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 1
The Consortium: A Journal of Classical Christian Education Volume 4, Issue 1.
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
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ISBN: 978-1-963505-16-0
Version 1.0.0 June 2025
The Public Death of Civilized Language
Twitter Killed Tolstoy and Why Justice Never Stood a Chance
A Classical Argument for Cursive-Writing
Forging a Modern Christian Approach to Classical Rhetoric A Critical Review of A Rhetoric of Love
Book Review Mandy Gerth’s Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom
THE CONSORTIUM
A Journal of Classical Christian Education
Introduction
Cosmos or Chaos: Words Create Worlds
by Dr. Scott Postma
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” - John 1:1, 14
J.R.R. Tolkien scribbled the word ‘hobbit’ on a blank page of a boring exam paper he was grading in the early 1930’s, but it would be several years later before he discovered what the name referred to. It seems the word emerged in his imagination first and the story followed. In a letter to the Houghton Mifflin Co. in 1955, Tolkien states this explicitly. His creation of Middle-earth was born out of his penchant for invented languages, particularly Elvish. Tolkien explained: “The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.”1
In his essay titled “A Secret Vice,” Tolkien expounds on his lifelong passion for language invention and its integral role in his creative process. He started constructing his first Elvish language, Quenya, around 1910–1911, a hobby inspired by his studies of Finnish, Latin, and Welsh. As his linguistic creations blossomed, he needed a mythology and a history, a cosmos, to give his languages context. This ultimately led to
1 J.R.R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter, and Christopher Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2000), 219.
the rich, complex narratives of The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and The Lord of the Rings, works we still find fascinating today. To state it succinctly, Tolkien's sub-creations were deeply rooted in his linguistic interests; and his mythology of Middle-earth served to bring his constructed languages to life. Although Tolkien’s approach may seem surprising, it actually reflects a cosmic reality. Words form worlds. Genesis reveals this divine pattern: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light” (Genesis 1:1–3, ESV). A total of ten times in the first chapter of Genesis, the writer records the words: “God said” followed by the manifestation of what was declared. God’s Word gave form and substance to God’s world. The pattern also holds true universally for God’s sub-creators, human beings. Hence, it is unfortunate that in many modern educational institutions this principle has been lost, and rhetorical instruction—writing and delivering speeches with cogent, persuasive eloquence—is too often viewed as a necessary box to check. More recently, significant developments in AI seem to be making the case that learning the art of writing is effectively becoming obsolete since new language models can do the task for us—often better and more efficiently. Notwithstanding the quality and efficiency of AI developments, the contention of classical Christian educators is that writing and rhetoric are essential disciplines because good writing is clear thinking made visible. Thus, rational public discourse depends on a society’s proficiency in rhetorical skills; without these, there can be no political cosmos, only chaos. Consider the art of rhetoric originated in the Greek polis (city-states) and eventually became one the principal forms of higher education throughout the ancient world because the right use of words prevented wars, and created and cultivated civilizations. Studying the right use of words prepares students to be good listeners and readers, to communicate cogently and
persuasively, and effectively safeguard against the fallacious use of words employed by sophists.
Further, words are much more than symbols scribbled on blank paper, spoken into the ether, or typed out in pixels on a digital screen. As Richard Weaver so poignantly articulates in Ideas Have Consequences, words possess inherent metaphysical substance and are bound indissolubly to truth. Reminding his readers of the “ancient belief that a divine element is present in language,” 2 Weaver insists that “if the world is to remain cosmos, we shall have to make some practical application of the law that in the beginning was the word.” 3 By cosmos, he suggests a well-ordered whole, societies functioning in harmony toward a good. Its opposite is chaos—disorder, confusion, and disintegration. In this pronouncement, he makes a profound, even prophetic, contention regarding language’s power. In the fashion of Tolkien, he claims that words can create or destroy worlds; they form the cosmos or plunge societies into chaos.
Weaver’s assertion that language, or word, is rooted in the divine reaches back to antiquity, not only to Genesis, but also to Heraclitus and Plato and the rest of the virtuous Pagans who identified the divine, i.e., God, with mind. It further finds its quintessence articulated in Aquinas's realist view of language: that words signify things that actually exist. That is, words correspond to real beings in the world (or in the mind of God), and possess their own ontological status: Modi essendi et subsistendi (“modes of being and subsisting”).4 Weaver is deeply concerned, however, with the modern infatuation of semantics (e.g., logical positivism). He argues that it is nothing more than the progressive product of Occam’s Nominalism. Simply stated, Nominalism refers to the belief that words do not refer directly to real things in themselves,
2 Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 134.
3 Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 134.
4 Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 136.
but to mental concepts or significations, how we think about or categorize things minds: Modi significandi et intellegendi (“modes of signifying and understanding”). 5
This distinction matters tremendously because the Nominalist shift has profound consequences on our ability to flourish both individually and as a society. Nominalism severs language from its metaphysical correspondent and leads to cultural relativism, legal positivism, and moral subjectivism. It further makes traditional education (which is rooted in the idea that words and ideas reflect realities) increasingly unintelligible and irrelevant. When words are separated from realities to which they correspond, truth becomes flexible and law and morality become procedural. Truth is something we construct, not something we discover; and, justice is no longer about aligning law with nature but about codifying the cultural consensus.
A contemporary example of this is the recent redefinition of marriage. The realist view would hold that marriage is a real institution grounded in human nature and teleology (its natural ends, such as expressed in Summa Theologica and Westminster Confession of Faith). 6 It has an essence—a fixed nature— that exists whether or not we name it or recognize it. To speak of "marriage" is to refer to a real thing that has an ontological status and moral structure. Thus the word “marriage” signifies a real human good rooted in natural law, human biology, and divine ordinance. In this view, language mirrors reality. The Nominalist (and later, the logical positivist), holds that marriage is whatever society or individuals define it to be. There is no essence of marriage outside our collective agreements or psychological associations. Thus, the term “marriage” is simply a label that we attach to any number of relational arrangements, according to preference, feeling,
5 Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 136.
6 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica , trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 9 (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, n.d.), P3.S.Q44–49 and The Westminster Confession of Faith, 24.2.
or utility. In this view, if a society decides that marriage can include same-sex couples, polyamorous groups, or any other configurations, then the definition changes because the word “marriage” refers not to a real universal, but to whatever society agrees it means. Any given word or expression is merely a social construction, a convenient tool for organizing our experience, not an ontological good or intrinsic reality rooted in nature or creation.
Lamenting the sophistry of modern of semantics, Weaver writes of its endeavor:
This is only an attempt to substitute things for words, and, if words stand, in fact, for ideas, here is but the broadest aspect of our entire social disintegration. Here would be a vivid example of the things in the saddle riding mankind. For the sake of memory, for the sake of logic—above all, for the sake of the unsentimental sentiment without which communities do not endure—this is a trend to be reversed.7
The phrase “things in the saddle riding mankind” is borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote in “Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing” (1846), “Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind.” 8 For Emerson, the expression means to criticize the growing materialism and industrialism of his age which had reversed the proper order of life. In the modern age, Emerson recognized tools and concepts (i.e., “things”) had become masters over the very people who created and are supposed to be using them. Instead of man being the rational steward and governor of things, those things now governed him. Instead of controlling their tools and economic systems, people were being controlled by their creations. For Weaver, the metaphor extends effectively into the realm of language and semantics, especially in the context
7 Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 144.
8 www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45874/ode-inscribed-to-william-h-channing.
of Nominalism and modern linguistic skepticism. Language that had originally been a tool for expressing reality and truth is now the master of thought itself. Even more pernicious, words and symbols that were once used to describe things, now shape and determine how we think about reality, regardless of whether that thinking aligns with what is real. Semantics, then, is a clever kind of sophistry, a closed system where the play of signifiers detaches from actual referents. Consequently, societies become subservient to their linguistic categories, allowing labels to define reality rather than describe it. This is especially ominous in a culture dominated by technical jargon, ideological euphemisms, and bureaucratic talking points. In these cases, words frequently obscure rather than reveal truth. For example, “fetus” replaces “baby” to manage the moral discomfort of murdering a child in the womb. “Equity” replaces “equality,” subtly altering the meaning of “justice for all.” “Gender identity” replaces “sex” and redefines the anthropological categories of human nature. To this end, language does not serve truth; it manages human perception. And once perception is governed by such sophistic terms, humanity becomes saddled and ridden by its own linguistic inventions.
Weaver campaigns for the restoration of language because our ability to reason accurately, in accordance with reality, is congruent with our ability to comprehend or correspond to Divine Reason, i.e., the Logos. Words cannot be arbitrary mental labels we use to describe experience. Words have substance so we must acknowledge they correspond to metaphysical realities, because if human beings are going to flourish, to live successfully in community, we must be able to understand one another. Words, when used in common, everyday life, express something that transcends the ephemeral moment they are used. “Unsentimental sentiment,” Weaver argues, is necessary for sensus communis and rational public discourse.
The idea of cultivating “unsentimental sentiment” is something C.S. Lewis also championed. In his classic work,
The Abolition of Man, Lewis explores the critical role that language plays in either forming cosmos or devolving humanity into chaos. Contemporary with Weaver, Lewis contended most specifically with logical positivism, a prevalent movement in Oxford academia at the time. Logical positivism asserts that only statements verifiable through empirical methods or logical deduction are meaningful. Under this framework, moral statements become meaningless as they cannot be empirically verified. For example, to say, “It was wrong for you to steal that car” would only amount to “you stole a car.” To assert it was wrong is tantamount to saying, “I feel like it is wrong,” which is not a cognitive statement in the logical positivist’s view. It is only an expression of one’s feelings. Lewis vigorously counters the impulse of this grandchild of Nominalism, arguing that logical positivism dangerously fragments reality into two irreconcilable domains: empirical facts devoid of meaning, and emotional responses devoid of truth.9 This dichotomy, Lewis maintains, creates “men without chests”—individuals incapable of coherent moral reasoning or genuine virtue, since morality requires the acknowledgment of objective values.10
Lewis takes on the language epidemic of his day by drawing attention to a seemingly innocent English textbook he calls The Green Book . Its authors are men he calls Gaius and Titius. They argue that when someone describes a waterfall as “sublime,” they are merely expressing subjective feelings about the cataract rather than making objective claims about reality. Lewis rebuts this interpretation firmly, stating that such language involves objective claims about external realities, and in particular, appropriate emotional responses to those realities. He explains, “The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of
9 C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001), 20.
10 Lewis, The Abolition of Man , 26.
veneration .”11 In other words, it is actually the opposite. A man who calls an object sublime must, in himself, feel small, not sublime. In any event, by reducing all evaluative statements to subjective emotional states, Gaius and Titius implicitly encourage the belief that value judgments are merely personal preferences devoid of objective significance. Next, Lewis addresses their attempt to debunk sentimental language in an advertisement for a pleasure cruise that celebrates famous historical sites. Gaius and Titius suggest the emotions these ads evoke are irrational manipulations. Lewis, however, claims a proper education will differentiate between genuine and superficial sentiments, recognizing that genuine emotional responses—what Weaver called unsentimental sentiments—such as awe and reverence, are not only virtuous, but necessary in healthy humans. The failure to inculcate the right emotions deprives students of their moral and cultural inheritance and leaves them susceptible to manipulation by less scrupulous rhetoricians, the propagandists and sophists. Lewis explains:
Gaius and Titius… see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda—they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental—and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotions. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is not infallible protection against a soft head.12
11 Lewis, The Abolition of Man , 3.
12 Lewis, The Abolition of Man , 13–14.
There is no escaping the fact that human beings are created with a capacity for emotion. By first removing their ability to make objective claims, teachers produce soft-headed students who are void of discernment. By subsequently depriving them of their capacity to cultivate genuine emotions, teachers encourage hard-hearted students. By depriving them of a fortified mind and starving them of their natural sensibilities, teachers make students doubly susceptible to false sentiments and propaganda.
The repercussions of Nominalism and logical positivism extend beyond individual morality though. The semantic approach to word and language undermine societal coherence itself. Words, Lewis argues, inherently hold power because they connect humans to universal truths or objective realities, which he identifies as the Tao —a term he strategically adopts from Eastern religion to describe universal natural law. According to Lewis, traditional (i.e., classical) education aims at harmonizing students’ emotional responses with the Tao, training them to recognize and appreciate intrinsic moral truths. However, modern education, influenced by logical positivism, seeks instead to dismantle this connection. By relegating all value judgments to subjective emotional states, educators like Gaius and Titius subtly condition students to reject the existence of universal moral truths that create a cohesive society.
Accordingly, Lewis’s now famous metaphor vividly underscores the tragic consequences of this educational shift in regard to language. He declares: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”13 This potent imagery of impotence captures the essential contradiction of modern education: it simultaneously destroys the foundations of virtue while demanding its outcomes. Before turning to Doro -
13 Lewis, The Abolition of Man , 26.
thy Sayers’s essay, two additional, but brief, analyses of Lewis’s confrontation of logical positivism will be worthwhile.
In the second chapter of The Abolition of Man, “The Way,” Lewis commends the Tao as the necessary foundation for coherent moral discourse and education, claiming that it encompasses principles that are universally recognized across diverse cultures (i.e., justice, honor, and fidelity). Lewis insists such principles cannot be derived solely through empirical observation or logical deduction but must be accepted as axiomatic truths foundational to proper moral reasoning. He argues persuasively that “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly, if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.”14 The logical positivists’ attempts to debunk the Tao, therefore, undermine their own moral arguments, as their critiques implicitly depend on principles drawn from the Tao itself.
In the final chapter, “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis predicts the ultimate consequence of abandoning the Tao : humanity’s subjection to manipulation by elites who control education, language, and thus, the moral formation of culture. Once moral language is reduced to subjective sentiment or stripped away entirely, power will inevitably shift to those who shape the language and concepts available to society. One might think of Orwell’s 1984 and be correct. Such linguistic manipulation, Lewis warns, will not liberate—as the logical positivists claim their philosophy is attempting to do—but enslave humanity by allowing a small elite to dictate moral values and societal goals arbitrarily.
In sum, like Weaver, Lewis critiques the supposed rational neutrality claimed by logical positivists. He argues that educators inevitably communicate moral and philosophical positions through their choices of language and examples (i.e., education is never neutral). The act of debunking traditional sentiments itself presupposes a normative stance—that is, certain sentiments should be discouraged because they are 14 Lewis, The Abolition of Man , 40.
deemed irrational. Ergo, logical positivism, far from being neutral, subtly imposes its own moral framework on students while simultaneously discrediting others. Lewis identifies this hidden ideological agenda as particularly pernicious because it conceals its values behind a façade of scientific objectivity. Also like Weaver, Lewis provides a prescient warning against reducing human existence to empirical and logical positivist frameworks of language. He subsequently calls for the restoration of the realist view of language, but he does so by arguing for the restoration of education’s traditional role: cultivating proper emotional responses aligned with objective moral truths embodied in natural law, the Tao.
The rediscovery of Dorothy Sayers’s essay on “The Lost Tools of Learning” was one of the chief catalysts for the modern Classical Christian Education renaissance. Her compelling essay presents a provocative critique of modern education and advocates for returning to a medieval liberal arts pedagogy, specifically the recovery of the Trivium as it contains the foundational tools for learning. At the heart of her critique is consternation over the failure of modern education to adequately prepare students to handle words skillfully and thoughtfully. The result is a generation of ill-equipped individuals who are unable to manage the constant flood of linguistic and rhetorical manipulation inherent in modern English society. Fundamentally, her critique, like that of Weaver’s and Lewis’s, highlights the power inherent in words. According to Sayers, words are not loose symbols with ambiguous meaning, but dynamic terms referent to precise realities whose usage have profound implications for human thought and societal order. While the modern educator may scorn the medievalist for obsessive hair-splitting over connotation, at least the medieval reader was “defensively armored by his education as to be able to cry: ‘Distinguo’,” argues Sayers.15 Modern students are forced to go out into the world
15 Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning” (Escondido: Escondido Tutorial Service, n.d).
linguistically unarmed at a time when it has never been more necessary to be so armed. In a now-well-known statement, Sayers proclaims,
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.16
In this provocative excerpt, Sayers underscores just how potent and pervasive language really is: it literally shapes cultural perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors. The failure of modern education to equip students with the linguistic and rhetorical competence to critically engage with language leaves them vulnerable to manipulation through propaganda and advertising. If it was a troubling reality in Sayers’s day, how
16 Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning.”
much more pertinent is her admonition in today's digitally saturated society?
The power of words, for Sayers, thus necessitates rigorous education in rhetoric and writing. Without these tools, students remain intellectually defenseless. This means making a proper distinction between “education” that merely imparts knowledge of “subjects” and education that trains students in the liberating arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. For Sayers, the medieval Trivium is precisely the pedagogy for equipping students with the ability to master language at every level. Although her attempt to tie a child’s three stages of development—the Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic—to an individual corresponding art of the Trivium has come under scrutiny in recent years, as a “rough-and-ready” approximation, her claim is at least helpful for visualizing the work of recovering a profitable language education.17
Nevertheless, Sayers conjoins the Poll-parrot stage (the ages prior to puberty) with grammar, arguing that at this stage of a child’s development,
learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things.18
In its correspondence to the Poll-parrot stage, grammar provides the basic structures of language and vocabulary necessary to engage meaningfully with ideas. Sayers corresponds the Pert stage (onset of puberty) with dialectic or logic. The Pert stage, building on the Poll-parrot stage “(and, naturally, overlaps it to some extent), is char -
17 This author holds the position that the Trivium is both “a field of study” and “an educational method.”
18 Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning.”
acterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to “catch people out” (especially one’s elders); and by the propounding of conundrums. Its nuisance-value is extremely high.”19 Dialectic sharpens the student’s reasoning faculties, cultivating clear thinking, precise argumentation, and the identification of logical fallacies.
Finally, Sayers corresponds the Poetic stage with rhetoric because this art teaches eloquent, persuasive, and elegant communication. Rhetoric vests the students with the ability to articulate their thoughts effectively and persuasively in both spoken and written form. The “Poetic age,” Sayers argues,
is popularly known as the ‘difficult’ age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness; a reaching out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others. 20
Ultimately, Sayers’s essay is a compelling plea to restore language, rhetoric, and writing to the central role of education. She convincingly demonstrates that words wield immense power, shaping individuals’ intellects and societies’ collective discourse. The failure to adequately equip students with rhetorical competence and linguistic precision leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and unable to engage or contribute meaningfully to public life. For Sayers, forsaking or neglecting the essential tools of learning is to risk intellectual impoverishment and cultural deterioration.
Weaver reminds us that words are fundamentally tied to metaphysical realities. In classical Christian traditions, words embody reason itself, aligning humanity’s reason with the eternal Logos. Lewis reminds us it is the duty of educators to
19 Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning.”
20 Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning.”
inculcate in students just sentiments—unsentimental sentiment—because words ultimately connect humans to universal truths, objective realities he identifies as the Tao. For her part, Sayers reminds us that in the age where the manipulative onslaught of words plays powerful games with our perceptions of reality, students need to be armed with linguistic and rhetorical competence. For this to happen, we must recover the lost tools of learning found in medieval pedagogy.
Collectively, Weaver’s, Lewis’s, and Sayers’s admonitions serve as an intellectual foundation for this issue of The Consortium, urging a recovery of a proper view of language’s sacred power, and encouraging the continued, concerted efforts of classical educators to restore rhetorical training to its foundational role in modern education before the recovery of rational public discourse is impossible and the barbarization of society is inevitable. Building on this foundation, several essays have been selected for this issue which provide valuable insights into various aspects of writing, rhetoric, and language in Classical Christian Education.
Robert Woods’s incisive critique, “The Public Death of Civilized Language,” places a spotlight on language’s alarming decay in contemporary discourse, propelled significantly by social media. Woods identifies how linguistic misuse, especially around terms like “justice,” distorts reality, promotes confusion, and manipulates societal norms, precisely the sort of linguistic degradation Lewis predicted would result in moral collapse. Indeed, Lewis’s assertion that the improper use of language leads inevitably to ethical and intellectual impoverishment finds validation in our era’s widespread rhetorical famine. Woods’s critique serves as a sobering reminder: our collective linguistic choices bear profound moral consequences.
Tracey Leary’s “Poetic Knowledge and Writing Instruction” provides an antidote to this malaise, advocating a poetic mode of knowing that counters the sterile utilitarianism that permeates much of modern writing instruction. Drawing from James S. Taylor’s notable work, Poetic Knowledge, Leary
asserts that poetic knowledge reintroduces wonder and emotional resonance into the educational process, definitively arguing that effective writing is nurtured by an encounter with beauty, goodness, and truth. Poetic knowledge provides students with a robust imaginative framework that is capable of recognizing and articulating nuanced, complex realities. Armed with this knowledge, students can sustain and contribute meaningfully to society.
Writing also embodies this higher calling of words, as Mark Signorelli’s contribution clearly illuminates. Stated simply and directly, writing manifests the otherwise invisible nature of thought. As I often tell my students, good writing is clear thinking made visible. Writing, therefore, is an indispensable discipline, because as Jacques Barzun emphasizes, clarity and directness in writing are ethical imperatives that are deeply grounded in rhetorical discipline. Signorelli further illuminates the idea that writing is not merely the transference of completed thoughts (the “serving tray” metaphor); rather, it is a generative act that is akin to the preparation of a meal. Said differently, words themselves help shape and form the content of thought. Thus, effective writing instruction demands an approach that integrates the process of thought formation and linguistic articulation, guiding students to first to discover their thoughts before expressing them (Signorelli, 2025). Important to the Classical Christian educator, Signorelli’s understanding of writing runs counter to two contemporary pedagogical extremes: on one hand is the pedantic mechanical correctness devoid of meaningful content; on the other hand is subjective self-expression that lacks any kind of disciplined clarity. A proper approach to writing instruction, therefore, equips students first to think and then to communicate their thoughts, clearly.
Karla Memmott’s compelling defense of cursive writing complements the philosophy of education advocated for in this issue, especially in its emphasis on the transcendent nature of words. The practice of cursive writing is being increasingly abandoned by modern education because it is not
practical, efficient, or necessary. Memmott argues that since the purpose of education is to not only learn history, literature, math, and science, etc., but to habituate the mind and body to appreciate the beautiful, act in accordance with the good, and pursue truth and excellence, the act of cursive writing embodies these qualities and is therefore indispensable to a humane education. She asserts that cursive writing extends beyond mere utility. It emphasizes writing’s integral role in preserving historical memory, aesthetic sensibility, and human dignity. Ultimately, Memmott’s argument demonstrates that seemingly minor choices in education profoundly shape the moral and intellectual fiber of a culture.
In the penultimate paper, Lucas Vieira offers a critical exploration of “Forging a Modern Christian Approach to Classical Rhetoric” where he challenges Douglas M. Jones’s attempt at redefining rhetoric exclusively as a “Way of Love.”Vieira’s critique reminds Christian educators that classical rhetoric, as demonstrated by Aristotle and Cicero, already presupposes virtue, truth, and justice as its primary ends. These classical authors did not conceive rhetoric simply as a tool for domination, as modern misconceptions would have it, but as an essential instrument through which justice and truth prevail in civic life (Vieira, 2025). Rhetoric, rightly understood, is an essential tool for developing virtuous public discourse.
Finally, Tyler Bauer’s insightful review of Mandy Gerth’s Thoroughness and Charm reminds us that educational theory cannot remain at 30 thousand feet. It must translate meaningfully into the lived experience of the classroom. Classical Christian educators bear the responsibility of embodying the virtues and traditions they teach. They must guide students toward the “Tyrannizing Image,” the transcendent ideal of humanity. Teachers who model classical virtues through disciplined habits and an authoritative presence will profoundly influence students, nourishing them into thoughtful, virtuous adults capable of engaging meaningfully with the world.
This issue’s collection of essays underscores the centrality of language (i.e., words) as foundational to a flourishing
human civilization. Weaver, Lewis, and Sayers offer potent, prophetic warnings against neglecting the divine aspect inherent in our words. For the classical Christian educator, “In the beginning was the Word,” invokes an entire philosophical tradition from the ancient world with which John’s Gospel was meant to resonate. But, in John’s case, the Word became flesh and that had eternal implications for the cosmos, and for humanity. Thus, the challenge before classical Christian educators is clear and urgent: to restore to words their rightful dignity, aligning linguistic practice with metaphysical reality. Our stewardship of language cultivates cosmos or condemns society to chaos. This is our sacred trust: to remember that words, when wielded responsibly, create worlds where human beings can flourish.
Dr. Scott Postma Editor in Chief Summer 2025
The Public Death of Civilized Language
How Twitter Killed Tolstoy and Why Justice
Never Stood a Chance
by Dr. Robert M. Woods
It has long been recognized that language is in large part conditioned by social usage. This does not mean that language is so fluid that it is unreliable. In everyday usage, language is extremely reliable, in large part because of fixed use. Another more precise way of describing the full nature of language and how it functions in various social orders is that language is “…not just a set of coded symbols transmitting information; it is a set of meanings. The meanings of the self, of nature, of spirit, of time, for example, are given to us in the deep cultural formation of our language.”1
Language in most social orders of a modern nature is always in peril of misuse and abuse. Social media platforms are, by their very nature, disembodied and disconnected. The self being ravaged by social media, even willfully so, is often left in discord, distraction, agitation, and purposelessness. The habit formed by social media is glance, skim, swipe, repeat. The appetite is never satisfied and the soul is never edified by the endless quest for the next illusory connection. 2
Through television, radio, and now social media the symbolic universe of what should really matter to the mass-
1 Paul Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2019), 20.
2 A brilliant recent analysis of the nature of our current captivity and a possible exodus is from sociologist Felicia Wu Song, Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age (Downers Grove, IL; InterVarsity Press, 2021).
es is clearly established. 3 Language and images when pushed into the forefront of American mass culture can serve as propaganda for someone. It is worth pausing to provide the reader with a solid understanding of the nature and scope of sociological propaganda. While not an exhaustive definition, nor unique and exclusive of all other definitions, sociologist Jacques Ellul offers a partial definition that is most instructive moving forward:
Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulation and incorporated in an organization… We also must consider the fact that in a society in which propaganda—whether direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious—absorbs all the means of communication or education… propaganda forms culture and in a sense is culture. When film and novel, newspaper and television are instruments either of political propaganda in the restricted sense or in that of human relations (social propaganda), culture is perfectly integrated into propaganda; as a consequence, the more cultivated a man is, the more he is propagandized. Here one can also see the idealist illusion of those who hope that the mass media of communication will create a mass culture. This culture is merely a way of destroying a personality.4
Terms
such as systemic racism, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), Black Lives Matter, Anti- (fill in the blank) all share in common a linguistic fluidity that is like a river in constant motion. It will change sooner rather than later and will be replaced with the next “latest” buzzword. 5
3 Mark C. Miller, Boxed In: The Culture of TV (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988); Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
4 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage Books, 1965) 61, 110.
5 This is, in part, why sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes the modern fluid moment in terms of liquidity.
Social scientists who study language and linguistic shifts note changes over years and decades. These changes in what words mean and how they are used is a most fascinating and, at times, disturbing occurrence. As norms change within social orders, language changes also, and it is important to consider how these changes come about, who influences these changes and why. It is also crucial to recognize that language is used and it can be misused. Language is a wonder. Any reflective person is mindful of the power of language. Words can cause the soul to soar, move the mind, call to action, destroy community, or proclaim hope. Language can also be used to misinform, deceive, and malign. Certainly language shifts by human use and over time can even shift significantly. While this is true, language is not as fluid as deconstructionists, postmodernists, and Humpty Dumpty declares, “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”6 If language is totally arbitrary, as some propose, then authentic human communication would be impossible. Language is a primary way that social scientists engage and interpret social orders. When language is misused (say to manipulate masses) or abused (as within popular culture) this has both an erosive and coercive effect. Of course, most human societies have a range of uses of language: common parlance, vocabulary that shifts from one setting to the next, and syntax that varies from small sub-groups to large public gatherings.7
In the past seventy years or so in American mass society there have been some stunning shifts within everyday usage
6 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), 117.
7 Of the many books that offer insight and understanding into thinking more clearly about rhetoric and language, here are my top recommendations: Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992); Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (Wipf & Stock, 2021); George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2010); Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Brattleboro, VT: Ecco Point Books, 2015); Barry Sanders, The Private Death of Public Discourse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Throught, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956).
of certain terms. How and when exactly these shifts occurred is unclear; certainly these linguistic transitions are now firmly wedged into conventional usage. Most of the following social shifts from the left, right, and even the center are all about power. If one can pull off the illusion that it is “all about what the majority thinks” then half the battle is won. In a land that abides by majority rule (on many issues) the power block of the majority is key. Think of it as the sheer force of majoritarianism. It is how “Pro-Choice” triumphed over “anti-abortion”; how homophobia is deemed a great social ill but one will not hear the whisper of heterophobia (even though this opposite phobia must be real and true based on the logic of homophobia). Or think about the most impressive rhetorical power play of recent years when the simple term Gay Rights became LGBT which is sometimes LGBTQ+ and occasionally the unintelligible LGBTQQIP2SAA requiring a decoder ring. There are other strings of letters signifying legions of sexual orientations and activities. One day, most assuredly, this will all morph into what will be accepted as the new normal LGBTQXYZ. At the core of all of this is the bent tendency to destroy historically held norms to be replaced by LGBTQXYZ as the new norms. This is accomplished by the abuse of language and the use of power. Key to the victory is the full blown adherence to the illusion of great numbers. Mass is force and force is power; and the new kingdom of this world is established by the new majority through sheer power. 8
For many sub-groups, the importance of presenting one’s sub-group (or even one’s sub -sub group) in the light of not being unnatural, an anomaly, a minority of a minority, or even of being any kind of sub-group is the social move of adding or expanding one’s quantity grouping. Simply put the L or G of the above social demarcation is in fact an extremely
8 Even though a little dated, the book to consult is still the most informative on this and related matters James D. Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle To Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
small percentage of the wider population of human existence. Thus the need to add the B and the T. Still needing larger numbers to demonstrate a great force of tremendous power one should indeed fear the + mark. This indeed does the job! The XYZ is an addition by the author anticipating the trajectory of the current sub-sub-groups primarily forming self-identification in reductionistic terms of debased sexual activity. One of Freud’s many prophecies will be fulfilled: all humans will be reduced to mere sexual appetites and identities prowling about seeking whom to devour.
The imposition of this new norm is a social and logical fallacy as it is implemented and enforced. The term for such accusations is Kafka Trapping. If someone denies being x (say “transphobic”) this now functions as proof that said person is indeed the very thing she denies that she is since someone who is x (“transphobic”) would deny being x. This commonplace abuse of language and reason, as well as the logical fallacy, is drawn from the insightful and all too relevant novel The Trial by Franz Kafka. The reason this is both a social and logical fallacy is because it broadly places all people into the predetermined guilty camp. This means that people who are possibly really afraid of transgender people are lumped with those who have sound arguments questioning the contemporary social construct of transgenderism.
On an affirmative note, the reason the average citizen, including Kingdom citizens, should have at least a general interest in the social sciences is because, despite their collective modernization within the university, there are still good and beneficial insights to be gathered from these ways of looking at the world. An understanding of how societies shape its members and how particular members influence others is simply beneficial to know. Being able to interpret the contours and configurations of society can be useful as well as protective. We should have a general working understanding of the social sciences not so we can manipulate people but so we can be more informed and aware as to how others might manipulate us.
Social sciences as academic disciplines and practiced endeavors can and do yield insight into particular social issues. It is disingenuous if the critics of social sciences do not operate under the general goodwill premise that these disciplines are minimally seeking to better understand our social order and the various ways culture shapes its inhabitants. Similar to other academic divisions and disciplines in the modern university, the social sciences have become fragmented, territorial, and highly specialized with a vocabulary distinctly employed by the insiders, practitioners, and experts. The term “social” is an essentially stable term in the history of English.9 As designed by God, humans are naturally drawn to community. Of course, the majority of the social scientists ascribe and assign a range of motivations to the formation of human communities. Most of these are rooted in an evolutionary worldview and are offensively reductionistic. Within this narrowing and thinning of motivations, sex and material consumption are at the top of the list.
At the core of the deeply flawed criticisms of cultural appropriation resides the historical and social reality that we all, to varying degrees and with different realities, appropriate from others. It is almost impossible to identify such a phenomenon as “appropriation” post Disney, McDonald’s, and Walmart. As consumers in a mass society, the ability to consume purely from one heritage and segment is nearly impossible. This is the same reason that multiculturalism and the celebration of diversity is a thinly-guised illusion some still cling to. It is a social reality that there may be genuine
9 “n. 1531, Companionship, fellowship; borrowed from the Middle French societe, and probably directly from Latin from socius companion… the meaning of an organized group, club, association, is first recorded in 1548, and that of a system or condition of living with others as a community, in 1553.” Robert K. Barnhart, The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology: The Origins of American English (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 735.
diversity (in some ways) and at the same time homogeneity (in most other ways).10
Here are just a few examples. Carefully pay attention to people who denounce traditional religion and yet when they assemble note that the tone, tenor, symbols, signs, language, and gestures resemble the very religions that they decry. Similarly, contemporary holidays that have been devised in the past hundred years in America look, feel, and sound very similar to pre-existing holidays. This kind of appropriation is unavoidable unless consciously counter-cultural, and then there is the habit of borrowing from the anti-traditional, counter-cultural forerunners.
In the current moment, the Church (as well as nuclear families and traditionally formed communities) must resist the disdain for language and reclaim the vocabulary of the Great Tradition. The People of the Book, by extension, have been called to be stewards of language from the charge given to our first parents. Of the many ways humans bear the image of God, certainly language-maker (or dare we say linguistic sub-creator) is one.
There are many words that have been used, misused, and abused over the past few decades across the American social landscape. Certainly the term justice is in the top ten. Of course, if you add the word social in front of it, now you are closer to the top five. In truth, the article you have before you would likely be both thinner and wiser to not even broach the topic, but as an exercise in social scientific reflection and
10 As with other cultural and social points of discord, “cultural appropriation” is problematic as grounds for authentic grievance. In a historically and culturally diverse society, most are likely guilty of cultural appropriation at different times with different items. In a consumerist society, almost anyone can lay claim to being a victim of having their culture appropriated by someone else and nearly anyone can get away with appropriating a symbol from another group. For example the rainbow, historically in the West, a symbol associated with Jews and Christians reminding God’s holy people that God destroyed a wicked and sinful world and provided the rainbow as a sign of hope that He would not do so again in a similar manner, was ironically appropriated by the gay community in the late 1970s. In America, the rainbow is now more associated with groups primarily identified by their sexuality. In the West, the Romans culturally appropriated much from the Greeks which has been the normative posture in the West ever since.
the collapse of reasoned rhetoric about the subject of justice, it is essential.
In addition to being a word that has a rich heritage and identity in the Western Tradition, justice is also fully articulated in sacred Scripture. Additionally, it is a term readily used by those on the political and social left as well as the social and political right. As with all definitions (boundary drawing) it is sometimes best to clearly articulate what justice is not and why justice cannot be what some argue that justice is. Other, more suitable terms will be suggested accordingly as a replacement for justice.
Justice is most assuredly not to be defined in the manner that the brutish, loud, manipulative propaganda of social media defines it. These controllers of mass news who proclaim their gospels of social justice and equality are ignoring both human nature and human history. Traditional and conventional wisdom contends that humans can, when attentive, learn from suffering. This is not offering a pass to the dispensers of pain. It does not matter if the powerful who inflict suffering are traditionalists, the majority, a tyrannical minority, or an elite progressive force. The general assumption then would be that even a right understanding of justice must occur (at least in part) through the very common experience of human suffering. Justice, like suffering, is not limited to a class, culture, social order, era, race, or either of the two genders. Aeschylus, in his masterpiece The Oresteia , even affirms via the chorus that, “Justice will tip the scales, to bring learning through suffering.”11 The great Greek tragedian lived within a universe where justice was not defined by the whim of a rioting crowd. Aeschylus dwelt in a time and place where there was confidence that justice would be known. “The gods are not blind to men who bring slaughter, the dark Furies will pull down the man who unjustly pros -
11 Aeschylus, The Oresteia , trans. Peter Meineck (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998), line 250.
pers, reversing his fortunes, grinding him down. A shadow, below, he is lost forever.”12
If there is a single greatest difference between the way justice is used in common American parlance and the consensus of the way that it was used in the Bible and ancient civilizations it is that in former ages there was an integral relationship between righteousness and justice. In addition to justice being what was right or righteous, the thought of the wicked seeking justice would have made no sense.
“Justice shines her light on humble, smoke-filled homes, honoring the righteous man.”13 As with the modern world, within the civic square it was not uncommon that there were competing bids for justice. “Blame is met with blame, it is so hard to decide between them.”14 In The Oresteia , it is neither ironic nor odd to find that the very individuals who sought justice and killed the king for killing his daughter are now being held accountable to justice. “These prayers are for us, for our enemies I say: bring the avenger into the light, let Justice kill the killers!”15
Much of the language and activities related to the social justice of the past several decades in America would be canceled in terms of piety (that is righteousness toward God and one’s neighbor and enemy) due to the simple truth that while justice was historically predicated on piety and righteousness, these are no longer deemed essential for the cry for justice. In biblical terms, the reader can scour the prophets of the Old Testament seeking justice, but will soon discover the same frame of reality that there is justice where righteousness abounds. Here are just a handful of references to justice and essentially needed presence of the Lord in the book of Amos:
12 Aeschylus, The Oresteia , lines 461–467.
13 Aeschylus, The Oresteia , lines 773–775.
14 Aeschylus, The Oresteia , lines 1560–1561.
15 Aeschylus, The Oresteia , lines 142–144.
They have rejected the law of the Lord, and have not kept his statutes, but their lies have led them astray, those after which their fathers walked. (Amos 2:4)
Seek the Lord and live,[…] O you who turn justice to wormwood and cast down righteousness to the earth! (Amos 5:6a and 7)
Therefore he who is prudent will keep silent in such a time, for it is an evil time. Seek good, and not evil, that you may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, as you have said. Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate: it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph. (Amos 5:13–15)
Is there still anyone with you? he shall say, no: and he shall say, silence! We must not mention the name of the Lord. (Amos 6:9)
But you have turned justice into poison and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood. (Amos 6:12)
Justice
But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe (Exodus 21:23–25).
Then it is not only by custom but nature itself that doing wrong is the greater evil than being wronged, and having what is due one is justice… (Plato, Gorgias, 489A)
Were the basis of justice in the decrees of the people, the rulings of Kings, or in the decisions of judges, then justice would permit theft, adultery, even forgery of wills, if a majority of the populace voted for them. But if such a power
resides in the decisions and decrees of fools who are sure natural law can be altered by votes, then why do they not decide that what is bad and harmful shall be considered good and worthwhile? (Cicero, Laws, I, 15)
But like your grandfather here and like me, the one who gave you life, you should cultivate justice and piety. This is of great importance in relation to your parents and family, but most of all to your country (Cicero, The Dream of Scipio, 16).
Justice itself is the great standing policy of civil society; and any imminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France).
Behold, this is the whole of the tarantula. Do you want to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web; touch it, that it tremble!
There it comes willingly: welcome, tarantula! Your triangle and symbol sits black on your back; and I also know what sits in your soul. Revenge sits in your soul: wherever you bite, black scabs grow; your poison makes the soul whirl with revenge.
Thus I speak to you in a parable—you who make souls whirl, you preachers of equality. To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful. But I shall bring your secrets to light; therefore I laugh in your faces with my laughter of the heights...The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise. “What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge”—thus they speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not”—thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!”
You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words
of virtue. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy—perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers—erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge…
I do not wish to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of equality (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Excerpt from Tarantulas).
Much social power, akin to a weapon of mass destruction, has been garnered and even great wealth amassed under the banner of social justice and equity. In our current social order, to even raise a whisper of a question about the meaning and application instead of standing and chanting is a form of heresy and will result in immediate and decisive censure from the cultural High Priests. In a nation that has historically advocated freedom of dissent from the rich and powerful, it is odd that this is now shouted down and censored. It seems that the loud and powerful advocates for the current iteration of social justice have won the moment.
Historically, in the Western Tradition, justice is one of the four cardinal virtues. Part of the confusion regarding justice may very well be related to the practice of disconnecting the four cardinal virtues. One may go so far as to propose that justice may be in both existential and linguistic trouble because she is no longer intertwined with wisdom, moderation, and courage. Certainly justice is in peril because her three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) have vanished from the social ordering of our lives. Justice is also certainly in trouble because she is currently flanked socially by the weakling tolerance and her anemic co-hort call to be nice. “In houses dim with cooking smoke, Justice shines, honoring the life of righteousness. Precincts that filthy hands have hung with cloth of gold, she turns from in disgust and moves along to holy places. She does not honor money when its power counterfeits praise. No, she guides all things to their fitting end.”16
It is evident from both Aeschylus and Amos that justice must be firmly rooted in righteousness of God and rightness of God’s citizens. This assertion alone would have the speaker run out of the public square as the very affirmation of righteousness has such an air of moral superiority. The counter claim would be “whose righteousness” or more to the postmodern point “who says righteousness matters?!?!” Then the response is usually “those who are rich and or powerful.” Now is when it should be remembered that there is nothing new under the sun.
The social reality is that justice and equality as forced equalism cannot and will not ever work because humans simply are not equal.17 This is not a bad thing. People tend to be ready to accept that humans are not equal regarding certain physical abilities but are less willing to admit that humans are intellectually different; and one will never hear that humans are not all morally or spiritually equal. Yet, as social creatures we should readily recognize that inequalities in light of these matters should be celebrated as part of the true diversity that enables human societies to thrive. As usual, C. S. Lewis was ahead of his times when he wrote,
In that promising land the spirit of I’m as good as you has already become something more than a generally social influence. It begins to work itself into their educational system. Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments… The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic.’ These differenc-
17 See Kurt Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron,” short story and Ray Bradbury, especially from Chief Beatty, “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.” Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 55. Read also the dense but deep reflection of this always important and always contemporary topic by Eva Brann where she says, “Equality is imperfect sameness, sameness is imperfect identity. Both equality and sameness are, if relations can be said to have an essence, essentially relations: you can't be same or equal on your own. Identity is a condition regarded as a relation: self-sameness.” Is Equality An Absolute Good? (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2022), 74.
es between the pupils—for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences—must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary sciences can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mudpies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have—I believe the English already use the phrase—‘parity of esteem.’ Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma… by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own agegroup throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his contemporary’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON THE MAT.
In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers—or should I say, nurses?—will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching.
Of course this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will… I’m as good as you… is the finest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political Democracies from the face of the earth.18
18 C. S. Lewis, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 203-206.
Robert M. Woods has been associated with Classical Christian education for thirty years. He holds the Ph.D. in Humanities and the D.A. in Social Sciences. He is also a Certified Teacher with the National Paideia Center. He has served as Professor of Humanities and Great Books for a number of Colleges and Universities and has served for ten years as Headmaster at two Classical Christian schools. He is currently Director of the Humanities MA and PhD Programs at Faulkner University and Dean of Academics for Kepler Education. He has authored numerous scholarly articles, a few books, and is a popular speaker at conferences that are part of the Classical educational renewal.
On Fostering Poetic Knowledge in Writing Instruction
Making the Great Books Personal
Tracey Leary, M.Ed.
The Concept of Poetic Knowledge: A Brief Exploration
The topic of how to foster poetic knowledge in the liberal arts classroom is one that has in recent days seen a resurgence of interest. With the publication of James O. Taylor’s book Poetic Knowledge in 1998, and its appraisal of the Integrated Humanities Program that thrived at the University of Kansas in the 1970s and 80s, the term “poetic” as it relates to an epistemology at variance with our modern tendency to quantitative assessment of learning entered the vocabulary of the classical educator. Since that time, the concept of poetic knowledge has proven to be one that is difficult to define and even more difficult to determine how best to incorporate into a daily classroom rhythm. It is a task that is well worth the attempt, however.
It is the goal of this paper to explore some identifiable characteristics of poetic knowledge, why it matters, and how its salient points can be addressed in particular in writing instruction.
Poetic knowledge, in brief, is important because it is a foundational way of knowing which is usually considered to be prior to discursive reason, and was first identified and named
by Thomas Aquinas.1 This Thomistic mode of knowing was thoroughly explained and defended in James Taylor’s work on the subject as “the appropriate means of reawakening the intuitive nature of human beings who are able to know reality in a profound and intimate way.” 2 Its roots reach further into the past than Aquinas, however. Taylor explains, “Poetry, and all art, for the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, was considered a means of real and valuable knowledge, a knowledge of the permanent things.” 3 In a day in which only that which can be quantified and analyzed is considered to be real and true, the concept of poetic knowledge opens for the educator a way to address with students truths that we cannot see.
Prior to Taylor’s work, John Senior, one of the founders of the IHP program, on whose thought Taylor drew heavily, identified four degrees or types of knowledge, of which the poetic was one. The other three were science, dialectic, and rhetoric.4 Senior defined the poetic mode of knowing as that “where truths are grasped intuitively as when you trust another’s love.”5 Father Francis Bethel says of Senior that he also considered the poetic mode as necessarily prior to the other modes of knowledge and “arranges the four modes of knowledge… in pyramid fashion… He places the poetic mode at the base [because] it is a prerequisite for the abstract thought inherent in the other modes.”6 Taylor likewise comments on Senior’s view of the primacy of the poetic mode: “There is a proper order of knowledge, as outlined by John Senior… beginning with the poetic.” 7 Although the poetic mode for Senior precedes the other three, this does not mean that it
1 James S. Taylor, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press1998), 3.
2 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 4.
3 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 12.
4 Francis Bethel, John Senior and the Restoration of Realism (Merrimack, NH: Thomas More College Press, 2016), 173.
5 John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture (Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2008), 115.
6 Bethel, John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, 180.
7 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 13.
is in any way rudimentary or basic for “Senior also affirms that from another point of view the poetic mode soars higher than the other three.” 8 In fact, the poetic mode can be seen as both the beginning and the end of knowledge. Drawing on Josef Pieper’s Aristotelian-Thomistic description of schole, or leisure as both the first and final principle of all our activity as virtually synonymous with this conception of poetic knowledge as the boundary around thought, Taylor says that it is through the poetic mode that “we are reminded of our final purpose, which is to experience happiness, a resting from activity, a return to where we began, to a state of repose.” 9 A state of rest then is both the genesis and end of all active learning, as poetic knowledge is both the foundation and the goal of discursive reason.
As such, one of the primary characteristics of poetic knowledge is that it is a receptive posture toward knowledge rather than an active pursuit of information. James Taylor clearly states that poetic knowledge is experiential as he clears up a common misconception: “Poetic knowledge is not necessarily a knowledge of poetry but rather a poetic (a sensory-emotional) experience of reality.”10 One of Senior’s primary reasons for considering the poetic mode as of primary importance to learning was also its concern with reality. He believed that “Truth follows upon the existence of things.”11 Senior’s reasoning which led to this belief is that “Something exists and I know it and therefore I know that I exist and think. Thinking follows from existence; it does not make things so.”12 Taylor also calls this Thomistic view of reality an “older tradition” which “was uniquely equipped to grasp reality and to move upwards to contemplation of existence and being.”13 Thomistic philosophy asserts that “we
8 Bethel, John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, 180.
9 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 20.
10 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 5.
11 Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture , 46.
12 Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture , 33.
13 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 88.
simply do not, cannot, know our thoughts of things before we know the things as they are first.”14 Thus the “perennial philosophy” of realism is foundational to the concept of poetic knowledge. As Taylor succinctly puts it, poetic knowledge “always deals with the really real.”15
The inclusion of the senses and emotions in poetic experience then do not exclude imagination, but rather heighten and direct it. As Senior says, “to restore the imagination, we must put the intellect in its proper place; but to put the intellect first, we must have restored the imagination.”16 In the Thomistic framework, the imagination must work hand in hand with the senses in the reception of this kind of knowledge for it to be actualized into the learner’s storehouse of memory from which he draws his comprehended understanding. Without the function of imagination, this sort of poetic contemplation cannot take place. As C. S. Lewis said in his essay “Bluspels and Flalansferes”, imagination is not the organ “of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood… Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”17 It is the ability of the imagination to produce meaning through seeing the common ground of nature between ourselves and the object contemplated that leads to the kind of insights to which poetic knowledge aspires.
The role of the imagination in poetic knowledge is best seen in the concept of connaturality, which is a kind of knowing from the inside of a subject rather than analyzing the topic of study from the outside. Taylor defines it in this way: “To be connatural with a thing is to participate in some way with its nature.”18 Aquinas says that it is this quality of connaturality which distinguishes poetic knowledge from discursive
14 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 94.
15 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 69.
16 Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture , 18.
17 C. S. Lewis, Rehabilitations and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 157.
18 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 64.
reasoning as “an intuitive way, refined by habit, of knowing immaterial reality and transcendent truth.”19 Bethel explains further that connatural knowledge is a kind of knowing “where one participates in the being of another.
Stemming from one’s having a like nature with the object, this knowledge consists in ‘feeling like the object (in sympathy with it) as if it were ourselves.’” 20 Taylor confirms that this element of knowing produces “a knowledge more real than the scientific due to its vicarious experience of the subject.” 21 It is the connaturality which is intrinsic to poetic knowledge that most deeply involves the imagination because it fosters a way of contemplation which nurtures “the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within the object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.” 22 It is only by experiencing the object of contemplation as it really is and not as we think it to be can poetic knowledge come to light.
The time spent in contemplating meaningful images always produces an affective response, which is the basis for the next characteristic of poetic knowledge: it has as its goal love of the object under contemplation in addition to intellectual knowledge of it. This affective response often begins with a sense of wonder which spurs the wonderer to contemplate the object which sparked the reaction. Drawing on Aquinas, Taylor describes wonder as an “emotion of fear, a fear produced by the consciousness of ignorance.” 23 Although it is classified as an irascible emotion by Aquinas, it is still due to “something of the beautiful embedded as a universal in the particular object that gives rise to wonder and delight for there to be poetic experience.” 24 This delight in the wonder is that which Aristotle says creates the “poetic impulse to
19 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 81.
20 Bethel, John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, 178.
21 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 83.
22 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 9.
23 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 24.
24 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 38.
know in all men… that initiates all learning.” 25 This occurs because wonder always leads either to a desire to know more of the object or an inclination to repulse the object for “to behold is to possess [with] near-simultaneous fear-joy: the sensation of one’s heart leaping up in the chest.” 26 It is when the beholder experiences joy in the object of his beholding that he is spurred to learn more of it.
This process is inextricably linked to the Thomistic view of appetite and will. If the object of wonder stirs pleasure in the beholder, then it “increases desire and therefore the joy of discovery.” 27 As Robert Edward Brennan explains this phenomenon, “The first movement of concupiscible appetite, when confronted with a good of some kind… is a passion of love. At once it sets out to attain this good, and in so doing gives birth to a passion of desire.” 28 It is this passion of desire which drives the wonderer to relieve his ignorance concerning the source of his wonder. The opposite is also possible, however: “If on the other hand it is faced with an evil of some sort, its first movement is a passion of hatred. At once it starts to withdraw, giving vent to the disgust which it feels.” 29 If the object does spark a pleasure which draws the learner to it, in the Thomistic framework, the learner is said to incline to the object by means of the will.
These operations of the will inclining to a source of pleasure or desire are called the “natural movements of the will,” or the “loving will,” a term which Taylor borrows from Conrad Baars and which he says constitutes “impulses toward the good,” whether it is setting out to pursue the good or withdrawing itself from what it perceives not to be good. 30 Taylor further quotes Baars on this loving will, describing it as “a blind power which follows the enlightenment of the intel-
25 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 24.
26 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 50.
27 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 25.
28 Robert Edward Brennan, The Image of His Maker: A Study of the Nature of Man (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1948), 171.
29 Brennan, The Image of His Maker, 171.
30 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 54.
lect” and “is characterized by the activity of passivity.” 31 This is another reason why poetic knowledge cannot be actively pursued, but must be received on the leading of the learner’s will, which has responded in love to the object that it wants to understand. A love for the object of knowledge is further identified by St. Augustine as absolutely necessary to truly knowing that object. He said, “However good a thing is, if it is not loved, it cannot be perfectly possessed, that is, known.” 32 Senior elaborates on this idea, “Love presupposes knowledge. Love without knowledge is sentimentality, an indirect form of hatred that adds deception to contempt, so that one actively loves what is not really there–something worse than no love at all.” 33 Again, the necessity of knowing, and consequently loving, what is “really real” is vital to true understanding of anything that we wish to genuinely know. Finally, poetic knowledge incorporates a science of relations across areas of study, which tends to integrate rather than divide knowledge. This kind of integration happens naturally as the will inclines to objects of contemplation in love and later reflects on them. Taylor quotes Aquinas as saying, “Memory is being guided by reason in a purely natural way . . . It tends, of its own accord, to link together various items of experience that are alike. Reason merely takes advantage of this tendency.” 34 John Senior pictures this kind of integration through a medieval concept–the tower of liberal arts, which a scholar climbs by progressing from grammar to dialectic to rhetoric and into the levels of the quadrivium. As Senior explains it, each scholar rises “from one to the other, not by a horizontal extension, but a vertical ascent to a different level of understanding that include the lower ones, analogous to the relation of part to whole.” 35 (Once the scholar reaches the top of the tower, metaphysics and theology, he “must now de -
31 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 55.
32 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 31.
33 Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture , 103.
34 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 46.
35 John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture (Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2008), 99.
scend to wherever in the scale of work his talents lie… having had a vision of its place in the universal scheme of things.” 36 He has learned that in God, “all knowledge is integral” and is able to take his place in the great chain of being, knowing his purpose and by it, directing his work to glorify the whole. 37 It is only once the student sees his place in the overarching scheme of the world that he can truly feel himself to be at home in it and to work out that purpose for which he was created. Northrop Frye said that the reason we must create meaning is out of “a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.” 38 Senior cites this need to be a part of what we know as the reason that medievals depicted ancient events as occurring in the current culture. It was not “archaeological naivete” but because “the past was seen as present because its meaning was present. The past event is materially long since gone, but if it is anything, it is spiritually present right now.” 39 If we want our students to find meaning and purpose in their studies, they must first love them, and second, must see themselves in the material they are studying.
POETIC KNOWLEDGE IN WRITING INSTRUCTION: MAKING IT PERSONAL
How then do we as educators incorporate these beautiful but intangible principles into our daily instruction? Ultimately, students primarily actualize their knowledge in two
36 Senior, The Death of Christian Culture , 100.
37 Senior, The Death of Christian Culture , 100.
38 Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964), 33.
39 Senior, The Death of Christian Culture , 64
ways: oral and written expression, although other types of artistic expression do this as well. Most of our classwork will focus on the first two, however. I would like to suggest a few ways that we might use writing instruction in particular to further poetic knowledge in our students. First, for our students to write meaningfully, they must have actual thoughts about the material to express. This is a principle that is startlingly simple, as simple as that which says that the first principle of activity is rest or the first principle of music is silence.40 Because it seems so obvious, it may be easily overlooked. However, it is far too common for students to try to express what they believe they are supposed to think about their studies rather than what they actually do think . Because the knowledge that produces genuine understanding that can be expressed in writing is largely poetic rather than discursive, it is receptive. Taylor says that “listening is above all the gateway, along with looking, to the poetic mode.”41 Critically, the listening cannot be to lectures if poetic knowledge is to be received. The listening must be to story. If we want our students to appreciate the Great Ideas in the Great Books, they must first engage with them as Great Stories. Consequently, the first principle of meaningful writing is meaningful listening. Our classrooms must be places where enjoyment of Great Stories is encouraged, and we as teachers must demonstrate the receptive posture of delight in these stories. Taylor recalls a class of high school boys who remembered their time together many years later and says, “I think this was possible because these books were read in an atmosphere or pure enjoyment–no notes were to be taken, no pop quizzes. We read a great deal aloud and would talk whole hours about one scene, recreating it in our minds, savoring some moment or event that seemed true to us.”42 This relaxed “atmosphere of enjoyment” is one that most educators
40 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 71.
41 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 10.
42 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 181.
can replicate without upending their curriculum, especially when the curriculum itself consists of Great Stories, and one which best lends itself to drawing out of our students what they actually think rather than placing them under a rigorous atmosphere which leaves them no leisure to determine what they themselves think. Of course, sometimes it is necessary to to emphasize certain concrete facts such as historical dates, but as Taylor points out, “for students these can also be enjoyable, if those precise things are left embedded in the stories of history.”43 If we teach the Great Books and not textbooks, this process is intrinsic to the material.
Instructors can foster students’ connatural knowledge of these Great Books by helping them to get inside the story. Connatural knowledge is described by Taylor as the process which takes place when a child becomes in imagination the object of their thought, such as a toddler who pretends to be a horse.44 One of the best ways to do this is through narration, or retelling the story themselves. This can be accomplished informally in class discussion or more purposefully in written assignments which may include narrative assessments in lieu of traditional testing. In narrative assessment, the student chooses the selection covered in class which most resonated with him, in order to deepen his or her understanding of it by spending further time with it, and retells the selection from memory as much as is possible. Doing so brings the student inside the story in an integrative experience of the selection rather than an outward analysis of the material, which is one of the key components of poetic knowledge: a knowing from the inside of a subject. This element of retelling is vital to the student’s ability to enter the story themselves, and students may be given as much time and space as they desire in such an assessment to retell the story to their satisfaction without the constriction of grammar or syntactical requirements.
43 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 169.
44 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge , 83.
Such assessments work best when they are considered on the basis of substance alone.
This element of retelling can be incorporated into formal essays as well. The fable essay in the progymnasmata is well suited for students to retell a fable at the beginning of this assignment. As most fables are brief in their original form, this is a perfect way to incorporate such retellings into formal writing in balance with other required elements. The fable essay can also use retellings of other stories as well, as the fable is compared to a story in which a character follows the advice of the moral of the fable (the Example, or Paradigm paragraph) and can be compared to a story in which the character does not follow the advice of the moral (the Opposite, or Antithesis paragraph). Students may also tell their own narrative of a time when they either did or did not follow the advice of the moral. The Vituperation and Encomium essays are also formats into which a retelling of the narrative of a villain in a fairy tale or a hero of a legend may be introduced and contemplated through the other elements of the essay. While the narrative assessment may allow for students to take as much time or space in their retellings as they desire, the formal component teaches them to balance these retellings in a way that flows with other parts of the essay to produce an integrated whole.
In allowing students to retell the material in class and in their written work, teachers encourage a posture which tends to produce love for the material, not only through demonstrating delight in the material themselves, and seeking to produce an atmosphere which draws out the student’s true thoughts, but by assigning particular essays, the nature of which require an appreciation for the subject. For example, another of the levels of the progymnasmata is the confirmation/refutation essay. Rather than first assigning the student to refute an idea or a story, such as a medieval legend or a tale from Herodotus, the student can be asked to confirm it. This naturally puts the student in a posture to be first receptive to the truths found in that story or account rather than encour -
aging them to debunk the story. The process of confirming the account, and finding the reality in it, will often create an affection for the material which is not generally accessible when analyzing or critiquing it. Confirmation does not have to entail proving the truth of the story, which is simply another way to stand outside the story and to judge it, but to find the intrinsic truth which is part of the story in ways that characters act believably, events are probable, aspects of the story are clear, and outcomes are proper. None of these items of evaluation are necessarily proof of the story’s factual historicity, but can help students to find the truths that are more metaphysical in nature and thus true on a different level than bare fact. It is these truths that tend to produce the affective response of enjoyment and eventually love for the material. Finally, teachers may help students to integrate the material studied in class into their own personal cognitive frameworks, which include multitudes of fictional, historical, and personal knowledge and thus foster their own individual science of relations. Asking the student to relate fables to other stories already in their mental libraries is one way to do this. In narrative assessments, students can also be asked to connect the selection being retold to another story from the student’s personal vault of knowledge. This story can be a book, a movie, a television show, a video game, or a piece of art or music that the narrated selection brings to mind for the student. As the student progresses, the level of connection expected can increase from a simple identification of a similar story, to a comparison of specific themes or characters, to an additional contrast of dissimilarities between the two. Including this comparison as part of the assessment allows the student to integrate the story into their existing narrative world of personal meaning to them, to see themselves in the story, and in this way to promote the science of relations that provides joy in knowing that they too have part in these Great Stories.
Poetic knowledge, as C. S. Lewis pictured it in his essay “Meditation in a Toolshed” is being able to look along
a beam of light rather than at it, and by this to see everything through the lens of that light. It necessitates love for the light, enjoyment of the light, and an ability to be part of the light. Likewise, for Taylor, “Poetic knowledge… moves to deeper realities… through the concrete things of the world [and] operates through images, as does the cognitive sense process where the intellect gazes and penetrates with light our memory’s storehouse of images.”45 For students to desire to move to these deep realities, realities which are ultimately the truths which will lead them to the One who is Truth Himself, teachers must lead them toward looking by the light rather than merely at it. Studying the great works of Western Civilization is uniquely qualified to do this, but only if they are approached as offering truths to be loved rather than just principles to be known. The affections of our pupils and not only their reason must be engaged in this regard for these studies to have lasting and eternal impact which, after all, is the only true end of our labors. Anything else is chaff.
Tracey Leary is a doctoral student in the graduate humanities program at Faulkner University and holds an M.Ed. from Auburn University at Montgomery. She has more than twenty years of experience in education, which includes teaching in both public and private school environments as well as homeschooling her own children and directing a local classical co-op, for which she also wrote and compiled its secondary humanities curriculum. She now teaches integrated humanities classes for Kepler Education and lives in Montgomery, Alabama, with her husband and three boys.
Serving Trays and Recipes
Two Ways of Thinking About a Sentence
by Mark Signorelli, M.A.
Few books bear as much honesty in their title as Jacques Barzun’s Simple and Direct. A guide to writing for students, and for teachers who instruct them, Barzun’s work is filled with a variety of insights and suggestions for producing prose that is forceful, clear, unpretentious, and, well, simple and direct. Barzun’s ideal is writing composed of “the hard, clear words of a lover of plain speech.”1 It is writing true to “the very ethics of writing,” that acknowledges that “the purpose (of writing) is always the same: it is to be understood aright.” 2 Barzun claims that such an approach to writing is grounded in the art of rhetoric, which he defines as “the craft of setting down words and marks right,” or, more plainly, “the art of making oneself understood.” 3
Accordingly, the book provides a very large number of tips for lucid writing. “Prefer the short word to the long; the concrete to the abstract,”4 is fairly typical of the kind of advice that Barzun offers, as is the following note about prepositions: “You can often help yourself over an uncertainty by remembering the probability that the wanted preposition goes with the one buried in the word: con-(com-) means with
1 Jacques Barzun, Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers (New York: Quill, 2001), 19.
2 Barzun, Simple and Direct, 10.
3 Barzun, Simple and Direct, 5.
4 Barzun, Simple and Direct, 18.
and calls for with.”5 Throughout the work, Barzun makes clear that the primary criterion of good writing is correctness, and so the dominant frame of mind to be inculcated in writers is one that is critical. “(The writer’s) perpetual question,” he claims, “is: do these words, does this paragraph, does the entire piece, suit my present purpose?”6 Later, he describes the mental landscape of the writer as follows: “The adapting of words to needs, this goal of suitability, about which the writer continually challenges himself, naturally breaks up into a great many particular questions—is this the suitable term or form? The suitable order of ideas? The suitable length?” 7
With this emphasis on clarity and plainness, Barzun is articulating a general orientation towards the task of writing that has become more or less normative in school rooms across America. From a very early stage of their instruction, modern students are taught that good writing is a matter of not doing certain things : not confusing there and their, not writing a run-on sentence, not mixing up verb tenses.Undoubtedly, the reams of obscure prose that many teachers confront on a yearly basis inclines them to desire clarity above all things, as a minimal requirement of the essays they must grade. But the elevation of plainness and correctness to stylistic preeminence has enormous consequences for the way students write, and as a result, for the way they think.
The conception of a sentence that emerges from this approach is one that sees it as a vehicle for the communication of an idea existing in the mind of the author into the mind of the reader. Barzun quotes an unnamed author to this effect: “The fundamental rule of style is to keep solely in view the thought one wants to convey.” 8 That action of conveyance is held to be the primary action a sentence accomplishes. In this sense, we might think of the sentence as a kind of serv-
5 Barzun, Simple and Direct, 61.
6 Barzun, Simple and Direct, 10.
7 Barzun, Simple and Direct, 10.
8 Barzun, Simple and Direct, 145.
ing tray, the purpose of which is to convey a meal that is already prepared from its origin in the kitchen to the table of the diner. The virtues of a good serving tray are the characteristics that enable that conveyance: sturdiness, balance. Likewise, the virtues of a good sentence are the ones that facilitate the conveyance of the author’s meaning to the reader: simplicity, directness.
The problem with this conception is apparent to anyone who has sat alongside students as they engage in the task of writing: more often than not, they do not have the ideas to convey in the first place. They are struggling to figure out what they want to say, what significant thoughts about the material they can generate out of their own mental resources. It is of little use to provide students in this situation with rules of correctness, since they have as yet no content upon which to exercise those rules. The sturdiest serving tray in the world cannot convey a meal that has not been prepared.
Tellingly, the quote cited above (“The fundamental rule of style is to keep solely in view the thought one wants to convey”) is completed by the addendum: “One must therefore have a thought to start with.” Stated in this manner, the process of sentence construction would seem to entail two separate stages: the generation of a thought, and then the construction of a sentence that will adequately convey that thought. This approach threatens to strand apprentice writers in the first stage without assistance, unable to find the right words because they are unable to generate the right thoughts. What is needed is an approach to sentence construction that treats it as a unified process, a process through which thought and word are generated simultaneously, and by which students are enabled to discover content by exploiting the grammatical structures through which that content is articulated.
This was the aim of Francis Christensen in his landmark essay, “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence,” a piece which classical educators would benefit from studying. For Christensen, the value in teaching grammar lay not primarily in cultivating correctness on the part of the students, but in
providing them with structures of language that would elicit thought from the students when employed deliberately. As he put it, “we need (a rhetoric of the sentence) that will generate ideas.” 9 The presupposition of such a rhetoric lies in the acknowledgement that when we ask a student to articulate his thoughts on a given topic with greater precision or greater thoroughness, we are typically asking that student to say more about the topic. As Christensen writes, “the foundation then for a generative or productive rhetoric of the sentence is that composition is essentially a process of addition.”10 Teachers who have coached students through the writing process, constantly urging them to add more details about a historical event here, or more evidence for the motives of a character there, will recognize the need to cultivate this basic impetus towards fecundity.
For Christensen, the sentence pattern which provides the greatest impetus towards fecundity is what he labels “the cumulative sentence.” Christensen both describes, and exemplifies, the structure of such a sentence as follows: “The main clause, which may or may not have a sentence modifier before it, advances the discussion; but the additions move backward, as in this clause, to modify the statement of the main clause or more often to explicate or exemplify it, so that the sentence has a flowing and ebbing movement, advancing to a new position and then pausing to consolidate it, leaping and lingering as the popular ballads do.” As successive modifying phrases accumulate, “the additions stay with the same idea, probing its bearings and implications, exemplifying it or seeking an analogy or metaphor for it, or reducing it to details.” The crucial point is that “the mere form of the sentence generates ideas. It serves the needs of both the writer and the reader,
9 Francis Christensen, “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence,” College Composition and Communication 14, no. 3 (October 1963): 155, https://doi.org/10.2307/355051.
10 Christensen, “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence,” 156.
the writer by compelling him to examine his thought, the reader by letting him into the writer’s thought.”11
One need not accept Christensen’s elevation of the cumulative sentence to paradigmatic status in order to appreciate the importance of this insight (sentences with a parallel structure, which is almost antithetical to the cumulative sentence, will similarly compel a writer to articulate their thoughts with greater abundance). Rather than serving merely as a means of conveyance for thought, sentences, by virtue of their grammatic and syntactic structures, can elicit thought that has not yet taken place, and do so in a way that not only enhances the scope and abundance of a writer’s style, but its clarity and force as well. The writing instructor who trains his students to become conscious of those structures, and to exploit them for a variety of expressive ends, is inculcating in the minds of those students a bent towards fecundity of thought. As they are inclined to say more, they are inclined to think more—more precisely, more thoroughly, more interestingly. Rather than conceiving of a sentence as a kind of serving tray, students come to regard it effectively as a recipe—a set of ingredients and procedures which, when utilized with skill, brings into being a composition that was not there before.
Classical educators are uniquely positioned to appreciate the value of Christensen’s insight. As inheritors of the classical rhetorical tradition, they will recognize and understand the importance of his emphasis on generation as the key note to strike in writing instruction. Barzun’s definition of rhetoric as “the craft of setting down words and marks right” suggests that the emphasis in this tradition has always been on correctness. But this is debatable. Examining the texts through which that tradition was transmitted—works like Aristotle’s Rhetoric or the Rhetorica ad Herennium —it is impossible not to notice the evident concern with the generation of arguments, with finding things to say about a variety of topics. Likewise,
11 Christensen, “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence,” 156.
the progymnasmata , the series of exercises intended to prepare young students for more advanced rhetorical study, is primarily focused on providing generative models of argumentation. The emphasis is on invention, on finding things to say. Classical rhetoric recognized five “canons,” or aspects, to the orator’s task—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—but of the five, invention was granted a significance out of all proportion with the other four, for the obvious reason that nothing could be arranged, articulated, or remembered that was not first generated. As the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium succinctly states it, “of the five tasks of the speaker Invention is the most important and the most difficult.”12 Any teacher who has watched pupils staring into space, struggling to get started on an essay assignment because they cannot think of what to say, will appreciate the justness of this insight.
This emphasis in the rhetorical tradition on invention resulted from an affinity that few modern persons would be capable of perceiving any longer: the affinity between the disciplines of rhetoric and poetry. With our convictions about the disinterested cast of poetry’s aesthetic ends, and the utilitarian cast of rhetoric’s political ends, we tend to draw a thick line of demarcation between these two arts. But many scholars in the classical tradition recognized that, insofar as both arts aimed at a response that was both affective and rational, and insofar as they employed many similar linguistic techniques to elicit such responses, a training in the art of poetry could contribute much to the development of rhetorical skill. Oftentimes, one and the same textbook might contain material relevant to both arts; texts like Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1793) and Alexander Bain’s English Composition and Rhetoric (1877) had sections devoted both to rhetorical topics of argument and poetic topics like meter and
12 Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 59.
genre, revealing an undeniable sense of the mutually reinforcing benefits of the two arts.
The best way to think about Christensen’s conception of the sentence is as an attempt to reintroduce poetic considerations into the process of writing instruction at language’s most fundamental level; to infuse the construction of sentences with a play of mind, a joy in combining ideas, a regard for the rhythmic aspects of language. The goal is to make the writing of a sentence coincident with the discovery of matter on any given topic. Rather than waiting upon the clear conception of an idea to begin writing—a wait that is often prolonged and disheartening—the student learns that such a conception only comes into view once he or she attempts to articulate it in the form of the sentence. In a broader sense, the invitation to begin the writing process is extended by shifting the tone of the exercise from one prioritizing correctness to one that emphasizes fecundity. The anxiety students feel about getting things right can be at least partially alleviated by centering expectations around getting things in the first place ; by training students to delight in their own mind’s generative capacities. By giving the writing process a bent towards fecundity at the integral level of the sentence, the goal is to infuse an expansive and comprehensive dynamic into student’s thoughts that will permeate all of their intellectual efforts, and enable them to think extensively about a range of subject matter.
One of the most valuable tools for realizing instruction centered around this conception of a sentence is Aristotle’s Categories. A work that is generally covered in logic curricula, the Categories’ application to instruction in grammar and sentence construction is remarkably fruitful. Aristotle provides us with a schema for ostensibly predicating all that can be predicated about objects of experience.13 It is a schema that not only structures thought about objects, but prompts that thought by self-conscious application of its concepts. When grammatical units like parts of speech and parts of a sentence
13 Aristotle, Categories, 1b25.
are taught to students as vehicles for the expression of the categories, the teaching of grammar becomes a process of providing students with the tools they need to discover the content of their compositions.
This process can begin at the core of the sentence. Nouns quite clearly correspond to the category of a substance; verbs lend themselves naturally to the expression of actions and passions (or things done to an object ), and at times to what Aristotle refers to as “position” or “attitude,” which might be thought of as a posture resulting from a previous action, as in “lying” or “sitting.”14 By making students aware of the philosophical dimensions of these parts of speech, we enable them to explore those dimensions more thoroughly, allowing them to think more precisely and more abundantly. “Are you naming this object as accurately as you can,” we might ask a student—“is it a fish? or is it a trout or a salmon? Is it swimming in the creek, or is it struggling, flailing, or gliding?” Nouns and verbs are presented to students not primarily as static structures attached to rules for their proper usage, but as mental implements that bring aspects of reality into view that might have otherwise lay hidden. In this manner, we are encouraging them to use these grammatical units in a self-conscious manner that is guided by a basic impetus to see, to make their minds and their language adequate to the world they encounter. Lessons in picture study can train students to search for just the right name of the objects they perceive, and just the right verbs to describe what those objects are doing. Lessons of this sort can be interspersed with lessons about subject verb-agreement and verb tense consistency; such attempts to cultivate grammatical correctness in regards to these parts of speech need not be eliminated, but only placed into their properly subordinate relation to the training of fecundity.
As students learn additional parts of speech, the goal is for them to receive this knowledge as an enhanced capacity
Aristotle, Categories, 2a2.
to introduce meaning into their sentences. Lessons on prepositions can emphasize the capacity of prepositional phrases to introduce information about the categories of time and place. Lessons on adjectives can emphasize their capacity to introduce information about the categories of quantity and quality, as well as, on occasion, habitus or state (which refers to a state of possession such as “well-dressed” or “armed”).15 By recognizing each part of speech as a conduit for specific categorical information, students can eventually realize that simply by adding a prepositional or adjectival phrase to their sentence, they are discovering something new to say about the topic at hand.
As students advance into parts of the sentence—grammatical entities like verbal phrases and subordinate clauses— they will see how these structures can be used to introduce a variety of categorical information into a sentence. Again, the goal is to have them do so in a deliberate, self-conscious manner, that inculcates an intuitive drive to seek clarity in their own thoughts through an expansion of their own sentences. By this stage, sentence expansion drills will have become a routine part of the classwork. Students would be presented with a base sentence, and asked to introduce specific categorical information into the sentence by the addition of the appropriate grammatical unit. The content of these sentences would bear reference to the rest of the coursework, so students can see first-hand how their comprehension of this material is enhanced by the writing process.
For instance, the base sentence “Achilles fought Hector” can be written on the board; below it would be listed the various transformations required: swap out “fought” for more precise verb; add a prepositional phrase to indicate place; add an adjective to indicate quality; add a participial phrase to indicate passion. Students then might write an emended sentence as follows: “Choking on his rage, fearsome Achilles stalked Hector before the walls of Troy.” By calling attention
15 Aristotle, Categories, 11b12.
to the increased information contained in the emended sentence, the teacher can open the eyes of students to the fact that by simply adding grammatical structures to their sentences, they can articulate a more thorough and more lucid understanding of the text.
My focus here is on the sentence, but it should be evident how this approach to the writing process can be extended from the level of sentence writing to the larger scales of organization in a composition. Consider paragraph writing, which is almost universally taught to students according to a formal model that includes a topic sentence, evidence, and a concluding sentence. The problem once again is that such strictly formal structures only guide students in the organization of their ideas; they do not help students formulate those ideas in the first place. A generative approach to paragraph writing would be one that centers each paragraph around an argumentative structure that elicits matter from the student’s mind to comprise the substance of the paragraph. Once more, Aristotle’s logical works are of great value here; his “topics,” which are literally places to go in search of matter, include concepts like “comparison” and “cause and effect,” which stimulate thought in students in a way that structures like the “topic sentence” cannot.16 By centering paragraph writing around the use of topics, we are once more prioritizing a bent towards fecundity as the primary thing to be cultivated through writing instruction.
I am of course only sketching the outline of an approach to writing that could be elaborated over many years in the curriculum, from elementary all the way up to high school. But it is an approach that promises a more faithful realization of the ends of classical education than one which trains students to regard their sentences solely as a means of conveying their thoughts. This latter approach effectively presents writing as one kind of skill, a means of communication
16 See summary of the topics in Edward Corbett and Robert Connors’ book Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (Oxford University Press, 1999), 88–120.
that will prove useful in future academic work and vocational endeavors. But the approach I have tried to describe is one that places writing at the heart of the curriculum, the subject matter that draws together all subject matter, by making students’ minds adequate to it all. It is an approach, in short, that fully fuses writing with thinking, and that teaches children the surest path to learning about the world around them is becoming capable of saying more about it.
Mark A. Signorelli has over twenty years of experience in education, as teacher, administrator, and consultant. He has served as the head of two secondary-level classical education programs, and currently provides professional development to fellow classical educators through the Beautiful Teaching Company. He is also an author, whose work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Modern Age, The Public Discourse, Arion, and The University Bookman .
A Classical Argument for Cursive Writing
by Dr. Karla M. Memmott
Humans are communicative, innovative and creative beings. As a person interacts with other human beings, the natural world, and the surrounding social-political community, humans develop new ways of dealing with the mundane day to day activities. One might call this perceived forward movement “technological advances.” Whether it is impressing reeds on wet tablets of clay to create business records, transcribing the oral tradition to papyrus, or keyboarding prompts for an AI article, written communication between human beings is a reflection of the interaction of a person with another person by means of some type of technology. There is a practical component in the expressive nature of written correspondence. As one means of technology coaxes a society forward, another is often cast aside to become outdated and antiquated. In the midst of the confusion, one is left asking whether the technology is designed to serve the person and make life more convenient and practical, or whether the person becomes a slave to the technology.
Cursive-writing is the most recent means of written human communication that may be facing extinction. Many students are no longer taught the art of cursive-writing. The culture of cursive illiteracy may not simply be one of personal preference or expediency, but may be one of cultural historical concern. The Smithsonian Magazine posted a notice in January 2025 looking for individuals who could read cursive-writing; “The National Archives is brimming with historical documents in cursive, including some that date back more than
200 years. But these texts can be difficult to read and understand—particularly for Americans who never learned cursive in school.”1 The article petitions cursive-reading individuals to volunteer time to interpret national documents. It ran in several national forums including NPR, CBS, and USA Today. In addition to the National Archives, organizations such as the National Collaborative for Women’s History, the National Park Service, and the North Dakota Historical Society are desperately seeking individuals who can read cursive to interpret precious historical documents. The loss of cursive literacy may mean the loss of historical literacy.
As with any advancement, debate often ensues between progressive members of society encouraging the social structure to embrace the new technology and the conservative members striving to hold on to the elements which are perceived as integral to the social structure. These types of debates are not new, but necessary for the culture. Edith Hamilton notes, “The modern minds of each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers.” 2 Hamilton’s point is that those criticizing the traditional way challenge society to consider the why’s of holding onto tradition. Similarly, those who value tradition serve as a weight to counterbalance against the thrill of unreservedly embracing the new simply because it is new.
Those in favor of casting cursive-writing to the wayside laud the technological advancements of computers and AI and suggest that cursive is no longer practical, efficient, or necessary. Advancing the skills of newer written forms, anti-cursviverians contend there is insufficient time in the classroom to teach cursive; cursive is not necessary for vocational training; cursive is rarely used outside of the classroom
1 Sarah Kuta, “Can You Read This Cursive-Writing? The National Archives Wants Your Help,” Smithsonian Magazine , January 17, 2025, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/can-you-read-this-cursive-handwriting-the-national-archiveswants-your-help-180985833/.
2 Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (New York: Time Inc. 1958), 253.
except for legal signatures; and cursive is no longer a useful skill for the contemporary person. 3 Conversely, pro-cursiverians counter with arguments that cursive-writing is faster than manuscript-writing, promotes increased brain development, and benefits individuals with dyslexia.4 Although each camp may interpret the basic facts of cursive-writing differently, both sides of this argument hold a common belief as to the nature of education.
A common, contemporary misperception of education centers around the purpose of education which holds that the purpose of education is vocational training. If this is valid, then curriculum decisions involving cursive-writing based on practicality, need, and efficiency are logical arguments. However, education is more than job training. Andrew Bernstein captures the heart of education in his book Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, or Write or Understand Math : “The main purpose of education is to train the mind; that is to teach students to read, to write, to understand math, and to learn history, literature and science.” 5 Whereas Bernstein defines education that fills the mind with excellent sources of historical and literature sources, David Hicks incorporates virtue training as fundamental to instruction: “The purpose of education is not the assimilation of facts or the retention of information, but the habituation of the mind and body to will and act in in accordance with what one knows… the life that knows and reveres, speculates and acts upon the Good, that loves and re-produces the Beautiful, and that pursues excellence and moderation in all things.”6 Unlike the modern mindset, classical pedagogy has a high standard to consider when evalu-
3 Moritz Pratt, “9 Pros and Cons cursive writing: An Honest Look,” The Art of Scribing , https://artofscribing.com/handwriting/9-pros-and-cons-cursive-writing-anhonest-look/.
4 Pratt, “9 Pros and Cons cursive writing.”
5 Andrew Bernstein, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read or Write or Understand Math And What We Can Do About It (Nashville, TN: Bombardier Books, 2022), 14.
6 David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education (Lanham, MD: UniversityPress of America, 1991), 20–21.
ating all components of education, including cursive-writing. The classical educator aspires to inspire students to seek the transcendent true, good, and beautiful through a rich linguistic exposure to history and literature, and a naturally descriptive exposure to math and science. Vocational training ought not be a consideration.
A deeper review of Moritz Pratt’s list pros of cursive-writing includes three unique contentions. These arguments include the fact that cursive-writing links students with the past, cursive-writing develops an appreciation for beauty, and cursive-writing is intrinsically rewarding. These final three points lean toward qualities appreciated in classical education as addressed by Bernstein and Hicks. Whereas the classical educator may be tempted to enter the cursive-writing conversation with arguments of practicality, necessity, and benefit, she has the unique opportunity of promoting a classical pedagogy by highlighting that cursive-writing preserves historical connection, promotes aesthetic appeal, and provides soul-forming opportunities. The remainder of this essay makes an argument on the benefits of cursive-writing by addressing its connection to history, beauty, and goodness.
History and Cursive-Writing
The act of writing is not without its points of contention, nor is it without its points of historical practicality. However to immerse oneself in the historical debates of writing is to become an active participant in the ongoing conversation. The ability to communicate one’s thoughts in writing about the debates of writing is to be a part of the classical pedagogy and the ongoing conversations. To engage in the act of writing cursive is to participate in the flow of history and to preserve its legacy. Thus, the classical educator can integrate historical lessons while instructing the loops and swirls of cursive-writing.
Writing held many historical purposes including business records, government policy and propaganda, and funeral records. There was also a philosophical, theological, and poetic purpose associated with the promotion of the written word. For example, early Jewish scrolls contain the recorded history, instruction, poetry, and wisdom. Hebrews were instructed to “write the commandments and bind them around their neck and on the tablets of their heart.” 7 Although the proverb is clearly a metaphor, it carries with it a weight of meaning based on a writing culture. However not all ancient cultures or individuals embraced writing. Socrates, for example, distrusted the written word and suggested it stunted knowledge.
The specific which you have discovered [writing] is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. 8
Socrates reasons that writing is the appearance of wisdom without the understanding of wisdom. The acquisition of wisdom, according to Socrates, comes about only through engaging with an individual and discussing the topic. Thankfully, Socrates’ student Plato was fond of writing and preserved the dialogues for posterity, and highlighting the tension of oral and written cultures.
Most historical records and archeological documents support a commonly held belief that cursive-writing in the western civilization began with the Greeks. It was later adapted by Romans who incorporated the Etruscan alphabet. Many of the shapes of modern cursive letters began to take shape during this era. Writing tools were expensive and mistakes
7 Proverbs 3:3 (ESV)
8 Plato, “Phaedrus” in Great Books of the Western World , vol.6, ed. Mortimer J. Adler, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1993), 275.
were costly. Scribes learned to keep the stylus on the papyrus to eliminate damage to the writing utensil as well as the document. The penmanship associated with cursive-writing evolved into a specialized discipline which was highly valued. With the decline of the western Roman empire, cursive-writing was preserved primarily through monastic communities. These monks valued the written word in general, and were responsible for preserving many of the historical documents of the ancient world which are read and enjoyed today. The letter structure evolved as the monks developed a Carolingian script and later the Anglicana script near the eighth century.
Cursive-writing continued to evolve, often mirroring the spirit of the age. During the rise of the Renaissance, the Italic script with its artistic flow was extremely popular. The Reformation insisted on a more subdued and humble human spiritual disposition; accordingly the simpler and more humble Copperplate script was embraced in Protestant circles, especially the Puritans who fled to the New World in search of religious freedom. The Declaration of Independence was penned in the Copperplate style. However, the Copperplate flow was too English for many Americans. Shortly after the American Revolution, and perhaps in rebellious response to the newly obtained independence, many Americans picked up quill to write in the Spencerian Script which was a genuine American cursive-writing style created by Platt Rogers Spencer. As America became the power-house of industry, American penmans insisted on a business script; Austin Normal Palmer met the need with what became known as the Palmer Script. Up until the twentieth century, American writers were emulating the writing origins and gradual shifts of western civilization.
Tradition held that cursive-writing was taught exclusively. Manuscript script was non-existent. However, with the rise of the type-script printing press, the need for speed-writing, and the desire to teach younger children to write, American penmanship took a sharp turn towards manuscript. The manuscript print was introduced to American culture by English
school teacher Marjorie Wise at the Columbia University Teachers College in 1922. By this time, the pencil had become a common writing utensil and students were no longer plagued with damaged stylus tips or drops of ink across the page. Many schools embraced manuscript writing in kindergarten and first grade with a transition to cursive-writing for grades three to six. Sadly, many students failed to transition well and gave up cursive-writing when it was no longer compulsory. Donald Neal Thurber attempted to resurrect cursive-writing with a combined cursive-manuscript script called the D’Nealian (from Donald Neal) in the 1970’s. However, the results were nominal. As contemporary classroom teachers struggle to maintain the demands of standardized testing, writing instruction in general (and cursive-writing specifically) has been all too frequently abandoned for more pressing needs. The results are the gradual death of cursive-writing. Cursive-writing has a clear connection with the classical world. The classical educator who makes the argument for cursive-writing not only continues the legacy of cursive-writing, but also opens the way for an interesting dialogue into the historical reason to preserve cursive-writing. cursive-writing ought not to be maintained for its tradition sake; tradition ought to be maintained through cursive-writing.
Beauty and Cursive-Writing
During a recent class, a third grade student proudly held up her paper and beamed, “My paper is beautiful!” She was not exhibiting a sheet filled with artistic sketchings. She displayed lines of neatly formed and properly slanted copywork. She was right. Her paper was filled with beautiful cursive script. Beauty is not a subject that can be taught. Beauty is appreciated at a specific moment, in the representation of the medium before the individual. It is pleasing. It is tran-
scendent. Although calligraphy offers wondrous embellished curves and swirls by one who masters cursive and then takes it to the next level, clear cursive-writing from a young student is beautiful. In a progressive pedagogy where beauty is removed from the curriculum and the classroom, the classical educator has the opportunity to teach an appreciation of beauty to her students through artistically crafted cursive-writing. The student has the benefit of understanding beauty because she is exposed to a definition of beauty, in an environment that promotes beauty with a decorum that celebrates the beauty of language. Utilitarian education cannot teach beauty and robs the student.
Beauty is currently considered subjective. However, there was a time when beauty was intimately and inseparably united with truth and goodness. Roger Scruton describes such a period in which “beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.” 9 A pedagogy that defines education within the parameters of practical vocational training cannot offer beauty as part of its curriculum and remain consistent with its educational paradigm. Within such a classroom, beauty is not a topic to be defined or discussed. The term is left to relative definitions at best, or not defined at worst. Thus, to consider writing to be beautiful becomes nonsensical and not celebrated.
The gradual decline of beauty appreciated is not limited to discussion. The lack of beauty appreciation permeates the architectural structure of schools and classrooms. Students learn in boxed-in classrooms with bolted doors to prevent stranger danger and walls promulgated with brightly-colored posters. Multi Purpose functionality takes precedence over beauty. John Skillen, author of Making School Beautiful, Restoring the Harmony of Place, suggests that the lackadaisical attitude of
9 Roger Scruton, Beauty (New York: Oxford University Press: 2009), 2.
the physical environment permeates the physical beings of that room. Where there is no appreciation for decorum of beauty in the environment, there is no longer an appreciation for decorum in rhetorical language. Skillen identifies that attitude as slouching and notes:
‘Slouching’ in our language shows up in all those uhms, likes, and you knows that litter our speech, weakening or avoiding a clarity of statement. Every time we put sort of or kind of in front of a noun or a verb, we call into question the reliable identity of the thing so qualified… Such slouching also occurs in the erosion of syntax, even the outright disappearance of traceable grammatical coherence. The first phrase out of our mouths often does not turn out to be the subject of the sentence that sort of gets underway through clumsy trial and error. The speaker’s movement through the sentence shows no evident trajectory to a goal.10
Students verbally “slouch” in verbal and physical environments when they are not given the words to describe beauty. They lack skills to speak or write of beauty. Those who are not immersed in beauty through their environment do not have anything to speak or write about. It is a gift to be given beautiful language, whether written and oral, and an environment enveloped with beauty.
In a building that is constructed with little consideration of beauty, which is in turn compartmentalized into classrooms with curriculum demands not concerned with beauty, that are occupied with students who have little incentive to speak with decorum of beauty, beautiful writing is unremarkable. In this world, writing is a tedious task. There is no time for a young student to sit back and admire her writing. There are no words to describe the feeling of appreciation. There is no appreciation. Keyboarding is efficient. Keyboarding is practi-
10 John Skillen, Making School Beautiful, Restoring the Harmony of Place (Camp Hill, PA: Classical Academic Press, 2020), 9.
cal. Keyboarding is needed. Hence, more students at younger ages are learning to type instead of learning cursive-writing. The classical educator stands as a buffer against the forwarded steps of progress. Granted, there may be a time when an older student must learn how to prepare a type-written paper. However, at the beginning of the learning experience, the young student develops an appreciation for beauty in which cursive-writing is a part of the overall atmosphere. Skillen suggests a reclaiming of beauty and decorum of education beginning with the setting and linking it to rhetoric, “the classical liberal arts, rhetoric in particular, once fostered an acute sensitivity to the places in which speaking, deliberating, praising occur. Architecture was understood as rhetorical . If so, our curriculum, and the ‛great books’ and ideas we study provide valuable sources and resources for designing our campuses inside and out.”11 As students are surrounded by structural beauty and resources of beauty, they develop rhetorical beauty. There is beauty in the design of the classroom, the decoration of the classroom, and the dialogue within the classrooms. In such an environment, a piece of paper with beautiful handwritten cursive-script is celebrated.
Goodness and cursive-writing
The third suggestion from Pratt’s article is that mastery of cursive-writing is self-rewarding, which is represented in the young cursive-writing student from the previous section. Without any prompting, she reflected adoration for her own work. Not adoration in a haughty comparative proclamation contrasted to the work of others, but rather the self-admiration that manifests from a job well done. This point is not meant to suggest that only cursive-writing produces satisfaction of a job well done, nor that all students admire their
11 John Skillen, Making School Beautiful, Restoring the Harmony of Place , 89.
work equally. However, the situation provides an example of a classic argument of human inclination toward celebration of the good.
The celebration of the good implies achieving a desired state or standard. In the instance of the excited child, she understood the desired standard of letter size, slant, and spacing. She diligently struggled through the rudimentary issues of learning to write in cursive until finally, she confirmed that her work product matched the desired standard. Aristotle acknowledges the state of satisfaction by an individual who appreciates a completion of a project: “Those who have a certain work and action, the relevant good and the doing of something well seem to reside in the work, so too the same might be held to be the case with a human being, if in fact there is a certain work that is a human being’s.”12 The philosopher suggests that there is a common circumstance in celebrating a job well done, and if there is an ultimate purpose for humans, then an equal sense of satisfaction can be celebrated when one acts according to human purpose. The child celebrating her cursive accomplishments appreciates the satisfaction of a work well done. However, is the appreciation a foretaste of something greater? Aristotle suggests that there is a greater good for this child. Of course, the challenge is determining what that purpose entails.
The celebration of the good with such a simple task of writing is more than a celebration of the craft itself. Referring again to Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle indicates that an act well done represents the intersection of an act of the body and an act of the soul. The body has mastered the act, but the soul experiences satisfaction of living in accord with virtue. However, this one single experience with virtue is not complete, it is the beginning exposure for a child towards a life-long pursuit and maintenance of virtue: “For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day. And in this way, one day or a short time doesn't make someone blessed or hap -
12 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, 1097b.
py.”13 This jubilation of the emergent cursive-writing student is appropriate for the moment. However, she and her teacher acknowledged that mastery necessitated that she develop the repeated habit of achieving the designated template. Within this simple lesson, the cursive writer has developed the habit of seeking the standard of an ultimate good. In the case of cursive-writing, it is to master the format. The lesson, however, serves as a platform for the classic teacher to speak to the student about the condition of seeking virtue for the soul.
The celebration of the “good” in the practice of cursive penmanship opens the door for the classical educator to guide the student toward truth. The student was taught a particular cursive standard with respect to relative size, slant, and spacing. She practiced and learned to imitate the “truth” of the penmanship requirements. At the point when she achieved the standard, she celebrated the accomplishments. She celebrated the good. Whereas Aristotle suggested that the good of the human is to celebrate the flourishing and stable polis, Christ followers anticipate the celebration of the ultimate polis which is called the Kingdom of God. Humans are created to live in relationship with this God and to experience eternal goodness. Admittedly, the transcendent concepts may exceed the cognitive capacity of a grammar student, however the youngest of students can be guided to make the connection between a template used to craft cursive letters to achieve desired penmanship and the example given by Jesus as a standard for human living.
Refutation
The classical educator can make an argument for the instruction of cursive-writing within the paradigm of classical pedagogy. These arguments include the historical links
1, 1098a.
with cursive-writing as well as the inspiration of beauty and the celebration of human goodness. The astute reader may observe that elements such as practicality of cursive-writing are intimately engulfed in this essay. For example, the history of cursive-writing clearly identifies the practical origins of cursive-writing and its practical evolution as cursive-writing styles changed with the spirit of the age. In such an argument, the reader has presented a credible response. However, the purpose of the essay is to acknowledge that the classical educator does not need to rely exclusively on the practicality of cursive penmanship. To rely exclusively on such an argument is in some ways to give up primary arguments which are more conducive to classical pedagogy. To rely exclusively on arguments of practicality, efficiency, and necessity is akin to a Christ-follower entering into a debate with an atheist and agreeing not to argue from the Holy Scripture. Although there may be arguments, primary reasons for the existence of God are addressed in the Bible itself. Similarly, the classical educator who gives up the rich historical components, beauty, and goodness to argue for cursive-writing based exclusively on the progressive trinity has given up the primary reasons for her argument and her pedagogy.
Secondly, the reader may acknowledge the irony that this case for cursive-writing presented in a readable format made up of type-written, Times New Roman font. In response to such an argument, I present three responses. First of all, the rough draft for this essay was crafted through the inefficient, but beautiful and time-honored format of handwriting the essay in a commonplace journal. The second response to the argument has not been that cursive-writing should be taught to the exclusion of all other forms of writing. There is certainly a time and place for typed essays. To clarify by analogy, a parent of a sixteen year old may insist that the child learn to drive with a manual transmission. This does not mean that the child is prohibited from driving an automatic transmission, or even an electric vehicle. Simply, by learning to drive on a manual transmission first, the child has fewer driving
limitations and greater driving opportunities-such as driving a rental car in Italy, which are typically manual transmissions. The student who learns to write and read cursive, can respond to the National Archives and read original historical documents. The third response to this claim is that the essay complies with journal submission requirements. Finally, some may contend that not all classical educators promote cursive penmanship but still warrant the title of classical educators. I concur. Classical education is a rich pedagogy which
aims at cultivating fully integrated human beings, whose bodies, hearts, and minds are formed respectively by gymnastic, music, and the liberal arts; whose relationships with God, neighbor, and community are marked by piety; whose knowledge of the world, man, and God fit harmoniously within a distinctly Christian philosophy, and whose lives are informed and governed by a theology forged from the revelation of God in Christ Jesus as it has been handed down in historic Christianity.14
Classical Christian Education has fused the classical traditions from Greece and Rome with the truth of the Jewish Scriptures in the Old and New Covenant to produce a language rich pedagogy to instill values of truth, goodness, and beauty into the student. However, as part of that language rich heritage, the ability to write beautifully in cursive-writing is an entry-level step for the young learner to begin the journey. One can be classical while not teaching cursive-writing instruction. However, a secondary focus of the essay is for the classical educator herself to consider the merits of adding cursive-writing to her core, classical curriculum.
14 Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education , 1st ed. (Camp Hill, PA: Classical Academic Press, 2013), 3.
Conclusion
Fewer and fewer students are learning how to write in cursive. In doing so, students are deprived of a rich heritage. The classical educator stands as a buffer against the undulations of the ongoing pedagogical attacks. It serves her well to have a clear understanding of classical arguments for cursive penmanship so that she can articulate it well to herself, her students and parents, and the larger community. Although there are valid arguments addressing the practicality, efficiency, and need for cursive-writing as part of core classical curriculum, the classical educator is well-served to lay out her points based on classical values which include history, beauty, and goodness. The classical education system is preserving an impressive cursive-writing legacy that originated with the Greeks, assimilated by the Romans, and preserved through the monastic communities. There is a unique American heritage transmitted through cursive-writing. Cursive-writing is a component to the beautiful aesthetic of a classical school. Whereas the student is surrounded by beauty through architecture and encouraged to participate in the decorum of beautiful dialogue, the cursive-written paper is an opportunity for a young learner to engage in the beauty of the written language. Finally, humans are to communicate. Through beautiful cursive-writing, the young learner is fulfilling the goodness of what it means to be human. cursive-writing is much more than simply putting to paper to write multiple loops. It is a means for the learner to step into the heritage which has been preserved for her benefit.
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
lives in Fair Oaks, California where she homeschools her children. 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.
Forging a Modern Christian Approach to Classical Rhetoric
A Critical Review of A Rhetoric of Love
by Lucas E. Vieira, M.L.S.
In the Classical Christian Education movement today, the following question often arises: How can the contemporary educator within Christian schools devoted to Christ and His Lordship utilize classical texts and ideas written by pagan authors? This indeed can prove to be a particularly difficult task for the rhetoric teacher, as there are limited curricular resources which approach the study of rhetoric from a distinctly and unashamedly Christian perspective. With the aforementioned question in mind, Douglas M. Jones makes an attempt to move the conversation forward in regards to a Christian appropriation of classical rhetoric in his 2-volume curriculum series, A Rhetoric of Love. 1
Volume 1 of Jones’s text seeks to offer a basic overview of rhetorical principles and methodology, while simultaneously analyzing the use of rhetoric from a Christian worldview. While A Rhetoric of Love presents itself to be a helpful curricular resource that provides a uniquely Christian approach to rhetoric, I shall posit that Jones overemphasizes the notion of rhetoric as “love” by unnaturally forcing classical rhetorical concepts into categories of love and that the textbook’s presentation of rhetorical concepts follows a sequence foreign
1 Douglas Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , ed. Michael Collender and Michael Eatmon, vol. 1 (Lancaster, PA: Veritas Press, 2018).
to the classical tradition that fails to give proper attention to certain aspects of classical rhetoric. Indeed, in Jones’s attempt to provide a Christian approach to the field, he ultimately appropriates classical rhetoric in a way that tends to unfairly redefine the classical tradition. It is to these definitions and appropriations which we now turn.
The Classical Authors on the Ethics of Rhetoric
Three of the texts which are understood to be preeminent in the study of ancient classical rhetoric are Aristotle’s treatise On Rhetoric, Cicero’s On Invention, and the Rhetorica Ad Herennium. In order to compare A Rhetoric of Love with the classical tradition, we shall seek to analyze Jones’s definition of classical rhetoric compared with these seminal texts. The heart of my critique of A Rhetoric of Love lies primarily in the author’s argument that the Classical Rhetorical tradition promoted a “Way of Domination” while a distinctly Christian approach to the discipline would utilize a “Way of Love.” 2 This dichotomy is presented consistently throughout the textbook. In order to understand this dichotomy, one must seek to grasp what Jones means by a “Rhetoric of Love.”
Jones begins his work by arguing that in our modern era, “love is often the last one invited to our great conversations.” 3 Even Aquinas, according to Jones, chose to “tack” love to the end of his list of virtues.4 This modern error of relegating the virtue of love to the backseat, in the mind of the author, must be corrected. He states, “Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, is a vast and complicated subject. It has a long and influential history. More and more people have been asking how a
2 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , p. 3.
3 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , preface.
4 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , preface.
focus on love might reshape it” (emphasis mine). 5 Herein lies the faulty foundation for Jones’ approach — his preoccupation with the ideologies and methods of our modern context drives him to reshape classical rhetoric in a way which the classical authors would neither appreciate nor approve. Concerning our modern context, Jones remarks, “Modern clashes of rhetoric, even among Christians, show the same pattern. We ‘destroy’ another person’s arguments. We ‘crush’ and ‘defeat’ our opponents. We ‘dominate; our audiences and ‘eliminate’ our opposition.”6 Later, he states, “We make occasional room for the way of love. Our default modes of communication and culture, though, follow patterns of domination.” 7 Ultimately, Jones chooses to completely reshape classical rhetoric in order to serve his purposes of pushing back against certain trends that he sees in contemporary culture. While this is good-intentioned, it ends up failing to do justice to classical rhetoric.
Why is rhetoric a tool of domination according to the author? His understanding of classical rhetoric seems to derive itself from his understanding of modern rhetoric. Jones states,
When made to serve politics or philosophy or a host of other ends, rhetoric becomes a tool of domination. It doesn’t seek to serve others but to lord it over them. This can happen anytime rhetoric is severed from love. When cut off from love, rhetoric decays into manipulation. It takes on the form either of bullying or seduction. 8
Jones argues that whenever rhetoric is used to defeat an opponent, it is domination; specifically when it serves politics or philosophy (as was the norm for classical rhetoric).
5 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , preface.
6 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , 6.
7 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , 6
8 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , preface.
What might the classical authors have to say in regards to this claim? Did classical rhetoric primarily seek to employ “domination”? While Aristotle would define rhetoric as “an ability in each [particular] case to see the available means of persuasion,” he also makes clear that the moral purpose is what differentiates a rhetorician from a sophist.9 A sophist flatters and uses rhetoric to deceive, while a rhetorician is committed to the truth. The philosopher states, “Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are by nature stronger than their opposites, so that if judgements are not made in the right way the true and the just are necessarily defeated by their opponents. And this is worthy of censure.”10 To what does Aristotle tie the usefulness of rhetoric? He proposes that rhetoric is useful because of the nature of truth and justice. This, I posit, stands in stark contrast to Jones’s suggestion that classical rhetoric was one simply of domination. Indeed, it is at least an overgeneralization of some aspects of classical rhetoric, if not a dishonest presentation. The classical rhetorician—at least those who revered the words of Aristotle— would have valued virtue, truth, goodness, and beauty. Perhaps Jones was primarily talking about Cicero’s rhetorical philosophy when arguing that classical rhetoric was one of domination. Yet, once again, the classical writer proves that Jones is mistaken. Cicero argues quite similarly to Aristotle the philosopher, stating,
Therefore if anyone neglects the study of philosophy and moral conduct which is the highest and most honourable of pursuits, and debates his whole energy to the practice of oratory, his civic life is nurtured into something useless to himself and harmful to his country; but the man who equips humbled with the weapons of eloquence, not to be able to attack the welfare of his country but to defend it,
9 Aristotle, On Rhetoric , I.ii.1.
10 Aristotle, On Rhetoric , I.ii.12.
he, I think, will be a citizen most helpful and most devoted both to his own interests and to those of his community.11
Was the rhetoric which Cicero was attempting to engage in, and train others in, one that was primarily of self-serving, deceptive domination? According to On Invention, it seems clearly not to be. Instead, Cicero argues for a rhetoric that is other-oriented, rooted in virtue, honor, wisdom, and duty. Later, Cicero comments on the effects of rhetoric, how it makes men gentle and civilized instead of savage and brutal.12 While these two authors provide us with examples that clearly refute Jones’s overgeneralization about classical rhetoric, it is important to analyze his comments on love from a biblical worldview before turning to analyze his curricular sequencing. As has been established, Jones suggests that Christians need to engage in a rhetoric founded on and sourced in love. His first example of this rhetoric of love is by describing the actions of Desmond Tutu, who jumped in front of individuals who were about to be the victims of a violent act. This, according to Jones, stands as a preeminent, persuasive symbol, calling it an “instance of rhetoric.”13 But was this an instance of rhetoric according to the classical authors? I would imagine that they would likely not understand this action to be rhetoric, as rhetoric was concerned primarily with the invention, arrangement, and presentation of words. With this unorthodox example aside, Jones goes on to argue that both Paul and Jesus rejected using a rhetoric of domination. Yet, did not Paul and Jesus dominate their opponents, in a certain sense? Do not the words of Jesus found in scripture used against those who were perpetrating injustices and mocking
11 Cicero, On Invention , I.i.2.
12 Cicero, On Invention , I.ii.3.
13 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , 3.
the law of God seem to demolish their opponents?14 While it is clear that there are these instances, Jones claims that those rhetorical situations are not normative, stating, "They’re more exception than rule. They’re high stakes moments that require great wisdom and great maturity.”15 With that cursory remark, Jones fails to realize the fact that this type of language occurs prevalently throughout the Scriptures—language where truth is spoken, not in a domineering way, but in a way in which the beliefs of opponents and enemies are truly “demolished.”16 This, I argue, is a great failure on Jones’s part not only because it does not take into account the whole counsel of God, but also because recognizing that truth could have lent itself more agreeable to an honest appropriation of classical rhetoric. Jesus spoke in love, and yet his instances of speaking hard truths were not “exceptions to the rule.” If we truly long to reshape classical rhetoric within the Christian worldview, it will require more work than the overgeneralization provided by Jones. For Christians, Christ is our standard, not a principle of “love” that does not allow for us to seek to imitate all of Christ’s rhetorical methods.
Curricular Sequencing in A Rhetoric of Love
Amongst the preeminent classical authors, the grammar of rhetoric was widely understood to be established. Aristotle
14 Consider the words of Jesus in Matthew 23:13 & 15 when he states, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in… Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” (English Standard Version)
15 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , 6.
16 Consider the words of the Elijah in 1 Kings 18:27, “And at noon Elijah mocked them, saying, ‘Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” (English Standard Version)
makes clear that there are three subjects/types of rhetoric, namely, the forensic (judicial), the deliberative, and the epideictic.17 In addition, the five canons of rhetoric are Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery.18 The Rhetorica Ad Herennium helpfully explains the six parts of a discourse: the Introduction, Statement of Facts, Division, Proof, Refutation, and Conclusion.19 Lastly, the classical authors emphasize the means of persuasion in ethos, pathos, and logos. 20 These concepts all serve as the foundations of classical rhetoric. While the intention of this paper is not to describe these aspects of classical rhetoric in detail, it is firmly established in each of the classical texts that the primary education of the rhetor revolved around these parts. The rhetorician would be trained in invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, and would practice speeches in the three types of oratory using parts of a discourse all the while utilizing ethos, pathos, and/or logos.
These pieces of classical rhetoric would be taught by rhetors, as displayed in Quintillian’s The Orator’s Education, in a systematized way that followed the listings of the canons and the parts of a discourse. 21 Surprisingly, due to his division of rhetorical concepts as parts of the actions of love, as well as his tri-perspectival approach, Douglas Jones departs significantly from the common curricular ordering of classical concepts.
While offering an in-depth analysis of each individual chapter and treatment of every classical concept would be quite the lengthy endeavor, I shall instead seek to offer a broad overview of Jones’s categorization. He approaches rhetoric in three perspectives—the Normative, Situational, and Personal Perspectives. Explaining these, Jones claims,
17 Aristotle, On Rhetoric , I.iii.3.
18 Cicero, On Invention , I.i.2.
19 Rhetorica Ad Herennium, I.vii.9.
20 Aristotle, On Rhetoric , I.ii.2-5.
21 Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, The Orator's Education , trans. D.A Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
The normative perspective focuses on standards or rules involved in a judgment. Every judgement involves one or more norms. The situational perspective focuses on the facts of each situation, as well as its history. And the personal perspective seeks out the subjective elements of the individuals involves in a judgment, those making it and those receiving it. 22
This division by Jones is certainly a modern approach which would be quite foreign to the classical authors. 23 Having established a tripartite division, he organizes every chapter under an action of love. I lay out his organization in the outline below:
The Normative Perspective
Chapter 5: Love Acts
Chapter 6: Love Empathizes
Chapter 7: Love Listens
Chapter 8: Love Wrestles
Chapter 9: Love Connects
Chapter 10: Love Creates
Chapter 11: Love Renews
The Situational Perspective
Chapter 12: Love Serves
Chapter 13: Love Interests
Chapter 14: Love Grips
Chapter 15: Love Satisfies
Chapter 16: Love Moves
Chapter 17: Love Learns
Chapter 18: Love Shares
Chapter 19: Love Tests
22 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , 44.
23 It is important to note that Jones attempts to do so by claiming that the “presence of the perspectives” can be found in both Socrates’ & Aristotle’s definitions of rhetoric. The attempt, in truth, seems to be an eisegetical approach as Jones reads his three different perspectives into the definitions. Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , 48.
Chapter 20: Love Invites
Chapter 21: Love Constructs
Chapter 22: Love Measures
Chapter 23: Love Adapts
The Personal Perspective
Chapter 24: Love is Personal
Chapter 25: Love is Self-Denying
Chapter 26: Love is Patient
Chapter 27: Love is Self-Aware
Chapter 28: Love is Strange
Chapter 29: Love is Curious
Chapter 30: Love is Counterintuitive
Chapter 31: Love is Simple
Chapter 32: Love is Silent
How do the classical concepts listed above fit into his outline? In the following outline, I’ve chosen to list classical concepts under the certain chapters in which they were organized. 24
The Normative Perspective
Chapter 5: Love Acts
• Stasis Theory
Chapter 6: Love Empathizes
Chapter 7: Love Listens
• Invention
• Topics of Invention
Chapter 8: Love Wrestles
• Arguments & Use of Logic
• Hypothetical Syllogisms
• Enthymemes
Chapter 9: Love Connects
24 This outline of covered topics is by no means exhaustive. Throughout the text, Jones consistently uses quotes from the classical authors, and writes much about his modern approach to rhetoric. The purpose of this outline is primarily to display where the parts / concepts of classical rhetoric are organized in the text, and how much attention is given to each.
• Ethos, Pathos, Logos
Chapter 10: Love Creates
• Five Canons of Rhetoric
Chapter 11: Love Renews
• Style
The Situational Perspective
Chapter 12: Love Serves
• Arrangement
Chapter 13: Love Interests
• Introductions
Chapter 14: Love Grips
Chapter 15: Love Satisfies
• Conclusions
Chapter 16: Love Moves
• Conclusions & Emotion
• Pathos
Chapter 17: Love Learns
Chapter 18: Love Shares
Chapter 19: Love Tests
• Refutations
Chapter 20: Love Invites
• Fallacies
Chapter 21: Love Constructs
Chapter 22: Love Measures
Chapter 23: Love Adapts
• Types of Rhetoric (Deliberative, Forensic, Epideictic)
The Personal Perspective 25
Chapter 24: Love is Personal
Chapter 25: Love is Self-Denying
Chapter 26: Love is Patient
Chapter 27: Love is Self-Aware
Chapter 28: Love is Strange
25 Interestingly, the classical concepts of rhetoric are not touched on at all in the final section of Jones’s text.
Chapter 29: Love is Curious
Chapter 30: Love is Counterintuitive
Chapter 31: Love is Simple
Chapter 32: Love is Silent
With Jones’s division in mind, consider the following, highly simplified outlines of the On Rhetoric, Rhetorica Ad Herennium, and On Invention : 26
On Rhetoric Rhetorica ad Herennium On Invention
Introduction
Means of Persuasion
Enthymemes
Introduction Introduction
Judicial Invention Stasis Theory
Parts of an Oration
Parts of an Oration
Deliberative Invention Stasis Theory Issues (in Judicial Rhetoric)
Epideictic Invention
Judicial Invention
Means of Persuasion
Delivery
Style
Arrangement
Deliberative Invention Deliberative Rhetoric
Epideictic Invention Epideictic Rhetoric
Arrangement
Delivery
Memory
Style
Some observations based on these simple outlines can be made. First, the classical authors maintained similar methods of curricular organization, focusing on the three subjects of rhetoric—Judicial, Deliberative, and Epideictic. How does this compare with Jones? These three subjects are discussed in depth in only one of the twenty eight chapters of Jones’ text,
26 These outlines are by no means exhaustive. I have included these simplified versions simply to demonstrate the logical ordering of classical rhetorical concepts.
titled "Love Adapts,” beginning on page 316. While space does not permit us to analyze his full explication of these subjects, I posit that his minimal inclusion of these three areas of rhetoric, and his very late introduction of them, proves to be a significant departure of classical rhetoric (and thus causes the aforementioned classical concepts which are necessarily tied to these subjects to fail to have the requisite adequate foundation). Furthermore, the parts of a discourse are scattered throughout Jones’ text with little thought to order or proximity. For example, Jones’s discussion of refutations comes four chapters after writing conclusions. Overall, Jones’ placement of classical rhetorical concepts appears random and without regard for the purposes of the classical authors.
Indeed, Jones establishes his modern tripartite division, creates a list of actions of love, and then places classical rhetorical concepts throughout his work wherever they fit into his organization without clear vision for the order. While he undoubtedly explains many of the concepts well, the ordering of the concepts is far from systematic and is characterized by a disjointedness. This organization, I believe, is a major flaw of the curriculum.
Advantages of A Rhetoric of Love
While indeed I have argued that the foundational assumptions and organization of Jones’s work are truly flawed, it is necessary to point out that Jones’s attempt to create a distinctly Christian rhetoric textbook suitable to the modern student is both laudable and groundbreaking, and thus should be considered as a serious attempt to appropriate classical rhetoric for the modern era.
First, it is notable that Jones seeks to establish a curriculum for the study of rhetoric primarily from a Christian worldview. His willingness to forge a new path and reshape
the study of rhetoric according to his Christian convictions truly does stand out. For example, within the first four chapters of the text, Jones quotes fourteen scriptures and several quotes from church history, and seeks to use them as a defense of his approach to rhetoric. Furthermore, throughout his curriculum, the words of Jesus and other figures of Church History were featured prominently. His examples of rhetoric were often Christian, and this, I believe, is a helpful method which should continue to be used within classical christian schools today. May our rhetoric classrooms be filled with more speeches from church history and passages from the Holy Scriptures.
Second, Jones seeks to not only provide an explanation of classical rhetoric, but does so in a way that attempts to apply certain aspects of classical rhetoric to our modern age. As I mentioned above, Jones’s approach in this regard led to a general misplacement of the classical concepts, but his motivation stands out as a needed motivation for our rhetoric curriculums and classrooms today. How does one demonstrate to their students the need for rhetoric in our modern age, and how should we go about engaging in rhetoric in our modern age as Christians? These questions indeed should be a priority for our philosophy of rhetorical education, and while Jones falls short, he blazes a path forward which I hope more shall follow after.
Further Questions
In writing this brief review of Jones’s text, it became clear that there were a variety of questions that were raised as I read which fall outside the scope of my essay. First, the author makes it a point to include images and other types of media within the scope of rhetoric. 27 The following question
27 Jones, A Rhetoric of Love , 28–29.
arises: Would the classical authors include images within their understanding of rhetoric? If not, what is the a potential benefit or disadvantage of including images in our understanding of rhetoric?
While much has already been said in regards to the focus of love as Jones’s categorizing lens for rhetoric, I am curious as to whether love is truly the proper, most effective paradigm for rhetoric which is suitable for engagement with our modern world. In a modern culture that often touts love as a chief virtue, what might be the downside of using love as our driving force in the practice and study of rhetoric?
Lastly, as mentioned, Jones’s explicit purpose in writing his curriculum was to “reshape” classical rhetoric into a “rhetoric of love.” It is essential for Christians to always reevaluate and reshape ideas, methods, and fields of study in light of Biblical truth. Thus, the Christian must refuse the temptation to leave classical concepts and methods established by pagans untouched. Yet, the question arises; How, then, do you reshape valuable ideas which came from pagans, without completely changing the meanings and the methods?” For every concept and field of study, Christians will have to practice wisdom and discernment in their reshaping. While I agree that classical rhetoric must be reshaped in light of the Biblical Worldview, I have posited that Jones’s reshaping falls short of the ideal. What, then, would the ideal Christian reshaping of true Classical Rhetoric look like? This inquiry is a valuable one. Indeed, the Classical Christian Education movement needs more curriculum writers who have this question in mind.
Conclusion
Throughout the course of this essay, I have sought to provide a critical review of the Veritas Press textbook, A Rhetoric of Love: Volume 1. While Douglas Jones engages in a bold, modern approach to the field of classical rhetoric, he falls short of presenting the concepts of the field in an effective, true-to-origin way. This failure arises in his decision to force classical rhetoric through the lens of love and his use of a tripartite sequencing foreign to the classical writers which provided insufficient attention and ordering to classical concepts. Despite this, Jones’s textbook proves to be a serviceable attempt at forging a modern Christian approach to classical rhetoric due to his biblical and historical examples, clear writing style, and modern applications. If schools were to adopt this text, I would suggest that the curriculum is augmented with additional readings from the classical authors, and that classical sequencing and practice of rhetorical concepts are offered to the class by the instructor. With those in place, A Rhetoric of Love may indeed prove to be a helpful text for our classrooms today.
Lucas E. Vieira is the Head of Upper School at Beacon Hill Classical Academy and the Executive Director of the Beza Institute for Reformed Classical Education. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Madelyn, and their two children.
Book Review
Mandy Gerth's Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom (CiRCE Institute, 2025)
by Tyler Bauer, M.A.
It is largely undisputed that the Classical Education movement has experienced explosive growth. What was at one time seen as a fringe movement amongst homeschoolers and conservatives in northern Idaho is now an industry full of publishers, conferences, and college majors. One does not have to look hard to find book after book discussing “the basics” of Classical Education, Classical methodology, or a Classical philosophy of education.
Despite all of this material, a lacuna has been left by way of a book that gives teachers “next steps” practical advice for the classroom. While there are books on “method,” these usually focus on broad strokes, not actionable tips. The focus is on things like understanding Socratic conversations or the Liberal Arts. This material helps many a novice Classical educator “catch the vision,” but they are still left with the nagging question of, “How do I make that happen in the classroom?” Mandi Gerth’s Thoroughness and Charm is a good step toward filling the void.
Out of anything else, perhaps the most significant benefit of Gerth’s book is that it is both short and accessible. The content section comes in at ninety-five pages, followed by about fifty pages of liturgies, classroom catechisms, and
prayers. This book is such that virtually any school could hand it to their teachers at the beginning of the summer for use in yearly pre-service training. Teachers will find the writing style approachable and ready for immediate implementation.
Gerth begins the work by reminding teachers that they function as role models in the classroom. If teachers indeed expect their students to love the content, the teacher must first love the content themselves. If the teacher expects the students to approach life classically, the teacher must also approach life classically.
Further, Gerth stresses the importance of the teacher’s authority in the classroom. It is the teacher who sets the rules and expectations of the classroom, not the students. While there is a place for students to lead in their own discovery of knowledge, the classroom, for Gerth, is not student-led. The system Gerth lays out is one where the teacher uses their authority to properly structure the classroom so that the students may learn to model themselves after the teacher.
Gerth wisely roots this “teacher-as-model” system in tradition and authority. The Classical Movement is founded on the idea that the Great Tradition is itself an authority that must be considered. As such, just as the teacher submits to the authority of the Tradition, so too must the students submit to the authority of the teacher who is guiding them in the Tradition.
Gerth’s second chapter focuses on “embodying the tradition,” which is a way of saying “crafting a culture.” If the Classical Teacher is a person who embraces and lives out the Classical Tradition, the Classical Classroom must be a classroom that has a “Classical culture.” This culture is not created by arbitrary rules or pithy posters. Rather, it is created by the teacher living in such a way that the students wish to live as the teacher does.
Gerth reminds us that “Teachers need to learn how to live and how to look at the world rightly for both ourselves and our students. Students learn from what teachers say but more so from how we dress, why we laugh, and what
we love.”1 In other words, Gerth reminds us that the teacher often teaches more by who they are and what they do than by the content of their lessons. If a teacher wants a student to be wise and virtuous, the best lessons will come from the teacher speaking and acting in a wise and virtuous manner. Gerth’s third chapter makes a logical transition from teacher to student. The teacher is a mold to shape the students, but the teacher is not an end unto themselves. Rather, Gerth suggests that the students must become like the teacher because the teacher is becoming like “the Image.” 2
Gerth presents “The Image” as the sort of ideal “end.” It is the thing which a human ought to become and which the teacher must aim their students towards. It is an objective standard that transcends any particular time or culture, and it can be seen everywhere.
The Image can be seen when we remember to read things “mythologically” rather than analytically. By reading things mythologically, Gerth tells us that we are reading beyond the mere words on the page; we are reading to discover what great and universal ideas a text tells us about the world and our place in it. Reading this way retrains our minds from empirical analysis to imaginative thinking. It is by using our imaginations (read: image-ination) that we allow a text to transform us and orient us properly toward The Image. Chapter four moves further into the practical matter. Gerth reminds the teacher that true lesson planning involves “becoming the lesson.” 3 The teacher must be so steeped in the material that the content sort of naturally falls off of them. In one sense, this is just Gerth rearticulating what she has covered earlier in the book; the teacher must love the material and must be the kind of person that they wish the students to become.
1 Mandy Gerth, Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom (Kannapolis, NC:: CiRCE Institute Press, 2025), 21.
2 Gerth, Thoroughness and Charm, 32.
3 Gerth, Thoroughness and Charm, 49.
The teacher must be full of wonder in the same way that they wish the students to be. Gerth uses the analogy of a hostess at a party; the teacher is inviting the students to participate in an event with her.4 Just as a party host works to embody the life and energy of the gathering, so also does the teacher work to bring old ideas to life by embodying them during the lesson.
Here, Gerth rearticulates the idea that it is the teacher who guides the lesson. While the teacher is participating in the event with the students, they do so by guiding the students. The teacher does not follow the students where they want to go but rather leads them to where they ought to go. Gerth reminds the teacher to accomplish the mission even if the students resist. 5
The fifth chapter provides some basics for developing a classroom culture. Gerth focuses on the “avenues” of culture: embodied values, shared experiences, and a common language. Gerth also provides two questions for teachers to consider: 1) What do you believe is most important about the curriculum you teach, and 2) What is the most important thing you want your students to know about the God you worship?6 Gerth helps the teacher see that if they can refine these ideas in their mind, they will begin to hone in on what a proper classroom environment will look like.
The final chapter is the most practical, outlining the basics for crafting the daily liturgies and rhythms that will be the functional result of the previously defined culture. Gerth outlines the use of things like formal liturgies, hymns, historical prayers, and catechisms for classroom use and demonstrates how these things form the practical backbone of a classroom. If all classrooms have a culture and all cultures have liturgies and rhythms, then it behooves us to choose good liturgies and rhythms rather than letting the classroom
4 Gerth, Thoroughness and Charm, 53
5 Gerth, Thoroughness and Charm, 53.
6 Gerth, Thoroughness and Charm, 62.
culture develop accidentally. By being intentional with our classroom structure, Gerth shows us that we can create the charming, Classical classroom we have been striving for. Gerth helpfully provides sample liturgies, catechisms and prayers to help teachers get started.
Gerth’s book is an ideal resource for new and veteran teachers alike. Gerth moves beyond method and philosophy into practice. For the teacher who has read and is excited by the “Why be classical” books, Thoroughness and Charm provides the necessary next steps of “How to make it happen.”
Tyler Bauer serves as a Professor of Humanities and the Dean of Students at Christ College, and as an Instructor of Humanities and Apologetics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. His greatest joy, though, is being a husband and father. Tyler writes regularly on his Substack, The Classical Thinkery.
