THE CONSORTIUM A Journal of Classical Christian Education
THE CONSORTIUM A Journal of Classical Christian Education
Promoting classical education and fostering human flourishing for generations to come.
Volume 4, Issue 2
The Consortium: A Journal of Classical Christian Education Volume 4, Issue 2. Copyright © 2025 by Roman Roads Press Published by Roman Roads Press in collaboration with Kepler Education and The Consortium of Classical Educators Moscow, Idaho info@romanroadspress.com | romanroadspress.com Editorial Advisory Board: - Dr. Scott Postma, Editor in Chief - Dr. Robert M. Woods, Senior Contributing Editor - Dr. Gregory Soderberg, Contributing Editor Interior Layout by Carissa Hale All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by the USA copyright law. Licensing and permissions: info@romanroadspress.com ISBN: Version 1.0.0 December 2025
Contents Introduction by Dr. Scott Postma
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The Habit of Reading & the Ancient Art of Tsundoku by Dr. Scott Postma
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Virtuous Read-Alouds A Brief History & Philosophy of Communal Reading by Dr. Sean C. Hadley
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Reading as Inheritance by George Harrell, M.A.
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Mentoring the Mind The Art of Maximizing Memory through Literary Short Forms by Drew Mery, M.A. 43
Grammar Introduction & Chapter Excerpt on Grammar from Christian Paideia by Brian Welter
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Reading in Place The Whole-Person Awareness of Reading by Dr. Karla Memmott
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Book Review Vigen Buroian’s Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination by Sarah Hadley
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Introduction
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n an age dominated by fleeting trends, digital noise, and algorithmic tyranny, it is a peculiar comfort to classical Christian educators that amidst the recovery of liberating pedagogies, many teachers, parents, and students are also rediscovering the value of reading and a love for collecting physical books. Those who typically ascribe to this quiet fellowship are the collectors, the bibliophiles, and the practitioners of the ancient art of tsundoku.1 We hope this issue of The Consortium, with its curated focus on reading and Classical Christian Education, will fan the flames of literary culture and engulf a new generation of readers and collectors of good books. The articles presented in this issue treat various philosophical and practical dynamics of reading and Classical Christian Education. Dr. Hadley’s treatment of communal reading and George Harrell’s conceptualization of reading as an inheritance remind us that reading is not so solitary an endeavor as one might first imagine. Reading is deeply connected to the human experience, both in the present and across time. Drew Mery’s exploration of memory in reading and the excerpt on Grammar from volume one of Brian Welter’s book, Christian Paideia: A History of Christian Education to 500 AD, highlights the pedagogical aspects of reading. It is fundamental to human learning to conceptualize signs and those things which are thereby signified. Dr. Memmott’s personal essay connects reading with our place in the world, highlighting our limita1 積つん読 is a Japanese portmanteau and refers to the act of acquiring books and letting them pile up unread. There is no English equivalent. https://yain. jp/i/%E7%A9%8D%E3%82%93%E8%AA%AD 1
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tions as human beings, and serves as a complementary bookend to the opening essay. Finally, Sarah Hadley’s review of Vigen Gurion’s Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination constitutes an appropriate capstone to this issue calling us to contemplate the essential role stories play in human formation. The introductory essay that follows is my personal invitation to create your own habit of reading, to collect more good books than you’ll be able to read in your lifetime, and to cultivate a spirit of hopefulness and forward-looking faith: confidence that human culture, learning, and access to wisdom remain inexhaustibly rich and fruitful.
Dr. Scott Postma Editor in Chief Winter 2025
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The Habit of Reading & the Ancient Art of Tsundoku by Dr. Scott Postma
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e now live in an age where screens train humans to scan like a machine. For example, the “F scan,” which refers to the F-shaped reading patterns discovered in eye-tracking studies is a key consideration for developers and UI/UX designers today.1 Content designers opt to place the key pieces of information displayed above the fold in a manner consistent with the letter F. Viewers are expected to first scan across the top of the page, then down the left side of the screen, and finally across the middle of the screen, quickly taking in the most salient pieces of data for their particular needs. The scan happens automatically: quickly and often unconsciously. Notwithstanding, the act of reading presupposes that we are not machines. This is one of the reasons why classical educators frequently argue for the use of complete texts in the form of physical books for their students’ education. Where screens train students to scan, the page trains them to commune, to converse, and to contemplate. To lay the groundwork for understanding reading as human formation, consider the three kinds of reading in which
1 The Neilson Norman Group, a global team of UX experts that provide reliable guidance for design and research professionals, discovered this pattern in eye-scanning tests conducted over the past decade. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content-discovered/ 3
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humans typically engage.2 Humans can read for entertainment, for information, and for understanding. Reading for entertainment is the simplest of all reading. While it is true the reader can be entertained when reading for information or understanding, reading strictly for entertainment is its own kind of reward. Of course, there is nothing wrong with reading for pleasure. Reading for pleasure is its own good. First, there is the obvious reward of the pleasure one gets out of reading a good story, but there is also an inherent benefit to reading for sheer pleasure that one does not always recognize, consciously. It provides what J. R. R. Tolkien called “Recovery,” but it also cultivates what philosophers call hermeneutical intuition and forensic perceptual expertise, concepts that will be treated presently. The second kind is reading for information. This is the kind of reading that is immediately understandable, usually something in the category of journalism, like a newspaper or a social media post. When one reads for information, the intellect is not usually challenged, at least not significantly, because the reader is simply acquiring more information that can be added to one’s previous store and used at a later time. Like reading for entertainment, there is a pleasure, too, in reading for new information. Whenever one reads something that seems to be above his comprehension, however, something that must be pondered, reflected on, and wrestled with, the reader grows in understanding. Such reading is not simply amusing oneself or adding to the storehouse of information; instead, the reader is exercising and building his intellectual agility and moral
2 The three kinds of reading is a condensed and paraphrased treatment of Mortimer J. Adler’s four levels of reading: elementary reading, inspectional reading, analytical reading, and syntopical reading. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 16. 4
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imagination.3 In his classic guide to the art of getting a liberal education, How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler explains the art of reading is The process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from the outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that cause this to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.4
Adler goes on to explain that one of the keys to employing the operations that will help us grow as readers is to read actively. Active reading requires the reader to slow down, pay attention, and interact with the text by sitting humbly at the author’s proverbial feet, making annotations in the margins, and asking good interpretive questions. Nevertheless, as enjoyable as it might be to slow down and write good notes, reading does not guarantee the reader will engage in active reading. While technically, there is no such thing as purely passive reading, reading actively also means receiving what the writer is giving out, not like “receiving a blow, or a legacy, or a judgment from court,” explains Adler.5 Instead, active reading is like catching a ball. The catcher has to anticipate everything from fastballs and curveballs to changeups and sliders. A catcher has to watch attentively, move quickly, and adjust constantly. So it is with reading for understanding. Adler says, “the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort 3 One’s imagination is either being built up or degraded and malformed by one’s reading. Unlike the diabolic and idyllic imaginations, stories of the Moral Imagination reveal that the telos of human life is not pleasure, power, decadence, or utopia, but “arete”-virtue or excellence—and relational love. “The Moral Imagination,” Literature and Belief, Vol. 1 (1981), 37–49. Also published in Reclaiming a Patrimony (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 1982), 45–58. 4 Adler, How to Read a Book, 8. 5 Adler, How to Read a Book, 5. 5
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of communication as well as possible.”6 And as every catcher knows, it takes a lot of practice to be able to catch everything a pitcher might throw one’s way. This brings us back around to the argument for the physical book, where the reader’s active engagement trains him to commune, to converse, and to contemplate. Granted whatever value screens may offer to readers, they are largely deficient for providing the kind of environment where active reading can be properly cultivated. Creating good habits of reading not only requires one to know in which kind of reading he is participating, and learning to read actively, it also requires one to consider the content he is reading. The best books contain the wisdom (or even the anti-wisdom) of the ages, good and bad ideas that have been passed down from one generation to another. Because books embody the minds of other men (usually the dead) and allow them to converse with the reader, creating a good reading habit requires hospitality and discernment. Practically speaking, that means readers commune with the dead by humbling oneself as an apprentice, conversing with their ideas by annotating in the text, asking questions, and perhaps recording ideas in a zibaldone or commonplace book. But it also means comparing and contrasting the ideas of those authors with ideas of other, earlier and later authors.7 This aspect of the habit of reading is not mere academic box checking. It is inherently a moral activity whereby the reader is confronted with competing ideas and becomes more fully engaged with human thought, thus more fully human. It is also the palliative to our inherited errors of thought, as C. S. Lewis claimed. By reading old books the reader is allowing “the clean sea breeze of the centuries” to blow through
6 How to Read a Book, 6. 7 This corresponds to Adler’s fourth level of reading, syntopical. Adler, How to Read a Book, 20, 309ff. 6
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his provincial, modern mind.8 It is to trace an idea through history and consider its consequences, what Lewis also explained as visiting a conversation at the beginning and follow it through to the present hour.9 Interestingly, having good reading habits was so important to some of the early church fathers, they made active reading of Pagan literature a prerequisite for studying theology. They held that just like an athlete trains and exercises before the competition, and the painter prepares his paints so they hold their colors before applying them to the canvas, reading poetry, historical writings, and speeches prepared the reader himself before applying his skills to the Christian doctrines.10 They further held that the Logos Spermatikos (the sowing Word) was present in all creation, so that Christ was known, even if only partially, by the virtuous Pagans.11 Thus the active reading of literature was paramount if one was to become educated in theology. Literature, especially poetry, was the gateway to textual hermeneutics. 8 C. S. Lewis and Walter Hooper, “On The Reading of Old Books,” essay, in God in the Dock: Essays on Theolog y and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 220. 9 Lewis, “On The Reading of Old Books,” in God in the Dock, 218–219. 10 Basil of Caesarea. “To Young Men, On How They Might Derive Profit From Pagan Literature,” in Saint Basil: The Letters, ed. E. Capps, T. E. Page, W. H. D. Rouse, and G. P. Goold, trans. Roy J. Deferrari and Martin R. P. McGuire, Vol. 1–4, The Loeb Classical Library (London; New York; Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; Harvard University Press, 1926–1934), 409. 11 In his First Apology, Justin Martyr writes, “For each person spoke well, according to the part present in him of the divine logos, the Sower, whenever he saw what was related to him [as a person]. But they who contradict themselves on the more important points appear not to have possessed the hidden understanding and the irrefutable knowledge. Therefore, whatever things were rightly said among all people are the property of us Christians.” Fn71: The term logos spermatikos that Justin uses here has been widely held to imply that he believed that all people, insofar as they conformed to the truth, shared in the logos disseminated among men and women, which in its entirety was Jesus Christ. The seeds of truth sown in the hearts of people were the formative principle of right knowledge and right living (1 Apol. 44). So there were Christians before Christ (1 Apol. 46) and Christianity was brought into relationship with wider truth. St. Justin Martyr, St. Justin Martyr: The First and Second Apologies, ed. Walter J. Burghardt et al., trans. Leslie William Barnard, vol. 56, Ancient Christian Writers (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997), 83–84. 7
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This approach to education is the basis for the Christian adoption and baptism of liberal learning. When Aristotle declared that the end of education was virtue, he implicitly underscored the necessity of thoughtful reading. The liberal arts tradition was animated by the Incarnation (i.e., Christianity) and sought to liberate the soul by cultivating disciplined habits of attention and discernment, and nurturing the intellect and imagination. Thus, for three thousand years or more, good habits of reading have been essential not only for the development of one’s knowledge base and understanding, but for cultivating the life of the mind, inculcating hermeneutical skills, and fostering a moral imagination. Unfortunately, modernity has profoundly distorted our relationship with books. The negative influence of screens has already been mentioned. But further consider how pop culture, for example, has been seduced by and nourished on twaddle delivered through the lyrics of presentational music, media sound bites, and the illusion of importance via empathetic screen culture. If pop culture reads books at all, their selections are largely made up of end-cap staff picks and therapeutic self-affirmation literature. For this reason, it would not be a stretch to join Socrates in positing a large segment of pop culture is uneducable. One cannot expect to take the Olympics of life seriously by subsisting on poppycock and prattle. Self-indulgence, image-curation, and novelty are the narcissistic impulses of “youth culture,” those in society who are chiefly led by their baser passions of the bed and table whom Plato referred to as the demos, the hoi poloi. There is little room in such an environment for cultivating good reading habits as has been described. Yet, today’s educational institutions frequently mirror these democratic tendencies. Modern education prioritizes informational reading over formational reading. Enthralled with facts and information, modern educators have mistaken the ability to retrieve data for the task of soul formation and wisdom cultivation. Their approach is, quite literally, human 8
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reductionism (i.e., the making of utilitarian consumer-cogs for the marketplace and State). True soul education, on the other hand, demands far more than informational competency; it seeks to transform the reader through engagement with what is good, true, and beautiful. As David Lyle Jeffrey argues convincingly, even the sacred texts themselves rely not on absolute propositional content but on imaginative, literary forms designed to shape the reader’s soul rather than fill his head with analytical information.12 In short, reading well trains the reader to perceive and live wisely, to form judgments that align with a transcendent reality, and thus to act virtuously in a complex world. Also, because reading demands presence (i.e., active thinking), it plays a significant role in cultivating the hermeneutical intuition and forensic perceptual expertise previously mentioned. These are uniquely and exclusively human skills, something impossible for AI to replicate. What is meant by hermeneutical intuition and forensic perceptual expertise? While these are concepts better caught than taught, they might be described as the innate human skills of nuance, intuition, and pattern recognition that grows out of one’s universal understanding of the world and human experience. It is the development and practical outworking of hokma—that deeply Hebraic concept of skillful living in a morally ordered cosmos—which informs our understanding. It is frequently referred to as simply wisdom, but it is the aspect of wisdom that lifts one from his provincialism and enables him to be more cosmopolitan in his understanding. More specifically, hermeneutical intuition refers to a cultivated phronēsis, the pre-cognative capacity to grasp the meaning of a text, situation, or symbol by drawing on accumulated experience, developed imagination, and tacit knowledge. This kind of wisdom can only be cultivated by years of 12 David Lyle Jeffrey and Greg Maillet, Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 51; and David Lyle Jeffrey, Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 21, 238. 9
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immersion in a given linguistic, moral, and cultural tradition which has formed one’s interpretive faculties.13 One example of what is meant is an experience, say, in which someone meets another for the first time and immediately intuits the new acquaintance’s character or personal proclivities, not because the former is being judgmental; rather, he is simply intuitive. Perhaps it’s the case that the new acquaintance identifies like a character from a novel, not in a general way necessarily, but in the specific way a character is that character (e.g., Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is not Bingley or Mr. Darcy, or even Mr. Collins). Other examples might be walking into someone’s toolshed and recognizing the kind of work they do for a living or listening to the beginning of a never-before-heard musical composition and anticipating how the movements will proceed and how the piece will resolve. Being well read is at the core of developing the kind of hermeneutical intuition that allows one to be affable, winsome, and well-adjusted in society. Similarly, forensic perceptual expertise refers to the specialized ability of a trained observer. Such experts are able to see meaningful structures that novices cannot. In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses various domain experts’ abilities to identify salient details, anomalies, and patterns in complex perceptual fields with both speed and accuracy. Matthew B. Crawford also treats the concept in his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. Investigators, physicians, art historians, composers, musicians, manuscript specialists, and auto mechanics are all examples of fields or disciplines where expert-level sight, discernment, and discrimination are often acquired through long engagement and deliberate practice. Examples of forensic perceptual expertise might be an antique dealer’s innate ability to recognize when an artifact is a fraud even though every detail appears to be kosher on the 13 Whereas the Greek word sophia refers to theoretical wisdom, phronēsis refers to applied or practical wisdom. For more on hermeneutical intuition, see Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method and Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. 10
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surface. One might also think of the car mechanic who accurately just knows what is wrong with a vehicle before it is officially diagnosed. Some sound his ear has been tuned to hearing or some motion his eye intuitively recognizes alerts him to the problem; yet, it might, and often does, go unnoticed by everyone else.14 Because forensic expertise is perceptual, good reading habits are helpful because they exercise both the reader’s pre-cognitive skills and his reflective analytical skills; thus, it fosters the kind of interpretive agility needed to be an expert in any domain. The reader who willingly enters the discipline of forming good reading habits will not remain unchanged. This is why the seven educational arts that begin with grammar and conclude with abstract mathematics are called liberal (i.e., they are liberating). To form good reading habits is to immerse oneself in literary forms which help one become more fully human. The reader essentially enriches his soul by chiseling his intellect, expanding his imagination, and fostering virtue, perception, and wisdom. Thus, he liberates himself for the advancement of the Kingdom, the benefit of the polis, and for a good life well lived. Developing such reading habits require time, attention, and humility. Because all three of those features are in short supply in our technocratic age, the work of reading well requires the planned neglect of things less important than human flourishing. It also requires ready access to quality reading materials. In The Black Swan, Nassin Taleb reports that Umberto Eco, the Italian professor who wrote, The Name of the Rose, had a personal library of more than 30,000 books in 2010. When the professor died in 2016 at the age of 84, sources claim the number was actually closer to 50,000. Either way, it was 14 For more on forensic perceptual expertise, see Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2005), Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (New York, NY: Penguin Group USA, 2010) and D. Kahneman, & G. Klein, “Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree,” in American Psychologist (2009), 64 (6), 515–526. https:// doi.org/10.1037/a0016755 11
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more books than any one man could have read in his lifetime. In light of this astonishing revelation, Taleb summarizes a number of Eco’s thoughts on the value of collecting such an inordinately expansive library. Eco wrote, A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and growing the number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.15
Eco was an advocate of the private library as being one’s own research tool. In his estimation, there is a certain sense in which unread books are more valuable than read books because they represent everything one knows he does not know about the things that can be known. And a reader is only conscious of the unknowns because of the things already learned. Fundamentally, each layer of learning expands new horizons of unknown knowledge. And, unread books represent anticipated pathways to that knowledge. In sum, an antilibrary represents a person’s conscious awareness of all that he or she does not know. Eco’s insight compels us to think differently about reading and collecting books. Instead of thinking of vast personal libraries as book hoarding, an inordinate indulgence, or even as a sign of pretentiousness, it would be better to think of collecting more books than can be read in a lifetime as intellectual humility. All those menacing unread books are an encomium to curiosity, wonder, and want of knowledge. Such 15 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York, NY: Random House, 2016), 3. 12
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incredible collections are material manifestations of Aristotle’s famous opening line in Metaphysics: “All men naturally desire to know.”16 Educators like Eco understand books for what they really are: incarnational artifacts, the physical manifestation of others’ thoughts. They carry the wisdom of the ages from one generation to another. They embody the minds of the dead and allow them to converse quietly with the living. To read is to engage in an act of spiritual hospitality; to build a personal library, especially an antilibrary, is to collect these incarnational artifacts as a garden of souls with whom we might commune. Considered as the dead who are yet speaking, a library might also be thought of as a florilegium of friends or a compendium of companions. People were moved enough by their ideas and experiences to have written them down, so to gather their writings into one place is to play host to these thoughtful ones, to invite them to pull up a chair, break bread, and have a conversation. To consider the library from this perspective suggests reading is not merely the ingestion of information or the checking off of academic boxes. Instead, reading is a moral act by which readers apprentice themselves to those whom Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead” so that they can become more fully alive. This work is itself a kind of paideia. Thus, curating a soul garden naturally participates in the curious habit called tsundoku, meaning to pile up unread books. Originally a whimsical Japanese expression meant as a gentle self-reproach, the phenomenon has been adopted universally by some readers as a badge of honor. Properly understood, one’s collection of unread books is not a symptom of sloth or intellectual gluttony. Rather, tsundoku resists the utilitarian logic that demands each book earn its keep by being read immediately. As previously stated, it insists that 16 Aristotle and Jonathan Barnes, “Metaphysics,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1552–1728, 1552. 13
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the library is a sanctuary for conversation and not a checklist to be completed. To buy books that cannot yet be read is a tacit acknowledgement of current limitations but also of hope—hope to one day sit with those we desire to learn from and hope to grow into the person we desire to become. Understood this way, the curious, oft-maligned habit of tsundoku is far from being a harmless eccentricity; it reveals a profound anthropological truth about those C. S. Lewis calls literary people. Collecting more books than one will read in his lifetime testifies to one’s hope in the ongoing project of becoming fully human. And, to build an antilibrary is to do so conscientiously. This means that in addition to being a sign of humility and hope, the antilibrary is also a sign of aspiration. The library of unread books is an embodiment of one’s declaration in the belief that transformation happens over time, not in an instant. To continue to collect books even when many are still unread is to believe that time remains, to believe one is still in the midst of his formation. In this way, the antilibrary is also a kind of memento mori and a declaration of one’s telos. Instead of thinking of the unread book as a shameful reminder of failure, it is better to recognize it as a sacred provocation to become who we are not, yet. To make the matter more personal and get at the heart of it, the books we choose to surround ourselves with reflects an aspect of ourselves—the theologian, the philosopher, the poet, the father, the husband, the seeker—and says something about the people we long to become. Hence, our bookshelves tell the truth about us. Similarly, and perhaps less significantly, even how we choose to arrange our books—alphabetically, thematically, by publisher, or even by aesthetic whimsy—tells a story about ourselves. Arrangement is about more than convenience; it can also be a confession.
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In a delightful essay, titled, “How to Justify a Personal Library,”17 the author mentioned in the introduction, Umberto Eco, tells a story of a man who came to visit him. Upon entering his library, the man exclaimed: “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?” He said he wanted to answer a visitor with something more clever than, “That’s a good one!” So he thought of replying with a sarcastic alternative: “I haven’t read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?” But that is a dangerous answer he explains, because “it invites the obvious follow-up: ‘And where do you put them after you’ve read them?’” So he decided on the riposte: “No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.” This answer, of course, usually hastens the visitor’s moment of departure, a happy result for the bibliophile who wants to get back to his research and writing. As someone who collects a lot of books myself, I once (tongue in cheek) asked the same question of a fellow whose spacious library I happened to be admiring. His diverting and jocular reply was something like, “Some of them twice!” These little anecdotes hint at the fact it is generally the case that people with lavish libraries tend to possess copious wit and wisdom. Certainly there are those who collect books for pretense and seldom crack the covers of their prized collections, but such folks tend to be exorbitantly wealthy and inordinately shallow. Notwithstanding, a person who consistently reads good books over the course of time it takes to collect a vast library will likely possess copiousness. Derived from the Latin copia, copious means abundance. In rhetorical terms, copiousness refers to the mind material accumulated by the experience of life, the fodder of failure, and the absorption of wisdom from reading good literature. Copiousness is the invaluable possession of a deep, refreshing pool 17 Umberto Eco, How to Travel with a Salmon: And Other Essays (A Harvest Book), Kindle Edition, Loc. 1106. 15
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of ideas, axioms, principles, proverbs, and anecdotes from which to draw delightful, compelling arguments and responses. Copiousness is at the heart of the hermeneutical intuition and forensic perceptual expertise referenced earlier. But let us not romanticize tsundoku to the point of folly. There is a danger in collecting unread books. For example, there is the consumerist illusion that sheer possession of books amounts to wisdom. One cannot inherit the intellectual virtue of others by proxy. An untouched library is nothing more than an ossuary. To buy a book that is never intended to be read is not tsundoku; it is possible it is either vanity or acedia—both of which are their own kind of spiritual torpor that refuses the labor of love involved in good reading habits. Some unread books must be read eventually, or they cease to be a sign of hope. To borrow from Adler again, the only books one really owns are the ones that have been marked up and reread so repeatedly they are falling apart. It does no good to romanticize tsundoku. It is better to set aside time, read with a pencil in hand, take copious notes, and reread. Further, neither is it beneficial to read solely as an escape from the world. It is better to read for what Tolkien called “Recovery,” that reentry into one’s own world with sharpened eyes and a more attentive spirit. In sum, there is an ethical responsibility that comes with owning books. The weight of unwisdom (i.e., folly) is felt most acutely by those who have amassed wisdom and left it unopened. For which is worse, an illiterate person who wishes he can read, or a literate person who never does? Some final words on the antilibrary, a call to action and a caution. First the call to action. Collect physical books, used books when you can, and hardbacks if you can afford it. Some people prefer new books. That is just fine; but also consider the serendipity of finding annotations and marginalia from previous readers. Another blessing derives from rereading books, a kind of literary anamnesis—the holy remembrance of finding a note in the margin you wrote years before and 16
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remembering who you were when you wrote it. The sacred reminder of the formation being accomplished in one’s soul is meaningful. Yet there is caution here, too. Not every book deserves a place in our soul garden. Just as reading well shapes the imagination morally, reading poorly or carelessly can distort or degrade it. As Dante warned by his example, literature must ultimately serve the purpose of moving us from misery toward happiness, from shadow toward truth. Because we know we do not have time to read every book there is, our shelves should therefore be populated with worthy guides— voices that do or can be used to shape our souls rightly. In a time of cultural fragmentation and intellectual despair, to develop good reading habits and curate our bookshelves thoughtfully is to express hope—a conviction that goodness, truth, and beauty remain accessible and transformative. Even when unread, books incarnate a promise: they hold the seeds of moral and intellectual renewal that our morally impoverished technological age desperately needs. To build an antilibrary is thus to prepare oneself and one’s community for cultural renewal. ⸭ Scott Postma serves as the president of Kepler Education and the editor of The Consortium Journal. He completed his Ph.D. in humanities with an emphasis in literature at Faulkner University and earned an M.A. in Christian and Classical Studies at Knox Theological Seminary. He lives with his wife in the panhandle of Idaho where he avidly practices the ancient art of Tsundoku.
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Virtuous Read Alouds A Brief History & Philosophy of Communal Reading by Dr. Sean C. Hadley
Introduction
I
n 2024, the Chronicle of Higher Education released an article lamenting the “death” of reading at the college level. Beth McMurtrie’s bold claim was supported with insights from professors and looked at a handful of studies which seemed to corroborate the anecdotal evidence. As a result, there was a furor of discussion, with laments and excitement manifesting from all corners of the educational world. McMurtrie highlighted that concerns over class readings at the undergraduate level have been waning since 1981 and that this steady decline has been reshaping course expectations for years.1 Yet part of her article centered on what appeared to be an extreme claim, namely that reading was over as a primary pedagogical tool. This opened up other questions as a result. What percentage of sophomores in college have never been asked to read a single novel from start to finish? Is cheating as prevalent as the students interviewed for the article claimed? And perhaps most importantly, is this a moment when the best thing is for teachers to reshape the classroom to better reach this rising 1 Beth McMurtie, “Is This the End of Reading?”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 9, 2024. https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-this-the-end-of-reading. 19
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generation, relying on technologies that are not reading dependent? Such questions are important and have been handled from a variety of angles. While McMurtrie documents various ways that professors have attempted to respond to these questions and breathe new life into undergraduate reading, one professor’s suggestion stood out from the read: “Chris Hakala, a psychology professor at Springfield college… has them read aloud in class.”2 This idea is not explored further in McMurtrie’s piece, yet that silence is significant. What much of this discussion dances around is the purpose of education. For many teachers, at both the secondary and postsecondary level, the emphasis on success via grades and test scores has oriented the classroom away from its traditional direction, namely the cultivation of virtue. And it is important that for one of the teachers in McMurtrie’s article, reading aloud provides a tool for recovering a liberal education. McMurtrie specifically notes how the focus on test scores has been a net negative for students, but she does not discuss how this reshapes the moral character of the classroom. While McMurtrie is right to lament the emphasis on testing, what is needed more broadly is a restoration of what the classroom ought to do if scoring highly on a test is not the aim. B. Edward McClellan provides a helpful connection. By documenting how the earliest moral education in the United States began a steep decline in the middle of the twentieth century, he corroborates McMurtrie’s concerns as the emphasis on test scores came to prominence in the same cultural moment.3 This focus on various numerical outcomes stands in stark contrast to the long history of education in the United States. From the Puritan settlers of the seventeenth century to the reformers of the later nineteenth century, moral education was the dominant aim of what a school did, regardless
2 McMurtie, “Is This the End of Reading?” 3 B. Edward McClellan, Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 122. 20
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of specific religious beliefs and shifting family structures.4 Of course, the change in the early 1900s which moved educational practices away from their moral component is what paved the way for test scores and numerical outcomes to fill the void that virtue training had once filled.5 The practice that best unites the historical view that the end of education is a moral one to the idea that academic success can be achieved through strong pedagogical efforts is that of communal reading. Communal reading is something that occurs within the confines of a classroom, centered on a text read aloud in a group, while the text is viewed as a treatise containing elements of virtue worth discussing. This approach has a well-documented history and best explains how both the Ancient and Medieval classrooms understood the idea of reading.
Reading for Virtue in the Ancient World There has long been the belief that the invention of writing in the ancient world reduced, or even harmed, the oral traditions that had characterized Antiquity. But in the twentieth century, a better understanding of past oral practices emerged.6 While these studies often begin with ancient Greece, it is worthwhile to consider how the ancient Israelites factor into this history. The Hebrew culture described in the Old Testament tended to view education as primarily a matter of the home. Families were tasked with educating the young, evidenced in writings such as the Biblical books of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiasticus (or Book of Sirach).7 The 4 McClellan, Moral Education in America, 17, 61. 5 McClellan, Moral Education in America, 63–67. 6 Paul Saenger, “Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society.” Viator, 13 (1982), 367–368. 7 Philobiblius, History and Progress of Education from the Earliest Times to the Present (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1874), 55–60. 21
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emphasis was clearly on the oral, public nature of texts, as evidenced by the Hebrew Scriptures as well as the way many rabbis approached interpretation.8 Formal schools didn’t develop in Jewish culture until after the Exilic period and took on a structure like what had arisen in Greece. The Greek approach was to treat education as a matter concerning the State, famously coming to a head when Socrates was executed for teaching things the politicians in Athens didn’t like.9 Plato’s Apolog y offers a philosophical view of the case against Socrates, noting the moral import of the claim that Socrates was guilty of corrupting the youth.10 The Romans adopted much of the Greek system, though they brought the same familial sensibility that characterized Hebrew instruction into the system.11 This ancient mode approach to reading serves as a necessary corrective for the modern educator trying to understand the importance of the practice in the classroom. As classicist G. L. Hendrickson has described: It is doubtless superfluous to say that in the beginning the written word or book merely preserved a record of that which had once been spoken. For the words and sentences of this record to recover life and meaning, it was necessary that they be re–animated by the voice of someone who understood the significance of the written characters. Thus through the ear, whether to the one who pronounced them or to another listener, they conveyed again the thought or intention of the original speaker. The earliest readers stood
8 Saenger, “Silent Reading,” 374; cf. Biblical texts including Deut. 31:11–13, Josh. 8:34–35, 2 Kings 23:1–3. 9 Philobiblius, History and Progress of Education, 61–88. 10 Plato, Apolog y, in Euthyphro, Apolog y, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 23d–24b. Interpretations vary on how serious to take the charge or to treat it as something invented to rid the city of a nuisance. Regardless of one’s view on the legitimacy of the accusation, it remains clear that the citizens of Athens thought that the education of the young was a moral issue that necessitated harsh punishment when violated. 11 Philobiblius, History and Progress of Education, 89–100. 22
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toward the written surface (whether of stone or of paper) as most of us stand toward music.12
Brian Wright demonstrates the veracity of this view through his analysis of writers from the first century AD, including Pliny, Theon, and others.13 This practice of communal reading was born out of the ancient view of reading, “such as we found set forth by Augustine, held that written characters became significant only as they were reanimated by the voice and reached the mind through the medium of sound. A corollary of this theory is the apparent use of the word ‘to hear’ (ακούειν, audire) in the sense of ‘to read.’”14 This view helps explain how communal reading could still hold sway during a time of proliferating books and is supported by much paleographic evidence from the late Roman period, even through Quintilian’s day, which expected readers to read aloud even when alone, as the Latin language treated the syllable as the key aspect for any reader to fully understand.15 The early Christian authors blended the approach of the Hebrew culture, with its orality and family centered approach, with that of the Greek and Roman world, that emphasized both the text and the sound. While it is tempting to consider this primarily in light of how it affected individual readers, the connection between the moral life of teachers and students always played a role in communal reading. Augustine, for instance, stressed the idea that a teacher must be a good reader if they are to also execute their vocation well: It is the duty, then, of the interpreter and teacher of Holy Scripture, the defender of the true faith and the opponent of error, both to teach what is right and to refute what is 12 G. L. Hendrickson, “Ancient Reading,” The Classical Journal, 25 (1929), 185. 13 Brian J. Wright, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus: A Window into Early Christian Reading Practices (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 10. 14 Hendrickson, “Ancient Reading,” 188. 15 Saenger, “Silent Reading,” 370–371. 23
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wrong, and in the performance of this task to conciliate the hostile, to rouse the careless, and to tell the ignorant both what is occurring at present and what is probable in the future.16
Augustine’s counsel centers on what kind of person they were as well as on how their job contained a moral component in relation to reading. Few will argue that the ancient world emphasized morality more than the modern does, but there has not been sufficient exploration of how communal reading provided the essential framework for training in virtue. Such a connection is important for understanding how the medieval schools followed suit.
Reading for Virtue in the Middle Ages Just as the ancient period is too broad to cover in full, even in a lengthy monograph, the medieval period involves too many characters, movements, and locales to treat justly in this space. By focusing on the English patterns that emerged through Alfred the Great and John Colet, the direction of moral education in America will be better grasped. Both figures emphasized the importance of reading to the educational process but also recognized the need for education to be virtuous. Additionally, they represent the way in which moral education served both the needs of the State and satisfied the views of the Church. In the 880s, Alfred the Great began reforming education in England. King Alfred’s reforms provide an interesting starting point to leave the ancient world and move into the medieval world. Alfred himself stands out as perhaps a genuine phi16 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, in The Confessions; The City of God; On Christian Doctrine, eds. Mortimer Adler and Philip W. Goetz, trans. J. F. Shaw (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 4.4.6. 24
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losopher king, though baptized into the Christian faith rather than left in Plato’s paganism. Alfred was erudite, translating works from Latin into the English tongue of his day, and instituting significant reforms of the education system which had been established in England.17 The schools which Alfred commissioned were built upon the crumbling and scattered pagan schools which predated his reign, and his efforts brought these reformed institutions into line with the monastic groups who inhabited the English kingdom.18 There were three primary kinds of schools under Alfred’s program: catechumenal, catechetical, and monastic. These three categories would come to dominate the European community, but here it is important to highlight Alfred’s emphasis on bringing up children into the faith. This is most evident from the “Preface” to the Old English Pastoral Care, “where he announces the desirability of translating into English books ‘which are most necessary for all people to know.’”19 While much work has been done to better understand Alfred’s reforms, the manuscript evidence does showcase two pertinent aspects: there was a high emphasis on literature in the classroom and the expectation was that teachers of a high moral character. This was true of teachers in all three school types, and these efforts proved staggeringly effective at increasing scholarly output and translation efforts across Europe.20 Alfred’s teachers, regardless of what group of students they taught, were brought in for their capacity to read, translate, and transmit that heritage to their pupils. The reading of old books by men of high repute was the chief method of teacher training in these schools.
17 Daniel Anlezark, “Which Books are ‘Most Necessary’ to Know? The Old English Pastoral Care Preface and King Alfred’s Educational Reform,” English Studies 98 (2017), 759. 18 Stella Morris Osgood, Education in the British Islands from the Introduction of Christianity to the Death of Alfred the Great, master’s thesis (Boston University, 1915), 53. 19 Anlezark, “Which Books are ‘Most Necessary’ to Know?” 760. These books are likely a reference to the Christian Scriptures, though the principle could be extended. 20 Osgood, Education in the British Islands, 52. 25
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What is seen under Alfred’s efforts was representative of similar moves across England for the next couple of centuries. But a shift occurred in the later Middle Ages, namely the monasteries began to focus on the private composition of a text instead of the oral composition which had dominated the world previously, which had a significant impact on the way such texts were read.21 Up to this moment, it was the oral, public nature of reading which was seen as the most effective method for the training of the young, especially the training of their character. Even by the 1300s, it was still primarily religious schools who provided training in literacy.22 This meant that the form of the education was decidedly religious in its nature, and it aimed to encourage religious living in its pupils. The act of reading was itself an act of piety, and ought to have encouraged virtuous readers. Alfred’s educational philosophy understood moral education as a necessity for the State and was dependent on the Church to provide structure. Continuing in the tradition of Alfred, John Colet also worked towards significant educational reforms in England during the 1500s. Colet drew upon the work of Desiderius Erasmus but applied it specifically to the English schools. Colet’s reputation oscillates between that of a reformer and an innovator, depending on the current historical winds. But the consensus is that the founding of St. Paul’s in 1510 was not seen by Colet as something wildly original.23 And his adoption of the Erasmian approach was likewise treated as within the scope of reform, not innovation. St. Paul’s opened with 153 students, which, to Colet’s mind, was an ideal size. 24 21 Saenger, “Silent Reading,” 391. 22 John Nelson Miner, “Schools and Literacy in Later Medieval England,” British Journal of Educational Studies, 11 (1962), 23–24. 23 Michael F. J. McDonnell, A History of St. Paul’s School (London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1909), 13. 24 W. H. Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus: John Colet—Patron or Reformer?” Renaissance and Reformation 12 (1988), 171. Colet understood the school would grow and left the school’s charter open ended for that growth, though there does not appear any evidence that he wanted the school to get larger. 26
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Aside from Colet’s aspirations for a small school, he set a standard for teachers that was like that of Erasmus, but with his own caveats. He did not, for example, require all teachers to be conversational in Latin, though he did expect them to be honest, virtuous, and learned. And in a peculiarly specific moment, Colet required that all teachers at St. Paul’s be ready to read aloud with their students, treating this as essential to the best practices of teaching literature, history, etc.25 He also expected the teachers to be competent in teaching manners alongside their literature assignment, even though St. Paul’s was a secular school and was free for students (meaning it was not only a school for the elite of society). Taking Erasmus’s reforms and tempering them, Colet emphasizes the importance of a teacher’s character and erudition prior to their employment and leans into the notion that communal reading still had a vital role to play in the classroom.
Communal Reading and American Education While the practice of Communal Reading has never completely faded from the educational landscape, there is little doubt that it has diminished in its perceived importance. Yet despite its relative obscurity today, the practice of communal reading has a varied history in the educational systems of the United States. McClellan’s history of moral education highlights how the Puritans were focused on reading primarily for religious reasons.26 But beyond the colonial period, communal reading remained a key component of American teaching. The growth of Sunday Schools, with a clear religious focus, made teaching children how to read a part of 25 Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus,” 177. 26 McClellan, Moral Education in America, 25. 27
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their task.27 When mothers began to take on a more formal role in the education of the young, a pattern which emerged in the early 1800s, these mothers took communal reading seriously enough that they became the target audience for an entire new genre of printed books which were explicitly crafted with character education in mind.28 When honor codes gained traction in the 1920s and 1930s, the schools which implemented them also paired them with stories to be read which illustrated the specific virtues desired, and these texts constituted the community language and imagination of the school.29 But McClellan’s history notes a serious shift in the emphasis on moral education occurs in the twentieth century, which coincidentally saw a shift in how schools thought and deployed communal reading in the classroom. In 1964, Aileen Sundstrum identified five distinct schools of thought which appeared in the historical record prior to the changes of the twentieth century, four of which are germane here.30 The Imitative school has its roots in the ancient theories of reading and virtue discussed earlier.31 By the 1800s, this school of reading had taken root in American schools and continued the connection between reading and virtue that had previously characterized communal reading.32 It was not only that this model encouraged a definitively imitative understanding of rhetoric, but it reaffirmed the idea that the teacher must themselves be a moral exemplar if they are to adequately communicate the virtues contained within any given text. The Impulsive school likewise has roots that 27 McClellan, Moral Education in America, 38. 28 McClellan, Moral Education in America, 37–38. 29 McClellan, Moral Education in America, 64. 30 Aileen L. R. Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools of Interpretation on the Contemporary Eclectic Philosophy of Reading Aloud, PhD dissertation (Wayne State University, 1964). Sundstrom includes the little-known Speculative school, which was primarily a French phenomenon. While interesting, it diverges so much from the other four that it would necessitate a different analysis and will be left out here. 31 Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools, 37. 32 Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools, 66. 28
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date back to Antiquity, though with less consistency into the Middle Ages.33 The Impulsive school holds strongly to the idea of individual expression as more important than imitation, and when applied to reading in an educational setting leads to the idea that students are best served when they express their own ideas and values. This school grew in influence in the United States during the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified in work like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” essay.34 This approach depends on the reader, i.e. the teacher, to be inspired spontaneously, encouraging students towards sincerity and expressive feelings.35 The Natural school followed some of the ideas of the Impulsive school, but through an inward focus on the mind, which in turn allowed for the teacher to model “justness, elegance, grace, ease, decorum, propriety, spontaneity, variety, moderation, and energy” through communal reading.36 So many of its elements overlap with the Impulsive school, that it can be reasonably grouped with the Impulsive school on practical grounds. Both schools emphasized that communal reading was essential to the education process but rejected any form of imitation and the oral corollaries. The Mechanical school, in a similar vein, overlaps greatly with the Imitative school, emphasizing the notion that reading (and morality) can be passed on through a method akin to the sciences.37 This school is perhaps best represented in the education treatises of John Locke, which bears much in common with the moral grounding of the Imitative school but depends more on the method than the teacher as the exemplar.38 It is curious that Sundstrum’s analysis of the communal reading practice 33 Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools, 80, 90. 34 Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools, 93. Emerson described imitation in writing as a form of “suicide.” 35 Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools, 109. 36 Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools, 120. 37 Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools, 163–164. 38 Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools, 165. 29
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and the history of moral education which McClellan sketches overlap in important ways. Naturally, such a correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But even if the connection is coincidental, it is something worth further scrutiny. Still, regardless of which of Sundstrum’s approaches found the most traction in the classroom, what remains interesting is the dependence upon an oral, group reading to achieve the ends of learning. Education in the United States today may emphasize reading at home for oneself or only engaging books for pleasure, but this is a recent shift and not the historic position. The large push in American schools in the 1920s, which emphasized “reading readiness” over character education, led to an overall loss in how stories were valued in the classroom.39 From the 1930s to the 1960s, there were flashes of renewed interest in communal reading as evidence began to emerge that the move away from the practice was yielding worse outcomes for students.40 By the 1960s, the notion that “Speech is a matter of the whole man that the whole person is engaged in impression and expression” encouraged schools to combine the four primary schools which had emerged during America’s earlier educational development.41 But what remained the driving factor behind attempts to return communal reading to the classroom was mostly outcome-oriented towards grades and test scores, not the character of the student. Since communal reading retained influence at the grammar school level, traditionally kindergarten through fifth grade, opportunities to study outcomes abounds. Such practices are used as interventions in many schools, but it also works for everyday teaching, meaning that the data points are numerous.42 But there is a need to better understand why this 39 Guofang Wan, “Reading Aloud to Children: The Past, the Present, and the Future,” Reading Improvement, 37 (2000), 149. 40 Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools, 269. 41 Sundstrom, The Influence of the Traditional Schools, 272. 42 Federico Batini, Marco Bartolucci, and Adriana Timpone, “The Effects of Reading Aloud in the Primary School,” Psycholog y and Education, 55 (2018), 112. 30
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practice should regain its popularity at the secondary school level and beyond.43 There have been calls for content-specific teachers outside the literature classroom to reconsider how reading aloud might help students succeed. Teachers in middle school history classes are encouraged to utilize communal reading so that students will increase their reading comprehension and speaking skills.44 Middle school science teachers have been encouraged to read aloud with students to help build a common vocabulary and increase memory retention of concepts.45 And though the practice is not as widespread as it once was, there is still ample evidence that some high school teachers are treating communal reading as a viable option in their classrooms.46 That these practices yield similar results which have the support of repeated study confirms what the ancient and medieval teacher already knew that communal reading yields significant dividends.47 The things which were seen as important to communal reading throughout American history continue to be measurable in the more recent work done on the concept.48 The skills which communal reading increases or builds upon have not significantly changed over the course of the last few hundred years of English and American learning. And the renewed interest in character education has recognized the value of literature to the proper ends of teaching the young.49 What is missing is the more direct link that existed in the ancient and medieval
43 Wan, “Reading Aloud to Children,” 149–150. 44 B. De Lin Du Bois and Margaret E. Mcintosh, “Reading Aloud to Students in Secondary History,” The Social Studies, 77 (1986), 210. 45 Patricia Braun, “Taking the Time to Read Aloud,” Science Scope (2010), 46. 46 Lionel Warner, Caroline Crolla, Andy Goodwyn, Eileen Hyder, and Brian Richards, “Reading Aloud in High Schools: Students and Teachers across the Curriculum,” Educational Review 68, no. 2 (2015), 15–16. 47 Wan, “Reading Aloud to Children,” 152. 48 Rebecka Spencer, Reading Aloud and Student Achievement, EdD dissertation, (Lindenwood University, 2018), 8. 49 Kristian Kristjánsson, Aristotelian Character Education (London: Routledge, 2015), 160. 31
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world which directly connected character education with the practice of communal reading.
Conclusion In her conclusion, McMurtrie makes the same error that many have made regarding the Medieval era. She claims that “the introduction of writing led to the decline of oral culture.”50 But as has been demonstrated, the oral nature of reading persisted beyond the ancient period, through the Medieval, and even into the Modern. Before teachers rush quickly into a post-literate remake of their classroom, they should take seriously the notion that an ad fontes approach will yield higher returns. If teachers want students with strong character and academic success, they should consider looking at the historical evidence which suggests that communal reading in the classroom played a significant role in achieving both of those ends. That may indeed lead to a better future, but it will owe a debt of gratitude to the past. ⸭ Sean C. Hadley is the Upper School Principal at Trinitas Christian School in Pensacola, FL. He earned his PhD from Faulkner University and spent two years conducting post-doctoral research at the Classical Education Research Lab. His writing has appeared in Touchstone magazine, The Hemingway Review, and Classis journal. His wife Sarah graciously tolerates his eccentricities, and his four children have learned to laugh at his jokes.
50 McMurtie, “Is This the End of Reading?” 32
Reading as Inheritance George Harrell, M.A.
Introduction
T
he modern emphasis on learning skills and studying the trades claims that familiarity with ancient philosophy and literature is now a vestigial remnant of a pre-modern culture. Contemporary classical educators therefore feel pushed to defend reading the ancients in ways that earlier generations did not. Christian teachers specifically bear an added burden needing to explain why pagan authors should be included in an explicitly Christian classical education. St. Augustine is often invoked to justify reading the ancient pagans as a form of “plundering the Egyptians:” stripping them for their useful insights and discarding what is not valuable. Yet this utilitarian approach puts modern students at the wrong end of our tradition. Before we can be critics of our inheritance, we must first understand it, and our place within it.
The Early Church Fathers and Discernment Arguing for this may sound as if it contradicts the teachings of the Early Church Fathers, for what could be wrong with following St. Augustine’s admonition and critically evaluating the works of the ancient pagans, picking and choosing in order to cast aside what is false while appropriating 33
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their correct observations for ourselves?1 Similarly, St. Basil in his Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature, compares Christians reading pagan wisdom to a bumblebee gathering nectar.2 Christians, he argues, should read with discrimination, not visiting every flower, but wisely choosing those that nourish the soul, selecting only what is useful and leaving the rest. But when the Early Church Fathers urged discrimination, they were not dissecting a distant tradition of pagan philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, and Ovid were still culturally alive. Even St. Augustine, who barely knew Greek, was steeped in their writings through Latin translations and summaries. And Tertullian, who famously asked “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”3 was himself steeped in a classical education. The classical tradition was their own contemporary, cultural tradition. They were able to critique it because they lived within it, as part of an unbroken conversation that stretched back through the generations. As C. S. Lewis observes, cultured pagans and Christians “had had the same education, read the same poets, learned the same rhetoric… They were in some ways far more like each other than either was like a modern man.”4
1 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), II.40.60. 2 Basil of Caesarea, To Young Men, on How They Might Derive Benefit from Greek Literature, in St. Basil: Letters, Volume IV. Letters 249–368. Address to Young Men on Greek Literature, trans. Roy J. Deferrari, Loeb Classical Library 270 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 390–91. 3 Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum (“The Prescription Against Heretics”), trans. Peter Holmes, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3: Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), 390–91. 4 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 46. 34
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The Medievals Water the Tradition From these early Christian generations, selecting and preserving what they deemed valuable from their interaction with the pagan literature, the Middle Ages inherited the corpus of texts that formed the medieval project. Now no longer picking through the ancients, medieval writers became obsessed with not only preserving but also expanding upon their literary inheritance in what Lewis refers to as the “medieval synthesis.”5 In the fourteenth century Chaucer described his own literary project: For wel I woot that folk han heer-biforn Of makyng ropen, and lad awey the corn; And I come after, glenynge here and there, And am ful glad if I may fynde an ere Of any goodly word that they han left.6
In this posture of gleaning after the harvest, the medieval authors valued conversation over invention or original authorship. They pored over their inherited texts with marginal and interlinear glosses, treating every work as part of an ongoing dialogue with earlier authorities. As early as the sixth century the selected pagan authors had been so thoroughly incorporated into the Christian dialogue that Boethius could think of them “not as ‘they’ but as ‘we’.” 7 Frequently text and gloss became kneaded together, merging into one another. Chaucer 5 Lewis, The Discarded Image, 11. 6 Geoffrey Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, Prologue, lines 73–77, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 590. For well I know that folk have here before Of poems reaped, and led away the corn; And I come after, gleaning here and there, And am full glad if I may find an ear Of any goodly word that they have left. 7 Lewis, The Discarded Image, 79. 35
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regularly reshaped classical narratives into distinctly medieval forms in such tales as Troilus and Criseyde, Parliament of Fowls, or Knight’s Tale. The Beowulf poet stitches together pagan legend, historical sagas, and Christian reflections into a single narrative. Similarly, the author of Sir Orfeo retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a fourteenth‑century Breton lay, recasting it as a journey into Faerie. Furthermore, the pagan and Christian past, the philosopher and poet, were being organized into a “harmonious mental Model of the Universe.”8 Thus, Cicero’s Dream of Scipio became, not just a pagan vision for the Roman Republic, but through Macrobius’s lengthy reflections written in the fifth century, medieval writers came to see it as an essential exposition for understanding the structure of the Christian cosmos and the afterlife.9 Similarly, through Chalcidius’s sprawling, fourth-century commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, Plato became cemented in the medieval mind, as Lewis puts it: “next to Moses, the great monotheistic cosmogonist, the philosopher of creation.”10 The imagery of the ancient philosophers became inseparable from the medieval perception of the sacred order. This synthesis was for the medievals part of a divinely inspired model for not just attempting to understand but to behold the cosmos. Lewis used the musical metaphor of “transposition” to describe how they perceived that the divine vision breaks through in a simplified vocabulary into our lower realm, which we can perceive in our aesthetic, human experiences.11 These we can then collect and compile to inform our sacramental imagination, pointing us back to the divine. No one does this perhaps quite as effectively as Dante, who incorporates into his Divine Comedy the entirety of the 8 Lewis, The Discarded Image, 10–11. 9 Lewis, The Discarded Image, 23–28. 10 Lewis, The Discarded Image, 52. 11 C. S. Lewis, “Transposition,” in The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (New York: HarperOne, 1980), 95–99. 36
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medieval Model and the ancient tradition to tell in a poetic epic about a vision in search of the eternal. Although Dante is initially lost in the woods and attacked by his own desires, through Virgil’s guidance, and propelled by his love for the lady Beatrice, he reaches by way of Hell and Purgatory to the Highest Heaven, where he beholds the beatific vision and his desires are turned by “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”12 The goal, then, of the medieval project was a call to action. Martin Luther perceived this when he wrote: I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure, just as heretofore, when letters have declined and lain prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate… Certainly it is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies, as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily.13
Discarding the Image This method for engaging with the Great Conversation lasted throughout the premodern age. But in the modern era, we turned from symbol to the signifier. Where participation in the Great Conversation had been the focus of education, Lewis reflects that now “most knowledge depends, in the last resort, on observation.”14 The medieval vision transmitted 12 Dante Alighieri, Paradise, trans. Anthony Esolen (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 33.145. 13 Martin Luther, “To Eoban Hess,” March 29, 1523, in Luther’s Correspondence and Other Contemporary Letters, vol. 2, trans. and ed. Preserved Smith and Charles M. Jacobs (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1918), 176–77. 14 Lewis, The Discarded Image, 5. 37
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through the humanities has been discarded, and even those attempting to examine the literary architecture of the past have lost their ability to see it. In 1936 J. R. R. Tolkien summed up this modern impairment in his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In it he told an allegory of an old tower built from the stones of a far more ancient structure. But as generations went by, instead of attempting to appreciate or understand the reason for the tower, the locals knocked it down so that they might examine the stones themselves. And so, they came to forget and then misconstrue why the architect had built the tower in the first place. “But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.”15 The modern source-critics treated the Beowulf poem as a collection of mythological debris, a useful resource for reconstructing Germanic myth, Anglo-Saxon history, or linguistic development, but they failed to see it as a single poetic vision, a work of literary art to be emotionally moved by. Tolkien argued that by reading the text naively, the poem becomes revealed as a powerful, heroic elegy, lamenting the inevitability of death. From art to architecture, philosophy to literature, we are no longer steeped in the visions that formed the West for two thousand years. Our obsession with analysis and invention has replaced the authority of inheritance. But as Cicero warned: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”16 Like the townsfolk rummaging through the rubble of Tolkien’s tower, we not only fail to see what our forebears once perceived, but we are unaware that anything has been lost.
15 J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2006), 7–8. 16 Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orator, in Brutus. Orator, trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library 342 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 395. 38
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Lewis famously examines our modern myopia in his essay “Meditation in a Toolshed.”17 He describes seeing a beam of light shining through a crack in the shed wall, and he reflects that we can choose to either look at the beam itself or to look along it and see the world beyond the shed. These two very different acts of seeing produce very different results. While observation can allow us to come to a clinical understanding of the biological effects of being in love, we can never actually truly know what it is until we have experienced it for ourselves. How do we know that we no longer stand in the tradition? Because we lack the capacity to be moved by it.18 The first goal of art is to turn and hold our attention. Long before our phones had stolen our attention, we had already surrendered it to the cultural dissectors and taxidermists. Tolkien's critics of the Beowulf poem were happy to argue over what the text might have to say about the geopolitics of sixth-century Denmark, if only the poet had not been so interested in monsters. The pre-modern age is embarrassingly not interested in our progressive graphs and charts but instead seems to fixate on myth and a desire for the transcendent. Atheists look back on this superstition and wonder how someone living amid our modern age could be a Christian, and an equally important question is how can we be a Christian amid this modern age?
Rediscovering Our Humanity The modern classical education movement is a muchneeded attempt to reconstruct our mythic imagination by 17 C. S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theolog y and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1970), 212–15. 18 Joshua Gibbs, “Should Students With Smart Phones Pay Higher Tuition?,” CiRCE Institute, February 7, 2020, https://circeinstitute.org/blog/should-studentssmart-phones-pay-higher-tuition/ (accessed October 4, 2025). 39
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bringing us back into dialogue with the Great Conversation, but we are doing so against the cultural trends. Because of our unfamiliarity with our classical tradition this can lead to a mistaken sense that we are starting from scratch, and in many ways we are. Not realizing that the tradition is something to be inherited, some people might innocently echo Tertullian: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” But where Tertullian was individually and culturally engaged in dialogue with the pagans, we are frequently attempting to judge our ancestors before we even know what they have to say. And furthermore, as this paper has pointed out, the classical authors that have been preserved through the ages are the product of the Christian harvest. Re‑inheriting the tradition, not reinventing it, is the goal. As T. S. Eliot observed, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”19 While it is true that we should want to be able to achieve the ability to critically comprehend and judge the works of the past, too often we expect and demand this from students who are being introduced to these works for the first time. Our first meeting with these texts should not be to apply our reason and plunder or critique it, it should be an encounter like meeting a lost relative. Perhaps the best way to introduce this to students might be to work backwards. Once Narnia and Middle-Earth have been devoured and loved, perhaps they can be our guide to Beowulf, Dante, and Spenser. From them the litany of the medieval tradition awaits. Once we can read and be moved by the heroes of Virgil and Homer will we know that we have succeeded. The difference is between “beholding” and “analyzing;” between “apprehending” and “comprehending.” Only when we have empathetically experienced what our fathers saw through the tradition, and how their vision shapes our own, 19 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 43. 40
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can we then begin to evaluate it, because then we will be doing so from within the tradition. The tradition is what makes it possible for us to gain the knowledge and the tools to be able to reflect back on it and ourselves; to look at the beam, instead of just along it. Then our evaluation will be as lovers, not as scientists. Classical education invites us back into the Great Conversation, not as outsiders peering in, but as lost heirs to a kingdom. For Christians, this is not merely academic. Studying the humanities is studying what it means to be human. It is part of learning how to see ourselves as reflections of the image of God, called to participate in the divine, cosmic dance. ⸭ George Harrell is a speaker, writer, and humanities teacher with work spanning classical Christian education, history, economics, sacramentology, literature, Tolkien, nature, and political theology. He has taught for over a decade, currently with Kepler Education, and serves as executive director of the George Buchanan Forum, a conference exploring the intersection of theology, natural law, and history. He holds an M.A. in Theology and Letters.
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Mentoring the Mind The Art of Maximizing Memory through Literary Short Forms by Drew Mery, M.A.
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earning depends upon memory. As Hugh of Saint Victor observes: “Aptitude gathers wisdom, memory preserves it.”1 However, man’s memory “is dull and likes brevity,” and thus it is best “to gather brief and dependable abstracts” that may be easily remembered, contemplated, and applied as needed.2 That is, since it is difficult to remember most of what we read and hear, it is best to focus on that which is essential and memorable, which in turn serves as memory cues for the larger body of knowledge. Literary short forms, such as maxims and aphorisms, are both memorable and encapsulate key concepts and principles, thereby greatly aiding the learning process. Take, for instance, this maxim from Samuel Johnson’s essay in The Rambler (No. 7): “Other things may be seized by might, or purchased with money, but knowledge is to be gained only by study, and study to be prosecuted only in retirement.”3 This single sentence encapsulates Johnson’s thought regarding “the great art… of piety.”4 as being rooted in the mind. The content and argument of the essay as a whole are more easily recalled by the recalling of the maxim. What 1 Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 91. 2 Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon, 94. 3 Samuel Johnson, Selected Essays (London, United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2003), 22. 4 Samuel Johnson, Selected Essays, 25. 43
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is difficult to achieve—the memorization of a large body of writing—is essentially achieved with the literary short form. This may be referred to as the art of maximizing memory through literary short forms. The strategic use of short forms in higher education—by both teachers and students—can meaningfully enhance the process of learning by making it more engaging and memorable. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a maxim is a “rule or principle of conduct” and “a pithily expressed precept of morality or prudence”;5 and an aphorism is any “principle or precept expressed in few words; a short pithy sentence containing a truth of general import; a maxim.”6 In colloquial and literary use, maxim, aphorism, proverb, axiom, apothegm, the Latin sententia, etc., tend to be used interchangeably.7 All of these, as well as the six-word story, are included in the meaning of a literary short form. Former Europe editor of Time and deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, James Geary, notes the ancient origin of aphorisms, having been used by sages, prophets, and teachers during a time when writing and literacy were less common.8 They have been used extensively by men like Solomon, Hippocrates, Quintilian, medieval philosophers and poets, Chaucer, Erasmus, Montaigne, Baltasar Gracián, Francis Bacon, Pascal, François de La Rochefoucauld, William Penn, and Nietzsche.9 This covers philosophy, 5 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “maxim (n),” accessed March 2025, https://doi. org/10.1093/OED/9189893975. 6 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “aphorism (n),” accessed March 2025, https:// doi.org/10.1093/OED/9378612534. 7 Benedict S. Robinson, “Sense and Sententiae,” Critical Analysis of Law: An International & Interdisciplinary Law Review, vol. 10, no. 1, 2023, 44, HeinOnline, https:// heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/cclaysolw10&i=41. 8 James Geary, The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism (London, United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005), 26. 9 Ben Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (Oxfordshire, England: Routledge, 2016), 6–29; Andrew Hui, A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 6–12, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j. ctv941t7d. 44
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science, theology, and fiction, demonstrating the breadth of application in the art of maximizing memory through literary short forms.
Short Forms and Memory Two characteristics that make short forms memorable are their conciseness and rhetorical devices.10 Regarding conciseness, Francis Bacon spoke of the aphorism as containing “the greatest quantity of thought in the smallest space.”11 They are memorable forms that encapsulate details of most interest.12 This ability of short forms to communicate much in as few words as possible is the essential characteristic that makes them memorable and apt for a learning environment. As the squirrel gathers acorns for the winter, so the student must gather knowledge and wisdom for life. A squirrel does not gather a tree, neither does a student gather a tome. This act of gathering is analogous to memorization, as “memory retains through gathering.”13 As the acorn contains within it the potentiality of an oak tree, so a short form contains within it the exposition of a tome, because every exposition is built upon some principle.14 While it may not be possible, except with great difficulty, to memorize a tome, the principles or essential matter of a writing can be memorized with relative ease; and by internalizing the essential, the larger body of knowledge becomes more accessible, like a channel to the sea. When speaking of the act of remembrance, Sertillanges, 10 Frank J. D’Angelo, “Some Uses of Proverbs,” College Composition and Communication, vol. 28, no. 4, 1977, 366. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/356733. 11 Quoted in James Geary, The World in a Phrase, 18. 12 Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms, 5. 13 Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon, 93. 14 Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon, 93; A. G. O. P. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, trans. Mary Ryan (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 180. 45
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author of the classic The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, says to “imitate the procedure of mathematics in which necessity starts from the axiom and arrives at the most distant conclusions.”15 Rather than attempt to remember the whole of a matter, seek to remember the essential truths and concepts upon which the whole is constructed. To state it aphoristically: Think big by thinking small. The idea of remembering the essentials, and then building upon its foundation, has been referred to as extraction and elaboration.16 Extraction is the process of discerning or taking note of “key ideas” or “underlying principles or rules” and then organizing them into a “mental model,” or a “mental representation of some external reality,” whether that be a physical task or body of knowledge.17 Ben Grant, in The Aphorism and Other Short Forms, refers to this as concision, which involves using “the fewest possible words” to get at what is essential.18 Elaboration is “the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material.”19 Another way of thinking about elaboration is successively building upon the essential or fundamental point, thereby relating the complex to the primordial.20 Or, still more pointedly, thoughts becoming “the starting-point of new thoughts.”21 Grant refers to this as intensity—the packing of many meanings—which is related to the brevity of a literary short form, like a seed or gem.22 There is a fascinating conceptualization of concision and intensity in terms of centripetal and centrifugal forces. The centripetal force of a literary short form pulls as much meaning 15 Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, 182 (emphasis added). 16 Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Harvard University Press, 2014). ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/liberty/detail.action?docID=3301452. 17 Brown, et al., Make It Stick, 6, 133, 153. 18 Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms, 38. 19 Brown, et al., Make It Stick, 207. 20 Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, 178. 21 Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, 181. 22 Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms, 41–42. 46
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as possible into a short and pithy expression, whereas the centrifugal force casts outward, generating new thoughts about the broader body of knowledge that it encapsulates.23 In keeping with this language of physics, a maxim is a high-density literary form—compact in size yet rich in meaning and full of potential energy. As the mind meditates on the maxim, exploring its implications and relations, that potential energy is released and transformed into kinetic energy: the motion of thought. In his article on St. Augustine’s use of rhetoric in his preaching ministry, John Sypert discusses three rhetorical devices that made Augustine’s sermons “memorable and compelling:”24 analogy/word picture/simile/metaphor, repetition, and antithesis. D’Angelo includes five additional devices: alliteration, rhyme, ellipsis, parallelism, and puns.25 Both Sypert and D’Angelo are touching on what Cosmin-Constantin Băiaș speaks of as “the poetic nature” of the short form, which, together with its conciseness, makes it memorable.26 This is why Băiaș can refer to the aphorism as a jewel; 27 the beauty of a jewel is not in its size, but in its color, shape, and brilliance, which is equivalent to the various rhetorical techniques of the short form. Note how Jesus, for example, reduces the teaching of the Law and the Prophets with a maxim that uses parallelism: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12 ESV). The parallel is between others/you and you/others. Although not explicitly mentioning short forms, Brown (et al.), in Make It Stick: The Science of Suc23 Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms, 40. 24 John A. Sypert, “Redeeming Rhetoric: Augustine’s Use of Rhetoric in His Preaching Ministry,” Eleutheria: John W. Rawlings School of Divinity Academic Journal, vol. 4, issue 1, 2015, 30. https://doi.org/10.70623/QLFK6417. 25 D’Angelo, “Some Uses of Proverbs,” 366–367. 26 Cosmin-Constantin Băiaș, “The Aphorism: Function and Discursive Strategy.” Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 191, 2015, 2268. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.04.229. 27 Băiaș, “The Aphorism: 2268. 47
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cessful Learning, discusses several of these rhetorical devices, such as rhyme28 and metaphor/word picture, 29 as mnemonic cues for stimulating memory. Their point of using “rhyming concrete images as ‘pegs’ on which to ‘hang’ items you want to remember”30 is a helpful way of conceiving short forms in general. As a memorable peg, the Golden Rule from Matthew 7:12 can be used to hang intellectual items like hermeneutics, justice, mercy, humanity, and the like. Short forms, then, are intellectual cues to the ideas they encapsulate, being made more memorable by the varied rhetorical devices. So far, this art of maximizing memory through literary short forms may sound more suited to non-fiction than fiction. Short forms certainly are more prominent in philosophical or scientific works than the novel. One way short forms can be utilized in relation to fiction is by capturing the moral of the story or a lesson learned from a chapter. That said, in “Poetics of Six-Word Stories,” Fishelov notes the relationship of this relatively new genre with that of its ancient cousins.31 Five of the seven characteristics of six-word stories that he discusses directly relate to other short forms. These five characteristics are 1) the narrative element, 2) the tip of the iceberg principle, 3) the punch-line structure, 4) the poetic/ rhythmic structures, 5) and the contagiousness of the form. Proverbs 6:6 is a good example for a demonstration of these characteristics: “Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise” (Proverbs 6:6 ESV). Clearly, there is a narrative to this proverb, a story being communicated: A person goes to observe the ant, or is at least instructed to do so. The tip of the iceberg principle means that elements of the story are implied.32 What’s implied in this proverb are dereliction of 28 Brown, et al., Make It Stick, 188. 29 Brown, et al., Make It Stick, 207. 30 Brown, et al., Make It Stick, 189. 31 David Fishelov, “The Poetics of Six-Word Stories,” Narrative, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019, 36. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26644122. 32 Fishelov, “The Poetics of Six-Word Stories,” 37. 48
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duty, a person procrastinating, natural law, sluggishness as foolishness, etc. The punch-line structure means there is an unexpected turn in the narrative that makes the reader pause and re-interpret his expectations.33 This turn is especially characteristic of proverbs and maxims, and is associated with wit.34 The punch-line, or unexpected turn, is with the idea that one can gain wisdom from such a tiny creature as an ant. The poetic/rhythmic structure of this proverb is seen in its Hebraic parallel structure, with the second half elaborating on the first. Finally, the contagiousness of short forms is because of their linguistic and rhetorical devices: brief, witty, rhythmic, etc. They are easily caught and easily spread. Since six-word stories share these characteristics with short forms, it makes sense to include them in this art of maximizing memory through literary short forms. Indeed, they are a short form.
Short Forms in the Classroom Hugh of Saint Victor notes that “Reading consists of forming our minds upon rules and precepts taken from books,” and rules and precepts are essentially synonymous with maxims. He then speaks of reading as of three types: the teacher reads to the students, the learner reads under the guidance of the teacher, and the independent learner simply reads.35 The point here is that the art of maximizing memory through literary short forms is to be performed by both teacher and learner. The teacher should incorporate short forms in lectures, providing captivating, principled, and quotable material for 33 Fishelov, “The Poetics of Six-Word Stories,” 38. 34 Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms, 13, 17–18. 35 Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon, 91. 49
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students to latch onto as memorable cues for more expansive thought. This is consonant with the instruction by Quintilian, who spoke of sententia—what Grant defines as “a brief and striking saying, and the nearest equivalent in Latin to ‘aphorism’”36 —as a device that delivers a striking thought at the end of paragraphs.37 This is evidenced, for example, in the essays by the Roman rhetorician Seneca. In a lengthy paragraph on adversity as a means of producing excellence in the virtuous man, he concludes, “it is not what you endure that matters, but how you endure it.”38 The structure of the paragraph is such that it comes to an aphoristic point: brief, striking, and memorable. The Christian theologian and rhetorician St. Augustine continued this tradition, though he frequently makes use of sententiae at the start of paragraphs. For example, he begins a paragraph in On Christian Teaching, “All teaching is teaching of either things or signs, but things are learnt through signs.”39 This simplifies a central aspect of his teaching on hermeneutics, making it easier to grasp and remember Augustine’s overall thought on the subject. Sertillanges, who writes like a teacher instructing his students in The Intellectual Life, frequently uses maxims, which consolidate his thought and beckons the mind to contemplation. By following in the footsteps of these sage guides of antiquity and modernity, teachers can make learning and instruction more impactful and memorable in the college classroom. An excess of notes is to be avoided, as they become overwhelming and unusable, yielding little to no return.40 The student should therefore keep a record of principled thoughts from their readings, thereby creating a reservoir of essential 36 Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms, 137. 37 Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, trans. John Selby Watson (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), 426. 38 Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, trans. John Davie (Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. 39 Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford University Press, 2008), 8. 40 Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, 188. 50
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knowledge on various topics in the various subjects, creating a web of relations that synthesizes knowledge. Grant quotes Gary Saul Morson as referring to short forms “as particular genres of ‘quotation,’ and ‘quotation’ as the general term for memorable short expressions.’”41 This makes the commonplace book—a notebook used “to gather together and organize quotations and ideas on a range of subjects”42 —the perfect apparatus for keeping a record of short forms that can be turned to repeatedly for review and reflection. This practice goes back to the ancient anthology (lit. “a gathering of flowers”), which were “collections of the flowers of discourse”— beautiful sayings and captivating thoughts. The Greeks and Romans are known to have compiled numerous anthologies of “gnomes [i.e., shorty, pithy sayings], sententiae, proverbs, and epigrams.”43 Continuing in this tradition, the commonplace book flourished during the Renaissance, with students from Erasmus to Locke being taught to collect noteworthy quotations, or commonplaces.44 Johannes Micraelius spoke of these quotations as “memorable sentences.” So close are commonplace books associated with learning, that they have been referred to as a second brain and “an extension of memory”45 —Montaigne spoke of “paper memory.”46 Referencing John Locke, Pauline Griffiths refers to the commonplace book as a means of remembering what we want to remember.47 She says, “Commonplace books are intellectual spaces where writers [and learners in general] identify and
41 Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms, 71. 42 Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms, 131; Pauline Griffiths, “Commonplace Books: Writing and a Sense of Self in the 21st Century English Classroom,” English in Australia (0155-2147), vol. 53, no. 1, 2018, 83. EBSCOhost, https://research.ebsco. com/c/r3w5i4/viewer/pdf/6vs3runden?route=details. 43 Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms, 9. 44 Robinson, “Sense and Sententiae,” 45. 45 Robinson, “Sense and Sententiae,” 45. 46 Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, 186. 47 Griffiths, “Commonplace Books,” 83. 51
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select ideas worthy of close study.”48 This is the critical point; not all that is read or spoken is worthy of committing to memory and close study. There are, however, those rules, precepts, and essential knowledge-points that are worthy of such treatment; and these are frequently written as a short form. At the heart of Griffiths’ article is what she refers to as “the writing-thinking-learning connection.”49 The idea is rather straightforward: writing helps us think, and by writing and thinking about key ideas, the process of learning is more engaging and effective. In some ways, this personalizes education, as each student chooses what to write in their commonplace book and how to relate that knowledge. More generally, though, it is an example of active learning, which involves higher-order thinking. Brown (et al.) refer to this as “generation,” because it involves the student generating answers, solutions, and ultimately thought, rather than being given the answers.50 Uncommon knowledge is obtained in the commonplaces. Using extraction and elaboration to summarize book chapters can serve as both a notetaking practice and a writing assignment. For example, using extraction, the content of Book 1 of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy might be captured with the following maxim: Wisdom is nurse to the suffering soul. This encapsulates the medicine (wisdom) that Lady Philosophy gives Boethius to heal his ailment (clouded mind caused by misfortune). The student would then provide a brief elaboration of the maxim as it pertains to the chapter. The brevity, rhythm, metaphor, and alliteration of the maxim make it memorable. With this “peg,” the student is equipped to hang items from the chapter, establishing improved recall. Similarly, novels can be summarized using this method. It may be helpful, and even add to the memorable quality of a maxim or aphorism, by arriving at it through a six-word story. 48 Griffiths, “Commonplace Books,” 84. 49 Griffiths, “Commonplace Books,” 84. 50 Brown, et al., Make It Stick, 87, 89, 208–209. 52
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For example, a six-word story of Chapter 1 in The Fellowship of the Ring might go as follows: Bilbo goes. Ring stays. Shadow gathers. The rhythmic 2-2-2 pattern is memorable,51 and captures key elements of the chapter, which can then be elaborated upon. This could then be turned into an aphorism: A burden abandoned today burdens another tomorrow. This communicates the burden of the ring being passed from Bilbo to Frodo. This creative exercise itself, or generation, better facilitates the memory in the learning process.
Conclusion The art of maximizing memory through literary short forms is a longstanding tradition from the ancients to the Renaissance and beyond. This art involves noting and using key ideas, principles, and rules from educational material to better facilitate learning by improving the memory. Both the brevity of and rhetorical devices used in short forms aid in memorization. These short forms work as intellectual cues, enabling students to recall the broader body of knowledge that they serve to encapsulate. Teachers, too, have incorporated and should continue to incorporate short forms in their lectures to students, thereby facilitating maximal learning in the classroom environment. As D’Angelo aptly remarks, this practice of using short forms amounts to a revitalization of “an important part of the Western liberal-education tradition.”52 Classical education thrived in part because of the artful use of literary short forms, and it can thrive again with teachers and students intentionally making use of this art in the classroom. This art form is perhaps best captured in the keeping of a commonplace book, which is an important fea51 Fishelov, “The Poetics of Six-Word Stories,” 35. 52 D’Angelo, “Some Uses of Proverbs,” 369. 53
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ture of classical learning. And so, in closing, a maxim seems most fitting: Mind the short forms, and they shall extend your mind. ⸭ Drew S. C. Mery holds an M.A. in Humanities (Great Books) and serves as an adjunct instructor of humanities at Hillsborough College. His work has appeared in Salvo Magazine, FORMA Journal, and The Consortium Journal. He lives in Central Florida with his wife and three children.
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Christian Paideia, Vol. 1: A History of Christian Education to 500 AD (Waterloo, ON: Arouca Press, 2025)
by Brian Welter Following is an introduction and excerpt on Grammar from Brian Welter's book, Christian Paideia. Welter reminds us that the earliest Christian teachers recognized grammar as something more than the mechanics of reading. Learning grammar is both a spiritual exercise—a means of ordering desire, disciplining attention, and leading the mind toward Christ—and a humane art in which all further learning is anchored. In what follows, Welter invites us to once again view the liberal arts as the Church once saw them, as pathways by which truth, goodness, and beauty are pursued, contemplated, and loved.
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eading is at the heart of the liberal arts. The written text is central to the trivium and quadrivium. Reading is a very context-specific activity. There are many types of reading, from skimming an article for its gist, to scanning for a specific piece of information such as a phone number, to the deep reading required of a novel. In recent decades, it is the various types of deep reading that have come under pressure from technology such as smartphones. We are becoming increasingly detached from traditional ways of reading. Until recent centuries, reading was not simply an exercise in simply gleaning information from a passage. It was often a spiritual act, lectio divina. The words on the page represented more than facts. These words pointed to a much profounder set of truths that in Christendom were ultimately centered on the person of Jesus Christ. All of Scripture (and 55
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other Christian writings, especially those of the Church Fathers) pointed to Christ. Reading Scripture or other Christian tests was a spiritual act that was even connected to prayer. Ruminatio (to chew on a cud) was a common metaphor for reading, particularly in the monastic setting. It meant to chew on words. It was part of the wider metaphor of reading as nutrition. Ruminatio was a middle step in the nourishment, and came after the lectio (reading) stage. A passage from a text had to be digested after it was read. It had to be repeatedly turned over so it could sink in and become a part of the person. Ruminatio was therefore an aspect of meditatio, the subjective and personal reflection on a reading. When meditatio made everything clear, the monk could contemplate this truth: lectio-meditatio-contemplatio. Reading in the Christian era also involved hermeneutics. Hermeneutics had also been a concern for the Greeks in their attempt to smooth out the violence in Homer and for the Hellenized Jews of Alexandria as they made sense of the Septuagint within their Greek culture. Through all of this, scholars developed theories of textual interpretation. These theories became codified at some point into the four levels of the historical or literal, allegorical, typological or moral, and anagogical. Starting with the Bible, texts were seen as rich, multi-layered, and capable of speaking to the present situation of the reader centuries after the text had been written. Biblical texts in particular possessed an eternal truth that often went deeper than the literal-historical, although this latter level was taken as the critical first step in understanding the text. Proper reading was critical for the Christian faith. Heresy, the Church Fathers warned, arose from faulty biblical hermeneutics, disordered and irrational thinking, and misunderstood words. Ambiguity could lead to heresy by encouraging the misinterpretation of a Biblical passage. This partly explains Isidore of Seville’s investigation into the etymological roots of words which, as French historian Jacques Lafontaine 56
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has shown, was based on the Spanish bishop’s search for the metaphysical sense of these words. He believed this sense was present in the original meaning and form of a given word. Isidore consequently regarded grammar as holding metaphysical truths. This is only one example of the richness of the discipline of grammar throughout the Christian centuries. It provided the foundation not only to the other two trivial disciplines, but in fact to all the other disciplines. That is why it was the centerpiece of the Carolingians’ renovatio. Overall, then, a primary issue for Christian masters was clear understanding and use of language, clear logical thinking, and clear interpretation of Christian and non-Christian sources of authority. These three concerns reflect the domains of grammar, logic or dialectic, and rhetoric respectively. Christian thinkers did not attack or weaken Greco-Roman paideia, but helped to bring it to its fullest point. While Socrates and Plato may have been interested in serving the polis, Christians served something—someone, in fact—far higher, Jesus Christ. The search for the truth ultimately concerned the search for the person of Jesus Christ. There was always a religious sense to academic tasks such as reading, or to disciplines such as grammar. The study of grammar, which traditionally required years of input to relatively passive students, developed certain types of reading habits in the grammar school pupils. These habits undoubtedly endured for a lifetime. Someone living in the twenty-first century would not always recognize their reading as reading. More specifically, before the invention of the printing press, much reading occurred with the ears, not the eyes, due in part to the dearth of books, but also, perhaps, because of the more communal society. Grammar school pupils, monastic novices, monks at mealtime, important prelates or dukes receiving letters, and everybody at Mass listened to a master, monk, priest, or courtier read a text aloud. More specific to the grammar school pupils in their years of passive learning of the canon of authors, reading was 57
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closely associated with memorization. The master expected his pupils to memorize a part of the excerpts or fragments of a lesson’s text. The children would likely need to reproduce a part of that text the next day. Memorization was at the heart of the aim to build a common scholarly culture across Europe based in the Latin West on Romanitas and Christian ethics. The ancient pagan Roman authors became prized companions of many of these young minds: Horace, Virgil, Cicero, fables, and, naturally, the contents of the Psalter. This very common and beloved book, the Psalter, had replaced Homer at the center of the grammar reading curriculum. Rumination and meditation were likely a frequent part of this learning even for children. The Irish or Anglo-Saxon master was as much a spiritual father as a master or scholar, respected for his saintliness more than his book-learning. Instruction in the Psalter was at least as much about the spiritual truths it contained as about acquiring language and reading skills. Christians succeeded at cultivating the twin educational system. We are the heirs of Greek paideia, comprised of the liberal arts and philosophy. We have also received Revelation, which now exists at the reading level in the form of Christian dogma, Scripture, and liturgical texts. Reading, including reading through the ears, was at the heart of Christian paideia. The Greek word paideia, with its double sense of education and culture, expresses the pedagogical project of the Church Fathers, medieval Latin Christendom, and the pockets of the West that have continued this tradition until even now. Christian paideia, like the liturgy, has given sustenance to both the individual Christian and to Christian society. This is not irrelevant for today. The notable educational awakening in the US from the 1970s onward in homeschooling and classical education has provided a corrective to the Frankfurt School’s infamous and destructive march through the institutions. Classical educators have countered Marxist 58
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lies with truth, evil with goodness, and ugliness with beauty. Far from being endangered, Christian paideia is thriving. In the age of wokeism, including woke AI and all its manipulations, the ability to read, ruminate on, and interpret a text is more relevant than ever. Christian paideia provides the antidote to the childish, narcissistic emotionalism that now runs rampant in our schools and universities. It can teach budding scholars not only how to read, but also how to read the times.
14.1 Grammar In The Benedictine Schools, John Henry Newman observes that the ancient and medieval view of grammar provides “such an acquaintance with the literature of a language as is implied in the power of original composition and the vivâ voce use of it. Thus Cassiodorus defines it to be ‘skill in speaking elegantly, gained from the best poets and orators’; St. Isidore, ‘the science of speaking well’; and Raban, ‘the science of interpreting poets and historians, and the rule of speaking and writing well.’”1 Grammar teachers aimed to establish a lifelong love of literature and language in grammar class. Grammar and rhetoric class gave Greek and Latin pagan writers came to exert tremendous influence over the Church’s priests, bishops, and monks. Grammar provided the introduction to an entire culture that was based on skillful reading, interpretation, and contemplation of texts that often predated Christianity. In fact, it was Christianity that was the foreign, radically unfamiliar, and even intrusive, element in the ancient grammar or rhetoric classroom. A text-based grammar culture of Greco-Roman paideia stretched from North Africa 1 John Henry Newman, A Benedictine Education: Two Essays: The Mission of Saint Benedict; the Benedictine Schools, ed. Christopher F. Fisher, Margarita A. Mooney, and Thomas Frerking (Providence, Rhode Island: Cluny, 2020), 79. 59
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in the empire’s south to Gaul and England in the north and Anatolia and Syria in the east. Students in Lyons, Gaza, Byzantium, Thagaste, and Rome followed essentially the same curriculum. Despite this uniformity, the technological constraints of the pre-modern world made this learning quite challenging. The ancient and early medieval reader required advanced textual skills that went beyond mere reading. It was the duty of the grammatikos to introduce the youngest pupils to the problems of reading and interpreting texts. Before the invention of the printing press, lack of uniformity made reading a more onerous task. Ancient readers worked with unreliable, damaged, or carelessly-written copies of a text. These inconsistencies increased the challenges of interpreting a text. Lack of punctuation and spacing between words added to the burden. A crucial part of the grammar teacher’s task was to train students to take extreme care in determining the correctness of each word in the sentence, and only then how to interpret the wider text.2 Keeping in line with the trivium as a whole, grammar was anagogical in nature. The simple grew into the complex step-by-step. Very basic concrete skills and ideas were expanded into more nuanced and challenging skills and concepts that engaged the whole personality and even the spiritual life, and not simply the cognitive level. Practice with words and sentence patterns expanded into the appreciation of poetry and history. The leading and foundational events, beliefs, and philosophical schools of Greco-Roman culture were presented. Augustine comments on this anagogical movement through poetry’s emergence and expanding role in the discipline of grammar: “What was not encompassed by a fixed boundary, but still run in a certain order of meter, it [was] called rhyme, which is the same as number. This is how reason begat poetry; and seeing in poets’ work the combined strength of words and rhyme, gave them a special place of honor, together with the license to compose any fiction they 2
Schwartz, Paideia and Cult: Christian Initiation in Theodore of Mopsuestia, 40. 60
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wished, but within reason. And since poets drew their matter primarily from grammar, the first of the disciplines in time, reason gave grammarians the power to judge poets.”3 Here Augustine could just as easily have been tracing the intellectual progress of the individual student instead of the advancement of classical literary culture. Reading and writing clear sentences preceded the truths that were to be taught. Recognition of the truth requires clarity. Clarity in Latin writing was a vital concern for western Church leaders, particularly between 500 and 1050 AD, in their work to unify Christendom with clear dogma and to expand into the pagan Germanic and western Slavic lands. Two writings would impact education into the sixteenth century, the highly-esteemed grammar textbooks of the mid-fourth century Roman Aelius Donatus (Ars maior and Ars minor) and the fifth century Constantinopolitan Priscian (Institutes of Grammar). They were so pervasive that they became cultural phenomena. The Ars minor presents the Latin parts of speech. Every educated European in that millennium would recall, perhaps fondly, struggling through his donat. Donatus’ grammar had a central and near-universal place in the scholarly culture of the Middle Ages. His Ars Minor was so well-known that ‘donat or ‘donet’ or ‘donatist’ had come to mean, in several of the vernaculars, not merely both the beginner in grammar and the primer of that subject, but also the novice and the first principles in any study or art. Thus John Langland makes Pierce Plow man say, ‘Then drewe I me among drapers my donet to lerne,’ meaning, not grammar, but the beginnings of the draper’s trade. There is an old French proverb as follows: Les diables estoient encores a leur Donat, which signified that the devils were still young at their trade. John of Basin, about 1240, entitled his Greek grammar Donatus Graecorum. In the fourteenth centu3
Augustine of Hippo, On Order = De Ordine, Book 2, §40, 105. 61
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ry Hugues Faidit gave his grammatical treatise the title Donatz Proensals.4
The much larger Ars maior, or officially Donati Grammatici Urbis Romae Ars Grammatica, discusses the mechanics of language, from the most elementary (letters, syllables) to the practical (punctuation marks, the parts of speech), to proper and poor usage, to poetry (metrical feet, accents, poetical license in forms and in syntax, and figures of rhetoric) These points are illustrated with numerous citations from the classical authors, particularly Virgil.5 Unsurprisingly, the latter was the most popular pagan poet in Christendom for centuries. Priscian’s text was an alternative to the Ars maior. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica notes the impact of the Institutes of Grammar: “There is hardly a library in Europe that did not and does not contain a copy of his great work, and there are about a thousand MSS. of it. The greater part of these contain only books i.–xvi. (sometimes called Priscianus major).”6 Of Priscian’s content, the encyclopedia notes, “He has preserved to us numerous fragments which would otherwise have been lost e.g. from Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, Lucilius, Cato and Varro. But the authors whom he quotes most frequently are Virgil, and, next to him, Terence, Cicero, Plautus; then Lucan, Horace, Juvenal, Sallust, Statius, Ovid, Livy and Persius.” These texts were the basis of the European-wide culture that Christian education built in the medieval period and beyond. Donatus and Priscian reflect the phenomenal staying power of Greco-Roman paideia in Christian education. Donatus and Priscian benefited from an already well-established grammar culture that the works of Cicero and Quintilian underpinned. Though famed as a rhetorician, the 4 Aelius Donatus, The Ars Minor of Donatus, trans. Wayland Johnson Chase, Studies in the Social Sciences and History / Wisconsin. University 11 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1926). 6. 5 Donatus, 4–5. 6 “Priscian,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica (London: Vernon, Hood, and Sharpe, 1911). 62
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pagan Roman Quintilian valued grammar as the basis of his discipline. In the Institutio Oratoria, he follows Stoic tradition and divides grammar into “the art of speaking correctly (recte loquendi scientia) and the explanation of poets ( poetarum enarratio).” 7 The first part provides the foundation of language study at word and sentence level, and the second a fuller version of this first study through literary models. This fuller study included introductory reading and interpretation of the authors. The master’s glosses of the works of the poets concerned appropriate use of expressions, harmonious style, coherent writing, appropriate ideas, figures of speech, and elocution.8 Book 1 of the Oratoria introduces the rudiments of grammar, including orthography, pronunciation, “barbarisms” and solecisms, composition, and inconsistencies between spelling and pronunciation. These were the same sorts of issues that keenly interested many Christians, including the Carolingians in their project to rebuild Christian culture. Quintilian also discusses teaching methods in the grammar classroom, with the view towards the difficulties of the ancient texts and also the advancement of the future orator: Reading remains for consideration. In this connexion there is much that can only be taught in actual practice, as for instance when the boy should take breath, at what point he should introduce a pause into a line, where the sense ends or begins, when the voice should be raised or lowered, and when he should increase or slacken speed, or speak with greater or less energy. In this portion of my work I will give but one golden rule: to do all these things, he must understand what he reads. But above all his reading must be manly, combining dignity and charm; it must
7 Alexandre Héron, Oeuvres de Henri d’Andeli, trouvère normand du XIII siècle, Société rouennaise de bibliophiles. [Publications; 20] (Rouen: Impr. de E. Cagniard, 1880). lxviii. 8 Héron. lxviii. 63
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be different from the reading of prose, for poetry is song and poets claim to be singers.9
Book 2 addresses grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, and discusses the prog ymnasmata, which it terms primae exercitationes. The progymnasmata, which originated with Greek teachers of rhetoric or pre-rhetoric, was a series of exercises that aimed to build the relevant subskills needed for the declamation, or long speech to be given at the end of rhetoric studies. The progymnasmata, which had become widespread in both parts of the empire by the first century BC, supported students in their step-by-step progress towards a large, complex speaking task. Students of grammar and rhetoric learned narration, amplification, description, praise, criticism, composition, proof, and refutation in a highly structured and traditional way. These were all elements of the composition and delivery of a speech, and could be combined in different ways. It was expected that the teacher would assign a topic for practice. Free composition was not used by Greek or Roman educators.10 The progymnasmata was a curriculum in its own right. It encompassed elements across the trivium. Formal instruction in the progymnasmata continued in the Byzantine Empire, though its explicit teaching had faded in the West by the end of antiquity. Quintilian addresses the ambiguous, overlapping boundaries of the trivial disciplines in his reflection on the relationship between the teaching positions of grammaticus and rhetor. He laments mission creep among grammar teachers, as they tend to improperly encroach on the rhetor’s territory. For example, boys are promoted to the rhetor’s class at a later time in their development than they should be for two reasons. Teachers of rhetoric neglect some of their duties, while grammar teachers, the teachers of literature, take on tasks 9 Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, Book 1, §7–8. 10 George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 26. 64
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that are not reserved for them.11 The rhetors’ focus on their reputations as masters made them overly concerned with the end result of rhetoric, the declamation, according to Quintilian: “For the rhetorician considers that his duty is merely to declaim and give instruction in the theory and practice of declamation and confines his activities to deliberative and judicial themes, regarding all others as beneath the dignity of his profession; while the teacher of literature is not satisfied to take what is left him (and we owe him a debt of gratitude for this), but even presumes to handle declamations in character and deliberative themes, tasks which impose the very heaviest burden on the speaker.”12 Quintilian criticizes what he sees as unfocused instruction in the trivium in his day. Educators worked without clear boundaries for grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, as evidenced by the progymnasmata. Rhetoric spilled over into grammar class, which narrowed and limited the role of the rhetoric class because by that time nothing was left to teach, at least according to Quintilian. Many topics and exercises appropriate for rhetoric classes were introduced too early. Quintilian expresses frustration in this: “Subjects which once formed the first stages of rhetoric have come to form the final stages of a literary education, and boys who are ripe for more advanced study are kept back in the inferior school and practise rhetoric under the direction of teachers of literature. Thus we get the absurd result that a boy is not regarded as fit to go on to the schools of declamation till he knows how to declaim.”13 The Christian centuries never managed to straighten out these ambiguous boundaries, even with all the other significant and long-lasting contributions to the liberal arts in this period. The emergence of scholasticism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries later brought about a situation quite sim11 Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, Book 1. 12 Quintilian, Book 2, §1. 13 Quintilian, Book 2, §1. 65
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ilar to the one Quintilian describes, with teaching in grammar and rhetoric shortchanged by the domination of another trivial art, this time dialectic. Such imbalances were considered an important issue because a well-rounded trivium was thought to contribute to the development of well-rounded personalities and proper conduct. Unsurprisingly, then, and in keeping to Roman tradition, Quintilian was concerned with virtue education. Book 12 of the Institutio Oratoria envisions rhetoric as a tool for philosophers to defend concepts such as justice and truth.14 ⸭ Brian Welter has studied history, theology, and applied linguistics while teaching English in South Korea, Canada, Taiwan, and France. He is interested in how language can be used to shed light on the truth but also to manipulate it. He has translated several books for Arouca Press, including Immortal Latin, Pius XIV, and a multi-volume series by Philippe de la Trinité on Teilhard de Chardin.
14 Bice Garavelli Mortara, Prima lezione di retorica, 1. ed, Prime lezioni; 917 (Roma: GLF editori Laterza, 2011), 17. 66
Reading in Place The Whole-Person Awareness of Reading by Dr. Karla Memmott
S
everal years ago I traveled to Amsterdam. The anticipated highlight of the excursion was a venture to the Rijksmuseum to gaze on The Night Watch by Rembrandt. I eagerly walked with crowds of other tourists down the museum corridor toward the painting. I turned the corner and was overwhelmed to the point of tears with the magnificence of the painting. Shrouded in the brilliantly gilded frame and the dark green walls, the masterpiece overwhelmed me with feelings of awe, and also with disappointment. The sheer size and intensity of the painting demanded feelings of amazement. Yet, a small voice beckoned me to imagine what it would have been like to see the complexity of the entire painting, not the mere remnants that had been preserved for posterity. The yearning was to have been privileged to examine and enjoy the painting in situ. Years later I was privileged to be a pilgrim to Rome. Another anticipated highlight was Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew, located in Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. The masterpiece which is displayed as a triplet of Caravaggio offspring hangs nestled with its siblings in situ of the chapel. Granted, on busy days, the pilgrim is once again trapped against the tourist tumult of cell-phone selfie sensations. However in the early morning stillness, the silence beckons the pilgrim to ponder the privilege of a quiet conversation with the soul of the art. Neither work of art 67
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was any less grand than the other. However, the environment and the embodied experience of the encounter resonates in my memory. Whereas my encounters with the great works of art housed in the amazing museums and churches of Europe are limited by time and travel, the experience of great classical books is a part of my daily reading routine. I am not alone. Reading is a highly valued activity within the world of classical education. Mortimer Adler’s well-known book How to Read a Book acknowledges the varied levels of reading, instructs individuals how to read more deeply, and challenges readers to engage with the author through intentional reading. Author Karen Swallow Prior highlights the virtuous quality of reading, “Reading well is, in itself, an act of virtue, or excellence, and it is also a habit that cultivates more virtue in return.”1 Finally, Augustine notes that Christians should not ignore reading and letters on account of superstitions, but rather “let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found it belongs to his Master.”2 Reading is intellectual. Reading is virtuous. Reading is spiritual. However, in the midst of all accolades of the benefits of reading, little consideration is given to the aesthetic environment surrounding the body of the being who has nestled in to open a book. The body has become disconnected from the reading experience. The body has not always been invisible in the intellectual pursuit of the mind, or the spiritual pursuit of the soul. Early monks acknowledged the dual nature of humanity. Jaimer Kreiner, author of The Wandering Mind, notes that these early religious enthusiasts “saw themselves as a composite of material and immaterial parts, as bodies that had been joined with souls/minds/heart/spirits–terms that were overlapping and 1 Karen Swallow, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2108), 15. 2 Augustine, “On Christian Doctrine,” Great Books of the Western World, vol. 16, ed. Mortimer Adler, trans. J. F. Shaw (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1993), 727. 68
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sometimes functionally interchangeable.”3 Although these medieval monks acknowledged human dual nature, the focus was to moderate the needs of the body to minimize obsessing over it to better allow the monk to focus on the spiritual.4 Although these individuals aimed for a higher spiritual state, they recognized that the body was a part of human existence, and it required an integration into daily living. Ironically, while these committed Christians acknowledged the body and its relationship to the soul, they also contemplated the cognitive effects of book reading. While reading books created curiosity for the Creator, the same books also potentially distracted the penitent all the while. Again, Kreiner notes that the medieval monks recognized the relationship between the body, the mind, and the soul, noting that book reading was needed to embellish the mind, but that these books also presented a distraction. “The tension resulted in arguments about what, when, how, and how much to read; it generated a flurry of experiments to make books more cognitively compatible.”5 The challenge consistently surrounding the medieval monks was how to acknowledge the close relationship between the body, mind, and soul but also strive to metaphysically soar toward the spiritually sublime. “But all of these ventures were anchored in a fundamental consensus that body, mind and culture were linked. The problem was that the closeness of this relationship made cause-and-effect impossible to disentangle to anyone’s satisfaction.”6 The tension was determining how to achieve the results. Whereas medieval monks acknowledged the intimate relationship between mind, body and soul, the antithetical challenge contemporary culture faces is that the body, mind, and soul are dissected from one another. In some circles, the 3 Jaime Kreiner, The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2023), 73. 4 Kreiner, The Wandering Mind, 97. 5 Kreiner, The Wandering Mind, 100. 6 Kreiner, The Wandering Mind, 98. 69
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soul is merely a fabrication of a fabled and antiquated past. Additionally, the body and its needs are frequently ignored, or the body is viewed merely as a means of transporting the mind from one location to the next.7 Subsequently, children in many contemporary classrooms are forced to sit still to learn lessons with shortened recesses without consideration of the physical nature of the student. Their body is removed from the learning experience. Acknowledging that a bifurcation between body and mind has taken place, some education psychologists and behavior specialists are gradually recognizing the need to fuse the body and the mind for an overall enhanced learning experience. Some reading experts are beginning to reassess the embodied nature of reading. In their summary definition, they note: Embodied reading refers to the experience of engaging with a text in a way that incorporates physical sensations, movements, and emotions, allowing readers to connect more deeply with the material. This concept emphasizes the interplay between the body and mind in the act of reading, encouraging readers to consider how their physical presence influences their understanding and interpretation of the text. It highlights how visual poetry and experimental forms can create unique pathways for interaction, transforming conventional reading into a multisensory experience.8
Through this definition, one observes that the body and the mind have been reintroduced to one another in the reading experience.
7 Juan Toro & Sara Bro Trasmundi, “The Aesthetic Dimension of Reading: An Embodied-Ecological Approach,” Ecological Psycholog y 36:1 (2024), 5. 8 Fiveable, “Embodied Reading—Intro to Creative Writing,” Fiveable, 2024. Accessed September 19, 2025. https://fiveable.me/key-terms/introduction-creative-writing/embodied-reading. 70
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Despite the encouraging nature of this definition, one comprehends the underlying pragmatism which frequently permeates progressive pedagogy. Embodied learning is highlighted so that the child/reader has a deeper experience with the reading material, so that the child/reader has greater retention, so that the child/reader has improved understanding. This attempt to return the physical quality of reading is laudable, but concerns remain about a practice which focuses on embodied reading for merely pragmatic purposes. In his essay “Books and the Intellectual Life,” James Schall heralds the lifelong influence that books have on a person merely to become more human: “We need to surround ourselves with books because we are and ought to be curious about reality, about what is.” 9 Whereas embodied reading admittedly has practical benefits, the higher calling is human flourishing. Reading is frequently understood to be limited to a brain-bound activity for cognitive purpose only: “The orthodox conception of reading foregrounds two attentional processes: attention to perceive letters and words as units… and, attention to associate words with meanings.”10 The normative impression of reading is a bodiless, brain-centric experience. However, the human body is an integral part of the reading experience for whole-person reading. Subsequently, I submit that an awareness of the human body within the aesthetic environment during reading experience contributes to a humane, whole-person reading experience. Although there are narratives explaining how disembodied reading has evolved over time, the focus of this essay is to raise awareness of the embodied reading experience by focusing on the place of the reading experience. This placed-focused reading concentrates on the place of home, the place of the path, the place other-thanhome, and the place of transition.
9 James Schall, “Books and the Intellectual Life” in The Life of the Mind (Willmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 18. 10 Toro and Trasumundi, “The Aesthetic Dimension of Reading,” 7. 71
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Home as Place House and home are often closely intertwined, and yet reflect distinct differences. Whereas house is the physical structure in which the person seeks shelter and enjoys facilities to eat and sleep, home links the material elements with the immaterial feelings and memories which give one the impression of being from a specific location. Frederick Buechner more clearly notes, that “The word home summons up a place—more specifically a house within that place—which you have rich and complex feelings about, a place where you feel, or did feel once, uniquely at home, which is to say a place where you feel you belong and which in some sense belongs to you.”11 Admittedly, the connotation of home may not conjure feelings of coziness for some individuals. Buried within the hurts possibly rooted with home, there remains an underlying expectation that home should be the place of fondness and affection. It is this fundamental impression upon which this discussion of the home reading place is associated. Home is the designated space in which one first begins to develop a sense of identity, self-expression, and sacredness. Psychologist Clare Cooper-Marcus notes that home is a space fulfilling multifaceted hungers, “A home fulfills many needs: a place of self-expression, a vessel of memories, a refuge from the outside world, a cocoon where we can feel nurtured and let down our guard… Those of us lucky enough to have a home may rarely reflect on our good fortune.”12 Home provides one of the first sensations of personal identity, which is “I am safe.” Safety is represented by four clearly defined walls which separates us from them. It becomes a haven from the currents, torrents, and swirls of chaos which blow against a 11 Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections (San Francisco: Harper, 1996), 7. 12 Clare Cooper Marcus, House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home (Lake Worth, FL: Nicholas-Hays, 2006), 2 72
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person like an unrelenting storm. A door provides a sense of personal control, thus home helps the person to characterize one’s self to have some control. The resident locks the door to protect from the outside, or opens the door with discretion to let others into the home, or to step out into the world. Equally powerful are the windows which allows one to watch the outside world and to determine when to open the casements to let in the fresh air. Whereas the walls, doors, and windows protect from others who are not part of home, the roof protects from the natural elements. Heat, wind, and rain are kept at bay. Home is the designated place that provides identity and control, even where home is a disappointment there is an expectation that home should provide these options. Home is the space set aside for self-expression. Cooper-Marcus reflects on her own traditions of creating self expression during her many moves during graduate school, “Each time, the actual physical move was followed by weeks, sometimes months of getting used to the new place. Hanging pictures, moving houseplants around, rearranging furniture, I gradually created a home in each new setting.”13 The items placed inside the home and the small ways in which the items can be arranged and then rearranged becomes a reflection of the personal self. Families which are made up of several “self’s” often have designated spaces where each person may decorate in a self-expressive way. As items are placed, moved, and shuffled, the space gradually becomes a place for the person to enjoy self-expression. Whereas many contemporaries may not consider home as sacred, the pre-modern sacredness of home is exemplified by an example in the Italian Renaissance. Home was the place in which families, regardless of wealth, set aside a family altar for regular worship. Worship is not merely a mental or physical activity. It was a sensory physical experience:
13 Cooper-Marcus, House as a Mirror of Self, 3. 73
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Sensory stimuli enhanced the oneiric quality of the home– the aroma of a wood fire, flickering candlelight, pools of sunlight falling in different spots according to the season or time of day, the familiar feel of a quotidian object, the smell of the simmering stockpot. Sound in the form of changing prayers or singing devotional laude, perfumes from scented oils, and tactile actions such as kissing icons, statues, or books or fingering a rosary, figured prominently in domestic rituals and added to the range of sensory perceptions.14
The uniqueness of this worshipful experience in the home was that the populace understood the need to incorporate the home, the sacred, the person, and the body. The sacredness of the Renaissance household was represented through a meaningful, sacred worship. However, sacred can also mean those things one holds dear. When invited into any contemporary household, one need only to glance around to determine what the family members hold dear. Where there once were altars to divinity, there are now altars to electronics, sports, or shopping networks. Home provides protection, self-expression, and sacredness. Home is where children often learn to read or practice reading. Home is where newspapers are read, magazines are read, books are read. Home is the primary place that promotes embodied reading. In my own home, reading is sacred. I have three primary reading spaces—my reading chair in the snug, my IKEA Poäng chair with a footstool in my office, and a plush patio chair on the back patio. The snug is our sacred refuge surrounded with two and a half walls of books with an electric fireplace and large window completing the circuit. Two cushioned chairs with footstools and a reading lamp fill up the center of the room with my inspirational tsun-
14 Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard & Mary Laven, The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 39. 74
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doku stack tempting me to stay longer.15 Whereas the snug is an entire room dedicated to reading, the reading space in the office is an oasis from the glare of the computer screen and the blare of volumes of emails. Finally, the moderate California weather encourages outdoor reading in early spring, late fall, and sometimes early winter. Whether its reading room, reading corner, or reading chair, the place has a pivotal role in embodied reading. Afterall, there must be a place to place the body to settle in with the book. Although each space within the house has a designated reading chair for sitting, a stool for resting feet, and a light for seeing, there are other elements which nurture the body for humane reading. When describing the importance of place and setting over suspense in a story such as a Fenimore Cooper novel, C. S. Lewis notes, “I wanted not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged—the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, warpaths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names.”16 Similarly, the reader’s experience is more than a book and a chair. The reader is nourished through aesthetic sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch or the surrounding environment. The experience draws on the sensory worshipful experience of the Renaissance household. Whereas each sensation may meet a practical physical need, each sensation ministers to an impractical imaginary delight allowing the physical setting to be experienced while reading. Sight is not merely the ability to see the books clearly but also encompasses the items within the room. It includes the objects, placement, color, and coordinates within the room. For some individuals, eclectic architecture, random knickknacks, and stacks of books pleases the pupils. Conversely, others seek symmetricallylined statutes, structured books shelves, and guild-framed portraits gazing down from on high. The subtle background sights create an awareness of 15 For more information on tsunkoku, please read the article written by Dr. Scott Postma also included in this journal publication. 16 C.S. Lewis “On Stories” in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Harper Collins, 1982), 4. 75
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a special space for reading. In addition to the melody of the foreground of the sights within the room, the sights of the natural environment whisper through the window to fill in the background harmony. The physical nature of the room with its sights are often the first sensation to beckon the reader into the chair, to sit, and to read awhile. The smell of a good book is indescribable. It is experienced. Flipping leisurely through the yellowed pages of an old book and allowing the mature, stale smell of the book to waft through the room and to the nose, the aesthetic reader celebrates the sense of smell. Smell is personal but celebrates the embodied experience nonetheless. Whether candles, flowers, cigars, or potpourri, smell is part of the embodied reading experience. Smells transport the mind to other times, other places, and adds to the imaginative, embodied reading experience. Smells often become part of the memory. Smells transport the reader from the reading space to distant spaces, and from distant spaces smells transports the reader back to the reading space. Whether the fragrance of freshly cut grass, spring rains in the flower bed, hearty earth filled with worms, autumn leaves after a rain, or freshly baked cookies, smell brings up memories. Similarly, old bookstores have smells, vintage record shops have smells, movie theaters have smells, and auto repair shops have smells. Personal, unique, poignant, reading places have smells. Closely associated with smell is taste. Whether hot chocolate, coffee, or tea (Earl gray- hot), taste is an integral part of the morning reading experience. The experience may be laced with homemade sourdough bread laden with honey, warmed cinnamon rolls, or buttered croissants. In the dusk of the evening, the taste of reading includes sips of wine, port, brandy, cognac, bourbon, or tea (herbal, cinnamon- no caffeine) supported with flavors of grapes, cheese, chocolate, or butter cookies. Smell and taste create a flourishing and fulfilling embodied reading experience. Where smell and taste are the Siamese twins of the humane reading experience, touch and sound are often equally 76
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joined together in the experience. To touch the page of a book and gently turn it over is to create the wisp of wind which gently permeates the reading experience. My own reading experiences are only complete when there is a book on my lap table, ruler in one hand and slim-lined mechanical pencil in the other. The tension of the graphite point following along the edges of the ruler minutely catching against the uneven surface of the page accompanied with the gentle scratching sound. As I savor my coffee in the morning, the muted thud of the coffee mug against the table and the release of pressure in my arm indicate the cup safely stands until the next sip. Of course, some of the tones which resonate in my routine reading ritual are not accompanied with visible touch. With the window open on many mournings, the harmony of a new day harkens with sounds such as morning greetings from neighbors on their walks, the wind blowing through the majestic five-foot grasses of the front yard, the birds welcoming the sunrise, or the squirrels clawing and clattering on the bark of the nearby oak. Sounds solidify the reading experience. Embodied reading in home is space which reflects one’s reading habits and reading desires. Each space is different for each individual. However, designating sensory stimuli to accompany the reading experience is the critical part of embodied reading. Home is the place where most people spend their leisure time. Designated reading spaces, reading chairs, reading habits encourage the overall embodied reading experience. The second element of embodied reading is to consider the place of the path.
The Path as Place When a person is reading at home, the mind is engaged while the body remains stationary but a part of the physical environment nonetheless. On the path, the body is engaged. 77
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The path is physical. The path represents movement. The path promotes human flourishing. The path is the whole-bodied experience in which the mind freely flies while the feet rhythmically press against the pavement. The mind processes excerpts from one moment to the next like an old fashioned slide trajectory displaying scenes from the neighbor’s European vacation. In his essay “In Praise of Walking” author Leslie Stephens highlights that “The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread of other memories, and yet each walk is a little drama itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catastrophes, according to the requirements of Aristotle; and it is naturally interwoven with all the thoughts, the friendships, and the interests that form the staple of ordinary life.17 The episodes of the path are the familiar sights of the dayto-day laced with the excitement of the newly observed-the new leaves on the tree; the new birdhouse perched in the ash tree; or the new car in the neighbor’s driveway. The path is the place where mind and body relax together and allow the person to become more whole. Walking the path does not push away the rambling thoughts, but allows them to come forward, to be contemplated, and to be deposited into the recesses of one’s memory. The nineteenth-century British scholar Georgy Macaulay wrote “I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live at such close quarters that the one always catches melancholy from the other) I know that I shall have only to call in my doctors and I shall be well again.”18 Similarly, Stephen mused that, “Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season. All great men of letters have, there17 Lesley Stephen, “In Praise of Walking” in The Joys of Walking: Essays by Hilaire Belloc, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, and Others edited by Edwin Valentine Mitchell (New York; Dover Press, 1948), 20. 18 George Macaulay Trevelyan “Walking” in The Joys of Walking: Essays by Hilaire Belloc, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, and Others, 57. 78
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fore, been enthusiastic walkers.19 Whether to ponder what words should be involved when pen is put to paper or to muse the jots and titles of other authors, walking the path is the place mind and body are united. Obviously, each path is unique and filled with its own variance of sensual sensations. It is crystal clear that the path demands a physical presence. The reading component is less clear. James Schall provides clarity to the importance of the path to reading noting that, “Books are intended to guide us to see both what is visible and what is invisible… We discover a way of looking while we walk, and a way of walking that takes us to the knowledge of what is.”20 The path is physical. The path is real. The path represents what is. The path becomes the place there the reader can swirl, twirl, and twist the book contents to mentally inspect the multiple prismatic facets. Whereas food energizes the body to prepare for the path, books are fodder for the mind. Books-good books-are meant to be read and re-read. If books are meant to be read and re-read, so too are they meant to be reflected upon again and again and again. Like a cow’s cud, they are meant to be savored, swallowed, regurgitated and repeatedly re-mastigated. The path provides the sublime surroundings where in the leisurely cud-chewing commences. The path beckons the reader to inhale the goodness it has to offer. “It’s going to be a great day,” I routinely prophesy each morning after deeply inhaling the fragrances of the morning before my walk. The irony is that I say this whether I have taken in the subtle mixture of lavender, mint, thyme and oregano from my herb path or inhale the scent of summer heat and dried, dead oak branches. It does not matter if it is the dusty scent after the neighbor’s landscaper has blown dirt into my side of the street, or if it’s the scene of autumn rain drops dancing on fallen leaves. Smells fill my lungs and 19 Stephen, “In Praise of Walking”, 20. 20 James Schall, “The Metaphysics of Walking” in The Life of the Mind (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 92. 79
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prepare me for the path. Similarly, the path encourages one to drink deeply and draw to mind all the words which have been consumed in a reading session. One takes them in for all the gift and beauty of the essence of the wordiness of the words. Admittedly, an act of indeterminately taking in all words may appear to be imprudent, precocious and a wanton disregard for caution. However, in my own experience, I have absorbed words which seemed sweet at first consumption, only to melt away like cotton candy under the mental saliva of pathward scrutiny. The reverse has also been the case. Some words and phrases have had an initial impression harkening toward heresy, only to be a David in the marble once my misconceptions have been chiseled and buffed away. Words can be taken in. The path is the place and the time for sorting. The path also reminds the reader to adjust to the surroundings. The reader does not control the light and does not control the temperature. On the winter mornings in which the sun lazily allows the moon to linger longer, walking in the dark is part of my routine. Similarly, in the warm Mediterranean climates of Northern California, night-walking is a necessity. Night-walking frequently becomes a solo event in which the clearly visible sights of a daytime walk silently sulk into the shadows to create melancholy meditative moments. Charles Dickens observed that “In those small hours when there was no movement in the streets, it afforded matter for reflection to take Newgate in the way, and touching its rough stone, to think of the prisoners in their sleep, and then go glance in at the lodge over the spiked wicket, and see the fire and the light of the watching turnkeys, on the white wall.”21 As Dickens walked the pavements with his senses dulled due to the slackened activity, his mind was free to reflect. Similarly, Ray Bradbury’s Leonard Meed accurately captures the expectant sensory rapture of a night walk fused with musings. “To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight 21 Charles Dickens, “Night Walks” in The Joys of Walking: Essays by Hilaire Belloc, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, and Others, 47. 80
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o’clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Meed most dearly loved to do.”22 In a culture saturated with digital gluttony, the quietness of the night time path soothes the soul. Contrasted to the internal environment, the embodied reader is not in control of the temperatures when on the path. In the climate-controlled reading room, comfort is key. One push on the digital pad automatically cools the room, or an adjustment to an electric fireplace promptly adds warmth. The environment submits to the bodily needs and to the will. However, stepping out the front door, a person is no longer in control. The embodied reader must adjust and submit to the climate. The Northern California summer sun dictates that I start the walk in shorts and sandals at 5:00 am to enjoy the balmy seventy degrees before the mid-morning triple digit furnace ignites, or a temperate ninety degree walk at ten o’clock at night. Summer wanes to autumn. Shorts and sandals are traded for rain gear, warm socks and boots. Winter gradually takes over requiring scarves, stocking caps, gloves, and additional layers. Years upon years, the tri-seasonal Mediterranean climate of the out-of-doors path experience dictates the way to discern and adjust to experience the comfort of the path. Schall once again reminds us that the path is real: Nothing assures us that a place is real more than walking it, its roads or sidewalks or even its grass. When we put our foot down, the ground on which to step is already there. We did not put it there, nor give ourselves the two feet with which we walk. Once we recognize that something is in fact "real," that it is, we can begin the second adventure of our existence, which is not only to know that some-
22 Ray Bradbury, “The Pedestrian” in Bradbury Stores: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 600. 81
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thing besides ourselves exists, but to inquire about what it means. 23
The path is not altered. The person on the path must change. The individual changes externally based on time and temperature. However, changes take place internally as one mulls and muses on the path. The embodied reader allows the path experiences to determine what material of the lifelong reading experience must be transformed, what must be transferred, what must be discarded, and what must remain. The path, with its methodical rhythmic pace stimulates the embodied reader to contemplate. The path motivates toward human flourishing. Reading without the path is incomplete reading.
Other-than-Home as Place My circle of reading friends has a time-honored tradition. We photograph ourselves reading while on vacation. It is better said we photograph our books, our mugs, and occasionally our feet at our respective destination reading place. Books and beaches are natural pairs like jelly and peanut butter, peanut butter and chocolate, or chocolate sundaes with an order of french fries. Over the years, we have circulated book-beach photos from Lake Tahoe, The American River, Mendocino, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Hawaii, Mexico, and the Cinque Terra- to name a few. Similarly, we have shared mountain/meadow experiences including Yosemite, Yellowstone, Shenandoah Valley, and Angel’s Landing. Cafes are another favorite. We have shared shots of a coffee mug and book from Eugene, Honolulu, Boston, Amsterdam, London, Rome, and Istanbul. Destination reading adds zest to the embodied reading experience. 23 Schall, “The Metaphysics of Walking”, 94. 82
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As finite beings who can occupy only one space at any given time, we humans live in a state of tension. We exist in the satisfied state of routine and habits of home. However, at any given time, the notion to be other-than-home whispers in the psyche until one must succumb to the call to be elsewhere. Humans live in a state of wanderlust-heimweh tension, which is the desire to experience the sights, smells, taste, sounds and touches of places other-than-home and then longingly turning our faces toward home after we have ventured out. We want to break out of the daily, mundane, and routine to experience the exhilaration of elsewhere. But then, in the midst of the cacophony of newness and otherness, the mist of home invades our thinking to remind one of the sweet smells of home. Although the mind may wander to and fro and back again, the body must remain until it is transported back home. The contemporary archetype of the wanderlust-heimweh tension is a little hobbit who lives in a hole in the ground. His name is Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo is a compilation of his respectable, unadventurous Baggins family and the disrespectable, adventurous Took nature. The turmoil tosses this little hobbit back and forth until Tookness gains the upper hand when he is coerced and even tricked into a journey to go elsewhere by a wily but wise wizard. This invitation is followed by the darkness of Mirkwood Forest, the dungeons of the Elvenking, and then by the darkness of Smaug in the caverns of the Lonely Mountain. Together, Bilbo and the dwarves enter the darkness of the Mirkwood Forest, but the party is separated with Bilbo left alone. He faces the gigantic spiders. Bilbo the burglar enters the spiders’ lair and cuts down the webwrapped dwarves, and battles the spiders with his sword— Sting. He emerges into the light as Bilbo—Savior of the Dwarves, Burglar of Spiders, Spider-Killer, and Wielder of Sting.24 Up to this point of the journey, the wandering Took 24 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 156. 83
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nature seems to be Bilbo’s primary identity. He later declares himself, “I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider.”25 Although it appears that the Took nature dominates, Bilbo continues to experience the Baggins-like draw toward home. He consistently longs for his missing handkerchief, second breakfast, and afternoon tea. There is a little of this little hobbit in all of us. Despite the draw toward the destination, there is an internal tug toward home. Shared destination reading resembles the adventures of this little hobbit. As one ventures away from home whether for the weekend or the month, there is a quiet confidence that friends remain at home. Subsequently, shared photos of destination reading represent the ambiance of the new environment and the quieting comfort of home. The experience itself however, manifests with the body settled into a new place with new sights, new sounds, new tastes. The newness of the experience creates an awareness of otherness. However the familiarity of the touch of the book reminds one that despite the differences, all is somehow still well. The sensual excitement of the foreign place gradually moves into the background when the reader settles into a reading place, opens a book, and reinstates a habit. The body continues to experience the sensual nuances of the new place, however, the mind can settle into the comfort of the book. The routine and the new, the wanderlust and the heimweh, the body and the mind, all are entangled with one another in an ecstatic experience of whole-person, embodied human flourishing in destination reading. Whereas the similarities of embodied, destination-reading may closely resemble warmth of home, it puts forth the tension of otherness. The cafe experience provides a primary example. Although the coffee mug, the book, the table may all resemble the familiar comforts of a routine, the fact re25 Tolkien, The Hobbit, 223. 84
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mains that it is an unfamiliar coffee shop with an unfamiliar menu frequented by unfamiliar people. What is experienced as lack of familiarity for the destination-reader is a representation of the routine for the regular customers. This experience holds true particularly when visiting cafes in other countries. Ordering the coffee becomes a new awareness as a unique stammer of foreign sounds and words pass over the tongue and through the lips requesting Un caffè per favore or Un café s'il vous plaît or Een kopje koffie alstublieft or Einen Kaffee bitte or Bir kahve lütfen. There is the uncertainty of what type of coffee is being ordered, concern on the strength of the brew, and whether in the interpretation one is getting cream, milk, or black. One is faced with the uncertainty of standing at the coffee bar or sitting down. There is the question of whether two open chairs at a table is a presumed invitation to join in, or whether to respect the privacy of the party already sitting. If settling into a corner reading spot, there is an awareness of unaccustomed conversations filling the air, some of which are louder than home, some more hushed. After enjoying the coffee and a book, the question arises whether to bus one’s dishes or let the dishes remain on the table. Through a destination reading experience, one enjoys the embodied reading in other places. However, there is a deeper, human experience in joining others in their daily routine. Mark Twain acknowledges the personal benefit of experiencing otherness through travel. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetation in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”26 Taking time to read in foreign places forces the reader physically and mentally into unaccustomed, but enriching places. There is the opportunity to embrace the experience and return home with a grander understanding of what is. 26 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (Pleasantville, NY: Reader’s Digest, 1990),424. 85
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Transition as Place Up to this point, embodied reading has taken on pleasurable, even nostalgic, elements. This type of embodied reading is what many envision when settling in and snuggling up with a good book. It’s wood in fireplaces, blankets, mugs of hot cocoa, log cabins, and snow flurries out of doors. Its images of porch swings gently swaying back and forth, cicada serenading, willow branches dipping into the pond’s mossy surface, and lemonade with the clinking and melting of ice cubes in the sultry summer heat. Its leather chairs, Tiffany lamps, cigars, cognac snifters, open windows with crickets chirping under clear, starry skies. Most readers long for visions of nostalgic, embodied reading. But what about the less desirable embodied reading experience? What about the uncomfortable? What about the transition places? Transition places are the planes, trains, and automobile places of our lives. They are the hotel lobbies, doctor’s front offices, and oil-change waiting rooms in our lives. Reading becomes a time-filling, escapist past time. Does such a state qualify as embodied reading when the reader longs for a temporary out of body experience to transport them from the unsightly, uncomfortable, and sometimes unsanitary environments? Despite the potential ugliness and discomfort of the transitional reading place, it is, perhaps, the most real reading experience of embodied reading. It reflects the tension one experiences between temporary and permanence. It astutely depicts the wilderness existence each person regularly faces. In transition places, the person must acknowledge not being at home and yet not being in a desired other location. The transition reflects the exile from Eden and longing for Paradise. It is the days filled with manna on the journey while recalling the leeks and cucumbers of Egypt and yet anticipating the milk and honey of the Promised Land. Transitional reading reminds each person that there is a place from which we 86
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are from, and there is a place to which we are moving toward. Where home encourages us to settle in, and other than home calls us back, transitional reading reminds the reader that one is not of this world. The Apostle Paul represents the heart of the transitional reader in his declaration, “But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”27 Likewise, transitional reading reminds the reader to walk the path, contemplate the words, and to choose wisely what to hold on to and what must be discarded. Although the transitional reading spaces may be uncomfortable, they serve as a reminder to the embodied reader. There is more to become. Having taken in essays, narratives, poems, and novels, the reader has more to read, more to meditate, and more to mature into. Transitional reading emphasizes what has been and what currently is, while encouraging the embodied reader to anticipate what will be. There is the admonishment that one more reading experience of place reading accompanied with one more process of the path will contribute to an ever-blossoming human.
Conclusion The body, mind, and soul have been disconnected from one another. Whether this was an event or a process is a debate for another time. The fact that many humans exist in a zombie state is evident. Modern “experts” are beginning to recognize the dissected condition, and are making efforts to reunite the body and the mind. Unfortunately, in many instances the soul is treated like a non-existent unicorn. However, as the surge of Classical Christian Education continues 27 Philippians 3:13b–14 ESV. 87
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to gain momentum, a new hope arises to fuse the soul, the mind, and the body. At the core of Classical Christian Education is a story. It’s a narrative that any reader can enjoy. It begins in a place. This place is a garden. This place is home. The story is filled with sensory details such as seas swarming with fish; skies filled with birds; trees, plants, and grasses bursting from the earth; and the smell of rivers. Animals roam through the garden. There is a person fashioned by a Creator out of mud and gifted with divine breath. This human represents the embodiment of all that humanity was to be-body, mind, and soul-in perfect relationship with the Creator, other humans, and the created world. The story begins as a tragedy. The humans are exiled out of the garden into a wilderness and experience otherness as they were not meant to know. However, the story is punctuated with the appearance of an embodied, divine, hero—a Savior, Who is fully human and fully God. Each of the four gospels accentuate the physical life and body of the Messiah. They confirm the physical death. They affirm the physical, bodily resurrection. Despite the excitement of the resurgence of an old and familiar narrative, one cannot forget that even Classical Christian enthusiasts are products of the waters in which we swim. This means that we navigate in the current of contemporary culture, which still succumbs to a philosophy that largely celebrates disconnected human experience. Subsequently, classical educators ought to be intentional about embracing a whole-person embodied experience. This experience includes reading. Whereas reading is a highly valued skill for intellectual development, one must remember that an embodied reading experience celebrates the wholeness of a human being. It celebrates the person as a body resting and responding to the physical environment while engaged in the reading experience, whether at home or abroad. It celebrates the sensory experience. It celebrates the physical quality of the path. It celebrates the transitional places. Whole-person 88
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embodied reading stimulates more than intellectual insight. It highlights human flourishing. ⸭ Karla Memmott earned a PhD in Humanities from Faulkner University. She is the Rhetoric Program Coordinator for Legacy Classical Academy and teaches rhetoric at Kepler Education. She and her husband Kyle are the founders of Acacia Classical Academy, which is a classical Christian home-schooling education experience designed to meet the rising needs of homeschooling families in their area. They enjoy hiking, camping, playing board games, and walking their dog Kona.
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Book Review Vigen Guroian's Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classical Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2023)
by Sarah Hadley
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tories of today are often like melted soft-served ice cream cones on a hot summer day, still appetizing but not at the pinnacle of the cool, refreshing, whipped up peak it once was. Vigen Guroian proposes the importance of good stories in his book Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination. Guroian has spent most of his life in education and has a passion for theology and virtuous living that is expressed in his book for the sake of individuals and humanity. In it he expresses that adults and students need to cling to the development of the moral imagination founded in good stories. He previously taught at several universities, raised multiple children, and continues to enlighten his grandchildren through the use of good stories. He has written several books on theology and has revised Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination as a second edition to include more virtues and stories. In his book, Guroian discusses the importance of incorporating stories of good versus evil to enrich one’s Moral Imagination, but what is the moral imagination and why does it matter? The moral imagination “both the cognitive and affective dimensions of human nature. And stories are an irreplaceable medium for this kind of moral education, 91
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by which I mean the education of character.”1 When watered down stories of political correctness or stories of fluffy trophy-winners are all that is offered to children, their moral development is lacking. So, in reading stories that grapple with hard subjects of young men sacrificing themselves to plug the bottom of the lake for the Light Princess to be set free from her curse, as in MacDonald’s fabulous tale, or the young lady searching high and low to find her lost friend in Anderson’s “The Snow Queen,” the development goes far beyond comprehension and reading skills into a development of virtues through character telling. Tending the Heart of Virtue is a book that speaks to that kind of development. The book is an eye-opening experience for parents and teachers alike. It shares ideas of conversations and connections from common stories to focus on with young readers. From the humanity of Pinocchio to the friendships in Charlotte’s Web, Guroian details how the skill of the authors of weaving humanity and morality into beloved characters of tales to savor.2 It is a treasure-trove of literary conversations and story suggestions that all kids need to experience. And more than just children, it is a great reminder for adults in these simple fairytales, C. S. Lewis said it best in the dedication of the Narnia series to his goddaughter, “some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”3 The beauty of such a book is that while it is a goldmine for a teacher or parent, it isn’t far removed from what we, as adults, often need reminders such as with Bambi and the mentorship relationship spoken of by Guroian, or the redemption of wrong choices as made plain in observing Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.4 Guroian pulls from historical 1 Vigen Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 16. 2 Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue, 39–40, 82. 3 C. S. Lewis, “Dedication,” The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). 4 Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue, 103–105, 121–122. 92
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events, biblical stories, and even pop cultural tempered retellings to illuminate character traits worthy of replication and virtuous distinction in a world that “embraces an anti-human trinity of utilitarianism, subjectivism, and relativism that denies the existence of a moral sense or moral law.”5 While the book, as a whole, is an excellent reminder of the value of a good story, it is also an easy book to pick up to refresh one’s understanding before engaging with students on specific stories because of how Gurion set up the book. Each chapter focuses on one to three stories that have a similar theme. Some have already been listed above, but other chapters include virtue building themes of love, faith, courage, beauty, goodness, and obedience through stories such as “The Little Mermaid,” The Velveteen Rabbit, The Wind in the Willows, The Princess and the Goblin, Prince Caspian, “The Nightingale,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “Cinderella,” The King of the Golden River, The Wise Woman: A Double Story. It is an easy book to enjoy in its entirety or to flip to the specific chapter and draw out gems to prepare for leading children through the listed stories. In the conclusion, Guroian makes a desperate plea for training in moral development. He writes: “Our children are in jeopardy, and so is the future of virtue and human goodness. The sort of ship in which we send our children out onto the sea of life makes a profound difference as to whether they drown in the abyss or reach the shores of Paradise.”6 It is not just good writing we are after but a development of generations that need to see the Truth. A Truth that has been passed down through generations for centuries, a Truth that points mankind back to Goodness and Beauty to see and experience God all around us. Guroian’s book is nothing short of a treasure map, leading the pirates to and through great challenges and fantastical stories to seek the great reward but 5 6
Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue, 2. Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue, 2. 93
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it is important to bear in mind that though you be on a pirate ship, that ice cream cone need not be melted. Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classical Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination can both get you to that treasure and help to keep that ice cream from becoming a sticky mess. ⸭ Sarah Hadley has spent over ten years in brick and mortar schools teaching children of all ages and now enjoys homeschooling her own four with her husband in Arkansas. She received a B.A. from the University of West Florida and is pursuing a Master's in Liberal Arts with a concentration in Art History from the University of Saint Thomas Houston.
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