(Un)toward Education

Education concerns the whole man; an educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world. Education concerns the whole man, the capax universi, capable of grasping the totality of existing things. ¹

In the previous installment on education (which can be read here), we looked at the origins of modern public education. The Prussian model is indecent, full stop. Meaning the Prussian system treats man indecently, with indignity, and because of this it causes disorder. We need to move away from the Prussian model–and its latest iteration that we call Common Core–and towards a classical model. The classical model is gaining ground in the modern world, albeit rather incrementally. The classical model is based on the trivium and is composed of a healthy diet of classic literature and philosophy, theology, natural science, and language studies. One will often learn to read Cicero in Latin, discuss Aristotle and St. Augustine, and experience that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”² before analyzing and dissecting it. Many of the classical schools are Catholic, and there are some that are areligious, and there are a several Orthodox classical academies and universities scattered about the United States.

The purpose here is not to tread the same ground as these schools, we’ll let them do what they do best. The purpose here is to learn to integrate the classical model at the parish level with catechism, adult and children’s education. We’ll stretch back into antiquity to learn the roots of education, then see the form it took in the Middle Ages, and finally we will construct a rudimentary framework that will aid us towards parochial integration.

The Ancient Age

Our English word “education” finds its origin in Latin which is from ex and ducere, the former meaning “out” and the latter “to lead,” thus the word becomes educere meaning to “bring out” or “lead forth,” one must lead, the other to be led, ergo education is a relationship between teacher and student. This idea of “bring out” or “leading forth” is also found in the Platonic dialogues where Socrates believes himself to be a “midwife” of wisdom, and since φιλόσοφος (philosopher) is a lover of wisdom, he can assist in the birthing, or “bring out” of ideas. As in The Theaetetus:

My art of midwifery is in general like theirs [real midwives]; the only difference is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth.³

This idea forms the basis for what is commonly known as The Allegory of the Cave. The philosopher is the returning prisoner that tries to convince those he was previously imprisoned with that the reality is not the shadows on the wall, but just a simulacra or reflection of reality. They have to be led by him to the vast outside so they can experience the world as such and gain knowledge. And, of course, they refuse. Plato is revealing to us the nature of education. Book VII of The Republic begins with Socrates saying that he will now “compare our nature in respect of education and its lack to such an experience as this.” He then launches into the famous cave allegory. For Plato education is not unlike the prisoner escaping to find that his assumptions and judgements about the world were erroneous, and, therefore, he believes the teacher or philosopher to be like the returning prisoner who has been enlightened with this new knowledge. As the story ends with the prisoners killing the returning prisoner, this eludes to the eventual death of Socrates by the hands of his fellow Athenians. Needless to say, educators are rarely killed by their students, so this point will not be worth dwelling on. However, the nature of education is the point where we should start.

Socrates’ phrase that he will “compare our nature in respect of education”; the word he uses for education is παιδεία. The Hellenic understanding of παιδεία is the education of the ideal citizen, a citizen being a member of the πόλις (city or state). Previously, I laid out the influence of Fichte and Hegel on Prussian education, which was a totalizing public education that broke with the classical model. Hellenic education had as its end goal a man well integrated into the city, one who could reason, speak and lead well for the mutual benefit of fellow citizens, whereas the goal of the Prussian model was conformity and obedience to the State. The model of education in ancient Greece was what would later be called the trivium, which was to be the only form of education from antiquity to the late Middle Ages–and arguably the last great educator in the classical mold was Erasmus–only to begin a slow erosion beginning with the Enlightenment.

Aristotle used the the term καλὸς κἀγαθός to describe the ideal conduct of a well bred and educated man in society. Translated as beautiful and good/virtuous, καλὸς κἀγαθός (or καλοκαγαθία) in a sense was a proto-chivalric ideal. For Aristotle virtues had to be nurtured by instruction and practice, as he states in the beginning of Book II of Nicomachean Ethics:

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.⁴

The virtuous life is one that needs to be learned and cultivated. Education will aid in the cultivation of the virtues. It will teach man what is best to pursue, to aim one’s life towards the true, the good, and the beautiful, so he can become καλὸς κἀγαθός. Aristotle then quotes his former master:

[W]e ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; for this is the right education.⁵

Plato believed that from our very early years we must be brought up a certain way. There must be a formation of the youth, so they can make judgements about the way things ought to be, to guide their lives in a certain way. This is the purpose of philosophy. Moreover, since there are things that cultivate the virtues, there are, then, things that feed the passions. Plato warns us, for example, in The Republic that music can have an affect on the soul, some music can be soothing, while other music, the more rhythmic, can incite the baser passions. The teacher must be aware that there is a difference between things that cultivate the inner life of man and things that hinder it, or one can say feed the animality within man. As is popularly known, Aristotle offers a definition of man as a rational animal. Man exists with both animal and rational natures. The Fathers of the Church continue this definition of man, as in the case of St. John of Damascus he defines man as a mortal, rational animal, ⁶ and elsewhere he states that man is of two natures: soul and body.⁷ Man being composed of body and soul, material and immaterial, and knowing that the passions can drive man to acting like a beast, on one hand, or on the other acting disincarnated. There needs to be harmony between body and soul, so the human person can dwell properly in Creation. Man needing to be educated well so he can reason and act nobly and virtuously is a thread that runs through the ancient world until the Enlightenment–this is especially important for the theorists of representative forms of governance, such as the Athenian and Roman republics of old and the more recent American republic. Our ancestors understood that man needed to be formed, that education rarely happened autodidactically. Erasmus penned, “men be not born but fashioned”⁸. This idea that man had to be formed lest he act beastly or barbarously, has it’s origins in the Latin language itself: Vir being the Latin world for man and being the root of Virtue, which can literally translate to mean manly. The virtues were learned and added to human nature by practice, it is the rational part of man as rational animal.

The need to have a more formal, structured education whereby students were trained gave birth to the academy. Isocrates, Socrates rival, founded the first school of rhetoric which trained students in the art of persuasive, public speaking, they were known as Sophists. Plato founded his famous academy in Athens, and his most ambitious student, Aristotle, also started a school. The academy was central for educating those men who would eventual become part of the political life of the city. Centuries later some of the Church Fathers, such as Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian studied at the academy before ordination.

The Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, education continued with the Trivium being the basis of learning. Grammar was fundamental for the student because at its fullest as a discipline it gave students the tools necessary for understanding and interpreting signs. Grammar was the irrefutable starting point for all education. Christians used the best they had at their disposal, and that meant turning to pagan literature. Homer was used in the Greek speaking world to teach grammar and poetic form, in the Latin speaking world Virgil was used. In Byzantium, scholar John Tzetzes wrote commentaries on the Iliad and Odyssey, and, much to the shock and chagrin of modern Christians, he called Homer holy. In the West, Macrobius is famous for writing a commentary on Cicero’s The Dream of Scipio and Servius is remembered by posterity for writing a commentary on the Aeneid, although both of these men were likely not converts to Christianity, their works would be used for centuries by Christians. In Comparetti’s work on Virgil and Dante he states:

Servius, a word which as in regular use in the schools of the middle ages, and is of the greatest importance still, not so much for its elucidation of Vergil as for the numerous valuable notices of every kind that it has preserved ⁹

Both Cicero and Virgil were accredited for shaping the Latin language, the former prose and the latter poetry. But Virgil held a special place in the hearts of Latin Christians. Although St. Augustine harbored ambivalent feelings towards pagan poets–as seen throughout The Confessions and The City of God–and even at times critical of Virgil, he nonetheless exalted Virgil as the greatest of poets:

[I]s read by boys, in order that this great poet, this most famous and approved of all poets, may impregnate their virgin minds, and may not readily be forgotten by them¹⁰

Christians had to either just ignore the pagan themes in Homer and Virgil, or they would have to allegorize them for Christian sensibilities. We find those interpreting the Aeneid in terms of a spiritual journey, such as Fabius Planciades Fulgentius (5th-6th cent.) who absurdly allegorized Virgil. This interpretative lens on Virgil reached its peak with Dante, for more on this check out part nine of my series The Logos and the Muse. The allegorizing of Homer can be found in the works of Tzetzes and Eustathios of Thessaloniki. These approaches to Homer and Virgil could be found throughout the years in both East and West, and there were, of course, those who thought their writings had no place in the life of the Christian. However, the side in favor of preserving Homer and Virgil for instruction in grammar and rhetoric won. Again, Comparetti:

Those therefore who studied in the grammatical and rhetorical schools were taught to look upon Vergil as the supreme type of the grammarian and of the rhetorician, and as the final authority on all those questions of learning and culture which were regarded at the time as important ¹¹

As previously mentioned, the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) was the basis for education. It wasn’t until the fifth century with Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury that what would be later called the trivium was codified, even though grammar, logic, and rhetoric had been studied in Greece for at least seven centuries. It wasn’t until the intellectual renaissance led by Charlemagne did the term “trivium” enter into the vernacular. The trivium was not the entirety of Medieval curriculum. What is often known as the Seven Liberal Arts, of which the trivium was one component, while the other being the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) were the subjects or disciplines that were studied. The trivium taught students how to think and prepared them to study the subjects of the quadrivium. The trivium was always foundational, and, in one way, that foundation was all that was necessary before a person stepped into whatever role they would fulfill in society.

Universities in western Europe were largely funded and ran by the Catholic Church, so curriculum centered on studying Latin, logic, philosophy, doctrine, astronomy, etc, with the main goal of training clergy and the aristocracy for their positions in society. N.B., medieval Europe inherited the idea of a πόλις from Plato and καλὸς κἀγαθός from Aristotle, those who studied at university were being trained to either serve the Church or to become statesman for the benefit of society, thus the peasantry were not educated to such a degree, if at all. This was education up until the time of the Renaissance when things began to waver. This period introduced new subjects, and the rise of the merchant class altered society in a way that began to open up a space for a middle class. The scholasticism of the Middle Ages dragged on for a time although it was entrenched and stultified, and the burgeoning new natural science based on induction ascended to dominance in the seventeenth century à la Francis Bacon. (To read more about the shift from the Middle Ages to Modernity go here then here)

Toward Integration

Dorothy Sayers boldly urged that education needed to be turned back about 500 years and that it needed to be based on the above model, the trivium serving as the foundation.¹² Sayers, a medievalist, saw that education, even in the 1940s, was ineffective in teaching students how to think. If taught how to think properly, then a person could go on to learn a myriad of subjects rather quickly. The reason for this is that they were given the proper tools to learn.

Is not the great defect of our education today–a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned–that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. ¹³

Sayers continues with her vision of what a classical model of education could look like if were reintegrated. For her, starting with the Latin language was key, or at least an inflected language, like Greek would also work, but as an inheritor of the Western tradition the necessity of learning Latin is irrefutable. Grammar would start with learning Latin but also the grammar of any given “subject” would always be the starting point. The model of learning any thing is starting with the grammar, moving onto to logic (she sometimes calls it dialectic,) and then onto rhetoric. In a previous article I discussed, in a very basic way, the trivium in relation to other areas of study. Moreover, the trivium follows the stages of growth that all people go through.

Grammar = Knowledge

Logic = Understanding

Rhetoric = Wisdom (practical wisdom, prudence)

For an example of this, we’ll start with one of Sayers’ multiple examples: “the grammar of History should consist, I think, of dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities.”¹⁴ These “facts” are the basic building blocks of history, and they must be learned before moving onto a fuller understanding of history or studying, let’s say, historiography. Discussing history qua history, or varying theories of history, or even ethics of historical events, such as the ramifications of a given decision by a ruler, was he or she justified? These approaches to history would fall squarely into what we would call logic. From there the student can learn to approach history with wisdom, and be able to articulate well his or her ideas and even balance multiple ideas on a given topic with grace and prudence.

The integration of the classical model in parish life will not begin with the same content that is presented throughout this article, but content of which will be religious in nature. Since this blog focuses on Orthodox Christianity, all examples will be based on Orthodoxy. Grammar will consist of basic terms, simple practices (like the sign of the cross and lighting candles), biblical stories, and lives of the saints. The purpose of these last two will aid in forming the imagination in an Orthodox manner, meaning that it encourages φρόνημα. Logic will build upon that by learning dogma, the Creed, what the sacraments are, and the significance of the feasts. Rhetoric will consist of a deeper spiritual life, like the Jesus Prayer, asceticism, and overall praxis, what it means to live out the faith, learning to live with the tension between the Church and the world. First and foremost, teachers must instill in their students the love of learning and give them models to emulate. Erasmus tells us, speaking about the education of children:

Fyrst let them lerne to loue, and maruell at vertue and lernyng, to abhor sinne and ignorance. Let them hear some praysed for theyr well doinges, and some rebuked for their euyl. Let examples be brought in of those men to whom lernyng hath gottẽ hygh glorye, ryches, dignitie, and authoritie. And againe of them to whom their euyll condicions & wyt wythout all lernyng hath brought infamie, contempt, pouertye and myschiefe.¹⁵

This rudimentary framework can, and should, apply to adult and children’s education and catechism. Adopting this model is imperative for those instructing children, but it also can apply to adults–after all adults have been formed by the same modern education system and are also bereft of the necessary tools of learning.

In an age when education is not about leading others into a fuller understanding of what it means to be human, nor about the cultivation of virtues and the seeking of wisdom, the Church needs to rethink education at the parish level to ensure that the people of God live well within the world but not of it. When one is not taught how to think, one becomes susceptible to the “multiplying villainies of nature”¹⁶; or to put it another way, one becomes prey for the demons because one will easily believe any suggestion or thought.

The next article will flesh out more what this looks like in practice, and we’ll filter it through patristics.

1. Josef Pieper, Leisure as the Basis of Culture (San Francisco, Ignatius Press), 39
2. Gerard Manly Hopkins, Poems (New York, Everyman’s Library). The first line in the poem God’s Grandeur
3. Plato, The Theaetetus, 150 b-c. Internet text version
4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II. Although I own a copy of this book, I am copying the excerpts from an internet version
5. Ibid.
6. St. John of Damascus,The Fathers of the Church Vol. XXXVII: St John of Damascus: Writings (Ex Fontibus Co.), 27
7. Ibid.,66
8. Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of Children (A Public Domain Book), 14. This book is translated from the Latin into early Modern English. I “translated” it to more contemporary English
9. Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans.E.F.M. Benecke (London, Swan Sonnenschein & Co), 57
10. St. Augustine, The City of God (New York, Modern Library), 6
11. Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans.E.F.M. Benecke (London, Swan Sonnenschein & Co), 63
12. From her speech titled The Lost Tools Of Learning given at Oxford in 1947, can be read in its entirety here
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of Children (A Public Domain Book), 40. Translated from Latin into early Modern English
16. Shakespeare, Macbeth, (1.2.14)