A Musical Education: A Wonderful Foundation

by Timothy Knotts

More than six in ten adults said they are dissatisfied with the quality of education that students in the U.S. receive, and the approval numbers have done anything but improve in recent years.1 And this is not a new issue: for most of the last 20 years, this Gallup poll has shown more people dissatisfied than not. 2 Many solutions have been proposed for the current crisis in education in America. Some pundits claim that media literacy is fundamental in the internet age. Industrialists and economists put their eggs in the STEM basket, presupposing that the job market is the ultimate consumer of the educational goods. Mem- bers of former generations propose going back to a strict focus on the 3 Rs and a return to “simpler times”.

1 Reid Wilson, “Majority believes public schools on wrong track: poll,” The Hill, last modified March 3, 2022, https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/599272-majority-believes-public-schools-on-wrong-trackpoll.

2 “Satisfaction With K-12 Education,” Gallup, accessed March 20, 2022, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx#:~:text=46%25%20of%20U.S.%20adults%20say,survey%20conducted%20 in%20August%202021.

It is true that media literacy, STEM, and the 3 Rs are all laudable and even desirable outcomes for students. Certainly, the latter is a prime requisite to enter into the wider world of communication through books, articles, and even the internet. Nonetheless, not one of these solutions addresses the true needs of the student or society’s real needs in educational outcomes.

David Hicks argues that, “The supreme task of education is the cultivation of the human spirit to teach the young to know what is good, to serve it above self, and to reproduce it.”3 The formation of the soul was likewise the aim of the ancient Greeks. Twenty-four hundred centuries before Hicks, Plato stated that true education gives the student “true taste” that causes him to rejoice over the good and hate the bad.4

To that end, elsewhere Socrates says, “Shall we begin with the acknowledgement that education is first given through Apollo and the Muses?”5 Associating students with the arts engendered by the Muses prepares the student for the use of reason because then the student would know good without having to analyze why it is good, and then

3 David Hicks, Norms & Nobility (New York: University Press of America, 1999), 1.

4 Plato, The Republic , Book 3.

5 Plato, The Laws of Plato , trans. Thomas L. Pangle (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 654A.

“when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.”6

The nine Muses, born of the union between Zeus, father of the Olympian gods, and a titan were goddesses in their own right. Each had a sphere of influence, much as the gods of Olympus each ruled over aspects of the world or human endeavors. The great cataloger of Greek Myth, Hesiod, attributed his knowledge of the past to the Muses, in form of song,7 and the ancient epic poets call upon the muses for inspiration. 8

The muses and each individual area of influence were Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry), Euterpe (music), Melpomene (tragedy), Polymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy) and Urania (astronomy). Notice that there was no Muse of logic or arithmetic. The liberal arts are not under the sphere of the Muses. Instead, the Muses inspired observation, contemplation, and recollection. Though each has a place in education, the focus of this conversation will be in story, which combines several of the Muses’ areas of influence, music, and dance. Though much more could be said, these three areas will suffice as an introduction to a Musical education.

Two classical teachers in the modern era describe the classical approach to the education of younger children this way:

6 Plato, Republic .

7 Hesiod, Theogony , trans. Richard S. Caldwell (Cambridge, Ma: Focus Information Group, 1987), 31-33.

8 Virgil, The Aeneid , trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 1.11.

It studied all the subjects inspired by the Muses (from epic poetry to astronomy) in a pre-critical manner . . . They taught passions more than skills and content. They sowed the seeds which would grow into a lifelong love of learning.9

As classical educators, the ultimate goal is the raising up of a generation of adults who love what is lovely, desire what is beautiful, and do what is good. Allowing the Muses to do their work beginning at a young age sets students on the course towards right judgments and affections before they reach the middle years of uncertainty and confusion when all maxims are automatically challenged or rejected.

Memory and Education

Before exploring the role of the Muses in education, it must be acknowledged that both childhood education and the Muses themselves have a relationship to memory. The titan upon whom Zeus begot the Muses was Mnemosyne, the immortal associated with memory.10 In fact, her name is the Greek word for memory. But to the Greeks, memory goes far beyond just remembering details of our own past or what a textbook said. Plato records Socrates as calling

9 Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (Camp Hill: Classical Academic Press, 2021), 7.

10 Hesiod, Theogony , 915-7: “And again, he [Zeus] made love to Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair, from whom the gold-crowned Muses were born nine of them, who delight in festivals and the pleasures of song.” the ability to take in sensory impressions and later recall them the “very gift of Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses.”11 And to Socrates, the memories impressed on the soul are the means by which we apprehend all true searching and learning.12

Pindar, the great poet of Thebes, attributes to Mnemosyne and her daughters the ability to pursue wisdom: “And I pray to the well-robed daughter of Ouranos, Mnemosyne, and her daughters, to give resourcefulness, for blind are the minds of men, whoever without the Heliconians seeks . . . the steep path of wisdom.”13 Pointing students to the path of the Muses and memory sets their feet on the path to maturity and discernment.

In our culture, we value novelty over memory. As C. S. Lewis points out in his book on the medieval period, the emphasis on originality is a thoroughly modern affectation.14 Students should be encouraged to linger over their memories, and then reinforce them with repeated exposure to the same stories:

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the ‘surprise’ of discovering that what seemed Little-Red-Riding-Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia . 15

11 Plato, Theaetetus , trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 191c-e.

12 Plato, Meno , trans. George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns (Newburyport, MA: Focus Pub./R. Pullins Co, 2004), 81c-d.

13 Pindar, Pythian Odes , ed. William H. Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), Paean 7b15-20.

14 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 210.

Whether or not the Muses are acknowledged as the root of learning, there are clear pragmatic reasons that we emphasize memory with our students beginning at a young age. One modern commentator points out that, “Even as recently as half a century ago, schoolchildren as young as eight would be expected to memorize as many as 40 lines of poetry.”16 The author goes on to state, without support but probably factually true, “Many academics now agree that forced rote memorization is a useless learning technique—that something memorized does not mean it is necessarily absorbed or understood.” Yet, other academics have recognized that, “there is tight correlation between IQ and working memory and with problem-solving ability.”17 This was a concern of Plato’s as well, when he was discussing the invention of writing. As one of his Socratic interlocutors was lauding the new skill of writing as “an elixir of memory and wisdom”, another wisely points out “this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.”18 Anyone who has lived through the advent of the digital age will be forced to acknowledge that American adults have far less information stored in their heads now that it is readily at their fingertips.

15 C. S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature , ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

16 Jeva Lange, “The lost art of memorization,” The Week, last modified January 31, 2019, https://theweek.com/articles/820197/lost-art-memorization.

The neglect of memory by modern educators has far reaching effects as students are both unwilling and unable to recall important facts upon which to draw judgments and conclusions. One author, Dr. Jim Taylor, points out that our distracted culture is not just robbing us of our ability to pay attention, but is doing more long-term damage:

“Without the ability to pay attention to something, kids are not going to be able to process [information]. They’re not going to be able to consolidate it into memory, which means they’re not going to be able to interpret, analyse, synthesise, critique and come to some decision about the information.”19

17 William Klemm, “What Good Is Learning If You Don’t Remember It?” The Journal of Effective Teaching 7, no. 1, 2007, https://files.eric.ed.gov/ fulltext/EJ1055665.pdf.

18 Plato, Phaedrus , trans. Harold Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), 274e-275a.

19 Nicholas Mancall-Bitel, “How can a distracted generation learn anything?” BBC, last modified February 20, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/ worklife/article/20190220-how-can-a-distracted-generation-learn-anything.

The inability to remember takes away the ability we have to make connections between facts and observations. Instead of aiding us in growing in wisdom and understanding, the instant access of the internet search betrays us and weakens our ability to use the information we do have. Without an internal catalog of information, there is nothing for the Muses to work with to inspire a great poem or beautiful melody. The intellectual cupboard is bare. But all is not lost. What has been neglected as a society in search of “bigger, better, faster” can be regained with some effort. Scientists have confirmed what was already known: that by practicing memorizing students get better at it. 20 Ironically, the recent fad of “brain training,” as it is often called, is the very thing decried by the so-called “experts” who claim that there is no place for memorizing the Gettysburg Address or the names of the states and capitals, yet it is being advanced as a means of allaying or delaying dementia. 21

And so, the facility and capacity of memory are important areas for the educator to emphasize. By furnishing the mind with both ample material and plenty of room to grow, the student is set on a course whereby they begin to make connections between the items stored in the memory. The words and ideas they encounter stick, and the vocabulary of the student, both the external communicative sort and the internal stock of ideas being named by the words that could be used, prepare the student to be a thinker and communicator: a useful receptor of the influence of the Muses.

20 “Attention & memory in childhood,” Centre for Attention, Learning and Memory, accessed March 20, 2022, http://calm.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/ brain-development/.

21 “Researchers identify first brain training exercise positively linked to dementia prevention,” Indiana University School of Medicine, accessed March 19, 2022, https://medicine.iu.edu/news/2017/11/brain-exercise-dementia-prevention.

Stories, Poetry, and History

Albert Einstein once said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” The Muses inspire students to imagination and to inquire beyond themselves. Students, when they are young, are not engaged with stories about their mundane life circumstances. And rarely are life lessons very clear in stories that merely echo their hum-drum daily experience.

As teachers seek to elevate not just the intellect but the character of their students, stories of good and evil, right and wrong, courage and cowardice are necessary to build up that stock of ideas in the students’ memories. A plentiful store of incarnations and types will make good and evil familiar when they later encounter stories in less clear-cut settings or even in real life where wolves often wear sheep’s clothing.

This idea of right and wrong is a fundamental question heard echoing from every venue of children’s play as one calls out “It’s not fair” concerning the conduct of another. Stories that show fairness as desirable and often unobtained for the worthy build into children appreciation for righteous suffering. Tolkien stated that the question of character was much more important to his young readers than truthfulness:

“Far more often [than asking the question ‘Is it true?’] they have asked me: ‘Was he good? Was he wicked?’ That is, they were far more concerned to get the Right side and the Wrong side clear. For that is a question equally important in History and in Faerie.”22

Dennis Quinn authored an excellent article about this stage of education and put it well when he said, “What excites the passion of wonder is the confrontation of mystery, the dominant domain of the Muses. Mystery is in the very root of their name, the Greek mu. The same syllable occurs in the Greek mythos, which means ‘story’ . . . It is deplorable that college students cannot write and read and work mathematics and speak well; but it is worse when they are blind and deaf, insensible to the ‘world so wide.’” 23 Dickens gives us an illustration of this wonder-free education in the school of Thomas Gradgrind: “Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” 24

22 J. R. R. Tolkien “On Fairy-stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays , ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 109-61.

23 Dennis Quinn, “The Muses as Pedagogues of the Liberal Arts” accessed on March 18, 2022, https://www.angelicum.net/classical-homeschooling-magazine/second-issue/the-muses-as-pedagogues-of-the-liberalarts-by-dennis-quinn/.

24 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004).

“Nothing but facts” is the twisted and misused form of education that caused modern educators to turn their backs on memorization as a valuable skill. Memorizing for no other gain than to gather facts is indeed an evil aim and stunts the growth of wonder in children, who need it desperately in this life. Now it is the STEM advocate who wants nothing to do with wonder, only more facts about science and computer code.

One modern psychologist opined, “It hardly requires emphasis at this moment in our history that children need a moral education . . . [that teaches] not through abstract ethical concepts, but through that which seems tangibly right and therefore meaningful . . . the child finds this kind of meaning through fairy tales.” 25

Observing the utter dearth of understanding of the mythos of culture in his students, James Taylor designed a program to address the lack and educate his college students. He said, “. . . there can be no real advancement in knowledge unless it first begin in leisure and wonder, where the controlling motive throughout remains delight and love.” 26 The students enrolled in Taylor’s program were unable to remember, whether they had been previously exposed to it, the necessary foundation of stories and experiences to make meaningful further instruction. The remedial work focused on the recovery of knowledge that should have been already possessed, the knowledge present in every person, rather than the acquisition of new facts: “[I]t is . . . knowledge from the inside out, radically different in this regard from a knowledge about things.” 27 Stories reveal truths, not just about the story and its meanings, but about the reader.

25 Bruno Bettelheim, “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales” ( New York Times , May 23, 1976), 1.

26 James Taylor, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 153.

The stories of the ancient heroes of Greece were the basis for Greek culture and were repeated over and over again to children not just to teach them theology, but to show them what it meant to be Greek. The word for this child training was ‘paideia’ which was the process aimed at cultivating virtue, or excellence, which summed up in the word ‘arete’. “Greek paideia and Greek philosophical theology were the two principal forms in which Greek thought influenced the world in those centuries when Greek art and Greek science lay sleeping. Both were originally united in Homer, as human arete and the ideal of godhead.” 28 Beyond the mythic and character-driven interest of narrative, stories connect us to, and perhaps even create, culture. For the ancient Greeks, the fountainhead of Greek culture was found in Homer. For the Jews, God told them (through Moses), “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up . . . In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” Tell him: ‘We were slaves of 27 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge

28 Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture , trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 261.

Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.’” 29 For the Babylonians, it was the Epic of Gilgamesh. For the Romans it was Virgil.

No matter where one is from, these origin stories, these myths of the heroes of the land, these tales of self-sacrifice for the good of others are what bind people together. Stories like that of Lewis and Clark, or Washington’s refusal to lie about the cherry tree, or the heroic Minute Men standing up against a superior force shape and form our corporate national identity. The stories, poems, and histories weave together a cloth of culture that teaches children what is good, what is honest, what is upright in the context of our culture. Educating children without these kinds of stories sows the seeds of disintegration of the society as it looses the ties that bind the members of the culture together in a common vision of what society should be.

Music

If stories are powerful unto the mind, music speaks in a unique way to the heart and soul. Before a mother begins to instruct her child, she sings to it and rocks it in her arms, binding hearts together even without words. Even at the subconscious level, music can impact our stress levels while sedated. 30 This sort of passive listening speaks to the direct sort of communication that music has with the soul, to soothe or excite it depending on its nature. Plato understood the power of music when he discussed it in his great dialog, The Republic, saying “because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way into the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it.” 31 Beyond its undisputed ability to sway the emotions, there is also a relationship between music and the memory. Music and memory are intricately linked. Though perhaps with some degree of embarrassment, upon request every young (or even more mature) adult can sing the complete theme song to a favorite serial television show that was popular in his or her youth. A 2013 study in the journal Memory & Cognition showed that listening to phrases set to music amplified the mind’s ability to recall phrases later. 32

29 Charles Caldwell Ryrie, Ryrie Study Bible: New American Standard Bible, 1995 Update (Chicago: Moody Press, 1995).

30 “Effects of Music Listening on Cortisol Levels and Propofol Consumption during Spinal Anesthesia,” Front Psychol, 2011, 2:58.

Like pure memory practice, learning music during early life makes the brain more connected, which bears fruit in other areas of making connections. What another recent study found was that musical brains produce more structural and functional connections when compared to those who don’t learn music, and that the earlier the musicians had started with musical practice the stronger these connectivities. 33 This practice sets up the young person for success when presented with more complicated chains of causation and circumstance the future study of history, chemistry, or mathematics.

31 Plato, Republic .

32 “The power of music: how it can benefit health,” Medical News Today, accessed March 12, 2022, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/302903#Music-and-memory.

33 Geoffrey James, “Want Smarter Kids? Teach Music, Not Coding, According to MIT,” Inc.com, accessed March 19, 2022, https://www.inc. com/geoffrey-james/want-smarter-kids-teach-music-not-coding-accordingto-mit.html.

In the second century AD, the Greek historian Pausanias reported that the sons of Aloeus held that the Muses were three in number, not nine, and they gave them the names Melete (Practice), Mneme (Memory), and Aoide (Song). 34 The connection between memory, practice, and song is a powerful one. Repetition is the act that embeds information into our memory, and rarely does that come without hard work except by the empowering of song that somehow secures the words and ideas in a nearly indelible manner.

Though helpful to aid memory, music itself has other impacts on the brain. The study of music varied in its effectiveness based on what music was studied and how. Abstract ideas behind the music bring the brain more stimulus. Longer pieces or music that take time to resolve discord and have more variation in working with musical rules leads to greater pleasure in the brain. 35 The delayed outcomes in the music help students to expect and endure longer delay in gratification, resulting in a heightened mo - tivation for completion. 36 In a similar study, it was shown that following the flow of complex but ordered musical forms develops the predictive functions of the brain, and that the breaks between musical sections allows the brain the rest it needs to process, catalog, and store the information received during active listening to the music. 37 This enhanced ability to hold tension for longer by being exposed to this complex music allows the brain to make more connections while holding in dialectic multiple seemingly-contradictory ideas. By training up children to manage these tensions, we expand their capacity to engage successfully in dialectic when they enter into that study later in their education because the engagement with a dialectic requires holding onto contrary ideas while exploring them both and not demanding an immediate resolution. Music is an important part of the education of young people. Not only does it have capacity for enhancing good or evil impulses, it serves to cement information in the memory and train our spirits to endure discord. Neglecting the training of students with music may leave them open to continuing in their base desires, and poor taste in music opens them to the inhumane content that frequently accompanies such music. As the failure to teach children to eat healthfully yields a weak and sickly body, serving musical junk food leads to a spirit that fails to thrive.

34 Pausanias, Description of Greece , trans. W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod, (London: W. Heinemann, 1918), 9.29.2.

35 Valorie Salimpoor, “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music,” Nature Neuroscience, accessed March 18, 2022, https://www.nature.com/articles/ nn.2726.epdf?sharing_token=AsBHZGVWJXWxYZZ5xgkkE9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NX0PZtqxFT4f2iuroCfbRuG8pFHCeMf74HXf1U7LaW_V0zwYU1_t8E4UW9sf5UjsiLNjg4Rdj_1CV029xubNe8BcYS9cGKoMwdRpjhSD2y1HOomhk7CJcZ_6z11tV3tJeL-Mp3gw9J24heQ39JcNtB&tracking_referrer=qz.com.

36 Valorie Salimpoor, “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music,” Nature Neuroscience, accessed March 18, 2022.

37 Mitzi Baker, “Music moves brain to pay attention, Stanford study finds,” Stanford Medicine, accessed on March 22, 2022, https://med. stanford.edu/news/all-news/2007/07/music-moves-brain-to-pay-attentionstanford-study-finds.html.

An ancient Greek child would be expected to sit and listen to an epic poem sung at great length. Waiting for Achilles to resolve his differences with Agamemnon would take days of listening. Just the middle part of the Odyssey, as Odysseus recounts his journey from Troy to Phaiakia, would take hours to unfold. Training children to attend and engage with long-form stories and songs prepares them to read longer books as they graduate up to the literary arts. Plato required that children study music to “become more balanced, more capable in whatever they say or do, for rhythms and harmonious adjustment are essential to the whole of human life.”38 Training students’ taste in music is an important part of helping them order their souls and making music useful to them in exciting or tempering the appropriate emotions.

Dance

Dance, much like music, is seen as purely social today. Most people, if they think of dance at all, likely think of Dirty Dancing, or some club scene, or perhaps (at best) a Jane Austen courtship moment. Though dancing used to be a thoroughly admirable skill, it has fallen into disrepute amongst the ‘in crowd’ as effeminate or weak.

For the ancients, dance served a number of purposes. While there were some dances that were definitely meant for women or girls, other dance forms were manly and even bellicose. In the Iliad , Hector boasts of his great skill, “I know how to charge into the melee of swift chariots, and how to do song-dance to furious Ares in close battle.”39 In other places, battle is called the “song-dance of dogs.”

Upon Achilles’ shield, as forged by the god Hephaestus, depicting the very culture for which Achilles fought, “The dance of the youths and maidens is distinctive. It is a ritual dance performed with great care, by dancers scrupulously dressed in their best garments. It is made up of a crisp, rapid, circular figure, followed by a movement of two lines in opposition to one another.”40 Celebratory feasts and ritual dancing were important to the local community and to broader Greek culture. There were roles, distinct ones, for both the young men and young women. To the Greeks, dance was inseparable from music. The name of the Muse, Terpsichore, means “delight in the dance”. As expected then, the Greek word for “dance” is broader than our English word. For young men, dance education was much more like the study of Tai Chi. It was a deliberate practice of forms and movements, sometimes even armed, to imitate and ingrain movements common in battle.

“A pyrrhic dance, a form of weapon dance in which the dancers executed movements like those used in

39 Homer, The Iliad , trans. Robert Fagles (1998), 7:241.

40 Ibid., 18:478–608 battle, was part of all Spartan boys’ training, beginning at age 5. Youths wearing helmets and carrying shields and spears practiced these movements and postures to prepare themselves for military service. The pyrrhic was part of a larger ritual that prepared warriors for battle. Originally dedicated to Apollo, it began with hymns of praise for the god and included a magic dance to protect against sickness and death.”41

This physical training done with rhythm and perhaps even set to music connected the strengthening of the body with the strengthening of the soul.

While we have interesting cultural phenomena like jazzercise or cardio dance classes, the strengthening and control that comes with classical dance training has long been recognized. But the easy accessibility and low investment of a few local (or online) classes is attractive, giving the illusion of conveying some of the benefits of ballet training. But without the hours of hard work, focus on precise form, and hardening of the body, the true benefits of the dance training will never be realized. Plato argues that physical training, if left to run its own course without a relationship with the Muses (and particularly music) may go too far. “Yet surely, I said, this ferocity only comes from spirit, which, if rightly educated, would give courage, but, if too much intensified, is liable to become hard and brutal.”42 And yet, without the proper physical training, a man might become too weak. “It must also be given gymnastic in many studies to see whether it will be able to bear the greatest studies, or whether it will turn out to be a coward.”43 These forces must be balanced and tempered to make a young man rise up with strength and moderation.

42 Plato, Republic .

It was not only Socrates who held to this view that the training of the intellect and body must go hand in hand. A generation later, Isocrates of Athens wrote, “Give careful heed to all that concerns your life, but above all train your own intellect; for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body. Strive with your body to be a lover of toil, and with your soul to be a lover of wisdom, in order that with the one you may have the strength to carry out your resolves, and with the other the intelligence to foresee what is for your good.”44

Training the body to move with precision, disciplining the flesh to endure hardship prepares the child to enter into adulthood. When the physical form is subjected to the will, the mind can also be pressed into service when the days of study grow long and hard. Just as the study of music helps the soul to sustain the tension of a long discord, the study of gymnastics, wrestling, and dance strengthen the body to press on through challenging tasks. By this, the gap between spirit and flesh shrinks and some of the inability is lost that is wrapped up in the maxim “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” When the time comes for the student to have to die to self, this training bears its fruit in self control and even self sacrifice.

43 Plato, Republic .

44 Isocrates, Isocrates , vol. 1, trans. George Norlin (New York: G.P. Putnam’s sons, 1928), 29.

Conclusion

Beginning with the premise that an education will “teach the young to know what is good, to serve it above self, and to reproduce it,”45 it should now be apparent how a Muse-inspired early childhood education lays the proper foundation. Truly, a classical early childhood education serves that mission, giving the students the tool of memory, the foundation of stories, the tempering of music, and the strengthening of dance.

Plato’s greatest student, Aristotle, posited that, “someone who is not brought up well in good habits cannot listen intelligently to lectures on political science, or about what is noble and just.”46 Building the habits of bodily strength, experiential knowledge of good and evil, attention and memory prepare a child to step into the role of the student in earnest as they mature.

As children become friends with the Muses they are being readied to engage with the written word and the wide world that it opens to them. More than that, they are prepared to embark on the study of the liberal arts—to see meaning in grammar, connection in dialectic, and persua- siveness in rhetoric. The students who first have a musical education enters into these studies with heads full of knowledge and the self knowledge and self control to surmount the challenges that await them.

45 Hicks, Norms .

46 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics , ed. Lesley Brown, trans. W. D. Ross, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4.1094.

But beyond that, as Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain put it, “Education is not merely an intellectual affair, no matter how intellect-centered it must be, because human beings are not merely minds. As creatures made in God’s image, we are composite beings—unions of soul and body.”47 This musical education, though couched in ancient pagan terms, works in alignment with the way God made us. Moses told stories, Christ told parables, David wrote poems and music to teach that which is good and the way to wisdom. Can we believe that there is a better way than the way mapped out by both the men who founded Western culture and the godly men of the Scriptures?

Timothy Knotts is a reader of books, an apprentice to a master teacher, an amateur poet, and a lover of the beautiful. He is the co-founder of the Classical Learning Consortium for New England and lives with his wife, Cynthia, and his four children in Windsor, Connecticut. Occasionally, he has the opportunity to contribute to the Everyday Educator podcast and the CiRCE Institute blog.

The Awakening of Miss Prim and John Senior:

An Embodiment of the Reclamation of Culture in Early Education

by Tracey Leary

Iread The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera for the second time this summer. The first time I read this novel, I thought it was an enjoyable, Austenesque romance between opposite personalities in an idyllic setting, with a title character who experiences great personal growth and self-recognition. However, upon my second reading, I found myself fascinated with Fenollera’s vision, one that I was able to recognize this time because I also recently read another book: The Death of Christian Culture by John Senior. I realized that Fenollera was attempting to embody Senior’s ideas in a narrative form, and to communicate what it might look like for those ideas to be enfleshed in an actual community. She has said in a recent speech, “His imprint, the imprint of what he believed and taught, runs through my novel.”1 In particular, I found Fenollera’s interpretation of Senior’s ideas on the education of children to be worth closely examining.

John Senior wrote The Death of Christian Culture in 1978, and since then, other writers such as Rod Dreher in The Benedict Option and Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes have addressed the larger cultural issues now coming to fruition which Senior starkly outlined forty year ago and have articulated their own vision of how a community desiring to reclaim a practice more consistent with the beliefs of Christendom in the midst of the rapid paganization of our world might operate. Fenollera addresses many of these issues in her novel as well, and Rod Dreher has even called Miss Prim a novelization of his own book. 2 In addition to this, in Fenollera’s imagined village of San Ireneo, Senior’s philosophy as it concerns the early education of children is for her a theme of prime importance. One of her main characters is the nameless Man in the Wing Chair, who we are told underwent a spiritual awakening after attending a seminar at the University of Kansas, a detail which Fenollera says is a “passing reference to Senior”.3 He is responsible for the raising and instruction of his four nieces and nephews, and Fenollera spends a good portion of the novel in describing how he undertakes this task.

1 Rod Dreher, “Miss Prim at Clear Creek,” American Conservative , August 2017, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/miss-primclear-creek/.

The Awakening of Miss Prim and John Senior:

One of John Senior’s foundational ideas of early education is that the reading of Good Books ought to precede the study of Great Books. He says, “Taking all that was best in the Greco-Roman world into itself, Western tradition has given us the thousand good books as a preparation for the great ones—and for all studies in the arts and sciences. Without them all studies are inhumane.”4 Senior explains that the reason for this is to replenish the cultural soil in order that students in Great Books programs such as the one he himself developed at Kansas may “grow up like an undernourished plant suddenly fertilized and watered”. The Man in the Wing Chair likewise insists that his small charges read Good Books first. He says to Miss Prim, “I’ve carefully chosen not only which books but when and how they become part of my nieces’ and nephews’ existence . . . They’re being brought up with good books so that later they can absorb great books.”5 Senior has included in The Death of Christian Culture an appendix entitled “The Thousand Good Books”, which lists the books that in his opinion are most appropriate for certain ages, and he has categorized them into those for The Nursery (ages 2-7), School Days (ages 7-12), Adolescence (ages 12-16), and Youth (ages 16-20). The Man in the Wing Chair appears to have paid close attention to this list in curating his own for his children, as he says, “It’s no coincidence that they read Lewis

4 John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture (Norfolk, VA: IRS Press, 2008), 181.

5 Natalia S. Fenollera, The Awakening of Miss Prim (New York, NY: Simon and Shuster, 2013), 155.

Carroll before Dickens, and Dickens before Homer.”6 John Senior places Lewis Carroll on the Nursery list, Dickens beginning on the School Days list and extending various of his works through the Adolescence list and to the Youth list, and Homer, who does not appear on any of these Appendix lists, must of course be considered as one of the Great Books to be studied after the Good Books have been absorbed. Ironically, one of the many disagreements between Miss Prim and the Man in the Wing Chair is over whether Little Women ought to have a place in his nieces’ early education. Miss Prim insists that every girl ought to visit “that little corner of Concord” before her education is complete, arguing that the book teaches “beauty, delicacy, security” and that when adult life becomes difficult, “they will always be able to look back and take refuge for a few hours in that familiar sentimental story”.7 It is the sentimentality to which she refers that The Man in the Wing Chair takes issue. He declares that although he hasn’t read it himself, he believes Little Women to be a “prissy, syrupy book” full of “cloying sentimentality”. Their disagreement is in part a matter of the defining of terms, as the Man in the Wing Chair later distinguishes between sentiment and sentimentality, saying, “Sentimentality is a pathology of the mind, or of the emotions, if you like, which swell up, outgrow their proper place, go crazy, obscure judgment.” 8 In this line of 6 argument, The Man in the Wing Chair again follows John Senior, who in decrying the effect of sentimentality in religion quotes Cardinal Newman in saying, “There is in the literary world just now an affectation of calling religion a ‘sentiment’ . . . It is not a religion of persons and things, of acts of faith and of direct devotion; but of sacred scenes and pious sentiments.” Senior believed this sentiment to have become dangerous since “What had been a mere slipshod sentimentality . . . was formulated and defined as the established religion of England and America a century later and called Liberalism. Its theologians and philosophers count among them some of the most famous men and women of letters in the nineteenth century: John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold” and apparently for The Man in the Wing Chair, the Alcotts.9 This inherent Liberalism, however, does not preclude John Senior giving a place to some of these books in his Thousand Great Books list. George Eliot’s works at least can be found on the list for Adolescents. Similarly, the Man in the Wing Chair does finally agree, after reading the book himself, that Little Women has enough merit to give the book a place in the girls’ education, if not the boys. Perhaps he also stole a glance at John Senior’s list and discovered that it does in fact include all of Louisa May Alcott’s works there as well. Another of the main tenets of Senior’s ideas on youth education is the early introduction of Greek and Latin. He believes that “the reforming of education, which must begin with the study of the classics, will be sterile and meaningless without a return to the animating principle of 9 Senior, Death of Christian Culture , 137. our civilization”.10 He decries the removal of Greek and Latin literature from the schools at any level except that of the collegiate specialist and says that without this classical foundation, it is impossible to truly understand any literature, no matter what language. He goes on to say, “We read English in translation because we have lost all reference to anything. Not only outside the words we use by reference to history of other literatures, but even inside the words themselves . . .”11 How should this idea be practically applied? Senior is very specific: “Anyone who cares seriously about education will simply unplug the television set, burn most of his ‘Modern Library,’ learn at least some Latin and a little Greek, read the best vernacular literature . . . The shameful state of culture can be improved as soon as we want to improve it . . .”12 In accordance with this belief, the Man in the Wing Chair begins his instruction of the Classical languages in the earliest years of education. “He is teaching them Greek, Latin, and some Aramaic, the latter more for sentimental than academic reasons . . .”13 Miss Prim’s earliest encounter with the Man in the Wing Chair interrupts a lesson in which he is reading lines of Latin poetry and asking the children to identify the author, which turns out to be Virgil. They can’t quite place the lines from the Fourth Eclogue, but readily respond correctly to the “easier” lines from the Aeneid . Underlying both these em10

The Awakening of Miss Prim and John Senior: phases in the education of the children is the indispensable foundation of Christian faith. Senior unequivocally states, “If God is Christ, and Christ is truth, then truth is a Person to be believed in, not an idea.”14 The Man in the Wing Chair prioritizes above all the instruction of his children in the Christian faith. He and the children attend daily mass at the nearby Benedictine abbey, the presence of which seems to have been his initial draw to San Ireneo. He doesn’t only take the children to be instructed in the faith by the church, however. Miss Prim briefly has this mistaken belief when one of the children, Teseris, tells her that her favorite fairy tale is the Redemption. She is aghast to think that the Man in the Wing Chair “hadn’t succeeded in instilling even the most basic rudiments of the faith that was so important to him . . . How could this be? All those morning walks to the abbey, all that reading of theology, all that ancient liturgy . . . and what had he achieved? Four children convinced that the texts he so loved were just fairy tales.”15 She quickly realizes her error when Teseris goes on to explain, “The Redemption is nothing like a fairy tale, Miss Prim. Fairy tales and ancient legends are like the Redemption. Haven’t you ever noticed?” The Awakening of Miss Prim contains many other examples of the instruction of the children in accordance with Senior’s explicit directions for fertilizing the cultural soil. He states, “The next time my colleague the chemist says his students cannot read and write, I shall say, ‘You teach him Latin and Greek, the Bible, Classical history, something of the medieval world and the history of modern Europe through World War II—and then I’ll teach him to read and write!”16 We are told in the novel that in addition to their study of Greek, Latin, and the tenets of the Christian faith, the children of San Ireneo also stage productions of Antigone, learn medieval staff fighting along with the principles of chivalry that govern such contests, and regularly travel across Europe to see for themselves the great art and architecture of past ages. It is clear that as the children mature, the Man in the Wing Chair intends to extend their education as depicted by Senior in his description of the famous medieval picture which has a schoolboy entering a tower on the ground floor, which contains a book by the Latin grammarian Donatus, and ascending to Aristotle’s Logic, and then Cicero’s Rhetoric, beyond that to the higher stories of the quadrivium, and then even further to the study of philosophy, metaphysics, and finally theology.17 At the end of the novel, we see Miss Prim contemplating a newspaper advertisement placed by the Man in the Wing Chair for a “heterodox teacher for an unorthodox school, able to teach the trivium—Greek and Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic—to children aged six to eleven.”18

14 Senior, Death , 141.

15 Fenollera, Miss Prim , 78.

In the midst of the wealth of learning that occurs in this book, both academic and otherwise, one notable absence is any use of technology. None of the inhabitants of San Ireneo seem to use iPhones, email, or any sort of video content. Of course, all of the characters are either primary

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18 school aged children or adults, without exception. In Fenollera’s imaginary world, almost all of the educational needs of the children can be met by the adults in the community and when a need arises, ads are placed in newspapers in large cities to fill those positions. All correspondence is carried on through traditional mail. This seems to be in accord with Senior’s injunction to “unplug the television set.” Practically speaking, however, as students mature, it becomes less likely that a small community can provide for all of their educational needs. Had Fenollera included older students or young adults in her community, it might have been more difficult to omit all technology from her world, which does appear to be set in the present day. As Senior himself says, “That you cannot turn back the clock is no answer at all to the question of what time it is.”19 One possible criticism of Fenollera’s book is that she does seem to answer the question by trying to turn back the clock. As much as her vision of reverting to a simpler time has great value, we must live in the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. It would be fascinating to see a follow-up to this novel which carries the attempt to answer the question of reclaiming culture through education into the years when it is a little trickier to do so today without incorporating technology, which can be of great value in providing educational opportunities for students who either cannot travel to great teaching or whose resources are limited in the community in which they live, while balancing and preserving the character of the town which she has so beautifully created. In our culturally impoverished day, there are not many teachers who can lead students through those upper levels of the quadrivium and the higher sciences that lie at the top of the medieval tower that Senior pictures, and technology can provide an invaluable resource for students who want to ascend that tower as far as possible. The novel ends ambiguously, but it seems that Miss Prim, who has left San Ireneo, will return to help to further this project. I hope she does, and that we are given the privilege of watching her do it.

Tracey Leary attended Huntingdon College on a piano scholarship and graduated with a B.A. in music and English. She also received her Masters degree in Education at the Auburn campus in Montgomery, AL and has over 10 years of experience teaching in private school, homeschool, and co-op environments. She is currently teaching two Humanities courses and a Jane Austen elective for the 2022-2023 school year at Kepler Education. She and her husband live in Alabama with their three boys.

Reuniting the Trivium and Quadrivium

by Dr. Louis Markos

Within a few days of watching the Chuck Jones animated film version of The Phantom Tollbooth (1969), I had purchased and devoured with delight the Norton Juster novel (1961) on which it was based. In that most madcap of novels, our child hero, Milo, is transported to the divided Kingdom of Wisdom where he must find and rescue two princesses named Rhyme and Reason. Unfortunately, his quest is impeded by a civil war that has been raging between the citizens of Dictionopolis (who value letters above numbers) and Digitopolis (who value numbers above letters).

The idea of there being a feud between letters and numbers made a deep impression on me; however, rather than seek to reconcile the two in my soul, I chose the path of the English professor, leaving all those algebraic and geometric numbers to fall by the wayside. When, some dozen years ago, I began to write and speak for classical Christian schools and conferences, I was challenged to rethink Juster’s call to reunite the domains of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis and so restore Rhyme and Reason to our own divided Kingdom of Wisdom.

The architects of classical education, I quickly learned, advocated a system by which the letters-driven trivium of grammar, logic (or dialectic), and rhetoric was to be followed by the numbers-driven quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Well, that’s how it had been explained to me, but in nearly all the books and speeches I read or heard on the subject, the trivium took center stage and the quadrivium was relegated to the margins. The reason for this soon became clear: most of those books and speeches had been written or delivered by folks like me, letter-lovers who didn’t really know what to do with all those pesky numbers.

And then I came upon The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education by Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain. What makes Clark and Jain’s book unique is that it not only fixes its attention on the quadrivium— what it is and why it is vital—but it positions the trivium in the midst of a coherent educational track that they dub PGMAPT: Piety, Gymnastics, Music, (the seven liberal) Arts (that make up the trivium and quadrivium), Philosophy, and Theology.

Clark (DLS, Georgetown) and Jain (MA, Reformed Theological Seminary) are longtime faculty members at the Geneva School of Orlando, Florida, one of the finest classical Christian schools that I have spoken for. Jain teaches calculus and physics, Clark served as academic dean until 2019, when he founded the Ecclesial School Initiative to help underserved families in Florida receive better access to Christian liberal arts education.

Whereas most educators tend to think of Math in more practical, utilitarian terms than they do English, Clark and Jain demonstrate that “the original role of the Quadrivium [was] to lead the mind to the realm of eternal and unchanging truths.”1 Although this Pythagorean-Platonic understanding was later “displaced by the amazing power of mathematics to describe the physical world” (think Galileo and Newton), Clark and Jain insist that a proper understanding and execution of the quadrivium “ought to strike a balance between wonder, work, wisdom, and worship.”

2 Many classically-minded teachers, myself included, have felt that sense of awe before the Great Works of the intellectual tradition, and it has led us to put in the necessary labor to master that tradition, to extract from it rich nuggets of Truth, and to give praise to the Source of that Truth. Clark and Jain would encourage us to extend that same wonder, work, wisdom, and worship to the world of numbers, partly by reminding us that the list of those who did just that includes philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes. Remember that Plato treated geometry as the second closest discipline to the Forms—philosophy, of course, was first—for it points to universal ratios and not just to this or that particular cube or right triangle.

Throughout their book, Clark and Jain warn their readers against the dangers of nominalism, of the belief that words like Justice and Truth are just names that do not point back to any universals. What makes their warning unique is that they mount it, not in their discussion of the trivium, where I would have expected it, but in their defense of the centrality of the quadrivium to a full liberal arts education. This came as something of a shock to me, for I have, along with other apologists, often used Owen Barfield, Michael Polanyi, and the theories of quantum physics—not to mention the closing chapter of C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image !—to critique the way in which the modern world has cut off nature from man’s perception of it, thus stranding us in a cold, dead universe that has little to do with us.

1 Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (Camp Hill, PA: Classical Academic Press, 2014, 2019), 68.

2 Ibid., 68-69.

The Liberals Arts Tradition has challenged me to open my eyes to the danger of severing not only words but numbers from a real connection to universal truths and patterns. As Clark and Jain explain, most of the scientific advances since Galileo have rested on the belief of these early modern scientists, nearly all of whom were Christians, that the universe runs on fixed laws that operate apart from our perceptions of those operations. “[T]he mathematical realism of Kepler and Galileo is one of the key Christian contributions to the Quadrivium. These Christians, unlike prior generations of Platonists, believed that mathematics really predicted something true in nature. Kepler, Galileo, and Newton believed that their calculations represented how the world truly was. They didn’t think that their work was just intellectual accounting.”3

That this is the case for math, geometry, and, especially, astronomy should be clear to most readers . . . but music? As it turns out, Clark and Jain argue, the seventh liberal art of music “is far more powerful and mysterious than most would guess.”4 That is why, in his Harmonies of the World , Kepler includes “dozens of staves of music to describe the mathematical relationships among the planets. Kepler believed that God, the great artisan, had not just functionality in mind when creating the universe, but beauty as well.”5 Indeed, Clark and Jain make the even stronger claim that “all the heroes of the Scientific Revolution were mathematical and scientific realists . . . [who] believed as a presupposition that a perfect God had woven perfect mathematical harmonies into the world that reflected the truth of reality.”6

The Liberal Arts Tradition is well worth reading merely for its section on the quadrivium, but Clark and Jain give their readers so much more. By carefully sifting through the history of classical education, starting with Plato and Aristotle, they uncover something vital that has often been missing from classical curricula that begin their educational track with the trivium. What the ancients and Medievals knew, but we have forgotten, is that the seven liberal arts must themselves rest on a foundation of piety—which they define as “the duty, love, and respect owed to God, parents, and communal authorities past and present” 7—and gymnastics and music, which two disciplines unite body and soul and cultivate the affections, making them receptive to goodness, truth, and beauty.

4 Ibid., 88.

5 Ibid., 90.

6 Ibid., 96.

If piety, gymnastics, and music, in Clark and Jain’s helpful metaphor, form the roots of the tree of wisdom, then philosophy and theology form its branches. Just as the former three prepare the ground for the liberal arts tree, so the trivium and quadrivium so train the mind as to enable it to press on to the higher pursuits of the latter two. Traditionally, philosophy was divided into three branches, with one each taking up the truths about God, man, and the universe. “The area of philosophy devoted to comprehending the eternal and spiritual truths was called divine philosophy (its synonym was ‘metaphysics’). The branch of philosophy that pursued man as God’s image, both in his being and his relationships, was termed moral philosophy. Finally, the kind of philosophy devoted to exploring causes in the realm of nature, the world of God’s creation, was natural philosophy.” 8

While, in the past, these branches were united, today, sadly, they have been broken up into various specialties, most of which are cut off from any source of divine wisdom. Meanwhile, “the specialized academic discipline that we now call philosophy bears little resemblance to its historical namesake.” 9 But Clark and Jain do not let them- selves give in to despair. They know the possibilities inherent in a return to the full liberal arts tradition and are bold to imagine what such a full return could bring. “What might it look like to once again comprehend in a single vision what modernity has separated into the objective and merely quantitative realm of scientific knowledge and the radically subjective qualitative realm of love, meaning, and value? It is time that the West once again had a vision for the whole of reality, where God, his image, and his creation are the interpenetrating centers.”10

7 Clark and Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition , 15.

8 Ibid., 104-105.

9 Ibid., 105.

As for theology, if she is to regain her position as the queen of the sciences, then she must be honored as the discipline which gives unity to all the others and in which all the others find their consummation and reason for being.

“Theology orders our knowledge to its proper end in the worship and service of the Lord Jesus Christ.”11 Or to put it another way, if we are to recover a true paideia —which Greek word the authors translate as “the transmission of the entirety of the loves, norms, and values of a culture”12 —that begins in wonder and ends in worship, then we must commit ourselves to taking our students through the full PGMAPT curriculum that Clark and Jain lay out in their book. And if we do that, we just might raise up a generation of Milos who can restore Rhyme and Reason to our warring, fragmented education system.

10 Ibid., 106.

11 Ibid. 209.

12 Ibid, 211.

Dr. Louis Markos, Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; his twenty-two books include From Achilles to Christ, The Myth Made Fact, From Plato to Christ, Literature: A Student’s Guide, C. S. Lewis: An Apologist for Education, and three Canon Press Worldview Guides to the Iliad , Odyssey , and Aeneid . His son Alex teaches Latin at the Geneva School in Boerne, TX, and his daughter Anastasia teaches music at Founders Classical Academy in Lewisville, TX.

On Creating Meaningful Art

by Scott Postma

“Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.”1

Tolstoy wrote, “Art is that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” 2 This statement of Tolstoy’s seems like a noble definition of art. It appears to have all the elements for which artists tend to create: human activity, consciousness, external signs, feelings, experience, others. He describes art as a human activity whereby the feelings of one person about a particular experience infects the feelings of other people about that experience. What is more human than experiencing the satisfaction of sharing your most profound feelings about a personal experience in a way that you know there is nothing left to share because it has all been creatively expressed on the canvas, or in the composition? To put it in sports terminology, it is satisfying to the artist because he has left it all on the field, or on the court, or in the ring, or on whatever venue he has played. The artist has in some manner emptied himself of the feelings of that experience for the purpose of infecting others so they too can feel them. Also, what is more human than being on the receiving end of actually experiencing those most profound feelings of another human being— most often from another culture or epoch in history—in all its otherness? For example, who contemplates the early Christian drawing painted on the walls of the catacombs, or the reliefs sculpted on the Column of Trajan, and fails to wonder at the connection to such a people to whom he will never verbally speak or never physically touch? Who views Anton Losenko’s 1773 oil on canvas, Farewell of Hector and Andromache, and is not moved by the profundity of such a simple domestic scene of a noble warrior’s unwitting family soon to be torn, literally to shreds, by the horrors of war? And how does one not experience the stately rapture of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, and not feel as if he is transcending his particular human circumstances for a few moments of incorporeal imperturbation? Alas, who does not carefully read Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn and find himself caught up with the otherness of its existence and finish the poem sure of the urn’s declaration: “Beauty

1 Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99.

2 Leo Tolstoy, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky, What is Art? (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 40.