Forma Issue #14

Standardized tests meet classical education.

CLT - June 20

The June 20 CLT will be remote proctored by CLT, so students can take it at home.

CLT8 - July 20

This exam for 7th and 8th grade students will be offered the entire week of July 20.

Register for either exam today at cltexam.com

YOUR GUIDE THROUGH THE GREAT BOOKS.

OLD WESTERN CULTURE

COLUMNS

EDITORS’ LETTER

by the Editors

Cultural Currency

IF THY EYE OFFEND THEE (OR SOPHOCLES: PROPHET TO THE WELL-BEHAVED)

by Charlie Ritch

From the Classroom RECOVERING WONDER: HOW TOLKIEN’S AINULINDALË CAN HEAL OUR STUDENTS

by Jane Simpson

BOOK REVIEWS

THE ART OF RESURRECTION: MAURICE MANNING’S RAILSPLITTER

by Daniel Rattelle

CAN SEX BE WORSHIP? CHRISTOPHER WEST’S OUR BODIES TELL GOD’S STORY

by Gracy Olmstead

MIRROR OF JUSTICE: HILARY MANTEL’S THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT

by Heidi White

LIVING THE MATHEMATICAL LIFE: KAREN OLSSON’S THE WEIL CONJECTURES

by Anthony Barr

This magazine is published by the CiRCE Institute. Copyright CiRCE Institute 2020. 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.

Contact

FORMA Journal

81 McCachern Blvd SE - Concord, NC 28025 704.794.2227 - formamag@circeinstitute.org

Twitter: @formajournal / @circeins

Instagram: @forma_journal

Issue 14

Summer 2020

INTERVIEWS

RHINA ESPAILLAT: MY OWN FAMILIAR ROOM by

David Kern

NICK RIPATRAZONE: THE STORY MUST BE SHAPED by

Anthony Barr

FEATURES

THE OBVIOUS CENTRAL APPEAL: C.S. LEWIS ON GREAT TEXTS AND GREAT TEACHING

by Bret J. Saunders

THE CROWN OF CREATION: FEMININE NOBILITY IN THE MARIAN HYMNODY AND THE MUSIC OF BEYONCE

by Laura Councell

EDUCATING FOR INTELLECTUAL VIRTUE

by T. Ryan Byerly

MACBETH: MASK AND MIRROR

by Austin Hoffman

TOO CATHOLIC: A CLASSICAL ODYSSEY

by Joshua GIbbs

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

The world is in a state of flux. Most of us are on some level experiencing the increasing costs of a global crisis: economic loss, loneliness, ill health, uncertain futures, threats to freedom. Some of our readers have even lost loved ones. Without a doubt, this is one of the great crucibles of our age. And so we find ourselves facing a resounding question: do we actually believe that the Great Tradition contains wisdom and grace for such a time as this?

At FORMA, we say yes. In fact, we declare that the Great Tradition is more relevant than ever, because a large proportion of the enduring artifacts of the Great Tradition—books, paintings, music—were created during catastrophic seasons by people wrestling with the same issues with which we are faced today. Like them, we still create, discuss, contemplate, and write about what it means to be human in all circumstances. For this reason, FORMA will continue to engage in the intersection of classical thought for contemporary culture. In seasons of upheaval, the Great Tradition is not a luxury, but a necessity.

Of course, times this like this bring necessary change. And in order to fulfill our vocation we have had to adjust—as so many of you have. We’ve been a quarterly journal, but this issue marks our new identity as biannual. Now available twice yearly (summer and winter), each issue of FORMA is a lot thicker, overflowing with the essays, book reviews, poetry, and interviews that you have come to love. For those months in between, subscribers will enjoy more digital content than ever. Head over to formajournal.com to access more reviews, essays, and interviews each week.

During this pandemic, most of us are attempting on a daily basis to plant our unsteady feet upon something solid. As fellow sojourners through this strange epoch, we do not claim to be that solid ground, but we humbly attempt to join you in the journey.

Sincerely,

The Editors

The Editorial Team

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

Cultural Currency

David Foster Wallace once defended a liberal arts education for its ability to help progressive undergraduates empathize with aggressive drivers of gas-guzzling SUVs. His point was that a student who has spent enough time exploring the landscapes of other minds should be able to understand that their own point of view does not define reality. Theoretically, a student saturated in the liberal arts should have the cognitive ability to give everyone else the benefit of the doubt. Wallace’s diagnosis of our tendency for self-referential thinking is remarkably Augustinian. In the City of God Satan’s chief sin was to “live according to himself.” However, the alternative is not necessarily more empathy. Augustine would argue we need more than reorientation. Our problem is not a mistake of a poorly educated mind; it’s sin. We need repentance.

If Wallace would have us see the world from other people’s viewpoints, Augustine would have us see it from heaven’s. There, we would see that even our best successes are compromised by an ever-present shadow. Even if we improve our mindsets and become more empathetic, we will not have solved injustice, poverty, and disease. And our empathy will not make us less implicated in the massive failures of our race. We are the well-meaning and highly intelligent delegate at the Constitutional Convention trying to understand the merits of a national bank while living souls are bought and sold on the sidewalks a few feet away.

But a great work of literary art is a prophetic vision. It can offer us the mile-high view as well as the multi-perspectival. It can expose our towers of Babel for the flimsy sand hills they really are. It can elevate our minds by truthfully denigrating our condition. The brave voice that speaks the doom of our race is rare, but such voices do exist. One notable instance is Sophocles, whose Oedipus Rex is one of the most compelling portraits of humanity available from the classical world.

Sophocles’ tragedy begins like Homer’s epics, in media res. Oedipus has been the king of Thebes long enough to have two daughters and two sons. At the outset of the play, we discover that Thebes is suffering from a strange plague. His people cry out for help, and we learn that Oedipus has already sent his brother-in-law Creon to learn the cause of the plague from the oracle. Immediately, we see that this man is a kind, wise, and loving king.

When Creon returns, he announces that a criminal is hidden in Thebes and the gods demand punishment. Oedipus launches an investigation, indignant at the harm such a man has caused. Enter Tiresias the blind prophet of Thebes. It is his job to particularize the oracle’s pronouncement, to locate the individual causing all the trouble. Tiresias, however, is hesitant and evasive. He seems unwilling to help, but eventually, it comes out: Oedipus is the culprit! At first, Oedipus believes Creon and Tiresias have caved to their own ambitions and are conspiring to usurp his throne. The truth, however, is far darker.

Oedipus, it turns out, was born under a disturbing prophecy: He would kill his father and sleep with his mother. In a motif common to ancient myth, Oedipus’ father had attempted to outsmart the prophecy without technically killing his own son by having a servant leave the child in the woods to be eaten by wild animals. The ploy fails on account of the servant’s compassion. He defies the king’s orders and passes the child to a shepherd, who passes him to the king and queen of Corinth.

There Oedipus grows into a man and finally learns of the prophecy hanging over his life. Thinking that the king and queen of Corinth are his true father and mother, he tries to protect them in an act of supreme loyalty. He renounces his home and chooses exile. At a crossroads outside the city of Thebes, however, Oedipus fulfills the first part of the prophecy by fighting and killing his true father in what seems to be largely an act of self-defense.

From there he travels to Thebes, which is under constant threat from a strange monster called the Sphinx. Oedipus matches wits with the beast and saves the city. He is crowned king and marries the recently widowed queen, heroically and ironically fulfilling the second part of his prophecy.

It takes a plague, a prophet, and a painful series of testimonies from eyewitnesses to confirm the story to Oedipus, but in the end, he sees the truth. Oedipus responds in despair, gouges out his own eyes for having looked on his mother’s nakedness, and again imposes self-exile. Unlike many other tragedies, Oedipus Rex requires an on-stage depiction of real damage to the human body. In Greek theater all violence was, as a rule, implied. Resulting corpses were displayed as evidence of the outcome, but they became part of the stage. Sophocles, however, has Oedipus surviving the violence and presenting himself to the audience as alive but mutilated. This allows Sophocles to technically observe the conventions of the time while exploiting the power of the grotesque. As an innovation, it required very little in the way of makeup. A little fake blood dripping from the actor’s sockets blacked with eye shadow, and most of the audience will be hard-pressed not to turn away. It is exactly how Soph-

ocles gets the attention of his self-satisfied Athenian audience, whose sense of moral rectitude needed upending.

The Athenians, who once defeated the Persians in a heroic act of selflessness, were embroiled in the Peloponnesian War and thus poised to enact travesties that would have made Xerxes blush. Two years after the debut of Oedipus Rex, the Athenians formed an alliance for the defense of democracy. When the island city-state of Mytilene seceded, Athens not only attacked and defeated their former ally, but voted to execute all the POWs and sell the remaining civilians into slavery. This vote was overturned in the nick of time, but the Athenians’ potential for cruelty had broken the surface of its righteous soil. A decade later, the Melians were not so fortunate. Their bid for neutrality in the massively destructive war was answered by all the cruelty the Athenians had once intended for Mytilene. From here the bastion of freedom and philosophy would invade a fledgling democratic Syracuse without warrant. Near the end of the war, the assembly would vote to execute six victorious generals when a storm prevented their rescuing survivors of the battle. Finally, in the years following their loss to Sparta, the Athenians would find the audacity to convict Socrates of “corrupting their youth.” How does the prophet speak to a society on the verge of such atrocities? Sophocles chose the tragedy, the genre that turned fear and pity into an art form.

A good tragic hero, said Aristotle, must be relatable to the audience. He must be capable of evoking pity and fear. The purging of these emotions through vicariously experiencing the tragic hero’s downfall brings catharsis, the chief reward for the audience at a tragedy. Strangely, Oedipus is one of Aristotle’s favorites. He holds him up again and again as the prototype against which all tragic heroes should be judged. It may seem odd that Aristotle would choose a hero whose history is as unlikely as it is convoluted and whose crimes are about the worst imaginable. Are we really supposed to see ourselves in Oedipus?

There are two senses in which a character can be relatable. On the one hand, a hero may encourage what

Original sin, it turns out, is not so much religious dogma as it is a simple observation. Perhaps to see it, though, we must first have our optimistic eyes gouged out by the ravaging truth of our own doomed condition.

C.S. Lewis called “egoistic castle-building.” In this case, the hero presents us with the self as we would like to imagine it, and the author invites us to “project ourselves into the most enviable and admirable characters.” Such castle-building is the primary draw of certain westerns and paperback romance. On the other hand, an author may do the harder and riskier task of presenting us with a more diagnostic hero, one who gives us the bad news of our true condition, even if we fail to recognize it as immediately.

The difficulty of relating to Oedipus is evident in debates over how to translate Oedipus’ use of the Greek word harmatia, sometimes called the “fatal flaw.” In the early twentieth century, the classicist Gilbert Murray published a rhyming verse translation of Sophocles’ play in which Oedipus, upon discovering the truth of his life, states:

Thou light, never again May I behold thee, I in the eyes of men Made naked, how sin my being grew, In sin I wedded and in sin I slew.

Murray’s rendering echoes King David’s lament after his sin with Bathsheba: In sin did my mother conceive me. Some critics objected to Murray’s use of “sin” because it undermined the complex and anomalous nature of Oedipus’ guilt. He is not David. He is not culpable in the same way. If he is truly guilty, then he deserves what he gets and fails as a tragic hero. Perhaps, though, moral culpability extends beyond individual acts. Perhaps we, like Oedipus, must discover that our deeds, honorable and brave

though they may be, do not absolve us from complicity in the plagues of our city. The tragic hero speaks to the well-behaved of the crushing judgment that hangs overhead. We must be shocked into looking up.

In Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, Father Zosima sums up the way of salvation with a shocking aphorism:

Take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men’s sins, that is the truth, you know, friends, for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for everything and for all men, you will see at once that it is really so, and that you are to blame for everyone and for all things.

Most will find Zosima’s statement absurd. The blinded Oedipus would not. His life was absurdity incarnate. His and ours. The critic’s objection to Murray’s use of “sin” is an echo of every man’s objection to Zosima. And Sophocles. And St. Paul. We are all entangled and implicated in the suffering and sin that ravages our world. Guilt is something we are born into. There is no escape. Original sin, it turns out, is not so much religious dogma as it is a simple observation. Perhaps to see it, though, we must first have our optimistic eyes gouged out by the ravaging truth of our own doomed condition. Blinded like Oedipus, we can finally see the glory of man, not in might and honor, but in humility and contrition.

Charlie Ritch lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where he teaches humanities at the Westminster School at Oak Mountain and works in the children’s ministry at Christ the King Anglican Church.

The Art of Resurrection

By Daniel Rattelle

Maurice Manning’s new collection of poems, Railsplitter, proves that he is the boldest American poet working today. These poems, all written in the posthumous voice of Abraham Lincoln, are at odds with much of the landscape of contemporary poetics. Manning’s verse is stark, straightforward, and unadorned with vague pathology or preciousness. These poems have grit. Many of them are terribly funny (take as just one example, “A Brief Refutation of the Rumor That I Allowed Willie and Tad to Relieve Themselves in My Up-Turned Hat on a Sunday Morning at the Office while Their Mother Was Attending Religious Services”). Few poets would risk the self-effacement Manning displays in Railsplitter. However, he does make his presence known from time to time. Many of these poems are ars poetica that naturally say more about the poet than the president, as literary as Lincoln was. In the hands of a lesser poet, this would quickly tire our patience, but with characteristic wit and self-deprecatory humor, Manning pulls it off. In the comically titled “That Part of the Country is, Within Itself, as Unpoetical as Any spot of the Earth,” he writes:

That is a claim I would revise if I were living now. I aspired to poetry back then. To be thought of as wise and full of feeling,

to capture something in the world, to put some words in rhythms and rhyme, and follow the fashion of the time. A poem had to be sincere, and it had to be pretty, and the poem had to reveal the poet’s virtues. Nothing to ruffle the feathers of taste or to confess a human flaw.

Throughout this collection, Manning will “ruffle the feathers of taste”—never looking over his shoulder to see if he is being admired. This poem’s title is taken from a letter Lincoln wrote to Andrew Johnson describing the landscape of Indiana, but it could just as well refer to Manning’s home state of Kentucky. Manning offers to “revise that claim” that Lincoln made and finds unsentimental beauty in the prosaic corners of our republic. This is no surprise if you’re familiar with Manning’s earlier books. In many ways, Railsplitter is the sequel to A Companion for Owls (2004), which is written in the voice of Daniel Boone.

In “The Philosophy of Composition,” a riff on Poe’s essay of the same name, Manning makes his purpose as a poet clear. In contrast to Poe’s raven, Lincoln says:

I suppose introducing a chicken would not have been inevitable but that might have been my kind of poem. In one of the verses I composed I was happy to use skedaddled, a rarity in poetry, but it suited the rhythm of the line and I liked the flock of consonants,

In Manning’s “kind of poem” one is far more likely to run into a homely chicken than anything so poetical as a raven. His loose tetrameter can accommodate words and images that often seem alien to poetry. But it also welcomes a more serious and reflective tone when the occasion calls for it, as in “Transcendentalism,” wherein Lincoln claims that “the actor’s bullet” (significantly, John Wilkes Booth is only ever referred to as “the actor”) killed his body but not his mind: “Contemplation / is all there is of the afterlife—the mind / continues steadily” and “the capacity of the mind is oceanic / it laps and swells and subsides.”

But even this poem is not without a homespun quality and concludes on “the divine ditty of the universe, / the endless inner pitter-patter.” The most conventional poem in the collection, “The Smell of Open Ground in Spring,” is a highly lyrical mediation on two time-worn subjects—death and poetry. Manning, though, can rescue them from cliché, if only because he risks cliché. “What is the point of being alive in the world? / What is the point of watching your mother die?” One is hardpressed to find a clunkier pair of lines. But the poet recognizes how worn-out the sentiment is:

When metaphor and truth become the same, when the distance is erased between the fact and the figure representing it, one seeks, blindly perhaps, another metaphor.

On this realization, the poem turns.

Behind a horse and a plow I opened the ground in three states, sometimes reading a book as I went. Once in the middle of Pilgrim’s Progress I realized the furrows in the field could just as well be verses on the page.

The lines between labor and literature, poetry and the land are blurred. This, in itself, is nothing new. Turn to any page in Heaney and you’ll find the same thing.

But Manning takes it one step further. “While irony may wrap itself around / a poem,” he writes, dropping his Lincoln mask for a moment, “the true poem in the end / escapes the shroud. It’s the art of resurrection.” Manning speaking as Lincoln is ironic by definition. But Manning claims it’s more than that. He is, in some real way, bringing Lincoln back to life. A bold move. Abraham Lincoln is the closest thing we Americans have to a universal folk hero. He is a symbol of American gumption, republican virtue, and national unity. Manning’s choice to resurrect the great emancipator now is no accident.

One way in which Manning doesn’t flout conventions is that he is a classical pastoralist. The plows and furrows of this poem call to mind the tradition—or myth, depending on who you ask—of the farmer-poet. If Lincoln is resurrected in this book, then Robert Burns haunts it. A favorite poet of the president, he is a natural choice for Manning to call back to. Burns was himself a farmer and a writer of dialect poems. Scots, it is worth noting, is the parent dialect of the Appalachian English so dear to Manning. Railsplitter opens with “To a Chigger,” an homage to Burns’ “To a Mouse.” One of the last poems, “Reading Burns as a Boy below a Tree,” makes more explicit Manning’s pastoral affections.

A boy reading a book beneath a tree, a boy becoming part of the book and part of the tree at once, the scene and symbols tied so tightly together they cannot be undone. The weight of death was not upon me yet. not was being American yet a weight—

Here, landscape and story come together to form an identity. Nationality, citizenship, politics—all these come later and are of a lesser order. Railsplitter offers itself as a story to read beneath a tree and would make a welcome addition to any agrarian’s or localist’s bookshelf.

Railsplitter

| Copper Canyon Press | $17

Daniel Rattelle is an MFA student at the University of St Andrews. His poems and reviews have been published in Modern Age, First Things, Alabama Literary Review, Catholic World Report, Crisis, and elsewhere. He is working on his first collection of poetry.

Can Sex Be Worship?

By Gracy Olmstead

In my youth, I attended a church event built around Joshua Harris’s notorious book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. There was a lot of talk about emotional and physical purity. We discussed the potential pitfalls of dating, of kissing, or other forms of physical touch. And then we signed a pledge, promising to remain virgins until our wedding days.

Harris’ book, along with many others my friend group passed around in those days, was part of a “purity culture” movement within the church that emphasized the importance of abstaining from sex before marriage. I do not think the leaders at my church—nor my parents or friend’s parents—ever meant to instill in us a sense of self-reproach over sex. But I remember walking away from this and other events with deep feelings of shame and fear—not because I had transgressed any of the rules presented to me, but because I felt that my very sexuality, my very body, was somehow shameful. Us girls were often told, through purity culture books, how we should or should not dress in order to prevent men from “stumbling.” We often felt that it was our responsibility to “manage men’s lust as well as our own,” as Katelyn Beaty has put it in her New York Times article “How Should Christians Have Sex?”—

and if we messed up in any way, we were the ones who would be seen as tainted. Purity culture did not give me any sense of empowerment or joy in being a woman. Instead, it taught me to fear and detest my body.

Since those days, other kids who grew up as part of the purity culture movement have written many condemnations of it. Joshua Harris has apologized for the content of his book and the way it hurt people. But it does not seem that many Christian churches have hit on a full, comprehensive alternative to the worldview it represented. They haven’t managed to put forth a sexual ethic that might protect and inform young people while helping them to fully celebrate who they’ve been created to be.

But Christopher West’s book Our Bodies Tell God’s Story could help guide the church toward this new ethic. The ethic it describes is actually quite old: It is based on Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, which is itself rooted in Scripture. But West’s dissection and explanation of Theology of the Body (which he refers to as “TOB”) represents the complete opposite of the “purity culture” movement I observed as a teen. That purity culture emphasized what sex could not and should not be. But on a deeper level, it embraced the understanding of sex given to us by a secular world. Eros and sex were inherently lust-filled and broken. We were never told how marriage could redeem those emotions which, prior to its vows, were selfish and harmful. Indeed, in several instances, purity culture seemed to conceive of marriage as a no-holds-barred sphere in which lust and objectification could finally reign supreme.

Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, on the other hand, is all about what sex is and should be—a deep consideration of why God made sex, and what it tells us about Him. At its roots, TOB presents a radical vision for what West refers to as “positive purity”: a vision of the body and the “other” which emphasizes their dignity and beauty, and calls the beholder to Agape both within marriage and without it. It is about celebrating the beauty of the body, calling us to remember our dignity and worth as humans. The shame that came with the Fall, West suggests, was rooted in the objectification of the body, in being treated as a “‘thing’ for someone’s selfish pleasure.” Our gaze toward each other was no longer characterized by honor and love, but rather by self-focused lust. The Christian is therefore called not to shame-filled repression—nor to using marriage as a vehicle for lust—but rather to something far more radical: a complete emancipation of sex and Eros from the Fall, a re-dignifying of our nakedness. Rather than painting Eros in the light of shame and embarrassment, this book celebrates it—and seeks to challenge our conceptions of it. Eros, West suggests, was never meant to be a lower form of love than Agape. It was meant to be the vehicle through which Agape is fully communicated to the world.

West begins his book by responding to the evils of Gnosticism in the church, and the “spirit-good / bodybad dualism” that, he notes “often passes for Christianity.” This dualism is a direct attack on the roots of Christian faith, West says—one that seeks to split body and soul, which were never meant to be separated. “If the Manichaean mentality places an ‘anti-value’ on the body and sex, Christianity teaches that the body and sex ‘always remain a “value not sufficiently appreciated,”’” West writes. “In other words, if Manichaeism says ‘the body is bad,’ Christianity says ‘the body is so good that we have yet to fathom it.’”

Our conceptions of the human body and of sex have been horribly damaged and twisted by sin—but they are still good. They have always been good. And the promise West offers his readers is that “our bodies make visible what is invisible, the spiritual . . . and the divine.” Sex, therefore—both in its biological and copulative aspects—is an embodiment of a reality much greater than ourselves. It serves to point us to God, to the Trinity, and to the promises of heaven. Sex can even, when redeemed by God, serve as a liturgy, a form of worship.

This may sound preposterous to people, Christian and non-Christian. But West here gets at just how much we’ve all embraced an insufficient definition of what sex and marriage ought to be. We really have no idea what we’re dealing with, he suggests—have no idea how good, how beautiful, sex might be. “As a result of sin, our ex-

perience of erotic desire has become terribly distorted,” West writes. “In the midst of these distortions, we can tend to think that there must be something wrong with sex and sexual desire itself.” But the first couple “knew their goodness,” West writes. “They knew God’s glorious plan of love.”

This book, then, offers a reorienting of every desire— including Eros—in order to bring glory to God, and to selflessly love our neighbor. One of my favorite parts of this book is the passage in which West considers the Song of Songs, in which the writer refers to his lover as his “sister.” Here, we have a deeply egalitarian approach to sex and love, in which the spouse should never be the object of a husband’s lust or domination. Instead, the spouse is referred to as both his lover and his “sister.” His love is honoring and respectful, full of “disinterested tenderness,” West writes.

It is important to note what this book does not do. West does not consider here all the intricacies and controversies surrounding the question of gender roles, vocations, church responsibilities, or norms. He does not spend much time considering fatherhood and motherhood. Instead, this book focuses its gaze very specifically on sex and marriage (and more specifically, sex within marriage), and how they serve as a picture of Christ and His church. That focus and precision enable West to execute a very important mission: to connect the modern reader, whose understanding of Eros is painfully skewed by pop culture and modern consumptive philosophies, with a far more beautiful, radical vision of what it means to love one’s spouse.

West does touch on questions of homosexual desire, but he primarily addresses the subject insofar as it relates to sex. In a separate section of the book, he praises and encourages Christians who remain celibate, noting that they show “the rest of the world the ultimate purpose and meaning of sexuality: to point us to union with God.” But more writing could be done in this arena, insofar as many Christians who have experienced homosexual desire are striving to honor the scriptural designations of marriage by remaining celibate. This book offers a vision for married life and sex—but the modern church, especially the modern Protestant church, has few resources to offer to the celibate as they seek to foster a path outside both secular and traditional modes of life.

The last chapter of West’s book offers a radical but important look at contraception and its impact on sex and the church. Briefly, West argues that by uncoupling sex from its natural aim—having children—we weaken the connection between Eros and Agape, and serve to encourage lust instead. This argument needs to be carefully considered by every Christian, regardless of whether they

agree with West. Few Protestants have fully considered these questions to the degree that their Catholic brethren have and this book could thus represent an important foray into ancient church teaching on contraception, reproduction, and the “fruitfulness” of sex.

I wonder what would’ve happened if West’s book had been taught in my youth group growing up. I wonder whether I might have been able to avoid some of the Manichaeism I fell prey to in college, whether I would have been able to see myself not through the lens of a culture that objectifies and condemns the body, but rather through the lens of a God who made me—and declared my body, my very self, to be “good.” This is the promise and the beauty of West’s book: that through Christ, even now, we can redeem what’s been broken and experience a foretaste of the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Our Bodies Tell God’s Story | Brazos Press | $17.99

Gracy Olmstead contributes to The New York Times, The American Conservative, The Week, The Washington Post, and other publications.

Mirror of Justice

By Heidi White

It is considered bad form in the literary world to speak too much of oneself in a book review. The reasoning is that it is distracting and self-indulgent—a potential reader wants to know about the book, not the book reviewer. It is a sound practice and I abide by it, but in this case it cannot be helped. Like Mr. Darcy, in vain have I struggled, my feelings cannot be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I have admired and loved the first two books of this trilogy. Like many readers, I go through intense reading phases; perhaps for a month or two I might conduct a light perusal of crime fiction while researching how to garden, followed by, say, several months’ obsession with one author’s entire canon, interspersed with a heavy amount of poetry or essays. When I encountered author Hilary Mantel, I was immersed in historical fiction. The War of the Roses and the Tudor Period was my particular addiction at the time, so I picked up the first book of Mantel’s trilogy, Wolf Hall (2009), for $1.75 at a thrift store after skimming the dust jacket and discovering it was set during the reign of Henry VIII. Fiction about the bloodthirsty king and his unfortunate wives abounds, so I almost thrust it aside, but I was intrigued that the protagonist was Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, which

is a polite euphemism for what more jaundiced souls might call his “fixer.” (“The king never does an unpleasant thing,” quips Queen Jane. “Lord Cromwell does it for him.”) Cromwell, ambitious and unscrupulous, was the shadowy figure lurking behind the scenes who procured for Henry whatever he wanted, no matter how depraved and self-serving. In other words, Cromwell is one of history’s most notorious villains. My interest piqued, I bought the book—and found myself utterly captivated from the first page, a captivation that held me in thrall through the next installment, Bring Up the Bodies (2012). I am not alone in my ardor. Both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies won the Man Booker Prize, making Mantel the first woman ever to win the coveted award twice, and the only author to win for a sequel. The two novels have been translated into thirty languages and have sold more than five million copies.

This brings us to the 2020 publication of the final installment of the trilogy: The Mirror and the Light. Those like me who loved the first two novels have been waiting since 2012—that’s almost a decade—for this book. Many of us have wondered how it could possibly satisfy its avid readership, partly because of the hype, but also because anybody with a basic concept of foreshadowing and access to the internet knows how the story ends: Cromwell on the chopping block. This is no spoiler; it is historical fact. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies give us Cromwell’s rise; it remains to The Mirror and the Light to chronicle his fall. The task is harder than you might

expect, because although Cromwell is unequivocally a bad guy, the books make us love him. We intuited his future downfall from the first pages of Wolf Hall when we yearned for him to rise up, bloody and unbowed, from under his vicious father’s boot, but still we resist his impending doom. Mantel insists that she writes ghost stories, and I believe her, because the pages of these novels feel haunted by the clamoring dead. Mantel writes with intense immediacy, making even the most well-known historical events—Anne Boleyn on the block, for instance—feel as fragile as a spider’s web, as though perhaps we were wrong after all; surely the gossamer threads cannot hold in such turmoil and the beleaguered queen will break free. In Mantel’s hands, each inevitable fact is a surprise. Although we know how it ends, every page is fraught with the longing of ghosts, as though maybe this time it will all be different.

The Mirror and the Light begins with the execution of Anne Boleyn. (“Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away.”) Cromwell, who orchestrated her death, is at the zenith of his powers. (“A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner.”) The son of a blacksmith, he has been of such use to the king over many years that he now wields vast power in the realm surpassed only by the king himself. In this position, Cromwell of course has many enemies. At Anne Boleyn’s execution, he stands among them, watching attendants stuff the slender Queen’s headless body into an arrow chest, her bloody head tucked under her feet. The Duke of Suffolk, who hated the queen, refuses to kneel even at her death. (“I’d have put her on a dunghill,” Brandon says, “And the brother underneath her. And I’d have made their father witness it.”) From this vantage point we perceive the arc of the book; we know it will end with another severed head, another pitiless crowd. Thus, the novel is haunted not only by the ghosts of the past, but also by the bogey of the encroaching future.

The book chronicles a four year period, 1536–1540, during which Mantel explores Cromwell’s remaining years on multiple levels, both public and private. Well known for her meticulous research, Mantel had less to work with in this novel than in her previous offerings. When he was under political attack during these years, Cromwell’s defenders probably destroyed incriminating documents in order to protect him, creating gaps in the historical record that leave a contemporary novelist with decisions to make. Mantel takes a simple approach to the problem. “I think it was Faulkner who says, write down what they say and write down what they do,” she told The Paris Review. “I don’t have pages and pages in which I say what Cromwell thought. I tell you what he says, I tell you

what he does, and you read between the lines.”

This is nearly true, but not completely. If all the story required was the bare facts, a wikipedia article would suffice, but The Mirror and the Light is a literary feat of breathtaking scope and mature complexity. Mantel may scrupulously record only the factual information that her research uncovered—no cheating—but she is also past mistress of subtext. Like Dickinson, she tells the truth, but tells it slant. On every page we find masterful writing that both disguises and reveals. (“He, Cromwell, moves back toward his master, the knife in his grip. He stands in the doorway, words on his lips: Majesty, I find I have this knife in my hand, though it belongs to you.”) History, of course, is unforgiving, and a novelist cannot rewrite it, but we get the sense that Mantel would if she could, as if she loves these flawed and flouted ghosts, pleads for them, and longs to retroactively save them, but, alas, speaking for them with empathy and precision is the only service she can offer.

One way she speaks for her beloved ghosts is by examining the society in which they live and move and have their being, a man’s world where talent and ambition ram against rigid social boundaries. “I’m very concerned about not pretending they’re like us. That’s the whole fascination—they’re just not. It’s the gap that’s so interesting.” Cromwell, a commoner, makes himself great in a culture that dismisses self-made greatness. Cromwell inhabits a role of immense power, but it is artificial; everything hinges on the king’s favor, and with such a king, the favor cannot last. French ambassador Chapuys taunts, “For when all is said, you are a blacksmith’s son. Your whole life depends on the next beat of Henry’s heart, and your future on his smile or frown.” At the king’s command, Cromwell acts, but only the king gets the credit and only Cromwell takes the blame. “His chief duty (it seems just now) is to get the king new wives and dispose of the old.” This Cromwell does in particularly spectacular fashion, but the consequences are far-reaching. At first it seems to solidify his power, but the center cannot hold. Henry grows bloodthirsty, and Cromwell, tormented by his own ghosts, must wield the knife. The tension builds. This is where Mantel achieves true greatness as a novelist: she creates suspense where none should exist. Cassandra-like, we know his doom but cannot prevent it. As Cromwell walks the razor’s edge of his increasingly fragile position, we are behind his eyes, experiencing firsthand his calculation, conscience, strategy, hubris, and panic, but we know what he does not know: it will all come to naught. He will fail. He will die. In spite of his extraordinary talent, careful planning, and relentless energy, Cromwell will not overcome the odds; he will be destroyed by the very king whose nearly unlimited

power he helped create.

But men are not the only characters in the novel. Cromwell’s main job is curating women for the king, and Mantel examines these relationships with incisive pathos. Cutthroat Tudor England may ostensibly be a man’s world, but, as Cromwell knows, women hold the essential power. It is their bodies, their wombs, their life-giving capacity that (quite literally) form the beating heart of the world’s story. Mantel presents the ruthless society in which women have one job: entice men into the bedroom and emerge pregnant with healthy male babies. When advised not to “pull the women into it,” Cromwell responds, “The women are already in it. Its all about women. What else is it about?” Like all Tudor men, Cromwell sees women essentially as stock breeders—the king and court must have heirs. But he is also a widower, lonelier than he himself knows, and it is ever the softness of women that unlocks his latent longing for companionship. The relationships between Cromwell and the various women of the story—particularly Princess Mary and his daughterin-law Bess—are deeply moving as we sometimes catch a glimpse into his long-sublimated desire for meaningful human connection.

Mantel lays bare Tudor society with accuracy and compassion, but the most compelling aspect of her trilogy has always been the interior world of Cromwell himself. The motifs of mirrors and light are in sharp relief throughout the novel, but with Cromwell most of all. At Anne Boleyn’s beheading, Cromwell is quite taken with the executioner’s sword. “You would not guess it to look at him now, but his father was a blacksmith; he has affinity with iron . . . everything that is made molten, or wrought, or given a cutting edge.” Later we learn that the sword bears an inscription: Speculum justiciae, ora pro nobis. Mirror of justice, pray for us. To Cromwell, the mirror of justice is the king. “Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kings.” Henry, who is by this time the mirror of Cromwell’s abusive father—another ferocious man who subdues Cromwell under his boot—“repeats the phrase, as if cherishing it: the mirror and the light.” Whether Cromwell sees the reflection of his father in Henry, his abused childhood in his subjugated adulthood, we do not know: Cromwell is often blind, groping in the dark, and eventually the narrative reveals that it was the executioner’s sword that was the true mirror all along.

Always a single-minded man, in this novel Cromwell disintegrates. Throughout the story, the clear lines of his carefully constructed life begin to wobble, splinter, and refract. This is where Mantel’s prose approaches unbearable beauty. As the foundations quake, every aspect of Cromwell’s once-stable self begins to crack, and his ob-

sessive inner reflections reveal the fault lines.

You look back into your past and say, is this story mine? Is that flitting figure mine, that shape easing itself through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from the day? Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself—slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself, undone myself, have I forgotten too well?

As Cromwell is swept toward his inevitable end, we find ourselves resisting more with every step, straining back against what has always been irrevocable, but by the end feels nearly intolerable. The mirror of justice is too glaring for us; we want a different mirror, a different light. “Henry says: ‘Did I do right?’ Right? The magnitude of the question checks him, like a hand on his arm.” Mantel’s magnificent effect is the revelation that in the end, we will all cry for mercy, not justice—even for the villains. But this is a book about the executioner’s sword, and the best we can hope for is that Cromwell will find in the afterlife what he once saw in a vision of the dead: “He sees how they are visible, and how they shine. They are distilled into a spark, into an instant. There is air between their ribs, their flesh is honeycombed with light, and the marrow of their bones is molten with God’s grace.”

The Mirror and the Light | Henry Holt and co. | $30

Heidi White teaches at St. Hild School 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 Journal

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Living The Mathematical Life

By Anthony Barr

Once there were a brother and sister who devoted themselves to the search for truth. A brother who spent his long life solving problems. A sister who died before she could solve the problem of life.

The real life characters in Olsson’s book are Simone and Andre Weil. Simone was one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers, and her brother was one of the foremost mathematicians. Olsson uses these two brilliant minds as a springboard for an absorbing book that is part memoir and part essay collection. I love the tone of Olsson’s fairy tale. Olsson suggests that the search for truth–whether in philosophical dialogues or mathematical proofs–can be a source of profound enchantment, an invitation to meaning, wisdom, and joy, even amidst great suffering.

This invitation to enchantment through mathematics also lies at the heart of Francis Su’s new book, Mathematics for Human Flourishing. Su, the former president of the Mathematical Association of America, addresses his

book “to the demoralized, who’ve been injured by words someone said about their math abilities . . . to the disenchanted, for whom math has become boring . . . to those who haven’t had the resources or the confidence to get a mathematical education but have always been curious about how things work.”

In this essay, I want to draw from both books to reflect on mathematics as a pathway into living the good life. I write this as someone late to the party, who is beginning to see in mathematics an expression of that “beauty so ancient and so new” which captured the attention and love of St. Augustine.

Metaphysics and Meaning

Early on, Su briefly summarizes his underlying metaphysics. The idea of human flourishing “refers to a wholeness—of being and doing, of realizing one’s potential and helping others do the same, of acting with honor and treating others with dignity, of living with integrity even in challenging circumstances.” Su cites the ancient Greek notion of eudaemonia, the concept of the good life as conceived by Plato and Aristotle.

The central argument, situated within this Aristotelian mode, rests on two axiomatic claims. First, that “the proper practice of mathematics cultivates virtues that help people flourish,” and second, that “the movement toward virtue is aroused by basic human desires—the universal longings that we all have—which fundamentally motivate everything we do.” Drawing from these

Karen Olsson opens her book The Weil Conjectures with a condensed fairy tale.

two axioms, Su thus argues that “the pursuit of math can, if grounded in human desires, build aspects of character and habits of mind that will allow you to live a more fully human life.” Su observes that “there’s a moment in problem solving, as you start to brainstorm and think of potential strategies, when you must make sense of the problem as it really is—when you must strip away its nonessential elements so you can classify it and make connections between this problem and the catalog of problems you’ve tackled in the past.” This experience plunges us into the existential drama of making sense of our world. As Su notes, “When you do that, you are wrestling with its underlying meaning.”

Aware that all of this might seem too abstract, too disconnected from ordinary language and ordinary life, Su wisely ends each of his chapters with an excerpt from letters written to him by Christopher Jackson (“Chris”), a prison inmate who has found a deep and abiding sense of meaning in studying mathematics. In one letter, Jackson writes to Su that “I am still continuing to study mathematics; it helps me pass time productively and gives me a goal to focus on in the immediate to near and distant future. It gives me a personal satisfaction and also a personal hope.”

Olsson understands an aspect of the prisoner’s life— the artificial limits on personal autonomy, subjection to the external force of schedules, a life where one is rendered passive—that could make Su’s project so attractive to them. She discusses Weil’s consideration of force in the Iliad: violence and fatalism and the inscrutable and arbitrary wills of the gods. For Olsson , a large part of the existential drama of personal existence is making sense of force—whether violence or gravity—and the way that we as subjects try to make sense of a world of force, to try to find subject-ive meaning in an object-ive world. She writes that “I am always double: on the one hand, a passive being who is subject to the world, and on the other, an active being who has a grip on it; geometry and physics help me to conceive how these two things can be united, but they do not unite them.”

The ability to fully reconcile objectivity and subjectivity might elude us, but both writers suggest that wrestling with numbers and words will help us in our efforts. Su writes that “choosing a good notation or definition is like specifying what kind of conversation you are going to have with the material.” And Olsson similarly expresses her longing “to write something as clean and powerful as the best kind of mathematical proof. In pen, on quadrille paper: lines of black script conforming neatly, inevitably, to the faint blue squares.” It seems to me that Chris Jackson is experiencing something profound, both in his mathematical figuring and his letter-writing: a foretaste

of flourishing.

Conjectures

Olsson fundamentally desires “a hint, a glimpse into the nature of things.” And likewise, in his chapter on beauty, Su suggests that mathematics can indeed give us this glimpse. He writes, “When you realize that you’ve had exactly the same mathematical thoughts as another person—separated from you by oceans, culture, and time— you begin to believe there might be a universal, enduring reality that you are both somehow accessing. There are whispers calling us, but we have not yet found their source.”

In our quest to heed the whispers and find the source, we find ourselves in the realm of conjecturing. Olsson provides us with a helpful etymological account: “The word conjecture derives from a root notion of throwing or casting things together, and over the centuries it has referred to prophecies as well as to reasoned judgments, tentative conclusions, whole-cloth inventions, and wild guesses.”

In math, as in writing, we cast about, seeking to connect ideas, build structures, increase confidence in our knowledge. In describing this aspect of mathematical practice, Su uses the analogy of rock climbing. He notes that “axioms are like footholds near the ground” and “theorems are more like footholds farther up the cliff.” Some conjectures are sturdier than others, and “the especially useful ones are like large ledges from which you can push off in multiple directions.”

Conjecture might seem like a weird activity in which to locate virtues integral to flourishing, and yet Su is clear that conjecturing has its place, primarily because it forces us to search for deeper knowledge. He explains that “the quest for deep investigation in mathematics builds the virtue of circumspection. In mathematics . . . we are trained to know the limits of our arguments, and that helps us not to overgeneralize.” In addition to circumspection, Su notes that “the quest for truth in mathematics predisposes the heart to the virtue of intellectual humility.”

Here again it strikes me that the mathematician and the writer are operating in a similar mode. And indeed Su makes this point explicitly: “If, as the writer Kenneth Burke once said, literature is ‘equipment for living,’ then mathematics is equipment for thinking.” And so we can say of both the good mathematician and the good writer, that she “handles ideas rigorously, with honesty and integrity. She values circumspection and clarification of distinctions. She handles the truth accurately.”

Olsson, a novelist herself, notes a connection between mathematics and literature. “A quality of good literature

and good mathematics is that they may lead you to a result that is wholly surprising yet seems inevitable once you’ve been shown the way.” The writer and the mathematician handle truth, yes, but in a way that is subject to the contingencies of being human, in a way that leads to moments of shock, awe, surprise.

Struggle

The image of conjecture as climbing is consistent with the unnegotiable fact that formation of virtue and the fruit of flourishing are produced by a good deal of struggle. And though it has profound philosophical value, it is worth stressing that this struggle is literal: hours of frustration, scraps and scraps of paper, restarts and revisions, error and writer’s block.

The key point though is that the struggle is a good in itself, and not merely an instrumental good inasmuch as it leads to an answer or an essay. In struggling, we are “actively wrestling with a problem, persistently trying out various strategies,” and this helps us “to take risks” and to be “unafraid of mistakes” and to progress “incrementally in understanding the underlying ideas.” The virtues of fortitude, patience, and hope, and the skills of mastery-based learning have a wide-range application outside the classroom or the cafe. And again, this all holds even when no answer is forthcoming. As Su notes, “We appreciate that not solving a problem can be just as important as solving it—that, as Simone Weil suggested, the effort to grasp truth is itself worthwhile, for increasing our aptitude, even if it produces no visible fruit.”

Su’s prison correspondent, Chris, observes that “we can only become what we strive for.” I think that sounds remarkably congruent with St. Paul’s admonishment to work out our salvation. Struggle has intrinsic value. In his meditation on the Gospel of John, St. Augustine observes that “longing deepens the heart.” The deepening of the heart increases our capacity to respond to and participate in beauty.

Beauty

Olsson fell in love in college, and that love led to math. In her own words, “Part of loving math, for me, was loving a person who also loved math, who walked with such long strides, at once forceful and awkward.” And in loving—the guy, the math—she felt “let in on a truer and more powerful and more beautiful mode of being in the world.”

Readers of the Symposium won’t be surprised at all by this sequence of events. Plato reminds us that Eros begins with bodies, objects both static and in motion. Su does not specifically cite Plato in his chapter on beauty,

but I would not be surprised if Plato is his inspiration. Su writes of a sequence of mathematical beauty, beginning with the sensual and moving toward the transcendent. He notes that sensory beauty is “the beauty of patterned objects that you experience with the senses: sight, touch, sound.” A second kind of beauty, which he calls wondrous beauty, connects to feelings of awe and curiosity. Su observes that “wondrous mathematical beauty always invites a dialogue with ideas.” And he further observes that “both how and why [questions] are the start of conversations with mathematical ideas.”

A less tangible but still important form of beauty is “insightful beauty,” which Su explains is the “the beauty of understanding.” He notes that this kind of beauty can be apprehended in a sudden “aha” moment, “that thrill of sudden understanding, when something foggy becomes crystal clear.” But he also points out that this is a beauty found in “slowly growing appreciation over time.” Finally, there is transcendent beauty, characterized by a deep sense of gratefulness. It is here that Su writes of the whispers as quoted above, and it is here that we are closest to that which is heavenly.

Here I must confess that, as Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov, I have a Euclidean mind, and it is much easier for me to see the beauty of the sensuous and much harder for me to find the more abstracted forms trustworthy, good, true, and pathways to my flourishing. Olsson notes that this reticence joins me to Simone Weil. Olsson writes, “In her letters Simone has a bone to pick with algebra and with abstraction itself; for her, there is something distasteful about mathematical thinking untethered from any study of nature.” For Weil, “this type of math . . . is merely a game, referring only to itself.” Yet, reading Su made me wonder if perhaps my faith is simply too weak, if I am perhaps too accustomed to walking by my Euclidean sight that I fear to walk on waves.

Weak as my faith may be, it is also true that many current approaches to mathematics treat it as a contextless, culture-less playground. And this kind of abstraction is actually alienation, which is deeply concerning to Su. He writes that “we are not mathematical machines . . . We are embodied human beings. Why should anyone learn mathematics if it doesn’t connect deeply to some human desire, something we long for?” All this to say, then, that beauty, both sensory and abstract, does not leave us alienated but instead plunges us deep into that love that Boethius and Dante taught us to believe orders the world and moves the sun and other stars.

Conclusion: Creating Community

There is a final consideration I wish to make about hu-

man flourishing as it appears in these accounts. We find our flourishing together, in the context of community, and this is as true for the mathematician as it is for the writer.

Su writes that “those who desire community in mathematics must develop the virtue of hospitality, which includes excellence in teaching, excellence in mentoring, and a disposition to affirm others.” Part of this virtue means we must “reassure newcomers that they are welcome at any stage of development.” It also means that leaders “must be practiced at managing group dynamics with attention to student agency, identity, and power.” And finally, it means “developing collaborative skills that diminish hierarchies,” paving the way for inclusion and diversity of viewpoints.

Su provides us with a picture of human flourishing within the context of a mathematical community. Imagine this: “people who have joined together in a common mission of exploration and play, bouncing ideas off each other, valuing one another’s input, getting excited about the directions their ideas are taking them, and embodying a wide array of mathematical virtues along the way.”

And though this is a community of playfulness and joy, it is also a community of service. We are here to love and to serve one another. Consider this from Simone Weil: “So it comes about that, paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem . . . may be of great service

one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.”

Su reflects that “some of the best experiences I had in graduate school were times when I sat over the tutoring table and used the vehicle of mathematics—its wonder and its delight—to care for another human being.”

I think it is fitting here to end with Chris, Su’s friend and correspondent. Su reports that “six years after Christopher wrote me that first letter from prison, he’s helping other inmates learn math to get their GEDs.”

Truly, mathematics exists for human flourishing.

The Veil Conjectures: On Math the Pursuit of the Unknown | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | $26.00

Mathmatics for Human Flourishing | Yale University Press | $26.00

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

My Own Familiar Room

Poet Rhina Espaillat on Hospitality & Poetry

By David Kern

Rhina Espaillat is no stranger to crisis. Originally a prominent political family in the Dominican Republic, the Espaillats were exiled from their homeland in the wake of national turmoil. Under duress, they emigrated to the United States in 1939 when Rhina was six years old, eventually settling in New York City, where she grew up to become a teacher and a poet. Espaillat’s eleven volumes of poetry are known for their ongoing celebration of quotidian things. In spite of—or perhaps because of—her tumultuous beginnings, Espaillat holds space for the sacred nature of the mundane. As we find ourselves dwelling in the juxtaposition of ordinary life and extraordinary circumstances during the time of COVID-19, she chatted with FORMA about craft, catastrophe, and the commonplace.

In reading about your work over the last few years, I have repeatedly come across the idea that you are a sort of celebrant of the quotidian. Do you think of your work in this way? Is this something you set out to do?

Yes, I guess it is quotidian, because poetry comes out of one’s lived experience, and I’ve lived a relatively qui et, ordinary life as a family member, wife and mother, teacher, neighbor, and so forth. I didn’t “set out” to write that way. It’s just the life I understand best from the inside, the one that al lows me to be useful and fulfilled. Of course, your life is filtered through your thoughts, memories and temper ament, so someone else’s view of my life might be very different from mine.

This reminds me of the opening of your poem “Look Long Enough” where you write “look long enough at anything you know / and you will cease to know it.”

Linocut by Kirstie Ruffatto

whatever we look at may look different to each of us, but also reflect us both, to ourselves and to each other.

I’m not sure it’s possible to tell the writer—or the painter or composer or any other artist—what he “should” be drawn to or limit himself to. The most I can say is that my own poems generally happen in the space I live in, but there’s no limit to the view, either through the window, or from the reflective glass, or from what the mind does with either. As it happens, my son drove me to a doctor’s appointment this morning and then stayed for lunch, and we rambled for the rest of the afternoon from medicine through current scientific events–he’s a physicist–to certain lines from “Tree at My Window” and the way living things constitute a continuum, and somehow landed with Odysseus in the underworld trading news with the dead after interviewing Tiresias. I couldn’t map that trip to save my life, but it made perfect sense in the doing.

You speak of the reader “keeping you company a while,” which is a really lovely notion. When working on a poem, then, do you think about how you might keep your reader around, so to speak? That is, do you think about it in terms of making your time together enjoyable such that your reader might want to linger with you? Or do you primarily think about working out a poem that works in a self-contained sort of way and then hope the reader enjoys it?

No, it’s not so much making our time together enjoyable as making it an occasion for communication, a sharing not of verbal cookies and coffee, but of those things that tend to be hard to put into words except with images and music, even when they’re universal, and whether or not they’re painful or comforting.

Have you read Scott Cairns’ new collection, Anaphora, by any chance?

No, I haven’t.

Well, in that collection he has a poem called “Spare Opacities:”

I was talking with my sister about her preference for the denotative poem, which is a preference I cannot share. She was Staring out the window, and, far as I could tell, was studying The neighbor’s gray cat, which—for its part—was studying our Bird feeder, its tail twitching just enough to keep the birds from Lighting on the feeder. “I find comfort,” she was saying, “in Words that point directly to things, words that mean.” I looked Into my cup where the dark sheen of the coffee offered an Image of the skylight in miniature. “But sis, words that serve

Only to point to prior things have acquiesced to the least and Lowest operation of meaning, as well as to the poverty of the Nonexistant mean; they are also, I daresay, mean.” She turned From the window to face me. “You’re always doing that, Taking a simple, an honest statement and making it so goddam Loaded, so goddam ambiguous that it doesn’t mean anything. I like poems that point to real things, real events, actual feelings.” The coffee had gone a little cold, but its bitterness rought a surprising freshness to the tongue. “That’s exactly The problem,” I said to her. “The word or poem that points Only to appearances can never get anywhere near the real, Which is necessarily comprised of what is not apparent, even as It offers and honors what is.” She collected her things, getting Ready to leave, clearly paling to say nothing more. I couldn’t Stop talking. “I like when poems help me see things differently, Or when I register a faint shock of recognition in their terms.” As the door closed behind her, I felt suddenly very sad, and Drained my cold cup.

So here is my question: do you buy the suggestion that this poem seems to be offering, that denotative and connotative language in poetry are at odds? And in celebrating the quotidian (to continue using the word I brought up earlier), do you necessarily have to lean toward the connotative?

No, I don’t think they’re at odds, they just have different work to do. It’s like the difference between the painting on the wall and the nail it hangs on. The painting is what art—any art–makes of what it “sees” or senses behind the quotidian, but you need the nail to keep it up there. The argument between the siblings is interesting but silly, because it’s trying to give more weight to one or the other, the perceived or the intuited, in a poem, which is just another version of the “form vs. content” pseudo-distinction. If the poem works, the two feel united, like the tenor and vehicle of an apt metaphor.

I like the poem very much, by the way. It’s interesting–and right–that the brother is the one telling the story, but the sister is the one who is so frustrated that she leaves. They both understand—and regre—the difference of opinion and what it suggests about human relationships, but neither one knows what to do about it, except walk out or “drain” the “cold cup” of love that balks at its inability to deal with what ought to be trivia but isn’t.

Does a good poem, then, balance the two effectively?

I would say so; wouldn’t you? In fact, I would call that a requirement.

And here’s another question for you: Why has the term “quotidian” applied to my writing attracted your attention? Does it strike you as negative, or maybe inaccurate

in my case? I’ve never been troubled by it: Should I be? If so, why?

Someone once warned me against describing a shade of brown as reminiscent of my mother’s hair, because that isn’t “weird” enough, and she wanted my poems to be more weird. How do you feel about that degree of deliberate “anti-quotidianhood”?

I am actually quite fond of the quotidian nature of your poetry. I don’t think you should be bothered by it at all, but I’ve wondered if poets (and other artists) whose works gets described with that word feel as if it simplifies their work too much. For some people, the word has a negative connotation, as if it’s a relic of an era when the scope of a woman’s life was more limited. I’ve heard that before

You mention a reader who felt like your poetry wasn’t “weird” enough . . . That seems like an odd standard by which to judge poetry. It sounds dangerous, even. Am I wrong to think that if I am actively writing to be “weird,” then I’m probably not being very hospitable to my reader?

As for “weirdness,” if it comes naturally to the poet–that is, if it’s genuine and not “put on” for effect–I don’t have anything against it. But “weird on purpose” is a kind of “Look at me!” approach to the reader, and I don’t enjoy that when I come across it. I wouldn’t call it “dangerous,” but maybe a touch pretentious. And yes, maybe inhospitable to the reader, as you say.

As we write, we are in the midst of a global pandemic, a situation the likes of which very few of us have ever seen before. In these strange times, what poets have you found yourself turning to?

As it happens, I haven’t been reading poets from the past, but people writing now, several of them friends, or poets recently acquainted with or heard, who have asked me for blurbs for upcoming books, or comments on manuscripts they’re working on, or translations to one language of work they’ve done in the other and would like to publish in bilingual format. I’ve been doing lots of that all this year, most recently translations and a book intro for a Dominican poet and painter named Jimmy Valdez, whose book is being published by Bunker Hill Community College, where I’ve been “Distinguished Artist in Residence” (that’s more title than woman!) for almost two years now. I’ve just finished commenting on a gorgeous manuscript by one of the Powow River Poets,

David Davis, among others in English, and before that helping to edit the second anthology of the Powow River Poets, which is due out this fall or winter.

It’s been a busy year: a good thing for me, because it keeps me from obsessing too much about the virus, the economic situation, politics, police shootings of unarmed runners, and so forth. I enjoy keeping track of the work of poet friends, especially young ones. The PRP, which I co-founded with two or three others in 1992, is a very gifted group, and I also work with, help, and translate many members of the Dominican diaspora writers and other Latin American poets eager to publish here in our second language.

But there are poets I return to again and again, whatever the local circumstances of the moment: Frost, Wilbur, Kunitz, Hecht, Dickinson, Whitman, Herbert, and of course the classic poets in my first language: St. John of the Cross, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Neruda, Incháustegui Cabral, Borges, Pedro Mir, Manuel del Cabral . . . the list goes on and on! And I’ve translated work by a great many of them, in both directions.

I haven’t deliberately looked for poems to help me cope with this moment. If poetry is really good, really honest, it can deal with whatever the daily crisis is, social or personal, transcendent or brief, because what poetry does at its best is to say, “You’re not the first or the last to encounter this; there’s a chorus of voices behind you, and another one ahead of you, and they’re all speaking to all of us, including you.”

But there are individual, isolated poems that have stayed with me from the first reading and been a source of comfort over the years, such as this one by Mark Van Doren, a quiet poet without fireworks who deserves to be remembered:

In bitterness of heart I write, but gentleness of mind. For thinking slow, I may remember that the world is kind— or was—or would be—and contains, like dew within the rose, some delicate, some hidden friends. I must remember those. And so I do: and drop by drop, I am rewarded well, by tincture, or as weeping gold tempers the harsh bell.

The Story Must Be Shaped

Nick Ripatrazone Contemplates the Catholic novel

By Anthony Barr

Nick Ripatrazone has a keen eye for culture. He serves as the culture editor at Image Journal, a contributing editor at The Millions, a staff writer at Lit Hub, and has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Esquire. His new book, Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction, surveys the literary fiction of writers ranging from Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy to Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich. In exploring these authors, Ripatrazone situates them in their Catholic context, whether practicing, fully lapsed, or somewhere in between. He chatted with FORMA this spring about his spiritual journey, how faith is “a tremendous organizer of perspective,” and why you should read Graham Greene for Lent.

Your book is all about writers making sense of faith or its absence, and so I’m curious: Are faith and writing connected for you in your own life? What has your spiritual journey looked like?

I’m currently reading Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory; it’s an annual Lenten practice for me. Greene’s book is an overt reminder that I could never separate faith from writing, or writing from faith. When I read Greene, or the poetry of Franz Wright and Denise Levertov, I am convinced that the work of writing is an expression of faith, or at least an expression toward it—an acknowledgment that there is always work to be done, joy to be expressed. Language is an imperfect vessel, but imperfect vessels can be blessed ones. I’m a cradle Catholic, and the language and liturgy of Catholicism—particularly the Ignatian strain—informs how I view the world of stories. God is certainly in all things. My early books were poetry and fiction, but for the past few years I’ve been drawn to writing nonfiction—not about myself, but about faith and culture and God.

The authors featured in your book represent a range of dispositions toward faith: curious, detached, ironic, sentimental, sincere, devout, heterodox, profane. Which writers are furthest from your experience? Closest?

Thomas Pynchon has always intrigued me, since I think

he exists on the same Catholic jester wavelength as James Joyce—an absolutely, deeply Catholic writer (perhaps even despite his own movement from active faith). I am drawn to Pynchon and Joyce because I don’t feel similar to them: I don’t view faith from an ironic, profane, or parodic view. I am quite sentimental about Catholicism. Writers and people who have strayed from the faith attract me because I want to understand the texture of that distance. I wonder: What remains of God for them? It is often the song of faith, the syntax of Mass and prayer. I am perhaps closest to the Catholic sense of Ron Hansen, Phil Klay, Andre Dubus, and Flannery O’Connor—at least out of the writers I consider in the book. Each has or had a Catholic sincerity that I find endearing and empowering.

In your chapter on Toni Morrison’s work, you quote her as saying that “black people never annihilate evil . . . they don’t have witch hangings . . . they accept it. It’s almost like a fourth dimension in their lives.” This reminds me of Charles Taylor’s idea of the premodern porous self versus the modern buffered self. The former—perhaps best represented by the Celtic pagan—feels surrounded by all sorts of spirits, both friendly and malignant, whereas the buffered self—and here one thinks of the scientist Francis Bacon declaring dominion over nature—has a much more disenchanted view. Drawing on Taylor’s work, Alan Jacobs writes, “The positive valence of porosity is fullness; its negative valence is terror. The positive valence of bufferdness is protection; its nega-

tive valence is emptiness.” As you explore the continuums of sincerity and irony, faith and doubt, do you find this concept of enchantment/disenchantment helpful? And do you think postmodernism falls into either category, or does it represent something different?

This is a great question. I come from the immigrant world of Catholicism: Marian statues on tables and windowsills, votive candles, dogma bleeding into cultural superstitions. To take a reference you make in perhaps another direction, I think faith itself is porous and meant to be punctured: our real world can’t help but push into the spiritual one. If I am to be a Catholic and to believe in the faith sincerely—as I do—then I must also open myself to wonder, and to rest comfortably outside certainty. Although I don’t think the duality of enchantment and disenchantment is exclusive to Catholic writers, the sensual and celebratory (some might say performative and theatrical) components of Catholic faith create almost a rhythm of belief. When I was young, my parish priest told me that for most people, faith goes in waves: You will cry at Mass (as I do), and then you will go through periods when everything feels rather quiet. For me, those quiet periods have never reached doubt and distant, but they have been times of measured contemplation. Our liturgical calendar moves in seasons, and so do we.

You explore writers like Pynchon and McLuhan alongside the artist Warhol and argue that “there are certain traits of Catholicism—its coupling of grandeur with the corporeal and visceral; its offering of a complex theological map for a world that seems increasingly

absurd—that makes it strangely appropriate for a postmodern world.” It strikes me that most of the writers you profile, whether practicing or lapsed in faith, are self-consciously heterodox. Is postmodern Catholicism necessarily heterodox, or is there room for orthodox writers who adhere to some conception of dogma?

Orthodoxy is difficult to define, I think, in our actual lived world. Often converts are drawn to orthodoxy because it offers them a spiritual outline or border. This makes them no better or worse in their conceptions of the faith than those who have been Catholic since childhood; it merely is a matter of perspective. I have written about the strangeness of Catholicism before, and when I use the word “strangeness,” I do so with the highest compliment: I connote strangeness to mean that which is extra-natural, atypical, radical, transformative. When Catholics go to Mass, we participate in a ritual that is extraordinary: the Eucharist! What a life-changing concept and experience. To lessen it is dangerous. I think dogma and heterodoxy coexist, ultimately, in the realm of mystery.

One word that does not pop up a lot in your book is “piety.” But a key place where it does appear is in your discussion of Graham Greene and his rejection of what he called “conventional religious piety.” I assume Greene is reacting to the kind of “pious” sensibilities that are just middle-class, bourgeois values. But I wonder if you think there are representations of the more classical understanding of piety (i.e., Aeneas fulfilling his duty in the Aeneid) in any of the authors you explore, and how would you differentiate that piety from the conventionality Greene decries?

I’ve lived my entire life in New Jersey, so I am skeptical by nature. This sometimes confuses people, but it makes perfect sense to me: One small reason why I remain a Catholic is that I am very skeptical of a world in which God doesn’t make sense. I value piety, but also worry that what might pass for conventional piety can sometimes turn into complacency. We all want to think that we are better than we are, of course; when I read Greene’s story of the whiskey priest, I want to think, “Yes, I would never do the things he did. I would never be as sinful.” And yet when I get to the scene in the jail, when the lovers “sin” and the pious woman is shocked, the priest reminds her: This is the sweet conundrum of life. Our perspective often becomes our bias; our piety can often become our place of judgment. Mariette, the titular character of Ron Hansen’s novel Mariette in Ecstasy, strikes me as conventionally pious, and yet unconventional in her methods.

Writers and people who have strayed from the faith attract me because I want to understand the texture of that distance. I wonder: What remains of God for them? It is often the song of faith, the syntax of Mass and prayer.

Maybe this is all a check against myself: a reminder to not get too comfortable or certain in my faith.

I loved your chapter on Walker Percy, and especially your analysis of the character Binx in The Moviegoer. You write that Binx is “a goof when talking about money and women, but he is serious about the possibility of belief.” I have a number of agnostic friends who did not grow up in religious households, and who seem to me to have this exact posture. Some of them have even expressed a certain sadness at being outside the structures of belief. I’m curious if you have thoughts about how it is that Binx gets to this position. Why is he not pulled toward, say, the New Atheists, or something of the sort?

Like you, I have been surrounded by atheist and agnostic people who are drawn to religion, and sometimes articulate a longing for faith. I have rarely—perhaps never—experienced the type of militant atheism of Greene’s lieutenant character; of course his exaggeration in that novel is part of the point. In Percy’s work, Binx is trying to figure things out. He hasn’t had much luck in relationships. His family is skeptical of him. The only thing that makes sense is film, for the cinema is that communal experience of the sacred: what Jules Romains called the “group dream,” the “haze of visions which resemble life.” It is appropriate that one of the concluding scenes of the book happens on Ash Wednesday, when we open toward the solemnity of Lent. Binx is a seeker; unbelief would be an end to his search.

In that same chapter, you also suggest that faith might be “most realistically experienced in the background of our daily lives.” And you write that instead of signs and wonders, Binx found something more “more muted and authentic.” This description was startling to me and left me wanting more. Can you elaborate here?

This might be a bit Ignatian of me. If we consider existence to be miraculous—almost impossible—then everyday life is a wild bevy of gifts. We can’t expect signs and wonders on a grand scale; then faith becomes the projection of desire. A request for evidence. Faith is a tre-

mendous organizer of perspective. This is why, I think, all questions lead back to God. When Binx sees the man with what he thinks are ashes on his forehead, he resides in that uncertainty for a bit. I think we live most of our lives not knowing, grappling toward faith as a means of understanding the world. For all of Binx’s attraction toward the mystical elements of cinema, it is a man standing outside of a church at the start of Lent who is most acutely divine.

Your chapter on Louise Erdrich begins with the image of a confessional booth transformed into a bookshelf in Erdrich’s bookstore, and ends with Erdrich reflecting on how the confessional is “the one place you’re allowed to . . . really talk about yourself.” I was immediately reminded of Augustine’s Confessions as this effort to find the self through confession. But I was also reminded of Derrida’s engagement with Augustine and the fear that this effort resolves into mere self-creation. And of course one of Erdrich’s best books, The Last Report, features a protagonist who fashions a duplicitous identity: a woman, dressed as a male, acting as priest, and in a very real sense becoming an actual priest. That book is written as a confession, with Father Damien giving account. I’m curious about this tension, then, between confession as recovering authenticity on the one hand, or creating a self through fictive narrative on the other. Is there a way to resolve this contradiction?

I think of story initially and primarily along structural lines: that means from the shape of our narratives overall down to our practical process of syntax and choosing particular words. I can’t help but think about confession, literary and otherwise, on this practical and structural level. We communicate with each other best through story, and story must be shaped. I’m not sure that the contradiction you pose, which is a fascinating one, needs to be resolved. I crave a lack of resolution in stories; it is why I think Pynchon’s absurd book The Crying of Lot 49 is such a Catholic book: It acknowledges that the sacred can often remain confounding, no matter our attempts to deconstruct it. Catholicism is a faith of paradox, and that route leads toward the Eucharist: I’m comfortable with that uncomfort of not knowing.

1. how not to read like a humanist

Teaching well depends on reading well. But becoming a good reader or teacher requires, among other things, a model to imitate. A couple years ago I decided to take another look at C.S. Lewis’ criticism with the aim of approaching literature more as he did. I found that doing so meant learning to love—to taste and see—stories like Lewis. What makes a story worth loving according to Lewis? What makes a great story? What makes a good reader, critic, and teacher of a great story? These ought to be perennial weighty questions for classical educators. In An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis suggests we rate a story’s quality, not by something in the work itself, but by the kind of reader and reading it attracts. This approach is valid and useful, but Experiment far from exhausts what Lewis has to say on the qualities of a great work. It is more valuable, I contend, for what it says about good criticism and, implicitly, good teaching. But to really appreciate these insights we must take what Lewis would call a “longer way round” through his less familiar criticism of Spenser, before returning to Experiment and Lewis’ complete answer to the questions above.

I begin with a comment from his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: “[The humanists] lost . . . the power, apparently common in the Middle Ages, of continuing, despite such interpretation, to respond to the central, obvious appeal of a great work.” By “humanists” Lewis means the Renaissance teacher-critics who were obsessed with cataloging and imitating figures of speech and with judging literature by the canons of Aristotle’s Poetics. Through their stuffy-minded pride, they missed the deep magic of great stories. As classical Christian educators working against the grain, we know this deafness; we sometimes meet these folks at conferences and in journals. But the passage raises some further questions. What is “the central, obvious appeal of a

great work?” What is a great work? And how can we foster this power to respond?

Regarding the first question, a later passage is helpful:

The humanists could not really bring themselves to believe that the poet cared about the shepherds, lovers, warriors, voyages, and battles. They must be only a disguise for something more “adult.” Medieval readers had been equally ready to believe in a poet’s hidden wisdom: but then, perhaps because they had been taught that the multiple meanings of Scripture never abrogated the literal sense, they did not allow the hidden wisdom to obscure the fact that the before them was “a noble and joyous history.” They pressed the siege, wept with the heroines, and shuddered at the monsters.

We meet here, of course, one of the major themes of Lewis’ career: the centrality of delight to seeing anything rightly. A good reader will not merely imitate classical style or extract hidden meanings (logoi) while ignoring the surface appeal of the story—the story as poema, something made that invites participation. There is indeed a “hidden wisdom” or heart center, but we only attain it through surrender to the story’s flesh, through sympathy—fighting, mourning, fearing—with the characters. To ignore the story in favor of allegory and stylistic analysis reflects a “desire . . . for order and discipline, weight and decorum,” or, in other words, a “desire to be very ‘adult.’” Instead, we must read with “a child’s love of marvels and dread of bogies.”

Lucy discovered Narnia because she liked the feel of fur coats, and we must enjoy the surface of a great story as well as something “further up and further

“I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until . . . I was lifted and struck.”

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

in.” We must look along, rather than at, the beam of light. Furthermore, to read only the plot, out of “sheer narrative lust,” is “unliterary” and fails to respond to the deeper dimensions of the work. Attending to both dimensions is good reading and keeps us from becoming “humanists.”

Obviously surface is not center; whatever the center is lies beyond the plot. What’s more, the notion of a “central appeal” leads us to expect something unique, something that sets the text apart from others in its genre and tradition. Could this be what the essay “On Stories” calls “atmosphere” or “theme,” a “state[,] or quality” such as “giantness, otherness, the desolation of space,” which emerges through the plot to grip the reader via a certain felt response? The attraction of stories about giants, for instance, is not that we are frightened but that we are overwhelmed by “the intolerable pressure, the sense of something older, wilder, and more earthy than humanity.” In view here is the imagination’s response to something, its sympathy with something that transcends but also pervades the plot. It is because the whole fictional world is concretely and fittingly harmonized in its details—characters dressed and equipped, speaking and acting as they do, in thus-and-such a setting—that the story can provoke so deep a response to something in the human condition.

Many readers of Lewis have been introduced to this notion of atmosphere through Michael Ward’s work in Planet Narnia. Ward shows how the atmosphere of each chronicle is influenced by a different planet in medieval cosmology. Thus a jovial, festive spirit prevails in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Jupiter chronicle; Prince Caspian is martial (with an emphasis on trees via Mars Silvius); The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is solar, emphasizing gold and sunlight at the world’s end; The Horse and His Boy is mercurial, linked to the constellation Gemini; and so on. Linking the Chronicles with Lewis’ poem “The Planets” and with the “The Descent of the Gods” chapter in That Hideous Strength, Ward shows that “atmosphere” or “Donegality” was not only a central emphasis of Lewis’ criticism, but also a deep creative motif in his fiction.

If, as Lewis says, “the plot . . . is only really a net whereby to catch something else,” then the “unliterary” reader cannot respond to this something else, because he is fixated on “what happens next.” To read and teach stories well is first of all to respond to the unique atmosphere of a work, which both transcends and pervades the plot.

And yet we miss the fullness of Lewis’ meaning if we take “atmosphere” in the usual sense—I mean if we take it as something like “tone,” as lit teachers might refer to the macabre darkness of Poe, the stormy wistfulness of David Copperfield, or the playful irony of Pride and Prejudice. Lewis means something more concrete, more

thickly incarnate and fulsomely sensuous. The word “atmosphere” misleads; better would be “state,” “theme,” or even “the thing itself.” For instance, in Homer “the pressure of reality . . . makes it appear that we are dealing not with poetry about the things, but almost with the things themselves.” Then again in Spenser, we see the things themselves; we “see a little withered old man by a woodside opening a wicket, a giant, and a dwarf.” Atmosphere is a feature of myth, which “introduce[es] us to a permanent object of contemplation—more like a thing than a narration—which works upon us by its peculiar flavor or quality, rather as a smell or a chord does.” It is through palpability or richness of atmosphere that myth becomes fact. And the greatest texts, it seems for Lewis, are those that forge atmosphere into poema, so that through the words the reader may confront “the thing itself.” Lewis would have said, with Archibald MacLeish, that a poema “should not mean, but be.”

2. The “Three Levels” of Appeal in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

At this point, it seems we have answered several of our original questions. We know what a great work is: myth-radiant, atmospheric romance. We also know how we ought to respond as a “literary” reader who returns to savor atmosphere. But do we have the full picture? For an answer, let’s turn to Lewis’ earliest published criticism on his favorite great work.

If romance was Lewis’ favorite genre, then the Faerie Queene was his favorite story in that genre. Spenser’s epic romance was chief among the works that effected Lewis’ spiritual development and exercised his talents in criticism. He returned to it as lover and teacher throughout his life. His comments on it, especially in The Allegory of Love, add a crucial dimension to his view of a great story.

Lewis describes three “layers” in the Faerie Queene. On the surface is the typical action of fairy-tale romance, “shepherds, lovers, warriors, voyages, and battles” involved in “interlocked stories of chivalrous romance in a world of marvels.” Lewis would later comment that those readers of the Faerie Queene “who can surrender themselves simply to the story” will find “their own experience—everyone’s experience—loosened from its particular contexts by the universalizing power of allegory.” “We must surrender ourselves,” he said elsewhere, “with childlike attention to the mood of the story.” If we would learn moral and metaphysical truths, we must yield to the spell of a knight killing a dragon to rescue a princess. To read well is be taken in, gripped, enchanted by the story, to be caught up in a chronic state of wonder.

The theme of humility and childlikeness continues in Lewis’ discussion of the poem’s “second layer,” where we meet the folk symbols of the popular imagination: sorcerers and witches, ogres and giants. When we meet Redcross, Una, dwarf, and lamb in the opening stanzas, we need to realize that these “popular, homely, patriotic associations . . . spoke immediately to what was most universal and childlike in gentle and simple alike.” Lewis points out the modern reader’s tendency to read like a “humanist,” refusing to stoop through Spenser’s door in “humble fidelity to the popular symbols which he found ready made to his hand.” For instance, one of Lewis’ students was disgusted by the character Charissa nursing her babes in the House of Holiness (FQ I.10.30–31). It was too earthy for the student’s mature sensibilities. Elsewhere Spenser describes hell as where “the damned ghosts in torments fry” (I.5.33). We must, Lewis says, let ourselves respond naturally to these symbols, to the whiteness of Una’s lamb and the heat of hell, to the good and evil coded into the stock characters. To read Spenser rightly, “we must recognize the humility and seriousness of his poetry, and we must be humble and serious ourselves.

If we do so, if we let ourselves delight in the story (first layer) while also responding to the symbolism (second layer), we obtain access to the third layer. For “Spenser excels nearly all poets . . . in his profound sympathy with that which makes the symbols, with the fundamental tendencies of human imagination as such. Like the writers of the New Testament . . . he is endlessly preoccupied with such ultimate antitheses as Light and Dark or Life and Death.”

Thus the exiled princess Una is associated with light, white, purity, steadfastness, heaven, and truth, whereas the black magician Archimago and his colleague Duessa are associated with opposite qualities. When Archimago “bade awake black Pluto’s grisly Dame” (I.1.4) to aid his spells, and when the witch calls Night’s “coal-black steeds yborn of hellish brood” (V.20.8) to transport the injured Sansjoy to Hades, the symbolic atmosphere in these passages triggers the reader to respond with what Lewis regards as the proper sympathy or antipathy toward fundamental realities evoked by the symbols. Elsewhere Lewis calls these sympathies and antipathies

“stock responses.” These are “deliberately organized attitudes” that return the soul to, or reinforce it in, a normal state of harmony with the cosmos. All the details of character and action and style draw the reader into the rhythms and sounds and movements of the great cosmic dance. If these responses indicate harmony of inner life with the world, and if Spenser inculcates these responses, then Lewis can say, as he does repeatedly, that to read Spenser is to grow in mental health.

What Lewis calls “feelings else blind and inarticulate,” with which Spenser had “sympathy,” he then specifies as “the fundamental tendencies of the human imagination.” Spenser let himself feel, gave himself to, the innate human sense that there is Right and Wrong, Being and Non-Being, Goodness and Badness, Light and Dark. He then drew on a vast palette of images from Italian romance, British folktales, and classical mythology to incarnate these sympathies. Elsewhere Lewis claims the Faerie Queene’s “primary appeal is to the most naïve and innocent tastes: to that level of our consciousness which is divided only by the thinnest veil from the immemorial lights and glooms of the collective Unconscious itself.”

Lewis is working a Jungian vein here, but his point is that human nature is so wedded to the cosmos that its logos—the code, music, or fundamental structure of the cosmos—calls out from deep within, demanding a response. People can respond with philosophy or religion or poetry—they are all to some degree intertwined–but Spenser’s was a poetry that enabled, that prepared its hearers for a kind of childlike access to “the collective Unconscious.” That is why it is wrong to describe The Faerie Queene or The Chronicles of Narnia as allegory, because behind and through the poetry we feel “fundamental tendencies” that ever transcend it.

It is worth noting that these fundamental tendencies “make” the symbols. This sounds odd because it suggests that the making, the poesis of the poema, issues not from the poet’s power but from the logos itself. It is not so strange, however, if we assume, as Spenser and Lewis did, a divine creator. Nor is it so strange if we recall that poetry, according to Lewis, expresses an ultimately subconscious experience of desire for, or aversion to, something in reality. Spenser is medieval because he invites us to join in the solemnities of the world’s order; he is

If Lewis is right about criticism-teaching, then we are in perilous times. For what does higher education in the humanities quench more than the basic human responses to the central appeals of great texts?

a Romantic because he traces the soul’s Bildungsroman in the enchanted state of fairy land. What the soul journeys toward, what the poet sympathizes with, what he invites humble submission to, is just the cosmic order of Reality. This is what “On Stories” calls, rather more cryptically, “some more central region.”

And so Lewis’ Faerie Queene criticism exemplifies, as plainly as we could hope, the “central and obvious appeal of a great work.” The appeal resounds in both the surface and depth of a story, and the reader has to respond rightly. But here is the main point: In Lewis’ favorite example of a great work, the author of that work is himself responding to an appeal.

3. Responsive Criticism, Responsibe Teaching

To my knowledge, Lewis never discusses or defines good teaching as such. However, in Experiment he does define criticism, and not surprisingly its goal is to help the reader “‘see the object as in itself it really is.’ The best value judgment is that ‘which almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge.’ ‘The great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way and to let humanity decide.’” The critic must write or teach in such a way that he becomes, as much as possible, a conduit of the text to the reader. The best criticism will be a kind of poema, though of course not strictly fictional, that creates an experience of the poema on which it comments. In the end, the best criticism functions similarly to romance—as an exposition of reality.

Lewis’ literary criticism works in parallel with his apologetics, aiming to do for Christianity what his criticism aimed to do for literature. Indeed, his manifesto on criticism could apply just as well to his nonfiction apologetics. What is Lewis doing in Mere Christianity except clearing the way—through definition, distinction, and refutation—for a fair evaluation of “real” Christianity on the basis of “fresh knowledge”?

But if Lewis is right about criticism-teaching, then we are in perilous times. For what does higher education in the humanities quench more than the basic human responses to the central appeals of great texts? With a few exceptions, it has sold out to narrow-minded narcissism, to the idol of pluralism, to “current trends in _____ studies,” to “the state of the discipline,” and to “making a contribution to the field.” Proof of the sellout is the curricula of Ivy-League graduate programs in English. If you have the stomach, examine the required courses at Notre Dame, Chicago, Yale, Virginia, or Columbia. You will find not English but a hybrid of English, cultural studies, and world literature. You will find neither

vision nor a unifying program, nor great conversation within philosophia perennis. What the programs do offer is the jargon necessary to scrape little piles of nits from the margins of great works. They offer research and travel support, if your carping is reasonably “transgressive.” You go in just wanting to study Shakespeare—not Shakespeare “and,” just Shakespeare—only to be told that no one in the department is “working on that.” There is no time to study great authors on their own terms because that would marginalize underrepresented groups. There’s no time because you need to have a publishable article by spring of your second year.

True criticism, true research as the basis for true teaching, consists not in endless “interrogation,” “problematizing,” or “deconstruction” of the literary text; rather, it addresses roadblocks to reading the text well, refutes errors and misjudgment and provincialism, and puts the reader’s ignorance in crisis—criticizing not the text but the reader. We might even say that Lewis’ criticism of great works also aimed to criticize readers—removing ignorance, prejudice, and provincialism—so that the texts themselves could precipitate crises in their lives. For Lewis as Christian, the most important crises are religious; it was atmospherically rich authors like Herbert, Milton, Spenser, Bunyan, and others who “turned against” the pagan Lewis and turned him to God. The great stories, more than being judged by their readers, must be invited to judge them.

But also, following Lewis, we must help our students taste and see the substance of the story. I am grateful for some related advice from Joshua Gibbs. Don’t lecture your students, he says, since most teachers are not master critics like Lewis. Rather, spend more class time just reading—savoring—the work you are teaching. Train your students how to read, and thereby experience, great literature. Don’t be too proud to shut up and let the text itself speak, too proud to stutter over lines you can’t scan, meanings you can’t exegete, depths you can’t fathom. Do we shelter or buffer our students from the greatness of the great texts? Are we afraid to lose ourselves in a blur of delight, a blast of pain, when something hits us like an O’Connor finale? Dana Goia has made the same point with regard to poetry:

Poetry teachers, especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries.

I hope you see why we had to detour through fairy land

to fully appreciate Lewis’ insights in Experiment on good reading and great books. To “enlarge our being,” as he says there, a good or “literary” reading requires that we give ourselves to the story and its atmosphere that we may respond to its logos. The whole thrust of Lewis’ genial criticism and teaching was to enable this surrender: “We are not,” he told his students, “going to try to improve you; we have fulfilled our whole function if we help you to see some given tract of reality.” Through critic to text, from text to story to atmosphere, from atmosphere to “some more central region,” we come to see reality, respond to it, and become more real ourselves.

Dr. Bret Saunders taught humanities for over ten years at the University of Dallas and John Witherspoon College, where he was Associate Professor and Director of the Humanities Program. Currently he is transitioning to an instructor role in the online Kepler Consortium. He has published in Touchstone, Cultural Encounters, FORMA, and others.

Poetry Jill Kress Karn

Jill Kress Karn is the author of The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton. Her poems have appeared in Salamander, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Carolina Quarterly. She teaches at Villanova University and lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband and three children.

SPEAKING ITALIAN

I asked for a view—what else does one do in Venice?—with windows opening out to the canal, the chandeliers, impossible confections, hanging low from the ceiling. We rode on the boats, found a shop with paper thick as cloth, took pictures of some priests eating their ice cream, got lost. We did Venice just as

the books would have us, trying our bits of Italian like new wine in the mouth.

Saint Mark’s Square—bathed in gold, a clutch of musicians, the afternoon sun.

You took my hand and asked me for a dance. In the books, I would bow my head daintily,

a demure and supple bride. I would move closer to you, take your hand, and glide

over the stones, while onlookers mistook us for Italians. I would follow your lead, sway to the music, my dress billowing around my ankles like a sail.

I had not read that far. I talked, instead, and wished immediately for the grace to be silent. I did not know you just then. I did and did not want to be

swept away in a waltz, in Venice, in Piazza San Marco, in broad daylight.

But if I could not give way in Venice, when? That is, at least, how it seems to me now:

like I lost something, or rather, did not take something offered to me whole and boundless

as the light that covered us on that day in early spring in Venice, in Venice.

Poetry Jill Kress Karn

HOLY

My daughter takes communion like a saint, Her eight-year-old reverence is daunting, pure. This first born child whose piety takes shape Against the backdrop of organza gowns. At first I thought her joy was in the dress; Yet when I see her face upon returning, It is as if I’d never given birth. She stands separate, serene, while I am numb— Her holiness, pale shroud, makes me discrete. Sometimes I want her back inside the womb Intoxicated with her mother’s blood. Her face—my lines, my mouth, her father’s eyes: Next time, will I go up all on my own? Yes. I may only stand and watch her go.

UNFINISHED MADONNA

In the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, after a row of marble statues, another pietá— nothing like the famous one whose young Madonna, Michelangelo’s for certain, shines

from marble so lifelike it looks wet with birth— here, there are only beginnings of faces, a rough block of stone, unpolished, forms the entire back of the figures, little detail, though the hands

of the dead man draw you in and the legs— joints so delicate, unbroken, yet almost unhinged. Her hand, imposing, massive, as if she alone could hold this body, her body hardly relevant anymore, only folds

of a garment and a head emerging out of the stone. This is not work I would want to do: she does not cradle so much as buttress, there is too much weight to call it tenderness, even if you know how the story ends,

and who knows what she knew. Unfinished, she droops— if stone can droop—over a dead body, bowed down in grief, gravity pulling her low while she holds him up, no release, that stone from which she emerges not fully emerged, hulking

around her, holding her in while the body of her child dangles thin-legged and spindly as if on strings. She is unmoving— a cavern— she is her own grotto, she is the heaviness of mothering. She takes him in.

The important decisions of life are made musically: through patterns, steps, and forms instilled within the soul. Artful representations of the patterns that have aided individual survival and flourishing throughout time are seen throughout the canon of Western music. While much of modern music is written with an eye towards popular opinion, the music of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras was often commissioned by and written for the tastes and standards of kings, queens, and other nobility. This music, in turn, emerges from the music of the first three quarters of the millennium which was written and composed upon the traditions and standards of the church alone. Early church music venerates and celebrates people and ideas which are types of spiritual nobility, manifesting the glory of restored men and women in Christ. Marian hymnody, for example, a genre of music honoring Mary the mother of Jesus, meditates and ruminates upon the fact that Mary is the ultimate embodiment of the pattern of feminine nobility. She is the archetype. Compelling, comprehensive depictions of this archetype are deeply needed and sorely lacking in our own culture, where we see, paradoxically, both a championing of female power within society and an erosion of gender as a social concept. Christianity should be the clarity in the midst of such confusion, yet the genre of the Marian hymn, as well as any real consensus as to the meaning of femininity, is nearly nonexistent in mainstream American church tradition.

When the feminine figures of our spiritual heritage are underrepresented or dismissed, both men and women fall prey to an inability to embody many of the virtues necessary to a pursuit of Christlikeness. America’s predominantly Protestant religious heritage tends to eschew the idea of Mary as a noble spiritual archetype. Yet for our culture, which recognizes the deficiency of women in roles of high status, leadership, affluence, and power, Mary is a needed iconic type of femininity. She embodies specific virtues which exist in her son Jesus, but which are focused in her more limited personhood. Miltonic scholar Diane McColley notes that Milton and other notable Christian artists recognize a need to champion virtues traditionally seen as feminine, including many of the fruits of the Spirit listed in Galatians 5:22–23, like peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and faithfulness.

Many of the masterful works of music which beautifully depict Mary as an archetype of feminine nobility are undervalued or unknown outside the realm of clas-

sical music. The classical music tradition preserves this genre through performance, recording, and study of the great sacred works. Ave Maria and Stabat Mater are two types of Marian hymns seen throughout many eras of music history, with particularly beautiful settings in the Baroque era. The genre is nearly extinct in mainstream American church tradition, and should be studied and appreciated for both its role as a particularly vital part of the classical music canon and as a genre of art expressing the archetype of feminine nobility. Study and appreciation of Marian hymnody deepens our access to powerful, scriptural, and historically validated patterns of feminine virtue essential and necessary for human flourishing.

Even though the music of our own time and culture is composed for modern tastes, aspects of the Marian archetype are also found in pop music. The chart-topping music of Beyoncé draws much of its greatness from its utilization of some of the formal elements of this archetype in its branding, style, and delivery. Three of her most iconic songs reveal that her music partakes of this type in powerful but dangerously deficient presentations. These deficiencies can be more clearly recognized and understood in comparison with the ordered and sublime depictions of Mary’s nobility embodied in the earlier tradition of Marian hymnody.

Mary as an Archetype of Nobility

The concept of nobility is a complex one, combining ideas of prominence and servitude. Members of a society’s nobility were often born with special titles or from a royal lineage, but genteel, noble character was also expected, and ungentlemanly or unladylike behavior could jeopardize their status. The 1828 edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary contains rich definitions of “noble” with references to the King James Bible and words that depict dimensions both high (elevated, being above everything that can dishonor reputation, exalted, sublime) and vast (great, magnificent, stately, generous, liberal).

George MacDonald’s book The Princess and the Goblin illustrates a poetic understanding of nobility. Princess Irene is a princess in title, but it is clear that she is a true princess because she behaves nobly. Her friend Curdie is a miner but he might also be a prince, because he behaves like one. The goblins of the story were once treated unfairly, but instead of moving to another country they moved underground and sulked. Thus, they became obscenely hideous. Irene ascends many flights of stairs to the very top of the palace and discovers her great-greatgrandmother, who is a queen, and perhaps the most noble character in the kingdom. This introduces a spatial conception of nobility. Good behavior is a lofty noble

thing, hideous distortion can result from sinking into selfpity and resentment, and a miner’s behavior can elevate him to the status of prince.

Mary’s nobility, therefore, stems both from her acceptance of the lofty, blessed role as mother of the King, and also from her lowly servitude and obedience to God. Mary’s life offers a beautiful pattern of response to hardship, oppression, and suffering with acceptance, hope, and service. We are ennobled when we embrace daunting challenges with brave responses. Mary’s many paradoxical traits embody the vast dimensions of nobility. She is both elevated and accessible, of royal (Davidic) descent and a servant, virgin, and mother, chosen and oppressed. Her nobility is distinctly feminine because elements of her elevated status come from her identity as a female. “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” (Luke 1:42). “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!” (Luke 11:27).

Musical settings of Marion hymnody allow us to contemplate and admire the ennobling patterns of Mary’s life. Settings of the “Ave Maria” and “The Magnificat” allow us to observe Mary’s participation in Christ’s incarnation. The “Ave Maria” text portrays the moment “the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art though among women” (Luke 1:28 KJV), in which she responded with willing acceptance and commitment. The future clearly holds uncertainty and suffering, yet she sings a song of hope, and revolution. Notable settings of this song, “The Magnificat,” include those by Dufay and des Pres (fifteenth c.); Tallis and Taverner (sixteenth c.); Byrd, M. Praetorius, Buxtehude, Gibbons, Charpentier, Purcell, and Schutz (seventeenth c.); Vivaldi, Telemann, J.S. Bach, and C.P.E. Bach (eighteenth c.); Salieri, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gounod, Bruckner, and Tchaikovsky (nineteenth c.); and Vaughan Williams, Rachmaninoff, Tavener, Rutter, and Part (twentieth c.). Mary’s life as the mother the Lord is a magnification of God himself. Her devotion and obedience to Him makes her worthy of the high calling she accepted. We find her faithfully present with Christ at the end of His life, suffering and lamenting at the foot of the cross, a scene depicted in the Marian music known as “Stabat Mater.”

Marian hymnody of the early Christian traditions often expresses a conception of Mary as nobility by referring to her as the “Queen of Heaven” (Regina Caeli). Cultures with monarchies often hold the practice that the king’s living mother/grandmothers are also queens, and that their possession of this status does not diminish or threaten the authority of the king. Our own culture is not predicated upon traditions of nobility, and tends to shy away from

this conception, but the metaphorical dethroning of Mary robs us of a female heroine of high spiritual status. Our human need for a noble feminine ideal dictates that if that role is unfulfilled, we will search out other depictions and patterns of this type.

Beyoncé and Pop Culture

The music of our current culture appropriates the Marian archetype in ways which are powerful, attractive, and especially suited to the appetites of its listeners. The culturally relevant personas of femininity crafted by the pop stars of modern music change with the culture’s own misconceptions about gender. Madonna’s distinctive persona of femininity seen in her top hits “Just Like a Prayer,” “Papa Don’t Preach” (about an unwed mother wanting to keep her illegitimate child), and “Like a Virgin” subverts the image of the Virgin Mary. The rock genre is replete with artists renowned for using shocking, distorted blends of femininity in their artistic identities. Iconic male pop-rock is characterized by the sound of a soaring falsetto over a powerful rock accompaniment. Elvis was known for his fast shaking hips, pouty lips, and eyeliner. Mick Jagger and Kurt Cobain wore dresses. It’s difficult to imagine bands like Kiss, Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Twisted Sister without the big hair and makeup.

Likewise, Beyoncé’s pop music carefully crafts a powerful but misguided feminine aesthetic. Her works are culturally attractive, celebrating youth and fertility in morally deficient forms. Her lyrics and music participate in the attractiveness of virginity, without the chastity. “Queen B’s” most popular top-ten hits, including “Halo,” “If I Were a Boy,” and “Single Ladies,” illustrate the duality and transcendence of her image, sexual but unattainable, powerful and African American, democratic and royal, enslaved and revolutionary. As we will see, Marion hymnody utilizes word painting, flexible curving melodies, juxtapositioning of vocal registers, contrasting timbres, and wide range to convey elevation, magnanimity, and the sublime. Beyoncé’s music uses these musical devices as well, and combines the natural allure of the Marian archetype with the common allure of modern femininity. It doesn’t point us toward noble conceptions of femininity; rather it misdirects us to her own branded version of feminine authority, nobility, empathy, persistence, and love.

The music, text, and images in the song “Halo” illustrate Beyoncé’s branded appropriation of the Marian archetype, by emphasizing the broadness and transcendence of her own feminine identity. The song begins with floating block chords and subtle church choir sounds. The first two lines begin with dark vocal timbres in the chest voice, on middle C#4, considered a low C for female

singers. The melody flows downward an entire octave below that, which most women cannot sing (C#3), literally pushing the boundaries of female sexuality. She gradually ascends from the lowest possible notes and darkest timbres into the highest brightest parts of the female range. The next section, “It’s like I’ve been awakened,” jumps up into the middle vocal range (A4) in the octave above where she began, then jumps into head voice on “I can feel your halo, halo . . .” This section ends with a long run beginning on C#4, winding up to a high F#4, back down to the low note on which the piece began, and then back upwards to the middle range, spanning nearly three octaves. Beyoncé wears a variety of outfits in the music video, all of them either black or white. The scenes are filled with hazy light effects and rays of light stretching through the shots, as she is filmed in a tank top while brushing her teeth and flirting with her sweetheart, rehearsing in a leotard at a dance studio, and suspended in water in a flowing gown. We see her as the accessible girlfriend, successful working woman, and transcendent goddess. The three levels of musical timbres and feminine roles, and the juxtapositions of dark and light musical timbres and visual effects effectively spiritualizes and divinizes her own musical and symbolic transcendence from darkness into light. The title of the song “Halo” means a circle of light, and serves as a symbol of a divine crown.

“If I Were a Boy” laments the situation of romantically wronged women, but frames this injustice as the source of their emotional and empathetic superiority. Her dualistic use of vocal range brands her femininity as superior to masculinity. The music video is filmed in black and white, and begins in the low range with Beyoncé at home in a white tank top getting ready for work. She leaves the house in a police uniform. The song transitions to the high range with the text “If I were a boy, I think I could understand how it feels to be a girl. I swear I’d be a better man.” The suffering and victimization of women gives them the strength of empathy. The song exposes the structure which enables the mistreatment of women, but does not offer an alternative. If the empathy which is a product of suffering makes women superior to men, why end the injustice?

In “Single Ladies” Beyoncé assimilates the male sexual power structure but also cultivates an image which seeks to evade it, to play the game and yet be above it. In Beyoncé’s paradigm unattainability is the new virginity. Her sexual encounters do not imply any commitment on her part. She is seeking transcendent love, and a ring to go with it. She is a free agent able to engage in numerous trysts, so “don’t be mad when you see that he want it.” In the video, she is center and slightly in front of two backup dancers, whose choreography and costume are identical to hers, except for Beyoncé’s asymmetrical arms, which serve as symbols of gender. While the backup dancers have sleeveless shoulder

straps, Beyoncé’s right arm serves as a symbol of masculinity, and is entirely bare. Her left arm has a tight black sleeve and a combination of titanium arm-piece glove and bracelet, an allusion to a feminine superpower. The black and white filming accentuates her iconic dark/light aesthetic. Flashes of bright light emanate from her left hand, as the symbol of her femininity. The distinctive Bob Fosse-style choreography with its striking flashes of sharp angular posing, shoulder rolls, and inward knee turns culminates in the dancers flashing the back side of their left hands, waving the prize of their romantic commitment. The choreography of their right arms includes body caressing, rear slapping, and resting on the hip, accentuating the text “a man on my hip.” The accessorizing and infantilization of her next romantic partner do not offer a promising recipe for a successful relationship. She is in the club after the breakup of a three-year relationship. Her resilience is commendable, but belies a contradictory, self-defeating pattern. Women imitate this pattern at their own peril

The cult following of Beyoncé’s music highlights contemporary culture’s need for artistic depictions of feminine nobility, but this music does not sufficiently fulfill this need. The peril of the artistry of Beyoncé, Madonna, or the many male pop-icons in the latter part of the last century is that they salve but do not heal the soulish need for the feminine archetype; they merely appropriate rather than imitate the character and nobility of the handmaid of the Lord. Side effects include soul distortion, systematic oppression, cultures of shame and guilt, and the institutionalization of tyranny. Ironically, while many of them speak liberation and freedom, they engender the same corrupted power structures from which they seek liberation.

In an attempt to be culturally relevant, contemporary music, even when labeled as Christian, often utilizes vocal timbres, rhythms, and other musical devices crafted to express the culture’s current appetites and representations of gender. These imitations of pop art train us to seek the more potent expressions of these appetites and distract listeners from aligning themselves with the higher, more noble principles of their being. Therefore, more comprehensive musical embodiments of this theme are essential to an understanding of virtue, gender, and ultimately of Christ Himself.

Marian Hymnody

The majority of the classical musical tradition, and especially the baroque tradition, preserves and elevates the most masterful works of music. Baroque composers honored and utilized traditional music forms and ideologies which embody patterns of nobility. They firmly believed the Greek philosophy that music composition techniques had great power to affect the emotions and shape character. The settings of Ave Maria and Stabat Mater discussed in

this work are some of the most beautiful musical depictions of Mary’s role of feminine nobility, and they fittingly draw the listener to a state of reverence and awe. Schubert, Gounod, and Sances each composed their settings in ways which highlight Mary’s exalted position, as well her gentleness, purity, goodness, patience, and faithfulness. They include text which references Mary by some of her noble titles. They also express her femininity by emphasizing her role as a mother and the blessing and suffering of this position.

The most famous classical settings of the Ave Maria prayer are those by Schubert and Gounod. These two examples are ideal because by the nature of their baroque structure and musical techniques they express the nobility of this feminine archetype. Both settings are renowned, beautiful masterpieces still frequently programmed and recorded. These beloved works are known for the transcendent experience they give to listeners. Just as one is quieted and cued to the holiness of a grand church, the text and music of these settings draw the listener into the sacred, hallowed theme of the immaculate conception. The great artist Vincent Van Gogh once called architecture “frozen music.” The architecture of these romantic musical compositions can be better understood through their similarities to the magnificent, stately, and splendid architecture of the Baroque period.

Elegant baroque buildings are stately structures with firm foundations and copious ornamentation in the upper part of the building: vaulted and/or painted ceilings, gilded designs, etc. (Image 1). Both of these musical masterpieces begin with the construction of a foundation note beginning the chord in the bass clef, followed by broken ornamental notes fleshing out the harmonies in a higher range. The spacious, intricate structures of these settings convey a sense of gravitas and holiness. The flowing right hand harmonies ornament the bass line. The suspended voice lines of both works soar over top of these structures (Figures 1 and 2). The structures are beautiful, appropriate, and deeply resounding forms for the theme they so eloquently express. On top of the foundational structures of the church soars the transcendent ideal of the incarnation made actual in the womb of a woman.

“Ave Maria,” Schubert

Amidst some of the rigid architectural structures in the

music resides a very romantic expression indicative of a mother rocking a child. This blend conveys both royalty and universal humanity. In the Schubert setting, the harmonies are arpeggiated in rocking sextuplet rhythms (six notes per beat), conveying the image of a mother gently rocking and protecting a child. The music moves in even waves, ascending upward for three notes, then downward for three, over and over. We hear the distinctly romantic technique of setting rocking (triple) rhythms against duple rhythms. The voice line operates within the duple structure, a fitting depiction of mother and child. It gracefully and slowly floats in its own paradigm and meter, its rhythms gently but persistently out of sync with the quick steady pulses of the accompaniment. In both the original setting “Ellens Dritter Gesang,” where a maiden asks the Virgin for comfort and protection, and also in this universally beloved setting which utilizes the Latin Ave Maria prayer, the name Maria is the only word containing a double dotted rhythm, which is a baroque musical technique depicting royalty (Figure 1). We hear two very distinct rhythmical natures coexisting and intricately woven together: the incarnation.

Figure 1. Schubert, “Ave Maria,” mm. 1–4.

“Ave Maria,” Gounod Gounod draws from the baroque tradition as well, pull-

Image 1: Versaille’s Hall of Mirrors, Photo: Myrabella, Wikimedia Commons.

ing directly from Bach’s “Prelude in C Major” from The Well-Tempered Clavier, which stands on its own as a stunning expression of the beauty of perfect intonation. The mathematical precision of the quick arpeggiations couples with the emotionally moving emersion of harmonies. Bach sets the gold standard for harmonic progression. Gounod takes this exquisite structure with its drawn-out revelation of each chord and adds the element of humanity. The Regina Caeli is introduced in a royal processional. He sets the Ave Maria prayer with slow, long rhythms in the voice, suspended over the Bach prelude. The prelude is a fitting coupling for the text, in which the angel greets Mary to announce her role as the most blessed of women, the mother of Christ. This starting point is “a prelude” to the grand drama of the incarnation.

Similar to the Schubert setting, we hear a juxtaposition and synchronization of the two distinct musical natures of the accompaniment and the vocal melody. The sacred text expressing Mary’s exalted role as the mother of Christ is musically expressed with transcendent, upward-floating vocal lines. Conceptions of hierarchy are almost always conceived of in vertical dimensions, and that which is above comprehends and contains that which is beneath. The lower parts provide richness and support the the structure. The fast-flowing arpeggiations beautifully support the serenity, nobility, and gracefulness of the vocal line, which states two words (“Ave Maria”) over sixty-four notes of the piano part. This song sonically expresses that the incarnation is the elevation of humanity. The beauty of having this truth in musical form is that is opens our hearts to the eternal. Christ’s choice to become a servant

deifies us. He lives the rest of his life to show us what we should have been. His resurrection reveals that in our nature as it was meant to be, we are not mortal. Just as he rose in his humanity, so will we. Thousands of years of humanity yearning for the redemption of Christ culminates in this moment, and heaven says to Mary in the words of Gabriel, “Hail!”

Both composers set the text to gentle, stepwise melodies (with few or no leaps). The bright timbre and lofty range of the vocal line engages us deeply and prompts us to consider the text of the prayer with reverence for Christ and his mother. Though many listeners might not pray this prayer themselves, they cannot help but be moved by these settings, which are spiritually resonant because the text is based largely on two phrases from Scripture. In Luke 1, the angel says to Mary, “Peace to you, full of grace, our Lord is with you; you are blessed among women,” and Elizabeth, full of the Holy Spirit, declares, “You are blessed among women and blessed is the fruit that is in your womb” (Aramaic Bible in Plain English). This text is set in many different forms and styles, with textual variations specific to the church traditions in which the music is composed.

The second stanza with its prayer to Mary is specific to the Catholic traditions, and many other settings of the “Ave Maria” include only the first verse, or a different second verse. Other versions are still in use in the various traditions of Eastern Christianity. A famous setting of the prayer in Church Slavonic was composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff in his All-Night Vigil. This masterpiece is another vital part of a classical music education, and merits a place as required listening in Christian education as well. Other notable musical settings in Slavonic include those by Stravinsky, Bortniansky, and Vavilov.

Stabat Mater

A wide variety of music and art known as “Stabat Mater” stems from a medieval Marian hymn contemplating the theme of Mary standing next to the cross, witnessing Christ’s death as a both a mother and a symbol of the

Figure 2. Gounod, “Ave Maria,” mm. 1–8.

church. While the Ave Maria settings highlight the sublimity and elevation of Mary, this setting emphasizes a low point in Mary’s life, as she participates in the suffering of Christ. She is not a victim, and neither is Christ, rather both are willing participants in a sacrifice of suffering which will save the world.

The Sances setting begins with the text “Stabat Mater dolorosa iuxta Crucem lacrijmosa” (The sorrowing Mother stood next to the cross). Sances sets this text in the singer’s lowest range, a vocal register referred to as the chest voice, as seen in Figure 3, measures 1–4. When Sances moves the voice to the middle range on the words “Dum pendebat filius” (while her son hung), seen in measure 5–6, the wide leap and different timbre of the voice produce a striking effect, cueing the listener and drawing them into the drama and emotion of this iconic scene. The juxtaposition of these timbres is a moving sonic representation of the positioning of Mary below her son on the cross. This stark sonic depiction points us to the scriptural motif of Christ lifted up, and therefore able to heal and save us so that we might one day be with Him in heavenly places.

And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of man Who is in heaven. And, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:13–15)

After setting this scene, Sances moves the vocal line into the upper register, or head voice, and bends it upward and downward beginning with the text “O quam tristis” (Oh, how sad). This new striking vocal timbre in the highest vocal range draws us into the flowing sorrow of Mary’s grief (Figure 4)

Pietro Perugino, “The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John, Saint Jerome, and Saint Mary Magdalene” [middle panel], c. 1482/1485, oil on panel transferred to canvas, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, National Galley of Art.

Figure 3. Sances, “Stabat Mater,” mm. 1–7.

Figure 4. Sances, “Stabat Mater,” mm. 12–17.

We are drawn into Mary’s grief to participate in it be moved by it, and by the end of the work, to turn our eyes toward the paradise offered to us. We will one day participate in death, as Christ did. The song concludes with the text “Quando corpus morietur, fac ut animæ donetur Paradisi gloriae. Amen” (When my body dies, may my soul be given the glory of paradise! Amen). Sances composes vocal lines moving downward into the chest voice for the text which means “When my body dies” and “may my soul be given,” depicting the laying down of our bodies and the bestowing of a gift (Figure 5, mm. 174–177). The vocal line then soars up into the head voice for the repeated text “Paradisi” (mm. 177–181).

Giovanni Felice Sances set this twelfth-century poem in in 1670. His masterful blend of text setting, word painting, and expressive melodies emotionally engages us and allows us to grieve with Mary over the suffering of a most beloved one. Such powerful music and poetry stimulates our sympathetic nervous system to imaginatively engage and participate in Mary’s role as caregiver of Jesus.

These two texts and their various settings allows us to participate in the bonds of love, as well and the depth of concern and shared grief known by His mother. Virgin Mary was a human chosen for honor by God because of her obedience. Out of her submissive humility Mary was exalted by God to a place of spiritual nobility. The Ave Maria settings emphasize the bright ethereal timbres of the head voice, expressing Mary’s exalted spiritual status, and the Stabat Mater setting use the low register to depict the scene of Mary mourning below her suffering son.

We are designed to be physically affected by experiences like this. The act of attending to the sufferings of another releases the stress hormone oxytocin and activates the amygdala region of the brain to become sensitive, alert, attuned to the feelings of another, and able to share in their sufferings. When we hear and imagine Mary rocking the Christ Child or participating in His travails, if the aesthetic experience is affective enough it facilitates our own bonding with Christ, and alerts us and renders us sensitive to His sufferings.

Other masterful musical settings of the Stabat Mater include those by Josquin des Prez, Pergolesi, Palestrina, two of the Scarlattis (Domenico and Alessandro), Vivaldi, Rossini, Haydn, Dvořák, Poulenc, and Arvo Pärt. They all appropriately composed for the full, free, resonant vocal production of classical singing. The moving experiences of listening to them speak for themselves. They are clear examples of how musical settings of texts about Mary can be edifying and can lead our souls to magnify the Lord along with her, and appreciate her distinctive story and example. The ordered harmonic construction presents a beautiful type which hints to our souls that the low and base circumstances of our lives can serve as foundations out of which the Lord can be glorified and exalted.

Conclusion

Motherhood and femininity are essential to the physical, psychological, and spiritual survival of our species; therefore, their presentation and embodiments in art and culture are of critical importance—and are trifled with at our peril. We are not inherently born with an appetite for the best music, rather our love for it grows with virtue, knowledge, and training. Marian artworks embody patterns of feminine virtue essential to the spiritual growth and development of both males and females. The temptation to dismiss this genre and other traditional musical expressions of spiritual nobility may seemingly stem from intentions to preserve the centrality of Christ or to be relevant to the culture. However, the jettisoning of these vital musical conceptions leaves us vulnerable to the siren call of popular culture—a call which offers us nothing but shipwreck and no way home.

Careful music training with compelling masterpieces founded on comprehensive archetypes is vital to spiritual health, to the education and training of children, and to the discipleship of adults—all of which depend upon the humane patterns found within the archetypes of myth, great art, and the Bible. Beautiful music which ennobles human virtue imparts a wisdom that we could not achieve in our own lifetime and refines our taste for what is inherently good. A return to this music is, as the ancient church would see it, a return to the health of the soul.

Dr. Laura Councell has served on the faculty at Greensboro College, Averett University, Houston Baptist University, The Connection School of Houston, and the University of South Carolina at Beaufort, teaching voice; vocal pedagogy; introduction to music; Italian, English, German and French Diction; French; Spanish; and French for singers. She has directed the HBU Opera program and currently co-directs the Classical Arts Abroad program with her husband.

Figure 5. Sances, “Stabat Mater,” mm. 174–181

NEW COLLEGE FRANKLIN

At a Glance | NCF is a four-year Christian Liberal Arts college dedicated to excellent academics in the classical tradition and discipling relationships among students and faculty—to shape not only what our students will do in the future but who they will be.

Spiritual Formation | We seek to enrich and disciple students intellectually and spiritually; to guide them to wisdom and a life of service to God, neighbors, and creation; to respond to learning with awe, gratitude, and worship.

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

“As the classical renewal has matured and become increasingly familiar with its own rich heritage, more and more people are discovering the value and power in the liberating arts as understood in that heritage. I know of no college that pursues the wisdom of those arts, especially as embodied in the quadrivium, with the intensity and insight of New College Franklin. If you want a deeper harmony and a higher wisdom, consider NCF!”

- Andrew Kern, President of CiRCE

www.newcollegefranklin.org

What should we aim for as educators? Should we want our students to gain knowledge of the disciplines they study, for example? Or should we hope they acquire transferrable skills they can use throughout their professional lives? An increasingly popular answer is that we ought to help our students grow in intellectual virtue. But what are intellectual virtues? And how might we go about educating for them?

Intellectual virtues in this context are traits of character that make a person better as a thinker, learner, or teacher. They are admirable tendencies that make a person a better participant in the work of inquiry, whether they are doing this work alone or in cooperation with others. Examples of such intellectual virtues include inquisitiveness, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, intellectual courage and cautiousness, interpretive charity, intellectual empathy, intellectual generosity, and communicative clarity.

There traits share two key features in common that account for their status as intellectual virtues. First, each of the intellectual virtues involves a motivation to gain knowledge or understanding for the person who has the virtue, or else it involves a motivation to contribute toward others’ gaining knowledge or understanding. Each intellectual virtue, in other words, involves an attraction of a person’s will toward intellectual achievements. The intellectually virtuous person values gaining these achievements for themselves or promoting them for others. Second, each intellectual virtue involves a tendency to apply distinctive skills toward achieving these goals. For example, open-mindedness characteristically involves a tendency to carefully and fairly consider alternative perspectives on topics one is investigating. Interpretive charity characteristically involves a tendency to seek out ways of interpreting others that reflect well on their ideas. Communicative clarity involves a tendency to resolve or eliminate ambiguities in one’s communications so that others can better understand one’s meaning. In this way, each intellectual virtue involves a tendency to apply distinctive skills across a variety of situations in order to advance intellectual goals for oneself or for others. Intellectual virtues, so understood, have much to contribute to our lives. They enrich our personal lives

because they play important roles in our personal relationships. They help us understand and communicate well with our loved ones. They enrich our professional lives, allowing us to think outside the box, interpret others well, and communicate complex ideas to others effectively. Intellectual virtues are also vital for civic life. In order to make good political decisions ourselves and to help those under our influence to do so, we need to cultivate qualities of character that help us and others gain understanding of important issues regarding our common good.

It is clear enough how teaching for intellectual virtue adds value to an education. After all, it’s one thing for a person to have knowledge or skills and another thing for them to tend to use the knowledge and skills they have well. Likewise, it’s one thing for a person to have an accumulated body of knowledge and skills and another for them to be the kind of person who tends to continually add to the knowledge and skills they have accumulated. In each of these cases, intellectual virtues are the traits that push us beyond mere knowledge and skill accumulation. They both govern how we use the knowledge and skills we have, and they orient us toward increasing the knowledge and skills we have. When we’ve educated students for intellectual virtue, we have helped to sculpt who they are as inquirers.

It is important to stress that intellectual virtues do not come to us automatically. We aren’t born with them. We might have an inborn desire of some sort to gain understanding, and we might have some natural aptitude for seeking the truth, but these natural desires and aptitudes need to be molded and refined. We need practice. We need sharpening. Without it, we risk succumbing to equally natural tendencies toward intellectual laziness and various widespread bad habits of inquiry that contemporary psychologists have helped us appreciate. This is why educating for intellectual virtue is more than a cherry on top of the educational pie. It’s a key ingredient without which education may fail to be education at all.

If educating for intellectual virtue is in this way central to the educational task, the next question will be: How can we do it? How can we educate for intellectual virtue? To adequately address this question, we need to consider not just teaching techniques, but also appropriate settings for intellectual virtue education and specific

resources that can assist educators in educating for intellectual virtue.

Start with teaching techniques. While there is a lot still for us to learn about how to effectively teach for intellectual virtue, a consensus has emerged among scholars around the promise of five broad and complementary strategies.

The first is direct instruction. Here the aim is to name and explain a particular intellectual virtue that you hope students will cultivate. The explanation should involve a verbal definition or account of what the virtue involves, and it might also include contrasting the virtue with intellectual vices that oppose it. Part of the reason why direct instruction is important is that it helps to reduce students’ cognitive load. It gives them a common vocabulary with which to understand and think through their intellectual life. It also helps them to set the target for what they are aiming for as they pursue growth in intellectual virtue.

The next strategy is illustration. Here the aim is to show what the intellectual virtues—and perhaps also their opposing vices—look like in action. In attempting this, you might select some historical or fictional examples of people who appear to act in accordance with a virtue or its opposing vices. Those who seem to be paragons of the virtue are referred to as exemplars. By exposing students to exemplars, you give them a taste for the virtue and someone to attempt to emulate.

A third strategy overlaps with the previous, but involves students more in interpreting the examples. Here you provide students with brief descriptions of individuals engaging in behavior that is reasonably interpreted as characteristic of the virtue you have selected or its opposing vices. You ask the students to identify which descriptions involve action characteristic of the virtue and which involve action characteristic of its opposing vices, and why they think this. This exercise helps the students to practice evaluating scenarios in which intellectual virtues can influence behavior in light of the knowledge they have gained about the nature and characteristic activities of these virtues.

When done well, it can also help them to appreciate the variety of contexts in which intellectual virtues can make a difference and the different kinds of behavior they may lead a person to engage in.

A fourth strategy is the use of practice exercises in which students attempt to display the kinds of behaviors characteristic of the target virtue. There are many different kinds of assignments that can be given for this purpose, and they can range from very short, in-class assignments to larger projects in which students might practice the characteristic activities of a virtue several times over the course of an extended period. What is most important is that the students engage in activities that involve the application of skills distinctive to the virtue in question. It can help if students’ work on these projects is somewhat self-directed, however big or small the project is. This self-directedness helps to prevent the students from engaging in the required activities out of poor motives, such as merely pleasing their teacher.

A final strategy is virtue-based feedback. Whether it is through in-class comments or comments made on graded work or in counseling sessions with students, it is important to discuss ways you have seen them practicing the virtues you want to teach, as well as areas where they might be able to improve. It is debatable whether assigning students grades for their progress in intellectual virtue is a good idea, but feedback can be given independently of grades. Students can also engage in self-evaluations. They can reflect on their own practice of target virtues. They can even take self-assessments in a pre-post fashion—for example, at the beginning and end of a quarter or semester.

Consider now the setting for intellectual virtues education. Intellectual virtues education can take place in a variety of different settings. Some schools may want to offer individual classes with a substantial focus on intellectual virtues. The rare exception would be a stand-alone class in intellectual virtues. More likely would be a class on logic or critical thinking which incorporated a significant focus

intellectual virtues do not come to us automatically. We aren’t born with them. We might have an inborn desire of some sort to gain understanding, and we might have some natural aptitude for seeking the truth, but these natural desires and aptitudes need to be molded and refined. We need practice. We need sharpening.

on intellectual virtue. Incorporating a focus on intellectual virtues in such classes makes good sense because these classes often have as their other main focus developing a limited set of intellectual skills. By incorporating a focus on intellectual virtues as well, students are taught to develop both a broader range of intellectual skills and tendencies to apply these skills well when inquiring.

Yet, classes such as these with a very sizable focus on intellectual virtues are not very common. So, intellectual virtues education is more likely to take place within existing classes with different focuses. Thankfully, this is not a problem. Intellectual virtues education can be incorporated into teaching just about any academic subject. After all, studying academic subjects is a paradigmatic case in which intellectual virtues have application. Whether it is literary interpretation or composition or history or science or math, students will be better off in their study if they are applying intellectual virtues to it.

Nor does adding some teaching about intellectual virtues in these classes require taking away very much of their main content. A teacher might, for example, aim to introduce two or three intellectual virtues to students over the course of a semester, taking ten or twenty minutes to teach about each one, and perhaps providing some readings about each that students can complete outside of class, along with relevant exercises. Teachers are often under tremendous pressure to cover content in their class time—and this should be acknowledged. Yet, even a few hours of teaching and learning about intellectual virtues over the course of a semester could be quite valuable, and it will be doable for many instructors. And even more importantly, a teacher’s heart may be in this as much as it is in any other teaching they engage in. Teachers are often highly motivated precisely to help their students develop in intellectual virtue, even if they haven’t thought of their work in these terms. The fact that they are motivated in this way is reflective of their own intellectual virtue.

Of course, ideally individual instructors will not be left on their own to teach for intellectual virtue in isolation. It is best if there is buy-in throughout the school and a whole-school approach to educating for intellectual virtues. Such an approach has proven popular for character education more broadly, and it is natural to imitate it for intellectual virtues education. Schools can, for example, adopt several signature intellectual virtues that are their focus. They might hold assemblies devoted to intellectual virtues. They can encourage intellectual virtue in extracurricular activities as well. In this way, students are encouraged to see intellectual virtues as having a broad application to all aspects of their lives.

Turn finally to resources. Until recently, there has been little in the way of student-friendly books designed for

intellectual virtues education. But this is an area of con tinual change. Three recent books deserve brief mention.

First is Jason Baehr’s book Cultivating Good Minds. This book is downloadable from IntellectualVirtues.org for free or for a donation. The heart of the book surveys nine different intellectual virtues. While Baehr writes mainly for instructors, these chapters are accessible for a high school audience. The book contains additional resources about how to teach for intellectual virtue that instructors will find useful as well.

A second book is Phil Dow’s Virtuous Minds (InterVar sity, 2013). It too is written primarily for instructors, but contains short chapters on seven intellectual virtues that would benefit a high school audience. The book is written mainly for a Christian audience, but it has appeal beyond this sector.

Also written primarily for a Christian audience is my own book, Introducing Logic and Critical Thinking: The Skills of Reasoning and the Virtues of Inquiry (Baker, 2017). The book is designed for instructors who wish to incorpo rate a focus on intellectual virtues in their logic or critical thinking classes. While it is designed with an introductory undergraduate audience in mind, it has been used to good effect in high school logic and critical thinking classes as well. One distinctive feature of the book is that it includes a focus on intellectual virtues that help a person when they are depending upon others and when others are de pending upon them, and not only when they are engaged in inquiry on their own accord.

These texts are notable because of their relatively low cost, breadth of coverage of the virtues, and accessibility to students. Yet, some schools may want to develop their own materials rather than using an existing text—and this may be a perfectly legitimate option. One thing that should be kept in mind whether schools use an established text or go their own way is that there is a scholarly community with keen interest in the project of intellectual virtues education. The community of educators who want to teach for intellectual virtue and this scholarly community have much to learn from each other. My own hope is that there might be productive partnerships between these communities in the future. Together we might come to better understand how best to educate for intellectual virtue, and we might just do it.

Dr. T. Ryan Byerly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He is author of Introducing Logic and Critical Thinking: The Skills of Reasoning and the Virtues of Inquiry (Baker: 2017) and the forthcoming book Intellectual Dependability: A Virtue Theory of the Epistemic and Educational Ideal (Routledge Press).

Access professional development videos, annual and daily literature lesson planners, and over 200 K-12 assignment templates geared toward developing the core skills of good reading and writing, no matter the book list. Unlike the sterile “worksheet” or “workbook” approach, these assignments work with the teacher to train students to engage thoughtfully with the text. It’s a Teaching the Classics literary education, now designed for classical day schools.

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The power of literature, without the busy work.

Pleasant taste sweetens harsh medicine. Likewise, wrapping bitter truth in sweet words may ease its reception. However, the principle can be abused. One may cover a lie with pleasant words or mix it with truth. Truth then becomes a means for concealing, a coating which allows error to be digested. Therefore, because reality may be covered by the appearance of things, it is necessary to distinguish truth from falsehood. We are especially prone to deceit when it comes to our self-knowledge, when we hide our ugliness with virtue. We pattern ourselves after other models and images in hope that we will become beautiful like them. However, flawed imitations only increase our blindness as we lose the ability to see the truth about ourselves. This danger of self-deception and mimetic destruction is nowhere more evident than in “the Scottish play.”

Mask

Shakespeare fills Macbeth with misdirection and disguised intention. Nothing is as it seems: The first scene confounds fair and foul. Duncan cannot recognize a bloody soldier or either of his traitorous thanes. Macbeth and Banquo comment on the confused nature of the day, and the witches themselves are covered by beards. Although Duncan praises the fair appearance of Inverness, Macbeth obscures his intentions by “appear[ing] the flower, / yet [being] the serpent under it,” and his wife gilds the faces of the murdered grooms with bloody guilt so that Duncan’s court cannot identify his murderer. Duncan states the play’s problem clearly in the beginning: “there is no art / to see the mind’s construction in the face.” A man may present an outward appearance, but his inner life remains hidden.

In addition to outward appearances, words also hide reality. Despite Banquo’s warning that “the instruments of darkness . . . / win us with honest trifles to betray’s / in deepest consequence,” Macbeth consistently remains blind to the witches’ equivocations. Every word uttered has a double meaning that he cannot untangle. As drink equivocates—it promises overmuch, yet does not provide the performance— like strong liquor, the witches’ words fill Macbeth with desire, but not power. Macbeth seizes on the slightest

hint because he has been intoxicated by ambition and made impotent. He regards the prophecies of doom as talismans of protection.

Modern man also hides himself with words. Using transparency to achieve status or goodwill is just another mask. Oversharing is another form of pretending. Plato well understood the temptation of preferring to be thought of as just rather than to be just. A student might receive the respect of his teacher by speaking thoughtfully and kindly in class, while cursing the man behind his back. Another might adopt technical jargon to appear intelligent. Such speech does not accurately reveal the heart, so much as conceal it.

Masks hide. Because human beings are afraid of being discovered, they invent coverings for themselves. The most insecure post most prolifically on Facebook. They carefully curate social media profiles to present only the highlights of life. A man may choose certain clothing to appear a specific kind of person: I’m a Chiefs fan, I wear Banana Republic, I’m professional. These decisions are driven by who we think we are and whom we wish to appear. Every advertisement is selling not only a product, but an identity.

Once adopted, a mask cannot be easily discarded. After becoming king, even Macbeth must still pretend to be good. When he tries to destroy Fleance and Banquo, he cannot do so openly. “Security is mortal’s chiefest enemy,” and, childless and friendless, Macbeth fears his “fruitless crown” and “barren sceptre.” Because he has no heir, a mask is necessary to preserve his power and agency. If he were secure, he would have no need for assassins to disguise his will. As long as his position remains precarious, he must continue to “make his face vizard to his heart, disguising what it is.”

At times, we do well to cover our ugliness: it is better to withhold bitter murmurings and complaints. Many first poems are terrible, but that shouldn’t be our first comment to a twelve-year-old aspiring poet. Yet consistent pretending also brings danger. If people wear masks for too long, they may start believing that they are the image they present to the outside world. Repeating a lie within the recesses of the heart carves the words indelibly upon the soul. The mask melds to the face until there is no longer a distinction between actor and persona. The mask not only fools others; it

fools us.

Macbeth’s self-deception grows as he latches on to the witches’ words without restraint. He receives their first blessings and is overjoyed when they come true. Does he not remember the prophecy given to Banquo? Macbeth is blind to believe that murdering Duncan would be enough. Even drowning in blood, Macbeth still foolishly believes it better to continue his desperate plans than to repent. His greatest folly is hoping that murdering Duncan’s heir or Banquo’s son or Macduff’s children could ever grant him progeny and security. Even when the witches’ equivocations become clear, he still cannot see his doom.

Masks rob us of the ability to see clearly because they prevent us from knowing ourselves. Devoid of self-perception, we believe our vices to be virtues because we do not know our own ugliness. We are cruel and call it rigorous discipline. We manipulate or devour others and call it love. In the name of honesty, we brutally slander and gossip. Masks also rob us of the ability to see others, for if we do not know ourselves, we cannot know others. We project our own insecurities and think they are guilty of the crimes we hide. Our reflection seen in their face causes us to recoil.

Mirror

Many characters in Macbeth receive their motives and desires by imitation. Macbeth takes on the borrowed robes of Cawdor and immediately continues Cawdor’s treason. Banquo prompts the witches to speak because he heard Macbeth’s fortune. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth become indistinguishable doubles as they feed on the other’s ambition and cruelty. They not only finish sentences; they complete each other’s murders. By the end of the play, Fleance, Malcolm, and Macduff have been made doubles of Macbeth—fatherless, childless, wifeless.

Beholding an object conforms a man to its image and likeness. By “choosing love by another’s eyes,” an individual gains his desires from another, borrowed second-hand from the admired. Husband and wife, by their proximity, find their tastes drawing nearer to the other’s. I have purchased countless books just because someone talked about them. I have liked movies simply because I heard my friends enjoyed them. Every man inevitably becomes his own father as he repeats the same maxims, adopts the same mannerisms, and disciplines in the same way. We become like what we behold.

As goes the king, so goes the kingdom. The night of the murder is filled with unnatural and violent happenings. The bonds of loyalty are broken and the bounds of nature are erased. Macduff calls upon the dead to come from their tombs. An unnatural darkness covers the day, an owl kills the falcon, and Duncan’s horses eat each oth-

er. The disorder in Macbeth’s soul is reflected in the disorder of the kingdom. Macbeth is remaking the world in his own image. Henceforth Banquo and Macbeth cannot speak honestly to each other, and Malcolm pretends to be a rapacious tyrant. Without a noble king in the land, every man does what is right in Macbeth’s eyes: deceive, betray, and kill.

Because of the power of imitation, when a leader is evil, the entire community degrades. A society is only as noble as its common objects of love, often represented by its rulers. When the model is good, a city is healthy, but when evil, it devolves into a vicious cycle of envy and self-destruction. This can be slowed by leaders assuming a virtue they do not have, but unfortunately, the self-destruction of a culture cannot be halted by pretense.

Macbeth’s ambition increasingly separates him from community as the kingdom devolves into chaos, distrust, and betrayal. Imitation of a distorted image generates isolation and conflict. He murders his king, his friend, his thanes, and has no intention of stopping there. Macbeth is ignorant of Banquo and Macduff’s true intentions. He begins to hide his plans from Lady Macbeth, and finally, she murders herself. It is fitting: the man who robbed Malcolm of father, orphaned Fleance, and bereaved Macduff of wife and child should lose his wife—and his hope for descendants. The kingdom groans “with curses not loud but deep” as he sits in his fortress, denied even the honor of old age.

When the king refuses to know himself and engages in mask-making, no one else can reveal themselves. Virtue accommodates to the dark setting wherein it finds itself and dims its glory to prevent from shining with resplendence. Every true glimpse of goodness is a threatening dagger. In nations with cruel and wicked regimes, even relationships among family members break down for there is no trust; anyone could be a spy. Thus, what is good appears to be evil.

Macbeth’s pursuit ultimately fails because his ambition cannot grant him true likeness to his object. Macbeth doesn’t just want Banquo dead; he wants to be Banquo and possess his security. Once king, he finds that he still envies Duncan’s restful place while he is forbidden sleep. When Fleance survives, Macbeth despairs of hope, yet ironically exclaims, “Banquo is safe!” The central conflict of the play surrounds Macbeth’s quest for permanence, but he can only destroy; he is impotent to create life. “He has no children!” Macduff curses. The former king’s robes hang loose about Macbeth’s dwarfish figure while he hopes to be Duncan. Rather than accomplishing his desires, Macbeth’s “bloody instruction returns to plague the inventor.”

Because sin is always an imitation of good, it cannot

create its own being. It can only corrupt existence. Like a filthy mirror, something is always lost in vice’s grimy reflection of virtue. Thus, the mere outward aping of good isn’t enough to bring happiness. One may buy all the books in the world, yet never receive scholarly recognition; one could dedicate himself to football, yet never win a Super Bowl; one could court a myriad of suitors, yet never receive genuine affection. Failed imitation exaggerates the characteristics of our model to idolatrous proportions. Without a unified portrait of goodness, we chase fractured shards of happiness, experiencing the curse of hell: to ever live in desire, yet without hope.

Barefaced

The dark world of Macbeth lacks a noble image to pull it from destruction. Without a kingly type, the characters cover and deceive themselves because they fear being found out. Since Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden, we have abandoned hope of being known and loved. Like our first parents, we cover ourselves so that we will be attractive enough to be welcomed. This is the basis for curating social media profiles and online presence, massaging résumés and only dispensing vetted information. However, this outer presentation prevents us from knowing our true selves.

Self-deceit dims our vision as we veil our ugly souls in fear of the truth. Beauty repulses us and goodness cannot reveal itself to us unsheathed. We wear a covering to protect our eyes from blinding holiness. Retreating from grace we resent all that is good because our lies have distorted our perception of reality. We will not see clearly until we are unmasked. We will not gaze on glory until barefaced—“till we have faces,” in the words of C.S. Lewis. Shakespeare, through the mouth of Hamlet, exposes the power of mimesis to shine through our masks:

The purpose of playing, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as t’were, a mirror up to nature.

To show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

Stories and types have the power to reveal our true natures. We may be horrified at the character in a fable, only to recognize our reflection and amend our behavior. Likewise, an ideal type may guide us in our escape from the cycle of envy, imitation, and self-deception.

Jesus Christ provides a perfect model of imitation that shines through our mask. The radiance of His image puts to flight our blindness and its voice shatters our deafness. He unveils and remakes us, becoming our covering as we wear His righteousness as a robe instead of our tattered rags. It is this divine unmasking that allows us to see ourselves—we can be known and loved. He allows us to know ourselves by showing our true telos. He covers us with His kingly robes, and His overwhelming beauty compels us to be like Him.

Our world is a battleground of images. Just as Adam rejected God’s image and sought to remake the world in his own, we seek to refashion the world into our likeness rather than be shaped into the likeness of another. Macbeth’s bloody cycle of deceit and imitation cannot end because of the insufficiency of its king. Christians have a better mirror. When questioned about the taxes owed to Caesar, Jesus responded, “Whose image is this?” Caesar could legitimately claim ownership over what was stamped with his image, but Jesus was ascribing the same test of ownership to God. What God has marked with His likeness belongs to Him. Thus Jesus meant His hearers to ask themselves, “Whose image are we?”

Austin Hoffman is the Assistant Headmaster at Charis Classical Academy in Madison, Wisconsin, where he also teaches humanities and Latin. He leads worship at First Baptist Church of Watertown.

A society is only as noble as its common objects of love, often represented by its rulers. When the model is good, a city is healthy, but when evil, it devolves into a vicious cycle of envy and self-destruction.

is probably safe to assume that every classical Christian school in the country sees itself as the rival of some better funded, more liberal Christian school across town. Let us call this school St. Adam’s Preparatory. The students at your school have many stories about St. Adam’s Prep and they always tell these stories with a spirit of envy, loathing, and disbelief. To begin with, St. Adam’s Prep has a GSA Club and a climate change elective. Their basketball players use the f-word during games, but so does their coach. They have a prom where a DJ plays trap music in front of everybody— the same trap music, in fact, that some kid at your school played on his phone in the locker room last semester and for which he was subsequently suspended for two days. The uniform skirts are always shorter at St. Adam’s Prep. The senior class goes to Miami Beach for spring break at St. Adam’s Prep. The religion teacher said Genesis was probably just an allegory at St. Adam’s Prep.

What is not often mentioned about St. Adam’s Prep, though, is that it is has been around far longer than your school. Of course, being older than your school isn’t all that difficult—your school is only fourteen years old, just like most classical Christian schools presently in operation—but the age of St. Adam’s Prep intrigues you. Has it always been this tawdry? Has it always been so gutlessly obedient to the spirit of the age?

When you ask several older faculty members at your school about St. Adam’s. They tell you it was founded in the 1940s and that it used to be a very fine school. If the founders of St. Adam’s could have seen the sophomore girls dressed like Kardashians, dancing to “Bodak Yellow” at the Spring Gala while the headmaster looked on nodding his head, they would have bulldozed the school and salted the ground ages ago. And yet, you know that such falls from grace do not occur overnight. Any school which does not vigilantly, diligently, constantly assert an unflinching loyalty to tradition will naturally slouch towards progressivism.

St. Adam’s Prep made compromises for all the predictable reasons, like boosting enrollment or appeasing wealthy donors who sent their arrogant, moronic sons and daughters to the school. St. Adam’s went hard for state money just once, then just once more, then they stripped every vestige of creationism from their science program so they could buy microscopes. “If we don’t do this,” the St. Adam’s headmaster said, back in 1983, “we’re not going to beat an 80 percent retention rate over the next two years. We would have to close.”

After a few lean years, St. Adam’s hired a new headmaster in 1987 and their fortunes revived. The school’s

formal relationship with a local Catholic Church was officially severed, chapel was cancelled, and the statement of faith was made optional. Consequently, enrollment boomed. A local businessman offered to build a new gymnasium for the school if they were willing to remove the cross from their foyer; a few of the St. Adam’s board members quit in protest, but the gym was built. The basketball team won state just two years after the gymnasium was built.

You have been thinking of St. Adam’s Prep quite often lately because of a curious convergence of two separate events in your life as a teacher: first, the latest round of senior theses are about to be presented in front of the entire secondary; and second, because you have just become aware of Elias the Hermit—not the historical Elias the Hermit, mind you, who was a late antique Egyptian ascetic who lived in a cave—but Elias the Hermit Classical, a new and rather small school which has lately opened in the basement of a Baptist church across town.

Senior theses have brought St. Adam’s Prep to mind because the presentation of senior theses is the most political event in the annual life of any classical school— they are even more political than board meetings where there is shouting and cursing and threats to walk out. As always happens when senior theses roll around, some boy named Zeke (who should have been kicked out in eighth grade) is about to give his thesis presentation on skateboarding, and no one is quite sure how or why no one put the kibosh on this project months ago.

The fact that Zeke is about to graduate betrays the fact your school has a terrible problem with grade inflation, because everyone knows Zeke can barely spell. There is a rumor going around the break room that Zeke’s thesis advisor is being blamed for his bad thesis and that his thesis advisor is basically rewriting Zeke’s entire thesis before it is presented publicly. However, this round of senior theses has produced a problem far more exquisite than Zeke’s, for another student named Deborah has written a thesis which the administration has deemed “too Catholic.”

Deborah’s thesis is about “treasure in heaven,” but it could have been about sacraments, liturgy, St. Francis, charity, the death penalty, or six dozen other issues. If Deborah were a Catholic, her thesis would not actually be all that problematic, but Deborah is Presbyterian, and thus the situation has become political. Despite the fact Deborah has spent six months researching the expression “treasure in heaven”—her paper presents juicy quotes about the matter from Augustine and Aquinas and John Calvin and Karl Barth, and she is more or less just synthesizing what all these great theologians say about the matter—someone on the administrative

team of the school has made the claim her paper “does not comport with what the school statement of faith says about salvation by grace alone.” There is presently discussion about whether Deborah will be allowed to present her thesis at all, or whether she will need to rewrite it and submit it to the school theology teacher for approval, even though there is absolutely no precedent for such a decision.

For her part, Deborah is quite confused, because she knows “liturgy” has become a fashionable topic over the last twenty years, and in her own mind, her paper on “treasure in heaven” drafted on the fresh excitement over “liturgy,” even though she has had some trouble explaining the connection to her parents or the concerned administrator. While you were not Deborah’s thesis advisor, she spoke with you several times during her research, and it was you who directed her to passages from Calvin about the matter, and now it appears you may have to answer to the administrator for whatever you said to Deborah in these meetings.

The whole situation with Deborah is quite off-putting, though, because you understand the position of the administration on the matter. You know that your school is heavily stocked with families that would be quite upset if the administration took a soft approach to distinctly Catholic doctrines. You are not an idealist, but a realist, and at the end of the day, you know your school has to keep the lights on and keep the peace. Keeping the peace often means compromise.

At the same time, Zeke and Deborah’s theses are not the only matters which have you thinking of St. Adam’s Prep lately.

You became aware of Elias the Hermit Classical when a student mentioned it in class one day. The student in question said a new classical school had opened in town, that the school was small and cheap and had no basketball team, and that it must really suck to go to a school that met in a basement and had no basketball team. Another student mentions that some kid who used to go to your school now attends Elias the Hermit Classical, but there is debate about whether this kid’s name is Toby or Moby and everyone laughs. “He dropped out in seventh grade so his mom could homeschool him,” someone says. “Now he goes to basement school.” Even you laugh at this. Apparently, a monk teaches theology and English at Elias the Hermit Classical, Toby’s mom teaches biology, tuition is $2000 a year, and only thirty-two students are enrolled. The subject of Elias the Hermit Classical passes and you forget about it for a day.

Until, that is, you see a man who looks quite a bit like a monk sitting in a coffee shop grading a stack of handwritten essays. You sit in the corner of the coffee shop

reading Drudge on your phone and stealing glances at the monk. You believe he is a monk because he is wearing a cassock, because he intimidates you, and because he does not have a white collar, as a priest would have. After some time, you gin up a little courage and walk over to the monk and ask him, “You don’t happen to teach at Elias the Hermit, do you?”

The monk looks up, sets down his pen, and says, “Yes, I do.” You introduce yourself and say, “I’m a history teacher at The Carpe Diem Academy,” and when you say this, the monk gives you a funny little smile which you immediately interpret as a sign he does not take you seriously. Though you shill for tradition (being Anglican and all), you have never met a monk before, and you are taken back when the monk does not introduce himself as “Sabbas” or “Brother Lucretio” or “Abba Matins,” but tells you his name is “Steve.” You wonder if his street name is actually “Brother Lucretio” but he has told you his name is “Steve” because he thinks you don’t know about street names. Obviously, he does not take you seriously.

You tell him that you’ve heard of Elias the Hermit Classical and that you are glad that “another real classical school has opened in this town,” but he responds to this claim by asking, “What do you mean?” You tell him that too many of the Christian schools have gone the way of St. Adam’s Prep, then you describe for him some of the outrageous things you’ve heard about prom and spring break.

STEVE: Do you see Carpe Diem as being very different from St. Adam’s?

YOU: Yes, why?

STEVE: Don’t you have a prom, as well?

YOU: It’s not exactly a prom. It’s more of a formal dance.

STEVE: Where everyone waltzes to “The Blue Danube”?

YOU: Well, we waltz, but it’s often to Lady Antebellum songs and that sort of thing.

STEVE: I don’t really see the difference. Sounds like a prom.

YOU: There are no waltzes at prom.

STEVE: There are no Lady Antebellum songs at a real waltz.

YOU: We’ve got to keep the kids interested.

STEVE: Sure.

YOU: What do you teach?

STEVE: Everything except biology and algebra.

YOU: What’s your theology curriculum like?

STEVE: Augustine. Plotinus. Chrysostom. Leo the Great. The Cloud of Unknowing. David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite.

YOU: What grade is reading The Beauty of the Infinite?

STEVE: We don’t have grade levels. Grave levels are a progressive corruption of education, much like standardized tests, reports cards, fire drills, proms, and so forth.

YOU: Geez, even I had a hard time understanding The Beauty of the Infinite.

STEVE: It’s much easier to understand after you’ve read Plotinus. What’s your theology curriculum like?

YOU: You know, there’s some Augustine. There’s some Karl Barth. We also do some of the better theology books written in recent years, the kind of books I think will stand the test of time.

STEVE: Like Girl, Wash Your Face? That sort of thing?

YOU: Oh, no. Nothing like that. Some stuff by John Piper, actually.

Francis Chan.

STEVE: Never heard of him.

YOU: He’s good. I guess you could say he’s “at the level” of the students.

STEVE: I get it. Why test them on stuff they don’t know when you can test them on stuff they already know?

YOU: I see you’ve got a stack of tests you’re grading there. Mind if I asked what the students were writing about?

STEVE: No, these aren’t tests. This is a book which a priest in Alaska wrote and asked me to type out for him. We don’t do written tests at Elias the Hermit. There are oral examinations once a year. That’s it.

YOU: No reading quizzes or anything?

STEVE: Obviously not. It’s a classical school.

YOU: How do you ensure that students do their homework?

STEVE: There’s no homework.

YOU: Do you assign reading for students to do at the end of the day?

STEVE: Does a husband assign his wife the task of making dinner every night? Does a wife assign her husband the task of mowing the lawn every week? Or do we simply do these things because they are right?

You leave the conversation with Steve shaken. You begin making a list of ways your own school is not like St. Adam’s Prep, but you are vexed by the fact that St. Adam’s Prep is far older than your school and that their slide into

zeitgeist-worship had to start somewhere. What is more, Elias the Hermit Classical seems “too Catholic” in exactly the same way Deborah’s thesis was judged “too Catholic,” and yet Elias the Hermit Classical does not seem in danger of zeitgeist-worship at all.

The following morning, you walk into literature class and some of the sophomore ladies are laughing that one in their midst has received a uniform violation on account of the short length of her skirt. The young lady who received the uniform violation is saying something about modesty and rolling her eyes. While reading Paradise Lost, a benign use of the word “ejaculate” occurs in the text and all the boys burst out laughing. Before you can regain control, one of the boys explains the biological meaning of the word to a guileless girl named Louisa. You begin composing an email to parents in your head. At the end of the day, the principal asks to talk with you.

PRINCIPAL: I wanted to have a word with you about Deborah’s thesis.

YOU: Of course.

PRINCIPAL: What have you said about “treasure in heaven” when the subject has come up?

YOU: Deborah hasn’t been a student of mine in two years.

PRINCIPAL: I know, but what have you said on the subject of “treasure in heaven” in class? We’ve spoken with Deborah about her thesis and she said you would lecture about “treasure in heaven” back in sophomore year.

YOU: I’m quite sure I told my students they ought to “store up treasure in heaven,” but other than that, I don’t recall exactly what I said. This was several years ago now.

PRINCIPAL: Well, why don’t you tell me what you think of “treasure in heaven”?

YOU: We should store it up, like Christ commands.

PRINCIPAL: I think the problem is that some students are confused about what you’ve said on the subject, including Deborah. The statement of faith at this school clearly puts forward a belief in salvation by faith alone. I don’t want to get into a theological argument with you about what that means, but a number of things you’ve said about “treasure in heaven” are at odds with salvation as a free gift.

YOU: Has Deborah not offered numerous quotations in her thesis from great Protestant intellectuals on the subject of “treasure in heaven”? She isn’t quoting me, is she?

PRINCIPAL: No, but your influence seems very obvious in her work.

YOU: Is the influence of Calvin and Barth obvious in her work, as well?

PRINCIPAL: I’m not sufficiently familiar with the work of John Calvin or Karl Barth to know his influence when I see it. Look, I’m just not a theologian. I’m just a principal who is trying to keep the peace at an ecumenical Protestant school, and the fact of the matter is this: Deborah has written a paper which sounds very Catholic.

YOU: If you’re not a theologian, how do you know what “very Catholic” sounds like?

PRINCIPAL: Be careful. I also know what “very disrespectful” sounds like.

YOU: I apologize.

PRINCIPAL: You’re forgiven. Look,

the short version is this: Deborah’s thesis just doesn’t sound like the school statement of faith. If it doesn’t sound like the school statement of faith, she can’t present her thesis publicly. I also need you to make a personal apology to Deborah’s parents.

YOU: For what?

PRINCIPAL: For confusing her on the matter of “treasure in heaven.”

YOU: What have her parents said about her thesis?

PRINCIPAL: Like myself, they’re not well-versed in the writings of John Calvin or Karl Barth, either. They were quite surprised to find Deborah had written a paper which sounded so Catholic.

YOU: When did her parents first raise their concerns?

PRINCIPAL: When they read the final paper.

YOU: Was she not talking with her parents about her research while she was working on the paper?

PRINCIPAL: Why does that matter?

YOU: I’ll put my cards on the table. I think Deborah’s paper is “too Catholic” in the mind of exactly one person and that one person keeps putting the idea in other people’s heads.

PRINCIPAL: And who do you think this one person is?

YOU: Someone on her thesis board.

PRINCIPAL: Who?

YOU: I don’t know who is on her thesis board, so I couldn’t say

for sure.

The matter of your apology to Deborah’s parents is put on hold for the moment. You leave the principal’s offer dispirited. You are vexed at yourself for defending the school in your heart earlier when you heard that Deborah’s thesis would not be presented publicly. At that time, you were content for Deborah to be a scapegoat for the school’s ecumenical frustrations.

At home, you phone the one and only Catholic who actually works at The Carpe Diem Academy: Carl, the grizzled old gym teacher, whose Catholicism is nearly unknown and entirely undiscussed among students, staff, and faculty alike. You explain the situation to him.

CARL: These things happen.

YOU: What do you mean?

CARL: At ecumenical schools, these things happen. Nobody wants to be ecumenical. Presbyterians who like classical education wish there was enough interest among Presbyterians to start a classical Presbyterian school. The same is true for Lutherans. The same is true for . . . whoever. What everyone wants is to be parochial, but there’s not enough interest—or ability, really—in anyone’s church to create a parochial school. So, you bite your tongue, you write a very basic statement of faith, and you make yourself an ecumenical school.

YOU: What does that have to do with Deborah’s thesis being “too Catholic”?

CARL: Well, “ecumenical” just isn’t much of an identity. It’s a concession. So, from time to time, you have to give “ecumenical” some teeth. You’ve got to draw a line in the sand so that you know who you are. Haven’t you ever read Rene Girard? Every now and again, a little purgatorial violence—usually bureaucratic violence, but still—is necessary in order to assuage our fear that “ecumenical” just doesn’t mean much.

YOU: But, why me?

CARL: Was anyone ever so young? Why me? Are you serious?

YOU: I don’t know, Carl. Your explanation of the situation just strikes me as too . . . too . . .

CARL: Too . . . Catholic?

You hang up the phone. What does Carl know? He teaches at an ecumenical school, after all. He can’t mind it too much. You wonder if Elias the Hermit is an ecumenical school. It must be. Toby couldn’t have been Catholic, could he? But Steve the monk must be Catholic, and so Elias the Hermit must be ecumenical. You decide to check Elias the Hermit’s website to see if your suspicions are correct, but Elias the Hermit doesn’t have a website. At this moment, you get a notification on your phone that Louisa’s parents have sent you an email. They want to have a meeting with you and the academic dean to discuss the Paradise Lost incident from earlier in the morning. Several words in their email are written in all caps—words like “very disappointed” and “dangerous” and “harassment.” You do not read all of the email. Emails wherein such words are written in all caps are, in fact, all the same.

The person who has claimed Deborah’s thesis is “too Catholic” is almost certainly the Reverend Baldwin Henry, a retired Lutheran minister who teaches four theology classes at Carpe Diem. In the four years you have known the Reverend Henry, he has never once asked you a question. Baldwin likes R.C. Sproul, Tabletalk Magazine, and he opens every class with five minutes of dumb blond jokes he has memorized from a book. You once heard him pronounce the name Nietzsche “Nitch-key.” He claims to know quite a lot about the Catholic Church because he was “raised Catholic,” although you’ve heard him refer to the miraculous conception of Christ as “the Immaculate Conception” and he regularly contends that the corrupt Renaissance popes were “all Arminians.” The Reverend Henry has been with Carpe Diem since it opened fourteen years ago, and this alone accounts for his continued employment.

The following day, the Reverend Baldwin Henry comes into the break room and begins brewing a pot of coffee. You are making photocopies from a book of essays by Montaigne. There is no one else in the break room.

YOU: Did you have a chance to read Deborah’s thesis yet?

BALDWIN: Unfortunately, I did. It’s a

shame about that young lady.

YOU: Did you find something problematic about her thesis, Reverend Henry?

BALDWIN: Yes. It was entirely too Catholic. Extremely Catholic, even.

YOU: Would you have preferred the thesis be mildly Catholic?

BALDWIN: I would have preferred her thesis not be Catholic at all.

YOU: What about all the quotes from Calvin?

BALDWIN: Even Calvin had his problems. Deborah wrote as though Calvin had more authority than the Bible.

YOU: There was a good bit of Scripture quoted in her paper, as well.

BALDWIN: It was all taken out of context.

YOU: The rules which govern the authoring of a thesis require citations from six scholarly sources. If not Calvin and Barthes, who do you think she should have quoted from?

BALDWIN: I couldn’t help but noticing that Deborah interprets the Bible through a very Catholic lens.

YOU: You couldn’t help noticing?

BALDWIN: She was a student of yours last year, after all.

YOU: Does that seem curious to you? You know that I’m not Catholic, don’t you?

BALDWIN: You’re Anglican, though, and aside from the Pope, I don’t see much of a difference between the two.

YOU: How do you figure?

BALDWIN: The head of the Anglican

Church is the king of England, which gives the Anglican Church a pretty considerable problem so far as the separation of church and state goes. The Catholic Church also had a sizable problem with the separation of church and state, at least during the Dark Ages.

YOU: Fascinating. What other similarities do you see between the two?

BALDWIN: Theological liberalism, for starters. Prayers for the dead. The so-called doctrine of apostolic succession. An emphasis on good works rather than obedience. I was raised Catholic, so if anyone at this school would recognize a Catholic influence, it would be me. Deborah could have chosen an edifying topic, like Piper. Piper wrote a fantastic paper about why Christians should play sports. It’s dense with Scriptural prooftexts.

After school, you meet with the principal, who tells you that apologizing to Deborah’s parents is nonnegotiable. In its present form, her thesis warrants a C, though she will be allowed to edit it and resubmit it for a higher grade. You ask the principal what you should apologize for and he tells you, “She obviously came out of your literature class last year very confused about the matter of salvation and theology. I don’t think you meant to lead her astray, but this is a Protestant school and we have a Protestant statement of faith. Protestant parents need to have confidence their children won’t come home sounding like Roman Catholics. I know Deborah has a lot of teachers, but you’re her only non-Protestant teacher.”

You leave the meeting downtrodden. The meeting actually went on for more than two hours, though the content of the meeting can be summarized in less than thirty seconds. You want to quit. You are fed up with classical education. You want to feel sorry for yourself, but Elias the Hermit will not let you. You want to pronounce yourself more wise, more well read, and more human than the Reverend Baldwin Henry, the principal, Deborah’s parents, and Louisa’s parents, but in your imagination, you see Steve’s face rise up like the sun. Steve does not think you have any right to feel sorry for yourself. You are angry at Steve for thinking so little of you, but you are also angry at yourself for deserving so little respect. You have gotten what you deserve.

You were never the real deal, you are not the real deal now, and you never will be.

There is no way Steve is where you left him. What would a monk be doing at a coffee shop? Still, you need Steve to be at the coffee shop, and perhaps you need him to be there badly enough that sympathetic magic will make it so. By the end of the following week, you will have heard thesis presentations on why Christians should learn to dance (“David danced before the Lord”), why abortion is wrong (“You knit me together in my mother’s womb”), why R-rated movies are okay to watch (“Christian liberty”), why democracy is biblical (“All have sinned and fallen short”), why evolution is wrong (“In the beginning, God”), why classical education is biblical (“Train up a child”), why the death penalty is biblical (“Blood for the blood god”), why nuclear war is allowable (“Blessed is he who dashes your little ones on the rocks”), why women should be elders (there is one United Methodist at the school), and seven different theses which treat on the subject of Christians and sports (“Run the race,” et cetera). Most of the scholarly sources cited in these theses will be motivational books written by celebrity pastors, conservative news entertainers, and social media polemicists, all of which have been published in the last six years. Any scriptural citations will have been acquired through BibleGateway.com searches and interpreted in the most convenient manner possible. You do not fault the students for any of this. Like all human beings, they are only doing what they are told. By the end of the following week, the only student who will have presented a paper which respects the academy, tradition, old and venerable books, and the classical spirit will be Deborah, who will receive a C for her work. For now, the whole experience will merely confuse her. Then, in a few years, memories of the whole ordeal will lead to a well-found skepticism of authority, then cynicism, then apostasy. As you drive to the coffee shop, your eyes involuntarily fill with tears at the maddening injustice of it all.

When you arrive at the coffee shop, Steve is there. You approach the table where he sits grading papers, ask if you can sit down, then sit down before he answers.

STEVE: I know you.

YOU: I teach at Carpe Diem. We spoke a few days ago.

STEVE: That’s right. What do you want?

YOU: Is Elias the Hermit an ecumenical school?

STEVE: No, it’s a classical school.

YOU: Is it an ecumenical classical school?

STEVE: No.

YOU: Are all the students Catholic, then?

STEVE: No, it’s a classical school, not a Catholic school.

YOU: Do you know what the word “ecumenical” means?

STEVE: Yes, do you?

YOU: At this moment, I’m not confident I do anymore.

STEVE: Elias the Hermit Classical is a classical school. Only old ideas have purchasing power at Elias the Hermit. I’m Catholic, but I respect the pedigree of certain Protestant ideas. The works of Luther and Calvin have lasted for hundreds of years. That means they’re worth something at Elias the Hermit. At Elias the Hermit, students can argue whatever venerable old ideas they want. New ideas aren’t worth much, though. New Protestant ideas aren’t worth much, but Protestants don’t have some kind of corner on the market of new ideas. There are idiotic Catholic theologians who publish novel theological tomes every year. I don’t care to hear students attempt to reconcile Catholic dogma with Marxism. I don’t want to hear students argue for female priests, though plenty of fashionable modern Catholics do. I’d sooner trust old Protestant ideas than new Catholic ideas—and that’s the word of a confirmed and honest papist. Long story short: If human beings have believed something for a long time, that idea gets respect at Elias the Hermit. Otherwise, save it for your blog, because it has no place at a classical school.

YOU: I can’t tell if that’s ecumenical or not.

STEVE: Does it sound like Carpe Diem?

YOU: No.

STEVE: Then whatever you think “ecumenical” means, it’s getting in the way of being classical. Your school needs to figure out what it wants to be. In my mind, “ecumenical” is not a virtue, but “classical” is.

YOU: Does Elias the Hermit have a statement of faith?

STEVE: The Nicene Creed.

YOU: Do your students write research papers?

STEVE: Research papers aren’t classical.

YOU: [sobbing, covering your face with your hands] You’re ahead of me. You’re ahead of me in every way. You’re so far ahead of me, I can’t even see you. I want to be proud of something, but there’s nothing to be proud of. I have nothing. My school has nothing. We’re no better than St. Adam’s Prep. We’re no different than the public schools. I don’t even know why we exist.

STEVE: Whoa. Hey. These are tears of self-pity. They aren’t worth crying. Only tears of repentance are worth crying.

YOU: I don’t know what to repent of. Being an idiot? Choosing the wrong school to work for?

STEVE: There is no wrong school to work for.

YOU: How can you say that?

STEVE: You’re not working at the wrong school. There’s no such thing as “the wrong school.” There are only wrong reasons, wrong motivations—corruptions of the heart.

YOU: [still sobbing] Why do you work?

STEVE: I work to work out my salvation with fear and trembling. That’s the only reason to teach. Don’t try to please your students. Please your God by turning from your sins. God does not desire the death of a sinner, but that he turn from his wickedness and live. Turn from your sins and live. Do this every day, every hour, every lecture. God gave you your job, your school, and everyone you know so that you could be saved. Everything points to your salvation, if you can only give thanks for it. Quit whining. Quit trying to get ahead in the world. Quit trying to change the world. Quit trying to make the world a better place. Quit trying to make your school a more beautiful place.

You return to work the next day. You apologize to Louisa’s parents. You apologize for not being a better teacher, for not loving the Truth as much as you should, and for seeking out your own glory, reputation, and satisfaction when you could have been dying to yourself, instead. You listen patiently through all the senior thesis presentations, even marking down a few nice things about a thesis on why Christians should own dogs, replete with Scriptural prooftexts from the book of Tobit, which no one seems to know come from the Apocrypha. Zeke gets an A on his thesis. His father, who is on the school board, is both surprised and delighted. A week later, you get a dog for yourself. A dachshund, a wiener dog, which you name Baldwin. You leave anonymous gifts in the mailbox of Reverend Henry, congratulating him on what a fine job he has done with his students this year. And when you are fired two years later, for reasons which I shudder to record in these pages, you take up a position at Elias the Hermit. You teach literature for pennies and, in time, find better employment and strange new opportunities in the East.

Joshua Gibbs teaches Great Books at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. He is a columnist at the CiRCE Institute and the author of How to Be Unlucky and Something They Will Not Forget. His podcast is called Proverbial.

Poetry Daniel Rattelle

Daniel Rattelle is an MFA student at the University of St Andrews. His poems and reviews have been published in Modern Age, First Things, Alabama Literary Review, Catholic World Report, Crisis, and elsewhere. He is working on his first collection of poetry.

Poetry Daniel Rattelle

GLASGOW NECROPOLIS

What could be more Victorian than this? A picnic lunch, The two of us walk the Necropolis In search of famous dead. You had a hunch We’d come up empty. Bruce and Burns and Hume, Of course, were elsewhere, from another age. Here’s where the 19th Century is laid. Those dark industrial lords have founded tomb By tomb their city of the dead. Their wage, Bequeathed to us as romance, fully paid.

BLUESMAN

With brand name trainers and a thrift store jumper, A basement bar, And double whisky neat, he plays a number Whose name I can’t remember, tunes his guitar, Then takes another. An opening act for sure, But then I wonder? Now, near ten years spent, Is he still up there moaning soulful slow, Smooth baritone gone gravelly thirty-four, Who’s nine-to-five is just to pay the rent? Would that. Here’s hoping. I can’t hear him, though.

In Jonathan Rogers’ The Secret of the Swamp King, a false king imposes his rule by deceit and flattery on a particularly discontented band of feechies—swamp people who live off the land by their own wild code. Aiden, the true king, is captured by this band and learns how the imposter is teaching them to think about themselves and the world. The false king claims that they need to commit to Progress to learn to see the usefulness of the world around them. Pickro, a feechie, says to Aiden:

“Anyway, it’s what feechiefolks need. Just look around you.” He waved his hand toward a stand of giant cypress. “Lot of folks’d call them trees. The Wilderking calls them natural race horses.” He leaned back for the effect of his big words to sink in.

“Natural resources?” asked Aidan.

It is not only feechies who are deceived by seductive claims of Progress. I grew up in the mountains of North Georgia, and my parents grew up in western North Carolina near those same mountains. My father’s family was the last to leave a community now buried under the Nantahala Lake. When he was alive, he still named the parts of the lake for the places that they had been before the damming of the river. Progress came later to our part of the country, and whatever it gave, it took away things that were worth having.

It was not just the landscape that was remade as the demands of the modern world came to the mountains. Progress also came to our schools with a system of thinking that narrowed our understanding of the world. Just as those named communities—Aquone, Big Choga, Little Choga—were buried under the lake for the sake of electricity, so the naming and knowing of the world was buried to make way for using it. What lots of folks would call trees, the children in my elementary school classes were taught to describe as “natural resources.” The names of the trees did not seem to matter to my teachers, nor their beauty, but only what kind of exports they provided for the state. The connection to anything more than the material world was not considered a legitimate top-

ic of conversation. This utilitarian vision attempted to bind our imaginations to a system that can only use the world, that holds no place for love and wonder. Accordingly there is also no place for delight or mystery. It tells the story of a world whose meaning cannot be perceived, but must be made up out of whole cloth from students’ choices. Singer-songwriter Josh Ritter celebrates this bereft making in his song “Lantern”:

So put away those lamentations; We both know them all too well If there’s a book of jubilations, We’ll have to write it for ourselves.

This naturalistic account of the world’s existence handicaps a student’s imagination by ignoring the world as gift, and its Giver, and laying the full responsibility of meaning-making on creatures.

It is this disease of the imagination that J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (his mythological backdrop to Middle Earth ) addresses. The first chapter, “Ainulindalë,” or “The Music of the Ainur,” provides a remedy for this diseased imagination. It puts the reader on a path to recovery of his God-given place in the world: a place of reception and stewardship. This story offers a healing, imaginative lens for viewing students’ work in the world that is true to the anthropology of the Scriptures. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories” Tolkien describes recovery as one of the legitimate functions of a true fairy story. Such a recovery is like awakening from a fevered sleep or coming to our senses after a period of madness. Though “The Music of the Ainur” is more of a mythology than a fairy tale, it still offers this element of recovery in the portrayal of the world as a gift from a majestic Maker. This can heal students who are too often afflicted in their studies with a kind of alienation from the natural world—what can it have to do with them personally? What does it mean? They are all too often told that they must make their own meaning. Tolkien offers an image of a different path to meaning.

The creation account in The Silmarillion begins with Eru, the One, who is called Ilúvatar. He makes beings called the Ainur who are like angels. These are the elemental powers of the world: Manwë—wind and air; Ulmo—water; Aulë—earth. There is Varda, Lady of the

" . . . with a little gumption and discipline and a commitment to poor grass we can make something of ourselves."

—Pickro in Jonathan Rogers' The Secret of the Swamp King

Stars, whom the Elves call Elbereth. Yavanna is the wife of Aulë and the Giver of Fruits. Nienna is the power acquainted with grief and she mourns the hurts of the world. Oromë is the Lord of the Forests, who loves all trees and delights in horses and hounds.

The naming and personification of life’s elements in the world—earth, wind, growth, grief—magnifies the mystery, beauty, and depth of the place in which we find ourselves. The world itself is a gift. Trees are not merely natural resources. Instead, the wind is a king who loves all birds that fly. This is no God-forsaken space of gears and switches. It lives with authority and delight and love and grief. In the words of Wendell Berry:

There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places And desecrated places.

The first time I read The Fellowship of the Ring—at home by the bedroom window out of which I could see the walnut trees and boulders I had played on as a child—I did not understand the transformation that was occurring. The rocks pressed their weight heavily into the earth and the smell of the walnuts’ dark stain drifted into my mind as the wind blew. Since going to school, that place had been desecrated in my imagination—I had learned to stop looking at it as meaningful. At school, delight, mystery, and beauty were off limits when considering the real world. There was nothing more to see than what could be measured or used. The old pasture shaded by the walnut trees and lined with cedars was not useful for making money. There were not even any cows living in it. Despite its beauty, it had become empty and lonely; I had absorbed the utilitarian vision of the world. But Tolkien’s mythology began to give me back my senses.

The setting of The Lord of the Rings—the very air and soil of Middle-Earth—is shaped by majestic, personal beings. The Ainur are creatures whose beauty, power, and personhood do justice to the magnificence of the world. Who is surprised that Starlight is a beloved goddess on whom the old ones call out of dark places? In The Silmarillion, Tolkien takes this liveliness a step further and shows these gods and goddesses, the Ainur, standing in awe of Ilúvatar from whom they came. Their personhood, which lies at the heart of the elements of the world, originates in the personhood of the One who is

infinitely greater. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.” To Tolkien, the world is a great gift which testifies to a great Giver.

What’s more, Tolkien offers a vivid image of creaturely making. Ilúvatar gives the Ainur themes of music. They sing before him and he is glad. He calls them together and gives them a Great Theme, and the beauty and glory of it amazes them. According to Ilúvatar’s wishes, they sing, each contributing his own thoughts and adornments to the theme. After awhile, Ilúvatar silences the song and shows them their music in a vision—the world, Arda. In Arda, they see how each particular voice and device in the music are reflected in the mutually created world. Ilúvatar then gives to the world the Flame Imperishable, making it Eä, “the world that is,” and it takes Being. The Ainur are able to go down into it, and form it according to the vision that they have sung and seen. The image in this part of the story is of a creation that has a double belonging—both to the Creator and to his sub-creating creatures.

In his book Only the Lover Sings, Josef Pieper claims that the first condition for any meaningful activity is receptivity. The Silmarillion gives us a picture of the cosmos by which we may contend against the lie that would have us write our own book of jubilations. While the myth of Progress considers only how the world might be used, Tolkien helps us to recognize it as a gift. This settles whatever we might do with the world in the context of receptivity and gratitude.

According to Pieper, the second condition for meaningful activity is an acceptance of reality outside ourselves—this is what it means to celebrate a feast. There is no feast without the gods. We cannot engage the world in a celebratory way without recognizing and accepting something greater than ourselves. Tolkien’s “The Music of the Ainur” offers an image of connection to something greater. Even boulders are a piece of the song of Holy Ones. Tolkien gives us back the gods that Progress has taken away.

Tolkien’s picture, however, is not paganism. The gods he tells of have been given a Reality outside themselves. They have their being in the thought of Ilúvatar. Their work is given them in the themes of music that Ilúvatar propounds to them, and then in the Great Music that he shows them and which they are meant to sing alongside men and elves. Their creaturely making is to shape and adorn the song that they have received from the One

who holds all things together.

“The Music of the Ainur” also gives us an image of creatures as shaping stewards of the gift received. That is the pattern: reception first, followed by making and shaping according to particular natures, gifts, and powers of individual creatures. The Ainur sing the song that Ilúvatar gives them with voices of their own. The song they sing is theirs as well as his. Accordingly, God also gives us the world and the stewardship to shape it. He makes the world and then charges the man and the woman to “be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it.”

The feechies in The Secret of the Swamp King are deceived into thinking that a commitment to “poor grass” is going to give them something they are missing. The false Wilderking, like the true Enemy, plays on their wounded pride and discontentment. Like the feechies, we have been deceived into thinking that Progress is going to give us something we are missing. We are robbed of our connection to the world—its majesty and its Maker—and are easy prey to the lies of progress.

As a teacher, I want to expose my students to the wonder and delight of the world before they seek to harness it. This means giving them opportunities to listen to poetry and stories, to be out of doors, and to encounter paintings. I also want them to explore their studies with a sense of inheritance, as though the Apostle John or Gerard Manley Hopkins are their great-grandfathers in the family of God. Great ones have sung the song before us. What do we have that we did not receive? I want to hear that inheritance spoken in their voices. There is a song woven into the fabric of the elements around us—black walnuts and granite and red clay—and students are creatures made to hear, love, and sing.

Jane Simpson lives in Athens, Maine, with her husband and four children, where she enjoys homeschooling and working as a private tutor.

Tolkien gives us a picture of the cosmos by which we may contend against the lie that would have us write our own book of jubilations. While the myth of Progress considers only how the world might be used, Tolkien helps us to recognize it as a gift.

Back Page Books

Selections from the editors

The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart

“Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?” Dozens of children respond to this ad in the newspaper, but only four are chosen for their bravery, cleverness, and love of truth. They qualify for a secret mission that will endanger them more than anyone could have foreseen: infiltrating an advanced school that conceals a nefarious and subtle campaign for world domination. The children have only a desperate hope of thwarting its progress. In their attempt, they must learn to trust each other, conquer their fears, and do the right thing before it’s too late.

—Emily Callihan, copy editor

From Bauhaus to Our House, by Tom Wolfe

Architecture had been burrowing into my subconscious for years. Something had gone wrong. I couldn’t name the problem, but I couldn’t ignore it. It was everywhere I went. One burning question was how we went from beautiful buildings to multi-million-dollar eyesores in a single century. In From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe exposes the small band of ideologues who unraveled centuries of architectural development in a few decades. Wolfe’s wit and wisdom dissect architecture built on bankrupt anti-bourgeois moral philosophy, tying it to similar movements in art and literature. After forty years, its 143 fast-moving pages are still a must-read on the state of architecture in America and beyond. —Brandon

The Intellectual Life, by A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.

“Have you two hours a day? Can you undertake to keep them jealousy, to use them ardently? If so, have confidence. Nay, rest in quiet certainty.” For someone working ten-hour days or homeschooling a house-full, a life of reflection and scholarship may seem unobtainable, and encouragements to the contrary may sound disingenuous coming from a vocationally celibate Dominican. Nevertheless, Sertillanges proves an empathetic mentor for any soul who longs to cultivate a richer life of the mind. This life, he assures, is open to any who desire it and will afford just two hours—hours he will teach you to dispose of wisely, fruitfully, and in service of the wider church body. Indeed, deft marrying of the practical, esoteric, and mystical is the book’s great virtue. Sertillanges fosters no illusions about ease: “To get something without paying for it is the universal desire; but it is the desire of cowardly hearts and weak brains . . . truth serves only its slaves.” To paraphrase another great Frenchman, “Not everyone can become an intellectual, but an intellectual can come from anywhere.” Sertillanges makes an ideal companion on the way.

Sean Johnson, associate editor

LeBlanc, contributing editor

Abelard and Heloise: The Letters and Other Writings, edited by William Levitan

In the twelfth century, a charismatic intellectual named Peter Abelard fell in love with his brilliant student Heloise. Even as a teenager, Heloise was an able scholar in her own right, and the wellknown Abelard, thirty-seven, became her private tutor. When Heloise found herself pregnant with his child, the couple fled to Brittany, where they secretly married. Upon the birth of their son, Heloise’s uncle commissioned a gang of mercenaries to castrate Abelard. Mutilated, Abelard became a monk. He persuaded Heloise to leave everything behind—including their newborn child—to take the veil. They departed to separate monasteries, took monastic vows, and began a remarkable correspondence. Abelard and Heloise’s love was no mere physical passion, but a charged intellectual union of two prodigious minds. Their letters address more than their personal relationship, illuminating spiritual, philosophical, and intellectual issues of the day. William Levitan’s compilation of their letters and writings chronicles one of history’s most fascinating love affairs and the medieval culture in which it unfolded. —Heidi White, managing editor