Forma Issue #16

GIVE YOUR CHILDREN A GREAT BOOKS EDUCATION. OLD WESTERN CULTURE THE GREEKS

THE ROMANS

from ROMAN ROADS PRESS CHRISTENDOM EARLY MODERNS

THE EPICS: 1. Introduction to Old Western Culture 2. The Backdrop to the Iliad 3. The Anger of Achilleus 4. The First Critical Turning Point 5. The Deception of Zeus 6. The Second Critical Turning Point 7. The Death of Hektor 8. The Telemachy 9. The Court of Alkinoös 10. Odysseus Tells of his Wanderings 11. The Homecoming of Odysseus 12. Legacy of Homer in the Western

THE AENEID: 1. Overview of Roman History 2. Introduction to the Aeneid 3. Rome is an Idea 4. Fall of Troy and Wanderings of Aeneas 5. The Tragedy of Dido 6. The Underworld 7. The Broken Truce and Shield of Aeneas 8. The Tragedy of Nisus and Euryalus 9. Juno’s Surrender, and Death of Turnus 10. Metamorphoses I 11. Metamorphoses II 12. The Epics of Lucretius, Lucan, Statius

EARLY MEDIEVALS: 1. Historical Overview of Christendom 2. Benedict’s Rule and Monasticism 3. Transition to the Middle Ages 4. Procopius and Gregory 5. Maximus the Confessor 6. Celtic Christians 7. Beowulf 8. Bede I: Early History of England 9. Bede II: The Coming of Christianity 10. Bede III: The Confirming of Christianity 11. Lives of Charlemagne and Alfred 12. John of Damascus

RISE OF ENGLAND: 1. Introduction to Early Moderns 2. Introduction to Shakespeare 3. Shakespeare’s Sonnets 4. Shakespeare’s King Lear 5. Shakespeare’s Richard III 6. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice 7. Metaphysical Poets: John Donne 8. Metaphysical Poets: Herbert & Marvell 9. Introduction to Milton 10. Paradise Lost I 11. Paradise Lost II 12. Paradise Lost III

DRAMA AND LYRIC: 1. Development of Theater 2. The Period, Poets, and Presentation 3. The Agamemnon 4. Libation-bearers and Eumenides 5. Oedipus the King 6. Oedipus at Colonus 7. Medea and Trojan Women 8. The Frogs and The Clouds 9. Sappho, Pindar, and Theocritus 10. Lyric Poetry: Hesiod 11. Quintus of Smyrna, The Fall of Troy 12. The Argonautica

HI THE HISTORIANS: 1. Livy: Philosophy of history, monarchy 2. Livy: Beginning and Heroes of Republic 3. Livy: Threats to the Republic 4. Tacitus: History philosophy and Tiberius 5. Tacitus: Claudius 6. Tacitus: Nero 7. Jugurthine War, Catiline Conspiracy 8. Julius Caesar: The Gallic wars 9. Plutarch: Demosthenes and Cicero 10. Plutarch: Alexander and Caesar 11. Cicero: Against Verres, Against Antony 12. Overview of The Historians

DEFENSE OF THE FAITH: 1. Historical Overview of High Middle Ages 2. Anselm’s Ontological Argument 3. Anselm’s Monologium 1 4. Anselm’s Monologium 2 5. Anselm’s Why God Became Man 1 6. Anselm’s Why God Became Man 2 7. History of the Kings of Britain 1 8. History of the Kings of Britain 2 9. The Golden Legend 10. Historical Overview of the Crusades 11. The Conquest of Constantinople 12. The Life of St. Louis

POET POETRY AND POLITICS: 1. Introduction to Enlightenment 2. Alexander Pope I 3. Alexander Pope II 4. Edmund Burke I 5. Edmund Burke IIt 6. Romantic Poetry I 7. Romantic Poetry II 8. Victorian Poetry, Democracy in America 9. Edgar Allen Poe 10. Victorian Poetry I 11. Victorian Poetry II 12. Victorian Poetry III

THE HISTORIES: 1. Overview O of Greek History 2. Intro to Herodotus 3. Stories of Egypt and other nations 4. Beginning of Persian Wars 5. The Battle of Thermopylae 6. Salamis and End of the Persian Wars 7. Intro to Thucydides 8. The Early Years, Pericles, the Plague 9. Mytiline, Exile, Revolution, and Melos 10. Sicily and the Downfall of Athens 11. Xenophon: March of the Ten Thousand 12. The Lessons of Greek History

EARLY CHRISTIANITY: 1. The T Roman Background of Christianity 2. The Jewish Background of Christianity 3. The Didache 4. The First Letter of Clement 5. Roman World in 2nd and 3rd Centuries 6. Ignatius and Polycarp 7. The Apologists 8. Justin Martyr 9. Irenaeus 10. Clement of Alexandria and Origen 11. Eusebius I 12. Eusebius II

THE MEDIEVAL MIND: 1. Introduction Int to The Medieval Mind 2. Aquinas’ Compendium I 3. Aquinas’ Compendium II 4. Aquinas’ Compendium III 5. Introduction to Dante 6. The Inferno I 7. The Inferno II 8. Purgatorio I 9. Purgatorio II 10. Paradiso I 11. Paradiso II 12 Conclusion

THE ENLIGHTENMENT: 1. Intro: Int What Is the Enlightenment?

2. The Scientific Revolution: An Overview 3. Galileo Moves the Earth 4. The Galileo Affair 5. Descartes & Skepticism 6. Descartes’ Search for Certainty 7. Did Descartes Succeed?

8. Descartes & the Scientific Revolution 9. Isaac Newton Takes the Throne 10. Hume: Taking Skepticism Seriously 11. Kant’s Answer to Hume 12. Reid & Genuine Enlightenment

THE PHILOSOPHERS: 1. Intro to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle 2. The Apology: Socrates, Paul, Wisdom 3. The Crito and Phaedo 4. Phaedrus: Dialectic of Desire 5. The Republic: Understanding Morality 6. The Forms influence on Christendom 7. The Metaphysics: Aristotle & Aquinas 8. Cosmos in Antiquity and Middle Ages 9. The Ethics: Happiness the End of Man 10. Aristotle: The Ethics: Friendship 11. Aristotle: Poetics: Oedipus and Austen 12. The Lessons of Greek Philosophy

NICENE CHRISTIANITY: 1. Constantine and The Council of Nicea 2. The Nicene and Post-Nicene Age 3. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation 4. Athanasius’s Life of Anthony 5. John Chrysostom 6. Augustine’s Confessions I 7. Augustine’s Confessions II 8. Augustine’s City of God I 9. Augustine’s City of God II 10. Augustine’s City of God III 11. Augustine’s City of God IV 12. Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy

THE REFORMATION: 1. Intro to Renaissance and Reformation 2. Canterbury Tales 1 3. Canterbury Tales 2 4. Canterbury Tales 3 5. From Premodern to Modern Times 6. Predecessors to the Reformation 7. Luther and 16th Century Reform 8. International Calvinism 9. The Reformation in England 10. Spenser 1 11. Spenser 2 12. Spenser 3

THE NOVELS: 1. Introduction to The Novels 2. Jane Austen I 3. Jane Austen II 4. Charles Dickens 5. Fyodor Dostoevsky 6. Russian Short Stories 7. Tolkien: Fairy-Stories and LOTR 8. Escape, Consolation, Eucatastrophe 9. Tolkien: Themes in The Lord of the Ring 10. C. S. Lewis I 11. C. S. Lewis II 12. Old Western Culture and 20th Century

ROMANROADSPRESS.COM/OWC

Issue 16 Summer 2021

COLUMNS 6

F E AT U R E S

EDITORS’ LETTER

19

Cultural Currency APOSTASY FACTOR IES

32

MEN WITH CHESTS; OR WHY WE LEARN

by Paul Twiss

by the Editors 8

by Joshua Gibbs 75

From the Classroom HYBR ID HOMESCHOOLS: BIG BATTALIONS VS. LITTLE PLATOONS

by Eric Wearne

WHAT IS CRITCISM?

by Emily Andrews

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE MEDIEVAL COSMOS

42

by David Russell Mosley 48

BOOK REVIEWS 12

LONGFELLOW, MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: REVIEWING CROSS OF SNOW

by Sean Hadley 14

MISUNDERSTANDING HOMER: REVIEWING THE SIEGE OF TROY

by Anika Prather 56

KNOWING THE WORST: REVIEWING THE UNQUIET ENGLISHMAN

POETRY AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION

by James Matthew Wilson 68

BUILDING THE HOUSE: THE PUBLIC GIFT OF FAMILY

by Jonathan Callis

by Christian Leithart

16

HUMAN STORY BOOKS: THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE AND THE CANON OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

POETRY

by Sean Johnson

38

MARLY YOUMANS

I N T E RV I E WS

40

MARY GIUDICE

64

J.C. SCHARL

26

FROM MARGIN TO MAINSTREAM: HOW “WOKE ” IDEOLOGY APPROPRIATED AMERICAN ACEDEMIA A Conversation with Samantha Jones

by Heidi White

This magazine is published by the CiRCE Institute. Copyright CiRCE Institute 2021. For additional content, please go to formajournal.com.

For information regarding reproduction, submission, or advertising, please email formamag@circeinstitute.org.

Contact FORMA Journal 81 McCachern Blvd SE - Concord, NC 28025 704.794.2227 - formamag@circeinstitute.org

ABOUT The CiRCE Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3 THE organization that exists to promote and supPUBLISHER port classical education in the school and in

the home. We seek to identify the ancient principles of learning, to communicate them enthusiastically, and to apply them vigorously in today’s educational settings through curricula development, teacher training, events, an online academy, and a content-laden website.

Learn more at circeinstitute.com

Editors' Letter Currently, the public square is an ideological battleground. The good news for those of us with classical sensibilities is that the classics exist for such a time as this. In fact, current cultural contentions mirror the complexities of classical antiquity far more accurately than our former (and now likely defunct) Pax Americana. As poet Robert Hass quipped, “All the new thinking is about loss. In this, it resembles all the old thinking.” At FORMA, we dwell in the fraught intersection of old and new, and we believe that classical thought can illuminate a divided contemporary culture. Of course, such an endeavor requires free discourse—which was a classical virtue long before it was a contemporary one. For this issue, we invited our contributors to address the concerns that are perplexing America—education, family, race, academia, censorship, and more. By providing a platform for classical practitioners to address complex questions through the lens of ancient thought, we continue the pursuit of wisdom and virtue that characterizes the Christian classical tradition.

We welcome the thoughtful conversations that will ensue.

In this issue, Dr. Anika Prather defends the classics for all people, Samantha Jones addresses “woke” academia, Dr. Eric Wearne proposes options for hybrid homeschooling, Paul Twiss invites the church to a deeper engagement with human flourishing, and more.

Along the way, you will find the thoughtful reviews and original poetry that you have come to expect from each issue of FORMA. In this embattled cultural moment, FORMA is honored to provide a platform for Christian classical thinkers to advance goodness in the public square through robust scholarship, insightful commentary, beautiful poetry, and civil dialogue.

Cheers,

The Editors The Editorial Team Publisher: Andrew Kern, President of The CiRCE Institute Editor-in-Chief: David Kern Managing Editor: Heidi White Art Director: Graeme Pitman Poetry Editor: Christine Perrin Associate Editors: Emily Andrews, Sean Johnson Senior Editors: Jamie Cain, Matt Bianco Contributing Editors: Ian Andrews, Noah Perrin Copy Editor: Emily Callihan

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Cultural Currency

8 | WINTER 2020 / FORMA

Cultural Currency

WHAT’S IT GOING TO TAKE? Neither the astronomical cost of tuition, nor the high incidence of sexual assault on American campuses, nor the omnipresent assault on Christianity and conservatism which is now standard at secular universities can keep graduates of classical Christian schools from wanting to go. It seems a secular university could rename itself The Anti-Christian Apostasy Factory and a good number of classically educated Christians would still want to go simply because it had an “amazing mechanical engineering program.” I suspect there are two reasons for this, both of them rather embarrassing.

First, classical Christian education has become too big, too diffuse, and there are simply too many people attending classical Christian schools that don’t belong. Mark Twain once said, “A classic is something everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read,” which means I will not be convinced human nature has changed in the last twenty-five years, that classics have somehow become easy to like, and that good taste is more common now than in the past. Classic literature is neither more nor less popular now than it was back in the

1970s, which means that whatever it is about classical Christian schools which is now popular, it isn’t Milton, Homer, or teaching virtue.

Second, classical Christian schools are reluctant to admit just how many graduates fall away from the faith when attending secular colleges. Cliches about “cultural engagement” and “plundering the Egyptians” mean a secular university can be hostile to the faith and yet still do remarkable work in bioengineering or computer science. A Christian trained in presuppositional apologetics, history, Scripture, and logic must be prepared to have his faith challenged in college. It is widely thought, then, that a classical Christian school could not claim to offer a robust religious education if graduates were not prepared to leave home, enjoy profound freedom and autonomy, and have their Christian convictions continuously assaulted for the next four years.

And yet, I know many classical Christian educators who would contend this is simply not an accurate depiction of what normally happens. A Christian teenager whose life revolves around sports, video games, and memes is not prepared to have his FORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 9

Cultural Currency

faith assaulted in college simply because he got a 72 percent on a test over Greg Bahnsen’s Always Ready, especially given how many questions on the test were probably multiple choice. As a strategy for cultural engagement, “plundering the Egyptians” tends to assume human beings are far more rational, intellectual, and guided by abstract considerations than they actually are. In fact, arguments prevail very little over the powerful embodiments of self-direction, self-discovery, and cultural rebellion which proliferate on the modern campus.

Having discussed this matter in class many times, I know that many students at classical schools bristle at the comparison between public schools and secular colleges. “At fourteen or fifteen, a Christian can’t handle everything which comes with public school. You don’t know enough. You can’t handle the temptations.

By eighteen, though, you’re ready.” Ah, yes. Eighteen.

When intellectual maturity and spiritual competence have finally settled in. But their reasoning seems a little too convenient, a little too predetermined by their own plans to attend the sort of university which brazenly, tirelessly assaults Christianity. How many children born and raised in the faith abandon it at sixteen? Personally, I know of none. How many children born and raised in the faith abandon it in college? I have lost count, and so I have far more confidence that a Christian attending a public school will remain faithful to God through graduation than that a Christian attending a secular university will do so.

That confidence has quite a lot to do with life outside of class, not just intellectual acumen. Unfortunately, too many of the exhortations we give to graduates going off to secular universities revolve around “making good Christian friends” and “finding the right church,” even though the former typically determines the latter. Our idolatrous devotion to community blinds us to rather obvious facts about friendship—namely, that our friends are far less likely to keep us from sin than our families are. When my students tell me about the ultimate importance of making good Christian friends in college, I ask them how much of their sinning is done in the presence of friends. After thinking on this a moment, they reply, “Quite a bit of it.”

Nonetheless, the typical classical Christian school 10 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

is simply not willing to present itself as an option that requires any real renunciation or sacrifice apart from finances. Rather, classical education is simply a recherche, indirect route to success—of course, “success” in the conventional, entirely worldly sense of the word. “Latin, logic, and Paradise Lost are capable of producing graduates every bit as attractive to secular universities as the other expensive private schools in town,” and so no one enrolling their child in a classical Christian school should expect to give up anything.

But what if enrolling your child in a classical Christian school entailed existential sacrifice, not just financial sacrifice? What if it meant giving up on much of what the world has determined “success” to mean? What if enrolling your child at a classical Christian school actually meant consigning them— economically speaking—to a rather average future, a future comparable to that of a classical Christian educator, in fact? Suppose prospective parents were told what the average classical Christian educator made per year and that enrolling your child in a classical Christian school meant agreeing your child might not make a whole lot more. I was probably three or four years into my career as a classical educator before I realized there were a handful of parents that I cordially chatted with throughout the year who uncritically assumed any career which only produced a salary comparable to mine must constitute failure.

What is more, they often assumed I must believe this, as well, and that it was the responsibility of any teacher to secure the “greatest advantages” for his students so they would not have to suffer the indignity of lower-middle-class life.

As a great admirer of Edmund Burke, I neither despise the rich nor envy them; nonetheless, as a private school teacher of many years, I have spoken with parents whose ambition for their children slyly implied, whenever grades and transcripts and colleges came up, “Oh, you have to want your students to turn out better than yourself—otherwise, who will be around in twenty years to send their children to this school?

You can’t afford the tuition, can you? That’s just the way some industries work, old chap. The employees at a Gucci boutique can’t afford the handbags they sell, but they hope somebody can, or else the boutique

Cultural Currency

will have to close. Don’t you see? By giving my son lower grades, you’re hurting yourself. Lower grades mean he won’t have the greatest advantages possible, which will hurt his chances of someday sending his children to this school.” Granted, conversations with these sorts of implications are rare; however, parents of goodwill, generosity, and virtue who enroll their children at private schools should know that many of their children’s teachers have been subtly informed of all this a few times in the past.

We are not hesitant to send our children off to Babylon U. We are not gritting our teeth as they head off to get reeducated. Rather, we will do whatever it takes to get them to Babylon U. There was a time when classical Christian education was a small, scrappy movement for people who rejected the false promises of the zeitgeist and were willing to suffer accusations of being Luddites, dorks, snobs, and recluses—in other words, to live with a great many disadvantages so far as advancement goes. Today, classical Christian schools are no longer densely populated with such people, just sparsely populated.

At this point, one has to wonder what exactly a secular college would have to do in order for classical Christian schools to quit sending them graduates.

Conversely, to what degree is a secular university’s willingness to consider my letters of recommendation born of their ignorance of my beliefs or the beliefs of most teachers at classical Christian schools?

Do graduates from classical schools want college admissions offices to know what their high school teachers raised them to think, or would that hurt their chances at getting in? Should I not want former students to attend colleges where I could lecture and write freely without fear of getting canceled?

It is one thing for a classical school to claim their graduates are apologetically savvy and ready for the world, and yet, a casual observer might be forgiven for wondering when self-respect would take a hand and classical teachers would tell students, “Don’t go there. They can’t stand our kind.”

If a classical school took a more skeptical approach toward apostasy factories—or an outright hostile one, for that matter—as opposed to merely saying there are things in life more important than grades and scholarships, could it survive? In our vir-

tue-signaling society, “There are things in life more important than grades” could easily become the classical Christian equivalent of the snack food company which claims to be “More than a snack food company,” and yet must make this claim because every modern boutique product needs a noble credo which describes its raison d’être. If the modern man is going to pay a steep price, then, he demands to hear he is doing good, but the only real way to avoid the temptations of virtue-signaling is to willingly suffer.

In order to break the vice grip secular colleges have on the Christian imagination, Christian high schools need to reimagine graduation as the beginning of a relationship and not the end. Were I an administrator, one of the first questions I would ask a high school teaching candidate—an experienced candidate, at least—is, “With how many of your former students are you still in regular contact?” If a high school teacher of ten or more years does not regularly talk to any former students, he is not likely a mentor to any of his students now. Reimagining graduation also means schools would do well to regularly conduct this thought experiment: if a tuition refund had to be given to parents of graduates who quit going to church in college, how would this affect the way we send students to college, or which colleges we were willing to send them to? How would this affect the way we conduct classes, or even what classes we teach?

What I am suggesting might very well throw the rapid expansion of classical Christian schools in this country to a grinding halt, but people within this movement talk entirely too much about growth and numbers. Pious people need chaste, peaceful, sober refuges from the madness of public schools, but a classical Christian school must be something greater.

It must be a refuge for all those “nobodies” who actually want to read classics, as Twain might have put it.

Joshua Gibbs is author of the books How to Be Unlucky: Reflections on the Pursuit of Virtue and Something They Will Not Forget: A Handbook for Classical Teachers, and host of the podcast Proverbial, which you can subscribe to now wherever you listen to podcasts.

FORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 11

Book Review

LONGFELLOW, MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

By Sean Hadley hy write another biography on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? Some authors—Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle—are universally recognized, even if the reader has never picked up one of their works. Today a name like Stephen King likewise generates ire or admiration at a mere mention, though there are enough folks on both sides who have never read him. Go back a few decades, and you will get the same kinds of reactions to names like Washington Irving and Longfellow. Longfellow’s is perhaps the most recognizable name of the nineteenth-century American authors whose works continue to find their ways into student hands every year. Everyone knows the name Longfellow, but “the best-known American author no one has read” is a dubious honor indeed. Do we really need another biography of one more old, dead, white, male poet?

In fact, we could use it now more than ever.

Consider how many Americans encounter Longfellow at some point in their life. It is true that only a narrow portion of his complete oeuvre is read,

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with “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” probably topping the list, alongside his shorter poem “The Cross of Snow,” or the poem turned Christmas carol, “Christmas Bells.” But Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha are some of our best candidates for a national epic and, along with shorter works like “The Psalm of Life,” are so ingrained in our cultural fabric that the titles and characters find their way into pop songs and children’s cartoons with ease. Often, Longfellow is just one more name stood up vertically on a bookshelf, with a handful of pages leafed through and many more begging for attention, but many homes, classrooms and libraries contain at least one book with a Longfellow poem within its pages. And all of this in spite of the efforts, detailed in Cross of Snow, to purge Longfellow from the literary canon. Longfellow’s poetry may not always please modern sensibilities for formlessness and void, but his poems endure all the same.

Longfellow is the kind of author with whom familiarity is easy to come by but seldom runs very deep. Longfellow wrote lyric and epic poetry, but he also penned dramas (including one, in verse, about the life of Michelangelo), translated Michelangelo’s sonnets and Dante’s Divine Comedy, and was the founding president of the Dante Society of America (one of the first scholarly societies in America to

Book Review

admit women). The author of some of America’s greatest poetry deserves a bit more than the casual passing glance that he receives in the average classroom.

Like the breadth of poetry, prose, and translations that he produced over his fifty years of writing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s own life serves as a poignant reminder of the tragic, the blessed, and the ordinary aspects of human existence. And while biographies of the poet abound in an unbroken series from just after his death to today, most view him from a respectful distance.

It can be difficult to get your hands on the exceptions—the extensive biography written by his brother, Samuel, or the brief and witty life penned by literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Thankfully, Nicholas Basbanes’ recent contribution, Cross of Snow, closes this gap for the reading public and reintroduces this extraordinarily ordinary man to a new generation of everymen and everywomen.

The twenty-first century has averaged one decent Longfellow biography per decade. Longfellow Redux (2004) by Christoph Irmscher and Longfellow: A Life Rediscovered (2016) by Charles Calhoun are worthy reads in their own right, but Cross of Snow stands out for its highly relational approach to telling the story of Longfellow’s life. It is not only that Basbanes details Longfellow’s friends and relations, for other biographers do that as well; Basbanes draws the reader into Longfellow’s joys and sufferings by treating the poet as a friend. Modern biographies tend to be either academic treatises or lionizing tales; Basbanes manages to avoid both. We sympathize with “young Henry,” as Basbanes refers to him throughout the book, as he tries to balance the duties of a son and student while studying in Europe with his desire to grieve the early loss of his first wife. We want to celebrate with Henry when he meets Frances a few years later, knowing the joy that lays before them. And we feel his heartbreak when Basbanes recounts her death and Henry’s failed attempts to rescue his wife from the burning dress which took her life. Basbanes accomplishes this through two key elements: the

relational focus already mentioned and the interweaving of Longfellow’s writings—both personal and private. In addition to providing the book’s title, Longfellow’s own words run through the whole volume; almost every page contains a line or two of Longfellow’s own writings, often from his previously unpublished letters. In this way, Basbanes creates in the reader a sense that we are truly getting to know Longfellow, rather than an idealized American icon or a caricatured object of derision. Longfellow is merely a man.

But we know as well that Longfellow is more than that. Basbanes opens his biography by describing Longfellow as “a man for all seasons, discreet, loyal, and principled to a fault.” Every man and woman could use such a friend, which makes the accessibility of Cross of Snow all the more inviting. When Longfellow died in 1882, a national day of mourning was declared and from coast to coast it was observed with genuine feeling. Has the country seen a more unifying figure since?

And as we move away from the struggles of 2020, a year of separation and division, Longfellow’s final printed word, coming just before his death, seems a welcome call into new friendship and new readings: “It is daybreak everywhere.”

Sean Hadley is a graduate of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and a doctoral student in Faulkner University’s Great Books program. He currently teaches humanities and research at Trinitas Christian School in Pensacola, FL.

FORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 13

Book Review

Misunderstanding Homer

By Christian Leithart he Iliad is not a book a man would need if he were stranded on a desert island. He would not need it because the Iliad would be there already, in his bones and breath.

The story of the Trojan War is as much a part of Western heritage as reading from left to right. From it, a man could rebuild all our tales.

Theodor Kallifatides admits as much in the afterword of his 2019 novel The Siege of Troy, a retelling of the Iliad set alongside the occupation of Greece

by German soldiers during the Second World War. The book is slim, and its author humbly states that in writing it he had no intention of trying to replace Homer. How could he? Instead, he says, “I just wanted more people to get to know him” (203).

With so many recent attempts to “reframe” ancient tales for enlightened modern minds, this is a refreshing attitude. But who is the Homer Kallifatides wants to introduce us to?

The novel’s frame tale takes place in April of 1945, in a small Greek town where a new teacher has just arrived from Athens. The story’s fifteenyear-old narrator is immediately smitten by the young woman, whose pupils address her as “Miss

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Marina” or, more often, “Miss.” When British bombers scatter bombs over the countryside, attempting to dislodge the Germans, Miss takes her class to a nearby cave and distracts them with a story. A besieged city . . . ragged warriors camped on a beach . . . the most beautiful woman in the world. . . . The skeptical high schoolers are soon enrapt.

The Iliad that appears in the novel is clearly told from Miss’s point of view. For one thing, the language falls far, far short of Homer’s original.

Here is how the opening line communicates the rage of Achilles: “The sun was shining bright on the camps of the Achaeans, but their mood was far from sunny” (6). Far from sunny indeed.

For another, Miss does not hide her disdain for the war, and in particular for the men who started it. In this telling, Helen is not kidnapped by Paris, but leaves willingly, having fallen for his sensitive nature. Menelaus does not fight to regain his honor but to soothe his jealousy. Achilles is cruel, Agamemnon stupid, and Odysseus conniving.

Hector alone is honorable, but it is clear from the moment he appears that he is doomed. Kallifatides considers the Iliad “the strongest anti-war poem ever written” (203) and, in Miss’s voice, paints the Trojan War as futile and senseless, more about muscles and cruelty than reason and honor. The Achaeans are fools to think they are fighting for

Book Review

anything other than their own masculine vanity.

By contrast, the female characters are innocent (Iphigenia), self-aware (Helen), courageous (Andromache), and resourceful (Briseis). None of this makes any difference, of course, in a world controlled by men. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. When Miss says to Dimitra, her one female student, “A woman’s body is the field of conflict where men crush one another’s pride and honor” (30), Dimitra refuses to accept the statement, but as the novel progresses, the atrocities of war prove Miss right.

Strangest of all is the omission of the gods. They are absent from Miss’s story, except for a character’s occasional prayer or curse. Zeus does not deign to appear. Athena participates in no battles. Achilles’ armor is fashioned by Iphis, a female slave, not Hephaestus. Their absence is all the stranger considering the fact that Miss is herself religious. She comments that her seven students make a “good number . . .

God created the world in seven days” (4).

Her story implies that men’s fates are not under their control, but as to who or what does control them, she is silent. Her students, however, speculate. When Dimitra asks if he believes in anything, the fifteenyear-old protagonist says, “In people, to put it simply. Some are stupid, some are evil, but there’s nothing else to believe in” (85).

By the end of the novel, the teenage protagonist has dropped his puppy love and accepted the fact that he will marry Dimitra and quietly raise a family in the village. Despite cruel men, despite bullets and bombs, despite random executions in the village square, life goes on. Love outlasts hate because it needs to. Even women, who are treated more savagely by war than men, have a place in the world. The last line of the book, as the protagonist and Dimitra walk toward the lights of the village, is: “Our mothers were waiting for us” (202).

For those who have never read or perhaps never even heard the story of the Trojan War, The Siege of Troy would make a fine introduction. Its aims and execution

are equally humble. But its Homer is not the one I know. Kallifatides does not capture the vitality of the Iliad partly because he does not seem to recognize the heroism on display, the “prodigality of life,” as William Hazlitt said. Kallifatides’ Greeks and Trojans are barbarians full of nothing but despair.

By contrast, in Homer, the characters, Trojan and Achaean, man and woman, know that life is cruel and painful, but also rich and wonderful. Yes, war is hell, but facing hell with courage is what life is for an ancient hero. You do not need to read between the lines to find life in Homer’s epic. Its splendor, force, and variety are laid bare on every page.

As for the man on the desert island, the only book he would need is a practical guide to shipbuilding, of course.

Christian Leithart writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He likes old books and staring out the window.

Book Review

Knowing the Worst

By Sean Johnson

amed not by the author but by his readers, “Greeneland” is the darker, more desperate reflection of our own world in which many of Graham Greene’s novels are set. Anyone who has ever set foot there will know it again at once. It feels like a Charles Dickens novel minus the children, wealthy philanthropists, and general optimism—a world dominated by what Greene himself once called “the Fagan darkness.” I have spent so much time there that even the faintest whiff of Greeneland can set my pulse racing—I am overcome with images of hunted men, beleaguered priests, foreign locales, and Carol Reed movies. It is also the very last atmosphere I want to encounter in a biography of Greene. Measuring by this standard alone, Richard Greene’s The Unquiet Englishman is the best to come forth in some time.

Any biography that invokes a world crafted by Graham Greene is a biography too much in the shadow of the man himself. Some accounts of his life fall prey to this for the rather excusable reason that they are literally of Greene’s own making. A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape are probing, as autobiog-

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raphies go, but pointedly selective. Not that Greene spared the lurid details—his then-fascination with Freudian psychoanalysis prompted surprising candor about private matters, even of a sexual nature, in A Sort of Life. Yet he was extremely protective of details surrounding his increasingly unhappy marriage and the religious conversion that had accompanied it—much to the frustration of his Catholic readers.

When Greene (feeling pressure to let someone else tell his story) selected Norman Sherry to write his “official” biography, it was largely on the strength of Sherry’s promise “to keep away from the personal . . . but if the work begins to move in a biographical direction you will be free to censor it.” Sherry’s first volume is not quite as discrete as he promised, but Greene’s shadow hovers over the entire project.

Greene’s concerns for privacy anticipated a prurient interest in his personal life, and his fears were confirmed when the unofficial biographies began appearing. Some early books about Greene were little better than tabloids in their preoccupation with his romantic entanglements, and even the more serious studies could get bogged down in looking for correspondences between Greene’s love life and his fiction. This temptation seems forgivable when the subject, Greene, made a career writing spy thrillers and dramas revolving around love affairs. And yet,

Book Review

The Unquiet Englishman does more than its predecessors to show that Graham Greene’s vices and virtues share a single source.

while a fictional life might be justly reduced to its most sensational details, the same is rarely true of a genuine human existence.

Richard Greene (who probably has the phrase “no relation” printed on his business cards by now) takes this truth as his polestar and wastes no time announcing the fact: Even as this biography narrates, with much new detail, the key events and patterns in his private life, it swings the balance away from obscure details of his sexual life, which have captivated earlier biographers, to an account of his engagement with the political, literary, intellectual, and religious currents of his time.

The “new detail” comes courtesy of several memoirs by people close to the author, as well as troves of letters, discovered or published since the last serious attempt at a Greene biography. There were no better hands for these new materials to fall into than Richard Greene’s. As editor of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (2008), he is already deeply familiar with Greene the author, and the supremely valuable practice of aggregating a myriad of fragmentary sources and synthesizing from them a comprehensive and coherent narrative of a life. Of course, any biographer can adopt such a method, but in Richard Greene the practice rises to the level of instinct, sometimes leading him to valuable material far removed from the writings or affairs of the primary subject and serving him well in his project of presenting a balanced, whole (Graham) Greene.

One of the more gratifying fruits of the biographer’s method is, at last, a happy conclusion to a notorious episode in the author’s life—the Shirley Temple libel case. Long before he was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, young Graham Greene was paying the bills by writing movie reviews. He hadn’t been at it for long when he was slapped with a lawsuit over his review of (wait for it) Wee Willie Winkie. In the review, Greene accused the studio behind the film of exploiting the child actress in order to appeal to adult male audiences with prurient tastes. Though the slander was not against Temple per se, her lawyers jumped at the chance to sue Greene for libel and eventually won after an acrimonious and very public court battle.

When Temple met the aging Greene decades later, well into her celebrated career with the U.S. foreign service, they quickly became friends. Drawing from memoirs she wrote shortly after that period, Richard Greene suggests one basis for the easy friendship was that her own recollection corroborated Greene’s “view of the studios as full of sexual menace for child actors.” In that light, the early episode—sometimes attributed to the brash pen of a young writer—can be better understood as one of Greene’s early forays into the humanitarian arenas where he would spend most of his adult life.

Admittedly, Greene is a bit like the famous lovers in Dante’s second circle, blown about by the wind of unfettered affections. Richard Greene advocates, though, for a charitable reading of the novelist as a man in the grips of some form of bipolarity—a disorder better understood today than it was even at FORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 17

Book Review

the end of Greene’s life. While “journalists looking for easy copy have sometimes condemned Graham Greene’s character,” he suggests “the disasters, especially of his marriage and sexual life, are generally more pitiable than culpable.” He does not contend that culpability should give way entirely to pity (the novelist himself had little patience for the kind of pity that distorted reality) but does want the writer’s detractors to recognize that his sins brought him more pain than pleasure. “Indeed,” he adds, referring to Graham Greene’s professional and personal preoccupation with suicide, “his survival itself is something of a triumph.”

The Unquiet Englishman does more than its predecessors to show that Graham Greene’s vices and virtues share a single source. The heedless affections that led him into adultery also led him into the thick of the twentieth century’s worst humanitarian crises with little concern for his own safety.

These affections, and the ferocious loyalty that often undergirded them, can be summed up in Greene’s own concept of involvement. “Greene used the term ‘involvement’ to describe a kind of loyalty, passion, and commitment that can overtake a person who observes suffering and injustice—as a character remarks in The Quiet American, ‘Sooner or later, one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.’”

Greene dodged Haitian hit squads, ducked gunfire on Vietnam battlefields, and rode a donkey across the worst wastelands of Mexico because of an insuperable instinct to “take sides.” In the cases of the Marxist revolution in Mexico and the Spanish Civil War—two upheavals that saw the progressive parties brutally oppressing Catholics—he had to take sides against those parties with which his own liberal politics would formally have aligned him. It is a mark of his integrity that no one and nothing commanded more of Greene’s loyalty than the church in which he himself often felt like a “displaced person.”

Richard Greene is to be commended particularly for his affectionate attention to (Graham) Greene’s later years. He offers thoughtful critical treatments of late novels including The Honorary Consul and Greene’s most underrated success, Monsignor Quixote. Quixote is both an inventive retelling of its classic namesake and a tribute to one of the author’s most intimate friendships. In the later decades of his life, Greene began taking yearly trips through Spain with 18 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

Father Leopoldo Duran, who became his friend and confessor. The complete correspondence of Greene and Duran is among the newly-available source material informing this biography. These letters reveal the aging Greene—who had all but excommunicated himself in the heyday of his adulteries, not going to confession or receiving communion for years at a time—as a penitent and unexpectedly pious old man. Each year the pair would visit the ancient Trappist monastery of Oseira, which features prominently in the mystical conclusion of Monsignor Quixote.

When he first saw it in 1976, Greene “was impressed by its austerity, and wrote in the guest book: ‘Thank you for these moments of peace and silence. Please pray for me. Graham Greene.’”

One of my favorite literary serendipities is that the Whiskey Priest of The Power and the Glory fails to escape by boat to the city of Vera Cruz (“true cross”), but stumbles instead into martyrdom—the truest cross. Greene’s own end boasts a similarly happy coincidence. When the blood disease that claimed his life entered its final stages, he was admitted to hospital. There the man who had taken Thomas as his baptismal name (in honor of his abiding doubt) received communion and last rites before finally succumbing on April 3, 1991. The hospital’s name: Hospital de la Providence (“the hospital of providence”).

Richard Greene weaves a complex narrative, to which Graham Greene’s own concept of “involvement” is more integral than any singular besetting sin. He doesn’t whitewash Greene’s failings, and doesn’t ignore the connection between life and art, but also never loses sight of “the central narrative of Graham Greene’s life—how politics, faith, betrayal, love, and exile become great fiction.” Richard Greene brings us to the place described by the pitiable Scoby in The Heart of the Matter: “Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst.” Finally, a biographer leaves us knowing the best, too.

Sean Johnson is an associate editor of FORMA. He teaches literature at Veritas Academy in Richmond, Virginia.

MEN WITH CHESTS OR

WHY WE LEARN

BY PAUL TWISS FORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 19

It is not yet clear how the annals of history will memorialize 2020. I am inclined to think that most immediately, last year will be recorded as one of opportunity. As we were reminded afresh of our relative fragility, every society on the planet was galvanized to respond and adapt so as to prevail. However, as time progresses and the pandemic slides further into the past, I believe we will see how 2020 perpetuated some subtle yet undesirable trends. The interlocking of some unique variables further affirmed the notion of instruction without training, education that fails to shape the mind. The repercussions of this will be a depreciation of beauty and courage. After tracing out this relationship I will attempt to use this essay to explain the responsibility of the church to respond.

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As the pandemic progressed and stay-at-home orders were issued, we reconfigured, with breathtaking haste, the sinews and the tendons of society in order to permit the continuation of everyday life, at a distance. Foregoing the consideration of other possibilities, commonplace routines were upended, with the near wholesale substitution of in-person interactions for online equivalents. In doing so, we unwittingly forfeited the long-established means by which members of a society build trust, mutual respect, and affection. As image bearers of a relational God we depend upon a steady stream of opportunities to engage with one another: every seemingly insignificant interaction is in fact an occasion to fulfill our role, projecting the imago dei and receiving it in turn. Our unchecked endorsement of online meetings and contactless collections ushered in new levels of autonomy, unlikely to disappear post-COVID-19.

And so we find ourselves embracing a new reality of the virtual meeting and curbside pickup—both of which leave us feeling strangely alone.

To be sure, this rapid transition to “distanced living” does not represent the sum total of our response to the crisis. Certainly, it was the most immediate.

But there are surely more protracted inflections, the details of which are still being worked out. If the impact of the events of 2020 adheres in any way to the contours of history, we may see an increased uptake in higher education in the coming months. Studies have shown that during periods of societal and financial hardship, the population responds by returning to school. When the outlook is bleak, the market value of education goes up.

As one whose daily bread derives inferentially from student intakes, you might think that such a trend would give me cause for celebration. However, again, I believe there are valid reasons to be apprehensive. While the desire to learn should be commended, careful attention must also be given to the proposed educational path. The means are as important as the end. When deciding upon a new educational venture, due consideration must be given to the “what” and the “how,” understanding that true learning is bound up in both. What is it I intend to study? And how will I go about the task? Or, more pertinently, what is this course offering? And how will it achieve the stated goal? It is with respect to this point that many well-intentioned students have

faltered, and the trends of 2020 are set only to exacerbate their mistakes.

The time-honored tradition of education in the Western world has been that which seeks both to train and instruct. From Plato, to Aristotle, to the apostle Paul, and St. Augustine, all understood the necessity not only of equipping the student with new knowledge, but of shaping him into something which he is not. The child’s immature mind must be shaped and strengthened before it can be informed. Indeed, until very recently, all reputable institutions of education deemed the task of instruction vanity until serious strides had been made in the way of training. For this reason, the first years of formal learning were given to catechizing, memorization, recitation, and exams.

Little was asked of the student in terms of opinion, or argument. He was not yet ready for such things.

First, he must be trained. He must receive a cultural heritage—a value system—and to such a degree that it formed his mind into something new. Only when the pupil’s character had been sculpted via the rigors of disciplined study was he ready to harness new knowledge, debate with fellow students, contribute to his field, and instruct others in turn.

With the rise of industrialism at the turn of the twentieth century, educational patterns began to change. The dogma of an increasingly mechanized society eventually infiltrated the classroom: efficiency was paramount, productivity the goal. In due course, less value was attributed to the formation of character. The task was deemed too arduous and convoluted in light of the burgeoning demand for output. So education became almost exclusively about the acquisition of knowledge. To be sure, the responsibility for such changes does not reside exclusively with the schools. Educational boards were all but held hostage to the demands of a consumeristic age. If they offered anything but the most basic qualification deemed necessary for employment, via the path of least resistance, their days as an institution were surely numbered.

This trajectory persisted into the twenty-first century as the trend was augmented by the technological age. Learning that previously necessitated a teacher, a classroom, and the expenditure of much ink was aptly replaced by an almost robotic interaction between the student and a screen. As computers quickly assumed a position of indispensability in the learning FORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 21

environment, the illusion that true education can be accomplished via non-relational transactions was perpetuated. The shift in 2020 to “distanced living” will almost certainly force another stride along this path. The ease with which we sacrificed a multitude of interpersonal exchanges for autonomous imitations will raise new questions for teachers. Why not follow suit? Why persist with antiquated methods if more “efficient” means are available?

Certainly, it could be argued that the shift I have been describing has not been altogether detrimental.

Graduates today are generally equipped for the task demanded of them. The universities have not failed them insomuch as their students are able to join the workforce, contribute to society, and pursue meaningful careers. If such is the case, then we need not worry too much about the future. The pandemic presented an opportunity, so we have responded, and in a manner that may one day be celebrated. However, the consequences of privileging instruction over training are numerous, and the weightiest ramifications are perhaps the most subtle.

When a student has received an education tantamount to mere data acquisition, and no effort has been made to shape his character, his mind is a plateau void of any contours. His soul lacks anchor points by which evaluative judgments are made. He has no frame of reference, and thus sits as an impressionable island with little understanding of cultural heritage and why things are the way they are. While he may be able to produce, he is ill-equipped to contribute (in the truest sense). In accordance with the industrial age of which he is a product, he has become a gearwheel in a system that does not ask for his opinion because he is incapable of offering it.

What I am describing need not be interpreted as a tragedy. The uneducated graduate will likely secure a well-paid job. He may even be content. Along the way he may garner some anecdotal semblance of truth so as to inform his perception of the world. From this he may then derive a rudimentary system of ethics, by which he construes an illusion of competence to make moral decisions for himself. But even if, by chance, the young scholar is able to fill something of the void that his overpriced education has failed to address, there remains a significant gap that he will struggle to close by himself.

Stated plainly, the untrained mind lacks an objec22 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

tive value system. He does not have a framework by which to make properly informed assessments of the things around him. Pertaining most immediately to the realm of aesthetics, he is prone to label every pang of appreciation as mere subjectivity. He enjoys Elgar but he does not understand why. He loves walking round the Louvre, but can’t explain his pleasure. He renders his enjoyments as somewhat whimsical: they work for him, but there is certainly no need for others to follow. He has no road map by which he might trace out the path of beauty—his is a world wherein value is arbitrary and declarative affirmations of glory are meaningless. Worse still, the student cannot explain why he finds other things to be innately ugly. Consequently, he surrenders his judgment as personal opinion: “I find modern architecture to be disagreeable, but I’m not saying that you should too.” This lack of objectivity as it relates to value is one of the greatest casualties when education neglects the formation of character, and such is our situation today.

When an individual lacks an objective value system, certain things follow as a matter of course. First, the world around him becomes inescapably dull. He does not have a measuring rod by which to perceive splendor, and thus the lofty becomes akin to the benign. The aesthetic world flattens into a level playing field: Beethoven no longer trumps pop music, and the sitcom is as compelling as Shakespeare. Indeed, in recent times this phenomenon has been further augmented such that now the simple regularly wins favor over the beautiful. Since an appreciation of the latter demands a focusing of the mind, we choose the way of entertainment, purposefully avoiding the rigorous pursuit of more wonderful things. Why endure Mahler’s Ninth Symphony when three minutes of Beyoncé will suffice? Yet the superficial does not satisfy.

We have made ourselves into perpetual consumers who are forever hungry. True accents of brilliance have been muffled by our inability to form objective value statements.

A second consequence is perhaps more disconcerting: the untrained mind lacks courage. Since the student has no system by which to attribute value beyond his capricious fancies, he struggles to identify which battles are worthy of the fight. He may assume a particular responsibility very well, until pressures come his way. At such a time he is ill-disposed to make the decision: “Stay at my post, or retreat?”

When an individual lacks an objective value system, certain things follow as a matter of course.

First, the world around him becomes inescapably dull.

If he cannot gauge the task’s objective worth, in the heat of battle he may well run. C.S. Lewis made this argument at a time when war was a reality for most young men in Europe. Writing in 1943 on the importance of true education, he explains that to diminish objectivity in the realm of aesthetics is to raise “men without chests.” The student’s propensity to render affirmations of beauty as subjective opinion appears harmless, until a lack of courage is seen as its inevitable subsidiary.

Coincidentally, a positive illustration of this principle can be drawn from the same period of history by way of the British prime minister Winston Churchill. A cursory engagement with any one of his many biographers quickly makes plain the dogmatic valor shown by Churchill at that time. The contemplative reader cannot help but feel immense gratitude for his resolve during a time of the utmost crisis. Additionally, he may also think to question: From where did such gallantry derive? What was the source of Churchill’s resolve to fight, and resist the pressure of so many around him to capitulate to Hitler? More than a few have given attention to the prime minister’s education for an answer.

Certainly, he was by no means an exemplary student. But in some measure, Churchill’s boyhood was one of training. His mind had been shaped by a value system that affirmed beautiful things as worthy of his attention. A particular highlight of his time at Harrow was winning the headmaster’s prize for reciting from memory The Lays of Ancient Rome: 1,200 lines of poetry recounting heroic endeavors from the Empire.

It surely isn’t anecdotal to suggest a line of correlation between this kind of training and the objectivity with which Churchill approached the war. For him,

surrender wasn’t an option. The battle was worthy of the fight. Why? Because his estimation of democracy, liberty, and peace did not derive from subjective meanderings of the mind, but from a cultural heritage that had been marked upon his soul.

The argument I have been tracing so far is not new. Many have gone on record before me to advocate for the role of training in education. Still more have expressed discouragement at the subjectivity that plagues our culture and the havoc it wreaks in so many areas of life. At this point, my hope is to draw attention to the responsibility created by these issues for the church. The people of God have a role to play, elders and laymen alike. We must address the loss of objective value for at least two reasons.

First, the deficiency of which I have been speaking hinders Christians from fulfilling their responsibility to make manifest the gospel. As the preaching of God’s Word has succumbed to the utilitarian pressures of our age, ministers invariably strive to give “practical application” from every juncture of the text.

Earnest church members spend their energies during the week in an attempt to comply, understanding at some level that Christ has called his followers to live an excellent life. However, for as long as exhortation and appropriation are confined to the realm of individualistic moralism, the question of beauty becomes increasingly foreign.

The lack of an objective value system prohibits the truth from informing every corner of life: the pursuit of leisure, the enjoyment of stories, the topic of conversation at the dinner table. If the activity in question is deemed morally acceptable, no further judgment can be rendered, and well-meaning disciples are hindered in their ability to ordain the gospel. Indeed, FORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 23

without proper training the church member is just as likely to derive his sense of value from the affirmations of society as he is from Scripture. Occasionally these might be right. Yosemite is glorious; the Grand Canyon is spectacular. The advertisement for a cheap get-away should not be altogether ignored. However, most often they will be wrong. Twenty-three reviews of popcorn by the sixteen-year-old YouTuber should be discarded. Time is short, and this contribution is not worthy of our attention.

As a result, the professing adherent to Christian orthodoxy willingly recites an age-old creed, he persistently conforms to a prescribed system of ethics, but in every other respect, his life looks the same as his agnostic neighbor. Though the teaching of truth and ethics should not be sidelined, it is an attendant responsibility of the church to recover an objective value system. Such is necessary for true Christian living, and somewhere along the way it has been lost.

Second, the church should be concerned to understand matters of beauty because the horizon is bleak.

Western civilization has chosen the path of secularism, and at some point congregations in America will be made to feel the consequences of post-Christian thinking. The outworking of this, Sunday by Sunday, is difficult to predict. But surely it will demand a clearer articulation of the gospel and an expanded understanding of how one may draw strength to press on. Leaning on C.S. Lewis again, he points out that the soldier fights not because he knows the truth per se, but because he understands the value of that truth. Syllogisms alone do not save the day. But beauty breeds valor.

For the pastor this will necessitate delineating a rubric of majesty that extends far beyond those tasks we are prone to label as “ministry”: discipleship, evangelism, counseling, etc. The single mother of three needs encouragement. She shows up on a Sunday not knowing how to keep going. The week ahead promises to be lonely, much the same as the last few. Her children are too young to acknowledge her burden, much less shoulder it with her. To be sure, their crying at night does not cause her to question the gospel. But it does raise doubts about her choices. Secularism has not esteemed her role. The public sphere attributes little value to the labors of parenting. Her friends regularly suggest she put the children in daycare and take a part-time job to pay for it. At 2:00 a.m.

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in the morning she entertains the idea. Why? Because she has no reason not to.

This mom is not in need of an argument for why the trinitarian understanding of God is correct, over and above Islam’s Allah (though certainly there is a place for such a sermon). Rather, what she needs is a vision for the beauty of childrearing. She needs a framework that begins with the divine relationship between the Father and the Son and extends all the way to her Wednesday evening reality of three tired children and no help. The pastor must equip her with a blueprint that attributes worth to spoon-feeding oatmeal at 5:00 a.m., building towers whose sole purpose is to be knocked down, and singing solo nursery rhymes because no one else in the room knows the words. She needs a sense of objective value that addresses her struggle. Understanding what beauty is and where it comes from will equip her to go about the business of another week.

As society progresses towards a yet-less-Christian version of itself, holding to biblical convictions will prove to be an increasingly difficult task. The local church must train its members to live. Followers of Christ must know the gospel, the imperatives of our faith, and the means by which we make value judgments. The language of beauty must become familiar. The means of deriving a roadmap from biblical truth to arbitrary, mundane tasks should be intuitive.

Only then will the church be positioned to stand in a postmodern age which champions utility, subjectivity, and “tolerance.”

The means of accomplishing such a task is not straightforward. As I have already mentioned, throughout the history of Western education, a high priority has been placed on training. Great efforts have been made to shape the soul over several years, equipping the individual with a sense of heritage and cultural worth as determined by the test of time.

Today, the classroom has rejected this approach to learning, and most local churches will not be able to fill the gap. With limited time and resources, the tyranny of the urgent prevails; couples need counseling, unbelievers need the gospel, Sunday’s order of service must be approved, and there probably should be a prayer meeting at some point.

It is important to note, however, that there is another route towards an objective value system—one which is readily accessible to Christians. Notwith-

As society progresses towards a yet-less-Christian version of itself, holding to biblical convictions will prove to be an increasingly difficult task.

standing the value of an education that esteems training, there are certain things that the optative and the Parthenon do not explain. Indeed, the authoritative blueprint for matters of beauty and aesthetics is the Bible. Therein, a theological rubric is given by which all affirmations of glory may be tested. Initially, such a claim may appear logically strained. We usually turn to Scripture to derive a system of truth, and ethics.

Seldom do we consider it as a commentary on objective value, particularly with regards to such things as music, art, and literature. However, this assessment speaks more of our unwillingness to think than of the limits of God’s Word. When rightly pursued, a multitude of biblical doctrines inform our understanding of the world around us, teaching us what is valuable, what is not, and how we can decide between the two.

Central among such ideas are the images of God, the Trinity, and the divine attributes. A proper consideration of each will instruct us not only in terms of right behavior, but also with regard to pleasure.

By way of example, we find in the Godhead qualities such as unity, diversity, complementarity, and restraint. Incidentally, we perceive these same characteristics as present in an orchestral score: a multitude of instruments, each pursuing a unique line of music and yet forming a composite, harmonious whole. No one musician is overbearing; everyone assumes his rightful place so as to produce a taxonomy of sound that is intuitively agreeable. Thus, with steadfastness, history has declared the music of Beethoven and Mozart to be beautiful. By contrast, we need not feel

the burden to speak similar words of affirmation to the amateur rock band. Theirs is a sound that is not balanced. The various instruments struggle to work together as each player fumbles his part and values his own contribution too highly. The resultant sound bears few if any fingerprints of trinitarian congruence. With grace and humility, we are allowed to say that this is ugly.

Though we must not forsake the teaching of truth and morality, to stop there is to render a disservice to Scripture. God intends for the Bible to inform our understanding of the world, and this extends to the realm of aesthetics. As the privileged stewards of his Word, the church should understand beauty. It is our responsibility to harness an objective value system, not merely because the days are evil and the church has been found wanting, but because Scripture provides a blueprint. We will not be taught such things in the secular classroom. But all is not lost: the church has the Word. May pastors, elders, and laypeople attend to the task of learning. May our study of the Bible be formative, impressing upon our souls an objective understanding of divinely ordained things. May we have chests, perceiving beauty, understanding worth, and fighting the battles that are worthy to be fought.

Paul Twiss is originally from the UK, is married to Laura, and has six children. He is a faculty member at The Master’s Seminary in California, and is in the final stages of a PhD in Old Testament at Queen’s University, Belfast.

FORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 25

Interview

From Margin to Ma in stream How “Woke” Ideology Appropriated American Academia (and What to Do about It) A CONVERSATION WITH SAMANTHA JONES

By Heidi White

Samantha Jones is a force to be reckoned with. A former social justice warrior, Jones was earning her PhD in women’s studies when she became disillusioned with the “woke” takeover of American universities. After over a decade of teaching college writing, she is telling her own story—and pulling no punches along the way. She writes under a pseudonym, explaining that if her colleagues were to discover her criticisms, she would be unable to secure employment in academia. This, she says, tells us everything we need to know about the state of American higher education. Jones wants to maintain her anonymity in her critiques of academic culture so that she can work on projects that aim to improve academia from within. She is also very interested in Christian classical education and wants to be part of it. Jones chatted recently with us our about her take on the woke project that dominates contemporary academia. § Thank you for being willing to talk with me, Sa- woke friends, and attended activist conferences. mantha. Tell me, what is your experience with All this drew me away from my faith and led me down a path where my purpose was fighting for “woke” academia?

Social Justice.

I was raised in a Christian working-class family.

As a first-generation college student, I assumed What happened next? that the system is meritocratic and that professors are among the smartest people in the country. After a few years, I started having doubts. I had Now I know that the professoriate has long been become angry and resentful, focusing on the indominated by woke ideologues. One undergrad- justices of the world rather than cultivating gratuate course included a unit on Women’s Studies. itude for the good things in my life. I saw myself My professor offered to help me on an academic as a victim, which was disempowering. Also, I was career path, which I appreciated, although now I bothered by the arrogance of the activist crowd. I see it as an example of woke professors imposing saw no intellectual humility, so I disengaged from their worldview in order to produce new activists. activism.

After a while, I completed a master’s degree in I began to read Women’s Studies and Social Justice books. I worked for a feminist nonprofit, made writing and taught college writing. I began a PhD 26 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

Interview

program in women’s studies. I realized that woke ideology dominated many of the graduate students’ minds. This was a contrast to my undergraduate and master’s programs, when Social Justice existed, but it was on the margins. When I began college in 2000, there was still some viewpoint diversity among the faculty that represented the entire political spectrum.

By the time I began working on my PhD, however, social justice was dominant through the establishment of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices and plans.

You experienced woke activism moving from the fringes to the forefront between your undergraduate studies and your doctoral program? That was quick. What changed?

The term “woke” for example. What is “woke”? It is a term at the front and center of this cultural moment. But what does it actually mean?

Being “woke” means seeing the world through a “critical consciousness,” defined by Critical Theories that believe society is shaped by systemic racism, sexism, and other oppressive power dynamics. To be woke means becoming an activist and attempting to achieve social justice. No one is ever woke enough; there are always more opportunities to “do the work,” as the activists say.

Becoming woke is a psychologically appealing state that matches the cognitive abilities of teenagers and young adults. People of this age want to establish their identity independent from their parents; an ideology that represents itself as subversive is attractive. Also, young adults are becoming more aware of injustices, which is painful. When they discover a theory that claims to be the path to justice—that by following its tenets, and becoming activists, they can participate in ending injustice—it is very captivating.

Around the time of Trump’s election, I saw things that greatly disturbed me. My colleagues attacked Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and white men as oppressors. They supported outlawing “hate speech.”

When I defended free speech as a foundational principle, I was attacked. I judged a writing award and my colleagues were upset that I emphasized merit rather That all sounds compatible with moral action than gender or race. These are just a few examples of though. What’s wrong with it? many.

Social justice ideology is a totalitarian worldview —a How did this shift in academic culture impact you? Utopian project that can be described as counter-Enlightenment. The genealogy of the counter-EnlightI wanted to break free from ideological possession enment can be traced back to the late eighteenth cenof any kind. I gravitated toward thinkers who didn’t tury, primarily to German intellectuals who critiqued seek to eliminate nuance, but to honestly grapple with empiricism, universalism, and rationalism. Later, the complexities of our world. I considered multiple these critiques emerged in the work of postmodernviewpoints from all over the political spectrum: con- ist thinkers. In the concluding pages of Madness and servatism, libertarianism, and classical liberalism. I Civilization, postmodernist scholar Michel Foucault even started reading conservative media, which I had praised the “sovereign enterprise of Unreason.” Founever thought to do, because I had been indoctrinat- cault argued that reason is a mechanism of oppression ed into the belief that conservatism is evil and hate- that proceeds by way of exclusions, constraints, and ful. I realized that social justice ideology is intellec- prohibitions. Another important postmodernist phitually weak, and that it compensates for its weakness losopher, Jacques Derrida, indicted “logocentrism,” with very shrewd tactics, mainly a deliberate plan or the tyranny of reason. Postmodernist thinkers into dominate academia and other important institu- fluenced social justice scholars. tions. Woke academics are adept with language. If social justice activists tried to promote conservatism, So the woke project in American universities is inthey would probably call it something like “histori- herently anti-rational? If that’s the case, isn’t it also cal global wisdom.” There is something to be learned inherently destructive? from wokeness in terms of how to frame ideas.

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aims to change everything in order to rid the world of oppression. Social justice activists do not acknowledge the coercion inherent in their project, nor the authoritarianism that silences other points of view through censorship and cancel culture. Activists do not view their opponents as wrong, but as evil, and treat dissenters as such.

Wokeness is fundamentally illiberal; it explicitly rejects the idea that universities should be marketplaces of ideas with the pursuit of truth at their core and with freedom of speech as the method of arriving at truth.

In order to solve social problems, we must have honest discussions about the nature of such problems and the merits of proposed solutions. But social justice activism severely restricts discussion on crucial topics: race, gender, sexuality, immigration, and social inequality. Woke ideologues in the universities police discourse on these issues. They attack, vilify, and cancel any dissenters.

I have witnessed what happens in classrooms when students question woke ideology: they are ridiculed and ostracized. I know of professors who explicitly say that their goal is to demolish their students’ Christian faith. I also know of professors who give grades based on whether students articulate Social justice ideology in their papers.

If the coercive tactics of woke activism result in a more just society, why does an independent academia matter?

An ideologically independent academia is important because the purpose of academic institutions is to facilitate research that expands our knowledge, which cannot happen without a fundamental commitment to the truth. If academia is not ideologically independent, then researchers run the risk of confirmation bias—the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories. History is rife with examples of existing beliefs or theories that have been wrong.

In this context, I am reminded of Francis Bacon, the founder of the scientific method. In The Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon emphasized intellectual humility as the prerequisite for knowledge advancement: “. . . the same humility that we practice in learning, the same we also observe in teaching, without endeavoring to stamp a dignity on any of our inventions, by the triumphs of confutation, the citations of antiquity, the producing of authorities, or the mask of obscurity; as any one might do, who had rather give lustre to his own name, than light to the minds of others. We offer no violence, and spread no nets for the judgments of men, but lead them on to things themselves, and their relations; that they may You are talking about coercion and censorship on a view their own stores, what they have to reason about, wide scale. Is this really happening? and what they may add, or procure, for the common good.” Bacon’s commitment to intellectual humility Yes, this is happening. Because of social justice ideol- and empiricism is a model for how academia should ogy, people in academic institutions cannot honestly function. discuss important issues. The institutions we designed and funded as places to seek truth, discuss and solve The shift of wokeness from margin to mainstream problems, and advance justice are inhibited from do- is not only disturbing but fascinating to me. How ing so. This is a betrayal of public trust. What if an- did wokeness permeate the fabric of American life? other ideological or religious group completely took over American public universities—say, for example, There is an old adage, “The fish rots from the head Scientologists—and forced all academic questions first.” In other words, everything flows from academia. and answers to conform to their teachings? I don’t In the West, the class-based proletarian revolution mean to disparage Scientology, but most Americans that Marx predicted was not happening as quickly as would say that the idea of Scientology controlling all the Marxists wanted, so they invented strategies to academic discourse is absurd. This is exactly the state foment revolution. In the 1930s, the Frankfurt School of affairs we are in with the ideology of social justice. was established at Columbia University. Presiding intellectuals—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Allow me to play the devil’s advocate for a moment. Herbert Marcuse—developed Critical Theory and 28 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

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While not all Social Justice academics are atheists or agnostics . . . Many woke ideologies devote their lives to fighting for justice on earth because they hold out no hope for eternal justice. One of the many problems with social justice is that there is no emphasis on forgiveness.

promoted its development in American universities.

Their theories are sometimes called Cultural Marxism. In Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), Marcuse explicitly outlined a strategy for the Left to take over America. His tactics? To build counter-institutions and to embark on a “long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them.”

The strategy outlined by Marcuse advocated co-opting established American institutions, beginning with academia. So far, Marcuse’s strategy has succeeded; the activists who entered academia in the 1970s trained another generation of scholar-activists, who, around the 1990s, advanced the application of Critical Theory in other domains: postcolonialism, gender, race, sexuality, and disability. During these years, however, there was still intellectual diversity in academia.

But things have changed. There are almost no conservatives teaching in academia, while classical liberals and libertarians are a small minority, nearing retirement. Woke activists know this and therefore require signed “Diversity Statements” and “Commitments to social justice” to ensure that only people who share their ideology can secure careers in higher education. Woke ideology gained complete control of academia around 2015, when most universities began establishing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. University graduates brought this framework into the private sector. As a result, wokeness is the dominant ideology in America.

You are a professional academic who inhabited academia during the woke takeover. What are the intellectual roots of social justice ideology?

Wokeness does not recognize itself as an ideology, but as an accurate description of social power dynamics.

Social justice scholars argue that certain people have advantages because of their subordinated location in the social strata. Feminist standpoint theory, first articulated in 1983 by Nancy Hartsock, applies Marx’s analysis of class to gender, maintaining that oppressed peoples have access to knowledge that dominant groups do not. Therefore, the insights of people from these groups should be valued. While there is nothing wrong with valuing the insights of people from marginalized groups, woke activists claim that they are more valuable than non-marginalized people.

Intersectionality, developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, is a theory from Women’s Studies.

Originally, intersectionality had some utility in calling attention to areas where courts had treated black women as solely women or solely black, thereby ignoring specific injustices that black women face as a group. Overall, however, intersectionality lacks nuance because it doesn’t consider people as individuals. Instead, it considers people as the sum of their intersecting categories of oppression. So, for example, intersectionality theory considers an African American woman as inherently more oppressed than a European male, due to the African American woman’s possession of more marginalized identity categories than the European male. But what if the African

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American woman is a wealthy doctor? What if that called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” European male is poor and unemployed? What about funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has class? been rolled out in California and Oregon. The program argues that “white supremacy culture shows Interesting. What are some proposed woke solu- up in the classroom when the focus is on getting the tions? ‘right’ answer” or when students are required to show their work, while stipulating that the very “concept of Currently, social justice activism focuses almost ex- mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally clusively on race. Critical Race Theory is another false.” academic theory popular with woke activists. CRT However, the ability of mathematics to provide provides the framework for anti-racist initiatives im- right answers to problems is the very nature of mathplemented throughout the country. Activist Ibram ematics. This is not just an ideological concern, but X. Kendi explicitly states, “The only remedy to past a practical one. If math does not maintain its basis discrimination is present discrimination.” In other in fact, then we will not be able to support our techwords, discrimination must be solved with discrim- nologically advanced society. Sergiu Klainerman, a ination. This doesn’t make sense, yet this so-called professor of mathematics at Princeton who grew up “remedy” is being taught in schools all over the coun- in Romania under Ceausescu, recently wrote an artry. To give just two examples of many, Christopher F. ticle about this program. He said, “When it comes to Rufo reported that a public school in California forced education, I believe the woke ideology is even more third-graders to rank themselves according to their harmful than old-fashioned communism” because at “power and privilege.” Earlier this year, Rufo reported least “communism had a strong sense of objective rethat the principal of a New York school sent a letter ality anchored in the belief that humans are capable of encouraging white parents to advocate for “white ab- discovering universal truths.” olition,” an idea from Northwestern University professor Barnor Hesse.

What about the classical schools that have been basAnother problematic idea promoted in woke ideol- tions of traditional education? Will the encroachogy is that all unequal outcomes between groups are ing woke agenda impact our vocation as classical the result of discrimination, and radical action must educators? be taken to advance “equity”—defined as equal outcomes for all groups. But is it reasonable to expect ex- Social justice activists want to destroy classical Chrisactly equal outcomes, across every domain of life, for tian schools. The proposed Equality Act reveals the all racial groups, and for each gender? For example, blueprint for this goal. Woke ideologues will try to women are underrepresented among garbage collec- force classical Christian schools to teach gender idetors. I don’t think that anyone would make the case ology and LGBT marriage. If schools refuse, they will that this disparity is the result of discrimination. Not attempt to remove accreditation, and they will stop all disparities are the result of discrimination. admitting graduates of classical Christian schools to many universities. I already know of one department You saw woke ideology become the dominant creed in a public university that refuses to admit anyone in academia. Is social justice activism becoming the to their graduate program who went to a Christian norm in any other educational settings? school.

Woke ideology also attacks the discipline of Classics Yes, social justice ideologies are becoming incorpo- as white supremacy. In February 2021, the New York rated into classrooms across America, and not just in Times Magazine featured an article about the Princthe obvious ways. Most people wrongly assume that eton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who “believes wokeness has been limited to humanities and social that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as sciences, and that STEM fields haven’t been affect- to be inseparable from it.” Classical educators must be ed. But woke activists are attempting to completely prepared to explain why the teaching of works from change math instruction. An educational program the Western canon is not inherently racist.

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If activists make attempts to standardize Social Justice and/or Critical Race Theory into the curriculum, concerned parents must organize and articulate why these ideologies are damaging to children and to our country. A new organization called FAIR (www.fairforall.org) is helping people to organize this effort.

All of this is deeply troubling. I have to ask: Why is wokeness so appealing to otherwise rational, freedom-loving people, especially college students?

Wokeness does not appeal to people’s reason, but to their emotions and need for meaning. The rise of “religious nones”—people who identify as non religious—in the West has been well documented. Social Justice serves as a replacement for religion. In many cases, people become woke because it is portrayed as virtuous.

Young people also become woke because they haven’t been exposed to other points of view. This is particularly true of conservatism, which has been portrayed as racist, immoral, and cruel. Ultimately, I don’t believe that you can reason anyone out of being woke because wokeness is not based on reason, but on ideology and emotion.

Some have claimed that woke activism functions as a substitute religion for an increasingly secular academic culture. Do you agree?

Many authors, in particular John McWhorter and James Lindsay, have made a convincing case that Social Justice ideology is itself a religion. While not all social justice academics are atheists or agnostics, I have found that people who are most strongly atheist and woke tend to advocate the destruction of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many woke ideologues devote their lives to fighting for justice on earth because they hold out no hope for eternal justice. One of the many problems with Social Justice is that there is no emphasis on forgiveness.

But isn’t it a good thing to align with causes that promote justice? Does woke culture have anything good to offer? Can it be redeemed to the life of Christ?

There is nothing that woke ideology can offer Christianity. The Gospels are complete. They are inherently anti-racist. They are inherently focused on the mar-

ginalized and oppressed. There is nothing that should be added.

Is there any hope? What can ordinary folks like us do to combat woke dominance in academia?

There is always hope. However, let’s be honest about our situation. Woke ideology dominates every major institution in America. Generations of people have been thoroughly indoctrinated in this ideology with little or no exposure to other points of view. Social Justice ideology will run its course. How long the reign of wokeness lasts depends on how many people find the courage to resist.

However, at least half of the country does not support woke ideology. Those people can create new institutions to support non-woke people, including progressives, liberals, libertarians, conservatives, moderates, and independents. New institutions must be both educational and cultural, because politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from education.

New developments in the educational landscape— including online courses and certificate programs— are promising. I hope that more employers will hire people who might not have a college degree, but who have demonstrated relevant skills by completing online courses or certificate programs. I also strongly encourage young people to pursue apprenticeship programs and learn skilled trades. Additionally, we need universities with classical liberal arts missions, whose explicit purpose is the pursuit of truth, literacy, numeracy, and the scientific method.

Those of us who oppose this ideology need to flood social media with arguments and testimonies about the inherent authoritarianism of wokeness, demonstrating how it is a totalitarian ideology. Woke culture is based on censorship, eliminating freedom of speech, and cancelling people from access to their livelihoods.

Woke opponents need to start alternative media companies, including film, television, book publishing, and schools. We need networks to support all nonwoke people, including Christians, who will be cancelled from their jobs, or who cannot find any because they dissent from Social Justice ideology.

Samantha Jones can be reached at sammariejones42@ protonmail.com.

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If Dostoevsky is the meat of Russian lit-

erature, then Tolstoy is the wine. How easily one throws back page after page of War and Peace or Anna Karenina, getting drunk off the liquid prose. Granted, most English readers today access Tolstoy’s style through the mediation of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, themselves worthy of a room in the Russian literature hall of fame.

But if their translation can be trusted—and a laundry list of academic awards says it can—Tolstoy’s gift for clarity and precision is unparalleled. His language sparkles, and at the same time disappears so that his meaning lies transparent beneath.

Open one of his tomes at random, and you’ll be immersed in a description of some secret thought or emotion you imagined to be yours alone.

No wonder, then, that such a gifted communicator could not tolerate obfuscation. The popular literary style of the late nineteenth century, embodied by artists like Wagner and Nietzsche, was oversaturated with arcane natural imagery and ornate sensual metaphor. It looked nothing like simplicity, and Tolstoy took no pains to hide his distaste. Fed up with Europe’s Romantic excesses, he began drafting an attack on contemporary aesthetics that would be published in 1898 as What Is Art? It was one of several harsh polemics against the government, the academy, and the church that dominated his late-career thought. Unfortunately, Tolstoy’s keen observation of cultural problems did not always result in constructive solutions. His rhetoric, while strident, is full of contradiction and concealed uncertainty, suggesting that his thinking lacked the order of his prose.

In What Is Art?, Tolstoy holds his profession to an impossible standard, dismissing his own artistic career in the process. He targets the world

of commercial art, questioning whether the multitude of lives and resources devoted to cultural production are worth the cost. His answer, in short, is no. Offering example after example of his contemporaries’ melodramatic, meaningless verse, he exposes the obvious absurdity in their cryptic tone and pseudo-intellectualism. If art is such that it cannot be understood, he argues, then it is not worth the physical or emotional wellbeing of the untold number of common laborers who manufacture it. However, it is the product, not the practice, he condemns. In his words, “true art is modest.” It is simple and understood without effort. Esoteric art, he argues, is an effect of European society’s obsession with beauty. Unimpressed by the secular Trinity of goodness, truth, and beauty, Tolstoy asserts that true beauty does not have a moral or spiritual aspect; so-called nonphysical beauty is simply “goodness” rearticulated.

Real beauty is properly understood as ideal sensory experience. Therefore, he claims it is actually in service of pleasure and easily opposed to the good.

Truth, meanwhile, is also vulnerable to misuse. It is valuable only when directed toward the good, otherwise becoming mere extraneous detail. Thus, in his opinion the best art points us to the good, and not necessarily to the beautiful or true. To overemphasize beauty, he argues, leads to decadence without significance—to the floridity of the nineteenth-century poets.

It’s important to recognize in this context that Tolstoy had a very particular vision of the good.

He found its foremost embodiment in human religion, whose primary role has been to represent “the highest understanding of life accessible at a given time in a given society to the best of the leading people” (42). Tolstoy perceived that, in ancient history, men worshiped at the altar of manliness FORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 33

and strength, and as a result the culture produced heroic myths and reverent depictions of the human form. He believed that, in his time, religious feeling had “progressed” to uphold the brotherhood of all men as life’s best thought. Therefore, because true art propagates the good, and the good is understood as the brotherhood of all men, true art must draw mankind together. Art should be communion.

Ignoring (for the moment) the circuitous route by which he arrives at this metaphor, in the passages where he expands on the image, Tolstoy’s definition of art echoes a theme sounded through the ages: Every work of art results in the one who receives it entering into a certain kind of communion with the one who produced or is producing the art, and with all those who, simultaneously with him, before him or after him have received or will receive the same artistic impression. . . . The activity of art is based on the fact that man, as he receives through hearing or sight the expressions of another man’s feelings, is capable of experiencing the same feelings as the man who expresses them.

An individual artist, observing himself or the world around him, communicates his experience to others. After becoming “infected” by that impression, the receiver of the art is then united in brotherhood to the artist and other receivers. “It is this liberation of the person from his isolation from others, from his loneliness, this merging of the person with others, that constitutes the chief attractive force and property of art.” The artist demolishes barriers and overcomes isolation by communicating that which is otherwise uncommunicable.

Tolstoy’s own artistic output is fitting wine for this communion. How can a heart not leap with desire for reconciliation when the dying Prince Andrei discovers in himself love and not hatred for his wounded rival, Anatole? Is it possible to read Levin’s return to Kitty after her foolish pursuit of Vronsky without gratitude for those who have overlooked fault in our own lives? And yet, Tolstoy’s standards for true art are high indeed. They are so high, in fact, that he dismisses from the canon not only the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven, but his own work as well. (With the exception of his short stories “God Sees the Truth” 34 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

and “The Prisoner of Caucasus.” Apparently, we can all make room on our bookshelves by throwing out his beloved door stoppers in favor of these more slender volumes.) In his eagerness to tear down barriers between art and its audience, Tolstoy tears down his own household and the majority of the Western tradition along with it.

His primary complaint with most alleged “great” works is the common man’s inability to understand them without tutorage: The majority understand and have always understood what we, too, consider the highest art: the artistically simple narratives of the Bible, the Gospel parables, folk legends, fairy tales, folk songs are understood by everyone. Why is it that the majority suddenly lost the ability to understand the highest of our art?

Tolstoy highlights the divisive nature of a society that prides itself on exclusive access to art. If art is meant to unite, it should be accessible to everyone.

While it is hard to argue with his call to simplicity— there is something instinctively distasteful about art that seeks to confound rather than communicate— his examples of “the highest art” seem to contradict his purposes. I have often needed guidance through a fairy tale—and how to even begin addressing his reference to the parables of Christ, intended by their very genre to confound?

Yet Tolstoy acknowledges the possibility for great art’s misinterpretation. “The obstacle,” he says, “to understanding the best and highest feelings, as is also said in the Gospel, by no means lies in an absence of development and education, but, on the contrary, in false development and false education.” Here Tolstoy touches on something fundamentally true. In my own experience, misunderstandings I have held about Christ’s parables were in many ways the result of poor education. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s standards outpace the reality of a broken world. When education is conducted by fallible human beings, unable to achieve omniscience or omnipotence, how can it fail (in one way or another) to be “bad”?

But Tolstoy is ready with an answer here, as well: true art requires no explanation. Education need not intrude on the subject. His stance on the matter of criticism, therefore, is unyielding: “‘Critics explain.’

Publicly, he was a wild-eyed prophet in the service of Truth. Yet behind closed doors, Tolstoy fought a lifelong battle to find meaning or significance in the world.

But what do they explain? . . . Artistic works cannot be interpreted. If it had been possible for the artist to explain in words what he wished to say, he would have said it in words.” Literary interpretation, in Tolstoy’s view, is a redundant occupation. As you can imagine, this is an awkward predicament for critics of Tolstoy’s work. I wonder whether Gary Saul Morson had a crisis of conscience in 1987 upon publishing Hidden in Plain View, his magnificent reading of War and Peace. Does his project disrespect the author’s wishes? Of course, Tolstoy would see the very existence of the work as further confirmation of his failure. The fact that Morson’s explanation unlocks the novel’s hidden depths proves the novel does not communicate as directly and simply as it should.

In eschewing literary interpretation, Tolstoy comes dangerously close to affirming the “noble savage” theory, which holds that man is at his best in his natural state. His solution to misreading is not to conduct a better education, but to avoid as much education as possible. The common Russian serf, unsullied and uneducated, is the one most equipped to understand the true meaning of life. Ironically, the noble savage theory is a Romantic philosophy. Just as nature mystically communes with the one who escapes the artifice of industrial life, art mystically communes with the one who eschews the artifice of intellectualism. The underlying assumption of the theory stands in direct contradiction to the orthodox Christian doctrine of original sin, which suggests that man’s corruption doesn’t proceed from the influence of his environment, but already exists within him at birth. Whereas Christian dogma states that men need divine intervention in order to be rescued from themselves, the Romantics, generally speaking, place their hope in the strength of man’s will to re-

turn to original purity.

The language of sanctification by any means but Christ flirts with heresy. Yet Tolstoy doubles down, envisioning art alone as a means for “mankind’s movement forward towards perfection.” It is no surprise, then, that his relationship with Russian Orthodoxy was complex, to say the least. Baptized in the 1870s, he spent about two years faithfully committed to the church, but soon became disenchanted with its dogmas and neglected formal participation.

However, in spite of his doubts, he retained a kind of faith, celebrating a Christianity of his own imagination. Attempting to garner his own flock of disciples, in his writing he elevated the importance of Christ’s moral teaching and tended to devalue teachings involving the Trinity, Christ’s divinity, and the story of redemption.

Tolstoy’s spiritual struggle did not keep him from being a man of declaration. The certainty he conveys by proclamation, in both treatise and fiction, is formidable. Publicly, he was a wild-eyed prophet in the service of Truth. Yet behind closed doors, Tolstoy fought a lifelong battle to find meaning or significance in the world. In his 1882 autobiographical Confession, Tolstoy depicts himself, much like his beloved protagonists, drifting from cause to cause, attempting to paper over the disquiet in his heart.

Pierre Bezhukov, the sympathetic hero of War and Peace, echoes his creator’s discontent: Every sphere of work was, in his eyes, bound up with evil and deceit. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he undertook—evil and falsehood repulsed him and barred him from all paths of activity.

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That space between difference and similarity is where the critic should live. By standing in the gap between artist and audience, he meets the artist’s failure to find a ubiquitous language with mercy.

Tolstoy’s eyes were full of the depravity in himself and the world around him. Perhaps it was this obsession with his insufficiency which caused him to reject his own art. Still, even his judgment on himself in What Is Art? is spoken in full authority. With no real confidence in the gospel promise of redemption, he clung fervently to his strength: rhetoric. His prose reveals an author uncomfortable with articulating ignorance. Morson calls it his “absolute language.” Even the narrators of Tolstoy’s fiction speak with the voice of God. If artists are to shape the world’s destiny, the artist must be in control of his voice. However, the drama of Tolstoy’s uncertainty plays beneath the surface of his prose.

What Is Art? fails to reckon with art’s limitations.

Surely it was not just the language of reason that fractured at Babel. Even in the realm of feeling, humans sometimes require a translator of sorts to bridge the gaps between us. Tolstoy, however, could not acknowledge such weakness in art. With nowhere else to turn, he depended on it as the engine of moral progress in the world, able to direct the hearts of men without assistance. Consequently, he could not see the merit of good criticism. Artistic creations, “the meaning of which we figure out gradually and with effort,” may be interesting, but do not provide an “artistic impression.” In his opinion, art that requires explanation is not strong enough to do its good work. But can’t an artistic impression be nurtured over time? Although it requires dethroning a work of art from godlike sta36 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

tus, its intended feeling may be conveyed to the audience after they have put in the work to understand it. My own reading of Hidden in Plain View may be taken as an example. As Morson’s expert guidance unlocked the author’s narrative structure, I found myself overwhelmed by the epic scope of Tolstoy’s vision. I had to be given eyes to see before the art could reach my soul.

Of course, there is such a thing as bad criticism. It proliferated in the late 1800s as it does today. In the opening of What Is Art?, Tolstoy observes: Criticism, in which lovers of art used to find support for their judgements of art, has lately become so contradictory that, if we should exclude from the real of art all that the critics of various schools deny the right of belonging to art, almost no art would be left. Like theologians of various trends, so artists of various trends exclude and destroy each other.

Like Christianity, art suffers when its participants are distracted from essential matters by reputation. In both instances, the origin of activity should be love, not competition. Tolstoy saw this and tried to encourage compassion in the artistic sphere by simply hounding on the brotherhood of men. However, humanity is historically incapable of sustaining brotherly love. That is why true Christianity doesn’t primarily depend on human love; Love intrudes from the

outside. Real equality is only possible when a secure standing depends on the Savior’s love and not on destroying the competition. Therefore, to avoid bad criticism, creator and audience must acknowledge shared weakness before participating in the activity of art. The good critic must humbly admit that a flawed artist can still have something important to say to him. In fact, an artist’s flaws are often the source of his profundity as they are the only thing he has in common with every other man on earth.

Unfortunately, Tolstoy’s rhetoric leaves no room for the communion he so desired. In a world marred by the fall, it is weakness—not strength—that unites.

While it is true that pretension has no place in art, all communication demands grace. Art, artists, and readers all have their flaws. For example, an artist will use images or symbols taken from his environment—from what he knows—to communicate his feeling. My surroundings may not look exactly like his, and so I may have trouble understanding his meaning. I will have to overcome the differences between us before I can tap into what is universal about his work. Yet neither I nor the artist can reach beyond these natural boundaries on our own. We are necessarily limited by our circumstances.

That space between difference and similarity is where the critic should live. By standing in the gap between artist and audience, he meets the artist’s failure to find a ubiquitous language with mercy. A good critic immerses himself in the artist’s perspective. Time and attention are limited, and so his ability to critique will be limited, but where possible he walks in the shoes of his chosen artist so that he may turn around and speak on the artist’s behalf to fellow, limited audience members. He “translates” the work of art so that artistic foreigners may understand.

Furthermore, a critic is an individual and will himself have a distinctive perspective. Although there are correct and incorrect interpretations of a work of art, all correct interpretations will have shades of nuance, their focus and emphasis particular to each critic’s point of view. These differences between interpretations offer a new chance to engage in “the essence of art,” which Tolstoy believes “makes us rejoice over another’s joy, grieve over another grief, merge our souls with another’s.” Witnessing the ways in which a work of art uniquely influences another person gives us eyes

to see not just the artist, but our fellow audience members, as well. Just as Christ’s love begets love among his followers, an artist’s act of communion begets communion among its interpreters.

Tolstoy’s discomfort with the theology of redemption seems to have had unforeseen consequences for his philosophy of art. Yet his novels suggest that the author understood something with his heart that he struggled to affirm intellectually. With the godlike assurance of his absolute language, Tolstoy crafts a beneficent Providence—the Providence whose existence he doubted. In War and Peace, when Prince Andrei discovers his fiancée, Natasha, has betrayed his trust, he refuses to speak with her and leaves for the war. With a wounded pride, he continues to harbor profound hatred in his heart. But when he is mortally injured on the battlefield, he comes to see things differently: “Loving with a human love, one can pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change.

Nothing, not even death can destroy it. It is the essence of the soul. But I’ve hated so many people in my life. And of all people, I have loved and hated no one so much as her.” And he vividly pictured Natasha to himself, not as he had pictured her before, with her loveliness alone, which brought him joy; but for the first time he pictured her soul. And he understood her feeling, her suffering, shame, repentance. (921) For Andrei, true understanding proceeds from divine love, only accessible to human beings as a gift. It allows him to see beyond Natasha’s deserving—beyond her artistic performance, as it were—and glimpse the essence of her soul. The flaws of human nature must be absorbed by mercy before they can be overcome, before we can deal with each other in love. In the same way, a good critic must forgive an author’s faults to see the heart of his work. It is only then that he can turn to his fellow readers and give them new eyes with which to see the soul of art.

Emily Andrews is an Associate Director at CenterForLit in Spokane, Washington, where she teaches, writes, podcasts, and develops teacher resources. She is an Associate Editor for FORMA.

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Poetry Marly Youmans

Marly Youmans is the author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction. Recent books include the collection of poems The Book of the Red King (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2019), and the novel Charis in the World of Wonders (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020). Find more at www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com.

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DREAM OF LIGHT AND RAIN A slantwise gold, a summer evening light On vineyard rows, the wobbling leaves like hands That caught and spilled the rain of evening light…

And I was happy in the rows, my hands Illumined by the gold, my face an orb Of sun that shone above the leafy hands…

And each translucent grape was also orb That drank the gold of sun and milk of moon To make a knot of seed, the flesh, the orb…

Like masks of gold and silver, sun and moon Hovered together in the sky, as rain Fell slanting like the tears of sun and moon…

Each crimson drop proclaimed the rain Our daily rain, while floods of light Illumined sliding drops of rain…

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Poetry Mary Giudice

Mary Giudice is a contented wife and homeschooling mother who lives in Newberg, Oregon. After a bachelor’s degree in English from Calvin College and a master's degree in literature from Sacramento State University she still hadn’t had her fill of reading and discussing books. So now she guides local friends through the classics and hosts Take This Poem, a podcast that celebrates the good work that poetry can do in everyday life.

Her own poetry was most recently published in Triggerfish Critical Review.

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GIFTS FROM THE KNIFE The best part of carving the spoon was when the hook knife slipped

and slashed its curved beak into my forearm.

It isn’t every day that one hears her skin unzip and sees the deep pink of what should be internal, and waits to watch the darkness fill the rift,

and waits patiently for pain.

The weeks that came after were holy too: after a shower seeing the gray-green scum form across the pond of the wet wound, at night feeling the electric crackles as the cells rushed in with their needles, knowing what to do, how to re-make an arm,

ready for this, pulling the edges tight.

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In his book The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis frequently recommends that his readers take a walk under the stars at night and try to imagine how they would have looked to our ancient and medieval ancestors. Lewis believed that the medieval understanding of the planets contained spiritual symbols of permanent value. He wanted, most notably in his literature, to overcome the modern view that sees the stars as merely flaming balls of gas and the planets as potential homes for humanity (if not already inhabited). For Lewis, the medieval way of seeing the stars, while wrong on many factual counts, was nevertheless still valuable to modern man. To that end, I want to take Lewis’ argument seriously, that we can learn something about ourselves, about reality, about God, byattending to the medieval model of the universe.

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At the end of the Divine Comedy, as the pilgrim looks upon the blessed Trinity and is struck by supernatural knowledge concerning the incarnation, what he sees is “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” As Lewis explains, to people living in the Middle Ages the cosmos was just that, an ordered whole which moved in perfect spheres and was moved by the love of God. And while each of these spheres, the planets, was itself moved by some kind of angelic intelligence, it was the love of God for the universe that caused it to move. This movement caused a music, the Music of the Spheres, which no one could hear, for its bliss would have been too much for us. They looked on the cosmos with baptized pagan eyes, seeing in the planets vestiges of the gods of old, but these gods now became angels, their influences and temperaments, the will of God. In the medieval model, the Earth was at the center of the physical universe. Contrary to many popular claims, this did not mean that humans saw themselves as the most important beings in the universe—far from it. The planets moving in their spheres were perfect. They were not subject to corruption. But on Earth, corruption, death, decay, and sin reigned supreme. This is part of why hell was often conceived as existing in the center of the Earth, for the center of the Earth is the place in the physical universe farthest away from God. Dante goes even further and not only places hell at the center of the Earth, but specifically makes the central point Satan’s genitalia.

Then came Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo who sought to elevate the Earth to the status of a planet. For them, Earth danced with the other planets to the Music of the Spheres. However, it was not long before questions of spirituality were sidelined. With the explication of the laws of gravity, angels were no longer needed to keep the planets moving. And with the disappearance of the angels came the disappearance of any spiritual significance in the planets. The Music of the Spheres ceased.

Lewis was not content with this outcome, however, and, both as a teacher of medieval literature and as a Christian, decided to reintroduce modern people to the medieval cosmos. Citing both ancient and medieval sources, Lewis describes how the medievals saw the planets. For many at that time, the 44 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

terms “god,” “angel,” and “planet” were interchangeable. But if these wandering lights in the sky were gods, they were not to be worshiped, as the medievals themselves served the one, true God. The reason the planets were considered as living in some way was because they moved. For Aristotle, whose understanding of the soul would come to influence St. Thomas Aquinas and the later scholastics, selfmoved objects like planets, animals, and people have souls.

Therefore, because the planets move, they must have souls. Medieval people were systematizers.

They took what was written by the auctores (the famous authors, both pagan and Christian, who shaped the world in which they lived) and found ways to make them coalesce. People in the Middle Ages believed that everything written by the auctores must somehow be true. And it did not matter if this appeared in a philosophical text, in a scientific text, or in works of poetry.

The assumption was that the auctores’ investigations into reality, especially when based on logic and reason, must be correct. So, they transformed Jupiter, a god more interested in your wife than his own, into a symbol of joviality, a kingly magnanimity and joy. They also believed his angelic influence conveyed that quality to various people born under his sway. Similarly, when Venus was dominating, you could expect love; the Moon, wandering of wits or feet or both. This may sound like New Age astrology, which does share some characteristics with medieval cosmology, but the key difference is that most modern astrology deals primarily with the horoscope, the time-vision, where one looks to see what will happen in the future based on the alignment of the stars.

While there were certainly some in the Middle Ages who practiced this kind of fortune-telling, most did not. They simply assumed that all things are interconnected and related to one another. The stars and planets present at the time of your birth have some influence over who you are, but they only incline. They do not determine. Dante condemned astrologers to the eighth circle of hell, that of the liars, because while they sought or claimed to tell the future from the stars, they could not. This shows that while notions of influence from the stars were

The medieval conception of the cosmos teaches us that the universe is ordered, that nothing is here by accident, and that all things are united and influence one another.

considered natural, any suggestion that they could be predictive was not. It was natural for the planets to have influence on the Earth. Their light shined on us, and with that light came various events, metals, and even temperaments. But divination has always been strongly condemned by the church; what’s more, it was ineffectual. As early as the fourth century, Augustine noted that if horoscopes worked then people born at exactly the same moment should lead exactly the same lives. And yet, princes and paupers were often born simultaneously yet led completely different lives.

So, what then is the importance of the medieval cosmos? It doesn’t predict the future—most people today would say that the planets and stars have little to no effect on our lives. And we know the Earth is not the center of the universe, let alone the solar system. So, why bother with learning about it, other than to better understand the Middle Ages? Why did Lewis, for instance, believe the planets to have “permanent value as spiritual symbols”?

Lewis’ interest in the planets likely grew out of his study of medieval literature, which he taught first at Oxford and then as the Chair of Medieval Studies at Cambridge. Thus, the planets and their medieval aspects find their way into his scholarly work, his personal life, and his fiction. Lewis would often go stargazing, even writing in one letter that after watching the conjunction of certain stars, he could understand why our ancestors saw meaning in their movements.

In his scholarship, the planets come up in several places, not least of which are his poem “The Planets,” his essay on alliterative verse, and the aforementioned book, The Discarded Image.

In his poem, Lewis describes the characteristics of

each planet. He notes the enchanting and wandering spirit of the Moon, and the shifting, variegated nature of Mercury. He draws attention to the difficulty in pinning down Mercury by calling him a “madcap rover,” the “patron of pilf ’rers,” but he also notes the planet’s relationship to words and meaning. Lewis calls him the “Lord of language” and associates him with weddings, particularly the wedding of “thing with thought.” Venus, the third heaven to which St. Paul ascended in Dante’s cosmology, symbolizes beauty and the sea and the growing of things upon the Earth. Next comes the Sun, filled with ruling and intellect. The Sun is not the king of the planets, but he is kingly, and he is, as Lewis describes him in The Discarded Image, the eye of the universe. He sees all and by him we see. He imparts wisdom to us. From the Sun we move to Mars, who is called mercenary. In the poem, Lewis associates Mars’s metal, iron, with the nails of the crucifixion. As a result, we see that Mars, despite his role as infortuna minor, is necessary. After all, we call the Friday of the crucifixion Good Friday.

After Mars we meet Jupiter, the true king. Alongside the mercurial, Lewis lists joviality as one of the hardest concepts for modern people to grasp. Today it means something primarily along the lines of being jolly, joyful, or convivial. This is all true of Jove, but he is more than that. There is magnanimity in joviality, a kingliness. Lewis says, however, that we must not imagine a king at war, but a feasting king at peace in the halcyon days of summer. After the kingly Jupiter, who Lewis says in That Hideous Strength is sometimes confused with his maker, is Jove’s father, Saturn, old Kronos or Father Time, the cause of pestilence and death. Saturn comes last because the meFORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 45

dieval astronomers knew that Saturn was farther away than Jupiter. But even allegorically, it makes sense that Saturn would appear last, for he represents the death we must all pass through before we can reach the true heavens that exist beyond our physical universe. Lewis describes Saturn in his poem as “stoop’d and stumbling, with staff groping.” He is a wizened old man who embodies pain and suffering. And yet, as Dante concurred, his is the sphere of the contemplatives. In the poem, Lewis writes that his “distance hurts us.”

Saturn’s effects on the Earth are so negative precisely because he is so much closer to God. As noted above, being the center of the universe is no boon to the human race. All change and sin and imperfection are found on Earth. Saturn is the last of the planets, and in Dante only two spheres away from the Empyrean—the fixed stars and the Primum Mobile being the final two spheres of the physical universe. Therefore, although God is present in all parts of the cosmos, there is a sense in which, because he is also beyond the universe, the edges of the universe are somehow closer to him. This distance causes a kind of refraction in the light that descends from Saturn, so that even the good that may come from him is first cloaked in a kind of natural evil. It is not necessary to believe that the planets are indeed moved by angels and that those angels have these influences on the Earth, but it is necessary to understand that this is one way humanity sought to understand reality and that the characters and temperaments which arose out of their understanding may still be important for us today.

Lewis is convinced that these symbols are of permanent spiritual value, but what can we do with them? The answer is twofold. First, these symbols are useful archetypes that may help us better understand ourselves, each other, and even God. The second part of the answer lies in the deeper notion that the world is so ordered that nothing happens purely by chance.

What happens in one part of the cosmos has an effect on the whole.

To see the planets as beneficial archetypes, one need only turn to Lewis’ fiction. Before the Narniad, he wrote a trilogy of science fiction novels. In these earlier novels, part of what Lewis sets out to do is present the medieval cosmos in light of modern science. When the protagonist Elwin Ransom is taken into space (a word he soon decides is a blasphemous 46 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

libel of the Empyrean before him), he does not find that the Earth is the center of the solar system, nor does he find the planets as perfect, light-filled spheres spinning round in perfect circles. He discovers planets not unlike our own—some solid, some gaseous.

He also finds two of them inhabited by rational creatures who worship the true God. Yet each planet is moved through the Fields of Arbol, the “Old Solar” name for the solar system, by a kind of angelic intelligence called an Oyarsa. What is more, the Oyarsa of each planet maps fairly well onto the medieval understanding. This comes to the fore in That Hideous Strength, where, instead of going into space, the planets, represented by their Oyarsu, come down to Earth.

As they do, their influence is felt both by Ransom and by the other members of Ransom’s household, who are hiding in the kitchen. While Lewis does not have all seven planets descend, he nevertheless uses their descent as an opportunity to describe the archetypal character of each. When Mercury comes, the characters find themselves making puns, playing with meanings, and putting forward intellectual ideas that seem mad at first, and yet on reflection ought to be taken seriously. When Jupiter descends, they dance—not in some bacchanalian frenzy, but in a way that is both lordly and folksy.

Lewis suggests that humanity participates in each of these archetypes, but in individuals one of them will often predominate. In a sense, he offers a vocabulary to help us articulate ourselves. To paraphrase Lewis’ essay that comes before the poem on the planets, we know the saturnine well enough, but who doesn’t need to be reminded of Jove? This was particularly true in Lewis’ day, following both World War I and World War II. Gone were the days where mankind was progressing to a pure and wholly good technological future. Instead we discovered that technology meant making it easier to kill people. This is the saturnine quality that tends toward despair and pessimism.

But joviality? Who can fully comprehend all its meaning between kingliness, magnanimity, and yet also joy and jollity? Lewis considered himself something of an apologist or herald for Jupiter, reminding people of the importance of this peace-filled, festive, kingly character.

Attention to these archetypes can help us become more intentional in how we think about ourselves and our neighbors. While the goal isn’t to change your

nature if you are of a more saturnine bent, you can ensure it is the contemplative side of Saturn which you feed, rather than the one which deals in death and decay. If you are more venereal, then love as only you can, but make sure your love is appropriately directed. If you are more mercurial, make sure it is the love of language and meaning you stoke, and not the changeability which causes you to turn from joy to despair. Every planet has a diurnal and nocturnal aspect (or, if you prefer, a paradisal and infernal). Our job, then, is to bring out the diurnal in ourselves and others and to combat the nocturnal.

And as God is the source of all things, he must also be the source of these archetypes. Their characteristics each give us some glimpse of who he is. According to Michael Ward, in his book Planet Narnia, this is what Lewis sought to uncover in the Chronicles of Narnia. For those unfamiliar with Ward’s thesis, it is this: each of the seven Chronicles of Narnia is governed by one of the seven planets of the medieval cosmos. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the Jove story and is concerned primarily with kingliness; Prince Caspian is the Mars story and culminates in the fight between Peter and Miraz; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader tells the Sun story as the characters travel east to Aslan’s country and drink liquid light; The Silver Chair is the Moon story and is concerned with wandering and madness; The Horse and His Boy is the Mercury story and is concerned with the meeting of selves, storytelling, and even thievery; The Magician’s Nephew is the Venus story and describes the creation of Narnia (and contains its own version of the Garden of the Hesperides); and finally The Last Battle is the Saturn story and is concerned with the end of Narnia. Ward’s widely accepted thesis presents a convincing argument, noting how Aslan himself, Narnia’s picture of the second person of the Trinity, is portrayed in each novel in ways that emphasize the planet which dominates the story. Aslan is primarily seen as the Son of the Emperor across the Sea in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He is the creator of all plants and animals, even creating the animals primarily in pairs of husband and wife in The Magician’s Nephew. And as Aslan helps us understand God through the guise of fiction, he also helps us understand these archetypal aspects of God through His assumption of the planetary temperaments. To learn about the medieval understanding of the plan-

ets is to learn about who God is.

Finally, the medieval conception of the cosmos teaches us that the universe is ordered, that nothing is here by accident, and that all things are united and influence one another. Is it true that those born under Jupiter, as Lewis was, are inclined to be jovial in temperament—red-faced men and women prone to laughter and with loud voices? I can’t say. But it is true that “the heavens declare the Glory of the Lord.”

It is true that their cosmic dance sings with the Music of the Spheres, which we cannot now hear but may be able to glimpse and hear more fully when Christ returns. Thus, to read Dante or Chaucer or even Shakespeare, who were all concerned with this conception of reality, is to get behind the purely mechanistic, even the purely naturalistic, and to see the cosmos more holistically.

Lewis constantly asked his students, the primary audience of the lectures on which The Discarded Image was based, to walk under the stars at night. He asked them, and therefore us, to look up with the eyes of a medieval man or woman. If we heed him, we may learn something about ourselves and about God. So, go take a walk, look at the stars, and see what you may learn. Perhaps you too may glimpse the Love that moves the sun and the other stars, the Love that keeps creation in motion and seeks it out, declaring itself to its creation through our very movements. And then, perhaps, you too can see the world for what it really is: a gift of love from the one, true Lover.

Dr. David Russell Mosley is a poet and theologian in Washington State. He is Dean of Academics at the Chesterton Academy of Notre Dame in Spokane. When he’s not reading books or writing, Dr. Mosley likes to get lost in the woods, drink a nice dram of Scotch, and smoke his pipe.

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I

recall my first journey into the canon of Western civilization at St. John’s College.

I was so nervous. As the only Black person in most classes, I felt out of place.

I was reading literature that I had been instructed to believe was a tool of white people to oppress me. I took one look at the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and knew I was done. But something magical happened to me as I read Aristotle’s Parts of Animals during that first year of study.

The text strengthened my faith in God as I saw how Aristotle proved that every part of an animal’s body was created to fulfill a certain purpose to keep the creature alive. I began to understand that Aristotle was not on a power trip; he was seeking to build on the knowledge he gained from Socrates to better understand humanity and the world around him.

At that moment I began to see the purpose behind reading these books.

Rather than being a tool of oppression, what if the canon of Western civilization is simply a part of a larger collection of books that tells the full human story? The way many of these books have been misused in history has rightfully received resistance from many people, but it is my hope that this article will provide a new perspective. Socrates said, “I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.” Similarly, Paul wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one.” Perhaps these two great philosophers had a deeper understanding of human existence. Both were learned men—Paul being a scholar of the Tanakh and an author of much of the New Testament, and Socrates being the leading teacher of his day. What if the purpose of learning is not to highlight which civilization is more brilliant than the other, but rather to gain an understanding of our shared humanity?

Many people see the canon of Western civilization as the story of humankind, but I have come to see it as part of the story of humankind.

Both Socrates and Paul had front-row seats to the creation and canonization of classic texts, yet they

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read them with a global understanding that escapes many present-day readers. Socrates and Paul read the scrolls of their day as part of a bigger picture.

What would happen if we read the canon of Western civilization with that same mentality?

Ancient times reveal an intersection of ethnicities, cultures, and status. Mankind thrived together and shared knowledge together. There existed no racially polarized way of looking at literature, learning, and humanity. When reading the Greek Euclid’s Elements, we notice his reference to the Egyptians’ work in geometry, giving us insight into how differently our cultures pursue knowledge. In our time there seems to be a toxic competition to see who discovered knowledge or who is the most knowledgeable.

In that competition, we purposely leave out how the “other” has contributed to the overall body of knowledge. For example, when discussing the Underground Railroad, we rarely hear Black educators and scholars refer to the role the Quakers have played in the abolitionist movement. When discussing the Revolutionary War, we rarely hear white teachers explaining the role the Black Crispus Attucks played in starting the war that led to our independence.

Just as the Black community knows the story of Crispus Attucks and the Quakers know their role in the abolitionist movement, we understand that those individual stories are part of a larger story. By extension, we realize that the creation and naming of the Western canon ought not to evoke ideas of white supremacy or racism. Rather, the canon is supposed to open a window into the full human story. Are there holes in the story? Yes. Has the canon been used to promote prejudice and racism? Yes. But the canon itself was not created to do that. It was created to help humankind develop a deeper understanding of the human story.

By analogy, consider the way the Bible is not a single book, but a canon of collected ancient religious writings. It includes forty different authors and sixty-six different books. Those sixty-six books are split into various genres: the prophets, the Gospels, the

Rather than being a tool of oppression, what if the canon of Western civilization is simply a part of a larger collection of books that tells the full human story?

poems, etc. All of those books and sections are further divided into either the Old or New Testament. The authors of the books lived at different times, and their stories describe different cultures. For example, Nimrod was a world ruler who lived somewhere in Africa long before Abraham. Timothy was a Christian leader who was half Jewish and half Greek. Read separately, it may be difficult to identify how these books and stories fit together, but read collectively we form a picture of the Jewish people and how the Christian faith was born out of the Jewish story. In The Drama of Scripture

by Dr. Craig Bartholomew and Dr. Michael Goheen, the authors present a unique perspective on the concept of human stories:

and Goheen write in The Drama of Scripture, “In order to understand our world, to make sense of our lives, and to make our most important decisions about how we ought to be living, we depend upon some story.” In light of this, consider the canon of Western civilization as part of a larger body of work I call the Human Story Books, a collection made up of smaller canons, testaments, and series, many of which include classic texts.

Again let us return to the structure of the Bible. As stated earlier, the Holy Book is made up of sixty-six books, written by forty authors (some unknown) and organized into the following structure:

Imagine that the Bible, with its sixty-six books, written by dozens of human authors over the course of more than a thousand years, is a grand cathedral with many rooms and levels and a variety of entrances.

a. The Pentateuch, or the Books of the Law: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

If we apply this global understanding of the Bible to our understanding of the canon of Western civilization, we develop a clearer understanding of its importance. It is not that we favor the canon of Western civilization over other worthy books, but we recognize the powerful way in which it reveals a human story of long ago. Those of us who have come to embrace classical learning use that understanding to gain a seamless perspective on all human stories. As Bartholomew

1. OLD TESTAMENT

b. Historical Books: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther c. Wisdom Literature: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon d. The Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi

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2. NEW TESTAMENT a. The Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John b. Historical Books: Acts c. Epistles (Letters): Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and Jude d. Prophetic/Apocalyptic Literature: Revelation.

These books vary in length, time period, and foci and yet are combined into one canon. Many authors knew nothing of each other as individuals, yet they each cite each other and build on each other’s knowledge such that through this Holy Canon we learn Jewish and Christian history. This is the way the books of the canon of humanity should work: one overall work, with different testaments. The books of the canon of Western civilization contain their own testaments, revealing more about the people who came before us. To engage in focused study of this cannon is to seek to understand ancient humanity better. However, the key is not to remain stuck in that canon. As Bartholomew and Goheen write, “By sharing personal narratives, we come to know one another. We want to understand not only who that other person is now, at this moment, but also how he or she came to be so.”

When one reads the Bible without identifying how it connects to others, one cannot grow or learn from it.

Likewise, we need freedom to build bridges from the canon of Western civilization to ourselves and to other people. From this we create more empathy, which leads to the creation of more Human Story Books. For example, in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis took what he learned about Jesus and created a bridge through allegory, helping us understand the story of Christ. Watching Aslan die on the Stone Table helps us to visualize the sacrifice God made for us. If Lewis had merely stopped with Scripture, we would have missed his beautiful retelling of the story of Jesus and God’s love for all of us.

This is what all Human Story Books do. Just as the Bible inspires works like Augustine’s Confessions, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or Aquinas’ Summa Theo52 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

logica, they touch our imagination and our hearts to express how the text moves and changes us. Bartholomew and Goheen write, There are . . . stories that are basic or foundational: they provide us with an understanding of our whole world and of our own place within it. Such comprehensive stories give us the meaning of universal history. These have been called “grand narratives,” “grand stories,” or “metanarratives.” Each of us (whether we’re conscious of it or not) has one. To frame and give shape and meaning to our experience of life, all of us depend upon some particular story.

When inspired by the bigger story, many great artists have created their own Human Stories that express spiritual revelations. Just as the Old Testament inspired the creation of the New Testament and thus creates another aspect of faith, the Human Story Books lead us to new enlightenment that can change our lives and communities. In fact, in reading through the Bible, we see how one book inspires the next, sometimes after centuries or even millennia. In 2 Samuel we see David warn his son Solomon to live wisely and be a successful king, and then we see in Ecclesiastes how Solomon realizes the wisdom of his father. Those two books together reveal the relationship between King David and his son Solomon, yet the books are decades apart, written by two very different people, Solomon being half African and half Jewish, and David being fully Jewish. Similarly, we see the connection between Ezra and Nehemiah; Nehemiah reported his work restoring the wall of Jerusalem, while Ezra shared his ministry to the remnant coming back to Jerusalem at the same time. From those two books we gain a clearer understanding of the physical labor it took to rebuild the wall and the emotional/spiritual labor it took to keep the faith as the wall was being rebuilt. These perspectives are just two in a plethora of ideas woven throughout the overall canon of Scripture. Can’t this same structure be applied to all the other canons of humanity? In identifying them as the Human Story Books, it is possible to remove some of the stigma often associated with them by oppressed peoples.

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we see how different accounts of Jesus’s life give a

We need freedom to build bridges from the canon of Western civilization to ourselves and to other people. From this we create more empathy, which leads to the creation of more Human Story Books.

complete picture of the Savior. Each Gospel has its own purpose and message, yet offers a unique peek into the Messiah and his ministry. Bartholomew and Goheen write, The Gospels are not like modern biographies; they do not try to give a precise chronological record of the events of Jesus’ life. Rather, each of the Gospel authors shines the light of the good news on a particular historical situation, selecting events from the eyewitness stories of what Jesus said and did. Each evangelist interprets those events in light of the needs of his own moment in history, arranging the events to convey a particular theme.

These four men did not hold a meeting and divide tasks to cover these themes. They were students of the Tanakh who believed in Jesus Christ as He walked this earth. In fact, Only John and Matthew were among the original disciples. Each wrote his own story of what he experienced with Christ that, taken together, offers the full picture of His birth, life, death, and resurrection. These four books are included in the overall canon of Scripture. Reflecting on this, we can see how different texts, written by different authors, give us a fuller historical account of Jesus and the beginnings of the early church. We do not fault the author for giving only a partial account. Rather, we read it along with the other Gospels to gain a more complete picture.

Applying this understanding to the canon of Western civilization, we can see how it provides us with

specific accounts of ancient times. We learn mostly of Greek and Roman culture, but we also get a glimpse of other cultures mentioned in these texts. We learn that ancient times were a mixing bowl of ethnic groups and cultures, seeking to learn from each other. The books have been misused plenty of times in history, but the books themselves simply tell a human story from a specific time, place, and perspective. Linked together as a canon, each story reveals a piece of a larger puzzle which helps us to identify the story of ancient times and how those times have impacted humanity through the ages.

Additionally, we can look closely at the Tanakh, which is also called the Torah (five books written by Moses), the Nevi’im (the Prophets), and the Kethuvim (the Writings). These books tell the story of the Jewish people. Though many of the authors lived centuries apart, we can discover a full picture as each author shares the human story of his or her experience with God, creating the lineage of the Savior. The early Christians read the Jewish canon and connected its writings with their experiences with a man called Jesus. Those connections with an earlier canon bridged Jewish tradition to the lives of the early Christians.

Out of their experiences with Jesus, they created the canon of Scripture, revealing the birth of the Christian faith. The creation of the New Testament reveals exactly what happens when people come face to face with the Human Story Books, whether the Bible, the Tanakh, the canon of Western civilization, Eastern classics, or African American texts. These ignite our collective imagination, memory, and heart to connect with what we know or experience. They help us develFORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 53

op our worldviews, and they inspire some to add to the collection of the Human Story Books.

As a final example of people connecting to a classic text, let us examine how American enslaved peoples connected to the canon of Scripture and created a body of work to be added to the Human Story Books. The Negro spirituals “are the religious songs sung by African Americans since the earliest days of slavery and first gathered into a book in 1801 by Richard Allen.” This liturgy of songs reveals how, in the midst of the pain of being enslaved, abused, and oppressed by a people who used the canon of Scripture to justify injustice and cruelty, enslaved peoples were able to create their own connection to the text. When they sang “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” they believed that if God could knock those walls down, then he could deliver them too.

When they sang “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” they believed that if God could shut those lions’ mouths, then he could deliver them too. When they sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” they believed that if God could carry Elijah away, then he would deliver them too. As The Norton Anthology of African American Literature explains, these enslaved people had many reason for creating the spirituals:

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For one thing, along with a sense of the slaves’ personal self-worth as children of a mighty God, the spirituals offered them much-needed psychic escape from the workaday world of slavery’s restrictions and cruelties. Certainly, “this world is not my home” was a steady theme in the spirituals, one that offered its singer/hearers visions of a peaceful, loving realm beyond the one in which they labored.

Enslaved people were not deterred from reading Scripture because the slave master quoted (or misquoted) it. Many were illiterate but upon hearing the text somehow found their own story—and even found hope. If, through all of this, these people could compose such beautiful songs of lament and praise inspired by the very canon the master used against them, then how much can we connect to these texts and find our own story within them?

Dr. Anika Prather has degrees from Howard University, NYU, the University of Maryland at College Park, and St. John’s College in Annapolis. She teaches Classics and she is the founder of the The Living Water School.

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THOSE WHO HAVE READ RUSSELL KIRK’S CLASSIC

book The Conservative Mind will have observed a curious shift of attention as the volume approaches the end of its last chapter. For nearly five hundred pages, Kirk has offered short sketches of statesmen and historians, philosophers and theologians. But at the very conclusion of the book he shifts his focus.

There, he turns to the poets: to Robert Frost, Dante, Rudyard Kipling, John Betjeman, and above all to T.S. Eliot. While he had discussed the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge early in the volume, he only considered Coleridge’s theory of church and state. But here, in a section titled “The Conservative as Poet,” Kirk considers poetry as a central source of the conservative disposition he has defined in his book. He emphasizes that the poet need not answer to the name of conservative, as Frost certainly did not, to accomplish nonetheless the particular social function Kirk praises. “No less than politicians do, great poets move nations, even though the generality of men may not know the poets’ names,” Kirk writes.

Such poets as those he features in his book have an “armed vision” that communicates “the idea of a community of souls,” the “enduring themes” of “order and permanence,” and which gives expression to “normative and ethical” truth. Kirk puts his trust in their vision as a source of renewal of “the principles of order” and “normality” in the present age. Indeed, as Bradley J. Birzer has noted in the fourth edition of The Conservative Mind, Kirk proclaims “the poet the center of all true civilization.” What is the source of this great confidence in the poets to achieve what, on balance, Kirk’s book shows that philosophers and statesmen have failed to do?

To answer that question is to explain the entire mind and vision of Russell Kirk. Happily, Kirk himself distilled that vision in a short lecture he delivered in 1981, called “The Moral Imagination.” The title of his essay is also the principle he has come to enounce. It is borrowed, as he notes, from one of the most memorable of many purple passages found in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. There, Burke recalls the humiliation and imprisonment of the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, in the wake of the Revolution. He depicts the Queen as one who stood “just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy.” The revolutionaries 58 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

violate all that; they ravage her of her beauty, not by recognizing it and violating all decency, but by denying the reality of that beauty in itself; in that denial of fact, the revolution issues in a new epoch. “The age of chivalry is gone,” he laments; “That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

How have the revolutionaries brought this about, Burke asks? The passage from which Kirk draws the phrase “moral imagination” provides the answer, and Kirk quotes it at length, though incompletely, in his lecture. “All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off,” Burke writes; All the superadded ideas, furnished in the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

The revolutionaries are what Michael Oakeshott would later call “rationalist in politics.” They will accept as true only that which can clearly and plainly be demonstrated; but only lesser truths lend themselves to such facile or technical demonstration. Human nature does not. “On this scheme,” Burke writes, “a king” will be viewed as “but a man,” and “a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.” Everything but material realities that can be displayed by a plain logic will be torn away, leaving only “naked shivering nature,” a world of physical bodies and force. Rationalism in politics results not in the triumph of reason, therefore, but in the establishment of force itself as the principle of all social arrangements. The objects to be arranged are to be judged as stripped bodies, absent of any sort of intrinsic or acquired meaning or significance.

Burke’s source in this reflection is his own appreciation of the queen’s beauty, we know, but he has also placed the tragedy of her humiliation, by way of allusion, within the setting of an actual stage tragedy, that of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). In the second act of Lear, the king, who has resigned his power but not his crown to his two daughters’ husbands, discovers that he has made a grave error. He thought his daughters loved him, and rewarded them generous-

ly, reserving only his title and one hundred knights as his privilege. The daughters conspire to winnow down that number by way of what might be called sophistical reasoning or, in Oakeshott’s sense, rationalism. When his daughter Regan, after a lengthy exchange, at last poses the rhetorical question of “what need” Lear has even to retain “one” knight, when a whole household stands ready to wait upon him, Lear cries out: O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest things superfluous.

Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st, Which scarcely keeps thee warm. (2.4.261–68) The daughters have reason on their side, concedes Lear. He has lost the argument insofar as he cannot answer them with reasons of his own. But beyond the limits of reason, he feebly intuits some truth. Our nature requires only what satisfies its needs, meaning, in this context, the requirements of its bodily life. But, by the sisters’ own vestments, they testify against their confident words: there is more to our life than need.

For there is also the “gorgeous,” that which is beautiful and may even hinder one’s needs as it serves another, higher purpose.

Lears’s accusation goes unanswered; he succumbs to rage and madness, wanders out from castle to heath, and is lost in a world-cracking storm. But we know how the daughters would answer it: there is need and there is the “gorgeous” ( that which is vain ornamentation and therefore unnecessary). Lear has conceded that, rationally speaking, man is but a “beast,” a low animal, and though he demands more for himself, he has all but acknowledged this as the indulgence of vanity, an illusion that belongs to his ideas and wishes and not to nature and necessity.

Burke’s meditation on the queen risks making the

same concession. In lines that Kirk does not quote, Burke begins, “All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.” The old regime was beautiful, but was this beautiful appearance merely a cloak of “sentiment” thrown over the body of “power” and “conquest”? Were noblesse oblige and the distinctions of rank but an illusion to make the facts of power less brutal and more sufferable? Are the revolutionaries correct, as far as reason goes, but the truth of reason too terrible to bear? Will the encounter with reality, including that of real power, drive the modern age mad, just as the disputations of the daughters drive Lear to madness?

Some have interpreted Burke and the conservatism he begot in just this way, to be sure. To conserve, they presume, is to preserve the old illusions that make life gentle, that ornament it with a grace that charms us but which cannot stand up to the scrutiny of reason. Our lives really are as cheap as beasts; the terror of the revolution is that it would hold us all to account for our shivering nature by tearing away the cloth with which we have gowned ourselves.

But this is probably not Burke’s intended meaning. He holds, rather, that what we perceive as beautiful—the gentle, the gorgeous—may be a sentiment, but sentiments are the language of human nature, first discovered by the “heart” and only later “ratified” by that higher form of reason he calls the “understanding.”

In his early treatise Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke indicates that to study how the human body responds to experiences of beauty and sublimity is to discover how God, as our creator, has ordered us, bodily and mentally, to respond to the world. To observe how an apple falls from a tree is to discover the law of gravity, said Newton; to discover how the mechanism of the body responds to a woman’s beauFORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 59

The moral imagination perceives the world as ordered by transcendent laws, the knowledge of which may be handed down in the form of wisdom from age to age. In the modern age, the rationalists of the French Revolution and their successors sought to sweep away that vision in favor of a reduction of the human world to its material contents.

ty is to discover the law of human nature, says Burke.

In the Reflections, he certainly suggests that manners, countries, social orders, and the English Constitution are artifices made by human activities no less than a “gorgeous” gown must be made by the seamstress, but these artificial undertakings are rooted in human nature. Our natural passions instruct our reason as it elaborates and civilizes a world. The hard division between nature and art falls to incoherence, because man’s nature is art, to build up by his activity a society according to the laws of his nature. Kirk concludes by taking for a principle that phrase Burke utters only in passing—the moral imagination.

Burke’s way of thinking suggests that in order to attain to a mature understanding of the proper order of things we must learn to feel in accord with our moral nature. We can only come to know and understand, therefore, if our first impression of (our feeling for) the world is well fortified. For that, we need to experience the beautiful forms of things, natural and social.

But it is precisely such beautiful forms that the rationalists aim to tear away.

It is well known that Burke’s treatise on the sublime and the beautiful was one inspiration for the idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who would argue that the specific judgments we make about the phenomena of the world are made possible by the a priori conditions of our own subjectivity. I will not bother to explain such a notion on Kant’s terms, but it is important that we note a mutual disciple of both Burke and Kant who joined the thought of the two in a way that clarifies why Kirk would, two centuries later, latch onto that phrase, “the moral imagination.”

That mutual disciple is William Taylor Coleridge.

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reason—which knows specific concepts—and understanding—which is intuitive, more profound, and of wider breadth. This is a difference Coleridge borrows from Aristotle, where the terms refer respectively to the first principles of reason and reasoning as an activity; but he also borrows them from Kant, where their meanings refer only to our perception of the phenomena of the empirical world. Coleridge makes an analogous distinction when discussing the faculty of the imagination between primary imagination and secondary imagination. The primary imagination is our interior vision of the world as we perceive it; it is our vision of the world as a whole, equivalent in this way to Kant’s idea of understanding. The secondary imagination, Coleridge argued, is the specific activity of making that defines poetry, the echoing of our perception of the world as a whole in the making of a little world.

Here, at last, Burke’s use of the word “imagination” becomes clear. It refers not to a fantasy superimposed upon nature, or a fancy standing apart from what is in the ideal of the mind, but rather to the particular scheme through which we order and understand our experience of the world. It is of the primary imagination that Coleridge’s friend William Wordsworth speaks in “Tinturn Abbey,” when he writes, of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive.

Our primary imagination is the means by which we weave the myriad fibers of perception into a single reality. The moral imagination, then, is a particular realization of the primary imagination. But what sort

of realization is it?

Answering this becomes Kirk’s first business in his essay. The moral imagination is “that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events.” It entails “the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.” In sum, it describes the world in terms of “norms,” the enduring standards that belong to human nature and human dignity; it is the perception of things as they are and also things as they ought to be, of things that pass away in light of the permanent things, teaching us “what it means to be genuinely human.” To possess the moral imagination means, therefore, not necessarily to be good, but it is to have one’s imagination—one’s perception of reality—formed according to “normative consciousness.” Those possessed of the moral imagination respond to reality as the philosopher responds to perceiving the light of the Good in Plato’s Republic.

The moral imagination, then, is a species of primary imagination.

But we may imagine the world in more than one way. The moral imagination perceives the world as ordered by transcendent laws, the knowledge of which may be handEdmund Burke ed down in the form of wisdom from age to age. In the modern age, the rationalists of the French Revolution and their successors sought to sweep away that vision in favor of a reduction of the human world to its material contents, as Burke tells us. Kirk draws upon Irving Babbitt, the early twentieth-century founder of the new humanist movement, to describe one modern alternative to the moral imagination that fostered such a revolution and spread widely thereafter. In his study Rousseau and Romanticism, Babbitt discusses the romantic or idyllic imagination as a distinctly modern way of perceiving the world. In this scheme, every norm handed down to us from the outside is judged a form of constraint and “the imagination is to be free, not merely from outer formalistic constraint, but from all constraint whatever.” This is to envision the world not in terms of the norms handed down to us, but in terms of what the newly “emancipated” imagination might make of it. Truth is no longer imagined as a thing dis-

cerned and discovered as a transcendent order, but a thing made by man himself.

The idyllic imagination is a dream that—eventually and after doing much harm—fails. Having wiped from the world everything that could actually bring order to society and to souls, the modern victim of the idyllic imagination falls into a further degradation. This Kirk names—following another student of Babbitt, the poet T.S. Eliot—the “diabolic imagination.” The diabolic imagination follows to its logical end the view of the revolutionaries: that the world and its contents are just bare matter subject to our creative will. But, while the idyllic imagination seeks to construct that bare matter into conformity to its sovereign idea, the diabolic imagination is helpless to do so. It sees the emptiness of things, and yet it still yearns for some order beyond itself, and thus it gives way to every pandering form of lust that promises a moment’s ecstasy. The diabolic imagination lies “devoid of spiritual and intellectual discipline—empty, indeed, of real desire for anything.” It has only the memory of desire.

Kirk hoped to counter this decadence by restoring the moral imagination. To that end, he proposes that men must recall the way in which human beings had been formed to live within the moral imagination for many centuries before the late decline of the modern age. Literature “exists to form the normative consciousness,” Kirk writes. Yes, there is romantic and diabolic literature, but the great works of our tradition have always served to reveal and affirm the true nature, dignity, and place of the human person.

The moral imagination found in literature serves to form the primary imagination of its readers. The King James Bible, the Lives of Plutarch, Shakespeare, Cicero, and Virgil formed generations of minds, lending to them the forms of normative perception, perceiving the miseries and misadventures of the human condition, but also the shape of lives well ordered.

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Russell Kirk

or ill, and have revealed to us the character of the actors, good or evil. For Aristotle, literature is an imitation of an action. He does not say so himself, but his readers have long recognized that these imitations— when good—are themselves exemplary and are to be, in various ways, imitated by those who contemplate them. This is the principle of emulation, where we fashion our souls to the form of those great characters of history and literature whose glorious actions attract of themselves our admiration and conformity.

Providing admirable forms for our emulation, for our ethical formation, was long the province not only of literature but of history as well. This was the basis of Aristotle’s claim that poetry is a kind of philosophical activity. It is a great one indeed, for we sense the possibilities for human life, as well as its dangers and limits, in the imitations of life that are found in literature.

Kirk’s was in many ways an eighteenth-century (or Augustan) sensibility. He viewed the formation of the imagination by literature primarily in moral terms.

And indeed literature does form our imagination in its moral dimensions. Literature helps us envision what should be the content of our character, how we live our lives in company with others, and to what end that society tends, in terms of the establishment and practice of order and justice.

But there is more to Kirk’s vision. Late in the essay, he claims that fantasy ought to be the first form of literature studied for formation of the moral imagination and that philosophy and theology ought to be the final one. Here his master seems to be less Burke

and Aristotle, and more Plato, Coleridge, and their descendents: G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. For these writers, it was important to form the imagination first on what Chesterton called the “Ethics of Elfland,” which is something more than a merely ethical vision. It is a vision of the world as the creative love of God, a mystery represented by such fantastic creatures as elves and monsters, precisely because these things remind us that the world lies open at both ends to the expansive creative genius of the God who first imagined it. The only ethical dimension here is our ascent to it, our saying “yes” to it or, as Chesterton would remind us, to say, in response to all that we find given to us, “thank you.” The rest is contemplation: an act that passes beyond what we normally call morality to the higher plane of the intellectual (without of course ceasing to be moral). What I want to emphasize is that this entails a formation of the moral imagination that is not mere morality. It entails a way of perceiving things as a whole, not only in their practical dimension of actions for good or evil, but in their full metaphysical dimension. Kirk’s syllabus, as it were, encourages us to encounter the world, first, in childlike wonder as its fathomless possibility and, second, in the mature wonder of wisdom that recognizes every finite thing as a signature of the infinite.

By way of conclusion, I want to address two questions that arise from Kirk’s taxonomy of the imagination. When Kirk describes the moral, idyllic, and diabolic imaginations, their normative arrangement from goodness to decadence is self-evident. But, by conceiving the idea of a primary imagination, Coleridge opened the possibility that we may fruitfully discuss different ways of envisioning the world without immediate reference to a norm. The American poet and critic Allen Tate, for instance, composed essays on the angelic, symbolic, and unliteral imaginations, and though there is a moral valence to his arguments akin to Kirk’s, he also suggests that there are what Charles Taylor has called various “imaginaries” by which we may attempt to understand the world. So also, in recent decades, theologians and literary critics alike have discussed the Catholic and the Protestant imaginations, sometimes called the analogical and dialogical imaginations, as distinct visions of reality that each have something to teach us. An intellectual descendent of Tate, the literary critic William F. Lynch gave this compelling expression in his book Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions

of the Literary Imagination, with its description of the two visions of the Apollonian and the Christian imaginations. Kirk’s discussion of the moral imagination is normative, and rightly so; indeed it is broad enough that the acceptance of the reality of a permanent norm is its most conspicuous feature. But recognizing that we may imagine the world in multiple ways, not all of them diabolical, can be a fruitful way to understand human experience and the fine arts alike.

Yet it is important that we nonetheless hold our imaginations accountable to such norms. Discussion of different kinds of “imagination” or “world-view” can obscure our responsibility to reality. The difference between one person’s vision of things and another’s is not relative, as if everything depended on the kind of imagination in which our selves have been formed, and there was nothing more to be said about it. For this reason, it has sometimes seemed to me obscurantist to speak of the imagination in these terms. It risks suggesting that we may be subjectively formed to view the world in better or worse ways, based upon a transcendent idea of goodness that stands apart from reality specifically as an idea. But must not our minds be formed simply by way of our maturing reflection on reality in its fullness? Norms inhere not in us, but in the structure of being to which our lives respond.

Discussions of the imagination, in other words, often entertain beauty, our vision of order, in light of moral goodness, but without reference to truth; they risk bifurcating the world into the ideal and the real, a frequent and frustrating pathology in the modern age.

For those of us with such concerns it is good to observe that Burke and Kirk’s idea of the moral imagination can be reconciled to a classical realist vision of the world such as that found in Plato’s dialogues. Most people will know something of the moral education that Aristotle proposes in his Ethics. Our appetites, when we are young, are unformed. They are ordered to what is good, but their conception of the good is primitive and tied to the native pleasures of the body.

Moral education is specifically the training of the mind and the body, of the character as a whole, to desire the pleasures of the mind in themselves and the pleasures of the body that are in accord with the mind’s right reason. If we turn to Plato, however, we find a similar depiction of education and character formation, but, in Plato’s account, the human soul is far less determined, far less pre-formed in childhood, than it is for Aristotle. He compares the soul to fertile soil; soil in itself has potential for fruitfulness but it is utterly lacking in

seed, in a directed tendency to some specific end.

Aristotle thought people need to be planted with images of what is good, and that this is done in part by poetry. Plato, in contrast, argued that we need poetry to sow within us images of truth and goodness alike. That is, our capacity to envision the world and arrive at knowledge of what is requires a certain kind of founding, formation, and cultivation, a cultivation he identifies with music and poetry. Aristotle believed we need to be habituated to virtue, to goodness. This was to be done primarily by how we are brought up, but the narratives of poetry also served this end. Plato had a vision of human beings that is under-determined in comparison with Aristotle’s, and a theory of poetry that plays an even more expansive role than it does in Aristotle’s philosophy. He believed that we need to be habituated to metaphysics, to the very capacity to perceive the intelligible order of things. We need habituation not only to what is good but also to the truth.

Poetry played a central role in such habituation. As was the case with Aristotle, so with Plato, the stories found in poetry plant us with images of what is good, but in Plato alone, the rhythms or measures of poetry also condition us to the perception of form and order—and so prepare us to perceive the truth. Is this not what it means to impart the moral imagination?

There are differences to be sure between the idealistic framework of Coleridge’s theory of the imagination and the realist ones of Plato and Aristotle, but the moral imagination, in Burke or Kirk’s handling of the term, draws them into close proximity. We must be habituated to see the world, so that we may perceive it as it really is if we are to be responsible to the norms it has to teach us. From fantasy, theology, and philosophy to stories, poetry, and history, Kirk believed just such a habituation could be achieved—even in an age like ours, compromised by the blindness of decadence and the inanition of the diabolical.

James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. Wilson is a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in various magazines and journals and he has published nine books, including The Hanging God (Angelico, 2018).

Wilson is the Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine, the series editor of Colosseum Books, of the Franciscan University at Steubenville Press, and is director of the Colosseum Institute for writers.

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Poetry J.C. Scharl

J.C. Scharl is a poet and critic. Her work has appeared in the New Ohio Review, the American Journal of Poetry, Dappled Things, and Measure Review, among many others.

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THE LEAP One night along the path I come upon a rabbit, wounded, lamed, his one bright eye a vast of black around a single star, head bent, back broken, but sleek forelegs still rampant, pumping in a final splendid frolic all alone, the mighty hindlegs inert and bone thrusting from the fur, and still the great forelegs leap on, milling the whole little body in a great arc upon the ground all dark with blood, and still those legs leap on, springing as the muscles beg for life, for movement learned and learned and by time burned into those sinews that begin to still, but, as the single star dims, will still, unto the very end, leap on

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SPRING EVENING There are evenings braced by light like a pillar, when time hang in the air like dust, suspended.

This is one of them.

Even the breeze is its own calm.

The unending ripples on the pond become, by repetition, a calm beyond stillness.

This, I think, may be how the world ends: in a moment that simply stays, trembling in place like an apple blossom but forever.

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There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

T.S. Eliot, “East Coker"

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OVER FIFTY YEARS AGO, Robert Farrar Capon

wrote an idiosyncratic little book called Bed and Board (1965). Repurposing Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling for families, Capon argued that the task of modern parenting is an absurd undertaking. Because we’ve abandoned the traditions of our parents and grandparents, the American family must be constantly reinvented. We have no common life to bind us to one another and to the past. Ecology and economics tell us that it’s expensive and risky to raise a family. So why take the leap?

For Capon, modern “innovative parenting” was a burden. Rather than following what their parents taught them, each parent was expected to find their favorite developmental psychologist (Piaget, Spock, Skinner, and so on) and embark on the great theoretical project of parenting. He and his wife raised their children during those free and prosperous years after the two great wars. The whole world seemed to lie open to them. Along with so many other parents in the 1950s and 1960s, he felt the responsibility of creating the world anew after many years of violence and displacement. It was a time when the birth rate in America exploded, when parents were trying to bring a new kind of nuclear family into existence. After so much chaos, many families wanted a self-enclosed womb of safety.

Consider Capon’s description of the dilemma of the modern parent: The world is going mad because it has too many reasonable little options, and not enough interest or nerve to choose anything for good.

In such a world, the marriage service is not reasonable, but it is sane; which is quite another matter. The lunatic lives in a world of reason, and he goes mad with thinking sense; it is precisely paradox that keeps the rest of us sane. To be born, to love a woman, to cry at music, to catch a cold, to die—these are not excursions on the narrow road of logic; they are blind launchings on a trackless sea. They are not bargains, they are commitments, and for ordinary people, marriage is the very keel of 70 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

their commitment, the largest piece of ballast in their small storm-tossed boat. (17) What Capon describes is a world wrenched free from necessity: that age-old cycle of birth, marriage, kids, death, repeat. It’s a world where you can choose freely what kind of family life to establish, how many kids you want, the innumerable cereals to choose from at the grocery store, the potential partners you could marry, the style of house and neighborhood you want to live in.

Of course, this illusory freedom has only expanded over the last fifty years. Today we have social media to show one another the interesting papier-mâché crafts our kids have made, the kombucha we successfully convince them to gulp down, that rustic-farmhouse pumpkin patch we visited, the weekend subway-tile project we completed only after intense effort and multiple failures. In light of all this choice (or perhaps the illusion of choice), how do we sail through the modern world as a family? Children remind us that we have bodies, that we are all frail, and that one day we will die. They are our very own replacement models, our planned obsolescence.

Historically, the church has been Noah’s ark sailing over the flood of the world. The metaphor also applies to the family, pointing to the risky, uncertain venture of family life. We cast out upon unknown waters and hope that we have enough wisdom and courage to sustain us. Parents know that disaster can strike at any point: illness, financial loss, or unresolvable conflict within the family. Yet, in our world, nothing else quite awakens us to the gratuitous mystery of life, the unexplained and contingent gift of incarnation.

The Despair of a Single Day Imagine a woman standing before her vanity as she prepares to take her children to Communion. She looks in the mirror and sees a much older woman than she expected, a body that’s marked by wrinkles and scars from the seven births she’s endured (one of which ended in a stillborn child). She dreads the public exposure if her children act badly. She’s tired

just thinking about carrying her six young children to church all by herself. She’ll parade them around in their finest clothes, all the while praying they stay clean and tidy before the service begins.

This mother is always wrung out from directing her children to eat right, to obey, to learn their grammar, to practice the piano. But this time the children act perfectly. They don’t tear or stain their clothes.

They sit, kneel, and stand at all the right times. One of the girls politely asks if she can have a little more wine, and the congregation smiles at her naïveté.

Later that day, the mother takes her children to pick fruit and go swimming. There are several other mothers at the pool, and they all marvel at the beauty of those children kicking and splashing. The mother herself takes joy in her kids as she watches all the arms, legs mixed up together in the pool. She jumps in with them, and out of the corner of her eye sees how the other women at the pool envy her good fortune. How beautiful and well-behaved her children are!

On their walk home they meet a young man, an old friend of the family who’s still single. He longs for the family life that this mother so clearly enjoys. He follows her home where he hopes to feed himself on the hope of one day having the family life she has.

But once he arrives, things turn sharply for the worse.

The children begin to fight and scream. One of the daughters yanks her brother’s hair out and whales on his head with as much power as her little arms can muster.

At this moment, the mother begins to despair. She sees her friend silently judging her. He thinks to himself, “I would never let my (admittedly imaginary) children fight like this. She can’t even control her kids!” In the end, he leaves her to her struggles and pushes his desire for a family out of mind.

This story could be any day in a family’s life from the past five years. But it comes from perhaps the most famous novel ever written on family life: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It’s a day in the life of the scorned wife Dolly Oblonsky, whose husband Stiva has committed adultery and destroyed the peace of their family. Raising her children in the country

while her morally vacant husband sleeps around in St. Petersburg, Dolly attempts to save money and live a good life under the difficult circumstances of what amounts to single parenthood.

As Dolly thinks to herself that day, her children often “repaid her griefs with small joys. These joys were so small that they could not be seen, like gold in the sand, and in her bad moments she saw only griefs, only sand; but there were also good moments, when she saw only joys, only gold” (262). Family life provides just this severe back-and-forth between gold and sand. Children irritate us and drive us to frustration and anger, but when the very same children squeal with joy in the pool or spontaneously forgive each other, family life shines like the gold in Tolstoy’s novel.

Dolly lives between the poles of possibility and fatalism. She’s often very close to losing hope in the future of her kids. She wonders if they’ll be lost to vice and selfishness when they’re older, and she boils over in anger when they fight with one another. But somehow Dolly remains hopeful. She never loses sight of that pale sheen of gold, even if she feels like the sand is swallowing up her life. Through a glass darkly, she sees the moral creatures her children can become. She has faith that someday they will learn to love others.

While Levin, a single man in the story and the nov-

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el’s surrogate for Tolstoy, is the novel’s main character (despite the novel’s title), Dolly is the novel’s moral heart, the woman who is willing to fall on her face in front of others. She keeps struggling to raise her kids in love and discipline. She wants them to learn to love others, to practice unselfishness and forgiveness.

In The Sickness unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard comments on the dangers of silence. He writes that a person who stays silent is often thought by the world to be prudent and wise. The truth, however, is that silence is too safe: We say that one regrets ten times for having spoken to once for having kept silent—and why? Because the external fact of having spoken can involve one in difficulties, since it is an actuality. But to have kept silent! And yet this is the most dangerous of all. For by maintaining silence, a person is thrown wholly upon himself; here actuality does not come to his aid by punishing him, by heaping the consequences of his speaking upon him. No, in this respect it is easy to keep silent. . . . If I have ventured wrongly, well, then life helps me by punishing me. But if I have not ventured at all, who helps me then?

(35) To stay silent as a parent is impossible. Everyone has been in the grocery store or at church when a child decides to wail about something that impedes the path of her will. But many try to be as quiet as possible, to sail through life without venturing anything. Kierkegaard challenges parents to live before others, to speak and commit themselves to the moral life of parenting.

As I taught Anna Karenina a couple of years ago, I realized that my wife is like Dolly. She invites other families and single people into our house for meals.

They see her attempts to mix homeschooling and public schooling for our children. They watch her make food for thirty people when she has her own children to feed. She goes to older women for advice and makes herself vulnerable by admitting her own ignorance. She lives her life before others and asks her friends to give her their best wisdom.

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Ghana, we watched missionary families who daily invited strangers into their homes, and who raised their kids in front of others’ curious eyes. They practiced family life not only in front of other missionaries but in front of Ghanaians, who didn’t understand the world as they did. Observing families with older children renews your hope and gives you the wisdom to experiment, to try a new method of discipline or a schooling tactic you were too afraid to try. Living among other families also shows you what’s universal and necessary. Everyone’s kids disobey. Every kid resists learning what you have to teach them. All parents struggle with the daily demands of sustaining another life.

Children and the World of Things When my wife and I had our first child, we had never felt such settled calm. Despite the pain of childbirth and the sleeplessness of those first months, she felt secure in her new identity as mother. That settled feeling didn’t last, but it was strong enough to hold on for a while. Like Father Capon and Dolly Oblonsky, I have a large-ish family. I don’t say this to brag. It really was an accident. At the end of graduate school, I had no immediate prospects, no postdocs lined up, just a stack of unanswered job applications.

With two kids already at home, my wife got pregnant with our third child in the late fall of our last year in South Bend. This time the pregnancy was different. She could barely move through the first months.

She was sick to the point of incapacity, barely able to eat and completely powerless over her body. She had taught high-intensity fitness classes up to the day of the birth the last two times, so this was a strange new reality for her. What we didn’t know was that my wife had three babies growing inside her at once. She had triple the hormones, triple the bone-shredding pain that separated the fibers in her pelvis, triple the prescribed caloric intake from previous pregnancies, triple the babies.

In a violently immediate way, parenthood made us part of the world of things. Each time we had another child (and especially after the triplets), I felt more alienated from the self that had lived so freely before parenthood. When we lived in Ghana, we rode our bikes to school on dirt roads where smells attacked our noses as we flew past. The mixture of open sewage, exhaust, and burning goat hair has left an im-

For those of us who do have children, the best stewardship of God’s gift of creation is to share our families with others. Sharing our families shatters our self-enclosed silence and disrupts our restless autonomy. And it saves parents from the delusion that we can sail the ark all by ourselves.

pression I’ll never wash out. Yet even in that place where I couldn’t escape the burning sun and pungent smells and the singing of the Ghanaians, there was still a limitless unreality to my life. I felt I could do whatever I wanted.

The Ghanaians I interacted with certainly didn’t feel this way. They were rooted to their world of familiar things: the mango stands and open-air churches and fish-markets had been with them all their lives.

As a recent college graduate with a head full of books and ideas, my mind was infinitely more real to me than my wife’s favorite fruit seller, who was there one day and gone the next, hit by an errant car and killed instantly. I had ideas of what I wanted to do with my life, what graduate school to attend, how many kids to have, what new Ghanaian dish to try tonight at that new restaurant. Everything was possibility. I was dangerously, insufferably free. What jerked me out of my disembodied world was our kids.

Sometimes I hear from grad school friends or read articles in The Atlantic or Vox that say we should all stop having children. But children root us to the earth.

They let us know through their bodily existence that we are accountable to others.

Even trying to have children can be an especially painful reminder of our contingency. We exist only through God’s mysterious acts of creation. In every place I’ve lived, some of my closest friends have struggled with infertility. Their faithfulness and hope through infertility reveal how loss teaches us to trust that God works through the absence of children as well as their presence. Existence isn’t owed to any of us.

We need disorder. We need moments in our life that can be grasped only as paradoxes. In his book on Dostoevsky, Rowan Williams has written, “Christ is

apprehended when something not planned or foreseen in the contents of the world breaks through, in an act of event that represents the gratuity of love or joy” (30). The desire to have children—and the painful process of raising them—throws these moments of disorder into our paths and helps us glimpse a hidden order, the spiritual reality that is everywhere.

Building the House of God during a Pandemic In the middle of the pandemic, my wife decided to start a school. Without a building or any other families initially committed, she developed a plan to establish a cottage school (a school that meets once or twice a week, while parents homeschool the other days). As she began to reach out to others through text and social media, she was surprised—in the middle of the pandemic, no less—to find so many people she could draw on to help her build the school. She’d spent years cultivating friendships and connections with people around our town. When we moved here, we had no family nearby, no friends, just us and our two young girls and newborn triplet boys. She cultivated friendships for companionship but also to survive the sleeplessness and anxiety. Without that community, no one survives.

As she has set out for socially-distanced coffee meetings, outdoor get-togethers and playdates, and FaceTime calls, she is inspiring parents toward the vision of the classical cottage school: studying ancient and modern texts in the pursuit of Truth. But more importantly, she is persuading others to join her in planting a community. In the process, she has become a moral architect. She doesn’t know exactly how every piece will fit, but as she keeps talking to parents, she finds ways to integrate teachers, children, and families into the imaginative edifice of the school. She FORMA / SUMMER 2021 | 73

certainly didn’t invent this school out of whole cloth.

But she’s the one uniting these families in this shared vision.

In his book on the classical virtues, the Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper uses an architectural metaphor to describe a life guided by prudence: The man who does good follows the lines of an architectural plan which has not been conceived by himself and which he does not understand as a whole, nor in all of its parts. This architectural plan is revealed to man from moment to moment. In each case he sees only a tiny segment of it, as through a tiny crack.

While Pieper describes the individual life, his analogy could just as easily apply to the family or even to the church. Not one of us discerns the whole metaphysical and spiritual order of Being that brings meaning to everything we do, but we do glimpse it in part. To build God’s house is to bring others to an awareness of the kingdom of God. In the evangelical circles of my childhood, the emphasis was purely on the nuclear family. No one talked about connecting one’s own family with other families. How is our cluster of grapes connected to the vines in the vineyard?

For the last fifteen years, Psalm 127 has been a riddle to me. This song of ascent, which begins with the famous sentence “Unless the Lord builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it,” ends perplexingly with what’s now known as the “quiver-fuller” passage: “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them! He shall not be put to shame when he contends with his enemies in the gate” (Ps 127:1, 5–6 AV).

The meaning of this psalm unfolded to me as I taught the Psalms and Aristotle to a freshman seminar this past fall. Certainly, the house of God is built by laying the foundations of temples, churches, schools, and family homes. But building the house of God is primarily an act of communal belief. As Pieper explains in his essay on faith, “To believe means to participate in the knowledge of the knower” (42). Knowledge comes by trusting the trustworthy. By seeing knowledge embodied in someone else’s words and actions, you can trust and believe that their message is true. To 74 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

build is to pass the vision of Christ’s house to others.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the families we knew in South Bend, Indiana, and in Accra, Ghana, laid the foundation of the house of God in our minds and hearts. They invited us into their homes, allowed us to observe them reading Scripture after dinner, disciplined their kids in front of us, and passed on their own practices of family and church life. In his lesser-known work The Rock, T.S. Eliot writes: The soul of man must quicken to creation. / Out of the formless stone, when the artist united himself with stone, / Springs always new forms of life, from the soul of men that is joined to the soul of stone. / For man is joined spirit and body, / And therefore must serve as spirit and body. / Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in man.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Eliot understood the peculiar combination of soul-work and material creation that goes into building the kingdom. He never had any children. He was forced to look beyond the narrow present moment, to ancient rites and spiritual friendships that were “tongued with fire beyond the language of the living,” to build the family of God outside his own solitary house.

For those of us who do have children, the best stewardship of God’s gift of creation is to share our families with others. Sharing our families shatters our self-enclosed silence and disrupts our restless autonomy. And it saves parents from the delusion that we can sail the ark all by ourselves.

Jonathan Callis started at OBU as an Assitant Professor of English in the fall of 2015. He has a bachelor's degree from Rhodes College and PhD from Notre Dame.

He started his teaching career at a small international school in Accra, Ghana, where he and his wife, Amy, taught a variety of subjects to students from all over the globe.

From the Classroom

HYBRID HOMESCHOOLS BIG BATTALIONS VS. LITTLE PLATOONS

A

by Eric Wearne

merican institutions are failing. According to Gallup, which has been polling public opinion for decades, Americans are disenchanted with our chief institutions—congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the media, and so forth. Political scientist Hugh Heclo writes in On Thinking Institutionally, In recent decades we modern people have grown more suspicious of almost all our society’s major institutions. That includes business, unions, public schools, the legal and medical professions, religious institutions, journalism, and nonprofit organizations.

With a few exceptions, growing distrust in the modern mind is directed toward the entire apparatus of modern society. If you imagine that apparatus as a sort of bank, the overall picture is one of many withdrawals, few deposits, and a continuous depletion of reserves.

This is not a new sentiment—On Thinking Institutionally was published several presidencies ago, but Heclo’s observations are even more germane today than when first published. Mankind’s need for institutions, after all, is ancient and perennial.

Heclo spends considerable effort on defining the concept of “institutions,” but as a shorthand, he observes that institutions are entities that “represent inheritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations. They constitute socially ordered grounding for human life.” So as our large institutions crumble, many Americans are turning to smaller, more local solutions that will meet their needs for community, coherence, and fellowship.

Educational “institutions”—both formal and informal, at home and in classrooms—affect all families with children at some point, and an increasing number of families are seeking alternatives to the struggling educational institutions we have. “Hybrid homeschools” are one such alternative.

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From the Classroom

Hybrid Homeschools as Little Platoons In my book treating the phenomenon, Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons, I explore who attends these schools, why families found and patronize them, and how they operate.

But first: What exactly are “hybrid homeschools”?

One might think of them as more formalized versions of homeschool co-ops. The frequency with which students attend school varies from one day a week to five half days, depending on the model.

Most frequently, students attend school two to three days a week and are homeschooled the rest of the week. These schools differ from co-ops in that they incorporate more formal curricula, class schedules, grading scales, etc. They often start as co-ops, as less formal groups of homeschoolers, or as church ministries, and then grow and formalize in time.

What problems are these schools trying to solve?

In a 1977 speech, Russell Kirk discussed the nature of educational institutions at the time and the problems they faced. In the speech, he criticizes the then-current trend of centralizing institutions, especially in education, which sought to take more and more control of basic tasks from families and reassign them to larger and more centralized institutions. Kirk is skeptical, for example, of “educationists” who sought policy goals like state infant care, universal early childhood day care, nine-to-five schooling with after-hours services beyond that, social and health services run through schools, and more. While many likely see this list and think, “That sounds like a good start,” Kirk was rightly concerned that such centralization of responsibilities, combined with a centralization of decisions about the purposes of schooling, would be extremely detrimental to families, and therefore to society as a whole. It would mean taking daily and long-term decisions out of the hands of those with most connection to and knowledge of the children involved. The social bonds that would result from every family sending every child to forty-plus hours of centralized schooling each week would eventually look very different and would be a sorry imitation of the social bonds that are supposed to come from cohesive families and smaller, more local communities. Hybrid homeschools are an attempt to avoid these problems. One hybrid homeschool’s website describes community well in its “student 76 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

life” section: “Ideal community springs from good families and friends partaking in good activities together.”

While the problems Kirk notes in his speech— centralized schooling, a deterioration of family bonds, and so on—have in many ways only become worse since 1977, we have more ways to address them today. Many forms of school choice, such as homeschooling, education savings accounts, charter schools, and others, are more available and accessible in 2021 than they were in 1977. The earliest incarnations of hybrid homeschools date from the early 1990s, but they have been steadily increasing in the last ten years or so, due to the deterioration of larger educational institutions, due to improvements in technology, and due to a general desire for greater individualization. I will discuss some of the practical specifics around hybrid homeschools—their demographics, curricula, and some structural issues—below.

Hybrid Homeschools in Practice One important advantage that is worth noting is that these institutions serve a large audience that most modern school choice programs do not—the broad middle class. Most American families access school choice in one of three ways: either they earn enough money to pay tuition; they move into a school district they prefer; or they live in an area with low-performing schools, and so are eligible to receive localor state-based aid, or have charter schools located nearby. Families in between these groups—those too wealthy to qualify for choice programs, but not wealthy enough to pay tuition or to move anywhere they’d like—are typical clientele for hybrid homeschools. Because hybrid homeschools use mostly part-time teachers, and often rent space, they are typically able to charge tuitions that are half or less of nearby conventional private schools.

To address one definitional question: Some people object that because hybrid homeschools often choose curriculum, grade assignments, etc., these entities are not “homeschooling” at all. I use the term for two reasons. First, many people who use these schools themselves call them “hybrid homeschools.” A meaningful percentage of hybrid homeschool families have been, at some point, full time

From the Classroom

homeschoolers (likely almost a quarter of them) and continue to see themselves as involved in some form of homeschooling. And second, it is simply a compromise umbrella term that everyone easily understands, even if a particular school prefers another term.

That discussion aside, what do these schools look like? Based on my research over the past several years, the following demographic picture emerges: Hybrid homeschools are mostly, though by no means entirely, a suburban phenomenon. These families have above average educational attainment, marriage rates, and incomes. This is the broad middle class whom existing school choice programs leave unserved.

Regarding curriculum, rather than acting as onesize-fits-all comprehensive schools, most hybrid homeschools are high-identity institutions, with well-defined missions. A significant number of them are classical in nature: the St. Augustine School in Ridgeland, Mississippi (a member of the University-Model Schools network), Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (an independent school), and all of the schools around the U.S. in the Regina Caeli network are examples. The research literature on outcomes for graduates of these schools is still scant, but the work that has been done indicates that these students tend to perform well on conventional academic measures—test scores and college GPAs. In terms of enrollment, these schools are generally small (often a few hundred students K-12, with a number of them enrolling well under one hundred students). The dissatisfaction with large institutions affects schools—both public and private—as well as other institutions. While large schools may be efficient in some senses, “efficiency” and “scale” are not typically things parents seek out when they consider what kind of education they want for their children.

And yet that is what most schools increasingly offer: large-scale comprehensiveness. If families want something different, schools will sometimes create programs within their existing structures to try to fill those needs. But the bureaucratic size which enables them to do this also works against them. The machinery only gets bigger. Schools in many places have ceased performing their function as mediating institutions, tempered by local preferences and serving as buffers between families and large, formal state

agencies, and have simply become larger and larger, and more impersonal.

Though in many places people argue that public schools are already locally controlled, school sizes have been growing, while the actual number of schools has decreased by about 84 percent in the last seventy years, a combination that renders public schooling increasingly less responsive to individual families. Hence our current situation: More spending. Flat test scores. Less parental interest in those test scores. Larger schools. Less direct responsiveness to parents. A desire among parents for more individual responsiveness. This combination cannot continue, especially at a time when general respect for large institutions, including schools, is at near-historic lows.

As Kirk says later in his speech, “We begin to look to the little platoon. The big battalions are failing us.”

A Time to Build New Institutions Many of our institutions are failing us, but as humans we need institutions. Churches being closed or nearly closed to their congregations for much of the past year helped demonstrate this. The best churches, schools, and other institutions serve as collective means to meet individual needs, and are responsive to those needs while maintaining their essential character. Of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, Joseph Pearce writes, If structures—economic, political or social— became too large they became impersonal and unresponsive to human needs and aspirations.

Under these conditions individuals felt functionally futile, dispossessed, voiceless, powerless, excluded, alienated.

Parents will not long accept feeling “functionally futile, dispossessed, voiceless, powerless, excluded, alienated” from their children’s schools. One hybrid homeschool notes on their website that “the family is ‘the vital cell’ of society, and rebuilding the culture to a civilization of love and life must begin precisely where the breakdown began: in the family.” Hybrid homeschools allow the parent to participate in their child’s education and root education within the family.

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to the broader community through practical, realistic means. Because they are part time, their personnel and facilities costs are typically lower than nearby private schools, and their tuition can consequently be much lower (on average, around $4,000–5,000 per year). They typically do not seek charter school status, which would require a variety of local and state approvals and navigating a number of political engagements (a colleague of mine has suggested that charter schools are very slightly less regulated than nuclear power plants). Though most of these schools are private, they do not operate in the same way as full-time, five-day schools, which would require a much heavier fundraising effort and tuition structure. Thus, small, local groups can conceive new institutions and stand up to these existing institutions without the typical political fighting necessary to establish other kinds of schools.

Hybrid homeschools are not, however, “easy” to set up. Many families describe them as “the best of both worlds,” with increased family time and flexibility, amidst a formal school structure and community. Yet they can also be the worst of both worlds. Administrators (or, in some cases, the lone administrator) must deal with all of the issues a private school does–facilities, human resources, board relations, etc.–while simultaneously allowing the flexibility and independence homeschooling families expect. While establishing K-8 hybrid homeschooling is comparatively straightforward, adding high school greatly complicates matters, as these middle-class families often expect the schools to provide access to higher education, which affects curricular decisions, accreditation, etc.

Does setting up new schools simply mean abandoning one set of institutions to create another? Perhaps.

While as humans we need institutions, those institutions can also be dangerous and harmful to us. Heclo writes that, as twenty-first-century Americans, “we are compelled to live in a thick tangle of institutions while believing they do not have our best interests at heart.

Like a disgruntled teenager, we are not quite willing to run away from home, but there is no mistaking the sullen malcontent in the house.”

Rather than existing as “sullen malcontents,” we would do better to build intentional solutions to our institutional problems. Family is the first and most important institution. Following Hugh Heclo’s definition of institutions, families certainly “represent in78 | SUMMER 2021 / FORMA

heritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations” and “constitute socially ordered grounding for human life.” If existing institutions fail to reinforce families’ beliefs, families will seek to create institutions that will do so (and they should). Redeeming educational institutions presents a complex challenge, but our institutions cannot remain on autopilot. In Robbery Under Law, Evelyn Waugh writes, “Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all. . . . If [it] falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.” A return to labor in little platoons in education is one important way to maintain civilization. Through hybrid homeschools, families, schools, and communities can work in concert together to prevent this spiritual and material dissolution of which Waugh speaks.

Eric Wearne is Associate Professor of Education Statistics in the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University. He is the author of Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons (Lexington Books, 2020). He was previously Provost at Holy Spirit College, Associate Professor of Education at Georgia Gwinnett College, and Deputy Director of the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement in Atlanta. He has taught courses in statistics, literature, teacher training, and other subjects in hybrid homeschool, public school, and college settings.

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