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This relaunch of the publication reaches ‘back to the sources’ of the Davenant Institute and the energies that first launched “A Journal of Protestant Letters.” Ad Fontes set out to mine the riches of the classical and Christian traditions for wisdom to face the questions we encounter today, both within the walls of our various magisterial Protestant communions and in our shared commonwealth. The aim was not antiquarian nostalgia, but the patient retrieval of truths still capable of forming free peoples and faithful churches in the service of Christ.

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In his great novel Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy lampoons the discourse of highbrow drawing rooms through the pretensions of Princess Shcherbatsky, “who, in case a topic was lacking, always kept two heavy cannon in reserve—classical versus modern education, and general military conscription.” We will hope that the course of events does not require us to dust off the second cannon, but will risk the satirist’s irony and try to say something useful about the first.

The “Christian classical education movement” has grown from a trickle of eccentrics who thirty-odd years ago began seeking alternative ways to form the hearts and minds of their children, armed with little more than Dorothy Sayers’ “Lost Tools of Learning” and perhaps a copy of Credenda/Agenda, to a flood of publishers, books, curricula, and conferences. To some extent, the movement’s coherence has become a victim of its own success. Put headmasters from the A.C.C.S., Great Hearts, Chesterton Networks, Valor, and I.C.L.E. in the same room and ask them to agree on what it means to educate “classically,” and where exactly “Christian” fits in that. Or ask the tiger-moms of the local homeschooling support group to write a shared statement of purpose. Whose ‘classical’? Which Christianity? We know from experience how primed this particular cannon, loaded as it is with ideas of eternal significance, is to go off.

This issue, then, is an attempt to engage those competing ideals while bringing the conversation down to earth in practical ways. In our first section, “Church & Society,” Carl Young’s essay provides a foundation by tracing the enduring tension between a philosophical and a civic education found throughout classical writings on the formation of the young. In so doing, he underlines the impossibility of using “classical” as if the Greeks and Romans spoke homogeneously, while drawing out key areas of overlap. My essay takes up that story and extends it both to the tension between the City of God and the City of Man in Augustine’s educational program, and its evolution into the utopian Renaissance humanist attempt (still influential today) to wed both cities in the pursuit of “universal knowledge.” Miles Smith traces the competing claims of secular and ecclesiastical education in the American founding, and the importance of that history for contemporary Christian parents. Mikael Good weaves together many of these strands—classical and Christian, theological and political—in her response to Harvey Mansfield’s new book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control.

Josh Patch introduces our “Arts & Poetry” section with an essay on the importance of satire in a liberal education, arguing that we must pursue serious things without taking ourselves so seriously. In honor of Frederick Buechner’s 100th birthday, Jon Balsbaugh reintroduces us to the earthy, profanely funny Reformed novelist who taught him Christian sanctity. The issue concludes with original poetry that draws inspiration from the tradition of Reformation-era sacred lyric while experimenting with contemporary forms.

We hope you are provoked and edified by what you find here.

Patrick Timmis, Senior Editor

doctrina sed vim promovet insitam rectique cultus pectora roborant; utcumque defecere mores, indecorant bene nata culpae.

—Horace Carmina 4.4

 

Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, or human greatness… Liberal education consists in listening to the conversation among the greatest minds. —Leo Strauss1. Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 6-7.

 

Introduction

What is a “classical” education and what is it for? In many contemporary discussions, especially within the Christian classical education movement, the answer tends toward an ever-expanding ideal: the formation of pious and virtuous students who, by the end of their schooling, have read (and understood) the great books of the Western tradition, acquired fluency in Latin (and perhaps Greek), mastered a STEM curriculum comparable to that of their public school peers, and perhaps, learned to play the violin in their free time. Yet for all its ambition, this ideal often leaves unclear how these aims are to be ordered, or even whether it is possible to pursue them together in any kind of coherent way. Moreover, it reflects a hesitation to state clearly what the ancients took for granted, namely, that education is, in a fundamental sense, political. Most of us prefer to speak of “the True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” or to invoke the talisman of “Great Books,” rather than sully the name and reputation of the “Classics” with the idea that education should be ordered to the shaping of citizens for participation in a particular political regime. The result is a certain ambiguity about the end of classical education itself. Is it ordered to the pursuit of truth? To moral formation? To civic responsibility? Or to all three at once? Even the best modern approaches tend to affirm these aims together, often without clarifying their relation to one another.

The classical tradition, however, did not treat these aims as easily harmonized. From at least the fifth century B.C., Greek education was characterized by a tension between the demands of philosophy and the claims of the city. On the one hand, the philosophic life seeks knowledge of the whole and so cannot be confined within the limits of political opinion or civic utility. On the other hand, education is always situated within a political community and must, in some sense, serve its needs, forming citizens capable of judgment and action. This tension is most clearly seen in the competing ideas about education put forward by the greatest minds of the classical Greek world—Socrates and the sophists, Isocrates and Plato—ideas that were transmitted to posterity chiefly through the writings of the Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

This essay, therefore, is not an attempt to recover a single, unified model of classical education, but to clarify this underlying tension and the different ways it has been ordered within the tradition. Only by recovering this problem can we begin to answer, with greater precision, the question with which we began: what, in fact, is a classical education for?

Greek Paideia

The standard Greek term for education was paideia. It should be distinguished from what the Greeks called trophē, upbringing within the household, and from technē, the training in particular crafts or skills. Paideia is neither familial upbringing nor vocational training, but the cultivation of those capacities necessary for participation in civic life. It is closest to what Cicero would later call the artes liberales (Inv. 1.35): the studies proper to a free person, preparing him to take part in governing the city.

Although Plato later says that Homer “educated Greece” (Resp. 10.606e), the term paideia itself does not appear in Homer and is not attested in extant Greek literature before the fifth century B.C. Nevertheless, Homer does show us an aristocratic education oriented toward the cultivation of virtue (aretē). The Homeric epics depict young noblemen who are formed through athletic contests and training, immersion in music and heroic poetry, and instruction in persuasive speech, all ordered toward prowess in war and sound judgment in the assembly. Phoenix is sent to teach Achilles “to be a speaker of words and a doer of deeds” (Il. 9.442–443), while Achilles himself sings the deeds of heroes, and the funeral games for Patroclus display a fully developed program of aristocratic competition—chariot racing, boxing, wrestling, and footraces—in which honor (timē) and excellence (aretē) are publicly recognized and ranked.

Thus, traditional Greek paideia aimed at excellence (aretē) of both body and soul. Homeric aretē, however, was not yet understood primarily in the later philosophical sense of moral virtue, but more broadly as aristocratic excellence expressed in war, speech, athletic prowess, and public honor. A line from the Roman poet Juvenal is often invoked as a shorthand for this classical ideal: “One must pray for a sound mind in a sound body” (orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano, Sat. 10.356).2. Cf. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1996), 10. Physical training and intellectual cultivation were both essential, each disciplining and perfecting the other.

Paideia began naturally at home, as parents habituated their children in the manners, morals, customs, and ancestral traditions (nomoi) of their city. When children reached the age for more formal education, parents would usually hire tutors. As Xenophon relates: “the parents teach [their children] whatever they themselves have that is good for one’s life, and they go to expense to send them to someone else when they think that one will be more competent to teach certain things” (Xen. Mem. 2.2.6).3. Amy Bonnette, Xenophon: Memorabilia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014). Given the expense involved, such schooling was confined to the aristocratic class, except in Sparta, where there was a compulsory civic educational system in place, the agōgē.

The core of Greek education was centered on three subjects: gymnastics, music, and letters (grammata). Plato recommended that boys start gymnastics at the age of six, letters at ten, and music at thirteen, a practice which became the norm in Hellenistic Greece. The gymnastic trainer began by teaching games to young children and, as they grew older, introduced more athletic training. Running, jumping, throwing the discus and javelin, boxing, wrestling, and pankration were the chief athletic events.4. Pankration was an ancient Greek combat sport, first introduced into the Olympic Games in 648 B.C., that combined elements of boxing and wrestling into a nearly unrestricted form of hand-to-hand fighting. Gymnastic training was expected to cultivate strength and speed and, in turn, endow the youth with their characteristic beauty. The Greeks—those inventors of the Olympic Games—certainly delighted in the beauty of the human body in motion, and bestowed glory on victors in contests of strength, speed, and skill. Yet, gymnastic training was not merely for the sake of bodily goods—health, strength, and beauty—but also for the good of the soul; it provided a training ground for the cultivation of virtue. In gymnastic training, young men learned how to discipline their bodies, how to control their fear, and moderate their rashness. In short, they learned courage and self-control, virtues necessary for defending oneself, one’s family, and one’s homeland. Gymnastic training that was oriented toward mere sport, therefore, was often rejected as unfit for men who are to be “noble and free” (Pl. Leg. 796d; Arist. Pol. 1338b20; Plut. De lib. 11).

The Greek term, mousikē, had a much broader meaning than the English “music”; mousikē referred to any art over which the Muses presided. In terms of education, however, what the term chiefly meant was learning to sing and play the kithara, or lyre. The music teacher, therefore, taught children lyric poetry—choral and monodic poetry accompanied by the lyre.

Aristotle writes that, unlike gymnastics and letters, which are “useful for life and have many uses,” music has no obvious practical benefits; it is the quintessential “leisure” activity (scholē, Pol. 1337b25 ff.).5. Carnes Lord, Aristotle’s Politics, 2nd Ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). The Greeks understood that music shapes our souls in profound ways. Different rhythms and melodies are imitations (mimēmata) of different ethical characters, and consequently, it was thought essential to teach the young those melodic forms that imitate and so produce virtue. For example, the Dorian mode was thought to imitate manly and warlike sounds, thereby producing courageous characters. The music teacher, therefore, also provided an early formation in ethics.

Finally, choral singing had a distinctly civic function. The chorus—the coordinated union of song and movement under the direction of a choral leader, in which many voices and bodies act as one—provided a child with an image of a well-ordered political community and likely served as his first formation in citizenship. Plato, therefore, argues that “a lack of training in choral poetry” is essentially “a complete lack of education” (Leg. 654a-b).

The third subject in a traditional Greek paideia was “letters” (grammata, lit. “the written things”). This course of study began by learning the alphabet, and proceeded to instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic. By the fifth century, the study of letters began to include the study of literature. Students would copy passages of the poets, especially Homer and the lyric poets, commit them to memory, and then recite what they had learned both in the classroom and at public competitions. Through the teaching of letters, a literary canon and a shared cultural identity thus developed among educated Greeks throughout the Hellenic world.

Moreover, just as music was expected to contribute to the ethical formation of the child, so too was the study of Homer and the poets. As Plato tells us in his Protagoras: “Contained in these works [of the poets] are many detailed descriptions and praises and encomia of the good men of old, so that the boy, out of emulation, imitates them and longs to become such himself” (326a).6. Robert C. Bartlett, Plato: Protagoras and Meno (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004). In this way, the study of letters did not merely transmit the practical skills of reading and writing, but also formed character through imitation. Children learned to inhabit the moral world of the poets and to model their lives upon it. Plato, therefore, warns that great care should be taken in selecting the poets that the students should learn by heart, choosing only those that are both “the most well-measured… and especially appropriate for the young to hear” (Leg. 811d), by which he means poets whose style is worthy of imitation and whose works are filled with models of virtue. Thus, in addition to the practical skills—reading, writing, calculation, and public speaking— the study of letters provided intimate knowledge of the best that had been said or written in the Greek language, and in so doing shaped both the student’s style of speech and his way of life. Letters were thus an initiation into the sources and foundations of Greek culture and identity, its customs, traditions, and highest aspirations. This poetic formation would remain the foundation of Greek education even as later thinkers sought to question, reinterpret, or censor it, or lay claim to its authority.

Greek paideia aimed at forming virtuous citizens who would take an active role in the governance of the city-state. As Plato has Protagoras observe, once young men “are released from their teachers, the city in turn compels them both to learn the laws and to live in accordance with these paradigms… [and] compels them both to rule and to be ruled in accord with these” (Prt. 326c-d). By the mid to late fifth century, however, ambitious young men began to think that traditional Greek paideia did not adequately prepare them for political life. This is a common theme, whether explicitly or implicitly, in much Greek literature from the period. Aristophanes’ Clouds, for example, first produced in 423 BC, portrays a conflict between the “old” education that focused on gymnastics, music, and letters, and the “new paideia,” which he associates with the sophists generally, and Socrates in particular (Nu. 937a-b; cf. Pl. Thg. 122e-123e). This period witnessed an explosion of new and competing ideas about the nature and purpose of education.

These competing educational ideals centered above all on the rivalry between the rhetorical education advanced by the sophists and later refined by Isocrates, and the philosophic education associated with Socrates and the Socratics, above all, Plato. It is important to stress that all of these competing schools were concerned almost exclusively with what we would call higher education: the sophists, the Socratics, and Isocrates all accepted the traditional elementary education in gymnastics, music, and letters as preparatory for the kind of higher education they offered.7. It is true, however, that both Plato and Isocrates, as we shall see, expand elementary education to include subjects that are roughly analogous to the seven “liberal arts” of the medieval period (Pl. Rep. 525a–531d, 536d–e; Isoc. Antid. 261-267). Nor was there any serious debate about who was to be educated: education was understood to prepare the leisured, gentlemanly class for political responsibility and leadership.

The debate, then, was about the end of education: whether education should prepare young men for “a life of public usefulness as statesmen,” or “a life of calm tranquility as students of philosophy” (Plut. De lib. 10). Questions of curriculum and method were largely secondary to this fundamental disagreement about the end of education. What follows is an account of the competing alternatives to higher education in antiquity. My aim is not to choose between them, but to show why the tension between them cannot be resolved without distortion, for it is endemic to the tradition of classical education itself.

The Sophistic Revolution

The sophists were itinerant teachers from other Greek city-states, who were attracted to Athens because of its increased wealth and position of power in the aftermath of the Persian War, and because Athenian statesmen, like Pericles, were willing to spend lavishly on an extensive arts and culture project aimed at increasing Athens’ status and reputation in the Greek world.

Moreover, the demands of participatory democracy highlighted the need for new skills and training suited to a new political landscape. Any citizen over the age of twenty had the right to speak and vote in the people’s assembly, and, since there were no professional lawyers in ancient Greece, citizens were required to speak on their own behalf in all court cases and legal proceedings. This led to a demand for instruction, especially in the political and judicial branches of rhetoric.

Hence, the sophists were responding to a practical civic need, not a theoretical or philosophical one. They claimed to provide a “democratic education,” that is, they claimed to be able to teach anyone, regardless of birth or lineage. The aim of sophistic education was “to make men good citizens” (Pl. Prot. 319a), or “to make men clever at speaking” (legein deinous, Pl. Men. 95c), which, for them, more or less amounted to the same thing. For “the political art,” in the words of Plato’s Gorgias, is the ability “to persuade by speeches judges in the law court, councilors in the council, assemblymen in the assembly, and in every other gathering whatsoever, when there is a political gathering” (Pl. Grg. 452e; cf. Prt. 319a, Men. 91a ff.).8. James H. Nichols Jr., Plato: Gorgias (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). The sophists were revolutionary not only in their pedagogical aims, but also in their methods. As Werner Jaeger observes, they were “the founders of educational science… [or] pedagogy.”9. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture: Vol. I, transl. by Gilbert Highet (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1939) 298. They pioneered the scientific study of grammar, including morphology, syntax, etymology, prose composition, as well as the interpretation and analysis of poetry. Protagoras’ exegesis of a poem by Simonides in Plato’s Protagoras is a remarkable demonstration of sophistic poetic analysis and criticism, which Protagoras calls “the greatest part of a man’s education” (338e ff.). As Plato makes clear, such interpretation was not an end in itself, nor an attempt to elevate poetry as art, but a way of subjecting it to critical scrutiny. The sophists sought to replace the poets as the educators of Greece, and thereby to assume for themselves the formative authority once exercised by poetic tradition.

The sophists are most well-known for their contributions to the study of rhetoric. Protagoras was the first to write a treatise on the part of rhetoric devoted to invention, collecting standard lines of argument, “topics” (topoi), that could be imitated and adapted by students. It should be stressed that the sophists as a whole taught not by precept, but by example and imitation (Gk. mimēsis , Lat. imitatio). As Aristotle tells us, the sophists “gave their students speeches to learn by heart,” which they, in turn, would imitate in both form and content in their own speeches, a method that also trained students to argue either side of a case and thus exposed them to the charge of making “the weaker argument the stronger” (SE 184a).

In this respect, the sophists did not invent the practice of imitation but repurposed it—from the poetic models of virtue that had formed earlier generations to rhetorical models of persuasion, and from formation in the Greek way of life to victory in political contests. This practice of imitation was gradually systematized into a more comprehensive art of rhetoric.

Gorgias is credited with inventing the rhetorical canons of arrangement and style. Hippias taught a system of mnemonics, which had the obvious practical purpose of helping the orator learn his speech by heart, and which we may identify as the precursor to the rhetorical canon of memory. Thus, in the sophists, we find four of the five classical canons of rhetoric.

In the sophists, we may also discern the beginnings of what would later be codified in the medieval tradition as the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), while figures such as Hippias taught the arts that would come to form the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). Thus, the sophistic revolution in education laid the groundwork for much of what we today would call a classical or liberal education: a systematic teaching of the arts of language and persuasion with a view to creating virtuous citizens. It is important to stress, however, that the kind of education offered by the sophists was a form of secondary education; it was not a replacement for, but built upon, traditional Athenian elementary education in gymnastics, music, and letters. Moreover, while the sophists are often lauded for inaugurating a spirit of democratic egalitarianism in education, this was still education for wealthy and aspiring gentlemen.

Although they claimed they could, in theory, teach anyone the political art, in fact they taught only those who could pay their fees, which were often quite high. Their pupils, therefore, tended to be wealthy young men driven by ambition to acquire political power and influence, and they often used the rhetorical techniques they learned from their masters to obfuscate and manipulate the people into believing that their proposals were on behalf of the common good, while, in reality, it was their own self-interest they pursued.

Plato

Plato and other Socratics like Xenophon criticized this immoral and manipulative aspect of sophistic education. They questioned whether the sophists possessed genuine knowledge of virtue and the political art, and consequently whether they were able to teach it. If the sophists were confused about what virtue is and so were unable to teach it to their pupils, then it was irresponsible, even dangerous, to put powerful tools of argumentation and persuasion into their hands. Moreover, Plato criticized the sophists’ willingness to take on anyone who wished to study with them, regardless of their aptitude or previous education. For Plato, rigorous testing was necessary to determine whether students possessed the intellectual and moral capacities required for higher study.

Here, we can give only the barest outline of the extensive and ambitious educational system Plato developed in the Republic and Laws for training the philosophers of the future. In Plato’s educational system, only the best and brightest would prove capable of the highest education in philosophy. Plato was not attempting to make everyone a philosopher. He nevertheless did provide all free-born men and women with a civically-minded “preparatory education” (propaideia)—that is, an “education from childhood in virtue, that makes one desire and love to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled with justice” (Leg. 643b-644a).10. I distinguish here between “philosophy” as inquiry into the whole and “moral or civic formation” as the shaping of character for action. For Plato, questions of virtue belong within philosophy. Yet questions such as the unity of virtue or whether virtue is teachable remain open to inquiry. This is distinct from the early habituation in moral and civic life that must precede such inquiry, for one must be formed within a way of life before one can critically examine it. As we saw earlier, this civic education was essentially the traditional Greek elementary education in gymnastics, letters, and music, along with rudimentary instruction in arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Plato, however, introduced a further stage of civic and military training, which became the model for the ephebic paramilitary training required of young Athenian men before they could become full citizens.11. Ephebic derives from the Greek ephēbos, meaning a youth or young man approaching adulthood, especially one undergoing civic and military training in preparation for citizenship. This civic education was directed chiefly toward the formation of character—toward the education of the heart rather than the intellect. Its purpose was to produce pious, patriotic, and moral citizens, not philosophers.

Although the highest form of Platonic education, namely, philosophy, presupposes and depends on a lower, non-philosophic, civic education, its ultimate aim lies beyond the city. The pursuit of truth can begin only on the basis of an earlier formation in civic virtue and intellectual discipline, but it proceeds through a radical re-examination of that formation—a questioning of one’s deepest commitments, one’s first principles, and thus of one’s morals, politics, and religion.

In other words, a potential philosopher must first be formed in the way of life of his political regime—its customs and traditions, its laws and institutions, even its gods—before he can begin to radically question that way of life.

This means that no regime’s educational system, even the best’s, can truly promote and support philosophy; philosophic education will always be regarded by the city as an attempt to “corrupt the youth” (Pl. Apol. 24b-26a). Thus, a conflict between the philosopher and the city is always inexorable. This is, at least partly, why Plato considered it dangerous to introduce philosophy to the young, or to the masses more generally, and why he insisted that only those who had been rigorously tested and found fit in both intellect and character should be permitted to pursue higher studies in mathematics and philosophy (Resp. 535c–540e).

Thus, while Plato considered moral and civic formation a necessary foundation for the highest form of education, philosophy, his system of education was neither subordinate to politics nor derived from the teachings of the political regime, even from the perfectly just city of the Republic. His aim was not to produce ideal rulers but philosophers. Even the “philosopher-kings” of the Republic rule only by necessity and compulsion, for they are rulers precisely because they are philosophers, not philosophers because they are rulers (Resp. 519c–521b; 540a–b). Just as politics is subordinate to philosophy, so Plato’s educational system aims first at the ascent of the soul toward truth, while political rule remains a secondary civic obligation imposed upon the best natures.

Thus, philosophy may offer statesmen some guidance in political life, but its ultimate aim lies beyond the horizon of the city and its claims. As a result, such an education proved too remote from the immediate demands and concerns of fourth-century Athenian political life.

Plato’s philosophic education required exceedingly rare natures, long discipline, and a degree of withdrawal from ordinary civic life that placed it beyond the reach of most. Isocrates’ program, by contrast, was explicitly directed toward the formation of gentlemen for public life and could be taught, imitated, and reproduced within the life of actual cities, not utopias. It offered not a philosophic reorientation of the soul, but a practical formation in judgment and speech, grounded in shared opinions and oriented toward political action.

For this reason, while Plato may have given us one of the most comprehensive theories of education from antiquity, in historical fact it was Isocrates, not Plato, who educated fourth-century Greece and, through his influence, the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. His emphasis on rhetorical training, literary study, and the disciplined imitation of exemplary models proved far more adaptable to the needs of schools and states alike. Nor was his influence limited to antiquity: the educational ideals of Renaissance humanism were ultimately derived either directly from Isocrates or through his Roman heirs, above all Cicero and Quintilian.

Isocrates

As a student of the sophist Gorgias, and a friend of Socrates, Isocrates occupies a position that may be described as a revision of sophistic teaching in light of the Socratic critique (Pl. Phdr. 278d–279b). Like Plato, he rejects the purely technical conception of rhetoric as a tool for persuasion without regard to truth or virtue. Yet he also departs from the Socratic inclination to treat virtue as a form of knowledge. Isocrates emphasizes instead the role of judgment in a domain where certainty is elusive. For Isocrates, the aim of education is not theoretical knowledge of ultimate reality, but the ability to deliberate well about human affairs—to weigh circumstances, to perceive what is fitting, and to arrive at sound decisions where no fixed rule can guarantee the right result. Rhetoric, understood not as a technique but as an art of speech grounded in experience and refined through practice, is the proper instrument for developing this capacity. What does not admit of abstract knowledge must instead be approached through prudence (phronēsis).

Although he was indebted to the sophists for their pedagogical methods, Isocrates did not aim to teach his students merely to be successful in the assembly or courtroom. Nor was his teaching amoral; it had a distinct civic and patriotic purpose, namely, the re-establishment of Athenian power and influence following their disastrous defeat in the Peloponnesian War.

Isocrates believed that the excesses of democracy had led Athens into a ruinous policy of expansion and imperial overreach, which had not only caused the war with Sparta but also bankrupted the city. The cause of Athens’ downfall, however, was not external, but the result of a democratic regime that taught its citizens that they were “free” to do whatever they wanted (Areop. 36–37). More importantly, he argues that the problem lies not simply in the corruption of the regime, but in the complacency of the citizens themselves, a perennial problem of political life:

We sit around in our shops denouncing the present order and complaining that never under a democracy have we been worse governed, but in our actions and in the sentiments which we hold regarding it we show that we are better satisfied with our present democracy than with that which was handed down to us by our forefathers (Areop. 15).12. George Norlin, Isocrates, Vol. III: On the Peace, Areopagiticus, Against the Sophists, Antidosis, Panathenaicus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

Thus, for Isocrates, the central problem of politics is how to change men, and the answer is to change the regime itself, by restoring the old mixed constitution associated with Solon. His ultimate educational goal was to train a small number of young gentlemen in ethics, politics, and public speaking, who would, in turn, make Athens great again.

In this sense, Isocrates is sometimes described, not without exaggeration, as the leader of the “new right-wing party” because he advocated a return to an earlier and more moderate constitutional order.13. H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, transl. by George Lamb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 87. Greek paideia had always been oriented toward the cultivation of those who would rule the city. With Isocrates, however, this aim becomes explicit in the training of gentlemen for political leadership through speech, understood not merely as a technical skill, but as the means by which authority is established, and the life of the city is ordered.

In short, Isocrates’ program endured because it treated education as a practical means of preparing citizens to lead and govern actual cities. Moreover, his emphasis on the study and composition of prose, alongside and increasingly in place of the poets, established rhetoric as the organizing principle of higher education. Unlike most Attic orators, however, Isocrates did not build his reputation on speeches delivered in the courts or the assembly, but on speeches written for circulation rather than delivery, intended to be read, studied, and imitated. Having abandoned speechwriting early in his career, he established a school devoted to the teaching of rhetoric through written discourse.

In this way, Isocrates played a decisive role in the transition from an oral to a literary culture of education. By elevating the study and composition of prose and directing students to the careful imitation of exemplary texts, he helped to establish a canon of authors whose works would serve as enduring models of thought and expression. Taken together, these developments mark Isocrates as both the culmination of classical Greek paideia and the foundation of what later came to be called ‘classical education,’ a tradition taken up and developed in Rome, above all in the writings of Cicero, who systematized and transmitted a broadly Isocratean vision of education to the Latin West.

Cicero

In Cicero’s Rome, there had been a long-standing uneasiness about Greek philosophy and learning. Staunch traditionalists such as Cato the Elder warned against its corrupting influence, fearing that it would weaken the moral and political discipline of Roman life. Both philosophers and rhetoricians were at times expelled from the city, but the Romans quickly recognized the political usefulness of rhetoric, whereas philosophy continued to be regarded with suspicion, even long after Cicero’s time. Thus, to understand Cicero’s account of education, we must remember that his first aim is to make the case for philosophy—namely, that it is not a threat to the city. To do so, he had to present a philosophic education in the service of the city.

Like Plato before him, Cicero recognized the distinction between the education of the philosopher and the education of the gentleman and even affirmed the superiority of the philosophic life. Yet, Cicero’s focus was almost entirely on the education of the gentleman, the statesman, and orator who is not merely skilled in speech but also a good man. Cicero’s emphasis on oratory and politics thus gives his account of education a more Isocratean flavor, insofar as philosophy is not rejected but subordinated to the demands of civic life. Rome nevertheless also inherits, through Cicero, the Platonic philosophical tradition, while giving institutional priority to the Isocratean model of civic and rhetorical education.

In his dialogue, De Oratore (On the Orator), Cicero has his former teacher of rhetoric, Lucius Licinius Crassus, argue that the primary aim of the education of Roman gentlemen should be oratorical skill, or eloquence. If Roman gentlemen are to be effective political leaders, wise and just lawmakers, prudent statesmen, and competent advocates for their clients in the courtroom, then they must be eloquent. Moreover, Crassus declares that eloquence is not confined to the forum or the Senate House but extends as well to the broader cultivation of the mind. Not only does the perfect orator possess the leadership and wisdom to provide for “the safety of countless individuals and of the State at large,” but he is also “perfectly accomplished in every kind of refined conversation,” which is itself characteristic of human culture (Cic. De Orat. 1.32; 3.144–45).14. May, James M., and Jakob Wisse, eds. and trans., Cicero: On the Ideal Orator (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Crassus thus presents eloquence not merely as a technical skill but as a standard of intelligence, moral character, and a cultivated and polished style of speech. The orator emerges as a political and cultural leader, capable of influencing public affairs and shaping Rome’s broader cultural ideals through the power of rhetoric.

At the same time, Cicero does not present a unified doctrine of eloquence but dramatizes a debate over the relation between rhetoric and philosophy, and over the kind of knowledge required for the orator. De Oratore stages a quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy through Crassus and another one of Cicero’s teachers, Marcus Antonius. Antonius presents a powerful line of objection to Crassus’s conception of the philosophic orator, especially the claim that such comprehensive knowledge cannot be mastered within the constraints of an active political life.

Antonius’ objection is not that philosophy is useless, but that the orator does not require precise or comprehensive knowledge of the whole, nor even of human nature in the philosopher’s sense. Rather, he works from commonly held opinions about justice and the good, addressing audiences who possess political authority without necessarily possessing knowledge. Eloquence, therefore, depends less on systematic knowledge than on natural ability, good judgment, and long experience in public life.

This point is especially clear in the conditions of the forum, where persuasion depends not simply on argument (logos), but on the speaker’s character (ethos) and his ability to move the emotions (pathos) of his audience. In such settings, the orator must adapt himself to the dispositions, expectations, and prejudices of those he addresses; it is not abstract truth alone that carries the day, but the prudent management of audience, circumstance, and his reputation as a good man. In Antonius, we thus see the hard-boiled and common-sense objections typical of a Roman gentleman.

Nor does Cicero take sides in this debate. Though Crassus gets the last word, it is not clear that he has won, and the dialogue instead suggests that Cicero—Rome’s greatest orator, statesman, and philosopher—was the product of both traditions. From Crassus, he inherits the exalted ideal of rhetorical eloquence joined to philosophic wisdom and virtue; from Antonius, the practical insistence on experience, training, and natural ability, as well as the recognition of the limits of reason or philosophy in political life. Accordingly, while Cicero insists that the orator must possess some knowledge of ethical and political matters and not merely persuasive skill, he does not treat the philosophic way of life—understood as inquiry into the whole—as the governing end of education for the Roman gentleman. Rather, the demands of political life set the limits within which such knowledge must be acquired and employed. The orator does not speak to philosophers but to fellow citizens and judges, whose authority rests not on knowledge but on opinion, and who must be persuaded as they are. He, therefore, requires not comprehensive philosophical knowledge, but a practical grasp of human affairs sufficient to guide judgment and move an audience. Thus, in Cicero, as in Plato, we find a distinction between a civic or “liberal” education, directed toward the gentlemanly class, and a truly philosophic education, which remains the province of an even rarer few. Yet, Cicero’s focus in De Oratore and elsewhere is directed almost exclusively on the former; in this sense, his account of education is thoroughly Isocratean.

Against this background, Cicero turns to the concrete practices by which the orator is formed. Whatever one’s natural talent, Crassus and Antonius agree that learning from exemplary orators, both contemporary and historical, is a central method for developing rhetorical skill.

Again, imitatio (Gk. mimēsis), the study and conscious imitation of features recognizably characteristic of a canonical author’s style or content, remains essential to eloquence. Cicero has Crassus recommend that young orators practice mock exercises, taking “as a starting point some case very similar to those brought into the forum,” and speaking on it “in a manner that is as true to life as possible” (De Orat. 1.149). Speaking extemporaneously is useful, he says, but “it is more useful to take some time for reflection, in order to speak better prepared and with great care” (1.150). For this reason, he recommends writing as much as possible. Writing is indispensable for learning how to develop arguments: it trains invention, arrangement, and style, and even strengthens memory. A speech once written and internalized continues to guide delivery even when the written text is removed, like “a ship at full speed, when the rowers rest upon their oars” (1.153).

Crassus then describes the exercises he himself practiced as a young man. At first, he would restate poetry or speeches from memory using different words, but he came to see the limitations of this method: either one merely repeats the best expressions or else grows accustomed to inferior ones. He therefore turned to a more demanding and fruitful practice: translating and reformulating the speeches of the great Greek orators into Latin. The advantage of this approach, he argues, is twofold. It allows the student to employ the finest available expressions in his own language and, at the same time, to enrich that language by adapting Greek forms—provided they are used with judgment. Yet this practice requires discernment: one must carefully choose one’s models, lest imitation produce not excellence but deformity. In this way, imitatio becomes not mere repetition, but appropriation and transformation: the disciplined reworking of inherited forms within a new linguistic and cultural setting. This practice of imitation through translation provides the model by which the classical tradition itself would be received, adapted, and transmitted in later ages.

Thus, Cicero’s educational vision appears to be fundamentally Isocratean. Rhetoric and political life provide the primary framework within which the intellectual and moral development of the gentleman takes place. Philosophy is not rejected; it is appropriated and subordinated to the practical demands of public life. Thus, while Cicero draws freely on Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, the center of gravity in his account lies with the formation of the orator-statesman, whose task is not the contemplation of truth as such, but the prudent and persuasive guidance of the political community.15. Cicero’s understanding of Plato and Aristotle, of course, is shaped in part by the Hellenistic Academic tradition, especially through figures such as Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon.

Conclusions

What emerges most clearly in Cicero is not a resolution of the tension between the philosophic and civic aims of education, but a stable ordering of them. Philosophy has a secure place in Cicero’s educational regime, but it does not rule. This ordering proved decisive for the history of classical education in the West. The Roman appropriation of Greek paideia, especially in its Ciceronian form, established a model in which the education of the gentleman—through language, literature, and rhetoric—became the central and enduring framework of higher education. Philosophy, though never absent, was incorporated into this framework as one discipline among others, valued for its contribution to judgment and moral formation rather than, in most cases, pursued as an end in itself, as we see in Quintilian and later in Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus. The result was not the resolution of the tension between the philosophic and political aims of education, but only a partial and uneasy accommodation of them within the very institutions that came to define Western education— above all, the rhetorical schools of Rome and the later liberal arts and humanist traditions. On the one hand, the classical tradition continued to preserve, in Plato and his successors, the ideal of a life devoted to the pursuit of truth beyond the confines of the city. On the other hand, it formed generations of gentlemen through a rhetorical and literary education ordered to the active political life. These two strands—philosophic and civic—remained intertwined but not reconciled.

The modern “classical” education movement, for all its strengths, has in important respects lost its bearings. What we call primary and secondary education would, for the ancients, have been understood as a fundamentally political formation: the shaping of the mind, the heart, and the body for participation in public life. Modern classical schools often imitate only the literary residue of ancient paideia rather than its full formative regime. Too often, they treat paideia primarily as the study of “Great Books,” while relegating gymnastics and music—once essential to the formation of the soul and body alike— to the margins as electives rather than foundational disciplines. At the same time, the central pedagogical method of the classical tradition has largely fallen into disuse. The practice of imitatio, by which students learned through the disciplined imitation and transformation of exemplary models, has been displaced by methods that prioritize analysis over formation. The result is an education that retains fragments of the classical curriculum while losing sight of its animating tension. Even recent efforts to recover spoken Latin pedagogy—often described as “Living Latin”—can, despite their pedagogical benefits, overlook Cicero’s deeper insight: that the highest exercise of imitation lies not in fluency alone, but in the careful translation and reworking of great models into one’s own language. A recovery of classical education today would therefore require reviving older pedagogical practices of imitation, paraphrase, memorization, recitation, declamation, and translation through which students learned not merely to study a great work, but to internalize and reproduce the excellence of the ancients in thought, word, and deed.

Today, the classical tradition is often reduced to a set of harmonious ideals—the true, the good, and the beautiful—without sufficient recognition of the tensions among such ideals. The pursuit of truth does not always confirm what is traditionally held to be good or beautiful.

Rather, it sometimes unsettles, challenges, and even overturns established opinions and attachments. The legacy of classical education, then, is not a settled program but a perennial question. It asks whether education is ordered to the pursuit of truth as such or to the formation of citizens capable of acting well within a political order—and whether these aims can be held together without distortion. That question remains with us still, not as an antiquarian concern, but as a live and pressing problem for any account of education that would claim to be both humane and serious.16. I would like to thank Joshua Patch, and David DeMarco for their helpful comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, and especially Patrick Timmis, who first encouraged me to undertake this project.

Introduction

In the conclusion to his piece on the Christian classical education movement’s desperate need to rediscover its Ciceronian roots, Carl Young notes that—contra many a breezy conflation of ‘Athens and Jerusalem’ among contemporary adherents of ‘The Great Tradition’—simply finding peace within “Athens” itself, between the citizen and the philosopher, is difficult enough: “The legacy of classical education, then, is not a settled program but a perennial question. It asks whether education is ordered to the pursuit of truth as such or to the formation of citizens capable of acting well within a political order—and whether these aims can be held together without distortion. That question remains with us still, not as an antiquarian concern, but as a live and pressing problem for any account of education that would claim to be both humane and serious.”1. See Carl Young, “Fons et Origo: The Greek and Roman Roots of the Modern Classical Education Movement,” Ad Fontes (Spring 2026). Any attempt from the side of “Jerusalem” (that is, from those who look to the Judeo-Christian scriptures for the revelation of eternal truth) to engage that conversation must take seriously Augustine of Hippo’s less-than-sanguine account of the relationship between the curriculum which prepares a talented young patrician for service to the Roman Empire, and the education (literally, “leading out”) which frees us from absorption in the temporal City of Man to become citizens of the eternal City of God (whose outpost is to be found at the altar of every Christian church).2. See Augustine’s Preface to his magisterial The City of God Against the Pagans. These tensions within Augustine’s account and his fragile resolution are inherited by the greatest of the English Christian humanists, John Milton, whose utopian early writings on education (which continue to be studied in Great Texts circles looking to Renaissance studia humanitatis as their model) adopt the Platonic ideal of universal knowledge for its own sake.

Ironically, it is in studying actual sinful humans, in being forced to come down from the ivory tower into the cut and thrust of ecclesio-political debate among, that Milton both lowers his expectations of the possible while also producing his best poetry and rhetoric. After giving brief accounts of Augustine and Milton’s educational visions, I will suggest several practical conclusions for Augustinian Christian humanists in 21st c. America eager for a pedagogy that is not (in the words of another of the great English humanists, Philip Sidney) “wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air,” but instead bestows models like Xenophon’s “Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses…”3. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy (1595), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69375/the-defence-of-poesy

Augustine of Hippo

In his Confessions, Augustine recounts his own journey from student to highly successful teacher of Roman poetry and rhetoric. The two authors who loom the largest over his formation are Virgil and Cicero. In Virgil’s great poem The Aeneid, Augustine sees the Roman way of life encapsulated. Time and again throughout his narrative, Augustine creatively paraphrases or adapts the Aeneid’s most famous lines—a miniature manifesto for the dream that was Rome:

[T]u regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem, parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.

[Roman, remember by your strength to rule Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these: To pacify, to impose the rule of law, To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.]4. Virgil, The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), l. 1151ff.

The fact that Aeneas will be divinized as he carries out this mission statement from his father Anchises indicates for Augustine that ultimately, Romans worship their own Romanitas—the very piety to the fatherland, which being “forced to memorize the wanderings of some fellow called Aeneas” (as Augustine describes his own schooldays) was meant to instill.5. Augustine, Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Maria Boulding. (New City Press, 2001). I.13.20. Memorized poetry—which Augustine frames as a kind of secular catechesis in place of the deferred baptismal preparation he ought to have received—was intended to inform civic action. Augustine recounts how Virgil’s poem was a model “proposed to me for imitation”:

I was required to produce a speech made by Juno expressing her anger and grief at being unable to repulse the Trojan king from Italy, but in words which I had never heard Juno use. We were obliged to follow the errant footsteps of poetic fantasies and to express in prose what the poet had said in verse. The boy was adjudged the best speaker who most convincingly suggested emotions of anger and grief and clothed them in apt words, as befitted the dignity of the person represented.

Augustine’s guide in finding prose words fitted to the “dignity” of a goddess was presumably “Cicero’s dignified prose,” which he says formed his tastes and became the model against which his adolescent self judged other writings (even including the Scriptures). A schoolboy exercise like this (Augustine won the contest) bridges the gap between poet and public orator by translating from verse to prose, and prepares the rhetor-in-training for the kind of opportunity that would come Augustine’s way as professor of rhetoric in the imperial capital of Milan. “I was hankering after honors, wealth and marriage,” he writes, and he received an invitation to advance himself on this course by delivering “a eulogy upon the emperor in which I would tell plenty of lies with the object of winning favor with the well-informed by my lying…”6. Augustine, Confessions, I.13.20; I.11.17; I.18.28; Confessions, I.17.27; Confessions, III.5.9; Confessions, VI.6.9. Imperial eulogy was of course what Virgil excelled at beyond all others. Tradition has it that Virgil read the above-cited lines of Book 6 aloud to Augustus himself—a book which climaxes in the deification of Augustus’ line.

All of this, Augustine insists, simply distracted him from praising the emperor of the New Jerusalem, Jesus Christ. “I wept for Dido,” Augustine laments, and so heard the “approval of people all around me [ringing] in my ears” when he should have been seeking the approval of God. These studies, which were regarded as so “civilized and rewarding,” were nothing but a Dido-esque betrayal of his first Love: “To pander to this world is to fornicate against you, but so loudly do they shout ‘Well done!’ that one feels ashamed to fall short of their expectations.” The Ciceronian elegance that fueled Augustine’s successful pursuit of “praise and honor” comes off little better than the lies of the poets.

In his circles at the time, the Manichean bishop Faustus was a “man of high renown” for his learning in “all branches of reputable scholarship” and especially “in the liberal arts.” What Augustine finds on conversing with Faustus is “a man of pleasant and smooth speech,” who in his cursory reading had taken in “a few of Cicero’s speeches,” which had helped him towards a “glib and seductive” trick of the tongue. He was all show, no substance—an example of Augustine’s growing conviction that, contra his schoolboy self, “nothing should be regarded as true because it is eloquently stated, nor false because the words sound clumsy.”7. Augustine, Confessions, I.13.21; V.3.3; I.17.27; V.6.10. Now, this all sounds like a resolution of Young’s “perennial question”—Augustinians (i.e., all magisterial Protestants) must be all Jerusalem, no Athens; all heavenly truth, no this-worldly city. But Augustine may be deriving his critique of “poetic fantasies” from the poet of Romanitas himself. While Book 6 of the Aeneid gives us a soaring vision of the Roman imperial dream, it ends on a strangely doubtful note as Aeneas, having received his mission, passes through the ‘Gate of False Dreams’ on his way back to Italy and a brutal war. Augustine’s response to Faustus’s lack of real liberal education is to begin spending “much time in his company on account of his ardent enthusiasm for the literature that I, as a master of rhetoric, was teaching to the young men…” Ironically, it was his own zeal for liberal education that first allowed Augustine to identify Faustus’s sophistry—a zeal which Augustine’s teachers accidentally inspired in him when they assigned him Cicero, “whose language is almost universally admired, though not its inner spring.” This book was the Hortensius, and Augustine says that it first “kindled” in him the “love for wisdom” which resides with God, a love “called by the Greek name ‘philosophy.”8. Augustine, Confessions, V.7.13; III.4.7. The Ciceronian love of wisdom, or “philosophy,” became for Augustine an entrée into a Christian adoration of Wisdom, or theology.

Paradoxically, then, Cicero’s “inner spring,” which flowed in the direction of the biblical Word, ultimately triumphed in Augustine over the aesthetic fastidiousness which Cicero’s technical elegance fostered towards the words of scripture. But as long as one’s words flow from the spring of truth rather than from sophistical sleight-of-hand, elegance can serve the good. While he has learned that eloquence does not equal truth, Augustine cautions against swinging too far the other way—things are “not true for being expressed in uncouth language either, nor false because couched in splendid words.” Augustine finds this nowhere more clearly than in the great preacher Ambrose, whose sermons Augustine attends simply as a matter of professional interest in his role as master of rhetoric: “[A]s his words, which I enjoyed, penetrated my mind, the substance, which I overlooked, seeped in with them, for I could not separate the two.”9. Augustine, Confessions, V.6. The beautiful medium, in this case, is the message, for, as Augustine writes: “If sensuous beauty delights you, praise God for the beauty of corporeal things, and channel the love you feel for them onto their maker … If kinship with other souls appeals to you, let them be loved in God …” In this way, the taste of Arma virumque cano on the tongue and the image of civic-spirited man carrying his patria on his shoulders can perhaps be reconciled with the search for Divine Wisdom.10. The opening words of Book I of Virgil’s Aeneid, and the famous Roman icon of duty or pietas, derived from Book II Virgil’s Aeneid. Without advertising his purpose (he will frequently quote or paraphrase Virgilian lines without citation in a way that will not tempt or trouble the unlearned but will catch the eye of the literate), Augustine, despite his polemic against pagan poetry, subtly models his own journey on the wanderings of Aeneas, producing in the first 9 books something very like a baptized Aeneid.11. See Michael Foley, “St. Augustine: The Confessions,” in Finding a Common Thread: Reading Great Texts from Homer to O’Connor, ed. R.C. Roberts. S. H. Moore, and D. D. Schmeltekopf (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press) 2013, 81-97. Similarly, while Augustine never once names Cicero in his own treatise on Christian pulpit rhetoric, De Doctrina Christiana, he obliquely references “ipse Romani auctor eloquii” (that author of Roman eloquence himself) as an authority in his claim that the orator’s aim is “ut scilicet doceat, ut delectet, ut flectat”—to teach, delight, and move.12. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, translated by R. P. H. Green. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), IV.34. While these Roman models sought truth, they did it in the service of others. “Pius Aeneas” sacrifices his own pursuit of Venus (both literally in Book 2 and allegorically in Book 4) for the sake of his city, and is destined to join the gods as a reward. Cicero’s great learning and eloquence were dedicated to ‘moving’ a community—“The Roman virtue pietas was so deeply embedded in [Cicero’s] philosophy of life that the duties it entailed could not escape him, and his personal convictions established them in a hierarchical working order, namely: pietas erga patriam; pietas erga parentes.”13. Piety or duty towards fatherland and towards one’s parents. Sr. Gertrude Emilie, “Cicero and the Roman Pietas,” The Classical Journal, Vol. 39, No. 9 (1944), pp. 536-542, at 537, quoting Cicero, De Invent. II, 66. Likewise, when Augustine criticizes Faustus’ lack of “liberal education,” it is not from a snobbish assumption that everyone should be a walking encyclopedia.

On the contrary, he “regard[s] with tolerance” sincere people who make embarrassing mistakes about natural philosophy, for instance. But the “case was quite different with a man who set himself up as a teacher and a writer,” for such a man guides those around him. After failing multiple times to ascend to the philosopher’s vision of That Which Is on his own (while studying the works of the neo-Platonists), Augustine finally receives it as a gift through “colloquy” and “discourse” with his parent, Monica:

[W]e arrived at the summit of our own minds; and this too we transcended, to touch that land of never-failing plenty where you pasture Israel forever with the food of truth. Life there is the Wisdom through whom all these things are made…14. Augustine, Confessions, V.8.9; IX.10.24.

And, having left “the first-fruits” of his spirit in that land, Augustine returns and dedicates himself to public service—ruling and teaching others as an abbot, bishop, and preacher.

Because of this community focus, Augustine in De Doctrina follows Cicero’s Crassus in relativizing the orator’s need for universal learning. Like Cicero, Augustine is primarily interested in “the good man speaking well.” The “aim” of “the Christian orator” is “to be listened to with understanding, with pleasure, and with obedience.” As exemplified by Bishop Ambrose, form must match content. He must speak truth and avoid “sophism,” which Augustine defines as “a puerile show of skill” intended “to trap not just dull people but also clever ones who are less than consistently alert.”

So the orator must know truth, and that requires studying certain disciplines (Augustine approves of logic, mathematics, music, astronomy, practical biology, linguistics, history, politics, and philosophy). “A person who is a good and true Christian,” Augustine writes, “should realize that truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found, gathering and acknowledging it even in pagan literature…” But that person must ruthlessly cull his archive, both because some pagan writings are “superstitious” and because time is limited. Multiple times during his discussion of a Christian orator’s classical education, Augustine repeats lines such as this: “These are useful … provided that limited time is spent on them and that they do not become an obstacle to the more important things which they should help us to obtain.” He even cautions against spending too much time on learning Greek and Hebrew, saying that the orator should either study them “up to a point” or consult the translations “of those who keep excessively close to the literal meaning,” alongside other translations which go thought-by-thought rather than word-by-word.15. See Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana II.22—II.63; IV.28—IV.35. After all, if Augustine were to preach in Greek or Hebrew rather than in the Latin vernacular, he would be heard with neither understanding, pleasure, nor obedience, and he would not be listened to for long.

John Milton

Augustine’s own lack of linguistic prowess and his pragmatic reliance on translations like Jerome’s Vulgate contrasts starkly with one thread of the Renaissance humanist drive ad fontes, a drive which was both cause and effect of Erasmus’ displacement of Jerome with a new scholarly Greek New Testament. John Milton was the greatest English disciple of this Christian humanist movement. He dived headlong into the Erasmian quest for “universal knowledge,” became Latin secretary for Oliver Cromwell’s Parliament (he once quarreled with his superiors over what he considered a barbarous solecism in their suggestion for the Latin name of a newly formed naval board), composed original poetry in Latin, Greek, and Italian and translated Hebrew Psalms into English verse. This Erasmian ideal, however, could strain against the recognition that the humanists must live among humans as members of political and ecclesial bodies. When John Milton imagines his program of education, which will “repair the ruins of our first parents,” he makes the encyclopedia (universal knowledge) the ultimate goal of his staggeringly ambitious—and finally unattainable—curriculum.

The goal, he argues, is to “endue” students with “the spirit and vigour of Demosthenes or Cicero, Euripides or Sophocles,” making them “able writers and composers in every excellent matter, when they shall be thus fraught with an universal insight into things.” Composing in every matter, he argues, also must mean reading and writing in every language:

And, seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kinds of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom…16. John Milton, Of Education, in William Kerrigan, John Peter Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon ed., The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 971. All following references will be to this volume.

In theory, learning from Demosthenes and Cicero requires fluency in Latin and Greek. We can pick up the modern European languages “at any odd hour” (Milton cannot quite find an actual hour in the day to fit this in).17. Milton, Of Education, 971. Since we are Christians, we should also be able to read Hebrew and Syriac, as well as all the heads of the traditional trivium and quadrivium. But we must go further and respond to the Scientific Revolution by training students in practical engineering, agricultural science, and medicine. With this addition of the hard sciences to the already rigorous humanist curriculum, Milton is in line with the 17th c. polyhistor movement, a group of “philosopher-scientists” whom Leo Strauss would identify in the 20th century as a bridge between classical liberal education and a new technocratic vision for learning.18. Leo Strauss, “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” in Liberalism Ancient & Modern, (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9-25. In short, the truly educated young man (Milton imagines all this will take to about age 20) must be expert in everything, and such an education ought to be available to everyone, as Milton suggests that his academy could be the model for a democratic national network of schools.

As Milton would discover, this is easier said than done; the tension between the ideal of repairing our ruins through liberal education and the actual clay with which he had to work is a theme throughout his prose writings, all produced during the long middle of his career when the poet took a backseat to the public orator. Milton’s nephew and pupil (himself a writer) would recount Milton beating him for his slowness at his lessons.19. For Edward Phillips’ rueful account of his own inability to keep up with his uncle’s gargantuan demands, see Nicholas McDowell, Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 76. Milton needed each of his pupils to provide themselves with a horse and military gear, as well as unlimited leisure for about a decade—not surprisingly, he had few students, and his attempt to enroll his young wife, Mary, as a pupil ended after just weeks, in a years-long separation.

Milton was frustrated with even his own education when, at age 30, he found himself pulled into public affairs. Up to this point, he had been pursuing the Cambridge B.A. and M.A. and then continued reading in theology (with the idea at one point of taking a research degree in divinity). Milton lamented in his first political tract that civic crises were now drawing him into service, despite the fact that he had not “yet completed to my mind the full circle of my private studies.”20. Milton, Reason of Church Government, 839. As public service consumed ever more of his time and eventually his eyesight, he wrote a lament for the wasting away of his “Talent” for learned poetry and the darkening of his “light” in what is now his most famous sonnet.21. Milton, Sonnet 19: “When I consider how my light is spent” And yet, Milton’s taking of public office and spending his talents on the correspondence and debates of the commonwealth (he became one of the chief spokesmen for Parliament in their quarrel with King Charles, for instance) is precisely what Augustine would have demanded. In The City of God, Augustine laments that the magistrate walks in a cloud of “ignorance,” forced to make decisions “between men and men” without true knowledge. “If such darkness shrouds social life,” he asks, “will a wise judge take his seat on the bench or no? Beyond question, he will. For human society, which he thinks it a wickedness to abandon, constrains him and compels him to this duty.”22. Augustine, The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2. Edited by Philip Schaff. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887.), Book 19, Ch. 6. Duty would force Milton to acknowledge that when polyhistor ideals conflicted with the demands of the commonwealth, the former must give way.23. After all, while Erasmus’ New Testament provided the text for the great ressourcement project of the English Reformation, Augustine’s sermons and commentaries provided the engine. A glance at the index of cited authors for Gerald Bray’s useful edition of the Church of England’s Book of Homilies illustrates this fact. So despite Milton’s own perfect Latin, in his Areopagitica (an address to Parliament denouncing censorship of political and ecclesial dissent) he attacks the state’s use of an “Imprimatur” to limit debate as a Romanizing (popish) offense to Englishness, for “our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in the achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enough to spell such a dictatory presumption …”24. Milton, Areopagitica, 935. Suddenly Latinity, the humanist’s public marker of liberal education (hence the Renaissance fad for classicizing names—Desiderius Erasmus was born Gerrit Gerritszoon), is a servile blot on Anglophone liberty.

On the other hand, much that is truly liberal is preserved in the Graeco-Roman tradition. How can that be translated and transmitted to speakers of “our English”? In an oddly personal aside in the second book of his first political oration, Milton dedicated his life as an orator and poet to the “adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end, that were a toilsome vanity, but to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect.” What Dante did for Italian, Virgil for Latin, and Homer for Greek, in other words, Milton would do for English—demonstrate that it was capable of the highest genres: the political oration the religious ode, the national epic, and the pure tragedy.25. In Areopagitica, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes respectively. Anthony Grafton notes that “By the sixteenth century … Italian had become not only a literary language but a classical one in its own right.” Anthony Grafton, The new science and the traditions of humanism, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, edited by Jill Kraye, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 203-223, at 204. In taking up this adornment of his own language, Milton begins to bridge the gap between his lofty goals in Of Education and the obstacles real life imposed on most citizens becoming polyglot polymaths by legal adulthood. After all, Milton reminds the polyhistor at the beginning even of this early treatise why we learn languages: “though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.” But the young educator naively went on to predict that learning all the tongues of Babel would not prove “more difficult than I imagine, and that imagination presents me with nothing but very happy and very possible according to best wishes, if God have so decreed, and this age have spirit and capacity enough to apprehend.”26. Milton, Of Education, 971, 981. The Harvard Miltonist Douglas Bush wrote nearly a century ago: “When we think of the Renaissance humanist’s limitless faith in the possibilities of education, we may remember among other things that the faith was not annually sapped by the spectacle of alumni reunions.”27. Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1939), 77-78. The middle-aged Milton was still pleading with his age to show the spirit and capacity his youthful faith had foreseen. Before Milton would publish Paradise Lost, the great epic of the English language, the heroic liberal statesman Oliver Cromwell had fallen into monarchal pride and doomed the Republic by naming his son as his successor. Cromwell’s New Model Army—the first professional modern army in Europe—had become a tool for controlling Parliamentary debate. And the people of England had rejected Milton’s last ditch public plea, as that hostile alumnus of the Civil War Charles II marched towards London, to reject the House of Stuart once and for all, and establish a state modeled on the “old Athenian Commonwealth, reputed the first and ancientest place of civilitie in all Greece,” upheld by “schools and academies at their own choice, wherein their children may be bred up in their own sight to all learning and noble education, not in grammar only, but in all liberal arts and exercises. This would soon spread much more knowledge and civility, yea religion, through all parts of the land.”28. Milton, Ready and Easy Way, 1134. The people cheered the king’s return; the republic crumbled; Milton fled for his life, barely escaping execution for his public writings.

In Paradise Lost, the military engineering which the now elderly Milton had recommended in Of Education has become a demonic art which involves treating creation as raw materials, delving into the earth to turn its bones and sinews into ostentatious architectural piles, and inventing weapons (gunpowder, cannon) intended to shake the foundations of heaven itself. Philosophical speculation (whether natural or philosophical) is satirized, as Adam’s “studious thoughts abstruse” undermine the archangel Michael and Raphael’s admonishment to “be lowly wise” and care for “this Paradise and thy fair Eve”—Adam’s kingdom and his family.29. Milton, Paradise Lost 8.40. Milton no longer expects that classical epic, even in the English vernacular, can be democratized, hoping (realistically) for a “fit audience, though few” in the midst of the “barbarous dissonance” that characterizes his now failed political life.30. Milton, Paradise Lost 8.40; 7.31. Paradoxically, however, it is in the crucible of this dissonance of the earthly city that “Urania,” the muse of Christian poetry, finally answers Milton’s prayer of thirty years earlier (in the above-cited Reason of Church Government) that “the eternall Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge” would send “his Seraphim with the hallow’d fire of his Altar to touch and purify the lips” of a man of unclean lips, dwelling among a people of unclean lips. Having sacrificed the life of the philosopher, in short, Milton finally achieves his vision of the national writer of epic and tragedy (the most rhetorical and political of the belles-lettres), with a “power beside the office of a pulpit to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility.” And while Paradise Lost and Areopagitica failed to establish a republic in his own land, they quickly found many willing students on this side of the Atlantic.

Conclusion:

In his surprisingly Augustinian essay “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” Leo Strauss recounts the failure of the 17th c. philosopher-scientist to popularize his own encyclopedic path, and concedes that our age, like Milton’s, lacks the spirit or capacity to make even a far less ambitious curriculum the preserve of more than a very small cadre of preternaturally gifted individuals:

We are indeed compelled to be specialists, but we can try to specialize in the most weighty matters or, to speak more simply and more nobly, in the one thing needful. As matters stand, we can expect more immediate help from the humanities rightly understood than from the sciences, from the spirit of perceptivity and delicacy than from the spirit of geometry. If I am not mistaken, this is the reason why liberal education is now becoming almost synonymous with the reading in common of the Great Books. No better beginning could have been made. We must not expect that liberal education can ever become universal education. It will always remain the obligation and the privilege of a minority.31. Strauss, “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 24.

Despite Milton’s outgrowing of the utopian idealism of his Of Education (due largely to England’s reunion with the victoriously returning alumnus of the Civil War, Charles II), his own turn back to the spoken word (he composed Paradise Lost orally, reciting roughly 10 lines every morning to his secretary) remains fully in line with that earlier treatise’s elevation of Ciceronian rhetoric as the ultimate end of education. Phil Donnelly (the founder of one of the leading Protestant centers of classical education, Baylor’s Great Texts program) has recently noted that the study of rhetoric and of “Great Books” are often “assumed, in the classroom and in the curriculum, to be unrelated or, at least, related only by accident. Such a presumed disconnection between the study of rhetoric and the study of Great Texts is, I suggest, a missed opportunity.”32. Phil Donnelly, “Demonic Deliberation as Rhetorical Revelation in Paradise Lost,” Principia 1.1 (2022), 43. This is an opportunity we can no longer afford to miss.

Nor can this mean simply adding yet another subject (“Eloquence 101”) to the curriculum. There is a desire among many in the Christian classical education movement to reverse engineer a young John Milton and produce cultured, well-read students who are free and virtuous without falling behind on any of the STEM and testing requirements of state schooling. If asked, “What is a classical education for?” the answer would be something like the Renaissance humanist ideal of “universal knowledge.” (It is worth stressing again that John Milton dedicated the first 30 years of his independently wealthy life entirely to pursuing this goal before beginning a career or marrying and starting a family.) Functionally, the attempt to cram this pursuit into 18 years, and the insistence that a classical education is something every 18-year-old can and should have achieved, ends up meaning that a “classical education” is everything everywhere all at once.

This may largely explain the widespread problem of “burnout” among parents, students, and especially teachers in these contexts. The firehose approach works better in a classical curriculum catalog than it does on a human child. We need to simplify. We cannot expect a teenager to master the arts of the ancients and the pursuits of modern science. Conversely, while tradition can give us a model here, we should not be so conservative in our approach that we cannot creatively deploy that model in the context of 21st c. American society. For instance, the meteoric rise of programs like ChatGPT forces us to be more iconoclastic than the Christian classical education movement has been up to now. Most great texts seminars, for instance, are still oriented toward students producing a research-and-analysis paper, which has its scholarly roots in the late 17th-century Royal Society and its pedagogical development in the Prussian universities of the 19th century. It is all too seductively easy for students to outsource this major project to an Artificial Intelligence, perhaps the world’s first true polyhistor.

The achievement of encyclopedia thus corresponds to a loss of the human speaker. To save humanism, we should return to the chief evaluative tool of medieval and Renaissance education: the public oration and disputation. Milton, for instance, took his Cambridge degrees based on a series of “Prolusions,” which he later published and can still be studied today. In a moment when audiobooks, podcasts, and rhetorical soundbytes shared widely online have come to dominate literature, commentary, and politics, there is an opportunity to cultivate virtue in the public arena by joining the old and the new and molding, not just pens, but tongues–small members, but capable of setting the world ablaze. As we consider the best way forward as teachers who want to form virtuous leaders in society, we should be willing to query even such pillars of our contemporary classical schools as the research-and-analysis paper or (perhaps more controversially) the requisite 8-year-course of Greek or Latin.

We should be, in Augustine’s framing, more interested in “things” than in “signs.”33. The divisions of Books I and II of Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana. We turn to the past for wisdom and for instruction in communicating that wisdom persuasively in our own context. As Milton argues even in Of Education, “we do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek, as might be learnt otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.”34. Milton, Of Education, 971. Milton almost certainly overestimated how much could be learned easily and delightfully by most people in that year, but something of the point stands, echoed by the pragmatic Renaissance Frenchman Michel de Montaigne: “I would wish first to know my own language well, and that of my neighbours with whom I have most dealings. Greek and Latin are undoubtedly an admirable ornament, but we buy them too dearly.”35. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, trans. John Florio (New York: Modern Library, 1933), I.26, ‘Of the education of children’ Part of the cost is that we leave too little time for in-depth study of the end of grammar—eloquence, gained through the practice of imitation and translation which we have seen exemplified by Cicero, Augustine, and Milton. A course of rhetorical education via the study of a limited canon of great texts, either originally composed in English or in outstanding (preferably canonical) translations. The majority of students will rely on these translations, which should balance fidelity to the original ideas with modeling an excellent English style. None of our students will ever make a Latin oration in a school board meeting, from the pulpit, or on the floor of Congress. Should they be so esoteric as to try, they would fail (comically) to teach, delight, or move their audience.

Nor should they try; like Italian, English has become a classical language in its own right, with a rich canon of the highest genres. The Romans could look back to Greek models like Aeschylus, Homer, Demosthenes, and Thucydides as they studied their own primary classical corpus of Seneca, Virgil, Tacitus and Cicero. Americans can look back to the Englishmen Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon and Churchill as we study our own Hawthorne, Melville, Jefferson and Lincoln. Pious Romans could look back to the Greek Plato and Aristotle as they contemplated the divine. Two English texts have shaped the way that Americans (like our linguistic and cultural ancestors Shakespeare and Milton) speak to and about God—The King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.36. While both have been modernized / adapted in America (The NKJV and the ESV; the American prayerbooks of 1789, 1928, and 1979, and the various Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran abridgements), they remain the standard. See, for instance, the entry for the Prayerbook in the Encyclopedia Britannica: ”The Book of Common Prayer has also influenced or enriched the liturgical language of most English-speaking Protestant churches.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/Book-of-Common-Prayer. The great Roman Catholic Douay-Rheims translation and even some Roman Anglophone liturgies are themselves based on these two texts. As the above list begins to make clear, then, an Anglophone classical education will be an inherently Protestant education.

100 years ago, Allen Oscar Hansen, a professor at Columbia University’s prestigious Teachers College, published what he called an exposition of sources and a source book entitled Liberalism and American Education in the Eighteenth Century. The title implies what the work is about. Liberalism, so the book says, played an outsized and perhaps even definitive role in shaping American education and the formation of the American republic in the years following the Patriot victory over the British Empire in 1781. The new nation, Hansen believed, was affected by the two great propositions of the liberal Enlightenment. Those were the infinite perfectibility of man, and the destructive tendency of fixed institutions of church and state, the bedrock values of the liberal order. In the ensuing 100 years since 1926, most American educators and educational institutions have affirmed the idea that American education has its roots in liberalism. But a closer reading of the history of education, and particularly collegiate and university education in the United States, reveals that American education’s truest roots did not lie in liberalism, or in the rejection of churchly influence on education, or in the rejection of the citizen’s or family’s duty to state service. American education’s roots were in the Protestant intellectual tradition birthed in the sixteenth century and carried forward by Americans well into the twentieth century. Liberalism’s dominance came only in the twentieth century, well after Protestant churchmen and intellectuals laid the foundations of American education. Those foundations were manifested in the great universities that became the Ivy League and others, and in the commitment of government, churches, and families to education oriented towards things divine and natural. Perhaps most importantly for Protestant intellectuals considering education in the twenty-first century, religion and the law of nature’s God—instead of individualistic civil liberties historically tied to liberalism—were seen as the bedrock necessities for society by Protestant educators.

State universities in the nineteenth century were hardly liberal by the standards of even their own times. Most were administered by conservative Protestant ministers, and most of those ministers rejected the Enlightenment foundations of liberalism. As Europe collapsed into chaos in the wake of the liberal revolutions of 1848, Andrew Wylie, a Presbyterian-turned-Episcopal minister and president of Indiana University, took the occasion to warn his students about the nature of liberal so-called freedom. Wylie sneered at “the three words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which the French People sang and shouted with so much enthusiasm, near the close of the last century, and which their children are singing and shouting now, with enthusiasm as great, and more enlightened.” But, Wylie warned,

“as in the mouths of the mob then, and the mob now, these words stand for things which are incompatible, which never had, nor ever can have existence in any form of Social Life, nor any where, except in the incoherent dreams and disordered fancies of such madmen as those who tried fifty years ago to realize them in France, and force them upon the other nations of Europe.”

The revolutionary project “failed, not at Waterloo, but all along from the very first bloody step, to that last in the desolating track in which it moved; it failed utterly.” Yes, Wylie admitted, “some good resulted, as some good results from all projects; but not enough, one would think, to encourage a repetition of the experiment. Brute force cannot govern, much less renovate.”

Wylie found the very idea of equality as articulated by the Enlightenment and French Revolution to be fundamentally laughable: “Equality! What equality? In some one thing and not in all things? If not in all things, and to all persons, equality is the very height of in-equality, iniquity, injustice. In all things, and to all, do you then say? Well: try it; and see.” Even if revolutionaries did get their so-called equalized and individualized society, it would still be filled with “injustice,” and “much cruelty.” The principle of equality would “destroy the vital principle of social life, and reduce to barbarism the nation that should adopt, or permit it.”1. Andrew Wylie, Baccalaureate Addressed to the Senior Class at the Commencement, September, 1848 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Tribune, 1848).

Wylie saw in egalitarianism the rise of anarchy, and he committed his university to stand against those who would tear down government, which he saw as the foundation of property and family. “Social Life,” he declared, “is founded on the right of property, which means simply this, that a man should enjoy a portion of what his labor actually produces.” In a statement sure to horrify libertarians, Wylie argued that individuals should not have the whole of a nation’s property, “for government must have a share; since government is the watch-dog without whose aid a man could enjoy nothing at all of the fruit of his labor.” Without government, warned Wylie, “every man must be his own watch-dog, and consequently have no time to labor:—he would have to act as becomes a watch-dog:—and he would turn into a savage wolf at last, prowling through the uncultivated waste for prey—alone or with his kindred gang.”

Wylie impressed upon his students the divine and natural authority and origin of government. Natural law-informed government, Wylie believed, reflected the Creator God. In a state university in the nineteenth century, students were taught to recognize the authority of nature, nature’s God, and the authority of government that recognized natural law and, by inference, the Christian religion. Of government’s need, Wylie left no doubts: “There must be government. Government is as the breath of life to man’s social nature. And, though to the ignorant it sounds like a contradiction, man, as a social being, can be free only in being governed.” A governed man was a free man. Law preceded freedom. “That is the best government which gives to the different powers with which The Blessed and Only Potentate endows each individual, when imparting to him his existence, the most free and perfect scope for exercise.” All men were equal in God’s eyes, but God had not placed every man on a so-called equal footing in human society. The government that governed best recognized that social hierarchies existed, and made laws accordingly. Government, then, used different types of power on different types of citizens. “As these powers are exceedingly diversified, so will be their exercise and its result, production, wherever this freedom is enjoyed.” Some were “better fitted by nature for one kind of work, and another for another; and the complex business of social life goes on to the best advantage for all, when each is left to employ the gifts which the Author of nature has bestowed upon him.” Law had to recognize differences in social value and knowledge:

If a law were enacted that the same rate of wages should be paid for mending a broken gate, as for setting a bone; for making fences, as for making laws; for constructing rat-traps, as for building organs; for steering a ferry-boat, as for navigating a frigate; for butchering pigs, as for commanding an army; for laying out roads in the interiour, as for making a trigonometrical survey of the coast; such a law would be as foolish as unjust, for it could not be enforced.

The president of Indiana’s state university summed it up for his students. Inequality was a fact; government needed to realize it; students needed to learn it. “In the march of life,” Wylie stated, “all cannot be foremost. ‘Wherever there is motion there must be precedence. Gradation is Nature’s law. Man is not exempt from it, in any condition of his social existence.’” There was, he soberly reminded his students, “equality in the grave; but nowhere else on earth.”2. Wylie, Baccalaureate Addressed to the Senior Class at the Commencement, September, 1848, 5-7.

Protestant education in the nineteenth century remained comfortable with hierarchy. Daniel Coit Gilman, the educational innovator who served as the inaugural president of Johns Hopkins, saw the roots of American education in Puritan New England. The ideas of the Declaration of Independence only mattered inasmuch as they conformed to the prior commitments of the Puritans. “From the days of the Puritan minister, who gave his name to our oldest University, and the days of the London merchant, who endowed the second college in New England, each generation has surpassed its predecessors.” It was, said Gilman, “a striking coincidence that among the very earliest names on this heraldic roll is that which our foundation bears. The schools which Edward Hopkins, a colonial governor, established in 1660, by his will, and his gifts to Harvard, still keep alive his name and influence.” Gilman hoped that the “name of our founder live for more than two hundred years to come, and his gifts be immortal.” Johns Hopkins, Gilman continued, might have used the very words of Cromwellian Puritan Edward Hopkins, who desired to bestow “some encouragement for the breeding up of hopeful youths, for the public service of the country in future times.’” Gilman conjectured “a spiritual if not a physical descent in the line of Hopkins. In 1676, the name is written on the door of an endowed grammar school at New Haven, older than Yale, and second only to Harvard; in 1776, the name is signed to the Declaration of Independence; in 1876, it distinguishes a University Foundation.” And the colonial university foundation was not liberty, fraternity, and equality. Colleges existed for “the promotion of religion, science and charity.”

To perform their true function, colleges could not, and should not, allow students every so-called intellectual freedom they demanded. True college education implied as a “general rule, restriction rather than freedom; tutorial rather than professorial guidance; residence within appointed bounds; the chapel, the dining hall, and the daily inspection.” Colleges theoretically stood “in loco parentis; it does not afford a very wide scope; it gives a liberal and substantial foundation on which the university instruction may be wisely built.”3. Addresses at the Inauguration of Daniel C. Gilman, as President of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, February 22, 1876 (Baltimore, MD: John Murphy, 1876), 19, 32.

Despite the presence of a chapel and a commitment to Christianity in education, Gilman wanted Johns Hopkins to be a non-sectarian institution. This was not because he wanted to free the citizen from the control of Christianity or the American nation, but because he believed that a university “will doubtless serve both church and state the better because it is free from the guardianship of either.” A non-sectarian college was a place where “students would gladly cease to discuss sectarian animosities and political prejudices, in their eagerness for the acquisition of Knowledge and their search for Eternal Truth.” Gilman realized, however, that Johns Hopkins was an outlier. In the United States, “almost every strong institution of learning is either ‘a child of the church’ or ‘a child of the state,’ and is thus liable to political or ecclesiastical control.”

Even after the founding of Johns Hopkins and the rise of nonsectarian colleges, many Americans remained children of the church via their educations. Ecclesiastical leadership in the major Protestant denominations recognized the enduring power of religion in the United States’ educational milieu. Bishop James Hervey Otey pushed the Protestant Episcopal Church to prioritize education and particularly Christian education. At the church’s General Convention in 1859, he used his sermon—later published as “Christian Education”—to emphasize the societal benefits of Christian education. Few other topics, argued Otey, could “more fitly claim the serious consideration of a Christian assembly, or the anxious reflections of American citizens, or the deep and pious thoughts of the right reverend fathers, ministers and brethren composing this council of the church” than the importance of Christian education. “This is not a subject, which may or ought to awaken interest, only in the bosoms of Christian parents. Its range is wide enough to embrace all the families of the land.” Christian education’s influence extended “to many other interests than those merely of domestic life. It is the boast of our countrymen that their social well-being is not dependent for its source nor for its continuance on the circumstances which may surround an individual.” Just because someone was not religious did not mean they should not receive a Christian education.4. James Hervey Otey, Christian Education: A Sermon Before the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church United States of America at Saint Paul’s Church the city of Richmond on Wednesday, October 5, 1859, (Richmond, VA: 1859), 6-7 Societal change and the quixotic nature of humans in general formed the chief reason why Christian education needed to be given to American children. Christianity alone offered a metaphysic enduring enough to withstand societal change.

“Many of us,” he told his fellow bishops, “will probably live to see the sceptre of our civil condition transferred, and the destinies of this nation, social and religious, intellectual and moral, public and individual, pass into the hands of the little beings whose minds are now occupied with the toys of childhood.”

There was, however, no guarantee that the present generation of children would be virtuous republicans as adults. “The next race of the sovereign people may be as degenerate as the successor of an absolute monarch.” History in the form of the Roman Republic and the French Revolution offered a warning to Americans on the inherently unstable nature of republican societies:

The voice of history proclaims the grave and impressive lesson, that the glories of republics have been evanescent—that their energies have become effete and languid, in the transmission through fewer generations than those of some hereditary dynasties. They seem to resemble those vegetable productions which bloom more magnificently, and bear a richer fruitage, but arrive at earlier decay and decrepitude. How shall we, on whom the care of ours is now incumbent, maintain the vital principle with undiminished healthfulness and vigor, that it may flourish for us, and for those who follow after us? There is but one method, and that method is obvious; it is easy, and it is secure, if faithfully pursued.

“Here,” Otey reminded the bishops, “within our reach, under our almost unlimited control, and in a ductile state, is the very material on whose shape the stability of our institutions must depend.” Without religious education, Otey suggested, there could be no stable republican foundation for society.

Otey and most other Protestant churchmen forcefully maintained that American institutions depended on Christianity. Schooling, under largely Protestant control, provided institutions with stability through Christian philosophy and religious principles. “The alternative is before us either to leave that material to be moulded by external circumstances highly unfavorable, or to give it form by that plastic touch of education, whose moral impress the droppings of time can never efface, nor any stroke of accident destroy.” He quoted the aphorism that “The child is father to the man.” Foundations of character and destiny “of every individual element of that rational multitude whose mind will sway the world of thirty years hence, will be laid permanently and indestructibly before it has attained the twelfth year of its being.” By the time a child turned into a teenager, they would either be educated as a Christian, or they would be educated as something else: “Subsequent influences may strengthen or impair that foundation, but they never can displace it.”

Bishop Otey rejected the notion that “the characters of men” resulted “from their own investigations: the patterns are not selected and approved by a mature judgment: they are formed by the combined development of those associations and sympathies of childhood, from whose abiding influence no reasonings or efforts of mature years will ever entirely emancipate them.” The choice for the Episcopal Church was clear, warned Otey: “You must communicate, or you must withhold from that wave of human society which follows after you, and will soon rise in your place, those principles whose infusion will make it pure, and whose absence will cause it to spread bitterness, corruption and desolation wherever it rolls.”5. James Hervey Otey, Christian Education: A Sermon Before the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church United States of America at Saint Paul’s Church the city of Richmond on Wednesday, October 5, 1859, 6-7

The belief that God could be removed from education worried Otey. Such presumptions, warned Otey, were “prevalent and dangerous.” Unless this anti-religious trend was “very soon checked, this nation will in a few years be made lamentably, mournfully and woefully sensible.” Dechristianized education was, Otey noted, “advocated sometimes explicitly and often impliedly by men who are set as watchmen for the defence of society from the incursions of moral and religious evil; and yet it virtually admits the claims of infidelity.” These assumptions were “precisely the principle which was preached by skeptics of the last century, and was in truth the fruitful parent of that direful progeny of evils which the world witnessed in the excesses and horrors of the French revolution.”6. Otey, Christian Education. Bishops like Otey desired true denominational colleges for Episcopalians, and he was instrumental in founding the Episcopal Church-run University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. But denominational colleges, as important as they were, were still seen as secondary to the primary educational institution of the American republic: the family. Protestant thinkers from Lyman Beecher to William G. T. Shedd to Robert Lewis Dabney saw education as essentially starting at home. Americans worried over challenges to families’ ability to educate their children. The rise of the Industrial Revolution led some European countries to see mass schooling as a way of alleviating poverty. The subsequent rise of the market economy and the presence of vocational schools elicited concern among bishops and rectors, who feared that parents would neglect catechesis and Bible classes in favor of education focused solely on vocational prosperity.

Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, the rector of Grace Church in New York City and a future bishop, warned parents about the perils of prioritizing vocational training over religious education. “How differently,” Wainwright told his congregants, “are you instructed in the world. There you learn that advancement in the present life is to be the all-important object of attention.” Secular education taught parents that they were “to bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the teachers of useful and ornamental accomplishments.” This worldly education regime told parents that they “must assiduously prepare them to make their way in society, and you find those esteemed the most successful and enviable parents, whose children obtain the largest portion of worldly honours and emoluments.”7. Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, Sermons Upon Religious Education and Filial Duty (New York, NY: T. and J. Swords, G. Long, E. Bliss, and G.C. and H. Carvill, 1829). Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch statesman and cleric, saw the religious family as the fundamental educator of children. “The father,” thundered Kuyper, “is the only lawful person, called by nature and called to this task, to determine the choice of school for his child. To this we must hold fast. This is the prime truth in the whole schools issue.” The most basic axiom of education was that “parental rights must be seen as a sovereign right in this sense, that it is not delegated by any other authority, that it is inherent in fatherhood and motherhood, and that it is given directly from God to the father and mother.” Moral and religious nurture of children could “only succeed when we begin by seeking out the inclinations and tendencies within the child and bring those to consciousness. And this we can only measure according to what is in us. Just as a mother nurses her infant at her breast, so also with this nurture, our own consciousness must teach us what consciousness is in our child.” Parents’ rights concerned “the principled continuity of the generations. That which you find strange, you cannot give to your child.” True education only existed when “the treasure of moral and religious life that is in the heart of the father, is transferred to the heart of the child.”

As the nineteenth century progressed in Europe and the United States, educational reformers subtly questioned whether parents were necessary for the education of children. Public schools became the special instrument of political liberals, pursuing utopian schemes of universal liberty, fraternity, and equality, the very fantasies Andrew Wylie warned his students against in 1848. At the end of the nineteenth century, Americans and Europeans saw an inevitable educational disaster emanating from liberal government schools. Liberals were not, warned Kuyper, “content to raise their own children as full-blooded liberals, so long as the children of their neighbor (who exceeded the number of their own children by ten percent) were raised in an opposite manner.” Liberals’ secular universalizing dreams translated into national tyranny. State schools tyrannically extended their “reach over the entire land.” Tyrannical schools, warned Kuyper, had more power to shape society than even a tyrannical state. Liberals would only accept a society wherein “the liberal state-school in which they set the tone and inspired all the people with that tone,” was the total educator. Only then, after a tyrannical imposition of government power that the Medievals would have ever dreamed of, was the liberal “position in our land safe.” Liberalism, from being committed to freedom, used state power to coerce Christian families into an educational milieu they did not want. Kuyper therefore rejected secular and liberal education because it was tyrannical. God had said “in his Word that the parents are the first ones responsible for the children.” The new educators, he moaned, did not “want to hear anything of this parental right” because they believed that the “child is the responsibility of the state…and not of the parents. You must entrust the nurture of your child to the teachers that they choose.” Liberal educators were “as afraid of true freedom as they are of death.” Kuyper’s final message for educational liberals was simple. “Stay away from our children!”8. Abraham Kuyper, Jordan Ballor ed., On Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), editor’s introduction.

Kuyper’s prioritization of the household as the fundamental place for the education of children was shared by his American contemporary, Robert Lewis Dabney. The one-time chaplain to Thomas J. “Stonewall Jackson” taught as a professor of moral philosophy and theology at Hampden-Sydney College and then, after 1883, at the University of Texas. Dabney, like Kuyper, feared that secularism attacked natural and divine associations, particularly through institutions like secular government schools. Sean Michael Lucas, Dabney’s standard biographer, notes that both “Kuyper and Dabney recognized that modernism had the potential to remake society in both the American South and the Netherlands.” Modern secularism sprang “from a principle that substituted human in place of divine authority.” Modernity was, Dabney and Kuyper believed, de-Christianizing the West, “with disastrous results.” Both Kuyper and Dabney prioritized ordered liberty, and rejected the crown jewel of liberalism: individual rights. They preferred “social bond individualism,” essentially Christian communitarianism with a strong Protestant emphasis on economic freedom and individual human worth, “taught by God through general and special revelation and providentially established in local institutions, especially the household.”9. Sean Michael Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney: A Southern Presbyterian Life (P&R Publishing, 2005), 236. Among the most aggressive rejections of the idea of secular education was Dabney’s 1879 essay, fittingly named “Secularized Education” in Libby’s Princeton Review. Dabney’s essay addressed his concerns about the changing nature of education during the nascent Gilded Age. He served as a professor at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, before moving to the University of Texas in 1883. Dabney’s body of work and his teaching prowess made their mark in his own time, and his voluminous works continue to be read by historians and some theologians; his Syllabus and Notes of the Course of Systematic and Polemic Theology ran to 887 pages of text. Dabney’s support for the Confederacy and comfort with biblical defenses of slaveholding understandably cause modern historians and theologians to treat his works with caution. Nonetheless, his erudition and vision of education deserve consideration in an era when educational institutions are fighting for mission, stability, and even their existence in the face of growing societal iconoclasm and increasingly ossified ideologies that control state universities.10. Robert L. Dabney, “Secularized Education,” The Princeton Review (July-December, 1879): 377-400.

Religion, Dabney averred, was an antidote to ideological ossification that often occurred in colleges and universities. This sort of intellectual calcifying typifies much of American education in the second quarter of the twenty-first century. The late international studies professor Angelo Codevilla, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute and at the Claremont Institute, argued that the modern Western ruling class had been formed by “an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.” The taste and habits that inculcated university students over the last half-century “amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints.” The use of certain appropriate terms and the avoidance of wrong ones when referring to important cultural or social matters–what Codevilla called speaking the “in” language–ultimately “serves as a badge of identity” to maintain proper socio-cultural credentials in the regime.

Dabney, like Codevilla after him, understood that true liberal education was not credentialization in the service of maintaining a regime, but something entirely different. State education, warned Dabney, increasingly became education in the service of a faction. Buzzwords and faddish intellectual constructions were not transcendent or oriented towards the permanent things, but instead relied on unstable, quixotic societal moments and the state’s official approbation to maintain their place in intellectual life. The permanent things that underpinned a true liberal education all had divine origins, and so the truly educated person must understand the divine and theistic origins of learning. State-paid teachers who scrupulously avoided affirming or denying the divine origins of education would ultimately reduce their teaching to a mere shadow of what constituted true education. An educational regime that rejected or was agnostic on the question of the divine would ultimately have to be silent on the very foundations of liberal education. And the state, said Dabney, would mandate that silence. Liberal democratic societies, he warned, would become more censorious than despotic Rome ever was. Codevilla and Dabney believed that the best way to mitigate the power of the state to censure intellectual life was to keep parents involved in their children’s education. “Natural families,” wrote Codevilla, represented affections “into which government has difficulty intruding, and natural families educated the children they produce.” Because of this, the modern state and its education bureaucracy subaltern has done “its best to undermine marriage and to take as much authority from parents as it can.” Robert Lewis Dabney argued that while both parents and state educators were imperfect, the state could not feel parental love and would never be as self-denying and self-sacrificing as a parent. State-education, therefore, had no right or reason to assume the duties or prerogatives of parents.11. Angelo M. Codevilla, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It (New York, NY: Beaufort Books, 2023). Kindle, Chapter 2.

In 2026, a century downstream from Allen Oscar Hansen’s claims about liberalism and education, Protestant parents are reevaluating education, and returning to the Classical—and natural—aims that Protestant education prized until the twentieth century. Homeschooling and classical schooling are just two ways in which parents are taking back their rightful place in the educational order. Italian Reformer Girolamo Zanchi, notes David Haines, declared that the natural vocation of humans was the rearing and education of children. The promise of Protestant-influenced education is not, therefore, turning schools into factories of liberal democracy. It is creating spaces for humans to fulfill their generational duty to educate their children according to Classical and natural precepts. Anything less is neither Protestant nor an education.12. David Haines, “Why Protestants Need Natural Law,” American Reformer (17 May 2022).

The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2026)

Several years ago, I attended a conference devoted to the thought of Harvey Mansfield. At the conclusion, Professor Mansfield rose from his seat in the front row to give a few remarks. I remember the fascination I felt as he spoke slowly and softly of the “land of virtue” whose “beauties and difficulties” the ancient philosophers extolled. In this land lies a secret garden—the garden of tact, of those philosophers who know more than they say—where beautiful wildflowers are allowed to blossom. The great indictment of rights-obsessed liberalism, and its reactionary younger brother conservatism, is that they know almost nothing of the awesome, sun-drenched vistas of the land of virtue.

The reader may decide if I yielded that day to the siren song of Straussianism. Yet if true education always begins with wonder, Professor Mansfield has immense gifts as a teacher. The great books that have shaped the self-understanding and aspirations of the West are not dead artifacts, but living manifestations of flawed genius that have an innate power to fascinate. Nor do they exist in isolation; they form prominent landmarks in a great conversation, emerging from a common spiritual and cultural history that reaches across the centuries. In reading them, we read ourselves.

Professor Mansfield’s ability to communicate the significance of great books is on display in The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy (2026). Mansfield here “transcribes” the undergraduate course on modern political thought that he taught at Harvard for over fifty years.1. The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, 310. (This is a venerable genre: Aristotle’s Politics is a compilation of lecture notes, as is Hegel’s Philosophy of History, which Mansfield exegetes at length.) He invites his students (readers) to encounter the great texts of the Western canon along with him, sprinkling his interpretations with charming editorial asides. “[T]o tell a secret,” reading Kant is easy as pie once you learn his terminology. Hegel’s great works, by contrast, are “a foreign land where home becomes a distant and unnecessary memory.” Yes, Nietzsche is thrilling to read, but “please try not to fall in love with him!” Mansfield grants his apprentices dignity and agency without abdicating his authority as a superior guide.

Professor Mansfield allows the great books to speak for themselves, claiming to offer only “a respectful and secondary guide to the higher guides.” Nevertheless, he wants to say something definite about them, to tell a cohesive story that is of more than historical interest. The subtitle, The History of Modern Political Philosophy, is instructive for those who are familiar with the Straussian distinction between the ancients and the moderns. The ancients (represented by Plato and Aristotle) were concerned with virtue; the moderns (beginning with Machiavelli) replaced virtue with self-interest and physical well-being. The ancients respected nature, including human nature, and sought a freedom in accordance with it; the moderns seek freedom from nature through rational calculation and the manipulation of matter. The original sin of modern philosophy is to lower the bar for human achievement below the moral potential and dignity of our nature and to hubristically proclaim the efficacy of human will—and the tools it makes for itself—to re-fashion reality in conformity with the modern standard.

The book’s subject matter, then, is the second act of this great drama, from Western man’s fall from grace to the moment when he exhausts the possibilities of his dogged self-reliance and feels the full consequences of his fall. “Rational control” is both the essence and the means of realizing the modern ideal of freedom. This is freedom from both God and nature, and it is born in man’s mind when he discovers that he is alone in the world with no one to be grateful to. This presents a distressing challenge—because man now must provide for his own necessities without help from beneficent powers—but also a thrilling possibility—because man now may change the world as he sees fit without restraints of religion, tradition, or the normative laws of nature.

According to Mansfield, modern political philosophy has a coherent “internal history” because it consists of self-conscious efforts by great philosophers who correct and build on each other in working out one central idea. On the Straussian view, if human history at large is one damn thing after another, the history of philosophy is made by men who rise above the vagaries of historical change to articulate ideas that cross barriers of time, space, and language. Great philosophers are founders.

Hence Machiavelli, with whom the book begins, is the true founder of modernity. His philosophy gave birth to the staggering technological and scientific changes of the subsequent centuries—rather than those changes giving birth to a theoretical justification post hoc, as a Marxist interpretation of history would have it. Machiavelli invented the idea of rational truth when he elevated “effectual truth” over the received truths of philosophy and religion. Reason becomes a means of control by which man reckons with his natural nakedness and helplessness—his “necessity”—rather than a means of understanding the world as it is given. The politics of rational control requires rulers to exercise “indirect government” over those who believe themselves to be free, and Machiavelli must mask his own teaching lest the deceitful aspect of political rule be fully exposed.

In the next phase of Mansfield’s narrative, Hobbes and Locke (two Englishmen) pick up where the revolutionary Italian left off. Hobbes, who “would be the founder of modern political science” if not for Machiavelli, domesticated Machiavellianism, recasting it in abstract, scientific terms and orienting it toward the modest goal of self-preservation. Man uses his reason not to discern and conform to nature (as in a Christian natural law thinker like Aquinas), but to escape from the “state of nature” regardless of the will of God. Locke’s project of rational constitutionalism is along the same lines, and the fact that his teachings are more palatable than Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’s only means that his fraud was more subtle and complete than theirs.

The turning point of the narrative comes with Rousseau, who called the modern project into question by pointing out the historicity of reason itself. For Rousseau, man’s radical freedom within history, not his reason, is his defining characteristic. The discovery of “History” as a central category leads to a radicalization, not a rejection, of the project of rational control. Now we must make ourselves as rational beings before we can remake our world, and both actions are understood primarily as expressions of human freedom, unbounded by nature and God.

The remainder of the book is devoted to German thinkers. Kant, Hegel, and Marx develop the Rousseauian discovery of History, which now becomes an inevitable vehicle of human progress, reintroducing a secularized teleology into human development. For Hegel, the proud author of World History, history (still more of a problem than a promise for Kant) is the progressive actualization of a reason that replaces nature and God.

Nietzsche’s “postmodernism” finally exploded the modern ideal of freedom without transcending modernity. Mansfield calls him “the fundamental philosopher of our time.” Nietzsche announced that the developments of modern history had led, not to the culmination of human reason and freedom, but to nihilism—the end of history in a negative sense. Nietzsche rebuked the dead end of historicism in favor of a human creativity that soars above history, and in doing so he returned to a conception of nature and to a corresponding “philosophy-religion.” In the old age of the modern idea, freedom comes to mean “the escape from human necessities, from the history we have made for ourselves, back into the arms of God and nature.”

Mansfield quietly concludes that the failure of the ideal of rational control should lead us to wonder whether “the original mistake was to define an opposition between freedom and nature”—whether, after all, we ought to return to ancient virtue in accordance with nature. History cannot be undone, so we might aim for a “reworked liberalism” that maintains something of the modern emphasis on individual rights and bodily welfare, but reintegrates the concerns of the soul.

As an apprentice in the practice of political philosophy, I owe masters like Professor Mansfield a great respect and deference. Without pretending to offer a wholesale evaluation or critique of the book, I will pose a few questions and critical comments from the standpoint of an inquisitive student.

Mansfield speaks candidly about being an intellectual heir of Leo Strauss, but I remain puzzled about his pedagogical purposes (being without formal Straussian training myself). For example, what is the reason for expounding Machiavelli’s ideas—including the secrets and contradictions—with such seductive force? There are moments when one forgets that Mansfield is deeply critical of the modern project Machiavelli founded. On the one hand, maybe such a compelling reconstruction of a dangerous thinker’s ideas could have the indirect result of corrupting the youth, who are too easily dazzled by a transgressive genius. On the other hand, by the logic of esotericism, to bare Machiavelli’s veiled agenda before the public (if that is what Mansfield aims to do) would be to neuter him. More generally, does Mansfield think that public philosophy is a tenable and prudent undertaking, as the publication of this book for a general audience would seem to imply? Or must the true activity of philosophical education continue to take place in private, between a trusted teacher and his select students?

Another lingering question concerns the relationship of Christianity and modernity. To the prodigal sons of modernity who have exhausted themselves in their flight from nature and God, Mansfield exhorts a return to nature—but not, we must note, to God. He ascribes to modern philosophy and society a fundamental hostility to God and religion, and he seems to find modern critiques of Christianity to be powerful and modern reinterpretations of Christianity (such as Hegel’s) to be dishonest and unconvincing. He briefly acknowledges an important counternarrative in his discussion of Hegel, who points to Machiavelli’s contemporary Martin Luther as the true father of modernity. Perhaps there is more to unpack in Hegel’s claim that “The essence of the Reformation [is that] man is in his very nature destined to be free.”2. See, for example, the thesis of Ernst Troeltsch, who interpreted Luther (along with Calvin) as the unwitting father of a wayward stepchild, modern freedom. Luther’s proclamation of the freedom of the individual conscience before God was dislodged from its theological and institutional context to become the inspiration for a radical reformation of religion, politics, and society that eventually overturned medieval Church-civilization. Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World, trans. W. Montgomery (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958). Certainly Machiavelli pays lip service to traditional Christianity to serve un- or anti-Christian ends. But how might we read Hobbes, Locke, or Hegel differently if we do not presume an inherent incompatibility between modern philosophy and Christian theology? Might Christianity in fact contain the seeds of modernity, granted that they were transplanted from their native soil by thinkers whose philosophical and political concerns outweighed strictly theological ones?

I am also curious about Mansfield’s comments on liberalism at the end of the book. Is his suggestion that we tutor liberalism rather than reject it based on a normative judgment about the truth and value of liberalism, or a prudential judgment informed by a sense of historical constraint? Maybe a more spiritual and virtue-oriented reinterpretation of liberalism would do violence to the essential idea of liberalism—similarly to how, on Mansfield’s telling, modern reinterpretations of Christianity impose alien schemes of thought onto traditional theological claims to make the latter more politically salutary. If that were the case, would tutored liberalism necessarily involve a certain benevolent deception? Granted, this book is primarily an exercise in historical and philosophical self-understanding, not a proposal for action. Mansfield directs us to study Tocqueville, Aristotle, and the U.S. Constitution for a fuller understanding of the possibilities of reforming liberalism. But his terse and suggestive conclusion still provides much food for thought.

Finally, as Mansfield traced the dramatic development and demise of modernity, I kept wishing for a more satisfying account of why the idea of modern freedom should emerge late in human history to revolutionize the world. If nature is real and does not change, such that the human capacity to rebel against God and nature originates in human nature, is there not something unaccountable in history having a distinct shape? To be sure, we can never adequately “explain” a great philosopher or founder (as Machiavelli may be), and such men may indeed have the power to shape epochs. But it still seems mysterious that modernity would take on the aspect of a great unfolding drama, a narrative whole in which individual actors and events carry out their assigned roles. Would not the author of such a drama be a kind of god?

Perhaps such riddles are unanswerable, at least in the domain of philosophy (as Straussians define it). In that case, we could make peace with leaving them unresolved. However, we might also turn to the tradition of Christian political thought, which claims to be inspired and guided by a “sacred history” authoritatively revealed.3. For an excellent treatment of the concept of sacred history from an Augustinian perspective, see R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 1970), ch. 1. On this premise, it can claim to out-narrate some of the elements of modernity elucidated so profoundly by Mansfield.

To take one example, Augustine’s account of earthly politics as the realm of necessity, coercion, and violence is not unlike Machiavelli’s. Augustine observes that political communities are rarely oriented by a substantive common good, but more often by a shared commitment to worldly ambition and the satisfaction of conflicting private desires. The tower of Babel expressed man’s desire to dominate the entire world in a usurpation of God’s office; the confusion of languages is a fitting punishment and mechanism of restraint, since “a ruler’s power of domination is wielded by his tongue.”4. Augustine, City of God XVI.4, trans. Bettenson (Penguin, 2004), 658. Notice the anticipation of “modern” developments as Mansfield interprets them: technological progress that enables man to wield control over his world is the logical fruition of his deadly idea—that of asserting his freedom and mastery over and against God and the limitations of his nature.

For Luther’s great teacher Augustine, the lust for domination (libido dominandi) and other vicious desires that corrupt politics are always latent in fallen man, but the gradual triumph of man’s imperial ambitions permitted by divine providence constitutes a tangible historical development. As Oliver O’Donovan writes, “[w]orld history…does assume a shape, and the evolution of a pacified and civilized world government is the key to it.”5. Oliver O’Donovan, “The Political Thought of City of God 19,” in Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present (Eerdmans, 2003), 69. Though God works through the history of human kingdoms to achieve his redemptive purposes, that history considered in itself is “a demonic history… What appears to be civilizational progress is, in fact, on the moral and spiritual level, self-defeating.” Augustine’s problem, then, “is not to conceive of progress within the political realm, but to distance himself from it, retaining the perspective that God brings the pretensions of the proud to naught.” Elsewhere, O’Donovan suggests that the idolatrous and imperialistic aspect of history is all the more pronounced in our own age—the age between Christ’s triumphal ascension and his second coming—as the human and demonic rebellion against the Kingdom of God revealed once and for all in Christ grows to a fever pitch.6. See Oliver O’Donovan, “History and Politics in the Book of Revelation,” in Bonds of Imperfection, 25–47, esp. 35–36. If we take such theological insights seriously, the history of man’s self-defeating attempts to assert his prideful freedom—which is called “progress”—is contextualized in a greater story. This act of the drama is bracketed by other crucial events: man’s creation by God in true freedom according to his nature; his catastrophic original rebellion and fall; and the restoration and perfection of his fallen nature through the grace of Christ, which makes the true politics of virtue and fellowship possible once again—though not fully until the end of the age.

Professor Mansfield has masterfully traced the rise and fall of an idea within a philosophical tradition. But the great Christian theologians warn us to expect no decisive fall of man’s hubristic desire for control, which he expresses in his philosophy, his politics, and his scientific and technological innovations, until the true King returns who will judge the nations and “rule them with a rod of iron” (Rev. 2:27).

There is a genre of literature that has long performed the useful office of mocking the best that has been thought and said in the world. Wherever lofty ideas have arisen, irritable humorists have taken up arms to knock them down. Northrop Frye dubbed this genre “anatomy” (he was thinking of Robert Burton’s masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy, and he accordingly named his own magnum opus Anatomy of Criticism). Usually, it is called “Menippean satire.”

The brilliance of a Menippean satire seems to be in proportion to the profundity of the idea it attacks. It took the genius of Voltaire to make fun of the modal metaphysics of G.W. Leibniz. In his Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz argued that, however imperfect our world might seem, it is in fact the best world that God could have made, as evident in the simplicity of the natural laws by which it brings about the rich abundance of creation.1. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, trans. George Montgomery (Chicago: The Open Court, 1908), 11. Not unlike Augustine in the Confessions, Leibniz also held that seeming flaws in the cosmic order would ultimately work themselves out for the good of the whole.2. See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E.M. Huggard (Chicago: The Open Court, 1985), 129, 137. In Voltaire’s Candide, this philosophy appears in Pangloss’s defense of the syphilis that is killing him:

It was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not in an island of America caught this disease, which contaminates the source of life, frequently even hinders generation, and which is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal.3. Voltaire, Candide, trans. Philip Littell (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1918), 15.

Voltaire uses fiction to transform Leibniz into a pathetic buffoon, so consistent in his principles that he is willing to justify a horrific infection as a good trade for chocolate and fabric dye.

The purpose of a work like Candide is not to refute anything or to offer an alternative intellectual model. Rather, it is to burst the bubble of intellectualism altogether. Voltaire’s book famously ends with Candide’s deflationary plea: “All that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden.” The moral is that there are healthier things to do than to erect metaphysical systems.

Frye gives a useful synopsis of this species of fictional writing, in contradistinction to the novel: “The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect, as a kind of maddened pedantry which the philosophus gloriosus at once symbolizes and defines.”4. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 309. The satirist, in response, “shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon.” In Voltaire’s Pangloss, we get such an avalanche of Leibnizian jargon. Voltaire proves himself, not exactly wiser than Leibniz, but healthier, wittier, and more human.

Many fine satirical works have undertaken to lampoon, or “anatomize,” the heritage of liberal learning. They diagnose, through madcap storytelling, the intellectual diseases that afflict cultivated society. They take aim at curricula, canons, pedagogies, reforms, sublime beauties, and noble virtues. Yet these great books have had little place in our educational debates. It is hard to think of an issue that breeds as much pompous panegyric, or as much ingenious system-building, as education. There is plenty of venom, too, but every attack is accompanied by an alternative master plan. The glut of self-serious proposals, from both specialists and non-specialists, begins to make the whole subject tiresome—especially, one would think, to teachers and students, who know most intimately the elaborate regimen of absurdity that school-life can be.

Literary artists give voice to that sense of absurdity, which is present even when education seems to be doing its best. Bob Dylan knew how to dismiss the prestige of “the finest schools” with a petulant rhyme: “You know you only used to get / juiced in it.” But that barb is barely a taste of the rich tradition of poetry against pedagogy.

People who want to defend liberal learning should talk more about Menippean satire. It is, arguably, the genre most relevant to the theme of education. Far from being a threat to the educational enterprise, it is a natural outgrowth. It represents the last flowering of wisdom, when the mind turns its ruthless scrutiny back on itself. Without this ironic self-distancing, even sound ideas remain coarse and overearnest. We worship Lady Wisdom falsely if we cannot say with the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, “Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth.” Our defenses of learning are often mirthless and, therefore, easy targets for the skilled satirist.

Take, for instance (to pick on someone dead), this excerpt from Robert Maynard Hutchins’ The Great Conversation, the essay that prefaces the Great Books of the Western World series.

The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public (for man is a political animal). Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men.5. Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 13.

There is nothing wrong with the substance of this. University presidents have done far worse. And read in light of Hutchins’ and Adler’s historical mission to make great literature available to all classes of Americans, it even warms the heart.

It is also a bit heavy-handed. All that talk of “human excellence” and “man” and “ends.” This is the language of formal praise, and anyone who has listened to advocates of the liberal arts, the classical method, or the restoration of the humanities has heard it before. The rhetorical situation, perhaps, demands it. It behooves the “defender of tradition” to employ an epideictic style.

But liberal learning should not be heralded with trumpets all the time. Such monotony does an injustice to a tradition that has laughed at itself so much. Too much greatness and excellence becomes trite. Ultimately, it is the content of a liberal education that makes the best case for it, and not all of that content is high panegyric. Some of it is in the Menippean vein. In what follows, I will introduce the reader to three deeply educated authors who knew how to honor their education by laughing at it.

Against the Tyranny of the Intellect: Rabelais’ Gargantua

First, let us consider that champion of humanism, François Rabelais. Rabelais’ five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel, written between 1534 and 1554, are landmarks of French prose and prototypes of the bawdy babytalk fantasies of James Joyce. The stories relate the origins and adventures of two giants, Pantagruel and his father Gargantua. Rabelais, a highly educated clergyman and doctor, followed closely the developments of Renaissance humanism and the Protestant Reformation. In his second book, The Truly Hair-raising Life of the Great Gargantua Father of Pantagruel, he takes up arms against the old conventions of medieval learning.

The book tells the life of Gargantua, from his wine-guzzling infancy to his glorious (and still bibulous) manhood. The latter half focuses on his military exploits: he saves his father’s kingdom by smashing hordes of foes with an uprooted tree or inadvertently drowning them in a sea of urine. It is in this section that we meet Gargantua’s ally Brother John Mincemeat, a warlike monk who wields a processional cross in combat and goes on to found the libertarian Abbey of Desire. But the crucial early chapters concern Gargantua’s education. In chapters fourteen and fifteen, Rabelais carefully details his course of study.

Under his first teacher, “the great philosopher, Maitre Tubalcain Holofernes,” Gargantua learns the alphabet “so well that he could say it backward, by heart.”6. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), 38. So far, so good. Next, starting at age five, comes the grammar stage, where Master Holofernes “read[s] with the boy a Latin grammar by Donatus, plus a dull and well-meaning treatise on courtesy, and a long book by Bishop Theodulus, in which he proves that ancient mythology is all a heap of nonsense, and finally an exceedingly long poem in dreadfully moral quatrains.” This introduction to grammar, morals, mythology, and poetry takes “thirteen years, six months, and two weeks to accomplish.”

Now, at age eighteen, Gargantua is ready for even more grammar, plus some mathematics. For the next eighteen years, he reads De modis significandi, “ ‘The Methods of Reasoned Analysis,’ with the commentaries of Broken Biscuithead, Bouncing Rock,” and others, and learns that “de modis significandi non erat scientia, the methods of reasoned analysis [are] neither reasonable nor a science.” For another sixteen years, he reads “that great book Calculation, surely the longest almanac ever compiled.”

Sadly, Master Holofernes dies of the pox before Gargantua’s training is complete, so his father hires “another old cougher, Maitre Blowhard Birdbrain,” to carry on the cycle. With this tutor, Gargantua studies such texts as “Eberhard de Bethune’s Greekishnessisms,” “Sulpicius’ long, long poem on the psalms and death,” and Passavantus’s Sleep in Peace, “a collection of sermons chosen to make happy days still happier.” We are not told how long this stage lasts, only that under the guidance of Master Birdbrain and these auctores, Gargantua becomes “quite as wise as any blackbird ever baked into a pie.”

What stands out most in this narrative is the contrast between the grinding boredom of the activities described and the lively fun of the writing itself. Gargantua’s textbooks (some of them real and some fictional) pile up in ever more absurdly granular detail. Each one shines like a worthless, delightful costume jewel. No one would ever want to read the commentary of Broken Biscuithead on “The Methods of Reasoned Analysis,” but to read about a lazy young giant reading it is exhilarating. We are far from the classroom pathos of David Copperfield. Here, the reader gets to look down on decades of academic suffering as on a frivolous fairytale. We enjoy Gargantua’s slog because it makes us feel our own comparative health within the story’s zany verbal atmosphere. Instead of refuting the old books on their own terms, Rabelais cheerfully repurposes them as the furniture of absurd fantasy.

For Rabelais, intellectual health correlates with bodily health. During the time of his early studies, Gargantua lives a slovenly life. He rises late and combs his hair “as that great Ockhamist philosopher Jacob Almain always did—that is, with four fingers and a thumb.” And then (to give a sample of Rabelais’ earthy descriptive style),

…he shat, pissed, vomited, belched, farted, yawned, spat, coughed, sighed, sneezed, and blew his nose abundantly. Then he put away a good breakfast, the better to protect himself against the dew and the bad morning air: good fried tripe, some nice boiled steak, several cheerful hams, some good grilled beef, and several platters of bread soaked in bouillon.

Now, Rabelais has no disdain for normal bodily functions—far from it. But this catalogue of overflow and excess shows what happens when we practice intellectual gluttony. The imbalanced diet of grammatical commentaries and pious drivel also lends itself to physical dissipation.

Unlike some satirists in the Menippean line, Rabelais does have a prescription for intellectual ailment: humanism, the educational reform movement that was sweeping Europe at the time of his writing. In one sense, the miseducation of Gargantua belongs with other humanistic complaints of the period, like Martin Luther’s 1524 letter To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany. Luther recommends that German towns establish quality libraries, which he feels the monasteries failed to provide, to the detriment of the classical tongues:

Instead of worthwhile books, the stupid, useless, and harmful books of the monks, such as Catholicon, Florista, Grecista, Labyrinthus, Dormi Secure, and the like asses’ dung were introduced by the devil. Because of such books the Latin language was ruined, and there remained nowhere a decent school, course of instruction, or method of study. This situation lasted until, as we have experienced and observed, the languages and arts were laboriously recovered—although imperfectly—from bits and fragments of old books hidden among dust and worms.7. Martin Luther, To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany that they Establish and Maintain Christian Schools, trans. Albert Steinhaeuser, Luther’s Works Vol. 45, ed. Walther Brandt (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962).

The list of texts that Luther designates “asses’ dung” is a lot like Gargantua’s curriculum. (In fact, two titles are identical: Eberhard de Bethune’s Grecista is the “Greekishnessisms” of Burton Raffel’s translation of Rabelais, and Dormi Secure is the sermon collection Sleep in Peace.8. See John Warwick Montgomery, “Luther and Libraries,” The Library Quarterly vol. 32, no. 2 (April 1962), 147 note 47.) Both authors bemoan the preeminence of fusty grammatical tomes and scholastic piety. Luther’s main concern is the contamination of language study and the liberal arts, which, of course, he associates also with a spiritual malaise, since he thinks ineptitude in languages has led to widespread ignorance of the Bible. He credits the humanists with partially recovering proper methods of study by poring over “bits and fragments of old books.” It is in a humanist spirit that he urges the German councilors to renew education.

Rabelais endorses humanism, too, by giving it a salutary role in his fiction. Eventually, under the guidance of a tutor whose name can be translated “Powerbrain,” Gargantua purges his body and mind of the corruptions of the old education and becomes a kind of Renaissance philosopher-prince. He begins to rise early, exercise, say prayers, read classic authors, and study the arts of knighthood.9. Rabelais, 57-59. But importantly, the giant’s new regimen is still treated with irreverent fun. Powerbrain explains the difficult points of Scripture to him every morning while he sits in the latrine. In a state of health, too, mental and bodily digestion are related. The well-adjusted student is still not a god: he remains subject to the awkward needs of earthly life. The folly of scholasticism was to forget the body and build cloud castles of pure cognition. Rabelais’ purpose is not just to suggest an alternative syllabus. He honors humanism as a system to make the mind lean, to topple its tyranny and subject it to bodily limits.

His attack is devastating. As the above passages show, Rabelais is in full command of the intellectual tradition he aims to anatomize. There is no refuting him. He cites chapter and verse of obscure treatises for the most outrageous applications (e.g. Pliny the Elder as testimony that a woman can carry a child for eleven months). He mixes scatological gags with tropological exegesis. The whole texture of the work is that of unraveled erudition. Bookworms take a beating, no doubt. But then, you have to have read a few books to get the jokes. And while you are laughing at them, it feels as if learning is not being degraded after all, but rather set free to perform its true function—to elicit joy.

An Education in Mystery: Lewis Carroll’s Alice

A different flavor of Menippean satire appears in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The fastidious Oxford lecturer Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Carroll, would never have dreamed of writing down the obscenities that so delighted Rabelais. His humor is more cerebral, involuted, and bizarre. His audience is the bored, brainy child, to whom he offers a manic daydream full of puzzles and free of lessons.

Like Rabelais, Carroll arranges intellectual matter into an imaginative atmosphere, but in his story, the intellect in question is that of his young protagonist. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is about a little girl’s education coming apart. After Alice goes down the rabbit hole, she finds that words have new meanings, cause and effect are confounded, and the things she knows, such as memorized poems, come out of her mouth as distorted parodies.

Worst of all, many of the creatures she meets on her trip turn out to be impatient schoolmasters, insistent that she deliver herself of her knowledge. Caterpillars, hatters, and heads of state keep ordering her to narrate, explain, and recite. But the combination of topsy-turvy physics and partial insanity (in both herself and others) seems to render Alice’s knowledge useless. In her innocent attempts to find some amusement, she faces a series of impossible puzzles. Still, she has a few conversations and a few laughs along the way. Her dream-odyssey is an exploration of both the pleasures and the frustrations of irrationality.

In the ninth chapter, Alice discovers that some of the inhabitants of Wonderland have also been to school. Shortly before the climactic trial scene that ends the story, Alice visits the Mock Turtle, a morose, half-bovine sea creature, who tells her about his education. It was, he boasts, “the best of educations.”10. Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999), 101. The curriculum he then lays out is composed entirely of awful puns. The “regular course,” which the Mock Turtle took, consisted of “Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with… and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.” Next came “Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography” (naturally, the school was in the sea); “then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.” The Mock Turtle never studied under the Classical master, “an old crab,” but recalls that “[h]e taught Laughing and Grief.”

Once you are done groaning at the puns, there is a lot to ponder in this list. On one level, it is an appropriate fantasy curriculum for an aquatic academy. Just as J.K. Rowling, in her own Menippean vein, will later imagine her young wizards doing their Charms homework and trying to read from the carnivorous Monster Book of Monsters, so Carroll has his fish and reptiles studying the elements of Reeling and Writhing. Seaography is a given, but Mystery, too, seems a fitting study for inhabitants of the deep. Like so many jokes in Alice’s Adventures, these serve a purpose beyond humor. They evoke a possible world beyond mundane experience.

At the same time, they also comment sharply on mundane experience. Every subject on the list serves to ridicule stuffy teachers, including Carroll himself. “Reeling and Writhing” suggests not only fish, but the agony of the students. The four branches of Carroll’s own specialty, Arithmetic, collectively depict the fate of those who teach it. Mystery, under this interpretation, denotes obscurity and thus incompetence in the tutor. The subheadings “ancient and modern” imply a whole Western Tradition of question marks without any meaning. Meanwhile, the crab-like Classical master seems to inspire as much snickering as the mathematician—that is, when he is not inflicting grief. As for the “old conger eel,” Martin Gardner explains that this is an intentional caricature of legendary art critic John Ruskin, who really did tutor Alice Liddell and her sisters in Drawing, Sketching, and Painting in Oils.11. The Annotated Alice, 102 note. Presumably, the Drawling Master’s three parody subjects reflect personal habits of Ruskin himself.

This aggressive side of Carroll’s satire presumes to unmask education. The puns, in this sense, are almost literal equivalences. Multiplication, for those forced to study it, is Uglification. Greek is Grief. The lived experience of school is trivial, futile, and inhumane. Like Rabelais, Carroll uses humor to diagnose an intellectual malady.

There is, however, one more layer to the Mock Turtle’s fantasy curriculum. Like the one in Gargantua, this course catalogue is fun to read. But in contrast to the drudgery of Gargantua’s research, some of the Mock Turtle’s classes could be fun for the student. I would not want to read Sulpicius’ long, long poem on the psalms and death, but I might sign up for Laughing 101, or even try my hand at Fainting in Coils. These titles represent what real students and teachers often feel like they are doing at school, but they may also represent the meaningful learning we wish we could be pursuing instead. Every scholar, no matter how earnest, has experienced the phenomenon of facts, figures, words, and even morals dissolving into nonsense. What good are they for life, which so often turns laughter to grief and beauty to ugliness? No one ever taught us to manage these bitter realities, and so we meet them haphazardly and without confidence. In such moments of warped clarity, Carroll and Rabelais are our ideal schoolmasters. Both Gargantua and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland could well be described as master-classes in the true arts of Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. We need them as much as we need rhapsodies to Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

Above all, we need Mystery. Both ancient and modern. No explanation of the human condition can satisfy us that succeeds by ignoring most of the data. We need philosophies that show us what we are when we are not being excellent. This may be one reason why the doctrine of the Incarnation has compelled so many people for so many centuries. In it, God comes out of the tidy little rooms to which rationality and high virtue tend to confine themselves, into the open air where anything can happen. By temptation, suffering, and truck with sinners, Christ stretches God out over a human expanse that seems to have so few transcendent moments. Good ironic literature has the same appeal. Rabelais lays open the squalor and excess of life, Carroll its abysses and non-sequiturs. In both, we glimpse life’s mysterious anatomy without a disguise. This too is a part of an education that is liberal—that liberates. Left unchecked, even the highest human ideals risk becoming a prison for the mind.

Transcendence and Snobbery: Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel

Our final example is from twentieth-century America. Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, published in 1929, tells the story of his youth in Asheville, North Carolina. A sprawling, meditative family epic, it is probably reductionistic to classify the work as a pure Menippean satire. Yet parts of it clearly fit the genre. A recurring theme in the life of Eugene Gant, the protagonist and authorial stand-in, is the unselfconscious provincialism of his education.

The prose of Look Homeward Angel is highly rhetorical. Often, the narrator’s voice merges with the inner thoughts of Eugene in grand soliloquies. These can be exquisite or a little embarrassing. Take a passage from the very end, in which Eugene addresses the imagined ghost of his dead brother Ben:

O sudden and impalpable faun, lost in the thickets of myself, I will hunt you down until you cease to haunt my eyes with hunger. I heard your footfalls in the desert, I saw your shadow in old buried cities, I heard your laughter running down a million streets, but I did not find you there. And no leaf hangs for me in the forest; I shall lift no stone upon the hills; I shall haunt you, ghost, along the labyrinthine ways until—until? O Ben, my ghost, an answer?12. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Scribner, 2006), 544.

Is this the real inner voice of a teenage southerner? For all its intense emotion, it is almost unbearably stagey. The “o” of formal address, the pastoral metaphors, the tricolon—it all feels learned, not natural.

But the affected quality of Eugene’s outlook is part of the story’s point. Between the drunken Shakespearean rants of his father and the attainments of his backwater classical education, Eugene develops a sense of culture that is always veering toward barbarism. Wolfe paints an unflattering portrait of Eugene’s teachers discussing literature:

“O rare Ben Jonson!” Margaret Leonard sighed with gentle laughter. “Ah, Lord!” “My God, boy!” Sheba roared, snatching the suggested motif of conversation out of the air, and licking her buttered fingers noisily as she stormed into action. “God bless him!” Her hairy red face burned like clover, her veinous eyes were tearful bright. “God bless him, Gene! He was as English as roast beef and a tankard of musty ale!” “Ah Lord!” sighed Margaret. “He was a genius if ever there was one.” With misty eyes she gazed far off, a thread of laughter on her mouth. “Whee!” she laughed gently. “Old Ben!” “And say, ‘Gene!” Sheba continued, bending forward with a fat hand gripped upon her knee. “Do you know that the greatest tribute to Shakespeare’s genius is from his hand?”

“Ah, I tell you, boy!” said Margaret, with darkened eyes. Her voice was husky. He was afraid she was going to weep.

The ladies go on like this, bemoaning the low reputation of Ben Jonson, then the general illiteracy of the southern elite. “There are a lot of things money can’t buy, my sonny,” Sheba says to Eugene, “and one of them is the society of cult-shered men and women.”

All this pretentious cooing is uncomfortable to read. Eugene Gant’s teachers are a recognizable American type—the newcomer to high culture whose education fits awkwardly. Margaret and Sheba did not cease to be bumpkins when they read Ben Jonson. Because they are not real aristocrats, their aristocratic disdain for unlettered millionaires appears resentful. Their intellectual talk reads as compensation for low social class. Margaret Leonard is a well-meaning and talented teacher, but even as a student, Eugene notices in her talk the “tin currency of criticism she had picked up in a few courses at college.”

Eugene becomes increasingly aware of the limits of his own formation. But though he is more circumspect than his teachers, he too comes to represent the idealistic striver who gets “bogged in the gray slough of factuality.” His liberal education supplies him with eloquent language and an imaginative escape from his troubles, but it allows him neither to transcend his narrow southern world nor to find a place in it. Even his emotional outbursts, like the address to Ben’s ghost, have the ring of literary “tin currency.” Wolfe’s narration represents Eugene’s inner life with an ironic distance he himself never fully achieves. There is something beautiful about the cultured soul, but—at least in North Carolina—there is also something false about it.

How different is today’s liberal arts crusader from Margaret Leonard? Does the renewal program amount to indefinite raptures over Elizabethan poets? “Whee! Old Ben!” Look Homeward, Angel is good medicine in this regard. It is a celebration of old-fashioned literary learning, yet it points out the embarrassing affectation, insecurity, and blindness of so many who pursue it. This may be especially true in America, where ambition for learning is frequently an expression of anxiety about class. Broadly speaking, educational attainment in this country has been viewed as a gateway to social advancement, whereas in older European society it had been a marker of class identity. Thus, in an American context, there is a strong incentive to perform one’s education, as Eugene Gant’s teachers train him to do. Eugene would not have been liberally educated at all had his father not intended to make him a famous politician: “In his youngest son he saw the last hope of his name’s survival in laurels.” The son forsakes this goal and is left with a misplaced sense of superiority and importance.

Where does respect for learning end and vaulting ambition begin? The question remains relevant today for the middle-class Americans who are now seeking to revive an aristocratic form of education. It is beautiful to love poetry and disdain money. Snobbery and resentment, however, are not beautiful. We need to learn how to distinguish, and also how to notice when the virtues and the vices are mixed. Thomas Wolfe depicts this ambiguity in the education of Eugene Gant. Look Homeward, Angel is especially a good book for bright young people, who can see in Eugene both the nobility of their own hunger for transcendence and the laughable folly of their own pretense.

Conclusion

To laugh at liberal learning is not to attack it. I return, one more time, to the guiding spirit of this essay, Northrop Frye. “The influence of low-norm satire in American culture,” he wrote in 1957, “has produced a popular contempt for longhairs and ivory towers, an example of what may be called a fallacy of poetic projection, or taking literary conventions to be facts of life.”13. Anatomy of Criticism, 230. In other words, the anti-intellectualism in American culture is a result of taking books too seriously. It is an error to learn from Rabelais to hate logic, from Carroll to despise school, or from Wolfe to scoff at poets. That would be no different from watching The Sopranos and then going to work for the mob. Fiction’s main purpose is not to provide us with literal descriptions or actionable prescriptions. It is to provide us with conventions: images, attitudes, and hypotheses to incorporate into our consciousness. The vulgar vitality of Rabelais is not a philosophy of life, but a new territory of thought that we may never have encountered without reading him. He maps out this territory for our aesthetic enjoyment, to deepen our thinking, to make us wise.

Many of the great authors bring us into the same territory again and again: the goodness of virtue, the beauty of wisdom, the glory of truth. In this they are correct. But real virtue, wisdom, and truth are more than correctness. Education cannot really be liberal if it confines itself to a rigid set of conclusions. Instead, its motto should be Terence’s line, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me). In fiction, we encounter human perspectives that do not demand our full assent, but expand our awareness of how human beings can think and feel. Menippean satire shows us wisdom at its most ridiculous. When we laugh along, we see that the opponents of wisdom are right in a way. We take their hypothetical attitude on board, not as an article of faith, but as an aspect of our consciousness. As a result, paradoxically, we become wiser. Certain human things become less alien to us: the boredom of students, the frustrations of teachers, the needs of the body, the limitations of rationality.

Augmenting our sympathies in this way may not lead us to act more righteously. But the alternative will certainly lead us to act foolishly. If we do not absorb the satirical perspective in a spirit of learning, we may well make the mistake Frye mentions and adopt it in earnest. Those who hope to renew a healthy respect for the intellect in our society should learn to criticize intellectualism as well as honor it. Again, we should follow the example of Solomon’s Preacher: “And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly.” The books we have surveyed here are good places to start.

I grew up in a part of America known as “the grass seed capital of the world,” Oregon’s Willamette Valley. I learned my religion in the small community churches my family attended. We sat together in folding chairs—the families of farmers, fabricators, laborers, and the occasional small-business owner. We were homeschooled or went to small Christian schools to avoid the corruption of the public school system (and the kids in it). Dancing, drinking, gambling, swearing, alcohol, and tobacco in any form were forbidden (though I knew my father to keep a pinch of wintergreen Skoal between his cheek and gum from time to time when he was out in the garage). Our faith was fundamentalist, Baptistic, and cessationist, allergic to anything that smelled of either sin or sacrament.

I must say that I am deeply grateful for my upbringing, regardless of any changes in my own belief, practice, or religious affiliation. It taught me to be morally serious. I learned early of the need for personal conversion. I was probably preserved from many genuinely destructive “things of the world.” And the folks who raised me in this culture were mostly good, loving, salt-of-the-earth people. I was not a rebellious teenager, either. I went to church. I read the Bible. I toed the line. Yet something was missing.

I could not have named it, but it had something to do with beauty and something to do with integrity—a way of reading the world that held together. On the one hand stood my tradition’s firm commitment to Biblical truth and morality. On the other hand stood the tragedy and mystery of life, those elements of human existence that resist easy explanation. I found myself drawn to poetry, art, music, and books to help me explore that latter category, but my religious tradition seemed to have no place for such things. At best, they were marginal; at worst, a distraction from the real business of Christian life.

This tension grew increasingly uncomfortable and finally became a full-blown crisis. It seemed like I was going to have to choose between my own humanity and the only form of holiness that had ever been on offer. Many of my friends from those days who felt similarly torn eventually lost any attachment they had to traditional Christian religion. Some lost their faith altogether. So I have an idea what direction my life might have taken had one of its central events not occurred.

Into my hands fell a book—Frederick Buechner’s novel Godric. Here was an unapologetic Christian author who spoke like no Christian I had heard before. Published in 1980, the novel retells the life of a 12th-century English saint, Godric of Finchale. And it spoke to me as powerfully as the voice Augustine heard calling to him, “Take up and read.”

Most of the events of the novel are taken from The Life and Miracles of Saint Godric, Hermit of Finchale, a hagiography by Reginald of Durham, one of Godric’s contemporaries. Medieval hagiographies (biographies of saints) were written primarily for spiritual edification and moral instruction. But they also remain a valuable source of historical information, and what we know of Godric we know from them. The real-life Godric was born in Norfolk to Anglo-Saxon peasants at the time of the Norman Conquest. It was an inauspicious beginning, but his entrepreneurial spirit allowed him to rise in the world. Beginning as a local peddler, he eventually became a merchant, served several prominent men, and ended the first half of his long life as the partial owner of at least two commercial ships that he used for trade, pilgrimages, and perhaps a bit of piracy on the side. He even played a minor role in the world’s great affairs. In 1102, after the disastrous Second Battle of Ramla, it was Godric’s ship that rescued King Baldwin I from an Egyptian siege and returned him to Jerusalem.

Then, sometime around the age of forty, Godric had a spiritual awakening, vowing to give away his considerable wealth and adopt a monastic life. Returning to County Durham for good, he first served as a sacristan of a local church and even attended school with a group of choirboys. Eventually, however, Godric realized that he needed solitude, so he asked the bishop for a plot of land and was granted a place near Finchale by the River Wear. He spent his next sixty years there, only rarely leaving the grounds.

Godric’s entire world consisted of a small hermitage, a Marian chapel, and the river in which he regularly immersed himself as penance for his sins. He planted his own vegetables, cultivated barley for bread, wore a hairshirt and a metal breastplate, and used a stone for a pillow. Twice he was nearly killed: once by a flood and once by Scottish brigands.

Despite his isolation, Godric developed a reputation as a holy man. Several miracles of healing were attributed to him; he had clairvoyant visions (especially of other people’s deaths); and he became known for his friendship with wild animals (even snakes). His hymns to Mary and prayer to St. Nicholas are recognized as among the earliest poems in Middle English. He received visits not only from commoners but also from abbots, priors, canons, and even once from William I, King of the Scots. Thomas à Becket and Pope Alexander III were correspondents.

Towards the end of his life, the Bishop of Durham sent Reginald to serve both as Godric’s caregiver and as his biographer. Godric of Finchale died in Reginald’s care on May 11th, 1170. He was over a hundred years old.

It is a story ripe for novelization. It is also a story that a man like Frederick Buechner would be drawn to. Like Godric, his early life was marked by roaming from place to place, rubbing elbows with the cultural elite, and achieving no small worldly success. Then, like Godric’s, his life began to tilt. After an extraordinarily well-received first novel, his second novel flopped. He quit his job and moved to New York to regain his footing, but he was unable to push through crippling writer’s block and found himself alone and rudderless in a great city.

Then one Sunday he decided he would go to church. He went only because the church was on his block, he had heard the preacher was a good one, and he had nothing better to do with his Sundays. The preacher was George Arthur Buttrick, minister of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian church, and Buechner was deeply affected by his sermons. They had a literary quality he admired, but even more important was their spiritual depth and complexity. In his memoirs, Buechner avoids talking in the conventional language of conversion, but it was one particular phrase that “did it” for him—Buttrick’s assertion that God was crowned in the hearts of believers “among confession, and tears, and great laughter.” The inclusion of “great laughter” especially struck him. After church, he confessed to his grandmother that he thought he had found God. Later that week, he reached out to Buttrick, wanting to learn more about “whatever it was that had taken place.” The following fall, at Buttrick’s suggestion, he enrolled in Union Theological Seminary.1. Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey (HarperCollins Publishers, 1982), 107-110. He would later write of the decision, “I felt something of what Saint Francis must have felt when he decided, to everybody’s astonishment, to give everything away to serve Christ’s poor. I too succeeded in astonishing almost everybody including myself, but the difference was that I was no saint.”2. Buechner, Now and Then (HarperCollins Publishers, 1983), 5. Over the next four years, he met and married his wife, took his ordination vows in the Presbyterian church, and accepted a position at Phillips Exeter Academy. There he taught classes, served as the school chaplain, preached sermons, and performed the duties of priest; but his primary task was to revive the dying religion department at one of the country’s elite institutions for the education of young men. Most of these boys were from families of privilege and wealth; but at the same time, this was the late sixties, so many of the brightest of Buechner’s pupils were also “anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-God, and anti-authority in any form whatsoever.” He understood the pedagogical challenges he faced:

I was ordained as an evangelist, but apologist, I suppose, would have been, and continues to be, the more appropriate word. My job, as I saw it, was to defend the Christian faith against its “cultured despisers,” to use Schleiermacher’s phrase. To put it more positively, it was to present the faith as appealingly, honestly, relevantly and skillfully as I could.

He had his students read the most challenging theologians and Christian writers he could find, authors like C.S. Lewis, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth. But he also had them read books like King Lear, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Power and the Glory. He made sure that they really understood Sartre and Camus and what the disappearance of God from human life would actually mean. The war he was fighting was, in his words, “to convince as many as I could that religious faith, even if they chose to have none of it, was not as bankrupt and banal and easily disposable as they most of them believed.”

He was by any measure wildly successful. In eight years, he had grown the department from one teacher (himself) and around twenty students to four full-time faculty and around three hundred students enrolled in religion courses. Then, to even his own surprise, Buechner abruptly decided to withdraw from the world, retiring with his wife to a farmhouse in a small Vermont town to dedicate himself again to full-time writing.

Frederick Buechner’s career spanned six decades, during which he published thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, essays, and memoirs. He was an O. Henry Prize winner and finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He died in his home in 2022 at the age of 96. This year would have marked his one hundredth birthday.

Thinking back on his time at Exeter he wrote:

[I]n one form or another we all of us share the same dark doubts, the same wild hopes, and what little by little I learned from those years at Exeter was that unless those who proclaim the Gospel acknowledge honestly that darkness and speak bravely to the wildness of those hopes, they might as well save their breath for all the lasting difference their proclaiming will make to anybody.

This more than anything is the spirit that pervades Buechner’s writing. What he learned as a post-modern apologist to the cultured despisers of religion he put into practice as a writer.

Godric is perhaps Buechner’s greatest work. The novel is framed as a first-person narrative, told from Godric’s perspective near the end of his life (with a brief afterword by Reginald). The style is antiquated, borrowing masterfully from the principles of Old English poetry and leaning into Anglo-Saxon diction. “Five friends I had, and two of them snakes,” the novel opens. “Tune and Fairweather they were, thick round as a man’s arm, my bedmates and playfellows, keepers of my skimped hearth and hermit’s heart.”3. Buechner, Godric (HarperOne, 1983), 3. But the narrative structure is distinctly modern, a set of episodes from the life of the saint retold in a non-linear fashion and alternating between the wandering of his early life and the settled pattern of his later years. The episodes do have a spiritual order, though, circling around and eventually arriving at a confessional revelation that very much makes sense of sixty years of penitence and self-denunciation. (For the sake of the reader, I will not reveal that event here.)

As Godric unravels his story, three tensions emerge: the narrative tension between the hagiographer and the autobiographer, the interpersonal tension between intimacy and brokenness, and the ultimate spiritual tension between holiness and humanity.

The first of these tensions takes shape in Godric’s literary battle with Reginald. Godric knows himself to be a man seriously flawed by sin, but the monk keeps trying to spin his life into a conventional hagiography. At the beginning of their interaction as “saint” and “biographer,” Godric tries to frighten Reginald off from the project altogether.

There’s much you’re better not to know, I say, but know you this. Know Godric’s no true hermit but a gadabout within his mind, a lecher in his dreams. Self-seeking he is and peacock proud. A hypocrite. A ravener of alms and dainty too. A slothful, greedy bear.

Not worthy to be called a servant of the Lord when he treats such servants as he has himself like dung, like Reginald. All this and worse than this go say of Godric in your book.

At this rebuke, tears begin to run down Reginald’s cheeks. He has come to tell the story of a holy man, and all that Godric will give him is a litany of his sins. Though Godric despises the softness and piety of the younger monk, he is also moved by pity and loathes his own instinctive cruelty towards him. So he finally makes a concession: “Well, but say this also if you like … Say yes, it’s true that Mary came. She came though who knows why. Clad all in skyblue mantling with the crown of Heaven on her head. She smiled at me.” Godric then sings one of his hymns for Reginald.

Reginald is delighted, but despite this concession, the tension between his version of Godric’s life and Godric’s self-understanding persists throughout the novel. Reginald keeps trying to tell a story that will “unbushel the light” of Godric’s life “for the schooling of children.” Godric keeps refusing to give in to Reginald’s sanitizing instincts. “Did he but know where Godric’s path has led or what sights his light has lit,” Godric laments, “he’d bushel me back fast enough. I’ve told Mother Reginald tales to rattle his beads and blush his fishbelly tonsure pink as a babe’s bum, but he turns them all to treacle with his scratching quill.” And yet, Godric cannot ultimately deny the miracles that God has worked through him any more than he can deny his sins. There are two sides to his story that Godric himself cannot ignore, even if Reginald manages to do so.

The second major tension concerns the intimacy possible between human persons and the struggle we face to connect even with our truest friends. The novel does not shy away from the fact that such friendships bring some of our greatest sorrows—the departures unlooked for, the distances between us, the anticipation and reality of death, the words we wish we could take back but know we cannot. Even in our friends (perhaps especially there), we encounter the unbridgeable otherness of fellow human beings. We hardly know ourselves. How can we know another? Early in the novel, Godric offers a melancholy expression of the sorrows that come to one who loves too closely: “What’s friendship when all’s done, but the giving and taking of wounds?” Likening his five friends to stigmata, he tells the tale of his wounding:

When Godric banished Fairweather and Tune, they all three bled for it, and part of Godric snaked off too nevermore to come again. And it’s Godric’s flesh that Ailred’s cough cleaves like an axe. And when brave Mouse went down off Wales, he bore to the bottom the cut of Godric’s sharp farewell. And when Gillian vanished in a Dover wood, she took with her all but the husk of Godric’s joy.

But as his friends’ stories weave in and out of Godric’s own, it is clear that these his “wounds” are also his greatest treasures. “What a man was Mouse!” he proclaims of the seafaring companion of his youth. “What a sinner too was Mouse, but none was ever a fonder friend.” He and Ailred become old men together, talking about time and kneeling “hours on end under the low thatch without a word to clutter the silence save for the prayers they heave heavenward braided together.” Of Gillian he says, “I have forgotten my father’s face. I have forgotten my own face when I was young … But her face I’ll remember ever.” He even wonders about the two snakes, the companions that he sent off one day in a fit, “Have they withstood the years? Do they drape themselves like garlands over dead limbs still and coil themselves for sun on rocks too high for Wear to wet? Have they found it in their hearts to pardon Godric?” The wounds we give one another will persist at least as long as we see only through a glass darkly; yet friendship is still somehow worth those wounds. In the end, Godric prays for them all, asking of Christ, “Be thou in us and we in thee that Godric, Gillian, Ailred, Mouse and thou may be a woundless one at last. And even Reginald if thy great mercy reach so far.”

Finally, we arrive at the core of Buechner’s retelling of the story of this medieval saint—the tension between holiness and humanity. On the one hand, the novel is aggressively “human.” It is earthy, bawdy, even vulgar. There are bottoms and bums and other unmentionables aplenty. Godric’s friend Mouse “had an eye out ever for the willing maids,” whether they were “old as earth or cherryripe for the plucking.” Godric himself confesses to Reginald in one of his rants: “I tumbled all the maids would suffer me and some that scratched and tore like weasels in a net. I planted horns on many a goodman’s brow and jollied lads with tales about it afterward.” The novel contains scenes of violence equal to the Book of Judges, horrors of human making, and stories of people overcome by shame, disgust, and despair.

Nor does religious life offer any refuge from the darker side of humanity. On their pilgrimage to Rome, Godric and his mother encounter a city whose “very grin was ghoulish … a corpse without a shroud.” After climbing St. Peter’s stairs on their knees, Godric and his mother encounter the gold vessels, paintings, and priests with tapers they might have expected. But right alongside these, they also find:

A crone so old she looked like Caesar’s nurse sat selling badges crossed with Peter’s keys to stitch upon our cloaks. A lass so young the tender breasts she bared were scarcely more than pigeon eggs made clear enough the wares she sold although she spoke no word I understood. A silk-capped cardinal with pretty boys in cowls to serve him sang mass at the high altar like a love-sick maid, and from his hands we took the blood and flesh of Christ.

Was there beauty in Rome? Yes, and even perhaps glory. But even on the very steps of St. Peter’s, he finds grotesqueries, hypocrisy, child prostitution, abandonment, and spiritual decay. “We found no God in Rome,” he proclaims. “And yet to pray we’d come and pray we did.”

“And yet…” That phrase occurs twenty times in the text of Godric, often in the turn from raw nature, sin, frailty, and human failing towards extraordinary grace that comes despite it all. In the final telling, it is only in the light of this “and yet” that Godric can reconcile the discontinuity between his own brokenness and the miracles that God nonetheless works through him. Of the many pilgrims who seek him out for healing, he can only say:

To touch me and to feel my touch they come. To take at my hands whatever of Christ or comfort such hands have. Of their own, my hands have nothing more than any man’s and less now at this tottering, lamewit age of mine when most of what I ever had is more than mostly spent. But it’s as if my hands are gloves, and in them other hands than mine, and those the ones that folk appear with roods of straw to seek. It’s holiness they hunger for, and if by some mad grace it’s mine to give, if I’ve a holy hand inside my hand to touch them with, I’ll touch them day and night. Sweet Christ, what other use are idle hermits for?

In Godric, miracles are no more the product of moral perfection than is salvation. Frailty is a given, and yet miracles still take place. And the greatest miracle of all may be the complexity of the human condition into which and ultimately out of which divine life speaks. And as a young man, what I found in Godric was not a mere resource to navigate these tensions, but a way in which holiness and humanity could be truly married, a version of Christianity that was unwaveringly honest about real life but still offered redeeming grace within that landscape.

To use C.S. Lewis’s phrase, Godric was the book that baptized my imagination; and coming up from the waters of that baptism, I saw everything with new eyes. Faith was no longer something that could not be questioned, and I began to discover, as if for the first time, the very questions to which faith was the answer. The moral life ceased to be a matter of mere obedience to a human code, and I found that it was far more worthwhile than I had ever imagined. I was not afraid of darkness anymore (whether in the world or in myself), so I began to find the sacred in surprising places. This new way of seeing was particularly powerful in transforming the way I read the scriptures. The Psalms became for me the rich poetry they are. The stories of the Old Testament took on a depth equal to that of a great novel. And the characters in the Gospels sprang to life. Even Paul’s letters began to speak with an authentic voice to real human concerns.

To put it in more directly theological language, what I learned from Buechner in story form was something Martin Luther had taught in his Commentary on Romans five hundred years prior, that a Christian really can be “at the same time justified and yet a sinner (simul iustus est et peccator)”4. Martin Luther. Commentary on Romans (Kregel Classics, 1976), 114-15. and that this condition is normative and inescapable. Perhaps herein lies the key to a robust Protestant imagination that can sustain the marriage of holiness and humanity. There is certainly nothing wrong with moral fervor, with a longing for revival, with the desire to be “unspotted by the world,” or even with a culture of disciplined temperance—nothing wrong, that is, unless these things generate an enveloping religious culture that blinds us to the reality of our true spiritual condition, our true human condition. We are a Romans 7 people in need of a Romans 8 God; and so we will be until that far off day when all things are made new.

In a sense, Godric and the rest of Buechner’s stories are not all that unlike medieval hagiographies. They are written with a kind of moral formation and spiritual enrichment in mind, but the context has changed. The heresies and half-truths towards which we tend in a secular age are different from those of Christendom. The forces that operate against Christian formation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (both outside of the Church and within it) are not the same as those that operated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This side of Shakespeare and Renaissance humanism, it’s probably not possible to simply pick up Reginald’s version of Godric’s story. But in novel form, Buechner borrows the framework of a hermit’s life that was once enough and reanimates it for a new time, for a faith that is ever ancient, ever new and always in need of an honest teller of tales.

As is fitting, much of the poetry in our spring edition of Ad Fontes deals with beginnings.

First, we have the great privilege of publishing two new poems by Donald Revell, celebrated critic and translator and one of American poetry’s most searching Christian voices. “Both poems,” he says, “arise from my interest in Kierkegaard’s and Barth’s notions of Absolute Beginnings, and in the ways in which these notions might direct the poetic line.” When I read with that hint in mind, I notice how the sense of each enjambed line in “One Shore” seems to taper off in uncertainty, only to renew itself as if by a leap of faith: “In the matter / Of flowers, all there is to say draws, momently, / Meanings too brief for color. Think insect / Wings.” Each new line is more than a function of the sentence it continues. Another spirit breathes into it.

Eric Hutchinson, unofficial house poet of Ad Fontes, reflects on Easter as a beginning to the year. The repetitions and echoes in this terse six-line piece figure the cyclical frustration of unredeemed time. He flatly dismisses the notion of moral progress: “Time leads to death. It passes; nothing more.” Hope lies not in a future culmination but in a sudden irruption into the past: “the time that time was pierced by love.”

Hutchinson’s debt to the deceptive plainness of George Herbert (explicit in his second poem, “Love’s Welcome”) links him to the next author in this section, Steven Searcy. “Since Adam is my dad, / I duck and hide,” he writes in “Response.” It is hard to imagine a more poignantly succinct formulation of original sin. His “Kitchen Abstraction” is worried about origins too. In gently modulating meter and interlaced rhymes, this poem finds arcane sacrifice behind all culinary activity: “The harvest and the slaughter / happened some other place, with other hands.”

Other fine images of beginning appear in the selection. In Stewart Lindstrom’s “Baptism,” it is the orienting memory of immersion, still fresh beneath the “detritus” collected in the quest for love; in Travis Wright’s “Zero Sum Game,” it is “the prophet’s womb,” from which God brings linear time to birth.

To my mind, the contributions of Tober Corrigan and Charles Mines evoke not so much cosmic beginnings as the dynamics of youth. The wilderness call of Moses never comes for Corrigan’s young prophet—he turns out to be only a green outdoorsman who cannot make a fire. Mines goes the other way, finding unexpected strength in youth. In his poem, guitar prodigy Giulio Regondi flees the stage after his performance, but his composition itself exudes a contrasting maturity, an andante confidence that “even the best obituaries won’t cover.”

We are very pleased to share these poems with you as we observe the spring season and a new beginning for Ad Fontes.

Josh Patch, Associate Editor for Arts & Poetry

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Donald Revell

One Shore

Its needle slow to draw, this moment
Is: blood flowering ampule; authority
Of one Paul; next to nothing. In the matter
Of flowers, all there is to say draws, momently,
Meanings too brief for color. Think insect
Wings. Butterfly hastens the book, black,
Then white, then black. I was beside a lake
And saw the water folded, falling neatly
Into place, a needle’s whisper. I saw
Christ’s authority inscribed in oil,
Black on the waters. One shore, and yet
So many apostles, you could barely move,
Barely catch a glimpse of the book surfacing
Far out for just a moment. Whiteness
Circled the black place instantly.

Where the Willow Bends

Some final tree, bent double, shapes sweet William
And a vineyard woman. No applause
For theologians and no pomp for the crawl of words
Into the parables. These are significance
Itself, alone among the couples
And their drifting combs, their loose fragrances.
How to speak of hair where the willow bends?
How Christ to Peter: “love me more than these”?
Insects pass through glass as through thin air.
It’s a matter of conscience, every passage
A radio thrown into traffic
Where the noise becomes dirt teeming with sparkles
Until, and the rain only naked later,
Much later and no pomp. The fanfare belongs
To the cabbage moth hissing sodium,
Turning night into day. Love me more than these.

E.J. Hutchinson

Easter

Every year I think I will improve,
At last less selfish than the year before,
Supposing time will suit me more for love.
Time leads to death. It passes; nothing more.
Except the time that time was pierced by love,
Remain we dead and changeless as before.

Love’s Welcome

“Why will you die?”
“We know not why;
But sin tastes sweet.
Now give us meat.”

“I give you bread
From heaven instead.”
“We want a treat.
So give us meat.”

“It will not last.
Recall the past
And Eve’s defeat.”
“Hush. Give us meat.”

And so it went
Till heaven sent
Our Mercy Seat,
Whose flesh is meat.

“But, Lord, we’ve marred
Your hands, so scarred
By our deceit.”
“Sit; taste my meat.”

Steven Searcy

Kitchen Abstraction

Smooth and white and hard,
the countertops are cleared and washed with water
where tender flesh was sliced and pared, to hide
the necessary fact that something died—
a grain, a grape, a lamb.

The harvest and the slaughter
happened some other place, with other hands—
here, hands can sort and sear in stainless steel
then gently rinse, without having to feel
the strain of sacrifice.

To mute the grim demands
of sustenance, the blades that cleave and trim
are cleaned and sheathed meticulously. Still,
the solemn law remains—that life must spill
from life to nourish life.

Response

I can’t admit I’ve wrecked
things yet again.
Deny, defend, deflect—
I dodge and fight to save my skin—
what else could you expect?

Admit the charge is fair,
the harm is real?
That’s more than I can bear.
The verdict: guilty, no appeal.
The sentence: pure despair.

Since Adam is my dad,
I duck and hide.
I know, I know—it’s sad
but true. Shame’s gates are open wide.
It really is that bad.

But, like the first time, you
are not content
to leave me. You pursue
and call my name. You won’t relent.
And no, you can’t eschew

the consequence and curse
of what’s been done,
but open up your purse
to fund my care, and one by one
you dress my wounds. You nurse

me, patient with my slow
and halting pace.
I’m hesitant. You know,
of course. You look me in the face.
You will not let me go.

Stewart Lindstrom

Baptism

Four times I tried to marry,
three times I kept only the detritus:
A cribbage board, a quilted jacket,
and Kafka’s stories, collected in paperback.

The fourth time, I succeeded.
But for this romance, I have nothing to show,
Only a memory I will always cherish:
How I came up laughing from the cold water.

Travis Wright

The Benefit of Being a Puritan

For Cambridge Presbyterian Church

Despite its grateful damages
I confess to my father’s name
in droves, a crestfallen wreck awake
one hundred years before notice
of his death. Four hundred years
this Sunday someone else
also left his flat in the rain to play
a posthumous part in this
endless foxtrot. He also missed
the first hymn, and the call
to worship, but the first Psalm hit him
too the way the sun sets
in his daughter’s room. I will
miss this, he thought.

Zero Sum Game

First he built the prophet’s womb
in code that cannot be rewritten
for us in the language of mathematics.
Very well, he thought. Now prayer
for the past will be impossible
to ask. Then the limits will set in
on their bodies in a gust of logic,
and from the silence of belief
I will teach them how to repent
to the land, rather than rape it.
That would be right, he said.
If in the interregnum, they woke
in their original weakness
to find twice the light Adam lost.

Tober Corrigan

Crying Faith

Crying faith
in a wilderness
usually leads to doubt
very quickly. It’s not
the anarchic echoes
that turn you Thomas,
but the selfish silence
after, of a mocking nature,
as it makes quick work
of your inability to burn
a bush.

Charles Mines

Regondi Etude No. 6

Because it was Regondi,

orphaned and forced,

who ran off in fright

the first time applause roared from the audience.

And it’s Etude No. 6 which almost—

could be interpreted
as slugs of wine or
reels of memory,

as café emptiness,

or the monsignor
with his head in his hands.

Like something even
the best obituaries won’t cover:

figuring the strength
of the instrument,

delineating what it means
(‘walking pace’),

reasons for that speed.

Contributors

Donald Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently Canandaigua (2024) and White Campion (2021), both from Alice James Books. Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine’s Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as: Sudden Eden: Essays; Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Poetry editor for both Colorado Review and The Mountain West Poetry Series, Revell also serves on the editorial board of The Test Site Poetry Series (University of Nevada Press). Having previously taught at the Universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, he is now Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Revell divides his time between Enterprise, Nevada and Geneva, New York.

E.J. Hutchinson is Associate Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College and Director of Hillsdale’s Collegiate Scholars Program. His poems have previously appeared in various fora in print and online.

Steven Searcy is the author of Below the Brightness (Solum Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age, Southern Poetry Review, New Verse Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and four sons in Georgia.

Stewart Lindstrom spends his days teaching Latin to middle schoolers at Nova Classical Academy, a charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota, the same city where he grew up. He lives with his wife Michaela, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota. Stewart spends his weekends and his summers reading avidly, writing novels, and taking long walks beneath the sight of heaven with his wife and his cherished childhood friends.

Travis Wright is Assistant Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies at Patrick Henry College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, Prism Review, Cambridge Elemental Poetry, The Bangalore Review, The Windhover, and Dappled Things, among others. He is the author of A Woodland Lexicon (Little Gidding Press, 2025).

Tober Corrigan works in the cybersecurity industry by day and tinkers with his poems by night. He currently lives (and shares poetry) in Baltimore, enjoying an historic row home with his wife and two Texas rescue dogs, both with energy and scruff to spare.

Charles Mines is a writer in Atlanta, GA. His fiction and poetry have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Streetlight, The Brussels Review, and more.