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GIVE YOUR CHILDREN A GREAT BOOKS EDUCATION. OldWesternCulture.com

OLD WESTERN CULTURE YEAR 1 THE GREEKS

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 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 THE HISTORIES: O 1. Overview 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 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

YEAR 2 THE ROMANS 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 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 EARLY CHRISTIANITY: T 1. The 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 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

YEAR 3 YEAR 4 CHRISTENDOM EARLY MODERNS 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 DEFENSE OF THE FAITH: 1. Historical Overview of High Middle Ages 2. Anselm’s Ontological Argument 3. Anselm’s Monologium I 4. Anselm’s Monologium II 5. Anselm’s Why God Became Man I 6. Anselm’s Why God Became Man II 7. History of the Kings of Britain I 8. History of the Kings of Britain II 9. The Golden Legend 10. Historical Overview of the Crusades 11. The Conquest of Constantinople 12. The Life of St. Louis THE MEDIEVAL MIND: Int 1. Introduction 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 REFORMATION: 1. Intro to Renaissance and Reformation 2. Canterbury Tales I 3. Canterbury Tales II 4. Canterbury Tales III 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 I 11. Spenser II 12. Spenser III

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 the Third 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 POET POETRY AND POLITICS: 1. Introduction to Enlightenment 2. Alexander Pope I 3. Alexander Pope II 4. Edmund Burke I 5. Edmund Burke II 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 ENLIGHTENMENT: Int 1. Intro: 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 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. Tolkien: 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

Issue 18 Late Summer 2022

COLUMNS 5

EDITORS’ LETTER

F E AT U R E S 22

by the Editors 6

Cultural Currency A CLASSICAL YEAR ZERO

by Oakley Meredith

76

From the Classroom WHAT WILL I BE? EDUCATION AND THE TR INITAR IAN IMAGE

by Claire Patton 38

THE COSMIC LOVE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

by Paul Krause

41

CRUMBS FROM THE MASTER’S TABLE

by Wes Callihan

by Rachel Woodham

BOOK REVIEWS

YE SHALL BE AS GODS: THE DESIRE FOR TRUTH, THE VANITY OF MODERNITY, AND A CHRISTIAN IN THE ACADEMY

48

MONTAIGNE AND CHARLOTTE MASON: TWO PEAS IN A SCHOOL POD

by Drew Mery 11

GOOD BOOKISH: AN APPRECIATION OF SWALLOWS AND AMAZONS

68

by Sean Johnson 14

17

READING THE CLASSICS: THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH

THE UBIQUITY OF CLASSICAL PEDAGOGY: A STUDY IN VIDEO GAMES

by Adam Condra

P OE T RY

by Matthew Bianco

34

PAUL J. PASTOR

READING THE CLASSICS: PLUTARCH’S LIVES

54

POETRY: ON TEACHING AND LEARNING, WITH ERIC POTTER AND ZOË PERRIN ENDICOTT

by Timothy Knotts

I N T E RV I E W 28

THE HEALING PRACTICE OF NEIGHBORLY DISCOURSE

A Conversation with Nathan Beacom

by Katerina Kern

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

This magazine is published by the CiRCE Institute. Copyright CiRCE Institute 2022.

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

Editors' Letter Dear Readers,

A

s this edition finds you in the late unfolding of summer days, we offer you a small celebration of this waning season. The warm pause of summer, like an inhale held, must soon be released; but for now, we pause and contemplate. In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, gave birth to the nine muses. Amongst her children was Thalia, the muse of comedy and idyllic (pastoral) poetry. Like all muses, she inspired—“in-breathed”—the receptive soul with life. Like the warm wind calling us outward, speaking of ready crops and deep springs and hidden dances, Thalia exhales in summer.

Ancient Greek comedy isn’t, by definition, comic; rather it presents man in all his flaws, but lacks the damning consequences of those flaws, enabling the viewer to bear humanity a little more lightly, to feast. As one of three graces, Thalia presides over banqueting, feasting, abundance, and fertility. But as the daughter of memory, her celebration of harvest carries memories of winter, just as comedy bears reminders of human frailty. And when frailty has welcomed us into new life, surely the trees will clap their hands, but the flowers will laugh.

This, our eighteenth edition, contemplates and celebrates Thalia. The myriad of ways the authors herein explored this theme, we think, exemplifies the true nature of abundance. We hope you think so too. May this small taste of summer offer you new grace.

Cheers,

The Editors

The Editorial Team Publisher: Andrew Kern, President of The CiRCE Institute Editor-in-Chief: Katerina Kern Art Director: Graeme Pitman Poetry Editors: Christine Perrin and Noah Perrin Senior Editor: Matthew Bianco Contributing Editors: Ian Andrews and Emily Andrews Copy Editor: Emily Callihan Layout: David Kern

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

The CiRCE Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization that exists to promote and support 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

FORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 5

Cultural Currency

A CLASSICAL YEAR ZERO WAS THERE anyone in contemporary history more miseducated than Saloth Sâr? Still, the academic genesis of the man who would be called Pol Pot was nothing if not totally expected (and initially accepted to be totally “by the by”). The young, Cambodian semi-royal did as many of his privileged peers had and went to gain his highest education within the marbled and columned learning palaces of Cambodia’s then mother country, France. In Paris he would by no means be the only student listening to lectures from the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre (that lazy-eyed womanizing nihilist who failed miserably to marry existential angst with historical materialism) et al., nor was the “idealistic” Sâr the only “Marxist-Leninist” to be found among the rarefied atmosphere of Cambodia’s young “educated” elite who were more than happy to establish “reading circles” and even

6 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA

// BY OAKLEY MEREDITH

“cells.” To the surprise of no one, Sâr would eventually confess that he found Marx’s primary texts immensely difficult reading material (an experience that was more than likely common among his “proletarian community”), but this, as we know, did not stop him.

From a rather twisted perspective, one can possibly admire Pol Pot for taking his education, such as it was, seriously enough to indulge in one of the most horrifying “civilizational projects” of the twentieth century (a hundred-year period replete with many such cataclysmic political enterprises across the globe). Eventually, Pot would do what none of his professors ever dreamed of doing and take Marx’s dictum to heart that the point of philosophy (or education) as such was not to interpret the world but “to change it.” Thus, after a series of revolutionary up-

Cultural Currency

sets, coups, and various turmoils, Pol Pot would have his very own “liberated” postcolonial nation-state to reign over, and he began by ushering Cambodia into “Year Zero” on April 17, 1975.

The notion of “Year Zero” is as easy to understand as it is sadistic—a radicalized facsimile of “Year One” of the First French Republic, the Cambodian “Year Zero” was nothing if not the absolute derailment of the train of history whereby all previous traditions, culture, mores, artifacts, civic attitudes, social norms, and the like were to be utterly obliterated and replaced with a “new” and thoroughly “revolutionary culture.” Where others wanted a “great leap forward,” Pol Pot demanded a gargantuan stumble backward into the void of anti-civilization, prophesying that only such a move could deliver his people into a new garden of Eden—and not, as it ended up being, a second tower of Babel.

Wouldn’t it then be profoundly perverse of me in some way to find that Year Zero—according to the Kampuchean understanding—bears a striking (albeit distorted) resemblance to my own migration from public school to classical education? Because from the perspective of this refugee the sense is much more of shedding layers upon layers of necrosis and corruption than it is securing a path to the “great and ancient ways.”

The word for all of this is “radical,” as classical education, I have found, is that which is most profoundly radical. Radical, of course, comes from the Latin radix, that is, “root.” There are then two ways to be appropriately radical. The first is to deracinate and rip the entire ensemble of foliage out of the ground and plant anew, whereas the second method requires us to return solely to the roots, hacking away all of the witch grass, dandelions, thistles, and various undergrowth until the garden returns to a state of originary perfection. To be radical, then, is decidedly not to wholeheartedly follow Candide’s meek advice to merely “cultivate our garden” with a few passive shear snips here or there but rather, with shovel or machete to venture into a grueling, but rewarding, labor. Conventionally one would consider the Year Zero approach to involve the shovel alone whereas the classical model would make far more judicious use of the machete. Yet while it is rather tempting to consider classical education as concerned entire-

ly with aggressive weeding, I find that as a teacher I paradoxically require use of both the spade and the machete, sometimes on the same plant!

And herein lies the rub; far too often classical education is perceived as emphasizing recovery alone, of “getting back” to that past model that is superior to the wretched and overburdened mainstream.

Thus, if contemporary education is “re-education,” then the classical model is real education. And this is true, as far as it goes, but in some ways, we must cherish the perhaps uncomfortable reality that in this time and place classical education is re-education, at least for those no longer mired within the mainstream (a body of water that has ceased to flow at all and become nothing more than an elongated quagmire). No, classical education is not at all some sort of propagandistic attempt to brainwash “our young people” for the “glorious revolution,” but it absolutely is subversive and requires just as much eradication as it does implementation. In other words, classical education in 2022 is a Year Zero proposition, and those of us engaged in it must see ourselves as utopian anti-utopians, perennialist revolutionaries, digital sundials, counter-cultural classicists, vagabond aristocrats, and cynical idealists.

Consider the following list of public education “traditions,” “cultural norms,” “educational methods,” “professional models,” and the like which I have had to—tremendously, sublimely—eschew upon encountering the classical framework: • Expectations of students are actively harmful and should be ignored if not suppressed.

• Getting a “grade” is the equivalent of “getting paid” as a minimum wage worker.

• Schools are primarily about keeping children “safe.”

• Education is ideally in flux and never, ever settled on any matter.

• Education is in flux because tradition and wisdom have no place in the classroom.

• The latest “pedagogical research” suggests that you must alter your curriculum again.

• The latest “pedagogical research” suggests that you return to your previous curriculum.

• It’s not “what you teach” but what you make note of on paper that matters.

FORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 7

Cultural Currency

• “Education” is a matter of paperwork, professional development, and cosmetics.

• There is no such thing as “the canon.”

• There is no such thing as a dumb question.

• Your evaluator expects you to “gamify” all areas of knowledge, or else.

• “Education” is only as successful as it is “fun.”

• Parents are not that important.

• Students are not that important.

• Test scores ARE that important.

• Pronouns are of immense significance despite the fact that your students cannot yet identify a verb, let alone a dependent clause.

• Pronouns are baptism, just never, ever, ever teach the actual components of grammar.

• Pronouns ARE grammar.

• Education is a synonym for self-esteem.

• Standardized testing is the only appropriate metric for academic success.

• Standardized testing is “what we all want to get over and done with.”

• Standards of any kind are the residue of colonialism.

• “You are here to support our kiddos.”

• High school is a holding pattern.

• “All we want is for our kiddos to graduate.”

• “All we want is for our kiddos to understand that they already know everything.”

• It is far better to graduate than to have learned.

Only a true Year Zero could in any way annihilate all of this detritus, and classical education has, in just a few months, fully done away with these patterns of thought and behavior which had become far more a part of my pedagogical day-to-day than I would like to admit. And while those who have had the joy of being fully ensconced within the classical model for most, if not the entirety, of their teaching careers may see classical education as being primarily reactive or anti-progressive (that it is the “last bastion” striving against a sea of woke®), the exact opposite is truly the case; in 2022 classical education is the new world on the horizon, is the counterculture, is the revolution, is civilization itself, that “most romantic of rebellions.” When Mao proclaimed that a “revolution is not a dinner party” 8 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA

but “an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another,” he had no idea how literally correct he was, for all we do in the classical world is depose the now Ancien Régime of “learning styles” and “problems of practice” beneath the tank treads of the trivium and quadrivium. SaintJust, while a ranking member of the Committee of Public Safety (where he was the so-called “archangel of the Terror”), quipped that “one cannot reign innocently” as “every king is a rebel and a usurper.”

Troglodytes that they were, neither Saint-Just nor Robespierre ever stumbled upon the actual truth that “one cannot teach innocently” as “every classroom is a vanguard and a terror cell.”

Classical education truly is revolutionary, truly is radical, truly is violent. And it is an extreme form of violence because, unlike barbarity (which merely kills the body, mutiliates society, and wipes the slate clean, all while satisfying the most base and boring desires), actual education dismembers the unthinking, grinds the very bones of ossified decadence, slashes and burns the fallow, and resurrects the very recollection of truth itself within the student and teacher (something that can only be accomplished after a dying to self, and most recur over and over and over). Can there be anything more violent than honesty, geometry, and literature in a world of professional fact checkers, NFTs, and cinematic universes? Can there be anything more dangerous? And why should it not be so? So let us look towards the ultimate figure of Year Zero thinking, doing, and being—not that fraud Pol Pot but Socrates, the most violent felon of classical Athens who assaulted a stagnant polis and corrupted the youth so fiercely that he was executed by the state for that most insurgent crime of questioning received wisdom. We, too, are called to “corrupt” the youth of today, and I look forward to nothing more than Year Zero, more Year Zero, always Year Zero!

Oakley Merideth is a writer and English language arts and rhetoric teacher at Axiom Christian Classical School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A recent refugee from “mainstream education,” he is looking forward to reading, writing, and thinking classically for the rest of his life.

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Book Reviews

10 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA

Book Review

GOOD BOOKISH An Appreciation of Swallows and Amazons

By Sean Johnson

f the canon of “great books” is a vast river—deep, expansive, mighty, ancient— one could say that “good books” are the myriad of smaller tributaries feeding into it. The distinction between “great” and “good” is by no means absolute, and we tend to make it intuitively and imprecisely, just as we might struggle to pinpoint where the Ohio River ends and the Mississippi begins. While it is difficult to pinpoint the dividing line between good and great, we all understand the qualitative difference between a Dante and a James Fennimore Cooper. Dante and Dryden might be a thornier question—with multiple right answers. The mistake comes in believing we are wasting our time whenever we choose a “good” book over a “great”’ one.

Because ranking a book among the “good” is far less fraught than calling one “great,” the good books tend to be less lofty and more diverse in character, but they all share a common essence and purpose.

In The Death of a Christian Culture, the great twentieth-century educator John Senior called these good books preparatory to the contemplation and enjoy-

I

ment of great books. “The seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas,” he writes, “only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories rhymes, adventures, which have developed into the thousand books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas, and the rest.” If the great books invite us to contemplate the good life, the good books catechize us in the virtues and values needed to make the good life intelligible. There are even some good books that dramatize that function for us, and few are presently as underrated as Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.

Swallows and Amazons is about the sort of boys and girls who do not seem to exist anymore (but did once and could again). The four Walker children, ranging in age from seven to twelve, are summering in the Lake District of England while their father is away at sea. After discovering a small sailboat—Swallow—at the lakeside farm where they are lodged, they spend their holiday having adventures, both real and imagined, with no electronics and minimal adult supervision. Their central undertakFORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 11

Book Review

ing even includes camping alone on a small island in the middle of the lake for much longer than the average mother would be comfortable with. But too good to be true the Walkers are not—Ransome based them on real acquaintances, and they quickly become as endeared to the reader as they must have been to the author.

On the novel’s first page we meet seven-yearold Roger Walker imagining himself as a clipper ship under sail, “tacking” in zigzags through a windswept field. He is buffeted by a strong headwind and by the boyish dilemma of wanting to run straight to his destination while also remaining faithful to the strictures of his make-believe. “His elder brother John had said only that morning that steamships were just engines in tin boxes. Sail was the thing, and so, though it took rather longer, Roger made his way up the field in broad tacks.” In these few lines Ransome signals his genre by relegating the book’s fantastical elements to the realm of imagination but also deftly establishes an understanding with his audience that we will not be talked down to about imaginary matters. Roger may not be a sailboat, but his play is no less serious for not being real. Roger’s older siblings—John, Susan, and Titty—share his imaginative bent and we begin to discover its source as soon as he is reunited with them.

The Walkers are not overly bookish, not prodigies, not upper-crust Etonians, but they are immediately recognizable as well-read children.

After sailing through the field, Roger meets his siblings on the peak of “Darien,” a coastal promontory the children have named in honor of a Keats poem. On their island they play “Robinson Crusoe.” All summer they work painstakingly at a hand-drawn map of the valley, inspired by the exploits of literary explorers, and snatches of Alexander Pope or John Masefield spill from them with casual familiarity. They are the antithesis to C.S. Lewis’ Eustace Clarence Scrubb, who hadn’t read any of “the right sort of books” and so proved useless when adventures came along.

Good books are in their veins, and their reading has not ruined them for the world. The Walkers have spent plenty of time in books but have come 12 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA

out again with a heightened grasp on how to live well in everyday circumstances.

In that way, Ransome’s series is a kind of successor to all good fairy tales. Most fairy stories translate their young heroes and heroines out of our world and into another, stranger one. Hansel and Gretel enter the dark forest, Alice steps through the looking glass, Frodo and Sam leave the Shire. When they cross the threshold between worlds, moving from the known into the unknown, the heroes begin a process of transmogrification that prepares them to meet challenges they were previously unequipped for. For the typical hero, many of those challenges reside back home in their own world—our world. The rules of the genre do not usually allow heroes to take up residence in fairyland; they have to come home again. Mythographers call this necessary aspect of fairy stories the “Return” and it is, from a literary standpoint, the reason Hansel and Gretel do not live happily ever after in the witch’s house, but with their father. It also explains why Lewis will not allow the Pevensie children to remain in Narnia or return there at all after a certain age and why The Lord of the Rings does not end with the downfall of Sauron, or even the coronation of Aragorn, but with the scouring of the Shire. The function of a journey into fairyland is to prepare the heroes to set things right back at home.

This is why fairy tales don’t often get the sequel treatment, even with our current mania for rewarming and rehashing beloved stories. The adventure is meant to end and give way to the calmer rhythms of real life, which tend to garner lower ratings. Under the pen of Mr. Ransome, however, life after Faerie is vibrant and charming in all senses of the word. An education in the “good books” has done its job, and the Walker children have come through brave, compassionate, and resourceful. They are a perfect picture of what children nurtured in and on good books could look like. While the Walkers spend their summers the way the Pevensies might, there is nothing in their adventuring that would preclude my own children from doing the same.

Book Review

Malcolm Muggeridge, reviewing the book shortly after its release, called it “thrilling, just because it is not fabulous. It is make-believe such as all children have indulged in; even children who have not been so fortunate as to have a lake and a boat and an island but only a backyard amongst the semis of Suburbia.” While the crew of the Swallow live out extravagant fantasy exploits on land and sea, peradventure they conduct business with adults, keep themselves washed and fed, teach young Roger to swim, and confront an adult neighbor who mistakenly accuses them of vandalism. In later books, as their age and daring increase over successive summers, the Swallows must eventually cope with shipwreck, injury, and even storms on the open sea. And, speaking of sailing, I wager few lubbers have read descriptions of seafaring and ship-craft that are at once as accurate and comprehensible as those Ransome provides.

Indeed, Ransome was a stickler for detail but had a knack for making his point winsomely. He once wrote

J.R.R. Tolkien a letter praising The Hobbit but graciously expressing several linguistic quibbles. In nearly unprecedented fashion, Tolkien incorporated the criticism into his revision of the text. Tolkien wrote in reply that after praise from Ransome, “my reputation will go up with my children,” and expressed the family’s continued delight in the Swallows series. “On their shelves, winnowed of the chaff left behind in the nursery, I notice that their ‘Ransomes’ remain.”

After their mid-century heyday, enthusiasm for the Ransome books gradually declined, but if the perfectly decent 2016 film adaptation is any indication, they could be headed for more favorable winds. Tolkien said it best: these books are anything but chaff and promise much nourishment to those who will rediscover them.

Sean Johnson is a contributor to the Close Reads podcast and teaches great books at St. Francis Classical Academy in Pensacola, Florida.

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Book Review

READING THE CLASSICS

The Epic of Gilgamesh

By Matthew Bianco

T

he Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known story ever transcribed, is commonly believed to have been composed before the biblical books of the Old Testament (except the book of Job). Written near modern-day Iraq by an unknown author— though the case could be made that Gilgamesh, a historical king of the ancient city Uruk, wrote it himself—the epic relates the story of Gilgamesh and his adventures with his friend Enkidu as they navigate love, friendship, heroic adventures, death, grief, and the desire for immortality.

This review considers no particular translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, though I am most familiar with Stephen Mitchell’s 2004 translation. You may be wondering why, if not newly translated, this epic merits a review. Considering C.S. Lewis’ argument that one should read one old book for every two new books, I find it odd that critics give ample attention to new books and disregard the old. Critics regularly review new books to inform readers of their existence and their value while neglecting old books, despite the fact that some are so old and forgotten that readers today may know neither of their existence nor of their value. This review, then, seeks to help readers make an informed decision about whether The Epic of Gilgamesh should be one of the

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old books they read after they’ve completed their two new books.

Many find the epic difficult to decipher and understand because it has come to us as a collection of fragments in diverse languages. Originally, it may not have been one text as it appears today, for many of its gaps have been filled by fragments in other languages or by the translator’s poetic license.

So, what is it about? Is it about friendship? Is it about self-discovery? Is it about love? Is it about the quest for immortality? These are questions that have fascinated humans for centuries; else, why have so many epics, plays, poems, and novels been written seeking the answer to these questions?

Like all of the best stories, how the reader answers those questions depends just as much on the reader as it does on the text itself. Is the Iliad about justice? Or is it about the horrors of war? That may depend equally on the reader’s ability or willingness to take up Achilles’ cause as it does Homer’s intentions. One reader of Gilgamesh may find Gilgamesh’s friendship with Enkidu so moving that the poem becomes a poem about friendship, while another reader may find Enkidu’s reluctance to fight Humbaba the Terrible reasonable enough that the poem becomes a poem about the limitations of pursuing heroic glory.

Book Review

I believe The Epic of Gilgamesh contemplates none of those ideas, except insofar as all of them contribute to the larger question, “What does it mean to be human?” Which is, of course, another one of those questions that many if not every epic, play, poem, and novel attempts to understand. Gilgamesh begins with the king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, tyrannizing his citizens. Two-thirds god and one-third man (a mathematical and biological problem not explained in the text), his rule of Uruk has made it a leading city in the world of cultural advancement, and so the people are happy. He is also, however, a tyrant who demands the first right to bed a new bride on her wedding night, and so the people are unhappy—though, they do explain the tyranny away as a thing the gods have ordained (perhaps more to make life under that law more survivable).

The people of Uruk pray to the gods for deliverance, and the gods send Enkidu. Enkidu is described as Gilgamesh’s equal, but he lives in the woods, a friend to the animals. The poem does not describe Enkidu in this mathematical way, but his behaviors and habits indicate that he could be described as two-thirds animal and one-third man. Living in the woods, Enkidu has been unwittingly terrorizing a trapper by scaring away the trapper’s game and freeing those animals caught in his traps. The trapper seeks help and receives it from Shamhat, a priestess of Ishtar, who woos Enkidu with her love arts. After Enkidu makes love to the priestess and eats a meal of bread and beer, the poem tells us that he has become “fully human.” The animals now fear him, and he has lost the animal-like strength that allowed him to run with them. Enkidu must, it seems, move into the city; he follows Shamhat to Uruk.

While in Uruk, Enkidu learns of Gilgamesh and the law allowing him to be the first man to sleep with a newly wedded bride. He becomes enraged, goes to the home of a woman who was married that day, and blocks Gilgamesh’s access to her home. They fight.

Neither win. Equals, they become best friends. Gilgamesh’s tyranny of the men and women of Uruk ends. Whereas the love of a woman tames Enkidu’s animal-like ferocity, the love of a friend tames Gilgamesh’s godlike tyranny. Enkidu becomes less animal and more human; Gilgamesh becomes less divine and more human.

Shortly thereafter, Gilgamesh forces Enkidu to

join him on an adventure to slay Humbaba the Terrible, the god that terrorizes all who seek to enter the forest of the cedars of Lebanon. With this adventure, Gilgamesh attempts to win the glory and honor that will guarantee that both their names live on for eternity. Gilgamesh’s mother blames this desire on the gods, who gave her son a restless heart. The adventure, however, demonstrates the futility of his desire and the frustration of fate, for, while their adventure seems supported by the gods, it leads to the death of Enkidu.

The remainder of the poem describes Gilgamesh’s great grief at the loss of his friend as he seeks to find another path to immortality or at least to perpetual youth. All his attempts fail. Gilgamesh returns home, having acknowledged his own mortality, to Uruk, where the city continues in peace and happiness, now ruled by the Gilgamesh who as tyrant was tamed by the love of his friend and as the restless-hearted was tamed by accepting his human mortality. Gilgamesh has become fully human, and Uruk is at peace.

The Epic of Gilgamesh wrestles with the same questions that every great story does, and it answers them beautifully. It confirms the universality of human questions and the ubiquity of what C.S. Lewis called “the Tao.” Anyone interested in those things will surely find The Epic of Gilgamesh a worthy read.

The poem is not, however, without faults—either its own or those that history has imposed upon it.

There are two reasons, I conclude, that, as much as I may love the poem, the epic does not demand study or reading—even while there is value in both.

The first reason I hesitate to call it a must-read can be called the “Puritan reason,” though the term “Puritan” here is not meant as a pejorative. In several instances, the poem describes sexual activities with unnecessary gratuity and detail. Believing that to the pure all things are pure, one may read these passages in a way that communicates both the power (for both good and evil) and the fruitfulness of a woman’s “love arts.” For those who have either lost or not yet attained this purity, however, the passages can be distracting or, worse, provoking. One must be aware of what might be encountered, especially if seeking to read, study, or teach this story with others.

The second reason I hesitate to deem it a mustread I call the “great books” reason. The great books are those that have passed the test of time. They have FORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 15

Book Review

been recognized across multiple cultures and multiple times for their greatness. And, because of this, they have heavily influenced the cultures that have embraced them. The Iliad and Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, and the works of Shakespeare are all texts that immediately come to mind. While The Epic of Gilgamesh has come to us from approximately two thousand years before Christ, and while twentieth-century scholars and readers, especially the poet Rilke, have commended it to us today, the poem was essentially lost to us from about 600 BC until AD 1853 (and then not translated until the late nineteenth century).

As a result, Gilgamesh has not had, as a text, a direct and obvious influence on culture today, though it may have had an indirect influence (in the memories of those who had known it) that was passed on to us through their progeny and the cultures that followed them. Being extant today and lauded by the twentieth century is a good test but is not the same test as passing through twenty-plus centuries and being lauded

by Greeks, Romans, Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Americans, and more.

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All this to say, there are many books that have been tested by time more thoroughly and completely that you may want to prioritize—a perfectly legitimate choice. If, however, you desire to see the universality and ubiquity of the human spirit in a culture somewhat more foreign to us, then Gilgamesh’s epic may be just the poem to turn to next.

Dr. Matthew Bianco is the chief operations officer for the CiRCE Institute, where he also serves as a head mentor in the CiRCE apprenticeship program. A homeschooling father of three, he has graduated all three of his children, the eldest of whom graduated from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. His second graduated from Belmont Abbey College in Charlotte, North Carolina, where his youngest still attends their great books honors college. He is married to his altogether lovely high school sweetheart, Patricia. Dr. Bianco has a PhD in humanities from Faulkner University’s Great Books Honors College. He is the author of Letters to My Sons: A Humane Vision for Human Relationships.

Book Review

READING THE CLASSICS

Leaving Childishness Behind

By Timothy Knotts

F

amed essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson called Plutarch’s Lives “a Bible for heroes.” Though far from Holy Writ, this ancient work deserves a place in the literary canon and should be included as required reading for young and old alike. In this collection of twenty-eight extant biographies, the first-century historian Plutarch compares the historical importance and, more significantly, the virtues and vices of Greek and Roman nobles. He compares famed leaders, like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; lawgivers, like Lycurgus and Numa; and orators, like Demosthenes and Cicero, providing commentary on how these famous men are alike or different.

These biographical sketches have been a part of school reading lists from time immemorial and continue to be worthy of study for a number of reasons. Plutarch meticulously researched and cited his varied sources, even critiquing when necessary.

In engaging, vibrant, and beautiful prose, he presents the best and worst of each nobleman without declaring a winner. And perhaps the greatest strength of the text is the careful manner in which he creates parallels: sometimes lovely and striking similarities appear by tracing the compared lives.

Revealing his intent for this biographical study, Plutarch appeals to Plato in his work Moralia, arguing that parents “should teach while still a child / The tale of noble deeds.” In this ideal lies the true value of Plutarch’s Lives: though a beautiful literary artifact, Lives is an exploration of virtue and should be read as a primer in stepping into a fully realized adulthood, for knowing and imitating revered members of a past civilization teaches us how to become full members of our own communities.

But, as Plutarch shows us, there are many paths to becoming a hero of a community. When Plutarch compares Lycurgus, the lawgiver of Sparta, and the Roman lawgiver Numa, he shows how acting virtuously can lead to apparently contrary, yet right, results. Numa’s right decision to accept kingship starkly contrasts with Lycurgus’ declining the kingship offered to him. Yet in each life, Plutarch demonstrates how both men acted virtuously despite these diametrically opposed decisions. In doing so, the author reveals the paradox and antithesis that is inevitable in a world of dialectic.

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Book Review

it is found, but he also provides a warning against twin follies where subjects deserve opprobrium. While comparing the founders of Athens and Rome, he argues: Both Theseus and Romulus were by nature meant for governors, yet neither lived up to the true character of a king, but fell off, the one into popularity, the other into tyranny, falling both into the same fault which is done no less by avoiding what is unfit than by observing what is suitable. Whoever is either too remiss or too strict is no more a king or a governor, but either a demagogue or a despot, and so becomes either odious or contemptible to his subjects.

Exposing both the good and the ill in his examples, Plutarch aimed not to teach “history,” but to teach virtue. He reveals his intentions, saying: But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men’s minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them . . . Moral good is a practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen, than it inspires an impulse to practice, and influences the mind and character not by a mere imitation which we look at, but by the statement of the fact creates a moral purpose which we form.

It was Plutarch’s belief that telling laudatory stories of great men would inspire future generations to see, recognize, and thus desire to imitate the good of the virtuous men.

These lessons have not fallen on deaf ears throughout history. For example, Plutarch’s account of Cato the Younger was adapted by the great eighteenth-century playwright Joseph Addison, and George Washington produced the play for his troops at Valley Forge to build morale. In the Addison version of the story, Cato makes the following speech on liberty: Alas! my friends!

Why mourn you thus? let not a private loss Afflict your hearts. ’Tis Rome requires our tears.

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That humbled the proud tyrants of the earth, And set the nations free, Rome is no more.

O liberty! O virtue! O my country!

Listeners may well hear in these words the echoes of “I came. I saw. I conquered.” Or perhaps these lines inspired Patrick Henry to declare, “Give me liberty or give me death,” inspiring the founding fathers to heroic deeds in the American Revolution.

Like a good sermon, though, one cannot approach Plutarch’s lessons on virtue as something simply to be taught to others. Every reader needs to read about historical figures with high moral character. This was Plutarch’s own pattern—applying the lessons first to himself, then attempting to pass them on to others: Using history as a mirror I try by whatever means I can to improve my own life and to model it by the standard of all that is best in those whose lives I write. As a result, I feel as though I were conversing and indeed living with them; by means of history I receive each one of them in turn, welcome and entertain them as guests and consider their stature and their qualities and select from their actions the most authoritative and the best with a view to getting to know them.

The use of biographies of past heroes as models for character and behavior is even a biblical model, where Paul tells the Corinthians that the stories of Israel in the wilderness were written for the education of future generations. He also commands disciples to imitate him, inasmuch as he imitates Christ.

One hundred years after Washington, Charlotte Mason, the famous British educator, urged the study of Plutarch’s Lives for children’s civic education: Again, they will answer, “How did Pericles manage the people in time of war lest they should force him to act against his own judgment?”

And from such knowledge as this we may suppose that the children begin to get a sympathetic view of the problems of statesmanship. Then, to come to our own time, they are enabled to answer, “What do you know of (a) County Councils, (b) District Councils, (c) Parish Councils?”

Book Review

knowledge which should make children perceive that they too are being prepared to become worthy citizens, each with his several duties.

Notice that it was not a study in civics of the administrative sort that Mason sought. Rather, she wanted children to read about Pericles and other great statesmen to learn about their duties as citizens. In an age of dissipation and loss of piety toward our country, a time where people and place are becoming increasingly fungible and transient, the lesson of the hero statesmen might be what leads us out of, or at least towards, the exit of the current political morass. The study of these men who selfishly or selflessly led the Greeks and Romans into great victories or stunning defeats provides a context from which we, and our students, can glean lessons about what it takes to be honored as members of the community.

Plutarch wrote, “To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.” Rights, obligations, and every relationship within the community hinges on those

duties. Ignorance of duty leaves one groping blindly at understanding one’s place in the community. Plutarch explains that the Spartan laws stood for many generations, but the Romans quickly abandoned theirs. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus’ laws (the Spartan) would have fared no better than Numa’s “if he had not, by discipline and education, infused them into the children’s characters, and imbued their whole early life with a love of his government.”

Many in the modern era have abandoned Plutarch’s Lives as out of date or irrelevant. However, in an era of self-serving politicians, visionless leaders, and empty political discourse, there may be no better time to consider the lives of men who have shaped two thousand years of Western culture and consider the outcomes of their choices.

Timothy Knotts is completing the CiRCE Apprenticeship in spring of 2023 and is the co-founder of the Classical Learning Consortium for New England. He lives in Windsor, Connecticut, with his wife and four children. He has been published in the Consortium Journal, at CiRCEinstitute.org and guests on the Everyday Educator podcast.

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T

he Oklahoma wind ripped the dead leaves from the branches, and they crunched as I stepped over them. My head was bent against the wind as I walked out of the university library and to class, past the water fountain and library lawn, where on warmer days college boys played Ultimate Frisbee. I walked past the statue of an old college president and then past Theta pond, which had been home to a crocodile at some point in my school’s history. I was a small sophomore history major with short brown hair and studious glasses that seemed to cover my whole face.

Outwardly, I was doing very well for myself. I had a scholarship for a research project of my choosing with the guidance of a professor, and as a history major, I elected to research the history of clothing in the Dust Bowl. After receiving the award, I was hired as a research intern for the school’s library, and my supervisors graciously allowed me to do a project that was similar to my scholarship project. Despite these successes, tears were biting at my eyes. I had just come from work and was utterly overwhelmed; I felt like I was drowning in a pit of information with no way out.

I was studying the Dust Bowl, one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. During the late 1930s, massive dust storms ravaged parts of rural Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and Colorado. Since the Dust Bowl primarily affected agriculture, the majority of the writings about the Dust Bowl have focused on this, most famously Donald Worster’s The Dust Bowl. However, the dust impacted every aspect of daily life. My research sought to understand how this affected the Dust Bowler’s sense of self and well-being. Through this research, I was creating a space for myself as a member of the academy, that behemoth which gives out degrees and seeks to learn about and order the world around it. The academy is defined by its pursuit of truth, and it had made me two promises: first to give me knowledge and then to give me the detective and critical thinking skills to find the truth. I was unreasonably excited about my project and the new world that was opening to me.

And so, I began. The basis of my project was around two thousand pages of interviews with wom24 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA

en who had lived through the Dust Bowl. Working through this material, I found that interpreting primary source material isn’t nearly as easy as just reading the documents and taking notes. One interviewee said that women always wore white dresses to town, while another said women always wore black dresses to town. I had absolutely no idea who was right or how to find out. Perplexed, I emailed my boss, and she sent me a number of theoretical articles and we scheduled a meeting to discuss the readings. The readings and the meeting overwhelmed me with all the qualifications I had to put on my sources. Questions about the fallibility of human memory, why people tell stories at a certain time, how questions can lead a conversation in the wrong direction, and the danger of broad statements swamped me in indecision about what to write and how to write it.

It was after this meeting that I found myself fighting back tears on the way to class, wondering how I could possibly finish my research project. What was true about these sources? Who was telling the truth, and who was misremembering? I had no idea what was true or how to find out. To make matters worse, the research project included a substantial scholarship and I had to come up with a paper and a poster at the end of the school year to prove that I had completed the project and deserved the money. I had to find the truth.

It was a lot to put on an eighteen-year-old. I look back on this moment, now as a graduate student, and I realize that I had eaten the fruit the academy had offered. The academy had promised me knowledge, and it had delivered, but it delivered the knowledge that I knew hardly anything and that crafting truth statements, otherwise known as thesis statements, was more complicated than I realized. Now, I know that the need for thesis statements displays the reality that there is truth in this world and the difficulty that comes with laboring over a thesis reveals that we are not God, we are not all-knowing, and the search for truth is hard-fought and sorely won. Laboring over our thesis statements is the real education of writing: forcing ourselves to reckon with the world that we live in and, in humility, to seek to honor God with our writing, our words, and our ideas.

LABORING OVER OUR THESIS STATEMENTS IS THE REAL EDUCATION OF WRITING: FORCING OURSELVES TO RECKON WITH THE WORLD THAT WE LIVE IN AND, IN HUMILITY, TO SEEK TO HONOR GOD WITH OUR WRITING, OUR WORDS, AND OUR IDEAS. The work of the academy, my work included, is built on extensive research and a central truth claim, in other words, a thesis statement. Thesis statements are crucial, as they make sense of our research and give readers a one-line answer to a big question.

These thesis statements, ultimately, are intended to make the reader’s life better. If a scientist were to only publish the graphs of his data and methodologies but offered no conclusion as to what his results meant, then how are his readers supposed to use his research? Thesis statements synthesize our work, they tell the reader what our work is about, and they are the unifying factor behind all of our sources. They don’t just tell us what the research is about, they make meaning of it.

Yet it is profoundly difficult to write thesis statements. I still struggle with it after years of school. I think a lot of people do. They have the sources, they have the words on paper, the essay is nearly done, and they’re still staring at their screens waiting for the thesis to come. I saw this during my first semester of graduate school. In classes, my friends had fifteen excellent sources for their twenty-page research papers, but even when they had hit the page count, they still didn’t know what to write for the thesis. I understood this too because I was in that exact position. After turning in our papers, I looked at my friends, threw up my hands, and said, “I don’t even know if I agree with my own paper!” This made me

realize there was something profound in the difficulty of writing a thesis statement.

It is true that in the Dust Bowl women made clothing from feed sacks, they washed their clothes in a gasoline-powered washing machine, and they owned very few clothes. It is an entirely different thing, however, to say, “This is what these facts tell us about the meaning of the Dust Bowl and this is how we should live in light of that.” This is uncomfortable to argue because it is a bold claim, and part of me wonders if I am misrepresenting the women who lived through the Dust Bowl. It is safe to retell facts in a thesis statement, but the writer opens herself to critique and realizations of her own fallibility if she makes an argument about the meaning of those facts. I know I am fallible. I know I cannot know everything, and that makes me unhappy. I know that it is a sin to lead others astray, and I want to be sure that my words honor God. I look back on my walk to class and see one desire come out: a desire to know everything that is frustrated by the realization that I can’t. It was disappointing to realize that there was so much in life that I could not know and would not know: I realized that I was not God and would never know everything, and I would never have enough wisdom to suit me or enough knowledge to make me happy. That moment showed me who I was and who God is, and it put me in my proper place so that I could work out my salvaFORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 25

tion with fear and trembling and glorify God in my actions. Education had promised me that I could eat of the tree of truth and not die. I had eaten the fruit, and what I saw brought me to my knees.

The reality of my fallibility and finite knowledge makes it tempting to say, “There is no truth,” as so many postmodern professors and students have said.

And yet, the academy is built on the pursuit of truth.

The historical method is much like the scientific method, and historians are, in a sense, scientists. We begin with a research question; in my instance, how did the Dust Bowl affect clothing? We find a variety of sources, look at them, and let the texts speak for themselves. Then we state what is true about those sources. Our papers then follow those thesis statements with evidence. If the work is going to be a journal article, project, or book, the information is peer-reviewed by three people who hold PhDs. With this process as proof, the academy is built on the premise that it is possible to understand truth through deductive reasoning and reproducible results.

However, there is room for a great deal of variability in this research process. From our research ideas, to the sources we choose, to our personal experiences that influence the way we read a text, one hundred different researchers will come up with one hundred different ideas about a selected topic.

I think this is why postmodern thinkers tell us there is no truth, because it seems impossible to accurately understand the past.

Thus comes a strange dichotomy, a divide between the actions of the academy and the ideas of postmodernism, which are so prevalent. Out of one side of their mouth, professors will say, “Oh, there is no truth.” Yet out of the other side of their mouth, they will tell you many “true” facts about the subject which you are supposed to be studying. Of course, professors know that there is truth; it is true that they had an egg salad sandwich for lunch, that they are married, or that they have to take their ten-year-old to baseball practice after work today. As stated previously, I think what professors really mean by “there is no truth” is that truth is difficult to discern. They have the same questions about life that I had about my research. Who is telling the truth? Who is lying?

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haunt me haunt them as well, but in their hearts they know there is truth, and their very jobs prove it.

In the end, I argued that the Dust Bowl did not change the women who lived through it. “Though times were difficult, they still enjoyed looking through fashion magazines and creating new looks out of feedsack. The Dust Bowl was a horrible event, but they did not let their circumstances change who they were on the inside.”

I’m very pleased with my thesis, and though I’d tweak it a bit now, I still agree with it. As I was crafting it, I felt burdened by a desire to completely know and understand the truth. When I spoke to others about my research, I wanted to speak the truth. Even in a secular worldview, lying about one’s research is wrong, but for me, there was an eternal weight to speaking truth about my research. I felt, in some small way, that I was claiming to be all-knowing—“exercising power over my knowledge,” as my research mentor told me. And that didn’t sit well on my heart.

The theologian R.C. Sproul writes in The Holiness of God that “truth is that which corresponds to reality as perceived by God.” He continues, “His truth expresses His own character. Insofar as He is the fountainhead of all truth, all truth points back to Him. Since all truth points to Him, all truth is sacred. The sacredness of truth is what makes the lie so diabolical in that it distorts our perception of the very character of God.” Because God is truth, and God created the world, then truth is intimately woven into every moment of our day. The Bible shows us that truth is knowable; it is not hidden from us. As Christians, we must orient our lives towards an understanding of who God is and of the world that He created so that we can better honor Him. Knowing this, how brash it felt to sit down and make that truth claim as a little eighteen-year-old.

Perhaps it would have been better for me if, when I felt I had read enough, I had simply closed the books and walked away and never written a word about the subject. It seems almost like laughing at God to make an argument about the past, to make a truth claim.

I’m sure that a prideful part of me was worried because I didn’t want to look like a fool, but I hope that enough of me realized that the truthfulness or lack thereof of my thesis statement would either honor

God or it would not. When I wrestle with a thesis statement, I am doing something holy because I am seeking to honor God’s character. I am asking, “Is this statement true? Is it honoring God?” If I claim something is true when it is not, I am lying. This is why, when I write, I follow Paul’s command and write as if writing unto the Lord because I know that someday I will have to give an account for every idle word I have spoken or written. Our essays, even the ones we delete from our computer when the school year is over, should be given great care.

Though it might have been more prudent to close my books and never write, I couldn’t escape the need for a thesis statement. All the knowledge I had accumulated would have been useless if I had not created a thesis statement that not only argued for the importance of the topic, but showed what that research said about the human soul. It was so much, so much, to hang on one sentence.

Yes, it is incredibly difficult to write thesis statements, and it is good and right that it should be so because this difficulty humbles me and reminds me that I am not God. Perhaps it is so hard to know the truth because God wants us to remain humble and

dependent on Him. I will never know everything, and I must be content with that. I will never know if women always wore white dresses to town or if women always wore black dresses to town (though I doubt either is true). But how freeing it is to know that I am not God, to realize that the world does not stop turning if I don’t know everything! Grace does not negate striving for excellence in my work, though grace often feels as though I’m giving myself an excuse. There is an inexorable tension between humility and grace that we must maintain, one that I have yet to fully understand and practice. But if I were to go back to that autumn day and walk with my younger self, I would say this: “Your heart is right with God, you want to honor Him, and that is all He requires of you. Now, just write one word at a time.

Sometimes, that is all you can do.”

Claire Patton is a master’s of public history student at Oklahoma State University writing a thesis about clothing, labor, gender, and community in rural, nineteenth-century Oklahoma. In her spare time she enjoys reading, discussing the world with her husband, Titus, drinking coffee, and petting her evil cat, Sophie. She blogs at ThreeHundredHours.com.

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INTERVIEW

If you’ve found yourself bemoaning the relegation of communal inquiry over a strong drink to the elite of a romanticized past, the Lyceum Movement will shatter your conceptions of the elite, the past, and the availability of deep conversations. Nathan Beacom, their founder and executive director, recently sat down with our editor, Katerina Kern, to discuss why and how communities need to openly and leisurely discuss universal ideas over a drink or shared meal.

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Interview

Could you say a bit about yourself and why you started by a farmer in Connecticut in the nineteenth started the Lyceum Movement? century. In those times, Lyceums became the place where a city came together to do its thinking and I’ve worked in public policy in both conservative and learning. Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, progressive settings, and within them, I observed a Susan B. Anthony—all of the great thinkers of the lack of shared language, of a shared framework for day propounded their ideas in Lyceum settings. thinking about common problems. Conservatives and progressives occupied, to some degree, differ- This is fascinating because you’re reviving a traent and separate worlds of experience. This tribal ditional mode of dialogue and inquiry, but withphenomenon is universal but is exacerbated by a in a contemporary, non-partisan context (please culture that is increasingly lonely, isolated, and on- correct me if I’m wrong). What role does tradiline. Rather than having a back-and-forth between tion and place play within the goals of the Lyceum neighbors who disagree, we sit behind our screens Movement? and receive news and information we already agree with and affirm our opinions among those who are Yes, that’s exactly right. We are hoping to go deeper already on our side. than the political fights of the hour, to the pre-poThis leaves us alienated. It leaves us at a distance litical ideas and relationships that shape our public from our neighbors and at a distance from the hab- conversations. its that can actually help us to get at the truth about Tradition plays a strong role, as is indicated in our things. The Lyceum provides an alternative. At the name, with all its rich history. I see the historical LyLyceum, neighbors gather together face-to-face to ceum Movement as an instance of something that is pursue knowledge in really rich in American the context of relationculture. When Alexis ship. Human beings de Tocqueville did his always desire to learn famous tour of a young and always are in need America, he noted that of a community of feleven the most rural, low learners to help far-flung cabin would them along the way. have Shakespeare, the Being face-to-face, we current newspaper, and are able to balance and the King James Bible. push back on one anThe Lyceum is not the other’s views, provide only tradition of public a broader perspective, learning in American and see those who dishistory. The Chautauagree with us as fellow human beings. In order to qua Movement and Public Forum Movement are answer the important questions we face as commu- two notable others. Americans, historically, have nities, we need a place to establish trust, form good been enthusiastic about widespread education and habits of dialogue, and pursue a shared foundation character development, seeking to join with their of knowledge together. That’s what the Lyceum neighbors to sharpen their minds. This was true hopes to provide. across diverse communities, too. That’s a fine tradiIn Des Moines, where I am from, there is a long- tion to draw upon. standing history of public forums where citizens Place and particularity are key to how we think engage in important matters together, and we are about the Lyceum, too. In other words, there is bringing that tradition back to the city, and to the something to be gained from discoursing not just Midwest, today in the form of the Lyceum Move- with random people online, but with the people ment. The name of our endeavor comes from a here, with whom I share my place. Together, we can historical movement of the same name, which was gain a shared sense of history, loyalty, and solidar30 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA

Interview

ity, the more we learn about our neighbors’ stories, points of view, and experiences in the community we share. The sociologist Robert Putnam noted that major moral reform and positive social change in American history have not come so much from Washington, DC, or from our big universities but from local communities taking responsibility and deciding that things needed to change. In his view, the reason social ties and community trust were once so much higher was because of the work of local Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs, churches, Knights of Columbus, and things like that. That’s how I see the Lyceum. We are not from a university or a think tank, and our role is to create a network of local leaders who love the place they’re in and who can bring universal conversations into the local context. By turning to the local, we can provide a counterweight, too, to our angry national political debates.

refugee from Sudan versus a fourth-generation local.

Both philosophical questions and local stories are, in some way, pre-political. We are not talking about culture war or hot-button issues, we are trying to get a handle on basic concepts and to understand the experience of our neighbors, and in so doing, to approach the truth of things.

We need to have these kinds of discussions because if we are only having those hot topic debates, we will talk past one another and not have a full appreciation of what the other is saying. Productive discussion depends on a shared language and set of concepts and stories. We might still disagree, but we are at least communicating and learning from each other in a real way. In addition to providing this benefit, the truth is worth knowing for its own sake, and learning is its own good, in that it helps fulfill that deep human desire to develop our minds and seek what is real.

I love this idea of going back to pre-political ideas and am encouraged that communities are actively seeking this! However, I’m curious how this plays out. How do you avoid “hot-button issues” when so many of our cultural divides form around funA pre-political idea need not be specific to a place, damental, basic truths? How do you approach “the but, in our work, we do try to bring things into a local truth of things” without discussing politically divicontext, to connect the universal to the particular. The sive topics? Do you find common ground is possimeaning of virtue or the idea of home or the nature of ble in the Lyceum? beauty are pre-political ideas. It’s not that these have no relationship to politics, but they are questions that Common ground is certainly possible, and we aren’t are more fundamental and universal than policy de- necessarily looking for consensus; we are looking for bates, and they deal with concepts that we bring to people to engage in a common pursuit and to grow bear on those political discussions. What it means to in mutual understanding through the shared project “be at home” is kind of a philosophical question, and of truth-seeking. To dialogue and learn well, just like we would explore that at the Lyceum with the help of anything else, requires the practice of certain virtues. a philosopher, but also through the lens of personal In the pursuit of knowledge, these virtues include experience, like how this idea plays out in the life of a things like humility, generosity, and patience. At the

​ an you give us some examples of these “pre-politC ical” ideas? Are they all specific to the local place?

Do you find that the conversations vary widely from one place to the next?

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Interview

Lyceum, we have a set of habits that are sort of the ground rules of our conversation, and these have to do with being a generous listener, with giving people the benefit of the doubt, with trying to find things to affirm about your partners in conversation. The basic reorientation has to do with turning away from the idea that conversation is about you or I winning and toward the idea that it is about both of us, side by side, trying to get at the truth of things, even when we disagree.

Generally, people come to the Lyceum seeking something like that. They’re coming because they have an honest desire to learn, not because they want to get into an argument. Some of that has to do with the tone and the ethos we set. Institutions shape us by the ethos they work to embody, and by working to enact these virtues, everybody who participates in the Lyceum is a part of that work of building a positive culture and a positive ethic.

Creating that kind of positive ethos also has to do with creating a convivial environment, one that is welcoming and warm, and that’s something we try to do at the Lyceum, too. When you set the table in this way, people can find common ground. Often, we dig in and become more radical in our views when we feel threatened by a political opponent; if we can talk about things honestly, openly, without a fear of threat, we can allow ourselves to be a little more patient and vulnerable, and in that circumstance, some common ground, or at least common sympathy, I think, is more likely.

That is part of the reason why we look at things through a local lens and have a policy of avoiding the culture war. It is easier to find commonalities when we talk about shared experience and shared space.

Studying texts from other places and times can also be helpful because they take us out of our own narrow and impassioned political context and allow us to see things in a new way. There’s no perfect way to avoid contentiousness or for everyone to find complete common ground, but with the right habits and virtues, we can engage more fruitfully in the pursuit of knowledge.

This kind of question has always been a part of virtue ethics and the philosophy of character development since Aristotle. Virtue has to get started somewhere.

Someone whose habits have been formed really negatively will have a hard time progressing in fruitful conversation, but I think most people are a combination of virtue and vice, and you can use that starting point of virtue and appeal to it through a community that affirms and encourages its development. So, left to our own devices, we are often tempted to talk and argue in ways that are not virtuous, but when we are part of a community that is constituted by an effort to build virtue together, we have the support and encouragement to be better. When we agree to come together and learn side by side in friendship, we get the chance to practice positive habits that we bring to other conversations in our lives.

Can you describe further how you create this “convivial environment”? Many of our readers are educators and would surely long to nurture the same ethos.

When it comes to conviviality, a big part is the feeling of the space. Using a school classroom or community center after hours is not going to work very well. Plastic chairs under fluorescent lighting, white plastic tables, drab walls—these do not contribute to a feeling of conviviality, they make things feel like a boring chore. We host our events in local businesses with really great design to their spaces. Some of these are breweries or cafes; we also use a stylish co-working space and an antique store. The point is to get an environment that is warm, comfortable, and inviting, where it feels like we are hanging out and not like we are listening to a required lecture. We will have music playing and the tone of our conversations is fun and jocular even as it is serious and meaningful. The writer G.K. Chesterton said once that “funny” and “serious” are not opposites. The opposite of “funny” is just “not funny” and the opposite of seriousness is just unseriousness. One can be solemn and unserious, and one can be hilarious but very serious too. Finally, since our events are mostly for adults, we have You mention the essential role of virtue in dialogue. beer, wine, and food, which encourage the feeling of Do you think virtue is a prerequisite for open dia- conviviality as well. logue, or can this form of dialogue develop virtue?

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Interview

I​ find it encouraging and exciting—and somewhat incredible—that communities are practicing this form of open, communal inquiry! What challenges do you face? Do you find it relatively easy to get people to discuss in this manner?

One thing that has surprised me is how much the idea does appeal across viewpoint differences. A lot of people on the left and the right want to have a space to learn with their neighbors in this way; they see the value of local conversations about big ideas.

I think the major challenge is to get people away from their screens. It’s just so easy to come home from work and plug in rather than go out and do things with people. The latter is much more richly rewarding, but the inertia of just watching TV or scrolling the web is strong.

​ hat topics do you hope to contemplate in the LyW ceum in the coming months (or years)?

​ s America becomes increasingly polarized, do A you fear this open communication being jeopardized?

Not everyone wants to have these conversations.

There are people who believe their political opponents simply aren’t worth talking to; that they are to be simply defeated rather than reasoned with. The conviction of the Lyceum, though, is that dialogue is worth having, that we should all be engaged in a common endeavor to find truth and the common good, and that not everything must be shoehorned into the political debates of the moment. I think that appeals to a lot of people, and they are attracted to the Lyceum because of it, and so they are ready to talk thoughtfully, patiently, generously. Human nature is human nature, and conversations can be imperfect or challenging, but we try to cultivate good habits to make them better.

When it comes to polarization, I think we have already lost a great deal in our ability to have fruitful, thoughtful public conversation. That’s part of why we at the Lyceum make things so local and interpersonal—there can be more trust and less fear. When there is more trust and respect, people are less likely to become defensive or to look for “gotchas.” Our hope is that more people want these kinds of conversations than want to continue down the path of anger and enmity, and the data seems to bear that out. ​ hat have you learned through this experience W that has surprised you?

In the coming months, we will be talking about the ways we are shaped by our smartphones, about what art teaches us about the meaning of life, the dignity of manual labor, suffering and hope, and other themes, and we’ve got a lot of really fascinating speakers lined up in our locales. Next year we are hoping to put on a much larger “Festival of Ideas” over the summer, so stay tuned. ​How can people get involved?

If people want to be involved, they can go to lyceummovement.org and find our monthly essays, podcasts, and so on. If they live near a Lyceum, then they should go to an event! They won’t regret it. If they don’t live near one, they can apply to start a chapter.

Katerina Kern is the editor-in-chief of the FORMA Journal and director of press and researcher for the CiRCE Institute.

She loves beautifully crafted paintings and words and believes poetry could save our culture were we bold enough to allow it.

HAVE AN IDEA FOR AN INTERVIEW SUBJECT? Please email our editorial team via formaeditor@circeinstitute.com!

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Poetry Paul J. Pastor

Paul J. Pastor is a poet, author (most recently of Bower Lodge: Poems), and editor for Penguin Random House. His poetry has been published in The Windhover, Ekstasis, Fathom, Solum Literary Press, North American Anglican, and many other fine outlets; and anthologized by The New York Quarterly Review. He lives in Oregon.

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THE EATER Set me a glass of the world’s green sadness and I will drink and wipe my fresh mouth, asking you to pour another. Shove me plates of anger in vain repetition, I will consume and not be full. Spread me a board copious with griefs, reversal, denial, sodden bargains falling rich from marrowbones, and I will sigh and laugh and chew, for I am human and my appetite is human, my warm gut digests all bitterness to joy.

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“I have never seen anyone who loves virtue the way he loves beauty.”

—Confucius "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Among the English Romantic poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is an interesting case. He lacks the ecstat-

AMONG THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETS, SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE IS AN INTERESTING CASE. HE LACKS THE ECSTATIC PERSONALITY OF WILLIAM BLAKE. HE ALSO LACKS THE MYTHIC LIFE AND HAGIOGRAPHY OF LORD BYRON OR THE SUPPOSED MARTYR’S DEATH OF THE GREAT LYRICIST PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. HE ISN’T WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, WHO, IN YOUTH, IS CREDITED WITH MUCH OF THE RADICAL ÉLAN OF THE LATER ROMANTICS. YET COLERIDGE’S POETRY MOVES WITH A DEEP, METAPHYSICAL SPIRIT, ONE THAT CALLS US TO CONTEMPLATION AS MUCH AS TO ADVENTURE.

I consider the great gift of English culture to be its poetry. Beginning with John Milton, and carrying forward through W.H. Auden, the warm soil of England produced a grand garden of souls whose poems sing forth through the starry nights and call us to adventure: a contemplative adventure of love.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one such poet who synthesized what many individual Romantics are best known for: Coleridge is not generally considered as grand a poet of the adventurous-pilgrim tradition as is Bryon. He does not epitomize the eroticism of Shelley or the contemplative psychological-pastoralism of Wordsworth. Yet Coleridge’s ability to combine all these motifs into his poetic form is worth our admiration and love, for it reveals his genius and the beauty which governed his soul; his ability to combine all the elements and characteristics of romantic poetry reveal the totality of the human soul.

Concerning the inquiry into the heart of human nature there are generally two dominant views: the rational animal and the erotic (loving) animal. The

ic personality of William Blake. He also lacks the mythic life and hagiography of Lord Byron or the philosophers of antiquity conceived of humans as rational creatures whose primary problem was their enslavement to passion; this produced, in its extreme form, the anti-passionate philosophy of the Stoics with its hyper-intellectualism. While Epicurus endorsed a hedonistic materialism wherein humanity was a passionate animal, Epicureanism denied a rational basis for passion. It wasn’t until the rise of Christianity that love was given a rational justification, thus uniting reason and love together. To be made in the image of God, Christian theological anthropology asserted, was to be made in love for love and in wisdom for wisdom. Eros and Logos are finally united.

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame.

These words, by Coleridge, reflect the Romantic emphasis of the Christian notion of man as love and God as Love, even going as far as updating Augustine’s reading of the epistles of John where Love is itself Divine. For we “are but ministers of Love.” If pre-Romantic theology emphasized the assembling role of reason, which orders love to its proper orientation, Romantic theological poetry emphasized the liberating role of love in life itself—a re-enthronement of passion above reason as the godliest aspect of our nature. This wasn’t to demean human rationality, but in Romanticism’s violent reaction against rational sterility, the ecstasy of love was the primary vehicle the Romantics latched on to in their rebellion against the mechanical and passionless vision of man offered up by the Enlightenment rationalists.

What makes the love poetry of Coleridge special is its embrace of the totality of the human heart: Not just mere eroticism; not just the mere tender gaze and smiles that flow from love; not just the mere forgiveness needed for reconciliation and relational persistence; his poetry embraces it all. “She was FORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 39

Furthermore, Coleridge also understands that love is a pilgrimage—a journey, just as Byron epitomized in his works. This journey is not always pleasing, and it is often difficult: Through weeds and thorns, and matted underwood I forced my way; now climb, and now descend O’er rocks, or bare or mossy, with wild foot.

Yet the pilgrimage, the journey that love entails, inherently brings with it joy: Onward still I toil, I know not, ask not whither! A new joy, Lovely as light, sudden as summer gust.

The journey that love is includes the self, for we are all on these journeys as selves, but the journey of love invariably includes relationality with the beloved to which two journey together as one: “And I may be her guide the long wood through.” Likewise, “For here, my love, thou art, and here am I!” The journey of love is more fulfilling together than alone because God made man and woman as companions in love.

Coleridge supersedes Bryon in this regard, whose heroic journey is often alone.

What makes Coleridge’s romantic poetry so profound is the fact that it is not mere bodies that enthrall lover and beloved. True, the physicality of touch and embrace are part of Coleridge’s romance poems.

But his retention of the centrality of the face, the gaze, the eyes, the smile ensures the serene and beautiful side to eroticism more than the merely titillating and sublime, characteristic of the darker romanticism of Shelley. Coleridge’s romantic poetry doesn’t forsake, as Shelley’s romantic poetry does, the imago Dei in the face and eyes of human beings, made in the image of Divine Love, which is most visibly seen and encountered through the face.

The celebration of the self and humans isn’t the only essential aspect of Coleridge’s romanticism. The romance of nature, the beauty and love that can be induced through traveling in creation, was another component of the Romantic spirit that Coleridge captures with rhetorical and imagistic brilliance. Earth and heaven are united, with man as the intermediary who experiences both the transcendent and phenom40 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA

enological: “Beneath the moon, in gentle weather, / They bind the earth and sky together.”

Romantic pastoral and naturalistic poetry—especially from Coleridge’s pen and mind—retain that theme of love as journey and include how this journey of love binds all things together. The binding of humanity and nature is not accidental or incidental.

It is essential. “I climb the Coomb’s ascent.” The climb brings us up to the heavens. It is not an escape from the earth, but it allows us to see the earth from a far more beautiful perspective. “Ah! what a luxury of landscape meets,” Coleridge’s pilgrim-lover, in the heart of nature, declares at the top of the mountain. These journeys and encounters in nature are “Enchanting” and bring a “drop” of “tear[s]” to the adventurous lover, pilgrimaging out in the wilds of God’s creation, which was created by the love of God. Moreover, the musical reality of love and the cosmos is part of Coleridge’s romantic traveling poetry. “Far off the unvarying Cuckoo soothes my ear,” Coleridge writes as the poet pilgrim finds beauty and serenity with nature. We live not in a cosmos of empty rainbows but a universe of enchantment, song, melody, harmony, love. We live in a cosmos that sings with us on our journeys of love. Music is the melody of love itself.

If ever there was a Romantic poet who embraced the best of Romanticism and married it with the best of Christian theology, it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

We are inspired by his songs of love not because they simply tickle our emotional and passionate hearts but because of the deep truths contained therein. We find in Coleridge that metaphysical yearning for love in adventure, and adventure in love, graced by the rhapsodic melodies of the cosmos singing to us that song of love which governs the human heart. In this enchanting cosmos, we see smiles, faces, and eyes— all prefiguring that Divine Face that we yearn to gaze upon in supreme affection.

Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView and the author of The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books (Wipf and Stock, 2021).

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Yea, Lord; yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.

–Matthew 15:27

T

he everlasting power of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as stories lies in their central plots, the ones we might hear if we asked for a summary. George MacDonald, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis would call this the “mythopoeic”—that is, the power of their stories does not depend on the form in which they are told; the basic story could be recast in different words, summarized, sung, painted in murals, or acted on stage, but the power would remain.

The greatness of those poems as poems, however—that is, as works of literature—lies precisely in their form, in the way in which they are told. This includes the style and level of the diction, the unvarying epithets for gods and heroes, the lengthy and repetitive speeches, the recitation of genealogies by warriors on the battlefield, and, of course, the wonderful similes. And it includes the actual Greek language, which is why translations, even good ones, are always denatured representations of the original artifact (which is what the word “poem” means), and that is why classics professors constantly urge us to learn the original language—and why, many years ago, a former Greek professor of mine hung up the phone in frustration when I called to tell her proudly that a friend and I had created a concordance for my favorite modern English translation of the Iliad!

But even in a translation, a great deal of the beauty and power of the poem comes through, and this is particularly true in the case of the similes, one of the most marvelous features of Homer’s epics. Some translations bow to modern sensibilities by varying the stock epithets and repeated speeches, or they ruin the nobility of the heroes’ voices by making their conversations and arguments too colloquial; but it would take a spectacularly bad translation to ruin the similes, because they are like the plot of the Iliad—they are mythopoeic. They cannot be ruined by altering the words or the manner of telling, though they could be told badly, making the audience laugh at an awk-

ward or inappropriate turn of phrase. Even then they would serve their function, which is to describe a scene in a story that was ancient even to the original audience by comparison with a contemporary scene familiar to that audience, because the similes would still give us the picture that Homer meant for us to have.

Scholars have wrangled endlessly over the similes, as about everything else in Homer, but no one denies their profound value in the poems, nor that they are evocative, delightful, charming, moving, sometimes amusing, or even shocking. Every simile is a snapshot, a vignette, a perfectly rendered glimpse of a moment in the experience of ordinary people, one that could almost stand alone as a lyric poem, something lifted from one of the Nine Melic poets—Alcaeus perhaps, or Pindar, or even Sappho. One scholar calls the Homeric simile a “relatively autonomous mini-genre.”1 Their startlingly clear and vivid pictures of scenes from common experiences in the original audience’s daily lives lend greater clarity and immediacy to the more remote event being described in the story, and this is the generally accepted explanation for their presence in the epics. For example, the Achaian hero, Patroklos, kills the Lykian hero, Sarpedon, in Iliad 16; not everyone in the audience may have been in battle and seen a warrior fall, but most people would have seen a woodcutter felling a tree, so Homer says Sarpedon “fell just as an oak falls, or a silver poplar, or a slim pine tree, that the shipwrights fell with sharpened axes on the hills, to be timber for shipbuilding; in the same way he lay at length in front of the horses and chariot.”2 The audience might shiver a bit then at the awesome image of a warrior falling with a crash like an oak or a pine in the forest. Even a seasoned warrior might say that that is just what it’s like to see a man fall. The very specific details—that the tree is an oak, poplar, or pine, that the feller is a shipwright, and that his ax is sharp—seem at first glance utterly unnecessary, but they are precisely what makes the

1. C.A. Martindale, “Milton and the Homeric Simile,” Comparative Literature 33, no. 3 (1981): 224–38.

2. Homer, Iliad, XVI.482-84. Book and line numbers throughout will refer to the Greek, but will be found to match satisfactorily with most translations that correspond closely to the Greek lines (e.g., Murray, Lattimore, Green, Alexander, etc.).

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comparison so powerful, because those details create such a clear picture in the hearer’s imagination. The listeners may indeed have seen blood-stained skin from an injury or battle wound, but the picture focuses more sharply when Homer says in Iliad 4: As when some woman of Maionia or Karia stains ivory with purple, to make a cheek-piece for horses, and it is laid up in the treasure chamber, though many a horseman begs to wear it, but it is laid up to be a king’s boast, both an adornment for his horse and a glory for his charioteer; even so, Menelaos, were your well-muscled thighs stained with blood and your legs and your fair ankles beneath.3

that the similes, in turning our attention briefly away, keep us from overstraining like a bow that is never unstrung. The Odyssey, being an adventure story, does not produce such strain and so the reader needs no such relief. The mere quantity of similes indicates the difference in the kind of story each tells.

The similes are even more important for us who read the poems thousands of years later in a culture almost indescribably different from Homer’s, not only because of the great detail mentioned earlier, but because many of the things he describes in his word pictures are things we still see and experience—though few of us have seen ancient forms of battle, and even fewer of us can dimly understand the utterly alien worldview of the men in the stories or the audience listening to them. And even those similes about things we are still familiar with often do more than illuminate the events of the plot—they sometimes reveal an unexpected or unsuspected aspect of the commonalities we have with the ancient world. We know, for example, that men have always fished, but we think of ancient people as using nets or fish traps. Fishing with a hook, line, and sinker seems very modern, apparently, to many of us—until we read in Iliad 16: “...just as when a man sits on a jutting rock and with a line and glittering hook drags a fish out of the sea—in the same way [Patroklos] dragged Thestor, gaping, from the chariot with the bright spear.”4 In a still more macabre vein, we read in Odyssey 12 that Skylla, the horrifying monster who lives in a hole in the cliff above the sea, has grabbed some of Odysseus’ men from their ship and hauled them, struggling, up to her cave to be devoured,

We don’t need to know where the woman is from— but having been told, we (or at least the original audience) can imagine her better, just as we can imagine “an Italian woman” or “a Navaho woman” better than we can “a woman.” We don’t need to know for what purpose the ivory is to be used, but having been told not only that, but where it will be stored, and who wants it, and who brags about owning it, we have a far clearer picture in our mind’s eye, because now it has the sort of context real objects have in our lives. If you ask me to picture a cup, my mental image is rather vague, but if you ask me to imagine “that coffee mug on the desk in your study, the one your students gave you last year after you complained about breaking your old one,” then the image in my mind comes to life. The Iliad and the Odyssey would not be the same without these similes and the similes would not be the same without the wealth of “unnecessary” detail, the embarrassment of riches that Homer spreads before us. just as when a fisherman on some headland lets Many readers of Homer notice that the Iliad condown with a long rod his baits to deceive the littains about five times as many of these epic similes as tle fishes below, casting into the deep an oxhorn, the Odyssey—nearly two hundred for the Odyssey’s and as he catches each one he flings it, writhing, roughly forty—and one possible explanation is that the ashore; in the same way, the men were writhing narrative in the Odyssey itself contains enough vivid as they were carried upward to be devoured.5 description that the similes are less necessary. That is This is a terrible scene, made more clear by the true as far as it goes, but it may also be that the tension is pitched so much higher in the Iliad’s tragic mode vivid comparison to a scene we all know, because 3. Homer, Il., 141-45.

4. Homer, Il., IV.406-8.

5. Homer, Odyssey, XII.251-56.

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when we were children, or perhaps just last week, we fished with a rod, line, sinker, hook, and bait; and the next time we catch a fish at the local trout pond and pull him wriggling onto the grass we might remember Skylla doing precisely the same to Odysseus’ men. That needn’t stop us fishing, but it might help us remember Homer.

Likewise, many of us have had precisely the dream that Homer refers to when he describes Hektor’s desperate attempt to outrun Achilleus in Iliad 22: “Just as in a dream a man can never quite catch one whom he is chasing—the one can never quite escape and the other never quite catch up—in the same way Achilleus could not overtake Hektor in the race, and Hektor could not escape.”6 We know that dread as we thrash in our sleep, trying to outrun some horror, our legs seemingly mired in molasses. Here, apparently, is a dream known to suffering sleepers since the world began, and it not only helps us understand Hektor’s helpless and hopeless struggle, which is Homer’s intention, but it helps us to understand Homer himself, who surely had this dream, and how very ancient some of our most common experiences are.

Again, all of us have seen children building sandcastles at the seashore—we’ve done it ourselves— but this activity too goes back to the morning of the world, and though we shouldn’t be surprised to read it in Homer, delightfully, we are: “And very easily did [Apollo] throw down the wall of the Achaians, just as when a boy scatters the sand beside the sea, first making sand buildings for sport in his childishness, and then again, in his sport, destroying them with his feet and hands—in the same way, you, Archer Apollo, destroyed the long toil and labour of the Argives…”7 We know well the impetuous and capricious violence of the child suddenly kicking down the sand structure he has just created, and that gives us another perspective on Apollo.

At other times, Homer’s similes do their work through an odd and even seemingly inappropriate comparison. In Iliad 12, the Achaians defend their wall against the Trojan Asios’ furious attack by tearing 6. Homer, Il., XXII.199-201.

7. Homer, Il., XV.361-366.

8. Homer, Il., XII.154-61.

9. Homer, Il., 278-89.

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great stones from the structure itself and hurling them down onto the invaders below: For the men above were throwing down stones from the well-built towers, in defense of themselves and of the shelters and of the swift-faring ships. And the stones fell to the earth thick like snow that a tempestuous wind, as it drives the dark clouds, drops thickly down on the bounteous earth; in the same way, the missiles fell thickly from the hands of Achaians and Trojans alike, and their helmets and their embossed shields rang harshly, struck with mighty stones.8 A similar but even more clearly incongruous passage comes only a page or two later: Just as flakes of snow fall thick on a winter day, when Zeus the Counselor has begun to snow, showing these arrows of his to men, and he has lulled the winds, and he snows continually, till he has covered the crests of the high hills and the farthest headlands and the grassy plains and rich tillage of men, and the snow is scattered over the harbors and shores of the gray sea, and only the wave as it rolls in keeps off the snow, but all other things are covered over, when the shower of Zeus comes heavily—in the same way, from both sides their stones flew thick, some towards the Trojans, and some from the Trojans against the Achaians, while both sides were struck, and all over the wall the din arose.9 In the first of these two snow similes, the snowfall illustrates merely the thickness of the falling stones; the second one goes well beyond that and conjures up a peaceful, still, silent scene where the countryside is blanketed and hushed . . . and then suddenly we return to the thunderous roar of gigantic rocks falling on bronze shields. We almost suffer imaginative whiplash, and yet this simile is strangely effective in its disjunctive contrast. An even more odd, seemingly incon-

gruous, and for that reason amusing, simile describes Odysseus tossing and turning fitfully on the ground, incognito in his own palace, unable to sleep as he tries to plan revenge on the treasonous suitors at the beginning of Odyssey 20: “As when a man by a great burning fire takes a paunch full of fat and blood, and turns it this way and that and longs to have it roasted quickly, so Odysseus tossed from side to side, pondering how he might lay his hands on the shameless suitors...”10 Odysseus compared to a roasting blood sausage makes us smile; yet it is a surprisingly effective word picture because that is just how a sleepless man feels—and probably looks—as he tosses and turns.

The longer snow simile mentioned previously also illustrates the sharp clarity with which Homer can render the beauty of a scene from the natural world. One of the most justifiably famous of Homer’s similes compares the myriad watchfires of the Trojans camped on the plain around the Achaian wall at the end of Iliad 8 with the stars in a clear night sky: But with high hopes the Trojans sat all night along the pathways of the battle, and their watchfires burned in multitudes. Just as when in the heavens the stars around the bright moon shine clearly, when the air is still, and all the peaks appear and the tall headlands and glades, and from heaven the infinite air spills out, and all the stars are seen, and the shepherd’s heart is glad—in the same way the watchfires that the Trojans kindled in front of Ilios shone in multitudes between the ships and the streams of Xanthos. A thousand fires burned in the plain, and fifty men sat by the side of each one in the gleam of blazing fire. And the horses champed white barley and spelt, and standing by their chariots they waited for Dawn to take her throne.11

but there are few adjectives within the simile itself, just a simple mention of what the shepherd, and we with him, see from our hillside overlooking the flock. In the modern, electrified West, our technology keeping us indoors, it may be that few people go outside at night, and so are no longer familiar with the night sky. But for all of human history until recently, everyone was familiar with the sight of the heavens at night, and its occupants and patterns, and would hear this simile with delight because of that familiarity. The passage gives additional pleasure because it describes the Trojan camp just as vividly as it does the simile used to illuminate it. The multitude of blazing fires, the men around them, and the champing horses, all waiting for the dawn—this is just as powerfully evocative as the simile. In fact, the two could be reversed with equal force—the stars in the night sky are like a multitude of watchfires on the Trojan plain.

Homer’s similes also tell us about the poet himself.

His similes, taken as a whole, show that he was an outstanding observer of nature and the activities of man before he went blind; if he was blind from birth, he must have had a profoundly powerful imagination and could render what he heard others describing better than most of us can render what we see with our own eyes—but this is a more difficult assumption than the first.

Furthermore, consider what a simile like this next one suggests: when Patroklos leads Achilleus’ Myrmidons out to battle in Iliad 16, Homer says: Immediately they poured forth like wasps that have their dwelling by the wayside, and that boys always like to vex, always tormenting them in their nests beside the way in childish sport, and they create an evil for many people. If some man on a journey passes by them unknowingly, every one of them flies with a furious spirit, and each defends his young…12

There is no more beautifully evocative description in Homer, and perhaps anywhere, of a moon-and-starlit night as seen from a hilltop in a dark countryside, Tradition says that blind Homer, surely accompaand it is all the better for being so spare. The simile is nied by a guide, wandered through Ionia singing his one great adjective describing the Trojan watchfires, poems, and he would certainly often have been this 10. Homer, Od., XX.25-30.

11. Homer, Il., 553-65.

12. Homer, Il., XVI.259-65.

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“man on a journey” who “passes by [the wasps] unknowingly” and for whom boys had created an evil. He sounds annoyed in this simile, though perhaps with a smile. Homer’s own humanity is revealed here: his troubles on the road, and for all that, his gentleness toward the silly childishness (which is precisely what the Greek text says) that provoked it.

Again, in his travels, Homer would have heard a great many things about the world of men and their politics, and one fascinating simile suggests that Homer may have gotten caught up in them. Just a hundred or so lines after the wasps, Patroklos drives the terrified Trojans out of the Achaian camp, through the gate, and out onto the plain toward Troy, and the ground shakes with the thunder of the horses’ hooves: As beneath a storm the whole black earth is burdened, on an autumn day when Zeus pours forth rain violently in fury against men who make crooked judgments in the assembly by force, and drive justice out, and do not consider the vengeance of the gods; and all the rivers run full and torrents tear the ravines, and they rush headlong from the hills down to the dark sea roaring powerfully, and the works of men are destroyed—in the same way the roar of the Trojan horses was thunderous as they ran.13 Here again is that unnecessary but fascinating detail: Why does Homer tell us not just about the thunder of rivers in flood, which would be enough to tell us about the horses’ loud running, but also the specific detail that Zeus causes this flood because he is angry about corrupt judges who drive justice from the courts of men, and who do not bear in mind divine retribution? It would not be at all unreasonable to speculate that Homer has run afoul of such political injustice himself, perhaps trying to recover an unpaid fee from a powerful lord for whom he sang. We know of other cases in Greek history where this very thing hap-

pened—Simonides of Ceos, the poet to whom Cicero and Quintilian ascribe the invention of the mnemonic system described best in the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, was bilked out of half his promised performance fee by Scopas, the Thessalian nobleman who commissioned him and who should indeed have remembered the “vengeance of the gods,” because they literally brought down the house on him (and all his guests) immediately after his refusal to pay. Homer’s inclusion of the detail about the judges suggests a bitter memory that popped, perhaps unbidden, into his story as he recited, and that memory became preserved like an insect in amber from millenia past.

Yet again, some of the similes are perfect assessments of Homer himself, the master poet who presides over the feast of all of Western literature (for, to borrow with alterations a saying from Alfred North Whitehead about Plato, “The safest general characterization of the European literary tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Homer”).14 Homer loves to offer similes about the Ocean; the great Roman rhetorician Quintilian says, “He is like his own conception of Ocean, which he describes as the source of every stream and river; for he has given us a model and an inspiration for every department of eloquence.”15 At the end of Iliad 18, Homer has the smith god, Hephaistos, fashion the great new shield for Achilleus on which is depicted the whole world, and at the end of that description he makes the River Ocean which encircles the earth. Homer is the Ocean that encircles all of later literature.

The very first simile in the Iliad appears early in Book 2 when the leaders of the Achaians call them all to assembly, like “dense swarms of bees [that] continually issue from the hollow rock and fly clustering among the flowers of spring, and on every hand fly in bunches.”16 Every great poet after Homer has a bee simile, because while Homer uses it to illustrate great numbers of men, most poets have recognized that Homer is himself the Great Bee, gathering and bringing to us the beauties of the world around him in his similes.

13. Homer, Il., XVI.384-93.

14. Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1979), 39.

15. Quintilian, Quintilian: The Orator’s Education in Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), X.1.46 16. Homer, Il., II.87-90.

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And so those later poets use bee similes to illustrate the gatherings of things: virtues, or ideas, for example. Vergil does this because Homer did; Dante does because Vergil did; and Milton does because everyone before him did; and countless others use the bee simile, including the great fathers of the early church who were almost without exception classically educated.

Homer is full of similes about storms and raging fires. Alexander Pope, in his “Preface to The Iliad of Homer,” prefixed to his great neo-Augustan translation, declares that it is Homer’s power of invention that makes him absolute master of all poets, and says, “It is to the strength of this amazing invention we are to attribute that unequaled fire and rapture which is so forcible in Homer, that no man of a true poetical spirit is master of himself while he reads him.” Homer is the raging, uncontainable Fire he describes in so many similes; he himself is the Storm that sweeps away all in its path.

Earlier in this essay, I mentioned the very different culture and alien worldview represented by Homer’s poems. Our modern culture and beliefs are so different because they have changed so radically over the millenia (but especially in recent centuries) that it is almost impossible to really understand how it would have felt to be a Homeric warrior or a member of his original audience; this seems to me to be beyond argument. I believe we can indeed comprehend the story— the tragedy of Achilleus and the struggles of Odysseus.

But the epic similes arrest my attention because, for the most part, they come straight out of the world we still live in, see, experience; and like all great artistic works, they show us afresh the things we see all the time and yet never quite see until someone else points them out. Fra Lippo Lippi, the artist in Robert Browning’s poem of the same name, says: ...we’re made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted—better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out.17 Homer’s epic similes do this—he has lent his mind to us. The similes are tiny paintings or scraps of paintings from the master’s studio, and by them, we, ignorant though we are, and struggling to comprehend the high and noble understanding of life that he has, are still lifted up.

I have been a reader and lover of Homer for nearly forty years. Nearly that long ago, I first worked through the Iliad (and later the Odyssey), compiling a list of all the similes, with book and line references and brief summaries. The yellow-ruled sheets of paper, on which I wrote that early list in pencil, still resides, often falling out but never lost, inside the cover of my worn and ragged, well-loved and over-used copy of my long-favorite translation. The sheets are faded, wrinkled, hard to read in places. I look them over with delight every time I open my Homer.

But in our discussions together about Homer, especially on our Perpetual Feast podcast, my friend, Andrew Kern, fanned into a new and hotter flame my love for the similes—though I don’t recall whether we ever talked specifically about them—because of his boundless enthusiasm for everything Homer talks about and everything Homer makes him think of (whether Homer talks about it or not), which is everything in the world. That’s how the similes move me. They talk about everything in the world, and they make us see the beauty in everything in the world.

We may not be able to really comprehend the way Homer and his audience thought; we may not be able to fully partake of the perpetual feast, beggars that we are; but we can still be nourished by the little beauties; we can still eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table, and be fed.

Wes Callihan has taught for over thirty-five years at two private schools, a small college which he helped found, the University of Idaho, and his own online classess. He lectures on the Great Books, speaks frequently at classical education conferences, has written essays, short fiction, and poetry for several journals, has contributed to books on classical education and home schooling, and guides adults through reading the early church fathers at Hill Abbey. Wes lives on his sixth-generation family farm in northern Idaho.

17. Robert Browning, “Fra Lippo Lippi,” ll. 300-306.

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C

harlotte Mason (1842–1923) is a name well known to those in the classical Christian education community, especially among homeschoolers. Educators in Mason’s tradition can frequently be heard discussing her educational principles, most notably the view that children are born persons with a mind, that living ideas feed the child’s mind, that education involves various relationships (to God, the world, and other human beings), and that living books—the best of books, typically in narrative form, which communicate ideas beautifully and imaginatively and not dumbed down “twaddle”—should constitute the child’s reading from which he may narrate (or “tell back”) so as to activate that knowledge and make it his own. This is a Charlotte Mason education at its core.

Roughly three hundred years earlier, a similar educational philosophy was articulated by Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), a French Renaissance philosopher and essayist. Both Montaigne and Mason addressed problems they perceived in the administration and content of the education of their day and in the process laid out key principles of education that can be seen as a continuation of the classical and Renaissance tradition: an education that may broadly be described as humane, relational, active, and lively.

A HUMANIST EDUCATION Montaigne wrote his essay “On Educating Children” in the humanist spirit. Although Renaissance humanism was embraced by a variety of thinkers, it may generally be understood as a reappropriation of classical literature—writings that stand the test of time due to their contributions to the great ideas about God, the world, and civilization—and concerned with a curriculum in grammar, poetry, history, logic, rhetoric, and philosophy (natural and moral). Renaissance thinkers saw themselves as being in constant dialogue with the past, reflecting on and contributing to the classical tradition. Montaigne emphasized history, poetry, and philosophy as a means of cultivating judgment due to the ability of these studies to associate the student with great minds, great leaders, great feats, and great speech. He speaks of history and poetry as his “game-bag,” which he loves, and says of philosophy that it ought to be the child’s chief study because it concerns itself “with everything.”

Mason’s matured and organized philosophy of education is primarily found in her book Towards a Philosophy of Education. Like Montaigne, she sees herself operating in the humanist spirit, classifying the three parts of knowledge “under the head of Humanism”: knowledge of God (divinity), of man (humanities), and of the physical world (science). She likewise emphasizes poetry, literature (in which she includes “practical phiFORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 49

losophy”), and history, all of which she generally refers to as “Letters,” in which knowledge is primarily found. She views history as “a vital part of education” and even cites Montaigne’s essay: “that the teacher ‘shall by histories inform himself of the worthiest minds that were in the best ages.’” Like Montaigne, Mason perceived that history helps in the cultivation of sound judgment.

Thus, Montaigne and Mason were in agreement with the general content of a sound education, both promoting a philosophy of education in the classical and Renaissance tradition, which may succinctly be characterized as an education in letters.

A SELF-EDUCATION Both Montaigne and Mason put forward the notion of self-education. Self-education is active instead of passive, child-assimilated instead of teacher-expatiated. The child is constantly in thought, entertaining ideas, verbalizing those ideas, and making judgments. There is no quietly sitting in a chair and listening for lengthy periods of time while trying to memorize a seemingly endless stream of information. Mason goes so far as to say that real education does not take place unless it is self-education, as the key to education is the child applying his mind. The end-product is truly the child’s as he utilizes his judgment to transform that which he has taken into himself. To contrast this with the experience of sitting in a chair and taking notes, you may picture in your mind dialogue between teacher and students, collaboration among students, movement in the classroom (or home), narration, and outdoor excursions. Put simply, a self-education is characterized by reflection or contemplation.

A significant point of agreement in the educational philosophies of Montaigne and Mason is that both saw the child as being a true person, and therefore the child’s education should address him as a person.

Montaigne remarks, “We are not bringing up a soul; we are not bringing up a body: we are bringing up a man. We must not split him into two.” He therefore views the child as body and soul—a true man—who requires a well-rounded education that addresses both elements of their nature. Similarly, Mason’s first principle (of her twenty principles) is that “children are born persons.” Like Montaigne, this includes the body-soul reality. Indeed, the ideas of body and 50 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA

soul “must needs form the basis of our educational thought,” says Mason.

Mason places much emphasis on the mind of the child in reference to personhood. Education is not seen as producing the child’s mind, rather the mind is already fashioned with reasoning, imaginative, and judging capabilities. What children lack is knowledge, not mind; but the desire for knowledge is natural to them. It is Mason’s view that “mind appeals to mind and thought begets thought and that is how we become educated.” This touches on the emphasis throughout her writing on the precedence of ideas (sometimes referred to as “living ideas”) over facts: “Mind must come into contact with mind through the medium of ideas.”

What appears to be very similar to Mason’s emphasis on ideas, as opposed to merely memorizing facts, is Montaigne’s emphasis on the child’s discerning between things, rather than merely being lectured at. Montaigne addresses this priority of discerning between things over merely being lectured at in the context of the teacher-student relationship.

He speaks of teachers “for ever [sic] bawling into our ears as though pouring knowledge down through a funnel,” advocating instead for the teacher to allow the student a chance at “appreciating and selecting things—and by distinguishing between them.”

Education scholar David T. Hansen remarks that things refer to “the phenomena of living,” meaning “thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and actions.” Montaigne thought constant lecturing would produce the latter (well-filled), whereas a child actively discerning between things would produce the former (well-formed). Montaigne is not disparaging the importance of being well-filled, he only puts lecturing in its proper place, which is after the child has been well-formed. The implication is that an education which places an emphasis on the teacher lecturing, over the child actively discerning and making judgments, views the child as less than a person.

We see here Mason’s ideas, what she speaks of as a “live thing of the mind” that strikes and may even possess or captivate us. She speaks of ideas influencing life, namely “character and conduct.” Mason saw children as “persons of generous impulses and sound judgment, of great intellectual aptitude, of imagination and moral insight.” This is certainly consonant with Montaigne’s view that children are not only in-

JUST AS MONTAIGNE PROPOSES A CONVERSATIONAL TEACHING METHOD, MASON SEES THE TEACHER AS A “GUIDE, PHILOSOPHER AND FRIEND,” AVOIDING “THE WEARIFUL TASK OF SPOON-FEEDING.”

terested in discerning between things—a natural curiosity—but they likewise have the capacity to act on their conclusions.

Their view of the teacher-student relationship is equally in agreement. Mason speaks negatively of children being “poured into like a bucket,” which resembles Montaigne’s bawling teachers. Just as Montaigne proposes a conversational teaching method, Mason sees the teacher as a “guide, philosopher and friend,” avoiding “the weariful task of spoon-feeding.”

In short, teleology (purpose, goal, or end) corresponds to ontology (being). What is seen as the end or product of education, and how this is carried out, assumes something about the child’s being. Bawling teachers who simply fill the child’s mind with facts do not possess an ontology that views the child as possessing a soul but merely a body, with the mind created subsequently in education. Montaigne and Mason, on the other hand, advocate for an education that recognizes an ontology of body and soul, with an ever-present, active mind.

The driving force of this assimilation process, for Mason at least, is what is known as narration, or telling back what is read or heard. Mason refers to narration as “the act of knowing.” This is no mere act of memorization; the child adds their own original thought to the material. This means that the child chooses what to include as most important in their retelling, as well as how to organize the material, classifying and con-

necting the details along the way. They are recomposing, as best they can, a well-written story, poem, or historical event, thereby improving their attention, speech, and reasoning powers. Similarly, Montaigne sees the child’s sense of judgment being developed by reading and discussing the writings of others.

A LIVING EDUCATION The kind of education that has so far been described may be labeled a living education, meaning it focuses on living ideas or things and has the child actively engaged in the process as opposed to simply taking in facts (or presumed facts) from a lecture. However, a living education not only encompasses content and delivery but atmosphere and relationships as well.

Montaigne remarks, “Put into his mind a decent, careful spirit of inquiry about everything: he will go and see anything nearby which is of singular quality: a building, a fountain, a man, the site of an old battle, a place which Caesar or Charlemagne passed through.” Montaigne wants the child to have a sustained curiosity for the world and to be afforded the opportunity to explore all its wonders—to relate to things—whether that be local architecture or a site of historical significance. The child’s education is not to be an isolated study but an exposure to the realities of life. This is because Montaigne saw the world as a mirror, the reflection of which reveals something of ourselves, and for this reason, it is “to be the book

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which our pupil studies.”

Mason also saw the living aspect of education as a science of relations, remarking in her twelfth principle “that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books.” Life is full of relationships, and therefore education should develop in the child a knowledge of a variety of subjects to equip him to live fully in society. As can be expected, this principle greatly influenced the breadth and high standard of Mason’s curriculum: If [our pupils] are so taught that knowledge delights them, they will choose companions who share that pleasure. In this way princes are trained; they must know something of botany to talk with botanists, of history to meet with historians; they cannot afford to be in the company of scientists, adventurers, poets, painters, philanthropists or economists, and themselves be able to do no more than “change the weather and pass the time of day”; they must know modern languages to be at home with men of other countries, and ancient tongues to be familiar with classical allusions. Such considerations rule the education of princes, and every boy has a princely right to be brought up so that he may hold his own in good society, that is, the society of those who “know.”

Mason saw the main part of a child’s education as being concerned with love, obedience to authorities, and neighborly kindness. For both Montaigne and Mason, education is fundamentally about relating to God, to fellow man, and to creation.

In addition, Montaigne’s explorations discussed above are comparable to Mason’s nature walks. She remarks, “It seems to me a sine quâ non of a living education that all school children of whatever grade should have one half-day in the week, throughout the year, in the fields.” For an education to be living, therefore, the child must not only be mentally engaged but regularly exposed to the stuff of life. Life gives life just as much as mind appeals to mind and thought produces thought; education should therefore be thought of as a world of lively interactions.

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cation, and one especially discussed in Mason circles, is her emphasis on what she calls “living books.” In short, living books are of high literary quality, not dumbed down or selective (“twaddle”), and feed the imagination and reasoning powers of the child through living ideas, not reduced information; these are the kinds of books that allow for narration. This is Mason’s point when she says under her thirteenth principle, “Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language, because [the pupil’s] attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in literary form.” Books of this nature are what awaken a child’s love of knowledge, making their studies a delight rather than a chore.

Again, Montaigne expresses similar notions, although not quite to the extent of Mason. For instance, he describes a book he was reading and, in the process of critiquing it, essentially communicates the notion of living books: “I had languished along behind some French words, words so bloodless, so fleshless [i.e., lifeless] and so empty of matter that indeed they were nothing but French and nothing but words.” In other words, it was boring.

In conclusion, Montaigne and Mason both espoused an educational philosophy in the humanist spirit, promoting self-education and a living education. For those acquainted with Charlotte Mason, it helps to know who her influencers were and in what way they influenced her. For those acquainted with Montaigne, it helps to know who he influenced and how some of his ideas were later developed. What we see with these two peas in a school pod, if you will, is a continuity of educational thought, not only of Montaigne to Mason but of both to the broader classical and Renaissance tradition. While many in the classical education and homeschooling world today are already familiar with Charlotte Mason, it may be of encouragement to review what other philosophers and educationalists have said regarding the nature of education and of the child, looking for points of continuity and discontinuity. What is more, how might such an educational journey help us as we continue to reform our own educational system and establish new schools in this great tradition? Perhaps these living ideas can guide us in our efforts.

Drew Mery is a graduate student of humanities at American Public University and is on the board of Pietas Classical Christian in Melbourne, FL.

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​IN THIS EDITION, WE HAVE THE PRIVILEGE OF PUBLISHING THE POETRY OF A RENOWNED POET AND HIS STUDENT TOGETHER. OFTEN AS READERS, WE SEE ONLY THE FINAL PRODUCT OF A POET’S HARD LABOR, THE WELL-CRAFTED POEM MAKING IT APPEAR EASY. IN THIS SPECIAL FEATURE, WE’RE GRANTED A UNIQUE GLIMPSE INTO THE RELATIONSHIP OF A TEACHER AND STUDENT AND THE LOVE AND LABOR THEY POUR INTO THEIR WORK, FOR IN ADDITION TO THEIR POETRY, YOU’LL ALSO FIND A REFLECTION FROM EACH OF THEM ON TEACHING AND LEARNING POETRY TOGETHER. Eric Potter, English professor at Grove City College and author of the poetry collection Things Not Seen, reveals the power and limitations of any poetry teacher, while drawing back the curtain on teaching and writing poetry. His pupil, Zoë Perrin Endicott, illumines the supremely human work of writing poetry, showing the grace with which she views even common things. Together, they reveal a unique grace filling a poetry infused classroom and teacher-student relationship.

ERIC POTTER is a professor of English at Grove City College (Pennsylvania), where he teaches courses in poetry and American literature. His poems have appeared in such journals as First Things, The Christian Century, and The Midwest Quarterly. He has published two chapbooks and a fulllength collection, Things Not Seen (2015).

ZOË PERRIN ENDICOTT is a 2008 graduate of the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts and a 2013 graduate of Grove City College and was classically educated in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at Covenant Christian Academy. She holds a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling and practices as a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of trauma.

She lives in North Carolina with her husband, Scott, and two young sons, Samuel and Owen.

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From the Student

I

met Dr. Potter as a freshman at Grove City College. I took his poetry class in the fall and his poetry writing class in the spring and then tried as hard as I could to take a class with him every semester after that, going to such lengths as inventing independent studies in order to have more time as his student.

Even though this was a decade ago, I remember very clearly what it felt like to travel through a poem with Dr. Potter. Whether the poem belonged to Auden or Frost or a freshman English major, he approached it with interest and curiosity. After laying before us the feast of the poem, he held himself at a sort of distance. We weren’t sure exactly how he felt about the poem because he spent his time reflecting our observations, adding depth and clarification to them, asking questions, then modeling a return to the text to read it aloud, mining each line with attention and following the rhythm and images until they carried us somewhere new.

Once I brought a poem into a workshop as a freshman. Another student began her feedback with the words “I find this sentimental.” Dr. Potter responded by matter-of-factly asking her to describe why. I could sense the way he approached each person and reading occasion with a posture of close attention and a withholding of quick conclusion.

After a decade of study and practice as a psychotherapist and as a five-year-old parent of young children, I realize that the posture of close attention while withholding conclusion sums up the condi-

tions necessary for the development of secure attachment between people. It is the dance I am constantly striving to work out, fumbling to find my footing for, and hearing my patients describe. Now I am always trying to listen for every detail, spoken and unspoken, for the rhythm and music in their voices, the pauses, syntax, suggestion, metaphors. When I start to lose focus, I tune in again, reflecting what I have heard, what I understand so far. I hold guesses but hold them loosely as I gather more.

In attachment theory, we describe parents with deep attachments to their children as “rich informants.” The more securely attached the dyad, the more the parent can describe the child and his preferences, frustrations, delights with detail, precision, and metaphor. But how do we become rich informants? We must become the objects of this ourselves. Not only did Dr. Potter model how to become a rich informant toward a poem, but he made us the objects of his attention and curiosity, providing the sort of deep rest and security that makes exploration possible. Dr. Potter looked at himself “the way one looks at distant things” (Czeslaw Milosz). In his self-forgetfulness and complete attention to the other, I felt the limits of my own ability to attune my gaze outward. But perhaps it was precisely this feeling that began to train my sight—to the poem or my patient’s narrative or my own child—to want to use myself and things so that they “stand in the glow of ripeness” (Czeslaw Milosz).

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From the Teacher

S

ometimes when people learn that I teach creative writing, they ask if you can really teach creativity. I usually reply that I don’t teach creativity but the craft of writing. Creativity is, after all, something that is given. As with any gift, though, it can be nurtured and exercised (or starved and left to atrophy). For the writer, creativity can be fed with a healthy diet of good writing, and it can be exercised by being given opportunities to use it in ways that help it stretch and grow. So, while you can’t teach creativity, you might help students develop their creativity.

Craft is, perhaps, more easily taught (or, at least, the attempt is more straightforward). You explain a task, provide examples of good writers accomplishing it, and then, with an implicit “go thou and do likewise,” let students practice and offer them feedback.

Even here, though, I wonder whether you’re teaching so much as coordinating learning opportunities.

That challenge is especially true with talented students, students like Zoë. Early in the first class she took with me, I knew she was a poet. It was not just her fine mind, her sensitivity to language, her facility in using it, or her passion for poetry, it was her sensibility, her way of being in the world. She was attentive to people, to feelings, to words. I quickly recognized there was nothing I could teach her.

So, what to do with a student like that? I tried to stay out of her way, sensing that as a writer she would figure out whatever she needed to figure out.

But I also tried to provide opportunities, pointing her toward poets I thought might nurture her creativity or show her ways of doing things and giving her prompts I hoped might push her into new territory.

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And I tried to be a sensitive reader, to say “yes” to the strongest, most vital moments in a poem and “give me more” to the things that were working. Only sometimes did I ask if a word or phrase was doing enough work or if it matched the rest of the poem.

I tried to enter the spirit of each poem to help it become what it wanted to be (what Zoë wanted it to be), keeping in mind, as best I could, that my responses were limited by my poetic sensibility.

That said, the qualities that make Zoë’s poetry so admirable [wonderful, delightful] are not things that can be taught. Her work is animated by a concern for human experience, an awareness of other lives, by her ability to see (and make) connections. Those qualities are evident in a poem like “Voice.”

It provides many poetic pleasures resulting from her skillful arrangement of words. The surprise and aptness of an image like “clean architecture.” The pleasing sound texture evident in a line like “Violets rise from the earth in tidy rows.” The alternation between listening and speaking, and at the end the return to the beginning: her child listening.

But what really makes the poem work [moving], I think, is the way Zoë weaves together a mother speaking to her son with a son speaking of his mother. At first blush, these experiences seem unrelated, but their relationship occurred to her. They happened in her life, and she noticed their connection.

And that’s what cannot be taught, that attention to experience, her awareness of her own life and the life within her as well as her awareness of her client’s life.

And that’s what we want from our poets. We want them to turn us toward the world and help us see what we otherwise might have missed.

VOICE // BY ZOË PERRIN ENDICOTT In my eighteenth week I read my child can hear things. so, I start speaking aloud: This is rain, loud and green.

That is the moon in the dark.

Violets rise from the earth in tidy rows.

He moves while my client speaks about his mother’s death, the way the water pooled the ground where she stood near the sink, frying chicken.

I feel the kick under my rib, you, spinning in me, curled in warmth, swimming, forming the clean architecture without me willing it—cranium, chambers, capillaries—listening to the sound the world makes.

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MISCARRIAGE // BY ZOË PERRIN ENDICOTT Walking in early summer, the sun in its evening burial, we spot a kitten under our rose bush. You coax it out of the pink silks and carry it in your palms to our tub, stroking its silver dollar face beneath the stream of water.

Next day, in the bright overcast of morning, I knew it was dead by the way you rubbed the place where your fists clenched each other.

Then you shoveled red Carolina dirt in the bleed of morning light and I could smell the scent of the garden —basil and mint—from where I stood watching you, as near and far as the people we were before we knew how to lay such a small thing in the ground.

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READING WITH MY MOTHER // BY ERIC POTTER Last time I taught Walden ​my mother was dying and wanted me to read to her.

I worried she’d get bored​ with my books for class or be too tired to listen.

She assured me she wouldn’t,​ ​so I grabbed Thoreau, picked up where I’d left off.

In the shade-drawn dimness ​of that hospital room Walden was like a window to the world she was leaving ​its brute neighbors brought to life in prose.

She’d always enjoyed nature,​ ​learned the names of trees and wildflowers, even turned her sofa ​toward the picture window to watch the backyard birds, kept a list of all ​she’d seen, and listened to recordings of their songs.

Sometimes I thought she’d drifted off ​until a word or smile conveyed her continuing delight.

When I was a child, she read to me ​for hours after lunch, fighting off a nap, while I was wide awake. ​Book after book, she said, I never wanted to stop.

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When it was time for “Song of Myself,” ​I worried she’d be scandalized but she was past all that.

She loved the catalogues the best ​the world’s many things presented and named.

She wasn’t curious about God either​ but confident He loved her, though she did wonder what heaven would be like so we read a book meant to offer a glimpse as if its hints and guesses could delineate the unknown.

Better, I thought, to enumerate the world you know, not a garden of earthly delight— loss had surely taught her that— though she delighted in so much. ​Why not tell over and over the things you’re soon to leave?

Back home after lunch— ​she didn’t have much appetite— she stretched out on her recliner and wanted me to read some more, ​as if she couldn’t get enough.

Sometimes she drifted off.

Through the window I could see ​ the birds at the feeder busily filling themselves.

When she woke again, ​I picked up where we left off and never wanted to stop.

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CATCH AND RELEASE // BY ERIC POTTER Some summer evenings after supper the kids and I would drive to Wolf Creek slip down the weedy bank to where a stony shelf reached halfway across, just below the dam.

Not much of a dam really, a twelve-foot spill, but it formed a pool deep enough to hold a lot of fish hoping for an easy meal.

I’d bait their hooks with bits of the worms we’d bought at the convenience store.

So many rocks around that pool, I spent a lot of time releasing snags, replacing hooks when the line snapped. A good night would keep me scrambling across the rocks, hoping not to slip as they caught fish faster than I could release them and re-bait the hooks.

Mostly they caught bluegill and pumpkinseed though once my oldest hooked a foot-long brookie and my daughter, only four and sporting a kiddie pole, landed a largemouth bass nearly as long as her arm.

No matter the fish, I wet my hands, slipped it from the hook, and eased it into the water.​ With a wriggle and a flash, it darted off.

So many fish some nights I hardly noticed the satin curve of the water over the lip of the dam, swirl of yellow foam at the edge of the pool, smell of water, mud, and worm, thrum of the falls, the kids’ ecstatic cries each time a fish grabbed their line, late sun slowly slipping below the trees its slant light sometimes rainbowing the mist.

In high school I spent a lot of time in my darkroom developing prints.

I learned to calculate the exposure, how long to leave them in the developer before moving them to stop bath and fixer.

I liked to watch what the light had written gradually appear, the way an object comes

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clear in the fog or a face in the crowd.

I liked the way an image of some moment could be fixed in different dimensions.

How flat those photographs, how little I understood of such moments, how memory like amber in its fixed brilliance preserves what is no longer alive. Who wouldn’t want such moments back? Who wouldn’t want another chance to hold them, even knowing how easily they slip from your grasp, a wriggle and a flash and they’re gone.

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LEARNING TO SPEAK // BY ERIC POTTER The way my grandson babbles on video his musical voice rehearsing his day, no syllables yet no sentence shapes but he’s got the feel of conversation’s give and take and pours forth his utterance to his parents’ constant encouragement.

Like every baby the infant Word must have begun by babbling, the one​ who made the mouth and spoke the world learning to make his mouth speak.

For now my grandson can discriminate the phonemes of all the world’s tongues, though soon his universal ear will be tuned to the language he hears surrounding him.

Designed for speech when it comes to the language of the spirit, we’re infants who’ve just begun to discern its sounds but not produce them.​ FORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 65

Thank God we’ve got someone who listens who encourages our babbling, helps us discriminate among this confusion of tongues tuning our ears till we become fluent in our true mother tongue.

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BY ADAM CONDRA

A recent conversation in the world of video games has surprising relevance to classical education.

Two games, Elden Ring and Horizon: Forbidden West, were released days apart from each other this past February and quickly established roles as archetypes of competing philosophies in game design. Though they are both open-world adventure games—a genre in which players are given a landmass to explore and a story to follow at their own pace—their similarities do not persist past the surface.

Horizon: Forbidden West is a show pony. A sequel to 2017’s Horizon: Zero Dawn, Forbidden West is a gargantuan science fiction epic, rich with beautiful environments, realistic lighting, characters portrayed by professional actors, and startlingly detailed animation. The player takes the role of Aloy, a crafty, no-nonsense huntress whose mission is to stop a rampaging AI program that controls a host of robotic beasts from destroying post-apocalyptic Earth before it has a chance to recover from catastrophe.

Pulpiness aside, it is the type of video game that you want to show to people who don’t play games, to demonstrate how much diverse artistry and excellent technical craft are evident in the medium now. Its release was highly anticipated by players of all ages and tastes.

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By contrast, Elden Ring is not the type of game that radiates broad appeal. It’s the culmination of a decade of work from Japanese studio From Software (or FromSoft, if you’re friendly), who has built a sterling critical reputation and cultivated a small but passionate fanbase that appreciates dark, medieval fantasies defined by mystery and hostility to the player. To those outside FromSoft’s audience, Elden Ring is brutally difficult, its mechanics are byzantine and poorly explained (when they are explained at all), and its art style oscillates between the dour and the grotesque.

There are no bucolic landscapes or plucky heroes. It is FromSoft’s attempt to apply the design tenets and artistic principles pioneered in the smaller games of the studio’s recent history to the much more complex and popular open-world genre. In short: Elden Ring is a wager that FromSoft’s infamously off-putting style can succeed in the mainstream.

And the wager has paid off. Though the lion’s share of media attention and conversation in the weeks leading up to the two games’ releases went to Horizon, the enthusiasm and goodwill of the broader gaming community shifted almost entirely to Elden Ring once players had a taste of both titles. FromSoft’s fanbase guaranteed that Elden Ring was always going to be a success, but few predicted the critical and commercial fête that awaited it—becoming the best-reviewed game of the last five years and selling an industry-displacing twelve million copies in its first month.

Why is this? How has a game that looks so stiff, and mundane, and dark, in all senses of that word, in comparison to Horizon’s verdant, captivating, and slickly produced world managed to so deftly plunder the imaginations and curiosity of their overlapping audiences?

The explanation for this, surprisingly, is found in the ways the two games exhibit the dual modes of classical instruction: the Socratic and the mimetic.

It’s important to remember before anything else that video games distinguish themselves from other media by requiring the audience’s participation. We must also be careful to remember that there is no 70 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA

such thing as “passive consumption.” When we read a book or watch a film, our minds are actively engaged in absorbing and interpreting what is before us. The distinction in a game is that a player is required to engage and adapt to various challenges or conflicts in addition to intellectually engaging the scenario.

Depending on the game in question, the scenario could be a sprawling and intrigue-filled adventure, or it could be a simple curio or sport. Video games have been untethered from the simple dynamics of competition and mastery for decades; their chief creative concern these days is furnishing escapism, simulating experiences that are unlikely to occur to the player in real life. The key aspect to keep in mind is that a player’s participation in a game scenario inherently involves a type of embodiment of the actor in that scenario, no matter whether that actor is a crude simulacrum of a ping pong paddle or Dante Alighieri himself. Yes, that was a real game. I strongly discourage you from learning anything else about it.

We stress this characteristic of embodiment because it follows from there that players must learn how to conduct themselves properly within the context of every game they play. Playing a video game is learning how to play a video game. The goal—the qualifications for fulfillment or satisfaction—changes from game to game, but the standard of playing “properly” is almost always the player’s overriding concern.

So games are not only interested in drawing players into their scenarios but also in teaching players how to interact with those worlds properly. By examining the way games teach the player to interact with them, we begin to identify the connective tissue between what we play and what we do in the classroom, and where Horizon stumbles and Elden Ring soars.

The two modes of classical instruction, the Socratic and the mimetic, have the same goal: to harness and activate the attention of the student to teach them a logos. A student’s attention can bridge in two different directions: memory and imitation, the former of which is served by the Socratic method and the latter by the mimetic.

The Socratic method of teaching is leading a student to a logos through inquiry. The teacher asks the student questions, presenting information the stu-

Screenshot from Elden Ring

dent is familiar with and asking them to verify the truth of it, which gradually leads to a greater realization that produces a turn, or metanoia, to the logos that the teacher is endeavoring to impart. In brief: the student suffers from a misconception, and the teacher asks them questions that help them identify the misconception and replace it with the truth.

The mimetic method of teaching is showing a student how to imitate a logos. There are actually four types of imitation, an in-depth examination of which is merited in a different conversation. What matters for us here is that a mimetic lesson generally involves a teacher demonstrating a particular task, which the student is then asked to replicate and eventually master. We must stress, however, that the mastery of a mimetic lesson is not found within an artifact or perfect replication, but within a student’s own personal rest: their retirement from a task secure and confident in the knowledge that they know how to do what they are supposed to do. In short: a mimetic lesson concludes with rest, or what German philosopher Josef Pieper would call “leisure.” We will come back to him.

The two signature qualities of Socratic and mimetic teaching are, respectively, the metanoia and rest. Depending on what logos a teacher wants a student to know, be it how to do long division or the fact that Frankenstein is both the doctor and the monster, they will employ one method or the other. Mimet-

ic instruction produces students who are capable of performing the physical and mental tasks demanded of them, and Socratic instruction produces students who are capable of continuing to learn, to pursue truth once removed from their teachers. A student who receives both is capable of analysis and virtuous action. He is Plato, and he is Homer.

In Pieper’s renowned book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he draws a distinction between leisure itself and our modern idea of leisure as a mere break from our work. Leisure, in Pieper’s view, is not just resting from labor, it is a state of being entirely divorced from the work/rest dynamic. From part 3: Leisure, it must be understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude—it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of “worker” in each and every one of the three aspects under which it was analyzed: work as activity, as toil, as a social function.

Leisure, for Pieper, is not a side effect or consequence of refraining from work but a luxury found in a society that values the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Leisure is the ability to dwell on FORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 71

and appreciate what one has learned without the need to use it for a task. The classical method of mimetic teaching is the exact tool for fashioning such a society because it reflects the creative order of God and does not end in product but in rest.

Video games then, which are ostensibly a leisurely activity and, as we established, teachers of their audience, ought to reflect this eternal truth. In our wildest dreams at least. The number of games developed with such virtuous aims in mind hovers somewhere between “What?” and “No.” But with Elden Ring and Horizon: Forbidden West and the questions they have provoked, we are witnessing a moment in which the winds of game design pitch sharply toward the mimetic. Let’s examine how.

Of these two games, Horizon is the more conventional. It cleaves to a set of open-world design principles popularized by French publisher Ubisoft, which are enumerated thus: 1. The player has free rein to go wherever they want and pursue whatever activity they want, within the space afforded to them by the story.

2. The game keeps track of all pertinent gameplay data for the player.

3. The game directs the player to the relevant spaces or events that satisfy their current pursuit.

The so-called “pursuits” in trait one vary, but they are generally split between main story activities, side-story activities, and side-content activities, such as hunting or crafting. The “gameplay data” mentioned in trait two refers to quest progress, map legends, Macguffins, lore, special points of interest, or achievement tasks. This data merges with the “direction” of trait three to assist the player in doing what they want to do.

To its detriment, Horizon hews to these traits with extremely comprehensive fidelity. It adopts a logically extreme type of Socratic game design that suggests information to the player and leads them to the “metanoia” of fulfilling the task they wish to pursue. The metanoia, such as it is, is not so much a turn towards the truth but verifying that the game’s code is functioning correctly. There is almost nothing in the 72 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA

game that is not represented by an icon in the map legend and no process for which there isn’t a fully tracked, step-by-step guide.

For example, if the player wants to upgrade one of Aloy’s bows, they can open the map and find a weapon specialist who will upgrade it for them and the materials they require to do so. If the player doesn’t have those materials, no problem! They can simply track the items needed, which reveals the location of the machines they need to kill or the plants they need to harvest, and Bob’s your uncle: bow upgraded.

This applies to every pursuit in Horizon: Forbidden West. There is a quest chain and a map marker for everything, easily accessed via an in-game menu, which teaches the player that in order to know Horizon’s world, to embody Aloy in her quest to prevent catastrophe, the player should tell the game what they want to do rather than attempting to discover it for themselves.

This type of interaction makes for an expedient and very accessible experience, and there’s no denying that the artistry and technical heft makes experiencing the game in action a thrill. But such a framework for a video game asymptotically drifts away from real Socratic engagement and approaches something more akin to didacticism; a didacticism in which the player tells the game how it is played. Horizon is the apotheosis of this drift, which has been happening in video games at large for the last fifteen years or so.

Thankfully, Elden Ring is the metanoia the industry needs toward a more engaging type of gameplay.

Elden Ring tells the player almost nothing. Its world, known as The Lands Between, is a gargantuan, bizarre, and terrifying place, filled with mystery and danger. The player has a map that provides a very crude, suggestive sort of geography that only hints at the reality of its terrain. Players must explore and find out what to do for themselves. Along the way, they will amass weapons, armor, crafting materials, magic spells, and ephemera that come with their own brief descriptions, but by and large, the player has to figure out what these things do by using them. Players will also encounter other characters in the game with their own quests and storylines, but the game does not keep track of where they are or where they lead.

In short, Elden Ring makes the player responsible for learning about its world. The player must attend to the game, pay careful attention to what they

Promotional image from Horizon: Forbidden West

encounter, and act accordingly based on what they know. This creates a gameplay loop with striking resemblance to a mimetic lesson. The player begins the play session from a resting site (called a “Site of Grace”), attends to their surroundings and what they accomplished at the end of the previous session, then decides what their next goal is. Along the way, they may be challenged by fighting hostile enemies or navigating treacherous terrain, and the game will reward or correct them based upon how they approach the challenge. Death and failure are the instructions for what not to do.

This makes the act of playing the game the teacher, and the Sites of Grace cement the order of learning by giving the player a discrete place to rest. Unlike most video games, you cannot pause Elden Ring unless you are resting at a Site of Grace. This makes each play session a series of learning experiences in which the player’s attentiveness is slowly transformed into a moment to dwell upon their victories. That victory could be a few minutes spent fighting enemies to gain experience points and strengthen the player’s abilities, or it could be an hours-long attempt to navigate a dangerous castle and defeat its boss. The size of the task does not matter, the pattern remains the same.

This creates an aggregate effect of satisfaction, of true leisure, that goes back to Pieper. Though The

Lands Between is an intimidating, ferocious place to explore, the pattern of exploration, challenge, experimentation, and, finally, rest gives the player a true sense of fulfillment. As Pieper says, “Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen.”

Elden Ring captures this idea perfectly because its pattern of challenge and rest allows players to look at all the work they have yet to do, all the world they have yet to explore, without feeling stressed or cowed or prodded to the next task. They are given the inward calm, the silence, to recognize that the challenges of The Lands Between will be met and surmounted in time because whatever challenge that preceded this rest was also met and surmounted. That games are considered a leisure activity in and of themselves only highlights how unique it is for something to incorporate this into its actual design. After all, rest in Horizon: Forbidden West happens when the game is turned off.

Horizon, for all of its technical wizardry and thunderous production value, only offers the player the next piece of knowledge for verification. It is designed to be mastered, its world shrunk down to a series of items obtained and story scenes triggered. It

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presents itself fully to the player to be known, and known, and known, and known again, but rarely discovered. The player engages with it to receive the experience of having played it but not of truly occupying its world on its own terms.

Again, games are participatory media, and that’s why a game with a mimetic structure like Elden Ring resonates so strongly with its audience. The Socratic method is essential in helping us learn discernment and understanding, but it’s there to direct us to logos, not to embody it. Video games, for all their juvenile intermingling of art, commerce, and bizarre cultural affectations, will always benefit more from designs that exhibit mimetic principles because they are fundamentally about types of embodiment.

So why does this matter? And why draw the comparison between video games and classical teaching at all? In the classroom, we explicitly deploy the Socratic and the mimetic based on which method is better suited to teach a lesson to our students. But we must remember that the classroom is not the exclusive domain of these methods. In fact, the inverse is true. Classical education is about teaching our students to live well, and that means knowing how to properly interact with the things that harness their attention. They must know how to inquire and how to act.

Inquiry and action are the mechanisms for living well. All stimuli can be engaged on the Socratic or the mimetic level because everything is a prompt to think or act. Games are just a terrarium for this

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principle. That might sound dismissive, but it is in fact the undergirding reason for their popularity. If you work in education at all, you’ve probably heard, or issued, a lament about the influence video games have over our charges. Such lamentations are fair, but we must be aware that their influence derives from truth: that each of us participates in the reality of Socratic and mimetic instruction.

To be clear, this essay is not an exhortation to let your kids play Elden Ring, or to play it instead of playing Horizon, or to do anything, really. Rather, the dynamic between these two games, and the conversation that arose because of it, prompted questions from the gaming community that they couldn’t answer but the tradition of classical pedagogy could.

In our attempt to direct our lives toward the true, beautiful, and good, we are sometimes blessed with an awareness of the ways in which worldly artifacts, like video games, or movies, or Argentine silver cow creamers, run abreast of these eternal qualities, oftentimes unintentionally, and it behooves our continued Socratic instruction to comment on it.

Whence this behoovement? The moments where we receive this awareness are the true leisure that Pieper was talking about, for we see the world passing by, and it goes because we allow it.

Adam Condra is a rhetoric teacher and director of development at Riverwood Classical School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He believes very strongly that Chesterton should be canonized by now and that every classroom should have a world map on its walls.

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From the Classroom

WHAT WILL I BE? EDUCATION AND THE TRINITARIAN IMAGE “What will I be?” Robbie looked up at me with his wide, chocolate eyes through enviable lashes. Not understanding, I shrugged with a dismissive “I don’t know.” I sat with Robbie on the grounds of his orphanage years ago when I worked as a missionary in western Ukraine. This orphanage was home to children rejected or expelled from orphanages across the Carpathian region. They were expelled for behavioral or mental health issues or rejected for learning disabilities or even minor physical challenges like poor eyesight or a cleft palate. Many of the orphans weren’t orphans at all, but their parents could not or would not keep them, doubly rejected.

It was from this tragic setting that an American couple was considering adopting Robbie. This was an unthinkable outcome for any of the orphans at the Chaslovtsi Orphanage, but especially for a gypsy.

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By Rachel Woodham

“What will I be?” thrice asked, I finally understood. I had assumed he was making a grammatical error, not uncommon among the undereducated children from varying linguistic backgrounds.

Ukrainian, like Latin, is a highly inflected language.

Nouns have varying endings, changing according to their use in the sentence. He asked in the instrumental case, himself as the instrument. He spoke as though he were the object by which an action would be accomplished. He had no paradigm for adoption.

Just like the older boys would work in the fields for neighboring farmers, he thought he was being adopted to do a job, to serve a purpose.

We live in a society that’s stuck in the instrumental case, and the field of education is one of the worst offenders. Some of these are obvious, such as teaching to a test or schooling to prepare for more

From the Classroom

school. But others are less so. Any time I approach a student like a machine that breathes, expecting input to lead to a predictable output, I am operating in the instrumental case. If I feed a math lesson to a student and become frustrated when I do not get the expected outcome of a correct answer, I am treating her as a machine. If I read a book with a student so that he can correctly fill in blanks on a vocabulary test, I am treating him as a machine. A machine produces; an image-bearer is.

Struggling with the nuances of case endings when learning Ukrainian, my tutors always gave me the same advice: to find the right case, ask the right question. As a linguistic tool, this is categorically unhelpful; however, in other areas of life, it is pretty good advice. To know what or how to teach, I must first change the question. Educational philosophy begins with anthropology; we cannot know how to educate without knowing the nature of the creature whom we seek to educate. As we are created in the image of God, we understand man by first conceiving of the One in Whose likeness man is created. The correct question is not “What will I be?” Instead, it is “Who is He and how are we like Him?” Augustine provides an answer with his vision of the Trinity in The City of God. In response to Origen, he explains the Trinity in relation to Itself: God the Father is; God the Son knows that He is; and God the Holy Spirit delights in His being and knowledge of it. We can see the role of all three persons through the story of creation. The Father spoke creation into existence through the Word, saying, “Let there be.”

It was through the Son, the logos, that everything was made that was made. Solomon explains, “The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the depths were broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew” (Prov 3:19–20). After creating, He saw that it was good. God made creation not from necessity but as an extension of His goodness. Augustine understands this goodness and delight to be the role of the Holy Spirit.

Man, like all creation, follows this pattern of the Trinity. Augustine writes that creation “has its form by subsisting in Him; its enlightenment by contemplating Him; its joy by abiding in Him. It is; it sees; it

loves.” Subsisting. Contemplating. Abiding. To make education both classical and Christian we must begin with this Trinitarian paradigm of man. Mankind was not created solely to be an instrument of labor.

Toil was the result of the damage that occurred in the fall. Approaching students as beings to which we feed material to get a certain output is fundamentally unchristian and unclassical. This is true whether the food is Plutarch or a social studies textbook. To provide procedures divorced from any larger logos is to traipse upon the image of God. Math class is often the setting for such casualties of the imago Dei. When I taught fourth grade in our local classical school, math was by far my least favorite subject to teach. It was a confluence of problems.

By this age, students had decided whether they were good or bad at math; those who believed they were bad at math often decided to be confused before the lesson began. The curriculum was suboptimal, teaching procedures without Reason. It was formulaic, divorced from the logos and any larger sense of reality. As a teacher, it was my job to transcend the curriculum, guiding students in understanding. But I could not guide students in understanding which I did not have.

It is amazing the difference a humane curriculum can make both for teacher and student. Due to my weaknesses as a math teacher, when I transitioned to homeschooling, I thoroughly researched math curriculum options, read reviews, and consulted other educators. The curriculum I chose approached math differently, teaching number sense with games and manipulatives. I have begun to see how the procedures that I already knew fit into the larger, beautiful wisdom that I had never seen. My sons have learned to intuitively apprehend from knowing the larger reality in which the operations sit. Enlightenment from contemplating wisdom revealed in math opens the possibility of delight. The exhausting explanations that I gave in the classroom are no longer necessary.

Augustine summarizes the Trinitarian nature of creation, explaining, “In God’s eternity is its life; in God’s truth its light; in God’s goodness its joy.” Light.

Joy. These do not come from an instrumental case; they come from life. Being is not used but named. All FORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 77

From the Classroom

those years ago at the orphanage in Chaslovtsi, I answered Robbie in the nominative case, naming him. “You will be his son.” Likewise, the Christian classical educator excels when she operates in the nominative case, naming her students as image-bearers. She excels when she begins with the right questions: Who is He? And how are we like Him?

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Rachel Woodham has a BA in Russian language and literature and is a graduate student of great books at Harrison Middleton University. A classical educator for the last decade, she now homeschools her three all-time favorite students.

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• Self-directed • College prep • Honors option

• Week-by-week lesson plans • Includes evaluation rubric • 5 levels; 1 year each

How does it work?

Students read full-length great books, study interesting context resources; then follow week-by-week lesson plans to develop strong thinking, writing, and study skills.

You might also like the Handbook for Writers • 400+ pages of reference and instruction for writing, grammar, style, and usage. Great for high school and college!

Excellence in Literature helps you teach classic literature to your teens even if you don’t know Virginia Woolf from Beowulf!

Available in print, ebook, or binder.

EverydayEducation.com • Excellence-in-Literature.com

WANT TO WRITE FOR FORMA? We are always accepting pitches and poetry submissions. Just email our editorial team via formaeditor@circeinstitute.com.

Master the craft of classical teaching.

• On ground and online courses in suburban Philadelphia • Integration of philosophy, history, education and pedagogy • Deep inquiry, Socratic discussion, and personal reflection

Accepting applications

• Unique community and mentoring

by Templeton Professors • Courses on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful

mat.templeton@eastern.edu | templeton.edu | (610) 225-5345

FORMA / SUMMER 2022 | 79

MASTER OF DIVINITY

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DOCTOR OF MINISTRY

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MA BIBLICAL & THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

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MA CHRISTIAN & CLASSICAL STUDIES

Engage Your World THE MASTER OF ARTS IN CHRISTIAN & CLASSICAL STUDIES is an advanced degree program designed with you, your passion, and your vocation in mind. Cultivate or start your future in Classical Education with a flexible and fully accredited academic degree program from Knox Theological Seminary. At Knox, we bring a trusted and complete seminary experience to you so you can do more of what you love where you are. Discover the Knox difference today!

IN, WITH, AND FOR THE CHURCH

KNOX SE MINARY. E DU 80 | SUMMER 2022 / FORMA