Engage Your World

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IN, WITH, AND FOR THE CHURCH KNOXSEMINARY.EDU 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

3. Lewis, Discarded Image, 96.

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, 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.

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

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

6. Munteanu, “Cosmic Liturgy,” 335.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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

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

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

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

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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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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

2. On the Study Methods of Our Time.

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.

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.