Saving Western civilization one student at a time.
Late Summer 2022
The Vision of the Soul The Six Central Insights of the Western Tradition by James
Matthew Wilson
Befriending Books by Leta Sundet Science and Imagination by Dr. Jay Wile The Three Cultures by Martin Cothran
One True Sentence by Martin Cothran
In
“You would think it would be easy to write true sentences about education. But, in fact, it sometimes seems that true sentences about education are very hard to come by.”
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Letter from the Editor
Ernest Hemingway's book A Moveable Feast, he gives the best advice I have ever read on dealing with writer's block. He tells you to sit down, take up a pen, and write one true sentence. That's it. Just one true sentence. For example, I had writer's block as I sat down to write this article. I have written probably hundreds of articles like this one, articles taking one truth about classical education and expounding on it for about seven hundred words, but I couldn't think of anything to write about now. So I wrote a sentence that was true, and I was off to the races. You would think it would be easy to write true sentences about education. But, in fact, it sometimes seems that true sentences about education are very hard to come by. Much of what is written about education could accurately be called "cant"—not the contraction of "can" and "not," but "disingenuous speech," the repetition of trite opinions or sentiments, the insincere use of pious words. The rhetoric on education is filled with it. Take graduation speeches, for example. I have attended quite a number of graduation addresses and I have a hard time remembering any that really said much worth saying about the education the student listeners presumably received. It is in these speeches and in other chatter from the educational establishment that we hear a blizzard of slogans and catchphrases that betray a lot of enthusiasm but very little substance. We hear talk about "child-centered learning," but education is not the development of a child. Rather, it is the formation of an adult. Before 2000 rolled around we heard talk about "building a bridge to the twenty-first century," when, as it pertains to education, we would have gotten better results building a bridge to the nineteenth. And "no child left behind"? Do we really believe any program or practice will do that? Likewise, all the education prattle about "research." Research in general—even in the hard sciences—can be unreliable and misleading, as Richard Harris points out in his book Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions. But in education the research is especially terrible. In a meta-study done by two researchers from Duke University and the University of Connecticut, they found that only 0.13 percent of education research has been replicated (a basic measurement of competent research). What if we abandoned the cant and the bad research about education? What if we just wrote one true sentence about education? What would it be? What if we said: Education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue through the study of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, in order to develop fully formed human beings. Hemingway doesn't tell us to end with one true sentence. But there it is.
Late Summer 2022
FEATURED ARTICLES
Letter from the Editor by Martin Cothran...................................................... 2 Top 10 Reasons for Studying Latin by Cheryl Lowe..................................... 4 The Mind of a Gentleman by Dr, D. T. Sheffler............................................... 6 The Three Cultures by Martin Cothran........................................................... 8 The Vision of the Soul by James Matthew Wilson........................................... 11 Science and Imagination by Dr. Jay Wile.................................................... 14 Mapping the Imagination by Dr. Carol Reynolds........................................... 16 Give Them a Door by Cheryl Swope........................................................... 18 Befriending Books by Leta Sundet............................................................. 20 Sacrificial Friendship in Charlotte's Web by Leigh Lowe............................ 22
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LATIN
TOP 10 REASONS FOR STUDYING LATIN by Cheryl Lowe
1. Latin is the next step after phonics. We all understand the importance of phonics— the systematic study of the English letters and their sounds—but phonics only covers half of our language: the concrete words that students learn to speak and read first. English is a hybrid language, a marriage of concrete, Germanic-influenced English and Latin. Beginning in third grade students start to encounter the Latin half of English. Latin words are bigger and harder and have more syllables, more abstract meanings, and different pronunciation and spelling patterns. The only truly systematic and orderly way to continue the study of the English language after phonics is to teach Latin.
2. Half of our English vocabulary is made up of Latin words and roots. Here's the problem: Students have learned the English word "father," but as they progress through school they meet a whole new set of words: 3-5-syllable words like "paternalism," "expatriate," and "patronize" that are difficult and abstract and come from the Latin word for "father," pater, patris. How do we teach these Latin words masquerading as English? We should teach Latin.
3. Latin provides the root words for all of the modern sciences. We live in an age dominated by science, so parents often ask, "Why study something useless and impractical like Latin? What we need is more science and math education." We think science is important too—so important that we strongly recommend Latin to these folks. Biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, Cheryl Lowe was the founder of Memoria Press and the author of the Latin Forms Series, Classical Phonics, and many other books. She also founded Highlands Latin School in Louisville, Kentucky, where all Memoria Press materials are developed and tested. The full version of this article can be found at MemoriaPress.com.
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Top 10 Reasons for Studying Latin
sociology, economics—Latin provides most of the root words for the specialized vocabularies of the modern sciences. The first task in learning a new subject is to learn the vocabulary—that is half the battle.
4. Latin is the language of law, government, logic, and theology. The Romans excelled in the practical arts of law and government, and it is from them that we derive our legal and political language. All legal terms are Latin. And although logic was first explained by Aristotle in Greek, it was really developed and systematized by the schoolmen in the Middle Ages—in Latin, of course. In the West even Christian theology was worked out in Latin. Many of the original words were Greek, but they were all filtered through Latin. Many well known theological concepts are in Latin: We are created Imago Dei, in the "image of God," and ex nihilo, "from nothing."
5. Latin is the most efficient way to learn English grammar. The first reason for this is that it is difficult for students to analyze their native language, something they use instinctively and have learned by imitation. But a foreign language is foreign; the student has to break it down to learn the grammar. And for this purpose there is no grammar like the Latin grammar. Latin is the most orderly, logical, disciplined, structured, systematic, consistent grammar in existence. Every lesson in Latin is a lesson in logic. Latin is a grammar system that is unparalleled among all the languages. It has no equal. The second reason is that English grammar is unsystematic, unstructured, unreliable, and inconsistent. It is abstract and invisible because of its lack of structure and inflection. Inflected languages like Latin have noun endings that tell you what the noun is doing in the sentence and verb endings that tell MemoriaPress.com
you who is doing the action of the verb and when. It is visible and concrete. Latin grammar teaches English better than English grammar teaches English.
6. Latin is the best preparation for learning any language. Latin is the best preparation for learning a Romance language—or any language. Once you really understand how language works, the task of learning a new language will be more than cut in half. Why settle for just one language? Learn a dozen—but learn Latin first.
7. Latin effectively develops and trains the mind. I consider this to be the most important reason of all: mental training. Latin is the most effective tool we have to develop and train the minds of the young. Not only does it cut in half the task of learning another language, it makes learning any subject easier. The student who has learned how to learn with Latin will be a better student at all of his other subjects. Latin teaches students how to think systematically and approach any new subject with greatly enhanced learning skills. You see, subjects are formative. Literature teaches insight, perception, and compassion for the human condition. History develops judgment, discernment, acumen, and wisdom. Latin requires and teaches attention to detail, accuracy, patience, discipline, precision, and thorough, honest work. Latin will form the minds of your students.
8. Latin connects every subject. Latin is a unit study where the work is done for you, where everything integrates naturally and the connections are there for you to discover. There is no subject you can study that connects with every other subject more than Latin. Science, math, logic, theology, 1-502-966-9115
law, literature, history—for a thousand years Latin was the language of Western civilization, and everything from the ancient world has come down to us filtered through it. When you learn Latin you are learning the history of just about everything. Learning is making connections. The more you know, the easier it is to acquire new knowledge because it will stick to something you already know. Latin gives you more stickies than any other subject. It is like academic velcro. It connects with everything.
9. Latin is transformative. Latin will change your curriculum and homeschool from good to great. Latin provides the missing element in modern education—the glue, the integrating factor. Latin does for the language side of the curriculum what math does for science. It provides the mental discipline and structure that the humanities side of the curriculum desperately needs. We talk a lot about higher order thinking, but there is only one way to reach a high order of thinking, and that is to dive deep into one subject. We need that kind of experience on the language side of the curriculum. Latin is the answer.
10. Latin is the language of Western civilization. If we plan to save Western civilization, we must study it. Latin is the mother tongue of Western civilization. The original thinkers in the ancient world were the Greeks and the Hebrews, but the Romans summarized, synthesized, codified, and handed Western civilization down to us—in Latin. Latin is the most influential language in human history. Learn Latin! You will be doing your part to save Western civilization and transform your education from good to great. As G. K. Chesterton said, Latin is not dead; it's immortal. Top 10 Reasons for Studying Latin
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The Mind of a by Dr. D. T. Sheffler
Gentleman
In
his book The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman argues that the goal of education in a university should be the cultivation of a "liberal" type of mind. In Latin, liber means a "free man" as opposed to a slave, and the education appropriate for such a man is an education in the "liberal arts." In this way, students might be lured away from the servile and toward the gentlemanly. Newman uses the term "gentleman" in the way it was commonly used in his time: to refer to the free man who uses his freedom wisely by becoming a man of broad culture, taste, and learning. An educated gentleman should live with a confident bearing toward the world. He should be able to look upon the variety of human life and the vastness of the cosmos with an eye that takes it all in. He may not be an expert, but he knows how to think about any of the things he sees, and more importantly, he knows how to think about them all together as a unified whole. The servile man, by contrast, sits with hunched shoulders and head down, toiling at his one assigned task. Being a slave to a particular kind of work, he Dr. D. T. Sheffler is a professor of philosophy with Memoria College and has taught philosophy, logic, Latin, and history at the University of Kentucky, Georgetown College, and Asbury College.
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The Mind of a Gentleman
will naturally become knowledgeable about one very specific subject. He knows exactly how to stack Widget A on top of Widget B, and he can tell you anything you want to know about these two specific widgets—but no more. He does not share the gentleman's flexibility and liberality of mind, capable of approaching the whole of life with intelligence and dignity. Newman specifies the ultimate aim of such cultivation thus: Our desideratum [desired thing] is, not the manners and habits of gentlemen … but the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us, which sometimes indeed is a natural gift, but commonly is not gained without much effort and the exercise of years.
Newman does not conceive of this as a simple ability exercised in discrete mental acts but rather as a broad "habit of mind," an attitude toward reality that colors all one's thoughts, words, and actions: "A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom …." If only we could reliably expect such a habit of mind to come out of our universities today. The distinction between the gentleman and the servile man is not at all a class distinction. MemoriaPress.com
There are many who go to work in suit and tie who think in exactly the cramped mode that Newman describes. The kind of person who only ever evaluates knowledge in terms of its use to his specific widgets— whether they be paper or spreadsheets, and whether the widget factory be a tiny cubicle or a corner office. Conversely, there are blue-collar workers who have cultivated their whole soul beyond their work through wide reading and deep reflection. How then do we cultivate this kind of soul in our students? The goal of the ideal university graduate may seem rather daunting and remote to the homeschooling parent preparing to teach geography to an eight-year-old, but rest assured that teaching geography is exactly what we should be doing. Newman argues that the gentleman's habit of mind develops over long study in all those disciplines that teach a knowledge of the world. That eight-yearold may not go on to be an airline pilot, but when someone mentions the Danube, he will have a picture in his mind of a more-or-less definite line on a map. Possessing this general picture of maps and places, he will enjoy a certain confidence as he moves through life: the confidence of the man who knows where he is. As this student continues to learn not just geography but math, science, history, and literature, his mental map will hold not just cities and rivers but trees and 1-502-966-9115
weather systems, peoples and poems, fictional heroes and historical scoundrels. Educated in the classical manner, he will be able to situate all these little pieces into the whole of his learning, locating them somewhere on the map and locating himself in their midst. He will have a comfortable familiarity with them and an ease in handling new pieces that are similar to the ones he already knows. He will not panic when he cannot place them immediately because long experience has taught him that all the truths that are really true will ultimately fit together into a single map. By contrast, many contemporary experts would have our student educated with a view toward efficiently learning the narrow skills that he will "actually use someday." A man educated like this would know how to use the more recondite features of Excel, but he probably would not know what "recondite" means, and he certainly would not know where he is in the world. Newman calls the integrated vision of reality a "philosophical habit of mind," which is a little different than what you would get by reading Sartre in a college philosophy class. What Newman means by philosophy is a science that is distinct from all the other specific sciences and is "in some sense a science of sciences," that is, a discipline of mind that stands back from the details and reflects upon their meaning as they relate to one another and to the totality of reality. Philosophy is the science that pulls all the local maps together and draws up a single—hopefully coherent and accurate—map of the whole. Naturally, this map of the whole will not be finished all at once by the eight-year-old; he will draw it bit by bit throughout the entirety of his life. He will make adjustments as he goes, and at crises or conversion moments of his life he may need to erase and redraw whole continents. But he will not have anything to put on the map if he does not begin by learning that the sources of the Rhine and the Danube are quite close to each other, that King David lived long before the Peloponnesian War, and that moths are different from butterflies. As he deepens and matures, familiarity with the process of drawing and redrawing details on his map will inculcate in our student the desired disposition of mind. He will sit at a dinner party and know how to say something intelligent about subjects other than himself. He will read an article and know how to have opinions other than those handed to him. He will take his family to an art museum and know how to interact with the art through means other than his phone. He will face a difficult moral decision and know how to think in terms other than those of his passions. In short, he will have the mind of a gentleman. The Mind of a Gentleman
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G R E E K S
THE THREE
O
ne way to think about Western civilization is to think of it as consisting of three cultures: those of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. It is, in fact, these three cultures, historically tied together and intimately linked, that we refer to when we use the expression "Western civilization." It is this civilization we purport to be passing on in classical Christian education. These three cultures became so integrated over the course of the last two millennia that they have become hard to distinguish from one another. These three harmonic cultural voices speak to us out of the past and are sometimes hard to disentangle. But we can draw some basic distinctions. Greek culture was artistic, literary, and philosophical. The Greeks invented representative art, drama, and philosophy as we know it today. The Romans, being less theoretical and more practical, were noted more for their contributions to ordered government, roads, and architecture. The culture of the Hebrews was noted for its posture toward a personal, transcendent God. It was to the Hebrews that God directly revealed Himself, and it was the Hebrews, His own people, with whom He dealt—individually and as a nation. It was these three cultures which, in the first five centuries after Christ, were taken by the Church Fathers and transformed into a greater thing than the combined parts: Western civilization, which was handed down over the last two thousand years by what we know today as classical Christian education.
THE GREEKS
The two great values of the Greeks were strength and intelligence, as articulated in their literary tradition. The value of strength is illustrated in the first of Homer's great works, the Iliad. It is the story of a warrior, Achilles, who values martial strength and personal honor (which is the individual reputation of strength) over all else. It is about his ability to defeat the Trojans in battle, his angry retirement from the conflict when his honor has been challenged, and his return to the battle where, as we know from other accounts, he is killed because of his one weakness. The value of intelligence is personified in the protagonist of Homer's other great work, the Odyssey. Unlike Achilles, who succeeds due to his physical strength and the strength of his character, Odysseus succeeds through his intelligence. He is "Odysseus of many wiles." He does not rely on physical strength to defeat his enemies, but rather relies on his intelligence. He outsmarts his foes. As time went on, the earlier martial culture of the Greeks gave way to the great intellectual culture that grew out of Athens. This transformation is illustrated in Sophocles' play Ajax, when a meeting of the generals is held after the death of Achilles: They must decide who will receive the armor of their now dead champion. The two nominees are Ajax, the next strongest warrior after Achilles, and Odysseus, known for his subtlety and quickness of mind. The scene represents a symbolic decision point for the Greeks. Will they remain primarily a martial culture, or become known instead for their intellects? The award is given to Odysseus. And, though the Greeks retained their reputation as great warriors, they did so in large part on account of the strategic and tactical abilities of their great generals—Leonidas, Themistocles, Pyrrhus, Lysander, and, of course, Alexander the Great. They also conquered Martin Cothran is the editor of The Classical Teacher and author of Traditional Logic Books I & II, Material Logic, and Classical Rhetoric.
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Heading Goes Here
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CULTURES
by Martin Cothran
their foes through military innovations that gave them an advantage over their enemies, such as the phalanx, in which hoplite soldiers stood with their shields locked together and their spears projecting outward toward the onrushing enemy, and the trireme, a ship that gave them greater mobility against their naval enemies. Alexander embodied in many ways the aspirations of the Greeks. He was a military mastermind who repeatedly crushed armies much larger than his own, he eventually conquered most of the known world, and, although not properly a Greek (he was Macedonian), he was deeply learned in Greek education, having as his tutor none other than Aristotle himself. According to legend, Alexander brought along on his campaigns his copy of Homer, out of which he had memorized long passages, and which he is said to have kept under his pillow while he slept. His campaigns were not just military, but cultural. He brought Greek culture with him like a missionary, and, in the end, it was not the Greek military that conquered the world, but the Greek culture itself, which remained long after he left. And what is this culture? It is the culture of intellectual curiosity. "Up and down the coast of Asia Minor," said Edith Hamilton, "St. Paul was mobbed and imprisoned and beaten." But only in Athens, she points out, did they listen: "They brought him unto the Areopagus, saying, 'May we know what this new teaching is?'" There was great art and architecture before the Greeks, but they were the first to attempt to discover and portray the ideal of man. Their literature and their philosophy, however, seem to have come out of nowhere. "With them," said Hamilton, "something completely new came into the world." In a matter of two or three generations Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were writing tragic dramas—and Aristophanes his comedies—that remain unsurpassed even today. And then there was Socrates, who, unlike anyone before him, came asking questions about the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. He interrogated his friends on every issue imaginable—justice, truth, happiness, moral obligation, music, friendship—using his dialectical technique of discussion. His thoughts were written down by his student, Plato, and studied by Plato's student, Aristotle. And all of this was done through the use of Greek, a language of unique richness and subtlety, which made the articulation of these ideas understandable and compelling.
THE ROMANS The twin values of the Romans were order and piety. The Romans ruled the world for more than a thousand years—longer, if we count the eastern Roman Empire—because of their unsurpassed ability to order both their civilization and their selves (piety is the order of the soul). The savage Roman temperament, which can be seen in Romulus, their first king, is seen no more clearly than in their extravagant and bloodthirsty games and pageants. Such a violent and energetic race of people could not survive without some external means of control, some way to channel their enormous energy into productive purpose. And so they developed the extrinsic cultural means by which they should govern themselves. The Romans succeeded because they were more organized than the civilizations around them, and this organizational ability was nowhere more evident than in the device by which they organized themselves: "Rome's 1-502-966-9115
R O M A N S 9
monumental achievement," said Hamilton, "never effaced from the world, was law." Law, a thing we take for granted in our still vaguely Roman world, was made supreme, and was taken, as Alexander took Homer, to the rest of the world. "The little town on the seven hills conquered the other little towns around her," said Hamilton, "because her citizens could obey orders." Their ability to militarily conquer and then to maintain a huge empire for so long a time is a testament to their organizational abilities. Their thirst for order extended to everything around them. They built roads and aqueducts that are still being used today. To look upon the Colosseum is to behold the essence of Roman power and order in stone. This external order was reflected by the inner order of the soul. The Aeneid, the great work of Virgil (the Roman Homer) is the story of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who flees the burning city of Troy with his father on his back and his family in tow. He exemplifies the Roman virtue of piety (the order of the soul) through his devotion to family and practical, everyday ethics. The Roman language itself betrayed the Roman character. It was the language of order. R. W. Livingstone has said it better than anyone: The best revelation of the Greek genius is the Greek language, fine, subtle, analytic, capable of feeling and expressing the most delicate minutiae of thought, never hard, and yet not flabby, the most malleable of tongues and equally capable in the hands of a master like Plato, of wit, dialectic, pathos, satire, poetry or eloquence. And can we really understand the spirit of Rome without knowing the march of the Latin sentence, serried, steady, stately, massive, the heavy beat of its long syllables and predominant consonants reflecting the robust, determined, efficient temper of the nation, as different from Greek as a Roman road from a breaking wave.
THE HEBREWS There was Athens, Rome—and then there was Jerusalem. The Hebrews, too, could be said to have had two values: faith and obedience. Unique among the ancient tribes of the world, the Hebrews believed in one transcendent God, and their entire culture was centered on His worship. There was the one holy God, who had revealed Himself specially and specifically to the Hebrews, whom He called His people. The entire history of the Hebrews consisted of this one single, supreme, transcendent Deity and His dealings with individuals and with nations, especially the nation of Israel. While the Greeks had Achilles and Odysseus, and the Romans' Aeneas, the greatest of the Jewish heroes was Abraham, a hero not of warfare nor of the mind, but a hero of faith. By the time of Christ these three cultures had begun to converge. Alexander had conquered the known world and Rome had expanded it. In the centuries after the death of Christ, Church Fathers in the East and the West worked through the relationship between the direct revelation of God—the Old Testament Scriptures and Jesus' teachings—and the great truths of the natural order that were discovered by the Greeks and Romans through God's general revelation. They melded these together into what we now call Western civilization. All three of these civilizations saw their beliefs as universal, applying to all men everywhere, but by the fifth century in the West the Christian Roman Empire had become universal in fact. And so it remains, even in our modern world where, despite ever-present attempts to change them, all Western nations still share the central assumptions of the three cultures. It is only through the work of centuries of faithful educators that we today benefit from this great tradition. And it is only through our own ongoing commitment to continue this work that it will survive. 10
The Three Cultures
H E B R E W S
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11
If
we seek to conserve the Western tradition, then what are the principles that constitute it? There is a recognizable tradition of Western civilization in which we all participate, one governed by the concept of beauty. Let us consider six key insights about the nature of the cosmos and of the human person that constitute the genius of the West that we should all desire to share in, to conserve, and to cultivate. These insights are to be found already present in the culture of ancient Greece at the time of Socrates, and they are also to be found in the Judaic tradition prior to its contact with Hellenic culture. But they find fuller and more satisfactory articulation just before and during the first Christian centuries, as the thought of Athens and Jerusalem engage one another. Socrates himself can be understood as a representative figure within a synthetic but readily unified tradition that no less profoundly depends on Jewish and Christian thought. The first insight is that man is an intellectual animal. This is not strictly identical with claiming he is rational. First of all, "intellect," in the Christian-Platonist tradition, means the faculty of thought itself. Aristotle's understanding of God is of a thought that "thinks itself." Many centuries later, Thomas Aquinas would explain that this claim does not indicate that God thinks only about Himself to the exclusion of all else, but that He is His Thought, comprising the knowledge of all things in a single, simple essence. What absolutely characterizes the human being as intellectual is not his distinct way of solving problems, but the essential openness to being, the capacity to drink in the whole of reality, becoming it virtually without ceasing to be himself, afforded by the spiritual operation of thought. Our intellect impresses not primarily in its orderly processing of data, but in the "limitless voracity" by which it "seizes being and draws it into itself." The mind can potentially contain the universe; it can possess the fullness of being and of truth. Second, reason finds in its very operation a truth beyond itself that defines the human person. Namely, that his nature is founded on a prior or foundational intelligibility in the world and that he is intellectually and aesthetically oriented toward a transcendent knowledge of it. We can demonstrate truths by our reason's use of logic, but the principles that make reasoning possible cannot themselves be demonstrated. Something James Matthew Wilson is Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the Founding Director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston, as well as an award-winning poet and author of several books, including The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition, from which this excerpt is taken, and which won the 2022 Parnasssus Prize from Memoria College.
The Vision of the Soul
precedes man's act of knowing, both in himself and in the world. Aristotle speaks of the intellectual virtue whereby the mind "grasps the first principles" of thought. The most ancient authorities in the tradition emphasize that prior to our reasoning lies some kind of gift, visitation, or inspiration. For Plato, every idea is a recollection (anamnesis) from the plane of eternal ideas, or pure intelligibles—what are commonly called the "Forms." Centuries later, Augustine would stretch into the darkness of memory to find the presence of God—the one who makes the memory to be in the first place and who abides there as in all things. When we look out at the world we discover the intelligibility of reality itself; thought is only possible because idea— truth—was there first, already waiting to be thought. That we can know things—that we can readily know that they are and what they are—tells us something about the objective intelligibility that precedes our knowing and greets us at every turn. But this ready comprehension that things are and of what they are provokes us to strain and exceed ourselves in trying to understand what it is To Be—or to glimpse something even beyond that. But what is this supernatural end? The tradition proposes a third thing: This dual orientation proceeds by way of reason towards an intellectual vision perceptive of Beauty Itself, which is the splendor of truth. The world would not be reasonable if it did not act "for a purpose." We find the world soaking in intelligible truths and desirable goods; we find purposive action everywhere. And so, the proper question is not whether there is a final cause, a highest good at which all things aim, but rather what is that good. Because of the mind's universal capacity, we know that whatever it may be, we may come to understand it. We see in the Symposium that Socrates believes the name for this good at which our nature aims is Beauty. Plotinus will write, centuries later, that the soul's course lies in "the vision of the First Beauty itself." When we arrive, by way of discursive reason, at the final knowledge, the highest good of the intellect, and come to possess it, the tradition tells us we do not know it any longer in terms of discourse but in the form of intellectual vision. Augustine, with most of the Christian-Platonist tradition, considers the seeing of truth as the soul's vision of Beauty. We speak truths as truths, but when truth presents itself to the mind's eye, it does so as Beauty. In such vision, we encounter truth as more than a series of particular propositions; we see it whole, with all its multifarious aspects joined into a seamless whole, every part overflowing into every other like, again in Plato's words, a vast sea. Nearly one thousand years later, Thomas Aquinas will accept it as a matter of course, speaking consistently of true knowledge as vision, of rational truth as spiritual
light, of divine revelation as the "light of glory," and of the divine knowledge as akin to a single glance over all eternity. Beauty in its purest sense designates a finality at which the human intellect arrives when it fulfills itself, when it is most fully saturated in reality. Human beings are by their nature ordered to this vision of beauty, and the intelligibility of the world around us is not the least of evidences in favor of that proposition. This should suggest to us that beauty is not exclusively or even primarily a human "value," but that the world is itself ordered by and to Beauty. This is the fourth insight. Nature must be understood in terms of well-ordered desires, that is to say, movement ordained to an intelligible end, which is, in turn, to say, form (being constituted in itself by a purpose beyond itself) ordered to splendor. The cosmos is a
poem, an artwork, a thing of beauty, eternal and yet composed of movements or processions that give it a form visible to the vision of the body and of the soul. In a similar vein, the Wisdom of Solomon will praise the creative knowledge of God for having "arranged all things by measure and number and weight," that is, for endowing creation with the mathematical qualities of beauty. Later, it will take on new life, finding more complete expression in the prologue to John's Gospel, where the eternal Logos, the well-measured and ordered thought of God, creates everything from nothing. Medieval writers will embrace these concepts with alacrity, finding the geometrical and numeric structures that saturate the material world, the cosmos, 1-502-966-9115
as but signs of its origin in Beauty Itself and its orderly journey back to it. This rich perception would find its greatest single advocate and most sustained explication in Dionysius the Areopagite, whose Divine Names holds that the universe is mapped as a great pageant begun in the divine Beauty of God, proceeding out into the precincts of creation, and returning once more to Him. Aquinas writes that man's vision of the Divine Beauty leads, finally, to his assimilation to it. This leads us to the fifth insight: Human dignity specifically consists in man's unique capacity to perceive and contemplate that splendorous order, and, thus, the most excellent form of human life is that which is given over to such contemplation. When a man capable of wisdom first learns of the life of philosophy, Plato's letters tell us, he "thinks he has heard of a marvelous quest that he must at once enter upon with all earnestness, or life is not worth living." We should wish to become lovers of wisdom, if we are not already, and this consists in a life shaped by certain practices and oriented toward a certain end, rather than in a specific knowledge. In his Gospel centuries later, John indicates in his narrative of Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well that all human beings already are seeking this most excellent way of life—they just do not know where to find it. Gesturing to the well, the Lord cryptically tells her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." In a dark room, we all immediately turn to a spark of light; we all thirst. We sense that light from above and water from below surround us as the inexhaustible reality we always need. The craving for a water that so quenches our thirst that we shall never thirst again, a light that answers our most gnawing question, anticipates our sixth and final insight: This contemplation realizes itself in what we may call happiness or salvation, and it is characterized by an activity that resembles passivity, that is to say, not simply the absence of motion but a fullness of activity that is called peace and freedom. The whole of the Christian-Platonist tradition converges on "happiness" and "beatitude" as the terms best suited to name the purpose of human life, and it tells us that all our activities are ordained to that end. Because one could only achieve this in a condition that transcends the present, fallen earthly realm where all things pass away, Christians emphasize that happiness is just another name for beatitude as salvation. Aquinas, for instance, affirms that only the contemplative life realized outside of time is perfect happiness, and, crucially, this he describes as the dual-act of "knowing and loving God." The Vision of the Soul
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hen discussing the heliocentric (sun-centered) view of the universe, the brilliant astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote,
For in the sphere, which is the image of God the Creator and the Archetype of the world … there are three regions, symbols of the three persons of the Holy Trinity—the center, a symbol of the Father; the surface, of the Son; and the intermediate space, of the Holy Ghost.
In other words, he saw an analogy for the Trinity in his theory of the universe. The sun represented God the Father, the sphere of stars at the edge of the universe represented God the Son, and the space in between represented God the Holy Spirit. Why does Kepler make such a statement in a work of science? Because it was a necessary step in developing his theory. He wanted to understand how the planets and stars moved in the heavens, but before he could go into the details, he had to provide the big picture that encapsulated his entire theory. The fact that the heavens represented the nature of their Creator gave him a guiding principle that he could then use to understand the details of how the heavens worked. As a result, he was able to come up with what we now call Kepler's Laws, which are still considered an accurate description of how the planets move in the solar system. Where did Kepler get this guiding principle? It wasn't from a collection of data. It wasn't from the work of a previous scientist. It was from his imagination. Kepler imagined that God would imprint His very nature into the structure of the universe, and as a result, Kepler was able to revolutionize the way astronomers understood the heavens. If you take the time to read the great scientists of the past, you will see that their imaginations were critical to their work. Archimedes imagined the surface of each body of water to be the surface of a sphere, because he knew the Earth was a sphere. As a result, he was able to use geometry to derive his Law of the Lever and his principle of buoyancy. Blaise Pascal imagined the atmosphere as a weight that was pushing down on all things it touched. He then described an experiment to his brother-in-law that would determine whether or not he was correct. Because his brother-in-law performed the experiment, we now know that the atmosphere exerts pressure, and we also 14
Science and Imagination
SCIENCE AND IMAGINATION BY DR. JAY WILE
MemoriaPress.com
know that this is true for any fluid, which led have three holes, and they represent nitrogen, which engineers to develop the hydraulic lift. is stable when it has three bonds. This inclusion of imagination is one reason I find The teacher told the students to try to build it valuable to read the great scientific works of the molecules using their kits. He said that any past. In those days, scientists weren't constrained to molecule in which each ball had all its holes filled write their works in a dry, dispassionate style. They would represent a stable molecule, because each wrote honestly about the way they thought, often with atom would have a stable arrangement of electrons. poetic language and great enthusiasm. As a result, you This is, of course, an oversimplification, but can gain insights into how they came up with their then again, he was teaching ten-year-olds. Well, revolutionary ideas. In today's science, imagination Clara started building molecules, and she built is still central to our ability to discover new things. something that not only had all the holes filled, but Unfortunately, because of the nature of peer review, also captured her imagination. She showed it to funding concerns, and artificially imposed writing her teacher, who took a photo of it and sent it to a formats, we rarely include the imaginative part of our friend, Dr. Robert W. Zoellner, who is a chemistry thinking in our scientific papers. professor at Humboldt State University. Dr. Zoellner Despite the fact that it is searched the chemical rarely included in the scientific literature but found no literature, imagination is just reference to the molecule. as important a part of the As a result, he did his own scientific process today as it theoretical analysis of was in the past. Indeed, Albert the molecule and decided Einstein said, "Imagination that it was, indeed, stable. is more important than Theoretically, it should knowledge. Knowledge is be possible to make limited. Imagination encircles the molecule. the world." When we allow In the end, Dr. Zoellner what "encircles the world" published a paper about to guide us in our scientific Clara's molecule (and FALL 2022 investigations, we end up other possible molecules discovering new frontiers. in the same class) in the It's important to realize Journal of Computational and Introduction to the Liberal Arts that this is just as true for the Theoretical Chemistry. Clara Western Art & Music young, budding scientist as and her teacher, Kenneth it is for the experienced one. M. Boehr, are co-authors on The Ancient Epic Consider, for example, the the paper. It turns out that An Introduction to Philosophy story of ten-year-old Clara based on the energetics of Lazen. In school, she was being the molecule, it could be More classes at MemoriaCollege.org taught the basics of how atoms used in batteries or even bond to make molecules. explosives. As a result, Dr. In certain molecules (called Zoellner is trying to find "covalent" molecules), the atoms share electrons so someone to attempt to synthesize the molecule. they each attain a stable state. The shared electrons This is an illustration of Einstein's view. make a chemical bond, and this kind of bond can be Any chemist would tell you that Clara's teacher represented using special molecular modeling kits. oversimplified matters for his students. In addition, The kits have balls with different numbers of holes in Clara didn't really understand chemical bonds. She them. Some of the balls in the kit, for example, have hadn't even been taught Lewis structures or Valence four holes in them. They are generally black, and Share Electron Pair Repulsion theory, which together they represent carbon. When carbon has four bonds, are the basis of the molecular models with which she it is stable. Other balls have two holes, and they are was playing. However, her imagination was more typically colored red. These balls represent oxygen, important than such knowledge, and it opened up a which is stable when it has two bonds. Other balls new frontier for molecular energy storage. As scientists from Johannes Kepler to Clara Lazen Dr. Jay Wile is an award-winning author of science textbooks for all demonstrate, the search for knowledge is a creative ages, including his Exploring Creation With… series, as well as a endeavor. As such, it requires a rich imagination. professor at Memoria College.
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Science and Imagination
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Mapping the Imagination by Dr. Carol Reynolds
ne of my favorite children's books happens to be Uri Shulevitz's How I Learned Geography. Touchingly illustrated by the author, the story is based on Shulevitz's actual childhood. Born in Warsaw in 1935, he fled with his family after the Nazis incinerated the city center in 1944 and razed Warsaw to the ground. The family was taken to a refugee camp in the remote steppes of Turkestan. There, everything was harsh and unwelcoming. After a number of years, the Shulevitz family found a pathway to Paris, and ultimately Israel. The storybook recreates Uri's life in that Turkestan village through the character of a little boy fleeing exactly the same tragedy. War refugees lived in trying circumstances and existed primarily on small parcels of bread. So, it was a serious decision when the father in the story (and Uri's own father in actuality) chose one day to invest the pennies available for daily bread to buy a wall map. The seemingly frivolous purchase was met with ire by the wife and the hungry boy. The child went to bed filled with anger and shame. Yet, the next morning, when Father hung the map, the drab, dusty hut built from blocks of camel-dung transformed into a living cinema. The child spent hours gazing at the colorful map, memorizing the strange names, marveling at the blue seas, tracing the mountain ranges, and copying its details onto any scrap of paper available. In his imagination, he flew across the globe, ran on beaches, swung with monkeys, ate fresh mangos and papayas, froze in the Arctic, and stood in awe of the endless windows of New York skyscrapers. At the story's end the child forgives his father, for Father had been right. For Shulevitz, that long-ago map and the waves of imagination it triggered got him through an awful period of displacement and set his course to become a fine author and illustrator. Few things are more powerful or valuable than the human imagination. Expressions of the imagination garner praise in young children, but later imaginative play often gets labeled as a distraction that needs to be put aside. Imaginative speculations (and the mess they create) are muzzled. The wrongness of this muzzling ought to be self-evident, particularly since we simultaneously praise the imaginations of writers, inventors, and artists who long ago created works like the Divine Comedy, the printing press, or the glorious ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Beyond fostering tangible, praiseworthy achievements, the imagination has the power to nurture the well-rounded mental, emotional, and Dr. Carol Reynolds is a widely acclaimed author, speaker, and educator. She regularly leads arts tours throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, recently in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute.
spiritual development of every person. The beloved author L. Frank Baum wrote in his introduction to The Lost Princess of Oz: The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization.
How, then, do we nurture this intrinsic, intangible ability in our children? Certain steps are clear. For starters, avoid labeling or denigrating a child's imaginative expressions and activities. Take a strong stand to eliminate actions and attitudes that kill the imagination. Disallow immersion in, or even regular exposure to, video screens. Turn off the endless chatter of TV and replace it with reading good literature aloud and listening to fine audiobooks. Doing these things removes many a pollutant of the imagination. The imagination is stirred and strengthened through ex p o s u r e to b eaut i f u l, interesting objects. Fill the home with books, costumes, simple musical instruments, and items that are the products of skilled hands, such as handstitched quilts, real china and cut glass, hand-carved and hand-painted decorations, and loom-woven fabrics. These things are cheap to obtain nowadays in thrift stores and yard sales since so few modern people want them. Keep a pile of art and craft supplies nearby. Spend significant time out-of-doors, observing and experiencing nature. Expose the whole family to great music, dance, and theater, either live on stage when possible, or through prepared viewings of classic works via DVDs, streaming services, and the online offerings of the world's best companies like The Metropolitan Opera, The Royal Ballet of London, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as many worldclass orchestras. (As you prepare these experiences, remember that professional companies produce a wide variety of performances, so screen your chosen works.) Like a daily diet of nutritious food, a regular diet of these offerings feeds the health of the imagination. Additionally, from a young age, employ styles of discussion and inquiry that help students strengthen the intellectual and verbal sides of their imagination. Foster an awareness of the style, details, sweep, and placement of illustrations in books. When introducing 1-502-966-9115
a novel, poem, or short story, stop the momentum to have students predict subsequent scenes, dialogue, or character development. From science to history, help them see the limits of solely learning facts, names, and dates. Ask them to rethink historical or current developments—what might have happened if certain elements had been rearranged or occurred differently? Spending time with these kinds of activities is the opposite of "wasting time." Instead, it brings the imagination to maturity and burns a vibrant blueprint for learning into the brain. The imagination unleashes a powerful fusion of skill and courage: It could hold the key to survival in desperate circumstances. Recall the Father in How I Learned Geography who invested "foolishly" in a tool to stimulate his son's imagination. Let that be a reminder that a wellfed imagination can bring concrete aid to a child negotiating the effects of displacement, family distress, destitution, and acts of destruction. Accordingly, consider (and teach about) the ways people throughout history have employed their imaginations to free themselves from danger and despotism, such as those bold East Germans who fled the strictures of Communism in homemade hot-air balloons or the ones who secreted themselves in the interior cavities of someone's tiny Trabant (twocylinder East German car) before it crossed the border. And here is one last thing: Do not feel anxious about children who engage seriously in imaginary relationships. The digital age has narrowed the corridor for imaginary pets and imaginary friends or siblings. Without my own long-lived imaginary friend, my childhood would have been far lonelier. I would have lost a comforting sounding board for my ideas and an invisible poultice in moments when I felt no one understood me. The exercise of our imagination may, at first glance, seem like the whisp of a breeze, dotted by color from a butterfly's wing. But imagination can snap to become a glistening, sharp-edged sword that slashes through obstacles and lifts us above adversity. Let us rejoice in this Divine gift and value it accordingly. Mapping the Imagination
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SIMPLY CLASSICAL
GIVE THEM A DOOR by Cheryl Swope
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he Door in the Wall is a slim work of children's literature that welcomes a student into the world of the Middle Ages, enchants his imagination, and shares a poetic knowledge of life itself. More than this, the little book also embraces all that we hold true in Simply Classical by helping us as parents and teachers see what is needful in education. This humble story begins with a ten-year-old boy in dire circumstances: Robin's father, a strong and noble knight, has been called to war, his mother has been called to serve the Queen as a lady in waiting, and after their departures Robin himself fell very ill and is now unable to move his legs, becoming bedridden and sullen. To make matters even worse, the servants assigned to care for Robin have all either scattered due to his surliness or have died of the plague. Robin's insolence soon turns to dread and hungry loneliness. Brother Luke, a wandering friar, happens by, learns of Robin's lot, and brings him food. In earlier days Robin would have cast the offering against the wall with a broad show of disgust, but in this moment he eats what Brother Luke gives him. The friar tells Robin that together they will travel to his quarters at St. Mark's, where the friar will care for the boy himself. Robin responds with doubt. "'See you, my two legs are as useless as if they were logs of wood. How shall I go there?'" Brother Luke uses this as an opportunity to teach Robin greater lessons. He references something familiar to Robin: "'Dost remember the long wall that is about the garden of thy father's house?'" Robin replies, "'Yes, of course. Why?'" The friar continues, "'Dost remember, too, the wall about the Tower or any other wall?'" Robin nods. "'Have they Cheryl Swope is the author of Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child and Memoria Press' Simply Classical Curriculum, as well as editor of the Simply Classical Journal.
Give Them a Door
not all a door somewhere?'" The friar continues with conviction, "'Always remember that. Thou hast only to follow the wall far enough and there will be a door in it.'" Robin promises that he will remember, though he is not entirely certain he knows what Brother Luke is trying to tell him. As the story continues, Brother Luke continues to teach Robin many things, including carpentry. "'Remember, even thy crutches can be a door in a wall.'" Years ago, over the course of several evenings I had slipped away early to read this unassuming little children's book, marveling at its reflection of all that we believe and teach within Simply Classical. "Each day," I read, "Robin grew stronger, and could work longer before resting." With admiration I watched as the author described a well-rounded, nurturing instruction that is at once spiritual, physical, and intellectual, just as we wish classical Christian education to be. Robin is taken to Vespers and shown the written psalteries, is given therapeutic massage and physical tasks to perform, and is taught letters to enable him to read and write. He joins in swimming with other boys. Besides reading, writing, and the study of history and the stars Robin was given certain duties in the routine of the church …. Each day, too, he worked with Brother Matthew in the carpentry shop …. [B]est of all he liked the swimming. It made him feel free and powerful.
Later, when Robin meets the lord to whom he was to become a squire before his illness, his transformed demeanor shows in his humility and servitude: "'I shall make a sorry page,' said Robin ruefully. 'But I can sing and I can read a little to while away the time for your lordship,' he offered, 'and I can pen letters for you.'"
Rather than rejection or hopelessness, Robin hears from the lord words that we can speak to all of our children: "Each of us has his place in the world," he said. "If we cannot serve in one way, there is always another. If we do what we are able, a door always opens to something else." There it was again, Robin thought, a door. He wondered whether Sir Peter meant the same thing that Brother Luke had intended.
A classical Christian education offers numerous doors to students who seem locked behind impenetrable walls. History offers illumination beyond a narrow preoccupation with current circumstances. Latin and mathematics discipline the mind with steady sureness. Music, art, and literature stretch inflexible thinking and free imprisoned imaginations. Poetic knowledge, an understanding beyond mere skills or rote memory, is perhaps best taught through the psalms, as we see with young Robin. The Word of God holds a power greater than anything we could hope to impart on our own. When we teach our children to pray the psalms we give them a gift to last longer than our lifetime. Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy
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presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit. (Psalm 51:10-12)
In the presence of God's holiness, our insolence fades away. In the presence of God's mercy, our gratitude begets service. With the Word of God we give our children the peace of Christ Himself to carry them through their infirmities. Even one psalm deeply impressed upon a student can give him sustenance to seek more. Formidable walls often stretch long before our children. As our children grow, they will find, as we all must, that they cannot walk without aid. In a classical Christian education we impart knowledge, skills, and new interests, as do the friars with young Robin. We give our children companionship in our teaching and in fellowship with other students. Most importantly we lead them to the door. I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture …. I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." (John 10:9, 11)
This culmination of all history, imagination, and poetic knowledge is in the truth, mercy, and hope of the words of Jesus, as He speaks words of life to our children and to all who will hear.
Give Them a Door
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Befriending Books by Leta Sundet
I
was going to write an essay about why everyone should read Jane Austen's novels. I was going to make an impassioned case that her books are not just the smart girl's romance novels or guides for men seeking to understand the female mind but truly great books, as insightful in their way into the nature of reality and the human soul as Homer or Dante's poems. But I realized that, in general, the only people persuaded by those arguments (probably the only people who read those arguments) are the people already convinced. Instead, what to say to the person who wouldn't read that essay—to the person who says of a book (Austen or otherwise), "Look, I tried. I just couldn't get into it. Why waste time reading what I know I won't appreciate? I'll pick something else that will actually do me some good." I understand the logic—I've used it many times. We tend to be somewhat utilitarian in our approach to literature. We're interested in what we can "get out" of books—whether information, a moral vision, a jolt of conviction, or simply entertainment, wish-fulfillment, escape. We generally know which we want at any given time, and before we invest in a book we want to know what the book will deliver. If we find, as we read, that a book is not delivering, we discard it. None of the above are bad reasons to read. Reading, as a leisure activity, should to some degree be dictated by our desires. But if we think of our literary lives merely in terms of brief encounters that are either worthwhile or not, that either succeed or not, we miss the fact that neither people nor books really work that way. To truly know a person takes a real investment of time, attention, and even affection. People reveal themselves over time in response to curiosity and love. Good books are no different. I want to make a case that we should think of our relationships with texts as relationships—that we should be in the business of cultivating friendships with books. Since my own most potent experience of literary friendship thus far has been with one of Austen's novels, I'll use it as a touchstone. But the way her novels work on a reader over time teaches us how all great texts work. If we bring to our reading the virtues that we bring to friendship—charity, attention, patience, long-suffering—books reward us the way that human friendships reward us: with more than we expected to "get out" of them, with more than we thought to ask for from them—with unanticipated challenge, surprising understanding, unexpected delight. Leta Sundet is a doctoral candidate in literature in the Institute for Philosophic Studies at the University of Dallas. She received her M.A. in theology and letters from New Saint Andrews College, and also received an M.A. in English literature from the University of Dallas. Her dissertation research explores narrative surprise in the work of Jane Austen, Isak Dinesen, and Flannery O'Connor.
Mansfield Park was my gateway book to Austen. I read most of it on a plane home for Christmas break in college—a cheap edition I'd picked up somewhere. I can't remember why I suddenly decided to read it. I hadn't managed to get through any of Austen's other novels. I sympathized—painfully so—with the heroine of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price—with her anxiety and social awkwardness; but I also felt all that was compelling in her rival, Mary Crawford, who is so effortlessly charming. So I was surprised, more than surprised, when Fanny Price got her happy ending. I was deeply touched that Austen would consider this little nobody of a character and her happiness. It felt like the time when I was six years old playing tag with a bunch of kids and this little girl I barely knew slipped her hand into mine and wanted to be my friend. I remember the sudden glow of heart, the feeling of gratitude. You're with me? Many people find Austen's novels very easy to make friends with. They're cheerful, they're witty, and they make you feel intelligent while you read them—like a good friend should. But Mark Twain also spoke for many people when he said of Austen's novels, "[H]er books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy … and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time [sic] I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the head with her own shin-bone." What I'm most intrigued by is "every time"—by the fact that apparently Twain kept right on trying to read Pride and Prejudice. Was he a glutton for self-punishment? Did someone keep forcing him to make yet another attempt? Or did he find something compelling about it even though he detested it? Was this his grudging attempt to be friends? My second or maybe third reading of Mansfield Park was for an Austen class in grad school; I wrote a long, rambling paper defending the "villain" of the piece, Henry Crawford, convinced Austen had a soft spot for him because I had a soft spot for him. I wanted the book to say things it didn't quite say. I felt the novel's stubbornness, though I wouldn't acknowledge it. After that paper was finished, I didn't read the novel again for a while—it had left a bad taste in my mouth. It's hard to feel a book or friend set their jaw like a bulldog and resist you. Joseph Conrad addresses the 1-502-966-9115
following to readers who "demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed" by his stories: My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see …. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.
As convicting as these words are, they also give me hope. Eventually, however bad a reader you might be, a book will give you that for which you "forgot to ask." The greatest texts are written to require re-reading— that is, to reward our friendship. With any thing of real depth, be it art or human, misunderstanding and inadequate understanding are part of the process of coming to know the thing. And the affection that develops from giving that thing attention over a long period of time likewise transforms the way we see. To read something with love is to read it with new eyes. You know what moves me deeply about Mansfield Park, even as I write this? The thought of what happens after the novel is over. It's a novel about mothers, I realize more and more, about a terrible lack of mothers, about a girl who longs for a mother but maybe more deeply than that longs to be a mother and has no one to be a mother to. And when, at the end, Austen with typical Austen reticence just touches on a future, just brushes with her little finger a vision of the future in which this character's person and story at last blossom into full life, I feel burning behind my eyes and in my throat. Oh my friend. My friend. When people talked about good books getting better with time, I used to nod and agree without realizing what they meant. I thought you just noticed more things on subsequent readings, or maybe your own life experience contributed to a better understanding. I didn't realize that a book could become a life-long companion with all that that entails: that it could astonish, disappoint, delight, speak hard words, frustrate, reassure, refuse to talk to you, suddenly speak too much at once, be unpredictable, be steadfast, be a continual, changing object of wonder. Befriending Books
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Sacrificial BY LEIGH LOWE
Friendship IN CHARLOTTE’S WEB
C
harlotte's Web, written by E. B. White in 1952, is a quintessential book for children. While conveying important truths about the nature of people and the world, it is also an imaginative, happy story about life on a family farm. The book gives us a clever glimpse into the lives of our animal friends while beautifully describing nostalgic childhood experiences like attending state fairs, visiting barnyards, and making your first friends. Charlotte's Web points out what is miraculous in the often underappreciated experiences of everyday life. It exquisitely details the changing seasons of both land and life. While there are a number of meaningful themes in this book, one of the most profound is sacrificial friendship. The idea of sacrifice is likely a familiar virtue to children, hopefully discussed in the context of their faith. It is important, however, that students truly understand the idea and know what it means practically. Sacrifice means that something must be given up. It is the necessary surrender of something desired for the happiness or well-being of another. Sacrifice naturally involves a loss—but, importantly, contributes to a greater gain. Charlotte's Web beautifully demonstrates the idea of sacrifice in three key relationships. By explicitly discussing what is given and what is gained in each, students can see more tangibly what sacrificial friendship truly looks like. The relationship between Fern, a young girl, and Wilbur, a newborn piglet and the runt of the litter, is the first example we see of sacrificial friendship. Fern, outraged by the injustice that awaits Wilbur, saves him from an untimely death. She courageously stands up to her father and fights for Wilbur's survival. Fern loves Wilbur instantaneously—like the love of a parent for a child. She doesn't love him on his merits—she doesn't even know him except as the victim of a perceived injustice. She simply loves him for being him, and soon, for being hers. After winning an argument with her father, Fern quickly dignifies Wilbur's mere existence by giving him the "most beautiful name she could think of" and by further committing to his physical and emotional well-being. Fern nurtures the runt pig with (adorable) acts of mercy and love—she feeds, shelters, and clothes Wilbur, and later, visits him when her father insists he be moved to the Zuckermans' farm. Fern is courageous and Leigh Lowe consults on curriculum, trains teachers, and speaks publicly about classical education and the vision of Memoria Press and Highlands Latin School. Leigh is the daughter-in-law of Cheryl Lowe, founder of Memoria Press and Highlands Latin School. Leigh worked closely with Cheryl for years as a teacher, editor, and writer.
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Sacrificial Friendship in Charlotte's Web
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tenacious in protecting Wilbur from the very beginning. She sacrificially gives her time, energy, and affection to Wilbur and he receives from her not just life, but an enchanted life, one that introduces him to another special, loving friend. Fern's model of friendship is the seed that bears much fruit as the story progresses. Wilbur, learning from Fern (and later Charlotte), knows what to look for in a friend and, ultimately, how to be one. We also see sacrificial friendship in the relationship between Charlotte and Wilbur. After his move from the Arable home to the Zuckermans' farm, Wilbur finds himself "friendless, dejected, and hungry." One dreary, rainy day he bemoans as "the worst day of his life," he wonders whether he can "endure the awful loneliness any more." But then Charlotte appears and Wilbur is blessed with the promise of an unexpected new friendship. Charlotte takes up the mantle from Fern to protect Wilbur. Her contribution to Wilbur's happiness and safety is just as significant and just as providential. She is uniquely qualified to serve Wilbur both by her talent and by her temperament. Charlotte is a genuine friend to Wilbur from the outset. Importantly, she is consistently honest with him—sometimes lovingly revealing hard truths about the nature of the world. She acknowledges, for instance, that she is "'not entirely happy about [her] diet of flies and bugs, but it's the way [she's] made.'" Similarly, she cedes to the old sheep that Wilbur is at risk of being "turned into smoked bacon and ham"—but with her next breath declares that Wilbur will not die for she will save him. Resolute in her commitment to save Wilbur from his inevitable fate as a pig, Charlotte is dependable, bold, and wise. Even when she doesn't have a plan, she breeds hope and confidence with matter-of-fact imperatives. She routinely admonishes Wilbur: "never hurry and never worry." Ultimately, Charlotte recognizes that her special ability as a weaver is precisely the thing that can save Wilbur. She fulfills her natural purpose by using her good gifts in a miraculous way—and also by taking advantage of the "mercy" that "people are very gullible." While she calls her true magnum opus the creation of her web sac filled with 514 eggs, Charlotte's pinnacle feat for Wilbur happens at the State Fair, where she weaves above the radiant pig a web that wisely reads: Sacrificial Friendship in Charlotte's Web
"humble." When both Charlotte and Wilbur are at the height of personal glory, the reminder to stay "low to the ground" is the message that hangs boldly in the air: They are not to give way to pride. The true victory for each is better than a blue ribbon. In her final act for Wilbur, Charlotte is "languishing," giving all that she has for her friend. But content in her service, confident in Wilbur's fate, and secure in the knowledge that her children will be safe in her friend's care, Charlotte is prepared to breathe her last. Before she expires, Wilbur asks her with gratitude, "Why did you do all this for me? I don't deserve it." Charlotte responds, "You have been my friend …. That in itself is a tremendous thing." Wilbur now knows what it truly means to be a friend. Echoing Scripture, which tells us that "Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends," Wilbur says to the dying Charlotte: "You have saved me, Charlotte, and I would gladly give my life for you …." But that is not to be. So instead, he does all he can to give life to her legacy by protecting and loving her babies. To do this, Wilbur makes an oath to give the unsavory Templeton the best from his trough in exchange for his desperately needed help in retrieving Charlotte's egg sac. Once retrieved, Wilbur extends to the children kindnesses reminiscent of those he received from Fern and Charlotte. He loves and protects them all before they are even born, struggling in hope and charity for their safety. Though 511 children quickly fly away after crawling out of the sac, three of Charlotte's daughters stay, choosing their mother's "hallowed doorway" as their home. Overjoyed, Wilbur names them Joy, Aranea, and Nellie. In the classical tradition, he educates them by passing on the culture of the barnyard and sharing stories that reveal the notable virtues of their beloved mother. Wilbur makes a commitment to the children: He pledges his friendship to them "forever and ever." This is a promise they return. Consequently, hope springs eternal. "As time went on … [Wilbur] was never without friends," for "Charlotte's children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, year after year, lived in the doorway." They all lived happily—ever after.
