as described?

Cold memorization of the steps can cause the student to not understand the importance of the order. They may memorize mechanically, but this exercise can help reveal this, it can make the teacher realize that a student is not understanding, even if they have memorized all the steps perfectly.

This exercise, which can be very useful for problem-solving, can sometimes be more difficult when considering theorems—in which we must consider certain properties of geometric figures, for example. In any case, this exercise proves very useful for verifying our students’ learning before moving on to new topics.

A review of the previous propositions.

Narration is a powerful tool for mastering a particular subject. It is, at the same time, a gift for both the teacher and the student: for the teacher, because it helps to have greater clarity about the degree of assimilation that a particular student has had; for the student, because they are forced to translate into their own words what they have read, and during this process they appropriate what was previously foreign to them.

I use this resource a lot for review, so that the student has a synoptic overview of everything that has already been studied. When do I know it’s the best time to use this resource? When the student, in a subsequent proposition, has difficulties with a certain step due to a lack of mastery of a previous proposition.

Also I can vary my request according to the skill I want to develop in that student. I might ask them to be concise in narrating a previous proposition: this way I can see how capable they are of synthesis, and I also help the student avoid getting lost in the explanation by trying to explain in an excessively detailed way—a teacher who does this exercise, for example, becomes more didactic because they know how to explain even complex topics concisely.

I can ask a student whose explanations are more concise to expand on them and make connections with previously studied concepts. This way, we can determine if the student’s conciseness stems from intellectual virtues or simply indicates that they have only performed rote memorization.

Thus, a teacher who wishes to teach Geometry using Euclid’s Elements must be versatile, knowing how to use these resources wisely, adapting them to their circumstances. These resources will be all the more useful the greater the teacher’s mastery of the subject, since they will be better able to make connections between propositions and also to enchant the student with a beauty that once enchanted them, and still enchants them.

. . .

Lucas Fonseca holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) and is dedicated to the study and teaching of the classics in Brazil. He is currently student earning his M.A. in Humanities with a Concentration in Classical Education at the University of Dallas. He has participated in intensive advanced in-person courses in Latin and Ancient Greek at the Accademia Vivarium Novum in 2022, 2023 and 2024, as well as other remote courses at the same organization. He is translating Classical Education materials into Portuguese and translating Latin and Greek texts related to the Quadrivium for the Boethius Institute. He also works on audio recordings for the University of Dallas’s Latin Through Stories project, the only near-immersion, comprehensible input-based curriculum in Latin for elementary age students.

This Lent, I’m fasting from fiction. That may not seem like an especially meaningful penance, but it’s been difficult — a sign that it was necessary. That decision, in conjunction with teaching St. Augustine’s Confessions, has accidentally enriched my intellectual life as a teacher and learner.

Let me begin with a digression.

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An Excess of Modernism

As of late January, my reading diet consisted almost exclusively of modernist fiction, with a few dashes of poetry and history. All very literary, all very urbane — and all very sad. It’s as if I was wearing sepia glasses, wandering between the lines of a Rimbaud poem, living la vie en mélancolique.

One of the sources of modernist melancholy is the impression that, despite Europe’s tangible cumulus of Greek, Roman, and Christian culture, a gulf divides the past from the present. The achievements of the past warm the soul, but can only warm the mind at the cost of forfeiting critical reason. The consequence is a pervasive sense of longing and loss. Matthew Arnold famously voiced it in “Dover Beach”:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

But Arnold isn’t the only exponent of late modern loss. The ever insightful Harry Kessler, in India at the far end of a trip around the world, wrote in 1892 that

the great misfortune of our time is that everyone is faced with the alternative of either sacrificing their heart or their reason, to stifle his feelings or send his reason to the devil. You sense this when you hear again the old liturgy that accompanied your prayers every Sunday as a child, and the old, well-known hymns. And with what unspeakable bitterness do you feel it. (Harry Kessler, Journey to the Abyss, p. 98, entry for July 3, 1892)

Beautiful, sad, and thought-provoking — and yet, if Christianity and philosophy are to be believed, false. For all its validity as a lived experience, the misfortune Kessler describes is not necessary: it does not and cannot arise from the nature of things as an inherent consequence of their being so. Granted, that conviction might derive more from faith than from reason, though that should come as no surprise. As Joseph Ratzinger noted, “in the last analysis, it is only theology that can guarantee the continuing possibility of metaphysical inquiry.” (Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 319)

My beloved fiction was nibbling at that conviction. It’s one thing to read such novels to expand your experience, as Jacques Barzun noted about reading the classics. But it’s all too easy to drift past expanding experience to actually resting in the heads and hearts of others. That isn’t problematic in itself, so long as the hearts and heads in which you rest are aligned with the good and the true. But I found myself luxuriating in Kessler’s misfortune — expressed in Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mann, and Doderer — for its own sake, since it was the soil out of which grew the literary flowers whose color, scent, and form intoxicated me. It was time to take a break.

The break has been good, but hard, because I do have a soft spot for that late 19^th century agnosticism. Not because I actually think truth is inaccessible, but because claiming to know the truth tends, in my experience, to make a person less humane than sincerely believing the truth to be unknowable. There are few things I find more distasteful than insistent dogmatism: it’s precisely such dogmatism, about contrary positions, that makes the internet and social media such poisonous places. What first drew and continues to draw me to modernist literature is the openness implied in the authors’ agnosticism. I was afraid that pushing off from an island of openness would awaken my longstanding rational hubris and undo years of maturation.

And then suddenly, in the midst of my fiction fast, here I was teaching St. Augustine’s Confessions.

Questioning with Augustine

I’ve had my struggles with Augustine, as I’m sure most have. It was good not to reread him in solitude, but with students encountering him for the first time. Teaching a book you know forces you to look at it with fresh eyes, to distinguish what’s truly essential from what simply interests or annoys you. A leisurely reread, by contrast, can sometimes be a bit too leisurely: your attention lingers on whatever draws it most, which isn’t always what’s most important.

Looking at the Confessions with fresh eyes, I was struck by the book’s full-to-the-brim saturation with questions. A few quotes from Book I alone:

• You are not scattered but reassemble us. In filling all things, you fill them all with the whole of yourself. Or is it that because all things cannot contain the whole of you, they contain part of you, and that all things contain the same part of you simultaneously? Or does each part contain a different part of you, the larger containing the greater parts, the lesser parts the smaller? Does that imply that there is some part of you which is greater, another part smaller? Or is the whole of you everywhere, yet without anything that contains you entire? Who then are you, my God? (Confessions, p. 4)

• Who will enable me to find rest in you? Who will grant me that you may come to my heart and intoxicate it, so that I forget my evils and embrace my one and only good, yourself? What are you to me? What am I to you that you command me to love you, and that, if I fail to love you, you are angry with me and threaten me with vast miseries? (p. 5)

And that’s just the first few pages. Augustine accompanies nearly every episode in his life with a stream of questions directed to God, or to himself in God’s presence. He probes the conditions and implications of his distorted will in the episode of the pear tree; he wonders why he enjoyed weeping at tragedies but found weeping at actual suffering unbearable; he recounts his pre-conversion struggle with the nature of spiritual substances and the problem of evil in page after page of mounting questions and tentative answers; and on the cusp of converting in the garden at Milan, he interrupts the narrative with a series of penetrating questions on the rupture between the human mind and will that he experienced firsthand in his struggle to submit to grace. And that’s to say nothing of whole books on memory, time, and the spiritual implications of Genesis. For Augustine, to confess and to question mean almost the same thing.

I wasn’t the only one struck by the number of his questions. My students began showing up to class groaning about the latest reading. “He asks all these questions, but he never answers them,” went their grumpy refrain. I tried to show them that sometimes he did, in fact, answer his questions, but I had to admit, they weren’t entirely wrong. ‘Never’ is a bit too strong, but all the same, the ratio of questions to answers in the Confessions feels like 3 to 1. And yet, is that a problem? Where my students groaned, I delighted: I enjoyed and profited from Augustine’s questioning mode far more than his moralizing narrative mode.

We’ve since finished the Confessions and moved on, but I’ve continued to wonder about that habit of questioning. It strikes me that for Augustine, questioning is more than the intellectual exercise of searching for answers: it’s an actual mode of philosophizing, perhaps even a kind of spiritual exercise. What do I mean?

I spoke before of resting in the heads and hearts of those you read. “Rest” is a key word. It has obvious resonances in the Confessions, right from the opening paragraph. But for a book about finding rest, it’s strikingly restless. His relentless questioning, without pausing for answers most of the time, has an almost agitating effect, not unlike — but not wholly like — Socrates’ effect on Meno:

Socrates, before I even met you I used to hear that you are always in a state of perplexity and that you bring others to the same state, and now I think you are bewitching and beguiling me, simply putting me under a spell, so that I am quite perplexed. Indeed, if a joke is in order, you seem, in appearance and in every other way, to act like the broad torpedo fish, for it too makes anyone who comes close and touches it feel numb, and now you seem to have had that kind of effect on me, for both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you. (Meno, 80a-b)

Augustine, too, reduces the reader to a state of perplexity — but it can’t be called numb. Because of his confessional, confidential tone, you feel the urgency of his questions alongside the bafflement at their seemingly conflicting implications.

Of course, if I’m going to attribute the effect to his tone, it’s possible that his questioning is nothing but a rhetorical device designed to exhaust you into accepting whatever answer he proposes when he finally switches out of the interrogative gear. To be a truly philosophical mode of thinking, his questioning as such would need, in some way, to uncover truth and dispel error. Does it?

I think so, albeit in a roundabout way.

Questioning as Philosophy

First, we must briefly examine St. Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between knowledge, belief, and opinion — a necessary pitstop, I promise.

Some acts of the intellect have unformed thought devoid of a firm assent, whether they incline to neither side, as in who doubts; or incline to one side rather than the other, but on account of some slight motive, as in one who suspects; or incline to one side yet with fear of the other, as in one who opines. But this act, to believe, cleaves firmly to one side, in which respect belief has something in common with science and understanding; yet its knowledge does not attain the perfection of clear sight, wherein it agrees with doubt, suspicion, and opinion. (ST II-II, q. 2, a. 1, resp.)

Beneath Aquinas’s austere style lies a rich sensitivity to the contours of mental experience. I’m particularly interested in his idea that opinion is distinguished by assenting to one proposition while fearing that its contrary may also be true. This interface between mind and emotions is the basis for several traditions of questioning as a spiritual practice.

Think, for instance, of the kōan tradition in Zen Buddhism, which poses riddles to reveal, through paradox, the impermanence of all things. Even more to the purpose, think of the Hellenic skeptical tradition associated with Sextus Empiricus, for whom questioning was an essential characteristic of the philosopher — but with a quasi-kōan twist.

There are some who think that they have found the truth, such as Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, and certain others. These are, in a special sense of the term, the so-called dogmatists. Clitomachus and Carneades, on the other hand, and other Academics, claim it is a search for inapprehensibles. But the Skeptics go on searching. (Sextus Empiricus, Selections from the Major Writings on Skepticism, Man, & God, p. 31)

“The Skeptics go on searching.” That sounds almost heroic; indeed, not unlike my beloved modernists, no? But shortly thereafter, Empiricus clarifies the spiritual motive of the Skeptic’s questioning, and it’s pernicious:

Skepticism is an ability to place in antithesis, in any manner whatever, appearances and judgments, and thus — because of the equality of force in the objects and arguments opposed — to come first of all to a suspension of judgment and then to mental tranquility. (ibid, pp. 32-33)

It is precisely not to uncover truth, therefore, that the Skeptic asks question after question. Rather, his questioning inoculates the soul from the fear of conflicting opinions by revealing the equal possibility of every opinion — thus annihilating the emotional effects of uncertainty without resolving to certainty. Unlike the dogmatists who claim that everything can be known and the “true” skeptics who claim that nothing can be known, Empiricus espouses a kind of therapy-through-questioning.

The philosophical character of Augustine’s questioning, I think, becomes clear in this light. He asks questions about God, creation, the soul, and so on, neither fully to rest in supposed answers, like the dogmatists, since God transcends our minds — nor to inoculate ourselves against the sting of uncertainty, like Empiricus, since our minds are created inherently to crave knowledge of God. And neither are the questions simply rhetorical cudgels to tenderize the reader into accepting his eventual conclusions. Augustine questions, rather, to intensify his mental agitation before the mystery of God so as to amplify his heart’s plea that God send out His light and His truth. Through philosophical questioning, reason discovers its own poverty and clears the path for an act of faith that transcends, but includes, reason.

In this way, Augustine is far more open than my beloved modernists. The solution to Kessler’s misfortune is not urbane agnosticism, but neither is it hedonist nihilism or the reactionary dogmatism that drove so many disaffected denizens of la Belle Époque and le fin de siècle Europe to embrace ideologies that “brought them, somewhere else, to grief.” The solution, rather, is the questioning spirit of St. Augustine, which I discovered anew teaching his Confessions this semester, and which accepts nothing less than the truth, and which for that reason never ceases to explore — not without fear, but neither without hope. For

the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where started
And know the place for the first time.
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”, V)

All in all, I’d say it’s been a good Lent so far.

Theoretical concerns about the nature of liberal education and attention to the broad-strokes history of its rise and fall are well, good, and necessary. But as St. Augustine says, “Ubi cecidimus, ibi stare debemus.” Where we have fallen, there we must stand. The renewal of liberal education is a fine goal, but the first steps to that goal must be concrete, based in the here and now: we only encounter the true condition of Western education in the classrooms of today.

In the following essay, Gannon Hyland argues that the loss of a clear and authentic integrating principle in so many Catholic schools — one of many side effects of the broader decline in liberal education — has led to to precisely the sort of fragmentation and identity crises that we observe. Rather than tarrying overlong with the negative, Gannon turns to Hugh of St. Victor for wisdom on what that principle should be, and how it should be articulated — for Catholic schools and beyond.

Gannon is the Asst. Director of Formation for the St. John Henry Newman Institute, assisting the renewal of Catholic education. He has spent a decade working in classical, Catholic schools and is currently finishing his Master of Arts in Classical Education at Hillsdale College, having successfully defended his master’s thesis on Hugh of St. Victor. He and his family live in Hillsdale, where he enjoys reading history, smoking his pipe, and tinkering in his woodshop.

- Benjamin Trull

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Recovering Wisdom

Commentators have long pointed to a problem that continues to trouble Catholic education today: the loss of a final telos, or purpose, to govern the means and ends of education. In the wake of this loss, Catholic schools have often tried to “fill the breach” by appealing to more visible and reliable goals, especially technical skill and material success. The result, as the controversial thinker Ivan Illich observed, is that “school [becomes] the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.” When Catholic schools reduce their sacred calling to preparation for only horizontal, or purely temporal, engagement, the result is theologically incoherent.

This failure comes from the loss of an integrated vision of the dignity of the human person. When rightly understood, such an integrated vision takes the material and technological advances of the present age and orders them toward a transcendent end: the repair of man’s nature and friendship with God. In this framework, utility does not simply mean practicality. Rather, it means usefulness ordered toward a final account of human flourishing. It means incarnating the reality of man as a craftsman. Recovering this vision does not require rejecting material goods or technological advances, but the placing of them in their proper order — putting first things first — so that material goods are understood within the larger course of our lives, now and in eternity.

If Catholic education is to recover a true understanding of its end, it should not put a premium on novelty. There is no inherent virtue in a novelty. However, there is virtue in innovation (from the Latin, innova, meaning “to create”), in adaptation of the old to the new. Catholic education should turn to those who understood education as a re-formation of man. One such figure is Hugh of St. Victor, a twelfth-century Augustinian priest. Hugh presents a vision of education ordered fundamentally toward Wisdom, understood as the Second Person of the Trinity. Through the pursuit of Wisdom, the human person is not only prepared for a good life, but restored to his own nature, which was corrupted by the Fall.

This, then, is the true end of Catholic education: to restore man to himself so that he may know himself, and to give glory to God, his Creator, through his life and work. This vision offers teachers a task that is both inspiring and serious. It also offers students something far more dignifying: the message that through study, they are recovering something that has been lost. They are more than mere consumers of society’s goods. This is the true answer to the familiar question, “How is this useful?”

Hugh of St. Victor was a master teacher of both laypeople and novices who entered the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris in the early twelfth century. His manual of reading, the Didascalicon, presents a framework of study meant to prepare all people, regardless of their station in life, for a holy and devout life. For Hugh, the purpose of study is not utility, but love of Sapientia, or Wisdom. He describes this love as “an illumination of the apprehending mind by that pure Wisdom, and, in a certain way, a drawing and calling back to Itself of man’s mind, so that the pursuit of Wisdom appears like friendship.” Too often, study is described as the simple accumulation of information. Hugh instead presents study as an intimate relationship of friendship with Christ, through which knowledge becomes a path to deeper intimacy with the Lord.

With this end in view, Hugh offers a framework of philosophy — understood as “the love of Wisdom” — divided into four parts: theoretical, moral, mechanical, and logical. Together, Hugh argues, these “contain all knowledge.” Within this framework, he includes both the seven Liberal Arts and the mechanical, or common, arts. This structure should not be passed over too quickly. For Hugh, Wisdom is pursued through study, moral virtue, and the work of our hands. All too often, one of these is emphasized at the expense of the others. Some schools focus on intellectual rigor without the practice of virtue; others focus on the ordering of affections without intellectual reflection. Worse still, some cultivate neither. Hugh, however, understands that intellect, moral virtue, and human action form an integrated whole. Through their unity, the human person is restored to his nature and the imago Dei is repaired.

Only when education is ordered toward this restoration can it truly be called useful. Critics of pragmatic education often appeal to learning “for its own sake,” but the only thing enjoyed for its own sake is beatitudo — happiness understood as friendship with Wisdom. In other words, the person who cultivates friendship with Christ is truly happy, because Christ is Wisdom itself. All other things have utility only insofar as they lead the human person toward this final end. We must not forget that Adam was a steward of a garden and that Christ was a carpenter. Wisdom Himself chose to learn a trade. Hugh reminds us that “Want it is which has devised all that you see most excellent in the occupations of men.” From this need arise the arts of building, carving, weaving, and painting, so that we marvel not only at nature, but at the craftsman as well. Through our own work, we come to wonder more deeply at the Craftsman of all reality.

What, then, does this mean for Catholic schools today? The Victorine vision has clear implications for curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional identity. The mission of Catholic education must be the restoration of human nature through the repair of the imago Dei by instruction, by exhortation to moral virtue, and by apprenticeship in the common arts. Through knowledge, virtue, and human work, students grow in familiarity with Wisdom and in friendship with Christ. This is the true telos of our lives, as Hugh writes: “the pursuit of Wisdom; he who finds it is happy, and he who possesses it, blessed.”

“Classical” education doesn’t mean “not modern,” but “education as practiced in antiquity,” and education as practiced in antiquity (apart from the mathy metaphysics of Plato’s Academy) meant studying and imitating literature — chiefly, Homer and Virgil. Greco-Roman literature was so fundamental to classical education that these days “the classics” simply refer to the Greek and Latin masterpieces. The classical education movement, therefore, has clear precedent for placing the classics at the heart of its curricula.

And yet.

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Sed Contra

I was not a terrific student in high school. I was assigned The Iliad and The Odyssey, and a number of plays by Sophocles, The Aeneid, and so on — but I somehow managed to scrape through without creasing their spines. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in the subject matter. I thrilled to the Greek myths as told by the d’Aulaires and to Ray Harryhausen’s masterpiece, Jason and the Argonauts. But between the editorial self-importance of the curriculum, with its smug equation of “the Western tradition” and “the best that has been thought and said,” and my peers’ dutiful receptivity, which I pompously dismissed as servile, I couldn’t care less about the books. The stories were enough.

Now that I’m a teacher, I’m getting my just desserts. I have long since read Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, Plato, and the rest and realized that, even if the Western tradition isn’t exclusively the greatest, it gives the East a run for its money, and I have learned to appreciate the dutiful students, who aren’t servile — just respectful. And I must somehow engage those students who are competent and spirited and utterly uninterested in reading Homer.

What has saved me, though, is having not read the great books until I was in my twenties and had lived just a wee bit more than I had at fifteen. I can put myself in the skeptical students’ shoes, because I have experienced for myself the situation about which Nietzsche wrote in 1874:

1. A young man cannot have the slightest conception what the Greeks and Romans were.

2. He does not know whether he is fitted to investigate into them.

In light of my own experience as a student and a teacher, I wonder now and then if handing children the classics is a good idea. Why?

Classical education is formative, not merely informative. “The one who studies the liberal arts and engages in liberal education puts himself in an excellent position to cultivate the moral and intellectual virtues that free him from vice and ignorance,” we say at Arts of Liberty. Now, literature is obviously formative. Wrote Jacques Barzun, the famed cultural historian and educational theorist, “reading, and its necessary twin, writing, constitute ... a mode of incarnating and shaping thought.” (“The Centrality of Reading”, A Jacques Barzun Reader, p. 397) Elsewhere, Barzun insists on the formative power of the classics in particular:

The great works do not yield their cargo on demand; but if one reads them with concentration … the effort gives us possession of a vast store of vicarious experience; we come face to face with the whole range of perception that mankind has attained and that is denied by our unavoidably artificial existence. Through this experience we escape from the prison cell, professional or business or suburban. It is like gaining a second life. (“Of What Use The Classics Today?”, Reader, p. 416)

Well and good. But are teenagers disposed to such formation?

Surely Barzun and others would agree that the formative effect of literature varies with a reader’s imagination and maturity. But if that’s so, what kind of formation can we realistically expect high schoolers to receive from the classics? They’re all more or less advanced on the road to maturity, but none has quite arrived; and they have rich, but chaotic, imaginations. Shouldn’t we think twice about assigning the classics in high school, lest students grow indifferent to what they’re too young and inexperienced to admire?

But just when I start yielding to this suspicion, I have terrific classes where my students “get” it: something clicks in their minds, which permanently alters how they converse and think. They interlard their daily chatter with lines of poetry; they spontaneously compare Brutus to Aeneas; and so on. Something is going right. They are, in fact, being formed. So it’s not impossible — just difficult.

“Here I am, in the middle of the way”

My experience as a student makes me appreciate skepticism about assigning the classics; my experience as a teacher prevents me from succumbing to that skepticism. The result has been a fruitful dialectic.

I had a complex reaction when, for instance, I read Frederick Wilhelmsen, a major critic of the Great Books movement:

Plato and the rest of them are supposed, piously, to speak to the eighteen-year-old, fresh from four years of high school ignorance. John Senior wrote somewhere that a man ought to read a hundred good books before he reads one great book, but our high school graduates have read nothing at all. (“The Great Books: Enemies of Wisdom”)

Wilhelmsen isn’t exactly wrong that the average eighteen-year-old American is almost certainly ill-equipped to pick up and profit from the classics without a long period of handholding and preparation. He was writing in 1987, and trends in public education haven’t exactly waxed classical in the years since. Allan Bloom made a similar observation that same year about incoming college freshmen:

I used to think that young Americans began whatever education they were to get at the age of eighteen, that their early lives were spiritually empty and that they arrived at the university clean slates unaware of their deeper selves and the world beyond their superficial experience. (The Closing of the American Mind, p. 47)

“Used to think,” though, is key to Bloom’s apparent concurrence with Wilhelmsen. He soon realized that, far from coming with no sense of their place in a tradition, and therefore primed for the exciting work of liberal education, they had been malformed by the ambient materialism of mid-century American culture. They were ill-equipped to study the classics not just because they had read nothing in high school, but because they had never been encouraged to read, or even to think. “It is clear to me now,” Bloom adds, “that nature needs the cooperation of convention, just as man’s art is needed to found the political order that is the condition of his natural completeness.” (Closing, p. 51)

No student of Aristotle, which Wilhelmsen certainly was, would deny the formative power of convention. But if that’s true, then for the same reasons that Wilhelmsen takes issue with reading the classics in American schools, Bloom adopts precisely the opposite conclusion:

I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. The soul’s longing, its intolerable irritation under the constraints of the conditional and the limited, may very well require encouragement from the outset. (Closing, p. 62)

Bloom is correct to ground his suspicion not on particular circumstances (e.g. American schools in 1987) but on human nature itself. There have always been tensions between nature and nurture — that was one of the first and deepest insights of classical philosophy. They were certainly in conflict in Plato’s own time, a reality that underlies and informs his dialogues.

It’s odd, in fact, that Wilhelmsen cites Plato of all people as his would-be impenetrable author. Many of his dialogues purport to be the words of Socrates, who spoke to adults and children, slave and free, about everything under the sun, and whose sensitivity to the dangers of convention led him to make education his first and almost exclusive concern. This is because Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were animated by a deeper assumption — one with which Wilhelmsen, Aristotelian that he claims to be, would surely agree.

Classical philosophy, for all its elitism, began with the conviction that the principles of philosophy are accessible to everyone with senses and a mind. They didn’t think everyone could equally apply their mind or discipline their senses, but that’s a separate consideration entirely. It is profoundly un-classical to assume that time and geography alone suffice to sever the kinship between a 21^st century American teenager and a Greek on the cusp of manhood in the 4^th century B.C. That being so, there’s no reason in principle that an American teenager can’t profit from reading Homer.

We should be clear, though, about the kind of profit, because this is what Wilhelmsen gets right. Even granting exposure to the classics, we can’t expect high schoolers or even college students to make mature judgments about what they read, which is, after all, the ultimate goal of intellectual formation. Says Wilhelmsen:

Aristotle insisted that philosophy is the highest instance of the life of leisure, but there is no leisure for boys and girls who are expected to gorge themselves on three thousand years of texts and then regurgitate them come examination day. To remember all the data, as suggested, leaves no time for judgment. Yet judgment, says St. Thomas, is the mark of the philosopher of being.

Now, I suspect that Wilhelmsen overemphasizes the need for a teacher in the strictest sense. Lifelong learners know that if you have energy, a library, and a list from a trusted guide, there’s no limit to what you can learn. But if you want more than a superficial formation, whether as a scholar or an independent learner, you must be disposed to receive and assess what the books have to give — and Wilhelmsen is correct that the young have only a limited capacity, harried by practical concerns, to appreciate the classics for what they are.

Bloom and the classical education movement, therefore, seem right that the best way to ensure continued interest in the classics is to introduce them to students early, but Wilhelmsen is right that students can’t really appreciate and reach considered judgments about them, which is the ultimate goal of the formative enterprise. What to do?

Respondeo dicendum quod…

I’ve come to believe that the purpose of studying literature in high school isn’t so much that the classics form students through the mediation of their teachers — that’s the purpose of reading literature as an adult. Rather, high school literature teachers aim to form habits in their students that will enable them, as adults, to submit to the formation of the classics. In high school, in other words, the classics aren’t ends in themselves, but a means to the end of forming lifelong learners.

Presenting the classics, therefore, as ends in themselves is a mistake — the mistake that disinclined me toward them, I think. After all, “a young man cannot have the slightest conception what the Greeks and Romans were,” and therefore will regard his teacher’s endorsement of these strange texts as one more adult imposition on his world. The worst way to sell a classic to a kid is as a classic: they have no idea what that means.

Now, to anticipate an obvious objection: isn’t it the height of impudence to turn books into tools? The purpose of literary education is to enable the soul to contemplate, not instrumentalize, the classics. But when it comes to stirring the soul to love what ought to be loved — and education has no other purpose — the perfect has few more pernicious enemies than the merely good. It is a simple fact that teenagers crave greatness and know instinctively when they’re being deprived. You have to walk a thin red line, therefore, between telling them, “This is great!” and “You’re only ready for the merely good.” Learning to walk that line is the heart of becoming an effective literature teacher.

So how to walk that line? By embodying the habits you are trying to form. You must be a good reader yourself if you want to make them into good readers. You can’t just react to a book; you must attend to how and why you react this way or that. You must be intelligent, vulnerable, and self-aware in your own reading — and be willing to show that to the students.

The best way, I find, to model these habits for students is to show how you feel about a book. We live in an age dominated by cynicism and social comparison. The teacher has to model what it means to be moved by beauty, model the validity of laughter as a response to comedy and un-self-conscious catharsis as a response to tragedy. Here, the value of the classics is clear. Show students an adult who can’t read through Priam’s plea at the end of The Iliad without a catch in his voice, and you will plant a memory that will outlive the inevitable giggles, the sort of memory Alyosha cherishes at the end of The Brothers Karamazov:

You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life.

Above all, though, teaching the classics well means showing students what it means to submit to the wisdom of a masterpiece. Before we can judge greatness, we must first be judged and found wanting. Virgil’s depiction of Dido’s descent into madness in The Aeneid infuriates you — but why? Is that how Virgil wants you to react? If not, why are you reacting that way? What does it say about you, or your culture, that you don’t or can’t react the way he assumes you will? Are you at fault? Is he? Should you try to react as he intended?

These are the beating heart of high school formation; every other aspect of “lit class” (quizzes, maps, historical context, etc.) are so many veins and capillaries. Students thus formed don’t need convincing to revisit the classics as adults, because the classics’ perennial value has become axiomatic.

And that, friends, is my view of the goal of “education as practiced in antiquity.”

Teaching includes technical and human skills, things that depend on training, and others that depend more on our personal temperament and how we shape that temperament. Among the technical skills, one can include the ability to present, the capacity to answer questions, mastery of the subject matter, among many others; in the dispositions that depend more on personal temperament, I consider kindness, patience, charity, and many other virtues.

For a long time, I thought that being a good observer was a temperamental disposition. In recent days, however, I have realized that, although some may have certain dispositions that favor silence and observation, these must be cultivated to a high level by any teacher who wishes to perform their duties adequately and efficiently.

Attention is, at the same time, a necessary condition and a result of study. Simone Weil, in her text “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”, states that since prayer brings us closer to God, and only those who are attentive pray, the attentive

person will be better disposed to prayer, and our studies should not distance us from this perspective: if we love studies, studies should make us more attentive to detail. The teacher is also a student and must have gone through the process that the student is being led through: the temptation of distraction, discouragement, and disenchantment is not foreign to them, but they are an example of someone who fought and was able to overcome each of these temptations every day.

The teacher has become more attentive because of their experience in studies. This attention is formed very adequately through their personal studies, and especially when the teacher is required to deal with challenging subjects that demand a more precise look at details, so that the first way in which the teacher has to be more observant and attentive to detail is through studies that are more demanding.

In my opinion, every teacher should add to their personal studies some topic that is not easy and that takes them outside their area and comfort zone. This experience cultivates healthy intellectual tension and keeps the mind alive and active—just as muscles need exercise to maintain their tone, so does our intellect. I had this experience studying Apollonius of Pergamon’s Conics (see here) , which was one of the most demanding studies I have ever undertaken, but it made me more attentive to certain details that I was previously unable to perceive—it seems to me that there are certain transferable skills that we acquire when studying these topics.

Attention to abstract topics shapes our minds so that we are able to see certain human realities that are also hidden in the daily life of a teacher—as well as a spouse, father, friend, etc. When studying Euclid’s Elements, the solution to a problem is often right before us, but we don’t yet perceive it because there are so many lines and so many points—aren’t there many invisible lines and points in our human problems that would only require a more attentive look from us? The solution to problems is not always so obvious if we are not attentive, and if we are not able to maintain constant attention for a longer period of time.

How can you, professor, say that your student has no problems if you are not observing the details of their answers and their behavior, the variations in their expressions and moods? You only see when the problem has become so evident that you are tempted to look for a provisional cause to offer a provisional solution; you would certainly have more elements for your judgment if you had paid attention to the details from the first day. I know it’s difficult—attention implies a certain tension, and we are not used to maintaining this tension for very long, since we do not exercise ourselves to maintain this tone.

If you are a beginning teacher, I suggest you record what you notice about your students from the very first day of class. Write it down in a notebook, in short bullet points, and you can revisit it whenever you want to give feedback on a student’s progress. This is an exercise I frequently ask the teachers I am training and who are my assistants during my classes to do.

If you are not naturally attentive, the previous advice can be very useful and will turn what is not a natural disposition into a habit—after all, habits are established through repeated actions.

It seems increasingly clear to me that the teacher’s attention, ideally, should be able to transcend the classroom, and I have already written extensively about this.

However, while we discuss attention as it relates to what happens inside the classroom, I want to bring up some points that help me in daily practice.

● Pay attention to the students’ gazes during class and, above all, to those of the most expressive students.

There are teachers who are so attentive to detail that they can sometimes perceive that the student has doubts even before the student asks. Sometimes, a change of position in the chair or a movement of the eyebrow is enough for you to realize that something is wrong with that student.

To notice this, it helps me a lot to take a short pause—ten to fifteen seconds—between the end of one argument and the beginning of another, so that I can see the faces of each student and see if any of them want to ask a question, or if, despite the doubt, none of them will raise their hand. These 15 seconds of pause are sometimes enough for a student to gain the courage to raise their hand to ask a question, or to assimilate the topic and make a comment that expands on the theme of the argument being discussed.

Silence doesn’t always indicate the absence of doubts. It’s more comfortable to assume that silence implies the success of your work, and when the argument is more difficult for the teacher, it’s tempting to move on to the next argument without giving students time to ask a question to which we don’t have an answer.

Not all silence indicates doubt. Sometimes it simply indicates that we should allow time for reflection, so that doubt is possible, since it is not the absolute absence of understanding, but a relative absence—only those who have understood some of the lesson’s argument can have doubts about a class; those who have understood nothing have no doubts, but are simply completely ignorant. We need to allow time for doubt, to allow them to formulate an intelligent question, to have time to intellectually structure the argument, and to verify at what point their understanding failed.

On some occasions, silence needs to invite reflection and expansion of the argument. If the student perceives that we are eager to return to speaking, and that the silence between arguments is merely procedural, the student will not be able to formulate doubts, and will be demotivated to develop the topic, since it seems that the argument is already, or should be, concluded.

The students’ gaze and expressions are objects of our attention, and reveal the difficulties they try to hide, or cannot formulate, or think do not exist.

This is valuable advice, but not always definitive. We won’t always be able to do this in every class, and some students are more challenging than others, making it harder to see what isn’t being said—in advanced teacher training programs, where students are more experienced, noticing these details is more difficult.

How to solve this problem?

I think it’s helpful for the teacher to identify the most expressive student or the one most open to expressing doubts. This student will sometimes be the link between the teacher and the class and will be able to sincerely express their own difficulties or even those they believe are common to their classmates. Sometimes, a student who is observant or close to their classmates can also be a great help to the teacher.

● Recognizing Repeated Patterns in Difficulties

Recognizing a difficulty can be easy for an experienced teacher. They will be able to perceive what is not going well in a lesson; what distinguishes the experienced teacher from the experienced and attentive teacher is the ability to perceive the causes of the difficulty, so that they can properly address them.

One must distinguish between occasional and frequent difficulties and, among the frequent ones, perceive what repeats itself. I had such an experience in a geometry class this week: I called on a student to present a proposition from the Elements on the board, and during the presentation, I noticed that everyone understood all the constructions and that, at the beginning, the student was explaining each line in great detail and naming each angle. By the end of the presentation, he was presenting more quickly and without naming the angles and lines, but only pointing to them.

In all the presentations, I noticed that the proof part was the most difficult for the other students to follow, since speed can sometimes hinder the explanation of a step in the argument. It was a constant: during the exam, students had more difficulty understanding—this was my constant, a recurring issue.

I asked the student presenting to always name the angles, even if it seemed to make the presentation more repetitive. I noticed that the difficulties in understanding the presentations by classmates manifested in the exams, since students were confused by the angles being discussed because they weren’t always named according to a convention among the students. When I asked students to always name the angles—not just pointing to them on the diagram—the doubts disappeared, and I saw that the students began to understand more deeply.

In short, it’s not enough to be attentive to students’ difficulties, but also to their causes. This requires attention that you must cultivate by engaging with demanding topics, for which a summary or a quick glance is not enough.

Lucas Fonseca holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) and is dedicated to the study and teaching of the classics in Brazil. He is currently student earning his M.A. in Humanities with a Concentration in Classical Education at the University of Dallas. He has participated in intensive advanced in-person courses in Latin and Ancient Greek at the Accademia Vivarium Novum in 2022, 2023 and 2024, as well as other remote courses at the same organization. He is translating Classical Education materials into Portuguese and translating Latin and Greek texts related to the Quadrivium for the Boethius Institute. He also works on audio recordings for the University of Dallas’s Latin Through Stories project, the only near-immersion, comprehensible input-based curriculum in Latin for elementary age students.

Read this post in Portuguese at Lucas’s Substack.

It’s been less than a year since Leo XIV became pope and he’s already trained his eye on education. According to his recent letter on the subject, authentic education

does not pit manual and theoretical skills, science and humanism, technology and conscience against each other; rather, it demands that professionalism be imbued with ethics, and that ethics be not an abstract concept but a daily practice.

Leo’s belief in the compatibility of science and humanism — the old name for classical education — is hardly a shock. He began discerning the priesthood months after completing a degree in mathematics, and his choice of name and stated interest in artificial intelligence echoes Leo XIII’s writings warning about the impact of industrial technology.

While the usual threat to harmony between science and humanism seems to come from science, anyone working to advance that harmony should be on guard of the subtler threat posed by humanism. What do I mean?

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Let’s think back in time and far away to Paris in the 1200s. According to St. Thomas Aquinas’s fifth argument for God’s existence,

We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. (Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 2, a. 3, resp.)

The marvelous grandeur, and clearly purposive character, on display in the wonders of nature points, says St. Thomas, to the God Who endowed nature with purpose and ordered it so beautifully.

This argument, grounded on the appreciation of the beauty and harmony of creation, had more staying power than other traditional arguments for theism. Even Immanuel Kant, who began his career as a physicist before making his name as a philosopher, and who shone with the full glare of the German Enlightenment, was compelled to acknowledge it with admiration:

The world around us opens before our view so magnificent a spectacle of order, variety, beauty, and conformity to ends, that whether we pursue our observations into the infinity of space in the one direction, or into its illimitable divisions on the other, whether we regard the world in its greatest or its least manifestations,—even after we have attained to the highest summit of knowledge which our weak minds can reach, we find that language in the presence of wonders so inconceivable has lost its force, and number its power to reckon, nay, even thought fails to conceive adequately, and our conception of the whole dissolves into an astonishment without the power of expression — all the more eloquent that it is dumb. (Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 382-383)

The problem, though, is that St. Thomas’s argument allows would-be humanists to acknowledge nature without having to struggle through the riddles of physics and biology. Scientists, by contrast, must rankle at every premise in the proof: “Natural bodies act for an end, do they? And always, or nearly always, in the same way? And they do so to obtain the best result? What universe are you looking at?” If apologists continue to make this kind of argument without addressing the objections of science, they risk estranging scientists from engaging with philosophy and theology, thereby amplifying the current dissonance between the two main branches of human learning.

Now, to be clear, both St. Thomas’s and Kant’s comments trace their origin to the Bible and to classical philosophy. Wisdom 13:1-9 and Romans 1:20-21 are foundational passages that trace the beauty of creation to the Creator, while strains of Plato’s and Aristotle’s theism — so central to St. Thomas’s theology — survived in some form in Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, all of whom shaped Kant’s intellectual atmosphere.

Nevertheless, despite that pedigree, Kant’s and St. Thomas’s arguments have opposed rhetorical centers. Kant mentions the beauty-of-the-universe argument only to dismiss it as uncompelling: he is so taken with the richness of the mysteries of the universe that he can’t bring himself to look beyond them to their author. St. Thomas’s argument in the Summa Theologiae, by contrast, reduces the proximate mysteries of creation nearly to zero by comparison with the infinite, and infinitely remote, mystery of the Creator. It is the implicit dismissal of the density of creation, rather than belief in God, that repels the scientific mind.

Humanists thrill to the study of the classics because the classics reward aesthetic appreciation. Studying nature is more demanding and less immediately gratifying, but it’s no less rewarding, in the long run. You can’t read the book of nature like a book of poetry, because it’s written in a different language — a language humanists resist learning. Why?

Humanist distaste for modern science flows from a gross simplification of intellectual history. It’s popularly believed that the spirit of Francis Bacon, who advocated putting nature “on the rack” to extract her secrets, continues to define the practice of science. That, however, doesn’t remotely correspond to the spirit of inquiry as modeled by actual scientists. Newton’s Principia concludes with a lengthy comment on how universal gravitation demonstrates the existence of God; Alexander von Humboldt, geologist and explorer, is considered the godfather of the conservation movement; and both Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell inaugurated a tradition of naturalist literature that warmly admires the wonder and richness of the organic universe as it is in itself; J. Henri Fabre preferred “a laboratory in the open fields,” where, he said, I could “make my observations under the blue sky to the song of the cicadas.”

But no one has more thoroughly convinced me that Bacon’s stature in modern science is overblown than Vasily Grossman, a chemist turned novelist, and therefore proof that humanism and science can coexist. I’ve been reading his 1952 novel Stalingrad, about the eponymous battle. In the midst of his book’s world-historical sweep, Grossman narrates how his protagonist, a physicist named Viktor Shtrum, first fell in love with science — a passage that warrants quoting in full.

In the dark sterility of a Soviet lab, surrounded by arcane instruments for studying radiation, Viktor suddenly realizes that

there was poetry in nature’s deepest mysteries. Little violet stars flickered for a second on a dark screen; invisible particles hurtled by like comets, leaving behind them only misty tails of condensed gas; the fine needle of an ultra-sensitive electrometer shivered in response to the upheaval brought about by invisible demons endowed with insane energy and velocity. Seething beneath the surface of matter were enormous powers. These flashes on a dark screen, the mass spectrograph readings that made it possible to figure out the charge of an atomic nucleus, the dark spots on a photographic film — these were the first scouts, the first prospectors for tremendous forces now beginning to stir, if only for a moment, in their sleep.

Sometimes Viktor imagined these flashes and dark spots as a fine cloud of breath, exhaled by a huge bear asleep in its lair. Sometimes he imagined them as the splashes of tiny fish over a bottomless pool where monstrous pike and catfish had been dozing for centuries. He wanted to glance beneath the pool’s green surface, to disturb its silty bottom and compel the great fish to the surface. He wanted to find the long pliant withe that would make the bear roar, that would make it emerge from its dark lair, shaking its shaggy shoulders.

A two-way passage across the boundary that both bound matter to quanta of energy and separated it from them, within the framework of a single mathematical transformation! And the bridge between the high cliff of our ordinary, common-sense picture of the world and the still mist-shrouded, silent realm of nuclear forces was an experimental apparatus that — for all its apparent complexity — was in its basic principles absurdly simple.

It was strange and surprising to think that it was here, in this deaf-mute realm of protons and neutrons, that the material essence of the world was to be discovered. (Grossman, Stalingrad, pp. 184-185)

That’s a rich image: the pixelated blips on a laboratory screen become so many condensed droplets of the steaming breath of a slumbering bear. It’s no more Baconian than a little boy poking at a coiled snake with a stick — which is just what Grossman’s image of the withe and the bear calls to mind. Here is respect for the depth and density of nature as nature, not just as a cipher for God. If you want to learn the language of science, start reading Grossman.

Sure, he lived and worked in a famously atheist country, but that’s no reason to hold him at arm’s length. Viktor’s epiphany isn’t the only striking insight into the scientific mind in Stalingrad. Earlier in the book, Grossman gives us a spirited debate about ethics (typical of Russian literature) between two sisters: Marusya, a working mother, and Zhenya, an asrtist. Also present is Sofya Osipovna, a veteran surgeon. At one point during dinner, Marusya snaps Zhenya:

“Instead of strange daubs no one can understand, you should paint posters. But I know what you’ll say next. You’ll start going on about truth to life... How many times do I have to tell you that there are two truths? There’s the truth of the reality forced on us by the accursed past. And there’s the truth of the reality that will defeat that past. It’s this second truth, the truth of the future, that I want to live by.”

“Closing your eyes to everything around you?” said Zhenya.

“Well, you don’t see very much either,” Marusya retorted. “You don’t even want to see the wood for the trees.”

“No, Marusya,” said Sofya Osipovna. “You’re wrong. I can tell you as a surgeon that there is one truth, not two. When I cut someone’s leg off, I don’t know two truths. If we start pretending there are two truths, we’re in trouble. And in war too — above all, when things are as bad as they are today-there is only one truth. It’s a bitter truth, but it’s a truth that can save us. If the Germans enter Stalingrad, you learn that if you chase after two truths, you won’t catch either. It’ll be the end of you.” (Stalingrad, p. 99)

Many paths to a single truth: what could be more classical than that?

Welcome (back) to the Arts of Liberty Substack!

If you subscribed a few years back and haven’t heard from us in a while, hello again! If you’re just joining us, welcome.

There have been many developments at Arts of Liberty and its associated project, the Boethius Institute, this being one of them. Today, we’d like to go into what to expect from our new and improved Substack.

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To Goad the Great Conversation

As our website says, our “the mission of Arts of Liberty is to educate students, teachers, and lifelong learners in the purpose and power of the liberal arts and liberal education.” The historical path to “the” liberal arts as a fixed canon of disciplines — the Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and the Quadrivium of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music — was long and complicated, but elements of the tradition are as old as the West itself. Plato, for instance, thought the quadrivial disciplines were essential preparation for studying the order of the soul and the cosmos, and the Good from which both spring and to which both point. And Isocrates, Plato’s contemporary who considered rhetoric the capstone of education, never denied the value of mathematics, even if he accorded it a secondary position. Despite their real differences, Isocrates and Plato shared a basic vision of the person’s relation to the city and the cosmos, which informed their basic attitudes toward education.

Around the time of the Renaissance, the West drifted from this vision. The explosion of new data and new ideas that followed the late medieval and Renaissance recovery of Greco-Roman literature led to new theories of man’s place in the universe — and, as a result, to new theories of education. The legacy of the Renaissance was complicated, if not eclipsed, by the Reformation and the Enlightenment. At the far end of Renaissance humanism, Reformation-era partisanship, and Enlightened scientific rationalism, scholarship and skill training replaced wisdom and dialogue as the end and means of education. This eroded the liberal arts, with devastating consequences for education. Having learned from that mistake, we at Arts of Liberty hold that “the liberal arts in particular and liberal education in general are the surest, most time-tested way to direct students toward a life that is truly free.”

But the purpose of reviving those time-tested principles isn’t to admire them like a fireworks display, but to live in and explore the world revealed by the light they shed.

Our resources aim to reestablish the vital contact between learners and the liberal arts, and thereby reanimate the great conversation about Truth, Goodness, and Beauty they make possible. “The finest achievement of human society, and its rarest pleasure, is conversation,” observed Jacques Barzun. His observation is insightful: conversation isn’t just the result of a shared language, but of shared society, whose bond it strengthens through the pleasure of familiarity in difference. Henri Marrou makes this explicit in connection with classical education, which

embraced all subjects, and could be embraced by all types; since it was concerned with everything, it was suitable for all. It was thus a powerful factor in promoting unity amongst men. Hence what seems at first sight its surprising emphasis on the idea of speech — logos — its predominantly literary tone. The Word was regarded as the prime instrument of any culture and any civilization, the best means of ensuring contact and communication between men; for it broke through the enchanted circle of solitude in which any specialist inevitably tends to be enclosed as a result of his very accomplishments.

The goal of the Arts of Liberty Substack, therefore, is to stimulate conversations between learners, educators, and liberal arts enthusiasts, in the hope that those conversations may contribute, alongside Dappled Things, The Imaginative Conservative, Classical Academic Press, and beyond to the birth of a new “republic of letters,” conceived in wonder and dedicated to the search for truth in friendship. Substack is an especially appropriate platform for building this “republic”: like the Athenian agora, it is a place where like-minded strangers can encounter and challenge each other in spirited, but respectful, conversation.

Call that a lofty goal, but we believe it’s possible. Articles will address questions from science, the humanities, and everything in between; their tone will aim to invite, rather than to settle, debate. In this way, we hope not just to restate, but to practice the time-tested arts of liberty.

About the Interlocutor

Behind the “we” in this post, there is an “I”.

My name is Benjamin Trull, the Boethius Institute’s new Director of Scholarship. Since I’ll be behind most of these Substack articles, I’d like to introduce myself and explain how I came to pen these pensées.

I am a child of the classical education and homeschooling movements’ early days, when both were socially radical — and, in the case of homeschooling, something of a legal question mark. I loved all things literary and philosophical, especially when they overlapped on the stage. Both loves led me quite naturally to Thomas Aquinas College, which fused them into a single spirited, though sometimes spastic, desire for wisdom.

When I graduated in 2019, I mistook that desire for wisdom as a desire for further school and sought an M.A. in Theology from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception. I had excellent professors and studied alongside excellent students, but I realized that there was a distinction between the intellectual life I craved and the world of term papers and comps. That world is haven and home to many, but not me: I was a stranger in a strange land. When I completed the degree in 2021, I accompanied it with a vow never to return to academia. I’d seek my intellectual fortune in the “real world.”

Having been so long a student, though, I was afraid that the “real world” would quickly drain my motivation without necessarily devouring my time, like a toaster charring bread into a slab not even butter can redeem. I was convinced that letting a day pass without cracking a book would send me cascading down a slippery slope to Netflix and meme binges. I read aggressively, therefore, no matter the jobs I worked: I brought Servais Pinckaers to my check-lane when I worked as a cashier and Turgenev to my lunch breaks as a grant-writer. I eventually realized I was over-doing it, but the habit stuck.

And the more I read, the more I wanted to write. There’s a lot of justifiable handwringing about artificial intelligence at the moment, but one silver lining is that large language models like ChatGPT and Claude have shown the world that thinking and writing are, in some ways, two names for the same activity. I don’t mean that AI truly thinks, only that its remarkable and synthetic imitation of human writing explains its eerie approximation to thought. To read well forces you to think, and to think well means to express, examine, and refine your impressions.

I started voicing those impressions on Substack and for the Albertus Magnus Institute; I even returned to the stage (as an amateur, of course), not only as an actor but as a playwright. Between my Substack articles and Passion’s End, a play I co-wrote with a friend and fellow graduate of Thomas Aquinas College, I caught the attention of my old teacher, Dr. Andrew Seeley. Since I was already toiling in intellectual fields adjacent to Arts of Liberty, he suggested, why not bring my metaphorical hoe and spade one field over and coax some fruit out of this fertile ground? Why not, indeed! And so you find me here, working the soil of the great tradition and goading discussions — the intellectual life I didn’t know I was craving all those years ago!

On behalf of Arts of Liberty, therefore, and in hopes of contributing to the educational renewal and stoking the enthusiasm of my fellow teachers, I bid you welcome back. I look forward to many conversations to come.

I look forward to working closely with Jeff, now the Director of the St. Ambrose Center at the University of Dallas, to further the work he has begun. Forty years of teaching and learning in programs of liberal education make me eager and ready to advance the project. Working directly with teachers and schools has made me aware of the liberating power that authentic education still exercises in our day and age. I hope to make the Arts of Liberty Project an ever-greater force for freedom, by making more widely known the abundant resources already available and by continuing to enhance it as a resource for teachers, students, and lifelong learners. 

We will be resuming the Arts of Liberty newsletter next month. In order for the Arts of Liberty Project to become more integrated with the other initiatives of the Saint Ambrose Center, we are going to switch our newsletter over to MailChimp. We want to give you a heads up that your email addresses have been transferred.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year,

Andrew T. Seeley, PhD

Recently, my teenaged son asked me for some time to talk before he left for school. He confided to me that a friend had decided to lead weekly devotions during lunch. During the first meeting, this friend had decried the flatness of his spiritual life, how far away from God he felt, and exhorted his friends to pursue the high that comes from being close to God. My son was confused. He questioned the language his friend had used and what he really meant, because it sounded like his friend was comparing his spiritual life to a drug.

Our conversation replayed in my mind for hours after he had left for school. And I came to see even more clearly how much teenagers, especially, need a liberal arts education—an education which inculcates habits and orders loves and frees a man from himself. This student’s self-proclaimed love for God could be interpreted as exemplary; after all, he was leading a “Bible” study. But my son’s concern, and mine, was that this student talked not about how spiritual disciplines produce holiness or how holiness draws a disciple close to God. Instead, God was a passion. A high. A feeling. Although both these young men attend a classical school, the true fruit of a liberal education was missing in the life of one of them. One had exchanged the object of his appetite toward an end that is socially acceptable at his school.

A few days later, I read an article in The Imaginative Conservative that reinforced the danger to young people of holding up feeling-based religion as an example to emulate. Quoting John Henry Newman’s sermon “Unreal Words,” the author David Deavel writes,

“True faith teaches us to do numberless disagreeable things for Christ’s sake… In most books Christian conduct is made grand, elevated, and splendid; so that any one, who only knows of true religion from books, and not from actual endeavors to be religious, is sure to be offended at religion when he actually comes upon it.”

The grand and elevated and splendid, which this student was encouraging others to chase, is nothing remotely close to true religion. Liberal education offers teenagers soul-saving truth. Holiness is found in the mundane and servile acts we do unto the Lord, not the feeling we get from youth group.

Teachers in the liberal arts tradition must model a life of obedience, humble dependence upon God, and routine acts of piety. We must teach the Great Books and the Great People of our tradition and hold them up as flesh and blood examples of ordinary holiness, lives spent, talents surrendered. A liberal arts education offers real words in striking contrast to contemporary culture’s unreal words. In doing so, we shape hearts and order loves. The sugar-coated lies of this world are based upon consumerism, infatuation with pop culture, and denial of the eternal.

A liberal arts education teaches students that they are not slaves to their desires nor to their culture, that they are part of a tradition that goes way back and will continue long after them. Too many, even among the churched teenagers at my son’s classical school, hear the siren’s song that their life is all about them and how they feel. A true liberal education must be for these teenagers like the rope that tethered Ulysses to the mast.     

Mandi recommends the following for parents trying to navigate raising liberally educated children:

• The Joke’s on You – Podcast by Joshua Gibbs

• Parenting – A book by Paul David Tripp

• A Benedictine Education – Essays by John Henry Newman

• You are What you Love – A book by James K.A. Smith

If you are enjoying this newsletter, please share it broadly. We welcome guest writers and would be delighted to share content from partner organizations who share our vision of the true, good, and beautiful. Contact us at artsofliberty@udallas.edu.

And mark your calendars for next year’s first event, The Fourth Biennial Future of the Catholic Imagination Conference.

One of my most gifted students over my dozen years of teaching is blind, which has often led me to meditate on the difference between reading as an aural or visual experience. For centuries, reading was a communal activity because people primarily read aloud; they read as the copied manuscripts, as they taught dictation and memorization. Reading was more of an aural experience than a visual one. What can we learn from the past’s ways of reading that still might benefit us in an age where our technology has rendered aural experience mostly unnecessary?

Consider Christopher Smith’s book Reading for the Common Good, which advises us to slow down in our reading habits, dwell deeply with texts, and most significantly, converse with and about the books we read.

And, Sarah Mackenzie has taken great strides to return us to the practice of reading aloud through her Read Aloud Revival. If you do not listen to her podcast, please subscribe; I’m sharing here the conversation with Alan Jacobs, probably one’s go-to author when it comes to reading practices: A Theology of Reading, Pleasures of Reading in a Distracted Age, Breaking Bread with the Dead. (I joke that my purpose in life is to share Alan’s work.)

In your home, I hope you’re reading aloud regularly, reciting poetry at dinner, or to family and friends (my husband and I read comedy aloud most often, so we can enjoy laughing with one another). In the classroom, spend chunks of time reading the texts aloud to students. On campus, host reading marathons where you read all of Paradise Lost, Pride and Prejudice or Native Son aloud, students and faculty taking hour time slots throughout the day. The Whaling Museum in New Bedford, which I visited this past summer, hosts an annual reading of Moby Dick. You can see versions of these reading marathons across the country, proof that we literary weirdos continue to be a countercultural force.

When I was teaching Basil the Great’s “On Pagan Literature” in my Art of Reading seminar at the University of Dallas, we honed in on the saint’s description of reading as “gathering travel supplies for eternity.” What a phenomenal way of seeing the activity of reading! Basil writes one of the earliest apologies for why Christians should read Greek literature, such as Homer and Plato (I discovered a reader’s guide to this letter in Arts of Liberty vault of riches). We read to prepare our souls for the life-long pilgrimage.

If you would like to read in community but are not sure where to start, here are a handful of book lists to guide your journey:

• 10 Books to Read Before You Graduate College

• An Annotated Bibliography on Liberal Education

• IMAGE Journal’s Top 50 Writers of Faith

• John Senior’s 1000 Books for Life-Long Readers (If you’re not familiar with John Senior, he was one of the three professors who made up the legendary Kansas University Integrated Humanities program.)

In Majmudar’s poem, the unnamed guide attends to the wanderer in the library and navigates his way, so that he can discover the beauty of the treasures before him. They come alive when someone lights the way. Arts of Liberty hopes not only to be that guide for some of the greatest books in our tradition but also to empower teachers to continue passing on the light. We should not read in seclusion, but reading should be a communal activity. This newsletter hopes to invite readers into a community of reading and learning.

In lieu of graduation in 2020, when students were all sent home because of the pandemic, Law & Liberty asked a handful of people to pen graduation speeches for students. I remembered these words that I wrote then because hundreds of us are experiencing the metaphor of pilgrimage as we read through Dante’s The Divine Comedy over the next 100 Days in the largest reading group ever, cohosted with University of Dallas, Biola University’s Torrey Honors, and Baylor University.  The first videos were released recently, so you still have time to join and catch up.

When I teach The Divine Comedy, I consider the journey one of the pilgrim’s education. Dante learns the difference between liberty and license as he descends into hell, where the sinners are enslaved by their own passions. They were free to choose even what would imprison them. As Dante reaches the summit of Mount Purgatory (spoiler alert), he is crowned and mitered lord of himself. His pilgrimage has transformed him to become truly free.

As we celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death this year, you will find so much on Dante out there. New books, new translations, podcasts, webinars. Here are just a handful of resources to enjoy:

• Beatrice Institute hosted a conversation with Jason Baxter, author of A Beginner’s Guide to The Divine Comedy

• The legendary Robert Hollander, translator and Dante scholar, who passed away in June 2021, gave a lecture “The Scandal of Dante’s Catholicism” at the University of Dallas that is worth watching

• Jennifer Frey and Matthew Rothhaus Moser discussed all of the Divine Comedy over three episodes of The Sacred and Profane Love podcast

• the University of Notre Dame published a book by Dennis Looney Freedom Readers: The African-American Reception of Dante

• And, for teachers, my friend Jennifer Holberg edited a two special issues of Pedagogy (13 and 17) on how to teach Dante well

• Randy Boyagoda aptly titled his new novel Dante’s Indiana; read this review “Finding Dante in the Infernal Midwest” if want to know more

• of course, there’s a thousand more!

For pilgrims like Dante, the virtue of hope becomes all important. It is the wayfarer’s virtue. On our Arts of Liberty site, we guide learners and teachers through what these virtues mean and how they appear in various texts throughout the tradition, including in Dante’s Commedia. St. Thomas Aquinas defines hope as “the virtue by which a person attains proper measure in his or her deeds, hoping for a difficult but attainable good, attainable only through the help of God” (Summa Theologiae, IIa.IIae, question 17). I invite you to read some of our other articles that explore what hope means to Socrates, Sir Thomas More, or Winston Churchill. In Winter 2020 Evangelization & Culture, the journal produced by Word on Fire, dedicated a special issue to Hope, in which I contributed a reflection on Dante’s Commedia. I’d recommend you grab a copy.

We are all pilgrims on this journey, and I am so grateful to have a broad company with whom to sojourn. We welcome your contributions to this conversation. If you would like to send me further examples of where hope sings loudly in great texts (art, music, literature, film), I would love to share them.

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime.” --John Lewis,

I started teaching at twenty-two at a classical school in Fort Worth. I’ll never forget that first day, standing in an Ann Taylor dress before ten slightly odorous fourth graders, wondering how I got there. Despite my inexperience, I felt what Eric Liddell describes in Chariots of Fire as “God’s pleasure in me.” I knew teaching was my calling, though I did not know how to do it well. Over the next dozen years, I dedicated myself to discovering how to teach well, to researching more about the liberal arts tradition that I had unwittingly stepped into, and to promoting liberal education for more people.

In 2020 amidst the chaos of the pandemic and the quick disintegration of liberal arts programs across higher education, a group of professors in liberal arts applied for a grant to found Liberating Arts, an effort we hoped would help us learn more about why the liberal arts matter, where such formation in these arts should occur, and how to continue this tradition. After a year of hosting conversations via Zoom and sharing them over in podcast form, we learned a lot. First, we learned that we needed a way to sustain the project that began only as a three-year investigatory grant. The Arts of Liberty, founded by Jeffrey Lehman, began years before our efforts into this arena, and the project will become the home for our future endeavors. Through the Arts of Liberty, we will be able to support teachers in the liberal arts in their liberating work in and out of classrooms.

The Arts of Liberty is the resource that I wish I had encountered as a young teacher, and it should be the go-to support and encouragement for all of those invested in liberal education. The project aims to offer reliable guides to students, teachers, and lifelong learners. We have a grand vision in our desire to educate for freedom:

·      A regular newsletter with inspiration; upcoming opportunities; resources from our site; lists of relevant podcasts, stories, and articles; as well as pieces by guest writers

·      A podcast hosted through Liberating Arts, with more episodes from Director Jessica Hooten Wilson and the Arts of Liberty founder Jeffrey Lehman

·      An annual conference: in 2022, you can look forward to the fourth biennial Future of the Catholic Imagination Conference hosted by Arts of Liberty on the University of Dallas campus

·      Free courses, lectures, books, trips abroad…. We are just getting started!

We look forward to increasing our opportunities to inspire you on your journey. Please feel free to contact me (Jessica Hooten Wilson) if you would like to work more closely with Arts of Liberty in the future. We would love to share your likeminded content, promote organizations invested in liberal arts, and continue in friendship with those who care about freedom, a flourishing culture, and the good life.

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