Would Socrates Zoom?

Posted on by Paul Drake

A discussion on how the Zoom platform ‘does and does not’ work for classical socratic pedagogy, professional meetings, church and bible studies, or any other form of important gathering. We’ll talk about the centrality of community, face to face interaction, body language, setting, and live caring for one another in a world of lockdowns.

Grant Horner

Dr. Grant Horner is a full-time Associate Professor of Renaissance and Reformation Studies at The Master's University in Santa Clarita, California, where he was named “Professor of the Year” in 2001 and 2007. Dr. Horner received his PhD from Claremont University. He specializes in literary and cultural studies, philosophy, theology, art history, and film studies. He teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature and courses on Milton, Shakespeare, Poetry and Poetics, The Epic, Dramatic Literature, Critical Theory (Pre-Socratics through Derrida), Art History, Film Studies, Classical Christian Humanism, Classical Latin, and Comedy. He is the founder and director of The Master’s University in Italy Program, an intensive study abroad experience for the university’s students. Dr. Horner also crafted the Humanities program at Trinity Classical Academy and continues to mentor teachers at the school. He has discussed theological trends, philosophy, and popular culture in numerous radio, television, and college-campus speaking engagements. *Adapted from The Master’s University website

Augustine, Africa, and the Idea of the West

Posted on by Paul Drake
From the continent of Africa came the greatest ancient Church father and an influential classical educator—St. Augustine. Dr. Grant Horner explores how the education Augustine described and practiced is now what we call “classical Christian education.”

Grant Horner

Dr. Grant Horner is a full-time Associate Professor of Renaissance and Reformation Studies at The Master's University in Santa Clarita, California, where he was named “Professor of the Year” in 2001 and 2007. Dr. Horner received his PhD from Claremont University. He specializes in literary and cultural studies, philosophy, theology, art history, and film studies. He teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature and courses on Milton, Shakespeare, Poetry and Poetics, The Epic, Dramatic Literature, Critical Theory (Pre-Socratics through Derrida), Art History, Film Studies, Classical Christian Humanism, Classical Latin, and Comedy. He is the founder and director of The Master’s University in Italy Program, an intensive study abroad experience for the university’s students. Dr. Horner also crafted the Humanities program at Trinity Classical Academy and continues to mentor teachers at the school. He has discussed theological trends, philosophy, and popular culture in numerous radio, television, and college-campus speaking engagements. *Adapted from The Master’s University website

Socratic Dialogue Demonstration

Posted on by Paul Drake

Grant Horner

Professor Grant Horner’s academic specialty is the literature, theology and philosophy of the Renaissance and Reformation, with primary concentration in Milton, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin and late sixteenth and seventeenth century intellectual and cultural history. His research and writing has focused on Christian Humanism in the Reformation, particularly the complex relationship between developing Reformed thought and Classical Graeco-Roman pagan mythology and philosophy. At Duke University he was taught and mentored by Stanley Fish, America’s leading literary theorist. He has worked on the citation of classical Greek and Latin authorities by Renaissance writers, published on theology and the arts, and is actively researching and writing a full-length work on John Milton and John Calvin. His book Meaning at the Movies on lm and theology (Crossway, 2010) was an Amazon bestseller and nominated for Book of the Year in Christianity and Culture by the Book Retailers Association.

The Socratic Method is Utterly Pagan and It’s a Good Thing Too

Posted on by Paul Drake

Central to authentically classical teaching is Socratic dialogue. It is a major attraction for parents and students considering classical education and a core reason highly motivated and serious intellectuals love working in such institutions. The drudgery, boredom, and ineffectiveness of so many other teaching styles and systems stultifies both teachers and students; classical pedagogy invigorates and inflames them with a passion for learning.

When I ask for definitions of Socratic dialogue, even seasoned teachers who use it are often at a loss. I hear variations of “well, we talk about the reading, and I ask lots of questions instead of lecturing.” We describe the event instead of thinking through why it works. Certainly very few of us run discourses exactly as Socrates did, where someone is led down a garden path by a slightly ironic master spirit only to discover their own ignorance unfolding before them. Such a method can be a hard sell when also discussing tuition payment plans.

But the real hard sell is elsewhere. How many times have we heard, “But wasn’t Socrates a pagan? Why use a ‘Socratic method’ of asking questions, instead of just telling the kids what to think?” Toss in some problematic pagan content (Ovid, anyone?) and you have a serious recruiting and retention problem. As Tertullian asked, what has Athens to say to Jerusalem? Shall the former dare charge tuition to the latter? And would that conversation be a Socratic one?

We would indeed be wise to ask, how Christian or biblical is Socratic discussion, exactly? Did Jesus use it? Did he simply imitate a Greek philosopher who preceded him? Did he claim like Socrates to know only that he knew nothing? Both showed with revelatory efficiency that none of us know what we think we know. And while there are certain parallels between Christ and Socrates, there are far more differences than similarities, including the ultimate difference – namely that, after drinking the hemlock, Socrates remained dead.

So the question must be asked: is education which is Classical, Christian? Why use content and methodology derived, even in part, from darkened minds? This question is beyond the scope of a short article, but one piece of the puzzle is the nature and workings of Socratic dialogue, and it is this which I would like to consider here.

A common defense for Classical Christian education goes rather like this: God is sovereign over all; all truth is God’s truth; even pagan culture functions under God’s rule, including worldviews, belief systems, and cultural tropes; these cultural expressions are all partial, shadowy imitations or reflections of God’s ultimate truth. Thus pagan content and even methodology are worthy of study and of some use to Christians.

It does not take particularly keen observation to recognize this formulation as absolutely Platonic and perhaps a weak apologetic for Classical Christian education. A skeptic would say the premises contain the desired conclusion – that paganism has already infected Classical Christian education at the level of foundational justification. Yet a similar critique could be mounted against this objection, which is built upon an unproven assumption that there is no value in studying the pagan conception of the world. Stalemate.

Which brings me to my thesis: that there is in fact a theological reason why Socratic dialogue is so effective, and why Christians should utilize it in the educational setting.

II.
But first, what exactly is the classical pagan theory behind Socratic dialogue? It did not just suddenly appear fully- formed on the tongue of an annoyingly inquisitive Greek philosopher. Surprisingly, few who use it are familiar with its origins. A brief glance towards a few ancient texts can provide the basic framework. In Cicero’s marvelous little book on aging, De senectute (44BC), we find lodged among manifold Ciceronian gems this nugget: “And a strong argument that men’s knowledge of numerous things antedates their birth is the fact that mere children, in studying difficult subjects, so quickly lay hold upon innumerable things that they seem not to be then learning them for the first time, but to be recalling and remembering them. This, in substance, is Platos’ teaching” (xxi.78). Cicero refers to Plato’s Meno and Phaedo and to a lesser extent the Phaedrus.

This educative “remembering” as opposed to learning something entirely new is called anamnesis. Etymologically it suggests “not-not remembering”, what we could call “not-forgetting” or, better, “remembering”. The Greek and Latin prefixes, a double-negation before the root “remember” (an+a+mnesis) is significant. The word’s form is a roadmap of its function. In the Platonic and Socratic conception, learning is an unforgetting. You knew something; you forgot it; it was brought back into your consciousness. Who brought it back?

A teacher, asking questions.

We see this in narrative form in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 6. Here Aeneas, legendary founder of Rome, imitates the heroes of antiquity by descending into the underworld to gain advice from his dead father Anchises. He sees many dead Trojans and Greeks (who scatter before their dread enemy) and has a most decidedly awkward encounter with Dido, his ex-lover who committed suicide after he abandoned her. Aeneas wonders at a massive throng of the dead drinking from Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness; souls doomed by Fate to suffer again through bodily human life. But why leave pleasurable Elysium for another round of human tribulations? Anchises explains that souls are continually reincarnated until they reach perfection. After death, souls that were relatively bad go to Tartarus to be purged of evil habits and deeds; relatively good souls enjoy Elysium temporarily but must eventually return to the world to live better and better lives with each incarnation. Anchises then shows Aeneas a long line of souls awaiting rebirth – his Trojan ancestors, waiting to be reborn as his Roman descendants. Aeneas is the link between them; the last Trojan and the first Roman, watching his past becoming his future. Aeneas will be reborn as Marcellus, nephew to Caesar Augustus, who in actual history died shortly before Virgil read the Aeneid at Caesar’s court. (According to Seutonius, Marcellus’s mother Octavia – Caesar’s sister – fainted as Virgil read his heartwrenching passage describing her freshly dead son as the reincarnated Aeneas.)

So why, when a soul is reborn, are we ignorant children – blank slates? The combination of the birth trauma and drinking the waters of Lethe causes us to forget what we have learned. The idea seems to be that excellent character is more habit than rational choice –- a person’s nature is made wholly good, in a Platonic sense. Goodness is the result of bringing to mind the wisdom learned in past lives and the underworld; this is Virgil’s reworking of Plato’s doctrine of recollection. You don’t learn so much as you remember: anamnesis – the not-not forgetting. Socratic teaching is a kind of midwifery delivering up by questions the goodness buried in the soul. This is all very interesting – and very pagan. The book of Hebrews couldn’t be clearer: “It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment.”

III.
It is now vividly apparent why Christians may rightly look askance at a teaching method of such pagan provenance. But let us put this in theological perspective.

In Romans 1 Paul delineates the primary marker of the human condition – the rejection and suppression of truth:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. (Romans 1:18-23 ESV)

As I argue extensively in Meaning at the Movies (Crossway, 2010) this passage is a crucial locus for understanding the origins and nature of human cultural production – not just what we make, but why we make anything at all beyond the bare necessities for survival. Where does culture come from? What is the ultimate source of our ideas, conceptions, values, practices, desires? Paul also addresses this issue indirectly in Acts 17. He quotes — apparently from his well- educated memory — several pagan philosopher-poets in the well-known words of verse 28, asserting that even their own poets know core truths about the invisible and immaterial God. Then he rebukes the Athenians for producing material idols: “Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.” Paul knows and quotes the Phaenomena of the Cilician poet Aratus and the Hymn to Zeus by Cleanthes of Assos. Pagans ironically rebuke pagans: the Athenians should know that we are the offspring of God and that he is unknowable through the “art and imagination of man.” This final phrase is worth close examination, and will bring us back to the suppression of truth in Romans 1.

Paul’s phrase in Acts as recorded by Luke is τέχνης καὶ ἐνθυμήσεως – two feminine genitive singular nouns linked by the conjunction ‘kai’ (‘and’). “Technes” is consistently translated as “art” but this is problematic; it is the root of “technique” and “technical” and is more than painting and sculpture. Its sense includes making objects for practical and/or aesthetic use. But it is not merely material. It was used equally in the plastic arts as well as medicine and farming, and even the techniques of ruling a city, as in Plato’s Republic. We could call it “production”, whether material or non-material. The other word, “enthumeseos”, is equally interesting. It is often translated “device”, “thought”, “invention”, or “design”. It is used of “thought” or “thoughts” in Matthew 9:4 and 12:25, and Hebrews 4:12; it is quite rare in classical literature but shows up in Hippocrates, Euripides, Thucydides, and Lucian. There it means thought, imagination, and in some cases, intense desire or drive. I think we need to consider these phrases in Acts in terms of both Romans 1 and another, seemingly unrelated passage: Genesis 4.

In Genesis 4, the origins of two sets of practices are contrasted: the descendants of Cain settle in the “land of Nod, east of Eden” and develop early cultural expression in music and metallurgy. “His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal-cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron.” This seems to powerfully suggest idolatrous worship. This worship originates, I believe, from what Paul calls enthumeseos in Acts 17 – a pattern of thoughts, an imagining, even an intense desire for meaning, grounding, a workable view of everything — all lost in the Fall. Man now desperately desires to fill that vacuum with cultural production, techne, culture which is made – and which replaces God. The replacement is always a partial imitation of truth, simultaneously accurate (because it knows the truth and acknowledges a need for God) and blasphemous (because it ultimately rejects God as he truly is and suppresses the truth).

The final lines of Genesis 4 complete the picture. Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth, produces Enosh, and then we read “At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.” Here is the apparent beginning of some kind of formalized worship of the one true God, clearly set over against the idolatrous “culture” in music and metallurgy of those who can now properly be called “pagans” as they sing and dance around metallic statues -– those who know the truth but have suppressed it.

IV.
Romans states that what can be known of God is built into man by God himself. He hardwires this core knowledge about His existence, nature, and workings into all of us; this knowledge is not a salvific understanding or faith, and in any case it is rejected. The primary effect of this knowledge is to remove the possibility of excuse from the unrepentant soul: no one can claim “but I didn’t know about God!” Because humans are by nature lost in sin, the response to this built-in knowledge of God is the act of suppression. Humans are actively, continually “forgetting” the knowledge of God. This brings about an interesting conundrum. How do you deliberately forget something? The act of suppression necessarily brings to mind the very subject being suppressed. In other words – suppression – deliberate forgetting – is doomed to failure, because you have to remember to forget. Since the knowledge of God is unbearable for those who reject Him, the acts of suppression continue, though futile. And this is not all that is suppressed. The act of suppression itself must be forgotten, denied, suppressed. You can’t suppress something successfully if you remember that you did so. The remembrance reverses the forgetting. Suppression requires suppression. We are most decidedly not like Aeneas — who has forgotten what Lethe does to the memory … because he drank from it himself. Aeneas is a mere human fantasy embodying our desperate desire to forget.

And so humans end up in a terrifying loop from which they cannot escape: they are aware of God and His commands; they suppress this knowledge; the suppression is ineffective because they can neither forget their suppression nor entirely escape truth; this set of circumstances is unbearable; the answer is more suppression. Unregenerate humans are trapped in a suppression whirlpool unless released by conversion, in which case the truth is unearthed, accepted, and becomes the transforming agent that sets you free. Until then truth remains rejected, suppressed, and “forgotten.”

If this is in fact an accurate picture of the human condition, then we have a better way to understand the superstructure of ideas supporting the ancient pagan theory and practice of Socratic dialogue. And we are in a better position to strategically utilize this technique and defend its usage from a theological rather than merely practical basis. Christians do not believe in multiple reincarnations leading to perfection via recollected knowledge; we believe that the suppressed Truth about Christ, when brought back to life in a dead heart, will set you free. Since studying human culture in light of Scripture inevitably shows us what we are, such study can, when well-guided, lead to deep self- knowledge. And it starts with questions.

All human culture – even the Socratic/Platonic doctrine of recollection — is a kind of tension between the wistful looking back towards a desired but lost Eden and a violent attempt to suppress the truth about that loss. Wise Christian Socratic teaching actually unpacks suppressed knowledge of God and his world, and of our condition. It reveals the truth about ourselves to ourselves. The fallen heart is cor incurvatus ad se “curved in on itself”; a Christian Socratic teacher gently unbends the heart by reminding it of the truth, which Christ and Scripture may then unfold from within the recesses of even the most resistant heart. Christian Socratics brings forth an unforgetting of the forgotten and suppressed truth. And that is why it works so well. The Greek word for Truth is of course aletheia – “not forgetting.” No Lethe.

“The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.” Proverbs 20:25 (ESV)

Socratic Literary Exploration: How to Teach Dialogically

Posted on by Paul Drake

Professor Grant Horner will lead a fully interactive Socratic teaching dialogue demonstrating interrogative pdagogy. Seven to ten seminar participants will work Socratically through two or three brief, connected lterary passages from John Milton, one classical pagan author, and Scripture. If the seminar has more attendees than that, the extras will observe. The last ten minutes will be devoted to analyzing the Socratic thread and various questioning techniques for teachers.

Grant Horner

Professor Grant Horner’s academic specialty is the literature, theology and philosophy of the Renaissance and Reformation, with primary concentration in Milton, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin and late sixteenth and seventeenth century intellectual and cultural history. His research and writing has focused on Christian Humanism in the Reformation, particularly the complex relationship between developing Reformed thought and Classical Graeco-Roman pagan mythology and philosophy. At Duke University he was taught and mentored by Stanley Fish, America’s leading literary theorist. He has worked on the citation of classical Greek and Latin authorities by Renaissance writers, published on theology and the arts, and is actively researching and writing a full-length work on John Milton and John Calvin. His book Meaning at the Movies on lm and theology (Crossway, 2010) was an Amazon bestseller and nominated for Book of the Year in Christianity and Culture by the Book Retailers Association.

Are We Blind? Visual Culture in the Classical School

Posted on by Paul Drake

What does it mean 'to look' and 'to see'?What is the role of the visual arts in the classical Christian school? Is there a theology of sight and of looking? Is there a 'visual/socratic interface'? Is 'classical art' the only kind of art we should spend time thinking about? How does our visual cultural production/consumption demonstrate human nature? And how can we avoid graduating 'blind' seniors, who have never really learned to 'see biblically'?

Grant Horner

Professor Grant Horner’s academic specialty is the literature, theology and philosophy of the Renaissance and Reformation, with primary concentration in Milton, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin and late sixteenth and seventeenth century intellectual and cultural history. His research and writing has focused on Christian Humanism in the Reformation, particularly the complex relationship between developing Reformed thought and Classical Graeco-Roman pagan mythology and philosophy. At Duke University he was taught and mentored by Stanley Fish, America’s leading literary theorist. He has worked on the citation of classical Greek and Latin authorities by Renaissance writers, published on theology and the arts, and is actively researching and writing a full-length work on John Milton and John Calvin. His book Meaning at the Movies on lm and theology (Crossway, 2010) was an Amazon bestseller and nominated for Book of the Year in Christianity and Culture by the Book Retailers Association.

John Milton, Proaeresis, and Education

Posted on by Paul Drake

John Milton’s Areopagitica stands utterly alone in the great Western intellectual tradition. It was central to the rights of freedom of thought and expression n America’s founding and is the single greatest anti-censorship argument ever penned. But in that same summer of 1644, Milton also wrote a much shorter, less-known work. Of Education, like Areopagitica, stands alone. Today, it still occupies primacy of place in arguments for a classical Christian education—and with good reason.

The Puritan John Milton has been called the greatest genius of the seventeenth century—the “century of genius.” This is the age of Shakespeare, of the greatest Puritan theologians, and of Francis Bacon’s invention of inductive rationalism: the scientific method. Milton attended Saint Paul’s School in London, where the classical curriculum and intense study of the Bible and ancient languages prepared him not only for Cambridge University but also for a long life as one of England’s most-beloved poets and most-hated political polemicists—and, perhaps, its deepest thinker about Christianity and culture. Milton mastered about a dozen languages and had facility in several others, was said to have his Homer and his Bible “by heart,” and, by all scholarly account, apparently read everything available in the seventeenth century. He is best known for his epic Paradise Lost, but his staggering output fills a sizeable shelf of poetry and prose, theology and politics, history and cultural critique. A major intellectual force in the Commonwealth government both before and after the beheading of Charles I, he wrote extensively supporting that first toppling of a European king; his first publication – a poem on Shakespeare – came at the tender age of 23 in the second edition of Shakespeare’s works; and he befriended the most famous “religious prisoner” in Europe: Galileo. And, yes — he looked through that very first telescope. Milton hardly fits the stereotypical image of a Puritan.

Then, if you can imagine such a disaster for a brilliant scholar, whose lives are their eyes: in his early forties at the height of his fame and influence, he went blind.

What he produced—his greatest long poems and many other works—after his blindness is indeed staggering and shows the power of a great mind dedicated to God. Of Education lays out his views on classical Christian education. It is essential reading for those involved in the current revival of the ancient model.

Milton begins with one of his most famous lines: “The end then of Learning is to repair the ruines of our first Parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.” The goal of learning, for a Christian, is to begin the process of recovering from the damage of the Fall. Milton does not believe that education removes or alters the fallen nature. But ignorance is a costly way to live, and education should always teach us about ourselves, our world, and our God. It thus has the possibility of making us better people who live more wisely in this world and who love God more and more.

The problem according to Milton is that languages and other disciplines are taught poorly and unwisely. Most students have a disastrous experience: “So that they having but newly left those Grammatick flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climate to be tost and turmoil’d with their unballasted wits in fadomless and unquiet deeps of controversie, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of Learning … while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge.” Students are dragged, unready, into deep, complex issues before they can even parse sentences. As a result, they grow weary and contemptuous of learning.

Milton has a plan. “I shall detain you no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but strait conduct ye to a hill side, where I will point ye out the right path of a vertuous and noble Education; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect, and melodious sounds on every side, that the Harp of Orpheus was not more charming.” A truly virtuous and noble education is difficult at first, yes, but his metaphor of ascending a hill is perfect. The first steps are painful, but, as we warm to the work, our pace quickens, our view widens, and we gain new prospects from higher positions with each passing day. Learning, instead of drudgery, becomes a thrilling adventure of exploration, challenging the mind and satisfying the soul.

Milton’s full curriculum and pedagogy is beyond the scope of a short essay, but his text, though dense, is not long. He delineates a strong course of study grounded in the humanities and languages, rounded out with science, mathematics, and athletics — including wrestling and swordsmanship! Intense reading, writing, and Socratic discussion are designed to form a critical, discerning mind. The teacher’s qualities are crucial: “he who hath the Art, and proper Eloquence to catch them with, what with mild and effectual perswasions, and what with the intimation of some fear, if need be, but chiefly by his own example, might in a short space gain them to an incredible diligence and courage: infusing into their young brests such an ingenuous and noble ardor, as would not fail to make many of them renowned and matchless men.” The teacher must be someone worth imitating in both life and thought.

Milton comes to the crux of his curriculum, however, with the vexed issue of significant texts containing good and containing evil. The truly educated Christian must neither remain provincial nor bask in filth. How to strike the balance? Areopagitica famously argues against censorship: all minds must be free to choose what they accept or reject as wise, true, and valuable; otherwise virtue, being unexercised, will wither. But in Of Education his tactic is somewhat different. Areopagitica is a recommendation for a grown-up world of ideas; Of Education is about preparing young Christian minds for service.

So, after leading the students through the best that has been said and thought, Milton comes to the dangerous arena of risky material: “By this time, years and good general precepts will have furnisht them more distinctly with that act of reason which in Ethics is call’d Proairesis: that they may with some judgement contemplate upon moral good and evil.” Somewhere around the age of 13 or 14, students are finally exposed to morally problematic texts: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; the plays of Aristophanes or much of Shakespeare; Dido and Aeneas in the cave; and most dangerous of all—the pagan philosophers and their views on matters of morality and truth. All of these cultural objects will deviate more or less from the tenets of Scripture, and, because they will do so interestingly, beautifully, and persuasively, the teacher must be extraordinarily diligent: “Then will be requir’d a special reinforcement of constant and sound endoctrinating to set them right and firm, instructing them more amply in the knowledge of Vertue and the hatred of Vice: while their young and pliant affections are led through all the moral works of Plato, Xenophon, Cicero, Plutarch, Laertius, and those Locrian remnants…”

A child can be educated without experiencing the complex and often tempting moral dilemmas found in many “adult” texts; but an adult cannot be educated without grappling with these ideas at a certain minimal level. Children can be taught Aesop’s fables as well as the Biblical Proverbs. But they do not yet need to read Plato’s Republic or Euthyphro, or Boccaccio’s Decameron or Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. They are incapable of the kind of subtle moral reasoning required for and created by reading such works. But the shift from puberty to adolescence changes everything. Education should produce adults by slowly and with great care walking them through the moral complexities of the fallen world. It takes mature judgment to contemplate evil and to reject it. But that is what virtue is.

The skill that is introduced and developed at this age is called proaeresis and is first found in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. It could be transliterated “divide before” and is etymologically related to the word “heresy.” Its semantic range includes the ideas of moral choice, will, and character. In Milton it means making moral distinctions regarding ideas, actions, or objects. It means dividing between good and evil by assenting to or rejecting what is at hand. This skill can only be learned by having the opportunity to make a mistake, or a bad decision. It is thus inherently dangerous.

How does the teacher develop proaeresis in the student without leading him or her into moral destruction? By the classical—and also biblical—method of comparative reading and discernment. Hebrews 5:12-14 reads: “For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of
the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” While the subject here—strong meat versus milk—is mature theology as opposed to infant theology, the principle of learning and discernment is transferable. Maturity comes not from remaining in an infantile state of cloistered seclusion from error but rather from learning to recognize it as error. The senses must be “exercised” in order to learn how to discern.

And what is the key, the necessary ingredient to rightly guide the impressionable mind of young adults as they learn to practice discernment in the real world? Milton’s reading program has its grounding, not in the pagans, though they make up a significant part of the curriculum by necessity. But after they study the works of man each day, all that they have learned is “still to be reduc’t in their nightward studies wherewith they close the dayes work, under the determinate sentence of David or Salomon, or the Evanges and Apostolic Scriptures.” In other words, read what men have to say—then compare it diligently with Scripture. Let the wisdom of Solomon, the worship of David, the hope of the gospels, and the theology of Paul “reduce” or “boil down” mere human texts to whatever truths the pagans may have produced. The word of God is a sharp sword (Hebrews 4:12), very handy for paring down the works of men, which are always shifting, irresolute, filled with attractive error mixed with some goodness and beauty. The Scriptures are instead called the “determinate sentence”; they are the final word, the ultimate arbiter of everything, the comparative text of the Absolute.

It is worth noting that proaeresis is always linked in classical thought and many early Christian theologians with the move from puberty to adolescence. This is not insignificant. Pagans and Christians have always noted a crucial change in moral awareness as a child becomes
an adult; our social and legal systems reflect this, as do personal expectations. I would argue that this spiritual/ psychological/ethical development is organically linked with the primary physical change of adolescence: our new ability to make fine moral distinctions parallels our new ability to make another human being, another imago dei. At this crucial moment, human accountability before God and man comes fully to fruition.

Cultivating the affections through wisely managed cultural exposure with an eye towards biblical-critical discernment has a significant effect on the moral compass. This is the end, the purpose of Classical Christian education. It is inherently risky. And there are no other options.