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.”11. 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).22. 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…”33. 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.]44. Virgil, The Aeneid. Translated 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.55. 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…”66. 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.”77. 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.”88. 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.”99. 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.1010. 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.1111. 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.1212. 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.”1313. 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 Ciceor, 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…1414. 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.1515. 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…1616. 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).1717. 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.1818. 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.1919. 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.”2020. 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.2121. 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.”2222. 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.2323. 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 …”2424. 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.2525. 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 of 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.”2626. 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.”2727. 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.”2828. 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.2929. 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.3030. 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.3131. 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.”3232. 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 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.”3333. 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.”3434. 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.”3535. 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.3636. 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.
