Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

Autonomy of means and education

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Though not as well known as his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams (1886–1945) was nevertheless an active member of the Inklings throughout most of its lifetime, and displayed a powerful, if somewhat eccentric, spiritual insight. He wrote seven odd metaphysical novels that haven’t ever quite caught the imagination of mainstream readers, but which have had a fervent following among a few; he also wrote a number of plays and various works of literary analysis, and The Descent of the Dove, a history of the Holy Spirit in the church. It would be hard to imagine a more daring enterprise.

He also wrote two slim volumes of poetry. His poetic style is odd, his imagery occasionally encumbered with a kind of private symbolic vocabulary that defies casual analysis, and his points are frequently highly abstract and obscure. For all that, I personally think that these two books — Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944) — are the pinnacle of his creative achievement. He was admired by such prominent poetic luminaries as W.H. Auden, who wrote a kind of hommage to him on his death. But Williams’ unique power, I think, comes largely from his capacity to articulate transcendent truths that slice through every aspect of life — often drawing steely, almost brutally realistic distinctions that are nevertheless rooted in the love of Christ.

Partway through the first of those volumes is a poem entitled “Bors to Elayne: on the King’s Coins”. It is about the introduction of a money economy into an abstracted kind of Arthurian Britain (which he refers to by its older name “Logres”). From the middle of that poem comes the following passage (the dragons are the images stamped on the coins):

They laid the coins before the council.
Kay, the king’s steward, wise in economics, said:
“Good; these cover the years and the miles
and talk one style’s dialects to London and Omsk.
Traffic can hold now and treasure be held,
streams are bridged and mountains of ridged space
tunnelled; gold dances deftly across frontiers.
The poor have choice of purchase, the rich of rents,
and events move now in a smoother control
than the swords of lords or the orisons of nuns.
Money is the medium of exchange.”

Taliessin’s look darkened; his hand shook
while he touched the dragons; he said, “We had a good thought.
Sir, if you made verse you would doubt symbols.
I am afraid of the little loosed dragons.
When the means are autonomous, they are deadly; when words
escape from verse they hurry to rape souls;
when sensation slips from intellect, expect the tyrant;
the brood of carriers levels the good they carry.
We have taught our images to be free; are we glad?
are we glad to have brought convenient heresy to Logres?”

Ever since I first encountered these words more than thirty years ago, they have resonated with me — and in particular the line, “When the means are autonomous, they are deadly.” In almost every aspect of life today, we can see evidence of its truth.

It’s as true in economics, I think, as it ever was — as Williams first envisioned it. A preoccupation with money rather than actual goods and services — price as opposed to value — enables the twin banes of inflation and depression that have become all too familiar to us in recent years; it allows manipulation of currency as a tertium quid, essentially sundered from the goods and services themselves and from the human beings to whom they are meaningful or essential. In politics more broadly, I think, we daily see examples of means — offices, commisions, departments, or even whole governments, set up for noble reasons — that have, over time, become ends in themselves. They now exist less to advance the causes for which they were founded than to perpetuate themselves and to aggrandize their own power. One could make a similar argument for many unions, charitable organizations, political parties, businesses, or even schools: in short, for almost any of the human institutions that crowd and confuse our frail fallen world. The underlying pattern is the same. Things created to be means have become autonomous — ends in themselves, answerable to nobody.

I don’t want to become mired in the bog of elaborating on this politically: I have my own opinions, and so, probably, do you. Whatever your beliefs, there are probably a number of places where you can easily produce a ringing denunciation of these means-turned-ends. Your list might not be the same as mine, but there would probably be some overlap. In many cases it’s pretty clear that not only are these entities, whatever they are, no longer serving the good at which they originally aimed, but that they are actually subverting it. They stand in a kind of rebellion from their initial purposes. When it happens, we wind up spiraling downward into a kind of idolatrous service of the means rather than the end.

But I do think it’s worth looking at how this phenomenon intersects with our common goals here of enabling and supporting classical Christian education. Educational institutions, practices, and procedures are not exempt from this broad tendency, which is, after all, a reflection of our nature as fallen beings. Herewith are a handful of reflections on how that concerns us here and now.

Perhaps the most obvious case in point is the matter of grades. Grades are, like money, a medium of exchange. That’s all. They are only a medium, however, and of no intrinsic value. They presumably enable us to compare this student with that one and to come up with a kind of relative determination of their achievement, worth, or so on. From a Christian point of view, of course, that’s rather grotesquely misguided: that anyone could presume to evaluate another person’s worth in an absolute sense, when Christ died for each of us equally and entirely, is preposterous: but we may do it all the same, while masking the reality with comfortable rhetoric. It’s not about the students’ value, we say, but about their achievement. Fair enough: but people still tend to use the term as if it were evaluative of the person. Moreover, what we don’t admit nearly as freely as we should is the fact that the grades don’t reflect the students’ achievement or learning in a more than superficial way, either.

Sooner or later — usually sooner — this dichotomy will drive us to a parting of the ways. I have had parents withdraw students from my classes on the grounds that, though (they admitted) I was providing their children with a better educational experience, in which they were learning more and understanding more deeply, they really were sure that they would get better grades from someone less rigorous. That’s probably true. I should also say that I have also had parents tell me that they valued the substance of what we were delivering over the easy grade.

A grade for a course is only a way — a very reductive way — of measuring, quantifying, and talking about achievement. It is not, however, the achievement itself. It is a purely derivative good, and entirely without value on its own. Worrying about the grades in preference to worrying about the education that it supposedly represents is a bizarre substitution of the sign for the signified. It makes about as much sense as going to a restaurant on the grounds that, though the food is inferior, the menu seems better, or the man who convinced himself he was losing weight by redefining the pound to be twenty ounces.

At first blush, this seems comical, but self-deception is always, in the long run, a grave matter, and contains the seeds of tragedy, in both earthly and spiritual terms. It eventually leads us to a kind of idolatry of the signifier, while disregarding the thing signified. It propagates up and down the whole hierarchy of being and of our experience, and eventually will — as it must — taint our relationship with God.

A similar phenomenon is the frenzy of attention attaching to Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Someone, somewhere, has been telling (especially homeschooled) students and their parents that they really need AP credits by the truckload to be in contention for admission to any kind of good college. U. S. News and World Report rates high schools on the basis of how many AP courses they offer; certainly the College Board itself is not going to play down the importance of a multi-million-dollar industry that is making it (another now-autonomous means to an end) more powerful every year. This is further heightened by the fact that many schools compute the grade point average (GPA) in such a way that a B in an AP class is equivalent to an A in anything else; an A in an AP class gets one a 5.0 on a four-point scale. It’s insurance to assure that the GPA doesn’t dip below 4.0. One bogus marker becomes convertible with another. None of them any longer has much to do with learning.

In the increasingly frenetic pursuit of these brass rings, though, fewer and fewer seem to be stopping to consider that they really are just brass. Who is fooling whom here? One of the purposes of education, it seems to me, should have to do with cultivating the ability to distinguish the genuine article from the dross.

We’re trying to do that at Scholars Online (doubtless with limited success, but we’re trying). We offer grades because people demand them, but I confess I remain uneasy about the whole process. I’d much rather graduate class after class of people who were so excellent that no grade other than an A would be appropriate, but at that point it would lose its comparative punch. Similarly, we offer some A.P. courses because people want them, and because we’ve concluded that the curricula have been established on pretty solid grounds. In other cases, we’ve made the decision not to pursue A.P. status because the A.P. curriculum definition either seems intractable or pedagogically unsound, or would in effect entail a dumbing-down of what we’re doing. A majority of the students in my Senior English class go on to take the A.P. exam in Literature and Composition, and they normally do quite well. But it’s not required, and I don’t bill it as an A.P. course. After a few passes through the College Board’s review process, I determined that in order to meet their criteria, I would have to remove a good deal of the substance of the course to enable extensive rewriting exercises that are not, to my way of thinking, the best way of spending our limited time. One can agree with that decision or disagree with it: I respect that. But that disagreement should be about the substance of the educational experience, not because there’s any real pedagogical value to having the letters “AP” on a transcript.

If classical education is worth anything, it is about seeing past the superficial to the essential. Ideally it’s taking a stand against a culture of superficiality. The value of any part of your education is not, contrary to popular opinion, in its ability to lever you into a position to get more of it somewhere else, or even a job down the line. If it has no intrinsic value, scrap it. If it has that value, grab onto it and hold on tight.

As a Christian, I believe that education is for us ultimately a matter of helping us fulfill our real life goal — in Greek philosophical vocabulary, our telos — as created beings, which is to serve and to glorify God. It is to enable us to grow more fully into that personhood for which he created and redeemed us. It’s not just to get a good job, it’s not just to get more schooling.

Williams introduces Taliessin Through Logres with an epigraph from Dante’s Latin treatise entitled De monarchia: Unde est, quod non operatio propria propter essentiam, sed haec propter illam habet ut sit. Translated a mite loosely, that is: “Therefore it is that the proper function [of any given thing] does not get its reason for being from its essence, but the latter from the former.” It’s a demanding, humbling perception that gets tougher and chewier the longer you think about it. But I think it’s entirely correct.

I will try to follow up on this theme more in particular in the coming weeks.

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Latin pronunciation for the continuing student

Monday, April 19th, 2010

On bulletin boards and in magazines dealing with classical homeschooling, one question that arises over and over again is, “What sort of pronunciation should we use in teaching Latin?” The options usually boil down to two: the reconstructed classical pronunciation, and the Italianate ecclesiastical pronunciation. Both have their champions, and the discussions that follow in their defense usually generate more heat than light. A lot of the discussion is usually centered on which one is right.

Asking “Which pronunciation is the right one?” is an exercise in historical reductionism doomed to fail. One cannot define an entire spectrum from a single point, and the history of Latin as a living language extends for somewhat over two thousand years. Either is right. Neither of them is satisfactory for all occasions.

Typically, the most attention is given this question by parents just starting out in Latin instruction. At this point, the question is more or less moot, and any real anxiety is out of proportion with its pedagogical significance. While learning forms — declensions and conjugations — it doesn’t matter much how you pronounce them, as long as you learn those forms, what they mean, and what they’re for. For practical purposes, therefore, my own suggestion is to pick one — whether purposefully or arbitrarily — and use it consistently for the first year or two. You’re probably better off choosing a pronunciation matching the kinds of texts used in the introductory text. With something like Wheelock’s Latin Grammar, which draws most of its examples from classical authors, you probably want to go with a classical pronunciation. If you’re using a course like Henle’s, which is based on ecclesiastical texts and ecclesiastical authors, then it only makes sense to go with that as your pronunciation standard. If your chief reason for learning Latin at first is to be able to sing church music, that’s a good reason to start with an ecclesiastical pronunciation as well.

Later on, though, pronunciation will become significant, especially when one begins to deal with literary products. Poetry in particular is at least largely about the sounds of a language. I’ll discuss that a little bit later. First, however, it’s probably worth dispelling some of the widespread misinformation that gets circulated.

The one I’ve heard most frequently is, “There are no recordings of classical Latin speakers. It’s clearly impossible to know how the language was pronounced.” This is generally used as a way of dismissing the classical pronunciation, though a parallel argument could be used as easily to dismiss any other system. Unfortunately, those who make this argument are merely asserting that they don’t know how to figure something of this sort out. But there are those who do.

At the subtlest level, yes — there are things we don’t know. We’d give a lot to be able to plant even one microphone in the Forum to pick up just one of Cicero’s orations. But we actually do know, with fair accuracy, how the major inventory of language sounds were produced. Historical linguistics is a slow and painstaking process, but over its long history people really have taken those pains, and so there is now a substantial body of data available for analysis.

Detailing all those sources of information is beyond the scope of this discussion, but a few examples may suffice. We do have a few grammatical and literary discussions about mispronunciations, of course. These are at least somewhat interesting. But they usually document the egregiously odd — such as Catullus’ harangue against a certain Arrius, who added initial “h” sounds to a lot of words that should have begun with a vowel. Those are colorful, but provide less information than we might wish, and almost no information about what was normal. There are, moreover, relatively few of them.

Just as one might read novels and the publications of the popular press today without learning a great deal about how we pronounce English, one could stare at a page of Cicero for the next ten years and learn little or nothing about how Cicero pronounced it. It would help you very little in distinguishing classical from ecclesiastical pronunciations.

But those are literary texts, and literary texts are not the only tools of the discipline. The real treasures for the historical linguist are errors. Some of the papers I get from my students, for example, could provide more information about how we speak than a ten-year run of National Geographic or New Yorker: those who write “I might of known” instead of “I might have known” are providing virtually irrefutable evidence that, in its auxiliary usage, “have” is normally pronounced much the same way as “of”. That will tell us something about the loss of the initial h; it will also tell us that in “of” the final f is like a v. The fact that one sees, with increasing frequency, comparative phrases formed with “then” rather than “than” illustrates the fact that in an unemphatic position (as these connective words almost always are), the vowel itself tends to settle down to about the same middle schwa sound (ǝ).

Our surviving evidence from the ancient world is (unsurprisingly) short on student papers, but they are not short of inscriptions scratched into stone of one sort or another. Some of these are quite elegant; others are primitive — the desperate efforts, for example, of a grieving parent who wants to memorialize his dead son or daughter as best he can. Often that best is riddled with misspellings. The inscriptions themselves are often rather moving, reaching across centuries with an uncommon universality, but in addition, almost every one of them tells us something about the language.

Anyone interested in the detailed conclusions about classical Latin, and the fastidious work that has gone into reconstructing it, would be well advised to take a look at W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina. It’s fairly dry going, unless you have the philological bent, but it’s worth reading if you do. It argues every point with very solid evidence.

Of course the “we can’t know” argument is not the only one out there. Others are more belligerent and random. One of the more bizarre ones I’ve encountered over the last few years includes the reflection that “if it’s good enough for Dante, it’s good enough for me.” This sounds full of conviction, but substitutes triumphal ignorance for reason. Anyone even glancingly familiar with rhetorical fallacies will identify it as an appeal to inappropriate authority. Dante, writing a little more than 1300 years after Vergil (whom he regarded as his master), had no better direct access to recordings of Classical Latin than we do, but certainly lacked all the comparative evidence that has been marshalled over the last two centuries. To read Vergil as Dante did is probably a useful exercise, if you are interested in learning what Dante was hearing. It tells us virtually nothing about what Vergil was writing, however.

So does it matter what kind of pronunciation you use, and if so, why? To start with, no. It will obviously not affect your conversation with native Romans. It will probably not vastly affect your understanding of Latin texts. Some of the best classicists I have known have had very peculiar pronunciation. They seemed to get along. The English have had a long tradition of some of the finest classical scholarship in the world, coupled with with some of the worst pronunciation imaginable.

But if you want to deal with authors on their own terms, you probably need ultimately to learn and use two (or perhaps more) different ways to pronounce Latin. Sure, you should start with one method while you’re learning the ropes. But if you really want to appreciate the Latin that was written over a space of a thousand years, you have to be ready to adapt. It’s not really that hard, and the fruits of the exercise are considerable.

What’s wrong with reading classical Latin as if it were Mediaeval Latin? It’s not merely that it’s wrong. It’s not, I would argue, morally wrong, and if you can read and appreciate Cicero’s orations while reading them with a thick Italian or English accent, fine. But you will lose the music of the language, and especially with poetry, that’s important. Just as a brief illustrative case, let’s look at two consonants and a diphthong that are treated differently in Classical and Mediaeval pronunciations.

  • In classical Latin pronunciation, the letter C is invariably hard — like our K. It does not vary with position. In ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation, it will change to something like our CH sound (as in “church”) when followed by an I or an E.
  • Similarly, in classical Latin pronunciation, the letter T is invariably hard. In ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation, it will change to something like our S or TS sound when followed by an I or an E.
  • The diphthong AE in classical Latin is a true diphthong — beginning with A (as in “amen”) and gliding into an E or I sound — much like our word “eye”. In the ecclesiastical pronunciation, it is flattened to the equivalent of E — much like what we call a “long” A in modern English.

So in the classical pronunciation, the word “caelum” (heaven) comes out to something like “kylum”. In ecclesiastial pronunciation, it is going to be more like “chaylum”.

Consider the implications in the following fragment from the beginning of Bk. II of Vergil’s Aeneid. It’s written in the ancient meter reserved for epic and didactic poetry, dactylic hexameter. The meter is quantitative, and the lines are unrhymed.

A few lines into the book, one encounters the remarkable lines:

…Et iam nox umida caelo
praecipitat, suadentque cadentia sidera somnos.

…And now dewy night from heaven
descends, and the sinking stars bid us to sleep.”

Vergil achieves something remarkable here (and he knows it’s good: he quotes himself later in Bk. IV):

In a classical Latin pronunciation, the vowels are dark and muted; and the two words in the middle of the line contain an internal rhyme (suadentque cadentia), are followed by two words alliterating in S. The effect is lulling and hypnotic.

In an Italianate ecclesiastical pronunciation, all that is ruined. Praecipitat becomes something like praychippytot; cadentia becomes more like cadensia, which piles up one S-sound too many at the end of the line, so that the whole thing begins to hiss like a basket full of vipers.

Lest I seem to be exhibiting a bias in favor of the classical pronunciation, let me hasten to point out that one can achieve a similar train-wreck by reading mediaeval verse in the wrong way, too. Take the following example from the beginning of the monumental De contemptu mundi by Bernard of Cluny. It’s written in something also called dactylic hexameter, but it’s of a completely different sort. It’s qualitative (stress accent, rather than duration); its lines are rhymed internally (but always at word-end) at the end of the second and the fourth dactyls, and couplets are end-rhymed.

Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt — vigilemus.
Ecce minaciter imminet arbiter ille supremus.
Imminet imminet ut mala terminet, aequa coronet,
Recta remuneret, anxia liberet, aethera donet.
Auferat aspera duraque pondera mentis onustae,
Sobria muniat, improba puniat, utraque iuste.
Ille piissimus, ille gravissimus ecce venit rex.
Surgat homo reus; instat homo deus, a patre iudex.
Surgite, currite simplice tramite, quique potestis;
Rex venit ocius ipseque conscius, ipseque testis.

To read this in a classical voice is to crush its rhymes: ocius and conscius in the last line there are meant to rhyme, but won’t, unless one follows the ecclesiastical norms for how to handle C; if one keeps a classical diphthong pronunciation of AE, the end-rhymes between onustae and iuste are obliterated. The driving, almost manic energy of Bernard’s apocalyptic lines drains away.

My point here isn’t to champion one form of pronunciation over another. It’s to recommend that a maturing Latinist — and I would include anyone who has done three or four years of Latin with Scholars Online — should learn to adapt his or her reading to the text at hand. If nothing else, it’s an act of humility before the material at hand, and that is probably a good thing in and of itself.

Posted in Education, Language, Latin, Literature, Uncategorized, Western Literature to Dante | No Comments »

The King of Quotations

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

This summer I’m planning on teaching the second of my three Summer Shakespeare courses. Accordingly, I’ve been putting together a web site for it, and have been thinking about Shakespeare a good deal in general; in addition, our son recently played Hamlet in Minneapolis, and we were fortunate enough to get to see him in it.

Shakespeare is probably the single most revered author in the English language — the gold standard. He wrote brilliant plays containing intriguing situations, characters, and philosophical problems, of course, but most particularly he was a master of language. His words can still move, transform, and amaze us. Probably for this latter reason in particular, his plays have been mined, ever since they were written, as sources of pithy quotations, aphorisms, and the like.

The mere fact that Shakespeare wrote something, however, does not inoculate it against banal misuse. This is the more likely, inasmuch as Shakespeare is more often revered than read, and more often read than understood. Accordingly, one commonly encounters extracts taken out of context, presented as the wisdom of the ages condensed into lapidary iambic pentameters.

One particularly amusing — and common — example is from Hamlet I.iii: the final advice of the old courtier Polonius to his son Laertes, who is about to take ship to return to Paris:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

This is prettily turned, with a certain rhetorical flourish on “true” and “false”. Being true to yourself sounds like a good idea, surely, especially if it leads to being true to others as well. The sentence is so often quoted out of context that one might well encounter it a dozen different places without ever realizing that it was apparently meant to characterize the speaker as either a buffoon or a villain or both.

There are a number of ways to understand Polonius, but none of them should particularly commend him to us. The simplest is as a mere self-important windbag. Surely he is at least that. He is constantly spouting florid phrases without any sense of proportion or context; he’s so wrapped up in his own rhetoric that he’s lost track of content. He distracts himself and derails his own discourse.

He can also plausibly be seen (as David Ball argues in his brilliant little Backwards and Forwards) as a much cagier fellow — perhaps relying on an affected persona of the buffoon to mask the fact that he is a cold behind-the-scenes manipulator, who manages, in the cynical pursuit of his own advancement, to destroy his son, his daughter, and himself, and to steer most of the events of the Danish court into pure disaster.

In either case, however, three lines come as the consummation of a lengthy run of advice, almost all of which tells Laertes how to behave — but having nothing much to do with being true to himself in any sense of the term, either ancient or modern. Much of it has to do with creating an impression upon others — an impression that at least Polonius believes is a false one. Immediately after seeing his son off, he sends out a spy (Reynaldo, in a scene cut from almost every commercial production of the play) to keep an eye on him and find out — largely by slandering Laertes — what he may learn of him that is to his discredit. Polonius is not a trusting man — even so far as his own son (who deserves better) is concerned — and certainly he’s not one to be trusted himself. He is not true to himself; he is not true to anyone else.

That of course does not necessarily vitiate the advice: it probably remains a good idea to be true to oneself and so to others. But taking that as the sum and substance of the matter — a golden apothegm because The Bard said it — is largely to miss its point.

My point here is that any author — whether Shakespeare or anyone else — needs to be read with an eye to the whole. Any author can be the source of extracts that seem lofty and laudable, or reprehensible, without those things having any real relation to what the author was saying. Reading well, and reading charitably, involves pushing past those limitations and engaging with the text itself in context. The reader is the richer for it.

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Making Sense and Finding Meaning

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

My intermediate and advanced Greek and Latin classes are largely translation-based. There’s a lot of discussion among Latin teachers about whether that’s a good approach, but much of the dispute is, I think, mired in terminological ambiguity, and at least some of the objections to translation classes don’t entirely apply to what we’re doing. What I’m looking for is emphatically not a mechanical translation according to rigid and externally objective rules (“Render the subjunctive with ‘might’,” “Translate the imperfect with the English progressive,” or the like), but rather the expression of the student’s understanding of each sentence as a whole, in the context of the larger discussion or narrative.

We aren’t there to produce publishable translations: that’s an entirely different game, with different rules. For us, translations are the means to an end: the understanding is the real point of the process, but it’s hard to measure understanding unless it’s expressed somehow. The translations, therefore, are like a scaffold surrounding the real edifice — engagement with the text as a whole: its words, its sounds, and its various levels of meaning. That engagement is hard to pin down, but it allows us to make a genuine human connection with the mind of the author. A detached mechanical “translation”, though, is like a scaffold built around nothing, or the new clothes without the emperor. Even were artificial intelligence able to advance to the point that a computer could produce a flawless rendition of a text into another language, it still would not have achieved what is essential. It will not have understood. It will not have savored the words, grasped the concepts, combined them into larger ideas, applied them to new contexts, or come to a meeting of the minds with the author.
This is not always an easy concept for students to grasp. Some are fretful to get exactly the right wording (as if there were such a thing), but apparently less concerned with understanding the essential meaning. At the beginning of the year, I usually have a few students who make the (to me bizarre) claim, “I translated this sentence, but I don’t understand it.” My response is always some variation on, “If you didn’t make sense of it, you didn’t really translate it.”

We talk about making sense of the passage, but even that turn of phrase may be one of the little arrogances of the modern world. The prevalent modern paradigm suggests that the world is without order or meaning unless we impose it; Christianity, however, presupposes a world informed by its Creator with a consistent meaning that we only occasionally perceive. For us, it would probably be more accurate, and certainly more modest, to talk of finding or discovering the sense in the passage.

Whether we call it “making sense” or “finding sense”, though, it is not just the stuff of language classes. Every discipline is ultimately about finding meaning in and through its subject matter. In language and literature we look for the informing thought behind speech and writing. In history we look to understand the whole complex relationship of individuals and groups through time, with their ideas, movements, and circumstances, and what it all meant for them and what it means for us today. The sciences look to find the rationale in the order of the physical universe, mathematics the meaning of pure number and proportion, and philosophy to find the sense of sense itself. Each discipline has its own methods, its own vocabulary, and its own techniques. Each has its own equivalent of the translation exercise, too — something we do not really for its own sake, but to verify that the student has grasped something larger that cannot be measured directly. But behind those differences of method and process, all of them are about engaging with the underlying meaning. All real learning is. (In that respect it differs from training, which is not really about learning as such, but about acquiring known skills. Both learning and training are essential to a well-rounded human being, but they shouldn’t be confused with one another.)

From a secular point of view, this must seem a rather granular exercise with many dead ends. That each thing should have its own limited kind of meaning, unrelated to every other, seems at least aesthetically unsatisfying; it offers us Eliot’s Waste Land: a “heap of broken images”, pointing nowhere. Language is fractured, and our first great gift of articulate speech clogs and becomes useless.

Our faith offers us something else: we were given the power to name creation — to refer to one thing through or with another — as a way of proclaiming the truth of God, surely, but also, I think, as a kind of hint as to how we should view the whole world. Everything, viewed properly, can be a sign. As Paul says in Romans, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (1:20, NIV); Alanus ab Insulis (1128-1202) wrote, about 1100 years later, “Every creature in the world is like a picture to us, or a mirror.” Signification itself is transformed and transfigured, sub specie aeternitatis, from a set of chaotic references into a kind of tree, in which the signifiers converge, both attesting the unitary truth of the Lord and endowing every created thing in its turn with a holy function.

Posted in Education, Government, Greek, History, Language, Latin, Literature, Mathematics, Science | No Comments »

The Forest in the Garden

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Literature often gives us pairs of similar images with sharply contrasting implications or referents. In the symbolic vocabulary of an earlier age, the garden, with all its Edenic connotations, was a symbol of safety, confinement, order, and harmony. The language of medieval love poetry is filled with gardens representing the beloved. The very term “paradise” is ultimately a reference to a garden: the Greek παράδεισος is itself a borrowing from a Persian term that referred to the enclosed royal parks and gardens of the Great King. Latin lyric and elegiac poetry abounds with references to the locus amoenus — literally, “a pleasant place”, but virtually always represented as a garden. It is a commonplace that gardens symbolize repose and cultivated order. A garden is a place of nurture, where reason and intelligence are imposed upon nature. The cloisters of the mediaeval monastery were the dominant foci of intellectual life for a thousand years. So it is perhaps not too surprising that gardens often also symbolize education and nurture at every level, from Stevenson’s rather precious A Child’s Garden of Verses to the lapidary prose of John Donne, who in one of his sermons (XIV, preached at Whitehall, March 4, 1624), writes:

The university is a paradise, rivers of knowledge are there, arts and sciences flow from thence. Council tables are Horti conclusi, (as it is said in the Canticles) Gardens that are walled in, and they are fontes signati, wells that are sealed up; bottomless depths of unsearchable councils there.

Many may recall that quotation from the beginning of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night.

The garden metaphor is often expressed in the physical surroundings of an educational institution. One thing people look for in a college is an attractive campus. Even people who seem to like chrome and steel everywhere else seem to agree that the most beautiful colleges resemble gardens, or series of gardens, into which are set appealingly weathered buildings overgrown with carefully maintained and trimmed ivy. It is generally thought (and not without reason) that an attractive and restful environment is especially conducive to deep and serious study. But even without physical reinforcement — where there are no cultivated plots of green, aimless walks, or manicured parterres, the metaphor has a certain strength. It speaks to us of the quiet from which we go forth. There is something womblike about it; it is associated with childhood, the preparation before the conflict.

Forests are not so. Though they share certain obvious similarities as places of growth and fertility, they have been seen, especially before we came (arrogantly) to presume that we had tamed nature, as places of peril. They were dark, trackless, and filled with dangerous beasts. In the romance narratives of the Middle Ages, going into the forest betokened confrontation with God and with one’s innermost self. In Sondheim’s 1986 musical “Into the Woods”, the forest is a place where one must go perforce — and from which one also must return. Forests are uncultivated, unpredictable, and chaotic. The 13th century romance that now goes by the name of The Quest of the Holy Grail describes how the quest begins:

The next morning at daybreak the companions rose, and taking their arms, went off to hear mass in a chapel within the walls. This done, they mounted their horses and commended the lord of the place to God’s keeping, thinking him earnestly for the great honour he had shown them. Then they rode out from the castle and separated as they had decided amongst themselves, striking out into the forest one here, one there, wherever they saw it thickest and wherever path or track was absent. And even those men who fancied themselves hard and proud shed tears at this leave-taking. (Tr. P. M. Matarasso)

Nathaniel Hawthorne depicted forests as places of spiritual peril: it is in the woods outside of town that Young Goodman Brown sees what he sees (or was it a dream?) In the woods, too, Hester Prynne commits the sin for which she is compelled to wear the scarlet letter; and part of her punishment is living in a house at the fringe of the town, always at the margin of the woods. Tolkien’s Mirkwood is a place of festering overgrowth and danger; his Lothlórien is all the more dangerous for the ancient power that lives there. The forest is not a safe place — not in reality, and not in imagery.

Most parents — and many homeschooling parents in particular — express a lot of anxiety that our schools are not safe. And of course I concur that we don’t want schools infested with gangs and drugs and gun-toting psychopaths. But the notion that school is a safe place or a safe undertaking, for that matter, is at some level necessarily false.

The garden and the forest are inextricably entwined. This is not just because there is a lurking snake in the grass at every turn, or because academic institutions have a dark underside. One could talk about that, of course — and many have. Those are (if common) at least accidental. But in every garden there lurks an essential wildness, and in any academic undertaking there is an irreducible kernel of high peril.

This is not just abstract talk. There is nothing more dangerous you can do with your children than educating them. Education produces ideas; ideas have results. Not all of those ideas are good, and the results can range into territory that at least a believing Christian would believe are of infinitely greater moment and gravity even than physical peril. In teaching our children we are forming their souls — shaping them, as C. S. Lewis argues in “The Weight of Glory”.

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

If this is true of our neighbor (and I firmly believe that it is), how much more so of the children we have engaged to teach, on whom our influence is much greater than on any of our other fellow creatures? We are forming minds; we are also forming souls. The stakes are as high as any we normally encounter, and yet the results are not completely in our hands, and even those parts that are under our control are largely over uncharted terrain. We will occasionally botch the job. There will be consequences: there always are. We will hurt our children. (They will hurt us too, but what of that?)

True education is a real encounter. It cannot be faked or falsified; it cannot be prepared or anticipated. The moments when the real education happens may — and sooner or later will — rattle one’s secure vision of oneself down to the ground.

There is a lot of specious education going on in the world today. There always has been. There have always been facile ways of simulating the fruits of the genuine process. They seldom hold up under intense scrutiny, but they often satisfy those who want an easy route: a guaranteed pattern of success. But God does not promise us a safe passage, or even to safeguard us from doing harm ourselves, with the best of intentions. But He is with us there at the heart of the enterprise, and has shown us in the improbable economy of grace that even our most horrendously botched jobs can be redeemed. Therein lies our hope.

— Bruce McMenomy

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