The Classical Teacher Parent Edition - Late Summer 2018

Saving Western civilization one student at a time.

Late Summer 2018

The Before Exercises Composition as Training in Virtue

by Abigail Johnson

Three Classical Terms

by Martin Cothran The Lord of the Rings and the Five Dimensions of a Story

by Peter Kreeft

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

HADRIAN'S WALL

by Martin Cothran

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was talking with a homeschool mother recently and she told me that she had visited Britain.

She was particularly impressed with Hadrian's Wall, which was built during the Roman occupation of the island.

Hadrian's Wall is made of stone and runs some 84 miles, from Wallsend on the River Tyne to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. It was built by the Romans as a defensive fortification to keep out invading tribes from the north. That was its purpose.

But the Romans eventually left Britain and their empire ult imately disappeared altogether. The wall itself is still there, and although some of it is in pretty good shape, a lot of it lies in ruins. Long after the Romans left, it became a de facto quarry. Its stones were taken by the people living around it and were used as building materials for castles and farms. In some cases the stones were used to build churches.

With its original purpose gone, it began to be taken apart and used for other ends, some of them worthy, some of them less so. What is left of the wall stands as a mere tourist attraction, an outdoor museum exhibit for the historically curious.

When something loses its purpose, it naturally begins to deteriorate. This is not only true of manmade structures, but of organic things as well. Plants, animals, and even people are structured in such a way that every particle that makes them up is organized around and oriented toward some animating principle.

It was this animating principle in humans—this purpose—that classical thinkers called the "soul."

We know what happens when a soul leaves a body.

The body dies. Its parts are preserved for a short time, and then they disintegrate and are appropriated by something else for another purpose.

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Letter from the Editor

What is true for man-made structures and for organisms is also true for institutions: Once they lose a sense of what they are for they tend to disintegrate.

Today's schools have forgotten what education is for. Rather than forming adults through the passing on of their culture, schools have instead attempted to refashion themselves into umbrella social service agencies, providing meals, health care services, and job training. These things are good, of course, but they have little to do with the special purpose of education.

In a few places the educational structures are in good repair. But, increasingly, real learning is having to take refuge in places outside of mainstream schools.

Our schools once had a specific and well-understood purpose: to form wise and virtuous human persons by passing on to them the accumulated wisdom and the great examples of virtue in Western culture.

Perhaps the most important role the classical education movement plays in modern culture is to restore to education what has been lost. To build something new is hard, but to rebuild something old is harder. In rebuilding we must not only rewrite the blueprints, but we must find the workers who still know the old ways of building.

Classical education requires a knowledge of things we ourselves have not been taught. How do we teach Latin if we do not know it? Whom do we get to teach Homer and Virgil when there are so few of us who have read them?

We must teach ourselves the things we should have been taught. We must pass on the things that were never passed on to us.

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Late Summer 2018

FEATURED ARTICLES Letter from the Editor by Martin Cothran..............................................................2 The Language That Rose from the Dead by Dr. Scott Randall Paine...........................4 Science's Useful Fallacy by Martin Cothran............................................................8 The Before Exercises: Composition as Training in Virtue by Abigail Johnson......10 School Spotlight: Lexington Latin School by Martin Cothran...............................13 The Easiest Way to Strengthen Your Child by Cheryl Swope...............................14 There Is a Special Providence by David M. Wright.................................................16 The Lord of the Rings and the Five Dimensions of a Story by Peter Kreeft........18 Three Classical Terms by Martin Cothran.............................................................20

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by Dr. Scott Randall Paine

“A language must die to be immortal.�

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hen it comes to expressing the eternal and immutable truths of the Christian faith, the only good language is a dead language. Chesterton once made a disarming retort to the customary detraction of Latin as a dead language.

He simply remarked that to say this is not a detraction at all, for quite in contrast to the detractor's intentions, it throws into profile the clear ascendancy of Latin over all the "living" languages of today.

It is the question of a dead language and a dying language. Every living language is a dying language, even if it does not die. Parts of it are perpetually perishing or changing their sense; there is only one escape from that flux; and a language must die to be immortal.1

Yes, indeed, pagan Latin eventually bit the dust, and the Western mind turned with relish to the new throng of spawning tongues which began to mottle the linguistic map of Europe. Among them, the intense lucidity of French, the irresistible bounce of Italian, the vehement velocity of Spanish, and the nasal sincerity of Portuguese entered upon their long evolutions, each of them drawing a thousand voices of secular discourse into their new constellations of emphases. But the golden tongue of Cicero was on its way out, and along with the Empire whose body was dismembered and put to seed for a new garden of nations, that ancient tongue was almost buried too.

But then came one of those bizarre turns in human history that makes us wonder just how human it really was. After Rome had lost its imperial dignity to Byzantium, and furthermore taken the moral nosedive of

soaking its arenas in Christian blood, it would have surprised no one had the last dying syllables of the Empire's language remained inaudible to history.

But at the opening of the fifth century, the idiom that once vibrated on the tongue of Cato was strongly and brilliantly ringing out again and in the very midst of the collapsing walls of the Empire. The Vandals had moved into northern Africa from Spain, and in twenty years time would sally northwards and sack the imperial capital itself. Meanwhile, within the African walls of Hippo, St. Augustine was penning the last chapters of The City of God and must have looked up from his desk every few minutes or so, wondering if Genseric's hordes were going to bring his episcopal residence down on his head. With the grace of God, he finally brought his book to an end, but in the interim, the Vandals had also brought Hippo to an end.

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atin died to the world. This was in 430 A.D. Just years before, St. Jerome had completed his Latin translation of the Bible, destined to become the most influential Biblical text ever. St. Jerome did his work largely in Palestine, as St. Augustine had in Africa. But in Rome itself, where the Hellenized Jewish converts had arrived with the Good News from Palestine, many of them turned their energies to the translation of the Greek Gospel and liturgy into a Latin the waning Romans could understand. The language was dying, but the souls of those who still spoke it were nonetheless in need of salvation.

To everyone's surprise, there rose upon the field of this purely instrumental effort something like a linguistic renaissance, as a host of prefaces, collects, orations, secrets, and post-communions grew into what is known to us today as the Leonine Sacramentary.

Roman civilization went on and died; the last emperor unceremoniously left the scene in 476. But paradoxically, the heart of the Latin language was still beating strongly, and its conjugations and declensions were carried on the breath of a new host of talkers. But there was a difference: for what these men were talking about was something hitherto unheard of on the street corners of history, and statements were being made that no period of Cicero's had even remotely embraced.

This is Chesterton's point. The Latin language died, indeed, but the death it died it died to the world. In the small enclave of the Christian Church, the same

Father Scott Randall Paine is a priest of the archdiocese of Brasilia and professor of philosophy at the University of Brasilia.

He is author of The Universe and Mr. Chesterton (Sherwood Sugden, 1999) and various articles on philosophy and theology in Portuguese and English. This article first appeared in the July, 1990 edition of The Homiletic Pastoral Review.

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language experienced nothing less than a miraculous resurrection; and the analogy can be pursued to the end. The bloodless carcass of the language, filled to the skin with the earthbound schemes of the ancients, could no longer respond to the soul of paganism; like every merely natural body, the life that had sustained it was merely mortal. So history slowly dragged it off to the grave, that one more might be added to the thousand withered tongues of time.

But then came Latin's Easter sunrise, for after the Gospel of Christ had been rejected by the Jews, the Prince of the Apostles sealed his witness to the Master by reddening a hill in Rome we now call the Vatican.

And then, like a hurricane abruptly changing course, the full fury of Christ's message turned itself suddenly and excitedly upon this prostrate language of the Romans, and, lifting a hand over its lifeless heap of words— all of them tongue-tied by centuries of unanswered questions—it cried out, "Ephphatha!"—and the tongue was loosed, and Christian Latin began to speak to the world.

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e will never appreciate the enormous importance of the Latin language for our Church and our faith until we grasp the supernatural character of what I have just described. In Christ, history itself was conditioned by God, and nothing, including language, has looked the same since.

The Church did not adopt Latin just because it was a ready-made tool which historical conditions furnished and which she then appreciatively picked up. It would be as big a lie as saying that Bach took up the fugue because everyone else was taking it up, when, in fact, everyone else was dropping it. The fact that fugues loom so large in the history of music is in no small way because Bach did pick it up when everyone else was tired of it; ignoring the "winds of change," he breathed his own storm of genius into the old form, while the others, red in the face and with throbbing temples, turned at last to the tamer challenges of novelty. In the same way, the Church picked up the discarded morphemes of Latin.

We labor under a particular handicap when we try to grasp this point today. The churchmen of the Renaissance, and to a greater extent, the Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation, were both anxious not to play second fiddle to the humanists; so they began dragging the paradigms of classical Latin into the ecclesiastical academies and reluctantly nodded when the Christian language of St. Augustine and St. Bernard was demoted beneath the flaunted standards of the ancients.

Not a little of the disaffection of modern clergy with Latin has to do with their being terrorized by the tortuous language of many Church documents, The Language That Rose from the Dead

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ordinary linguistic evolution; and what the literati including the modern encyclicals, and being made to mistake for barbaric unsophistication is rather the study Cicero and Virgil when all they wanted to do was dignified simplicity demanded by the mysteries of a offer Mass. Rather than enjoying the more accessible God who is Simplicity Itself. The anointment of the prose of many of the Fathers and the simple Latin of Spirit seems to force this Latin to move about more St. Thomas' Summa, the drilling of the mind in the modestly, with a kind of self-forgetful gait, but for all complexities and subtleties of ancient Latin was taken this it moves far closer to the hushed world of God's as the unavoidable baptism of fire in the Church's native most intimate secrets. tongue. And many got predictably burnt out.

Classical Latin is indisputably grand, undeniably his is the first claim I should like to make for majestic, and irrevocably dead; for the Renaissance did Christian Latin, namely that it was the same not resurrect it, but only dragged the skeletons out of language that had "known" the wisdom the tombs and taught us to marvel over the intensely of Greco-Roman antiquity, but had died a interesting way the bones are joined together. The natural death as that wisdom exhausted its resources. It classical scholars may get more or less close to imagining then was resurrected from the dead by the supernatural the meat and feeling the pulse of the language in its Truth of Christ. After much malignment, academic true Sitz im Leben ("sociological setting"), and a few opinion has come to acknowledge this quasi-miracle, men like Erasmus can certainly make this sort of thing especially after the 19th century researches of Ozanam, engaging. But the language is not living again, neither as Roensch, Goelzer, and others. it did in antiquity, nor through the infusion of a new life; The second claim I raise is the first for the humanist has no new life to give. of two consequences of the first claim, When framed in this unnatural medium, and it is this: though Christian Latin the simple, sublime assertions and quasiwas not born with Christianity itself, inspired neologisms of Christian theology Christian Latin it was nonetheless born with Christian seem to bang about clumsily amidst all was resurrected theology, and thus, not only its the flourish and measured earnestness of from the dead by characteristic simplicity (at least when Ciceronian constructions. compared with classical Latin), but Moreover, all this is so time-wasting, the supernatural also its new world of meanings grew for the Christian mysteries have already Truth of Christ. apace with the new understanding forged their own language, and there, as of the faith. Here, certainly, Christian nowhere else, they unfold their truths Latin was deeply beholden to Christian not only accurately, but also naturally.

Greek, at least in the early centuries.

This was St. Augustine's great Still, the unique powers of Western speculation, discovery about the Latin Bible; for after first turning to starting with Augustine and one day to climax in the it after years of Cicero, he found the style cropped and overwhelming Latin edifice of Aquinas, were fruits barbaric, making him wonder what crude doctrines borne in the language in which Christian thought were lurking behind such ingenuousness. Indeed, the first moved and matured. Within the grammar and Scriptures "seemed to me unworthy of comparison with vocabulary of Latin, pious reflections on Christ's the grand style of Cicero." But once he was touched by revelation had taken their inaugural steps, fashioned the mysteries behind the style, he discovered the reason their first conceptual tools, and demanded of syntax for the plainness: and morphology that they yield to the sovereign … [w]hat I saw was something that is not discovered by the proud and is not laid open to children; the way in is exigencies of the WORD's own Word. All this made low and humble, but inside the vault is high and veiled Christian theology and Christian Latin into correlative in mysteries ... these Scriptures would grow up together realities—each, in turn, a mother to the other. with a little child; I, however, thought too highly of myself to become a little child; I, swollen with pride, I was, in my The third claim I raise is the most pertinent of all, own eyes, grown-up.2 at least for us who ride on the stampede of modern progress. Chesterton had observed that the only The Christian Latin which we find in the Vulgate, way for a language to be truly living is to die and to in St. Augustine, in the Latin Fathers, and in the early resurrect by the agency of a higher, life-giving force Sacramentaries is not just a salvaged Latin, shaken, (such as the Church). The common, vernacular tongues dusted off, and clumsily recycled in an age that had of everyday life are immersed in the contingencies of lost the inspiration of the days of Virgil and Horace. time and subject to the vagaries of the world's currents This was the Renaissance view of the matter. It is rather of change. Words are dying almost every day, with a language reborn through obstetrics irreducible to

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The Language That Rose from the Dead

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new ones rising to take their place. Through the king-of-the-mountain flurries of technological change, one on the heels of the other, many of our words seem to lose their targets on the very tip of our tongue.

So—I repeat in a funereal tone—the English language is dying and with it, all the other "living" languages of the world. And sometimes they are even splitting in the middle. What is happening to Brazilian Portuguese when compared with continental Portuguese (as I have experienced firsthand) is an even more dramatic case than American English compared with British. All the spoken languages of the world are undergoing slow deaths, and parts of them are being draped every day in black. But the only reason I bring all this up is the effect it has on our ability to think and talk about immutable doctrines.

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f it is true that we are in possession of a supernatural revelation regarding truths that are not dying, that is, that are rooted in eternity and not subject to clocks and calendars, then it stands to reason that they will be imperfectly preserved if the only receptacles we have are the leaky old wineskins of contemporary idioms. If the truths of the faith are forever new (as they most definitely are), then we should keep them well nested within a language that has already been lifted above this linguistic mortuary we inhabit, invested with some share in the unchanging status of eternity, and thus made dead to this world and alive to another. For us in the Western Church, the forever new wineskin has always been Latin, and if this beverage is to refresh us all the way to eternity, we had better turn a skeptical eye to all the new, improved wineskins being offered us today.

Certainly we need to speak supernatural truths in the vernacular as well, but I am afraid we will have to drink the doctrine fast, for these old wineskins are hardly better than paper sacks, and the weakness of our fickle contemporary tongues is tearing leaks in the fabric of the language almost as fast as we utter our words. Sometimes it is impossible to find words whose bottoms do not fall right out of them when you try to put truth into them.

Try, for instance, to put the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation into modern American English without feeling the need of a page of paraphrasing to bring something close to theological content to the words "person" and "nature" as we use them today. And when trying to speak of the substance of the Eucharist, the need will be even more acute. Without at least a considerable body of Latin in the background of our memory, all three of these fundamental notions (and with them, the burden of our faith) could easily be lost to the English words they originally generated. The words, tossed around by history, and, unable to signify anything beyond history, may well race out of the past and hasten into the future, leaving a rendezvous with the present as only a rare and puzzling accident.

Latin lives in eternity. The whole glory of Christian Latin is that it abides in the greatest present tense of all: the "now" of eternity. Never needing to be up-to-date, it stands free of the danger of ever getting out-of-date. And we who spend hours speaking interminably about things that pass, must be able to turn in theological reflection to God's unchanging mysteries, and in a language still inspired by a Breath from the land of the living.

1 G. K. Chesterton, "Some of Our Errors," The Thing (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1930), p. 193.

2 The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans., Rex Warner (New York: MentorOmega, 1963), p. 57.

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LOGIC

SCIENCE’S USEFUL FALLACY

by Martin Cothran

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he expression "the science is settled" has been invoked as a way to end numerous discussions of scientific importance. On issues involving evolution, dietary science, or exercise physiology, it is not uncommon for one side to claim that the research has settled the issue. But, however much evidence there may be for any particular scientific theory, is the science of it ever really "settled"?

Although many scientists don't like to hear it, the nature of scientific reasoning itself prevents any scientific theory from ever being settled. The problem of the level of certainty in scientific judgments goes much deeper than any specific issue. It has to do with the very kind of logic science must employ in order to come to its conclusions.

To put it bluntly, scientific reasoning is based on a logical fallacy, and because of this fact, science is never settled.

HOW SCIENTISTS REASON Science largely involves the use of hypothetical arguments. A hypothetical argument looks like this: If all men are mortal, then Socrates is mortal All men are mortal Therefore, Socrates is mortal 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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Science's Useful Fallacy

There are four possible forms of hypothetical arguments, and only two of them are valid. The example above is a modus ponens ("the way of affirmation"): If P, then Q P Therefore, Q

We affirm the first part of the first statement ("All men are mortal") and therefore affirm the second part of the first statement in the conclusion ("Socrates is mortal").

The other valid form of hypothetical reasoning looks like this: If all birds fly, then an ostrich can fly But an ostrich cannot fly Therefore, it is not true that all birds can fly

This is called modus tollens ("the way of negation"): If P, then Q Not Q Therefore, not P

In modus ponens, we say, "If P, then Q," then we affirm P, and therefore affirm Q. In modus tollens, we say, "If P, then Q," then "not Q, therefore not P." The first is the way of affirmation and the second the way of negation.

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THE PROBLEM WITH SCIENTIFIC REASONING

other reason than rain. Someone might have turned on the sprinklers. It might be wet because some children So how does scientific reasoning work? It is, as we were playing in water. There are many other reasons said, hypothetical in nature. It takes a hypothesis about the pavement could be wet, which is why this form of whether one thing results in another. It then conducts reasoning is usually considered suspect. an experiment to see whether, when we have that one The Einstein example seems pretty convincing. But thing, we get the other. it does not eliminate the possibility that some theory In 1916, Albert Einstein had published his theory other than relativity could explain the bending of light. of general relativity. Among the implications of the In fact, relativity theory has still not been reconciled theory was that light would bend when it encountered with quantum physics—one explains some things and the gravity of a large astronomical object. But the the other other things. Einstein himself thought that theory had not been confirmed. In 1919, there was an there must be some other theory, not yet discovered, eclipse of the sun in the southern hemisphere. It just that would explain everything. so happened that, at the same time, the sun would Numerous scientific theories have been victimized cross the path of the Hyades star cluster. If by this fallacy: The Q that they thought was Einstein was correct, the eclipse would being caused by the P was really being allow scientists to tell whether the caused by an R or an S or a T. This is light from this star cluster bent as what prompted Karl Popper to say Certain theories it came around the sun: that we can never justify scientific If general relativity is true (P), theories; we can only make efforts may be said to be then light of the Hyades star to refute them. (In other words, cluster will bend around the well-established, but the you can prove that your P doesn't sun (Q) cause your Q, but you can never findings of science are When the results of the be completely sure, no matter how experiment came in there were always to some many experiments you do, whether cheers from many scientists. it is really P and not something else extent tentative.

The light indeed had bent that is actually causing Q.) around the sun. The theory (at least this predication of the theory) IS SCIENCE EVER was born out.

PROVEN? If general relativity is true, then light of the Hyades star cluster will bend around the sun The light of the Hyades star cluster bends around the sun Therefore, general relativity is true

But hold on. We said that there were only two valid forms of hypothetical reasoning—modus ponens (If P, then Q; P; therefore Q) and modus tollens (If P, then Q; not Q; therefore not P). But this scientific syllogism doesn't do either. Rather than argue either of these two ways, it argues as follows: If P, then Q Q Therefore, P

Instead of affirming P (modus ponens) or denying Q (modus tollens), it affirms Q. In formal logic this is known as the "Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent."

Suppose I were to say: If it rains, then the pavement will be wet The pavement is wet Therefore, it must have rained

This is of the very same form as the general relativity argument. But the conclusion does not logically follow. The pavement could be wet for some 1-877-862-1097

It was this problem that was behind Morris Cohen's quip: "All logic texts are divided into two parts. In the first half, on deductive logic, the fallacies are explained. In the second half, on inductive logic, they are committed."

For many years scientists put confidence in experiments that suggested something they called phlogiston was the cause of burning (it turned out to be a reaction between fuel and oxygen); they assumed for a while that there was an ether through which light waves had to travel (then light was discovered to be a photon or a "wave-particle"); and the expanding universe hypothesis has gone back and forth numerous times between the static and the dynamic.

In all of these cases the original P that was thought to cause the Q really didn't cause it at all, despite the fact that, at least for a while, every time they did P, they got Q. Scientific theories are never "proven" in the strictest sense, but only corroborated.

The fact that the chief mode of scientific reasoning is a fallacy is not an excuse for dismissing science. Far from it. But it should be a lesson to us that, though certain theories may be said to be well-established, the findings of science are always to some extent tentative.

Science's Useful Fallacy

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The Before Exercises

Composition as Training in Virtue

by Abigail Johnson

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O my people, hear my teaching, listen to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter hidden things, things from old—what we have heard and known, what our fathers have told us.

Psalm 78: 1-2

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he aim and objective of classical education is to instill in students wisdom and virtue, focusing on the ideal person we are trying to form and the models we can use to accomplish this. This central idea is nowhere clearer than in the progymnasmata, the ancient writing method utilized in Memoria Press' Classical Composition by James A. Selby. The progymnasmata, a Greek word that translates as "the before exercises," encompassed the pre-rhetoric study of all the educated West from ancient Greece to Paul, from Quintilian, Aphthonius, Augustine, and Aquinas up until Lewis and Tolkien. Because our Christian philosophy and expression are so steeped in this tradition, it might be better to ask "Why not?" instead of "Why?" study the progymnasmata. In addition to its tradition, there are two absolutely critical reasons why the progymnasmata holds a significant place in classical education. The first has to do with the quality of virtue we intend when we set out to train a child, and the latter with the quality of mind.

The ancient Greek Stoics, founded by Zeno in the 300s B.C., hit on what I consider to be the greatest ever secular argument for the necessary morality of man: Since the things that are the most honorable and right will always lead to the best outcome, we have an obligation to strive for those things. An educated man, therefore, was not only one whose mind was crammed full of knowledge, but one whose heart had learned to adhere to the virtuous. In fact, the Stoics first proclaimed the four cardinal virtues that were later adopted into the seven Christian virtues of the Church. Quintilian stated in his Institutio Oratoria that "the perfect orator … should be a good man, and consequently we demand of him not merely the possession of exceptional gifts of speech but in all of Abigail Johnson lives in Kansas City, Missouri, with her husband and three children. Classically educated herself, she has taught Classical Composition, literature, and Latin for the past six years with the Memoria Press Online Academy.

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the excellences of character as well." Indeed, a man who had been educated but remained immoral and selfish would be to the Stoics, as Paul described, a person without true love, "a clanging cymbal," an unwelcome, brutish noise to be silenced as quickly as possible. Their perspective on the successful citizen inextricably combined a discerning mind with a strong morality, and thus no well-taught student was without appetite for the good in addition to a solid grounding in knowledge.

Enter the progymnasmata. I love Psalm 78 because it speaks of teaching good through story—that shaping the mind involves plot, action, decisions, good guys, bad guys, and just outcomes. The progymnasmata focuses constantly on developing an appetite for good and a hatred of evil while simultaneously filling a student's "basket of writing tools," as I call them. The Fable and Narrative stages of Classical Composition teach through the use of well-known morality tales and engaging plots. In the third stage, Chreia & Maxim, students invent characters that accept or reject wisdom, to their success or downfall.

Refutation & Confirmation teaches the invention of arguments for or against an action, based on the six Heads of Purpose, one of which is solely concerned with what is honorable and praiseworthy. In Common Topic, students examine the full extent of a sinner's decisions, which are based on faulty, selfish reasoning and a carelessness of others, and have cataclysmic consequences for himself and others. Encomium, Invective, & Comparison reaches into the background of both the virtuous and the corrupt, seeking to understand their origins and actions, and their farreaching effects on society. Further stages employ the development of empathy for the deserving and rejection of the unworthy, the basis of "universal law."

With Christ as our universal law we have the completed centerpiece—the cornerstone—of the design the ancients envisioned, and it truly is phenomenal to see "good" as inextricable from "reason."

The Before Exercises

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Pursuant to that, we must cultivate the mind as well as the heart, and Classical Composition thoroughly answers this challenge as well. At its most foundational, Classical Composition is successful in teaching good writing because it concerns itself first with ordering the mind. After all, writing is but a coded, visual representation of what is going on in thought, so it follows that to have good writing, one must first have good thought. One of the largest failures of "modern composition" is its inexcusable habit of putting the cart before the horse. Proponents are fixated on the formulated structure supporting the reasoning in an argument (the dreaded five-paragraph essay), but give no instruction whatsoever about how to come up with the supporting reasons in the first place. This is the equivalent of asking someone who's

of rhetoric who lived in the early centuries A.D. His clear, concise writing is ideal for learning writers to imitate. Once again the progymnasmata stands above modern techniques that require students to "have something to say" before they can begin writing. Instead, it always provides students with content and allows them to explore a given topic creatively, but not ex nihilo. Also, by using models that are purposeful down to the very structure of each sentence and the ordering of each point, students learn elevated style, argument development, and expression just by writing as Aphthonius demonstrated. Students are not expected to come up with their own standard of "what sounds good to them," but are given a good example to imitate, a "universal law" to follow, which is a profoundly familiar concept for we who seek to imitate Christ.

Whether at home in the kitchen, online at the faithful family computer, in the church basement at a cottage school, or in the halls of a private school, Classical Composition is useful for teaching all kinds of students— and is especially helpful when teaching a broad spectrum of natural abilities and ages in the same class. Because it focuses on specific skills that have infinite applications, the "natural" writer is challenged to become more fluid, subtle, and eloquent in the very same lesson that encourages the less enthusiastic student with clear steps to take and examples to follow, not leaving him to his own less-developed resources.

In this way, Classical Composition provides flexibility and integration of abilities and ages in classrooms and homes, instead of breaking students into groups based on "natural ability."

As Christians, we are not concerned just with being good citizens of Christ ourselves (though this is crucial), or with merely raising professionally successful children, but ultimately with equipping our children for every good work for the benefit of others.

Our desire is to make the next generation eager and ready to labor for Christ, or as Augustine put it, to defend "the glorious City of God against those who prefer its own gods to its Founder." This requires a firm, surefooted understanding of what is right and good and what is not, along with the ability to clearly explain and persuade others of that good—an act that draws both the speaker and the audience closer to God. Classical Composition addresses the two aspects of man's fallen nature—the damage to the soul and the damage to the mind—which can help repair the ruin we have made of our culture and ourselves.

An educated man, therefore, was not only one whose mind was crammed full of knowledge, but one whose heart had learned to adhere to the virtuous. new in town to pick up a gallon of milk for you at the store, but not telling him what store, or where the store is, or how to get there. The task is given, but not the means of being successful at it. Instead, after instilling both the broad and deep skills of clear description and explanation in the first three stages, Classical Composition goes on in Refutation & Confirmation to show a student, step-by-step, how to invent arguments under six different categories. A trip to the store is much easier when you have detailed directions and a map, and you are much more confident if you already know the area well and can choose the best of several routes. This is the beauty of the Heads of Purpose: They give students the ability to both invent and select the best argument to suit the needs of a position.

Couple these writing stages with Traditional Logic and good, rich literature, and in a few years you will have a formidable mind—and righteous heart—to contend with! Parents often humorously lament to me that their adolescent students become more difficult to beat in an argument after Refutation & Confirmation, which is music to my ears.

In addition to teaching vivid description and boundless argumentation, Classical Composition offers students extensive practice in the areas of arrangement, style, and content through the use of models to emulate for each and every stage. The models for Classical Composition come from extant essays written by a man called Aphthonius, a teacher 12

The Before Exercises

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LEXINGTON LATIN SCHOOL

by Martin Cothran "The wonderful, interesting, and age-appropriate Several months ago, I had just gotten on a plane curriculum," Davis says, "is worth its weight in gold for at the Bluegrass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky, on educating students. We have rich student books and easymy way to speak at a conference. A young woman to-follow teacher guides that the teachers love to use." was in the seat next to me, and we struck up a Lexington Latin began with two students in Davis' conversation. She asked me what I did and I told home, and has grown to 270 students at two campuses. her I worked with Memoria Press and had helped "Besides the blessings of God’s providence, which has to found Highlands Latin School in Louisville, just sent us extraordinary teachers and precious families," up the road from Lexington. She said there was she says, "we are greatly blessed by Memoria Press' a Latin school in Lexington too: Lexington Latin outstanding curriculum."

School. Her best friend sent her children there and As one proof of the school's success, Davis points they loved it. to students like Maddie Asbridge, who started at LLS I came to realize that if you bring up the name of in kindergarten and graduated this year. She was Lexington Latin in the Bluegrass area, you're likely awarded a full scholarship by Xavier University and to hear similar exclamations: "Oh, I've heard great will attend there in the fall. things about that school!" or "Friends of ours were "When I started school," says Asbridge in her college just telling us about LLS." admissions essay, "my parents enrolled me in Lexington Jeannie Davis, the school's headmistress, has Latin School. LLS is not your typical school: It only meets similar stories. Her husband's dental hygienist had three days a week and some classes consist of two people heard you could get a great education there at an … one being the teacher. … Looking back on those times affordable price; someone sitting behind her at her I see the extreme benefits of this uncommon education. grandson's baseball game had heard good things A classical Christian education about it from a neighbor who has taught me to have a strong sent her kids there. appreciation for the arts and has "Doctors, pastors, and shown me how the arts and the counselors suggest us to their world are connected." clients and congregations," says Asbridge concludes: "As I Davis. "Our applicants all tell us The Classical Latin am preparing to graduate, I feel they have heard amazing things confident going into my college about our curriculum, teachers, School Association? years because of my ability to do and school culture, either from something as simple as think." having talked to parents with "Families are telling us that students in the school or just CLSA Member School: they have heard it's a great small having heard."

30% off Teacher Training community with a wonderful It is this kind of buzz that is education," says Davis. "They one of the signs of a great school.

Registration note that we have small class Davis received what amounted sizes, teacher-led classes, and to a classical education herself, On-site Teacher Training strong classical curriculum. A having read and loved classic majority of our growth comes literature growing up. When her Accreditation from good word of mouth. childhood friend, Cheryl Lowe, "We hear from people often came to her with a curriculum that LLS is the best kept secret she had developed, Davis knew ClassicalLatin.org in Lexington." Well, maybe not that this was a curriculum she so secret anymore. could use.

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SIMPLY CLASSICAL

THE EASIEST WAY TO STRENGTHEN YOUR CHILD

by Cheryl Swope The highest end of true education is capable, compassionate service to others.

W

hen our children struggle with learning, or face challenges such as medical conditions, we can devote extraordinary amounts of time and effort to help them. We cancel plans and sacrifice money so they can receive therapies and see specialists. We change diets, find special curricula, and spend our evenings learning ways to help even more. We try to give our children everything. But in our quest to give them the best, do we sometimes neglect that which might help them most?

More Than Self Even as we serve our children, let us lead them to think of others. Even if he is still in diapers, a child can be encouraged to look, smile, or wave, rather than ignore someone when he is spoken to. In a high chair he can be helped to set down his cup, rather than drop it on the floor for someone else to pick up.

As he grows into the preschool years, simple chores can be expected because "we all pitch in!" A simple visual list of tasks can assist this practice.

In the classroom or homeschool the child can have a job that suits him. My daughter used to sharpen pencils for us every Tuesday. This bilateral task aided her own goals, as she helped prepare all of us for the homeschool day.

As the child grows, so can his areas of service to the family.

We can expand service to neighborhood, church, and extended family.

The child might help bake cookies or bring flowers to a next door neighbor recovering from surgery. He can color a stained glass image to present a church member when visiting the hospital. He can copy a verse of Scripture to insert into a card to Grandma. As he learns that all people in all roles need kindness, he can begin to replace innate inward preoccupation with a life of service.

Just because an animal is large, it doesn't mean he doesn't want kindness; however big Tigger seems to be, remember that he wants as much kindness as Roo. —A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Go Further Dr. Temple Grandin, a renowned animal researcher diagnosed with autism, says that as the child enters the teen years, it becomes "essential for him or her to get outside the house and accept responsibility for tasks that other people want done. Dog-walking. Volunteering in a soup kitchen. Shoveling sidewalks."1 Find his interests, or simply find a need. Sometimes we must serve in ways that do not interest us! This, too, is good and right. Create a life of seeing—and easing—need.

"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."2 For years, despite the challenges of her childhood-onset schizophrenia, my daughter was given the daily task of placing cool water in the dog's water bowl for our next door neighbor. Each day our neighbor went to work, and his dog was left in a run in the wooded backyard. My daughter could do this task, so she did.

Our neighbor paid Michelle a small amount each week, and her service mattered. When she realized this, she took that first job seriously. "I think Chloe needs company," she would tell me. Then I would watch her from the window 14

The Easiest Way to Strengthen Your Child Heading Goes Here

ClassicalSpecialNeeds.com

as she would settle to the ground, petting the grateful Brittany spaniel and reading the book she had brought along to occupy herself.

Children's literature can help foster compassion in your child. If a young child seems to lack compassion, cultivate this through picture books. Explore the faces of the characters. Ask, "Does he feel sad? How do you know? Why do you think he feels that way? How might you help him, if you were there?"

As the child grows older and reads stories of hardship, he can notice how other people helped the main character take heart in dire trials. We can link our own situations to those in stories we read. Draw upon timeless lessons learned through literature. This theme will present itself again and again, as Seneca the Younger reminds us: "Wherever there is a human being there is an opportunity for a kindness."

Service Lord willing, someday our children with special needs will be adults. We try hard to remediate disabilities, but we must not hinder abilities.

Instead, we must help them to know what they can accomplish. As Dr. Grandin reminds us, "Look at what they can do, not what they cannot do."3 This will serve them well, even as they serve others.

Two summers ago my adult daughter confided in me. Among her other disabling conditions, she had just been diagnosed with kidney disease, and we had both grown sober about her future. I asked her if there was anything she wanted. She said yes.

More than anything, she wanted to work. She longed

Simply Classical:

A Beautiful Education for Any Child

by Cheryl Swope Text $24.95 | eBook $22.00 This book guides parents and teachers in implementing the beauty of a classical education with special-needs and struggling students. The love of history, music, literature, and Latin instilled in her own children by a classical education created in Cheryl the desire to share the message that classical education offers benefits to any child.

to be able to give money to church, contribute to the household, and have money to spend like everyone else, she told me, big tears welling in her eyes. She already volunteered at a nursing home, but if it could be possible, she said, she wanted a job.

I listened, but I did not know whether it would be possible. She was not contagious, so this was not my concern; she was weakened physically. I knew that a job would help her look outside herself to serve in a more formal way, but I did not know whether anyone would hire her. After Michelle gave voice to this desire, she took matters into her own hands. On her volunteering day, she walked into the director's office and closed the door behind her. She made this earnest plea: "I've been volunteering here for several years.

It would be an honor for me to work here as your employee, if you have an opening."

Michelle now works as an activities aide in the nursing home. She works two days a week, four hours at a time. This accommodates for her physical limitations and gives her the desire of her heart. When she is dressing for work, putting on her badge, and then whistling or chatting cheerily to residents as she wheels them to the dining room, I know that during those Godgiven hours of service, she is thinking not of herself or her troubles. She is thinking of the people in her care.

1 Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum.

(Mariner Books, 2014), 188.

2 Aesop, The Lion and the Mouse 3 Temple Grandin, quoted by David Chandler, speech at MIT, http://news.mit.edu/2015/temple-grandin-talk-0318, accessed September 23, 2016.

Simply Classical Journal Sign up today: MemoriaPress.com/SCJournal Do you wish there was a Classical Teacher magazine devoted entirely to specialneeds education? Well, now there is. The new Simply Classical Journal, edited by Cheryl Swope, author of Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child, has the same features as the Classical Teacher—insightful, informative articles, and descriptions of new and existing programs—but geared toward you as a parent or teacher trying to provide a classical education to your student with special needs, whatever his or her challenges may be.

Cheryl Swope is the author of Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child and Memoria Press' Simply Classical Curriculum.

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The Easiest Way to Strengthen Your Child

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LITER ATURE

THERE IS A SPECIAL PROVIDENCE Hamlet's Fitting Response

“T

he time is out of joint," utters Prince Hamlet to his close friend Horatio after encountering the Ghost of his recently deceased father, King Hamlet, on the battlements of Elsinore. Hailing from a purgatorial realm, the Majesty of Buried Denmark has come to inform Hamlet of the true nature of his death—that he was murdered by his brother Claudius, Hamlet's uncle—and to bid Hamlet to restore justice by avenging his most unnatural death.

In the play, Hamlet encountered circumstances— both earthly events and metaphysical reality—that were too large for his rational understanding, and his response involved four key stages: 1) astonishment and incomprehension; 2) belief and acceptance; 3) the use of classical learning to help understand human nature, sin, and God, and to help deal with doubt and despair; and 4) his recognition that God is in control, and his readiness to act courageously when the time is right.

David M. Wright is the director of the upper-school literature curriculum at Memoria Press.

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There Is a Special Providence

by David M. Wright

The stages of Hamlet's response can provide a process for how we might deal with the tumultuous circumstances that surround us in our age. After all, if the purpose of dramatic art is "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror/up to [human] nature; to show virtue her own feature,/scorn her own image, and the very age and body/of the time his form and pressure," then we, too, can learn about ourselves and our age in Hamlet.

The first stage is significant because it involves Hamlet's initial response to his circumstances. When he encounters the Ghost, he is utterly awestruck. He reacts with a mixture of intuition ("O my prophetic soul!"), horror, fear, and astonishment. He implores the Ghost, "What may this mean/That thou, dead corpse, … So horridly to shake our disposition/With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?" The Ghost astonishes Hamlet to such a degree that his thoughts run beyond the reaches of his soul; his thoughts cannot be contained. Earthly and metaphysical reality have confounded his rational understanding.

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In fact, much of the play features the interrogative mood. The play opens with the question "Who's there?" and proceeds through many more questions in dialogue and soliloquy until it culminates in the deepest conundrum of all: "To be, or not to be—that is the question." The play is replete with questions because reality is shocking and bewildering, and we are left with more questions than answers.

In the second stage of his response, Hamlet confirms his belief in the supernatural, which he knows intuitively through his experience and reason. He declares to Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Moreover, he comes to accept reality for what it is—to accept the circumstances for what they are. As well, he acknowledges the metaphysical weight of his situation: "The time is out of joint.

O [dreadful fate],/That ever I was born to set it right!"

The third and longest stage in Hamlet's response encompasses various dramatic events and scenes in Acts 1-4. In this stage, Hamlet draws upon the classical education he received at the University of Wittenberg to help him understand human nature, sin and suffering, and God's relationship with man.1 In Act 1, scene 2, when Gertrude asks Hamlet why he "seems" to be taking matters so personally, he answers by drawing upon Aristotle and Aquinas in making a distinction between the essence of things and their external characteristics.2 Hamlet responds to her,

and explains to them the nature of his despondency.

In his answer, he echoes Pico della Mirandola’s quintessential Italian Renaissance essay, "Oration on the Dignity of Man," which serves as a good example of an optimistic view of man that Hamlet can no longer believe. With a kind of dark irony, he reveals his despair and loss of faith in man: "What a piece/of work is a man!

How noble in reason! … how infinite in faculties! … the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And/yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"

There are others, but in Act 3, scene 4, Hamlet draws upon a strand of prophecy in the Book of Isaiah where God may occasionally choose a human agent in a certain time and place to help thwart evil and restore justice. Sometimes the agent chosen may already be evil, a "scourge" who commits atrocities on his own, like a persecuting despot. At other times, the agent chosen may be ethically good—a prophet or a kind of "minister" of God's justice. After accidentally killing Polonius, Hamlet seems to consider himself a combination of both. He tells his mother,

The stages of Hamlet's response can provide a process for how we might deal with tumultuous circumstances.

Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems. …

[Outward appearances] seem; For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passes show.

In Act 1, scene 4, just before Hamlet meets the Ghost, he hears the flourish of trumpets and the drunken revels of King Claudius and his court. This triggers Hamlet to consider Aristotle's theory of hamartia, the tragic flaw, to help make sense of Denmark's drunkenness—which he deems to be the country's tragic flaw, soiling its reputation and achievements.

Rather quickly, Hamlet moves his argument from the general to the particular—to help him understand the corruption that he suspects in his uncle and mother: So, oft it chances in particular men That, for some vicious [defect] of nature in them, …

His virtues else, be they as pure as grace, …

Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault …

In Act 2, scene 2, Hamlet calls out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for spying on him on behalf of Claudius, 1-877-862-1097

For this same lord [Polonius] I do repent; but Heaven hath pleas'd it so, To punish me with this, and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister.

These words signal the end of an intellectual and spiritual journey, yet they also mark a new beginning.

Thus far, Hamlet has struggled through learned theories, perspectives, and personal moods to help him make sense of his irrational, degenerate circumstances.

Now he arrives at the final stage with a newfound faith and purpose. On his voyage to England, Hamlet senses the grace of God in preserving him from certain death and providing him a safe return to Denmark. When Act 5 begins, Hamlet has traveled through the mind and into the heart. He has relinquished his desire to control things—both intellectually and physically. Now he is able to allow God, who sees all and is above all, to hold his omnipotent governance over the world. In a way, Hamlet embodies the maxim, "Let go, and let God." Yet ironically, through this recognition and faith, he finds a new freedom—a freedom to act courageously when necessary—for now his action no longer depends on the variables of his will, pride, or fear of death—but rather on the "special providence [that exists] in the fall of a sparrow … the readiness is all."

1 "The Causes of Tragedy," William Shakespeare: Comedies, Histories, Tragedies. The Great Courses, 1999.

2 Joseph Pearce, "Introduction," Hamlet: Ignatius Critical Editions.

Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2008, p. xi.

There Is a Special Providence

17

The Lord of the Rings

and the Five Dimensions of a Story

by Peter Kreeft

E

very story, long or short, has five dimensions.

They are usually called its 1) plot, 2) characters, 3) setting, 4) style, and 5) theme. We could call them respectively, the story's 1) work, 2) workers, 3) world, 4) words, and 5) wisdom. "Philosophy" means "the love of wisdom." So a story's philosophy is one of its five basic dimensions.

Which "dimension" sold The Lord of the Rings? All five. To be great, a work of art must be great in not just one dimension, but all, just as a healthy body needs to be healthy in all its organs, a healthy soul in all its powers (mind, will, and emotions), and a morally good act in all its dimensions (the deed, the motive, and the circumstances).

A great story must have, first of all, a good plot, a great deed, a good work, something worth doing.

You cannot write a great story about saving a button on a sweater and nothing more. You can, however, write a great story about saving the world, which is what Tolkien did.

Second, a great story must also have great characters, or at least one great character (greatly drawn, at least) for readers to identify with, to find their identity in. We become the characters—in spirit, in imagination. No story is great unless it sucks us in, takes us up out of our bodies, and gives us an out-ofbody experience, an ekstasis, standing outside ourselves and in another. Great stories give us the grace of a mystical experience, on the level of imagination.

We can identify with nearly all of Tolkien's characters—even Ents. Who would have believed that any author could conjure up, in adult human beings, literary belief in talking trees? And who else has ever

Peter Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and the author of numerous books on Christianity, culture, and philosophy. This article is an excerpt from The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings.

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The Lord of the Rings and the Five Dimensions of a Story

given us more credible Elves? We know these are the real Elves; we must have in innate Elf detector, an innate Jungian archetype of true Elvishness.

Even inanimate things—forests, horns, swords—are characters with memorable, credible personalities.

Third, a great story also should have a great setting, an interesting world. Sometimes it is a familiar part of this world, sometimes an unfamiliar part of this world, and sometimes another world. The Lord of the Rings setting is not another world, but a historically unfamiliar portion of this world: its mythical past. "Middle-earth" is an old name for "the third rock from the sun."

Sometimes, the setting is at a minimum (e.g., in The Three Musketeers, the book, not the movie).

Sometimes it is at a maximum, when the setting is the most memorable dimension of all (e.g., City of Joy, again, the book, not the movies, or Hal Clement's sci-fi classic Mission of Gravity). The importance of the setting varies with the genre. It is the most in epic and the least in drama.

Many readers find the setting of The Lord of the Rings—Middle-earth itself—to be its most captivating aspect. People come together to stage day-long outdoor reenactments of the plot, using many acres of land, many characters in costumes (usually playing multiple roles), weapons, battles, etc. This has never been done for Death of a Salesman.

What of the fourth dimension, style? Sometimes a great story is told in a plain style (e.g., the Koine Greek of Mark's Gospel), or even a bad style (e.g., the fairy tales of George MacDonald). A great style can sometimes make up for a small story (Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, John Gardner, James Stephens), but more often a bad style ruins a good story (Thomas Wolfe, Olaf Stapledon, David Lindsay, even George MacDonald).

Even his most severe critics admit Tolkien's excellence in one aspect of style: language, especially his proper

names. Tolkien tells us that the whole of The Lord of the Rings emerged from this preoccupation.

But surely the most valuable of all the gifts a story can give us is its fifth dimension: its wisdom, its philosophy, its world-and-lifeview, its insight into ourselves and our lives and our world. Stories do not communicate this worldview directly and deliberately (as preaching does) or abstractly (as philosophy does), but t hey do it. It is t herefore perfectly proper to explore this crucial dimension, this depth dimension of The Lord of the Rings, especially if The Lord of the Rings is "the greatest book of the century" and this is, in some ways the greatest dimension of a book. Though Tolkien's philosophy can be gleaned from the story, the story is not simply a vessel for philosophy. A true work of art, as opposed to a work of propaganda, never is.

19

I

3

Classical Terms

by Martin Cothran

have given many speeches and written many articles on the subject of what classical education is. One of the things I have realized in doing so is that, among the many impediments to understanding what classical education is, there is the simple problem of the lack of clarity in the words we use to talk about it. There are three terms that those of us involved in classical education like to throw around, terms we sometimes use interchangeably and simultaneously or in some other way that obscures their meanings.

We are in no danger of being arrested by the language police over this, but our approach to classical education and our execution of it depend on our understanding of what these terms mean and how they are distinct.

The three terms are: "classical," "liberal arts," and "humanities."

The Definition of "Classical" The original and still primary meaning of the term "classical" is, of course, "of or having to do with the cultures of Greece and Rome." These are the two classical cultures. Its secondary meaning refers to the entire subsequent civilization which derived from these two cultures as they confronted the culture of the Hebrews, and as they were digested, transformed, and later revived by the Christian culture of the Middle Ages. It was the civilization composed of these elements which was handed down, from generation to generation, through Western Christian education, until the mid-twentieth century in America (later in Europe) when it began to be displaced in our schools in favor of other more political and pragmatic concerns.

By the term "classical education," we mean the system of education that emphasizes Western civilization—the cultures of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem—and that attempts to pass it on to the next generation. It is the project of reviving the modes of thought that assumed and the body of knowledge that undergirded the ideals and values of the West.

This system of education has two chief and theoretically distinct components: the liberal arts and the humanities—the first being the traditional set of learning skills, and the second being classical content. In other words, when we say "classical education," we mean the liberal arts and the humanities—language and mathematics on the one hand, and on the other, as Matthew Arnold put it, the best that has been thought and said.

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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In his 1847 "Lectures on the Advantages of Classical Education," James Pycroft made the distinction between the forming of the mind and the filling of it. The forming of the mind is the job of the liberal arts. The filling of the mind is the business of the humanities.

"We should not be learning the liberal arts," explained the ancient Greek thinker Isocrates, making the same point, "we should have learned them." "By studying them," continues Mulroy, "one could discover thought's basic patterns, which are what bind the seven liberal arts together.

In contemporary terms, their subjects are the The Definition of "Liberal Arts" procedures that are hard-wired in our brains and do "The cultivation of the mind," said Pycroft, "like not differ from topic to topic." that of a field, requires that we should first prepare And I should probably distinguish this account of the soil, and then sow the seed. You must sharpen the the liberal arts from Dorothy Sayers' use of the terms tools," he says, varying the metaphor, "before you "trivium" and "quadrivium," which, in fact, sparked can make any progress in your work." much of the classical education movement If the instructor does not form the mind we see today. Hers is not a description of of his pupil before he fills it in earnest, the historical liberal arts. It is rather an said Pycroft, then "the labour of the analogical use of the classical trivium The instructor is like that of the Danaids, to explain her developmental in mythological story: doomed to analogy. I don’t think Sayers had fill leaky vessels." any intention of redefining filling of the Even though we often the liberal arts, with which call classical education the vast majority of her mind is the business in general a "liberal Oxford audience arts education" (often would have been of the humanities. The forming con fou nd i ng t he familiar, but I think liberal arts and the she simply meant to of the mind is the job humanities), the term use the historical trivium "liberal arts" historically has as a convenient metaphor of the liberal a more specific definition. The for the developmental stages liberal arts consist of the academic of the child as they relate to arts. skills we have inherited from the education—just as she used the ancient world, which are the three historical quadrivium as a metaphor for language arts of the trivium—grammar, logic, the division of subjects. and rhetoric—and the four mathematical arts of Sayers' developmental analogy is indeed the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, useful, but when I use the terms "trivium" and and music. The liberal arts are a set of generalizable "quadrivium," I am referring to the traditional intellectual skills, originally considered to be nine, definition that Sayers herself would have known. I including architecture and medicine. But they were am referring, not to what Dorothy Sayers said, but to winnowed down to seven when, as Martianus Capella what she assumed. tells it, the arts (represented as young maidens) were The Definition of "Humanities" presented as servants to the goddess Philology, during her wedding to Mercury, and architecture and medicine If the liberal arts constitute the forming of the mind, were told—because of their concern solely for earthly the humanities constitute its filling. If the liberal arts things—to sit down and be quiet. are the how, the humanities are the what of our culture.

The linguistic and mathematical arts included The term "humanities" refers primarily to three under the liberal arts serve a purely instrumental things: history, literature, and philosophy. The formal purpose. "The liberal arts are the ground rules of study of philosophy, being an advanced subject, is thought," says David Mulroy, in his excellent book, generally best studied in college. For elementary and The War Against Grammar, "not its end." "In Aristotelian secondary education purposes, the humanities consist terms," he says, "they are not speculative disciplines, of literature and history. aimed at learning ultimate truths, but practical ones The humanities are not a means to anything else designed to serve ulterior purposes. The value of the other than wisdom and virtue. They are not quite an liberal arts, in other words, is instrumental—but no end in themselves, but they are a very fundamental less necessary for being so." means. It is through literature and history that we

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Three Classical Terms

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find out who we are as human beings. They tell us the story of who we are, how we should act, and what and whom we should admire.

For most of history, education served as the means by which a culture's ideals and values were passed from one generation to the next. The Greek ideal was embodied in works such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The ideals of the Romans were embodied in works such as Virgil's Aeneid. In the Christian culture of the Middle Ages, the equivalent would be Dante's Divine Comedy, in which Christian ideals were informed and contrasted with the natural knowledge of the classical cultures.

Though the humanities are technically only the studies of history, literature, and philosophy, they include the mythologies of both Greece and Rome, which, while not true in fact, are rich in insights about human nature.

T he g reat medieval a nd Renaissance stories, such as the tales of Chaucer a nd S h a k e s p e a r e, who were themselves nurt ured on t he classics, show how these great classical works could be transformed by a Christian consciousness. And then there were the stunning philosophical a nd t heolog ical ac h ievements of philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, taking the insights of the ancients and placing them in the service of the Christian religion.

American culture is the beneficiary, through England primarily, of this heritage, which is why a classical education does not ignore our own heroes, men such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, who themselves studied the classical heroes and classical cultures in a way that prepared them for their roles in the forming of this nation.

The Earliest Definition of Education And so we have established that classical education consists of two things: the humanities and the liberal arts.

We can see it in the earliest definition of classical education, which is in Book IX of Homer's Iliad.

Phoenix is counseling Achilles and he says, "To thee did the old knight Peleus send me the day he sent thee to Agamemnon forth from Phthia, a stripling yet unskilled in equal war and in debate wherein 22

Three Classical Terms

men wax pre-eminent. Therefore sent he me to teach thee all these things, to be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds."

Since speaking and thinking are two sides of the same coin (we could add writing as well), we can say that classical education is teaching students how to think and what to do—which is just another way of saying "wisdom and virtue."

An Aside About Science I have left out the term "science" in this discussion, since it has not had as great a role in the confusion attending the term "classical education." But a complete categorization of education would, of course, include it.

To ancient and medieval thinkers the word "science" simply indicated any organized body of knowledge.

There were the arts (skills) and the sciences (bodies of knowledge). Today we think of science only in terms of natural science, which is the organized body of knowledge about the natural world. But there are also the moral or humane sciences (the humanities, as we've just defined them), as well as the theological sciences, which study the nature of God and our relation to Him. The passing on of a civilization as an educational ideal and the formal development of the mind came under hostile scrutiny at the turn of the twentieth century, and was eventually displaced by other agendas. The old classical curriculum was slowly replaced by the new progressivism, which was more interested in reforming future society than in reading past classics, and by the pragmatic curriculum which demanded more specific job training rather than general mental training.

A curriculum that stressed how to think and what to do was turned upside down in the new curriculum, where the dual priority was not on how to think and what to do, but on what to think (indoctrination in political ideology) and how to do (vocational training).

But man is more than a political activist and an employee. As Aristotle pointed out, he is a knower, a doer, and a maker, and any education worthy of the name should address all of these.

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