Forma Issue #12

COLUMNS FEATURES

6

EDITORS’ LETTER

by the Editors

Cultural Currency HUNGRY SOULS IN A SELF-AFFIRMING CULTURE

by Andrew Mitchell

Interview WITH KEVIN CLARK AND RAVI JAIN

by James Cain

Book Reviews

THE ODD IMMORTALITY OF JOHN CROWE RANSOM

by James Matthew Wilson

A BUNDLE OF HOPES AND HUNGERS: JAMES K.A. SMITH ’S ON THE ROAD WITH SAINT AUGUSTINE

by Anthony Barr

From the Classroom A CURE FOR THE YOUTH

by Joshua Gibbs

This magazine is published by the CiRCE Institute. Copyright CiRCE Institute 2019. For a digital version, and for additional content, please go to formajournal.com.

For information regarding reproduction, submission, or advertising, please email formamag@circeinstitute.org.

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Issue 12 Autumn 2019

24 CLASSICAL LEARNING AND THE NEW SCHOOL OF ATHENS

by Jason M. Baxter

S.D. SMITH TELLS HIS STORY

by David Kern

OFFERINGS TO THE WAITING: IN DEFENSE OF NEW ART

by Heidi White

THE DINNER PARTY AND THE ULTIMA CENA by

Sarah-Jane Bentley

HOW THEN SHALL WE EAT?

by Valerie Abraham

The CiRCE Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization that exists to promote and support classical education in the school and in the home. We seek to identify the ancient principles of learning, to communicate them enthusiastically, and to apply them vigorously in today’s educational settings through curricula development, teacher training, events, an online academy, and a content-laden website. Learn more at circeinstitute.com

Editors' Letter

Autumn ushers in a season of festivity. As the nights grow long and cold, we gather indoors for board games, chili, and spiced apple cider. For most of us, the fall season is peppered with traditions: the donning of our favorite fuzzy sweaters, the annual visit to the pumpkin patch, watching playoff baseball as a family, reading favorite cool-weather books. Sports enthusiasts wrangle fantasy footballs drafts and line-ups, and cinephiles rejoice at the biggest movies of awards season. And fall can be a catalyst for fresh beginnings, when we launch new endeavors or hone in on necessary growth. But the crown of autumn is, of course, the food. From the colorful jumble of candy wrappers piled in old pillowcases to the golden-roasted Thanksgiving turkey drizzled in Grandma’s famous giblet gravy, fall is marked by feasts.

With that in mind, we at FORMA wanted to contemplate autumn’s culture of abundance. So in these pages, you will find essays, conversations, reviews, and original poetry that consider the nature and purpose of feasting in story-telling, education, art, books, and more. Author S.D. Smith tells his story, Valerie Abraham (the daughter of a French chef!) celebrates slow food, James Matthew Wilson honors an old poet who inspires him and shares poetry of his own, Jason Baxter proposes a new kind of classical school, and Sarah-Jane Bentley takes on a famous modern art installation that she claims gets feasting all wrong—and much more. As the warm expanse of summer gives way to the snug huddle of fall, the Autumn issue of FORMA offers rich and meaningful meditations for your festivities.

Cheers,

The Editors

Publisher: Andrew Kern, President of The CiRCE Institute

Editor-in-Chief: David Kern

Managing Editor: Heidi White

Art Director: Graeme Pitman

Poetry Editor: Christine Perrin

Associate Editors: Emily Andrews, Sean Johnson

Senior Editors: Jamie Cain, Matt Bianco

Contributing Editors: Ian Andrews, Noah Perrin

Copy Editor: Emily Callihan

The Editorial Team

WHY NEW COLLEGE FRANKLIN

At a Glance | Located in beautiful Franklin Tennessee, NCF is a four year Christian Liberal Arts college dedicated to excellent academics and discipling relationships among students and faculty.

Spiritual Formation | We seek to enrich and disciple students intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, and physically, to guide them to wisdom, virtue, and a life of service to God, neighbors, and creation.

Classical Tradition | Intellectual development occurs through conversation in small classroom settings covering the great works of literature, philosophy, theology, the trivium and quadrivium.

Hungry Souls in a Self-Affirming Culture Rediscovering the Fundamentals of Feasting

by Andrew Mitchell

When we read Genesis 1 and 2, we realize we were made very good, but we were also made hungry. The God who made us created this remarkable method of sustaining life whereby we take food into ourselves, de-form it in our stomachs, and then experience its re-formation, becoming an integral part of who we are. Our Creator also provided us with a nearly infinite number of choices for us to satisfy our hunger. Yet we would have things differently.

Since the garden of Eden, appetite is primarily what drives us and causes us to be restless. God has given us appetites for good things—for food, work, leisure, sex. He made us desiring creatures. It’s the way in which we go about feeding those desires that is problematic. Because of this dichotomy our eating and drinking provides us the perfect opportunity to reflect on the ways a meal might feed both our bodies and our souls.

Eating and drinking are simple activities that we engage in every day, sometimes with focused intent, sometimes rather thoughtlessly. A momentary reflection reveals a few of the deep, and deeply American, contradictions concerning this subject. Americans purchase cookbooks at an extraordinary rate, despite the fact that fewer Americans are cooking today than ever before. America is a country full of barbecue-lovers and vegans. We are the fattest nation on earth and also home to millions who suffer from eating disorders.

Food is thus but a subset of the larger American paradox. We’re stalwart individuals who compulsively follow others on social media. Our modern culture teaches us we’re perfectly okay and need to be affirmed while con-

stantly bombarding us with advertising that tell us how incomplete our lives are. Image—real or Photoshopped, but definitely cultivated—appears to be everything.

That devotion to image creates uncertainty even in our eating. Should I change my eating habits? If so, should I diet or fast? Intermittent fasting, or cleanse? Paleo or keto? Do I avoid red dye? Should I only eat organic? This uncertainty only results in increasing isolation.

Further compounding our problem is the current tendency of foodstuffs to divide us at the table itself. Gluttony is alive and well not in terms of excess alone, but of “delicacy.” As Screwtape observed, “What do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern?” There is a right and proper hunger that makes us all human and that demands to be satisfied. On the one hand, the desire to satiate our hunger and thirst can become thoughtless and stultifying, where mealtimes become organic gas stations, filling and refilling the human engine with fuel ad nauseam.

When considered in its proper context, however, eating—especially that epic encounter known as the feast— has the ability to lift us up, beyond the confines of realities we have constructed for ourselves. In those moments, those special times at which friends, family, and congregations gather round the table, we can see clearer, appreciate better, and love deeper that Love which is the source of all creation, edible or otherwise. Through our companionship at table, around the humble fare of salt and bread, meat and wine, we enjoy some of the richest and most satisfying communion possible.

Salt comes to us from the ground and water. In a way, it is part of the same dust of which we ourselves are made. Salt (sodium chloride, NaCl) is one of the basic needs of the body, and one of our basic taste receptors as well. We have preserved many of salt’s essential functions (as salt preserves meats and cheeses) through proverbs. Salt cleanses, for example, so to take something “with a grain of salt” is another way of expressing cleansing our sight. Salt scours and abrades even cast iron, scraping and sanitizing, and “rubbing salt in the wound” comes from salt’s textural and antiseptic qualities. Then, bizarrely, salt accentuates the taste of what is salted, making it more itself. Steak becomes “steak-ier” when salted. Take all these things together, and when a wise man tells his disciples that they are the “salt of the world,” he opens up a whole world of implications.

While salt has the tendency to clear our eyes, bread lifts us to a richer vision of life. Bread has earned its label “the staff of life.” In many cases, the words for “bread” and “food” in ancient cultures are the same. We see an example of this in the petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread.” When shared with others, daily bread creates companionship (from the Latin pane, “bread”). By the eighteenth century, “bread” had become a synonym for one’s livelihood (“to earn one’s bread”); by the middle of the twentieth, it was slang for money.

Not only language, but even the making of bread points to a fuller human experience. It is not good for man to be alone, and what better way to remind him of that than by making bread. Flour must be sown as grain, harvested, threshed, ground, and baked. All this activity requires community. Small wonder that after discovering the harshness their new life promised, Adam and Eve decided it would be a good time to start a family.

Later, through manna—and later still with the coming of Christ—the food of the curse becomes the food of forgiveness and, more remarkably, the food of blessing. That which we labored for becomes a gift that has the potential to reorient our skewed perspectives on life. The fact that Communion bread is taken repeatedly in the Christian life also creates a strong link between this food and memory. Memory of past mercies, past meals, past forgivenesses, sows seeds of gratitude and love that can yield a thirty, sixty, even a hundredfold return.

To broaden our focus, we may follow bread with meat. This form of sustenance was not initially given to man in the garden, nor, significantly, was it permitted immedi-

ately after the Fall. Instead, it appears with the creation of a New Earth in the days of Noah, given almost reluctantly, as a concession to man’s increasingly violent nature. The killing and eating of animals, the beasts over whom we exercised a different dominion in Eden, makes those events tragically humanizing, reminding us in a visceral way of the bloody consequences of our Fall.

Accompanying this new food in the New Earth is wine. The preeminent symbol of freedom and grace, wine mirrors the human condition in some important ways. Like us, it need not exist, but it does, thanks be to God!

It is ambiguous, just like we are: prone to elevate and inspire, yet also prone to debase and degrade. As with food, we take wine into us, and it transforms us, provoking reflection and judgment in taste. And it is this capacity for, and exercise of, a qualified independent reasoning that separates us from the animals.

We can see these basic elements in several works of art. They are summed up rather beautifully in the Supper at Emmaus (below), a seventeenth-century work by Caravaggio. It presents a humble meal in a humble setting, just at the moment of its profound transfiguration. The basket of fruit in the foreground, positioned half-off the table, thrusts its rich allegorical message towards the viewer. In it we see apples and figs, the traditional fruits of our Fall and humiliation. We see also the pomegranate and grapes, the fruits of Christ’s humiliation and our Redemption. Finally, notice the pear, jutting out from the basket at an angle perpendicular to the slain fowl that represents the seemingly eternal reality of death. A pear, when sliced laterally along its mid-section reveals a five-pointed star, taken by contemporaries as a metaphor for Aristotle’s “quintessence,” that unchanging quality of the universe which is the living Christ, the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

Though the allegorical meanings have lost some of their power through the centuries, the modern onlooker cannot help but notice the astonishment on the diners’ faces. Consider the zig-zag way viewers are pulled in, from that rich basket of food to the outstretched arms of the be-scalloped pilgrim, ultimately to the hidden palm of the risen Jesus. Yet the painting that draws us in also has a message that pushes out. What we eat is only ever a part of mealtime. When we look to the Giver of the feast, we attain a true focus. That’s why we give thanks before the meal—to put the food we eat and our conversation in its proper perspective.

(1601) Carravagio, Supper at Emmaus.

(1885) Krøyer, Hip, Hip, Hurrah!

So we are made hungering creatures, and we have been given basic necessities of salt, bread, and meat to satisfy our appetite and wine from God to wash it down. But what’s the purpose? Is there, will there ever be an end to our hunger, to our thirst? Jesus of Nazareth has within himself the means to supply us with living bread and living water. Yet this selfsame Jesus, upon his resurrection, rarely met his disciples without eating with them, be it bread, or fish, or honey. We find ourselves jutting up against a cosmic mystery, but it appears that the body that is raised incorruptible will still find delight in eating, that the wedding feast between Christ and his Bride, hinted at in Jesus’ miracle at Cana, may be more than just a metaphor. The prophet Isaiah, in one of his first apocalyptic visions, describes the meal at the end of the world this way:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for allpeoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever…

A second illustration to help prepare us for this Greatest of All Feasts comes from the palette of the outstanding Danish realist, Peder Krøyer. Entitled Hip, Hip, Hurrah!

(below), it is a celebration of the artists’ community on the island of Skagen, one of the few places where the troubled Krøyer was able to find love and a sense of peace. This painting is a tribute to his friends and family, a simple meal concluded with a champagne toast. Just as Caravaggio arranges the order of his painting to draw us in and triangulate to the Christ, a more vertical, inward triangulation is going on here. Look closely at the trajectory of the participants and the glasses themselves. While Caravaggio’s subjects are lost in the wonder that is Christ, the artists in Krøyer’s piece are also being drawn away from their original positions, out of themselves. Everyone leaning in to the toast does so from their own vantage point, seeking a common ground and finding it, not by any one dictatorial position, but almost as it were by intuition. The closer the glasses, the closer we are drawn towards each other, the closer we approach that acme of love and joy, shouting together the ebullient cry, “Hip, Hip, Hurrah!” From a Christian perspective, we might see in this sacred speech and sacred drink the pursuit of God himself. If we are to live and experience our lives in their true

and proper perspective, we must have a true and proper focus to our lives, a center that allows those other elements to occupy their true and proper place. We must take time to slow down, to pause, to recognize intentionally the incredible efforts that go into allowing our families, our churches, our schools to eat in this way, and be grateful. In the words of J.S. Bach, we are sleepers awakening every day to an Easter morn that reveals how much we are loved, and inspires us to love others. This experience is asymmetrical, as are all our deepest loves. In a sense it is just perfect for what we need; in another, it is more than we deserve.

This is what a good meal can allow. Our dress may be different, the table isn’t groaning, but our hearts are nevertheless moved to love, in praise to something none of them made, a praise in delight that You Exist. Although Christ may not be physically present as he is in Caravaggio, we can sense the presence of the Sonlight drawing our glasses upwards, of the light reflecting itself in the color of the wine, to say nothing of the God who is present in the wine itself.

Not every meal can be a feast. But still, in these bent and incomplete communities in which we find ourselves, with broken families, isolated churches, and fragmented neighborhoods, we can take time before family busy-ness interferes to sit down to a real meal at least once a week. The ingredients don’t have to be fancy, but we can sit for a while and be grateful. Then, perhaps, when we have the courage to lose ourselves, not to affirm ourselves, we will awaken and see Love dwelling in our midst.

We are hungering creatures, yet it would be folly to pursue food and drink with the conviction that they will ultimately satisfy this hunger. Neither can we try to be godlike and live without it. But we can, when we eat and drink with others, enjoy a moment of transcendence, a moment of being caught up, a moment when time seems to stand still. I hope we can abandon the compulsion to look at a cell phone, and instead look into each other’s eyes. We can allow the food and the wine to lead us not only to talk of great things, but to live a deep love together. Then the magic of the feast can truly begin, transfiguring us all in a beautiful new way.

Dr. Andrew Mitchell is an associate professor of history at Grove City College. This essay was originally presented at a benefit for Veritas Academy in Lancaster, PA in March 2019 and has been edited for publication.

(1601) Carravagio, Supper at Emmaus.

Krøyer, Hip, Hip, Hurrah!

—Dr. John

Professor of Systematic Theology & Philosophy, Reformed Theological Seminary

Searching for a Coherent Philosophy

The authors of one of the most important recent books on the Classical education renewal discuss their ongoing process of discovery

By James Cain

Every person involved with classical education has had to field some version of the question “What is classical education?” No matter who asks it, the question doesn’t lend itself to easy answers in casual conversation. Answering it for those who seek to practice it—parents, teachers, administrators—is still more complicated, as it means translating a definition into practicable methods. Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, educators at the Geneva School in Orlando, recognized this need from their own teaching and training. Five years ago, Classical Academic Press published their research in The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. Clark and Jain not only proposed a complete definition for Christian classical education, but they also offered a robust philosophical framework for its practice, one that begins not with the Trivium or the liberal arts, but with piety. This year, CAP will publish a revised edition that includes an abundance of new and revised material. We asked the authors to tell us more about the genesis of the book, their continued work, and the need for a new edition.

basic level, was for a coherent philosophy of Christian classical education, one that made sense of, and found a place for, all of the good things happening at our school, and at schools across the renewal. Some items came to the foreground immediately. Looking here only to math and natural science (there is much to say about a more robust treatment of the language arts of the Trivium), we wanted to avoid two tendencies we saw in some schools; namely, the attempt, on the one hand, to fit them into the Trivium and, on the other, to treat them like they didn’t belong in the classical curriculum. This latter tendency is the more serious, because what it often means is 1) accepting that math and science as they are encountered in the modern curriculum are the same as math and science in the tradition, and 2) studying them at our schools anyway as subjects that we are forced to study in order to “get students into college.’’

Jain: We had been asked to help organize teacher training at the Geneva School for a couple of years. The first documents we shared with Christopher Perrin [head of Classical Academic Press, the book’s publisher] were directly from that training and contained the germ of the book. We had a very basic problem as a school (and to some extent we still do).

How did The Liberal Arts Tradition grow out of your teaching and leadership at Geneva? What need were you hoping to meet?

Clark: The need we were hoping to meet, at the most

If you asked ten different teachers for their definitions of Christian classical education, you would get ten different answers. Most of those definitions would reference the Trivium and perhaps goodness,

truth, and beauty at some point. But when one asked for an example of how the Trivium influenced the teaching of choir or P.E. there was no clear answer. This was also true of the subjects of math and science as Kevin mentions above. On the other hand, a number of us had the sense that there was a coherent mission that we were all engaged in, though it had not yet been clearly elucidated. We had hoped to clearly express the essence of this common project so that we could better connect our stated mission with our practices. We also really needed to know what historical resources were available to guide our process. We never intended to invent a kind of education, only to recover one. Thus we needed to know where to look for this recovery. In some ways The Liberal Arts Tradition is just a manual, a handbook, for those in the process of seeking to recover Christian classical education. For those not actively trying to recover it, the book might not make sense. But for those that are, we hope it is a faithful guide for them.

Hard to believe, but we’re five years on from the first edition of The Liberal Arts Tradition. What did you learn during those years that warranted a new edition?

Clark: We learned so much, especially from our contact with Christian classical educators in China, but we saw the most growth in our understanding in three areas in particular: the place of the virtues in a Christian moral philosophy; the vital role played by the life of the church in the calling, culture, and curriculum for classical education; and, surprisingly, the dynamics of the liberal arts of language. These seem like three independent areas of growth, but there is a common theme: saying what was simply assumed but actually needed to be articulated clearly. With respect to the virtues, we learned that there is a coherent Christian vision for moral philosophy, one that both adopts and yet transforms the classical inheritance. With respect to the Christian classical education in the largest contours—the culture of the church, the calling to educate our children, the curriculum that this culture and calling implies—we learned that the role of the church needed to be articulated given our post-ecclesial moment in American Christianity.

Jain: I would simply add how desperate was our need to clarify what is meant in the Christian tradition by virtue. Among Christian classical educators I fear we sometimes use the word virtue in a manner that sounds like something other than growth in Christ. It was important for me to understand that for Christians growth in virtue is growth in Christ. Understanding the Christian recep-

tion of the virtue tradition is absolutely crucial to understanding Christian classical education. This took much more work to understand than I had expected. Consider for example the relationship between justice (a cardinal virtue) and the New Testament term “justification.” I am confident that the Christian reception of the virtue tradition is robust and biblical. But it took a lot of historical digging and sifting through theological controversy to gain this confidence.

What does this edition provide that the first one did not? Does any of the new material respond to challenges or push back against ideas in the first edition?

Jain: We realized that our book was receiving a wider audience than we expected, so we could not assume the common background of readers that we did in the first edition. We had written the book primarily for Christian classical school teachers who were trying to understand how to do their jobs better. But in many situations it became a first introduction to Christian classical education that was read by pastors, professors, homeschool educators, and curious Christians. It was also getting read overseas. Because of this we needed to explain more of the biblical and theological underpinnings. We could no longer assume a relatively homogenous audience. This book is more attentive to the concerns of a broader spectrum of people.

What was the most significant, unforeseen change in your own classrooms as a result of your work on this book?

Clark: I’ve seen a significant change in the practice of teaching. Thinking about teaching the arts of the Trivium, for instance, I’m always asking myself, “Does this lesson or activity place my students on the trajectory from discovery to demonstration? If so, where does it fit? Is this lesson or activity making them more receptive to the effect or dynamics of language? Does this lesson nurture growth from the poetic and precritical context of musical education?”

Jain: When I wrote about the four causes and about natural science as a demonstrable knowledge of causes in nature, I was often instructing myself. While I was always careful in my writing not to describe an ideal case that is unreachable in practice, I was still new at understanding these categories. I could see how categories like the musica mundana and scientia made better sense of what I was doing in class. But I had not yet grown into them

completely. I did not know where all this would lead. The book took five years to write, so we had time to gain confidence about the significance of these categories. But now five years of further practice has made the paradigm far clearer for me. Kevin detailed above the major tectonic shifts in the book, but the insight the basic paradigm has brought to my everyday teaching has also been significant. I have realized more clearly that modern science is not interested in scientia, it is interested in technology. And so as a science teacher parents do not expect me to teach their children scientia (a demonstrable knowledge of causes) or natural philosophy (the pursuit of wisdom from nature), they expect me to teach them about rocket ships, Blu-Ray players, and computer programming. Understanding this distinction helped me clarify many problems in curriculum and pedagogy. It led me to inquire, “What is the proper narrative around technology and how do we connect modern technology to the traditional common arts?”

I could also go into greater detail about how the liberal arts train discovery and demonstration. This too is connected to Aristotle’s definition of scientia as a demonstrable knowledge of causes. Generally, I have realized that this whole web of meaning that the ancients and medievals developed in the liberal arts tradition is robust and coherent. I can lean into the paradigm. And the more I lean into it, the more insight I find. It has actually been astonishing. I had no idea that reimagining my paradigm for learning would be so powerful and productive. It has made me more and more convinced that Christians throughout the centuries have carefully guarded tremendous wisdom.

What is the best application you’ve heard from others after they read the book?

Jain: I was delighted when a school in China took their school on a retreat in the woods as a way to introduce elements of the musical education and natural history into their curriculum. A retreat like this was very countercultural to their test-score, work-driven schools. I have also been gratified to hear of teachers providing more historical context for their math and science classes. But I would love to hear of more examples of application. If any readers have some, please let us know!

A while back David Hicks asked, here in FORMA, whether classical education was still possible. He concluded his essay with a powerful challenge and question: “The pillars are toppled and the ground sown with salt, as thoroughly as the Romans destroyed Car-

thage. This requires us to make a sober estimation of the challenge we face. How are we to meet this challenge in an increasingly invasive, relentless, and hostile environment?” How do you feel this book addresses this cultural challenge?

Clark: That was a powerful and challenging question, and I think an unanswerable one from the perspective of the broader culture. The Christian classical model of education presupposes a culture and, as Hick’s argues devastatingly, that culture does not appear to exist any more than Carthage continued to exist after Rome dealt so decisively with it. That said, I do believe our book addresses this cultural challenge by suggesting (along with thinkers like Robert Louis Wilken and James K.A. Smith) that there is another alternative to, and indeed far more significant cultural resource than, the broader culture: the culture of the church. There’s not space here to defend this claim, of course, but this point was demonstrated powerfully by our experience with Chinese classical educators, where they often find it is only the cultural life of the church that supports and gives meaning and direction to education in a hostile and aggressively secular culture. So while I hope that it is not the case that the last lights have finally off the black west went, it is not the broader culture but the body of Christ that must give life and hope to our educational efforts.

Jain: When I first read Hicks’ article, I was both pleased and discouraged. I was pleased because his analysis is astute. The four pillars he describes are truly important and have truly been knocked down. But pillars that are knocked down are not necessarily destroyed. If they could once truly support the weight of culture, then perhaps they could do so still. That he offered so little hope for the way forward discouraged me. But I could see why from his point of view he was pessimistic. On the other hand, I do think that progress can be made if we attend to the problems he describes. Hicks gives us a hint at the direction of a solution in his article. Christians “are still charged with the responsibility to raise our children in the fear of God and educate them to treat the natural world with utmost respect, to live in pursuit of the ends for which all men and women are created, and to order their lives in accordance with biblical norms.” To the degree that this is what Christians in the past pursued, we have more in common with them than we do with contemporary secular education. Because pillars have fallen does not mean that the church cannot repair those ruins. But as Kevin points out, it will take the church. It cannot be done by individual lone ranger Christians. The

church is the hope of the world because it is the body of Christ empowered by the Spirit. Let us briefly consider how each pillar can be restored by the concerted work of the church.

Even this expanded edition can’t cover all of the bases in a subject as broad as classical education; what are some areas outside the scope of your book where you think important activity is going on?

Clark: I’ll let Ravi respond in more detail, but he, Chris Hall, and Robbie Andreasen have written a book on natural philosophy. Ravi is working on a math curriculum. Chris Hall has written a book on the common arts and Matt Clark one on the fine arts, all with reference to the A in PGMAPT.

Jain: I’ve been impressed by the colleges around the country which are trying to recover Christian classical education for higher education or those trying to start teacher training programs for Christian classical educators. Colleges like Baylor University and the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University are actively creating these pathways. Other schools like the University of Dallas and New Saint Andrews seem to be producing and gathering good thinkers as well. As Kevin mentioned, I have learned many things from Chris Hall regarding the common arts. I have enjoyed co-authoring a manuscript with him and Geneva School colleague Robbie Andreasen entitled A New Natural Philosophy: Natural Science and Christian Pedagogy to be published by Classical Academic Press in 2020. I am impressed with the work of the Rafiki Foundation planting Christian classical schools in Africa. I always hear good talks at the conferences spon-

sored by the Society for Classical Learning, CiRCE, and the Association for Christian Classical Schools. I think that there is presently a confluence between Christian classical education and the Charlotte Mason community that is pretty exciting. I am delighted with Kevin’s new project, the “Ecclesial Schools Initiative,” which seeks to provide a pathway for churches to start Christian classical schools focused on low-income families. So I think there is much to be excited for in Christian classical education today.

Your book includes a wealth of footnoted material from a wide variety of sources. What one book would you recommend for the reader who wants to better understand the liberal arts tradition?

Jain: It depends on what they are interested in. For the new edition, the book that enthralled me most was The Crisis of Western Education by Christopher Dawson. He understood intuitively our deepest concerns, and he had been urging people generations before us to return to the tradition. Also, I am often astounded that so few Christian classical educators have read Marshall McLuhan’s book, The Classical Trivium. It is the best full treatment of the Trivium I have read. But perhaps most importantly, if teachers have not read and fully comprehended The Abolition of Man [by C.S. Lewis], then they must begin there. This book speaks with devastating insight on the basic problems in education as we have discussed above—impiety and nominalism.

James Cain is a senior editor at FORMA and is Head of Vision and Advancement at Oak Hill Classical School, where he also teaches writing and literautre.

The Odd Immortality of John Crowe Ransom

By James Matthew Wilson

More than forty years ago, John Crowe Ransom’s biographer, Thomas Daniel Young, called for a variorum edition of his subject’s poems. Ransom had published three volumes of poetry between 1919 and 1927, books that struck a distinctive note in modern American poetry, at once awkwardly modern and stiltedly antique, wherein awkwardness and stiltedness are comic virtues. They had shaped the sensibility of two generations of American poets, including Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur.

When Ransom fell silent as a poet and turned to cultural and literary criticism, he further shaped two generations’ sense of what literature ought to do in itself and the role it ought to play in society. His Agrarianism, New Criticism, and religious humanism defined human life as a richly textured, aesthetic whole, from which the modern physical sciences and the utilitarianism of everyday life abstracted, but to which they were finally inadequate. The properly full or rich human life must always return to the localized weave of mythology that

was religion, and, Ransom contended, the irreducibly complex, uneven structures that were poems were principal pathways to just such a restoration of experiential fullness.

Poetry and literary criticism were, therefore, matters of great importance: our pedagogues to living not just by abstraction and technical know-how, but in close contact with what he called, as the title of one book, The World’s Body (1938).

It is almost certain that Ransom so overburdened the function of poetry with his theory that it led to his virtual silence as a poet, after 1928. So also is it probable that his critic’s mind provoked him to revise his work extensively, as it hopped from periodical to book, and from individual volume to the several editions of Selected Poems published during his lifetime. Further, in his declining years, he revised a certain few poems so extensively, thinking to “improve” them, that they constituted essentially new poems—new poems that found little favor with his longtime readers.

Ransom’s reputation as poet and critic were both in decline at the time of Young’s writing, and for nearly four decades nothing happened to bring all the poems into a single, complete volume, represented in their best versions. And so, it is strange to say that in just the last four years, we have had not one variorum edition of Ransom’s poems, but two.

Years ago, I learned that the poet Ben Mazer was

preparing one such edition. The publisher originally contracted to publish the book, as I understand it, delayed and then withdrew from the endeavor. Mazer eventually announced a luxury edition to be published by Un-Gyve Press; to finance the project, the press accepted subscriptions with subscriber names to be listed as the back of the volume. So anxious was I at last to have all Ransom’s work in verse that I subscribed immediately, as did many others.

The resulting book was elegantly designed, the pages and text large enough that each poem began on a new page. The editorial apparatus was less elegant. Mazer’s appendix at the back was largely limited to recording textual variations; the headers guiding one through the appendix were sufficiently unhelpful that it was difficult to track down the notes to each individual poem. The edition itself was expensive enough that it seemed unlikely to draw renewed attention to Ransom’s work; those of us who had long cherished it, however, were very much in Mazer’s debt for finally bringing off what had seemed a long frustrated and deferred feat.

By the time I held Mazer’s work in my hands, Louisiana State University Press had announced that it too would publish an edition of the complete poems. Not good, I thought, quite frankly. Mazer’s long toil will almost certainly be superannuated by a properly academic edition from the one publisher that had earnestly tried to keep Ransom’s work in print in the years since his death.

As with Mazer’s edition, however, the LSU Complete Poems almost did not happen. The edition was delayed several times; when it did finally appear, the editor, Ashby Bland Crowder, did not live to see it. He must have worked for many years and up to the very end, for his edition of the poems is a monument of editorial care. The attention to the textual history of the poems is comprehensive. Textual variants appear as footnotes, where they can be conveniently consulted. The annotations of the poems, printed as an appendix, include discussion of the origin and reception of each of Ransom’s three volumes, and not only account for textual matters but attend to interpretation as well, including the glossing of Ransom’s quirky vocabulary compounded of colloquialism and archaism. Finally, Crowder’s years of research reaped poems never before published. At last, Ransom’s work is genuinely complete.

The poems are a bit crammed together, with new titles sometimes starting near the very end of a page, but in fact that has made the otherwise over-large volume more compact and suitable for use as a proper reading copy, rather than as a mere library reference. Crowder’s superb care in preparing final editions of the poems is conspicu-

ous; alas, I found at least three typos, which are perhaps signs that he was denied by his death the opportunity for one last round of copyediting galley proofs.

I apologize for leading with such a prolonged and pedantic story! Many readers will wonder whether Ransom is a poet worth troubling over, these decades after his death, the great movement in American poetry and literary criticism he helped to incite having been, by and large, routed in the academy and in the broader culture.

The answer is, yes, indeed. When Ransom’s first book, Poems about God, appeared, it was obvious why Robert Frost himself had recommended it for publication. The poems display a homely, ironical humor, where Ransom at once respects and casts a cold light on the various devotions human beings give to whatever is most sacred or lasting in their lives. The union of the folk and rural; a documentary, impersonal eye; and a myriad-minded spirit of irony echoes Frost, Robinson, and A.E. Houseman without being merely derivative.

His earliest and least impressive performances wind plain, even cliché, language into a bundle until the repetitions of rhyme reveal the “waggish humor” behind it all. In “The Swimmer,” for instance, the narrator tells us the “dog-days” are times when “eggs and meats and Christians spoil.” So, he plunges into water, and out of that place of spoiled Christians, like a true Epicurean. He says to the icy pond water,

And now you close about my head, And I lie low in a soft green bed

That dog-days never have visited.

“By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread:”

The garden’s curse is at last unsaid

Only a few years later, in Chills and Fever, Ransom attained to a more mature synthesis of these elements. His poems from that point on would largely consist of ungainly narrative ballads, a union of the old Scottish ballad “Sir Patrick Spens” with Flannery O’Conner, specifically that eye for the grotesque caricature that marks Southern Gothic literature’s peculiar spiritual insight about sinfulness and depravity.

In Ransom’s old age, the neighbors complained that he would plant his garden with each kind of flower in a separate row—all the tulips together, as it were, rather than mingling their many colors to form a pleasing whole. For all his concern for the fullness of the world’s body, Ransom’s poems gain some of their charm from the clean, dualistic theoretical categories that he puts in play within them. As the poem unfolds, we have the sensation of abstractions akin to medieval allegorical figures com-

ing into conflict and making a mess of one another. His best-known poem, “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” for instance, confronts a vision of the world that is all a young girl’s dynamic, wonderful innocence with its sudden end, as that world is revealed as fallen through her own death:

But now go the bells, and we are ready, In one house we are sternly stopped To say we are vexed at her brown study, Lying so primly propped.

In “Armageddon,” Christ and Antichrist meet and become brothers, until a “godly liege of old malignant brood” catches the ear of the Lord and in his lust for blood-justice transforms Christ himself into a raging Greek warrior, desirous not of the glory revealed on the cross, but that worldly glory of the pagan societies before his coming:

Christ and his myrmidons, Christ at the head Chanted of death and glory and no complaisance

“Captain Carpenter” depicts the eponymous character as he goes “riding out” for adventure. At every turn, the disappointments of the world lop off a portion of his body: “his nose for evermore,” “His two legs at the shinny part,” “his arms at the elbows,” until at last “a black devil  . . .  had plucked out his sweet blue eyes.”

In Ransom’s view, we enter the world with a rich, immediate vision of reality as violent, dramatic, strange. Only too soon does our urge to “science,” to impose abstract concepts, lead us to believe we can master it all and thereby be at peace within it. His poems constitute a third moment, where violence and peace, strangeness and understanding exist together, chastening our ambitions but also restoring to our vision a sense of oddness and mystery.

By the time he wrote the poems for his last book, Two

Gentlemen in Bonds, Ransom had mastered the clattering rhythms, the use of a stilted meter and falling, feminine rhymes that give to nearly all his poems their meditative yet clunky music. In “Blue Girls,” for example, youthful beauty, which thinks it will last forever, is suddenly revealed, in its very delicacy, as fragile and subject to loss:

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail; And I will cry with my loud lips and publish Beauty which all our power shall never establish, It is so frail.

There are limits to our power’s doing; we have a certain obligation to stand still in reverence before what is fine but “so frail.” Elsewhere, another girl, beautiful Janet, wakes to discover that her rooster, “Old Chucky,” has been killed by a “transmogrifying bee.” Latinate polysyllables and homely Southern names jostle together, delivering a shock of nature as at once brutal and humorous, mythologically grand and disappointingly vain:

And purply did the knot Swell with the venom and communicate Its rigor! Now the poor comb stood up straight But Chucky did not.

So there was Janet

Kneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen (Translated far beyond the daughters of men)

To rise and walk upon it.

In both these poems the falling, slant-rhymed, rhythms (PUB-lish/est-AB-lish and JAN-et/up-ON it), which Ransom borrows with so much else from Mother Goose, are coupled with the mundane and the parenthetical, rhetorical, Latinate grandeur, and these all conspire to create poems immediately amusing to the ear; grotesquely jerry-rigged so as to compel us to ponder their inner-workings; and finally insistent that life in this world

In Ransom’s view, we enter the world with a rich, immediate vision of reality as violent, dramatic, strange. Only too soon does our urge to “science,” to impose abstract concepts, lead us to believe we can master it all and thereby be at peace within it. His poems constitute a third moment, where violence and peace, strangeness and understanding exist together, chastening our ambitions but also restoring to our vision a sense of oddness and mystery.

is a long defeat, where what is most precious, beautiful, and humane merits our reverence and study even though it will, in God’s time, fail us.

Ransom’s world is not ours. The descendant of Methodist ministers and himself an attenuated, but sincere, theist, he feared that the successes of the physical sciences would thoroughly disenchant culture of its necessary, religious mythology. Men would no longer believe in good and evil, discipline and transcendence, tradition and piety, but would rather give themselves over to a religion of commerce and complacency. In response, he tried in his poetry to acknowledge this disenchantment even as he revealed why the primeval insights of the religious imagination give us a truer vision of reality.

In our day, the physical sciences confirm as much as they challenge Christian belief; modernity has not been secularized by the disappearance of Christendom, but by a weird and unpredictable pluralization of religiousness that includes, among many things, that old god Mammon. Scientific knowledge and philosophical wisdom no longer seem incompatible and dualistically divided, as they did for Ransom. For those of us who have outlasted the age of disenchantment and been born into a new age of idolatry,

it is possible to see once again the world as a great book authored by our Creator. Philosophy and theology have been restored to their proper place in the intellectual life for many, and that restoration continues apace.

For us, then, Ransom’s poems take on a new significance. Their gaudy, uneven, and awkward constructions remind us to cherish the surface of things and the depths they conceal; to treat the oddness of the rhythm of things as occasion for us to enter more attentively into the mysteries that lie within, behind, and beyond them. Ransom’s influential literary criticism is now mostly of historical interest. His poems, in contrast, are at last demonstrating their independent value and immortality as the great comic fairy tales of modern melancholy and unbelief.

The Complete Poems | LSU Press | $39.95

James Matthew Wilson is an author, essayist, poet, and critic. He is Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at Villanova University.

For all the abundance of animal stories in modern entertainment, true beast fables are rare. Fables, with their obvious moral insinuations, can be unpopular in ages where they are most needed—the fable is like satire in this way—but the time may be ripe for their revival. And George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo, Tenth of December) attempts a rehabilitation of the genre in his illustrated short story, “Fox 8.’’

The tale is told by the title character, an inquisitive fox who has learned to speak “Yuman” by sitting outside the same window night after night, listening while a mother reads to her children. Saunders deftly shrinks the distance between reader and narrator by printing much of Fox 8’s language phonetically—a choice that is fairly inobtrusive when it isn’t meant to get a laugh (e.g. humans shop in “mawls” and their voices sounds “grate”). Aside from a few quibbles about literary depictions of foxes (“we do not trik Chikens! We are very open and honest with Chikens!”), Fox 8 is enamored of the stories he hears and, by extension, of all things human. This affinity troubles his group leader, Fox 28, but proves valuable when a sign appears near the edge of the forest announcing the imminent construction of something called FoxViewCommons.

The development, a massive retail complex, seems to go up overnight, and Fox 8 is eager to mingle with the humans who flock there. But, like Frankenstein’s monster—another literary figure educated via eavesdropping— Fox 8’s first direct encounter with people is brutal and disillusioning. What follows is a hard, but well-meant look at human nature: “I wud like to know what is rong with you people.” I get the impression most fabulists wish they were writing fairy tales, and Saunders is no different; the price may be a hard look in the mirror, but he leaves the door open for happy endings all around. —Sean

Johnson

"Fox 8: A Story" | George Saunders | Random House

A Bundle of Hopes and Hungers

By Anthony Barr

Ifirst read Augustine’s Confessions as a college freshman. The book was gifted to my entire cohort upon admission and I felt a certain compulsion to “get ahead on the reading.” So I read the book in the manner you might expect from an incoming freshman: with a mix of pride and ignorance and interest. We spent about a third of the semester working through the text with a renowned Augustinian scholar, but I’ll confess that during that semester I was more fascinated by Neoplatonists like Plotinus than I was by Augustine.

Midway through junior year, I reread Confessions at a point of epistemic crisis in my life. And as I floundered trying to work out what to believe (or if justified belief were even possible), I encountered the Augustine I hadn’t known before, the Augustine who knew intimately the pain I was experiencing. In book 6 of Confessions, Augustine is very near entering the Church, but then he remembers all the things he used to fervently believe and starts to panic. His words gave shape to my own feelings: “The anxiety as to what I should

hold as sure gnawed at my heart all the more keenly, as my shame increased at having been so long tricked and deceived by the promise of certainty, and at having with a rashness of error worthy of a child gone on spouting forth so many uncertainties as confidently as if I had known them for sure.” Augustine recounts how he “held back my heart from accepting anything, fearing that I might fall once more.” Augustine the bishop, recalling that season of inner turmoil many years later, notes that “[I] could not be healed save by believing, and refused to be healed that way for fear of believing falsehood.” And then Augustine poses this question: “Is it true that nothing can be grasped with certainty for the directing of life?” His answer brought me to tears: “No: we must search the more closely and not despair.”

James K.A. Smith has been searching the more closely with St. Augustine for many years. As a young PhD student at Villanova University, Smith was interested in Heidegger and the other continental philosophers, but it is not surprising that at an Augustinian school he finally fell in love most deeply with Augustine. Smith’s latest book, On the Road with Saint Augustine, is a letter of gratitude to Augustine, but more importantly it is an invitation for us to encounter Augustine as one who can aid us on our journey home. While Smith draws on a wide range of Augustine’s writings, the animating principle of Smith’s book is soul-searching reflection on Augustine’s Confessions, which Smith describes as “a book that breathes, a book with a beating heart.” Smith helps

us to see that Augustine is a cartographer whose pastoral aim is to map “the geography of desire” that is also a “geography of grace.” Augustine is deeply introspective, sometimes painfully so, but neither his nor Smith’s books are about losing ourselves in the conflicting depths of our own interiority. Instead, their books are about the gospel, about “the outward, upward turn” where our desire steers us toward the Father even as the Father runs to meet us, his prodigal sons and daughters.

One of the more fascinating threads Smith develops is the interconnection of ambition and education, a theme he highlights in his book’s central narrative. Close your eyes and imagine Augustine, age twenty-something, transplanted from rural North Africa to Milan and then later to Rome—the cultural and political centers of the world’s greatest empire. Augustine, the smart kid from the flyover states, the boy-genius who finally escaped the stifling small-town. Here’s how Smith frames this season in Augustine’s life: “Working in the precincts of the imperial palace, unleashing his creative energy and expertise, mingling with the great and the good, he would be seen for who he was: Augustine, the precocious provincial, the African from the edge of the empire who’d made it to the center.” Augustine, the staffer on Capitol Hill, the newest consultant at McKinsey, the hot pick for a clerkship at the Court. He’s a twenty-something in the most important city in the world, and there’s so much money to be made, and plenty of right swipes on Tinder, but more importantly, he’s part of the vanguard: connected, influential, and sophisticated. And yet, with the world at his fingertips, Augustine is utterly miserable?

It is here that Smith asks a rather Augustinian question: What does he actually want? Ambition can be good, and in fact a lack of drive is often a sign of acedia (the slothful spirit the Church Fathers call the “noonday devil”). But the question Smith wants us to wrestle with is, “What do I love when I long for achievement?” Smith observes that “there is a bundle of hopes and hungers bound up with our ambitions, but so often they boil down to the twin desires to win and to be noticed, domination and attention—to win the crown and be seen doing it.” Notably, these disordered desires do not disappear when Augustine is baptized, and indeed Augustine continuously doubts the purity of his own motives in even writing Confessions. But Smith paints love as the mitigating force to both check unbridled ambition and to steer it to appropriate ends. In Smith’s telling, it is Augustine’s newfound love for his mother, Monica, that ultimately allows his identity to become one of acceptance and gratitude for his roots rather than disdain. Later, as bishop, it is love for his flock that motivates him to publish Confessions, trusting that grace can be mediated through it to

the reader even if his own motives remained mixed. And finally, as a Christian, it is love that propels him into the very dialogue with God through which he is discovers the authenticity he craves. At the end of the day, it is not prestige or power or wealth or women that Augustine wants so much as it is to love and be loved authentically.

Throughout the book, Smith shows how deeply indebted Heidegger is to Augustine for his ideas of authenticity and self-actualization, but more importantly Smith shows why Augustine offers a corrective to the radical individualism at the heart of the existentialist project. As Smith argues, “To refuse the existentialist script for authenticity is not to embrace inauthenticity; it is to imagine why friends are gifts, how grace is communal, and how I find myself in communion.”

Inasmuch as education (read: personal formation) shapes the contours of our rationality, the nature of our reasoning is also communal. Remember Augustine, the twenty-something on top of the world? His parents pushed him toward a liberal arts education because they were ambitious for him, and as they expected, that liberal arts education paid a dividend of social capital. Smith points out that “it was Manichean connections that landed Augustine his appointments in both Rome and Milan.” This means that the experience of education and the epistemological context for Augustine’s whole worldview were directly shaped by the ambition (“the bundle of hopes and hungers”) that helped lead him into the Manichean network in the first place. As Smith explains, “The attractiveness of the Manicheans was an intertwined set of benefits that spoke directly to an aspiring provincial, running from his mother’s backwater faith, newly interested in being ‘in the know,’ and still clambering for positions of power and influence.”

Young Augustine was ambitious for himself, and that means his education was in service to that aim. Smith remarks that “it’s remarkable how philosophy—the alleged love of wisdom—can be domesticated by those other lingering habits of the heart, such that philosophy actually becomes just one more lust, one more game of domination and conquest.” Smith notes that the Augustinian term for this disposition toward learning is curiositas, which often manifests as “knowing for the sake of being known as someone who knows.” Smith explains that this “disordered love of learning makes you a mere technician of information for some end other than wisdom.” And he further writes that “when learning is reduced to curiositas, actual truth and wisdom are disdained as an affront to my interests, my authority, my autonomy.” This internal state is remarkably similar to the sense of alienation that Augustine experienced in Milan and Rome. As Smith notes, curiositas “generates its own frenetic anx-

iety” and produces the “burden of having to always be clever.” This is the kind of burden that one sees vividly illustrated in Tolkien’s Gollum, one of the most curious (and therefore anxious) characters ever depicted.

As a recent college graduate, I am still searching— sometimes frantically—for what Wendell Berry calls “the shape of a life.” Questions regarding marriage, career, or geographic place are fully existential for me: “Whom can I entrust myself to?” and “What kind of work should I pursue?” and “Where should I put down roots?” And the bundle of hopes and hungers that Smith identifies in Augustine is very much the same bundle in my own heart. This is precisely Smith’s point: The reason Augustine is such a good companion is because his heart is our heart, his temptations are our temptations, and the grace that he found is very much the grace that we need. In those quiet moments in Milan when Augustine is forced to be honest about his own restlessness (“our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee . . .”), the bitter weight of alienation from oneself and one’s world is itself the first sign of prevenient grace calling Augustine to a long pilgrimage. Smith asks us to “imagine a refugee spirituality, an understanding of human longing and estrangement that not only honors those experiences of not-at-homeness but also affirms the hope of finding a home, finding oneself.” Inasmuch as we experience this world as a vale of tears, we are refugees. And yet, as Christians, we travel with a destination dimly in view on the very edges of our horizons, and in that sense we are also pilgrims.

I reflected above on Augustine’s admonishment that we must search without despairing. If we were existentialists, we might read that passage as a heroic call to shun all dependency and relationship in order to seek out the truth on our own. But this is not how Augustine reconciles himself to belief. Instead, Augustine realizes that even his own self-conception and identity is contingent on the testimony of others. Augustine notes that since he has no memory of his mother’s womb or the earliest years of his infancy, he cannot know who his own parents are without some degree of faith. This realization—that faith is the bedrock of any meaningful knowledge—helps open Augustine toward belief. But more importantly, it allows Augustine to surrender himself to the loving influence of people like Ambrose, the bishop, without the radical skepticism that inhibited his reasoning. In his commentary on Augustine’s epistemic journey toward faith, Smith explains that “there is a relationality to plausibility. Illumination depends on trust; enlightenment is communal.” Smith thus connects Augustine’s maxim of “I believe in order to understand” to his equally important maxim that “I love in order to know.” There is a stunning degree of contingency in all

of this. Smith holds up Augustine’s life as a narrative of radical dependency, first and foremost on the grace of God, standing over and against what he calls “an epistemic Pelagianism” that pictures salvation as the product of our human will and intellect.

Once Augustine allows himself to be open toward the Other, seeking wisdom not as a means to fulfill his ambition but as an end in itself, he is able to encounter Christ sacramentally in sacred Scripture. You probably know the famous scene in which Augustine randomly opens to the book of Romans, but Smith underscores the ways in which Scripture (especially the Psalms) became the very language in which Augustine lived, thought, loved, and worshiped. Smith writes that “Scripture irrupted in Augustine’s life as revelation, the story about himself told by another, and as illumination, shining a light that helped him finally understand his hungers and faults and hopes.”

Pilgrimage is communal and, in the end, Smith’s book is a loving invitation to embrace Augustine as a spiritual father who can guide us into authentic formation. Smith borrows the concept of “witness authority” (what Aristotle called ethos) to suggest that Confessions is about bearing witness to our human condition and testifying to the grace that can fulfill our nature. For Smith, what Augustine offers is a chance to “find ourselves in someone’s story—to feel known by the witness of another.” Speaking from his own personal experience as Augustine’s spiritual pupil, Smith notes that “it can be freeing to effectively live as the understudy of some exemplar who gives us an orientation to the world, something to live for and a way to live.”

I’m still searching for that “shape of a life” that can make sense of my bundle of hopes and hungers. But Smith assures me I have a companion in Augustine. His ultimate exhortation to readers like me is that despite the angst and alienation, I do not despair in searching the more closely, because I have a hope grounded in the promises of Christ and the testimony of all the saints who find their rest in those promises. The harder the pilgrim’s journey grows, the more valuable a literary friend like Augustine becomes. As Smith memorably quips, “Augustine doesn’t write from the sky, he writes from the road.”

On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts | Brazos Press | $24.99

Anthony Barr is a graduate of Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. He writes for Ethika Politika, University Bookman, and the CiRCE Institute.

We often talk about the “liberal arts,” a term which seems innocent enough, but when we begin to reflect on what the liberal arts are, we find that it’s hard to have a definition at hand. You might use the term “liberal arts” once a week, but what exactly are the “liberal arts,” beyond the fact that they are studies that do not produce technologies or pursue scientific discoveries? It’s a slippery term.

If you pose this question to the tradition—“What are the liberal arts?”—you get a variety of responses. Imagine that Petrarch or Aquinas or Boethius were hired as consultants to shape a curriculum at a new liberal arts college. Each of them would choose books, classes, and curricular tracks differently, although each college formed could be called a liberal arts school. We’ll come back to this point in a moment, but before we do, I’d like to undertake a quick sketch, something like a figure drawing in art, in which I capture in quick outline a number of possible iterations of the liberal arts: the classical model, the medieval model, the Renaissance model, and then comment on how Romanticism and the Scientific Revolution modified these pre-modern pedagogical approaches to the liberal arts. I’ll conclude by speculating on what would happen if we dreamed up a new School of Athens, a new model of education that took into account all five of these iterations.

For example, one such formulation of the liber-

al arts comes to us from Boethius. According to his understanding, there are seven liberal arts: three arts that pertain primarily to language (the trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) and four that appreciate the deep patterns of harmony and musicality in the cosmos (the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). For Boethius, all of these studies can be thought of as a sub-category of music. Indeed, Boethius had a remarkably broad definition for music: He defined it as “the unifying of many things and the concord of separate things.” Such a wide-open definition enabled Boethius to find music almost everywhere in the world. There is a “music of the cosmos,” a music of stars, elements, and seasons; and there is also a “human music,” which includes the union of the soul and body. This forms the background for Boethius’ understanding of education: The study of the liberal arts is philosophical therapy, an attempt to bring the soul back into tune with the harmony of the universe.

In contrast to Boethius’ vision of cosmic harmony and his subordination of all of the arts to music, the medieval universities tended to subordinate academic disciplines not to music, but to logic and dialectic. They saw all the arts as preparation for theology. In the High Middle Ages (1200 to 1400), there was an exciting recovery of texts from antiquity—new translations from Arabic, new commentaries, and new debates. The era has been called the “Renaissance before the Renaissance.” In this period

of expanding texts, commentaries, and translations, it was not always obvious whether a pagan author could be reconciled with Christian doctrine. If Augustine and Aristotle disagree, who should you believe? Can Arabic-speaking philosophers who talk about worldly happiness in Aristotelian terms be trusted in Christendom?

In response to this dilemma, scholastic thinkers developed a logical system of syllogisms to sift through the increasing number of competing authoritative voices. The earliest scholastic writings were compilations of differing opinions from authorities and attempts to find agreement. Without a doubt, Aquinas was the most brilliant “architect” of Scholasticism. He built his arguments step by step, blending disparate thinkers like contemporary architects blend architectural elements: a lacy tower with doors carved with saints; a stained-glass window surrounded by screaming gargoyles. For Aquinas, it was important that all of the different arts be logically ordered into a hierarchy of sciences, and the pinnacle of all of these sciences—like a spire seated on top of a Gothic cathedral—was theology, the queen of the sciences.

But Scholasticism was not the last word on what liberal education could be. In fact, it was vehemently attacked a century later. Early Renaissance writers, like Petrarch, were dissatisfied by approaches to educational formation so reliant on dialectical argumentation. Petrarch, like a restless student who is suspicious of what his teacher wants him to accept, questioned how valuable a Scholastic system of logic—so indebted to pagan Aristotle— could possibly be for understanding Christian revelation. Furthermore, Petrarch lamented how often logical studies leave the character of a student unchanged. What we should do, argued Petrarch, is develop not a Scholastic mind, but a personal literary style, shaped by the reading of ancient authors. Why? Because developing your own rhetorical style means that your learning is alive, dynamic, and personal, that you are actually absorbing and digesting the authors you read. Petrarch wanted an ability not just to repeat arguments in the correct order, but to speak about them in a fresh way. Petrarch called this close study of Latin authors studia humana: a rhetorical education based on the Roman classics rather than a logical education based on Aristotelian philosophy.

In the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, many of these humanistically-trained scholars began to notice that the ancient authors—who were now being made widely available (in both Latin and Greek) during the Renaissance printing boom—often disagreed among themselves on various beliefs of how the physical world operated. And so, they began to try to sift through the assumptions they had gleaned from ancient books by testing them against precise measurements of the universe they observed. Starting with mystical intuitions about the harmonic construction of the universe, and then try-

ing to reconcile such beliefs with the newly gathered tables of precise measurements, they brought about a “slow revolution” of how we investigate and discuss the natural world. Such investigations into the natural world—what we now call “science”—increasingly employed the language of mathematics to speak about natural laws and discoveries, and, at the same time, mathematics itself became less reliant on geometry and, thus, more abstract. In short, over the course of a couple of centuries, the mathematization of the sciences allowed for a new way of thinking about the world which has yielded what some have called the most important revolution in thinking since Christianity.

The fifth and final educational model of a liberal arts education comes from the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition. Although poetry was, obviously, read and composed in antiquity, and although there was some attempt to think about what the imagination could do, as opposed to philosophical thinking, there was not yet a cohesive theory of literary criticism or historically informed readings. In the early nineteenth century, in the world of Coleridge and Wordsworth in England and Schubert, Schiller and Göthe in Germany, a handful of poets, critics, and philosophers began to address this very question: What can the imagination do? What does it have access to that is precluded in other sciences? In the wake of the success of the scientific method and mathematization of the sciences, they felt the need to carve out space for the ancient disciplines, which they felt were endangered in the world of steam engines, electricity, magnetism, and mathematically articulated laws of physics.

We have now identified five major strands of education: 1) the Boethian, harmonic vision of the cosmos; 2) the Scholastic or architectural vision of the world; 3) the Renaissance emphasis on rhetoric and personal style as a way of speaking to hearts and forming characters; 4) the modern study of the natural world (which led to the “Scientific Revolution”); and 5) the Romantic imagination.

Nowadays there are schools and programs that build their curricula so that theology is the crowning top of the pyramid, and there are schools that have constructed a curriculum with nothing but the humanities. I would like to propose that we can do something truly enterprising, difficult, and valuable if we put together all five of these approaches to the liberal arts: a language arts program inspired by a classical and Renaissance understanding of the role of rhetoric; a science and mathematics program that takes the Scientific Revolution seriously; a serious, historically-conscious approach to literature and history. The problem is that many of our existing enterprises in liberal learning adopt one paradigm and then simplify all of the other approaches to fit neatly within. In contrast, combining all of these historical approaches simul-

taneously would yield a kind of living School of Athens. Raphael’s famous painting was designed for the library of a learned, humanistic pope, and it depicts the great conversation of philosophers and liberal artists. But the liberal arts program I am describing would call for a new School of Athens that would do an even better job of depicting the full range of a possible curriculum. Because, in addition to Socrates and Alcibiades, Euclid and Aristotle, we could include Newton and Gauss, Faulkner and Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Ficino, Monet and Beethoven, Kepler and Coleridge, Dionysius and Plotinus.

Perhaps what is most exciting is that we would begin to notice overlapping patterns, moments of integration in which creativity is sharpened because we are bringing both a mature and a foreign way of looking into a new field. Students trained in this way could do city planning or urban design, create elementary school curricula, manage teams of computer programmers, persuade businesses to invest in cell phone towers, win awards for medical research, and rethink Shakespeare in relation to Italian Platonism, despite the fact that they were not trained in any one of those disciplines. Just as a polyglot can learn new languages quickly, by learning multiple paradigms, our students will develop the ability to think about the fundamental principles that inform a field of learning.

Let us explore not just how we could study, but why. Perhaps as you have been reading this you have thought to yourself, “Ok, I appreciate the vision described, yet I wonder if such a whole-hearted pursuit of intellectual excellence helps in other ways: Can study make me good? Can it make me a better Christian? Will I pray better? Be a better friend? Be a good spouse?” The answer is again, a bold one: Not only, yes, but study is the ordinary way for any of us to become deeply good and truly loving.

Intellectual work does not necessarily make us holy, but patient, disciplined, and loving attentiveness to reality is what opens us up to wanting God and to feel that we need his grace. Moreover, those steeped within the Christian medieval tradition would be confused that we believe that intellectual pursuits are remote from questions of goodness and the heart. The medieval Dominicans used to say that “first the bow is bent in study”: that is, learning is what pulls the cord of the bow back and makes it taut so that in prayer the arrow of desire is launched in love rather than falling flaccidly at your feet. When we have studied enough to see with eyes of wonder, when we have studied ourselves into wonder, so to speak, then we will begin to feel a kind of swelling of the heart, a curious desire for something we barely have a word for. Plato called it the sprouting of wings in the presence of beauty. Bonaventure called it “anagogy,” the uplifting of the apex of the mind up toward God. These moments of

uplift come when our pursuit of truth stops being merely an understanding of true things, and starts becoming a longing for the cause of truth itself.

What’s fascinating is that for Bonaventure—and most thinkers from Plato to Coleridge—these moments of uplift, these moments of “anagogy,” occur in the midst of an act of thinking. We experience these moments of anagogy when Lear looks at the awful overwhelming reality of death and is cracked and we look into the darkness too. The moment in which Dante looks into a black hole and sees that there is a face looking back at him, or when Achilles stares at the shield and sees the world in peace and war and tragedy and greatness and then burns with anger because he wants it all. The moment in which Kepler looked at the world after he discovered his three laws: “I contemplate [the world’s] beauty with incredible and ravishing delight.”

In short, through study, we sometimes catch a glimpse of something beyond the picture, something more of the depths, for a brief moment. These moments are what Plato called exaiphnes moments, or “all of a sudden moments.” I call them moments of falling inward. When we have them, something strange and deep begins to stir up longing and yearning, a desire to be whole and clean and righteous from the inside out. We realize again that we can change. For a brief moment, all of the different parts of us are in harmony, working together, in an act of intellectual and spiritual flight. It is during these moments that study begins to sublimate into charity, and learning becomes a prayerful, fiery vision of reality.

Dr. Jason Baxter teaches humanities at Wyoming Catholic College, where he is also the Academic Dean. He is the author of A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy and Falling Inward: Humanities in the Age of Technology.

Intellectual work does not necessarily make us holy, but patient, disciplined, and loving attentiveness to reality is what opens us up to wanting God and to feel that we need his grace.

Originally meant to cover a cistern that stored food items raised and lowered by a rope and pulley system, it is maybe eighty square feet. Thanks to the previous owner, it became a garden and tool shed for many years. But under Smith’s watch, it’s become a haven for creativity and community. It’s here that Smith wrote most of his Green Ember books, the first of which was published in 2014, and the last of which is due out this winter. The series has reached hundreds of thousands of readers and the audio version of the first book reached number one on Audible, no small success for a self-published author that doesn’t have the backing of a major publishing house. Smith’s success stems from the old soul at the core of his stories and his playful, imaginative interactions with the many young fans who devour them.

When considering his literary achievements, Smith is demure, reticent to give himself too much credit. He gladly talks about the magic of receiving mail from children the world over who have given him the chance to be a writer full time, and he acknowledges his younger brother, Josiah, who, a few years ago, quit his job to support Smith’s work full time. He seems genuinely surprised that any of this happened for him; and he repeatedly refers to his West Virginia roots, where he grew up, for a time, so deep in a holler there was nothing behind the house but rocks. He tells how he and his family were poor, not to enrich his own story, but as if he wakes up every day and pinches himself at the opportunities he’s been given.

This is what makes the The Forge the perfect setting for an interview. It’s small and humble, but a place for

S.D. Smith writes from his property in rural West Virginia, in a little shed he calls The Forge.

serious work. There’s a writing desk in one corner (a basket of fan mail next to one leg), a recliner and a small (but busy) a/c unit in another corner, and a bookshelf lined with books written by Smith’s various author friends (along with a smattering of prayer books) in a third corner. The walls are hung with artwork created by Smith’s children and a beautiful map of Middle Earth drawn for him by his older brother. And thus the place is itself an ode to the community that Smith seeks to cultivate and the thoughtful approach he takes to his work.

Earlier this autumn, Smith, sitting at his desk and playing with his favorite action figures, chatted with FORMA about his own story as an author and what he hopes to work on next.

some reason. I didn’t have a lot of models of men or boys that read a lot, particularly fiction. So that kind of went by the wayside. But I’ve realized more recently the vocation of storytelling was always haunting me, in the best sense. And I realized that there was always some element of world-building in my play from a really young age. I didn’t want to make what was in the Lego box [the way it was designed to be made]. I never wanted to make the prescribed things; I always wanted to just make my own stuff. There was always a story going on. We were not wealthy and we would play with paper airplanes. I would make a fleet and I would have a small group of these five elite little units of planes, and I used crayons and colored them a different color. They were my elite attack squad. So looking back, I was always inventing games.

Do you think that what you’re describing—the way you played, the way you told these stories—was escapism for you?

Two years ago you quit your job to write full time. Was that always the goal? When you were young did you know you wanted to write full time?

I probably didn’t know what “full time” meant, but I do think that I caught the bug for storytelling when I was really young, and part of that was being read to at a young age. Mom read us The Chronicles of Narnia and a teacher read us The Boxcar Children. I had a teacher who read us Little Women and I loved the character of Jo. I loved that she was a writer. For some reason that made the vocation more accessible to me. I realized that it was something people could do. It didn’t feel as distant. That was like a little door opening to me. I realized that writing is something that people do—and why would you want to do anything else?

Yeah, Jo wasn’t some kind of elite. She was from a regular American family and she had this talent that she pursued.

Right. Even though she was a woman and I was a little boy, I still felt like we were countrymen. So I started writing little stories when I was young. We had a border collie when we were kids and I would write stories that were Lassie knock-offs. And then I loved Star Wars and Star Trek. I loved anything that smacked of fantasy or science fiction from a young age. I wrote little science fiction stories. One was called “The Great Space Race Interruption.” It was an interstellar battle that interrupted the outer space Olympics. I made illustrations of creatures from Jupiter and Mars and Earth fighting each other. I would use a highlighter to create the little laser strikes. So I loved that. But that didn’t translate into a love of reading for

I’ve never thought about that before. I would say there would have to be some element of escapism. But it was more like that was in me and it was bubbling out. I always had dreams as a kid. I always had really vivid dreams. A lot of imagery was happening in my head all the time. I was captivated by the snatches of stories that I heard. I would always go into those worlds. I feel like it was very natural so I never thought of it as escapism. I never thought of it as running away from something. When I was really young we lived in what we called a “holler” in West Virginia—the hollow between two hills. Dad said we lived so far back in the woods that nobody lived behind us and I interpreted that in a fantastic way. It sounded amazing to me. I thought, “Wow nobody lives behind us.” I thought we could just keep going back and back and back, and you would never find anyone. That became like a story in my mind. I felt like it was an overflow of my own imagination and our surroundings felt like a canvas. I didn’t feel like I was escaping a prison. I felt like more like I was living in a canvas.

Now I hear from and meet thousands of kids and I see it in them all the time. I see that there are lots of kids like me. But I didn’t know a lot of kids like me at the time. I loved sports and we had a little Nerf basketball hoop, and we played hours and hours of that. When nobody else was playing I was making up my own stories with that. I wasn’t pretending to be Magic Johnson or Jerry West, but I had a guy that I invented who played for this team called the Richmond Rebels. And I invented their league and their season and his story and how good he was. He was not me. I had this whole story about him and I was playing as him.

That sounds very familiar to my own childhood imaginings, like there’s something innate in everybody and we each express that in a different way. Maybe some more purposefully than others. And we outgrow it, I think. There are creative and beautiful elements of childhood which tend to be beaten out of us by the hard realities of grown-up life.

Do you feel like when you’re writing you’re putting back in whatever was beaten out? Or maybe it’s been beaten down and you’re pulling it out for yourself?

Are you bringing out the child in you or focusing your adult imagination in a childlike way?

I think that the gift of those kind of activities in childhood is in self-forgetfulness. You might call it escapism, but I would call it imaginary play, and when we’re having the most fun, when we’re the most engaged, we have a short period of self-forgetfulness. I feel like that happens in sports, too. I’ve been getting back into playing sports in a really “old man” kind of way. I love the fact that sports are a place where there’s not a whole lot of anxiety for me. Some people struggle with anxiety during games . . .

You mean nervousness?

Right. Some people throw up or something like that. And even though I’m an anxious person naturally, I didn’t feel that on the court. I didn’t feel that on the field. I felt like I could forget myself in the act. And even now when I’m watching my favorite sports, one thing I love about it is I sort of forget about my own problems. I forget about myself. And I think that sometimes happens with worship. You’re not focused on yourself for a little while and it’s such a relief. Well, this sort of storytelling is like that. That’s probably my favorite thing about the act of storytelling, of writing. I can be in the forge here and I can be working away for hours and I’m just in it. And it’s just coming. I’m discovering. All that weird stuff that writers say about the mystical experience.

You get carried away.

Yeah, it’s just happening. And then someone will knock on the door and it scares me. It’s alarming because it’s waking me up to the real world from which I was so far gone. And that sort of self-forgetfulness is reminiscent to me of what it was like to be a child. So it’s like I’m playing for a living.

Do you want your stories to offer a chance at self-forgetfulness for the children who are reading them?

I want children to discover more about who they are via

an adventure. I think about self-forgetfulness as a perk of the job for myself. But I do feel like we are experiencing the same kinds of things, because the kids who love the stories are wrapped up in the reading in the same way I’m wrapped up in the creating. And it does feel like a gift that’s been given to us both.

When you’re writing these stories and you’re thinking about your audience, these kids, do you feel like you have a responsibility to say something? You know, we were actually listening to a podcast on the way up here and the hosts were debating whether a movie has a responsibility to the culture that it exists in, whether the creators have a responsibility to stick to some kind of moral code. Do you feel like its your responsibility to say something specific in your stories? Or is that a secondary goal?

I never think about saying something. I can say that pretty honestly. I don’t mind looking back and discovering that something was said. You know in a fairy tale where a kid tries to find out too much about why the magic is happening and they get burned because of that? I’m respectful of that process enough to not want to touch it. Tolkien describes stories bubbling up out of the leaf mold of the mind and he says that all the things that are dropped there help grow this new thing. I have respect for that and I feel like the best way for me to try to say something is to be something, to become something. Because the words on the page are coming out of the overflow of my own heart. And because my storytelling is for kids, and because the first telling was to my own children, there’s a whole lot of love associated with it. In that sense it’s pretty simple. What I love and what I care about are deep in my heart and these stories are going to have the flavor of my loves. There are always moral considerations; I try to be sensitive to the kids who are reading. I try not to go overboard on depictions of evil or things like that, but that’s just self-censorship; it’s the way you take care of your readers. It’s good hospitality.

Do you feel a responsibility, though, to make it clear that evil is evil?

Yes. Absolutely. One hundred percent. Chesterton talks very wisely about the fact that fairy stories don’t introduce evil to children. Children already know about the existence of what he called “the bogey”—the enemy, the evil, the dragon.

Three-year-olds have nightmares, right?

They do. They already know. And so what fairy tales do,

Opposite: The brothers Smith, S.D. and Josiah. A few years ago Josiah quit his job so he could work full time in support of his brother’s storytelling apparatus and community.

according to Chesterton, is give us a St. George to fight the dragon. So I don’t like stories that are “safe” for the whole family. I think that’s dangerous. I think that some of the work of my tribe of Christian writers is more dangerous because of the absence of evil, the absence of a genuine threat or genuine darkness—darkness that feels authentic. C.S. Lewis said that since it’s so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. I’ve got that on the wall here in the forge and is a little bit of a creed for me.

Do you think that if you were writing for high schoolers, or even for adults, you would be comfortable having villains that are a little more complicated or have a little more gray area in them? With a little more complexity in their choices?

I think so. It feels very popular to indulge and almost celebrate wickedness because it’s so real and so edgy. And I just don’t think evil is that interesting. There’s a Simone Weil quote which I’ll probably get wrong, but it’s something about how imaginary evil is always interesting but real evil is boring, barren, monotonous. And imaginary good is always boring, but real good is exciting. I’m not a big fan of the current trend of the antihero. I like to see the contrast, and I’m more interested in the complexity of the so-called good characters and the evil that they face.

S.D. Smith’s writing shed, The Forge, is lined with toys and creative projects aplenty, from actions figures (below) to a map of Middle Earth, drawn for him by his older brother one Christmas (opposite), as well as many drawings and projects produced by his children.

There’s a difference between a guy who loses his wedding ring in a septic tank—and he gets down in there to find the wedding ring—and a guy who goes for a swim in it because he wants to be edgy and interesting. I like the story of somebody going through something, battling something, but I don’t like the indulgence in darkness.

When you’re thinking about your characters, though, do you ever feel like you need to make sure that your heroes are flawed? Do you feel like you have to create contrast between the good and evil, between the heroic and the villainous? Like you have to sometimes imbue your heroes with flaws?

My examination of that kind of thing usually happens in retrospect, not in the act of creating.

Do you mean in the revision process? Or in the years later when the book is done and you look back at it?

Probably more in the years later. The characters come out and they’re there. I think they’re complex because I’m morally complex and these characters come from me. Not necessarily in the most interesting way, of course.

You mentioned the idea of stories overflowing from your heart. Now that you’ve attained some degree of notoriety and popularity (and you have a box of mail at

your feet from children), do you feel any added pressure? They value your stories and so the things that are overflowing mean something to the lives they live, the kind of children they are, and who they become. Does that give you pause?

I am a pretty introspective person by nature so I’m generally trying to avoid being more introspective. But, sure, I am concerned. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also realized that I’m a mixed bag and what kids are going to get from me is going to be complex. But these stories aren’t vehicles for my therapy. It’s not real deep stuff. I kind of feel like I have my nephews and nieces, and my kids are around, and I’m telling them a story. I try not to think about the stakes being too high. I try to think of it very locally. This is a nuance that all writers have to deal with: There are a lot of kids out there and I have an awareness of them, but they also feel like my friend’s kids. I try not be too reflective about that side of it. I try to focus on what I can control. And what I can control is that I can try and tell a really good story. So I try to keep it fairly simple. But I believe in a God of providence who loves these kids and is willing to hear my prayers about what I want for them. And he has been saying “yes” to a lot of those prayers for a long time in a way that makes me feel a lot of gratitude. So, in contrast to a lot of my life where I do struggle with anxiety, in this area I haven’t felt a tre-

mendous amount of anxiety. And because these stories are so natural to me and my family, they don’t feel like a pretense. It’s hospitality and generosity. So what do you want this whole thing to look like? What are your long-term goals? Did you watch Lost? I hated how that show ended.

Didn’t like purgatory, huh?

I loved the show and I hated how it ended. I’ve always disliked open-ended endings. “This book is supposed to be a trilogy but now it’s going to be twelve books because it sold really well.” I feel like that can be a temptation. Because the books are doing well and a lot of people like them, it is a good business strategy to keep writing Green Ember books. But I had a pretty strong desire to wrap up the main series. So it’s four books and it’s over. And there’s nothing after that as far as I’m concerned. The last book is called Ember’s End—and it’s the end. I wanted to finish it and I wanted to do it when I was alive. And I’ve had a strong feeling of relief. Hopefully I’ll feel that way when people get the books.

I’ve got plenty of other ideas. One thing I love about the series is it does have a lot of side doors that I leave open. From the very beginning I’ve left breadcrumbs all over the place. Some I didn’t even know about. And I’ve left opportunities here and there and I think of them as

breadcrumbs that will lead me back to some other kinds of stories.

Breadcrumbs for you more than for the reader? Right. They’re openings for me. I don’t know how I would steward them, but I’m interested in telling stories in different ways, via different kinds of media. But I’d also be content if we just publish a few more books and we were done with that. That’d be great. We love what we’re doing, but it is open and I like that.

Do you see yourself always working on stories for kids?

I would be happy to write novels for adults. Most of the ideas I have for the next things involve stories that I think will appeal to young people. One of them may be a little bit older than what I’m doing now. But I might grow with my audience, too. I might want to write something for them as they get older. I feel pretty comfortable with this audience. I’m aiming for the whole family. I didn’t do that necessarily at the beginning, but I’ve received such feedback from so many adults and families that enjoy it together. My favorite movies are movies I can watch with my kids. And I’d love to create things like that. That’s my hope.

We’ve talked around the concept of responsibility. And you mentioned before we did the interview—off the record, so to speak—about this place that you’re from, West Virginia. You said that a lot of people move back here because the place seems to get in their bones. Do you feel a responsibility to represent this place in your stories, to provide some kind of voice for it in the stories that you’re telling, the things that you’re writing? That is a wonderful question. I absolutely feel very much of this place and for this place. I love West Virginia like I love my mother, faults and all. Biases and all. That’s another thing that I don’t have to pretend. It’s not an act and anybody that knows our family couldn’t doubt the authenticity of my love for this place. So I do feel a responsibility in my vocation as an author to represent this state and these people well. And part of that is related to the resentment that a lot of Appalachian people feel about how they’re represented in our dominate media.

People from WV and other mountain cultures are almost always villains, backwards people, racists, that kind of a thing. We have to be honest about some of the things that are true about our history. But I’m interested in a counter-bias. I’m interested in sharing some of the better parts of WV because I feel like it is so neglected. I couldn’t have written the stories that I have written without having the experience of being rooted in this place. There are some very direct ways that it shows up in the Green Ember stories, like one of the heroes in the series is a coal miner. And there are secret citadels in the main series called Vandellia, which is a name for the area of this world. West Virginia was almost named Vandellia.

So those characters have experiences which are similar to the experiences of West Virginians that I know and love. It’s interesting that you asked that question right after asking about what else I might be writing because I keep thinking about the stories that are more close to West Virginia in an overt way.

Do you feel like you want to turn away from writing about animals to people? Is there any instinct to do that?

Oh sure. The rabbits were accidental anyway. I mean, as many people have pointed out— sometimes very critically—my rabbits are not like Richard Adams’ rabbits, which are very rabbity. Watership Down is the best rabbit book ever in my opinion. It’s so wonderful. I’m not trying to do that. My characters are more like people.

Like the beavers in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Beavers would never drink tea, people say.

Yeah, I’ve gotten some of that. Rabbits don’t have hands. They can’t hold swords.

You are from West Virginia; you are aware that rabbits don’t hold swords.

I was down on a book tour in South Carolina and my friend said to me very pejoratively, “So you’re still doing this rabbits with swords thing, can’t you mix it up and do mooses with bazookas or something like that?” So I went that night and wrote the first chapter of Mooses with Bazookas.

remember the exact moment I came alive to literature. My high school honor’s English class was reading T.S. Eliot’s poem

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Before Prufrock, I thought of reading as a beloved hobby, but I had no understanding of the capacity for words to channel transcendence. But when I sat in that stuffy classroom in that hard plastic chair, huddled over the photocopied pages of that Eliot poem, I was transported beyond myself. I remember the line that captivated me: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each / I do not think they will sing for me.” I remember looking up, startled, pierced by a sudden and overwhelming longing to hear that eternal song for myself, praying with a flash of searing reverence that I would not be passed over. It was in that class that I decided to become a teacher so that I could invite students to tune their ears to the latent longing for eternity that is threaded through literature.

Most of the time I advocate for the old books and enduring art of the Great Tradition which, in this crass culture of revisionist deconstruction, have been largely silenced and even viciously attacked. But the invitation in this particular essay is not for those who have forgotten the old ways. Instead it is for those classically-minded Christians who cling to them so tightly that we scorn the new. I have observed with concern that many insightful Christians in the classical renewal reject the arts and letters of this generation. They rightfully give deference to the enduring masterpieces of the Great Tradition but erroneously reject and dismiss the art of today. Instead, Christians who are immersed in the Great Tradition

should be the most zealous creators of new art and the most thoughtful critics and beholders of it. On the question of whether or not classically-minded people should create and behold new works of art, I turn to a classical archetype: Penelope, wife of Odysseus.

In Homer’s magnificent epic, the Odyssey, our hero, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, is journeying home. The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’ homecoming to his native land, of his reunion with his wife, Penelope, and their son, Telemachus, who has never known his father. Odysseus has not seen his home or family in twenty years. In that time he has experienced many adventures and endured many hardships while Penelope, who does not know if her husband is dead or alive, waits. Meanwhile, a group of violent and debauched suitors have occupied the palace. These dissipated young men court the queen and plunder Ithaca’s riches. They live in Odysseus’ home and feast on his meat, drink his wine, mock his son, sleep with his servant girls, and woo his wife.

Penelope has no idea if Odysseus will ever return, but she loves him as tenderly as she did as a young bride. She weeps for him every day, longing to reunite with her beloved. Odysseus’ absence leaves her vulnerable, but she refuses to accept another husband. Without a husband to guard the kingdom from the intrusion of the unworthy suitors, Penelope fears that they will force her to marry and she will have no recourse. Although she is the queen, at this point she is simply a woman living in a home that has been invaded by dangerous men.

But faithful Penelope is clever. In order to escape the advances of the degenerate suitors, she implements a cunning strategy. She informs the suitors that she must

weave a burial shroud for Laertes, her elderly father-inlaw, who is fainthearted and weak from longing for his son’s return. She tells the suitors that she cannot consider marrying again before Laertes’ shroud is complete, worthy of her skill and honor. Then, she promises, she will choose a new husband. The suitors cannot refuse. The act is so noble that even the faithless suitors, for a time at least, are ashamed to force themselves upon her.

Every day for three years Penelope weaves. She is skilled at her craft. The shroud increases in beauty and workmanship. She weaves all day, then every night, after dark, Penelope slips out of her bed, creeps quietly to the loom, and unravels it all. In spite of its beauty and skill, in spite of the honor it does to her revered father-in-law, in spite of the glory of the artifact she has made, she undoes every stitch. Why? The work is not the point; the shroud is really, at heart, an offering to the waiting. It is not for the thing itself that she weaves, but for Odysseus and the life of Ithaca.

The story of Penelope and the shroud is repeated three times in the Odyssey, indicating it’s crucial role in the narrative. It demonstrates Penelope’s essential character: her prudence, her fidelity, her fortitude, and her sagacity, all of which demonstrate that she is worthy of her heroic husband, the long-lost king. The episode also reveals something deeper and more elusive, a mysterious reality that even Homer himself could not have intended but which dwells within the narrative nonetheless. Many scholars and storytellers have noted the Christian allegory embedded within the narrative pattern of the Odyssey This is remarkable, because Homer recorded the Odyssey around 1,000—800 BC, and even then it was almost certainly part of a much earlier oral tradition. Even then artists were weaving the unfolding story of the life of the world.

We are like Penelope, the King’s beloved, stranded in our own home. Penelope dwells in the proper sphere for a queen, but everything is not as it should be. She is in danger. The suitors vie for her hand, but they do not love her. They desire only to possess her, to lure her, to seduce her away from her true lord, to fatten themselves on power and plunder. So it is with us: We are stranded in our own homeland, surrounded by encroaching dangers and pressing temptations, unsure if and when we will be rescued, yearning for the return of the King who alone can set things right again.

Waiting is a Christian dilemma in every generation. In fact, the Bible repeatedly employs the same metaphor as the Odyssey: a bride awaiting her royal husband’s return. From Song of Songs to St. Paul’s epistles, Scripture invites us to be a faithful bride, like Penelope. All of this raises a crucial question: While we wait for the Lord to return, what shall we do? We can imitate clever, faithful

Penelope—often called “wise,” “circumspect,” or “prudent” Penelope—who hatched a daring plan. She knew she could not save herself, but she could take purposeful and redemptive action in her excruciating season of waiting. What was that action? Penelope created something. She oriented her skill to crafting an artifact (the shroud) that honored the generation before her (Laertes) in order to protect the one in her keeping now (Telemachus). The shroud embodies far more than Penelope’s quiet wit; it is the artist’s vocation.

Penelope made a thing—a beautifully woven shroud—and in the making of that thing, she participated in the salvation of her land and her family. Artists who are Christians have the same vocation today as we participate in our own waiting. Like Odysseus, our Lord is coming home, and when he does, he will slaughter the suitors, reclaim the land, and restore his bride to her rightful place beside him. As Jesus says in a series of parables about his own homecoming in Matthew 25, “When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he shall sit upon the throne of his glory.” The Lord will return, and what will he find us doing? Like Odysseus, he should find his bride weaving, investing in the culture for the sake of resisting the corrupting evil and ushering in salvation when the master of the house returns.

However, the weaving is not the whole story. What do we make of the unraveling? That is the heart of the question that plagues classically-minded Christians who observe lesser works wane in influence over time. Should classically-minded folks engage in art that is destined to lose its influence beyond this cultural moment? Should we, perhaps, focus on the Great Tradition alone? It is the cream of the crop, after all, and what is the point of making or beholding art if it is destined to unravel?

Ah, but the unraveling is part of the point. Penelope unraveled her exquisite work herself, not because it wasn’t good (it was), and not because it wasn’t worth doing (it was absolutely essential). She unraveled her work because the work was not for herself, not for her own glory. It was for Odysseus. She was weaving far more than a shroud—an embodiment of her own faith and desire, a strategic action that participated in the greater story.

In every generation, artists weave and unravel. The work of very few artists, writers, poets, musicians, and craftsmen endures beyond their own age. Even the rare instances in which artists do transcend their time (say, Shakespeare, Bach, da Vinci, and Dante), they are often misunderstood and misinterpreted, even dismissed. The artist who assesses the worth of his own work by how long it endures is judging by a flawed standard. Our own work and the work of most artists in our generation may

not endure, but neither will shrouds, unraveled or not. Shrouds, by their nature, decay. Like Penelope, we do not weave shrouds for our own glory, but because love compels us beyond death.

Interestingly, the question of glory is a prominent theme—perhaps even the unifying theme—of Homer’s epics. The Greek word for glory in the Iliad and the Odyssey is kleos (“clay-oss”). In ancient Greece, kleos, or immortal glory, referred to the earthly memory of our legacies after death, which was crucial in a culture which was ambivalent about the afterlife. The epics portray dead souls as wisps of vapor with no memory, floating in shadows. A barren image indeed, which is why kleos was the dividing line of everything. Indeed, kleos may be the theme of Western culture itself, because it speaks to the human longing for transcendence, for everlasting life, for the mermaid’s song. For Christians, the yearning for kleos is threaded into the liturgy of the church when, like the thief on the cross, we cry, “Lord, remember me in your kingdom.”

In order to understand why art matters in every generation, we examine Penelope’s kleos, her everlasting glory, which is not in the weaving, but in the unraveling. She is remembered precisely because she laid her work down for the sake of another. Long after Penelope’s shroud devolved into a heap of tangled string, the poets were singing of prudent Penelope. The following tribute to Penelope is from the ghost of Agamemnon, King of the Greeks, whose own wife, Clytemnestra, betrayed and murdered him. “Oh fortunate son of Laertes,” said Agamemnon’s ghost. “Odysseus of the many devices, surely you won yourself a wife endowed with great virtue. How good was proved the heart of blameless Penelope, Ikarios’ daughter, and how well she remembered Odysseus, her wedded husband. Thereby the fame of her virtue shall never die away, but the immortals will make for the people of earth a thing of grace in the song for prudent Penelope.”

Some scholars claim that the “thing of grace,” the “song for prudent Penelope,” is the Odyssey itself. Perhaps. If that is the case, we do well to honor her wisdom. And what is that wisdom? She remembered her husband. Her great love for her absent bridegroom overflowed in an artifact of beauty, an offering to the waiting, that she wove and unraveled over and over again as necessary for the sake of love. The unraveling, as well as the weaving, embodies her faithfulness and demonstrates her wisdom.

Like Penelope, artists in every generation will create objectively good work that will not long endure. But that is not the point; rather, like Penelope, the point is to implement a redemptive strategy to create something skilled and beautiful as we wait for the return of our Lord. Classically-minded Christians should not throw up our hands because Shakespeare said it better or da Vinci’s

Last Supper is the last word in last suppers. Instead, we should create and behold the art of this cultural moment, this generation, this living sphere of influence.

That isn’t to say that the best works should not receive a greater measure of careful study and exuberant delight. They should. Shakespeare is better than, say, Rowling, herself a student and lover of the classics whose books overflow with classical allusions and forms. The old arts and letters are shrouds that have not yet decayed. But our reverence for the old ways does not disqualify us from engaging with the humanities of today, particularly those artists, poets, authors, and musicians who, like Penelope, hear the mermaid’s song and do the brave and holy work of weaving and unraveling artistic endeavors today.

The ancient and medieval church taught that our pilgrimage on earth is for the purpose of being made fit for heaven. When we arrive at the top of that immense metaphorical mountain, God will either say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into your rest,” or “Depart from me. I never knew you.” Every one of us who is Penelope at the loom will face this divine sorting. Our kleos will be determined by what we did while we were waiting for our Lord to return. Therefore the question, “What is the purpose of engaging in contemporary arts and letters since we already have a Great Tradition rich in goodness, truth, and beauty?” is a good one. It is an important question. But it is a question with an answer: Whether your work gets unraveled is not the point; the point is to weave while we wait. Every generation needs its Penelopes, the artists and poets and songwriters and craftsmen who will weave and unravel artifacts that tell the true story of the life of the world again and again. Some will create art that will endure beyond our time, and some will create art that will form the people of this generation. That is up to God. But either way, it is work worth doing. Like Penelope, may we be prudent and faithful, and may it be said of us, “How well she remembered Odysseus, her wedded husband.”

Heidi White teaches at Collegium Study Center in Colorado Springs. She is a regular contributor at The Close Reads Podcast Network, the host of the FORMA podcast, and the Managing Editor of FORMA.

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Poetry

James Matthew Wilson

James Matthew Wilson is the author of eight books, including The Hanging God (Angelico, 2018), The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (Catholic University Press, 2017), The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (Wiseblood, 2015), Some Permanent Things (Wiseblood, 2014; second edition, 2018), The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (Wiseblood, 2014), and The Violent and the Fallen (Finishing Line Press, 2013). His poetry appears regularly in many magazines and was included in Best American Poetry 2018. The 2017 winner of the Hiett Prize from Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, he is Associate Professor of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University and is poetry editor of Modern Age.

TWILIGHT

Raw and naïve, I was once told, As a friend quietly marked her birthday, She felt relief at growing old.

In youth, the weight of what’s unknown Overloads the pan and wrecks the scale, Till life seems anxiousness alone.

No matter how much we may savor, Writes Hobbes, still more lies round to fear: War, want, or losing the gods’ favor.

Around her ever briefer rest, The early autumn twilight fell And time stood by in darkness dressed.

Poetry James Matthew Wilson

THE RELUCTANT SCHOLAR

Sit down, my child, to your books. Enough with all those dirty looks, But turn to page one-hundred-ten Where Daniel’s in the lions’ den; And then, to chapter fifty-eight, Where you’ll learn how to calculate Beyond the limit of your fingers At whose stub tips the novice lingers. We’ll finish off our morning course With Greeks hid in their wooden horse. Those warriors had been lost and blind Without Ulysses’ myriad mind; And Daniel felt the lion’s tooth Had faithful thoughts not set him loose; And if you will live in this world Where mysteries wait to be unfurled As clues to God’s divinity, You’ll have to cross infinity.

But, Mother, I’ve been turning pages For far too long; it seems like ages Since I did anything but read. There’s other things that children need. We must go hunt stones in a brook, Not to count but just to look Upon their slick and mottled shades. At noon, the enemy invades (I’m sorry it puts you out of humor; My scouts confirm the awful rumor), And I have yet to make my maps, Prepare the troops and set some traps, Arm all my friends with shields and sticks To give those beastly Greeks their licks. Studying all day is such a bore. Please, let me up and out the door.

What’s this complaining all about?

The Greeks unloosed their awful shout And made a ruin of old Troy Though it was no great cause of joy. At dawn, the king came, his head hung, Thinking Daniel no more among The living, but soon found him there Because he’d memorized his prayer. Whether a prophet or a soldier, While still a child or somewhat older, Numbers will stay with you, and counting Is one path for the mind’s sure mounting From mystery to mystery, For minds can think what eyes can’t see. Arithmetic’s a sign of that. But very well. Stop where you’re at, Your pile of books has had its say, Go chase those sneaking Greeks away, Escape some lions, find some stones, And quit your count of scholarly groans.

This summer, I visited Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which houses Judy Chicago’s famous 1970s installation, The Dinner Party, one of the most controversial pieces of twentieth-century feminist art. Constructed between 1974 and 1979 by some four hundred people, the work cost $250,000 to create, $36,500 of which was tax-payers’ money. First displayed in 1979 in the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, the installation proved so contentious that plans for its subsequent tour were cancelled. Nonetheless, through the fundraising efforts of the people who originally worked on the installation, the piece toured three continents before coming to rest in storage in California for several years. By 1990, there were plans to permanently establish the work at The Carnegie Library in the District of Columbia. However, congressmen prevented this on the grounds that it was impractical, expensive, pornographic, and offensive. It wasn’t until 2007 that The Dinner Party took up its permanent residence in Brooklyn.

The installation includes five components: “Entry Banners” (a series of six fabric panels embroidered with writing that states the ideology of the work); “Place Settings” (thirty-nine “core imagery” plates on embroidered place settings); “Heritage Floor” (tiled with white triangular tiles covered in 999 names of real and mythological women, correlating to the thirty-nine Place Settings); “Heritage Panels” (seven large collage boards documenting the lives of the women named on the floor); and “Acknowledgment Panels” (monochrome photographs of the 129 people in the administrative and creative team).

In a large black room with a stud-lit ceiling, three forty-eight-foot-long tables are arranged in an equilateral triangle covered by a laboratory-white tablecloth that is set upon a white tiled triangular platform. The tables are set for thirty-nine guests, seated chronologically and divided into three wings:

“Pre-History to Classical Rome,” “Christianity to the Reformation,” and “American Revolution to the Women’s Revolution.” The place settings include white ceramic goblets, napkins, and cutlery, and fourteen-inch-wide china plates. The names of the women are beautifully embroidered and embellished with images relating to each woman’s particular occupation or claim to fame. Each plate is painted with what Chicago calls “central core imagery,” her euphemism for the vagina, and each of the thirty-nine “cores” is vibrantly colored. They even become three-dimensional as the installation moves into modernity, representing the idea that women have become increasingly assertive throughout history. The plates rise up as if to bite you.

The atmosphere in the room is austere, angular, and clinical. No human figures are present. There is no sound or scent, and the artwork cannot be

touched. And yet the installation is called a “celebration”; it is meant to be a ceremonial banquet. The table itself is insufficient to convey “the richness of women’s heritage” so a hefty, two-inch-thick guidebook can be consulted for explanations. In short, it is not the sort of art that invites the mind into a state of contemplative rest. And thus, while The Dinner Party is massive in its physical dimension, its material magnitude cannot compensate for its meager artistic spirit.

My encounter with this famous piece occurred while I was reading Dorothy Sayers’ own famous work The Mind of the Maker, which was published in 1941. Encouraged by Sayers’ belief in the possibility of “redeeming” art through criticism, I felt compelled to write a Christian response to Chicago’s installation, which I would like to propose is really a work of what Sayers would call “anti-art.”

Sayers argues in that the creative mind is analogous to the Holy Trinity. She presents the case that the artist’s Idea is like the governing will of the Father; the artist’s Energy, which incarnates the Idea into a tangible art-form, is like the Son; and the Power of the artwork (what it pours out in terms of its impression on the reader or viewer) is like the Spirit.1 In a chapter entitled “Scalene Triangles,” Sayers argues that imbalance in this trinity diminishes the overall effect of a work of art.

In a clear statement of the idea that inspired her work, Chicago wrote in her autobiography that she “became amused by the notion of doing a sort of reinterpretation of that all-male event from the point of view of those who had traditionally been expected to prepare the food, then silently disappear from the picture or, in this case, from the picture plane.”

Here, then, is Chicago’s creative mind in action.

1. At the 2019 CiRCE Institute national conference Andrew Kern made a similar argument. He views the imbalance thus: Art that idolizes the artist is overly Expressionist, art that idolizes the artifact is overly Formalist, and art that idolizes the percipient is overly Impressionist. What should guide the artist? Soli Deo Gloria

No doubt Chicago was full of good intentions, but Sayers warns that “the better the intentions, the more strongly does the will associate itself with them and the more disastrous the results.” On this basis, Chicago’s work of art is a failure because it is wholly submitted to a flawed Idea and is therefore willfully driven by a vacuous ideology: namely feminism’s founding misconception that all women throughout history have been, and continue to be, oppressed by men. Chicago’s technical skill, the high quality materials that were employed to compose the installation, her meticulous research into women’s history, and the intricate crafting of cloth and ceramics cannot prevent it from being a work of tawdry propaganda. Sayers again cautions: “The business of the creator is not to escape from his material medium or to bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it he must love it.”

Careful contemplation of Chicago’s installation reveals that she does not love the material medium of her art; the Idea dominates all. The Dinner Party fails to withstand the oppression of three dogmas imposed on it by Chicago’s Idea: equality, inclusion, and diversity (the popular mantra of today’s identity politics movement). Chicago’s equilateral triangle is duplicitous. It is, if anything, a scalene triangle. Formally, it alludes to a woman’s body (the womb, the vagina) and asserts that it reclaims for feminists some “patriarchal” symbols (the Masonic emblem, the Holy Trinity). But the geometric form is an extrinsic imposition on what is a formless piece of proselytizing that promotes inequality, exclusivity, and homogeneity.

In a recent lecture, author Joshua Gibbs considered the distinctions between an impostor and an image-bearer, emphasizing the importance of being able to recognize forgeries. He defined an image-bearer as derived from God yet distinct from God. Chicago’s Party impersonates art by setting itself up in opposition to God, rather than seeking to incarnate in some artistic way an eternal truth. It is manifestly an idol through which ancient pagan notions of ultimate oneness can be worshiped.

Because we are mimetikoi (“Be ye therefore imitators [mimetikoi] of God, as dear children,” says Paul) our souls desire harmony; when we look at a work of art, our natural inclination is to look for unity and to try to reconcile discordant notes. This is why viewers of modern art often use words like “disturbing” and “unsettling” to describe what they see. This is a natural response when the various parts of a work of art do not arrive at a point of unity. Chicago’s piece frustrates this natural human desire for harmony because it does not conform to the nature of the thing it depicts. A feast presents a microcosm of society. Chicago’s microcosm presents a society devoid of people, the inevitable consequence of erasing men from the face of the earth. Bereft of the mirth and fellowship that naturally abide at a feast, the power and beauty of the work scarcely exist.

Christine Hermo, the exhibit’s curator, said in an interview for an online review that the installation “was largely inspired by seeing these images of the Last Supper, seeing these thirteen men at the table . . . and having this needling question: Who cooked the Last Supper? Who cleaned up? And where are the women?” The answer to her questions can be found, initially, in Exodus 12. The Passover was an urgent and somber occasion. The man of the household prepared the Paschal lamb and the whole household ate it while standing up, belts fastened, sandals on their feet, staffs in hand. It was eaten in haste. And any leftovers were to be burned by the man of the house. Even the blood smeared on the lintel and doorposts was not to be cleaned. This was an essential ritual, of course, to save the firstborn of that household from death.2

For Christians, the symbolism of the Ultima Cena, which is central to the Bible’s typological imagery, is inherent to our understanding of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and the Eucharist. The story of the Passover feast which the disciples ate with Christ prior to his crucifixion, as told in Matthew 26, is depicted in Giotto’s 1306 fresco of the Last Supper in the Scrovegni Chapel in Pad-

2. Matthew 26 again bears no suggestion that the Passover feast was prepared by women: “Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying, 'Where will you have us prepare for you to eat the Passover?’ He said, “Go into the city to a certain man and say to him, 'The Teacher says, My time is at hand. I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples.’ ” “And the disciples did as Jesus had directed them, and they prepared the Passover” (ESV Matt 26:17-19). Chicago and the curator did not look very hard for answers to their questions.

ua, Italy and is worth comparing to The Dinner Party. Giotto reveals the most sorrowful moments of this feast, which occur between verses 21 and 23, with astonishing beauty and simplicity. The expressive eyes of the characters communicate across the centuries. John finds comfort in Jesus’ breast while Peter (in blue to His left) clasps a knife threateningly. Giotto conveys diversity with subtlety, remaining true to the Bible’s presentation of maleness. Hermo’s dismissive comment about “these thirteen men” fails to recognize that Jesus Christ is not just another one of the guys. He is fully man and fully God. He is the teacher; they are the disciples. His golden halo contrasts the dark halos of the sinners around him, eleven of whom will be transformed into saints by his sacrificial blood. And Judas’ dark halo begins to fade as he dips his hand into the dish alongside Christ. This is no moment of gaudy celebration (although there is deep joy here that the disciples themselves do not yet understand). I love Giotto’s the best of all the Last Supper paintings because of his careful attention to biblical detail.

Although Chicago’s work has been blighted by the isolating term “original,” any discerning viewer of the Party will be aware of her appropriation of liturgical imagery. But Chicago attempts to benefit from the potency of Christian symbolism while simultaneously desecrating it.

In spite of the artist’s claim that the Place Settings are inspired by altar cloths, the Party is a subversion of the Eucharistic feast. Even liturgical color symbolism is distorted. White glorified by gold is of potent sacramental significance in the church: white symbolizes purity and the triumph of the resurrection; altars, clergy, and brides are robed in white at weddings. And, of course, weddings symbolize unity: The Bible begins and ends with a wedding, and Christ’s first miracle is performed at a wedding feast. But there is no joyful union in Chicago’s Party. Even in antithesis, Chicago’s use of color proclaims the truth: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness” (KJV Matt 23:27).

What an utterly miserable dinner party this is. There are no guests, candles, or flowers; there is neither wine nor food. And isn’t a gold-lined chalice a somewhat uncomfortable vessel to raise to the lips at a feast which tri-

umphs in some of its attendants’ abundant sexual proclivities? And how sad that their cups are empty. The feast in Psalm 23 is overflowing with images of abundant water, oil, and wine. But here there are not even chairs (one way in which it is unwittingly consistent with the Passover in Exodus). Maybe the women have to bring their own seats in a symbolic act of self-throning? It’s the artist’s choice to depict the party before it has begun, perhaps. But what awaits them? Two courses (as the cutlery denotes), one choice of drink, and the embarrassment of knowing your own name but no one else’s. Surely it would make more sense to put the names on the inside of the massive anti-social vortex, so that you at least know at whom you are looking, even if you cannot talk to her?

If Sappho, seated in the the “Prehistory to Classical Rome” wing, has the lung power to bellow across the void to her fellow diner, Margaret Sanger, seated in the “American Revolution to the Women’s Revolution” wing, she might thrum on her lyre: “Have you any children, dear?”

And Sanger would have to lie: “Me? No. I took de Beauvoir’s abstraction that ‘the foetus is a parasite’ to its practical conclusion and, consistent with my beliefs, killed them. Can’t you tell from the subtle embroidery on my place setting where the umbilical cord is depicted as a chain, enslaving the mother?”

“Ah, sadly not, I can’t see it from where I’m sitting. Anyway, nor do I have children. They were out of the question on Lesbos (no sperm banks on those shores) so I made my odes my darlings instead. Most of them were lost, though, killed by the sheer incompetence of men entrusted with the preservation of ancient Western culture.”

And then might it dawn on Chicago how hypocritical and self-annihilating she has made these women? As Lear knows, “Nothing will come of nothing.”

Those women who didn’t make it onto the exclusive guest list can only be glad. But art is a series of decisions about what to exclude: Chicago can’t be criticized for making choices. The criticism is leveled at the art’s failure to meet her own standards. She claims that this work represents inclusivity; in fact it hegemonizes any woman who is not part of this prism of cultural elitism. The other 999 chosen ones can at best hope to have their names trampled into the Heritage Floor by these Überfrauen. The individually crafted triangular tiles with names painted on them in gold surely suggest women as the

downtrodden of history. But, even if you subscribe to this view, does putting the names firmly on the floor really restore them to a better place? And what of the acoustics on that hard tiled floor? Stilettos would be out; did anyone wash their feet? That sort of menial service would surely be too degrading for any woman among this entitled set to perform. Setting aside temporal constraints, it would be easy to imagine Ayanna Pressley sending out the invitations. “A woman’s face that does not want to be a woman’s voice has no place at this table” would rise in embossed letters on the card.

Then again, women’s faces have no place at this table. Instead, women are humiliatingly objectified as grotesque and psychedelic genitalia, which lie like patients etherized upon a table, awaiting gynecological examination. These “central cores” are imaginative representations of a woman’s anatomy, but they cannot be attributed to any particular individual in the way that a face can! The artist seems to have no shame in betraying her lack of faith in her own artistic ability to convey the identities of these women nor in her viewer’s ability to decipher them. Instead, she resorts to embroidering the name of each woman in foot-high letters on the tablecloth, along with images pertaining to the woman’s life, which has a rather patronizing effect. This pervasive doubt about the power of imagery to communicate meaning undermines the whole work.

Take by comparison Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco of the Last Supper in the refectory of San Marco in Florence (c. 1486). Imagine the loss of artistic power had he graffitied the name of each diner on the table cloth. Ghirlandaio, who respects individuality and gives his guests the dignity of actually attending the feast in person, characterizes each man by a gesture or emotion (even if some are somewhat rigid and overdone). Saint Peter urgently brandishes a knife, furrowing his brow at the suggestion that there is a traitor amongst the group. Saint John collapses in a dramatically supine position. Judas needs no introduction; he is seated alone, halo-less, on the wrong side of the table, to the left (sinister) side of Christ himself who is denoted by his central position in the painting, directly beneath a crucifix, and crowned with a distinctive cruciform halo. The guests feast on cherries, symbolically the fruits of paradise. Ghirlandaio’s fresco includes some humor, too. Playing on the old Latin pun Domini canes, which refers to the Dominicans as “the dogs of the Lord,”

Ghirlandaio places a cat, the enemy of the dog, next to the treacherous Judas. But there are no jokes allowed in Chicago’s work: It is deadly serious.

While Chicago’s “Party” gives the impression of being non-hierarchical, it is supremely so. Ghirlandaio’s gathering of fishermen, tax-collectors, and family members is convened not because of the individual merits of the guests but out of Christ’s love for them. The glaring absence of real corporeal beings at Chicago’s feast suggests that humans, in their physical form, are inconvenient. The names neatly represent the feminist ideology being forced upon us which the beauty of the female body itself might (were it present) gracefully defy. This is a distorted picture of equality, not derived from an artist’s observation of the female form: There would be no equality of beauty, no equality of height, no equality of age among the guests. They are names without faces precisely because only the names matter; you have to be a famous activist to be considered for inclusion in this dinner party. Simply being a woman is inadequate. Obviously the message in which we’re supposed to rejoice is that women now have a place at the table; they’re not serving in the kitchen. Hurrah! Where are they, then? Shouldn’t they now enjoy the feast? Chicago has not addressed the problem that she set out to solve: the women still “silently disappear from the picture.” And heaven help the lowly scullery maid, who, unless she’s beheaded a man, published a stream-of-consciousness novel, or penned a political tract during her tea-break, is never going to be seen amongst these formidable matriarchs.

Of course, the presence of thirty-nine image-bearers of God would be a paradox in a work of art that denies the existence of God in the first place. At this literal level there is a logical consistency to the Party which is admirably ruthless. On an analogical level this represents the primacy of abstractions in all ideologies prized by the mystagogues who reject the incarnation. The a priori theory itself, whatever it may be, is worshiped as divine and immutable; physical reality, if it contradicts the theory, must be mutilated, effaced, banished.

A disconnection between the Idea and the Energy of Chicago’s work is also apparent when we consider her portrayal of unity in diversity. Chicago’s installation paradoxically claims to achieve unity by eradicating all diversity. The Entry Banners read, “all that divided them merged.” The viewer receives from the Party a sense of

division and disharmony because the very Idea is fueled by all the destructive animosity of pride and covetousness that keeps “the battle of the sexes” waging. In pursuing the Nietzschean “Will to Power,” the artist renders the work, and herself, powerless. “Consequences cannot be separated from their causes without a loss of Power,” Sayers proclaims.

The contradictory nature of Chicago’s piece is apparent: It at once gives pride of place to individual identity and achievement while simultaneously denying the women individuality and dissolving all personal identity into the Primordial Goddess’s swamp of evolutionary indistinction. Would Artemisia Gentileschi, a Baroque artist from the school of Caravaggio (seated in the wing for “Christianity to the Reformation”), so crudely depicted by a cartoon-style paintbrush and palette on her Place Setting, be content with her identity being made indecipherable from Judy Chicago’s in the ultimate merging? True unity can only be enjoyed in Jesus Christ.3 Nor is there much concern for factual accuracy about the individual details of women’s lives. The guidebook claims, for example, that Mary Wollstonecraft, the famous author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, died during childbirth.4

By comparison, Jacopo Tintoretto, in his Last Supper in San Giorgio di Maggiore, Venice (c.1592-1594), paints the full cosmological picture of reality, from the diaphanous angelic host tumbling through the edges of the frame to the muscular serving woman, doing the dishes kneeling on the floor in the foreground of the painting. Christ’s radiant aureole highlights them all. Sayers observes that “the vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity.” Tintoretto’s artistic representation of the meal depicts true diversity and therefore achieves powerful unity. Even the dog feasts on the crumbs beneath the table. Chicago’s work demands a far more massive space than Tintoretto’s canvas and yet, by comparison, is rather boring to look at, offering thirty-nine meticulously uniform empty place settings. Even Lady Macbeth’s disastrous dinner party is more unified than this!

In Macbeth’s first encounter with the Weïrd Sisters, Banquo, in response to their equivocating incantations, poses what is possibly the most important question of the play: “Can the devil speak true?” The witches, like Satan,

are constrained to negating the truth. In the same sense, The Dinner Party communicates truth through negation, in spite of itself. For all its desperate theurgic gestures toward ultimate oneness, the work betrays the emptiness at the heart of its philosophy. At the center of this feast is a meonic, equilateral space. Chicago’s very artistic conception is abortive in keeping with the nihilistic doctrine the work promotes. As Sayers shows, “The false relation between Energy and Idea always results in a failure of Power.” So it can also be said with confidence that hailing this work, as critics are wont to do, “a celebration of the power of women throughout history” is manifestly false. It is, in fact, enfeebled by feminist ideology. Metonymically present only as yawning yonic chasms, the women are degraded, defaced, and devoured.

Chicago says the whole thing is meant to be “a wedge” inserting women’s art and women’s issues into the “male dominated” foreground.5 It looks a lot more like a void. The triangle bears no more relation to her concept of a dinner party than does a dinner party to her concept of female oppression. The triangular shape and the cultural ritual of a feast serve well enough as the blank backdrop upon which to project the feminist ideology. Chicago startles the eye with nice derangements and does by mechanical contrivance the work that should be done by “the response in the lively soul” (Sayers). The Party leaves the viewer cold and hungry.

David Hicks, author of Norms and Nobility, posed a fascinating question in a recent lecture: What if narrative is a distinguishing mark of being human? If he is right, The Dinner Party cannot enter into any communion with the reality of human life. It tells no story. It shouts a slogan on a placard. It sets up a memorial to the extinction of humanity while refusing to acknowledge that the doctrine it espouses will ensure there is no future audience for it. The Last Supper shows Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, serving the disciples. It is the story of repentance, salvation, sanctification, and the promise of eternal communion with Christ. It is the story of the gospel, which is the story of the whole world from beginning to end. It is a feast to which all are invited, although some may decline the invitation.

Sarah-Jane Bentley teaches English at Eton College in England. She is a contributor to The Close Reads Podcast Network.

3. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”(ESV Gal 3:28)

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (ESV Col1: 15-17)

4. In Muriel Spark’s biography of Mary Shelley, we learn Mary Wollstonecraft was delivered of her daughter Mary on the night of August 30th, 1797. She then developed a fever and poisoning was diagnosed. She died on the 10th of September.

5. Expectant mothers might find that The Dinner Party serves as a directory of names for daughters. Real art isn’t useful.

hy do we eat? And what is food for? Much modern marketing would have us believe that food is simply energy. Scientifically, that is true. Food is composed, among other things, of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins that all contain a certain number of calories, which, after all, are units to measure energy. But, thank God, food is actually a great, great deal more than mere calories to fuel the earthly body.

In the The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis gives us a marvelous metaphor for how we should view food when he presents a dialogue about stars between Eustace and Ramandu. Eustace declares that “in our world . . . a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” Ramandu answers, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” And yet so often in our harried modern world, we treat food and eating as a sort of necessary evil.

Consider the marketing of one meal-replacement drink: “We thought about your food so you don’t have to.” Just chug the drink and move on to the important things in life, like climbing the corporate ladder. It is estimated that nearly half of us eat fast food on a weekly basis, and another study claimed that twenty-three percent of us eat fast food three or more times a week. Meanwhile, we spend on average twenty-seven minutes a day on food prep, compared to an average of sixty-five minutes a day in 1965. One study in the UK showed that the British spend more time watching cooking programs than they do actually cooking.

But if eating is not about merely fueling our bodies with the perfect ratio of nutrients, then what is it about? The late Robert Farrar Capon, that tremendous theologian and food writer, put it beautifully:

To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste.

Unfortunately, as the studies above show, the food culture around us—and perhaps in our very homes—views eating as little more than a necessary evil to be more productive, economically viable cogs in society. (Or it can be something we use to virtue-signal on Instagram, but that’s a conversation for another time.) Even our “health” food options, like smoothies, bowls, vitamins, mixes,

and protein bars, are often built around efficient, quick eating.

Consider the history behind protein bars. KIND bars, LÄRABARs, CLIF Bars, PowerBars, SlimFast, Atkins diet bars, RXBars . . . Nowadays, these energy bars are often a pick-me-up during an afternoon slump, or a diet food to replace prepared meals for the sake of reducing caloric intake. Sometimes they are simply an emergency ration for days without lunch.

However, energy bars are commonly thought to trace their genealogy back to a much less suburban environment. During the Cold War, much research was devoted to how NASA could feed astronauts in the new and untested realm of space. They contracted with Pillsbury to develop a food called “Space Food Sticks,” which the company adapted for commercial use, and although Tiger’s Milk Bars beat them to the market, the Space Food Sticks made energy bars, or “nutrition bars” as they were called, a household name.

Reportedly designed to fit through a port in the astronaut’s helmet in case of emergency, Space Food Sticks claimed to be the perfect nutritionally-dense snack between meals for non-astronauts, even going so far as to claim that it was a “mini meal.” The front of their packaging boldly proclaimed in large letters, “The energy food developed by Pillsbury under a government contract in support of the US Aerospace Program.” Beneath these words were images ranging from a hungry child delighted with his snack to a skier racing down a slope. Space sticks were no longer a food exclusively designed for the extreme environment of an astronaut, but a food for any occasion, from intense sports to hurried after school snacks. In 1973, NASA officially announced they were sending modified Space Sticks on Sky Lab 3. Imagine the excitement of kids across the US, knowing they could snack on the same food the great American space heroes were at that moment eating in orbit! Historian Natalia Petrzela observed, “What I think is really interesting is that it was a moment in American food history when there was an incredible fascination with space and laboratory-created food.” Even today, these sticks have such a nostalgic following that there is a Space Food Stick Preservation Society.

The next big leap came with the advent of PowerBar in the 1980s, designed by a marathoner who wanted better nutrition while running. In 1997, the New York Times observed that these bars had moved into the mainstream diet along with new competitors, Balance and CLIF bars. Since then, new bars have proliferated, targeting every niche possible. Jaya Saxena, writing about the history of energy bars, calls bars a “mirror” that “reflect all of our

cultural obsessions and anxieties around food. They pack all of our nutritional hopes and fears into a single serving.”

Madeline Leung Coleman, in an article for Topic Magazine, tells a fascinating story of energy bars in their historical context. Coleman comments that energy bars “hit . . . such a precise point between the axes of virtuous and easy that they were perfect for a nation obsessed with efficiency.”

Our obsession with efficiency is perhaps nowhere so obvious as in the school and work lunch. In 2016, the New York Times ran an article about workplace lunches. The article was paired with a photograph collection that was so eloquent you hardly needed the article’s commentary. The photos simply show, one image after another, people across the US eating at their desks. One of the things the article and its photo collection bring out is the isolating effect of meals in American work culture. Fifty-five percent of all lunches in America are eaten alone, and sixty-two percent of professionals eat lunch at their desk. (In France that percentage drops to twenty-seven percent.) As instant foods become more and more advanced, and the tilt-a-whirl of modern life spins faster and faster, we grow lonelier and lonelier. It’s no coincidence that job burnout is at an all-time high when we can’t even bring ourselves to sit still and eat for a few minutes, to make space for a margin of time without work crowding our mind. How easily we forget that our ultimate goal is not mindless productivity, but rest and worship. We work towards Sabbath, not more work.

Many readers are probably familiar with the RXBar, which emerged in 2013 and has had a meteoric success. Large letters on the front of each package emphasize their commitment to “no B.S.,” appealing to a culture obsessed with “clean” eating. I myself used them to survive the topsy-turvy months of early motherhood. However, the philosophy motivating its co-founder, Peter Rahal, is a telling indictment of our culture’s attitude toward food as a whole. In Madeline Coleman’s article, Rahal admits that he himself doesn’t like eating lunch, because lunch, as he puts it, makes him lose focus and doesn’t “bring any value.” He’s aware that this kind of attitude won’t help him reach European markets, however, telling Coleman,

There’s a reason why protein bars don’t work in southern Italy or southern Mediterranean culture . . . In the United States, in our culture here, we want to improve. We want progress, we want growth, and it’s a beautiful part of the culture. And so the idea of a two-hour lunch doesn’t happen here. Everyone is racing for growth and progress.

It’s really progress: it’s a beautiful word.

Coleman’s article concludes with this exchange between herself and Rahal:

Rahal had an assistant who ordered lunch for him until, eventually, he asked her to stop. He didn’t even care what she ordered; he just didn’t want to decide what to eat. I tell him that I suspect this is the same reason why a lot of people choose protein bars: whatever the reason, they just need to get some fuel inside them. Rahal shrugs.

“It’s feed,” he says.

I stutter. “Uh …”

“It’s feed,” he insists.

“It’s feed,” I say. And I realize he isn’t wrong.

When I first read the article quoted above, I confess I was a bit shocked that someone actually had taken a position so much the epitome of modernity that it seemed a parody of itself. Then, I stumbled onto something even more bizarre. Soylent is a surprisingly popular meal supplement or replacement. Its founder, Rob Rhinehart, was strapped for cash as he and his friends struggled to make it in Silicon Valley, and he found himself frustrated by the amount of time and money he wasted on food prep. According to a New Yorker article, he began tinkering with chemical compounds directly, rather than eating “normal” foods, because “he began to think that food was an inefficient way of getting what he needed to survive.” At the time of the New York Times interview, in 2016, Rhinehart claimed he had been living off of Soylent for ninety percent of his meals over the previous eighteen months.

As dire as these interviews sound in describing the modern food scene, a vignette from C.S. Lewis’ novel, That Hideous Strength, shows this reductionist approach to food is not an exclusively twenty-first-century plague. Mark Studdock, an ambitious sociologist, is taken in by an organization called N.I.C.E. that is sweeping Britain with an agenda to improve everyone’s lives by making everything efficient, hygienic, scientific—and fascist, while they’re at it. At one point, Mark and a colleague named Cosser are gathering research in a quaint village when they enter a pub for some lunch. Mark, who is not yet wholly infected by the atmosphere of N.I.C.E., is reminded of more jovial days long before he began working for N.I.C.E. He comments on the village to Cosser as they enter the pub:

“I was saying,” responds Mark, “That on a fine morning there is something rather attractive about

a place like this, in spite of all its obvious absurdities.”

“Yes, it is a fine morning. Makes a real difference to one’s health, a bit of sunlight.”

“I was thinking about the place.”

“You mean this?” Said Cosser, glancing about the room.

“I should have thought it was just the sort of thing we wanted to get rid of. No sunlight, no ventilation. Haven’t much use for alcohol myself (read the Miller report), but if people have got to have their stimulants, I’d like to see them administered in a more hygienic way.”

“I don’t know that the stimulant is quite the whole point,” said Mark, looking at his beer.

The whole scene was reminding him of drinks and talks long ago—of laughter and arguments in undergraduate days. Somehow one had made friends more easily then.

Studdock was right. The stimulant—the “feed,” or the abstract nutrition—isn’t the point. But why not live off of energy bars and Soylent? After all, convenience isn’t wrong in and of itself. We all enjoy our electric washing machines and running water without over-worrying about their influence. Why watch the slow drip of coffee brewing when you could get the same caffeine jolt by stirring a teaspoon into a cup of hot water? Why spend painstaking hours making homemade pasta for a special occasion when you could get a Stouffers frozen lasagna in microwaved minutes? Or, if someone comes up with an even more perfect all-in-one nutrition pill, why not live off of that, as the RXBar and Soylent founder would prefer? We’d be spared the annoyance of food prep, the time drain of sitting down for a meal, the grief of navigating food allergies, and the distraction of fleeting “material” things.

Why? Because food matters. How we eat matters. Not that we eat—a mere necessity to survive—but how we eat. We are not gnostics.

We eat in order to know God better and delight in His creation. Food is a dim mirror of things eternal. In a broken world, it is a glimpse into the creativity, the abundance, the joy of our Heavenly Father. As we saw in the stories of hyper-efficient, instant foods earlier, our culture values eating less and less, while valuing abstract things like productivity more and more. We’ve adopted technologies designed for the most extreme of circumstances— an astronaut on a space station or a marathoner struggling to make it across the finish line. These “tool” foods can certainly be helpful in certain settings. I’m personally very grateful for frozen food on certain days, like when

my babies both go on napping strikes and I’m just happy we’re all still alive by dinnertime. How can we thoughtfully use some of these developments while giving our joyless, harried, instant-driven culture some much-needed pushback? How can we purse a richer appreciation for the beautiful gift that is food? Here are five ideas.

One of the first and most important ways to redeem food culture is by cultivating joy. Joy is sorely needed in our current food-scape. Joy is simultaneously the antidote to the Christian gnosticism that looks at gastronomy with suspicion, and the antidote to cheerless atheism’s alternate scale of morality that will gladly endorse every vice condemned by the decalogue while virulently condemning a hamburger.

The rise of this alternate moral universe is explored in a provocative Policy Review article by Mary Eberstadt, titled “Is Food the New Sex?” To a woman in the 1950s, considering the moral implications of what she ate would seem ludicrous. But it would seem perfectly normal to care deeply about sexual mores. In 2019, to even express that one ought perhaps to care about a culture’s sexual mores seems ludicrous to many, while to those same people it seems perfectly natural to zealously evangelize people to your way of thinking about food ethics. There are certainly times when it’s appropriate to consider the ethical questions surrounding food and its production, but this complete reversal of the sex/food moral imagination often manifests itself in a kind of quasi-religious food fundamentalism by those who deny the very Creator of both food and sex.

It is, then, in the face of both Christian culinary gnosticism and pagan culinary legalism that I propose we be jovial. Whether you’re eating a handful of trail mix or a six-course dinner, gluten-free cake or a cinnamon roll, eat with joy. Banish words like “guilt-free treat” from your vocabulary. Food does not have more or less moral value based on its glycemic index. As Robert Farrar Capon said, “Every real thing is a joy, if only you have eyes and ears to relish it, a nose and tongue to taste it.”

Secondly, eat slowly. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compared the average time spent at the table per person in twenty-nine different countries. Not surprisingly, France was number one, clocking in at an average of two hours and eleven minutes a day. Japan, China, and South Korea all made it into the top ten along with a number of Mediterranean countries. America, however, was dead last, just barely breaking the one hour mark.

If you’re homeschooling, perhaps experiment with longer lunch breaks. When I attended a traditional parochial elementary school in France, we were given two hours every day for lunch. The village school cafeteria provided

multi-course lunches for the children every day. Here’s a sample lunch menu from the cafeteria this past month: Tomatoes with basil, Roman calamari, ratatouille, plain yogurt, and homemade cherry clafoutis.

As impossible as it may seem in our world, work toward finding time to delight in the preparation of food and enjoy a real meal. No, we can’t follow Julia Child’s elaborate recipe for boeuf bourguignon every day. Neither can we always cook from scratch every day. But find times when you can enjoy making a meal, and give your full attention to it. A real meal need not be elaborate— bread and cheese make a perfect meal. As someone once said, “There are more important things to do than hurry.”

Third, eat in community. As the aforementioned article on work lunches in the Times revealed, we often eat in isolation. But eating ought to be a community affair. We have only half the pleasure of eating when we eat alone. As Chesterton put it, “All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. . . . Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.” Fellowship and food belong together.

Eat first, if at all possible, with family. This should be obvious, but our culture needs to be reminded. Next, eat with your church family. Fellowship with the particular body of Christ that God has placed you in is often stretching and enriching. Breaking bread together is a wonderful way to reinforce the fellowship we are called to in the Lord’s Supper. Third, eat with your city. Do you want to change the world? Do you want to see Christ’s love spread into the most exotic corners of the earth? Before you even begin planning a mission’s trip, invite the stranger next door over for a meal. Invite a city councilman. Invite the mom you met at the park. Invite your colleague. Eat with the stranger in your midst.

Related to this, make sure that when you eat with family, church, or city, you put away distractions. Leave work worries behind, put the phone facedown and on silent.

Be fully present to those around you at the table. One survey found that around one in three Americans use their phone during meals, and seventy-seven percent preferred watching TV to talking with their dinner companions.

Fourth, eat steeped in tradition; learn about the history of where you live. What is its food heritage? Learn about the history of your own family. Explore the food and hospitality traditions of your people. Whether you’re one hundred percent Scotch-Irish, or Italian, or Alabamian, or a melting pot from everywhere, you can find a culinary tradition in your history. Since living in the South, I have been amazed to discover the rich and varied tradition of barbecue: Texas, Memphis, North Carolina, etc. Not only is it a food with a rich history, but it’s one of the ultimate slow foods; true barbecue cannot be hurried by the demands of modern life. According to Wayne Mueller, who runs one of the most famous barbecue spots in Texas, the plate you order in a minute took twenty-three hours to cook. What a beautiful thing.

Bee Wilson, in her fascinating history of cooking, Consider the Fork, reminds us that traditional dishes and cooking methods enact a ritual that binds us to the place we live and to those in our family, both living and dead. Every time we use an old recipe that our great-great-grandparents used, every time we combine flour and water and yeast and salt, we are joining ourselves to a tradition greater and richer than ourselves. The foods that have resisted the siren call of speed, efficiency, monotony—and seem perhaps even archaic and inconvenient—these are the foods that anchor us. More than ever, we need these foods and drinks as counterpoints to an instant culture. Sourdough, cognac, parma ham, barbecue, cellared wine, aged cheddar—these are the foods that remind us what food is for, why we eat, and how we ought to eat. By loving these foods and carrying on their lore to the next generation, we are, in a very real sense, preserving culture.

Fifth, take one thing and learn how to do it well,

Joy is simultaneously the antidote to the Christian gnosticism that looks at gastronomy with suspicion, and the antidote to cheerless atheism’s alternate scale of morality that will gladly endorse every vice condemned by the decalogue while virulently condemning a hamburger.

whether that means preparing it from scratch or simply making a hobby of enjoying it. Explore its history, its lore, its science. This could be bread-baking, or making a particular pastry, or making a cup of properly brewed tea. Become an amateur—someone who does whatever it is for the sheer joy and love of it. To borrow Capon’s words once again,

The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers—amateurs—it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral—it is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness. In such a situation, the amateur—the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness is a sin and boredom a heresy—is just the man you need.

It can be especially valuable to cultivate a love for those foods that stand as counterpoints to our fast and furious culture. By all means, let us eat a protein bar while running a marathon, and use frozen lasagna or

rather than embracing a lifestyle defined by these conveniences, let us learn to make space for, and delight in, the beauty of slow things: the aging of bourbon, the rising of sourdough, the ripening of a cave-aged cheese. By doing any number of these things, it is my hope that we can rediscover the joy of food and eating as the overwhelming gift from God that they are.

Every time we leave the cares of the world behind to share a simple meal with family or friends, whether we enjoy the glory of barbecue and cornbread and sweet tea, or boeuf bourguignon and soufflé Grand Marnier and a bottle of Clos Vougeot—every time we do this, we join our fellowship with the fellowship of the Great Conversation. It is no accident that Christ took a meal, with all its banal earthy ingredients, and made it a sacrament by which each week we are bound together with one another—and with the Trinity—in fellowship.

To conclude with the memorable Father Capon once again, “If I had only a single temporal blessing to wish you, I would not hesitate a moment: May you be spared long enough to know at least one long evening of old friends, dark bread, good wine, and strong cheese. If even exile be so full, what must not our fullness be?”

Valerie Abraham is the daughter of a French chef-turnedpastor. She grew up in France and now resides in North

Poetry Jeffrey Bilbro

Jeffrey Bilbro is an Associate Professor of English at Spring Arbor University and the editor-in-chief of the Front Porch Republic. He has written several books about Wendell Berry, and his poems have appeared in journals such as First Things, Windhover, and Modern Age

MIDLIFE CRISIS

Washing Saturday’s dishes at dusk, I stare out blankly at summer’s detritus: oak leaves littering the drive; a weathered, leaning fence; browned ferns; the stunted corn ears that never matured; the spent and dropping Echinacea whose purple petals have faded and fallen. Then, two long stalks plunge violently—clutched by a pair of goldfinches who now bury their beaks into the dark cones, rich with seed.

Poetry Jeffrey Bilbro

DYING LIGHT

Some call this the Arsenic Hour, others the Witching Hour, that moment late in the day, at five or six in the afternoon, when a tired toddler turns into one inconsolable wail, and the only thing that will suffice is food, a bath, and bed.

On week-long road trips, the spell is stronger, the toddler louder. But this is also the hour when the slanting sun illumines the soul of each autumn tree. At the end of the year and the day— their tired leaves bled of green— they await this evening light to transmute death into a peculiar beauty.

And even my daughter’s inarticulate frustrations— her groans that words cannot express— disclose her longing for a better world. As she matures, we hope to show her how to shape exhaustion, to spread her arms and hold it loosely so that, as in this maple tree, it might become a means of grace, transfigured by the dying light.

MOCK FROST

Last night August’s heat left, wrung the humidity that has been lingering and building for weeks into a thick fog blanket, a mock frost that beads on the spider’s warp and weft, drops from each leaf, each tiny pistil in the goldenrod’s thousand autumn blossoms. Each night is a shadow of the Night, each sleep a momento mori, and the killing frost will come, shrivel gold to brown to dust. This day awakens from gentle rest.

Young people have not suffered much, and thus they are too lenient, too optimistic, and not skeptical enough. This, at least, is how Aristotle characterizes the young in his Rhetoric. The elderly, on the other hand, have been tricked too often, keep long records of the wrongs done them, trust no one, and think ill of all. Young and old alike often make imbalanced assessments of the world, although the faults of the elderly are far more sinister than the faults of the young. The young wrong others to insult them, but the elderly shoot to kill.

When Aristotle writes of the young, he is not only referring to school-aged children, for he argues physical maturity is reached between thirty and thirty-five and that intellectual maturity is not reached until forty-nine. Along with their students, then, young teachers will be tempted to “look at the good side rather than the bad, not having yet witnessed many instances of wickedness” and to “trust others readily, because they have not yet often been cheated.” What is more, young teachers are “easily cheated, owing to [their] sanguine disposition.”

In the same way childhood gives way to adolescence, adolescence gives way to the freedom of college, and the freedom of college gives way to the hardships of a career

A Cure for the Youth

Lessons for Teachers Young and Old

By Joshua Gibbs

Yand the mature consolations of marriage, perhaps the career of a teacher also passes through a series of stages. Having only been a teacher for fifteen years, I could not say what all these stages are, though I believe moving from the first stage to the second involves overcoming the excessively sunny view of the world that Aristotle teaches is characteristic of youth.

Pessimism and cynicism will not do, either, but only those still in the grip of youth assume that anything other than an excessively sunny view of the world is cynicism. There is something between pessimism and optimism, between cynicism and gullibility, and it is this moderate approach to the classroom which the young teacher must find before settling into the really productive years of his career.

Young teachers are more often exasperated by students who cheat, habitually violate the dress code, curse, shirk their homework, sneak off campus, and so forth.

As Aristotle puts it, “They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations,” which means young teachers often believe they will accomplish more during the school year than is possible and are disappointed when they fall behind schedule. However, I once heard the most seasoned teacher at the school where I presently work remark, “It’s

a problem if you’re not behind schedule on the last day of the year.” Young teachers are apt to misunderstand the proverb, “Don’t smile until Christmas,” which veteran teachers know has everything to do with classroom management and nothing to do with a lack of kindness. The young “overdo everything,” according to Aristotle, which is to say that young teachers give too many quizzes and give too much slack in grading those quizzes. There is a moment in Till We Have Faces when Orual has just become queen and Bardia, her most loyal servant, remarks of an evening, “Queen, the day’s work is over. You’ll not need me now. I’d take it very kindly if you’ll let me go home.” Orual is heartbroken because she thinks Bardia a friend, and yet Bardia thinks of Orual as his employer. Orual comments to her readers:

I suppose he never dreamed what he had done to me with those words the day’s work is over. Yes, that was it—the day’s work. I was his work; he earned his bread by being my soldier. When his tale of work for the day was done, he went home, like other hired men, and took up his true life.

So, too, young teachers are apt to think themselves friends with students, and yet students begin packing their things the split-second class is over, even when the teacher is pouring out his heart. Young teachers make handmade Christmas presents for their students and take it to heart when their favorite students do not give presents in return. Young teachers offer extra-curriculars, host get-togethers, and are surprised when certain students do not come. A classical Christian school is one-part business and one-part ministry, and feelings are often hurt when everyone does not calibrate the balance between these two things properly. Veteran teachers get their feelings hurt, too, but they do not mind so much.

So far as policing the behavior of students, young teachers “are ready to pity others, because they think ev-

eryone an honest man, or anyhow better than he is,” and yet, Aristotle also teaches that young people “love too much and hate too much,” all of which means rookies are regularly exasperated with students for lying, cheating, and stealing.

Veteran teachers are not indifferent to such vices, but the veteran’s temper is governed by the fact that he “has seen worse.” The more capable a teacher is of handling such vices, the less his feelings are hurt when favorite students fall to temptation—at least no more so than a priest is hurt when his congregants confess the same sins over and over again. The veteran who submits himself to the form of the teacher (the platonic form, the nature of the teacher) is unoffended when students prove less than honest because he knows the dishonesty is against the form, not the person.

Time, the wisest counselor, can harden a heart or thicken the skin. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon writes, “Do not pay attention to every word people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you—for you know in your heart that many times you yourself have cursed others,” and so a certain amount of complaining about bosses and deadlines is simply par for the course of life. The rookie teacher knows that his class is not everyone’s favorite, but holds out hope it is, nonetheless. The veteran knows the best teacher cannot make everyone happy all the time. If our spouses are sometimes a vexation to us, how much more our teachers and bosses? The veteran throws the thoughtless complaints of students into the bottomless pit of his own occasional ingratitude. If the wisest man who ever lived sometimes heard his servants cursing himself, there is no hope for you to escape a little carping critique.

The veteran teacher is not a cynic but comes to understand human nature by contemplating what different kinds of people have in common. Common sense is a sense of what is common, what is average, and one cannot know what is average apart from experience. The veteran teacher does not think ill of everyone, but

The veteran teacher is not a cynic but comes to understand human nature by contemplating what different kinds of people have in common.

the veteran teacher also understands why, in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, Solomon did not assume the best about everybody. As with Aristotle’s “man in his prime,” a veteran teacher will not “trust everybody nor distrust everybody, but judge people correctly. Their lives will be guided not by the sole consideration either of what is noble or of what is useful, but by both; neither by parsimony nor by prodigality, but by what is fit and proper.”

Common sense cries out in the street, which means the sound of common sense is often too omnipresent to hear and too vast to fit into our ears, much like the music of the spheres. What the young teacher needs is common sense, but common sense is hard to look for. In the same way, it is nearly impossible to start a tradition. Lasting traditions are not created but discovered. We find only in retrospect that something we did on a certain day last year ought to be done again on the same day this year, as well. Similarly, common sense emerges only in retrospect. Looking back, we realize the world works a certain way, and yet we cannot go out in search of the way the world works. We can only go in search of the world. In this way, the most important lessons a young teacher can learn do not come from reading this or that book on classical education, but from what Zbigniew Herbert calls “[confronting] the world with your whole skin.”

Joshua Gibbs is the author of How to Be Unlucky: Reflections on the Pursuit of Virtue and Something They Will Not Forget: A Handbook for Classical Teachers. His new podcast on the CiRCE Podcast Network is called Proverbial and is avaialable now.

Back Page Books

Selections from the editors

Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation, by Josef Pieper

In this slim volume, the beloved German philosopher Joseph Pieper invites readers to contemplate beauty. Comprised of five essays that explore the aesthetic and moral virtues of leisure, music, sculpture, and poetry, Only the Lover Sings is Pieper at his most succinct and profound. Perhaps the greatest Thomist philosopher of the twentieth century, Pieper argues that art is inherently an endeavor rooted in love and that our capacity for delight is what propels us to the fullest expression of our humanity.

An avid defender of joy, Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings is a series of meditations on how beauty and celebration can mend our fractured souls.

—Heidi White, managing editor

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

This book, published in 2016 by Amor Towles, is delightful. Count Rostov is a young nobleman when the Bolsheviks seize power. Shortly thereafter, Rostov is put under indefinite house arrest at Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. We spend years with this remarkable character as he behaves with humanity and nobility, enlivening his potentially monochromatic life and exposing the comic in the everyday. Towles’ elegant and playful use of the English language combined with his deft knowledge of history and Russian literature make it a captivating and satisfying read. Although A Gentleman in Moscow was written by an American, it feels as Russian as Rostov himself.

—Emily Callihan, copy editor

What I Saw in America, by G.K. Chesterton

Foreigners visiting America and then publishing their impressions of the country is a time-honored literary tradition, but few have done so with the frank friendship of G.K. Chesterton in What I Saw in America. The fruit of his 1921 voyage to our shores, this collection of essays documents the frequent bewilderment, occasional exasperation (at our preference for hotels over inns, and the general inhumanity of Prohibition), and deep affinity (especially with the rural, “medieval” Midwesterner) that Chesterton felt when he was here. He does not always see us as we wish to be seen, but he looks with charity, sees clearly, and helps us see truths about ourselves as only a friend could—all with his own trademark disarming humor. —Sean Johnson, associate editor

“Remy Wilkins was born on one side of the Mississippi River and lives on the other.” This first half of a brief dust jacket bio was enough to pique my interest in Remy Wilkins’ debut YA novel, Strays. Abandoned by his mother for the summer, Wilkins’ protagonist, Rodney, is drawn into a world where demons are (literally) coming out of the woodwork and he must discover whether Uncle Ray is dotty, deluded, or dabbling in demonic destruction. Wilkins’ imaginative dive into the ethereal world of celestial beings, deliniation of redemptive paths, and discovery of the power of a name are grounded by a sense of a real and specific place, by bunnies, bees, and baseball. You can feel the heavy humidity of the Alabama woods and the cool relief of the air rising off the river. Marrying the metaphysical and the mundane realities of a small Alabama town, Wilkins offers an engaging first effort for any young reader or family. —Brandon LeBlanc, sales director

Strays, by Remy Wilkins