Put Another Way: Our
Thesis in a Nutshell
Contra
the modern tendency in Christian apologetic movements, we desire that
human letters and science be made perspicacious, pellucid, and
integral with what is known of the nature of God. Anything less
would be to cripple the possibility of developing a specifically
Christian worldview, for what good is a world view that cannot
account for itself, or remain true to itself, at all possible levels,
and in all possible situations? At the same time, we wish to do this
consciously, that it may be criticized, improved upon, or clarified
in important points. In this sense, the effort to develop the
Quadrivium and the Trivium can be called Christian Humanism.1
We agree with R. Scott Clark at Heidelblog that a Christian,
or even a Reformed, humanism is quite possible: he refers us to other
sources as well-
“On this see the massive work of Richard
Muller, e.g., Post-Reformation
Reformed Dogmatics or Carl R.
Trueman and R. Scott Clark, eds.Protestant
Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment or
Willem
van Asselt, Introduction
to Reformed Scholasticism.”
It appears to this writer that
the anti-classical movement (while making good points, generating
sound insights, and clarifying some topics) actually requires more of
man than God does, & says worse things about him than the Creator
does, and that this is because they believe that man's reason is
completely extinguished, and that the image of God in man is
obliterated. Apparently, this theory does not extend to their own
reasoning on the subject, nor (presumably) to that which they appeal
to in their listener. I include the Biblical scholar Gary North in
this category, and to a lesser extent, James Jordan. Rush Limbaugh
has also joined the attack on “liberal studies”, bizarrely. Here
is Lisa Van Damme, of the Ayn Rand Objectivist Standard, attacking
“classical education”- she objects to this idea of a higher
Wisdom with a capital W:
Like Hirsch’s Core Knowledge catalogue, The
Well-Trained Mind fails to differentiate
facts at various levels of abstraction. Facts are simply the
automatically given raw material from which logical conclusions are
drawn and impassioned arguments made. In the first years of
schooling, the child is supplied with all the facts known to man—no
matter how these facts actually came to be known, and thus regardless
of how these facts can be truly understood firsthand. In the logic
stage, he learns how to relate and interconnect the facts to form
arguments. In the rhetoric stage, he learns to use his catalogue of
facts and skill at argument to create new ideas and present them in a
compelling manner. How is he to know that the said facts are facts?
The answer is that he simply does not know; he is to accept them as
facts because an authority says so....Nothing is more destructive to
a child’s (or an adult’s) ability to reason than to be fed dogma
and to swallow it. Reason functions by logically integrating
observable facts of reality into a non-contradictory whole. In regard
to every idea, a reasoning mind must ask: Is this supported by the
facts of reality? And: How does this integrate with my other factual
knowledge of reality? When a rational person spots a contradiction,
he knows that at least one of his premises is wrong. But what is he
to do with the Bible—which, if taken literally, provides him with
an endless stream of absurd falsehoods and unscientific assertions?
Can a bush talk, as is claimed in the Old Testament? Can a man walk
on water or turn it to wine, as Jesus is purported to have done? Was
everything created ex nihilo
in six days? Was man created in his current form? Have Christians not
caused major atrocities throughout history—and are these atrocities
not sanctioned by the Bible? An education that places primacy on the
observable, provable facts of reality can teach a child how to think
and integrate; one that does not, short-circuits his mind by telling
him to accept that which makes no sense and contradicts that which he
knows.
Can the mind actually create
ideas on its own, like a mushroom creates spores? Isn't it dogmatic
to assert that “nothing is more destructive....to a mind than to
be fed dogma and swallow it”? Also, is that true? Nothing?
What about lying to yourself? What is meant by “observable” and
provable”? “Facts” and “reality”?
Contrary to Van
Damme's wishful thinking, there isn't an obervable, provable
“reality” which everyone can easily agree on. Even worse, there
isn't a consistent “method” that those who disagree on what
“reality” is, can agree on either. The closest thing we have to
this, which is the scientific method, is an agreement on procedure in
certain instances, rather than “method” strictly speaking, since
“method” implies (in addition to procedure) the tinctures of the
contents and ambiance of the Mind. Yes, we all tend to agree that we
experience reality, we hypothesize, we “test” or observe that
hypothesis, and then we refine our theories. After that initial
consensus, everything diverges into infinity, unless we are
discussing the lowest mineral or chemical levels of reality, about
which there is usually an easy agreement. This is true even among
scientists.
The classical world
had derived a rather careful and conservative, but effective, remedy
for this confusion. By using the locus of common texts (eg.,
Homer's Odyssey, Euclidean geometry, etc.) it became possible
to awaken the possibilities inherent in the student.2
In the ancient tradition of the liberal arts, it was recognized that
“only like can know like”. Although many Christians today deride
this as “Platonism”, it was simply a recognized epistemological
maxim of the older world that was shared in common, by and large.
Stoics would also have accepted it, as would have Pythagoreans, the
mystery schools, and a variety of other philosophical schools. Jesus
put the same truth in its purest form: “Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall see God”. If we accept that maxim, we can see
why humans will never experience identical “reality” on the
inside – the interior of men is different, and some people are
incapable of understanding what others do. At the same time, there is
a kind of basic similarity in all men – their “noetic” faculty
is divided into the image and the likeness of God: we all share God's
image, but we participate in His likeness to the degree which we are
able, according to our talents. It was the common, shared “image”
of God which created Mediterranean, classical “humanism”, later
baptized and furthered by the Christian community of the Dark Ages.
It was a firm belief
in the continuity between Grace and Nature that lead (to some degree)
the ancient, and (to a greater degree) the medieval, worlds to
canonize what they called the seven Liberal Arts. True, Grace doesn't
merely restore the primordial state, but neither does it obliterate
it by something entirely Other or alien. One is tempted to express
the difference between Greece/Rome on the one hand, and medieval
Europe on the other this way: the ancient world possessed
transcendence and immanence, but it had no stable or sane way to
bring them together – it was the coming of Christ that reconciled
the interior worlds with the exterior cosmos. From then on, humanism
made sense, but only as Christian humanism.
Francis Schaeffer in
his magisterial work How Shall We Then Live stated that
towards the end of the Middle Ages there happened
an
increasing distortion of the teaching of the Bible and the early
church. Humanist elements had entered. For example, the authority of
the church took precedence over the teachings of the Bible; fallen
man was considered able to return to God by meriting the merit of
Christ; and there was a mixture of Christian and ancient
non-Christian thought (as Aquinas' emphasis on Aristotle). This
opened the way for people to think of themselves as autonomous and
the center of all things.3
With enormous respect
to Schaeffer (to whom I owe very much), there is a lack of subtlety
in this sweeping approach. While it is true that the Middle Ages gave
birth to the “numeracy” and computus of modern Science, a
tendency that was certainly exaggerated and reached its peak in the
Deistic period of 18th century humanism and the
Enlightenment, there were competing tendencies within the sharpening
of the Western intellect which lost out (over time) to the
quantitative approaches to both Nature and God. “Reason” in the
Middle Ages stood for the noetic faculty, rightly used
(including in inquiry into Nature), so it was not until the great
nominalist debate and William of Ockham, that the West decisively
turned towards the dark side of reductionism and determinism4.
To give just one
example of the survival and continuity of the older view, Jean Calvin
quotes with approval Saint Bernard of Clarivaux in his Institutes,
on the righteousness of Christ. So that if we return to that high
point of the medieval period, during the 10th-13th
centuries, we find a very different kind of “humanism” than
existed in either ancient Rome or the Renaissance, or (for that
matter), the Reformation. Looking past the label, what we encounter
is a deliberate attempt to work out the cultural implications of the
doctrine of theosis, which Athanasius championed:
God
became man, that man might become God.
Hugh of St. Victor
says it even better, this way:
This,
then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend,
namely, to restore within us the divine likeness, a likeness which to
us is a form but to God is his nature. The more we are conformed to
the divine nature, the more do we possess Wisdom, for then there
begins to shine forth again in us what has forever existed in the
divine Image or Pattern, coming and going in us, but standing
changeless in God.” - Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalion. 5
When Christendom rose
up out of the Dark Ages, it arose in Northwest Europe, rather than in
Africa, the Middle East, or Asia, precisely because the ancient world
beyond the Rhine retained enough cultural “paganism” in a certain
form to render it susceptible to the preaching of the Gospel. Since
you cannot convert someone who believes in nothing, & you cannot
convert someone who believes in everything, it took the world
of the barbarian tribes to be balanced at the right enough point to
culturally implement the Gospel, so that European man could have been
said (with all his faults, and they were many) to have Christian
“bones”.
These preconditions meant that
it was in the Western world that Christianity was able to take
shape.6The
Germanic peoples who accepted Christ did so because they already
understood, latently, the chivalric ideal proclaimed in Christ's
passion:
"If
I had been there with my Franks I would have revenged his wrongs!"
(Clovis the Frankish king).
This was no mere jest – time
and again, with far lesser reason, and against outrageous odds, the
barbarians of the West stood on the day of battle for as little a
thing (as Hamlet says) “as an eggshell” - it was to be expected
that the baptism of this Gospel would produce a society which would
be extremely brave and high-minded, which it did. So a culture (of
chivalry in this case) matters, because culture is part of God's
given world, His already given gift to us7.
If God was not a “Gifter”, but a pretender or a scrooge, then we
could say that Mozart, Goethe, and Milton do not matter.
So does politics and language
and learning: all these are “matter” and they matter. To list a
few instances, when Rome fell, the various Christological heresies
dominated Church and politics. When Spain was occupied by the the
Visigoths, the Church there became Arian. When Byzantium conquered
the remains of the Empire and split it with Charlemagne and his
Franks, the Church was fractured. When Rome persecuted the Church,
the Church became permanently impressed with an underground and
impoverished character. When the Founding Fathers subordinated
Christendom to the Enlightenment (and the Church to “freedom of
religion”), classical secular liberalism came into existence and
stamped the Church with a sectarian and “second hand” character.
Time and time again, in the history of the West, the “Empire” or
secular arm's lack of health has caused the Church to catch a cold
from its sneezing; in our day, it is “culture” itself which
infects the Church, the Church having let it go to seed. We now have
a vicious cycle of Church and culture influencing (and neglecting)
one another to the detriment of each.
So a defense of Christendom is
not out of order, but in fact represents an essential element of
health, without which the Ekklesia
has immense difficulty in ordering its own soul and the souls of its
sheep. It is highly in the interests of Christians, thinking or not,
whether the secular arm is dominated by a democracy, Caesar, or a
demagogue or a tyrant (to name a few)8.
Or whether we live in a world lead by Brittney Spears and the
Kardashians, or one dedicated more to Brahms or Wagner. Even if
culture were purely neutral or even negative, it would still be true
that sustaining it with some forms of beauty, truth, and goodness was
a valuable way of making it stable and holding certain forces at bay
outside the Church, until the Church could regain its health. Even if
it were a negligible non-entity, it would still serve as a buffer or
a nursery: better still, it could be transformed, intentionally, by
the Church for express and spiritual reasons, to make something
better than itself alone.
To be even
more precise, we do not make the claim that goodness is either
guaranteed by high culture, or that high culture is a precondition
for any goodness, especially one that will save. It is not too much,
even given this, to say that
the
Greeks and the Romans taught us, by edict and example, the dangers of
cultural complacency. Culture does not breathe on its own; it is
preserved by those convinced of its value. This is not a new gospel.
It is simply true. The classical vision has been renewed, time and
again down the long centuries after being threatened with extinction
by prophets touting their New Jerusalem. But for students of history,
the burden of proof must lie on the shoulders of those who would deny
that vision's value...the case for classical education is not
airtight, nor can it be; it contains too many provisos. But...homage
has been paid to it before our time, and by finer minds...anyone
trained at least for a time to view the world as the Greeks and
Romans saw it may learn to ask pregnant questions. And even if the
ancient answers be rejected, the student – of whatever age – will
know what they are, and approach his own world with freshened vision,
one no longer blinkered by ideology and the reigning fashion. He
would have a liberal, because liberating, education indeed. No longer
would he be imprisoned exclusively within the velvet walls of his own
world's preoccupations and fetishes. No longer would he be just and
only a child of his own time. He might even partake of the divine.9
So
we are not maintaining
a high argument that high culture is inevitably and uniquely
Christian (although I have a suspicion that this might be very
possible); rather, the aim of the argument is to show that
Christianity can be more true to its Maker, and thereby, itself, by
receiving as a gift the “shields of the earth” from the hand of
the Giver10.
We conclude, therefore, that both high culture and Christianity
will be better together, than they could have been, separately.
How much better, or in what way, is a story that will be left up to
those willing to be mastered by both the high culture of the West, as
well as the Master Himself.11
Nothing else is worthy of free men who possess any form of memory,
and not to know the Mediterranean tradition is to have a form of
higher amnesia. To reject it consciously is a form of madness, or
deliberate surrender.
Thus,
a defense of the Quadrivium (in education) is tantamount to defending
the reality and health of Christendom, because the mores
and worldview of a society are formed in the nursery, the
kindergarten, and the high schools & colleges12.
The “soul of the university” is just as important as the “soul
of the body politic” in maintaining the health and well being of
the Church of our Lord. The liberal arts, as both Luther and Erasmus
acknowledged, in their own separate ways, are a kind of pre-sanctum
or preparatory study for the
knowledge of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good (again, the
archetypal Father, the embodied Son, and the end or Summation of all
Things in the Spirit).
So it is
un-apologetically and boldly that we do advance the thesis of this
work, which we intend to defend as that which was normative “at all
times, in all places, and by all”13,
and present this fully, replete with scholarly detail and exegesis
for those who wish to dig further.
This thesis
is that the Quadrivium (and indeed the entire seven Liberal Arts by
implication) are in fact the necessary framework for a full and
healthy Christendom of the mind, without which neither the State, the
Church, nor even the family can hope to plainly and clearly see where
the true Good is found, beyond the “strife of race and clan” and
the noise of the “maddening crowd”. The true seven Liberal arts
are the enemy sworn of the world, the flesh, and the devil – we may
call them the red right hand of God in the war on the dragon, for it
is by ideas, forged with passions, that men are swayed, governed, and
formed into an eternity, for either good or ill. As a man thinketh
in his heart, so is he. Therefore, the kingdoms of the world
are become the kingdoms of our Lord, the Christ, since, by
faith he looked for a different city, whose builder and architect was
God. Jesus did not receive the kingdoms at the hand of Satan, but
at the hand of God, to deliver them back at the end of all times to
the One who made them. This is what classical Christian education is,
or can and should be, all about.
2The
common body of texts was not a “matrix” in the sense of Obama's
“common core”, but was (rather) a rough, general, but flexible
canon of texts recognized as superior and helpful by previous
learners. You could displace a text, but only by superseding it with
something recognizably superior. Thus, the Stoics would not study
the same texts as Pythagoreans or Platonists – but there
differences were rational, known, and capable of being demonstrated
for the inquirer. In modern terms, one might substitute Imre
Madach's The Tragedy of Man for Goethe's Faust. I am
not sure if it makes that much difference in the canon.
3p.56
4Richard
Weaver fingered William of Ockham for this in Ideas Have
Consequences. The roots go back much farther, but in terms of
accepted philosophy, they reach a crescendo in Ockham's nominalism.
5Didascalion.
6GK
Chesterton makes this point at length, vis a vis Rome and Carthage,
in The Everlasting Man.
7Jesus
puts it this way – You didn't listen to the prophets, but stoned
them and put them to death. What makes you think God should send you
anything better? In fact, He does, but (naturally) because they
don't “get it”, they end up doing the same thing to Jesus as
well. In these essays, I argue this of Nature, as well: if you won't
listen to Nature, then what right have you to expect Grace? You will
get Grace, but it will only make you destroy yourself even more
efficiently and finally. Appreciation of Nature is a prelude to
appreciation of Grace.
8Please
read TS Eliot on Christianity and Culture, or Peter
Leithart's Against Christianity. Christ and culture are only
at war because our culture is so degenerate. Culture ought to
operate against the world (Empire), just as Empire should operate
against culture (degenerate culture & false religion – the
flesh and the devil). Or, to put it differently, could everyone just
focus on doing their own jobs well?
9Tracy
Lee Simons, Climbing Parnassus. P 22 & 24 2002 ISI
Delaware.
10When
Daniel was captive in Babylon, he and his friends were schooled and
disciplined in the best and finest arts which the Babylonians
possessed, and they are in no way censured for this by Scripture –
quite the opposite – it was an occasion for great power and grace.
11Phillip
Rieff, Fellow Teachers. “High culture belongs to whomever
will be mastered by it.”
12Karl
Marx's tenth proposition for a socialist society included the power
of dictating what type of education the young would receive.
13St.
Vincent of Lerins used this motto to describe Christian orthodoxy,
which would include an orthodoxy of the mind, a philosophy of
education, and a method and theory of training/learning. RJ
Rushdoony goes so far as to claim in The Foundations of Social
Order that the roots of Western civilization in fact lie within
the ecumenical councils of the Church and her creeds. I would
endorse this line of thinking, but not all of his conclusions,
adding (at the least) that the Hellenistic world provided at least
half of the framework of the creeds.
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