Forma Issue #19

Go Deeper into Classic Literature

Tap into the wealth and health of Christian civilization with the help of literary critic Joseph Pearce

After learning the true meaning of the word "civilization"—a society rooted in truth — you are taken on a tour of twelve of the most important books ever written, from Augustine to Shakespeare to the masterpieces of modern literature. Each work played a role, for better or for worse, in shaping the civilized world.

Great stories, even when awed, are a re ection of the greatest truths ever taught, and they share in the storytelling power of God himself: Jesus Christ, who taught in parables, and lived out the most dramatic tale ever told. The Twelve Great Books that take you deeper into the presence of the Creator through the fruits of his creative gi s, are: Augustine’s Confessions , Romeo and Juliet , Julius Caesar , Othello , Macbeth , Frankenstein , Wuthering Heights , A Christmas Carol, e Picture of Dorian Gray, e Man Who Was ursday, e Power and the Glory, and Brideshead Revisited.

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“A tour-de-force! Pearce not only introduces the great works of English literature in an engaging way, he encourages you to look afresh at the themes of the most famous works in the English language.”

— Fiorella De Maria, Author, e Father Gabriel Mystery series

“In this collection of sparkling and informative essays, Pearce brings together his breadth of knowledge and depth of insight, combining a love of literature with his love of the Lord.” — Fr. Dwight Longenecker, Author, More Christianity: Finding the Fullness of the Faith

“Joseph Pearce has proven himself to be one of the outstanding men of letters of our time. ere could be no better Virgil to our Dante to guide us through the heights and depths of the great works.”

Dale Ahlquist, President, Society of G.K. Chesterton

Edited by Joseph Pearce

e Ignatius Critical Editions are perfect for introducing great works of literature to anyone, teens to adults, wanting to revisit and get more from favorite authors. Each volume includes essays from top academics, writing from a traditional viewpoint that values classical education. Visit our website to see the full list of 27 titles.

Confessions — Augustine of Hippo

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Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë

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Great Expectations — Charles Dickens

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Hamlet — William Shakespeare

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Julius Caesar — William Shakespeare

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Macbeth — William Shakespeare

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King Lear — William Shakespeare

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Othello — William Shakespeare

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Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen

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Romeo and Juliet — William Shakespeare

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Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen

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e Scarlet Letter — Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Issue 19

Winter 2023

COLUMNS FEATURES

EDITORS’ LETTER

by the Editors

Cultural Currency

HOME WORK: “NOT UNBECOMING MEN WHO STROVE WITH GODS”

by Mark Botts

From the Classroom HEALING THE SCHOOL BY MAKING IT WHOLE

by Dr. Christopher Perrin

BOOK REVIEWS

THE LONGING FOR HOME: A REVIEW OF ANTHONY ESOLEN’S NOSTALGIA

by Matthew Bianco

MEMENTO MORI: A REVIEW MARCUS AURELIUS’ MEDITATIONS

by Brett Z. Chancery

A SPIRIT OF INQUIRY: A REVIEW OF DAVID HACKETT FISCHER’S AFRICAN FOUNDERS

by John Wilson

GARDENING AND THE SACRAMENTAL IMAGINATION

An Interview with Vigen Guroian

by Katerina Kern

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

GLORY AT HOME: NOSTOS AND KLEOS IN ROBINSON’S EPIC

by Christine Perrin

TENSION AND COLLAPSE IN MODERN MATHEMATICS

by William Carey

CREATION, LITURGY, AND SALVATION THROUGH A MEDIEVAL VIEW OF THE COSMOS

by Alexandra Kern

EXPHRASIS FOR COMMUNAL IDENTITY IN VIRGIL’S AENEID

by Talia Faia

MUSIC FORMS REST: TOWARDS A THEOLOGY OF HARMONY

by Gregory Wilbur

VICO’S VISION OF EDUCATION: RESTORING THE IMAGO DEI

by Patrick Halbrook

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

Editors' Letter

Dear Readers,

Winter greeted us unkindly this year, bringing the lowest temperatures across the US in thirty years (some have said). But perhaps fortuitously, this cold led many home just as Christmas arrived. The home, returned to in need, requires more than it once had, for it holds more than it once had. As we considered what to explore in this edition, it struck us that everything we are attempting to explore in classical education revolves around, and perhaps ends with, the home. Home: a place of safety, a sense of harmony, a cosmic belonging, a future salvation, a kingdom within us; it may be many things, but none of them are tangential to education. Fundamentally, the classical renewal is a return home.

So in this time of winter and sheltering, we decided to devote an entire edition to the exploration of home and our right relationship to it. While this certainly includes literal dwelling spaces, it also includes such broad ideas as the place of mankind within the cosmos, the ability of music to craft a home, the necessity of nature in developing an understanding of our spiritual home, the role of ritual in establishing a communal identity and belonging, and many more. Like previous issues, the authors herein consider the theme from diverse perspectives, allowing us a complex window into the home.

We hope you enjoy reading these meditations on humanity, belonging, nature, and our human need to craft a shared, sacred space to call “home.”

Cheers,

The Editors

The Editorial Team

Publisher: Andrew Kern, President of The CiRCE Institute

Editor-in-Chief: Katerina Kern

Art Director: Graeme Pitman

Poetry Editors: Christine Perrin and Noah Perrin

Senior Editor: Matthew Bianco

Contributing Editors: Ian Andrews and Emily Andrews

Copy Editor: Emily Callihan

Layout: David Kern

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

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

HOME WORK

“Not Unbecoming Men Who Strove with Gods”

BY MARK BOTTS

“I long—I pine, all my days— To travel home and see the dawn Of my return”

The Odyssey

“How dull it is to pause, to make an end.”

“Ulysses,”

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Classical education promotes heroism. The title of hero, unfortunately, in recent years has been diluted. Everyone is a hero. Everyone is special. Or, to quote from the animated feature film Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, which grossed, worldwide, more than $375 million dollars: everyone is Spiderman. While classical education does not, should not, encourage the current, feeble idea of the hero, it should pay attention to a certain temptation common among heroes, for this temptation, like waves, crashes upon the souls of everyone. It is the allure that something greater awaits us, and that the greater thing awaiting us exists outside the home. Consequently, the home lies vacant.

In Homer’s epic the Odyssey, the hero desires to return home to Ithaca. Even a life with the beautiful, seductive goddess Calypso cannot keep Odysseus from wanting to return home because there abides his son, Telemechus, and his wife, “wise Penelope.”

Of course, home concerns not only husbands and wives and children. The place matters even to the single man and the single woman. However, for our purposes here, home implies family: husband, wife, children.

Readers of the Odyssey will root for Odysseus to reach Ithaca. They will hope for Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion. They will revel in the hero and his son’s slaughtering expulsion from their home of the evil suitors. The story ramps up again, just before its conclusion, as Odysseus and his homeland crew, composed, in part, of his son, Telemechus, and their loyal swineherd, set out to lay waste to other enemies. However, the narrative resolves when Athena, goddess of war, commands Odysseus and his homeland crew to stay from their adventurous pursuits. The epic’s last lines state that Odysseus “obeyed her, glad at heart / And Athena handed down her pacts of peace / between both sides for all the years to come” (XXIV.598–600). “Peace for all the years to come”: what a climate in which to live, in which to keep a home. But this is not where Odysseus, also known as Ulysses, will remain. Before we look more at this hero’s journey, let us consider a few things regarding education and the home.

With classical education’s chief mission being the cultivation of the human soul towards virtue, the

Odyssey, while not a Christian text, serves its readers well because it satisfies the human desire for heroes and adventure. Such heroes and adventure offer a great model with which the reader can form his soul according to virtue. And a clear mark of virtue is a love for the home. Nevertheless, the human desire for a heroic adventure can result in the home becoming a place to which we are either traveling or leaving, as opposed to abiding.

The tendency to not abide at home can even affect classical schools. The academic seasons rush along, sweeping up those involved. The rush, while necessary and inevitable, in some cases, threatens to keep us from contemplating the books we read or the ideas we encounter. The rush pushes us past ourselves, past each other, the natural world, and, most importantly, God.

But the academic season is not the only time of year in which we must be watchful of the hurry-up offense that seems to define our nation’s culture. Summertime can become just as rushed along with the rush of (sports) camps, road trips, and preemptive academic work. Consequently, during the academic or summertime months, the home is vacated. We are either rarely physically there, or we are there but occupied by a number of activities and (de)vices. Much has been said about the sinister, demonic clutches that our digital devices have sunk into our souls, so technology will not take stage here. Rather, the focus here will be the physical vacating of the home.

While the Odyssey resolves with peace and Odysseus being able to live with his wife and son in their home, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” picks up with the hero years later, finding the great adventurer ill-tempered for the noble work home requires. Tennyson’s account of Ulysses borrows from Dante’s poetic rendering of Ulysses. Both artists present a complex and compelling, though deeply flawed, hero: one who cannot abide living out his days at home.

At the CiRCE fall regional conference in October of 2022, Andrew Kern remarked that the romance film genre either tracks a relationship forming or falling to pieces. Rarely, if ever, does the genre follow a relationship that moves toward maturity, com-

mitment, and virtue, thus reaching what Aristotle calls friendship’s highest form: goodness. Kern’s commentary landed on both feet. Film, which is housed under the literary roof of drama, relies on conflict. Conflict is easy to find when traveling, leaving (or visiting) home. Consequently, Ulysses encounters one conflict after another during his voyage to Ithaca, but once home, once at peace, he eventually becomes dissatisfied.

Why is this hero dissatisfied with being at home? Tennyson portrays Ulysses as a great man who cannot live an adventure-less life. The poem, which is a monologue, starts with Ulysses speaking to himself, then moves to him speaking to his crew. The reader discovers from the first lines that Ulysses thinks his life at home holds no honor:

It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees.(1–7)

Aside from comparing Ithaca’s barren crags with his aged wife, we should appreciate the hero’s frustration. He was a known man. A meritorious man. Who wants to stay in a place where they are not known? Who wants to end their days in anonymity? Ulysses’ proclamation that he “will drink / Life to the lees” makes for an enticing anthem.

Ulysses continues his monologue, claiming that his son Telemechus is better suited to rule people. According to the aging hero, Telemachus is “discerning to fulfill / This labour, by slow prudence to make mild / A rugged people. . . . / He works his work, I mine” (35–37, 43). It is the work Telemechus works that befits the home, and Ulysses admits his own inability and lack of interest regarding such efforts; however, the admittance does not imply repentance. According to Joshua Gibbs, in his essay “Why We Need Frog and Toad Now More Than Ever,” voicing one’s truth does

not put him on the path towards The Truth. Similarly, in a Proverbial episode titled “Not Perfect, Just Stupid,” Gibbs contends that confession must entail repentance. “Repent, and Christ will raise you up,” he says. Ulysses, however, seeks to raise himself through adventure:

I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause and make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use. . . . for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. (18–22, 59–61)

The heroic narrative often demands that the hero travels away from home. And, in some cases, such as the American Western, the hero cannot remain in place long enough to build and keep a home. Tennyson’s Ulysses speaks to this feature. But this feature is not an absolute requirement of the hero, as demonstrated through Homer’s Odysseus. In fact, the 2017 Western film Wind River, written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, ends when the hero, who has endured a life-threatening adventure in his hometown, says to an old friend, “I’m going nowhere,” after which both the hero and the friend rest together in the friend’s backyard. It is, then, unfortunate that Ulysses’ desire leaves him dissatisfied with home. It is tragic that this hero, though equipped with the qualities of courage, intelligence, and eloquence, believes the home unfitting for “noble work” that enriches the soul.

While we should exercise prudence when it comes to being known, especially publicly known, we certainly don’t want to live or die without having shared our soul with another, which is one purpose the home should serve. Ulysses sees himself as a man of adventure, but he does not view the home as a place where adventure awaits him. Without “noble work,” what will become the

hero’s soul? Home is one of the greatest adventures for human beings. Home demands that husband and wife share themselves with one another to such a degree that the two become one, “each the other’s world entire,” to borrow from Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses. To get to that place in a marriage, and sustain it, is no small task. On an episode titled “Childhood Trauma, Marriage, and Making Friends,” from the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, guest Dr. John Delony said to pursue a healthy marriage, which produces a healthy home, is a goal one will pursue his entire life. Ulysses could have set himself on that course. He would have found himself sufficiently occupied, rewarded, and known.

Mark Botts lives with his wife, Rebecca, and their three kids in West Virginia, where he is a visiting instructor of English for Bluefield State University. He teaches Bible for his local church and serves as a Strength and Conditioning coach for a Christian school. His writings can be found at Front Porch Republic, Merion West, and Voeglin View

THE LONGING FOR HOME A Review

of Anthony Esolen’s Nostalgia

By Matthew Bianco

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”

—Simone Weil

modern society, and perhaps especially modern American society, is highly transient. Many Americans do not have a place they have called home their entire lives, especially not multi-generationally. This increased transience has drawn attention to a larger and older conversation about home. As Anthony Esolen puts it in his new book, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, we are “homeless in a homeless world.” Nostalgia is Anthony Esolen’s contribution to this conversation.

Homelessness is a distinctively human characteristic, Esolen argues: “In all the world, only the

man is lost, only the man is not well.” On the one hand, we are homeless because of our transience (among other external factors). We do not have a place or a time that informs who we are, that gives us, as Esolen reminds us, what Mao Tse-tung decreed destroyed: the gifts of “old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture.” On the other hand, we are homeless because we are created to be pilgrims, struggling toward another, truer home. The pilgrim alone knows that his good and humble home perched on a hillside is an allegory of heaven, and not so by the arbitrary choice of the allegorist, but by its essence and our essence, as made by the God who

speaks to us through those essences. The human longing for home is caused first by time, insofar as time is an enemy to belonging. Time is constantly introducing flux. “You cannot go home,” Esolen says. To whatever home you try to return, it will be a home that is different than the one you left. Time not only introduces flux, though, it also introduces death, decay, and destruction. Esolen proposes that the most obvious way “to defeat the fell purposes of Time [is] to have children.”

This, however, makes time a tool for the enemies of our longing for home, whom Esolen identifies as secular progressives. These enemies do not believe we are pilgrims intended for another home. Nor do they believe that we can do much more than struggle for survival. Without hope for that brighter world and without respect for the old ideas, customs, habits, and culture, these enemies fight against the having of children, and ultimately, what that necessitates: “That they should make [the Law] known to their children” (Ps. 78:5). Esolen describes this as “the bequeathing of a heritage. . . . It is a grasping of time past, time present, and the time to come.” The past is to be rejected, except maybe for its quaint and entertaining features. We can love the past, but only as Kalypso loved Odysseus, says Esolen; as “a goddess who loves him as you love a pet.”

Esolen also asserts that the human longing for home is a longing caused (and partially satisfied) by place, which, in a mystical and beautiful way, helps to heal the ravaging effects of time. Place is “the heart of the village that makes the past present again and beckons toward eternity.” It stirs up memories—good, sad, happy, and bad—that connect past to present and that draw our thoughts and intentions toward the celestial home. It does this precisely because “home is an allegory of heaven.” Place, however, is not something we love out of sappy sentimentalism. A person loves a place, Esolen says, “because it is in him, and he is in it.” If he has not experienced it this way, then he is rootless, a modern-day gypsy. In this way, though, modern man suffers even

more because, as Esolen puts it, he is “a tourist but not a pilgrim.” Such a man can only turn to one solution: progress, which Esolen describes as “the destruction of place.” Our towns, our villages, our buildings, our parks, all of those places that have been the generational storehouses of memories, are being destroyed, he argues, replaced by technological and isolating monstrosities that can be built everywhere but represent nowhere–which lack memories. The march for progress by those without a home is akin to Sam and Frodo marching toward Mordor without a Shire.

The march toward progress ultimately fails because it is dependent on an inherent goodness in man, an innocence which has been lost. To follow after progress for its own sake is to act “as if some mechanical rearrangement of social conditions could manufacture the paradise for which men long.” That lost innocence, however, has constantly proven a barrier to the endeavors of various communities to rebuild societies with the perfect rearrangement of social conditions. The loss of innocence is rejected as an impossibility, on the grounds that innocence never really existed (or, rather, that innocence exists only in some higher, more secularly enlightened sense). To prove it, the innocence of children is attacked. Whereas Christ calls us to be like children, modern gypsies take away childlikeness so that there is no child to be like.

Again, Esolen warns of the problems this worship of progress brings: Progress continues, passing us, our children, and our ability to keep time with it, as it pays homage to the god Change, which “destroys the identity of the subject and . . . diverts us from the final—the consummating—change to be brought about by God.” It is not life-giving change but life-destroying change. And the very act of being a pilgrim on the journey to our home with God is to become an enemy of progress, a blasphemer of Change. “The last thing a man who has given up on the journey wants to see is another man energetically on the way.”

In fact, the man who has given up would ar-

gue that the man “energetically on his way” has obviously made an idol out of the past. He must necessarily approve of the oppression of minorities, women, the poor, and other groups. He must want to live in a world with slaves, no running water, a high infant mortality rate, and barefoot and pregnant wives who do not leave the kitchen. Yet, as Esolen argues, “the families of our grandparents are to be admired not because they were perfect but because they were very much alive and, potentially, on the way.” The man on the way is not making an idol of the past but admiring a generation that was alive and on the same path. In fact, this is true progress: “I want to return to something that was alive and thriving, because only a living thing can properly be said to progress.” For, he says, “the pilgrim understands the vow of stability; the restless wanderer hardly attains a place but he then wants to leave it.”

Esolen’s book contributes to a conversation which modern man desperately needs. He wrestles through questions we all ought to ask, but he does so by weaving in the voices of those who built the home in which we live: Homer, Socrates, Virgil, Cicero, Dante, Shake

speare, Burke, Spenser, Chesterton, Tolkien, and others. He doesn’t tell their answers; he shows them. In calling us to respect the time and place that has shaped each of us, Esolen embodies the very virtue he is commending in Nostalgia

To satisfy the longing that is nostalgia, we must be pilgrims moving toward our heavenly home, yet all the while we must honor the earthly home that is its analogue. This is the path to progress, according to Esolen: “No pilgrim, I say, no progress.” Until we can abandon change for change’s sake and recognize the home we are ultimately longing for, we will continue to be homeless in a homeless world. That most important of the human soul’s needs, rootedness, can only be satisfied then. Then can we have a home; then can we be pilgrims; then can we make true progress.

Dr. Matthew Bianco is the COO for the CiRCE Institute, where he also serves as a head mentor in the CiRCE apprenticeship program. He has a PhD in humanities from Faulkner University’s Great Books Honors College and is the author of Letters to My Sons: A Humane Vision for Human Relationships.

Everything you need to provide your student with a classical Christian education.

Influenced by Stoic philosophy, Marcus Aurelius was more than a political leader. Indeed, he was a philosopher in his own right. As the emperor of Rome who reigned from AD 161 to 180, Aurelius arguably was best suited to fulfill the lofty ambitions of Plato’s philosopher king in The Republic Given his position, the Roman emperor did not just wrestle with ideas in theory. He wrestled with ideas and their applications. Interestingly, Aurelius’ main philosophical treatise was never intended for publication. Compiled as a series of twelve “books,” Meditations lacks a central theme or organization. While the first book reflects a more autobiographical nature, the remaining books record various philosophical proverbs ranging in content matter. While Aurelius weaves a number of themes together to create the elaborate tapestry that is the Meditations, one theme appears clearly throughout the twelve books: death and its inevitable impact on life. As Aurelius contemplates his own mortality, three components emerge in his philosophy of death: fate, fear, and fame.

Throughout Meditations, Aurelius offers a pragmatic approach to life’s difficulties, applicable even

READING THE CLASSICS

Memento Mori: A Review of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations

By Brett Z. Chancery

to readers who may never claim the title of emperor. His approach to death is no exception. The idea weighs heavily upon the emperor’s thoughts. To him, understanding death was essential to organizing life. He explains, “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”

Considering one’s own mortality may carry a degree of morbidity, but the philosopher king constantly places death in the context of nature. Aurelius describes death as “a natural thing. And nothing natural is evil.” By recognizing the inevitability of death, Aurelius explains, “Death overshadows you.” Aurelius even extends this argument. Besides being natural and inevitable, death, in one sense, is prerequisite to birth: “Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.” By viewing death as cyclical, he removes its sting and with it the stigma of a seemingly morbid topic. “When we cease from activity or follow a thought to its conclusion, it’s a kind of death. And it doesn’t harm us. Think about your life: childhood, boyhood, youth, old age. Every transformation a kind of dying.” Surprisingly, Aurelius emphasizes

the good in death, for it is natural, inevitable, and prerequisite to transformation.

Grappling with the certainty of death can undoubtedly lead to fear, but the Stoic philosopher rationalizes dying: “And what dying is—and that if you look at it in the abstract and break down your imaginary ideas of it by logical analysis, you realize that it’s nothing but a process of nature, which only children can be afraid of.” Making death a natural process desensitizes death’s sting. Despite this realization, Aurelius admits that death is “a natural mystery.” The great mystery for Aurelius is what happens after death. He reminds himself, “Wait for it patiently—annihilation or metamorphosis.”

Aurelius addresses this concern more than once in Meditations. Using the analogy of a journey on a ship, he describes life’s journey poetically: “You boarded, you set sail, you’ve made the passage. Time to disembark. If it’s for another life, well, there’s nowhere without gods on that side either. If to nothingness, then you no longer have to put up with pain and pleasure.” Interestingly, Aurelius understands two possible outcomes following death. On the one hand, death is the staging ground for transformation. He bases this belief in transformation simply on faith. (While Christianity existed in the Roman Empire, Aurelius adhered to the traditional gods of the Romans.) His reliance on faith provided comfort for any fears regarding death. Wrestling with the mystery of life after death, he also writes,

If our souls survive, how does the air find room for them—since the beginning of time? How does the earth find room for all the bodies buried in it since the beginning of time? They linger for whatever length of time, and then, through change and decomposition, make room for others. So too with the souls that inhabit the air. They linger a little, and then are changed—diffused and kindled into fire, absorbed into the logos from which all things spring, and so make room for new arrivals.

Uncertainty plagues Aurelius’ understanding of this transformation. He struggles with articulating the nature of this metamorphosis, but as Aurelius considers metamorphosis, he recognizes the influence of the gods and his own faith as noted above:

“If it’s for another life, well, there’s nowhere without gods on that side either.”

Wavering between his understanding of metamorphosis and annihilation, Aurelius explores the consequences of both as they relate to fear of death. This mystery could be a potent provocation of fear for Aurelius. Part of addressing one’s fears is defining the object of fear. For Aurelius, he defines this mystery as “the end of sense-perception, of being controlled by our emotions, of mental activity, of enslavement to our bodies.” Aurelius ultimately concludes, “Fear of death is fear of what we may experience. Nothing at all, or something quite new. But if we experience nothing, we can experience nothing bad. And if our experience changes, then our existence will change with it—change, but not cease.” Building upon his understanding of death as a natural process, Marcus Aurelius addressed the fear of death by visualizing its possible effects by logic and accepting its outcomes by faith.

By considering one’s fateful appointment with death, the Roman emperor wages war on fear and considers his own posthumous fame. As an emperor of the mighty Roman empire, one may take actions to secure a positive and enduring legacy. Aurelius considers this pursuit of fame a quest in futility: “People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too.” Even great emperors cannot escape death through fame; “Alexander the Great,” he writes, “and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both. They were absorbed alike into the life force of the world, or dissolved alike into atoms.” The universality of death becomes a great equalizer.

The Latin phrase memento mori challenges readers to consider their own mortality. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations provides this sobering reminder as well. For one who could relish his own earthly power, to choose humility is not a common characteristic, yet Aurelius consistently reminds himself to pursue humility in his personal journal. Ironically, the emperor’s pursuit of humility actually secured his legacy.

While the topic of death is not often a joyful discourse, it is a topic as relevant as life itself. Popular culture today echoes this tradition by reminding us to live with death in mind. While Aurelius’ Meditations addresses a number of thoughts and issues, his attention to his own mortality permeates the text.

Aurelius considers each person’s appointment with death as fate, combats the fear of death with logic and faith, and explores the pursuit of posthumous fame as futility. Taking the time to read the classic work is well worth the effort. As with any work (classic or modern), the reader may not agree with every conclusion, but engaging the difficult ideas proves to be a beneficial exercise. Death is a part of the human experience, and Aurelius understands this well as he writes, “What humans experience is part of human experience. . . . Nothing that can happen is unusual or unnatural, and there’s no sense in complaining. Nature does not make us endure the unendurable.” As part of human experience, humanity must engage thoughtfully with death. In short, Aurelius’ closing statement reveals the impact of his own intellectual exploration of death on life: “So make your exit with grace— the same grace shown to you.”

As an alumnus of the University of Mobile and the University of South Alabama, Brett Chancery serves as a fulltime history instructor with Coastal Alabama Community College.

In 1989, Oxford University Press published a massive book by David Hackett Fischer entitled Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, destined to become a classic. Albion’s Seed showed how four streams of English-speaking settlers in America—Puritans; “Cavaliers” and indentured servants; Quakers; and “Borderers,” including Scotch and Northern Irish—brought with them distinctive outlooks and ways of life. Fischer described the book as the first installment in a “cultural history of the United States.” In his preface and on subsequent occasions, he referred to planned volumes that would follow. This enormously ambitious project morphed considerably over time, but from the beginning Fischer had promised a volume that would focus on the diverse and distinct cultures and folkways that enslaved Africans brought with them from their native continent: different languages, different religious practices, different skills, different senses of community. He never abandoned that plan, and

A SPIRIT OF INQUIRY

A Review of David Hackett Fischer’s African Founders

By John Wilson

now—more than thirty years after the appearance of Albion’s Seed—it has come to fruition with the publication of African Founders: How Enslaved Peoples Expanded American Ideals

And here the demands of the present insistently assert themselves, in a way that was not the case for Albion’s Seed. Although more than 150 years have passed since the Emancipation Proclamation, the legacy of slavery and the scandal of ongoing discrimination against black Americans is being studied, protested, and proclaimed with greater intensity than at any point since the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, perhaps even exceeding it.

I read African Founders with a sort of double-consciousness: on the one hand, absorbed and at many points exhilarated by the extraordinarily wide-ranging findings that Fischer has assembled; on the other hand, thinking about how his book will be perceived and judged (and misjudged) at this

present moment. The subtitle of the new book alone will inflame many readers who misconstrue it before they’ve even bothered to read a page. So “Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals,” huh? Very inspiring. And just what we need in 2023: a feel-good narrative. Right.

In fact, Fischer doesn’t at all minimize the evil of slavery and its long aftermath, down to the present day. What he does is quite different: he opens our eyes to the many strands of African influence that the slaves brought with them and transmitted to their descendants (see for example pp. 454—55, on Michelle Obama’s roots, under the heading “A Gullah Heritage in the White House”). I can’t imagine anyone with a genuine interest in American history reading this book without profit, not to mention moments of revelation and delight.

What African Founders doesn’t offer is a continuous narrative. It’s organized by region (the brief section on Michelle Obama’s family comes from a chapter entitled “Coastal Carolina, Georgia, and Florida”) and I read it in discrete chunks, not too much at a session.

The nature of the project is suggested in the introduction, in which Fischer harks back to Herodotus and the spirit of “inquiry” that animated his pioneering work:

In the school of Herodotus, history was not primarily a story, or an argument, or a thesis, or a polemic. In actual practice it sometimes became any or all of those things. But it tended to begin in another way, as an inquiry with a genuinely open end. It started not with answers but with questions, about events that actually happened.

This spirit animates Fischer’s entire enterprise. As he notes, “In our own twenty-first century, these ancient ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth have gained a new importance, in part because of hostile assaults upon them from many directions.”

African Founders is the product of decades of “inquiry,” drawing on an immense range of scholarship as well as on firsthand investigation. I’ve already talked about the book with several serious homeschooling parents, urging them to read it and adapt parts of

it for their “curriculum.” I hope you’ll consider giving it a look, too.

One final note. John J. Miller interviewed Fischer about African Founders recently on his podcast The Bookmonger. The interview is short, about eleven minutes, and I recommend it. Near the end, Miller asks Fischer how long he had been working on the book. Fischer says, “All my life,” and goes on to explain that his father was head of the Baltimore public schools at the time of the landmark Supreme Court ruling that mandated desegregation. Seeing his father committing himself to that goal, against outright resistance, foot-dragging, and more, was an experience that fundamentally shaped Fischer’s own sense of what it meant to be an American. Hence, many years later, African Founders

John Wilson edited Books & Culture (1995-2016). He writes regularly for First Things and a range of other magazines. He is a contributing editor at the Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at Marginalia Review of Books.

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s I prepare to teach the book Home by Marilynne Robinson for the fourth time next week to college seniors, I find myself contemplating the provision and pain of home and wondering about Robinson’s vision of the heroic. Home is one of two books (the other is The Idiot by Dostoevsky) I’m not sure I can read ever again because of the acute misery they narrate. My method of teaching requires me to reread the book and to converse anew from inside of the corporeal tissue of the words, images, and sentences each time. I need to reacquaint myself with the particulars as well as the special atmosphere of the living document. Home poses a conflict for me I’m not sure I can overcome this year.

The dramatic stage of this story is small with three central characters: Reverend Robert Boughton, Glory Boughton, and Jack Boughton. The father, Robert, is dying and his children have come home in various degrees of disgrace. Glory is thirty-eight and fresh from a failed romance with a man who was really taking financial advantage of her deep desire to be married and a mother. Jack is forty-three and has been away from home for twenty years, during which time he missed his mother’s fatal illness and funeral, although he took the money his dad sent for him to return—and he intended to return, even bought a suit for the occasion. Reverend Boughton is seventy-four but very weak and losing some of the velvet patience and hope he maintained in his relationship with his prodigal son over four decades of co-suffering. At one point in Gilead (the Pulitzer Prize–winning book in the tetralogy that precedes Home and tells an adjacent story), Robinson calls each person a civilization saying they are “built on the ruins of a number of preceding civilizations but with our own notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live” (Gilead, 197).

I happen to have had the privilege of visiting ruins that reveal such historic layers and to have loved Pope Gregory’s instructions to the Roman Christians that they ought to build on top of former pagan temples (St. Clement or Santa Maria Sopra Minerva) or even repurpose them (Pantheon), and I (and others) have taken this up as a metaphor for the relationship between the classical and Christian world, knowledge, and texts. Nonetheless, literally going to one of these

churches and taking the remarkable climb downward into the dank underground and seeing the layers of civilization (and cultic activity) is illuminating—second-century mithraeum at the bottom where the underground streams are, fourth-century altar and icons at the musty middle level, eleventh-century church on the top, all within sight of the Colosseum, where some of the most unspeakable atrocities happened against our Christian brothers and sisters. Robinson says by her metaphor that each person contains such layers or stories: foundations, altars, underground streams within our persons. A home is composed of persons trying to make a little city as well governed and flourishing as we can manage. It turns out that even the best of us struggle because at the center of the structure is the mystery of being bound to each other’s suffering (and strangeness). We see in Glory and Jack the edifice that they construct on top of the nave of their father. This presents a good metaphor for what writers do with old texts, and Robinson herself has discretely rewritten the great epics in a narrative about a small town and the life of one family.

I want to reassure you that, according to Robinson, the only thing worse than family life is not having one. Robinson shows us the darkness of loneliness and of not being taken into a family. Pastor John Ames (Boughton’s best friend and Jack’s godfather and namesake), who early lost his wife and child and in his old age (late sixties) meets and marries Lila, says this in Gilead: “My own dark time, as I call it, the time of my loneliness, was most of my life, as I have said, and I can’t make any real account of myself without speaking of it” (44). Lila and John have a son who is seven at the time of his writing the letters that make up the contents of Gilead. They are addressed to the beloved who will grow up without his presence. It is one of the central tasks of his end of life to reconcile himself to sending Lila and Robbie out into the wilderness after his death. Another alternative to family life is Lila’s experience of deadbeat parents who neglect her until she is embraced and “stolen” by Doll, a mother-substitute, who occupies the central place in Lila’s deep heart’s core. By this we understand that Robinson is not some anti-family prophet; she understands Tocqueville’s idea that democracy, like family, is the best of the worst options available. With Aquinas, she also understands that being is itself good from the onset and love is woven into it: “When you love someone

to the degree you love her, you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself” (Gilead, 139). Robinson shows the most broken people delighting in being, and all her characters have the capacity to enjoy the pleasure of the material world—down to its fundamental element, water. Water is the natural form that baptism participates in and supernaturally completes. Sacrament and nature are the same stuff.

But I was talking about family, and I haven’t yet given you a single quote from the book Home. Jack comes home to be with his father and to sound the city of Gilead where he grew up, to see if there is balm there, to see if he and his African American wife and their son could live in such a place. No one knows this for a long piece of the book. What people know is that he is a prodigal who has, like Odysseus, been away for twenty years. Wait, why are we talking about the Odyssey? Because, like Odysseus, Jack goes home, and when he arrives his father is almost dead and his sister, whose name is Glory, shows him the most profound understanding and acceptance I have ever read.

I’m going to make a bold claim (that I have never read in the critical work or heard the author say). Robinson is rewriting the ancient epics in these books. She is putting her own proud American boast right up there with Homer, but it is a deeply Christian claim. Glory and homecoming are (as Lewis claims in his essay “The Weight of Glory”) recast from the ancient terms (in which the hero accomplishes great deeds that are song-worthy) into taking up the burden of my neighbor’s glory, my neighbor’s holiness. Another word for this is “co-suffering,” that is, bearing each other’s crosses as best we can, resisting the despairing nothingness that evil wants to draw us backward into.

The Boughton family is described with words like “probity.” This stuck out to me in my several heart-aching reads (my heart literally hurts); it means confirmed integrity, honesty, and comes from the Latin probitās (honesty), from probus (virtuous). Jack is not historically honest. Most people in his world don’t think he is virtuous. Even his godfather, John Ames, struggles to be hospitable toward him. Jack has an interest in how things break; he finds himself unable not to cause harm. But Robinson and Glory know that he has a particular kind of integrity and honesty, and his desire toward virtue is tortured by the difficulty he has in doing it. He struggles to understand his father’s

theology and the teaching of the church, but still in middle age he is sincerely pursuing virtue in a culture steeped in the hypocrisy of racial sin, with all its webs and histories that have come home to Jack in the family he is unsuccessfully trying to build.

What happens in Home puts a stone upon my chest. Glory, herself wounded and struggling to find herself back at home, strains to see Jack and offers him intelligent companionship that is at once compassionate and restrained, concerned for his dignity and embracing. She pauses often, hesitates as it were, at the threshold between them. She has immense regard for him; indeed, she is the third person limited omniscient narrator of the book—everything true known about Jack comes from her perceptive gaze. I can open any page and find something remarkable she has observed or pretended not to see for his benefit. Here is one from Home (page 181):

The brightness in his face meant anxiety. When he was anxious a strange honesty overtook him. He did understandable things for understandable reasons, answering expectation in terms that were startlingly literal, as if in him the skeletal machinery of conventional behavior, the extension and contraction of the pulleys of muscle and sinew, was all exposed. And he was aware of this, embarrassed by it, inclined to pass it off, if he could, as irony, to the irritation of acquaintances and strangers, and she could only imagine, employers and police.

Note her perceptive concentration toward him and understanding that he struggles in this situation (and others) to function while bearing the weight of himself. She responds lightly, giving him a small job to do in the moment so that he can forget himself a little; she sees how the guests respond to him and knows the history; she encourages him but is aware that he is so often misunderstood and she cannot cure this trouble. These two have six siblings who are hale and successful. One is a doctor (Teddy, who always gets to offer saving help to people in the story and the family). Ames calls the siblings “estimable.” Do you hear the tacit references to one of the wounds of family? We don’t all land in the same place, or sometimes all of us land in the same place except one. Sometimes the very culture of a family that is good has difficulty

making place for the stranger born in its midst. There is nothing malicious about this, but it imposes burdens.

In our imperfect hunger and thirst after righteousness, for ourselves and for others, there are often unintended consequences even when we succeed. In one passage Glory is described as having kept the habits of her pious youth that include reading the Bible morning and evening, but added to this routine is a disposition of fealty (Home, 101):

Like most of their obligations and many of their pleasures, this [referring to reading aloud from Scripture when they were together] was meant to please their father, to assure him that they loved the old life, that they had received all the good he had intended for them. To please him was so potent a motive that it displaced motives of their own, which no doubt would have included piety.

What a gift for a child and then a grown woman to have this virtuous habit, and, in the story, we feel the way Scripture deeply shapes her imagination and her inclination toward her brother and everyone else. Yet we also register the accretions of the will of another and the difficulty in orienting toward the proper object of affection (ordo amoris). In this passage Glory passes through such rich and profound content and Robinson shows a character with remarkable mental furniture and the muscle to move it. She’d dreamed of three children and a home of her own: “very different from this good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent” (Home, 102). Here Robinson tells us about the burdens of piety as well as those of prodigality that Jack carries. But none of these characters are simple enough to assign to a category or forget; they take a place in the reader’s mental living room because of their dense texture and reality. In dialogue with the literary inheritance of the nostos, Robinson adds a layer of Christian civilization to the Greek and Roman ones (Home, 102):

All bread is the bread of heaven, her father used to say. It expresses the will of God to sustain us in this flesh, in this life. Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.

This passage is one-third of the way through this second book in the tetralogy. We don’t just need to get to the shore of Ithaka or the bed of Penelope, we need to come home to ourselves. We aren’t “right with [ourselves]” as Boughton says of Jack to his friend John. At the same time these old friends believe that in eternity this world will be Troy and “all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sang in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try” (Gilead, 57). A remarkable reference to the Aeneid in just the way the early church fathers and mothers thought of it—a description of this life’s resemblance to and preparation for that one; a sense that all we do, all we subjugate to that higher purpose will be given back in the fullness of a true home in a magnificent empire in the eschaton. But in both passages, Robinson revises, as all canonical authors do (see George Steiner’s Real Presences), the ancient sense of the relationship between now and then. We taste the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, but we are often strange to ourselves and to those who are our beloved. Natural daily bread, grown with the wheat cultivated out back, is both manna and eucharist, but it grows by sweat and with thorn. Both of these books show not only edifices being built on top of each other but, closer to the ground, the taming and cultivation of overgrown land into gardens by major characters— Glory, Jack, Lila. These three grow flowers and vegetables, pull weeds, and give love, food, and beauty by their effort. Nature and grace, creation and redeemed creation have a sacramental relationship to each other. We are constantly eating the bread of heaven, touched by the rain of baptism, and tasting of the goodness of our true and ultimate home. But, for now, the two dimensions inhere.

While my heart aches to read “what it means to come home,” I do love this writer and intellectual friend for understanding the complexity of our experience of home alongside its eventual wholeness. Jack for all his encumbrances intrigues Robinson. She shows us that even the most prodigal among us is vastly more than that profligacy. I haven’t done due diligence to prove his prodigality, but you will have to read the book: he is an alcoholic, he steals, he has a child out of wedlock that he leaves to poverty, etc. . . . but these are not the truest things about him (it feels wrong to even list these things so reductionistically).

He also loves virtue, is honest, is longing to be a good father and to bless his own father. I would go so far as to say he is full of virtue, or the longing for it, and suffers the lack of it. He wants to do no harm and he can’t achieve that. Yet Glory and Ames are both able to say to him at the close of these two books that he is a good man. And that child he had as a teenager with a poor country girl, the child who never had a name, loved the short life he gave her by his error. Robinson goes to lengths to show us the ordinary delight that comes to the child before she steps on a rusty nail and dies. And teenage Glory, a character who never does not love the good and always knows what is beautiful, holds precious that child’s being and presence in the world; still, despite this virtue and appreciation and fittedness for motherhood she herself will not have a child. We endure painful contradictions inside our homes, as good as they might be. The novel is the breakdown of the human, and the epic the raising of the hero, but here Robinson gives us the profoundly Christian heroism of home. In Robinson’s four-novel panorama and miniature, home is certainly broken in small and large ways, despite its visible provision, but it is also the site on which we might receive and carry each other’s burdens. It is the location of piercing and costly beatitude.

Boughton’s prodigal son has come home with good will, and his presence builds to a torturous scene where the old man, who has so faithfully cherished and extended grace to his beloved son, close to death, lacerates Jack by revealing the burden he has carried for him and its unendurable pain. He recounts Jack’s worst offenses and discloses that he sees Jack in the same light now as he did all those years ago, saying (Home, 295):

I thanked God for him every day of his life, no matter how much grief, how much sorrow—and at the end of it all there is only more grief, more sorrow, and his life will go on that way, no help for it now. You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn’t yours to keep or to protect. And if the child becomes a man who has no respect for himself, it’s just destroyed till you can hardly remember what it was.

Boughton, who has endured courageously, here

falls down in the most hurtful way. He is at death’s door, and he can’t sustain his labor of co-suffering. I hate to thrust upon you this passage and to leave you feeling the full flower of human and fatherly impotence. It is a terrifying and haunting caution to me that leads me into desperate prayer and will hopefully silence me when I ought to be silent. Glory’s blessed answer in this scene is to respond to her father by pointing out that Jack is here now, his life has been hard and sad, and he has come home. She bears none of the marks of the older brother; she is full of blessing.

The good news is that Home doesn’t end here. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I will say that, like Alyosha’s kiss in response to Ivan’s railing against God (The Brothers Karamazov), Robinson produces a kiss for Jack and for the reader. Glory’s response to this nightmare is like a bee that finds the sweetness in Jack’s presence and life, and the moment she does genuinely find it (unlike Myshkin in The Idiot, who falsely imposes it with drastic consequences because he can’t bear to see the ugliness of life) is described as “that terrible shock of joy—no, worse than joy, peace—that floods in like blood pushing into a limb that has been starved of it, like wild rescue, painful and wonderful and humbling” (Home, 323). And John Ames, who is finally able to bless his son by grace (Jack) at the end of both Gilead and Home says it this way: “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?” (Gilead, 245). Glory and John Ames are constantly illuminating beauty so blinding to eyes and hearts, and insisting, by example, that our work is to honor it. The world is charged with glory, and the book Home is charged by Glory, who has demonstrated true sight that transfigures. The sight is filled full with antinomy—we see both the tragic and the transfigured next to each other, for now. But Greek nostos and kleos from Homer are converted into Christian homecoming and glory that assert “blessed are those who mourn, / for they shall be comforted. . . . blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, / for they shall be filled.”

For G.H. and A.H.

Christine Perrin is the poetry editor for FORMA (with Noah Perrin), she has taught at Messiah University for twenty years, and she wrote Bright Mirror and Art of Poetry

Zeno of Elea famously argues in Aristotle’s Physics, “That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.” But to reach that halfway point, one would first need to reach another point halfway to the first halfway point, and so on. Thus motion is impossible, because to move, one would need to travel an infinite number of distances, which cannot happen. Diogenes, as legend has it, refuted Zeno by standing up and walking across the room.

Each year, when I introduced my physics students to Zeno’s claim, someone recreated Diogenes’s argument. Zeno’s argument that motion is impossible seems quaint, silly almost. But he made it in support of his teacher Parmenides’ idea that all is one: he was a philosophical monist. In this context, Zeno points out a genuine philosophical difficulty with the idea of plurality, articulating a tension we call the problem of the one and the many.

The Greeks understood two modes of plurality: quantity and size. We’ll call them the discrete and the continuous. The discrete is that which is countable; the continuous, that which has size but is not countable. For example, if I have some apples, I can count them and report that I have five apples. If I have some water, however, it would sound peculiar to count the water and say that I have seven waters. In fact, the distinction between countable and uncountable is woven into our very language. We use “fewer” for things that are countable and “less” for things that are not countable. You can’t say “I am fewer tall than she is” because height is a continuous length and not the result of counting. People who know how tall they are will raise an eyebrow at this!

So Zeno’s paradox, then, is this: if space is continuous and unendingly divisible then there is no smallest distance. Whatever distance I mark out, I can cut it in half and make a smaller distance. But particular distances are countable things. So in any finite (continuous) distance, there are infinitely many (very small!) discrete countable distances. How can that be? How can something be both countable and uncountable at once?

What Zeno saw as a paradox that rendered the idea of plurality incoherent, we can see as an important philosophical and mathematical insight: there is a relationship between the discrete and continuous that is both subtle and important.

We have gradually obscured that relationship over the last two thousand years. At times one waxes while the other wanes; the one is subsumed into the other. We resolve Zeno’s paradoxes, but rarely do we carefully preserve the ancient distinction between the countable and that which has size, the discrete and continuous. This is, I think, to our detriment. If we preserve the distinction that Zeno saw, we will find it a profoundly creative tension that illuminates much of how we share mathematics with young people.

Two Modes of Quantity

Arithmetic begins Greek mathematics, and likewise our curricula. It takes its name from the word

1. Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.

arithmos, which Jacob Klein notes “indicates in each case a definite number of definite things.”1 That is, an arithmos is the result of counting: it names a discrete number of things. For the first few years of school, we use a definition of number that makes intuitive sense and follows the ancient witness. Euclid says in the opening of book 7 that number is “a multitude composed of units.” From that definition he builds ideas like primality, coprimality, and a theory of ratios and proportions.

Geometry, the study of continuous magnitude, is the second lung of Greek mathematics. Euclid begins his treatise with definitions: a point is “that which has no part,” and a line is a “breadthless length.” In his geometry, Euclid is not interested in a line whose length is five or an angle of thirty degrees. Rather, he is interested in the relationships between continuous lines that we can understand without discrete measurements of their length or angles.

In modern mathematical education, we have collapsed the two modes of quantity into one another. Many modern textbooks trumpet “integrated” geometry and algebra. We teach young children the number line—an artifact of a nineteenth-century attempt to make arithmetic more rigorous—that blurs the distinction between discrete number and continuous line. The ruler and protractor, wholly absent from Euclid, invade our angles and lengths and fuse the continuous geometry of shape with the discrete counting of arithmetic. We call things like √2 numbers without exposing students to the necessarily geometrical meaning of that idea: it comes from the length of the diagonal of a square whose sides are 1. Whatever √2 is, it’s not the result of counting anything!2

We teach division several times. For example, consider the division 13 divided by 3. The first answer that a student might learn is 4 remainder 1. We could imagine a picture with dots, where we have four rows of three dots, and one left over. The next answer children might be taught is 13.333333 . . ., which is a very different sort of answer. Here we’ve taken the same question and treated it once as a part of arithmetic, with a discrete answer, and again almost as part of geometry with an answer that is not the result

2. If we wanted to think about √2 as a multitude composed of units, we’ll discover something amazing: the units that measure the diagonal of a square are incommensurable with the units that measure the side of the square. This was so shocking to the Pythagoreans that they (legendarily) murdered the man who discovered it.

of counting. But the language we use to describe the division is exactly the same because we omit the clear conceptual categories the Greeks used. No wonder students struggle.

A Creative Tension

Some mathematical problems are unexpectedly difficult for seventh graders. Consider the equation

2x+4=8. Essentially every seventh grader can make sense of that, and rightly say that it is true when x=2. But when asked to make sense of the equation

2x+5=8, things get murky for many students. Some (rightly) say that the equation is true when x=3/2. Others say that the equation has no solutions or that they’re not sure how to solve it. Still others offer numerically puzzling answers. But the two equations I’ve just offered are algebraically identical. The sequence of algebraic steps to solve them is the same: subtract a number from both sides of the equation and then divide both sides of the equation by the same thing. Why is one harder than the other? The easy one lives squarely in the discrete world of arithmetic. The hard one does not.

We further muddy the waters for our students with word problems like this:

Each table in a classroom can accommodate two students. There are eight students in the class,

but five of them are sitting in a circle on the floor. How many tables does the classroom need to accommodate the remaining students?

We might want our students to represent that situation as an algebraic equation, which would be 2x+5=8. But the solution isn’t 3/2 tables (which doesn’t make sense), but 2 tables. Students must intuit that this story lives in the world of arithmetic, and the unit is the table, and that the algebraic equation only approximately models the situation. That’s a lot to ask of a seventh grader without offering them the conceptual categories of the discrete and continuous to shape their understanding.

So collapsing the creative tension between discrete number and continuous magnitude adds accidental complexity and confusion to the mathematical work we ask of students at a critical juncture in their educational lives.

Harmonious Flow

Let’s look back to Euclid’s definition of number: “a multitude composed of units.” We focused earlier on the idea of a “multitude,” but now let’s think a bit about “units.” That’s a word we’ve all encountered: units are the things teachers intermittently take off points for omitting in science classes. What are they doing in Euclid’s definition of number?

Collapsing the creative tension between discrete number and continuous magnitude adds accidental complexity and confusion to the mathematical work we ask of students at a critical juncture in their educational lives.

From the Latin, a “unit” is a oneness, a principle of unity. To count something, we must first choose a principle of unity to count by (apples, or people, or trees, or pure monads). Choosing a unit allows us to take something continuous and uncountable (like the amount of water in a bucket) and make it countable. We choose ounces, and then we can count 145 ounces of water in the bucket. We choose inches, and then we can count 72 inches in my height. We could choose feet and we count a different number of feet in my height! That conversion of the continuous into the discrete—which we call “measurement”—beats at the heart of the natural sciences. Claudius Ptolemy carefully measured the position of the stars using a circular bronze disc with degrees marked out on it as the unit. Galileo measured the passage of time using his pulse as the unit. The kilogram sat in Paris. Fabulously expensive clocks use the radioactive decay events of cesium as the unit. Even the humble ruler takes continuous length and makes it discrete.

So we have a harmonious flow from the continuous that we perceive in the world to the countable discrete. If we lack the conceptual categories of discrete and continuous, how can we sensibly talk to our students about the meaning of measurement in the sciences? I’d submit that we can’t.

Does that flow operate in reverse, though? Does it move from the discrete to the continuous? It does!3 Imagine that you are Robert Boyle and want to uncover the relationship between the pressure exerted by a gas and its volume. You might measure the volume of gas to be 100 liters and the pressure it exerts to be 5 inches of mercury. You might take another measurement, say a volume of 50 liters and a pressure of 10 inches of mercury. From repeated discrete observations of that sort, you might intuit the harmony you seek: that the pressure is inversely proportional to the volume, P 1/V. Discovering that continuous harmony, though, comes from examining particular discrete measurements. So just as measuring moves from the continuous to the discrete, there is a synthesis that moves from the discrete to the continuous.

We ask our students to do this in all sorts of physics and chemistry lab work. How much easier for students to understand the meaning of lab work

if they see it as a process of choosing units to make continuous quantities countable, counting those discrete quantities, and then synthesizing the discrete to return to a continuous harmony!

Mathematics and Theology

The joys and benefits of preserving the creative tension between the discrete and continuous extend beyond mathematics and the natural sciences. After all, we began with a philosophical problem. Perhaps this tension can speak into students’ understanding of philosophy and theology. What would it look like to talk to students about the triune nature of God if they were prepared by studying the tension between the one and the many? The number three is both a unity and a plurality. Indeed, the proper preservation of the creative tensions in mathematics will bear wonderful fruit for students across their intellectual lives.

William Carey studied classics and history at the University of Virginia before teaching Latin, mathematics, and science at a classical Christian school in Virginia. His current project is bringing his love for the classics and mathematics together to build a classical mathematics curriculum. He and his wife, Maren, are members of Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in Haymarket, Virginia.

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3. I’m deeply indebted here to Ravi Jain’s thought and his work in the forthcoming Enchanted Cosmos.

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DR. VIGEN GUROIAN IS A MUCH-BELOVED AUTHOR WHO HAS TAUGHT THEOLOGY AT SEVERAL COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES, INCLUDING LOYOLA UNIVERSITY AND THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, WHERE STUDENTS KNOW HIM FOR TEACHING CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND ETHICS IN HIS THEOLOGY COURSES—AND FOR HIS GENEROUS FRIENDSHIP. HE ENJOYS GARDENING AND HIKING AND HAS WRITTEN NINE BOOKS, ONE OF WHICH, TENDING THE HEART OF VIRTUE, HAS A NEW EDITION COMING OUT IN MARCH 2023.

RECENTLY, KATERINA KERN AND VIGEN SAT DOWN TOGETHER TO DISCUSS HIS THOUGHTS ON GARDENING AND THE SACRAMENTAL IMAGINATION. TO READ MORE FROM VIGEN ON GARDENING, CHECK OUT HIS BOOKS INHERITING PARADISE: MEDITATIONS ON GARDENING AND THE FRAGRANCE OF GOD.

turn the soil over and over again. You’re constantly returning to the canvas, the garden canvas, as you’re constantly returning to the text that you’re writing or reading. If I stopped gardening, I wouldn’t be as productive a writer. But I don’t think it works the other way. I don’t think that if I stopped writing, I would not be as productive a gardener.

Why is that? What is unique about gardening?

It’s embodied. It involves every bit of my body and mind. When you’re gardening you’re in the ground, connected to what you’re made of. You’re using every muscle in your body. You’re thinking ahead. You’re trying to imagine what this garden is going to look like. You’re planning for the future. If it’s a flower garden, what kind of flowers do you want in that garden? What kind of picture do you want to paint? That’s not just static; it changes over time. It’s a highly imaginative activity, not merely sweat and aches. It’s building.

You’re a theology professor, so why do you write and speak frequently on gardening? Why is it important?

I grew up with a father who gardened and a grandfather who gardened and it caught. I didn’t like it at first. My father would turn to me in early spring and say, “It’s time to go out in the garden” and hand me a shovel or a spade and I would start digging, turning over the soil. That’s one of the first things I remember as a child. That and enjoying watching my father’s garden grow. My mother also for some years had extensive flower beds in our first home. So gardening has stuck with me. My wife, June, and I, in our first home, had some ground that I could turn over and garden. So I started gardening. I didn’t know much about it, though. I had to learn.

Would you say that gardening has shaped you?

Yeah, there’s a synergy between my gardening and what you might call my head-work, or my reading and writing: the synergy of discipline and organization of time and energy. I’ve often related the struggle in gardening to the struggle in writing, something to be done over and over again, just as you

I think that what I do in the garden in my later years is related to my play as a child. I didn’t have a sandbox. So I had a lot of very, very fine earth or dirt, because it was located where my father used to sift dirt for gardening purposes. And it was right next to the compost pile. So there are all kinds of smells that I am used to. But I used to play in that very pliable, very light dirt. And I would build cities and so forth, and design roads leading from one to the next. I think that that imaginative activity transferred over to what happened when I had to deal with much larger pieces of earth and turn it into gardens. So I think gardening is much more tactile, it’s much more complete. It’s fuller than writing. Again, my gardening informs my writing, my writing doesn’t inform my gardening.

Does gardening inform other aspects of your intellectual or academic life?

Oh, it affects me in every facet of my life, because I often draw organic metaphors from the time I spent in the garden (or even hiking). [Physical] activity has enriched my store of metaphors, which I use when I’m writing, in what would not be thought of as poetry or fiction or reflection on the world, but even more conceptual sorts of writing. Even those

abstract concepts are informed by metaphors. So it transfers into everything. How I speak to other individuals, how I think about change, everything.

A lot of your work is on the sacramental imagination. What is the relationship between gardening and the sacramental imagination?

There is a certain technical side to the sacramental imagination. By that term I don’t mean any imagination that belongs to humanity as such. The sacramental imagination is defined by specifically biblical faith. Behind the word “sacramental” are symbol and sacrament. These are closely related to one another because every symbol is a mini sacrament. If you understand symbols in the way I do, they are not merely signs pointing to something which is other, but a sign that participates in the other or draws you into the other, into not only one meaning but many possible meanings. So the sacramental imagination, in the way I speak of it, is fundamentally grounded in biblical belief. All my writing is, I think, illustrative of that.

There’s a relationship between nature and Scripture that many of the early Christian theologians saw. They would speak of two testaments, or scriptures, one being nature, and the other being the Old and New Testaments. But they always gave priority to the biblical language and revelation within Scripture and the symbols that they drew from Scripture. They believed the Creator endowed his creation with symbolic meaning, which we understand through a certain way of seeing that they sometimes called the “luminous eye”—spiritual eyes—a spiritual way of seeing into creation. The very purposes of creation—the intentions that God had for creation—are ultimately seen through the incarnation and the crucifixion.

So the sacramental imagination has a specific meaning and it’s not a matter of intellect. It’s not principally conceptual, nor does it necessarily drive toward conceptualization. Because in some ways,

conceptualization narrows your vision and closes it off from the many meanings that one can draw out of creation and out of Scripture that point us to the focal point of all creation and all the Bible, which is Christ. So it’s a particular way of thinking about things. It’s analogical; it’s comparative; it’s an allusion. And it works through images, principally, not through concepts. It’s disciplined not to conceptualize.

Would you say then that in the act of academic writing we’re forcing these ultimate realities into conceptualization and in doing so limiting reality?

Yeah, gardening reminds you that things can have many meanings. And if you bring a scriptural mind to the garden—not a scriptural mind trained by theology, but rather reflection and prayer—then you’re going to be very wary of conceptualization as a primary tool of theology. This emphasis on conceptualization, which I would call “rational theology,” dominates in the academy today; it drives out the sacramental imagination thinking it’s not precise enough. Professors say “clarify that for me” even though clarification means narrowing vision, not expanding. One of my favorite patristic fathers of all has to be Ephraim the Syrian, who wrote poems, hymns, and meditations on Scripture in a kind of fashion that he drew out of the great tradition rather than the kind of scriptural interpretation we do today. So it was more like Midrash telling the story and then retelling it in ways that expand upon its meaning.

Does that mean we’re doing our students a disservice in school by removing them from nature and asking them to rationalize?

Yes, and the removal from nature is even more destructive today, because we once were largely an agricultural society, but this changed over the last hundred years or so. Now, children are less and less in

nature. And therefore, if we don’t make a deliberate effort to reintroduce them into nature, we’re impoverishing their moral and sacramental imaginations, even when we presume to be teaching Christianity. If our children are reading the Bible and are not outdoors in nature, then I don’t see how they can understand the Bible, or understand nature. I mean, if you think of the Bible, it’s largely agricultural. These are the organic images and metaphors through which we understand the meaning of creation and ultimately the crucifixion. If you don’t look at a lot of trees, then you don’t know that nature is revealing to us its culmination in the cross and the crucifixion. But if you do, then you’re going to reflect it in your writing.

I’d like to take the opportunity to read a couple of things out of my two books on gardening that reflect that. This is from the book The Fragrance of God:

God wants us to hear his footsteps in the garden, to feel his embrace and kisses among the lilies, to feed on him at the tree of life, and to breathe in his life with the fragrance of the rose, as did Adam. God wants us to inherit eternal life. But these things can come about only if we reorient our senses, tune our human instrument, so that we are able to respond to the grace that permeates ordinary life. Christians are the real realists, the Son of God by His incarnation has demonstrated that the world is filled with symbols of God. And these symbols that God has planted in the world testify not only to his existence, but also the goodness of his creation. By the example of his own life, Christ teaches us that through our senses, we can commence our spiritual journey, and that he will receive us into paradise in the full integrity of our humanity, body and soul, united.

The redemption of our bodies constitutes the hope of the whole physical creation, that it too may be raised up in the spirit to eternal life. Gardening is a metaphor and a sacramental sign of that wondrous work of resurrection, brought by God in Jesus Christ, the one who revealed the barren cross as a fruitful Tree of Life and enjoins the whole of creation in a joyful song of praise as paradise grows up from the ground of our besieging.

And this one is from the meditation “The Garden Signed with the Cross”:

The first frost weathers the vines and the unripened fruit splits open, sending tiny seeds into the cool Earth. The wooden stakes that in May I drove into the ground are unclosed once again, except that now three trees stand in my garden, three crosses that grow out of the earth and rock and are draped with limpid forms. And when I draw near to the middle cross, it is as if its arms are reaching out to embrace me and lift me into the air. And I noticed tender young leaves that have burst forth from the wood during an Indian Summer. One spring I made steaks from fresh saplings, and in the fall found green buds and leaves the size of squirrels ears growing on the wood that I thought was dead and dry.

And I quote from a meditation by a sixth-century Armenian philosopher, “Blessed, are you holy wood, crown by Christ that grew on earth, yet spreading your arms rose above the arches of the highest heavens, and brought forth and carried upon yourself the imponderable fruit. You flowered in the stock of Israel and the whole earth was filled with your fruit.”

And then later, in that same meditation, I wrote this:

In the spring, a seed was planted, and it bore the first fruits of the final harvest. As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be brought to life but each in proper order, Christ the first fruits, and afterward at His coming, those who belong to Christ. So at the end of the gardening season, when the leaves of the sugar maple turn canary yellow, and flutter in flocks onto the browning Earth, Christians remember the cross. In November, as Advent draws near, look up, hundreds of wooden crosses reach to the horizon, and the birds find rest. And then, when the year grows old, we remember the cross. Only now with the assurance that soon the baby will be born, that the spring is not far off, that at the last trumpet at the beginning of eternal spring, the sun will clothe our dry bones with new flesh like the silvery green leaves that burst from the buds on the branches of the

maple trees in May. One cool September morning, as I worked in the garden, and the sun was rising, a flock of Canadian Geese geese flew high above dozens of small crosses like the ones pilgrims carved by candlelight on the walls of holy shrines, only they were spread in a vast V, across a luminous sky.

So the Bible teaches me to look at creation that way. And if I look at the creation that way, I find in it the truth and the meaning that God has put into his creation, right at the very beginning. Without sin, we probably would recognize him in his creation, but because we are in sin, we do not necessarily see him in his ordination. I’m not interested in natural theology, theology based on reason and intellect and science, because I don’t think that leads you to the truth. It may provide hints and suggestions of a greater power, and you might be able to talk about it in those conceptual terms, but it will never get you to Christ or the cross or the resurrection. Instead, I read the creation through a biblical imagination. And that brings me to a sacramental imagination—and so far as sacrament uncovers mystery—to the mystery of creation itself, which is hidden to us, as is God. The only reason we know the God who is revealed in Scripture is because, as Ephraim said, he has clothed himself in words through Scripture, and he has revealed himself in the very things that he has made. But those alone will not reveal the transcendent God, the absolute God, but Christ has bridged the creation with that God. And so, in his humanity, we get some confidence when we speak about God, but only then. And if we abandon the images that we have gained through the creation, and observation of it, and living within it, we’re not likely even to comprehend the meaning of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

You mention that the Bible teaches you how to read nature this way. Do you think you see Heaven in nature because of nature itself, or is it that you’ve read Scripture and consequently see these metaphors in nature? If you loved computers, let’s say, could you see Christ in computer metaphors rather than nature? In other words, is there something in the nature of nature that reveals Heaven more than other things?

Faith can open our eyes, not only because it objectively corresponds to the symbolic structure of Creation, but also because we ourselves are created in God’s image and made to know God through the symbolic structure and meaning of his creation. The Bible is the rule of faith. The symbols inherent in creation are illuminated and deepened by the symbols found in Scripture, for it is Christ who perfects the scriptural symbols by his cross, its types by his body, its adornments by his beauty. Once you have the rule of faith in you, you will have a luminous eye, or there will be a luminous eye growing up within you, that enables you to understand how deeply God has reflected himself, as in a mirror in his creation. We don’t see God directly though. We see him in that mirror which is his creation. God transcends all of that. That’s why I don’t put much stock in natural theology. After all, where does it lead? Well, it leads to where Paul, in the first chapter of Romans, points out how people have been misled and imagine their gods in the form of beasts and animals and all the rest of it. Natural theology almost inevitably leads to idolatry.

That’s striking because as you were contrasting natural theology and the way that it seeks after truth with this more holistic, sacramental mode that you’re describing. Does natural theology and that rationalistic mode of seeking God impact all of education and how we try to find any sort of truth? And if so, what does that mean about what we’re doing to students in school when we communicate to them that truth is propositional?

A truth is fundamentally imagistic, in my view. Every word we have was, as George MacDonald has pointed out, once a lively metaphor. Truth is fundamentally metaphorical, symbolical. It is revelation, it is not conceptualization. It is realization; it is illumination. Let me tell you, those guys from Harvard and Yale that I was thrown in the midst of . . . at first I doubted myself. But ultimately, their method didn’t impress me very much. They were good fellows who did some good writing. But their work is not as fundamental to our humanity as the kind of theology that someone like Ephraim the Syrian does through his hymns and poetry.

So I would say that there should be a lot more po-

etry taught very early on, and it should be mixed with getting into the earth, with observation of the world, not as a scientist necessarily, but as wonder. Children are fundamentally wonders anyhow. Let their imaginations run wild for a while and train the imagination through the rule of faith that is scriptural.

This is a really beautiful vision for what education could be or what seeking truth could be, but it strikes me that it would be very hard, especially with your statement that truth is not a proposition or conceptual, to then know if your students have grasped the truth. So as a teacher, how do you know whether your students have sought and found truth?

Are their virtues growing up inside of them? It’s not something you could test them on. The promise is that if God is in Scripture and we seek him out, not only in words, but in his creation, we will be more fully human.

Do you think, then, that everyone who turns to nature will grow in virtue?

No, there’s no guarantee that anyone’s going to grow from being in nature. Again, the rule of faith is Scripture ultimately. So being a naturalist does not guarantee that you’re going to be virtuous. I’m not talking about becoming a naturalist. I’m talking about being a supernaturalist. And one of the greatest teachers of supernaturalism is what we call nature.

Here is an example. Water washes us clean. So is that the only meaning that water has? No, it isn’t. Water is illuminative, too. It’s reflective and refractive of light. And so we understand baptism as illumination, not merely as cleansing, and all of that meaning is packed into water. If the scientist looks at it as H2O, he doesn’t get us very far, except in scientific experiments, which may be practical and useful. But they don’t bring us any nearer to God. But water is more than its chemical compound—as is oil, as is fire. The primary elements all are, actually.

How can we help our children and students foster this type of knowledge? Knowing water is H2O is useful. But how do you expand that understanding? Well, one way to do it actually is to practice some

of the rights of the church that are left unexplored today in the classroom. So you bless the water. You go out to a stream, and you bless the water. Why are you throwing that cross into the water? What does the cross have to do with the water? Well, Jesus bled on the cross and water came out of his side, signs of both the sacrament of the Eucharist and of baptism. Again, it’s not primarily conceptualization, it’s images that belong to the memory and are brought up in ways that help us interpret the world more deeply than science does.

A lot of people have written about scientism. Lewis did a good job of it. Our education is structured as if scientific knowledge is the only way of knowing to a degree of certitude. Then we begin to believe that that way of knowing leads us to some sort of salvation, but it doesn’t.

I’ve often caught myself in the classroom saying to my students there isn’t one strictly correct way of interpreting these texts. Have I invited them to relativism? I’ve invited them to see the world in multiple colors, as light is refracted in a prism.

So there might be a certain sense of confidence, or surety and truth, without something being proven?

Well, the certitude is in Christ. Certitude is an important thing. But what is it? What is certain? Certainty about facts or certainty about truth? And is truth limited to scientific knowing, experimentation, repetition of experiment? Is that all it is?

Well, a lot of schools have a Bible class, which is mostly apologetics. Are they reducing biblical truth to scientific truth?

Yes. It’s a mistake to teach apologetics to young children. Actually, they’re more advanced than apologetics in the sense that their imaginations have not yet been severely crippled. Apologetics is extremely important, but it’s primarily an adult thing, and adults seem to need it because reason has formed in them a capacity that children don’t necessarily have (sometimes a cancerous formation). But that doesn’t make children inferior to adults. In some ways, children are superior to adults, because they’ve been given the gift of imagination, if we wouldn’t kill it. Maybe they’re

wiser for it?

What if we find ourselves adults who have this cancer of reason, as you said earlier? What would the remedy for that be?

Gardening, but not everybody can be a gardener. We’ve crippled ourselves in this respect. There are many densely populated places where you can’t even look up into the sky and see the stars. We lose that higher sense of wonder about the vastness of the creation, which in some sense, ought to tame our pride, reminding us we don’t know much. It ought to be, in some ways, terrifying. That’s one way of talking about the fear of God. What is all that doing out there? What purpose or reason could it have for us? We have pictures of the galaxies. And the color in it, oh, my God, it’s a painting! God painted it. He’s just inviting us to view it. But view it as an icon not as a scientific fact.

The average person is in grave danger now, because they are glued to a screen, which is highly limiting. It’s a deception. You can tour the world on the internet, but it’s not the world. It’s disembodied. You can’t taste that. You can’t dig in the earth. You can’t smell the flowers. You can’t scratch your back on the bark of a tree.

What if people don’t want to do those things? What if they’re fine and happy to live in the virtual realm and travel the world that way?

I would say that their humanity is in danger. And maybe, they’re bound to be what Lewis satirizes and criticizes in the third volume of his space trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Maybe they are bound to be a living brain without a body.

But I don’t think there’s any way to salvation other than through our bodies. Salvation was secured to us through the body of God. There’s a lesson in that. I don’t know how much explanation needs to be given to it, because it’s a matter of faith. If you really believe that you’re fulfilled, and in some sense, immortalized by sitting in a room and living through what are dim one-dimensional images of creation, well, then, I’d say you’re doomed. Your humanity is reduced. You may not know it’s happening to you, but it is. It’s gnostic, really, ultimately, the body doesn’t matter anymore. It

may not even be a good thing, except to use for sex, or to feed, or whatever it might be.

But living in our body and interacting with the physical world is a way of understanding a deeper spiritual truth that we can’t find without the rest of creation. It’s not an accident of language that “human” comes from humus, which means earth. So we are earth people. Again, that’s a metaphor. We’ve lost the metaphor. Now we speak of human beings and we don’t know that “human” is a metaphor. We take it as a scientific truth. It’s not; it’s a metaphor.

We are symbols. The defining ultimate symbol is Christ. God speaks to us symbolically, even in the incarnation. And these symbols correspond to one another. He’s made the creation that way. As I said before, faith can open our eyes not only because it objectively corresponds to the symbolical structure of Creation, but also because we ourselves are created in God’s image and made to know. That’s the rule.

Did you start having these realizations about the nature of truth and Christ and humanity from gardening? Or did you know these things and then turn to gardening because you wanted to understand these things further?

I certainly didn’t turn to gardening because I wanted to know these things further. I turned to gardening because it was a way to put food on the table. I didn’t do much flower gardening then. I started flower gardening later. Now flower gardening, it seems to me, has expanded me because it requires a greater sense of symmetry, harmony, and beauty. It engaged with my senses in ways that gardening of fruits and vegetables certainly introduced me to but not so much so as putting my face in a rose and breathing it. That’s different.

Most of my thoughts on theology come from reading certain writers who don’t generally get read. And I’d say the one that’s most conspicuous is Ephraim the Syrian, who’s begun to be discovered in ways that did not belong to modern theology. I suppose he would be called pre-modern in that sense. He doesn’t go where the Enlightenment goes, and I don’t think he would have wanted to have gone where the Enlightenment went. Being from the fourth century, he’s very close to the scriptural mind—the Hebraic mind

more than the Greek mind. It’s also deeply embedded in my own tradition, which is the Armenian. If you look at the hymnody in the Armenian tradition, it’s filled with imagery out of creation.

But it’s not conceptual. It’s a different sensibility, I suppose. It was built into me by my experience in my time out of doors, there’s no question. I spent so much time outdoors in my youth. You couldn’t get me inside! I got punished for coming in late at night. Where was I? I was in a pond trying to catch a frog. I was discovering the texture of a pussy willow, breaking the branch off it and just rubbing my face, or something like that. Or lying in the grass that was shimmering and reflecting light, warming myself there and looking up in the sky and watching animal clouds chase each other. I mean, that’s what I did. So part of it was just who I was. I suppose if I had been born twenty-five years later and grown in the same neighborhood, all of those fields and woods that I traipsed around as a kid would be gone. They became plots for condominiums. Dr. Tucker once said to me, “The trouble with modern focus is that they walk on pavement and concrete. What grows in pavement and concrete?” Nothing. We don’t either. We’re stunted.

So there’s a combination of factors that helped me develop my thinking. I don’t think it was one thing. It was just where my reading led me in one respect, and where my adventuring and naturing led me in other respects. But look, I’m not a romantic in the sense that I think that if you bathe yourself in nature, you’ll become a theist or religious. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. You have to see nature through a particular lens. So when you read a Wordsworth poem, you better believe that behind it is Christianity. That’s the only way he could present nature the way he does. Even if at the beginning he was not so formally Christian as what he became later in his life when he began to be conscious of doctrinal truths. And that’s fine. He came to that, interestingly, through his poetry and reflection on nature, and then, in his later years, became more formally Christian or orthodox.

How do you help your own children and grandchildren see the world this way?

Well, I did crazy things with them when they were

very young and I could carry them in my arms. I’d walk by a rosebush and stick their face in it. Or when a wind came up, I’d say, “Listen to the wind. It must be saying something to us. It’s whispering in our ears.” Or when my son Rafi was just two or three years old, we’d go to the woods and there was a place in the woods where there was some wonderful moss growing under a tree, and I’d sit on the moss with him, and I’d say, “This is God’s carpet.” Now he tells his own children that. I’ve seen him do it with his six year old. Or we roll down a hill. You should see me rolling down a hill at the age of seventy-four. It’s painful. My knees won’t do it!

So, yes, I’ve done it with my grandchildren. And my children are doing it with their children. But being in nature is obviously not all that it is. I mean, you don’t raise children just to be creatures who are comfortable in or observant of nature. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that I think it’s very important, much more important than we make it out to be and that the substitutes we find for it are not sufficient.

I’m not saying the whole world ought to be a garden, in the wild sense of the word. But there ought to be some of it in our schools. If we create environments in which that’s not present, I think we’re doing potential great harm to future generations. And we’ve done it for a long time. Historically, human beings have done such things. And if children become untethered, that has a lot to do with it. I mean, untethered from the truth, untethered from their own humanity and the humanity of others. One can understand why it happens.

Katerina Kern is the editor-in-chief of the FORMA Journal and director of the press and researcher for the CiRCE Institute. She loves beautifully crafted paintings and words and believes poetry could save our culture were we bold enough to allow it.

SSince before the birth of Christ, many different models have been used to explain the cosmos—the order of created things. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle’s geocentric model placed the earth at the center of the universe with the moon, sun, and planets rotating around it, while other models, such as the one offered by Aristarchus of Samos, put the sun at the center of the universe. For a long time, both models (among others) were accepted as different possible ways of explaining the cosmos. But since the Copernican Revolution in the sixteenth century, the sun has generally been accepted as the center of the solar system with all the planets (including earth) rotating around it. This heliocentric model provides a fundamentally different understanding of the cosmos than other models: it expands the universe to incomprehensibility while diminishing man’s significance to a level thought sacreligious in other models.

Medieval thinkers believed that differing cosmological models were possible, but most accepted the geocentric model in which the earth was at the center, or bottom, surrounded by the heavens. Because medieval society accepted a different cosmology than modern men, they also had a different view of the cosmos (and mankind) in relation to God. By placing the earth at the center, their geocentric cosmology portrayed man as a more central part of creation than the heliocentric man. Naturally, the difference between the two cosmologies leads to markedly different understandings of salvation and the incarnation. Indeed, the way one thinks about the cosmos determines the way one thinks nature works, God works, and man works.

The geocentric model displays creation as ordered from earth to the heavens, and this path to the heavens parallels the path to the heavens in medieval worship (liturgy). While the geocentric model may seem bizarre and antiquated to the modern reader, it holds truths within it that can be seen by suspending disbelief and embracing metaphor, for the geocentric, medieval cosmology reflects the structure of the heavenly temple: it is a house for God to dwell in that leads men to Him, and, as such, is worth taking seriously.

Model as Metaphor

Before we consider medieval cosmology in detail, I want to take a moment to consider what any model is and does. A model is a representation of something that cannot be directly looked at or tested. Models are developed based on the answers to questions being asked, but they are not full, accurate pictures of reality. For example, a description of a person is a model, and the words used depend on perception and the one describing; I might describe my brother by my experience of him as a child or in relation to my parents, while someone passing him on the street could describe him by his appearance and his gait. Although different, both our answers would be right; what people see and describe is limited by what they search for. So multiple models of one thing are possible, and each model answers different questions and therefore shows different aspects of truth. For this reason, considering multiple cosmological models at once shows different aspects of creation, man, God, and our relationship to Him.

A model is also a metaphor. To create a model is to say “X is Y.” And like all analogies, it is the work of the viewer to understand to what extent this parallel is true. In the book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson discuss the constructive power of metaphors, noting, “New metaphors . . . can have the power to define reality. They do this through a coherent network of entailments that highlight some features of reality and hide others. The acceptance of the metaphor, which forces us to focus only on those aspects of our experience it highlights, leads us to view the entailments of the metaphor as being true.”1 It is important for people to be aware they do not see reality fully accurately, but only see a portion. The perceived portion builds the metaphor, or model, used to understand reality, and these metaphors they use (in a circular manner) affect the way they perceive.

Because humans are intellectual beings and are both material and immaterial, we can understand more than what is learned through the senses. Experience begins with the senses, but, in rational beings, information is abstracted and more can be known

1. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 157.

2. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 156.

3. Lewis, Discarded Image, 96.

than simply what is perceived through the senses; there is no way to discuss these things without using metaphors. Metaphors and pictures give understanding, and the pictures used to understand something affect the way a person acts in relation to the thing represented. As Lakoff and Johnson say, “Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.”2 And so, the medieval model, once believed, constructed the ordered world which it modeled—at least in the mind of men. This becomes evident when we consider the worship, buildings, and teaching of the medievals. But let us first consider this generative model in more detail.

The Medieval Model Described

The Judeo-Christian mind has traditionally viewed the heavenly temple as the ultimate model of reality. The first illustrations of the heavenly temple can be seen in the Hebrew tabernacle and in Solomon’s temple where all people entered the temple courtyard, but only priests were allowed to enter the temple proper, and only the high priest could approach the center, or holy of holies, where the ark of the covenant resided and God was present. Thus, it was hierarchical, ordered, and designed to lead man toward God. And like a Russian nesting doll, it enveloped the center in concentric layers.

Deeply influenced by the Old Testament and Jewish temple, the medieval cosmos reflects this temple model, echoing the divine revelation of the heavenly temple in cosmic form. In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis describes the order and hierarchy of the heavenly spheres in the geocentric model. The earth is the lowest point, the planets are higher, and the Primum Mobile higher still, while outside these spheres exists that which does not occupy time and space, which Christians recognize as God.3 If we consider the fractal image of the Russian doll again, the baby in the center is earth. Thus within this model, the cosmos

itself is a type of the well-ordered tabernacle, leading people towards heaven.

The clearly-ordered model does not solely describe the planets, but all things; it is as much a claim about the nature of things as a planetary model. Each being’s value is determined by its natural place in the hierarchy. Man dwells upon the earth which rests at the center, or bottom of the cosmos, placing his importance above earthly things, but below the heavenly. Thus, man knew himself through his medieval model.

Just as the medieval man knew himself through his cosmology, so too did he know the relations between things. Rather than matter moving through measurable, material forces, all bodily movement in the medieval cosmos occurs through relationship. God, in His love, causes the movement of the Primum Mobile, which causes the movement of the stars, which, in turn, moves Saturn, and the rest of the planets follow, all moved by the love of (and for) God.

Unless he or she has a strong imagination, the modern person will struggle to understand the impact this has on one’s interaction with the world. To see all movement as an act of love rather than force, to believe that looking out at “space” is looking up at higher beings, to believe one worthy of honor because he or she partakes in human nature—this would surely change one’s whole being. To understand this, let us consider man’s highest expression of himself and his beliefs: worship.

The Sacramental Life and Liturgy

In her essay “Nature and Scripture: Demise of a Medieval Analogy,” Willemien Otten explains the medieval relationship between nature and Scripture using Romans 1:20 which says, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”4 Here, Otten notes Scripture’s assertion that people can know God through His creation since creation reveals aspects of the creator. In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger echoes this idea,

4. Otten, “Nature and Scripture,” 262.

5. Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 26.

6. Munteanu, “Cosmic Liturgy,” 335.

saying, “Creation exists to be a place for the covenant that God wants to make with man.”5 So, creation reflects the creator and allows man to know God. It is the place for covenant and for worship; and thus is an essential part of salvation.

Perhaps this is most evident in the incarnation, when God took on humanity. In so doing, he redeemed our human nature and the physical world with it. The medieval Christians remembered this redemption of the physical by partaking in Christ’s body and blood through bread and wine: physical matter to remember a physical salvation. When Christ ascended into heaven, he walked the path of the temple and the whole cosmos and rose to his heavenly home. This was not a small matter to the medieval mind, for home was where your nature dictated you belonged, and to rise above or below it would be a sin. In taking human nature up the divine, he redeemed all human nature.

And so, in the medieval cosmos, nature is redeemed, becoming the central meeting point between man and God. This belief leads to a different kind of worship: not one that is individualistic and merely intellectual, but rather one that includes body and soul, past, present, and future, heaven and earth in communion. In this medieval mode of thought, all created things reflect the creator, and man is made in the image of God, so man and the cosmos are connected to the immaterial through their likeness to God. The purpose of the cosmos is for man to know God, so man, God, and the cosmos work together for this end. Daniel Munteanu says, “The cosmos was created by God to be a place for worship and communion, and the goal of matter is to become a vehicle for love.”6 To see creation in relation to the creator is to rediscover the depths of the world. The world is not an object of possession for human beings. It is an invitation towards a dialogue of love and communion with God and with each other.

The sacramental life, therefore, is a restoration of creation through love made evident in the medieval liturgy, or worship, itself. In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger discusses the connection between cosmos and liturgy, saying they are tied together. He

claims that considering the two in isolation is acceptable only if it does not lead to opposition. Their separation “narrows the meaning of Christian worship of God,” so maintaining their relationship is essential to worship.7 Ratzinger describes a heaven and earth tied together through the incarnation; when God became man, he united the immaterial to the material, and the two are eternally connected. Through the incarnation, the whole material world will be saved when God raises up the earthly to heaven. In the meantime, it exists as an icon of the heavenly kingdom to come. This movement towards heaven occurs because of Christ’s redeeming act, and this achievement will ultimately occur at the last judgment, but it is now present in the liturgy.

The marriage of the sacramental cosmology and the medieval liturgy begins in the church building itself: simultaneously spiritual, material, and cosmological. The worshiper moves from outside into the building and then towards the altar, the holy of holies, where Christ dwells in the Eucharist (again, much like the previously mentioned Russian doll). In the case of the Byzantine style of architecture, the domes represent the heavens bending to earth to be united with man in worship. The closer one gets to the altar, which acts as the throne of God, the closer he is to heaven, where Christ resides and the mystery of the Eucharist takes place, and only the priest, who is a representative of Christ, goes through the beautiful gate to move between the sanctuary and the apse and brings the heavenly out to the people. And so the worshiper’s journey through the church building mirrors the journey of Christ through the cosmos. In so doing, the worshiper experiences the structure of the entire cosmos within worship, for the transcendence of the liturgy and sacraments found in the altar raise him to God’s dwelling place in heaven.

The form of the liturgy also displays a movement from earth to heaven where man begins on earth, but ascends to heaven. As the liturgy progresses, it moves towards a union between heaven and earth that culminates in the Eucharist where Christ’s sacrifice is made present (just as his physical journey through the building culminates at the altar). In the first part of the liturgy, the worshiper prays from an

earthly perspective, then, at the Great Entrance when the King enters (when the priest carries the Eucharist through the church), the focus of the liturgy changes from earthly to heavenly things. After the sermon, during the Cherubic Hymn, the people say, “Now lay aside all earthly cares.” This identifies a change where the liturgy enters into the heavenly worship and all earthly concerns should be put aside. The medieval worshiper thought himself a participant in the continuous, heavenly worship of God. It is a cosmic liturgy where people on earth sing with the heavenly realm, and men sing “holy, holy, holy” together with the cherubim and seraphim as seen in Isaiah’s vision. And so man experiences his model of the heavens on earth, even through earth.

The Biblical Foundation of Medieval Cosmology

While science has today proven this model “false,” Scripture assumes it holds worth. Throughout the Old Testament, God presents his creation in a certain way that reveals how God wants man to perceive it, or at least the characteristics he wants man to know and attribute to it. He presents creation as an unmoving earth and a moving, circling, rising and setting sun. Psalm 18:1–7 says:

The heavens declare the glory of God; / the firmament shows the creation of His hands. / Day to day utters speech, / And night to night reveals knowledge. / There is no speech nor language / Where their voices are not heard. / Their proclamation went forth into all the earth, / And their words to the ends of the world. / In the sun He set His tabernacle; / And it rejoices exceedingly / Like a bridegroom coming forth from his bridal chamber, / Like a strong man to run a race. / Its rising is from one end of heaven, / And its circuit runs to the other end; / And nothing shall be hidden from its heat.

Ecclesiastes 1:5 says, “The sun rises and the sun sets and returns to its place.” Habakkuk 3:11 says, “The sun arose, and the moon stood in its course; At the light of Your arrows they went forth, At the flashing of Your gleaming weapons.” And, “The ends of the

7. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 24.

earth” as well as “the four corners of the earth” are often referred to. Each of these examples offer images that illustrate the cosmos. I would like to assert that the image of the cosmos God Himself provides should be the highest considered and most contemplated image of creation. To limit one’s cosmological model to only one image, especially to an image that is not the one God Himself presents in Scripture, is to limit one’s understanding of God and man’s relationship with Him. Medieval man contemplated his model of the cosmos, even if most often unthinkingly. He lived his model of the cosmos.

Our cosmological model shapes more than our conception of the universe; it shapes our understanding of how creation relates to the eternal. The result is not merely an intellectual endeavor—to be able to explain a way to God—but a spiritual one that influences the way we live from grand, important gestures to the seemingly insignificant, such as what I do with a bug I find in my house, or what I feel when I walk barefoot over rocks. Belief that creation is sacred determines how we interact with it in our daily existence and how we relate to every person we encounter.

The medieval model shows us how nature is necessary for salvation by constantly pointing us towards the heavenly. It does this through its physical structure which, as we have seen, culminates in the incarnation where the material and the eternal are united, and this unity is reenacted in the Eucharist. Liturgy occurs on earth and brings people into the heavenly realm and into communion with all the angels and saints worshiping God temporally and eternally.

The medieval man, when looking at the same creation as the modern man, saw something very different. He saw a sky full of light coming from a living sun, and at night he saw the planets and the moon, each inside a crystal sphere, creating music and influencing creation: the moon assisting in growing things, the planets influencing people’s health and temperament. With this view, man was not isolated from the world but united to it. And the world lay at the center of this harmonious cosmos just as the incarnation of God lay at the center of all things, both temporal and eternal. In this context, each man’s unification with Christ did not seem so far away, for it was not limited to himself but involved all who surrounded him on his path from earth to heaven. His journey was caught

up with the angels, saints, and all of creation as God led him through the cosmos to know Him.

Though she hails from Australia, Alex Kern now lives in Concord NC. She obtained a B.A. in Theology from Belmont Abbey College, has been working for the CiRCE Institute since 2014, and is now a CIRCE apprentice. You will often find her rock climbing, knitting, or discussing the carnivore diet with other Concord locals.

Bibliography

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins, I, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1987.

Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

———. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

Barr, Stephen M. Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013.

Evans, James. “Aristarchus of Samos.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 11 Dec. 2014. Web.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Milton, John. The Works of John Milton. Edited by Frank Allen Patterson. Vol. 14. Columbia University Press, 1933.

Munteanu, Daniel. “Cosmic Liturgy: The Theological Dignity of Creation as a Basis of an Orthodox Ecotheology.” International Journal of Public Theology, 4.3 (Jan. 2010): 332–44. doi:10.1163/156973210x510884.

Otten, Willemien. “Nature and Scripture: Demise of a Medieval Analogy.” The Harvard Theological Review 88.2 (1995): 257–84. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1509888.

Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph. The Spirit of the Liturgy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014.

Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003.

Simons, Daniel, and Christopher Chabris. “Selective Attention Test.” 1999. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.

POETRY BY 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 has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Rochester, the Eastman School of Music, Cornell University, and, most recently, Villanova University. She lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband and three children.

TOO SOON SPRING

February, and all the birds out pecking the muddy grass. What are they looking for? Surely not worms, buried deep, blinded— or can they see?—inside dark layers of dirt.

Beyond hope of a crumb, the birds still seem cheerful, chirpy. It hasn’t snowed all winter, and I’ve been waiting. Here the seasons, measure for measure, amount to less and less.

The texture of time thins, as if to let me see, through some transparent self, all the other selves I won’t let go of. My children becoming not children. My parents suddenly old. When

I was little, for hours, I would swing on that old tire swing in our back yard—bank of cherry trees, stone wall, wildflowers, grass—sing and talk to myself,

long before I knew how to tell time. That child on the swing, still me, even me with children of my own, grown, separate, separating, from me.

LA CAPELLA

I did not think we would survive that drive up the winding hills away from Lucca, the switchbacks, the taxi honking its horn at each turn, you holding my hand in the backseat in the twilight, but then we were there, and the woman spoke English, and she brought us up the narrow stairs to our rooms, which were the rooms in the photograph that you told me not to get too attached to, the chances of getting those exact ones are slim, you said, so try not to wish for it too much, but there was the iron bed with its calligraphy headboard and the warm gold on the walls and the fireplace in the corner, there was the deep marble sink and the little wooden table, the glass front cupboard with strips of delicate linen that held the dishes we loved so much you sketched the glasses and we searched until we found them back home, the couch where I sat each night to record our day, the worn clay of the tiles, cool under our feet, even the bath, the shower a huge disk as big as a sunflower overhead. When the host closed the door behind her, I fell backward onto the bed, threw myself onto it and tried to hide that I was crying one week into our marriage, afraid that it was too much, afraid of getting what I want.

WHEN I VISITED MY GRANDPARENTS

When I visited my grandparents, my sister and I would sleep in the room where my mother once slept with its matching milk glass lamps. I would fall asleep to the sound of my sister talking quietly to me, our heads resting close to each other on the embroidered pillowcases of those twin beds. When I visited my grandparents, my grandfather would take me into his room and open a wooden box where he kept his treasures—the letter that my mother wrote to him and to my grandmother when she graduated from college, the old mouthpiece to his trumpet, its plucky, shiny brass. He would tell me how his parents died one day after the other when he was a young man, he’d tell this story even though I’d heard it many times, and I would listen as if it were the first time.

When I visited my grandparents, I saw how they prepared for us, and even while we were there, they were always preparing, anticipating. My grandfather, hinting about dessert all the way through dinner. At dinner he would take a roll from the breadbasket, throw it up in the air and clap his hands on it to catch it, and my grandmother would say, Bob, a bit sharply, as in, Must you do that in front of the children, and every time? Still, we knew that she wasn’t mad; my grandfather knew it too because he looked at her in a way that made me feel this was a game they played and we were a part of it, maybe we even made it happen.

When I visited my grandparents, we would beg to go up in the attic—its creaky stairs pulled down from the ceiling. Once, my sister and I found my mother’s wedding dress, my uncle’s Air Force uniform, and ladies’ hats with netting all eaten away by moths. Years later, I found an old box with letters and a diary inside. I remember thinking, Now I will understand everything about my grandmother who was both warm and reserved, and who only ever talked about herself if prompted. I brought the box down and showed her; she named everyone in the photographs, gave me the diary. It was her mother’s, and I saved it until I was alone to read it. I didn’t even peek into it until I got home; but it was hard to find the woman inside.

When I visited my grandparents, they didn’t care how much time I spent lying on the couch reading, they didn’t tell me to go outside, run around and play. I did play when my brothers and sister were there. My sister and I would take the dolls that were my mother’s and go out on the porch and push the doll buggy around. We would use the names my mother used when she was a girl: she was Mrs. Downey visiting Mrs. Pearl. Then we’d join my brothers and walk down the road together toward the creek.

When I visited my grandparents, I entered the darkroom of my childhood. Age had taught them long suffering: you can’t rush development. They had an instinct for controlled exposure, trusting the latent image. When I visited my grandparents, they never cared if I was shy around strangers or sat around all day doing nothing but read or wanted to go back to the neighbors’ barn please to hold the kittens that I was too timid to touch the first time around.

In his book The Empty Space, Peter Brook explains our modern deficit: “We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony—whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays, or funerals—but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow.”1 Though we are not entirely ignorant of rituals, on the rare occasion we take part in them they feel so grand that we feel lessthan ourselves, or they feel obligatory rather than essential to living well. In contrast, Virgil’s Aeneid describes a cultural identity formed by the actualization of these “old impulses” of participation, particularly through visual storytelling. Through three ekphrastic examples—instances where he elaborates on art—Virgil expresses a ritualistic, even sacramental view of imagery that sustains community. Ritual especially appears in the creation of and interaction with the objects. Though much about these Roman myths may feel initially unfamiliar to us, Virgil’s ekphrasis elaborating on the artwork’s ritualistic use reveals a people finding communal identity and thus resonates with

the rituals that Christians practice for the same formation.

When Rome was still only a dream in the minds of displaced men in Virgil’s legend, Aeneas and Achates encounter a grove in the middle of Carthage where Queen Dido is building a temple for Juno.2 In this garden, what meets Aeneas’ eyes grants him restoration: the walls of this foreign people’s holy place display the destruction of Troy in images honoring the fallen city.

On the walls, Aeneas sees the broad action of the Trojan battles, as well as the vignettes of his companions, including familiar characters such as his kin Hector and Priam. He sees the weeping women who piously entreat the unmoved Minerva and one warrior woman among the ranks of men. He recognizes his own likeness on the front lines, clashing with the Achaeans. Virgil writes that as Aeneas “devours all in one long gaze,” he is both “enthralled” and “calmed,” heaving heavy sighs and wetting his cheeks with tears.3 Though he and Achates are enshrouded in a protective cloud, he now urges his friend to “throw off [his] fear,” because “here for the first time [Aeneas

1. Peter Brook, “The Holy Theatre,” in The Empty Space (Penguin, 1990), 45. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Making of the American Essay, ed. John D’Agata (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016), 177–78.

2. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (London: Harvill, 1996), bk.1, ln. 600.

3. Virgil, Aeneid, bk.1, lns. 610–77

takes] heart to hope / For safety, and to trust his destiny more / Even in affliction.”4

How does Virgil’s understated reference to “a mere image” raise such a powerful reaction from Aeneas?5 Virgil identifies several reasons: the replayed scenes of his great friends’ deaths, the valor granted honor, and Carthage’s implicit sympathy and safety towards Aeneas’ people. I assert that the sacredness of the space and the physical workmanship of the art intensifies its significance. In this temple, the Carthaginians raise offerings and supplications to the goddess Juno, the city’s patroness. Therefore, Dido dignifies the subjects of the murals by selecting them for this sacred context, implying that this foreign story moves her people to worship. Like the Trojans, the Carthaginians are also migrants—displaced Tyrians who fled with Dido after her brother murdered her husband. Before he knows her story, from the temple walls alone, Aeneas realizes “they weep here / For how the world goes.”6 Dido later confirms this, “Through pain I’ve learned / To comfort suffering men.”7 Through the murals, she has created a ritualistic experience for her displaced people and the travel-weary Trojans.

In addition, Aeneas, unaware of Juno’s antagonism toward him, maintains a posture of piety toward the goddess through sacrifice and prayer. With this temple, Dido unknowingly foreshadows the tumultuous but eventually resolved relationship that Juno will have with the Trojans. These scenes are not just merely scrawled on the wall for hasty depiction, but display “the handiwork of artificers and the toil they spent upon it, properly fitting for a temple.”8 All of this reveals that the place in which stories are represented, the way they are represented, and the way the viewers interact with them creates value not independent of but inseparable from the stories themselves.

Further, the visual contains a ritualistic power Aeneas may not be aware of: what was previously the

4. Virgil, Aeneid, bk.1, lns. 630, 612–14.

5. Virgil, Aeneid, bk.1, ln. 633.

6. Virgil, Aeneid, bk.1, lns. 628–29.

7. Virgil, Aeneid, bk.1, lns. 860–61.

memory of the migrants has now been turned to matter, later to become myth. Though oral storytelling keeps stories alive, when someone inscribes them on a surface they make it available to be touched and. seen again and again. The representation reifies the story—not that it wasn’t real before, but as limited humans, we quickly forget what is not repeatedly in front of us. The carnage of Troy on the temple walls provides the first artistic encounter that shapes the Trojans’ collective memory and identity.

From this revelation Aeneas feels confident to reveal himself to Queen Dido, especially encouraged by her declaration that “the city I build is yours … Trojan and Tyrian will be all one to me.”9 She then throws them an abundant banquet. In the midst of the fattened meats just prepared in the kitchens and the happy din echoing in the hall—festivities which readers can almost taste, smell and hear through Virgil’s descriptions—Virgil includes another instance of significant visual storytelling. On the “proud crimson-dyed” embroidered tablecloths, Dido’s staff set plates of silver and gold, “engraved with brave deeds of her fathers, / A sequence carried down through many captains / In a long line from the founding of the race.”10

It can be difficult for the modern mind to understand why Dido’s plates may have more than mere decorative value. Our grandmothers all have the china closet that we dare not rattle, displaying table settings “for a special occasion” that never comes. The Tyrian heirlooms are also made of precious metals, certainly adding monetary value. Though Juno’s temple walls revealed that production and place are integral to an artistic rendering, the object is not precious for just these reasons. When precious material substance is used to tell a precious story, and further, actually holds the food the people partake in, questions of sentiment and price cease to be relevant in the face of “who we are.” Here, when the visual story joins with the most basic human activity, eating, the

8. Virgil, Aeneid, bk.1, lns. 617–18.

9. Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 1, lns. 778–79.

10. Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 1, lns. 874–76.

people can answer with “we are Tyrians, and when we eat, our story becomes real again.” In this ritual, the plates reactivate the story of the Tyrians’ past to ensure their shared memory will shape their future.

The Trojans, homeless and wandering, find in Carthage this life-giving ritual and mode of knowing themselves. While we can’t assume Queen Dido brings out these plates for every meal, their necessity in this banquet speaks to the daily ritual formation of communal identity. The Trojans have been practicing this in their seven years of exile, growing together in moments of immense danger and peace, on sailboats and dry land, in laughter and mourning. They tend to unite the antinomy of joy and mourning; for instance, the Trojan wanderers memorialize Anchises’ death with wrestling matches and races. The sheer amount of diversified, shared experience is necessary for them to grow into a new culture. So when the Tyrians show them their collective identity through the banquet plates, the images stir Aeneas’ mind so strongly to share his peoples’ identity. He calls for his son to come from the ships with “relics of Ilium,” regal additions to Dido’s wardrobe that invoke Trojan story.11 Dido’s sharing of her identity in visual, active ritual compels him to recall and respond with wearable relics that speak of his community’s identity. From this initial participation in identity on his first day in Carthage through the rest of the Trojans’ time in the city Aeneas feels at home here. Virgil shows that the visual, ritualized story can be so powerful that it extends hospitality to the foreigner and enables them to share their own story. It later takes divine intervention and tragedy for him to overcome his individual desire to stay and start again toward his community’s destined home in Italy.

Miles of sea sailed and several false starts later, the remaining Trojans finally reach the land prophesied to them. After King Latinus warmly welcomes them and offers Aeneas Princess Lavinia’s hand in marriage, it appears that now weary travelers can begin to rebuild their walls. However, Juno has inflamed the Latins against the Trojans, most of all Queen Amata and her favorite suitor for Lavinia, Turnus. The goddess Venus, Aeneas’ mother, fears for her son and his

11. Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 1, ln. 883.

12. Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 8, lns. 540, 558.

13. Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 8, lns. 849–50.

people, and pleads with her husband Vulcan, who is conveniently the master of forged weapons. After she flatters him for his help, Vulcan laughs, saying, “You need not beg me for these gifts,” and after a short night’s sleep, sets to labor at the smithy.12

Practically speaking, the text demonstrates that the quality of one’s armor and weapons determines the outcome of the battle. In contrast to this strongest of shields, Virgil later writes of armory pierced as easily as straw, unable to hold up against Aeneas’ military prowess and excellent weapons. Out of the examples of visual story so far, Aeneas’ shield is the only object about which Virgil tells its ritualistic creation process, doing so with detail and delight, demonstrating the hand of the divine in the armor, and in the future of Rome. By chronicling the making and appearance of this formidable shield, Virgil again connects imagery with physical necessity, which he had already expressed through the ekphrasis of Dido’s plates. He now asserts that an armor made up of story, especially when written by the divine, preserves the life of its bearer and forges a future for its community. Readers can be certain that the god-wrought shield will be saved after Aeneas’ victory and sustain Rome’s story.

Upon seeing the shield, Aeneas gazes transfixed, and Virgil spends substantial words describing it. On the shield’s surface, Vulcan, “knowing the prophets, knowing the age to come, / Had wrought the future story of Italy.”13 He creates not just with hope for the future, but with divine knowledge of what will come to pass. Virgil then goes on to describe historically and mythically entwined stories: the twins suckling from the wolf; the rape of the Sabines; the end of the Tarquins; the Gauls’ terrorism; even events Virgil’s contemporary readers would know from their own memories, like Caesar Augustus’ grand entry into battle. Virgil narrates that the “divine smith portrayed the Nomad tribes” here, and a city had been “added by the artisan” there, immersing readers in an impossible multitude of stories for a limited surface. Though supernatural both in its creation and appearance, it is most excellent in its ability to project the viewer into the future and make the future real to the viewer. Aeneas’ reaction is humble; he “[feels] joy in their

pictures” even though he “[knows] nothing of the events themselves.” He is at peace with the mystery of these prophecies resting in this generous but still partial revelation from the divine. Propelled by this joy and wonder, he “[takes] up / Upon his shoulder all the destined acts / And fame of his descendants” ready to fight for the stories that will take place long after he can witness them.14 If Aeneas had taken up these stories in mind only, he might have forgotten them in the face of danger. But he physically takes them up on his shield on Italian soil, the land destined to be his people’s home. Whereas his temptation in Carthage was to give in to personal identity and stay there, now his communal identity in this homeland protects him as he in turn fights for the right to inhabit it.

Though our lack of ritual makes it difficult to grasp how visual representation can shape a collective, Virgil’s ancient myth properly reacquaints moderns with this understanding through three abundant examples: the walls of Juno’s temple that declare the necessity of making memory material, and of bringing the story of the other into holy places; Dido’s plates that show that story is as necessary as the ever present need for food and nourishes the life of the community and its guests; and lastly Aeneas’ shield that displays divine prophecies, the mystery of which causes its bearer to actualize his destiny in joyful courage.

These examples of the characters making the invisible visible point to the poet’s process and purpose for the Aeneid. Virgil strays from Homer’s ancient oral path by inscribing spoken word on tablets to make material the Roman identity and culture. Just as Aeneas sees his past in a painting and is moved to “trust his destiny more,” Romans read of shadowy figures of the past now made solid by Virgil’s Aeneid and were propelled into their empire’s destiny.

In the Aeneid, the mythical Trojans encounter visual representation that is ritualistic, identity forming, and a provision for communal life. Through this ekphrasis, Virgil unknowingly makes way for the communion of the early Christian church (very nearly Virgil’s contemporaries) which carries similar elements, markedly that of a visual, tangible experience. The Christian liturgy is the rehearsal of the story that ascends to the reification of Christ’s sacrifice in the Eucharist and descends with the members having their

identities renewed. It’s a ritual instituted by Christ that is relevant to the past pain, the present need, and the prophetic future glory of the church. Also like the Trojans looking for their home, the church has to practice life together outside of their church home in order for their community’s practice to stay necessary as their daily bread. And like Aeneas shouldering his shield, each member physically partakes in the Eucharistic mystery in order to restore their courage in the reality of Christ’s gift. In these ways, the ritualized artwork in the Aeneid has similitude to Christian life with liturgy but does not reach into our reality of redemption. Communion is the ritualized story on which Christian lives hinge and is the true fulfillment of our “old impulses [that] stir in the marrow.” Virgil reveals the human need to participate in the story of the community, to become united through and with image. This constant light shines from his lantern that he holds for those who come after him.

Talia Faia is an English literature and theater student at Wheaton College (IL) with the intent to teach high school after completing her degree.

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14. Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 8, lns. 990–92.

POETRY BY JUDITH KUNST

Judith Kunst is the author of The Way Through, a poetry collection from Mayapple Press, and The Burning Word: A Christian Encounter with Jewish Midrash from Paraclete Press. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Poetry, Image, and other publications. She makes her living as a grant writer in Evansville, Indiana.

FOR THE WORK

Four thick wires tangle in your hands, caught and snaking like a busted gyroscope. You know you should have given this more thought.

Bend, loop and thread each strand to form a knot and then a path of knots. Stay loose and grope along; hope your hand, tangling, won’t get caught.

Do some lucky people get to be taught this awkward art? Learn the work and its scope beforehand, know how to give it more thought?

It’s time; you think, I’ll only get one shot to pull this off. You’re filled with faith and hope, thick wires finely tangled, finally caught:

There! Do you love its beauty, now it’s taut? Yes, if beauty’s wrestling, if love is rope. (You know you could be giving this more thought.)

Work too much talked about is overwrought. You’ve made a necklace, not a stethoscope. Four wires tangled in your hands were caught. Perhaps you needn’t give it much more thought.

As one educated in music and with significant interest in the quadrivium and the role of music in it, I often get questions from highly educated individuals asking how music fits into the mathematical arts. Trust me for a few moments as we go on a little journey; I shall endeavor to be a faithful guide. The landscape we will traverse is music with its grassy knolls and protruding rock edifices, but I want to leave the worn path that walks past the cottages of emotions, the water mill of music theory, and the city hall of music history. Tempting as they are, we’ll also bypass the estate house of music appreciation, and the local pub, a less refined but no less enthusiastic home of song. We have a familiar and worn path that runs through the village past well-known houses and habits and ideas and assumptions. However, I would suggest that the path was laid down in such a way that it bypasses the parish church and avoids the clearing beyond the hills where we can get past the artificial enlightened town center to the natural light of the night sky and get lost in the cosmic dance.

To chart this journey to the home of music, let’s look at the basics for a moment and get our bearings. We will start with the nature of sound, stop at a scenic view of harmony, and move towards the purpose and power of music.

WHAT IS SOUND?

Take a moment and stop what you are doing and listen for a few minutes. What do you hear? Traffic, children, appliances, the HVAC system, electronic devices, pets, wind, your heartbeat? Our brains are constantly processing the sounds that surround us— differentiating, cataloging, ignoring, varying focus as needed. Sound is something we assume: but I’d like to re-enchant it.

Sound is a pressure wave that moves through a medium (such as air) as a succession of the compression and rarefaction of molecules. In other words, sound has measurable physicality. As this pressure wave disperses, it can cause other things to also resonate that have the same frequency as sympathetic resonance. For example, that rattle in your car when you go 37 mph that goes away when you hit above 40 mph; the extra boom your voice gets when you sing particular notes in the shower; and the way a crystal glass will begin to vibrate and eventually break if its resonant frequency is sung loudly enough.

So as someone speaks to you, their vocal cords vibrate at particular frequencies (rate of speed—literally how frequently) such that it causes a disruption in the air with a pressure wave of molecules alternating between compressing and spreading out. This pattern of pressure moves through the air and eventually finds its way to the side of your head, where your ear funnels that continued pattern through your ear canal to tiny bones that thump a taut membrane (drum) with that pattern that then agitates liquid that causes tiny hairs to sway to that pattern and sends electrical pulses to your brain, which are then translated as the particular voice of a friend, the purr of a cat, the squeak of the floorboards, the roar of a waterfall, the drip of fine rain on leaves, the forty-voice parts of Spem in Alium, the individual and simultaneous notes of a bluegrass band, the ebb and flow of conversation in a room.

Hearing is no less than a miracle! I can distinguish the voice of my wife from every other voice I hear— including the variations of tone, emotion, loudness, or love. You can hear the differences between a flute or oboe or violin or soprano singing the same notes and you can hear all of them at the same time. That is astonishing!

Sound has specific physical characteristics based on its frequency. Humans can hear sounds between 20 Hertz and 20,000 Hertz (at least when you’re young); 20 Hertz means that there are 20 cycles, or repetitions, of that waveform per second. The frequency number corresponds to the pitch of a note—higher and faster frequencies (more cycles per second) produce higher sounds than lower and slower frequencies.

Wavelength pertains to the length of a single cycle of a frequency. The actual length of the wave is equal to the speed of sound divided by the number of cycles per second (or the wave frequency). So a single cycle of a 20 Hz sound is 17.2 meters long! The length of the pipes for an organ, the size of a brass instrument, the placement of holes or keys on a woodwind instrument, and the length of strings on a violin, cello, guitar, or piano all pertain to their ability to generate particular sounds at particular frequencies. Longer pipes play lower notes. Shorter strings create higher notes. The physical mechanism that generates sound is directly related to the physical characteristics of that sound wave.

Sound waves are capable of realigning molecules in a reflection of the properties of different frequencies. In addition, the inherent physical properties of musical sound reveal a relationship between a specific note and other notes. For instance, a string and pipe resonate with multiple tones at the same time. These overtones are related proportionally to the original frequency in a ratio of 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, . . . For example, a note we identify as “C” also sympathetically creates frequencies twice, thrice, four times, etc. of the original frequency. These other notes (the octave, fifth, third, etc.) form the basis of where we derived our notes and scales, music theory, and the concept of harmony.

WHAT IS THE FULLNESS OF HARMONY?

I believe that the idea of Harmony is greatly misunderstood because we limit our conscious use of that term to music. We talk about melody and harmony as parts of a musical composition. This is a correct application of the term “Harmony”—because music illustrates the principles of harmony in concrete and tangible ways.

We can talk about the rules of harmony for six-

teenth-century counterpoint or the chorale settings of the eighteenth century. We can trace the development of harmony and its use. We can discuss the palpable ways in which music moves us and has various uses.

We can even talk about how political action, theological positions, and architectural experimentation influenced the history and development of harmony. In that case, we get closer to the idea of Harmony in the quadrivium sense—not because of the music discussed, but because of the bringing together of the seemingly disparate topics of government, church, building design, singing, and liturgy.

The Greek word harmonia means “to fit together.” It means to bring concord from discord. Harmonia is an expression of the biblical idea of peace, or shalom Peace is not just the absence of conflict, but rather it is the rightness of things, or the way things were meant to be. It’s a more complete and more holistic concept of fullness and flourishing. Think more along the lines of the garden of Eden, in which the image bearers of God lived together naked and unashamed, in concord with the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea. They had a job that would bring joy and extend the boundaries of the garden into the land of Eden and then to the ends of the earth. But most importantly, they enjoyed interaction with the Creator in the breeze of the day. Harmony with nature, harmony with one another, harmony with God. Peace on all levels in the very best manifestation of how God created things to be. This then is the context in which sin marred, spoiled, disrupted, and shattered the peace.

So not only does Harmony fit things together, but it also presupposes that there is an order and that it is knowable. As we look for harmony and seek to create it, the reality is that that requires us to know what order should look like.

Too often have we been told to seek moderation

or balance as a means to obtain order, but true harmony is to hold things in tension. G.K. Chesterton gets at this idea in Orthodoxy when he writes, “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious . . . It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink. It hates that combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers. It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty gray.”1 One need only to think about the attributes of God. God is both the apex of justice and the epitome of grace. If we seek to balance these two attributes, we diminish both and therefore diminish who God is in his nature and character. The fact is that he is wholly just and wholly merciful, and those two need to be held in harmony with one another without alteration. This is the tension of harmony.

Sound is produced in tension: whether a taut, stretched string, struck surfaces, or the disruption of air in pipes. Our role in the restoration of harmony is to resolve discord, whether that is in our souls, in our relationships or communities, or in the cosmic sense. “Discord” literally means disagreement, to be at variance, or dissension, but most significantly through disproportion. Sin introduces a different song that seeks dissonance even as St. Paul repeatedly reminds us to live in harmony with one another.

For these reasons, the purpose of music and the power of music have a significance and weight of glory well beyond our preferences or desires.

THE PURPOSE AND POWER OF MUSIC

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. —Romans 1:20

1. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Company, 1909).

Music brings order and rest because it can cause our hearts to resonate with the fullness of peace as it realigns the discord of our hearts and minds and spirit.

Medieval music theorists considered the telos of music in terms of its role as harmony, order, shalom, and rest. In its creation and composition, music reflects the divine created order. In its practice and by its pouring forth sound, music sustains the cosmic order. Music imitates, replicates, and echoes cosmic shalom and upholds, supports, and maintains that order in return. The same holds true on the personal, or psychic, level. The role of a musician was one of being an artifex—skilled, artistic, expert, craftsman—in service to resolving discord and bringing rest; to bring music to places of discord and injustice, or, as Cassiodorus puts it, “Music indeed is the knowledge of apt modulation. If we live virtuously, we are constantly proved to be under its discipline, but when we commit injustice we are without music. The heavens and the earth, indeed all things in them which are directed by a higher power, share in the discipline of music, for Pythagoras attests that this universe was founded by and can be governed by music.”2

If God’s invisible attributes—his eternal power and divine nature—are inherent in the things that have been made, our understanding of the created order becomes a deeply theological pursuit. This constitutes a deeper reality than seeing a majestic mountain and saying God is majestic. Or witnessing the power of the waves of the sea or of a thunderstorm and saying that our God is powerful. The very fabric of the world, from quarks to quasars, is reflective of the divine nature of God: the order of the cosmos, the way the solar system is sustained by gravity, the variations of seasons and years, and the miraculous way that we perceive sound. The way that atoms combine, and cells multiply, and ecosystems form, and systems of the body work together are all matters of harmony. For J.S. Bach, that meant that music was a serious and significant pursuit. “Bach saw the very substance of music as constituting a religious reality, that the more perfectly the task of composition (and, indeed, performance) is realized, the more God is immanent in music.”3

Music brings order and rest because it can cause our hearts to resonate with the fullness of peace as it

realigns the discord of our hearts and minds and spirit. The psalmist says he seeks the Lord with his whole heart—not a divided heart. Music forms in us the rightly ordered loves that bring rest.

Yes, there are pleasing melodies and skillful players, beautiful compositions and lyrics that speak truth. But, in addition, the very form of sound—its physicality and power—brings harmony, brings divine order, speaks to us of the invisible attributes of God. In Matthew 11, Christ calls us to come to him because we labor and are heavy laden and he will give us rest. He also calls us to take on the ordering and constriction of his yoke that we might learn from him, for he is “gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” Music works as music because it conforms to order and thereby brings rest, resolution, harmony.

This is a much grander context and purpose for music than the simple pleasure of an earworm! Here perhaps we begin to see why ancient authors, church fathers, and medieval writers spoke directly about the power of music and its potential to be misused. Beginning with the quadrivium, we achieve a richer, more grounded, and objective perspective on music as a fundamental expression of the nature of God. Though our journey through the hamlet passed by some familiar edifices of music theory, history, and appreciation, our village has to be rooted in the parish church and the natural world. Only then can we approach the fullness of the Divine Order and the created cosmos as the fount, foundation, and function of music—to reveal God, reflect his creation, and bring us home.

Gregory Wilbur is chief Musician at Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Franklin, TN, as well as Dean and Senior Fellow of New College Franklin. He is the author of Glory and Honor: The Music and Artistic Legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach and has released two CDs of his compositions of congregational psalms, hymns and service music His wife, Sophia, homeschools their daughter, Eleanor, and they all enjoy reading, cooking, taking walks, and enjoying life in middle Tennessee. He was the 2022 recipient of the Russell Kirk Paideia Prize.

2. As quoted in Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe (New York: Grove Press, 1993).

3. John Butt, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Bach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

The first warning bells against overemphasizing STEM education sounded not in recent years, but over three centuries ago. In 1709, the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico lamented, “The greatest drawback of our educational methods is that we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences.”1 By neglecting subjects like ethics, philosophy, and rhetoric, “our young men . . . are unable to engage in the life of the community, to conduct themselves with sufficient wisdom and prudence; nor can they infuse into their speech a familiarity with human psychology or permeate their utterances with passion.” School had become an institution for training technicians, not cultivating human beings.

If this sounds like a familiar problem, it may be because it is so easy to misconstrue the purpose of schooling. What is education for? Preparing for a career? Socializing children? Developing critical thinking skills? Pursuing self-fulfillment? The list goes on, with each answer partly correct yet also deficient in itself.

1. From Giambattista Vico’s On the Study Methods of Our Time, translated by Elio Gianturco. For a good introduction to Vico, see the selections featured in The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being, edited by Richard M. Gamble.

To pursue this question in a more imaginative way, we could ask what fundamental problem a school exists to solve. If you go to a hospital because you have a broken arm, check into a hotel because you need a room for the night, and get a table at a restaurant because you’re hungry, then what need prompts you to send your child to school? What deficiency, dilemma, or difficulty exists within the child which must be addressed and resolved?

One of the best answers—and a favorite among classical Christian educators—was penned by John Milton. Pointing us back to the earliest chapters of the book of Genesis, he wrote in Of Education:

The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.

If Milton was right, then the purpose of education is synonymous with the purpose of life itself: sanctification. Education is a moral and spiritual task which, as an application of the gospel (but never its replacement), aligns itself with the ways that God is at work in the world to reverse the effects of the Fall by reconciling us to himself and making all things new. Like the men of Nehemiah’s day who, brick by brick, reconstructed the razed walls of Jerusalem, educators—from kindergarten teachers to graduate school professors—engage in the lofty project of repairing the ruins in which each of us is born.

What within Us Must Be Repaired?

To help us better understand the nature of our rebuilding project, Giambattista Vico—our eighteenth-century critic of STEM—can help guide the way. Vico served as professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples during a crucial period of European history. In an age enthralled by Cartesian science, secular Enlightenment thought, and the technological, institutional, and moral progress these two inno-

vations promised to deliver, Vico labored to rehabilitate a humanities-driven worldview that preserved the role of the imagination, the necessity of theological wisdom, and the liberal arts tradition that had shaped the best of Western thought for millennia.

Vico’s key works on education, On Humanistic Education and On the Study Methods of Our Time, were originally delivered as inaugural orations between 1699 and 1709. In his sixth oration, “On the Proper Order of Studies,” he, like Milton, takes us back to Genesis on a quest to understand the true aims of education.

Vico begins by considering human nature—what it is that makes us unique among all of God’s creatures. We have been endowed with three qualities which we alone share with our Creator: “mind, spirit, and capacity for language.” These qualities enable us to understand the world and how to live in it, allowing us to pursue fellowship with God and with each other. Tragically, they have become distorted by the effects of sin, so “man is thoroughly corrupted, first by the inadequacy of language, then by a mind cluttered with opinions, and finally a spirit polluted by vice.”1

Language, mind, and spirit: their corruption and need for restoration form Vico’s paradigm for education. But first, he must more fully examine the effects of the Fall.

Corruption of Language

God created us with the gift of language so we could understand and relate to each other. The fragmentation of languages, a consequence of our sin at Babel, hindered this ability. Even within our own native languages, communicating is not easy. Born to imitate the glory of a God who spoke the world into existence, our capacity for language seems perpetually stunted by ineffective development:

Since man’s language in almost all situations is inadequate, it does not come to the aid of the mind and even fails it when the mind seeks its help in expressing itself. Because speech is awkward and uncultivated, it corrupts the meaning

1. From “On the Proper Order of Studies” in Vico’s On Humanistic Education: Six Inaugural Orations, 1699–1707, translated by Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee. The quotes that follow also come from this oration.

of the mind with words that are without merit. With words that are obscure, it betrays it, or with words that are ambiguous what we say is misunderstood or stumbles over itself by the very words which are spoken.

Our struggle to communicate effectively is, therefore, the first problem that education must address. The remedy is to teach students to read and write well, to translate foreign languages, and to speak clearly, articulately, and graciously. An education which seeks to restore our God-given potential will equip us anew in the skillful use of language.

Corruption of the Mind

Divided and confused from our inability to communicate, our situation is made even worse by disagreement, misinformation, and fallacious thinking:

To these deficiencies of language are added those of the mind. Dullness constantly grips the mind. False images of things toy with it and very often deceive it. Rash judgments cause the mind to form hasty conclusions. Faulty reasoning lays hold of it, and finally this confusion of things baffles and bewilders it.

Since the serpent deceived Eve, erroneous ideas have filled us with false perceptions of the world. Not understanding what the world is really like, we struggle to live in it with wisdom; not being able to agree with each other about what is true or false, we fight over mere opinions. A second problem education must address, therefore, is our lack of knowledge. An effective education will help us to overcome our ignorance by training us to observe and understand the world rightly, teaching us to value the pursuit of truth and to follow wherever it may lead.

Corruption of the Soul

The Fall’s most destructive effect is, of course, on our souls. In some cases our interpersonal and social conflicts stem from misunderstanding or honest disagreement; in many others, the corruption in our own hearts is to blame:

How much more grave are the shortcomings of the soul which are churned up by every storm and flux of the passions more turbulent than those of the straits! Thus it burns with desire and trembles in fear! It becomes dissipated in pleasures and is given to weakness in pain! It desires all things but never finds delight in any choice! . . . It is constantly unhappy with itself, always running away from itself and yet seeking itself! Moreover, self-love, as its own tormentor, makes use of these wicked plagues and tortures.

The soul cannot be saved through education. That is a task for the gospel. But education can become an extension of Christian discipleship, aiming to renew not only the mind and tongue but also the heart. This moral dimension of education is the one most frequently neglected—yet if we are attentive to the story in Genesis, we will realize that it may be the most vital.

Education’s Right Aims

Only when we have properly diagnosed how nature has been corrupted can we understand the needed remedy:

The punishments for corrupted human nature [are] the inadequacy of language, the opinions of the mind, and the passions of the soul. Therefore, the remedies are eloquence, knowledge, and virtue. These three are like the three points around which all the orb of the arts and sciences encircles. All wisdom is contained in these three most excellent things—to know with certainty, to act rightly, and to speak with dignity. Such a man as that would never be ashamed of his errors, never repentant for having acted viciously, never regretful of having spoken without propriety and decorum.

Eloquence, knowledge, and virtue: these must be the aims of education because they are the remedies we need most. We need schools that instruct us in eloquence, giving us the ability to read, listen, and speak rightly; that equip and motivate us toward the

pursuit of truth; and that train us to know, desire, and do good. Though education cannot save us, it can certainly sanctify us through the restoration of our God-given human nature. Of all the possible goals of education, what could be more important?

The Distractions of Our Own Day (and Vico’s)

Vico’s paradigm of education exposes the shortcomings of schooling that excessively prioritizes the wrong subjects. In Vico’s day, the scientific revolution had shifted the curriculum toward the sciences and away from the humanities. Valuable as the study of science may be—and Vico had no intention of denigrating it, recognizing it as a valuable component of human knowledge—when cut off from eloquence and virtue, it could not fully address our predicament as human beings. Education with an excessive focus on science supposes that our problem as human beings is a lack of technology. And while technology may further our ability to subdue the earth, it fails to address the weaknesses of the human heart.

Another mistake is to exalt eloquence apart from knowledge and virtue. It would be better to receive no education at all than to spend years in school only to become an excellent sophist. True eloquence, according to Vico, is essentially “wisdom, ornately and copiously delivered in words appropriate to the common opinion of mankind.”2 His emphasis on virtue echoes Quintilian, whose true orator was “a good man speaking well.” A teacher who trains students in the skillful use of language cannot neglect what words will be used for.

In short, we can imagine Vico’s vision of education as a three-legged stool, with the three supports of eloquence, knowledge, and virtue bearing up the wisdom that enables individuals and societies to flourish. Remove one, and the others will not stand for long.

A Lofty Aim

As a high school teacher, I love to read Vico with my students and ask them to consider each of their classes through the lens of his trifold paradigm. Which studies cultivate eloquence by improving their ability to communicate? Which fill them with knowledge and

2. On the Study Methods of Our Time.

equip them with skills to attain even more? Which encourage them in virtue?

We place their classes—history, rhetoric, pre-calculus, Spanish, and others—in a Venn diagram of three circles, considering the ways that many classes cultivate more than one, or even all three aims. My students are surprised by the overlap. I challenge them to ask whether every one of their classes, rightly taught, might land in the center. A good literature class, for instance, can help students to grow in their reading, writing, and conversation skills, impart knowledge about the lives and historical contexts of authors, and stir students to personally grapple with the moral choices made by a novel’s characters.

Other classes likewise have the potential to train students in much more than students first assume. If the circle of virtue includes intellectual virtues like carefulness, patience, and humility, then every class is a vital training ground for the soul. As Simone Weil observed in “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” to cultivate the discipline of attentiveness is to prepare students for the spiritual practices of prayer and meditation.

Ultimately, to educate for eloquence, knowledge, and virtue—“to repair the ruins of our first parents,” in Milton’s phrase—is to pursue an education in the imitation of Christ. The God who spoke the cosmos into existence, who comes to us as the Word incarnate, is a God who has instilled within us the ability to think and to commune with each other and with him through the gift of language. The God who compels us to seek the truth wishes for us to know him as the Truth, transforming us by the renewing of our minds so we might truly know him, ourselves, and the world he made. And the God who teaches us to live virtuously, who not only loves but also is Love itself, calls us to know him and to imitate him, restoring to us the sanctity that was lost in Eden long ago.

To this end the imago Dei points us, and our schools deserve an aim no less lofty.

Patrick Halbrook is a humanities teacher at Cary Christian School. He lives near Raleigh, NC with his wife and four children.

POETRY BY SETH FORWOOD

Seth Forwood is a husband, a father of five, and a LCSW/LAC who has worked alongside those experiencing homelessness and addiction in Northern Colorado for seventeen years. In 2013 he lost a poetry contest at his local library to a teenager.

VIGILANTS

We told the boys the dog was dying and they broke from their bedroom to stand above the juststilled body in warm twilight, better having seen him. Death’s rictus they deem a resurrected smile. At first light they sought for the box that held him to sit and fix his cold fur their other hands clutching graham crackers.

Asa holds one stalk of grain and swings it in the small grave, batting at the bright green bulbous flies at the dog’s anus and the dog’s eyes.

Their bent heads ringed in sweat and heat and sun, faces dripping shadows, pouring their song through the grass, teeming like flames.

CRICKET

Without our bellowed lungs, rudder tongue or mind cathedraled in doctrines, you defeat our deacon-brittle, sickle-like limbs ticking absencepiercing distraction throughout the wellbreathed sermon. Windless, your voice brushes us dark in gooseflesh, conscious now of worry’s worming, no escaping, nothing to decline this creak’s unminding. So, harvest this comfort, cricket, sharpen our attention, we feel well how you fit under the alter, at the foot of the cross, stalking the exit.

HEALING THE SCHOOL BY MAKING IT WHOLE

In 2012, British author and speaker Sir Ken Robinson delivered a speech at the Richmond Forum on revolutionizing education in America. After hearing his presentation, a student in the audience asked him a question along these lines: “Do you think it wise for us to integrate our studies across the disciplines?” Sir Robinson responded that the world is already integrated—it is we who have disintegrated it.

I love the way he turned common thinking about education on its head with such a comment. The world with all of its fascinating variety, from bubbles (why are they always spherical?) to elephants, is already an integrated whole.

In our mad drive to break things down and apart, we have lost sight of the wholeness of things. “Analysis” (from the Greek analuein, “to loosen, dissolve”)

By Dr. Christopher Perrin

is the word we use for breaking things down into their constituent parts. Analysis is good—we do need to study the various parts of an engine, a molecule, or the human body. But a study of the parts alone is never sufficient without remembering that the parts, well, are part of something. A piston ring is interesting; a metal block that contains a string of countless explosions (the internal combustion engine) is astonishing.

The world used to be called a cosmos—one great, big, beautiful ornament, or an arranged harmony. It was often compared to an organism—something living, something vital. The cosmos was an enchanted whole, existing for a purpose, and containing various integrated elements, all moving toward ends according to their essence and design. Put another way, everything that existed had a cause: a cause for

its form and a cause for its purpose or end. Nothing was a mere, brute fact; all things were coordinated and “going somewhere.”

We have sanitized the living cosmos, even sterilized it. And it seems the most we can do with a purposeless world is to cut it up into pieces for careful examination. This began to happen in earnest during the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Studying the material of things (and, for many, becoming convinced there was nothing beyond the material), we sought to put nature on the rack, as Francis Bacon said, and extract her secrets.

Let me give credit: We did learn a thing or two, for the deep study of material reality does indeed merit analytical study and rewards it. With the telescope and microscope, we saw things we had never seen before. We were astonished to discover so many more parts to our world that our unaided human eyes could never see. And the great scientists (Kepler, Galileo, Bohr, etc.) expected that these new parts were in fact ordered, that they had purposes and ends, even if kept secret for centuries. Most of these seminal scientists assumed an invisible order behind the material order they observed—they studied matter deeply without becoming materialists.

So I do not reject the deep study of material reality; I only reject the premise that material reality is a dead reality. I do not reject examining the various parts of any whole, but analysis need not become an autopsy. The world derives its life from its divine origin; once that is rejected, analysis will become a lopsided “parsing” of the world with no vivifying unity. With no unity in the cosmos, we will have no unity in education—no more genuine universities, where the many verses are folded into one (the Latin ūnus, “one,” and versus, “turned toward, facing”). Instead, we get fragmented departments and various subjects.

Our common current vocabulary does signal our breakup. Our world is fragmented, and therefore so are our schools, studies, and terms. As a fragmented school is not unified, it is therefore weak, therefore fragile. In Latin, frangere means “to break,” frāgmentum means “something broken,” and fragilis means “brittle, fragile, fleeting.” The Latin reminds us of the intimate connection between breaking up and breaking down.

Our word “college”—from cum (“with”) and ligare (“to bind”)—used to signal a “collection” of scholars who were “bound together” to read, study, converse, and teach a common curriculum; now it does not. We are left with traditional educational words (university, college, liberal arts, grammar, logic, rhetoric) that have become squishy and vague, connoting something revered and from a cloudy past we have only recently forgotten. Contemporary colleges, working out the latest expression of our reigning American ideas of materialistic relativism, pragmatism, skepticism, and pluralism, are split and fragmented, likely beyond the possibility of unification. Departments and majors have multiplied, fields of studies have proliferated, and one can get a graduate degree in “areas of study” that even twenty years ago would have been considered bizarre and beyond serious academic inquiry.

When there is no unity, there is also no criteria for what is “academic” or “nonacademic,” for what is excellent or lacking excellence. Without unity, the implications for learning follow logical lines: Why should Shakespeare be considered greater writing than The Vampire Diaries? Why shouldn’t we study “Tree Climbing,” “Getting Dressed in the Morning,” “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame,” or “How to Watch Television”? Colleges can and do offer such courses now, and usually without any sense of irony.

Here is the rub: American high schools have been designed to prepare students for what our colleges and universities have become. The trends on our college campuses become the curricula of our high schools. Classical schools want to return to the studies of a common canon of the Great Ideas and the books that contain them; modern high schools want to (and need to) make students ready for modern colleges without a canon.

Classical schools are working hard to remember what we have forgotten (and to remember that we have forgotten), and have been trying to do so for about thirty years now. It turns out that remembering is hard. It turns out that what was forgotten over two or three generations is not recovered in a single decade. We have been doing good work recovering the classical trivium (first) and then the classical quadrivium (second), while slowly learning to integrate learning and study across the curriculum and

cultivate a vibrant culture (third). The work has begun and is well underway. We have not yet, however, come to terms with the way that time and space are ordered in our schools.

Our schools are generally drab, pedestrian, and pragmatic in design. That is to say, they look and function like virtually any other modern school. This is not surprising, nor is it really a criticism. We have been formed in these kinds of schools, and our blindness is only healed gradually. Now, however, there are many who are seeing our school buildings and schedules for what they really are: modern and progressive. (Aside: What should a school look like? Visit a monastery or any college at Oxford. Build a school around a garden.)

The ordering of time and space matters, and it matters deeply. We are embodied creatures and our five senses are very good qualities indeed. I will leave behind concerns about our school space and architecture (though these are related dynamically to our use of time and space) to focus on the fragmentation of time. We might say that our buildings are “cut up” in ugly ways; so is time. We cut up time into seven or eight fifty-minute periods with a brief twenty-minute lunch period crammed in the middle. Most classical schools follow this pattern as an inherited educational norm (like the way we grade). Most classical schools are just beginning to question the practice.

Thus, we are left with “periods” and “sections.” Even these words connote the science of dividing, rather than unifying or harmonizing. Secāre in Latin means “to cut,” and we indeed cut our way through education. Our word “period” suggests a small unit of time after which we definitely will have to stop. In our class sections and periods, we know that we take a small cut at something and then stop in short order—often just when things were warming up. Our learning is periodic. We constantly start and stop, we cut learning short, we sell learning short. It is no surprise that many American students are inclined to cut classes or cut school altogether. They want to do what we do to them. We cut school; they cut school.

There is an irony here because classical schools know that learning should be integrated, and seek to integrate subjects and to integrate faith and learning. You might remember that a whole number in math is called an integer. Both “integer” and “integrity” come from the same Latin root word, integer, literally meaning “untouched” and thus something that is unimpaired, undivided, or whole. Learning should be holistic, for if Ken Robinson is right, the world lies before us already integrated.

But even to call our courses of study “subjects” can be problematic. The word “subject” has a legitimate use as a generic word for any directed matter or study. It is similar to words like “theme” (a general

American high schools have been designed to prepare students for what our colleges and universities have become. The trends on our college campuses become the curricula of our high schools.

conception running through a composition of some kind) and “topic” (often meaning a more specific idea treated in a section of a composition or speech). The reason we have grown comfortable with the word “subject” to refer to courses of study is that we have so widened our “curriculum” that it can include just about anything. Thus, we need to use adjectives to further modify “subjects.” We have traditional subjects, literary subjects, mathematical subjects, vocational subjects, technological subjects, classical subjects, linguistic subjects, and so on. We used to study the liberal arts and the four traditional sciences (natural science, moral or human science, philosophical science, and theological science). There was a time when virtually all that we studied was either an art or a science, and with a clear idea of the difference between the two.

The word “subject” originally meant something “thrown beneath,” as something thrown before you for your examination and consideration. Now virtually anything can be thrown at our feet, and virtually anything is in our modern schools and colleges. Virtually anything one encounters can be a subject, possibly even configured into a four-year degree. While we cut up the curriculum, we find that the curriculum has become a pie as big as the moon—so we must press on with our cutting, as there is so very much to divide.

I know the words “section,” “period,” and “subject” are here to stay and can be used without causing cancer. Still, what if we used some older words instead? We would do well to recover the following traditional academic words: art (skill, craft, craftsmanship); science (a collected body of knowledge organized by governing principles); discipline (training, habits, disciplined learning); form (model, pattern, shape); course (as passage or journey to an appointed end); session (a sitting down together at table); seminar (a gathering which is planting of seeds, an academic nursery); symposium (coming together with drinks for discussion); colloquium (a gathering to talk and discuss); tutorial (a small conference with teacher and one or two students); forum (a “marketplace” gathering for a larger exchange of ideas); disputation (a gathering to contrast opposing ideas); declamation (a gathering to hear planned speech that addresses a dilemma); oration (a speech on any topic).

These words have a rich history and have served us well for centuries. They are part of a tradition that has integrity and the potential to heal. Integrare: to make whole, renew, repair; to refresh, reinvigorate.

Dr. Christopher Perrin is an author, consultant, and speaker who specializes in classical education. He is committed to the renewal of the liberal arts tradition and co-founded and serves full-time as the CEO/publisher at Classical Academic Press. He has published numerous articles and lectures that are widely used throughout the United States and the English-speaking world.