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Pursuit of Truth THE MASTER OF ARTS IN
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C OLUM NS
EDITORS’ LETTER
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by Katerina Hamilton
Cultural Currency CHATGPT: THE MODER N OR ACLE
6
FEATUR ES 25
From the Classroom TEACHING ELEMENTARY MATHEMATICS AS A LIBER AL ART: "NO ONE USES IT R IGHTLY"
BOOK R EVIEW
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THE SWEET BITTER ON IF NOT, WINTER; FRAGMENTS OF SAPPHO
by Isabelle Ly 12
ALL MEN MUST DIE: CONSIDERING THE ESSENTIAL (AND IMMORTAL) NATURE OF BEOWULF by Ana M. Merritt
I N TERV I EW 38
GREG WILBUR ON WHY BACH MATTERS MORE THAN EVER
by David Kern
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BENARD SILVESTRIS AND THIERRY OF CHARTRES: A FRIENDLY DISAGREEMENT OVER QUADRIVIAL IDEALS by Lesley-Anne Dyer Williams
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by Daniel B. Murphy
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TRAINED IN THE QUADRIVIUM: DOROTHY L. SAYERS AS A RENAISSANCE WOMAN
by Lindsey Scholl
by Walker Larson
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Issue 22 WINTER 2026
THE SCHOOL OF ASTRONOMY AND RHETORIC: A MYSTERY AT OXFORD'S BODLEIAN LIBRARY by Shea Ramquist
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DECENTERING NUMBER: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE OBJECT(S) OF THE QUADRIVIUM by Junius Johnson
POETRY 34
ANNIE KANTAR
58
HANNAH ARMBRUST BADIA
62
BENJAMIN MYERS
76
OSIP MANDELSTAM, TRANS. BY BEN ROZONOYER
This magazine is published by the CiRCE Institute. Copyright CiRCE Institute 2025. For information regarding reproduction, submission, or advertising, please email formamag@circeinstitute.org.
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the Winter 2026 issue of FORMA! In January of 2025, scholars from around the country once again gathered at Belmont Abbey College to explore the classical tradition at the FORMA Symposium. There, we closely examined the quadrivium and considered how we ought to study these four arts today. We challenged ourselves; we communed together; we provoked questions—and we left wiser. This twenty-second issue of the FORMA journal includes select papers from that symposium. To celebrate this exploration of the quadrivium, we’ve paired these papers with extra poetry (certainly a result of the quadrivial arts, if not a liberal art themselves—a debate we never settled) and book reviews of some of the best poetry ever written. Our long-time readers will remember this journal in print form: a lovely addition to your coffee table or gift for a thoughtful friend. We have temporarily moved to digital, but we pray we will be able to offer print editions soon. As a 501-C3, CiRCE relies on donations to support all our endeavors. If you would like to return FORMA to print, please donate on the CiRCE website and note that the donation is for FORMA. May this edition prove a thoughtful, encouraging read to deepen your Christmas feast and illumine these dark winter evenings. Christ is Born!
Katerina Hamilton Editor-in-Chief
The Editorial Team Publisher: Andrew Kern, President of The CiRCE Institute Editor-in-Chief: Katerina Hamilton Art Director: Graeme Pitman Poetry Editors: Christine Perrin and Noah Perrin Senior Editor: Matthew Bianco Copy Editor: Courtney Allen 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 / WINTER 2026 | 5
CULTURAL CURRENCY / BY Walker Larson
A
CHATGPT The Modern Oracle
ll men by nature desire to know,” says Aristotle at the beginning of his Metaphysics. This is a natural, healthy, even virtuous, longing in the human heart. But it can also get us into trouble when that desire is corrupted. ChatGPT and similar AI technologies are powerful information tools, but their use does not come without risk of just such a corruption of human knowing. While the pursuit of truth out of love for it and in order to live a good life brings out our humanity, seeking the wrong kind of knowledge or seeking knowledge in the wrong way ruins the human mind and directs us toward evil. The Medievals called the former desire for knowledge the virtue of studiositas and the latter type curiositas. Curiositas takes different forms: Sometimes we seek knowledge of one element of reality while disregarding the bigger picture; we may pursue unimportant knowledge that doesn’t help us live better lives; or again we may seek knowledge of things we shouldn’t know or try to gain it by forbidden means; worst of all, we may seek knowl6 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
§ edge only because of the power it gives us over others. Humanity has an extended history of desiring to know things we can’t or shouldn’t know. The development of AI technologies such as ChatGPT is only the latest attempt to gain or generate information in unnatural ways in a long series of such attempts that trace back to at least the time of the Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece. In fact, our relationship to AI bears disturbing similarities to the Greeks’ relationship to the Oracle. The shrine to Apollo at Delphi, called the “navel of the world,” was the most important shrine in the Greek world. Delphi maintained its independence and wasn’t attached to any of the major Greek city-states, such as Sparta or Athens. In theory, it remained neutral and accessible to many people. The Greeks believed that the god Apollo gave messages through his priestess, the Pythia, or Oracle of Delphi. Here, seemingly, was an almost infinite wealth of knowledge and secrets normally hidden to mankind.
Visitors could tap into a level of insight far beyond the human. That temptation—access to knowledge beyond the normal human scope—proved irresistible to many. But knowledge is perilous. A perusal of the writings of Herodotus or Thucydides reveals numerous occasions where visitors to the Oracle received ambiguous or even downright misleading answers to their questions—sometimes leading to their death or the destruction of their kingdom. Take King Croesus of Lydia, for example, who asked the Oracle if he should make war on the Persians. The Oracle responded that if he made war on the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire. Gleefully, Croesus began his invasion, only to realize later that the empire he would destroy was his own. On another occasion, the Oracle seemed to provide contradicting predictions about the outcome of the Battle of Salamis, but these types of incidents didn’t seem to shake the Greeks total, blind confidence in the Oracle. Sometimes, in seeking to avoid the fate predicted by the Oracle, people fulfilled it. A famous literary exampled occurs when, in Oedipus Rex, Oedipus asks the Oracle about his parentage only to hear the dire prediction that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus leaves his home in order to avoid such a fate, but it is this very decision that leads him to unwittingly encounter his biological parents and fulfil the prophecy. Of course, this story is fiction, and even some of the purportedly historical accounts from Herodotus or Thucydides may be doubtful. But the Greek tales about the Oracle (whether legendary or not) and the reality of their complex relationship with prophecy continuously reinforces a fundamental truth: Too much knowledge, especially obtained in the wrong way, outside of normal human perception and cognition, can betray us. This brings us back to AI. We can ask ChatGPT any question and receive a detailed, convincing answer. Yet the responses of this modern oracle, like those of its ancient predecessor, can’t be trusted. Sometimes, ChatGPT is just flat-out incorrect in its answers, even to a potentially dangerous degree, as could be in the matter of medical advice. Further, a recent report indicates that ChatGPT possesses a left-wing bias: The program is more tolerant of hate-
CULTURAL CURRENCY
ful comments directed at conservatives or Republicans than those directed at liberals or Democrats, for example. On the practical level, this means that those who are turning to AI for their information needs may be easily deceived. Students who turn to the program as a quick and easy way to “write” papers or companies that use AI to generate online content can have their plans backfire. “Knowledge” is indeed perilous. But the problem is bigger than mere incorrect answers. True, in its ability to collect, process, and generate information, AI offers us distinct advantages and powers unknown to our ancestors. It can solve problems for us and answer critical questions in milliseconds. But it’s all just too easy, too convenient. The piper must be paid, sooner or later. We all know that when someone offers you a magic pill that will make all your troubles go away, there must be a catch somewhere. Drugs promise us artificial, chemically induced happiness—but we know the reality is not happiness but greater misery. The quick fix is never a true fix. It’s possible that in our ever-increasing efforts to achieve efficiency, comfort, and speed through technology that we risk losing something irretrievable along the way. Have we not dared too much in going beyond mere physical comfort and trying to streamline human thought itself, human conversation and language, these aspects of life so intimately tied to our rationality and thus our nature? If we outsource our thinking, we are outsourcing our humanity. And sometimes I wonder: Are we really so different from the superstitious Greeks of old? Or does our superstition just take a different form? Modern people speak of the capabilities of AI with a kind of hushed awe. We smile at the “ignorant” Greeks bowing down in reverence to gods of their own making, but we are in danger of doing the same with our machine creations. Modern society’s infatuation with, reverence for, and total confidence in “science” and technological advancement—manifested in many people’s attitudes toward AI—isn’t so far from the Greek’s worship of Apollo and the treacherous messages of his Oracle. This piece was originally published in The Intellectual Takeout, which you can find here.
FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 7
The Classical Education America Needs
For the student who questions everything—and the parent who wants those questions taken seriously. Some students are born wondering. They ask about justice, truth, beauty, the nature of the cosmos, and the shape of a good life. These are not students who want easy answers. They want—and deserve— real conversation. St. John’s College is the rare place where such students are not only welcomed, but challenged and nourished. Here, every student engages with more than 200 great books—from Aristotle to Shakespeare, Augustine to Tolstoy—through seminar-style discussion, science and mathematics labs, and careful, collaborative inquiry. This is an education grounded in humility, intellectual rigor, and shared pursuit. Our students come from all walks of life and learn to speak across difference with respect and clarity. Students of every background are met here with seriousness and care—not just in community, but in conversation. For those who seek something deeper, St. John’s is the oldest Great Books college in America and offers not trends nor ideology but the enduring questions—and the tools to build a good life.
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Our all-required Great Books curriculum is equivalent to a double major in philosophy and the history of mathematics and science, and a double minor in comparative literature and classical studies. Our alumni excel as lawyers, diplomats, theologians, judges, writers, scholars, doctors, scientists, ethicists, educators, and more.
8 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
READING THE CLASSICS
THE SWEET BITTER
W
e are fascinated by that which is incomplete, lost, or forgotten. Scraps of ephemera, of postcards and advertisements, conjure the vibrancy of the past and its inhabitants. Broken bits of pottery, with faded script, recall full jars and fuller stories. We collect, and we imagine. Sappho, a sixth-century poet from the Greek island of Lesbos, and the remnants of her lost work are just as elusive. Her poetry survives in fragmentary form: one complete poem, a few substantial passages, and dozens of isolated lines and singular words. μελίφωνοι honeyvoiced (fragment 185)
Her fame, already cemented in antiquity, renders these poetic morsels all the more tantalizing. Plato calls her “the lovely Sappho” in the Phaedrus and allegedly designated her as the tenth Muse in the Palatine Anthology. The Athenian statesman Solon, upon hearing her song performed by his nephew, asked to learn it, so that he might die.
On If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson by Isabelle Ly
Solon’s admiration indicates another aspect of Sappho’s genius: her musical prowess. Her poetry is lyric, meaning it was composed for accompaniment with a lyre. Again, imagination is our substitute. It alone can attempt to supply the richness of her lost melodies. Yet, Sappho’s musicality still shines through the euphony of her phrasing. Consider this line from fragment 146 about rejecting the good along with the bad: μήτε μοι μέλι μήτε μέλιςςα (mete moi meli mete melissa). Read it aloud. Taste its alliterative sweetness on your tongue. Anne Carson translates this proverb as “neither for me honey nor the honey bee,” in step with the sequence of the original Greek. If Not, Winter compiles the entirety of Sappho’s canon (excluding post-publication discoveries from 2004 and 2014) and presents Carson’s translations alongside the facing Greek text. Carson’s translations are simple in principle and meticulous in effort: “the plainest language [she] could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did.” She does not invent or elaborate; instead, she swiftly transports Sappho from Greek to English. Each translation visually and syntactically FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 9
READING THE CLASSICS
mirrors the original text. Translators often aim at invisibility: a perfect conversion from language to language, unadulterated by the process or the agent. Carson is no exception, yet her own skill as a poet inevitably shines through her work. Despite their fidelity to the text, her translations maintain remarkably fresh language and a kind of graceful fluidity. For example, consider lines five and six of fragment 31, one of Sappho’s most famous poems: καὶ γελαίςας ἰμερόεν, τό μ᾽ ἦ μάν / καρδίαν ἐν ςτήθεσιν ἐπτόαιςεν (kai gelaisas himeroen, to m’ he man / kardian hen stethesin eptoaisen). Taken literally, it reads something like: and laughing charmingly, a thing which truly excites my heart in my breast. Carson, however, does something much more interesting: “and lovely laughing—oh it / puts the heart in my chest on wings.” With reference to its phonetic similarity to the Greek word for wing, πτέρυξ (pterux), she translates the verb eptoaisen as “puts on wings.” The resulting imagery is lively, emotive, and masterfully evocative of fragment 1’s description of Aphrodite’s sparrow-drawn chariot. Her wordcraft consistently delights: “clearsounding lyre,” “sweetworded desires,” “goldsandaled Dawn.” Throughout If Not, Winter, Carson renders Sappho’s words both accessible and appealing to readers with any level of familiarity with ancient Greek (or none at all). The domain of Sappho’s poetry is lush and bountiful, somehow richer, sweeter, and brighter than reality. Her descriptive power thrives in comparison: “greener than grass,” “far more sweetsounding than a lyre / golder than gold,” “whiter by far than an egg.” She exalts what is fragile and ephemeral, both in the soul of the poet and the world in which she lived. Her poems are evidence of a life fully lived and loved. She writes about “Dika,” “gentle Atthis,” and “darling Kleis.” People inhabit lines, and stories lurk between them. Yet, above all, the subject of Sappho’s language is ἔρος (eros). Ἔρος δ᾿ ἐτίναξέ <μοι> φρένας, ὠς ἄνεμος κὰτ ὄρος δρύςιν ἐμπέτων Eros shook my 10 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
mind like a mountain wind falling oak trees (fr. 47) Sappho’s intimate acquaintance with eros reveals itself in her fluency in the language of love, heartbreak, and grief. Aphrodite herself addresses Sappho familiarly: “Who, O Sappho, is wronging you?” In the essay collection Eros the Bittersweet, Carson defines the Greek word eros as “‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’” Eros entails absence; desire only exists in the shadow of another figure. If Not, Winter is an often-barren landscape. On some pages, a single line of text alone breaks the fresh, white paper. Carson embraces the shadows left by Sappho’s absent poetry, portraying the ghosts of what we have lost as vividly as the bones we possess. She utilizes unconventional line breaks, incorporates negative space, and represents lacunae with square brackets (an “aesthetic gesture” to the papyrological reading experience). καμ[ ] νέκταρ ἔχευ’ ἀπὺ χρυσίας [ ]ναν .. . . (.)]απουρ[ ] χέρςι Πείθω ]nectar poured from gold ]with hands Persuasion (fr. 96, lines 27-29) Through these typographical choices, Carson achieves the visual texture of an eroded manuscript and the thrill of deciphering it. The brackets are particularly impactful: they invite reflective pauses, moments of breath reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s em dashes. They ask the reader to consider: what is lost? What was here? What could be here? Carson describes eros as “the whole life of imagination.” He is both the force by which lovers feel, invent, and know, and he is the story told about them. In fragment 188, Sappho gives him the epithet μυθόπλοκον (muthoplokon), “mythweaver.” Carson’s translations are an activity in mythweaving themselves; they engage the reader
in the interaction between translation, poem, and the space between them. Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter collects Sappho’s poems, and it invites the reader to imagine. Sappho blesses us with a rich inheritance of lyrical longing. Her enduring legacy has shaped the language with which poets feel and write, from Catullus to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti to H.D., and so many others. Like eros, our relationship with Sappho’s surviving work is γλυκύπικρον (glukupikron), a word which translates as “sweetbitter” and expresses the dissonant, unifying experience of simultaneous pain and pleasure. From this motley collection of fragments, Carson composes a greater story of love and loss, sweetness and bitterness. If Not, Winter is a thousand-year-old echo—the still-sounding notes of Sappho’s songs. μνάςεςθαί τινά φα< ῖ >μι καὶ ἕτερον ἀμμέων. “someone will remember us I say even in another time” (fr. 147)
FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 11
READING THE CLASSICS
ALL MEN MUST DIE Considering the Essential (and Immortal) Nature of Beowulf by Ana m. mERRITT
B
eowulf, one of the oldest stories in the English language, is a poem as uniquely brilliant as it is enigmatic. Part of this inscrutability arises from the uncertainty of the exact date of the poem’s original composition. What has reached rather broad consensus, however, is that both the composer and the audience of Beowulf were Christians1 living in Anglo-Saxon England sometime in between the seventh to eleventh centuries A.D., and that the people the poem describes are “remote pagan ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons.”2 But what every reader of Beowulf must keep in mind is that the poem defies all attempts at neat categorization. It is not simply Christian or pagan, oral or written, lay or epic, legend or folktale, myth or history, but rather a unique synthesis of them all. At a little over 3,000 lines, Beowulf is not a very long poem by historical standards, but it is one of the longest surviving poems from the Old English period (450 A.D.-1066 A.D). The only manuscript of Beowulf we have was made by two scribes, probably within the first decade of the eleventh century and bound up alongside an odd menagerie of medieval texts now referred to as the “Nowell Codex.” Between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, we have no written record of this manuscript until Lawrence
Nowell (after whom the codex is named) signed his name in the book in 1563. But even then, despite its age, Beowulf was essentially lost to the English imagination until the middle of the nineteenth century, when translators such as J. M. Kemble (1837) and Benjamin Thorpe (1855) finally rendered the poem into modern English verse and prose. Newer and better translations have since been offered to both public and scholarly audiences. This review does not consider any particular translation of Beowulf, though I am most familiar with R.M. Liuzza’s 2000 translation. Because this translation is not particularly new, and Beowulf is already a fairly well-known text, thanks, in part, to the popularity of Seamus Heaney’s translation, the reader might be wondering why this poem is being reviewed at all. Simply, one ought to read and be reminded of good, old books just as much as, if not more than good, new books. I also find that the representation of Beowulf in popular culture insufficiently encapsulates the beautiful nuance and complexity of the original work. Beowulf is so much more, though certainly not less, than a heroic tale of an ancient warrior slaying monsters. So, what is this poem about? As a tale about a hero, Beowulf is deeply concerned with courage and
1. Edward B. Irving, “Christian and Pagan Elements,” in The Beowulf Handbook, ed. by Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles. Paperback ed., (University of Exeter Press, 1998), 177. 2. Fred C. Robinson, “Appositive Style and the Theme of Beowulf,” in Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 6. 12 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
READING THE CLASSICS
glory. What is courage? What are courageous deeds for? Are they primarily for the benefit of others or oneself and one’s own glory? And if courage is concerned with the achievement of heroic glory, what are the limits and costs of this pursuit? As a tale of kings and their halls, Beowulf also raises the political question, “What does good kingship look like?” And as a tale about human beings, Beowulf contemplates man’s role as a moral agent in the world. The poem wonders about the relationship between human agency, divine will, and Wyrd (fate or chance). It also meditates somberly upon the evils of internecine conflict, the economy of revenge, and dragon-like greed. In this sense, the three monsters of the story, Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the Dragon, respectively, might be considered, though they cannot simply be reduced to, symbolic manifestations of these three evils.3 The opening lines of the poem run thus:
morning, Beowulf tracks Grendel’s mother back to her home, an underwater lair, and slays her there. With Heorot now at peace, Beowulf returns to Geatland where he rules nobly for fifty years after his king and uncle, Hygelac, dies. In the fiftieth year of his reign, Beowulf must face a dragon who avenges the plundering of his hoard by wreaking his vengeful ire on Beowulf ’s fortress. To answer this offense and achieve more glory, Beowulf goes to slay the dragon with the help of his thane Wiglaf, and succeeds, but not before receiving a fatal wound himself. Beowulf is burned upon a pyre, and a barrow is set up in his name. During their lord’s funeral, the Geats weep not only for their slain king, but also for their impending doom at the hand of their enemies, the Scyflings (Swedes) or the Frisians. The poem ends with despairing lamentation. The hopelessness of the ending defies our expecta“Hwæt! [literally, “What,” but it is a call to attention like tions of a heroic tale. We are not left with the rousing “Listen!” or “Hark!”] tale of a victor who lives to enjoy his triumph, nor the We have heard of the glory in bygone days subtle comfort of a worthwhile sacrifice. The heroic Of the folk-kings of the Spear-Danes, king is condemned to death and so are his people, and 4 How those noble lords did lofty deeds.” we are left wondering what it was all for. While a variety of motivations could be discerned, both vicious and With these opening lines, the poet calls the audi- virtuous, what seems certain is that Beowulf desired the ence to attention and thrusts them into an unspecified achievement of heroic glory above all else, even his own ġeārdagum, a mysterious and distant, but not altogether life. unfamiliar, “days of yore.” Before the story even begins, When Beowulf determines to slay Grendel’s mother, the poet already places a hoary beard upon it, white he declares to Hrothgar that: with age; he endows the poem with an ancient voice, wise and soaring, and eyes that peer back into the longEach of us shall abide the end lost lands of elder days and glint at the remembrance of of this world’s life; let him who can their glory. bring about fame before death—that is best In brief synopsis, the poem recounts the adventures for the unliving man after he is gone.6 of a young, Geatish prince named Beowulf. At the beginning of the story, Beowulf comes to the aid of HrothAll men must die. Because of this inevitability, the gar, king of the Scyldings (Danes), whose hall has been best a man can do is to attempt to immortalize himravaged for two years by a monster named Grendel. Be- self by deeds which surpass the common, to encase his owulf defeats Grendel and the Danes rejoice. But later name in the amber of song, and to disperse his name that night, Grendel’s mother seeks revenge for her slain so widely across the expanse of space and time that an son by taking a single thane for a wer-gild.5 The next English poet can one day proclaim to his audience, “we
3. R. M. Liuzza, trans. and ed. Beowulf, (Broadview Press, 2000), 18-19. 4. Liuzza, ll. 1-3. 5. Literally, a “man-price,” the payment for a blood debt. 6. Liuzza, Beowulf, ll.1386-1389. FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 13
READING THE CLASSICS
have heard of the glory in bygone days.”7 The story is old, but known. Voracious Time has neither sullied nor rapined its contents. In the final lines of the poem, the lamenting Geats declare the following of their lord: “þæt hē wyre wyruldcyning[a] … lofġeornost” [that he was, of all the kings of the world, … most eager for fame].8 The primary object of Beowulfian heroism is the defiance of death through the immortalizing power of lof (fame or praise). In a way, Beowulf succeeded; the bard has sung of his exploits, and we have heard it. But the pursuit of this immortality does not come without a cost. While Beowulf battles Grendel’s mother, the poet avers that the man who seeks to win “long-lasting praise” by his warfare, “cares nothing for his life.”9 This indifference toward death and willingness to purchase glory and fame at the cost of one’s life are what characterizes the Beowulfian hero. And for this very reason, in his seminal lecture entitled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” J.R.R. Tolkien states that “we may remember that the poet of Beowulf saw clearly: the wages of heroism is death.”10 In the cosmos of Beowulf, the price of glory and the fame which attends her is steep. Heroism and death are often bedmates. And though Tolkien was reticent to categorize the poem, he deems that of all terms, that of heroic-elegiac poem is most fitting.11 The heroic element of the poem comes across plain enough, perhaps. But what are we to make of the “elegiac”? Well, an elegy is, simply, a lament. But a lament for what? A lament for the tragedy of human mortality—the inevitability of human death, not only of the hero, but of all mankind. After Beowulf ’s harrowing triumph over Grendel, the poet declares that:
Death is not an easy thing to escape—try it who will— but compelled by necessity all must come to that place set aside for soul-bearers, children of men, dwellers on earth, where the body, fast on its bed of death, sleeps after the feast.12 Before recounting the festal celebration of Beowulf ’s victory in the bright hall of Heorot, the Beowulf poet sees fit to remind his audience of our common doom. All “sleep after the feast.” Thus, according to Tolkien, the Beowulf poet rehandles the ancient theme, “that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die,” that in the poet’s retrospective gaze he “sees that all glory (or as we might say ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’) ends in night.”13 Nothing abides forever in the world of men. The poem itself is a balance of two episodes, distant in time, but brought into poetic proximity: Beowulf ’s youth and old age, the rising and setting of a great and heroic, but sorrowful life. Beowulf is consumed by night just like any other man. Though such an abrupt and inevitable finality may induce one to despair, all must come to terms with the fact that they too have a death day and that the feasts, and songs, and glories of this life, though good, cannot pass with us into the life to come. They die with us, and if not with us, then with our posterity. Such a theme is not altogether foreign to the Christian, nor ought he spurn it. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes pronounces that “all is vanity and a striving after wind.”14 Temporal things come and go as the morning mist. There is a tragic vanity in Beowulf ’s striving for earthly glory. The Geats remember him and so do
7. Liuzza, Beowulf, l.1 8. Friedrich Klaeber, ed. and trans. “Beowulf,” in Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. by Robert D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. 4th ed. (N.p.: University of Toronto Press, 1950), ll. 3180-3182; Liuzza, Beowulf, ll. 3180-3182. 9. Liuzza, Beowulf, ll. 1534-1536. 10. J.R.R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. by Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984), 26. 11. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 31. 12. Liuzza, Beowulf, ll.1002-1008. 13. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 23. 14. Ecclesiastes 1:14 (Revised Standard Version). 14 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
we, but for how long? The Beowulf manuscript itself only came to us through fire.15 This is not to say that the heroic longing for glory is utterly misplaced in the human heart and alien to the Christian life. Nothing could be further from the case. We are only asked to recognize its true object. The hero’s longing for immortalizing fame, stripped of its pride, is but the fruit of a deeper longing to be commended by his Great Lord, to have his name proclaimed in the heavenly hall by a king and a people who shall never perish, to receive those words from the One who is most deserving of esteem, “well done thou good and faithful servant.” In his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” C.S. Lewis states that when we obtain to the glory which is “good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things” then “the door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”16 The desire to be known and acknowledged, to ascend to the utmost heights, to shine with a brilliance that no amount of time or age can dull, is at the very heart of all heroic longing and fulfilled in our acceptance into the Divine. In Beowulf, then, the poet captures something which is present in all human hearts: the desire to be eternally known and ineffably magnificent. Thus, just as the Preacher of Ecclesiastes’ proclamation of this world’s vanity might rouse the torpid heart from its worldly languor, so might the verses of the Beowulf poet ignite in the human spirit a dormant desire for eternity, for some thing, some good more lasting than the fleeting things of this life, for a realm beyond the horizon. Beowulf is, indeed, a somber poem, but a great one. And for that reason, it has captured the imaginations of some of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most brilliant poetic minds, Tolkien preeminent among them. Tolkien loved the poem, in part, for its unsoundable profundity and keenness of sight. Unlike
READING THE CLASSICS
many of his contemporaries, Tolkien did not regard Beowulf as a poorly constructed poem whose value lay primarily in its status as a historical object, but as a great poem which sees beyond the confines of its own time into all times. At the end of “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien states that Beowulf “glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts; it stands amid but above the petty wars of princes, and surpasses the dates and limits of historical periods. At the beginning, and during its process, we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world.”17 To Tolkien, Beowulf was not the haphazard product of a less sophisticated age, but a master-work of poetic imagination whose poet rose above the forests of his own time to look upon the world of men as from “visionary height.” Thus, the aim of the Beowulf poet was not to reconstruct the ruins of some old hall (the ancient history which supplies much of the story’s matter), but to construct a new tower upon its ruins and from its top to “look out upon the sea.”18 Tolkien also thought that the northern mythos retained a certain power for his own time which the southern (Greco-Roman) mythos, though perhaps loftier and more dreadful, had lost. He states that “while the older southern imagination has faded for ever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times.”19 It is no wonder then that some elements of Beowulf creep into his fictional works, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Gollum and the Orks share some uncanny similarities with the Grendels, and Smaug’s wrath at the plundering of his hoard cannot but be recollected when one hears of the ireful vengeance of the dragon of Beowulf. Another great poet who was profoundly impacted by Beowulf was Tolkien’s friend, W.H. Auden. Auden’s fascination with Anglo-Saxon poet-
15. Liuzza, 11. In his introduction, R.M. Liuzza notes that “in 1731, while Cotton’s collection was stored at Ashburnam House in Westminster awaiting donation to the future British Museum, a disastrous fire damaged or destroyed hundreds of volumes and nearly consumed the Beowulf manuscript as well.” 16. C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, (New York: Macmillan Company, 1949), 11. https://ia800908.us.archive. org/18/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.157427/2015.157427.The-Weight-Of-Glory-And-Other-Addresses_text.pdf 17. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 33. 18. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 8. 19. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 26. FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 15
READING THE CLASSICS
ry began when he attended a lecture by Tolkien who recited a long passage of Beowulf in Old English. And from that moment on, Auden recounts, “I was spell bound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish…I learned enough to read it, however sloppily, and Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.”20 Surely enough, Auden would incorporate into his own poetry many of the distinctive elements of Anglo-Saxon prosody (e.g. alliteration across two half-lines separated by a medial caesura (a pause), the use of accentual prosody, etc.). But Beowulf held not only a stylistic appeal for Auden, but also a thematic one. The poem’s denunciation of internecine conflict and revenge resonated deeply with a generation plagued by the aftermath of the World Wars. Through his works Paid on Both Sides and The Age of Anxiety, Auden adopts this Beowulfian theme and an Anglo-Saxon prosody to wrestle with the conflict of his own time. As Chris Jones succinctly
puts it, Auden “recovers the lost lingo of Old English to teach us of our present evils.”21 Like Tolkien, Auden recognized that Beowulf is not merely a historical curiosity, but a profound reflection on human nature. Irish poet Seamus Heaney also had a deep affection for Beowulf and composed his own acclaimed translation of the poem. In the introduction to his translation, Heaney remarks that when he studied Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poems in college, he had “a fondness for the melancholy and fortitude that characterized the poetry.”22 Beowulf is a sad poem, but strong; though the Beowulf poet recognizes the sufferings of this life, he does not cripple under their weight. And this is one of the many reasons Heaney admired the poem so much. These behemoths of poetry declare with one voice that Beowulf is a brilliant, unique, and insightful poem, just as pertinent now as it was in its own time. It is well worth a careful read.
20. W.H. Auden, “Making, Knowing, and Judging,” in The Dyers Hand and Other Essays, (Faber and Faber, 1962), 41-42. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet. dli.2015.16420/page/n59/mode/2up 21. Chris Jones, “W. H. Auden and ‘The “Barbaric” Poetry of the North’: Unchaining One’s Daimon” in The Review of English Studies 53, no. 210 (2002). 167–85. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/3070370. 22. Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, Trans. by Seamus Heaney, (W.W. Norton & Company: 2000), xxii.
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[Arithmetic] is one of those things we are seeking that by nature lead to intellection; but no one uses it rightly, as a thing that in every way is apt to draw men toward being. —Plato’s Republic
sually, mathematics and liberal arts only appear together in the titles of college courses, such as "Liberal Arts Mathematics" or “Mathematics for Liberal Arts.” Such courses treat mathematics as fundamentally separate from the liberal arts. Any math teacher at a classical or liberal arts school would be quick to correct this misconception. The liberal arts include the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). Yet few pedagogical topics generate more disagreement than what mathematics class should actually look like at liberal arts schools. The truth is that mathematics is not a purely liberal art. According to the ancient Greek tradition, there are two kinds of arts people can study: liberal and servile. A liberal art is a study fit for a free person—pursued for its own sake and to cultivate the mind. A servile art, by contrast, serves practical purposes and was considered fitting for slaves who worked with their hands. The reason there is so much disagreement about what elementary mathematics class should look like at a liberal arts school is that most of the content of an elementary mathematics class is servile instead of liberal. An Ancient Greek Distinction Mathematics contains within it many different disciplines, some of which are servile arts and some of which are liberal arts. In general, elementary mathematics students study what we call “arithmetic.” Sir Thomas Heath explains in his History of Greek
From the Classroom
Mathematics1 that the ancient Greeks distinguished between arithmetikos (the theory of numbers) and logistikos (the art of calculation). It is found as early as Plato, and it is clear from Plato’s writings that the distinction was not originally made by him. By arithmetikos, Plato meant not arithmetic in our sense but the study of numbers and the properties of numbers in themselves. Nowadays, we might recognize it as “number theory.” Arithmetikos explored well-known properties such as even or odd and prime or composite. It also studied lesser-known distinctions such as perfect, deficient, or abundant2 and triangular, square, or pentagonal3 numbers. The goal was to develop the mind through contemplating beautiful numerical truths and patterns. Here was a discipline pursued as an end in itself and for this reason was considered the first liberal art of the Quadrivium. The art of calculation, or logistikos, was the servile counterpart to arithmetikos. Heath describes how logistikos "comprised the ordinary arithmetical operations, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the handling of fractions,…dealt with problems about such things as sheep (or apples), bowls, etc.," and "the solution of simple equations with one unknown, or easy simultaneous equations with two unknowns."4 Logistikos was servile in two respects. First, it served the higher study of arithmetic by providing the basic calculations needed to explore number properties. More importantly, logistikos was servile because it was pursued not for its own sake but as
1. Thomas Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, vol. 1, From Thales to Euclid (Clarendon Press, 1921). 2. A perfect number is a number whose proper factors sum to the number itself (e.g., 6 = 1 + 2 + 3, 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14). A deficient number is one whose proper factors sum to less than the number, and an abundant number is one whose factors sum to more than the number. 3. A triangular number is a number that can be arranged in a grid to form an equilateral triangle. Similarly, any square number can be arranged to form a square. The Greeks also studied the properties of pentagonal numbers, hexagonal, numbers, and so on. 4. Heath, The History of Greek Mathematics, 15.
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a means to practical ends. One learned logistikos to work as a businessman, engineer, or architect. The study focused on memorizing number facts, applying algorithms, and using tools such as the abacus, an ancient calculator. The goal was quick, accurate computation for the sake of some end beyond the truths of logistikos. Plato himself acknowledged the value of logistikos while maintaining its subordinate role. In his conversation with Glaucon in the Republic, Socrates observes that people who are naturally gifted in logistikos are generally quick in other studies. Furthermore, logistikos trains students to think more quickly.5 The philosopher-king who governs the city, however, should master logistikos.6 Logistikos trains the mind and is useful in professional life, but to study it for this purpose only is to study a servile art. The deeper value lies in that it prepares students for the liberal art of arithmetikos, “the contemplation of the nature of numbers.” When a student of logistikos hears “ten,” he thinks of a number that has two digits and is easy to multiply and divide by (just move the decimal place). When a student of arithmetikos hears “ten,” he moves beyond its familiar decimal representation to more fundamental properties of the number itself. Ten is an even, composite (non-prime) number, but more remarkably, ten is a “triangular” number. Ten dots can be arranged in a perfect equilateral triangle, which is reflected in the relationship 10 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4. We call numbers "triangular" for the same reason that we call numbers "square." Ten is also classified as “deficient,” meaning the sum of its proper factors (1 + 2 + 5 = 8) is less than ten. These properties are part of the reason why mathematicians develop fascinations with numbers.
5. Plato, Republic, bk. VII, 526b. 6. Plato, Republic of Plato, bk. VII, 525c. 7. Heath, The History of Greek Mathematics, 16. 20 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
Its servile component was not limited to arithmetikos. According to Sir Thomas Heath, the ancients also distinguished between the liberal art of geometry (the study of geometrical shapes) and the servile art of geodesy (calculating the size of sensible objects as if they were perfect geometrical shapes).7 Unlike arithmetic, geometry has fared somewhat better in preserving its liberal arts character. Many classical schools still teach Euclid's Elements, focusing on pure geometric relationships and logical proofs. However, modern geometry classes—even at classical schools—have drifted toward geodesy without acknowledging it. They emphasize practical applications such as calculating tree heights from shadows, presenting proofs in rigid two-column formats that resemble accounting sheets, and treating geometric principles primarily as tools for measurement rather than objects of contemplation. This drift toward the servile wouldn't be problematic if schools honestly embraced geodesy as a practical skill. Instead, they maintain the pretense of teaching liberal geometry while actually providing surveyor training—satisfying neither the contemplative goals of true geometry nor the practical needs of applied measurement. Even more than geometry, elementary mathematics overemphasizes the servile art, and unfortunately this tendency pervades even the best classical and liberal arts schools. Arithmetic: “No One Uses it Rightly” Elementary mathematics pays homage to the Quadrivium by calling itself "arithmetic," but it would more accurately be called "logistics" or “calculation.” Traditionally, it was called “reckoning,” which more accurately reflects its character as logistikos. Whether through mental math, algorithms, or calculators, the goal of elementary math now is to calculate and memorize formulas. Students learn about even and odd numbers, but how many classrooms explore the patterns of adding or multiplying them? Students distinguish primes from composites, but how many use the sieve of Eratosthenes to find all the two-digit primes? Students study square numbers, but what about triangular or higher-order polygonal numbers? What elementary student wouldn't be excited
to discover perfect numbers, and yet how many know they even exist? At best, the standard curriculum of elementary mathematics turns children's minds into thinking calculators. At worst, it drives away mathematical thinking entirely, leaving only a lifeless calculator in its wake. If it merely bores students to tears, at least it hasn't done lasting damage, but mathematics education should aim instead at contemplating truth. Both servile and liberal arts have value. Logistikos is essential for creating the foundation for arithmetikos. It is also useful for business, engineering, and computer programming. But arithmetikos is essential for human flourishing. If we want to teach the liberal arts, we cannot limit the content of mathematics to that of a servile art. Perhaps this explains why math teachers at classical and liberal arts schools struggle to teach math classically—they don't teach it as a liberal art. Teaching elementary mathematics as a liberal art isn't simply about
changing methods by adding Socratic dialogue or more proofs. Nor is it just about incorporating the history of mathematics or mathematical writing. All of these strategies help, but ultimately the content needs to truly reflect the path from logistikos to arithmetikos. Plato understood that arithmetikos “by nature leads to intellection” and “draws men toward being.” He was also right to say that “no one uses it rightly.” Until we restore arithmetikos to its rightful place, we will continue producing students who can calculate but cannot contemplate, who can apply formulas but cannot perceive mathematical beauty. We will have servants of numbers rather than free minds capable of mathematical wonder.
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orothy L. Sayers was a wordsmith. Her scholarship, professional activities, and personal correspondence all indicate her devotion to language itself, whether her own or another’s. She took a First in Oxford in French and graduated with a degree in modern languages. She made her name writing popular novels. She wrote BBC plays, stage plays, essays, translations, and even Christmas cards. In his “A Panegyric for Dorothy Sayers,” C. S. Lewis says that “the variety of Dorothy Sayers’ [written] work makes it almost impossible to find anyone who can deal properly with it all.”1 What is more, Sayers’s use of the Trivium is famous for its effect on classical education: Long after her death in 1957, her reputation experienced a revival because of an article called “The Lost Tools of Learning,” an educational think piece about grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Some have criticized her interpretation of medieval education and child psychology in this short piece. Within each field, these critics may have a few valid arguments, but they miss the expanse of knowledge evident throughout her work.2 Sayers united the Trivium and the Quadrivium in her own education and writing: She was a Renaissance woman conversant with all of the liberal arts. Through her, those who are trained in the humanities can find a workable, exciting path into arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. They can learn how to think outside their field of words and appreciate the beauty of numbers. To do so—in fact, to learn anything new—will require two practices championed and modeled by Sayers herself: mental leisure and personal confidence. Without leisure and confidence, learning will remain a desirable dream rather than a reality. ARITHMETIC In Sayers’ education, as in most forms of our mod-
ern education, arithmetic is one of the first skills a young student learns. It is foundational for the other three disciplines of the Quadrivium. Without an understanding of discrete numbers, it is impossible to seek out the certainties of geometry or wrestle with astronomy. Possibly because of its foundational nature, arithmetic as a discipline is the most difficult to track in Sayers’s academic history. However, we do know that of the four qualifying exams Sayers took to enter Somerville College, Oxford, two were mathematical: One was on arithmetic, and the other was on algebra (the other two were on French and German, respectively).3 Since Somerville College was named after Mary Somerville, a mathematician, it’s easy to imagine its qualifying exams in math would be robust. Sayers took more algebra while attending Somerville; one of her assignments was to calculate the velocity of sound—a fairly complex equation for a French major.4 Sayers does not often refer explicitly to arithmetic in her later writing, but this is because arithmetic is assumed rather than absent. Everyone must be able to manipulate numbers. She confirms this in “The Lost Tools of Learning,” in which she places “Mathematics—Algebra, Geometry, and the more advanced kind of Arithmetic” under logic in a young person’s education. These are to be taught not as “a dark mystery” or “a special revelation” but as straightforward syllogisms “applied to number and measurement.”5 At the height of her career, there is an instance where Sayers reveals her enjoyment of and humility toward arithmetic: she had made a philosophical point that some people (to the detriment of rational thought) had come up with the equation 2 = 3. A reader challenged her to produce the equation, which she did. “Indignant readers,” she says, “need not write to assure me that there is a fallacy in it. I have always somehow suspected there might be.”6
1. C. S. Lewis, “A Panegyric for Dorothy Sayers,” in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 91–95. 2. Andrew Selby, “Dorothy Sayers was Wrong about the Art of Grammar,” June 28, 2018, presented at the Society for Classical Learning Annual Conference, https://www.societyforclassicallearning.org/dorothy-sayers-was-wrong-about-the-art-of-grammar/; Shawn Barnett, “Dorothy Sayers Was Wrong: The Trivium and Child Development,” CiRCE Institute, August 9, 2019, https://circeinstitute.org/blog/blog-dorothy-sayers-was-wrong-trivium-and-child-development/. 3. “Register Entry,” 1912–1915, SC/AO/RG/CR/3, Somerville College, Oxford. This document tracked Sayers’s progress at Somerville. 4. Black notebook with paper covers containing a few mathematical notes, box 1, folder 25, Wade Center, Wheaton, IL. This archival source contains various notes from Sayers’s time at Somerville. 5. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning” (Methuen, 1948). Sayers initially read “The Lost Tools of Learning” at Oxford University in 1947. Most of the paper originally appeared in Hibbert Journal volume 46, 1947–1948 before a full version was published by Methuen & Co. Ltd. 6. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Question and Answer,” Daily Telegraph, May 19, 1944.
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This brief exchange is just one example of something we see throughout Sayers's work: the willingness to converse about Quadrivium disciplines in order to make broader arguments.
“It’s Euclid,” said Katherine, and proceeded to enunciate the properties of characterising the radius of a circle.7
While arithmetic is understanding numbers in GEOMETRY the abstract, Geometry is often described as underRegarding geometry, Sayers was particularly proud standing numbers in space. Sayers enjoyed thinking of one episode in her youth, which is best recounted spatially. Readers of her detective fiction may take dein her own words from her unfinished autobiograph- light in (or possibly pass over) her regular insertion of ical novel Cat O’Mary. In this scene, two characters maps, calculations of angles, and so on. At least four attempt to unearth a tennis lawn buried in the grass. of her novels include some sort of spatial arrangement. Unnatural Death includes a diagram of lines of Spring had been rainy and the two iron sockets sight for a potential witness.8 The Five Red Herrings that took the net-posts, together with the perprovides a map of Galloway, a region in Scotland, manent metal corners of the court, had sunk complete with a scale.9 Have His Carcase involves a out of sight beneath the close roots of the turf. cipher that must be decoded using twenty-five-space After prodding about for some time, Mr. Lamgrids, each of which is depicted in the book.10 The mas found one of the sockets... measuring from Nine Tailors includes a diagram of the church, Fenthe socket in what he took to be the right direcchurch St. Paul, as well as two maps (scale included) tion, [he] began to prod the ground again for of the three large churches in the parishes of St. Paul, the missing corner. St. Stephen, and St. Peter. These maps appear precise and include roads, railroads, bridges, and the ThirKatherine [Sayers’s depiction of herself] ty Foot Drain.11 Even Clouds of Witness, which relies watched the series of prods, extending in a divery little on numerical data and ciphers, contains rect line towards the mulberry tree. a diagram of Lord Peter’s ancestral home, Bredon Hall.12 “I didn’t think it was so far this way,” said Mr. While none of the above insertions pose a sigLammas. nificant geometric challenge to the reader, they are also unnecessary to the plot. The fact that they exist “You’re going wrong,” asserted Katherine, indicates Sayers’s delight in charts and maps and her positively. “You want to make a circle, not a willingness to think in spatial terms. (This will apstraight line.” pear with more force in her work on astronomy.) Sayers also retained enough knowledge of geomMr. Lammas, whose natural intelligence may etry to use it as fanciful evidence about the inabilihave been a little confused by the heat, queried ty of some to distinguish between fact and opinion. this. She complains in a letter to a friend, “So difficult do people find it today to distinguish between statement about, and the personal angle on, that almost any reviewer or correspondent would be capable of writ-
7. Dorothy L. Sayers: Child and Woman of Her Time, vol. 5, A Supplement to The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. Barbara Reynolds (The Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 2002), 67. Barbara Reynolds even goes so far as to provide a diagram of the experiment in the appendix. 8. Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (Harper & Row, 1927; Avon Books, 1955), 102. 9. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Five Red Herrings (Victor Gollancz, 1931; Avon Books, 1968), front matter. 10. Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase (Victor Gollancz, 1932; Harper & Row, 1986), 304–08, 328–38. 11. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors (Victor Gollancz, 1934; Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 36, 56. 12. Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness (T. Fisher Unwin, 1926; ImPress, 2006), 16.
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ing: ‘Professor Euclid pleads with passionate sincerity in favor of the square of the hypotenuse,’ and nobody would be surprised.”13 Sayers applies geometry both to women’s issues and the Trinity. In her essay “Are Women Human?,” she points out the often-pointless search for “the woman’s point of view.” When asked for the feminine perspective on writing detective fiction, she responds, “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.”14 According to her theological masterpiece, The Mind of the Maker, which uses artistic creations to understand the Trinity, every artwork is a little scalene, leaning to one side or another in its distribution of Idea (Father), Energy (Son), and Spirit (Holy Spirit). MUSIC By age fourteen, Sayers was transposing music and instructing her cousin about musical theory.15 While at Oxford, she was an active member of the Bach Choir. She had a particularly memorable experience singing St. Matthew’s Passion, in which her conductor was enthusiastic to the point that “he got the cramp so badly he had to drop the stick and conduct with his fists.”16 She continued to enjoy Bach throughout her life. Her star detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, “was a musician of some skill and more understanding.”17 In her novel Strong Poison, Wimsey asserts that Bach is “good for the brain. Steadying influence and all that.” In fact, Wimsey is one of the most consistent conduits of Sayers’s in-depth knowledge of this area. He can “sketch an arpeggio with his right hand” while asking about a murder suspect.18 In his journal article “Music and Dorothy L. Sayers,” Philip Scowcroft lists the numerous references Sayers makes to music throughout her novels. These are not generic references but specific asides that invoke confidence in the author’s
knowledge of the piece: In Strong Poison, for example, Wimsey says that “to express the infinite complexity of modern emotion you need a scale of 32 notes to the octave," which, Scowcroft points out, is “an obvious reference to the quarter and sixth-tones favoured by Czech composer Alois Haba (1893-1973).”19 Anyone familiar with Sayers’s novel The Nine Tailors can attest to her knowledge of change ringing. Like almost everyone in her generation, Sayers grew up listening to church bells. She chose to set her novel in the Fenlands and center it around a nine-hour change ringing marathon put on by the rector, Mr. Venables. Instead of chapter titles she employed change ringing terminology (e.g., “A Short Touch of Kent Treble Bob Major”). Her research into this subject was so sound that she was made an honorary member of various bell ringers’ groups and vice president of the Campanological Society of Great Britain.20 ASTRONOMY As with the Quadrivium itself, Sayers’s interest in numerical studies culminates in astronomy. When she passed away in 1957, she had translated and annotated Dante’s Hell and Purgatory and was working her way through Paradise. Those who take Dante seriously know how conversant he was with astronomy. A look through Sayers’s notes in the published editions indicates her zealous research on this final Quadrivium discipline. At times, her notes feel like a craft project. In Purgatory, for example, the reader can cut out the circle of the earth and pin it on top of a larger circle of zodiac signs. The reader can then “turn the apex of Mt. Purgatory to the hour indicated in the text; the clock will then show the corresponding times at Jerusalem, at Rome, on the Ganges, and at the pillars of Hercules (Morocco).”21 The notes are also laboriously well-informed. Her footnote for canto 18, lines 79–81
13. Sayers to Barbara Reynolds, January 15, 1957, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 4, 1951–1957: In the Midst of Life, ed. Barbara Reynolds (The Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 2000), 364. 14. “Are Women Human?” in Are Women Human? (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 41. Sayers originally delivered “Are Women Human?” as a speech to a Women’s Society in 1938. 15. Sayers to Ivy Shrimpton, nicknamed “Marie,” ca. 1907, Folder 54, letter 10a-37, Wade Center, Wheaton, IL. 16. Sayers to Reverend Henry Sayers and Helen Mary Leigh Sayers (her parents), May 17–18, 1914, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 1, 1899–1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist, ed. Barbara Reynolds (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 88. 17. Sayers, Clouds of Witnesses, 87. 18. Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison (Victor Gollancz, 1930; Avon Books, 1967), 108. 19. Philip Scowcroft, “Music and Dorothy L. Sayers,” Sidelights on Sayers 1 (1981): 2. 20. Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography (Kent State University Press, 1979), 68. 21. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Universal 24-Hour Clock,” insert, in Dante Alighieri, Purgatory, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Books, 1955), between 350 and 351.
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of Purgatory provides an example: Dante has mentioned that the moon, viewed from Rome, sinks from sight between Corsica and Sardinia. Sayers clarifies his statement: The moon in her proper monthly motion is from W. to E. (against the daily motion of the heavens) is backing through the constellations, and has reached that part of the Zodiac in which the sun is when the people in Rome see him setting between Corsica and Sardinia. This by modern calculations would bring the Moon into Libra (the Scales); but we know that she cannot be there, because on the previous night she rose in Scorpio . . . Dante must therefore be mistaken about the latitude of Sardinia.22
I am not very bright at it myself, I must admit. But I was brought up on some nice, old-fashioned books which did implant in me a few elementary principles about the real and apparent movements of the celestial bodies. Nowadays, young people read a lot about atoms and electricity, but seem hardly to know the Great Bear when they see it; and having got it firmly in their heads that mediaeval people were a pack of superstitious fools, they are apt to dismiss all their perfectly good astronomical observations.
She then goes on to joke about how Dante put Venus under the wrong sign in the spring equinox of 1300 thanks to a trifling error in the almanac he was using: the Almanac of Profhacius. The almanac had calculated the cycles of all the planets for 1300, It is helpful to contrast her in-depth analysis with which was the year The Divine Comedy was set—all an endnote on those same lines from another trans- the planets except Venus and the Sun, which were lation. It merely reads, “the sun’s course from east to calculated for 1301.26 west (where, seen from Rome, it sets in the straits beThis overview of Sayers’s Quadrivium interests tween Corsica and Sardinia).”23 demonstrates that the Quadrivium was vital for at In her translation of Hell, Sayers provides a three- least three things in her life: accurate scholarship, as and-a-half-page commentary, entitled “Dante’s Uni- we see in her study of astronomy and Dante; rich verse,” in which she introduces the Ptolemaic system characters, as we see in Lord Peter and his arpeggios; and its assumption that the apparent motions of and a way of understanding other disciplines, as we celestial bodies are also the real motions. She then see in her theory of the scalene trinities of writing. breaks down those motions into “five concerns” of Though she was a novelist trained in literature, she which the reader should be aware, concluding with did not fear the study of numbers, and she held herthe reasonability of the Ptolemaic system given the self accountable for their proper use. lack of instruments of precision.24 Sayers’ determination to represent Dante’s astronomy correctly also ap- SAYERS’S REQUIREMENTS OF LEARNING pears in her correspondence with Mary Orr, author Sayers is consequently a model for us as we consider of Dante and the Early Astronomers. Sayers shared our own learning. There are many ways we want to be “Dante’s Universe” with Orr, who “approved all the like her: She was a hard worker with abundant native astronomical explanations.”25 intelligence who enjoyed support from family and In yet another letter concerning astronomy, Say- friends. But Sayers also shows us two more things we ers writes to the science writer and editor of Nature, need to pursue honest, rich scholarship: mental leiSir Richard Gregory, describing her own background sure and personal confidence. The need for mental in the subject: leisure is no surprise—everyone in industrial nations understands the distractions of smartphones. The 22. Sayers, footnote, in Dante, Purgatory, 214. 23. Allen Mandelbaum, in Dante Alighieri, Purgatory, in The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Everyman’s Library, 1995), 670, footnote for canto 18, line 79. 24. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Dante’s Universe,” in Dante Alighieri, Hell, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Books, 1949), 292–95. 25. M. A. Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers (Gall and Inglis, 1913); the quote in this sentence is from Sayers to Barbara Reynolds, June 7, 1948, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 3, 1944–1950: A Noble Daring, ed. Barbara Reynolds (The Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1999), 377. 26. Sayers to Sir Richard Gregory, January 23, 1950, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 3:481.
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These women worked like beavers . . . they all wrote excellent English, and knew at least two languages besides their own, with enough Latin to get on with. They asked all the questions there were, in pages on pages of flowing Italian hand, and distinguished scholars set aside their work . . . in order to write long, leisurely, thoughtful replies.28 How did they do it? “I think leisure is one of the answers,” she concludes. “Mental leisure. No examinations to get through. Quiet, well-organised households full of books. Long evenings, when people read aloud and discussed what they read.”29 It’s worth noting here that Sayers fit her own description of Victorian scholars. She knew French (medieval and modern), German, Latin, and eventually Italian. She wrote excellent English, perpetually asked questions, and scholars across Europe, from C. S. Lewis to Karl Barth, wrestled with her work.
Though she often pleaded overwork, Sayers passionately protected her own mental focus. She rarely traveled, and she frequently turned down writing and speaking invitations. She was also careful to write only what she wanted to write, to do what she considered her “proper job.” When C. S. Lewis suggested to her that Christians must write for the purpose of edifying readers (and possibly on topics about which they felt no particular conviction), she responded with heat: “Look, now! I’ve worried over this quite a bit, and I’ll tell you what I make of it….You must not accept money, you must not accept applause, you must not accept a ‘following,’ you must not accept even the assurance that you are doing good as an excuse for writing anything but the things you want to say.”30 Each person has a job she is suited for, and all Sayers asks here is that she be free to do it without distractions. Sayers is so adamant about this idea that she proposes a change in the postwar economy’s perspective on work: Work should be a thing one lives to do rather than what one does to live. It should be something “in which [the worker] finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.” It would then become delightful, so absorbing that the worker would want to work longer and count any interruption of those work hours as a “monstrous interference.”31 This may be wishful thinking on Sayers’s part, but it is wishful thinking in the right direction. Delight requires focus, and focus brings its own delight. But was focus more attainable in her pre-computer, pre-internet era? She did not have to struggle against smartphones and email. On the other hand, she had to contend with World War II: She read Dante in a bomb shelter during an “infestation of doodlebugs [V-1 flying bombs].”32 She nursed a husband often sick in mind and body from shellshock, kept a pig and chickens to sustain her household, and counted her ration stamps. After the war, in 1957, she gives a charming description of a domestic triumph: “The new heaters I have installed in the library work quite
27. Sayers to Barbara Reynolds, March 28, 1956, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 4:275. 28. Sayers to Barbara Reynolds, March 28, 1956, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 4:275. 29. Sayers to Barbara Reynolds, March 28, 1956, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 4:275. 30. Sayers to C. S. Lewis, July 31,1946, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 3:253. 31. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Why Work?,” in Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine (W Publishing Group, 2004), 135–37. Sayers wrote “Why Work?” in 1942. 32. Dorothy L. Sayers, “...And Telling You a Story,” in Further Papers on Dante (Methuen, 1957; Wipf and Stock, 2006), 2.
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Oppposite: image uncredited; Publicity photo published by Boni and Liveright in connexion with the release of Whose Body. Public domain.
second need, personal confidence, is easier to overlook and hampers us more than we think. Let us deal first with that most pressing issue: mental leisure. To do so, we’ll return to astronomy. It is Sayers’s interest in astronomy that actually leads her to point out the need for mental leisure. In a letter to the Dante scholar Barbara Reynolds, Sayers congratulates her on having read through Orr’s work on astronomy, which is a five-hundred-page monograph. Sayers was impressed both with Reynolds’s accomplishment and the monograph itself: “I am perpetually staggered by the general excellence of the education which girls of average good breeding managed to pick up in the 19th century from governesses and parents, and the good, sound, solid work they managed to turn out.”27 She then mentions two other Victorian authors: Agnes Strickland, who wrote respected works on English and Scottish queens, and Charlotte Yonge, the novelist and historian.
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splendidly. I realise now that I have been partly frozen ever since 1940 or thereabouts, when I had to put my old water-radiator down for patriotic reasons.”33 If Sayers managed to focus on her scholarship during wartime, what are we doing to preserve focus in our own era? In his book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, pastor John Mark Comer shares his story of pastoring several church campuses and coming home so exhausted on Sunday nights that all he could do was watch kung fu movies until he dragged himself to bed. He had little energy to focus on family, and his relationship with God was mostly activity— studying, preparing for sermons, preaching, going to meetings—and didn’t include many “long evenings” for meditating. Instead, he was always in a hurry: “I work six days a week, early to late, and it’s still not enough time to get it all done.”34 Like Comer, most of us schedule our days down to the minute, watch football games in traffic, and angle for the shortest checkout line. When we are in that short checkout line, we check our texts. The result of this behavior, not surprisingly, is irritability and distraction.35 But we adults, at least, have a memory of life before smartphones, streaming, and social media. We remember staring off in the distance; we remember boredom. When it comes to focus, our children and students are in a difficult spot. In his alarming study The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lists “attention fragmentation” as one of the four harms caused to preteens by smartphones and social media. He recalls a Kurt Vonnegut story in which a dystopian community forces individuals with a high IQ to receive a device that blares a few times every minute. As a result, they cannot think linearly and so are kept on the same level as everybody else.36 Considering the myriad of texts and notifications we receive in a day, this is exactly what is happening to us, and it is worse for our kids. How many of us have sat across from a student—conversing about her thesis or homework or life—and seen notifications fill her phone screen? Students have trained themselves to filter them; they’ll often flip the phone over and say,
“These don’t matter.” But journalist and researcher Johann Hari points out that there is a cost to even this little shift: it’s called “the switch cost effect.” Checking, or even seeing, those countless likes and hearts and LOLs slows down your brain and hampers your creativity.37 There is much more to say about preserving mental focus. We could talk about Sabbath, about consumerism, about the exhausting drive to accomplish and improve. Sayers did not address all of these, but she did see what was coming. Her 1953 poem, entitled “For an Evening Service,” was addressed to electric light: We think thee that thy speed incessant Provides upon this whirling ball, No time to brood on things unpleasant— No time, in fact, to think at all.”38 Confidence If we could, by various measures, preserve our mental focus in order to delight in learning, there is still another obstacle: We lack the confidence to learn. Since I have not yet found a term that covers this problem, I will define it with an anecdote. Several years ago, I began bird watching. It was a great and immediate joy to distinguish a bluebird from a blue jay. But it was more difficult to discern a sparrow from a finch from a wren. Ideally, I would have asked penetrating questions: What is the wren’s habitat compared to the sparrow’s? Why is the finch’s beak so much larger than that of other birds its size? But I am not a naturalist, so I did not ask these questions. Instead, I interrogated myself: Why am I doing this? Am I wasting my time sitting on a bench in silence, looking for the tiny bird making the large sound? And wasting more time by researching whether the bird was a chipping, lark, song, field, or savannah sparrow? Or am I wasting my time another way? It’s not as if I will become an ornithologist. Why am I learning what thousands of people before me already knew?
33. Sayers to Barbara Reynolds, January 15, 1957, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 4:276. 34. John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (Waterbrook Press, 2019), 1–2. 35. Interestingly, the literal definition of distraction is “being dragged apart.” 36. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024), 125–26. 37. Jonann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How To Think Deeply Again (Crown, 2022), 37ff. 38. Dorothy L. Sayers, “For an Evening Service,” Pantheon Papers, Punch 226 (1953):16–19. Republished in Poetry of Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. Ralph E. Hone (The Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1996), 153.
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For lack of a better phrase, I will call this hesitation to pursue a subject—and its attendant fear of wasting time—my “outsourced learning complex.” I figured that someone else had done all the work of knowing, and if I were to start at my late stage of life, I’d be taking time from something more valuable. In short, I should learn from the experts but not attempt to discover anything on my own. If Sayers was ever bothered by an outsourced learning complex, she did not show it. Intellectual sloth was not her besetting sin—quite the contrary, in fact. Late in life, she began a task that had already been completed thirty-five times or more: an English translation of the Divine Comedy. She was familiar with several of these editions, including that of her contemporary Laurence Binyon, who had translated Dante into terza rima, Dante’s original rhyme scheme.39 Still, Sayers decided to do yet another translation, also into terza rima. In a letter to novelist and Dante enthusiast, Charles Williams, she asks, “Why should I entangle myself in such a foolish piece of presumption? Who wants such a thing? Is there not Cary? Is there not Laurence Binyon?”40 She answers her own question with childlike enthusiasm: It’s a fun puzzle. “The snare is the lure of terza rima; you amuse yourself one day—while washing vegetables, or waiting for the kettle to boil—by doing a terzain or so.” What is more, she believed that even though she was doing what thirty-five other accomplished writers had already done, she still had something to contribute. Binyon was a quality translator, she said, but “I think…that my leopard is more prettily spotted, my loathsome worms wormier, and my whirlwind much more whizzy.”41 If there was a road she wanted to take, Sayers charged down the path, regardless of how many had already taken it. Some might call her work on Dante unnecessary or redundant, but it delighted her and benefits us: Her translation of the Divine Comedy was one of the earliest publications for Penguin Press, which was at that time just beginning to publish classic paperbacks. It is still in print and used by several classical schools, including my own.
The Divine Comedy is not the only example of Sayers’s willingness to try her hand at a skill that was done better by others. Though no artist, she regularly included sketches in her letters. And even as she worked on her translation of Paradise, she started a war against A. E. Housman and Robert Graves for their treatment of the first-century Roman poet, Lucan. In his edition of Lucan’s Pharsalia, Graves (using Housman’s research) had assumed that Lucan made a significant astronomical error. Graves then claimed that what Lucan said was “all nonsense.”42 Sayers zealously defended the poet, “a man to whom the face of the heavens was the dial to his own familiar clock”: In her letter to astronomer Brian Marsden, she claimed that “I don’t believe Lucan was a fool. And nobody else seems to care. Housman and Graves can get away with murder, because the ‘classicists simply say they don’t know anything about astronomy,’ and the astronomers say ‘they don’t know anything about classical poetry,’” so it becomes acceptable for “Graves to write rude footnotes about the unfortunate poet he is supposed to be translating.” 43 Classicists don’t know anything about astronomy. Astronomers don’t know anything about classical poetry. Sayers, the professional writer and amateur astronomer, wanted to unite the two disciplines, to bring the Trivium back into partnership with the Quadrivium. I have described her as a “Renaissance woman,” and surely the diversity of quoted sources in this article alone justifies the epithet. There is much we can learn from her, but we need some mental leisure and confidence to do so. Lindsey Scholl has a PhD in Roman history from the University of Santa Barbara, California and an MA in medieval history from the University of Missouri, Columbia; her graduate studies included intellectual history, art, theology, and politics. She is in her fourteenth year at Trinity Classical School in Houston, where she teaches tenth-grade humanities, including The Divine Comedy, as well as advanced Latin courses, such as the Aeneid. She has also taught rhetoric, historical theology, composition, and creative writing. She is the host of The Dorothy L. Sayers Podcast, which has finished its third season.
39. In terza rima, the middle line of a three-line stanza (or terzain) gives the rhyme to the first and third lines of the next stanza. 40. Sayers to Charles Williams, December 1, 1944, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 3:115. Henry Francis Cary translated the Divine Comedy into blank verse. 41. Sayers to Charles Williams, December 1, 1944, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 3:116. 42. Lucan, Pharsalia: Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars, trans. Robert Graves (Penguin Classics, 1956),186, footnote 3. 43. Sayers to Brian Marsden, April 23, 1957, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 4:376–80. FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 33
POETRY by Annie Kantar
Annie Kantar's full-length collection of poems, Means to Be Lucky, appeared with Poets & Traitors Press (The New School, NY) in 2023. Her translation of the book of Job, commissioned by Koren Publishers, appeared in 2021, and her translation from the Hebrew of Leah Goldberg’s collection of poems, With This Night (University of Texas Press, 2011), was shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association Prize. Her poems and translations have appeared in journals such as The American Literary Review, Barrow Street, Bennington Review, Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, On the Seawall, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Rattle, Saint Katherine’s Review, Smartish Pace, Tikkun, and Verse Daily and anthologized in Plume Anthology (Canisy Press, 2021), The Art of Poetry (Classical Academic Press, 2009), and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and Academy of American Poets Prize and resides in Jerusalem.
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COURAGE From corage, though even without the middle s I see red summer roses on lapels, hear grrrr in coeur, the heart of it to have heart, though who’s to say of what it’s made? Carried on the sleeve, cut from past meanings, once pride of the passions, wrath, lust—it stands, one hopes, for what it must. For this a mother can be proud (as long as her child shows not too much but just the right amount at the right time), a question for which she needs more than she’s been given in the august always of a world that can’t say when.
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ILLUMINATIONS Leah Goldberg, translated by Annie Kantar i. And again you make your way down the same city streets to see things that haven’t the slightest novelty. And again you walk the streets, past storefronts and their wares, past faces and smiles and old beggars. Each face seems to say: you’ve seen this before! And the voices declare: you heard this yesterday. But all at once, across the way a blue streetlamp stands, and it stood there yesterday and it stands here—suddenly. ii. And who knows what that was, or what blue light is for or the windows in the house next door. But evening’s a dove’s wing brooding over the city, over windows and gatherings and old beggars in the streets. iii. Over one of the hills an orange bird hovers, whose name I don’t know. But the olive trees know her, and the wind chases her and sings: you’re home.
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In the eyes of an Arab girl just outside the ruined village an orange bird whose name I don’t know.
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INTERVIEW
Dr. Gregory Wilbur is the president and dean of New College Franklin, a Christian classical college in Franklin that he helped to found, and the chief musician and liturgist at Cornerstone Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Franklin, Tennessee. He's also a frequent speaker at CiRCE's various conferences and is one of our primary go-to resources when we want to understand music more deeply. Twenty years ago, Wilbur released a biography of J. S. Bach called Glory and Honor: The Musical and Artistic Legacy of Johan Sebastian Bach, which revealed how Bach "lived out his calling, cared for his family, created masterpieces of musical devotion, and established a legacy of principles and practices of musical artistry and service to the Church." Unfortunately this book has largely been out of print in recent years. However, later this spring, Wilbur will be re-releasing the book under the title, Soli Deo Gloria, featuring an array of new content, including illustrations and maps, a new appendix, an expanded manuscript, and a beautiful new cover. It will be available in March from Hymnworks (with pre-orders open now). Recently, FORMA sat down with Wilbur to discuss his ongoing interest in the great composer and why his influence is as meaningful today as ever. It's clear that Bach is very important to you. Do between modernity and a pre-Enlightenment way you recall how that first began? Did you have some of being? sort of Bach-epiphany? Not exactly. You first have to reckon with the imI don't remember a particular moment in which I mensity and depth of his musical works as music. became aware of Bach—it just seems like he was al- As someone wrote, only a Bach could understand ways there in the background. My mother was an Bach--there are countless riches that can be expeorgan major and taught piano lessons as I was grow- rienced, studied, and enjoyed. One of the interesting up. The little busts of composers were on our pi- ing aspects of music is that not only can it describe ano, and Bach was present. joy or sorrow, but it can also elicit joy and sorrow in the listener. There's a participatory element to music I think the importance of Bach to me came later as that is part of its formative nature. I studied music in college. As I learned about various composers and developments in Art Music, one All music shapes us, but not all music shapes us in can't help but notice that Bach stands out—even the same way. The ancient, medieval, pre-Enlightenwithout regular performances of his work. ment understanding of the telos of music--its purpose and end--was to reflect the order of the creThe essential nature of Bach grew as I learned more ated Cosmos that in turn was a reflection of God's about the Quadrivium and how we have ignored the eternal power and divine attributes, as Romans 1 spiritual and cosmic connection to music that was says. When Enlightenment philosophers severed assumed prior to the Enlightenment. Coming to the metaphysical from the material, music became understand that loss caused me to more deeply ad- entertainment and an additive to life. Music now mire and respect the profound artistry and work of reflects the composer or the performer rather than J.S. Bach on a whole other level. He really is without point to the Divine. We see this change in the Claspeer as a composer and musician, and yet he is also sical period with composers such as Mozart and furvery human and approachable. ther so in the disruptive and revolutionary music of Beethoven and the other Romantics. Does your interest and affection for Bach then stem directly from the way he offers a connection This is the difference in intent and importance between someone like Bach and Beethoven. We lump FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 39
INTERVIEW
them all together as "classical music" as if we mean they are universally "safe" and of equal study and worth. But there is a metaphysical chasm between the two. So Bach is in some ways the pinnacle of the metaphysical nature of music, but also its last significant proponent.
-but you cannot separate the three without significant damage.
I'm not trying to just bash Beethoven and those that followed, but I do think we need to consider more fully what Bach and the medievals had in mind as they wrote treatises and composed music for a very This is fascinating and helpful. Do you see Bee- different purpose and for a very different ethos. As a thoven as actively repudiating the ethos of Bach's simple thought, what we consider "classical " music work? Or was he simply so steeped in a different is almost entirely instrumental, secular, and written world that, even in his age, he couldn't help but op- to be performed on a concert stage, and it represents erate in a different plane? about 15% of the musical periods and ideas of the last 2000 years. That alone should make us think. In some ways, Bach was already anachronistic and considered old-fashioned in his own time. We date the One last thing, before I completely belabor this end of the Baroque period by his death in 1750, but of thought. The author Douglas Adams succinctly wrote, course, philosophies and movements are not that tidy. "Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and The ideas that shaped Enlightenment thought and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells eventually fueled the Romantic period were already you what it's like to be the universe." at work before Bach's death. How does Bach manage to do this? What is it about As one author put it, it's difficult to understand how his work that the modern (non-expert) listener revolutionary Beethoven was if you don't know what wouldn't be able to see that makes him different he was rebelling against. From our vantage point, Bee- than Beethoven and co.? thoven, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler are mainstream "classical" composers and seem rather tame. We can Good question, because there are a few things that inmiss the seismic shift because that change became our hibit our ability to recognize this directly. The first is new normal. So yes, I do see Beethoven as actively re- that Mozart, Beethoven, etc. inherited and continued pudiating the ethos and intent of not just Bach's work to use the same musical vocabulary that Bach used as but Bach's theology and understanding of the world. a vestige from the former purposes of music. The second reason is that music reflects the inherent condiWith the Enlightenment and Romanticism, we see tions of physics, acoustics, and order that make music the ascendancy of ideas such as the purpose of mu- possible in the first place. sic is to express and embody emotion and feelings, or music is a pleasant diversion but unnecessary for life, As one moves towards the "art music of the twentieth or individuality and originality are favored attributes century, the difference in musical structure and vofor composers and performers. These are common cabulary becomes more pronounced with the use of assumptions and would have been highly suspect by twelve-tone music, "chance" music, and found music. earlier musicians, philosophers, and theologians. This subversion of musical elements changes the ways that individual notes function within a piece of muAnother change is the expression of man's nobility sic--instead of having particular roles that enhance and the quasi-religious nature of "art" and "beauty" the concept of order, they have lesser roles or funcand "aesthetics." The most significant example of this tions that undermine cosmic order. is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony—a hymn to the greatness of man, brotherhood, and the divinity of joy. The One obvious change moving from the medieval into trouble when people worship at the altar of beauty is the Classical (and later) periods is the shift from horthat they very often leave truth and goodness behind- izontal to vertical harmony. For instance, the early 40 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
Greek theorists through Augustine through plainsong chant considered harmony to be the movement from one note to the next in a melody. This horizontal understanding is why Renaissance polyphony (or even Bach chorales) have rich musical content in all of various parts—in other words, the alto line is just as interesting as the soprano, or "melody," line. The Classical period considered this practice to be "artificial" as opposed to the more "expressive," "natural," or "pleasing" style of having a main melody supported by a slow-moving harmony in a vertical sense. For example, playing the guitar chords of a Bach chorale in which the harmony changes on at least every beat (and sometimes half-beat) versus playing the chords of a Beethoven's Moonlight Sontata that change every two to four beats.
INTERVIEW
music is doing? I think it's important to focus on the music itself as opposed to creating a visual description--"this pieces makes me think of sunshine on a field of flowers"--which moves what is primarily aural into somethings visual.
So then with active listening, you should be able to start noticing that Berlioz is doing something different that Handel, and Beethoven does not sound like Mahler, but Haydn has some strong similarities to Mozart. It's a matter of listening attentively and training the ear to hear. To develop any skill takes time.
Also, watching a piece of music being played can provide all sorts of clues to help you. For example, if the flute player raises their instrument, you can more quickly identify when the flute part comes in or notice if the string basses are playing with the cellos. When I As a music layperson (so to speak), I am tempted to assign weekly music listening to my students, I always drop in that meme from The Office where Michael try to find a video of the piece being performed or a Scott says "can you explain this to me like I'm five" video that includes musical score. but even I can see that these ideas trend in a similar direction in other art forms as well. Poetry, or paint- Let me reiterate though, that takes active and attentive ing, for example. But what do you suggest modern listening—not just having music playing in the backlisteners who might not be musicologists listen for ground. to better understand Bach's work? Yes, this makes sense. As with most things, attenOk! fair enough. But you couldn't see my hands as I tion is key. For someone who wants to really dig into talked about those things. It may sound simplistic, but what makes Bach’s work essential what works would let the music speak for itself. I think folks are generally you especially focus on? Could you recommend a hesitant to talk about music (or poetry or visual art) Bach starter kit of sorts, works that truly reveal his because they fear that they do not have the "proper" greatness and that show what you’ve been describterms or study to do so. One aspect of good art is that ing—works to pay attention to? it resonates with true reality and with the reality of being human—spiritually, physically, emotionally. Here are some core works that also have a variety of elements to them: So you can use non-technical terms to talk about when a melody goes up or down, is flowing, comes to a place - Unaccompanied Cello Suites of rest, or talks back and forth with another melody - Concerto for Two Violins in the piece. What sounds do you hear (i.e. what in- - Brandenberg Concertoes struments are playing)? What type of piece is this--are - BWV 1: “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern” (How there words, does it sound like a piece for church, is it Brightly Shines the Morning Star) simple or big, do sections alternate or repeat? - St Matthew Passion - Two-part inventions Then you can compare one composer to another and to themselves. What makes a piece by Bach "sound" These run the spectrum of ensemble, solo, vocal , and like Bach? Can you find a way to describe what the keyboard. FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 41
I
n C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, Dr. Ransom writes a letter: “I am now working at the Platonists of the twelfth century and incidentally discovering that they wrote damnably difficult Latin. In one of them, Bernard Silvestris, there is a word I should particularly like your views on—the word Oyarses.”1 The work alluded to by Dr. Ransom is Bernard Silvestris’ Cosmographia, a twelfth-century Latin literary work about the formation of the world into a unified cosmos.2 Bernard Silvestris’ work makes clear why the Quadrivium (the mathematical arts of music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy) is a good preparation for the study of theology: From the world’s foundation, number and harmony have been the basis for order in the universe. Mathematical arts help us to see that order and consider the nature of the One who made it reflected in His creation. While few read Bernard Silvestris’s Cosmographia today, this work has influenced generations of literary artists, including C. S. Lewis, and while even fewer read the work of the man Bernard dedicates the Cosmographia to, Thierry of Chartres, his work affected generations of mathematicians. Appreciating the story of these two men, who fought together against the pressures to shorten the liberal arts curriculum in their day and yet challenged each other to consider the true nature of the Quadrivium, raises the question of the degree to which educational ideals can be affected by personalities and individual giftings.
1. C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, in The Cosmic Trilogy (Bodley Head, 1989), 137. 2. English translation and Latin text in this paper will come from Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, in Poetic Works, ed. Winthrop Wetherbee, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, vol. 38 (Harvard University Press, 2015).
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BERNARD SILVESTRIS’ DEDICATION TO THIERRY OF CHARTRES
Around 1147, the Cosmographia was written and then read before Pope Eugene III. The subject of the work is universitas, the creational foundations for the wholes existing in the universe. Modelled after Plato’s Timaeus, it uses allegorical personification to tell the story of Nature’s formation of Matter. The Cosmographia is organized into two books: Book 1, “Macrocosmos,” describes the formation of the universe, and book 2, “Microcosmos,” describes the creation of humanity. This structure highlights an inherently imitative relationship between the structure of the universe and the form of humankind. This creation of order is depicted as the ultimate example of writing (graphia) by the best of authors (auctores), God. By depicting God as auctor, Bernard the poet puts himself in an interesting position, similar to a schoolboy doing a progymnasmata exercise from classical rhetoric: He imitates not just Plato’s Timaeus but God (and His agents such as Nature). Bernard Silvestris dedicated the Cosmographia “to Thierry, doctor most renowned for true eminence in learning.”1 In this dedication, Bernard does not ask for “approval” from Thierry, merely “judgment and correction”; Bernard respectfully claims to have only a “dull wit” unsuited to the difficulty of the subject matter he is undertaking.2 Now, a good medievalist cannot read such claims without recognizing a humility typos. Medieval writers often attempted to avoid prideful exhibitions by displaying humility. (Anselm, for example, when he writes his Monologion, claims that the only reason he wrote was because certain people begged him to do so.) In the Middle Ages, such verbal gestures are the metaphorical equivalent to a physical bow in honor cultures: In other words, they are formally expected, especially in relationships between those who are not equals (Bernard was younger than Thierry). This does not mean that these verbal gestures are insincere, just that they are appropriate indications of respect from a younger generation to an older. Without doubting Bernard’s sincerity, however, it is possible to question whether this dedication may actually signal a moment of respectful disagreement.
In classical rhetoric, it is not uncommon for an author to begin with a captatio benevolentiae, which is considered one of the most effective ways “to convince and persuade readers”; it aims to stir up positive feelings in the reader as a way to counterbalance “the orator’s efforts to stir up negative feelings in respect of the opponent.” Praise of the sort given at the beginning of the Cosmographia’s dedication is relatively standard and often a prelude to some criticism. Bernard’s next step in the dedication, though, is to confess that he has been debating within himself whether to publish his Cosmographia at all: “For since a treatise on the totality of the universe (universitas) is difficult by its very nature, and this the composition of a dull wit as well, it fears to be heard and perused by a perceptive judge.”3 Note that Bernard does not ask for approval from Thierry, merely critical assessment. The combination of praise with self-deprecation fits within the standard tradition of the classical rhetoric of captatio benevolentiae. Furthermore, Bernard Silvestris’s identification of universitas as the subject of his literary work is a clue as to why he might be particularly interested in winning Thierry’s approval. BELIEF IN THE FULL LIBERAL ARTS CURRICULUM AS A COMMON GROUND
Bernard had every reason to wish for the approval of Thierry of Chartres. Of all the old-fashioned masters John of Salisbury speaks about in the Metalogicon, few were more intimidating than Thierry of Chartres, “a very assiduous investigator of the liberal arts.”4 In the twelfth-century French schools, Bernard of Chartres and William of Conches were both accomplished grammarians and Peter Abelard was known for his logic, but Thierry of Chartres knew and taught the entire liberal arts curriculum from grammar to arithmetic. One student, Clarembald of Arras, called him “the foremost philosopher in the whole of Europe” and “the soul of Plato granted once again by heaven to mortals.”5 Thierry’s writings give the distinct impression that, although he taught at both Chartres and Paris before becoming chancellor of Chartres in 1141, he had little
1. Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, 7. 2. Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, 7. 3. Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, 7. 4. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon 1.5. 5. Both epithets, along with more biographical information and an overview of the key elements of his writings, can be found in Peter Dronke, “Thierry of Chartres,” in A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 358–385. 44 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
patience for those wishing to shorten steps on the road to philosophia: I have carried out my resolve to shut out, at my whim, the ignorant mob and the mish-mash of the schools. For those who counterfeit genius, hating study, and those who claim to study at home, pretending to be teachers, and the clowns of scholastic disputation, armed with fistfuls of inane words.6 Thierry resisted the new twelfth-century attempts to shorten the traditional liberal arts curriculum because he believed in the fundamental unity of knowledge, a value rooted in the idea that God implanted unities in the world for humans to discover (and ultimately find their Creator). Like today, schools and schoolmasters in Thierry’s time felt pressure to shorten the ideal curriculum in favor of practical expedience: The older curriculum worked well in a monastic setting where students spent their whole lives in study. The “modern” twelfth-century student only had so much time and money to spend on education before pursuing a career. As can be seen in John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, many schools and universities in the twelfth century had begun abandoning the study of grammar, rhetoric, and the Quadrivium to make room for the study of more “practical” subjects such as logic.7 While other master teachers of the day shied away from certain subjects, Thierry stayed resolute in his belief in the unity of knowledge attained through the traditional progression through the liberal arts. One must first learn the rules of interpretation and expression in the Trivium and then acquire the subject matter upon which understanding can work through the Quadrivium. At the heart of each of these synthetic disciplines is universitas. In the Heptateuchon, Thierry’s compiled textbook for liberal arts instruction, Thierry follows in the footsteps of Boethius by asserting that philosophy “is the integral comprehension of the truth
of things that are.”8 Because order in the universe is so fundamental, order in the progression of study must be maintained. The foundation of the respect between Bernard Silvestris and Thierry of Chartres rested on their shared ideal belief in a full liberal arts curriculum. Even in the thirteenth century, when the battle over the seven liberal arts was considered over and lost, Bernard’s reputation was immortalized by a vernacular poet, Henri d’Andeli, who wrote a mock epic, Bataille des VII ars, about logic’s defeat of grammar, rhetoric, and poetry.9 In that epic, Bernard features as one of the valiant defenders of these disciplines. Thus, both Thierry and Bernard stand against the tendency in their day to focus on disciplines such as logic to the exclusion of the quadrivial arts, favoring the “old-fashioned” view of the seven liberal arts as a preparation for wisdom. Thierry launched the first offensive, and Bernard was the rear guard. A DISAGREEMENT OVER THE ORDER OF THE QUADRIVIUM Being on the “same team”—believing in the importance of universitas and an orderly progression through the liberal arts curriculum—does not mean that Bernard agreed with Thierry on all aspects of what an orderly progression through the liberal arts looks like. Careful attention to the role of music in the Cosmographia may indicate that Bernard held to a different order of the Quadrivium, one that came from Martianus Capella. As Michael Masi observed as long ago as 1974, “when we look at the allegorical representations of the liberal arts…we find a discrepancy between the emphatic statements [by Boethius] on order in the De Arithmetica and the traditions of the artists.”10 Although Boethius’s explanation for the order of the Quadrivium is the one most commonly given, the identification of arithmetic as the highest mathematical art is only one line of tradition in a dispute that began in Pythagoreanism over whether arithmetic or geometry might be the
6. Thierry of Chartres, “Commentary on Cicero’s De Inventione,” in Thierry of Chartres: The Latin Rhetorical Commentaries, ed. Karin M. Fredborg (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1988). Quotation appears here as it is translated by Peter Dronke in A History of Twelfth-Century Philosophy, 362. 7. See John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon for a description of the history and issues at stake in the popular attempt to shift away from the old progression in favor of a logic-focused curriculum. 8. Dronke, A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, 361. 9. Henri d’Andeli, Memoirs of the University of California, vol. 4., The Battle of the Seven Arts, ed. and trans. Louis John Paetow (University of California Press, 1914). 10. Michael Masi, “Boethius and the Iconography of the Liberal Arts,” Latomus 33, no. 1 (1974): 59. FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 45
most fundamental mathematical art.11 The quadrivial order preferred by the artists, dubbed the “iconographic” or “Capellan” tradition, saw music as the highest quadrivial art. The Boethian Quadrivium emphasized arithmetic as the highest mathematical art. Arithmetic in that case meant what we would call “number theory” today and would have encompassed subdisciplines such as algebra and calculus. (The “arithmetic” of today that is taught to young children would have been called “calculation” in the Middle Ages.)12 Boethius, deeply influenced by Proclus, taught that progressing through these various arts in order––astronomy, music, geometry, and arithmetic––would ultimately prepare the soul to perceive the highest Good, God.13 This particular progression of arts prepares the mind for theology by gradually removing the need for sensory input until mathematics is contemplated in its most abstract form. Then and only then is the mind ready to think about an eternal God who is invisible and intangible. Developing the Boethian argument in a more Trinitarian direction, Thierry theorized that the unities and trinities necessary for understanding arithmetic were the best mental preparation for understanding God’s unity and the Trinity.14 The Capellan tradition of the Quadrivium championed music as the highest art because of its emphasis upon harmony. This tradition was transmitted by Martianus Capella (and Augustine), who followed a modification of Varro’s order of disciplines that ended with music instead of architecture and medicine and reduced the number of disciplines from nine to seven.15 Martianus Capella’s De Nuptia Philologiae et
Mercurii presents a case in allegorical form for why music should be considered the highest art. In this story, Apollo, the god of prophecy, poetry, and song, recommends Philology to Mercury to be his wife. At the end of the work, many daughters of prophecy are offered as bridesmaids worth hearing because “in the cleavage that exists between the divine and mortal realms, they alone have always maintained communication between the two”;16 but Jupiter recommends ending the bridal preparation with Harmony because “she indeed, above all others, will be able to soothe the cares of the gods, gladdening the heavens with her song and rhythms, and she desires only to make our palaces resound, detesting the ever-increasing dullness and spiritlessness of the earthborn, resulting from their lack of skill.”17 Jupiter criticizes the earthborn mortals for rejecting music in their academies, music that is only now being brought back.18 In other words, although the Boethian tradition was worried about music’s ability to sway the emotions, the Capellan tradition viewed this ability as a desirable feature. Michael Masi has identified at least two particularly striking artistic examples of the Capellan Quadrivium: First, the Tympanum of the Incarnation Portal at the Cathedral of Chartres (pictured at the beginning of this paper) and second, the mid-fourteenth-century frescoes of the Spanish Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, located in Florence, Italy (i.e., contemporary with Dante). Strangely, the Cathedral of Chartres was where Thierry became archdeacon and chancellor in 1141. In this role, he would have overseen the creation of the West Façade portals that feature the Tympanum of the Incarnation Portal between 1145 and 1155, and
11. For more on this view in the history of Pythagoreanism, see Lesley-Anne Williams, “The Quadrivium and the Stakes for Ordering the Mathematical Arts,” October 4, 2023, Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet Us at the Crossroads of Everything, University of Notre Dame, https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2023/10/04/the-quadrivium-and-the-stakes-for-ordering-the-mathematical-arts/. 12. See Lesley-Anne Dyer Williams, “Mathematical ‘Small Things’ and the Quadrivium,” February 6, 2025, Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet Us at the Crossroads of Everything, University of Notre Dame, https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2025/02/26/mathematical-small-things-and-the-quadrivium/. For connections to contemporary mathematics see Lesley-Anne Dyer Williams, “Math Wars II: The Rise of the Common Core (Part II),” April 7, 2025, Better Things Blog, Mathematics, Memoria College, https://memoriacollege.org/math-wars-ii-the-rise-of-the-common-core-part-ii/. 13. Michael Fournier, “Boethius and the Consolation of the Quadrivium,” in Medievalia et Humanistica, ed. Paul Maurice Clogan, vol. 34 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 17–20. 14. I encourage those interested in knowing more about Thierry’s teaching, which is scattered in commentaries, to read David Albertson, Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres (Oxford University Press, 2014). 15. Many of Augustine’s writings can be seen as a Christian response to Varro, who thought there were nine disciplines of study––grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, medicine, and architecture. Although the City of God is the most famous example of Augustine’s engagement with Varro, his De Musica is one of an intended series of works designed to engage the mathematical disciplines as outlined by Varro. One might even argue that Confessions 11 employs the insights of Varro on music to chasten concepts of time found in Plotinus and then moves the argument even further by appealing to the superiority of Christian sacred music. 16. Martianus Capella, De Nuptia Philologiae et Mercurii 9.892. 17. Capella, De Nuptia Philologiae et Mercurii 9.899. 18. Capella, De Nuptia Philologiae et Mercurii 9.899. 46 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
Masi suggests that even though the design goes against the Boethian quadrivial order, Thierry “may very well have been on hand when the artist of the tympanum executed the sculptures.”19 While Masi observes a discrepancy between the quadrivial orders of liberal arts teachers (such as Boethius) and medieval artists, he does not give a plausible explanation for why there would be different preferred traditions among these two groups although he does muse that perhaps Thierry changed his mind on the order. The question is, What was at stake for having any opinion on the order of the Quadrivium at all? What does it matter whether arithmetic or music is the fundamental mathematical art? This disagreement only begins to make sense when one considers that poetry was a kind of music in the medieval period. Thus, an argument in favor of music is an argument in favor of poetry. THE ROLE OF MUSIC IN THE QUADRIVIUM
Boethius’s Fundamentals of Music, a textbook for teaching music theory that was standard reading for most educated men until 1255, gives us a fuller picture of the quadrivial art of music. In this work, Boethius identifies three kinds of music—cosmic, human, and instrumental. This categorization implies that the human response to music is rooted in the nature of not only the human soul but also the cosmos.20 Cosmic music, or the music of the spheres, is the harmonious sound produced when the stars in their courses and the diversity of seasons move swiftly together in harmonious union.21 Human music does not concern the music produced by humans. Rather, it is the music found in the harmony of soul and body in a human being. Boethius describes this music as “a careful tuning of low and high pitches as though producing one consonance.”22 It unites not only the rational and animal parts of the soul but also the parts of the body and the body with the soul. Boethius promises to speak about this subject later, but he never returns to it. (In-
cidentally, the Cosmographia supplies what is lacking in Boethius’s account of humankind’s creation.) Instrumental music, for Boethius, includes the harmonious sounds produced by the tension of strengths, human breath, percussion, and so on.23 This kind of music is what most people today see as music, but Boethius understands it to operate according to the same mathematical principles of both cosmic and human music. This mathematical concordance explains music’s profound effect on the human soul. Although the producer of cosmic and human music is ultimately God, instrumental music must be produced by a human musician. Boethius’s definition of a human musician broadens the horizon within which music itself is narrowly considered today. This threefold parallel invites readers of the Cosmographia to see that the harmonious relationships in the macrocosmos (the universe) and the microcosmos (the human body) imply that readers should consider a third harmonious relationship: instrumental music about the cosmos (i.e., universitas). In addition to identifying three kinds of music, Boethius identifies three classes of musicians: the instrumentalist, the poet, and the rational judge.24 The instrumentalist is no greater than a “slave” because one does not need the faculty of reason to produce music using an instrument. The poet is presumably higher than the instrumentalist, but Boethius remarks that even the poet creates songs by instinct rather than reason. One might recall here Lady Philosophy’s attack upon the Muses as “Sirens” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy because their base songs only prolonged Boethius’s misery.25 The third class of musician, the rational judge, is the one with the ability to judge rhythm, melody, and composition. Since this class exercises reason in their experience of music, they alone should be considered worthy of esteem. The inclusion of poets within the class of musicians may initially be startling. Note that Boethius is not merely referring to lyricists. Rather, anytime human beings take mathematics of sound seriously in the construction of a work of verbal art, they are a musician
19. Masi, “Boethius and the Iconography of the Liberal Arts,” 61–62. 20. Boethius, Fundamentals of Music 1.2. 21. Boethius, Fundamentals of Music1.2.187–188. 22. Boethius, Fundamentals of Music 1.2.189. 23. Boethius, Fundamentals of Music 1.2.189. 24. Boethius, Fundamentals of Music 1.34.224. 25. See Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 1.1. FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 47
Their story suggests that it is possible to fight side by side for the core values of classical education while recognizing that our visualization of this ideal may be affected by individual talents and callings.
whether or not the words constructed are intended for accompaniment with music. Dante works within the tradition of classifying poetry as music (even when it is not necessarily designed to be sung) in the Convivio, writing that the maker of a good canzone will be indebted to three of the seven liberal arts––grammar, rhetoric, and music.26 Boethius’ concerns over instrumentalists and poets are not without precedent. While it may be tempting to assume that Boethius’s concern over the power of instrumental music merely concerned secular and not sacred music, both Athanasius and Augustine expressed similar concern that music’s physical ability to produce bodily pleasure might distract from the spiritual focus of worship, even when singing David’s Psalter.27 Ultimately, Augustine’s remembrance of the power of music during his baptism reluctantly persuaded him to allow it in worship for “weaker minds.” In the case of Athanasius, Augustine, and Boethius, the concerns over music are about not just content but also music’s powerful ability to circumvent reason to sway emotion.
things, but a fully Boethian view of music disparaged Bernard Silvestris’ life work as menial. Rather than jettison the Boethian framework entirely, however, Bernard Silvestris’ Cosmographia is structured to make the reader of Boethius’ De Musica look for the third part of the musical triad. Book 1 of the Cosmographia, the “Macrocosmos,” concerns cosmic music. Book 2, the “Microcosmos,” concerns human music. This implies that the Cosmographia itself is a piece of instrumental music (poetry) about cosmic and human music. Looked at as a counterargument to this Boethian prejudice, the Cosmographia presents the strongest possible case that some poets (at least) could be practicing the liberal art of music in a way that imitates the creative nature of God Himself. This counterargument can be seen particularly in the metaphors used for the Creator: writer, author, and inscriber of mathematical order and harmony in the world. These metaphors present a strong counterargument to the idea that instrumental music, including poetry, is an inferior art. If God and His agent, Nature, write music, should it really be considered an inferior craft to imitate it? The word Cosmographia means “universe writing.” THE STAKES OF THE DISAGREEMENT This title clearly references Bernard’s poetic act. Bernard is writing about the universe. One may even say Boethius’ standard music textbook disparaged music he is verbally constructing a written universe based for its emotional nature and the writers of music for upon the cosmos. The frequent references to God as working instinctually (rather than rationally), but Ber- an author throughout the work, however, imply that nard Silvestris was a poet and a teacher of the poetic this title also includes a double entendre. At the begincraft. Within the Boethian framework, Bernard taught ning of the section titled, “Megacosmos,” Silva invokes and practiced the quadrivial art of music. Thierry Noys, as an epic poet might invoke a Muse, to take her of Chartres notoriously followed Boethius in most unformed mass and give it form. Silva appeals to God’s 26. Dante, Convivio, 11.6.9, quoted in John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance, and Drama, 1050–1350, (Cambridge University Press, 1986) 19, footnote 23. 27. Augustine, Confessions 10.33.49–50; see also 9.6.14. 48 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
benevolent and generous nature and then argues that an “author (auctor) does not disparage his work.”28 In the middle of her speech, she argues again that her very “countenance” (vultu) frightens her author (auctor).29 Toward the end of her opening appeal, she concludes, “let the work declare the author who has made it!”30 God “wrote” the universe, and Bernard imitates God by writing his poetic work. The mathematical nature of God’s poetry can be seen in Silva’s request of Nature. Silva pleas not only for order (a feature present in all number that unites the entire Quadrivium) but also for “formative number and musical bonds” (artifices numeros et musica vincla).31 The unformed matter of the universe is pleading with the Maker of the universe to make poetry—musical order. When the plea of Silva is heard, Noys brings forth increased order in the world in part by giving the gift of Nature herself, who is patterned after Noys. It is here that the author metaphor becomes an actual writing metaphor: “There, inscribed by the finger of the supreme arbiter, were the fabric of time, the chain of destiny, the disposition of the ages.”32 Furthermore, the place where life begins in the universe is found in the creation of time (at the end of “Megacosmos”) and the harmonious union of soul and body described in the eighth chapter of “Microcosmos.” Here is a depiction of creation as not merely an act of authorship or authorizing or thinking— it is an act of poetry. The universe needs music—needs poetry—to live, and the Author of creation uses just that to make His world. The Christian God does not merely think the universe; He composes it. Although Boethius (and Thierry by extension) devalues the craft of music in favor of its contemplation, Bernard’s act of writing a literary work about God’s composition of cosmic and human music suggests he may believe that the musical craft has inherent value as an enactment of human imitatio dei. The fact that Bernard imitates the literary form Boethius employs in the Consolation of Philosophy—Menippean satire (a form of prosimetrum)—may suggest that he does not really believe he is completely departing from the Boethian
tradition. Rather, he works within the best parts of it while departing on one key issue: the relative value of human poetry. The strategic emphasis of Bernard’s Cosmographia upon God (and His agents such as Nature) as a writer of music—that is, as a poet—gives us a plausible reason for the two quadrivial traditions: Those craftsmen who made music (and art) may perhaps preferred an order of the Quadrivium that places value upon their own vocations as a form of imitatio dei. They may even have thought that in the Christian tradition, where the creation of the world happens willfully and not as a result of some sort of fall from contemplation, the creative arts are particularly high forms of imitation. Furthermore, although initial creation cannot begin without arithmetical distinctions such as one from two and sameness from difference, life itself is not possible without time, without cosmic and human music. THE PROFOUND INFLUENCE OF BOTH MEN
Counterintuitively, Thierry of Chartres’ and Bernard Silvestris’ pursuits of “impractical” ends (by the world’s standards) resulted in very practical, real-world results. While neither Thierry of Chartres nor Bernard Silvestris are household names today, they made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics and poetry that affect modern thought. However, they did so in strikingly different ways. From John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, it is clear that much of Thierry’s contemporary influence came through his teaching and the memory of his teaching, as intimidating as it was. What little remains of Thierry’s writings reflects his particular interest in the hardest of subjects: the Quadrivium, Boethius’ theological works, and the Hexameron.33 Many of these are in commentary form, making them relatively difficult to read, except for a singular motivated individual named Nicholas of Cusa. It took only that one person a couple hundred years later, however, to develop the obscure arithmetical theology of Thierry into spiritual treatises that considered the relationship between the infinite
28. Bernard Silvestris, Cosmographia 1.15. 29. Silvestris, Cosmographia 1.32. 30. Silvestris, Cosmographia 1.63. 31. Silvestris, Cosmographia 1.1.23. 32. Silvestris, Cosmographia 2.13. 33. Nikolaus M. Häring, Commentaries on Boethius, by Thierry of Chartres and His School, vol. 20 (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1971). FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 49
and the divine, influencing Leibniz’s development of calculus.34 Even high schoolers today can see that contributing to the development of a brand-new branch of mathematics is quite significant. By contrast, Bernard’s teaching on poetics was appreciated in his time through a continuous lineage of faithful reading of his work. The Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris influenced generations of storytellers from Dante and Chaucer to John Milton and C. S. Lewis, even though the work is relatively unknown today. One of the reasons for this continued influence may have been the fact that Bernard Silvestris lived during a period of transition in the liberal arts curriculum—poetics became its own discipline, just as it was in the Arabic world, rather than subsumed within grammar and rhetoric.35 His student, Matthew of Vendôme, wrote one of the first theoretical manuals of poetic composition, which was used by Chaucer and others, and he praised his teacher as “the glory of Tours, the gem of scholarship, the pride of the schools.”36 In the fourteenth century, Boccacio copied the Cosmographia by hand, and the manuscript exists to this day.37 Additionally, Bernard was not only considered a great poet and teacher in his day, but as Jason Baxter has demonstrated extensively, “between Dante and the composition of the Cosmographia, there was over a century of poetic practice emulating Bernard Silvestris.”38 In other words, Bernard Silvestris’ work has inspired some of the world’s greatest literary minds. Whether or not it is possible to finally settle the dispute over whether music or arithmetic should be considered the epitome of the quadrivial arts, the idealism of both Bernard and Thierry led to outstanding achievements that affected multiple generations. CONCLUSION
Both Bernard and Thierry warned against the temptation to shorten the path through the Trivium and Quadrivium in order to make it more manageable,
advocating patient progression. Early steps should not be skipped or rushed in an attempt to cram the full study of liberal arts into the allotted time. Order and careful progression are more important for teaching divine order than rushing through material, even if that means humbly admitting that one hasn’t made it all the way through the progression. And because they cared about these ideals, they also argued about them. Sometimes that meant they even visualized these ideals differently, as in the case of the order of the Quadrivium. It is possible, however, to hold on to an ideal while also recognizing that the actual practice of most ideals in this world must be tempered by time, money, and even the inborn talent or proclivity of the practitioner. Thierry of Chartres was a Boethian philosopher and teacher. Bernard Silvestris was a poet. While they both shared many ideals concerning the nature of liberal arts education, they both gravitated to the traditional ordering of the Quadrivium that reflected these related but distinct callings. These differences of visualizing the ideal even affected who they were able to influence. C. S. Lewis knew and wrote about Bernard Silvestris but seems to be relatively uninterested in Thierry of Chartres. Nicholas of Cusa’s writings are full of the influence of Thierry but display no such interest in Bernard. And yet, together, Bernard and Thierry affected the poetry we read today and even the mathematics we study. Their story suggests that it is possible to fight side by side for the core values of classical education while recognizing that our visualization of this ideal may be affected by individual talents and callings. Lesley-Anne Dyer Williams is a professor of Great Books for Memoria College and a public humanities fellow at the University of Notre Dame. She was also the founding director for the Liberal Arts Guild at LeTourneau University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and a BA from Baylor University. Visit https://lesleyannewilliams.com to learn more.
34. Albertson, Mathematical Theologies, 2. 35. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475 (Oxford University Press, 2009), 544–549. 36. Matthew of Vendôme, Epistulae 1.3.69–70, Opera 2.90, as cited in Winthrop Wetherbee, The Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris, by Bernard Silvestris, trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (Columbia University Press, 1973), xii, note 27. 37. For the literary influence of the School of Chartres, see Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton University Press, 1972) and Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton University Press, 1972). 38. Jason Baxter, The Infinite Beauty of the World: Dante’s Encyclopedia and the Names of God, Leeds Studies on Dante (Peter Lang, 2020).
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Teaching the Virtues by David Hein
Dr. Hein’s book provides much matter for thought, and subsequent action, for educators and parents to intentionally transfer a culture of virtue to the young.” — Alvaro de Vicente, headmaster of The Heights School for Boys, Potomac, Maryland
David Hein’s little book is a treasure. It is a brilliant exposition of educational philosophy and an argument about how, in the classroom, teaching writing can cultivate virtue—and how good writing can itself be an exercise in virtue.” — Vigen Guroian, author of Tending the Heart of Virtue
This elegantly constructed primer on teaching virtues is a must read for all parents of school-age children.” — C. Russell Fletcher III, chairman emeritus, The George C. Marshall Foundation
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W
hy does an old wooden door at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library bear the title Schola Astronomiae et Rhetoricae—that is, “School of Astronomy and Rhetoric”? The Bodleian Library, built in the seventeenth century, remains Oxford’s premier research library. It is also an architectural masterpiece, the centerpiece of Oxford's dreaming spires. Enter the Bodleian’s stunning interior courtyard and you will see ten gothic-style doors placed at regular intervals and ornamented with stone grotesques and gilt lettering. While the other doors in the courtyard display stately inscriptions like “School of Moral Philosophy” or offer more familiar combinations such as “School of Arithmetic & Geometry,” the combined title of astronomy and rhetoric seems bizarre. To the modern eye, it makes as much sense as a joint department of physics and French literature. A pair of essays on the CIRCE Institute blog have marveled at the Bodleian’s astronomy and rhetoric doorway. Each essay offers astute considerations of the ways in which the liberal arts of astronomy and rhetoric might be connected. They both begin with the assumption that Oxford had taught both arts together, a reasonable supposition given the door’s title. But that assumption turns out to be mistaken. Such joint classes, perhaps lamentably, never occurred. So the mystery remains: Why does one of the ten weighty wooden doors in the so-called “Schools Quadrangle” at the Bodleian Library have the title Schola Astronomiae et Rhetoricae? The answer has much to tell us about the ways classical education has grown and changed through the centuries and has warnings for us to consider as we today rebuild and restore the figurative edifice of classical learning. The hunt for our answer begins in the sixteenth century, when both the buildings of Oxford University and the education it offered had fallen into disre-
pair. Throughout the upheavals of the English Reformation, the Oxford fellows maintained a rudimentary teaching of the Trivium arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric but lapsed in their instruction in the Quadrivium arts of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Further, in the midst of the Reformation’s disruptions, the building that housed the university’s library and Divinity School was largely destroyed.1 Enter Sir Thomas Bodley, a wealthy Oxford alumnus and a favored courtier of Queen Elizabeth I. In his retirement, he decided to return to Oxford and refurbish the library. In 1598, Bodley donated funds to restore the Divinity School and build a library above it.2 (That gorgeous library room, now known as Duke Humphrey’s, served as the Hogwarts library in the Harry Potter films.) In 1610, Bodley negotiated a deal whereby a copy of every book published in England would be donated to Oxford's library.3 Finally, as he neared death, Bodley arranged plans and funds to build a grand, three-story quadrangle of buildings.4 The top floor would house the incoming books. The first two stories would replace what Bodley called “those ruinous little rooms” where centuries of students had heard lectures and taken exams; at Oxford, those classrooms were called “schools.”5 Designed with an ornate fusion of classical and gothic stone architecture, the structure on its completion in 1624 was dubbed the “Schools Quadrangle.”6 The Schools Quadrangle was the largest work of architecture created by the university to that point, and it would serve for centuries as England’s most impressive set of classrooms.7 Among the illustrious students soon to be trained within the golden limestone walls of the Quad were John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, the Wesley brothers, Samuel Johnson, Adam Smith, William Penn, Jonathan Swift, and Edmund Halley.8 The elegance of the Schools Quadrangle extends beyond its physical design, for the schools within the
1. Santiago G. Villajos, “The Representation of the University at the Schools Quadrangle during its Building Process,” Oxford Buildings (2009): 2, https://www. academia.edu/2963137/The_Representation_of_the_University_at_the_Schools_Quadrangle_during_its_Building_Process. 2. Richard Tames, A Traveller’s History of Oxford (Interlink Books, 2002), 78–9. 3. “History of the Bodleian Libraries,” The Bodleian Library, accessed June 25, 2024, https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/plan-your-visit/history-bodleian. 4. For a full architectural history of the building of the library, see “Bodleian Library,” in An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of Oxford (His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1939), British History Online, accessed June 25, 2024, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/oxon/pp1-10. 5. I. G. Phillip, “The Building of the Schools Quadrangle,” Oxoniensia 13 (1948): 39, https://www.oxoniensia.org/volumes/1948/philip.pdf. 6. If you click here, you can virtually stand in the center of the Schools Quadrangle and take in a 360-degree view of all four sides. 7. Villajos, “The Representation of the University,” 4. 8. Tames, A Traveller’s History of Oxford, 106f.
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Quad are carefully arranged as a microcosm of classical education, a small universe of learning within the university. By examining this layout, we start to see the beauty of the classical view of learning and untangle the puzzle of the door.9 Begin by dividing the Schools Quadrangle into a west wing and an east wing. At the center of the west wing, on the ground floor, is the entryway to the Divinity School, the classical Christian apex of education, where the postgraduate “higher discipline” of theology was taught. Flanking the Divinity School on the second level are the other two higher disciplines, medicine and law. Beneath those two higher disciplines are two “philosophies”: moral philosophy under the law school and natural philosophy—with its emphasis on anatomy—naturally supporting the medical school. These advanced studies made up the western wing of the Quad. The eastern wing was devoted to the seven liberal arts: the Trivium schools on the ground floor and placed above them the Quadrivium schools. Except the layout was not quite as neat as that. Some compromises were made in the design, and these compromises reveal changes and tensions that classical education was experiencing in the seventeenth century. One was a simple compromise of space: The philosophy of metaphysics could not fit on the western side with its fellow advanced philosophies, so it was positioned opposite theology near the center of the eastern wing on the ground floor. Other compromises were more substantial. Four rooms were appointed to the three Trivium arts. Why? Oxford had added Greek and Hebrew grammar to the curriculum in addition to the traditional Latin grammar—Greek because of the new emphasis on classicism via the Renaissance and Hebrew due to the Reformation’s devotion to the Bible. Further, the Latin school had to somewhat awkwardly share space with a newly popular art, history, as a nod to Renais-
sance humanism’s interest in the lives and wisdom of the past.10 The space allotted to the Quadrivium arts was likewise inapt: Three rooms were given to the four mathematical arts since arithmetic and geometry were housed together. Indeed, the extra room for the Trivium arts came at the expense of the Quadrivium. Still, merely devoting these formal spaces to the mathematical disciplines was a strong sign of a recommitment to the centrality of the Quadrivium in the university after some years of neglect. Prior to Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687), the math theory taught in the Quadrivium had almost no practical application; teaching such abstract concepts to sometimes-surly teenage college students was an act of faith in the power of classical paideia.11 Despite resistance from students and their wealthy parents, Oxford placed the Quadrivium squarely in the heart of students’ education. Music, however, struggled to keep its place. Among the Quadrivium subjects, music alone was demoted to the ground level. While the other Quadrivium subjects had twice-weekly classes, music, then taught in its pure, classical, theoretical version, was judged to be sufficiently studied if students attended just one lecture per term.12 Rooms in the Schools Quadrangle had no heating (until 1945) nor artificial light (until 1929).13 Since the rooms on the upper floors received more natural light and warmth, Oxford’s fellows decided a more frequently attended class should take the music school’s place: rhetoric. Here we solve the mystery of the Bodleian doorway. The stairway up to the two Quadrivium classrooms for astronomy and music would have shared a door. But instead that door led up to the School of Astronomy and Rhetoric. Does this mean we should see the potentially enchanting combination of astronomy and rhetoric as no more than a quirk of early modern classroom distribution? Far from it. Look at that door—and the
9. To best understand the arrangement of the schools, see this diagram. The description of the Schools Quadrangle that follows is from “Bodleian Library,” in An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of Oxford (His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1939), British History Online, accessed June 25, 2024, https://www. british-history.ac.uk/rchme/oxon/pp1-10. 10. For the changes to the seventeenth-century English university curriculum, see M. L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain: 1500–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1959), 61f. 11. I. B. Cohen, The Newtonian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1980). 12. “The Schools Quadrangle, 1613-24,” Cabinet, accessed June 25, 2024, https://www.cabinet.ox.ac.uk/schools-quadrangle-1613-24-0. 13. “History of the Bodleian Libraries.”
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quad around it—and we see a noble, if imperfect, attempt to bring all of classical Christian education into one place—an attempt that many of us are pursuing at our own schools. Indeed, that door offers a number of reminders for the project of classical Christian education that we are engaged in today. First, in the building of the Schools Quadrangle after a period of pedagogical disrepair we see another episode in classical education’s repeated process of development, breakdown, and recovery. We may imagine a golden age of classical instruction where our predecessors had everything figured out. But such a golden age does not exist. Look at the history of Oxford, one of the oldest institutions of classical education, and we see an uneven, often messy, record of moving closer and further from an ideal of classical education. We should give ourselves grace as we also reach for that ideal, as we take up the standard passed down to us through the ages. Further, as with seventeenth-century Oxford, we today also struggle to make all the pieces of our educational project fit. We sometimes want to offer everything to our students. We feel pressure to add fashionable subjects to serve the changing desires of students and parents. We want to keep our commitments to the traditions of the seven liberal arts but struggle to know how best to faithfully teach them. We may want to teach the Quadrivium in its full philosophical glory, but most students also need to know enough practical math to advance to collegiate studies and gainful employment. So we do our best to balance these tensions and pray the resulting compromises do not endanger our whole endeavor. Yet, despite these tensions, there is undeniable beauty in our project. As difficult as it may be to make the pieces fit, our efforts are a courageous testament to our faith that God is the author of all truth and that knowledge is thus a unified whole. Starting in the nineteenth century, schools like Oxford lost that faith. Disciplines of knowledge were siloed, and academic departments splintered away from each other. What began on an intellectual level became an organizational and physical reality. Today, academic departments can be over a mile away from each other on some large campuses. These disconnected intellectual fiefdoms are better termed multiversities. Oxford’s School Quadrangle was once an embodied university
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of knowledge; it is now an empty shell, an image of an intellectual world that no longer exists. Except that vision of unified knowledge still continues in classical Christian education! Our classical schools are now the true universities, some of the few that are left. How wonderful it is to teach in classical education, where the map of knowledge is whole. As any emigrant from the often-narrow intellectual spaces of academia can attest, classical education is a spacious intellectual world where the same teacher might lead students through the Inferno’s circles in the morning and dive with students into Euclidean proofs in the afternoon. Classical education is an intellectual realm where we can confidently assert that rhetoric and astronomy have connections worth considering and then seek those connections. Indeed, we should think deeply about the links between astronomy and each part of the Trivium. We should do the same with the other quadrivial arts. I confidently look forward to reading more essays on the CIRCE Institute website on the ties between geometry and grammar, say, or music and logic. But in the end, the Bodleian doors and the Schools Quadrangle also offer a sobering warning. No classes meet in those rooms anymore. Indeed, Oxford as a whole has drifted far from being a fortress for the teaching of classical Christian ideas. Physical and curricular structures, no matter how beautiful, are no guarantee of fidelity without the institutional will to keep them. These days, the wooden doors with gilt lettering at Oxford are ornate facades, like the faded trappings of liberal arts education at many universities that were founded in line with an education Christian and classical. Today, despite its promise, through the door labeled Schola Astronomiae et Rhetoricae you will not find passage to the study of rhetoric and astronomy. For many years, the door gave entry to the men's lavatory. Now it merely opens into a gift shop. Shea Ramquist earned a BA from Biola University and Oxford University and a MA in intellectual history at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in the rise of the modern university. He teaches history and rhetoric at Trinity Classical Academy in Santa Clarita, CA.
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POETRY by Hannah Armbrust Badia
Hannah Armbrust Badia is poet, gardener, maker, and native Ohioan married to and working with @federicobadiashoes in Orvieto, Italy. She has always loved the light. She has also taught in the Gordon in Orvieto program. Her degrees are from Gordon College (BA) and Warren Wilson (MFA).
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CONTINUING JOURNEY After the image of the Magi’s journey in the Catacombs of Priscilla Since we must become constant nomads, I journey through this door into the dark. I journey down through shelves of desecrated tombs— all hollow, staring, and still. I journey down until, forgetting how it feels not to be alone, I find the three—tan, brick red, and green— illumined by an incandescent bulb. So now, I need to know: How were they sure about the star? Did others start, but then turn back when shadows said, You’re a fool to go so far? I ask, after walking for nights across the desert, blisters forming on my lips, when I find you kneeling in a lush oasis. I’d wandered far already, abandoned by the caravan, and found no one besides you searching just like me— deep wills pressing toward one light. Accident or skill? Providence, you said and touched my forehead reverently; in the graying dawn, your voice unloosed some depth within delicately as fern leaves unfurl. Now, after all this, after glowing together in grave valleys, after stairs and cellars, with a reinvented map, can we, must we journey on as birds compelled by season?
To see an image of the catacombs described in this poem, click here.
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BLIZZARD The sky is a swatch of fabric pulled taut, frayed at the western edge. Awakened at strange hours wind hisses through the frost scarred glass, Are you there? All night long my hands rattle like house shutters like broken shells. Stars pierce the sky’s black veil. Arriving, you exhale a constellation of crystals.
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POETRY by Benjamin Myers
Benjamin Myers’ poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Image, Rattle, 32 Poems, and many other places. He is a former Oklahoma Poet Laureate and the author of four books of poetry and three books of nonfiction. His sonnet collection, Black Sunday, was named by The Wall Street Journal in a list of the "Five Best Books About the Dust Bowl." He has written essays and reviews for First Things, Plough, Oklahoma Today, and other publications. He is also a contributing editor for The Front Porch Republic. He teaches creative writing, literature, and Great Books at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he also directs the Great Books Honors Program.
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A FORM OF PRAISE Three days of ice have stopped us cold. The trees are topped with sheaves of brittle glass. No drive to work. No class. And nothing much to do. I run hot water through the pipes so they don’t choke themselves with ice. We joke about Jack Nicholson, an ax, a door, then run hot water through the pipes again. Our youngest gripes that he has been confined too long and has declined in body and in soul. We let the slow times roll. And then one day we hear a sound that was not there before. A muffled thump comes thudding through the slump of faded afternoon. I trace the sound and soon discover that my son has suddenly begun a game of one on none beneath the winter sun. He dribbles on the ice— thumping once, thumping twice— then shoots and slides across to rebound his own miss: a boy’s keen inventiveness, given for hours as still as this. FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 63
LOVE NOTE FOUND IN A DISCARDED COPY OF PARADISE LOST Dustjacket lost and blue cloth torn between the cover and the spine, the book was wrapped in tape and worn so bare that, in its rags, it shared the look of wounded and forlorn foot soldiers marching home from war. I found it convalescing on the pile outside the office door of that stone hall I loved and haunted while I was still young and poor in both my pocket and my mind. A Milton there, however badly marred, was still a lucky find, those years I spent competing with that bard at reading ourselves blind, those years I picked up every book in search of some true thing, some mounting stone on which to stand and look at all the world before me loosely thrown and second-guess the path I took. But leafing through Edenic lore revealed a brittle, yellowed paper note, found folded in Book 4. how many years it must have crossed, this boat with neither sail nor oar, the sea it floated on gone nearly dry, perhaps the harbor lost that launched it out on tides both warm and high. Whatever port was meant to end its route, it surely wasn’t I. The letter was addressed “My dear__________,” the upper margin flocked with hearts in blue and faded ink, a clear sign of the letter’s purpose and of who had stashed the love note there.
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I read the letter’s opening words in lilting script like waves along a beach below those hearts like birds: My dearest one, I yearn for you to reach across and pull me towards. . . . The Miltonist was freshly passed, an aged, learned man, with gravitas. He was among the last of the old scholar-critics, and his loss reduced that noble caste. To pry into the loves of dead sages, to open the sealed heart and look, is spell-work we ought dread. I folded it like a grave cloth, closed the book, and left the note unread.
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“All is number,” Pythagoras is said to have said. Accordingly, when we consider the quadrivial arts of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, it is generally assumed that they are various ways of thinking about number.1 In short, then, thinking about the Quadrivium usually proceeds along the lines set out by the following proposition: There is one object of the quadrivial arts, and it is number. The distinctions among the arts are therefore seen to arise not from a distinction of object but from distinctions in the disposition of that object (whether it is discrete or continuous, abstract or concrete, mobile or immobile, absolute or relative). The above proposition consists of two claims, the second of which is dependent on the first: (1) that there is a common object to the quadrivial arts, and (2) an identification of what that common object is. In what follows, I would like to reconsider both halves of this proposition. Before beginning, however, I should offer an important caveat. I have set myself the task of decentering number, at least as an exercise in exploring the plausibility of a very different conception of the Quadrivium, which my instincts tell me will be fruitful. But whenever one sets about the task of decentering, one runs the risk that others will think it to be an attack upon that which is to be removed from the center. This is not justified merely on the basis of the project of decentering: To remove number from the center is not the same as to remove it from the board, nor even the same as to move it to the furthest periphery. This is no polemic against number or the rich intellectual tradition it has engendered; it is instead an attempt to consider whether, by placing it at the center, we have not devalued something else that would bring with it its own riches. It may turn out that the tradition is too Pythagorean; that will not mean we should jettison Pythagoras. I. The One Object of the Quadrivial Arts For the moment, I will take it as a given that there is, in fact, one common object of all four quadrivial arts. The question then becomes: What is it? And since number has long held this honor, it is fitting to begin with an examination of its claim.
Now, it is demonstrably possible to see all four arts as ways of reflecting on number. In arithmetic and geometry, this is so clear that it needs no further explanation. In the case of music, one need only pick up one’s monochord to see that it is so.2 This can also be confirmed by the scientific analysis of music, wherein sound is frequency, and so each musical note is a certain numerical frequency; thus, not only the rhythms of music, which are clearly marked by number, but even the very harmonies and melodies of music reduce to number. It also does not take much time spent in astronomy (ancient or modern) to see that what is really at stake is the calculation of orbital periods, the shapes they describe in their movements, and so on. Indeed, if one were to offer any other thing as the object of the quadrivial arts, it could be said that it is but a species of number. This is the force of the Pythagorean dictum that all is number: Whatever else you turn to, the Pythagorean reduction will show you that it is really a form of number. Sound and light are periodic number, gravity and momentum are number in relation, figure (shape) is number extended, and so on. Number’s claim to being the one object of the Quadrivium is absolute if we grant that all is number. But this does not delve deeply enough to do justice to the Pythagorean understanding of number, which is quite different from our contemporary understanding. For us, numbers are abstract entities that describe relationships and structures in the world, both intelligible and physical. But for the Pythagoreans, numbers are not something that measures the world; they are the fundamental structures of the world. Though not themselves physical, they are capable of inherence in and therefore instantiation in sensible matter, which includes not only extended bodies but also sound. Given the fundamental disagreement about the nature of number between ancient and contemporary mathematicians, one way of proceeding would be to argue that the way to recover what is missing is to return to ancient conceptions of number in order to rescue the Quadrivium from a mathematical reduction that renders it incapable of doing the work it was originally conceived to do. This does not seem quite right, however: I personally have always felt that something was missing even in the ancient account. I have always felt that something urgent in reality is being elided.
1. See, for instance, Hugh of Saint-Victor, Didascalicon, book II, chapter 6. 2. Pythagoras’s supposed last word of advice to his students was “play your monochords.” 68 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
And it comes down to the fact that I think that the primary locus of the existence of music is in performance, not in contemplation. It is interesting that the ancient conception of the quadrivial arts consistently failed to place much value on music as performed and encountered in performance. This failure is not limited to just a few thinkers: It is near total. Augustine, Boethius, and Hugh of Saint-Victor, among so many others, struggled to find much meaningfully good to say about what Boethius calls musica instrumentalis (instrumental music). To be sure, Augustine recognizes its power, which he feels he must resist if he is not to be distracted by the beauty of music during worship.3 For Augustine, the physicality of music seems to be part of the barrier: as performed, music is one of the material things of the world that seeks to overwhelm the soul with its force and displace the rule of reason. Music as a quadrivial art, by abstracting from performance, also abstracts from the physical, rendering music purely intellectual, thereby erasing the conflict between the physical and the spiritual. But such a harsh opposition of the physical and the spiritual has much more to do with Plato than with the Incarnation, and even in the hands of a theologian as great as Augustine, it is not a Christian but a Platonic doctrine. Hugh and Boethius fare better only insofar as they are not forced to try to explain away the physicality of the musica instrumentalis. Nevertheless, while they have brilliant things to say about musica mundana (the cosmic harmonies of the universe) and musica humana (the harmony of the parts of the human person), they almost seem to get bored when they get to musica instrumentalis, contenting themselves with the briefest of characterizations (it is music made with instruments) before moving on. All of this is a symptom of the insufficiency of number to account for the transcendent qualities referenced and accessed in musical performance. It is, perhaps, the boldest claim I wish to advance that the privileged point for understanding and interpreting the phenomenon of music is the musica instrumentalis, not the musica mundana. This might seem shocking and even repugnant because it flips the order of reality on its head, declaring the lower to be the higher and vice versa. But that is only an appearance. If we take off the mantle of Plato for a second, hanging it
ever so reverently on a shelf, and put on our cloak of Aristotle, the situation will look quite different. Musica instrumentalis is the primary substance, the actually existing particular; musica mundana is a secondary substance, a universal that is real , but only in the particular. What is primary is the individually existing thing. Yes, this corresponds to ideas in the mind of God; but the musica mundana is not meant to be the divine ideas, but rather the created instantiation of divine ideas. Musica instrumentalis is not a shadowy expression of the musica mundana; musica mundana is an analogy for the spiritual and transcendent intellectual and affective truths that musica instrumentalis makes present for us by giving them a contingent physical form. Given this approach to the nature of music, I do not think that the best path lies in restoring the ancient view of number. Rather, although I think the ancient view of number is richer than the contemporary one and able to ground a reflection on the other quadrivial arts that is closer to reality, it still comes up short precisely by reducing all things to number. The modern conception of number has clarified what was always lacking in treating number as the one object of the quadrivial arts. What if we ask a different question: What if the claim that number is the one object of the quadrivial arts is an instance of everything looking like a nail to a hammer? I do not doubt that when Pythagoreans looked upon the universe, they saw numbers everywhere, but is that not exactly what one would expect from mathematicians? It does not follow from the fact that all seems to one group of people to be number that all is in fact number. There is a significant cost to accepting this view. The hammer’s self-referential point of view is reductive: It seems to it good to engage in its characteristic act upon not only nails but also screws, pencils, stemware, linguini, and earthworms. Consider just the first of these, screws: A screw and a nail are both fasteners, but they have very different means of going about the task of fastening. For that reason, although their spheres of use overlap, there are some things for which one is superior to the other. Screws are superior in grip strength (they hold better), while nails are superior in sheer strength (they are less likely to snap). You can, of course, hammer a screw into a piece of wood, but you
3. Augustine, Confessions, bk. 10, ch. 33. FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 69
will lose a significant portion of the grip strength that is the peculiar excellence of the screw. Likewise, if it should turn out to be true that all is not really number, then to treat all things as number is reductive, and the claim itself will obscure important aspects of reality. How, then, should we test whether all things are in fact number? Because number has been so well ensconced for so long, we must first respond to the claim that all other things reduce to number. “It’s all very well to want to make something other than number fundamental,” an objector might say, “but sound just is number, so unless you can prove that it isn’t, you’re really only daydreaming.” I am afraid I cannot prove that sound is not only number. However, it is worth pointing out that no one has proved that sound is number, either; they have only asserted it. The numerical description of the sound wave is evidence offered in support of the claim that sound is number, not a proof or even an argument that it is. So, in the spirit of equal access to argumentative modes, I will make a counterclaim: It is not that all things are number, but rather that all things may be described by number. This is as much as to claim that the Pythagorean concept of number is analogical: It is not that numbers are the fundamental reality themselves; rather, they are metaphors that represent that fundamental reality. If this is true, then the reduction of all things to number would rest upon a fundamental category error. The specific nature of that error is that it mistakes epistemology for ontology, or even more specifically, the measure for the being of which it is the measure. In the same way that age is not just a number (only the young think that) but rather expresses an underlying reality that would not be altered if we numbered it differently or did not number it at all, so sound is not number, but is measured by number. Figure is not number, however much it is expressible in terms of number. Number is not primary, but secondary: It is not fundamental reality, but a way of describing and expressing fundamental reality. And so it is clear just what is at stake in the question of whether number belongs to ontology or epistemology: the very nature of the reality we live in. It is worth adding, as a plausibility enhancer for the claim that number is a measure rather than fundamental being, that it is always hard to understand exactly what it is that exists so long as all is thought to be number. Indeed, it seems very hard to speak that way at all with-
out descending into equivocation. For at the very least, since one when applied to a number of objects on the table references no physical thing, but rather an intellectual one (the concept one), and one as the unity that “is” the actual item on the table must either be physical or produce physicality as an emergent property, it hardly seems possible that one describing the number of items on the table and one as the constitutive number making up the item can mean the same thing. To consider an objection: It is a commonly held scientific belief that physical objects are mostly just empty space, so the amount of physical stuff in existence is very small at best or an illusion at worst. What we experience as solidity is not actually a uniformly solid surface but the electrostatic force between the electron clouds of the objects in question. But it will do no good to appeal to this as a grounding for the way number creates physicality, for it should be fairly clear that the reality here is not the number of electrons in the clouds nor the equations that represent the force relations between them but the electrons and the force itself, which have much more in common with our notion of a Lego block than they do with our notion of number. If number is not the common object of the quadrivial arts, what is? Since it is beyond the scope of the current project to consider all the possible alternatives, I will take only one: that which is the salient force in music. So strong is the tradition of number as the common object of the quadrivial arts that those well versed in these matters will immediately have to contend with the objection, arising from within, that it has been well-established that music is about number. For music consists of rhythm, harmony, and pitch. Rhythm is obviously number, harmony is a proportional relationship founded upon number, and even pitch is a certain numerical relationship—namely, the distance between peaks and troughs of a sound wave. Therefore, there is nothing in music that is not number. However, we would do well to remember Ramandu’s rebuke of Eustace in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. When Eustace, speaking to a living star (Ramandu), says that in his world stars are balls of flaming gas, Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”4 According to the claim advanced above, the number of a pitch is not really the pitch itself but simply its mea-
4. C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York: HarperTrophy, 2000), 209. 70 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
sure. Likewise, the proportions of harmony are expressive rather than constitutive of harmony. Music is not composed of number but rather is numerically describable. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental reality that is the object and material of music (as number is the object and material of arithmetic). This must be so, or music would not be about anything, which is absurd. We need a name for it, but the habit of long use will make the term “pitch” unsuitable because we have become accustomed to think of it in terms of number. Anyway, it is the wrong idea. What we are trying to consider is the basic building block of music, that which may be variously modulated to produce pitches, whose various modulations may be layered upon one another to produce chords, and whose starting and stopping may be staggered to produce rhythms. I do not know that we have a proper term for it; therefore, I shall call it the aureme, the most basic meaningful aural phenomenon. For me, at least, it is prima facie as plausible that the fundamental reality of music is an aureme as that it is abstract number. In fact, I probably do not know what one really is any more than the other. But to decide at this stage of the investigation that number rather than the aureme is the object of music would be purely arbitrary. As this is an investigation rather than a proof, I will not attempt a demonstrative syllogism in favor of the aureme; rather, let me point out that I think we have arrived at a real possibility for an alternative object of the quadrivial art of music. What does the aureme’s claim to being the common object of the quadrivial arts look like? Well, Pythagoras is said to have had either a mystical experience or, at least, an arresting epiphany hearing the sound of the blacksmiths’ hammers striking the anvils. Of course, he understood it in terms of number because he was a devoté of number; but how would Bach or Mozart have understood it? Might they not have seen in the monochord not that number is the basis of music, but that the aureme is the basis of number? Number is but the schematization of the fundamental phonic reality. Arithmetic, therefore, is a discourse that abstracts from the actual sounds and reflects them in numerical symbols, thereby allowing us to understand a different mode of the way the aureme fundamentally is all things. Geometry might thus appear as but a visual analogy to the fundamental resonance of the aureme,
tracing the shape of sound rather than ratios. Astronomy might then be the dance set in motion by the reverberations of the modulations and layers of the aureme: In this way, premodern cosmology would be more deeply true than we have allowed it to be for many centuries. The music of the spheres would now be about music, not math. Rather than resting on a bed of number, the universe would rest on a bed of song, and arithmetic itself might be best described as the measuring of musical periods. Where now we speak of continuous and discrete quantity, we might instead speak of melody and caesura. To some, it might seem that there is a certain loss of rigor. But this is shortsighted. In reality, a great deal of work has been opened to us: Now we will have to redo all of our work in arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, describing their characteristic discussions in terms not of discrete, continuous, or mobile numbers but rather articulation and tempo, ornamentation and cadence, and (because music is not primarily or only classical music) improvisation. There is enough material here for an intellectual quadrivial tradition at least as rich as the one number has produced. I will add that for me, a universe built on the aureme rather than number more easily explains the inclusion of freedom, particularly of free will. The number universe is constantly haunted by the shadow of determinism. Perhaps this is simply the human desire, innate in us since Eden, to abrogate responsibility; but perhaps it is because a number-based description of reality inherently tends towards the closedness of a formulaic expression. The dominance of number and its ineluctable calculations has left a lasting and definitive mark on all the STEM disciplines and has led to difficulty making sense of certain disciplines in the humanities, such as the fine arts. This (I hope) sounds very exciting, but we must be careful. We must not repeat the error of the past. For while this view may have the advantage of being more poetic, might not the mathematician argue that something urgent is lost in this reduction to the aureme just as I feel that something urgent is lost when all is reduced to number? Number may not be the common object of the quadrivial arts, but if we choose the aureme as the common object instead, we will have to do what I said at the outset that I was not trying to do: repudiate number in order to enshrine FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 71
the aureme. Rather, it is time to reconsider the claim proper logics and affect the world differently. But they that there is one object of the quadrivial arts. are nevertheless inseparable. A similar solution can be applied here. For the II. The Objects of the Quadrivial Arts sake of ease, let us say that the object of arithmetic is Why did we arrive at the conclusion that there was a number, that of geometry is figure, that of music is the common object? Why is this desirable? Probably be- aureme, and that of astronomy is celestial mechanics. cause we have an intuition that there is a certain unity For the supposition to work, we must doggedly reamong the quadrivial arts. According to the common sist any urge to reduce any one of these to the others. object account, then, the quadrivial arts are related to (They may be so reduced, of course, but to do so would one another by a sort of internal relation: They are dif- be to refuse to think through the supposition before fering modes of gazing upon the same thing. Although us.) Even if it is true that number is not figure nor figthis intuition arose historically from conceiving the ure the aureme, nevertheless number has an essential quadrivial arts according to number, it does not fol- relationship to both figure and the aureme, and numlow from the decentering of number that our intuition ber conceived apart from those relationships is either of unity is false. For even if number is not the object not conceived well or not conceived fully. The same of the quadrivial arts, it is expressive of that object or will of course hold for figure, the aureme, and celestial objects, and so we yet have reasons to believe in uni- mechanics. But if this is so, then the quadrivial arts ty. I take this desideratum very seriously, and so this need one another and complete one another, as each account will not entertain the notion that there is no delivers something meaningful and necessary to the connection among the quadrivial arts. The task then others that it could not deliver by itself. becomes how one might secure such a unity apart This is why we must resist every reduction: because from a singularity of object. it will exclude true things about reality and truncate To account for this, I will turn to the philosoph- our reflection. But why is such a reduction possible? ical notion of simplicity. In one sense, to be simple Because this reduction is grounded on the reality of is to not be composed of parts. But in a more robust the mutual coinherence of the objects. The aureme is sense, to be simple is to be such that divisions within not number, but number and the aureme are related. It the substance do not isolate segments of the substance is possible to mistake the aureme for number because from itself and are not themselves separated from one the aureme has a special and mutually conditioning reanother. So, for example, in the case of a simple God lationship with number. Therefore, it would be equally who is both just and merciful, His justice and mercy, possible to convert all the quadrivial objects to figure though notionally distinct, are not really two differ- (if indeed that be the object of geometry), the aureme, ent things. As a result, we are challenged to rethink and the object of astronomy. Indeed, given that numboth: A justice that is not also merciful is not divine ber has dominated the Quadrivium for so long, it may (and therefore is not really justice at all); likewise, a be that a series of projects that rethink the entire Quamercy that is not just is not divine. And yet justice is drivium from the perspective of the other quadrivial not mercy; the point is not to collapse their definitions objects will be required to restore balance. but to show that they are realities essentially and eterThis is not the goal, however. The goal is a multi-obnally held in a necessary relationship with each other. ject Quadrivium where each informs and enriches the All of God’s attributes are suspended in the perfection others. For if it turns out to be true that there is not of divinity and can only be rightly seen in their rela- one common object to the quadrivial arts and yet that tionships to all the others. We make the same move each art can be profitably and importantly described in with the transcendental properties of being: The True, terms of the objects of all the others, then as a culture the Good, and the Beautiful are bound in the meta- we have only been working on one quarter of the Quatranscendental of the One. This is often interpreted drivium project: the quarter that describes all the arts to imply simplicity, such that anything, to the extent in terms of the object of arithmetic. Three quarters of that it is true, is also good and beautiful, and so on, the richness of quadrivial reflection still lies below the mutatis mutandis. This does not mean that the Good surface, unexamined. Or rather, it will be more than is the True or the Beautiful; they each have their own three quarters; for once we have rigorously rethought the Quadrivium in light of the objects of the three 72 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
remaining quadrivial arts, there remains the work of source of great insight, the primary way to encounter synthesis, the discussion of just what is this thing that music is through performance. is not reducible to any one of its constituent arts. But more important than the fact that the performer deals more immediately with music than the III. Ramifications theorist is the fact that the discipline of music has just We have seen how rich it is to see the whole cosmos crossed effortlessly from STEM to the humanities. In from the perspective of number, how it has generated fact, I would not even say it has crossed, for the fact creative thought and progress in music and astrono- that number-based analysis of the Quadrivium is not my. We can expect a similar richness to flow back into to be thrown out means that music does not cease to arithmetic when we restore the proper objects of the be a STEM field, even while it is now also freed to be a other arts. Geometry, music, and astronomy, con- humanities one. ceived rigorously according to their proper objects, This is the revolution in the understanding of all will provide analogies that are more than metaphors to the arts that is so desperately needed: The division bethe other arts. These analogies will guide new research tween STEM and humanities was always merely proand discovery and open new paths of contemplation cedural, and it has run its course. Let us name what of the beauty of the cosmos. the distinction really is so that we may at last recognize This, in turn, has curricular and disciplinary ram- what we are really dealing with: The STEM disciplines ifications. Consider how this can impact one of the represent objectivity and the humanities subjectivity. more stubborn firewalls in our curricular imagina- And so, as long as we are enslaved to a scientism that tions: the divide between STEM and the humanities. demands that everything be objective in order to be Take the case of music: As a quadrivial art classically knowledge (formalized in all institutions of higher understood to be about number, the person with the education by Max Weber’s landmark lecture in 1917, ideal disposition to be a musician (in the sense of one “Science as Vocation”), we will gravitate to STEM as who studies the truths of music) is the mathematician. what shows us the way the world really is and releMusic is about frequencies, ratios, and proportions gate the humanities to the realm of wishful thinking and so is, as a mathematical discipline, a STEM disci- or mere opinion. But the notion that only the objecpline. But as a fine art, music requires attention to none tive is knowledge is a contradiction in terms: Because of those things. The ideal disposition for the musician knowledge is a mental state that must belong to some (in the sense of one who performs music) is a well-de- particular mind, it is inherently subjective. veloped affect, a sort of promptness to being moved In music we see that the objective (classically quaand an intuition of meaning where others would not drivial) elements, described by music theory, are the see it—in other words, a poet, or at least someone with vehicle through which the subjective is encapsulated, a poetic soul. As a discipline concerned with meaning, transmitted, and approached. The listener may lack music as a fine art is a humanities discipline. the means to describe the objective elements but is Which of these two accounts is right? That is the never unaware of them; otherwise, listening would not wrong question. That is a question born of the belief be happening, because nothing is being heard. And yet that the quadrivial arts have one object. In reality, both music that does not go on from the objective elements are right; nevertheless, they are not equal. Music is to affect us in some way is not really being listened to fruitfully described in terms of number, and therefore, either; it is only being heard. It is background buzz, the mathematical analysis of music is proper and valu- aural clutter. Listening requires the subjective and the able. But this is only an analogical description. Music objective together. is properly understood with reference to its own obSo does encountering the world. The world is alject, sound, and so the one who approaches with the ways encountered objectively, but that objective ensoul of a poet (for poets are those with ears to hear counter is always subjectively appropriated.5 This does what the Spirit says) is not only rightly disposed, but not render it relative; that would be to deny the conbetter disposed to engage with music on its own terms. tinuance of the objective component. But it does renThus, for every music theorist there are a thousand der it fuzzy enough to allow for error and difference of performers because though theory is fascinating and a opinion. 5. See Junius Johnson, The Father of Lights: A Theology of Beauty (Baker, 2020), 4–8, 62–67. FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 73
Study that embraces STEM without the humanities is unable to account for meaning; it has to stop at the level of mere fact. Study that embraces the humanities apart from STEM is detached from reality; forgetting that all meaning is the meaning of something, it treats meanings as the things themselves and so drifts further and further from reality, losing meaning by losing that which possesses the meaning.6 In contrast, genuine human knowledge is the fusion and interpenetration of the objective and subjective, of the dispositions of STEM and the humanities. Music can show us the way. The liberal art of music, I propose, is neither solely the classical quadrivial art nor the contemporary fine art of performance; rather, it is the union of the two; but performance is primary. This is the project I would set for the other liberal arts as well: So long as we allow arithmetic to be merely about number, we will never see the full range of its beauty. It will remain STEM alone, and its humane side will not be seen. And we will continue to bifurcate the cosmos into false dualities, which is ever the fate of those who succumb to reduction. The fundamental proposition that unlocks the path forward is this: There is no common object of the quadrivial arts; but there is the union of simplicity among their objects. From this starting point we will find our feet on solid ground and our minds prepared to leap into the space of a radically expanded Quadrivium. Junius Johnson is a writer, teacher, speaker, indepen-
dent scholar, and musician. His work focuses on beauty, imagination, and wonder and how these are at play in the Christian and classical intellectual traditions. He is the executive director of Junius Johnson Academics, a professional French horn player, and the author of five books, including The Father of Lights: A Theology of Beauty and On Teaching Fairy Stories.
6. The progress of literary theory in the twentieth century is a good example of this phenomenon. 74 | WINTER 2026 / FORMA
earn like a Medieval Thinking in the Middle place of ordered unity, where each thing Ages was animated by one was best understood in relation to other assumption above all: that things, and ultimately to God. God is the Alpha and Omega It is this same unitary vision of of all existence. Because Creation and this same conviction that all everything came from God, knowledge leads the willing mind back to everything bore the stamp of God that animates the work of Junius God; even more, everything Johnson Academics. We teach Latin, was, as it were, a kind of philosophy, history, and literature as vestige of God (vestigium means trails that lead us back to God; and we something an animal leaves behind by teach theology as the consummation of which it can be tracked). Because human knowing, that in which all other everything was destined for God, there was knowing comes to rest, and which gives a common striving in all things, a longing meaning to all other knowledge. If you to be what the Creator wished it to be and want to deepen your erudition while to find rest in Him. Together, these two inflaming your heart with pious love, this is the place for you. commitments revealed the world to be a
Because here, as in the Middle Ages, wonder meets rigor.
academics.juniusjohnson.com Offering online courses, consulting, coaching, and professional development FORMA / WINTER 2026 | 75
POETRY by Osip Mandelstam, trans. by Ben Rozonoyer
Osip Mandelstam (4 January 1891 – 27 December 1938) was a Russian and early Soviet poet, a foremost member of the Acmeist school of poetry, which fractured away from the vagueness of symbolism and emphasized clarity and direct expression through images. His earliest collection, The Stone (the source of the poems below), conveys his perception of imminence, fragility, and tragic foreknowledge. While Mandelstam enjoyed literary success in the early Soviet Union, in 1933 he wrote the fateful (anti-Stalin) “Stalin Epigram.” Boris Pasternak described it as a de facto act of suicide. It led to Mandelstam’s swift arrest. Intercessions by friends saved him from execution, and he was sentenced to exile from Moscow to Voronezh, where he composed the Voronezh Notebooks. Soon after the conclusion of his exile, in 1938, he was arrested a second time outside Moscow (discreetly so as not to trigger another intercessory campaign) and sentenced to five years in labor camps. He died in a transit camp in the Far East of typhoid fever and exhaustion at 47. He was buried in a mass grave. Ben Rozonoyer strives to make his translations as faithful as possible without sacrificing the music of the original rhyme and meter. While these two constraints are seldom satisfiable simultaneously, he grasps at the rare cases when they are and delights in sharing them with an English readership. His own book of poems is The Beaver Pond.
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MANDELSTAM'S EARLY POEMS (from The Stone)
3. * * * The noise, particular and mute Of fruit that’s broken off a tree-limb, Amid interminable trilling Of the deep silence of the wood... ~1908 43. * * * Of Thy form, tormenting and unsteady, I could not catch hold within the fog. “Lord!” I uttered accidentally, Not myself intending to say so. God’s name, like a large bird unfurling, From out of my breast took flight. Ahead of me — dense fog is curling, And an empty cage is left behind... ~1911 35. * * * O sky, o sky, you’ll come to haunt me later! It cannot be you’ve fully lost your seeing And day burned up like one white sheet of paper: A bit of vapor and a bit of cinder! ~1911 106. * * * Insomnia. Homer. Sails stretched out taut. The catalogue of ships I have read through halfway — This drawn-out covey, this long retinue of cranes, Which formerly o’er Hellas soared aloft. As if a sedge of cranes to foreign lands,— Upon the brows of kings has gathered foam from heaven,— Where are you sailing? Were it not for Helen, What would Troy mean to you alone, Achaean men? The sea and Homer both — it’s love that moves them forward. Whom should I listen to? But Homer has gone mute, While stirring craftily, the black sea starts to spew, And with deep rumbling encroaches on my headboard. ~1915
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