From Margin to Mainstream

How “Woke” Ideology Appropriated American Academia (and What to Do about It) A CONVERSATION WITH SAMANTHA JONES

By Heidi White

Samantha Jones is a force to be reckoned with. A former social justice warrior, Jones was earning her PhD in women’s studies when she became disillusioned with the “woke” takeover of American universities. After over a decade of teaching college writing, she is telling her own story—and pulling no punches along the way. She writes under a pseudonym, explaining that if her colleagues were to discover her criticisms, she would be unable to secure employment in academia. This, she says, tells us everything we need to know about the state of American higher education. Jones wants to maintain her anonymity in her critiques of academic culture so that she can work on projects that aim to improve academia from within. She is also very interested in Christian classical education and wants to be part of it. Jones chatted recently with us our about her take on the woke project that dominates contemporary academia.

Thank you for being willing to talk with me, Samantha. Tell me, what is your experience with “woke” academia?

I was raised in a Christian working-class family. As a first-generation college student, I assumed that the system is meritocratic and that professors are among the smartest people in the country. Now I know that the professoriate has long been dominated by woke ideologues. One undergraduate course included a unit on Women’s Studies. My professor offered to help me on an academic career path, which I appreciated, although now I see it as an example of woke professors imposing their worldview in order to produce new activists.

I began to read Women’s Studies and Social Justice books. I worked for a feminist nonprofit, made woke friends, and attended activist conferences. All this drew me away from my faith and led me down a path where my purpose was fighting for Social Justice.

What happened next?

After a few years, I started having doubts. I had become angry and resentful, focusing on the injustices of the world rather than cultivating gratitude for the good things in my life. I saw myself as a victim, which was disempowering. Also, I was bothered by the arrogance of the activist crowd. I saw no intellectual humility, so I disengaged from activism.

After a while, I completed a master’s degree in writing and taught college writing. I began a PhD program in women’s studies. I realized that woke ideology dominated many of the graduate students’ minds. This was a contrast to my undergraduate and master’s programs, when Social Justice existed, but it was on the margins. When I began college in 2000, there was still some viewpoint diversity among the faculty that represented the entire political spectrum. By the time I began working on my PhD, however, social justice was dominant through the establishment of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices and plans.

You experienced woke activism moving from the fringes to the forefront between your undergraduate studies and your doctoral program? That was quick. What changed?

Around the time of Trump’s election, I saw things that greatly disturbed me. My colleagues attacked Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and white men as oppressors. They supported outlawing “hate speech.” When I defended free speech as a foundational principle, I was attacked. I judged a writing award and my colleagues were upset that I emphasized merit rather than gender or race. These are just a few examples of many.

How did this shift in academic culture impact you?

I wanted to break free from ideological possession of any kind. I gravitated toward thinkers who didn’t seek to eliminate nuance, but to honestly grapple with the complexities of our world. I considered multiple viewpoints from all over the political spectrum: conservatism, libertarianism, and classical liberalism. I even started reading conservative media, which I had never thought to do, because I had been indoctrinated into the belief that conservatism is evil and hateful. I realized that social justice ideology is intellectually weak, and that it compensates for its weakness with very shrewd tactics, mainly a deliberate plan to dominate academia and other important institutions. Woke academics are adept with language. If social justice activists tried to promote conservatism, they would probably call it something like “historical global wisdom.” There is something to be learned from wokeness in terms of how to frame ideas.

The term “woke” for example. What is “woke”? It is a term at the front and center of this cultural moment. But what does it actually mean?

Being “woke” means seeing the world through a “critical consciousness,” defined by Critical Theories that believe society is shaped by systemic racism, sexism, and other oppressive power dynamics. To be woke means becoming an activist and attempting to achieve social justice. No one is ever woke enough; there are always more opportunities to “do the work,” as the activists say.

Becoming woke is a psychologically appealing state that matches the cognitive abilities of teenagers and young adults. People of this age want to establish their identity independent from their parents; an ideology that represents itself as subversive is attractive. Also, young adults are becoming more aware of injustices, which is painful. When they discover a theory that claims to be the path to justice—that by following its tenets, and becoming activists, they can participate in ending injustice—it is very captivating.

That all sounds compatible with moral action though. What’s wrong with it?

Social justice ideology is a totalitarian worldview —a Utopian project that can be described as counter-Enlightenment. The genealogy of the counter-Enlightenment can be traced back to the late eighteenth century, primarily to German intellectuals who critiqued empiricism, universalism, and rationalism. Later, these critiques emerged in the work of postmodernist thinkers. In the concluding pages of Madness and Civilization, postmodernist scholar Michel Foucault praised the “sovereign enterprise of Unreason.” Foucault argued that reason is a mechanism of oppression that proceeds by way of exclusions, constraints, and prohibitions. Another important postmodernist philosopher, Jacques Derrida, indicted “logocentrism,” or the tyranny of reason. Postmodernist thinkers influenced social justice scholars.

So the woke project in American universities is inherently anti-rational? If that’s the case, isn’t it also inherently destructive?

Yes. Woke activism is a revolutionary project that aims to change everything in order to rid the world of oppression. Social justice activists do not acknowledge the coercion inherent in their project, nor the authoritarianism that silences other points of view through censorship and cancel culture. Activists do not view their opponents as wrong, but as evil, and treat dissenters as such.

Wokeness is fundamentally illiberal; it explicitly rejects the idea that universities should be marketplaces of ideas with the pursuit of truth at their core and with freedom of speech as the method of arriving at truth.

In order to solve social problems, we must have honest discussions about the nature of such problems and the merits of proposed solutions. But social justice activism severely restricts discussion on crucial topics: race, gender, sexuality, immigration, and social inequality. Woke ideologues in the universities police discourse on these issues. They attack, vilify, and cancel any dissenters.

I have witnessed what happens in classrooms when students question woke ideology: they are ridiculed and ostracized. I know of professors who explicitly say that their goal is to demolish their students’ Christian faith. I also know of professors who give grades based on whether students articulate Social justice ideology in their papers.

You are talking about coercion and censorship on a wide scale. Is this really happening?

Yes, this is happening. Because of social justice ideology, people in academic institutions cannot honestly discuss important issues. The institutions we designed and funded as places to seek truth, discuss and solve problems, and advance justice are inhibited from doing so. This is a betrayal of public trust. What if another ideological or religious group completely took over American public universities—say, for example, Scientologists—and forced all academic questions and answers to conform to their teachings? I don’t mean to disparage Scientology, but most Americans would say that the idea of Scientology controlling all academic discourse is absurd. This is exactly the state of affairs we are in with the ideology of social justice.

Allow me to play the devil’s advocate for a moment.

If the coercive tactics of woke activism result in a more just society, why does an independent academia matter?

An ideologically independent academia is important because the purpose of academic institutions is to facilitate research that expands our knowledge, which cannot happen without a fundamental commitment to the truth. If academia is not ideologically independent, then researchers run the risk of confirmation bias—the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories. History is rife with examples of existing beliefs or theories that have been wrong.

In this context, I am reminded of Francis Bacon, the founder of the scientific method. In The Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon emphasized intellectual humility as the prerequisite for knowledge advancement: “. . . the same humility that we practice in learning, the same we also observe in teaching, without endeavoring to stamp a dignity on any of our inventions, by the triumphs of confutation, the citations of antiquity, the producing of authorities, or the mask of obscurity; as any one might do, who had rather give lustre to his own name, than light to the minds of others. We offer no violence, and spread no nets for the judgments of men, but lead them on to things themselves, and their relations; that they may view their own stores, what they have to reason about, and what they may add, or procure, for the common good.” Bacon’s commitment to intellectual humility and empiricism is a model for how academia should function.

The shift of wokeness from margin to mainstream is not only disturbing but fascinating to me. How did wokeness permeate the fabric of American life?

There is an old adage, “The fish rots from the head first.” In other words, everything flows from academia. In the West, the class-based proletarian revolution that Marx predicted was not happening as quickly as the Marxists wanted, so they invented strategies to foment revolution. In the 1930s, the Frankfurt School was established at Columbia University. Presiding intellectuals—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—developed Critical Theory and promoted its development in American universities. Their theories are sometimes called Cultural Marxism. In Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), Marcuse explicitly outlined a strategy for the Left to take over America. His tactics? To build counter-institutions and to embark on a “long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them.”

The strategy outlined by Marcuse advocated co-opting established American institutions, beginning with academia. So far, Marcuse’s strategy has succeeded; the activists who entered academia in the 1970s trained another generation of scholar-activists, who, around the 1990s, advanced the application of Critical Theory in other domains: postcolonialism, gender, race, sexuality, and disability. During these years, however, there was still intellectual diversity in academia.

But things have changed. There are almost no conservatives teaching in academia, while classical liberals and libertarians are a small minority, nearing retirement. Woke activists know this and therefore require signed “Diversity Statements” and “Commitments to social justice” to ensure that only people who share their ideology can secure careers in higher education. Woke ideology gained complete control of academia around 2015, when most universities began establishing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. University graduates brought this framework into the private sector. As a result, wokeness is the dominant ideology in America.

You are a professional academic who inhabited academia during the woke takeover. What are the intellectual roots of social justice ideology?

Wokeness does not recognize itself as an ideology, but as an accurate description of social power dynamics. Social justice scholars argue that certain people have advantages because of their subordinated location in the social strata. Feminist standpoint theory, first articulated in 1983 by Nancy Hartsock, applies Marx’s analysis of class to gender, maintaining that oppressed peoples have access to knowledge that dominant groups do not. Therefore, the insights of people from these groups should be valued. While there is nothing wrong with valuing the insights of people from marginalized groups, woke activists claim that they are more valuable than non-marginalized people.

Intersectionality, developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, is a theory from Women’s Studies. Originally, intersectionality had some utility in calling attention to areas where courts had treated black women as solely women or solely black, thereby ignoring specific injustices that black women face as a group. Overall, however, intersectionality lacks nuance because it doesn’t consider people as individuals. Instead, it considers people as the sum of their intersecting categories of oppression. So, for example, intersectionality theory considers an African American woman as inherently more oppressed than a European male, due to the African American woman’s possession of more marginalized identity categories than the European male. But what if the African

American woman is a wealthy doctor? What if that European male is poor and unemployed? What about class?

Interesting. What are some proposed woke solutions?

Currently, social justice activism focuses almost exclusively on race. Critical Race Theory is another academic theory popular with woke activists. CRT provides the framework for anti-racist initiatives implemented throughout the country. Activist Ibram X. Kendi explicitly states, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” In other words, discrimination must be solved with discrimination. This doesn’t make sense, yet this so-called “remedy” is being taught in schools all over the country. To give just two examples of many, Christopher F. Rufo reported that a public school in California forced third-graders to rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” Earlier this year, Rufo reported that the principal of a New York school sent a letter encouraging white parents to advocate for “white abolition,” an idea from Northwestern University professor Barnor Hesse.

Another problematic idea promoted in woke ideology is that all unequal outcomes between groups are the result of discrimination, and radical action must be taken to advance “equity”—defined as equal outcomes for all groups. But is it reasonable to expect exactly equal outcomes, across every domain of life, for all racial groups, and for each gender? For example, women are underrepresented among garbage collectors. I don’t think that anyone would make the case that this disparity is the result of discrimination. Not all disparities are the result of discrimination.

You saw woke ideology become the dominant creed in academia. Is social justice activism becoming the norm in any other educational settings?

Yes, social justice ideologies are becoming incorporated into classrooms across America, and not just in the obvious ways. Most people wrongly assume that wokeness has been limited to humanities and social sciences, and that STEM fields haven’t been affected. But woke activists are attempting to completely change math instruction. An educational program called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been rolled out in California and Oregon. The program argues that “white supremacy culture shows up in the classroom when the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer” or when students are required to show their work, while stipulating that the very “concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false.”

However, the ability of mathematics to provide right answers to problems is the very nature of mathematics. This is not just an ideological concern, but a practical one. If math does not maintain its basis in fact, then we will not be able to support our technologically advanced society. Sergiu Klainerman, a professor of mathematics at Princeton who grew up in Romania under Ceausescu, recently wrote an article about this program. He said, “When it comes to education, I believe the woke ideology is even more harmful than old-fashioned communism” because at least “communism had a strong sense of objective reality anchored in the belief that humans are capable of discovering universal truths.”

What about the classical schools that have been bastions of traditional education? Will the encroaching woke agenda impact our vocation as classical educators?

Social justice activists want to destroy classical Christian schools. The proposed Equality Act reveals the blueprint for this goal. Woke ideologues will try to force classical Christian schools to teach gender ideology and LGBT marriage. If schools refuse, they will attempt to remove accreditation, and they will stop admitting graduates of classical Christian schools to many universities. I already know of one department in a public university that refuses to admit anyone to their graduate program who went to a Christian school.

Woke ideology also attacks the discipline of Classics as white supremacy. In February 2021, the New York Times Magazine featured an article about the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who “believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it.” Classical educators must be prepared to explain why the teaching of works from the Western canon is not inherently racist.

If activists make attempts to standardize Social Justice and/or Critical Race Theory into the curriculum, concerned parents must organize and articulate why these ideologies are damaging to children and to our country. A new organization called FAIR (www.fairforall.org) is helping people to organize this effort. All of this is deeply troubling. I have to ask: Why is wokeness so appealing to otherwise rational, freedom-loving people, especially college students? Wokeness does not appeal to people’s reason, but to their emotions and need for meaning. The rise of “religious nones”—people who identify as non religious—in the West has been well documented. Social Justice serves as a replacement for religion. In many cases, people become woke because it is portrayed as virtuous.

Young people also become woke because they haven’t been exposed to other points of view. This is particularly true of conservatism, which has been portrayed as racist, immoral, and cruel. Ultimately, I don’t believe that you can reason anyone out of being woke because wokeness is not based on reason, but on ideology and emotion.

Some have claimed that woke activism functions as a substitute religion for an increasingly secular academic culture. Do you agree?

Many authors, in particular John McWhorter and James Lindsay, have made a convincing case that Social Justice ideology is itself a religion. While not all social justice academics are atheists or agnostics, I have found that people who are most strongly atheist and woke tend to advocate the destruction of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many woke ideologues devote their lives to fighting for justice on earth because they hold out no hope for eternal justice. One of the many problems with Social Justice is that there is no emphasis on forgiveness.

But isn’t it a good thing to align with causes that promote justice? Does woke culture have anything good to offer? Can it be redeemed to the life of Christ?

There is nothing that woke ideology can offer Christianity. The Gospels are complete. They are inherently anti-racist. They are inherently focused on the mar- ginalized and oppressed. There is nothing that should be added.

Is there any hope? What can ordinary folks like us do to combat woke dominance in academia?

There is always hope. However, let’s be honest about our situation. Woke ideology dominates every major institution in America. Generations of people have been thoroughly indoctrinated in this ideology with little or no exposure to other points of view. Social Justice ideology will run its course. How long the reign of wokeness lasts depends on how many people find the courage to resist.

However, at least half of the country does not support woke ideology. Those people can create new institutions to support non-woke people, including progressives, liberals, libertarians, conservatives, moderates, and independents. New institutions must be both educational and cultural, because politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from education.

New developments in the educational landscape— including online courses and certificate programs— are promising. I hope that more employers will hire people who might not have a college degree, but who have demonstrated relevant skills by completing online courses or certificate programs. I also strongly encourage young people to pursue apprenticeship programs and learn skilled trades. Additionally, we need universities with classical liberal arts missions, whose explicit purpose is the pursuit of truth, literacy, numeracy, and the scientific method.

Those of us who oppose this ideology need to flood social media with arguments and testimonies about the inherent authoritarianism of wokeness, demonstrating how it is a totalitarian ideology. Woke culture is based on censorship, eliminating freedom of speech, and cancelling people from access to their livelihoods. Woke opponents need to start alternative media companies, including film, television, book publishing, and schools. We need networks to support all nonwoke people, including Christians, who will be cancelled from their jobs, or who cannot find any because they dissent from Social Justice ideology.

Samantha Jones can be reached at sammariejones42@ protonmail.com.

If Dostoevsky is the meat of Russian literature, then Tolstoy is the wine. How easily one throws back page after page of War and Peace or Anna Karenina, getting drunk off the liquid prose. Granted, most English readers today access Tolstoy’s style through the mediation of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, themselves worthy of a room in the Russian literature hall of fame. But if their translation can be trusted—and a laundry list of academic awards says it can—Tolstoy’s gift for clarity and precision is unparalleled. His language sparkles, and at the same time disappears so that his meaning lies transparent beneath. Open one of his tomes at random, and you’ll be immersed in a description of some secret thought or emotion you imagined to be yours alone.

No wonder, then, that such a gifted communicator could not tolerate obfuscation. The popular literary style of the late nineteenth century, embodied by artists like Wagner and Nietzsche, was oversaturated with arcane natural imagery and ornate sensual metaphor. It looked nothing like simplicity, and Tolstoy took no pains to hide his distaste. Fed up with Europe’s Romantic excesses, he began drafting an attack on contemporary aesthetics that would be published in 1898 as What Is Art? It was one of several harsh polemics against the government, the academy, and the church that dominated his late-career thought. Unfortunately, Tolstoy’s keen observation of cultural problems did not always result in constructive solutions. His rhetoric, while strident, is full of contradiction and concealed uncertainty, suggesting that his thinking lacked the order of his prose.

In What Is Art?, Tolstoy holds his profession to an impossible standard, dismissing his own artistic career in the process. He targets the world of commercial art, questioning whether the multitude of lives and resources devoted to cultural production are worth the cost. His answer, in short, is no. Offering example after example of his contemporaries’ melodramatic, meaningless verse, he exposes the obvious absurdity in their cryptic tone and pseudo-intellectualism. If art is such that it cannot be understood, he argues, then it is not worth the physical or emotional wellbeing of the untold number of common laborers who manufacture it. However, it is the product, not the practice, he condemns. In his words, “true art is modest.” It is simple and understood without effort. Esoteric art, he argues, is an effect of European society’s obsession with beauty. Unimpressed by the secular Trinity of goodness, truth, and beauty, Tolstoy asserts that true beauty does not have a moral or spiritual aspect; so-called nonphysical beauty is simply “goodness” rearticulated. Real beauty is properly understood as ideal sensory experience. Therefore, he claims it is actually in service of pleasure and easily opposed to the good. Truth, meanwhile, is also vulnerable to misuse. It is valuable only when directed toward the good, otherwise becoming mere extraneous detail. Thus, in his opinion the best art points us to the good, and not necessarily to the beautiful or true. To overemphasize beauty, he argues, leads to decadence without significance—to the floridity of the nineteenth-century poets.

It’s important to recognize in this context that Tolstoy had a very particular vision of the good. He found its foremost embodiment in human religion, whose primary role has been to represent “the highest understanding of life accessible at a given time in a given society to the best of the leading people” (42). Tolstoy perceived that, in ancient history, men worshiped at the altar of manliness and strength, and as a result the culture produced heroic myths and reverent depictions of the human form. He believed that, in his time, religious feeling had “progressed” to uphold the brotherhood of all men as life’s best thought. Therefore, because true art propagates the good, and the good is understood as the brotherhood of all men, true art must draw mankind together. Art should be communion.

Ignoring (for the moment) the circuitous route by which he arrives at this metaphor, in the passages where he expands on the image, Tolstoy’s definition of art echoes a theme sounded through the ages:

Every work of art results in the one who receives it entering into a certain kind of communion with the one who produced or is producing the art, and with all those who, simultaneously with him, before him or after him have received or will receive the same artistic impression. . . . The activity of art is based on the fact that man, as he receives through hearing or sight the expressions of another man’s feelings, is capable of experiencing the same feelings as the man who expresses them.

An individual artist, observing himself or the world around him, communicates his experience to others. After becoming “infected” by that impression, the receiver of the art is then united in brotherhood to the artist and other receivers. “It is this liberation of the person from his isolation from others, from his loneliness, this merging of the person with others, that constitutes the chief attractive force and property of art.” The artist demolishes barriers and overcomes isolation by communicating that which is otherwise uncommunicable.

Tolstoy’s own artistic output is fitting wine for this communion. How can a heart not leap with desire for reconciliation when the dying Prince Andrei discovers in himself love and not hatred for his wounded rival, Anatole? Is it possible to read Levin’s return to Kitty after her foolish pursuit of Vronsky without gratitude for those who have overlooked fault in our own lives? And yet, Tolstoy’s standards for true art are high indeed. They are so high, in fact, that he dismisses from the canon not only the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven, but his own work as well. (With the exception of his short stories “God Sees the Truth” and “The Prisoner of Caucasus.” Apparently, we can all make room on our bookshelves by throwing out his beloved door stoppers in favor of these more slender volumes.) In his eagerness to tear down barriers between art and its audience, Tolstoy tears down his own household and the majority of the Western tradition along with it.

His primary complaint with most alleged “great” works is the common man’s inability to understand them without tutorage:

The majority understand and have always understood what we, too, consider the highest art: the artistically simple narratives of the Bible, the Gospel parables, folk legends, fairy tales, folk songs are understood by everyone. Why is it that the majority suddenly lost the ability to understand the highest of our art?

Tolstoy highlights the divisive nature of a society that prides itself on exclusive access to art. If art is meant to unite, it should be accessible to everyone. While it is hard to argue with his call to simplicity— there is something instinctively distasteful about art that seeks to confound rather than communicate— his examples of “the highest art” seem to contradict his purposes. I have often needed guidance through a fairy tale—and how to even begin addressing his reference to the parables of Christ, intended by their very genre to confound?

Yet Tolstoy acknowledges the possibility for great art’s misinterpretation. “The obstacle,” he says, “to understanding the best and highest feelings, as is also said in the Gospel, by no means lies in an absence of development and education, but, on the contrary, in false development and false education.” Here Tolstoy touches on something fundamentally true. In my own experience, misunderstandings I have held about Christ’s parables were in many ways the result of poor education. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s standards outpace the reality of a broken world. When education is conducted by fallible human beings, unable to achieve omniscience or omnipotence, how can it fail (in one way or another) to be “bad”?

But Tolstoy is ready with an answer here, as well: true art requires no explanation. Education need not intrude on the subject. His stance on the matter of criticism, therefore, is unyielding: “‘Critics explain.’

But what do they explain? . . . Artistic works cannot be interpreted. If it had been possible for the artist to explain in words what he wished to say, he would have said it in words.” Literary interpretation, in Tolstoy’s view, is a redundant occupation. As you can imagine, this is an awkward predicament for critics of Tolstoy’s work. I wonder whether Gary Saul Morson had a crisis of conscience in 1987 upon publishing Hidden in Plain View, his magnificent reading of War and Peace. Does his project disrespect the author’s wishes? Of course, Tolstoy would see the very existence of the work as further confirmation of his failure. The fact that Morson’s explanation unlocks the novel’s hidden depths proves the novel does not communicate as directly and simply as it should.

In eschewing literary interpretation, Tolstoy comes dangerously close to affirming the “noble savage” theory, which holds that man is at his best in his natural state. His solution to misreading is not to conduct a better education, but to avoid as much education as possible. The common Russian serf, unsullied and uneducated, is the one most equipped to understand the true meaning of life. Ironically, the noble savage theory is a Romantic philosophy. Just as nature mystically communes with the one who escapes the artifice of industrial life, art mystically communes with the one who eschews the artifice of intellectualism. The underlying assumption of the theory stands in direct contradiction to the orthodox Christian doctrine of original sin, which suggests that man’s corruption doesn’t proceed from the influence of his environment, but already exists within him at birth. Whereas Christian dogma states that men need divine intervention in order to be rescued from themselves, the Romantics, generally speaking, place their hope in the strength of man’s will to re-

turn to original purity.

The language of sanctification by any means but Christ flirts with heresy. Yet Tolstoy doubles down, envisioning art alone as a means for “mankind’s movement forward towards perfection.” It is no surprise, then, that his relationship with Russian Orthodoxy was complex, to say the least. Baptized in the 1870s, he spent about two years faithfully committed to the church, but soon became disenchanted with its dogmas and neglected formal participation. However, in spite of his doubts, he retained a kind of faith, celebrating a Christianity of his own imagination. Attempting to garner his own flock of disciples, in his writing he elevated the importance of Christ’s moral teaching and tended to devalue teachings involving the Trinity, Christ’s divinity, and the story of redemption.

Tolstoy’s spiritual struggle did not keep him from being a man of declaration. The certainty he conveys by proclamation, in both treatise and fiction, is formidable. Publicly, he was a wild-eyed prophet in the service of Truth. Yet behind closed doors, Tolstoy fought a lifelong battle to find meaning or significance in the world. In his 1882 autobiographical Confession, Tolstoy depicts himself, much like his beloved protagonists, drifting from cause to cause, attempting to paper over the disquiet in his heart. Pierre Bezhukov, the sympathetic hero of War and Peace, echoes his creator’s discontent:

Every sphere of work was, in his eyes, bound up with evil and deceit. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he undertook—evil and falsehood repulsed him and barred him from all paths of activity.

Tolstoy’s eyes were full of the depravity in himself and the world around him. Perhaps it was this obsession with his insufficiency which caused him to reject his own art. Still, even his judgment on himself in What Is Art? is spoken in full authority. With no real confidence in the gospel promise of redemption, he clung fervently to his strength: rhetoric. His prose reveals an author uncomfortable with articulating ignorance. Morson calls it his “absolute language.” Even the narrators of Tolstoy’s fiction speak with the voice of God. If artists are to shape the world’s destiny, the artist must be in control of his voice. However, the drama of Tolstoy’s uncertainty plays beneath the surface of his prose.

What Is Art? fails to reckon with art’s limitations. Surely it was not just the language of reason that fractured at Babel. Even in the realm of feeling, humans sometimes require a translator of sorts to bridge the gaps between us. Tolstoy, however, could not acknowledge such weakness in art. With nowhere else to turn, he depended on it as the engine of moral progress in the world, able to direct the hearts of men without assistance. Consequently, he could not see the merit of good criticism. Artistic creations, “the meaning of which we figure out gradually and with effort,” may be interesting, but do not provide an “artistic impression.” In his opinion, art that requires explanation is not strong enough to do its good work. But can’t an artistic impression be nurtured over time? Although it requires dethroning a work of art from godlike sta- tus, its intended feeling may be conveyed to the audience after they have put in the work to understand it. My own reading of Hidden in Plain View may be taken as an example. As Morson’s expert guidance unlocked the author’s narrative structure, I found myself overwhelmed by the epic scope of Tolstoy’s vision. I had to be given eyes to see before the art could reach my soul.

Of course, there is such a thing as bad criticism. It proliferated in the late 1800s as it does today. In the opening of What Is Art?, Tolstoy observes:

Criticism, in which lovers of art used to find support for their judgements of art, has lately become so contradictory that, if we should exclude from the real of art all that the critics of various schools deny the right of belonging to art, almost no art would be left. Like theologians of various trends, so artists of various trends exclude and destroy each other.

Like Christianity, art suffers when its participants are distracted from essential matters by reputation. In both instances, the origin of activity should be love, not competition. Tolstoy saw this and tried to encourage compassion in the artistic sphere by simply hounding on the brotherhood of men. However, humanity is historically incapable of sustaining brotherly love. That is why true Christianity doesn’t primarily depend on human love; Love intrudes from the outside. Real equality is only possible when a secure standing depends on the Savior’s love and not on destroying the competition. Therefore, to avoid bad criticism, creator and audience must acknowledge shared weakness before participating in the activity of art. The good critic must humbly admit that a flawed artist can still have something important to say to him. In fact, an artist’s flaws are often the source of his profundity as they are the only thing he has in common with every other man on earth.

Unfortunately, Tolstoy’s rhetoric leaves no room for the communion he so desired. In a world marred by the fall, it is weakness—not strength—that unites. While it is true that pretension has no place in art, all communication demands grace. Art, artists, and readers all have their flaws. For example, an artist will use images or symbols taken from his environment—from what he knows—to communicate his feeling. My surroundings may not look exactly like his, and so I may have trouble understanding his meaning. I will have to overcome the differences between us before I can tap into what is universal about his work. Yet neither I nor the artist can reach beyond these natural boundaries on our own. We are necessarily limited by our circumstances.

That space between difference and similarity is where the critic should live. By standing in the gap between artist and audience, he meets the artist’s failure to find a ubiquitous language with mercy. A good critic immerses himself in the artist’s perspective. Time and attention are limited, and so his ability to critique will be limited, but where possible he walks in the shoes of his chosen artist so that he may turn around and speak on the artist’s behalf to fellow, limited audience members. He “translates” the work of art so that artistic foreigners may understand.

Furthermore, a critic is an individual and will himself have a distinctive perspective. Although there are correct and incorrect interpretations of a work of art, all correct interpretations will have shades of nuance, their focus and emphasis particular to each critic’s point of view. These differences between interpretations offer a new chance to engage in “the essence of art,” which Tolstoy believes “makes us rejoice over another’s joy, grieve over another grief, merge our souls with another’s.” Witnessing the ways in which a work of art uniquely influences another person gives us eyes to see not just the artist, but our fellow audience members, as well. Just as Christ’s love begets love among his followers, an artist’s act of communion begets communion among its interpreters.

Tolstoy’s discomfort with the theology of redemption seems to have had unforeseen consequences for his philosophy of art. Yet his novels suggest that the author understood something with his heart that he struggled to affirm intellectually. With the godlike assurance of his absolute language, Tolstoy crafts a beneficent Providence—the Providence whose existence he doubted. In War and Peace, when Prince Andrei discovers his fiancée, Natasha, has betrayed his trust, he refuses to speak with her and leaves for the war. With a wounded pride, he continues to harbor profound hatred in his heart. But when he is mortally injured on the battlefield, he comes to see things differently:

“Loving with a human love, one can pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death can destroy it. It is the essence of the soul. But I’ve hated so many people in my life. And of all people, I have loved and hated no one so much as her.” And he vividly pictured Natasha to himself, not as he had pictured her before, with her loveliness alone, which brought him joy; but for the first time he pictured her soul. And he understood her feeling, her suffering, shame, repentance. (921)

For Andrei, true understanding proceeds from divine love, only accessible to human beings as a gift. It allows him to see beyond Natasha’s deserving—beyond her artistic performance, as it were—and glimpse the essence of her soul. The flaws of human nature must be absorbed by mercy before they can be overcome, before we can deal with each other in love. In the same way, a good critic must forgive an author’s faults to see the heart of his work. It is only then that he can turn to his fellow readers and give them new eyes with which to see the soul of art.

Emily Andrews is an Associate Director at CenterForLit in Spokane, Washington, where she teaches, writes, podcasts, and develops teacher resources. She is an Associate Editor for FORMA.

Poetry Marly Youmans

Marly Youmans is the author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction. Recent books include the collection of poems The Book of the Red King (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2019), and the novel Charis in the World of Wonders (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020). Find more at www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com.

Dream Of Light And Rain

A slantwise gold, a summer evening light On vineyard rows, the wobbling leaves like hands That caught and spilled the rain of evening light…

And I was happy in the rows, my hands

Illumined by the gold, my face an orb Of sun that shone above the leafy hands…

And each translucent grape was also orb That drank the gold of sun and milk of moon To make a knot of seed, the flesh, the orb…

Like masks of gold and silver, sun and moon Hovered together in the sky, as rain Fell slanting like the tears of sun and moon…

Each crimson drop proclaimed the rain Our daily rain, while floods of light Illumined sliding drops of rain…

Poetry Mary Giudice

Mary Giudice is a contented wife and homeschooling mother who lives in Newberg, Oregon. After a bachelor’s degree in English from Calvin College and a master's degree in literature from Sacramento State University she still hadn’t had her fill of reading and discussing books. So now she guides local friends through the classics and hosts Take This Poem, a podcast that celebrates the good work that poetry can do in everyday life. Her own poetry was most recently published in Triggerfish Critical Review

Gifts From The Knife

The best part of carving the spoon was when the hook knife slipped and slashed its curved beak into my forearm.

It isn’t every day that one hears her skin unzip and sees the deep pink of what should be internal, and waits to watch the darkness fill the rift, and waits patiently for pain.

The weeks that came after were holy too: after a shower seeing the gray-green scum form across the pond of the wet wound, at night feeling the electric crackles as the cells rushed in with their needles, knowing what to do, how to re-make an arm, ready for this, pulling the edges tight.

In his book The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis frequently recommends that his readers take a walk under the stars at night and try to imagine how they would have looked to our ancient and medieval ancestors. Lewis believed that the medieval understanding of the planets contained spiritual symbols of permanent value. He wanted, most notably in his literature, to overcome the modern view that sees the stars as merely flaming balls of gas and the planets as potential homes for humanity (if not already inhabited). For Lewis, the medieval way of seeing the stars, while wrong on many factual counts, was nevertheless still valuable to modern man. To that end, I want to take Lewis’ argument seriously, that we can learn something about ourselves, about reality, about God, byattending to the medieval model of the universe.

At the end of the Divine Comedy, as the pilgrim looks upon the blessed Trinity and is struck by supernatural knowledge concerning the incarnation, what he sees is “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” As Lewis explains, to people living in the Middle Ages the cosmos was just that, an ordered whole which moved in perfect spheres and was moved by the love of God. And while each of these spheres, the planets, was itself moved by some kind of angelic intelligence, it was the love of God for the universe that caused it to move. This movement caused a music, the Music of the Spheres, which no one could hear, for its bliss would have been too much for us. They looked on the cosmos with baptized pagan eyes, seeing in the planets vestiges of the gods of old, but these gods now became angels, their influences and temperaments, the will of God.

In the medieval model, the Earth was at the center of the physical universe. Contrary to many popular claims, this did not mean that humans saw themselves as the most important beings in the universe—far from it. The planets moving in their spheres were perfect. They were not subject to corruption. But on Earth, corruption, death, decay, and sin reigned supreme. This is part of why hell was often conceived as existing in the center of the Earth, for the center of the Earth is the place in the physical universe farthest away from God. Dante goes even further and not only places hell at the center of the Earth, but specifically makes the central point Satan’s genitalia.

Then came Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo who sought to elevate the Earth to the status of a planet. For them, Earth danced with the other planets to the Music of the Spheres. However, it was not long before questions of spirituality were sidelined. With the explication of the laws of gravity, angels were no longer needed to keep the planets moving. And with the disappearance of the angels came the disappearance of any spiritual significance in the planets. The Music of the Spheres ceased.

Lewis was not content with this outcome, however, and, both as a teacher of medieval literature and as a Christian, decided to reintroduce modern people to the medieval cosmos. Citing both ancient and medieval sources, Lewis describes how the medievals saw the planets. For many at that time, the terms “god,” “angel,” and “planet” were interchangeable. But if these wandering lights in the sky were gods, they were not to be worshiped, as the medievals themselves served the one, true God. The reason the planets were considered as living in some way was because they moved. For Aristotle, whose understanding of the soul would come to influence St. Thomas Aquinas and the later scholastics, selfmoved objects like planets, animals, and people have souls.

Therefore, because the planets move, they must have souls. Medieval people were systematizers. They took what was written by the auctores (the famous authors, both pagan and Christian, who shaped the world in which they lived) and found ways to make them coalesce. People in the Middle Ages believed that everything written by the auctores must somehow be true. And it did not matter if this appeared in a philosophical text, in a scientific text, or in works of poetry.

The assumption was that the auctores’ investigations into reality, especially when based on logic and reason, must be correct. So, they transformed Jupiter, a god more interested in your wife than his own, into a symbol of joviality, a kingly magnanimity and joy. They also believed his angelic influence conveyed that quality to various people born under his sway. Similarly, when Venus was dominating, you could expect love; the Moon, wandering of wits or feet or both. This may sound like New Age astrology, which does share some characteristics with medieval cosmology, but the key difference is that most modern astrology deals primarily with the horoscope, the time-vision, where one looks to see what will happen in the future based on the alignment of the stars.

While there were certainly some in the Middle Ages who practiced this kind of fortune-telling, most did not. They simply assumed that all things are interconnected and related to one another. The stars and planets present at the time of your birth have some influence over who you are, but they only incline. They do not determine. Dante condemned astrologers to the eighth circle of hell, that of the liars, because while they sought or claimed to tell the future from the stars, they could not. This shows that while notions of influence from the stars were considered natural, any suggestion that they could be predictive was not. It was natural for the planets to have influence on the Earth. Their light shined on us, and with that light came various events, metals, and even temperaments. But divination has always been strongly condemned by the church; what’s more, it was ineffectual. As early as the fourth century, Augustine noted that if horoscopes worked then people born at exactly the same moment should lead exactly the same lives. And yet, princes and paupers were often born simultaneously yet led completely different lives.

So, what then is the importance of the medieval cosmos? It doesn’t predict the future—most people today would say that the planets and stars have little to no effect on our lives. And we know the Earth is not the center of the universe, let alone the solar system. So, why bother with learning about it, other than to better understand the Middle Ages? Why did Lewis, for instance, believe the planets to have “permanent value as spiritual symbols”?

Lewis’ interest in the planets likely grew out of his study of medieval literature, which he taught first at Oxford and then as the Chair of Medieval Studies at Cambridge. Thus, the planets and their medieval aspects find their way into his scholarly work, his personal life, and his fiction. Lewis would often go stargazing, even writing in one letter that after watching the conjunction of certain stars, he could understand why our ancestors saw meaning in their movements. In his scholarship, the planets come up in several places, not least of which are his poem “The Planets,” his essay on alliterative verse, and the aforementioned book, The Discarded Image.

In his poem, Lewis describes the characteristics of each planet. He notes the enchanting and wandering spirit of the Moon, and the shifting, variegated nature of Mercury. He draws attention to the difficulty in pinning down Mercury by calling him a “madcap rover,” the “patron of pilf’rers,” but he also notes the planet’s relationship to words and meaning. Lewis calls him the “Lord of language” and associates him with weddings, particularly the wedding of “thing with thought.” Venus, the third heaven to which St. Paul ascended in Dante’s cosmology, symbolizes beauty and the sea and the growing of things upon the Earth. Next comes the Sun, filled with ruling and intellect. The Sun is not the king of the planets, but he is kingly, and he is, as Lewis describes him in The Discarded Image, the eye of the universe. He sees all and by him we see. He imparts wisdom to us. From the Sun we move to Mars, who is called mercenary. In the poem, Lewis associates Mars’s metal, iron, with the nails of the crucifixion. As a result, we see that Mars, despite his role as infortuna minor, is necessary. After all, we call the Friday of the crucifixion Good Friday.

After Mars we meet Jupiter, the true king. Alongside the mercurial, Lewis lists joviality as one of the hardest concepts for modern people to grasp. Today it means something primarily along the lines of being jolly, joyful, or convivial. This is all true of Jove, but he is more than that. There is magnanimity in joviality, a kingliness. Lewis says, however, that we must not imagine a king at war, but a feasting king at peace in the halcyon days of summer. After the kingly Jupiter, who Lewis says in That Hideous Strength is sometimes confused with his maker, is Jove’s father, Saturn, old Kronos or Father Time, the cause of pestilence and death. Saturn comes last because the me- dieval astronomers knew that Saturn was farther away than Jupiter. But even allegorically, it makes sense that Saturn would appear last, for he represents the death we must all pass through before we can reach the true heavens that exist beyond our physical universe. Lewis describes Saturn in his poem as “stoop’d and stumbling, with staff groping.” He is a wizened old man who embodies pain and suffering. And yet, as Dante concurred, his is the sphere of the contemplatives. In the poem, Lewis writes that his “distance hurts us.” Saturn’s effects on the Earth are so negative precisely because he is so much closer to God.

As noted above, being the center of the universe is no boon to the human race. All change and sin and imperfection are found on Earth. Saturn is the last of the planets, and in Dante only two spheres away from the Empyrean—the fixed stars and the Primum Mobile being the final two spheres of the physical universe. Therefore, although God is present in all parts of the cosmos, there is a sense in which, because he is also beyond the universe, the edges of the universe are somehow closer to him. This distance causes a kind of refraction in the light that descends from Saturn, so that even the good that may come from him is first cloaked in a kind of natural evil. It is not necessary to believe that the planets are indeed moved by angels and that those angels have these influences on the Earth, but it is necessary to understand that this is one way humanity sought to understand reality and that the characters and temperaments which arose out of their understanding may still be important for us today.

Lewis is convinced that these symbols are of permanent spiritual value, but what can we do with them? The answer is twofold. First, these symbols are useful archetypes that may help us better understand ourselves, each other, and even God. The second part of the answer lies in the deeper notion that the world is so ordered that nothing happens purely by chance. What happens in one part of the cosmos has an effect on the whole.

To see the planets as beneficial archetypes, one need only turn to Lewis’ fiction. Before the Narniad, he wrote a trilogy of science fiction novels. In these earlier novels, part of what Lewis sets out to do is present the medieval cosmos in light of modern science. When the protagonist Elwin Ransom is taken into space (a word he soon decides is a blasphemous libel of the Empyrean before him), he does not find that the Earth is the center of the solar system, nor does he find the planets as perfect, light-filled spheres spinning round in perfect circles. He discovers planets not unlike our own—some solid, some gaseous. He also finds two of them inhabited by rational creatures who worship the true God. Yet each planet is moved through the Fields of Arbol, the “Old Solar” name for the solar system, by a kind of angelic intelligence called an Oyarsa. What is more, the Oyarsa of each planet maps fairly well onto the medieval understanding. This comes to the fore in That Hideous Strength, where, instead of going into space, the planets, represented by their Oyarsu, come down to Earth. As they do, their influence is felt both by Ransom and by the other members of Ransom’s household, who are hiding in the kitchen. While Lewis does not have all seven planets descend, he nevertheless uses their descent as an opportunity to describe the archetypal character of each. When Mercury comes, the characters find themselves making puns, playing with meanings, and putting forward intellectual ideas that seem mad at first, and yet on reflection ought to be taken seriously. When Jupiter descends, they dance—not in some bacchanalian frenzy, but in a way that is both lordly and folksy.

Lewis suggests that humanity participates in each of these archetypes, but in individuals one of them will often predominate. In a sense, he offers a vocabulary to help us articulate ourselves. To paraphrase Lewis’ essay that comes before the poem on the planets, we know the saturnine well enough, but who doesn’t need to be reminded of Jove? This was particularly true in Lewis’ day, following both World War I and World War II. Gone were the days where mankind was progressing to a pure and wholly good technological future. Instead we discovered that technology meant making it easier to kill people. This is the saturnine quality that tends toward despair and pessimism. But joviality? Who can fully comprehend all its meaning between kingliness, magnanimity, and yet also joy and jollity? Lewis considered himself something of an apologist or herald for Jupiter, reminding people of the importance of this peace-filled, festive, kingly character.

Attention to these archetypes can help us become more intentional in how we think about ourselves and our neighbors. While the goal isn’t to change your nature if you are of a more saturnine bent, you can ensure it is the contemplative side of Saturn which you feed, rather than the one which deals in death and decay. If you are more venereal, then love as only you can, but make sure your love is appropriately directed. If you are more mercurial, make sure it is the love of language and meaning you stoke, and not the changeability which causes you to turn from joy to despair. Every planet has a diurnal and nocturnal aspect (or, if you prefer, a paradisal and infernal). Our job, then, is to bring out the diurnal in ourselves and others and to combat the nocturnal.

And as God is the source of all things, he must also be the source of these archetypes. Their characteristics each give us some glimpse of who he is. According to Michael Ward, in his book Planet Narnia, this is what Lewis sought to uncover in the Chronicles of Narnia. For those unfamiliar with Ward’s thesis, it is this: each of the seven Chronicles of Narnia is governed by one of the seven planets of the medieval cosmos. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the Jove story and is concerned primarily with kingliness; Prince Caspian is the Mars story and culminates in the fight between Peter and Miraz; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader tells the Sun story as the characters travel east to Aslan’s country and drink liquid light; The Silver Chair is the Moon story and is concerned with wandering and madness; The Horse and His Boy is the Mercury story and is concerned with the meeting of selves, storytelling, and even thievery; The Magician’s Nephew is the Venus story and describes the creation of Narnia (and contains its own version of the Garden of the Hesperides); and finally The Last Battle is the Saturn story and is concerned with the end of Narnia. Ward’s widely accepted thesis presents a convincing argument, noting how Aslan himself, Narnia’s picture of the second person of the Trinity, is portrayed in each novel in ways that emphasize the planet which dominates the story. Aslan is primarily seen as the Son of the Emperor across the Sea in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He is the creator of all plants and animals, even creating the animals primarily in pairs of husband and wife in The Magician’s Nephew. And as Aslan helps us understand God through the guise of fiction, he also helps us understand these archetypal aspects of God through His assumption of the planetary temperaments. To learn about the medieval understanding of the plan- ets is to learn about who God is.

Finally, the medieval conception of the cosmos teaches us that the universe is ordered, that nothing is here by accident, and that all things are united and influence one another. Is it true that those born under Jupiter, as Lewis was, are inclined to be jovial in temperament—red-faced men and women prone to laughter and with loud voices? I can’t say. But it is true that “the heavens declare the Glory of the Lord.” It is true that their cosmic dance sings with the Music of the Spheres, which we cannot now hear but may be able to glimpse and hear more fully when Christ returns. Thus, to read Dante or Chaucer or even Shakespeare, who were all concerned with this conception of reality, is to get behind the purely mechanistic, even the purely naturalistic, and to see the cosmos more holistically.

Lewis constantly asked his students, the primary audience of the lectures on which The Discarded Image was based, to walk under the stars at night. He asked them, and therefore us, to look up with the eyes of a medieval man or woman. If we heed him, we may learn something about ourselves and about God. So, go take a walk, look at the stars, and see what you may learn. Perhaps you too may glimpse the Love that moves the sun and the other stars, the Love that keeps creation in motion and seeks it out, declaring itself to its creation through our very movements. And then, perhaps, you too can see the world for what it really is: a gift of love from the one, true Lover.

Dr. David Russell Mosley is a poet and theologian in Washington State. He is Dean of Academics at the Chesterton Academy of Notre Dame in Spokane. When he’s not reading books or writing, Dr. Mosley likes to get lost in the woods, drink a nice dram of Scotch, and smoke his pipe.

Irecall my first journey into the canon of Western civilization at St. John’s College. I was so nervous. As the only Black person in most classes, I felt out of place. I was reading literature that I had been instructed to believe was a tool of white people to oppress me. I took one look at the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and knew I was done. But something magical happened to me as I read Aristotle’s Parts of Animals during that first year of study. The text strengthened my faith in God as I saw how Aristotle proved that every part of an animal’s body was created to fulfill a certain purpose to keep the creature alive. I began to understand that Aristotle was not on a power trip; he was seeking to build on the knowledge he gained from Socrates to better understand humanity and the world around him. At that moment I began to see the purpose behind reading these books.

Rather than being a tool of oppression, what if the canon of Western civilization is simply a part of a larger collection of books that tells the full human story? The way many of these books have been misused in history has rightfully received resistance from many people, but it is my hope that this article will provide a new perspective. Socrates said, “I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.” Similarly, Paul wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one.” Perhaps these two great philosophers had a deeper understanding of human existence. Both were learned men—Paul being a scholar of the Tanakh and an author of much of the New Testament, and Socrates being the leading teacher of his day. What if the purpose of learning is not to highlight which civilization is more brilliant than the other, but rather to gain an understanding of our shared humanity? Many people see the canon of Western civilization as the story of humankind, but I have come to see it as part of the story of humankind.

Both Socrates and Paul had front-row seats to the creation and canonization of classic texts, yet they read them with a global understanding that escapes many present-day readers. Socrates and Paul read the scrolls of their day as part of a bigger picture. What would happen if we read the canon of Western civilization with that same mentality?

Ancient times reveal an intersection of ethnicities, cultures, and status. Mankind thrived together and shared knowledge together. There existed no racially polarized way of looking at literature, learning, and humanity. When reading the Greek Euclid’s Elements, we notice his reference to the Egyptians’ work in geometry, giving us insight into how differently our cultures pursue knowledge. In our time there seems to be a toxic competition to see who discovered knowledge or who is the most knowledgeable. In that competition, we purposely leave out how the “other” has contributed to the overall body of knowledge. For example, when discussing the Underground Railroad, we rarely hear Black educators and scholars refer to the role the Quakers have played in the abolitionist movement. When discussing the Revolutionary War, we rarely hear white teachers explaining the role the Black Crispus Attucks played in starting the war that led to our independence.

Just as the Black community knows the story of Crispus Attucks and the Quakers know their role in the abolitionist movement, we understand that those individual stories are part of a larger story. By extension, we realize that the creation and naming of the Western canon ought not to evoke ideas of white supremacy or racism. Rather, the canon is supposed to open a window into the full human story. Are there holes in the story? Yes. Has the canon been used to promote prejudice and racism? Yes. But the canon itself was not created to do that. It was created to help humankind develop a deeper understanding of the human story.

By analogy, consider the way the Bible is not a single book, but a canon of collected ancient religious writings. It includes forty different authors and sixty-six different books. Those sixty-six books are split into various genres: the prophets, the Gospels, the poems, etc. All of those books and sections are further divided into either the Old or New Testament. The authors of the books lived at different times, and their stories describe different cultures. For example, Nimrod was a world ruler who lived somewhere in Africa long before Abraham. Timothy was a Christian leader who was half Jewish and half Greek. Read separately, it may be difficult to identify how these books and stories fit together, but read collectively we form a picture of the Jewish people and how the Christian faith was born out of the Jewish story. In The Drama of Scripture by Dr. Craig Bartholomew and Dr. Michael Goheen, the authors present a unique perspective on the concept of human stories:

Imagine that the Bible, with its sixty-six books, written by dozens of human authors over the course of more than a thousand years, is a grand cathedral with many rooms and levels and a variety of entrances.

If we apply this global understanding of the Bible to our understanding of the canon of Western civilization, we develop a clearer understanding of its importance. It is not that we favor the canon of Western civilization over other worthy books, but we recognize the powerful way in which it reveals a human story of long ago. Those of us who have come to embrace classical learning use that understanding to gain a seamless perspective on all human stories. As Bartholomew and Goheen write in The Drama of Scripture, “In order to understand our world, to make sense of our lives, and to make our most important decisions about how we ought to be living, we depend upon some story.” In light of this, consider the canon of Western civilization as part of a larger body of work I call the Human Story Books, a collection made up of smaller canons, testaments, and series, many of which include classic texts. Again let us return to the structure of the Bible. As stated earlier, the Holy Book is made up of sixty-six books, written by forty authors (some unknown) and organized into the following structure:

1. OLD TESTAMENT

a. The Pentateuch, or the Books of the Law: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

b. Historical Books: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther c. Wisdom Literature: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon d. The Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi