Temptation in a Time of Quarantine: How Screwtape Uses Pandemics

Posted on by Society for Classical Learning

In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis allows us to eavesdrop on a correspondence between a senior devil named Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood on the art of tempting humans. This talk will expose some of the techniques Screwtape might be using to sow discord within families during the pandemic.

Louis Markos

Louis Markos holds a BA in English and History from Colgate University and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He is a Professor of English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, where he teaches courses on British Romantic and Victorian Poetry and Prose, the Classics, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and Art and Film. Dr. Markos holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities and lectures on Ancient Greece and Rome, the Early Church and Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Romanticism for HBU’s Honors College. He is the author of eighteen books, including From Achilles to Christ, On the Shoulders of Hobbits, Literature: A Student’s Guide, CSL: An Apologist for Education, three Canon Press Worldview Guides to the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, & two children’s novels, The Dreaming Stone and In the Shadow of Troy, in which his kids become part of Greek Mythology and the Iliad and Odyssey. His son Alex teaches Latin at the Geneva School in Boerne, TX and his daughter Anastasia teaches music at Founders Classical Academy in Lewisville, TX.

Hektor and Andromache: Balance in a World Gone Mad

Posted on by Society for Classical Learning

In Book VI, Homer offers us a sort of Iliad in miniature: a self-contained narrative that carries the reader from war to peace, division to reconciliation, barbarism to civilization. We will discuss the various, underlying tensions, and then closely analyze the farewell scene between Hektor and his wife, Andromache. This scene embodies the universal, human need to find stability in the midst of chaos and meaning in the midst of existential despair. Attendees are encouraged to bring a copy of the Lattimore translation of the Iliad.

Louis Markos

Louis Markos holds a BA in English and History from Colgate University and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He is a Professor of English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, where he teaches courses on British Romantic and Victorian Poetry and Prose, the Classics, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and Art and Film. Dr. Markos holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities and lectures on Ancient Greece and Rome, the Early Church and Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Romanticism for HBU’s Honors College. He is the author of eighteen books, including From Achilles to Christ, On the Shoulders of Hobbits, Literature: A Student’s Guide, CSL: An Apologist for Education, three Canon Press Worldview Guides to the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, & two children’s novels, The Dreaming Stone and In the Shadow of Troy, in which his kids become part of Greek Mythology and the Iliad and Odyssey. His son Alex teaches Latin at the Geneva School in Boerne, TX and his daughter Anastasia teaches music at Founders Classical Academy in Lewisville, TX.

Living in an Eschatological Universe: Virgil’s Aeneid and The Fall of Troy

Posted on by Society for Classical Learning

It was Virgil – not in opposition to, but alongside the Bible – who taught Christian Europe the shape of history, the power that moves it forward, the primacy of duty, the pain of letting go and the burden of adapting new strategies. In this lecture, we will explore the scenes of e Aeneid: Book II, opening up the way in which Virgil presents the destruction of Troy as a happy fall (felix culpa) and as a great tragedy that provides the seed out of which greater good would come. Attendees are encouraged to bring with them a copy of the Fitzgerald translation of e Aeneid.

Louis Markos

Louis Markos holds a BA in English and History from Colgate University and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He is a Professor of English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, where he teaches courses on British Romantic and Victorian Poetry and Prose, the Classics, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and Art and Film. Dr. Markos holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities and lectures on Ancient Greece and Rome, the Early Church and Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Romanticism for HBU’s Honors College. He is the author of eighteen books, including From Achilles to Christ, On the Shoulders of Hobbits, Literature: A Student’s Guide, CSL: An Apologist for Education, three Canon Press Worldview Guides to the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, & two children’s novels, The Dreaming Stone and In the Shadow of Troy, in which his kids become part of Greek Mythology and the Iliad and Odyssey. His son Alex teaches Latin at the Geneva School in Boerne, TX and his daughter Anastasia teaches music at Founders Classical Academy in Lewisville, TX.

In Defense of the Humanities

Posted on by Society for Classical Learning

In the past few years I have noticed three troubling trends with regard to the humanities. I have been an English professor at Houston Baptist University for nearly three decades. During that time, I have seen the number of humanities majors – literature, history, philosophy, Spanish, Latin, classics, etc. – rise and fall, but never in all those years have I witnessed the kind of precipitous decline I have seen recently.

Secondly, in addition to teaching literature I have devoted the last nine years to lecturing for our Honors College, a program that allows students to obtain a full classical Christian Great Books education while also majoring in a field of their choice. In the beginning, a significant number of Honors College students chose a major in the humanities; today, more and more are majoring in the sciences, in business or in the social sciences.

Finally, I have spent the last 12 years speaking for classical Christian schools and conferences across the country. Though the movement as a whole is healthy and growing, I have noticed as of late a slow, but increasing danger. Parents who have been supportive of classical education and pleased by the intellectual and moral progress of their children are feeling the temptation to jump ship mid-stream and move their classically-trained middle school students to a non-classical high school.

What do these three troubling trends have in common? A growing perception on the part of students and their parents that an education grounded in the humanities/liberal arts is somehow impractical and will leave graduates without the resources to find a good college or a good job. “A passion for literature, Latin, history or philosophy is all well and good,” so the current wisdom goes, “but those pursuits will not provide the kind of training that students need to survive and thrive in the modern age.”

I’ve always known in my gut that this knee-jerk, utilitarian response to the humanities is false, but I never dreamed that its falsehood would be exposed by the very business world that the utilitarians invariably point to as their greatest ally and their key source of proof.

Now, before I proceed, I must confess that as a lifelong humanities person I feel an aversion to quoting statistics and current events. I have always preferred, and continue to prefer, time-tested wisdom to the latest trends, the testimonies and experiences of individual human beings to reductive and often anti-humanistic statistics. Still, I will here break my rule (temporarily) since the news and the numbers are punching holes in the current wisdom and letting the true light shine through.

Try typing this phrase into your favorite search engine: “Employers want liberal arts majors.” You will be greeted,  if not deluged, with articles, reports, book reviews and studies asserting that the naysayers are wrong and that companies do very much want employees who have cut their teeth in a good humanities program. You might be skeptical at first, figuring these articles must have been posted by humanities departments or classical schools. If so, you quickly will realize that you are wrong. Here is a brief sampling of what you will find:

  1. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics: “According to studies from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers often rank skills such as critical thinking and communication – hallmarks of liberal arts training – above technical aptitude as essential for career readiness.”
  2. From the New York Times’ review of George Anders’s You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education and Randall Stross’ A Practical Education: Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees: “According to both Anders and Stross, the ever-expanding tech sector is now producing career opportunities in fields – project management, recruitment, human relations, branding, data analysis, market research, design, fundraising, and sourcing, to name some – that specifically require the skills taught in the humanities. To thrive in these areas, one must be able to communicate effectively, read subtle social and emotional cues, make persuasive arguments, adapt quickly to fluid environments, interpret new forms of information while translating them into a compelling narrative and anticipate obstacles and opportunities before they arise. Programs like English or history represent better preparation, the two authors argue, for the demands of the newly emerging ‘rapport sector’ than vocationally oriented disciplines like engineering or finance.”
  3. From the Harvard Business Review: “From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today’s biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context – something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do. Call it the revenge of the film, history and philosophy nerds.”
  4. And, an Investopedia survey of executives – including CEOs, presidents, vice presidents and C-level executives – by the Association of American Colleges and Universities revealed:
  • 93% of executives say “demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly and solve complex problems is more important than a particular degree.”
  • 80% of executives say that regardless of a student’s major, they should have “a broad knowledge” of the liberal arts and sciences.
  • 80% of executives say schools should place more emphasis on oral and written communication skills.
  • 71% of executives say schools should place more emphasis on the ability to innovate and be creative.
  • 74% of executives would “recommend a liberal education to their own child or a young child they know.”

I easily could quote another dozen passages, but I hope these will suffice to show that the humanities/liberal arts are not as divorced from the needs of real-life employers as has been supposed. In taking a non-utilitarian approach, one in which the discipline is studied as an end-in-itself, the humanities end up producing graduates who excel in just the skills that modern companies are demanding from their employees. Furthermore, because the graduates acquired those skills not through direct vocational training, but as a natural consequence of dialoging with the great works of literature, history and philosophy, they internalize them in a way that better enables growth, flexibility and innovation over time.

Quote two above does a fine job listing some of the skills that develop organically from the humanistic disciplines, but I, as a humanities professor, prefer to flesh out the exact nature of those critical thinking skills by looking to the past for guidance, clarity and illumination. When I do so, I discover, to my delight, that all that needs to be said on the subject was said a century-and-a-half ago by a British Victorian sage who lived and wrote in the heyday of the industrial revolution: Cardinal Newman.

In 1852, Newman delivered a series of nine discourses – later published as The Idea of a University – in which he laid down foundational principles for a proposed classical Christian liberal arts Catholic university in Dublin, Ireland. In discourse VII, chapter X, Newman describes, in terms prophetic of the passages I quoted above, the fruits of a liberal arts education grounded in the humanities:

A University training is the great ordinary means to a great, but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them. He is at home in any society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart himself.

Were my concern here the ability of the humanities to shape virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens who can redeem public discourse and uphold and preserve a deliberative representational democracy, I would zero in on the first sentence. Heaven knows, our modern, fractured society is in desperate need of such college graduates! Since, however, my focus is the link between the liberal arts and the workplace, I will turn instead to the remainder of the paragraph – not to enshrine it, but to explicate, parse and interpret it as though it were a poem or a historical event or a Latin verb. For that is the way humanities majors interact with the world around them; it is as familiar to them as breathing or walking or falling in love.

It is this education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them and a force in urging them.

In the language of classical Christian education, such a student has successfully worked his way through the trivium (“three ways”) of grammar, logic and rhetoric. He, like the college humanities major, has learned to “think for himself,” not by parroting the words of others or rejecting all that came before him, but by measuring his ideas against standards of goodness, truth and beauty, synthesizing them into a coherent thesis or worldview, and then sharing that schema with his peers in a persuasive, but irenic manner. A humanities student learns to do this without knowing he is doing it – by wrestling with the timeless issues raised by Sophocles or Plutarch or Aquinas – and he will carry it with him into committee board rooms where such integrative, high-level thinking is required and valued.

It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.

The humanities excel at training students to read a text –any kind of text – and go for the jugular. That is to say, students who spend their college years intensively studying literature or history or philosophy become adept at cutting through what is peripheral to get to the core, to what is most essential, most lasting and most human. The business world very much needs employees who can analyze a situation and identify, quickly and with precision, the root causes of that situation and the consequences it is likely to produce. True, some of that can be gained by studying business case studies, but what those studies lack are the simultaneously particular and universal issues that confront humanities majors in every class.

It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility.

It may sound like a cliché to refer to the humanities major as a Renaissance man, but it should not. The liberal arts strive to produce graduates who can speak intelligently and with passion on a wide range of topics, not because they have memorized a packet of trivial pursuit cards, but because they have spent four years actively participating in the Great Conversation that has been going on since Homer and the books of Moses. Though they are sometimes ridiculed for being jacks of all trades, but masters of none, they are in truth generalists who see and appreciate the connections between all areas of thought. Such employees will be able to connect with clients in a way that goes beyond small talk at the bar or restaurant. Their training will allow them to see the client, not to mention their officemates, as fellow travelers on a  journey of self-discovery.

It shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them.

One thing that the humanities are particularly good at fostering and strengthening in their students is a sense of what I like to call, after Percy Shelley, the sympathetic imagination. To open oneself to the joys and sorrows, passions and fears, convictions and foibles of people from various ages and cultures – as humanities majors do every week in their classes – is to gain, by slow osmosis, the ability to see the world through different eyes. Although the characters that humanities majors meet in their studies share with them a common humanity, they all have unique struggles that draw students out of their comfort zones and cultural bubbles. Whether they be fictional (Achilles, Antigone, Aeneas, Elizabeth Bennet) or non-fictional (Alexander, Caesar Augustus, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I), poets (Dante, Shakespeare, Milton) or philosophers (Plato, Augustine, Kierkegaard), their intense reality forces those who encounter them to get inside their heads, to understand their actions and motivations, to sympathize with rather than stand in judgment over them. Needless to say, a company that employs workers who possess these skills will attract clients and customers who feel that their needs, desires and apprehensions have been understood and respected.

He is at home in any society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart himself.

To immerse oneself in the literary, historical and philosophical records that have been passed down to us over the last three millennia is to be confronted at once with our great potential and our profound limits. The humanities present man at his best and his worst, as a noble and glorious creature created in the image of God who is yet broken, fallen and depraved. Not until a student comes to grips with the good he is capable of – and the bad he is equally capable of – will he gain both the confidence and the humility to serve his fellow man. Only then will he know when to speak and when to remain silent, when to voice his own opinion and when to listen to the opinions of others. Employees who are firm in what they believe, yet open to correction and new ideas, are a rare and precious commodity in the business world. Employers are eager to hire such people!

It thrills my heart that the business world has finally caught up with what Newman wrote 150 years ago. Now, if only students (and their parents) could read and interpret the signs of the times. There are now, and always will be, students who do not feel drawn to classical schools or humanities majors. That is fine and as it should be. But for those students who are passionate about an education that immerses them in the liberal arts, please rest assured that the skills such an education fosters in them will serve those students well in whatever career they choose to pursue.

Aslan in the Academy: What C.S. Lewis Can Teach the Modern Christian Educator

Posted on by Society for Classical Learning

Louis Markos

Louis Markos holds a BA in English and History from Colgate University and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He is a Professor of English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, where he teaches courses on British Romantic and Victorian Poetry and Prose, the Classics, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and Art and Film. Dr. Markos holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities and lectures on Ancient Greece and Rome, the Early Church and Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Romanticism for HBU’s Honors College. He is the author of eighteen books, including From Achilles to Christ, On the Shoulders of Hobbits, Literature: A Student’s Guide, CSL: An Apologist for Education, three Canon Press Worldview Guides to the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, & two children’s novels, The Dreaming Stone and In the Shadow of Troy, in which his kids become part of Greek Mythology and the Iliad and Odyssey. His son Alex teaches Latin at the Geneva School in Boerne, TX and his daughter Anastasia teaches music at Founders Classical Academy in Lewisville, TX.

Praeparatio Evangelica: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics

Posted on by Society for Classical Learning

I am proud to teach at a university that is committed to bringing together the Greco-Roman legacy of Athens and the Judeo-Christian faith of Jerusalem. What that means in practice is that we believe that true wisdom can be learned from such pre-Christian writers as Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil. Why is that the case?

Although, as a Baptist, I hold a very high view of the Bible as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, I also know that Christ, not the Bible, is the ultimate source of Truth. The Bible is but the most perfect and reliable embodiment of that Truth which resides in Christ alone. The distinction here is vital. If it is the Living Messiah, and not a single book, that is the source of Truth, then it is possible for that Truth, albeit in a lesser, fragmented form, to appear throughout the imaginative literature of man.

“From one man,” Paul teaches the Athenians, God “made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘we are his offspring’” (Acts 17:26-8).

We have all—pre-Christians, Christians, and post- Christians alike—been programmed by our Creator with a desire to seek and yearn after the God who is Truth. If it is true that we were made in his image, that he is not far from us, that it is in him that we live and move and have our being, then it must also be true that those Great Books that record the musings of man’s greatest seekers and yearners will contain traces, remnants and intimations of that Wisdom which made us.

Truth is not limited to the Scriptures; the Bible, though it tells us all we need to know to find salvation in and through Jesus Christ, does not attempt or purport to be an encyclopedia of all knowledge and wisdom. It can lead us to Christ and can instruct us in the rudiments of our faith, but it cannot answer all our questions nor can it satisfy all of our deepest desires and yearnings for truth, beauty, and goodness.

God speaks to us in many other ways and through many other mediums, and, though Christ and the Scriptures (both the Word of God) must ever act as the touchstone against which all such communications are to be measured, we must not allow any “puritan” suspicions of the moral value and doctrinal status of humanistic pursuits to prevent us from accessing these encoded messages from our Creator. We must not reject the teachings of Plato or the symbols of classical mythology as pagan deceptions, but learn to discern within them a seed of truth whose final source is the Triune God. We must learn that though Plato did not see as clearly as Ezekiel or Paul, he did see, and what he saw merits close and loving study.

Despite the fact that our world and our humanity are fallen, God’s hand can still be discerned in the laws and the wisdom that keep the former in motion and the latter in check. Each nation has its Torah and its Book of Proverbs, and, though only the biblical manifestations of these essential elements of human life carry complete authority, traces of God’s truth and presence are to be found in all of them. All our works and our ideals are blackened over by the stain of sin, and yet, now and again throughout the history of mankind, the Light of Christ has broken through in the lines of a poem or the maxims of a philosopher or the decisions of a lawgiver (Cyrus, Augustus).

Wherever man has sought with his entire being to perceive the truths of his Creator, God is there. He does not always approve, but he is always present. And, at times, he will speak through the mouth of the pagan: to present a new kind of hero who must move beyond the physical prowess of Achilles and the craftiness of Odysseus to learn the (proto-) Christian virtues of patience, faith, and hope (the Aeneas of Virgil’s Aeneid); to denounce injustice and cycles of vengeance (the Antigone of Sophocles and the Oresteia of Aeschylus); to attest to the hidden nature of sin and the need for a scapegoat (the Oedipus of Sophocles); to prepare the heart for the arrival of a God-Man who will suffer and who will expose the legalism of the Pharisee (the Bacchae of Euripides); and to warn us against wrath and instruct us in what it means to be human (Iliad and Odyssey of Homer).


Any of the works listed in the above paragraph could be used to illustrate how the highest pagan literature contains glimpses and intimations of the greater revelation to come; however, I would like to focus instead on a single poem from the end of the classical age that was hailed by early and medieval Christians alike as proof that the God of the Bible intentionally prepared the Greco-Roman world for the coming of the gospel (praeparatio evangelica was the pregnant phrase used by the fathers of the church). I speak of a lyric poem that Virgil wrote about 40 BC (over a decade before he began the Aeneid) that seems to prophecy the Jewish Messiah.

Sometime after defeating, with the help of Marc Antony, the senators who had assassinated his adopted father, Julius Caesar, the young Octavian (later to become Caesar Augustus) began to pester his favorite poet, Virgil, about writing a Roman epic that could compare with those of Homer. Not feeling sufficient for the task, Virgil turned instead to the less lofty genre of pastoral poetry. Invented, or at least perfected, by the Alexandrian poet Theocritus, pastoral poetry calls its urban readers back to an innocent Golden Age when man lived a simple life close to nature.

Most of the ten poems that make up Virgil’s Eclogues (or Bucolics) depict the life of carefree shepherds who pastor their flocks and play songs on their pipes. But then something happens in the Fourth Eclogue. Unexpectedly, wonderfully, Virgil waxes prophetic, announcing to his readers that he will now sing of somewhat higher things. Here are some selected lines from the poem in the magisterial translation of the former poet laureate of England, C. Day Lewis:

Sicilian Muse, I would try now a somewhat grander theme. . . .
Ours is the crowning era foretold in prophecy:
Born of Time, a great new cycle of centuries

Begins. Justice returns to earth, the Golden Age Returns, and its first-born comes down from heaven above. . . .
This child shall enter into the life of the gods . . . And rule a world made peaceful by his father’s virtuous acts. . . .

Goats shall walk home, their udders taut with milk, and nobody
Herding them: the ox will have no fear of the lion .
. .

Come soon, dear child of the gods, Jupiter’s great viceroy!
Come soon—the time is near—to begin your life illustrious!

Look how the round and ponderous globe bows to salute you,
The lands, the stretching leagues of sea, the unplumbed sky!

Look how the whole creation exults in the age to come!

Though critics still debate the identity of the divine child extolled in the poem, Virgil almost surely had the young Octavian in mind. Indeed, it is likely that the Fourth Eclogue was inspired by the Treaty of Brundisium which temporarily ended the civil war between Octavian and Marc Antony, in part by brokering a marriage between Antony and Octavian’s sister. As such, the treaty promised future days of peace, prosperity, and propagation.

Still, whatever the exact historical impetus was that inspired Virgil, it cannot be denied that the poem, when shorn of its references to Jupiter and the gods, reads like a passage out of Isaiah, Jeremiah, or the Psalms. Though Greco-Roman mythology abounds with stories of demigods—Achilles, Hercules, Perseus, Aeneas—Virgil’s “dear child of the gods” stands in a category of his own. He will be more than a hero, more even than a slayer of beasts. He will bridge heaven and earth and bring Peace and Justice to the world. He will bring to consummation the crisscrossing strands of history and to fulfillment the desires of the nations. Under his rule, the prophecy spoken 700 years earlier by Isaiah will at last come to pass: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them” (11:6).

Well, not exactly. It is important to remember that Virgil did not write out of a biblical tradition, but out of a pagan one. He did not have access to Genesis, but he was steeped in the Greco-Roman belief that mankind had fallen, in successive stages, from a pastoral Golden Age, to an impious Silver Age, to a martial Bronze Age, to the present, degenerate Age of Iron. Virgil’s divine child will bring about the return of the Golden Age, even as he will oversee the creation of something far grander: a pagan New Jerusalem superseding a lost pagan Eden. That glorious dawn will arrive at the end of a grand cosmic cycle that would be glimpsed, a half century later, by a group of pagan Magi following their own rich, extra-biblical astrological tradition, Though I firmly believe that it was, ultimately, Yahweh who breathed on Virgil, it must not be forgotten that Virgil’s pagan prophecy has its roots in the gentile soil of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Theocritus, and Cicero. Though every true light finds its origin in the Father of Lights, Virgil draws into his prophetic eclogue the lesser lights of his predecessors. Yes, Virgil saw dimly in a mirror, but what he saw bore the outline of the Incarnate Truth that would enter the world a generation later.

Christian educators who feel called to keep alive the Western tradition would do well to start with Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. Every time I read it, I am reminded of two lovely lines from my favorite Christmas carol: “the hopes and fears of all the years / are met in thee tonight.” The thee, of course, is Bethlehem, the city where a long-anticipated child came down from the heavens above and began a process that would eventually reclaim all of creation.

Granted, a Christian can celebrate the fullness of Christmas without having read the Fourth Eclogue, but how much fuller that fullness can be when it includes the knowledge—both spiritual and aesthetic, theological and literary—that the Jews were not the only people in the world who yearned for One who would make all things new. The Medievals understood this well, and that is why they would begin their Annunciation plays, not only with the words of such Old Testament figures as Moses, David, Isaiah, and Daniel, but with that very sibyl who led Aeneas on his journey through the underworld (Aeneid VI): a sibyl who also appears on the Sistine chapel alongside the great prophets of Israel. Indeed, there are some medieval plays in which Virgil himself takes the stage and reads lines from his Fourth Eclogue.

In closing, I would encourage classical Christian educators to supplement their reading of Virgil with a well-known essay by a man who, though he lived and died in the fourteenth century, is widely heralded as the first man of the Renaissance: Petrarch. In “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux,” Petrarch shares with his father confessor his experience of climbing to the peak of a mountain, not for any practical purpose, but simply to accomplish the deed.

As he climbs, he contemplates the parallels between his physical journey up the precipice and the spiritual journey of his soul toward God and laments how inattentive he has been to the latter. In a sudden moment of shame, he is struck by the realization that the pagan philosophers knew better than he the inestimable worth of the soul. If Plato and Aristotle and Cicero knew, with their limited knowledge, the value of the soul, should not he, a man gifted with the full revelation of the Scriptures, be all the more diligent in his spiritual pilgrimage?

Significantly, this realization comes to Petrarch after he opens randomly his copy of Augustine’s Confessions and comes upon a passage in which Augustine rebukes his fellow mortals for expending so much energy on surveying the mountains and oceans and stars and so little on exploring themselves. That Petrarch should be convicted by a random sentence from the Confessions should come as no surprise, for Augustine himself records in that very book how he was finally converted when he took up a Bible and read the first passage on which his eyes fell. Petrarch himself makes this connection in his essay; what he does not mention, but certainly knew, was that many Medievals, seeking divine guidance, would flip open the Aeneid and read the first verse of Latin that caught their eye (a practice known as the Sortes Virgilianae).

Indeed, Petrarch likely has the sortes in mind, for he ends his essay, not with a quote from the Bible or Augustine, but with a series of four lines from Virgil’s Georgics, a mini-epic on the art of farming which he wrote in between the Eclogues and the Aeneid. For Petrarch, the wisdom he found in the Scriptures, in the church fathers, and the higher pagans was all of a piece. When read properly, they pointed together up the steep ascent of virtue.

Virtue and Volunteerism: Why Schools Should Stop Clarifying Values and Start Instilling Virtue

Posted on by Society for Classical Learning

It is a sad thing that our modern world has redefined virtue in negative terms. Rather than define a virtuous man as someone who actively practices the positive virtues of prudence, courage, justice, and temperance, we turn things on their head and celebrate the goodness of those who don’t succumb to folly, don’t betray an excessive amount of cowardice, don’t violate anyone’s rights, and don’t drink or smoke. Such is the case with the four classical virtues, but it is even more so with the three theological ones. We celebrate those who press on, who don’t give up, rather than those who actively put their faith in an unseen Creator and their hope in his promises.

In Screwtape Letters (#26), C. S. Lewis critiques his age for replacing the positive love (caritas, agape) of the Bible with a negative form of unselfishness. Although the highest pagans (Aristotle) and the great Christian ethicists (Aquinas) taught that virtue is a habit gained by practicing virtuous actions, we of a more “enlightened” age have embraced a distinctly hands-off ethos. Had Lewis lived today, I think he would have said that the reigning virtue is not unselfishness but tolerance—a pseudo-virtue that manifests itself, not in active charity, but in a negative acquiescence to the “rights” of others.

I say it with sadness, but modern education in our country seems interested only in fueling the negative virtue of tolerance (together with the equally negative virtues of inclusivism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism). Rather than encourage young people to reach out in love, we teach them to refrain from any and all judgment. Love does not mean helping others to grow into the people God created them to be; it means turning a blind eye and telling them that whatever they believe is right is right for them.

Given the negative nature of tolerance, I was initially thrilled by the rise in volunteerism among grade school students. Since then, my ardor has cooled. Most public school volunteerism is first mandated and then overly celebrated. Such a mixture tends to instill feelings of pride, self-satisfaction, and entitlement, rather than humility, compassion, and thankfulness. The message is not “you have been blessed so bless others,” or “there but for the grace of God go I.” It’s much closer to: “He put in his thumb, / And pulled out a plum, / And said, ‘What a good boy am I!’”

Worse yet, students are taught to evaluate the success of their volunteerism on the basis of how it affected them, not how it impacted the lives of those they purportedly went out to serve. The attention is turned inward, causing the child to delight in his own goodness and kindness, when it should be turned outward toward a true love of God and neighbor. Feelings are given precedence over actions and introspection takes the place of David’s “Search me, O God” (Psalm 139:23-4).

That is not to say that the giver of charity should not take joy in the giving. To the contrary, as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Lewis all knew and taught, one of the greatest rewards of charity is that the giver comes to enjoy it. That’s what the old adage, “virtue is its own reward,” means. The more we practice virtue, the more we enjoy virtue.

But we can’t put the cart before the horse. We must not teach young people: you’ll feel good if you help at the soup kitchen. We must teach instead: help at the soup kitchen because it is the right thing to do, and, in time, you will come to have feelings of love toward the people you help. Indeed, if those feelings don’t come in time, it is likely a sign that the giver of charity is giving out of wrong motives (to gain social approval) rather than out of love for God and neighbor. Can there be anything more unlovely than a person who hands out charity but who radiates bitterness, contempt, even hatred toward the people he is helping? As G. K. Chesterton once quipped, a humanitarian is someone who loves humanity but hates human beings.

When Christ tells us to love our enemies, he does not mean that we should try to manufacture nice feelings toward them. He means that we should treat them with love (charity). The husband is not to wait around for his wife to do something loveable before he loves her, just as the wife is not to wait around for her husband to do something respectful before she respects him. The actions come first; the feelings follow. The husband who treats his wife with love will come to love her, even as the wife who treats her husband with respect will come to respect him. But that is only half the reward. Wives and husbands who are treated thus will themselves become more loveable and worthy of respect.

Now here’s the terrible irony. Making middle and high school students log in a hundred or so hours of volunteerism should work. Young people who get in the habit of extending charity to the less fortunate should come to feel charitable. Better yet, the practice of charity should instill in them the virtue of caritas. So why isn’t it working?

#

I have a deep and enduring love for Hamlet; the play simply cannot be seen or read too often. Unfortunately, for all its beauty and power, it has had one negative legacy that Shakespeare could not have anticipated. Early in the play, Polonius, the advisor to the king, regales his son with a lengthy catalogue of proverbial nuggets. A close reading of the scene will reveal that Polonius is a windbag and that his advice is hackneyed at best, but that has not prevented the last several generations of teachers and students from enshrining one line out of Polonius’s jumbled litany as the be all and end all of virtue: “To thine own self be true.”

Don’t worry if you scandalize your parents or blaspheme God or violate all standards of decent behavior. As long as you are true to yourself, then your actions are justified. You are the center of your own moral universe. You are an autonomous individual with no ties or obligations to the past, to tradition, to your family, or to your Creator. You are the maker of your own destiny, the captain of your own soul. Learn to think for yourself, and everything else will fall into place.

Near the beginning of Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton argues that the core problem with the modern world is that it has taught us, not, as in the past, to doubt ourselves and believe the truth, but to doubt the truth and believe in ourselves. Charles Williams, a friend of Lewis’s who, like Lewis, was strongly influenced by Chesterton, explains, in chapter VIII of The Figure of Beatrice, that the Medievals “believed it to be less important that men should think for themselves than that they should think rightly.”

Ask ten random teachers why they went into teaching, and I guarantee that more than half of them will say that they became educators so that they could teach students to think for themselves. If they are English or art teachers, they might add a second, closely related reason: to inspire and foster self-expression in their students. Their goal is not to produce traditional artists who seek after the truth and then try to capture that truth in their art; it is to create a race of mini-Picassos who consider it their calling and their right to throw onto the paper or the canvas or the screen or the airwaves whatever they feel is good or true or beautiful.

More to the point of this essay, their job is not to instill the classical and theological virtues in their charges, but to help them (a la John Dewey) to “clarify” their own personal sense of virtue and vice, right and wrong, truth and error. Students are not trained to learn virtue at the feet of Moses, the prophets, and Jesus, nor even at the feet of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, but to assert (Nietzsche-like) their own personal understanding of virtue. It is up to them to choose their own standards of beauty, their own definition of goodness, even their own sexual identity.

Enforced volunteerism should work, but it does not, because it is carried out in a values-free zone apart from any traditional understanding of why we should be charitable in the first place. Darwinism, of which Dewey was a disciple, certainly offers no ultimate basis for charity (or any of the virtues), and the default religion of America, utilitarianism, offers a paltry pragmatic basis that quickly deconstructs itself. The “to thine own self be true” ethos of values clarification may work for a little while, but it doesn’t last, for it is powerless to instill virtue in students.

#

How then can we instill virtue in our students? The same way it was done in the two dozen centuries that precede the modern age. We teach them classic works of literature, not just to hone their critical thinking skills, but to provide them with role models of virtuous and vicious behavior. When Bill Bennett published his Book of Virtues, it was hailed (or despised) as revolutionary. Had he published it before the modern period, it would not have been considered revolutionary at all. It would have been considered common sense.

The classic works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton must not be presented as relics of the past to be read quickly and then ticked off. They must be offered as arenas for wrestling: training grounds where students can flex their moral and ethical muscles against Achilles and Hector, Odysseus and Aeneas, Dante pilgrim and our original parents.

The literary, historical, and philosophical classics, especially the pre-Christian classics of Greece and Rome, should be used first to instill the classical virtues of prudence, courage, justice, and temperance in students. Once those are (partially) achieved, then they will be ready to move on to the higher virtues of faith, hope, and love.


It is not a bad idea to first teach courage and chastity as practices that will save us from dishonoring ourselves and our family, and then lift them up to the higher Christian understanding of these virtues: that courage and chastity ultimately rest on a knowledge of who we are in Christ, why God gave us our bodies and our sexuality, and how we can stand firmly on the promises of God.

And as the virtues (and vices) are taught, the emotions appropriate to those virtues (or vices) must be taught as well. In chapter VIII of A Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis argues that one of the main functions of art is to instill stock responses toward virtue and vice: “All that
we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or, in general, as perseverance—all solid virtue and stable pleasure—depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux . . . of mere immediate experience.”

Values clarification inevitably champions “immediate experience.” Our gut response to a work of literature or art or philosophy must always be the right one: for it is the right one for us, and that is all that matters. In our modern/postmodern world, insincerity is considered the worst of sins. As long as a student’s reaction to a work or an event or a behavior is “sincere,” then it must be respected. Lewis, together with Aristotle and Aquinas, would disagree.

Training a child to feel a certain way toward courage or cowardice, beauty or ugliness, loyalty or treachery, purity or perversion does not result in a warping or falsifying of his emotional responses. To the contrary, it helps him to properly order his desires in a way that will not only bring him greater happiness but help prevent the community he is part of from regressing (or progressing) into barbarism.

The real danger with young people today is not that they do bad things: all people at all times do bad things. The danger is that when they do bad things, they feel no remorse whatsoever, only anger that they got caught. That lack of remorse is a warning sign that highlights the failure of public schools to instill proper stock responses. Instead of teaching students to feel shame when they do something immoral or unethical, schools today “protect” them from feelings of self-disgust, lest their self-esteem be damaged. This aspect of values clarification is particularly deadly, for it “instills out” of students a necessary internal moral censor. Apart from that censor, civilization becomes a precarious thing indeed.

And what then of volunteerism? Should we continue to send students out into the community to volunteer their time and resources? By all means! But when we do so, let us make sure to provide them with the proper context for doing so: 1) we don’t help others because they are “entitled” to our help, but because we are called to love as we have been loved; 2) charity is right and proper, not because it makes us feel good when we give it, but because the second greatest commandment compels us to love our neighbor as our self; 3) charity is good, not because it helps us to be true to ourselves as we are, but because it helps us to be true to the true selves that our Creator would have
us grow into; 4) since charity means wanting the best for the other person, it must not manifest itself in a weak- kneed tolerance that overlooks, and thereby enables, self- destructive behavior.

A teacher who fails to provide such a context for volunteerism risks producing students who neither acquire the virtue of charity nor experience the real joy that accompanies the virtue.

Preparing for Christian Higher Education

Posted on by Society for Classical Learning

As a professor of English at a Christian liberal-arts university (Houston Baptist University), I have dedicated much time to identifying the critical and creative skills that a liberal-arts university should instill in its students. In this essay, I would like to speak directly, not to my colleagues, but to high school students who are preparing to be freshmen at a liberal arts university, particularly one founded on Christian beliefs and principles. By surveying four key skills that lie, or at least should lie, at the heart of a liberal arts education, I hope to alert future undergraduates to the kind of intellectual rigor that will be expected of them in college and to start them thinking about the kinds of skills they will be expected to have developed by the time they graduate. When I teach freshmen composition, it is my habit to forbid students from using the second person; however, to help increase the immediacy of this essay, I will break my own rule and address college-bound high school students as “you.”

Move beyond the Surface

During your college years, you will be encouraged again and again to analyze, to dig deeper, to explore. Your professors will not be satisfied—and, soon, you should not be satisfied—with simple answers that only scratch the surface of the subject at hand. In many high-school English classes, if you wrote a paper on Romeo and Juliet that offered a well-written, grammatically-correct synopsis of the plot, you would likely receive an “A.” Not so in college. If all you can manage to do is retell the play, if all you are capable of is a simple plot summary, that paper, no matter how effectively written and organized, will receive, at the very most, a “B-.” In college you will be expected to move beyond the surface.

Likewise, if you are asked in a freshman composition class to describe an incident that occurred in your past and the significance of that incident, don’t give your teacher a detailed, blow-by-blow description of the event and then conclude, in a single sentence, that after that incident you “took life more seriously.” When a teacher asks you to define and explore the significance of something, that is what you need to do. Most people, students or otherwise, cling to the surface, for it is hard work to explore: it is risky, it is time-consuming, and it calls for significantly higher brain functions. It is so safe and peaceful on the surface of the water; to dive down to the depths below would be uncomfortable and challenging. But down there, on the ocean bottom, are the real wonders. Knowledge “too” is like that; she hides her wisdom and her insight lest the lazy and the reckless should get a hold of it and treat it rudely and harshly like the swine who trample the pearls underfoot.

If you are at a Christian university, bring this same zest for adventure and discovery to your religious growth. On the surface of Christianity are rules and regulations, standards of behavior and moral expectations. These, of course, you must learn, but you must also go deeper: move to the heart of the spiritual life. Yes, you will ask such academic questions as “Does God exist?” and “What does He expect of us?” But you mustn’t stop there. God is more than a definition to be memorized. He is a living, active Being who desires to have a relationship with you. It is not enough to determine merely whether God is true or not; you must also decide if He is real.

Uncover Assumptions

We live in an age of sound bite knowledge. That is to say, much of our information comes to us in the form of discrete, pre-packaged capsules. The media, in all its forms, assaults us daily with a kaleidoscope of sounds and images that are meant to appeal to us not on a rational or logical level, but on a strictly emotional “knee-jerk” level. Thus, a politician will make a long speech that details his platform and the assumptions on which that platform stands, but the media will only provide us with a smattering of disjointed, ten-second fragments from the speech. Even worse, the fragments will never reveal or explore the assumptions, nor will they detail the position itself; they will confine themselves, instead, to a witty pun, an emotional illustration, or a slanderous attack.

Trained as we are in such knee-jerk responses, it has become increasingly difficult for young people (and adults!) to uncover the assumptions on which political, theological, ethical, and aesthetic statements rest. It has become so much easier to turn off the higher functions of our brains and just think in sound bites. Such behavior, however, is dangerous, especially in a democracy where the leaders are a reflection of the people.

One of the traditional functions of a liberal arts university has been to make good citizens, people who can analyze complex issues, who can break down arguments into their component parts and then examine the validity of each part. Most college students don’t realize that behind all of their majors are assumptions that are accepted without question. It is imperative at a liberal arts university that students learn and apply tools for critical thinking that will allow them to determine the assumptions on which the central claims of their disciplines rest.

And these tools are more, not less, important in a Christian university. Most of the differences that distinguish modern thought from traditional Christian thought can be traced back to the assumptions upon which these contrasting systems are built. Thus, whereas our modern world rests on an evolutionary paradigm (that emphasizes progress and that posits physical matter as the origin of all things), biblical Christianity rests on a creationist paradigm (that emphasizes fixed codes and unchanging essences and that posits the spiritual as the origin). The fight between Christian and modern lies far deeper than any squabble over whether the six days of creation are literal or figurative; what is at issue is a battle over the very nature of reality. When a Christian and a modern disagree over whether the parting of the Red Sea was a miracle, what is more often at issue is the underlying assumption of whether or not miracles are possible.

Students who attend a Christian university must test the assumptions on which modernism rests. Now, after close study, you may decide that you agree with modernist assumptions. That is all right. What must be avoided at a liberal arts university, especially a Christian one, is not the informed acceptance of modernism—human beings are, after all, free agents—but the uncritical embracing
of systems of thought that claim to be “objective” and based solely on facts but which rest on unstated (and often unproven) assumptions.

Make Connections

To my mind, the greatest joy of a liberal-arts education comes in those dazzling moments when a connection suddenly, almost magically forms between areas of thought that might at first seem wholly unrelated: English and biology, psychology and physics, history and economics, and so forth. It’s that “aha” moment when the light bulb flashes and you glimpse a previously invisible thread that weaves its way through the academic tapestry. I hope you will experience many such moments in your college career and that they will encourage you to avoid isolating and compartmentalizing your knowledge.

Many today believe that wide-spread access to the vast stores of information available on the web is producing more intelligent students. I do not agree. The internet alone cannot make a student wise. That students now have access to more facts, figures, and statistics is not bad in itself, but the possession of discrete information is not equivalent to wisdom. Wisdom, understanding, and discernment only come when knowledge is synthesized into a greater whole, when connections are made that render the knowledge knowable, meaningful, and human.

If you attend a Christian liberal arts university, then the call to connect and integrate knowledge becomes even more vital. If you attend such a school, you will spend at least one semester studying works that were written by pre-Christian pagan writers. If you want to benefit from your education while remaining a serious Christian, then you must learn to draw together the lights of Athens and Jerusalem, the great accomplishments of humanism with the timeless truths of Christianity. You must not compartmentalize your faith, cutting it off from your humanistic studies or professional goals. You must know the maxim that “all truth is God’s truth” and seek to profit from all the wisdom that has been learned through the centuries. You must not reject the teachings of Plato or the symbols of classical mythology as pagan deceptions, but must learn to discern within them a seed of truth whose final source is the Triune God.

Enter into the Dialogue

At the core of any true liberal arts education lie the Great Books of Western Civilization, those timeless classics that contain, to quote Matthew Arnold, “the best that has been thought and known in the world.” They include the works of such thinkers as Homer, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Nietzsche, Herodotus, Machiavelli and Mill, Euclid, Ptolemy, Newton and Einstein, Marx, Darwin, and Freud, and, of course, the writers of the Old and New Testaments. Some of these writers you will have read in high school, but at a liberal arts university you will be expected to do more than read passively the works of these mighty thinkers. You will be expected, quite literally, to enter into the dialogue, to become an active participant in a three-thousand-year-old conversation.

The reading of Great Books is not a one-way activity. The dialogue is real and energizing and calls for intense effort. In high school, perhaps, you thought it sufficient to do your homework assignments while lounging on your bed. Such passive, lazy reading will no longer do on the college level. You will be expected to read actively with pen in hand, marking key passages and underlining recurring themes and images. The business you are about is serious and life-changing; it is not to be trifled with.

That, however, is not to say that you should slavishly accept everything that is in the book merely because it is a classic or that you should reject it out of hand as being out of date. To enter into the dialogue means neither to kowtow to the status quo nor to close off your mind to the voice of the past. It means treating your mind as a raw piece of wood and the Great Book as a lathe. Use the work not as a substitute for original thought but as a tool for shaping and honing your ideas. Be like Jacob, who wrestled all night with the angel, and don’t let the book go till it bestows its blessing on you. And yes, if you are at a Christian liberal arts university, then don’t be afraid to carry that wrestling match into the precincts of the Early Church Fathers and even the Bible itself. Remember that the wisest man who ever lived, Solomon, wrote a book of the Bible (Ecclesiastes) whose theme lies far afield from the cheerful optimism generally expected of the Christian.

So gird up your loins, and prepare yourself for an adventure! An exciting world of ideas lies in wait. But remember this: the point of a liberal arts education is not just to prepare you to do something, but to be someone: someone who is unafraid to think, to explore, to question, and to grow. May God speed you on your way!